This essay by Christina Eubanks-Turner is featured in the book Living Proof: Stories of Resilience Along the Mathematical Journey.

One piece of advice I would give my younger self is to tell her that she WILL accomplish everything she puts her mind to with patience and time.  My time as a graduate student truly validated this for me. As an African-American female and a proud graduate of an HBCU, I was sure that when I decided to pursue a doctoral degree in mathematics, I would also attend an HBCU for graduate studies.  I could not have been more wrong. After visiting several schools, my family and I decided on a large predominantly white institution (PWI) in the Midwest with a department that had a high percentage of women but lacked ethnic and cultural diversity.  While attending graduate school at a large, Midwestern PWI intimidated me, I had another task that concerned me more. 

 A year before I was to start graduate school, I had given birth to my first daughter. I had already struggled to complete my senior year as an undergraduate with a child, but now my fiancé and I had to contemplate what would be best for our family. Should we stay close to home and enter the workforce to make money to support our new family? Or should we leave so that I could pursue a graduate degree and accept a lower-paying teaching assistantship while securing a future career?  As I weighed my options, the fact that I could potentially be one of the first persons of color to gain a Ph.D. in math from my graduate institution played a role in my decision-making. In the end, I decided to further my education.

After getting married a month before I left for graduate school, I had a lot of anxiety about being a new wife, mother, and graduate student in a city where I had no support from family and friends.  I was thankful for the opportunities I had been afforded, but I still felt very nervous about the changes that were taking place in my life. Upon arriving in the small town where I would live for the next several years of my life, I remember saying to myself, “What have I done????”  I felt like a fish out of water, and although the faculty, staff, and my peers in the math department were friendly, I remember going into stores where the cashier dropped my change on the counter and did not place it in my hand. I recall my husband telling me of an instance where he was walking down the street and a group of men in a truck passed and called him the N-word. I felt invisibly noticed, that is, I was invisible as no one spoke to me, yet they all stared.

In my department, I soon learned that I was the only graduate student in my cohort with a child.  As my husband searched for employment, we found it hard as a family of three to get by on a teaching assistantship paying an annual salary of around $15,000.  We tried for government assistance, but they stated that I was not eligible because I was an employed graduate student, no matter how low my income was. During these times, I was full of self-doubt, and I wanted to give up.  To top it off, I was struggling to understand the concepts in my courses and falling behind with my work. I also served as a recitation instructor for the first time and specifically remember numerous white males in my courses questioning my mathematical abilities, forcing me to engage in “mathematical showdowns”, to validate that I knew enough mathematics to teach the course.  Once I did this and the student essentially “lost,” I was able to gain control of the classroom and earn some kind of trust from my students that I was a capable instructor.

If the stress and pressure from graduate school weren’t enough, the pressures from home at times were just as heavy. With a daughter in her “terrible-twos” and husband who was newly employed, I look back to those times and wonder how we remained sane. I definitely remember having arguments with my husband that stemmed from financial concerns and how much time I was spending at the office.  At this point, we did not have a strong support system, and I was too embarrassed to admit that I needed help. Mentally, I was about to crack. Fortunately, at a point when I needed it the most, I had a realization: I was not the typical graduate student, and I should embrace that fact. Instead of trying to fit the mold and lifestyle of a typical graduate student, I should boldly stand out.  

Although I needed to study as much as (if not more than) the others in my department and that I gained a lot from studying with my peers, I realized that when I was at home, my role as wife and mother commanded my attention. So, I learned that sometimes I needed to stay home and study by myself.  When my daughter was able to play quietly by herself, I also started bringing her study sessions. To my surprise, some of my peers enjoyed having her there, as they liked the intermittent distraction. Also, my husband became more visible in the department as I invited him to more of the department events. Ultimately, I ditched the self-guilt and realized that there is no perfect mom, wife, or student. I am fine with being imperfect and learning along the way.

