The Pregnant Professional

Let's just face it: Being 40 weeks pregnant is an obscene, in-your-face assertion.

When your belly is this size, there is no way to conceal your upcoming addition. No one needs to ask "What will you be up to this summer?" No one offers you wine, and strangers register vague fear on their face when you sit beside them, as if they imagine they may be called upon to deliver a wriggling infant at a moment's notice.

This is why I solidly recommend attending an academic conference the weekend of your due date. If you can remain professional-sounding, if you can miraculously obtain an air of intelligence, if you can get people to take you seriously without veering into baby talk, and if you can keep your feet from swelling so much they fall off, you know you have arrived. You are a true professional. You have not only successfully distracted yourself the fact that, despite your midwife's fear you would deliver weeks ago, you are STILL not in labor, but you have established that being a mother doesn't inherently detract from being a member of academia.

Of course, there's also the distinct possiblity you could fail terribly. You could find yourself in a state of panic in the morning, unable to find anything to accomodate your size from your "professional wardrobe," thus forced to wear an ugly shapeless flower-filled sundress. You could, like I did today, find yourself unable to have a conversation withoug blurting out: "My due date is tomorrow!" and "You won't BELIEVE what my three year old said the other day!" You could fail to prepare to present anything for your working session (since you thought you'd be in labor, after all), and instead sit nodding dumbly at the brilliance of all of the smaller-stomached presentations. You could hear your voice reverberating in the atrium at lunch: "After all, I'm eating for two!" as you snag a fourth cookie. You might even find yourself interrogating a new acquaintance about exactly how the delivered their third child without pain medication rather than discussing their research interests. Worst of all, you could, with great paranoia, imagine that everyone is looking at you judgmentally, surely thinking: "Look at THAT grad student. She surely isn't taking her career seriously enough."

So I may not have been at my professional best today. And I may not ever be, or at least for another 18 years or so. Nevertheless, I stand with my belly firmly placed forward. Juggling both maternal and professional identities is a choice I have made. They overlap in messy ways; they even inform each other at times. And although I may never publish quite enough research articles, and although I will never be the mother than sends "made from scratch" cupcakes to the kindergarten class, I may just scrape by. After all, mediocrity can't be such a curse if it results in opening up so many different opportunities for joy, for growth, and for life.