Wendy K. Wilde
WHEN I BEGAN my employment in the English Writing Program at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, a large, public university in New England in 1980, I was excited to be a secretary, following the footsteps of my mother, who was a secretary until she got married. I was nineteen years old. As I walked into 305 Bartlett Hall, the main office of a cluster of offices along the hallway, the atmosphere was casual and relaxed. Four women were gathered in the main office, sitting on the white, plastic bench or standing, drinking their coffee, talking about last night’s episode of Hill Street Blues, oblivious to my entry. I was amazed by the female energy projected throughout the room; it was my first empowering experience on campus. Over the course of several years, I would be “mothered” by these women (referred to throughout this essay as my “aunties”) while observing and learning from them.
My story here bears witness to the challenges I faced and the opportunities I embraced in the academy (first as an entry-level employee and then as a student) and demonstrates how the female relationships and connections I developed enhanced my life as a mother and woman. In many ways, my university aunties helped “raise” me because, many of them mothers themselves, they took on a maternal role in my life and served as role models. My aunties were in some sense like the “othermothers” whom Patricia Hill Collins (1994) portrays in her black feminist theory, those mothers who routinely take care of children in the black community even though their maternal ties are social rather than biological. My aunties also resemble the “fictive kin” Carol Stack (1975) portrays in All Our Kin—that is, black women who claimed one another as sisters as a way to assert the right to give and get care. My experience with aunties suggests that the figures “othermothers” and “fictive kin” can be utilized to understand other social and racial contexts. My aunties became the othermothers and fictive kin in my life and a key part of my survival strategy and success across work, personal, and academic environments. Yet my story is far from unique. I tell a highly gendered story, a story of the constraints routinely faced by working mothers (Garey 1999). I tell a story of social class, a story about the potent barriers—rooted in childhood, exacerbated in marriages, and amplified on the job—that make it more difficult for working-class mothers to reach what members of the middle class often simply assume or take for granted (Lareau 2003; Furstenberg 2010). I also tell a story of positive experiences shared by others who sometimes make the “hard choice,” as Kathleen Gerson (1985) so aptly calls it, to deviate from their past and seize those opportunities and pathways that make it possible to overcome some gendered and class-based constraints.
After working more than thirty years in a university setting, I now realize that my initial decision to work rather than commit to a college education was the result of my working-class background, although at the time this reason was unbeknownst to me. My growing up on a dairy farm until the age of sixteen in a small, rural community formed many of my attitudes, beliefs, and early experience of life. Like most children of the working class (Gerstel 2011), I was related to practically every family on the street, with no connection to the outside world except for the bus ride to a school twenty-five miles away. Most of my cousins began to work right away upon their graduation from high school. My mother’s exit from her early life as a secretary to a new role as a farmer’s wife, where she labored around our home and farm, was expected and accepted. She was “doing motherhood” as needed in the culture of a rural agricultural community (Garey 1999).
I wanted to experience something different than my rural home life could offer. Although I was not sure what I wanted to do, I attended a local community college for a year and studied secretarial science with the help of a church scholarship. I continued to feel an urgency to make money, yet working part-time at the local supermarket while attending school was not getting me closer to my financial and personal goals. I was not entirely sold on the importance of a college education; it did not seem practical. Instead, I had dreams of finding a fulfilling job, getting married, and having kids. I wanted to move out of my parents’ home, create my own home, and begin a new adventure outside my remote rural community.
One of my professors at the community college recognized my doubts about college and recommended that I apply for a job at the university. Luckily for me, there were many openings, so I applied in November 1980, and by December I was a university employee. At the time, I had no idea how my life’s path would deviate from the culture of a working-class community and farm life where I spent my early years. As I began working in the Writing Program, I soon discovered an eye-opening life outside the farm.
My early aspiration of getting married and having a child came true six months later when I discovered I was pregnant at the age of twenty. This news was a shock to my parents because of their (conservative) Christian values so prevalent in rural communities, and so a “shotgun” wedding followed in November 1981. My university aunties, in contrast, reacted to my news with excitement but without judgment. I received so much love and support from the people I worked with in the Writing Program, including other staff, faculty members, graduate students, and especially my aunties. They were protective of me while also guiding me through this unfamiliar territory of becoming a new mom at such a young age. In May 1982, my son came into the world.
