PACKING UP

Today is my last day at work (and by work I mean both paid employment and postgrad studies), for a year potentially...

Packing up my desk, I feel surprisingly emotional. While physically I am craving the time off - the opportunity to nap during the day, to have my heat pack handy, to not have to change out of my pyjamas - it's a different story emotionally. I enjoy having a daily routine, somewhere to go to (even if I have been getting in shamefully late these days). More than having somewhere to go is having people to see - I like that on any given day at work, I will interact with people, share an office with my colleagues, have people to discuss publications, research, blogs and personal stories with. It sure beats spending the day alone at home, and it helps that I genuinely like my colleagues.

What I will also miss is feeling like I have a purpose, something that has become more important to me since entering (step)motherhood. At home sometimes, it's so easy to become bogged down in domestic routine almost to the point where it starts to feel vaguely oppressive - and not because I have a partner who doesn't contribute his fair share, because this isn't the case. It's simply that some element of your individuality, a sense of command or equal footing - of reaping immediate, tangible rewards of your hard work - is lost among the chores and tending to of children who (despite being appreciative at their core) do not thank you for your efforts. At work, I feel as though my thoughts, my intellectual input, is sought and valued. The work I do is acknowledged and appreciated, and there are tangible rewards to my efforts. I feel like I am truly in my element as myself and not someone merely fulfilling a required role.

By no means do I mean to to imply that parenting is not fulfilling and rewarding in its own way. Neither do I mean to deride or belittle those who don't work or those who are stay-at-home parents, or suggest that one even needs work to have meaning in their lives - far from it. But for me personally, there is a certain sense of self-actualisation that I get from my work that is truly meaningful to me, as corny as that may be. It's this, along with the friendly faces in my office and along the corridors, that makes me a little misty-eyed looking at my bare desk today.

I like to think of it though as not the end of an era, but the end of a chapter - one that heralds the start of another chapter, and does not preclude a reappearance of this current chapter's contents later down the track.

THE JUGGLING ACT

Driven perhaps more by morbid curiosity to hear the vast array of responses, rather than a desire to find a definitive answer, I have read article after article addressing the (not-so) age-old question, How can women successfully juggle having a career and raising children? To be honest, I am getting tired of reading the same unhelpful content that goes along the lines of one of these options:

a) Women can have it all, they just need to reassess what "all" is and become comfortable with this new definition of "all". Through this, women should learn to accept the guilt they feel about doing an inadequate job either at home, at work, or both, as opposed to wider society making any changes or concerted efforts to reduce the need for these feelings of guilt (to me, not too dissimilar to the argument that if women don't want to be sexually harassed, they shouldn't dress inappropriately).

b) Women can't have it all, and it would be beneficial to them to stop pretending that they can.

c) In order to have it "all", you need to have enough disposable cash to be able to afford full-time childcare/a full-time nanny to help raise your children, or a supportive partner who is willing (and can afford) to stay at home to raise the children and tend to domestic chores. Not so feasible for anyone who isn't rolling in it, or doesn't have a partner (or one who can/will give up his/her career to become a stay-at-home parent).

d) Instead of trying to offer an answer, simply create a dialogue where women offer advice and insights from their personal experiences, which are usually along the lines of "There is no right time to start a family, so just go for it", and "It will be hard, but you will be so in love with and derive so much joy from your children that they will automatically become your priority at the end of the day".

Let me rephrase my earlier comment by saying I'm not fed up with women making an effort to try and discuss, reason and hypothesise about how we can reach some semblance of equality in achieving the career/home-life balance that men have been privilege to for decades. I think it's admirable and encouraging that women are creating dialogues about how things can be improved, or even if a solution isn't offered, at least the problem itself is being given air-time.

What bothers me is this attitude, like with so many other issues relating to gender equality, is that the burden of responsibility of change seems to always fall on women. We are the ones that must come to terms with these shortcomings, we are the ones that must resign ourselves to these facts, the sooner we do, and the sooner we stop fighting it - the happier we will be with what society offers us!

There is also commonly the token comment (I hate to say it, but usually from a man) who offers a "feminist" opinion that essentially states women need to stop "whinging" about this problem and, if it really is such a problem, they shouldn't try to have both kids and career in the first place. Basically, stop complaining and just pick one and be happy with that. Wow, what a great solution. Rather than trying to address the broader prejudices that make it challenging for women to have both, and making not just women but society (including, yes, men) accountable for these prejudices, let's place the burden on women to reign themselves in and shut the fuck up. How progressive!

Maybe the key is that answering this question will not suffice with words and verbal definitions of why or how there is difficulty in this balancing act. Maybe actual, practical change needs to come first, to facilitate the construction of an answer that doesn't involve a sacrifice of desires or resignation for women.

