"I'm twenty-two years old, and if you asked me what I want more than anything else in the world, I would tell you honestly, 'A baby.'"
I'm twenty-two years old, and if you asked me what I want more than anything else in the world, I would tell you honestly, "A baby." Unless you happened to be my PhD advisor. Or one of my fellow graduates of an elite liberal arts college. Or my parents.
Twenty-two year olds—twenty-two year olds who are women of color, who graduated from top-10 colleges as president of the student body and winner of the neuroscience thesis prize, who entered doctoral programs on prestigious fellowships immediately after college, who are poised to have PhDs at the age of 26– are not supposed to want babies.
 I do. Lest you think, despite my egoistical listing of accomplishments above, that I am an idiot, let me reassure you that I know raising children isn't easy, cheap, or particularly fun. I know that you barely sleep for years, that you worry immensely about money and time and the future, that you mourn your old life and your old friends and maybe even your old identity, that you never feel caught up with anything, that "you must accept that your heart forever walks about outside your body." And most of all, I know that I don't know how hard it will be, that I can't imagine.
I still want one. I've wanted to be a parent since I was about 10 years old. "Why not focus on the PhD and the job first, put the child-making and rearing on hold for a couple of years."
Why do I want to parent now? Nothing I say about this makes sense to anyone my age, or anyone who was ever my age. I want to parent young. I want to have energy when I'm raising children and many years left after they're grown to focus on working outside the home. I know I'll be good at it. I think parenting is the most important and valuable (and undervalued, especially mothering) job in the world. I just WANT it. One of my best friends broke down a few weeks ago and confessed he still just didn't GET it. Why couldn't I simply put it aside for a while? Why not focus on the PhD and the job first, put the child-making and rearing on hold for a couple of years. After all, if I start having kids at 30, I'll only be 50 when they're grown and there's 20 more years to have a career. I told him to put off medical school for 10 more years: after all, he'll only be 35 when he's done and that leaves 25 more years to be a doctor. He understood.
It's what I WANT. There's no way to explain it that doesn't make me sound like a selfish whiny brat. Why is that? If I WANTED a lucrative career in consulting, a vacation home in Puerto Vallarta, a LearJet, if I WANTED to take 3 years off to travel the world, teach English in Japan, live off the grid, do oral histories of small towns in the Midwest, if I WANTED a PhD in four years, a first-author article in Science, an NIH fellowship - all of these dreams would be understandable. They are acceptable dreams for graduates, particularly female graduates, of elite colleges to have. They are respectable and admirable, even expected. "It garners comments about 'wasting talents' and 'being ungrateful'."
But what I WANT is to parent*. What I WANT is to rock babies to sleep, chase toddlers, nag children. What I WANT is to develop imaginations, teach awareness, model compassion. And that’s not understandable or respectable. In fact, it's hard for most of my peers to discuss without snorting. It's impossible to broach with a faculty member without facing likely admonition if not outright discrimination. It garners comments about 'wasting talents' and 'being ungrateful'.
So instead, I'll chase the LearJet and the first-author articles. And I’ll wonder when we can finally tell our children that raising them is every bit as valuable and prestigious as the pursuit of either one of those.**
*Note: I have no desire (or capacity, really) to be a stay-at-home parent, i.e. this is not my personal manifestation of the 'opt-out syndrome' (thank you, New York Times ). While I believe Stay At Home parenting is wonderful and should be supported at all levels, I would suck at it. And be miserable. I don't want to opt out. I want to opt IN.
**This isn't what I plan to do. It's just the way I figure people expect something like this to end. I plan to get a master's and then a foster care license, and hopefully foster kids while working on my dissertation. Of course, seeing as I will be 24, probably single, and living below poverty level (ah, grad school), this is unlikely to work. Especially since I'd probably have to pay for childcare as I am both unable and unwilling to stay home with a child. Sigh.
- Anonymous first-year PhD candidate, out West Illustration by Gustaf von Arbin
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