The Trouble with Tenure, Part One

Many of you are aware of the job scramble that's been underway at Casa de Milkweed for the better part of three years. Actually, "job scramble" sounds too polite, like a board game you'd bring out after tea sandwiches. What it has really been is the most intense emotional roller-coaster and mind-fuck of my entire life, Eva's birth included.

What follows is the first part of my attempt to unravel my very complex and very ambivalent feelings about how Mr. Milkweed's search for that academic Holy Grail, the Tenure-Track job, has affected our lives.

Mr. Milkweed graduated with his Ph.d in English in August of 2006, a time of much relief and anticipation for both of us. As anyone in academia knows, completing a dissertation takes a near Herculean amount of time, effort, and sacrifice. It's difficult to relate the process to those outside of academia, but it was as if dissertation took on Fatal Attraction-like personhood, ready to spring out with a butcher knife every single time we tried to carve out a few moments to ourselves. Every birthday, weekend, Uno game or sitcom on the couch for SIX SOLID YEARS, it sat there like the dark twin of the Fraggle Trash Heap, breathing too loudly through its mouth. It was the ever-present footnote to every single second of couple time we managed together and every single second of solitude Mr. Milkweed managed for himself. The day he defended was a high like no other, and if it was a movie it would have been directed by Michel Gondry, our celebratory bagels at Beekman's quivering with stop-action glee.

The search for a tenure-track job has almost certainly been worse.

We knew the degree itself would eventually come. It might take another year or two-- it did take another year or two-- but we knew it would come, that we'd make it out the other side and not always have it breathing down our necks. What we couldn't have anticipated was that Real Life waited on the other side, armed with a checklist of coming-due accomplishments like parenthood and moving away from Columbus and home-ownership and 401-K plans. There was one caveat-- we needed the tenure-track job to make any of it possible.

At first, all of it was held at bay while we waited for the job offers to roll in. One year went by, then two, and we began to realize that this process was going to be much, much more difficult than we had imagined.

We began to cheat "Real Life" and set up an OK life of our own, beginning to work on goals we weren't supposed to meet without the assurances of tenure. Mr. Milkweed found a renewable full-time teaching job, and I graduated with my MLIS and became a Children's Librarian. We set aside the beginnings of a nest-egg. We set aside the beginnings of a down-payment for a house. And then we went and accomplished the one goal we once vowed never to try and meet without iron-clad job security, and we had a baby.

And now we're continuing along with our topsy-turvy life plan, putting down roots but making sure they run parallel to the surface, just in case. We've cheated Real Life as much as humanly possible, and we've come close to hitting the wall with dreams we can only hope to meet with more remuneration. Certain things are non-negotiable for our family: I want to work part-time rather than full-time while raising our children, and we don't want to end up any farther away than we already are from our families in Virginia. Lastly-- and this is a biggie-- we are also unwilling to wait to have more children.

The three of us can tread water where we are for another year or two. Once another baby gets added to the mix, though, things get a bit more complicated. It's uncertain whether I'd be able to take any time off from my job after another birth and still have it to come back to. We'll have the advantage of already having all of our baby gear the second time around, but will have to start thinking about paying for preschool or other activities for Eva. None of it would be much, but it might well be enough to pop our beautiful little bubble. And there is always, always the ever-present urge to get back to Virginia.

The worst part of it is this: every time we think we've had enough, and are just going to abandon academia forever, some job somewhere opens up that would be perfect or close to it, and the cycle of hope begins anew. We're in the midst of that now, and I'll explain more about it soon enough in Part Two of this post.