How You Do It

When my older son was six and my younger son was two, I spent a week teaching the Ibsen play A Doll’s House to sixteen brilliant first-year students. This was an unusual assignment for me – most of the time I teach premodern Japanese history – but the seminar was part of an interdisciplinary, co-taught course on the subject of marriage, and one of my colleagues in the English department had assigned it.

My students that quarter were so eager to speak that I barely had to guide the discussion at all. It was like a lovely vacation from the real work of teaching. I spent an hour and a half, twice a week, just sitting at the head of a seminar table marveling at the intellectual energy of eighteen-year-olds. That week, I listened as they returned again and again to the question that people have been asking about Ibsen’s heroine for nearly a hundred fifty years: How could she leave her children?

After seminar, one of my students came to my office to pick up a paper. On her way out, she turned back and asked, shyly, “Is it hard to be a professor and have two little kids?” 

I was surprised, and definitely sleep deprived, and I think I answered more honestly than I needed to. “It’s pretty much impossible,” I said. 

She looked thoughtful. “Did do you ever think about maybe not being a professor? Maybe just for a little while?”

I didn’t know whether to laugh. “No,” I said, “never.” 

Two weeks later, I stayed up late writing in my journal. 

H was sick after Thanksgiving, up in the night crying. He was feverish all weekend and into Monday. We sent him to daycare Tuesday, but he got sent home with a fever again, so I brought him to the doctor. Ear infections. Both ears. They said the tubes fell out already. Antibiotics. So he was out Wednesday, too. Wednesday night S woke up in the night saying his stomach hurt. Thursday night he was awake all night with a fever and then threw up, and then in the morning H woke up with a 102 fever and vomit all over his crib. B stayed home most of the day so I could go in. And I still have the cold I’ve had for weeks and weeks. I feel bad for being so desperate for it to be over. But we’ve been doing this for six winters now, and I’m exhausted.

But no, I never thought about not being a professor. Not ever. 

My first baby – now a lovely, easy child -- was a hard labor and a c-section. He cried all the time. I used to listen to “Winterreise” over and over again in the middle of the night, trying to get him to settle. It was summer in Chicago, but the nursery was a snow-crusted forest in Germany. “The depressed German man again?” my husband would ask. 

When the baby was six weeks old I brought him to campus for a visit. He was asleep in the stroller when I wheeled him into my office, which already seemed like it belonged to someone else. I saw the printed pages of the first draft of my book manuscript sitting on the desk and turned them, feeling like I was engaged in some thrilling transgression, until he woke up and started screaming. “You must be so happy to have this time with him,” people would say, and I would think of the manuscript lying on the desk in my dark office.

The problem wasn’t that having a baby changed me; it was that it didn’t. What was I supposed to do about that?

Often, when I look back on those years, I find strange holes in my memory. I’ll encounter pages of notes that I don't remember writing, on a book that I would swear that I’ve never read. The year my younger son turned one, I wrote twenty-six lectures about early modern global history. I know this because I use them to this day, but it’s as if they spontaneously materialized in my files, containing information that appeared in my sentences without ever passing through my brain. When did I learn about the extinction of land birds on Barbados? Where did I read about the sale of used tea leaves in Amsterdam? 

I do remember that the strangest things would strike me as funny. Commercials for sleeping pills. The entire concept of golf. Anyone trying to flirt with me, anywhere, under any circumstances. The emeritus professor who cornered me at the mailboxes and commented that I’d gotten my figure back. The well-meaning older woman – a professor with no children – who looked at me across a table, and asked me, quite sincerely, “Amy, what feeds your inner life?” My inner life. Hilarious.

I still encounter versions of my brilliant student who was disturbed by the firmly closed door at the end of A Doll’s House. They’re young women, and some older women, who want to have children. In office hours, at conference dinners, after class in seminar rooms, they ask me, “How did you do it?”

I think they expect me to have some practical advice, or rules. Plan to give birth in the summer, and submit your manuscript before your due date. Write while your baby is napping.* Schedule all your courses on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and never teach a winter quarter if you can help it. 

But instead I think of the extinct land birds in Barbados, and the depressed German man singing in a dark room, the incomprehensible commercials for sleeping pills, the crinkle of a diaper against my arm when I picked up my baby from daycare. Napping on the floor of my office. The paralyzing despair of unlocking a car seat’s five-point-harness for the fifth time in a day, for the fifth year straight. The crayon Valentines that said “I love Mommy,” decorated with lopsided hearts. “Did you ever think about maybe not being a professor?” All the things I know I can’t remember.

“There isn’t any way to do it,” I say. “You just do.” 

*hahahahhahahahaha. babies don’t nap.