Uprootedness; my version of the kids vs. academe "problem"

As profgrrrrl points out, making tenure more "family friendly" i.e. flexible time-wise is nice and all, but there are other reasons why people, perhaps especially women, leave academia. Speaking as the woman with a kid, it isn't the time crunch that's doing it. Instead, as profgrrrrl is saying, it is the uprootedness.

The role that pseudonymous kid plays in making academic life hard is that he makes the uprootedness more acute: when we moved, we left behind babysitters, friends who would come over and hang out, routines. Pseudonymous kid's daycare was at the house of a friend who had a couple of kids his age and who had worked as a nanny before marrying, and who was taking care of p.k. on the side for some extra money. She lived near campus, so after my day was done I'd walk to her house, pick him up, give him a snack out of my bag, walk him to the bus, ride the bus home, stop at the grocery store on the way up to the house, and cook dinner when we got back. 'Twas easy, and it provided time together, exercise, running necessary errands.

Here, when we moved, we had no daycare setup, and there was (of course) a waiting list to get into one. There's no public transportation to speak of, and the weather is dire half the year, so walking and bus-riding aren't options. Being a small town, grocery stores are out on the edges, not near residential areas. We only have the one car, which worked great in the city, but sucks here. So, Mr. B. spends a lot of his time running me back and forth to work, running pseudonymous kid to school, running out to do grocery shopping at the megamart once a week. We have a babysitting swap set up with another junior couple in the department, which helps once every two weeks, but isn't quite as flexible or useful as calling up any of a set of friends who think pseudonymous kid is cute and fun and asking for favors as needed.

So, despite being married, we miss having friends and a social life. If anything, being married maybe makes that harder; one has to arrange for babysitting, one has to coordinate social plans with one's partner (much harder to spontaneously go out for drinks after class with a friend on the hallway). And, oddly, one gets slotted into the "coupled" camp, and mostly invited out by other similarly non-social married folks with kids, which means dinner at someone's house once every few months rather than the more casual, loose socializing that happens around spontaneous coffee or bar dates.

The other big thing is the realization that time is fleeting. Kids, as they say, grow up quickly: thoughts like, "well, we can stay here a few years until something better comes along" seem much less palatable when one realizes that this means that pseudonymous kid's formative years will be spent someplace that I think sucks in terms of culture, diversity, and stimulation; that this will mean yanking him out of school once he's put down roots (so he'll feel uprooted and lonely just as I'm feeling now); that he's living with a kind of unhappy mama; that wonky teaching or research schedules that shift every semester are in conflict with the regular schedules kids in school need. There's also the more metaphysical issue, which is that, for me, having a kid has somehow made me have to learn to be more patient and in the moment, and that makes me less interested in living hectically for some ridiculous potential future gain where, you know, once I have tenure, I'll really start enjoying my job. Fuck that. Kids teach you that you need to enjoy them now; having learned that lesson, I want to enjoy my life now--not "in a few years." If anything, extending the length of time until tenure makes that particular issue more, not less easy to swallow.

None of this, of course, is meant to undersell the real problems that often do come up of timing children, being pregnant and/or nursing, caring for preschool age kids. In my case, we've "solved" some of those problems by having Mr. B. stay home, despite the financial hardship of supporting a family on an assistant professor's salary. But, for me, it isn't the supposed eighty-hour "work" week (although yes, it is hard to have time alone with your thoughts when there are children around who don't realize that mama sitting still means mama thinking); it's the ways that having a kid makes me less willing to settle for shitty work conditions now--including the need for constant mobility (even with a cooperative partner) to shift one's way into a "better" job--in the hopes that they'll magically improve later.