On marriage and all other forms of commitment

This post is part of the Diversity in Science Carnival on Pride hosted by Gerty-Z.

When I was pregnant and went to the doctor for the first time I had to fill out the obvious form with my name, address and social security number. I also had to check a box for marital status and was surprised to see that there were only 2 options here in the US: single and married. At the time I wasn’t married so I had to check single. But I wasn’t single either; I was living together with Dr. BrownEyes and considering that we had been together for five years and had decided to move to a different country together and have a baby together it felt weird to check ‘single’. It especially felt weird (and a bit sad) when the nurse asked me in a hopeful but doubtful voice whether the father of the baby was going to be involved at all.

I was surprised to see only those two options, because back home (in the country that was the first in the world to legalize gay marriage over ten years ago) there are always more than two options to the question of marital status. For example you can choose the option ‘cohabitant’ if you are living together but you aren’t married. You can even make a legal ‘samenlevingscontract’, which by the way is not just meant for people who are in a romantic relationship but can also exist between two people who decide to live together (as friends or roommates). It can legally specify anything from who bought the couch and who bought the tv to what would happen with the children when one of the partners passes away. The next option is a registered partnership. This was initially meant for gay people before it was legal for them to get married, but can also be entered into by heterosexual couples. And then the final box you can check is ‘married’. I have to add that back home, marriage is by far not as big of a deal as here in the US and many of my friends, even those with children are not married.

That's really Dr. BrownEyes and me!

For me, the initial (but not very romantic) reason to get married was so that everything was automatically arranged for BlueEyes in case anything was to happen to either of us. However, now that I am married I have to admit that it feels different. Not just because it’s much harder and more expensive to split up, but also because now we are officially connected to each other (and because we got to have this awesome day and I got to walk around in a beautiful dress the whole day).

So why am I writing this blog post? I’m writing it because the situation with the nurse asking me if Dr. BrownEyes was going to be involved at all since we weren’t married made me feel a little bit what it would be like if you would always have to check the ‘single’ box, even though you had been living together with your partner for an eternity. And for me it wasn’t even that I wasn’t allowed to get married, I had just chosen not to do so. I can only imagine how left out you must feel if you cannot take part in all aspects of a society just because of the gender of your partner. It makes me sad and angry to think about that, and I hope that soon everyone will realize that legalizing gay marriage doesn’t mean the end of civilization or destruction of the institution of marriage. I'm also writing this post as a part of the diversity in science carnival for pride hosted by GertyZ.

Does everyone suffer from Imposter Syndrome but me?

This post is part of the Diversity in Science Carnival on Imposter Syndrome hosted by Scicurious.

SciCurious wrote an interesting post today about Imposter Syndrome.

Imposter syndrome is a psychological phenomenon where people can't seem to feel that they are good at something, that they deserve to have their job or that promotion or what have you. It may sound really minor at first, but imposter syndrome can be insidious, pernicious, and prevent you from trying to get ahead and promoted, and even make you think you should leave your job.

 Reading the comments there, and on Dr. Isis' older post about the same subject, made me realize how many people suffer from Imposter Syndrome to a larger or smaller extent. And that surprised me a bit because I rarely doubt whether I should be where I am. It’s not that I am very exceptional: I did pretty well during my PhD (4 first author papers, of which one with IF>10), but decided to switch fields a bit to become a slice electrophysiologist during my post doc. I love doing electrophysiology experiments, but to say that I actually know what I’m doing? Not really. I never paid much attention to math and physics in high school and am deeply regretting that now. If my PI asks me to do a Nernst equation I have to google a Nernst equation calculator online because I cannot figure out how to do it myself. I cannot program in Matlab or R, and am kind of afraid to learn it even though it would make my life easier, and I get really nervous when I read papers that have equations in them. It’s been almost a year that I have been trying to read and understand the classic Hodgkin and Huxley paper about the action potential and I still haven’t finished it.

And two years into this post doc I still haven’t got a grant or fellowship for the project I am doing (I am currently waiting to hear from fellowship application #4). That might be because the project I have thought of for myself is pretty high-risk and very laborious (however, I am slowly getting data that make me believe it will actually work!).

So why am I not insecure about my place in science even though I’m only a post doc and I am a long way from being able to say that I made it? I can think of a couple reasons:

First, I’m generally an optimistic person. I have my fair share of panicky moments, but overall I usually have the feeling that things will turn out fine (and they usually do).  Second, my mentors have not been afraid to show that there’s a lot of struggling and rejection in science. When my first attempt at getting post doc money was rejected, my PI told me that he only got funded on his fifth grant as a post doc. And realizing that despite that initial rejection he’s still in science was a big eye-opener for me. Last, I think I’m pretty good at being happy when things work out well: experiments that work, papers that get accepted, travel awards that I got. And I often think back of how I felt when that happened. It’s embarrassing to say but I still sometimes sing the song in my head that I sang when my first paper got accepted. The only lyrics are the title of the journal it was published in….

Also, that’s what I love about electrophysiology: the instant gratification of patching a cell and seeing its membrane potential go to -70mV. It’s already a good day when that happens!  