As my husband and I reminisce on those times, we laugh, cry, and wonder how we made it through.  We realize that those times laid the foundation for our beautiful, strong 17-year marriage. I look at my amazing daughters—one of whom is preparing to go to college, and the other, a fourth-grader full of curiosity–and think of how blessed we are.  Although I started my family before my career, which was very hard, I look at my colleagues who are starting families in the midst of their careers. Seeing some of the issues they have to deal with (tenure clocks, maternity/paternity leave), I realize there is no perfect time to start a family.  I know now that you have to just take things as they come and believe in yourself.

Our first contributor is Math Mama Yvonne Lai. Yvonne is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is the mother of 1 year old, Vivian. 

I pump and breastfeed in public. It is one small way to reinforce an important personal narrative:  that motherhood and its activities are normal and can be integrated into life.

I also do these things in public, and am writing this post, because it is one small way to make one woman’s motherhood more visible. In doing so, my hope is that one day, the ordinary demands of motherhood — simultaneously mundane and requiring attention — are common knowledge. The main argument here is that with more awareness of what mothers do, it will be possible for more institutions to support mothers effectively; and also that cultivating this awareness must be work in progress, rooted in genuine interest for what motherhood entails for the work day.

To illustrate this argument, I give three stories of how visible motherhood made a difference.

“Do you know if there’s a lactation room?”

Two years ago, in a three hour evening course, I taught a female student who had a newborn daughter. She explained to me on the first day of class that she needed to pump, and asked to be excused for this, as well as whether there was a lactation room in the building.

I wish I could say that I immediately understood her situation. But I did not. I remember being confused about why she needed to pump in the evening, and also how 10 minutes could make such a difference. But I also knew, in vague ways, that pumping could be important. I was confused about these issues because no one in my circle had ever talked about pumping before, except to mention how much they disliked it. I was also confused because I had never thought to ask what was so unpleasant about pumping, because pumping had never concerned me. Pumping was invisible to me, and so I did not understand the demands of pumping.

In retrospect, I am relieved that I accepted her word for what she needed. Every Wednesday evening, around 7pm while the class was doing group work, she would unobtrusively grab my keys from the desk and exit. I would announce a 10-minute break. When she came back, I would begin instruction again. I confess that at the time, I did not understand her gratitude, which she expressed on multiple occasions. It didn’t seem like a big deal.

For the purposes of making pumping practices more visible, and how they can be supported, I will now explain some reasons why pumping can be at once so necessary and so demanding. When a woman can breastfeed and chooses to do so, her body produces breastmilk in response to her child’s supply needs. Newborns typically feed every 2-3 hours. When a woman needs to attend class or go to work for multiple hours, she misses a feeding session, which can lower the supply during a critical period of growth. To make up for this, a woman might hook herself up to a pump. This serves the dual purposes of having milk to feed the baby the next time she is gone, and also to maintain supply. This supply-and-demand dynamic explains why pumping at some point might be necessary, but not why a woman might need to pump at a particular time. When a woman produces milk, the supply builds up. When there is oversupply in the body, the woman can risk mastitis, which is an inflammation of tissues that can lead to fever, chills, and exhaustion. So routine inability to pump when a woman needs to pump can lead to both dwindled food for the baby and illness in the mother that impacts her ability to parent and to work. And even if a woman doesn’t get mastitis, milk build up hurts – for me, it feels like needles stabbing me from the inside.

My student’s story gave me more perspective, when I began pumping after giving birth last year, on how having easy access to a clean and comfortable place to pump can make the difference between a reasonable day and a terrible day. Some of my worst moments are when I feel like motherhood conflicts with just being able to go about my business — like the time I was almost late for hooding my first PhD student because I couldn’t find the one lactation room in the huge arena where the ceremony was held. At the same time, I am grateful for having a job in a town where I can pump in my office or at a coffee shop on my own schedule and with sympathetic baristas.  

“Don’t get chalk on the baby!”

