To quote Taylor Swift, “All of me changed like midnight.”
Though it wasn’t midnight.
It was 6:05 pm on January 21, 2022. My husband, Michael, exclaimed “It’s Lillian Grace!” To which I responded with astonishment and wonder, “It’s a girl!?!”
And with that, my whole world changed.
In “The Fault in Our Stars,” John Green described the experiences of falling in love and falling asleep as happening “slowly, and then all at once.” This same phrase describes my experience of becoming a mother. Over the course of 40 weeks and 3 long days, Lillian slowly grew inside of me. Meanwhile, Michael and I made the usual preparations. We took the birthing classes, assembled the crib, installed the car seat, wrote out our birthing plan (ha!), packed our hospital bags, and waited.
And then one day all those weeks of waiting converged on that moment at 6:05 pm when, all at once, Lillian took her first breath, and two new people were born.
“The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new.”
—Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
On that day all three of us were thrust into a period of transition. Lillian began the transition from inside the womb to the outside world, while Michael and I began the transition of understanding our new identity as parents. My mom had said to me before Lillian’s birth, “You’ll arrive at the hospital as Michael and Sarah, and you’ll leave as Mom & Dad.” While the titles and demands change quite abruptly, there is a longer transitional period trying to find a new rhythm to life.
Transitions take time. And in a country where there is no guaranteed paid parental leave, that time can be rushed for many women. I am one of the lucky ones. UMass Amherst has an excellent paternity leave policy for faculty – a full paid semester of leave. With Lillian being born in January and me being a 9-month employee, I essentially had 8 months, including the spring semester and summer, to adjust to being a mother and then gradually get back to research before returning full time to research, teaching, and service duties in September.
When September arrived, there was a whole new transition – from stay-at-home mom to a full-time assistant professor mom. This was a transition for the entire family, not just for me. It was an adjustment for Michael, from whom I needed more support to fulfill the home and parenting duties now that I had the added responsibilities from work. Lillian had to adjust to mom not being with her all day. I was trying to figure out how to juggle teaching a new course, breastfeeding and pumping, meetings, exercise, commuting, on-going lab construction, cooking & cleaning at home, advising my students, and sleep.
In full disclosure, I have not learned how to keep all the balls in the air yet. I am in the messy middle of trying to figure out what life looks like with the added identity of mom to my identities as wife, daughter, professor, mentor, colleague, friend, and last but certainly not least, a human being with her own needs, wants, and desires.
One month into the Fall 2022 semester, I realized that I was on the verge of being overwhelmed. Jon Kabat-Zinn defines overwhelm as the feeling “that our lives are somehow unfolding faster than the human nervous system and psyche are able to manage well.” Brené Brown suggests that the only cure for overwhelm is “nothingness.” Thus, on September 30th, just 4 weeks into the semester, I took a mental health day. On that day, I composed the following thoughts that I later turned into a Twitter thread which I shared for World Mental Health Day on October 10th:
In the wee hours of the morning, when I was pumping before I got ready for work, with a migraine that’d been pulsating in my frontal lobe for the past 12 hours, I heard the cries of my daughter from her room. It was earlier than she normally woke. I checked how much milk I’d pumped so far, knowing that – after months of having an oversupply of milk – the dip in supply I had observed after returning to work would mean I once again did not have enough fresh ounces of breastmilk for the day and would have to dip into my quickly depleting frozen supply. As I put the few ounces I’d pumped in the fridge and went upstairs to comfort and nurse my crying daughter, I thought, “I need a day.”
I had recently told a student they needed to take a mental health day. That it was in their best interest to take a break now instead of trying to barely hang on day after day. And now I needed to take my own advice.
Were things “THAT” bad for me? No, they were not. Could I have gone upstairs, fed my daughter, put her back to sleep and then gotten ready for work and been on my way? Yes. I could have. With enough Excedrin and coffee, I could have gotten through the day.
But the right question was not “Could I?”
The right question was “Should I?”
