An Interwoven Narrative: Academic Mothers in the Pandemic Context

In the Spring of 2020, our lives were upended as we delved into the great unknown of the COVID-19 pandemic. As I (first author) write now, I remember interviewing BSW and MSW students that May for an empirical study designed to capture the impact of the pandemic on their lives. As we anticipated the end of our month-long, state-wide quarantine, so many participants shared hopes of what life would look like afterward. But that quarantine was extended for another month, canceling their graduation ceremonies and vacations. And of course, we never did get back to “normal.” Our lives have shifted permanently in many ways.

Over the past three years, several of us published findings from the 67 student narratives captured in our qualitative study (Cole et al., 2021; Jen et al., 2023; Paceley et al., 2021). We wanted to honor the students’ experiences; with many of our preexisting research projects being delayed by the pandemic, we also wanted to publish to secure our degree completion, our jobs and tenure. I gave birth to my first child and thus all of us, as an authorship team, were also navigating motherhood while fulfilling our roles as students, faculty, and administrators. We found ourselves being drawn to the narratives of student mothers in our data; those mothers who had to decide whether to host a birthday party and “risk the germs;” who centered their children's experiences, even when asked about themselves; who expressed deep grief and deep gratitude in the same breath.

We are not the only ones who wished to uncover such narratives. In the past few years, scholars have addressed academic mothering – or the parenting experiences of individuals who identify as mothers while also being students, faculty, and academic staff and administrators – during COVID-19, including commentaries, autoethnographies, and testimonios (Beech et al., 2021; Bowyer et al., 2022; Donoso et al., 2021; Guy & Arthur, 2020; Lechuga-Peña, 2022). Authors speak to the challenges of merging their home and professional lives, rethinking orientations toward space and identity, and navigating confinement and the responsibility of maintaining their families’ health (Beech et al., 2021; Donoso et al., 2021). They argue for concrete supports to make academic mothering sustainable and to view motherhood as a strength and point of connection, encouraging us to embrace the complexity of the experience (Beech et al., 2021). These articles are often placed, implicitly or explicitly, against the backdrop of neoliberalism and its influences on the system of higher education (Bowyer et al., 2022; Kisitu, 2020). Neoliberalism presents an ideological application of market- and consumption-driven practices which demand productivity, managerialism, and efficiency (Giroux, 2015; Preston & Aslett, 2014). Within the academy, such pressures drive individualistic measures of success, foster competition over collectivism or collaboration, and inform affective manifestations of precarity (Burton & Bowman, 2022), failure (Horton, 2020), and shame (Shahjahan, 2020), often extending beyond the work life of embedded scholars. While the neoliberal academy and its feminist critiques (Amsler & Motta, 2019; Gilbert, 2008; Mountz et al., 2015) predate the pandemic, there are many ways in which neoliberalism's impact was made glaringly clear during COVID-defined years.

In this article we weave together a shared narrative from multiple, distinct voices, adding depth of perspective to the existing literature. We envision this narrative as a woven fabric of complex and multifaceted colors and textures. When we consider our own experiences of motherhood, we cannot separate being a mother from the other social roles we play. As one of our students said, “I've became a mom, an aunt, a teacher, a student, a worker. I'm all of these things under one roof.” Similarly, this article's structure reflects the interwoven nature of multiple sources of knowledge – narratives of student mothers, our personal reflections as mothers in academia, and literature on academic mothering – using the thread of feminist theory and critique to hold the intricate pieces together. Our goal is to story the often untold experience of academic mothers, both from the faculty and student perspective, and to critique the impact of the neoliberal academy within our pandemic-framed lives, in turn suggesting alternatives informed by feminist theory and praxis.

This fabric is informed by our situated knowledges within our daily context – in the Midwest United States, at a predominantly White institution, with a PhD, MSW and BSW body of approximately 500 students. Our authorship team includes one doctoral student with a young child, three pre-tenured and one tenured faculty member with children of widely varying ages, and a Dean with two adult children. The voices of our students anchor the structure of the paper through the use of in-vivo quotes from the 16 BSW and MSW student mothers we interviewed in the spring of 2020. Each quote highlights a key impact or experience academic mothers have shared during the pandemic with accompanying empirical and theorical discussion. The subsample of data is drawn from a larger study of 67 BSW and MSW students who participated in Zoom interviews with student or faculty interviewers depending on their preference lasting approximately 1.5–2 h. Interviews focused on impacts of the pandemic on students’ personal, social, educational, and professional lives. A full description of the methods can be found in Paceley et al. (2021). Study procedures were approved by the University of Kansas Human Subjects Division.