A month ago, I was talking to a collaborator about our undergraduate abstract algebra courses. She said that one of her favorite things about that class was that it was taught by a woman, and not only that, it was taught a woman who wore her baby in class while teaching (and would say, as she carefully erased boardwork, “Don’t get chalk on the baby!”). This woman was Kim Ruane (and she consents to this telling). My collaborator said this was the first time she, as an undergraduate, could see a future self being a woman and mother in mathematics.

Some readers may wonder what it means to “wear a baby”, and why one would choose to do so. “Wearing a baby” means holding a baby with a carrier that is attached to your body, so that the baby gets to be close to you and you have use of your arms and hands to do something else, such as eating your lunch, drinking a glass of water, or writing on the board. For many reasons, both emotional and practical, many newborns are calmer when held, and it is also one way that babies can take their much-needed, every 2-3 hour, naps. So wearing a baby, especially younger infants, is one way that a caregiver can sort of go about their day while also giving babies what they need.

For my collaborator, Kim’s visible motherhood sent an important message about being a woman in academia.  It also likely showed the students in this class what it might look like to integrate motherhood with other aspects of life. Prior to this class, my collaborator, and perhaps the other students in the class, had not had a female professor. Moreover, even if they had been taught by a female professor, whether the professor was a mother was invisible.

Balancing Acts

When my daughter was four months old, I posted on social media about the difficulties of integrating motherhood and academic work. As I noted, my strategy at the time for balancing work and motherhood was to literally do both. In the height of scraping for minutes in my day, I would wear her, pump, and type at the same time. Or I would walk her to sleep on the way to a cafe, work until she began stirring, lull her to sleep on the way back, and then feed her at home. These strategies were short-lived not just because she doesn’t sleep that easily or as much anymore, but also because multi-tasking comes with a mental tax. I would be so frayed from doing more than one thing all the time that I would spend hours afterwards crying or angry or both, even as I felt joy with time apparently reclaimed. In between phases, I felt fragmented, like I was a negligent mother, wife, and researcher. The multi-tasking shattered my sense of self.

I identify as a mother, to my daughter. I want to notice her, in the most intimate sense. I want to attend to everything she says or does, interpret what I see, and refine these interpretations as time passes, so that I can respond in ways that will help her live with kindness, grace, and meaning. And I want to embrace the pain and joy of motherhood, even though I sometimes fail at this and grasp at fantasies of easy-ness.

And I also identify as a researcher, of math education. I want to contribute at least in a small way to improving math teacher education. I find joy, and pain, in looking for insight and clarity when I write and read and converse. I want to try my best to do meaningful work for the issues of teacher education I have promised myself to address.

The hardest thing to balance is that when in either identity, I feel like it is my whole world and everything else falls away. And then when I come back to the other identity, I realize I haven’t been there and that hurts until I’m reabsorbed into that identity. The transitions have gotten easier over the past few months, and I’m beginning to accept that it is possible to embody both motherhood and research, though in different ways than I conceived when I first began them.

Telling stories

Since telling this story of balancing acts, various parents and parents-to-be have written to me saying how much they appreciate my posts and sometimes have asked for advice about their

own situation in academia. They have said how welcomed my posts were because it made the black box of parenthood seem more penetrable. I see these responses not as a sign of my virtue as a mother, but rather as a sign that in academic culture, motherhood can be mysterious in part because it is invisible.  Norms of invisibility mean that it is less likely for activities and ideas of motherhood to be public, and also that there are few widely-accepted ways for motherhood to become public.

I choose to tell my story because I believe the telling may benefit others, but mainly because it happens to feel right to me, on a very personal level, to share this story.

To be clear, it is no woman’s responsibility to make her activities or ideas public. A mother’s responsibility is to do what is right for her and her family.

