Winter 2004

Volume 33
Number 2

Balancing Act

In the Kitchen with an Academic Feminist-Mother: A Feminist Narrative,
By Beth Burmester,
Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Writing Studio
Georgia State University, Atlanta

Ann Roiphe writes in her memoir, Fruitful: Living the Contradictions, "If I were to tell the story of my life it wouldn't be about the conflict between being a mother and a feminist, but about being a feminist mother and a mother feminist." Indeed, being a mother with a demanding career in a popular culture that favors "stay-at-home moms" and being an academic "with children" in an institutional culture that favors individual achievement at the expense of a personal life creates a painful location for feminist mothers to occupy. For women who choose to become mothers, and for those who are chosen by motherhood despite their desires otherwise, we need to ask ourselves, as Roiphe asks, "Will my daughters' feminism find a way to alter the community so that their motherhood can be glory-filled, multicolored, fine as human nature will allow?" How can we help them do this with less pain and in less isolation and silence?

One way we can do this, in our roles as mentors, advisors, peers, and teachers, is to share the realities of our struggles. We can offer personal narratives that do not flinch from revealing the sacrifice and trade-offs we face daily, where sometimes we perceive success and other times utter failure. By sharing our stories, not only do we learn from each other, but we also gain a better understanding of our social and professional roles and their institutional importance--and resonance. We see that we do have peers, that our stories fit into a historical continuum, and that what we do can have an impact on changing the future for academic women.

As it stands, we have too few such stories. A few women have published personal accounts of their careers, but these tend to gloss over the difficulties of childrearing. The excluded details create a gaping exigence for mentoring female scholars, and the omission tends to glorify a few successful women without offering any solutions for "average" women still unsatisfied with unbalanced work and family lives. In addition, stories that only accentuate the positive become a master narrative that silences the women who do experience obstacles and, sometimes, failures, and who can find no peers to share their experiences with.

In this context, I share my own narrative of one night two years ago while I was in the early stages of composing my dissertation. Since then, I have finished and defended the dissertation, launched a national job search, accepted my top choice job offer, and moved across the country. I got exactly what I had most desired and dreamed for; but the attainment of this goal was still fraught with pain and struggle. I hope other women scholars see themselves reflected in it and realize that days like this come and go and are never constant.

It was not the worst day I experienced, nor were all my dinners this enervating. My daughter has in many joyful ways enhanced and even transformed my scholarly work--but I must also acknowledge that she has, on other occasions, prevented my work altogether. This seeming contradiction is what we must recognize and make visible: that our children both interfere with and make possible our growth as scholars and teachers. Our need remains how to share our resources in mutually beneficial ways and how to resist the narratives that would have us valorize self-sacrifice over self-worth.

SUNDAY, APRIL 6, 2002

6:00 p.m.
I am trying to prepare dinner, but it is already past the time my toddler usually eats. She is thirty-four months old. I decide to enlist her help in making meatballs for our spaghetti. I struggle to coordinate the preparation, more complicated than I anticipated. The meat is frozen and must be defrosted in the microwave. The water must be boiled for the pasta. I cut up basil, days past its prime, to add to the sauce (from a jar) that I have just poured into another pot on the stove top. To keep Annica's attention, I am also talking steadily, describing what I am doing, fielding her questions, once, twice, three times in a row. She drags a kitchen chair over to the counter-top closest to the stove and climbs it.

I show Annica how to mix the ground turkey with egg and breadcrumbs and at first she likes this new, squishy texture and is in it up over her wrists. The next second she finds it "icky" and is shaking it off her hands. Specks of raw meat are landing on the countertop, a box of Kleenex, the floor, my shirt, and face. I rush to hand her a paper towel, a spatula in my other hand, in the midst of my attempt to evenly brown a round of meatballs. I'm thinking about the dissertation chapter I was immersed in before my daughter came home from nursery school.

Meanwhile, Annica's elbow hits the plate with the next prepared batch, all made by her, and the plate arcs into the air and crashes melodramatically, violently, against the Italian ceramic tile floor--exploding into shards. My shoes and legs are covered in shreds of hamburger. Annica screams, dissolves into great weepy sobs, interjected with "My Meatbaws! Meatbaws!," which are smashed beneath the largest piece of broken wedding-present beside her chair.

She is pointing at it, flailing her arms, when my husband walks through the back door and enters our family tableau. I turn to look at my daughter and notice that the serrated knife I used to cut the basil is inches away from her left hand on the counter-top, while her right hand is just missing the steam rising from the pasta on the stove. She is now hopping up and down on the seat of the kitchen chair. If it were to tip over, she would be deposited on top of a hard floor now littered with fragments of pottery and globs of raw meat. The timer announces that the pasta is now ready, just as our golden retriever lopes into the kitchen, awakened from dozing under the bed by the crash and drawn by the smell of meat. He'll eat the broken plate pieces and the hamburger if I don't immediately drag him out by his collar and take him down the two flights of stairs to the yard.