AROUND HERE LATELY

• The 6 year old has learnt about Pinterest and has been keen to jump aboard (is that a pun?). Alas, to our dismay we discovered you need to be invited to join. Not by a friend, by the actual Pinterest dudes. Taking themselves a bit too seriously perhaps? In any case, we played along and have been awaiting acceptance with baited breath (I would like to say this just applies to the 6 year old, but I did feel the same longing to be accepted that one feels when waiting for a potential date to call, masked with the same feigned indifference of "I don't really care if I never hear from them again"). Finally tonight we received our official invitation, which delighted the 6 year old who has grand visions of pinning pictures of the "dream house". Back story: we have a running joke about one day being able to afford our "dream house". We all have slightly different ideas about details of the dream house (the 6 year old and I insist that the dream house must have a pool; Alex insists it must have at least one room dedicated to storing his bicycle collection), though we all agree that the dream house is, in essence, some kind of mansion that two of the three of us know we will never be able to afford. The other has already begun saving and has "30 or more monies" (30 individual coins, not dollars) in her piggy bank, which she believes is almost enough for a down payment. Bless.

• I have had recent doubts about what to do as far as a career goes. I am starting to realise that I went into my PhD with the aim to eventually become an academic, and never really entertained the thought of doing much else. Now, with the baby looming and my previous single lady freedom well and truly dead, I'm starting to question how realistic this goal is, especially considering recent funding cuts and increasing job competitiveness. Not really sure what to do post-baby. Perhaps I could get paid to blog??

• Speaking of which, I have discovered a fantastic "mummy blog" (apparently this is a phenomenon now?) of a woman who is much, much funnier than I could ever hope to be. Also, her life is a lot more interesting than mine. I'm struggling to produce even mildly entertaining material - there's only so many times one can write about weird pregnancy symptoms, and the 6 year old is shamefully well-behaved so not much material there.

• Along with wasting time reading aforementioned blog, I have been watching a lot of stuff on iview. My current faves are this and this (no judgement). There has also been a lot of Masterchef and Sailor Moon watching in the house, which is fine except for the fact that I often have a Katy Perry/Sailor Moon theme mash-up running through my head.

• We have YET ANOTHER head lice infestation. I've honestly lost count of how many times this has happened since the start of school this year. On the upside, we are now experts in lice treatment - I can name at least 3 different brands of lice shampoo (and which of those actually works), and we have the combing conditioned hair bit down to a fine art. We also have a nice collection of lice combs (5 and counting), which is going into the baby's dowry.

• I have been both excitedly awaiting and fearfully dreading the start of birthing classes (next week). Material to be covered in Class 1 includes: The 3 stages of labour (which was news to me, I always thought labour was just one long drawn-out process), when to come into hospital/what to bring, reason for induction, and role of the support person. Sounds like one of the more upbeat classes, as we have coming up in future weeks: postnatal depression, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, vacuum and forceps use during labour, and post-birth contraception. We will be paying particular attention to the last one.

ON BECOMING A YOUNG MUM

The first question I'm usually asked after someone finds out that I'm pregnant is, Was it planned? Although the way it's asked is often more like, It wasn't planned, was it? Most people I've told find it surprising that people could be so forward and, well, rude. In all honesty, I find it amusing more than anything. Was it planned? Hell no. I'm surprised people have to ask.

I never thought I would be a mother in my twenties. It's not that I didn't ever want children, but suffice it to say I rather enjoyed heavy drinking and sleeping till midday. Also for those who are wondering (and for those who have asked me, as a follow-up to the planned question), I'm certainly not pro-life and would have had no moral objection to not going through with an unplanned bump in the road... Though to my surprise, despite this, this was not the option that ended up feeling like the right one for me this time. And so here we are.

Certainly there are many positives about being a young mum. Having the energy and enthusiasm of youth is the first thing that comes to mind, not to mention a youthful body that will (hopefully) bounce back from the physical onslaught of pregnancy and childbirth without as much trouble as it may a few years later. There are times though at the end of the day, after having done my best not to fall asleep at my work desk then crawling home to do the nightly domestic chores, when I look at the clock, see that it's 9pm and surprise myself because surely it must be midnight - I am exhausted. And I wonder, if I feel this tired with all my supposed energy and enthusiasm of youth, how do other women do it? How will I do it as I inevitably get older?

I do worry a fair bit about money and, in only a vaguely related way, about my career - the latter has been a far greater source of anxiety than I had predicted in the early days of my pregnancy. After years of understanding the glass ceiling and the continued prejudice against women at an intellectual level, I finally understand this at a very practical level. The subtleties and nuances of discrimination that I have faced have astounded me. They have not come from a place of outright malice, but I see that where I was once highly respected among my coworkers and (arguably more importantly) among my superiors, I am now preemptively turned down on working on meaningful projects, I am not given due credit for tasks that I have worked on, I have been written off as though I have already gone on leave. I worry about being bumped off the ferris wheel of working life, and wonder how I will be able to get back on post-baby. Would I still worry if I were five or ten years older and already had an established career? Almost definitely yes, and maybe even to a greater extent.

For me, the one thing that I do come back to when I despair about potentially losing the "best years of my life" on child-rearing is that when my children grow up, I will still be young enough to relate to them in their young adulthood. I will hopefully not be too out of touch, and I hope that they will not feel a great generational divide as I did with my parents. And, maybe, I can reinvent my forties and fifties as the "best years of my life".