I learned more about motherhood when I first started trying to conceive. I learned about motherhood by asking my friends about their experiences, and also by joining a number of online groups of parents. I wish that I had started observing parenthood more, and earlier, if only because I have students and colleagues who are parents. At my department, meetings are intentionally scheduled during childcare hours. I tolerated this practice when I was a non-parent, but I didn’t see how critical this was for parents to participate in decision making. At the same time, once this practice was explained, it showed me something about the demands of parenthood, even if I didn’t completely understand the reasons. So one way for the that activities and ideas of motherhood (and parenthood) to be more visible is for practices that support parents to be explained by department leadership in matter-of-fact ways.

As well, reading and participating in online fora, such as groups and blogs, can make a different. These venues changed my relationship with motherhood, because through them, I gained sensibilities that I may not have developed otherwise, or at least as quickly. I learned of persistent problems that every mother faces —such as negotiating multiple identities, confronting and accepting your own limitations and circumstances, and re-learning that these problems are indeed persistent. These are problems that cannot be fixed; they can only be managed. What I hope for in the future is that the knowledge of these persistent problems and the emotional and practical challenges that come with them in motherhood, gradually change from idiosyncratic personal knowledge to common knowledge in academia.

I am Emille.

You, Reader, probably do not know me. The relevant information for now is that I am a Black woman (yes, this is always relevant) in my very late 30s. I earned a PhD in mathematics from a large, research oriented university almost 12 years ago and held a 3-year postdoc after graduating. I have a loving husband and two children under the age of six. No, that is not me celebrating on top of a mountain.

The following is one of the many stories that has shaped my professional and personal life. Before we begin, I’d like you to ask yourself: What does professional success look like in the mathematical world? If you took a moment to think about this question, you might have come to the conclusion that there are many types of “math jobs” out there that the question is too broad. OK, fair enough. What if I altered the question to: What does professional success look like in the mathematical world of academia? Because, Reader, you probably smell what I am cooking, the answer that you are mulling over in your head might be much broader than the answer in which so many of us were indoctrinated in graduate school. I’d guess that at some point in your graduate education, you were told that getting tenure was the proverbial end game and achieving anything less than this was somehow falling short of the mark. Even if this idea wasn’t explicitly articulated to you, I’d bet that most every career signal you saw pointed in this direction.

And is there anything wrong with having this as an ultimate goal? Absolutely not. In the words of the great Nina Simone, please don’t let me be misunderstood. My thesis is simply this: Professional success can be measured in so many different ways. Let us as a mathematics community broaden our metrics of success for the benefit of us all. The fact of the matter is that most math PhDs who intend to stay in academia at some point have intentions to find their dream tenure-track position in their dream location. But what if the cookie crumbles another way? This is real life, after all, and things don’t always turn out as planned. Moreover, women are more likely than men to make career decisions based upon familial obligations (see this recent article on research related to women leaving STEM fields). Hence, a narrow view of success could affect women even more negatively than men.

As you might have guessed, this particular issue hits home for me. Here’s the story, as promised. My husband and I got married the same summer my postdoc ended. I had accepted an offer for a tenure track assistant professorship at a great school in southern California, but my newly minted husband got a job working in Silicon Valley (read: about a 6 hour drive away). Our plan was that we’d live apart for a while taking cheap commuter flights on most weekends until he found a job in SoCal. What could possibly go wrong with this plan?! About 8 months in and still no job change for him, we found our bank accounts dwindling from the frequent travel and maintaining apartments in two very expensive markets. Our patience was wearing thin. On top of all of this, I suddenly started to feel a twinge of longing upon seeing mothers with their babies.

Then out of the blue, an opportunity knocked. It was something completely unexpected and in direct opposition to our grand plan. There was a year-long sabbatical replacement position at the University of San Francisco for the next academic year. Was I interested? Maybe. But what would this mean for the professional life that I had spent most of a school year (granted, not a long time) building? Was it even possible to take a leave after only a year? What would my new colleagues think of me? What would happen after one year? I grappled with all of these questions and more, but in the end, my desire to be with my partner and to get started with our family won out. I took a leave of absence for the following academic year, and moved to San Francisco despite my reservations toward leaving.

