Sacrifice and the Career

Before you have children it is quite normal to fear their arrival due to all of the things that you will have to give up: late nights partying with friends, intimate dinners, spontaneous trips, sleep. These are just some of the things that we begin to process and grieve when the two lines appear on the home pregnancy test and life becomes, at the same time, more complicated and more simple. Everything seems to speed up and concepts of time fundamentally altered. Something that I have often laughed about with other first-time parents is how you often wonder what you actually did with your time before you had children. The demands of a child can be so great and drive your focus into high levels of Bodhisattva mindfulness, that the days of lounging on the beach or (gasp) watching a mildly entertaining television program seem a lifetime ago.

Yet since Kaia’s birth, while I have been a significant figure in his life and day-to-day upbringing, my professional obligations and opportunities have been supported by my wife’s commitment to bring Kaia’s primary caregiver. This has allowed me to teach and research with the comfort of knowing that he is in the company of someone who truly loves him and focused on his needs. I certainly do not think that I would be where I am at professionally without her support. While all important decisions have been made as a family and some compromises made, I have been very fortunate to be able to have done just about all of the things that I have wanted to. But this, for many men, is not an uncommon story.

One of the things that attracted me to being Kaia’s full-time caregiver is that I wanted to learn more about sacrifice, service and love. These has long been important traits that I have attempted to cultivate in my life, but the challenge of doing it within the intimacy of your family struck me as being a whole other test. I knew that the priority of my wife’s new job and the need to care for Kaia would push aside some of my own interests and activities, but at the same time I could perhaps better understand my priorities, not as mere rhetoric, but as a true reflection of my actions. But it would be disingenuous to imply that I had some grand scheme or curriculum in mind that would help move me to higher consciousness. Hardly. I just knew that I would be confronted with some exciting (at least at the time) opportunities that I might have been able to jump into in the past, but now I would have to miss out on. “Stay at home” parents experience this all the time, especially in regard to their career. I can say now that I have had to do the same.

The loss was the opportunity of present a paper an international conference in London scheduled for late August. The scheduled panelists and respondents showed a large number of prominent figures related to my field of research, and this would have been the first time that I would be sharing my work with others in such a venue. My paper was accepted in a very stiff competition, and the three day conference would have no doubt yielded a number of great insights and future contacts, not to mention the prospects for publishing through a planned volume of selected papers from the conference. Yes, it would have been a fabulous event---WOULD HAVE because I found out just last week that over those same dates, it will be an extremely busy time for my wife’s work. The previous plan was for her to take vacation time while I traveled for 5 days, but now with her anticipating a 10-12 hour per day schedule for that week (at that time they will be having a grand opening of a new HIV/AIDS education and training center that will be a centerpiece for the entire country and the event will be attended by all kinds of dignitaries), there is no chance that we can make it work between us. Something had to give and there was little doubt that London was not happening. Even as I write this, I am still disappointed. But this is what I wanted, isn’t it?

It is interesting how this situation has initiated a thread of thought that I did not expect to contemplate so soon: the fear and doubt of losing your career to child-rearing. Now, this is not to say that I am riddled with concern about my ability to work or develop professionally—far from it—but rather, I can now begin to understand how important it is to recognize the great challenge in doing both—raising your child and keeping your career—well. The few people whom I have met who I think do this well seem to have two things in common: they have clear priorities and limits for their time, and they don’t take themselves too seriously. While we could all benefit from improving on the latter, maintaining these priorities are not so easy. But in many ways, I think that they are easier to maintain when they are challenged. This conference was just a minor event in understanding sacrifice, but it does bring to light some of the powerful external forces that influence our parenting and partnerships. I will write more in the future about the discourse around ‘stay at home dads’ (this is what this weblog is about, isn’t it?), but there really isn’t much sympathy out there. Women like to say everything from, “now you know what it feels like” to “get used to it”, which expectedly, don’t help. Most men just can’t even go there. So while the calendar inches closer to the Autumn Equinox and the conference goes on without me, I’ll be hopefully kneading and water recharging Play-Doh with alternate hands as Kaia asks for the tenth time to squeeze it through the processor.

Why I Love this time: How, sometimes, he will wake up, roll over and sit up, look around for about five seconds and then turn to you and say “car?”