And the hard answer to that question was “No.” I’ve waited until things were “THAT” bad to finally take a break before. And when things get “THAT” bad before I take a break, it takes more than one mental health day to recover.
I heard a metaphor recently that felt deeply applicable to this moment:
When you launch a rocket, if you make a small adjustment to the course early, it can have a large effect on where it ends up. But, if you try to course correct later in its trajectory it would take a huge, if not impossible, adjustment to arrive at the desired destination.
After our nanny arrived that morning (and I certainly recognize the immense amount of privilege I have on many levels that allowed me to take this mental health day), I laid down in my bed and listened to the “We Can Do Hard Things” podcast from Sept. 21, 2021 titled “LET HER REST”. Glennon Doyle shared a quote from her friend Liz Gilbert: “The revolution is a rested woman.”
That mental health day was my attempt at a small course correction. It was my first small contribution to the revolution of well rested women. Because I will disappoint others before I disappoint myself. And what would disappoint me most was if I once again allowed things to get “THAT” bad before I took care of myself. My hard thing that day was saying no to the pressure to show up for the world when who I really needed to show up for was myself.
Given my identities as a wife, mom, daughter, professor, mentor, colleague, and friend, there are a lot of people who count on me and who I care for on a daily basis. With all those identities, with their demands and needs and expectations of me, it is very easy to forget my identity as a human being (as opposed to a human doing). On that mental health day, I acknowledged and claimed my humanity. This claiming of my humanity is an essential and prerequisite step to my ability to meet the demands of all those other identities I hold. If my resources are depleted, if I try to pour from an empty cup, I will be unable to show up in my life as the loving and attentive wife, the mother, the thoughtful and helpful mentor, the effective instructor, and the caring and present friend and colleague I want to be. Truthfully, I’m not capable of doing all these things at the same time.
One of the hardest facts to accept is that no matter how much I wish I could, I cannot do everything everyone asks of me all the time. Even though my fantasy football team name is “Wonder Woman,” I happen to not be Wonder Woman (as evidenced by my team’s 4-10 record last season). Still, it can feel like meeting what is being asked of me requires superhuman strength and speed and energy. The difficult reality I have had to accept is that I happen to be human, and I actually don’t want to need to be Wonder Woman.
Yet, the world will not stop asking (nay, demanding) something from you. There will always be a dish to clean, a load of laundry to fold, a meal to cook, an assignment to grade, a paper to write, a paper to review, a meeting to attend, and an endless list of emails, texts, and calls awaiting your reply. So, in the face of all these demands on our time and energy, what can we do to preserve our humanity? A couple ideas come to mind:
Say no.
Ask for help.
It so happens that I am not particularly adept at saying no and asking for help. However, to quote C.S. Lewis, “experience: that most brutal of teachers,” has taught me that when I don’t ask for help or say no when I’m already at capacity, I can easily get overwhelmed. And I’m not my best self when I’m overwhelmed. At best, I’m a little snarky and impatient. At worst, I’m overcome with debilitating depression and anxiety.
So, if I know this is what happens when I get overwhelmed, why is it still so hard for me to say no or ask for help?
More broadly, why is it so hard for moms to say no and ask for help when so many of us are feeling this stress and overwhelm?
We live in a society that expects moms to do it all: breastfeed their babies for 2 years while returning to their full-time jobs 6-12 weeks after completing the marathon of pregnancy which culminated in enduring the physical trauma of delivering a baby, while also keeping a clean home, and don’t forget dieting and exercise to lose the baby weight as quickly as possible postpartum. All while discovering who they are in their new identity as a mother.
With a finite number of hours in the day, if we’re trying to do all the above, then there isn’t time to rest, which results in not having enough energy to exercise and take care of ourselves. Then we feel guilty that we’re not living up to all that’s expected of us, which results in feeling that we cannot say no to our kids or our partners or our boss without feeling even more guilt that we are failing in our role as parent, spouse, or employee.