“It Still Comes Back to My Kids”

Social work students have described the emotional complexity of their experiences in higher education during the pandemic, such as wanting to give back to their communities and feeling guilty for not being able to do more (Jen et al., 2023; Paceley et al., 2021). For mothers, the pandemic led to increases in the gendered labor of parenting and homeschooling while working from home (Beech et al., 2021; Donoso et al., 2021). Those balancing higher education and parenting have described feeling overwhelmed at having to navigate meeting their own and their children's educational needs at once, sometimes necessitating resistance and self-advocacy (LaBrenz et al., 2023). When layered on top of one another, we see these individuals - social workers, students, and mothers – navigating the felt need to do more for their communities while balancing their children's health and educational needs, often putting their own needs last.

For instance, one student mother was repeatedly asked by her interviewer about her own experience of the pandemic, but continually responded through the lens of her children's perspectives, stating:

I think that it still comes back to my kids. Because I tend to worry most about them and their safety, their health, their mental state dealing with all of this, how they're going to view this time in their life when they get older.

From a feminist political economy lens, mothering, teaching students and our children, getting an education, often working in part-time or full-time positions, and ensuring a family's safety represents the toll of the triple shift - work, education, and reproductive labor - that academic mothers regularly navigate (Stone & O'shea, 2013) only further exacerbated by the pandemic context (LaBrenz et al., 2023). We felt this tension and the consequences enforced by a system of higher education that often overlooks our efforts and responsibilities to mentally and emotionally balance the needs of others, framing those tasks as detracting from our own productive engagement in demonstrable scholarship – the personal and political bound up with neoliberalism (Amsler & Motta, 2019).

As faculty and administrators, we relate to our students’ feelings of responsibility, burden, uncertainty, and indignation while recognizing that the experience of student mothers is fraught with less privilege and greater feelings of powerlessness. We were better positioned to financially weather the crisis and relatively well-resourced and supported by our institution. Despite these privileges, we found ourselves navigating similar hurdles. We taught classes and held important meetings with our children at our sides, unable to give any one thing our full attention. We wondered if wearing masks would hinder our toddlers’ speech and socioemotional development. We wondered how long to keep our children at home, balancing their safety with the importance of social engagement. This dialogue extended to conversations with our college-age children who had to move home, sacrificing newly found freedoms and unexpectedly leaving dorm rooms and apartments full but empty. As much as we wanted to keep them safe, our rules only extended to the front door. We experienced the unbelievable pain associated with not being able to see our children. We worried about how they would experience closure and the rite of passage that graduation brings without ceremonies or celebrations. And all the while, we maintained our professional responsibilities, including providing emotional care to our students and colleagues, infusing our lives with felt tensions between sources of strain and meaning.

Navigating Tension: “I Can't Do This Anymore” and “I’m So Grateful for This Time”

For many mothers, the ups and downs of raising a child of any age are both extremely challenging and amazingly beautiful. Adding to this balancing act the impact of an isolating pandemic brought some academic mothers to their breaking points. As one student mother described:

There was a lot about [this time] that was so amazing…. But at the same time, [my child is] a toddler, so there's a lot that's just really hard about that, especially if you're the only one there for hours and hours with him while you're trying to do other things. That's really tough. It was a huge rollercoaster of, ‘wow, I'm so grateful for this time with my son.’ But also… I feel cut off from supports that I needed, that I really relied on.

As faculty we navigated similar tensions. For one of us (fourth author), the canceling or postponement of cultural events allowed for a trip to my traditional homelands, a first for both me and my children, which contributed to a summer of unforeseen gratitude. We also found flexibility in our roles which allowed for added time with our children. However, having flexibility often meant that we were the parent required to adjust to care-related needs in the moment, while some did not have a present partner to fall back on at all. Day-to-day flexibility also did not remove external pressures to produce. Thus, we scheduled meetings during nap time and relied on screen time more than we’d like, hoping all the while that we could still secure a job or our next promotion when it was all behind us.

While women have historically been positioned as sources of emotional and reproductive care and labor, a common suggestion for supporting mothers is to create space to step away from their caregiving roles and engage in “self-care.” However, this concept has been co-opted as a capitalist and neoliberal tool driving consumerism, placing responsibility for improved health and wellbeing on individuals rather than systems (Ward, 2015) and often equating to no more than meeting our basic needs. While it can be imperative for mothers to have time and space to meet their own needs, this lens does not acknowledge that we always have our children on our mind even when they are not present, nor the tension that many mothers feel, of simultaneously wanting time to ourselves while also being incredibly grateful for each and every moment with our children, something both we and our students felt while in quarantine. A feminist ethic of care would suggest that this deep expression of care for others is a natural human tendency that should be supported and incorporated into all aspects of our lives. As Gilligan (2011) has suggested:

…as humans we are by nature empathic and responsive beings, hard-wired for cooperation. Rather than asking how do we gain the capacity to care, the questions become how do we come not to care; how do we lose the capacity for empathy and mutual understanding?

