Spring Flowers

California Poppies at Coyote Hills Regional Park near Fremont, CA. I took these pictures while on a field trip for my Landscape Photography class last Thursday.

Being a Parent and Student at the Same Time

The following is a recorded excerpt from the conversation I had with Helen, my partner of five years and the mother of our two boys Sebastian, who is four, and Aidan, who is 18 months old.

Albert: What is it like being a parent and a graduate student at UC Berkeley at the same time? Is this difficult and stressful for you?

Helen: Well, it’s tough work. It’s two 24-hour a day jobs. But it is also very rewarding. When your research isn’t going anywhere and things aren’t working for you, which happens a lot, it’s like the majority of the time I think. If you don’t have a family to come home to then you come home and eat dinner by yourself and you go to bed, and your life is just graduate school, your life is the research you do. I don’t know how you would get up the next day.

But, if you have a family to come home to then you can put your research away for the night and you concentrate on playing games with your four-year-old and watching your 18-month-old dance in the living room. Then there’s reasons to get up in the morning. So, maybe it’s just that the harder things get, the more rewards you get for them.

Albert: Is it more stressful for you do your work now than before having kids?

Helen: Well, you know, it’s a balancing act actually. It’s kind of difficult. You know there are a lot of times I have to leave work at 4:30 to pick up the kids [we have daycare provided through UC Berkeley] and it would have been nice to have stayed there for another three hours to get the project done. And there are times that I envy the other students that, you know, can pretty much make up their own schedules and get a lot accomplished. But, um, you know, you just try to work through that and organize your life so that you can do your work when you can. I guess like the hardest thing is that you are on the job all the time, you don’t really have much in the way of a break. Um, occasionally you get to watch a television show or a movie or something, but that’s rarely uninterrupted because you have to get orange juice for somebody, you know, or someone has a poopy diaper. But that’s what is really hard is not having any time to relax. That’s tough. Having to work from 9:30 to 4:30 and then come home and do all the stuff at home, get the kids to bed, and start my second half of the work day that is three to four hours, like from 9:00 to 12:00 or 9:00 to 1:00 in the morning or something. So, you have to get used to not getting much sleep too.