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  • Mothering at Mid-Career: Beyond Parenting

    By Libby Gruner June 23, 2008 9:57 pm

    When my daughter was about to turn three, I asked her which friends she wanted to invite to her party. Without hesitating, she began listing them: "Kristy, Roxanne, Jason, Geoff…" Mark and I laughed out loud, then asked, "Do you want to invite any kids?" Her entire list was made up of our grad school friends. At the time I thought her impulse was cute and funny, but now I think better of it. These were her friends, after all: they'd been her constant companions since birth, volunteering care when Mark and I went out, accompanying us to the mall and grocery store, joining us for impromptu potlucks. Whoever had the most food in the fridge -- or the best idea for a main course -- would host. Why wouldn't she think these were her friends?

    While grad school is a distant memory, and we're not in touch with everyone as often as we'd like, these are still among Mariah's friends. And I mean that in the contemporary FaceBook sense as well as the old-fashioned one: when some of my former grad school colleagues and I joined FaceBook, Mariah was one of the first to "friend" us.

    A couple weekends ago we held a party to celebrate Mariah's high school graduation. Again I asked her for an invitation list, and again the list was almost entirely comprised of adults, most of them old enough to be her parents or even grandparents. Many of those on her guest list are members of the church choir in which we both sing; I joined when she was seven, and she started coming along and adding her voice when she was about twelve. These are the folks who have watched her grow up, monitored her hair color changes along with her vocal ones, taken her to lunch, and hired her to watch their dogs, their cats, their children.

    When I joined the choir -- for that matter, when I had my first child in grad school -- I wasn't really thinking about what my children would get out of the experience. I was doing something for myself. But without really planning it, I've managed to give both my kids a community of extra adults, of folks who aren't their parents but who are invested in their lives -- and, in so doing, have eased my own burdens and enriched my kids' lives all at once.

    I remember the first time my husband and I brought Mariah east to my parents' house for Christmas. We were in grad school on the west coast and it was a long and arduous journey, made more difficult by the typical holiday travel snafus. By the time we settled in at my folks', my three siblings were already there. For the rest of the week, I barely worried about Mariah once. Wherever she went, whatever she did, there was a willing adult nearby to watch, to monitor, to read to her or pick her up or put her down and play. I remember saying to my mother, "the next time I have kids, I'm going to make sure there are always more adults than children around." While I didn't quite manage that unusual household set-up, I've had versions of that in grad school and, later, in other communities as well. At Mariah's party, the adults who clustered around her, offering their congratulations, sharing our food, chatting about her plans -- and theirs -- for the summer and beyond, were and are part of her community, her life. They have made our task as parents immeasurably richer and, truly, easier. What a gift.

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Comments on Mothering at Mid-Career: Beyond Parenting

  • Posted by Darci on June 24, 2008 at 3:40pm EDT

  • I love this article. My husband and I have also created this adult community for our girls, ages 14 and 16. It is comprised of a group of 5 families that make up what the Jewish community calls a "havarah". Though we are not Jewish we have become part of the community and welcomed with open arms. These adults are an important part of my girls lives and ones who they reach out to all the time. It does indeed take a village to raise a child.

  • Back to School as a Mature Mother
  • Posted by janet peukert , PhD on June 24, 2008 at 7:10pm EDT

  • My return to tertiary education after a hiatus of 23 years has been a rollercoaster ride of amazing highs and crushing moments of despair and self doubt. It is only now, after successfully completing my PhD in Women’s Studies, that I am able to reflect on my experiences over the last 4 years and I relish the opportunity to indulge in some reflection with all the benefit of hindsight. Nothing I had read or heard prepared me to be thrust back into an environment that is saturated with wide eyed and bushy tailed 20 somethings after spending more than 2 decades as a mother and wife in Germany.
    Like many mature students, I decided to accept the challenge and return to university for reasons that are fundamentally personal. My experiences as a wife and mother led me to ask questions that I was unable to answer and my refusal to accept this meant that I had to go in search of those answers myself. The first step in answering niggling questions is to find out where to go looking for answers. I had come of age in a generation that articulated the ‘problem with no name’ through Betty Friedan’s ‘Feminist Mystique’ but I had been largely oblivious of the advances in feminist theory over the decades that followed this seminal work. I was a privileged woman with a Bachelors degree from the University of Maryland and a lovely family, yet I could not get rid of the sense that my life and my choices were being dictated by structures that were inherently hostile to me as a woman and a mother.
    These concerns as well as the excellent reputation of its Centre for Women’s Studies prompted me to apply to the University of York in the United Kingdom for a Masters degree. I was delighted when I received a placement offer and I was confident that my teenage son and my husband would cope well with my absence for a year, especially since I had the safety net of the easy accessibility of Germany from York. In retrospect, I realised how much I relied on my personal campaign slogan of ‘how hard can it possibly be?’ I had missed the excitement of an academic environment that I enjoyed at the University of Maryland and I was eager to address questions that I felt passionately about in a Centre of like minded people. Despite all my rationalizations and mental escape clauses, I found it incredibly difficult to move so far away from my son. For a teenage son, having your mother in a different country is obviously a dream come true, but his enthusiastic support failed to reassure me and it did not alleviate the lingering guilt that I was abandoning my ‘child’. Ultimately, however, I realised that continuing my education was something I had always wanted to do and, after many years of putting the needs of others first, I resolved to give myself this opportunity.
    On arriving at the university, the first major shock to my system was sharing accommodation with 5 other postgraduate students. For the first time I understood that I had not fully appreciated having my own home. Being an eternal optimist, I organised many meetings with my flatmates and volunteered to make cleaning rosters. It took a few months for me to accept that this was an exercise in futility and I continue to be amazed at how nonchalant young people can be about their personal space. I leaned that basic hygiene came a poor second to having a group of friends over with a fully stocked fridge.
    My Masters degree turned out to be such a success in terms of my intellectual development that I decided to do a PhD at York’s Centre for Women’s Studies as well. I was extremely fortunate in being supervised by an internationally acclaimed theorist on sexuality and heteronormativity, Professor Stevi Jackson. I dealt with the sense of displacement by taking frequent trips back to Germany and by making friends from many different countries. I also found support from the relatively large number of mature students at York University. My circle of friends includes people from South Africa, India, Romania and Hong Kong. Quite aside from the emotional support, these friends ensured that my period of PhD study taught me much more than what was included in the academic curriculum. I also realised that most of the challenges of a PhD were not age specific – all my fellow PhD candidates struggled with moments of feeling inadequate and overwhelmed. Another commonality was that we all turned to our personal network of friends, albeit differently constituted in terms of age, for reassurance and comfort.
    All these obstacles mean that returning to university in one’s 50s is not for the fainthearted. It is definitely not to be attempted without substantial reserves of humour and openness to new experiences. Overall, the gains far outweigh the sacrifices and I am enjoying my 50s with a sense of achievement and a belief in myself that I could not have imagined in my 20s. When I look back at my Bachelors degree at Maryland and remember how I took it for granted, I think that the amazing privilege of a university education was wasted on the young. The chance to go back and have all those opportunities is something that I was privileged enough to enjoy and, through all the difficult times, I remembered that I owed it to myself to seize them all and, above all, to have a fabulous time while I was at it!

  • Posted by Caroline , Co-editor, Mama, PhD at independent on June 25, 2008 at 9:40am EDT

  • What a lovely piece! I hope she continues to develop this community as she moves into the next stage of her life.

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