“I’ve Never Been Through This”

Student mothers also described an additional stressor of trying to navigate family care, self-care, and community care during a crisis with no examples of what that might look like. One mother described navigating this new world with no models while supporting the wellbeing of herself and her two sons: “[it] was really hard because I'm going through the trauma of it too, and I've never been through this. There's no parenting book that prepares you for this sort of a situation.” While we acknowledge the difficulty that arises when models are not offered for any new and challenging act we must perform, as informed by critical and queer theory, we also are inspired to ask what might be possible if we reimagined academic parenting without models. Would this allow for us to mother in ways better aligned with our constant awareness of our children's needs? We see this in our co-author who engaged their child in delivery of their online classes as an active learning and teaching subject. Would this expand our capacity to engage in community care for others and ourselves while recognizing the duality of connectedness between our roles as mothers and academics? We see this value of community care in our co-author who moved to a distant state to live with her parents for an extended period of time when her toddler's daycare closed. Would this create space for creative and resistive approaches to mothering within higher education that allow us to bring our full, interwoven selves to our home and work lives?

Implications & Conclusion

There are many reasons we found the storying of academic motherhood to be needed and compelling. Those reasons also give shape to the supports and solutions we see necessary within higher education in order to better support academic mothers through their parenting and schooling journeys beyond the pandemic context. For instance, there are very few opportunities to story the student experience and even fewer to explore overlap between student identities and other intersectional identities and social roles. One thing we have learned from pursuing qualitative research with our students during the pandemic is that they valued this opportunity to be and feel heard. They were hopeful about the potential of their stories to create change. We see rich potential for student narratives to shape our understanding of their needs and strengths, as well as shaping how we support our diverse student body during times of crisis and relative calm alike. As evidenced by the ways in which our own narratives echo those of our students, we also see utility in acknowledging shared experiences across students, faculty, and administrators, provided that differences in access and privilege are also acknowledged. Opportunities to form such connection, foster mentorship, and validate each other's experiences might arise in forming diverse research teams, creating intentional mentorship networks, and offering opportunities for students to get to know faculty and administrators in informal ways.

In shaping institutional policies and practices, strategies we have found useful for supporting the academic progress and wellbeing of student mothers include the creation of a student emergency fund to offset student crises and support degree completion, creating policies allowing children to attend classes when necessary, and promoting flexibility in deadlines and attendance. We also hired a case manager to attend to the stressors our students’ experience in all aspects of life and to remind them that our support extends beyond their educational journey. Some of these approaches also have significant overlap with tenets of trauma-informed education and will similarly support other students who may be underrepresented or under-supported in higher education.

Culturally, we strive to foster an ethic of care in supporting student mothers, where caregiving roles can be centrally positioned aspects of our own and our students’ lives. As fellow academic mothers, Beech, Sutton and Cheatham (2021) reflected that the pandemic offered opportunities alongside challenges, such as leaning into their parenthood as an asset and building relationships in new ways, stating: “We’re learning to see each other as multifaceted individuals, rather than unidimensional professionals” (p. 626). In the classroom, this can look like recommending that faculty address the balance of family and work life, acknowledging the full complexity of their students’ experiences, and setting coursework up as secondary to caregiving responsibilities rather than as primary while allowing our own complex humanity to shine through.

We have also found deep meaning and validation in sharing our stories with one another through this co-authorship process, leading us to see and acknowledge each other's full selves in new ways. We hope to maintain this sense of connection and to use it to inform how we relate to one another in our collegial context. For instance, we might find freedom from the demanding temporality of neoliberalism by validating our maternal experience of time and the conflicts such duality creates in our daily lives. We might support the value of maternal roles and an ethic of care through the advocacy for and sustenance of “slow scholarship” by mentoring one another into strategic approaches to slow the pace of our work, engage in meaningful writing and dialogue that sustains our passions, advocate for our invisible labor to “count” in meaningful ways toward securing jobs, merit, and promotions, and aspire to be “good enough” rather than constantly raising the bar on what success looks like (Mountz et al., 2015, p. 1253).

Many of these adjustments in practice and perspective were prompted by the pandemic context which offered opportunities to break from prior neoliberal demands limiting individual flexibility and the blending of our academic and personal lives. While we exit the early stages of pandemic life, however, it is our intention to maintain these interventions, resisting felt pressures to return to “business as usual” in many aspects of academic life. We aspire to promote resistance to the neoliberal agendas and logics of the university system through feminist critique and praxis. We take inspiration from the work of Amsler and Motta (2019) who state:

…feminist academic praxis can not only help make the gendered workings of neoliberal power more visible, but also enable us to nurture and sustain alternative ways of being and working in, against and outside the university. Far from desiring greater inclusion into a system which enshrines repressive logics of productivity and reproduces gendered subjectivities, inequalities, silences and exclusions, we aim to refuse and transgress it by bringing feminist critiques of knowledge, labour and neoliberalism to bear on how we understand our own experiences of motherhood in the academic world (p. 82).