Academic parenting, a special type of demanding

My parents, in infantile stages of their careers, were suddenly parents with an infant. They'd lived in Toronto for six months before I was born so my father could wrap up a postdoc. He was hopeful for a professorship, but within months of my birth, he learned that the role would not be his.

He rejoined the US academic job market to find any position that would feed his research interests and our tiny family of three.

My mother, who'd completed her bachelor's degree in music, had already paused her aspirations for a music career and took care of me and our humble home.

Dad found his next role as temporary faculty at Iowa State University. Within two years, he became a temporary faculty at the University of Iowa. There, our family expanded to four, and continued living on a salary not much higher than a postdoc’s.

Finally (it seemed), my Dad secured a tenure-track professorship in Delaware. Off we went to Delaware, where, at age 3, my shyness (and probably lack of social skills) led teachers to believe I didn’t know English. They advised my mother against teaching me Chinese at home. If you know my mother, you'll guess correctly that they were sorry for ever getting tangled up with her.

Turns out, that tenure-track professorship made my father so unhappy that he found a postdoc more attractive. I woke up one day at age 4, hearing him say, "We're moving to Kansas today. It's going to take us 4 days to get there." Off we went, one parent driving a yellow Ryder moving truck with two kids and our belongings, the other leading the way in our all manual yellow Subaru hatchback.

By age 4, I’d lived in Toronto, Iowa, Delaware, and Kansas. In Kansas, I was surprised when we did not move at age 5 or at age 6! Instead, I had two whole years of riding to preschool on the back of my father's bicycle, and when I began first grade, I already had friends! In Kansas, I enjoyed the greatest period of geographic stability and social growth of my then 6 years of life.

My parents, however, did not enjoy the financial tenuousness of their situation while living in a place that taxed everything, including milk and bottle deposits.

In search of a better future for my family, my father applied to research roles in the pharmaceutical industry. He succeeded, and in the middle of first grade, off we went to Pennsylvania.

On arrival in Southeastern Pennsylvania, I knew we weren’t in Kansas anymore.

Families and neighborhoods were so different from the college towns we'd lived in. Even in cornfields of the Midwest, college towns brimmed with internationals and intellectuals and the comradery of transplantation and short stays on the academic path. Plus, I'd been to Hong Kong three times by then.

Our pocket of suburban PA was ethnically uncolorful, and most of my new peers had never changed homes or changed schools, and their parents grew up nearby. While I didn't stand out in appearance, fellow 7-year-olds couldn’t relate to my life experiences, nor could I relate to theirs.

It was a big adjustment for all of us. My mother did her best as an outlier and would eventually reinvent her career as an educator. My father, after an academic career spanning seven US states, the two Canadian provinces of Ontario and Newfoundland, and 20 years, closed that door and adjusted to the culture and demands of research for a commercial industry.

In my child's mind, he loved it and didn't love it, and like many researchers of his age, he willingly retired during the financial crisis launched in 2008.

Throughout his time in the pharmaceutical industry, he took every opportunity to do what he loved in academia - working with students. He mentored undergraduate interns in his workplace, took me and my friends to "Take Your Daughter to Work Day", and volunteered as a judge in school, county, and state science fairs.

He was away for long hours each day, yet he showed up for us. Sometimes he went to the lab to start something, then returned home to fix breakfast. Other times, he returned to work after picking up one or two kids from afterschool activities, or caught up in the lab on the weekend. I remember him always being tired and dozing off while reading bedtime stories to us.

It wasn't better or worse than academia. It was different. Leadership, regulations, motivations, and accountability to shareholders shaped a culture different from that of education. Love it or not, it gave us a healthier financial future.

Last month, I found my birth home. If you've ever opened a can of sardines and noticed the fish perfectly lined up in there with no space to spare, that's what the houses on my birth street look like. Reproducibly narrow, packed in a line, they have what you need, no more and no less.

We lived on the top two floors of this humble, now aged home, right above the landlord who wore pajamas in public and his family. I learned that my father walked 4 kilometers (over 2 miles) to and from work almost daily.

As I look at this house, I'm grounded by the courage and audacity of these two people to bring me into this world when they did, and all of the careful big and tiny decisions they made every year and every day so that my sibling and I could grow up well.

The way I reflect on this journey now makes me realize that I’m an adult… that probably sounds funny. I used to get all angsty when talking about my stunted social growth from moving around and being “the new kid” in school too many times (and odd kid - who the heck has a name like “Slaughter”... and most people who read my name couldn’t say it right and those who heard my name couldn’t spell it right… I hated introducing myself and all the ways I stood out then.)

What stands out now is the intention of my parents, who did their best, day after day, with all of the resources and intelligence they had.

Parenthood, as far as I’ve observed (I am mom to a dog, not to humans), is demanding, even when it is full of joys and rewards.

Academic parenthood, with its abundance of short contracts, high mobility, long and dynamic hours, variable (often insufficient) funding, and pressure to produce, is its own brand of hard.