more on the family and the academy

I enjoyed Laura's blog conference over at 11D last week. It got me thinking: how do we really balance work and family, my friends and I? My references are pretty much all in the academy. I have a lot of friends who are tenured women with kids, even though I hear that statistically we're a pretty small group. And even though I can easily name, oh, half a dozen such women, I've noticed that we all have one thing in common: our husbands have, willingly or not, become career-secondary. This seems to be true, I should add, for the tenured men with kids I know--their wives are also career-secondary. But it's less surprising, and more socially acceptable, for women to put their careers on hold for a while (or give them up altogether) as they raise their children. These men I'm thinking of have given up careers, or simply not sought them with the same kind of ambition as their wives. They have jobs (sometimes more than one); they may even have good jobs, or careers, but their work is somehow secondary--lower-paying, less desirable, more flexible--than their wives' tenured positions. And that, I believe, is what has made tenure+kids possible for these women.

In our case I think it works ok, but there are always negotiations. We're making things up as we go along because we don't have a template for what we're doing--we know others who are making it up too, but very few (if any) ahead of us who've done it. So it's interesting to see how things work out, day after day. Luckily we are on fall break right now (two school days off) so we get a little time to breathe, to take stock--and to catch up.