When I return, the kitchen is filling with smoke, but Jeff has calmed Annica down, and she has resumed "making meatballs." She cries when my husband asks her to move so he can reach the colander from the cabinet behind her chair and is barely consoled when he tells her it will be only a minute. He drains the pasta and sets the table while I continue browning meatballs. Annica begins crying again. She wants to eat a pancake for dinner instead of meatballs, and she wants to eat now, and not wait for "you guys."

Finally, the meatballs are finished. We sit down to eat. The pasta is stone cold. There is no bread or salad or vegetable. It's taken me, with help, forty-five minutes to reach this point. Why is this so hard? My husband says, "It tastes good, thanks for making dinner," but I have to read his lips because of the volume of my daughter's screaming, so I say nothing in return. She's screaming because she wants colored sugar "sprinkles" on her pancake, and her father has had the audacity to try to do the sprinkling for her. She has announced that she will not eat the meatballs or pasta and has thrown them off her plate, where they have landed on the table just off the right edge of my plate. Jeff and I ignore her and try to "enjoy" our meal. I've only taken one bite and already have heartburn. I tell her if she wipes her hands off, I'll hand her the sugar shaker. She flat out refuses the washcloth.

She screams for twenty minutes. She cries with her mouth thrown open. Tears stream down her cheeks in round droplets. Her entire face is red.

Just as abruptly, she stops crying. Annica sniffles, smears the back of her hand across her face and into her hair, and asks for three meatballs. She doesn't want the sauce, so I stand at the sink, rinsing them off until they are acceptable to her. She eats all three, and asks for another one. She drinks all her juice in her cup and asks for milk. She is polite: she says please, thank you, welcome. When she is finished, she washes her hands. Has this storm passed? Not yet.

In the bathroom, she insists on squeezing the toothpaste tube herself, screaming when I try to help her with the lid. Then she pushes bright pink paste onto her entire hand, so the brush is buried, in seconds. When I at last remove the tube from her grasp, she screams, waves her arms, throwing toothpaste to the countertop, mirror, floor, and my shirt. Her bathroom fit ends only to be followed by the "No Sleep Tonight!" tantrum.

7:30 p.m.
Jeff takes Annica into her room, kicking and screaming, as he calmly yet forcefully iterates that kicking is unacceptable behavior and that she needs to use words so we can understand her. He says: "We understand how frustrating it is to have to stop playing to go to sleep, but everyone sleeps when it gets dark. You need sleep for energy to play tomorrow." She is vulnerable to no reason.

She runs around her room, crouching behind furniture and alternating between jagged sobs and primal screams. We eventually resort to cornering her by the door, and finally, all negotiating and attempts at compromise and choice vanquished, we are forced to rely on the sheer physics of momentum to put a fresh night-time diaper and pajamas on her. She flails, goes limp, goes rigid, releases unearthly shrieks, sobs until she gags. She won't give in. Her hands push off the diaper and clothes faster than we can put them on. She scratches, pinches, swings her head as a weapon. When we have finally got the diaper secured and the PJs on, we know there is a 50% chance that when we release her, she will rip them off, and we will have to start all over again.

Today, this is my life as a mother-feminist.

8:15 p.m.
I am sitting at my computer. This is my designated time to work on my dissertation. I can still hear my daughter's screams. My husband is finishing the bedtime ordeal, alone. I am in my "office," alone. I can hear the door down the hall banging rhythmically, as Annica tries to open it, and Jeff makes sure it stays closed. I'm supposed to tune this out. My head vibrates, my heartburn sears. I am meeting my dissertation director tomorrow morning. I must finish this chapter, I must, and I must prepare questions to ask about my material and an updated schedule. I wish I could go to bed, this very moment.

I type two lines of text. I stop. How to avoid these tantrums? What triggers them? Are all two-year-olds like this? All three-year olds? I shake my head. I stretch my neck and shoulders. I look back at the page of handwritten text, my notes from the quiet library. Quiet. I can't remember where the interrupted thread of the argument I was creating at the library is supposed to be heading. I get up and search for the book. It should be in my book bag, but it isn't. I have to scan the toppled piles of library books littering the floor, pushed out of previously ordered stacks by dog and child. I find it. In the kitchen. On a chair. I must have dropped it there before starting dinner. I return to my computer, sit down, open the book. It's taken me forty-five minutes to reach this point. I start all over, again.

Today, this is my life as an academic feminist.