Of Academic Conferences and Academic Mothers

Academic conferences and academic mothers are two topics near and dear to my heart, and they happen to come together nicely in this post :-)

It's been over a week since the conference, but I want to write about it before all the impressions fade from my memory.

It's so invigorating to go to conferences! Even if I'm not presenting, I come back home motivated to do scholarly work, to research, to write papers. This time was no different - in fact, it was even more motivating than usual because I have been away from campus for 1 year 9 months and I haven't presented at a conference since 2003! ). When I went to the MLA in December 2004 I came home and started working on a paper right away (too bad it was rejected); this time, I also had a paper to write (one that I know will be published, though :-) and I worked on it quickly and effectively last week.

This particular conference was one of the best I've ever been to because there were four other people from my department (and one faculty member) and I spent all of Friday and Saturday in the company of two good friends. They gave me support when I presented on Friday morning (it was a great success, I must say), and I supported one of them who was presenting. The presenter is a woman I respect a lot, both for her scholarly work and the fact that she also gave birth to two children while pursuing her Ph.D. She was literally a great inspiration for me -- I met her sometime in 1999 or 2000, I think, when her daughter was 3 months old. She told me that she had done her comprehensive exams while 6 months pregnant and that everything had turned out fine, hearing her experience gave me conficence that I could probably do the same. She went to France with her family for a few years and we met again at a conference (of course!) in Belgium when I was 6 months pregnant. I went on to do my comps when I was in my 8th month -- the oral exam was only 10 days before my son's birth -- and when I saw her again in 2004 (at yet another conference in our university), she was back in the U.S., had given birth to her second daughter (9 months old at the time), and I was about to give birth again in a month! By now she has completed the Ph.D. and is getting another master's (this time in my graduate program).

The other person I hung out with is a new student in my program with whom I had already exchanged emails, but who I first met at the conference. He is also Brazilian and is interested in some of the same authors I am working with (yay!). Obviously, he was a little annoyed with the two moms talking about her kids and teased us about it, but we also talked about Brazilian literature and other topics (like department gossip, for example! ;-). We went to several exciting panels together, and it was a great experience!

I also got to see two other colleagues, one who has known my oldest son since he was a baby (she would come to my office hours only to see him during his first year) and another one who entered the program the very semester I moved away, but who bonded with me because she had a baby in April and mine was born in May. I'll never forget the day we first met -- her son was 3 days old and there she was, attending a conference with her mom and baby in tow. I never saw anyone so motivated!! Then, in my last month of pregnancy I saw her and the baby several times as we both worked together at the university - she in her papers, me in the dissertation. I felt sad that I didn't get to see her son and she didn't see mine, but hopefully when I go to the university in May we'll get to see each other's kids! (and my other friend's girls as well).

It's so funny because I had originally set out to write about the conference itself, the thoughts I had about various academic-related issues (e.g. how you can tell just by listening to the presenters, among the grad students, who are those who will more succeed in the job market, which professors are on top of their games and which are not, things like that), but then I concentrated on writing about our experiences as mothers in academia!

And I'm not done yet! My friend's seminar (or panel) organizer was someone I had already met and briefly talked to at the MLA in 2004, and I was really excited to talk to her because she just started her tenure-track job last year. She's from Portugal and studies Brazilian literature as well, and she's really brilliant (she's working on a fascinating book which compares Russian and Brazilian authors). I got to talk to her both on Friday and on Saturday, but we talked most about... yes, you guessed it, kids, and being mothers. She was carrying a breast pump because her daughter is only 9 months old, and she was interested in any suggestions I might have about Brazilian children's literature, since she has a 6 year old daughter. I brought some of my favorite books to show her on Saturday, and she enjoyed it.

What did I miss the most during this conference? Not being able to talk about blogging with my friends and acquaintances... In the very same weekend Jo(e) was at a conference too, and I felt pretty jealous that she got to hang out with other bloggers and do some pretty wild conference blogging stuff ;-) One day when I am a "grown up" academic and get to stay at conference venues and not have to drive back and forth for over an hour, then I will really enjoy conferences fully. For now, I'm still just an "aspiring academic" and a mother of two little boys... and what I value most (as I have already insightfully commented* on a previous post) is being a mother. Hopefully I can be good at both, if not now, someday perhaps.

* why can't I be more modest? :-)