Saturday, November 11, 2006

Separate Spheres

In the first few weeks of motherhood, I've quickly discovered there is not such thing as separate spheres, at least not in my life. I generally consider myself a fairly private person, this blog aside. I don't share personal things with people I don't consider good friends. In short, I'm very fond of boundaries; that said, once I consider a person a good friend, I have very few boundaries. In the past few weeks, the boundaries I typically value, especially when I'm around colleagues or strangers, have largely disappeared. I've done things I never thought I would do--including almost crying in front of faculty members and breastfeeding in front of faculty members. I also almost told a faculty member whom I'm on a search committee with off. Said faculty member mentioned it was difficult for him to make it to campus for a 9:00 am meeting. FM said this as I had S strapped to my chest, while I was wearing my glasses in an attempt to hide the horrific circles under my eyes. I came close to detailing just how difficult it was for us to make it to the 9:00 am meeting. I refrained.

Privacy has taken on a whole new meaning for C & me since S's arrival. We've both discussed my breasts with people we barely know and with our respective advisors and the heads of our departments. Our friends know more about my breasts and S's bowel movements than I am sure they care to. The public and private aspects of our life have blurred--a change that was so sudden I didn't even notice it, until I found myself baring my breast in front of a faculty member yesterday. Luckily, this faculty member didn't care and even gave me some helpful nursing tips.

1 comment:

L said...

Hmmm, this is so interesting, and so positive too!! I always felt that the spheres were very distinctly separated. Of course I did bring my baby/ toddler to campus pretty often (once a week to my office hours for almost 2 years), but I never did what you're doing. After my older son was born I was able to stay home for 3 weeks because there was spring break and then I had two colleagues teach for me a week each (they had chosen the books before hand). That was perfect because I had TONS of problems with breastfeeding, my son wouldn't latch on, got nipple confusion and I pumped for a whole month before he finally got the hang of it. (I wrote a post about the first part of the story, but not the ending. I can give you the link if you want to).

Anyway, this issue of the different spheres interests me a lot. In the essay that I submitted to the Mama Ph.D. anthology, I write a bit about this -- the fact that it always frustrated me that my personal life as a mother didn't seem to fit in with my life as a graduate student and instructor... I also was probably less involved than you are in your dept (e.g. I never sat in any committees). In retrospect, maybe *I* enforced the separation and it didn't need to really exist, I don't know...