True Confessions by Susan Gubar

Author:Susan Gubar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

But in that photo I was smiling at my husband, who was holding the camera. And I was smiling at my pregnant stomach. So what of children, and their relation to a philosophical career? My daughter Rachel is now twenty-nine, a stunning dynamic individual with a mind 100 percent her own, writing a PhD thesis in German cultural history. I love being with her. From the time in utero when she pounded with determined rhythm, first the fists and then the feet, she has argued with me, and I love it, and her. She was, with respect to my work, an easy child. She learned to read early, and always loved reading; she sought out her own contemplative space, and left me mine. And she was sick and home from school only an amazing one day in her entire thirteen years from kindergarten through high school.

So if the world of the philosophical academy made it difficult for me to raise Rachel, a fortiori it would be difficult for women with more than one child, or children who demand a lot of attention, or children who get sick a lot, or even a normal amount. And it was exceedingly difficult. Already when I was pregnant, my thesis advisor told me story upon story of women who had babies and stopped writing philosophy. He did this out of anxiety, and with the real hope that I would both have a child and continue writing philosophy. But it imposed a stress nonetheless. Because Rachel was a small baby and I am long-waisted, I did not look very pregnant, even toward the end. I remember Owen saying repeatedly to me, “Perhaps it is a wind egg.” And I think that is what he wished. I brought my Aristotle texts to the hospital, feeling that I could not stop working for even a short time without making people think I had stopped completely. I missed only one Monday night dinner at the Society of Fellows.

During the three years that I was in the Society of Fellows, however, life was very good. Leontief provided extra money for child care, and he was one of those relaxed, joyful people who could relieve stress about the whole situation. I found care that was, though expensive, good—first with an in-home sitter, later at the Radcliffe Child Care Center. It was when I started to teach that the problems began. My husband was teaching at Yale and I at Harvard, so we kept our Cambridge apartment, and he commuted to New Haven five days a week. So from the time we began teaching in 1975 until we separated in 1985, and after that, I was in effect a single parent. In some ways, I found, being a single parent was easier than trying to share responsibilities with my husband. For although there was more work to do, I could just do it, without the extra feeling of injustice, or the always vain and difficult efforts to get him to do what I took to be his fair share.

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