motherhood

Self-Advocacy While on the Student Affairs Path

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THANK YOU to The Student Affairs Collective for the opportunity to share my experiences as a mid-career professional. You can see the original post here

During a recent #sachat about leaving student affairs, I posted this final thought: “you have every right to advocate for yourself, family, personal, mental, and financial health. If that means leaving, so be it.”

I am hesitant to publicly state that I want to leave. It seems so final. And I fear that by declaring my intentions, I will become invisible to colleagues and friends or worse, that my current efforts will be discounted because I lack stamina. In reality, these possibilities are remote. But, they feel real to me personally. I have devoted my entire “career” to higher education. It is all I know. If I leave, what the heck would I do? And, didn’t I spend a lot of time, money, and energy earning a terminal degree in this field? Where can I go where I can contribute to a team in a meaningful way and where my degree and experience would be valued?

Like many mid-career professionals, I am at a crossroads. As has been discussed before, to move up the ranks, I would have to move out. This means either relocating to another part of the country (not possible for us right now), or actively pursuing more advanced roles at my current institution. Both of these choices would require a significant lifestyle change in terms of the amount of time required to do the job well. Ideally, moving up would also mean a salary increase or some other form of compensation. But, if I am honest with myself, I am not sure that the modest salary increase would be “worth” the extra time required.

So, here I am: 15 years of experience in different functional areas at different institutions, Ph.D. prepared, and feeling lonely. What should I be when I grow up? From my doctoral research about the work-life strategies used by mid-career women in student affairs, I know that I am not alone. This sense of career path instead of career trajectory is a common one for women and especially for women with children. Yet, I am hesitant to make the leap and try something else. We advocate for students. We teach them how to advocate for themselves. I believe that we also need to advocate for ourselves. This gets tricky for most of us, myself included, because in student affairs we are supposed to love what we do. That love is supposed to be enough fuel for the long haul. Most of us probably didn’t get started in this profession for the residence hall director salary or glamorous lifestyle. In the beginning, it was about students and relationships. On many levels it still is about students and relationships. But, at mid-career, it has also become about paperwork, politics and red tape.

My desire to change the system from within has been tempered by the reality that higher education is slow to change and often resists outsiders with new ideas. My final thought from #sachat is true. All of us have the right to advocate for ourselves and our own well-being. This means me, too. I am quite comfortable advocating for the student organizations I advise and more than once I have encouraged my colleagues to create proposals asking for conference funding or time away. Now, at mid-career, I need to turn those advocacy efforts inward and advocate for myself. Since the Twitter chat, I have devoted serious time to thinking about how to use my training and experience and leverage them to make the next right step for me and my family.

There are ways to stay connected to higher education and college students without being part of a student affairs division. Maybe that means combining my true passion for childhood cancer awareness with my higher education experience and helping foundations recruit students as fundraisers or campus ambassadors. Maybe it means starting a coaching or consulting side business. Maybe it means another lateral move or truly taking all of my vacation days next year. What I said before about higher education being all I know, that’s not really true. And, it’s not true for you, either. We have a tendency to undersell our gifts and talents because so much of our work is behind the scenes. Let’s advocate for ourselves and stop doing that.

As a Ph.D. prepared professional, a mid-career administrator, mother and advocate, I know how to get stuff done. The skills that helped me negotiate a doctoral program, our son’s treatment, and my career thus far are the same skills I will take with me when I go. In student affairs, the typical timeline for career ascension is somewhat clear: Master’s degree-first job-Assistant Director-Director-VP. There is no roadmap for leaving. And leaving doesn’t have to mean forever. It could just mean that it is what’s next. I am trying to be patient and think in short-term achievable goals, rather than an all-out career leap. It’s a path not a trajectory.

Table Read

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This afternoon we had a table read for the Listen to Your Mother Metro Detroit Show. Doesn’t that sound so cool? Table read. Like a TV show. One of the other cast members said, “Oh I love Shonda Rhimes! And now, I feel like her!” Who doesn’t want to be Shonda Rhimes?

We met at Alternatives for Girls in Detroit. AFG is changing the lives of homeless girls in Detroit; and they are the beneficiary of our LTYM ticket sales. You can check out the amazing organization here.   There were 15 women in the room, all there to share their stories about motherhood. We sat in a circle, chit-chatted and ate some lovely donated pastries. Thank goodness I didn’t give up dessert for Lent! Our show’s producers- Angela, Angela, and Jessica– didn’t want us to introduce ourselves too fully. They wanted us to know each other through our stories and to read them the way we did in our auditions. This is also how the audience will experience them at the show on May 4. No frills. Women and their stories will take center stage.

I arrived at the table read today nervous and confident. I was nervous to read my full audition piece in front of my fellow castmates. But, I had been chosen from among 50 other women writers who auditioned so I was a little confident, too. I thought that my story and my writing would be among the best in the group. They were neither of those things. The talent of other writers absolutely blew my face off. The raw emotion that the other women captured using only their words was awe-some. And, I did the ugly cry throughout my entire five minutes of reading. Blerg.

On the drive home and the rest of the evening I have been thinking about the women in my circles. The childhood cancer community is like the PhD community. When everyone else in your circle has what you have or is in the process of getting one (a PhD) or experienced what you experienced (childhood cancer), it is easy to become insular and isolated. Only about 3% of American women has a doctorate. I detest the word “rare” when speaking about children with cancer because I believe it dilutes the power of our message and the need for more research funding. However, the number of children diagnosed each year is small. And with only 350 new cases of rhabdo each year, L’s diagnosis was even more rare. Basically for the last 5 years, I have been with people who are exactly like me. This is not a bad thing. I needed and still need those networks of women, especially my fellow momcologists and student affairs parents. I will always need them. But today I learned that as a result of my closed circles, I have lulled myself into thinking that my story, our story, our journey is unique, or would win some prize for most traumatic or most tragic. Not true.

There is no prize for tragic. There is no hierarchy of suffering or pain or misery or grief. There were women in that room today who shared about infertility, divorce, adoption, losing children, burying their parents. And all of this was going on at the same time I was living my own story. Parallel lives. From December 2008 until March 2010 I kept wondering how the world was still spinning. How was it still going while my baby was suffering so horribly and while S and I were so utterly terrified and exhausted? Turns out, most of the other women in that room today were wondering the same things. About their own lives, their own children, and marriages, and parents.

Jessica, one of our directors, said that this experience has made her more patient and more tolerant. That you really never know what someone else has experienced. That people have reasons for the way they act. Everyone has a story. Every.one.

What a gift, honor and privilege to be in that room today. To my fellow castmates, thank you. You are inspiring. And, I thank you for pushing me to want to be a better writer. I can’t wait for dress rehearsal in April and the real deal on May 4, 2014!

Big enough dreams: Part 2

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“Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.”

Well, I got what I wished for…I was accepted to the Listen to Your Mother Metro Detroit show! You can see the official cast announcement here.

Holy buckets! I am so nervous I might barf. I am so excited I can’t sit still. It is an honor to be chosen from among the almost 50 women who auditioned. It is a great privilege to be able to share our journey through #childhoodcancer and how it has influenced how I think of myself as a mother.

When I told S the good news, I said “I think I am becoming a writer.” He said, “You have always been a writer. Now, you are writing.”

Gulp.