Perfectionism, or the lack thereof (IWD)

Let me start with a disclaimer: BlueEyes is only 7.5 months old, so I am definitely a newbie in the combining work and being a mom game. As you can read in the ‘about me’ section of my blog, both my husband Dr. BrownEyes and I are post-docs. We were both not even 30 when BlueEyes was born. I do very much hope to be a professor someday. We both work five days a week and some days I feel that Buddhist monks that have to get up at 4AM to start an eight hour meditation practice probably have a more relaxed life than me (I’m not getting a ton of sleep and we literally ate a home-cooked dinner at 6.15PM every night for the past week), but most days are a happy combination of patching a bunch of cells and receiving drooly hugs and kisses from BlueEyes. This is what makes it work for me:

I guess I am the opposite of a perfectionist. To illustrate that I will admit that I only found out recently that when I was interviewing for a post-doc position, my CV said in two different places that I was working towards a PhD in nueroscience…  Apparently a lot of PIs don’t really read your CV, because I did get a bunch of interviews and a couple of offers for a job. However, in research it is sometimes nice if you are precise and a bit of a perfectionist (although I always say that if you don’t find a difference when you do a sloppy experiment, it’s probably not biologically significant anyway). 

My lack of perfectionism has come in handy before; when I finished my thesis in four and a half years and was fine with not looking at it for the 50^th time before sending it to my committee (I did discover a couple flaws later on, but nothing major).  And now that I have a baby I think it is actually one of my strong suits. Combining working and taking care of BlueEyes is only possible when I don’t worry too much (or at all) about whether I do everything perfect, like the house being clean. And no, with two post-doc salaries it is not possible to pay for someone to come and clean your house. So on the weekend, I put BlueEyes in a wrap on my back and run through the house with the vacuum cleaner, while dr. BrownEyes cleans the bathroom and kitchen. In half an hour we’re done, and everyone is satisfied. 

And in the lab it helps me too. I work from 8 am to 4 pm, and I leave early to pick BlueEyes up from daycare, so that we can spend some awake time together. Half of the time I am in the middle of doing something but I rarely ever have any problems throwing that in the corner and leaving it there for tomorrow.

These are the logistics behind it: our alarm is set for 6:30 but most of the days BlueEyes will wake me up before that. He sleeps in the bed with us so I don’t wake up fully when he wants to nurse, which is a couple times a night (but I can nurse while half asleep so I usually don’t remember how many times it was). I will nurse him while Dr. BrownEyes takes a shower, and I pump whatever milk is left while Dr. BrownEyes makes breakfast. We eat breakfast in bed (yes, every morning), and then I shower while Dr. BrownEyes dresses BlueEyes. Around 7:20 the three of us drive to the University together (we have only one car (which by the way, is the most car both of us have ever owned since we didn’t use to have a car when we lived in Europe)). Dr. BrownEyes drops BlueEyes off at daycare and I am in the lab by 7:50. Then I work a super-efficient day full of tightly planned experiments and neatly scheduled pumping sessions at 10 and 1 (total milk production in one day: ~16 oz). At 4:00 I leave the lab and pick up BlueEyes from the daycare and meet Dr. BrownEyes at the parking lot at 4:20. We drive home together and are home around 4:50. That feels very luxurious, because then we can spend time with BlueEyes until we eat dinner at 6:15. Then we’ll give BlueEyes a bath and put him to bed around 7. On really good days (which rarely happens) he’ll go to sleep immediately, but most nights it takes until 7:30 or 8 for him to go to sleep. Then we sit on the couch and talk or watch tv, and I’ll go to bed at 9.

On the weekends I usually do yoga on Saturday morning, we’ll get groceries, do laundry, clean the house and sometimes do some (or a lot of) work and we try to do something fun too.

The conclusion so far: I think you can have it all, but it sure is a lot of work!

On role models

I’m pretty excited to participate in feMOMhist's Blog Carnival on International women’s day next Thursday. I think it’s very important to have role models, so we don’t feel so alone and to show us that things that seem impossible are actually doable (for example for me, one of the questions was whether to wait until I got tenure (if ever) or have a baby sooner). I think it is also important to find role models that you can actually identify with, and I love the internet for that, since in real life it is so much harder to find those people.

The first female professor I worked for when I was in college had waited to get tenure before she had a baby. I started working in her lab when her baby was about 9 months. She had gone back to work when the baby was only a couple weeks old, because she felt that otherwise the lab would fall apart (that was a good probability since she was normally pretty controlling). She still worked 80 hour weeks, and on the weekend she and her husband (also a PI) would hire a babysitter to go to the lab and get some extra work done. Night time nursing sessions were used to answer emails. I remember one Saturday night when some friends and I drove back home after going to a bar at two in the morning: we passed the lab on the way home and I saw that the light was on in her office and she was working on a grant.

 I did not at all picture myself in her position. And now that I have a baby myself, I find it even harder to imagine how she was able to work so much while taking care of her baby (or was she perhaps exaggerating how much she actually worked? I don’t know). I was afraid that this would mean that I would never become a professor, since it requires so much work. But then I started meeting more people at meetings and online that show that it is possible to combine a career and motherhood (or just having a life besides work for that matter) in a way that would work for me. Cloud's post about the logistics behind this was very insightful. And even though we’ve only been doing this for a couple months now, I’d be happy to share how we do it in my next post.

All the usefulness of role models aside, I think what helped me most in my panicky days of early pregnancy, when I had just found out how expensive day care was, was watching MTV’s 16 and pregnant, to realize that if they could do it, so could I!