The Conversation

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Foreword xi
4. Acknowledgments xv
5. Introduction xvii
6. Part One: The Conversation
7. The Conversation 3
8. In Medias Res 11
9. Scholar, Negated 16
10. Student/Body 20
11. On Being Phyllis’s Daughter: Thoughts on Academic Intimacy 25
12. Engineering Motherhood 31
13. The Wire Mother 39
14. Fitting In 49
15. Motherhood after Tenure: Confessions of a Late Bloomer 55
16. Part Two: That Mommy Thing
17. First Day of School 63
18. Two Boards and a Passion: On Theater, Academia, and the Art of Failure 66
19. Living (!) A Life I Never Planned 72
20. Coming to Terms at Full Term 77
21. One Mamá’s Dispensable Myths and Indispensable Machines 80
22. That Mommy Thing 89
23. Failure to Progress: What Having a Baby Taught Me about Aristotle, Advanced Degrees, Developmental Delays, and Other Natural Disasters 93
24. Infinite Calculations 103
25. I Stand Here Teaching: Tillie Olsen and Maternity in the Classroom 109
26. The Facts, the Stories 116
27. I Am Not a Head on a Stick: On Being a Teacher and a Doctor and a Mommy 123
28. Lip Service 129
29. Body Double 136
30. Part Three: Recovering Academic
31. The Long and Winding Road 145
32. The Bags I Carried 149
33. One of the Boys 159
34. Free to Be...Mom and Me: Finding My Complicated Truth as an Academic Daughter 168
35. Nontraditional Academics: At Home with Children and a PhD 174
36. A Great Place to Have a Baby 184
37. Recovering Academic 189
38. Part Four: Momifesto
39. The Orange Kangaroo 201
40. Ideal Mama, Ideal Worker: Negotiating Guilt and Shame in Academe 213
41. In Theory/In Practice: On Choosing Children and the Academy 222
42. Motherhood Is Easy; Graduate School Is Hard 231
43. Momifesto: Affirmations for the Academic Mother 237
44. In Dreams Begin Possibilities—Or, Anybody Have Time for a Change? 247
45. Contributors 251