This is why Liz Gilbert’s statement that “the revolution is a rested woman” rang so true for me on that mental health day. To choose rest and to choose myself meant rejecting the societal expectations of what I should do that day. Moreover, part of what makes choosing rest and myself so hard is that there is the part of me that wants to do all those things. I want to spend as much time with my daughter as I can in these early years, which as everyone tells you, “goes by so fast.” I want to spend quality time with Michael and continue to grow our marriage. I want to pursue research and teach in the field that I am passionate about in the faculty position that I spent 5 years in graduate school and 3 years in a post-doc to attain. I want to exercise because it helps me feel my best mentally and physically. Very simply, I want to do it all, which, as it turns out, is not so simple.
I expressed the unsettledness I feel trying to balance work and parenting a 1-year-old in an email exchange with a more senior male colleague. His thoughtful response moved me greatly. He said, “I’ve moved away from trying to balance work and life – work-life “balance” makes me think of a scale that needs to be balanced at all times or else I feel some level of guilt. I think more these days about work-life equity. There are times when work will need more time, and times when life will need more time – and that’s all OK. I just need to be able to look back over the course of time and feel confident that I’ve been present and equitable to my work AND life responsibilities.” (This exchange highlights that there are also men out there who are struggling with these demands too and they get it!)
Still, how do we determine what is equitable division of our time in a given season amidst the external pressures and internal desires that make it challenging to navigate life as an academic mom?
Effective navigation requires a reliable source of direction: a north star, a compass, a GPS. While it is very easy to look externally for our sense of direction, I find there are too many external demands grappling for my attention for any one of them to consistently lead me in the right direction. Instead, I know that what I must do is, and this is the hard part, slow down, take a break from the fast pace of life (some might call this “rest”), and turn internally for direction. Deep below the surface of all my other identities is my identity as a human being, my humanity.
I’m far from perfect or consistent at doing this, but when I do return to my humanity – typically by journaling or meditating in the evenings – I feel a release from the pressure to be, along with a release of the associated guilt of not being, Wonder Woman. From this quiet, steady center, I can more objectively evaluate the external demands and internal desires of all my other identities and determine what the most equitable division of my time and energy is between them in this season.
In motherhood, I somehow gained a new identity, “something absolutely new,” which has also somehow helped me return to my core identity as a human being. Before motherhood, my identity rested more firmly in external sources, such as my profession or my appearance. When Lillian was born, I knew I wanted to embrace this new identity as “mom” without completely losing myself in motherhood. The added identity of “mom” required me to reflect on all of my identities.
In truth, these thoughts may not be “something absolutely new.” I recently recovered a journal entry from a couple years ago I titled “Mrs. Sarah Roelker, PhD:”
As much as the three letters before and the three letters after my name mean to me, they can cause a tension between trying to be the perfect wife and the successful career woman. However, in the middle is me, trying to balance the three letters on either side of my name [and now my three new letters: MOM]. Sometimes it’s nice to be “just Sarah,” which requires focusing on the center, not the sides. I serve the ends better when I am at my best. I’m not fully defined by the letters on either side. The true me is in the middle. “Just Sarah” is more than enough.
So, take a moment today to rest and remember that you are a human being, and that is more than enough.
About the author:
Dr. Sarah Roelker is an Assistant Professor of Kinesiology at UMass Amherst where she direct the UMass NeuroMuscular Biomechanics Laboratory. She received her Bachelor’s in Biomedical Engineering at Ohio State University in 2012 and then remained at Ohio State to complete her Master’s and PhD in Mechanical Engineering in 2015 and 2017, respectively. Professionally, she is motivated by a desire to improve the quality of life of older adults and individuals with mobility impairments through research that uncovers the biomechanical and neuromuscular mechanisms underlying human locomotion. Moreover, she is passionate about engaging and mentoring the next generation of scholars. Personally, it is her goal to live a life defined by the pursuit of wellness across all aspects of the human experience including physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual health.