There is so much more I could say about my life from that move until now. What I will say is that almost 8 years after my move, I still live in San Francisco. I am still teaching in a non-tenure track position at the University of San Francisco. And, as I mentioned, I had two wonderful children along the way. Did I make the right decision to leave a tenure-track job to start my family? The answer is not black-and-white. What I can say is that I made the best decision that I could at the time given all circumstances. You, Reader, might ask how I define success for myself. I feel most successful when I know that I am doing good work. Good work for me includes motivating my students, participating in outreach endeavors, keeping up with my own research, and certainly not least, maintaining a joyful home. Not all of these cylinders are firing all of the time. That’s when I grant myself some grace, and try again the next day. I don’t believe there is a formula for success (a point which I emphasize to students), and in fact, there can be as many definitions for success as there are individuals. However, success is intrinsically linked to the work we see as valuable. The more value we place on endeavors such as leading student research, broadening participation in mathematics, collaboration with K-12 teachers, or leading math circles, the more success stories there will be.

How do you define success for yourself? Did you make a “non-standard” decision in your career trajectory? Tell us about it in the comments.

Welcome to the first post of our new blog “Math Mamas”!  We, the editors, were hoping to create a space where we can share our experiences, learn from each other, and discuss how our identity as women underrepresented in mathematics interacts with our role as a parent. Research shows that academic men benefit professionally from having children, yet women are penalized for having children. Therefore, the community we hope to create through this blog centers mothers and non-binary parents, particularly those who are raising or are considering raising children. We hope that our conversations will help all genders understand the joys and challenges of balancing life as a working mathematician and as a parent.  Mathematics is the more formal part of our lives. Motherhood is the less structured and messier part of our lives. Each of these enriches and impacts the other. These roles are not separate and parallel. Instead, they are constantly intersecting which sometimes makes both jobs better and other times brings about unique difficulties.

Emille’s children, Margot and Grayson, at Yosemite National Park.

One of our goals is to build and expand upon ventures that have already been started in this direction. In January 2016 one of the co-editors of this blog, Emille Davie Lawrence, found herself feeling overwhelmed by the obligations of her career and parenting two small children. Seeking others to “compare notes”, she started a Facebook group called “Math Mamas” that quickly became a vibrant hub at which to share commonalities, seek advice, celebrate victories, or even commiserate at times. As the group thrived, group members sought out other opportunities to more publicly share their stories. As a result, Pamela Harris, Carrie Diaz Eaton, Becky Hall, and Emille Davie Lawrence co-edited a special “Mathematics and Motherhood” edition of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics published in July 2018.  The special edition featured a collection of essays written by mathematicians who are mothers about various aspects of how these two parts of their lives overlap. Math Mamas blog hopes to continue these conversations and to share them more broadly within and beyond the mathematics community. We strongly feel that communicating openly will help others realize that even those women who seem to “have it all” also deal with obstacles and challenges.

Amanda’s daughter, Eda, dressed as Math Girl for her school’s Super Hero Day.

We, as the editorial team, will give our own narratives, but we also want to encourage others to contribute. We welcome guest posts from parents with a variety of backgrounds. Please share with us if you have personal parenting accounts including, but certainly not limited to fostering, adoption, surrogacy, or infertility. We would also welcome you to share if you are a single parent or part of a blended or LGBTQ family. What does the intersection of math and parenthood look like for you? All experiences are unique, but we hope that these posts will bring about better understanding within the mathematics community. To grow a more diverse and inclusive community, we need to be able to appreciate that mathematicians are more than the people teaching and researching in our departments. We have full lives consisting of both struggles and joys that impact how we do our job.  

Rachelle’s children, Giulia and Owen, at Natural Bridge, VA.

We all exist in the intersection of many identities. While we focus on the mathematics and motherhood, we also hope contributors to this blog will reveal how all of their identities influence their lives as working parents. As an editorial team, we encourage readers and commenters to value the experiences of our contributors, to read with the intention to listen and learn, and to interact with the blog from a place of support.