lifecourse transition and everyone is pregnant, no one is pregnant

Sunday morning at 7AM and I'm reading about how severe will be the rupture in my human capital if I get pregnant in Canada. To make up for it, I don't even have time to be writing this blogpost.


I'm familiar with lifecourse transition literature on this socioeconomic loss for women. It was the focus of the later years of my undergraduate degree. What distinguished my reading then from my reading now is how much more the themes are reflected in my daily life. Three close women in my family are pregnant, as are three of my closest friends in Ottawa. The key transition for these pregnant bodies is at the nexus of individual biology and social structure, and it is beginning to hit closer to home.


The impact of this morning reading comes after a long week of bumping against my own lifecourse "choices". On Wednesday, I met with a colleague to develop my Vitae. That's right, vitae. Life.


Hers is 37 pages long. Pages 15 to 35 are publications. I left her office feeling like a Kindergartner. Nothing like comparing your novice CV to that of a senior academic to unleash a pang of insecurity into your throat worse than acid reflux. I should never have looked at the page numbers of that CV! I think it caused permanent cardia malfunction. **clearing throat*


The deeper I get into my comprehensive exam reading on life/work conflict for academic women, the more I accept that staying optimistic about competitiveness in academia should be laughable for us. Biking home from my CV meeting along the canal to Foster the People [better run, better run, faster than my bullet??], I felt the onset of waterworks. I pulled over in a Glebe park, sprawled out starfish and let the analytical thoughts spill into the front of my head. Sadly, a sense of doom that I work desperately to keep under wraps for purposes of daily functioning leaked forward.


None of my top five non-parental role model figures have children. Only one of them is married. The married couple is gender queer. What does this mean for the way I am fashioning my life? The feminist idiom (I'm paraphrasing), "if you aim to break the glass ceiling, raise dogs," is getting louder in my brain. No wonder I feel conflicted. To cope, I'm going to try to drown myself in the bliss of apple picking on this fall day. Then maybe I'll practice resenting my performance of normative femininity by baking a crisp.