Helen, Heading Out (3)
A series of articles about recreating identity after an all-consuming career
By Helen
University Professor of English and Women’s Studies
Retired August 2012 at age 63
Ring the bells that still can ring. / Forget your perfect offering.
– Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”
Quitting my job
As I prepared to return to the University English department after a medical leave of almost three years, I acted on advice I had read years earlier: I quit my job. Emotionally.
My commitment in the classroom wasn’t affected, because the presence of students had always drawn my best effort. In research, with its sometimes oppressive pressures, I’d say I actually wrote my most intellectually sophisticated article – on the literary intersection of race and sexual orientation – after my return. I also found ways over the next seven years of my career to apply my new knowledge of my daughter’s fetal-alcohol damage in articles on literary texts, believe it or not. So I found ways to reconnect with daunting theory and to link my work and my life more closely.
At the same time, I changed my internal relationship to my job. I took back my soul.
What kept me busy
Academic life had many pleasures. Apart from classes and meetings, I controlled my own time. I had non-teaching semesters (generally summers) for my research. I pursued my own interests, in writing and often in the classroom, and was generally protected by academic freedom. Work involved the elaboration of ideas (and in literary studies, the appreciation of sounds, rhythms, stories, and feelings). My fields developed and grew. I was surrounded by smart, articulate people. I had a hand in shaping future generations. The student population changed refreshingly.
At the same time, overwork was a serious problem. Like many other professions, academia is internally driven. I’ve known few slackers in my job. Besides classroom teaching, I met with students, created and updated courses (with new material every year), supervised independent studies, teaching assistants, and graduate students, wrote letters of reference, and examined Ph.D. candidates. Literary research involved reading comprehensively, visiting archives, applying theory, organizing conferences (including the first conference in Canada on Native people in literature), delivering papers, and writing reviews, articles, and books. I wrote reader’s reports on conference-paper proposals, unpublished articles, and book manuscripts. I applied for grants. Early in my career, for five years, I read and reviewed half the fiction published in Canada each year. Later, for a similar period, I sat on the board of a major feminist journal and helped select the articles it published. One of my books, in the days before personal computers, was a bibliography compiling everything written by and about eighty Canadian novelists. One of my articles looked at the changes and all the manuscript drafts of a much revised Canadian novel.
Apart from teaching and research, I belonged to two departments and served on endless committees: on curriculum, graduate studies, grade-appeals, departmental reviews, tenure and promotion, Chair selection, and hiring. I initiated and supervised the creation of a Women’s Studies program at one university. I assessed the files of applicants for graduate school, for scholarships, and for academic positions, hundreds of files each time. For the last hire of my career, I read the 130 applications over Christmas, in my coat, since the University was closed and the buildings only minimally heated. I filled administrative positions (Director of Graduate Studies, Co-ordinator, Chair). Evenings and weekends went to course preparation, reading and rereading, and grading.
Being formidable
Early in my career, I would routinely forego summer holidays. An older colleague at my first tenure-track job called my twenty-something self “formidable,” in part for the way I charged down hallways, permed hair bristling, always at full speed. “Busy, busy, busy,” was my mantra, when anyone asked how I was doing. Even for routine tasks throughout my career, I wasn’t good at simply doing an adequate job. When I assessed the performance of my colleagues for annual reviews, never mind tenure and promotion, I would go overboard, reading every publication, every student evaluation.
In fact, in creating a literal “Pros and Cons” list about having a child in my thirties, possibly as a single parent, I was persuaded to choose parenthood by the awareness that my days were going to be overloaded in any case. Why not direct some of that over-work towards rich human connections?
Having children did prove to be one brake on a work-dominated life. For my first child, there was no maternity leave, and I returned to work after four months. With my adopted child, I was new chair of a rocky department, and my partner and I took turns for months being with our daughter so she could bond, without time off or daycare. And yes, being a faculty member with children is harder for a woman than a man. One former president (male, of course) at the University of Lethbridge observed that he had his most productive research period when his children were small. I could only gape.
Work-life balance
Years later at the University of Minnesota, when a feminist faculty group to which I belonged chose “Work-Life Balance” as a topic for our gathering, a senior scholar, editor of a prestigious journal, spoke with tears in her eyes of wishing, at 60, that she could just take evenings off when she got home exhausted at night. As I passed colleagues at the University of Guelph flying by on the stairs to and from classes, I used to marvel at how we disciplined ourselves to devote hours no overseer could have extracted.
And then cutbacks reduced faculty and staff, increased enrolments and class sizes, combined departments, proliferated committee work on restructuring, removed travel grants and teaching assistants . . . Despite stimulating colleagues with intriguing, compatible research and teaching interests, usually neither they nor I could make time to chat. Faculty began requesting part-time appointments, prepared to sacrifice salary for a more manageable workload. I explained to a new Chair, after our departmental falling-out, that we also suffered from performance anxiety. People were having panic attacks, taking sick leave, switching into administration to get out of the classroom, taking on multiple book projects, and of course, measuring themselves against each other.
Taking back my soul
My partner had been urging me for years to moderate my over-involvement in work. On leave, I finally started acting on my growing realization that no embodiment of the institution was ultimately going to compensate me for the sacrifice of my life. I became the ultimate arbiter of my choices, setting aside external expectation as much as possible. I took back my classroom, choosing to teach only the texts and the theoretical articles that stayed with me, that seemed most valuable, rather than second-guessing what graduate schools would be looking for or what would establish my credentials for colleagues. I started carving out non-work time at home.
Although the University administration had cruelly rescinded reduced-load appointments, I was able to choose part-time work for health reasons. My fear was that I would receive a part-time salary for full-time effort, since being completely prepared for the classroom, as one example, had never been possible, and preparations were only constrained by lack of time.
But I had a new attitude now. When my part-time teaching spanned both semesters, I made sure to paint in the mornings before work. Whenever possible, I arranged to have all the teaching in the same semester, and actually took the other semester off. As I was paid to do, after all. I did not, as one colleague had complained about reduced-load appointments, use my unpaid hours to write more articles and gain an advantage in the competition for salary increments. My work became a part of my life, rather than my life.
Leaving a margin around my work
Overachievement may be the purview of the young. Later, an already fully loaded ship can sink under unanticipated additional weight: child-bearing and rearing; accidents and illness; responsibilities for elderly parents, troubled teens, and young adults; aging, fatigue, and physiological changes (I attribute some of my memory problems to menopause); marital breakdown; financial difficulties; or the cumulative effects of stressful work environments.
In my first tenure-track job, I undertook an unrealistic load of research projects that failed to account for administrative responsibilities I had never faced before. That strikes me as a good parallel for the general risk of over-committing to work without yet realizing what else life is eventually going to ask of you.
I was able to develop more resilience and to control the timing of my retirement, when I learned to create a life margin around my work. Although, sadly, I achieved this balance only in the last fifth of my work life, it remains an important discovery that I try to pass on to others.