BECOMING A YOUNG MOTHER
Becoming a mom at the age of twenty-one was scary and overwhelming, especially because I had to go back to work a month after giving birth (by cesarean section). This was in the 1980s, when a growing proportion of working-class couples could no longer rely on only one income (Roos 2010). Working-class women could rarely afford to take more than a month off to care for their new infants, and I was one of them (Perry-Jenkins, Repetti, and Crouter 2000). Because I had not been employed at the university long enough to accrue even two months of sick or vacation time, I returned to work in early June, taking my son with me to the office. In addition, there was no alternative to going off the payroll system, especially if you did not have enough sick time accrued for maternity leave. Today, the university’s Professional Staff Union manages a sick-leave bank where employee sick days are deposited each year, which allows new moms who do not have accrued personal sick and vacation days or have used them up to apply for additional sick days from the bank. Fortunately for me, my aunties in the Writing Program were sympathetic to my situation and welcomed my son into 305 Bartlett Hall. As a result, I brought my son and a playpen to work with me until he was old enough to be placed in child care. The director even gave my son “airplane rides” as he did his own son.
When my son cried and was hungry, I found the inside front of my shirt dampening as the overproduction of his nourishment couldn’t wait until I found a private space to nurse him. One of my aunties, who had three sons, was especially helpful. She took me under her wing and easily shared her wisdom of motherhood as I juggled doing my job and caring for my son at the same time. She taught me simple parenting techniques such as setting feeding and sleep schedules and limiting my impulse to pick up my son immediately just because he was making a noise or fussing. All but one of my aunties were mothers themselves; they were fifteen to twenty years older than I, and their wisdom provided many layers of support. I see that perhaps I was subconsciously discovering my multiple intertwined identities as a woman, mother, and worker through the “fabric” created by my aunties (Garey 1999). My son soon became part of this close-knit community and reaped the benefits of having several surrogate aunties in Bartlett Hall who became a part of our lives. As I look back at this period in my when I became an employee of the university, I realize I was learning how to be a mom while working outside the home, all with my fictive kin’s help.
One of the most difficult and emotionally draining tasks I faced was placing the care of my infant son in someone else’s hands. The university did have a child-care center, but children weren’t accepted until they were fifteen months old. The university’s Skinner Lab accepted infants, but spaces were few, it was not full-time, and the cost was high. I always wondered why the university did not support more child-care for younger children considering that the maternity (unpaid) leave policy was only for two months. As I came to understand and a growing number of feminists are showing, the United States, when compared to almost every other developed country in the world, is exceptional for the absence of public support it provides to working parents (Heymann 2000).
As a consequence of limited child-care facilities at the university, for his early years my son stayed with various friends I knew who lived near my home and were stay-at-home moms. When my son was finally accepted to the university child care, I was so relieved; he would be close by, and the cost would be lower than other kinds of care. My relief was short-lived, however, when I received a call from someone at the child-care center saying that my son had injured himself. He had a cast placed on his leg and returned to the university child-care center two weeks later. After eight long weeks, the cast was removed. Two weeks after that I received another call in which they informed me that my son was now not walking on his other leg. My initial thought was, “Is he doing this for attention?” Yet after an X ray, we learned that his other leg was fractured; this second injury was again caused by un-supervised play on the same piece of equipment with the same boy. I admit that my son was a handful with a great deal of energy, but so are many other kids. I was beginning to understand that there was a systemic problem that made it impossible for him to obtain the attention he needed in this child-care center. State budgets have always been tight, but they seem particularly tight when it comes to the allocation of funds for services (in particular for child care and hiring of staff) that benefit employees (Clawson and Gerstel 2002). And the situation for our family unfortunately became worse.
Because the timing and circumstances around the second injury were so unusual, the hospital called in the Department of Social Services. Of course, both my husband and I were upset and angry. As I was in the hospital room with my son trying to calm and console him, the doctors and other hospital staff brought my husband to the X-ray room and proceeded to accuse him of causing these injuries to our son. How could Social Services accuse my husband when it was while my son was at day care that he injured himself and had to be carried out in my arms? The Department of Social Services came to do a home visit to investigate the cause of the injuries. I felt totally stripped naked, helpless and judged. We had to defend our home, which was under constant repair; not perfect, but it was home. We had a wood stove in the kitchen that heated our small cottage, with no fence or protective barrier to keep our son away. We had an opening in the floor in the living room that led down to an area we had just finished digging out, to accommodate our washer and dryer. Our fear was that the social worker would think that my son fell down the living room stairs.
This fear typically associated with the Department of Social Services and the accusatory fingers it points are not a consequence of our personal failings as parents. They are instead the result of a wider institutional disregard for those with few resources. Their response was just one more example of the all too common “blaming the victim,” although it is a reality that child abuse exists (Ryan 1976). In the end, the Department of Social Services concluded that the injuries did occur at the child-care center and not in our home, but the child-care center was not charged with negligence. Furthermore, we had to hire a lawyer to remove my son from the list of kids who needed protective services even though we were not at fault. We had to withdraw him from the university child-care center, and for the next few years he went to several different licensed day-care providers’ homes, where I thought he would get more individualized attention and care.
I learned, however, that using private, licensed providers was also difficult; they were unstable and different from child-care centers. I remember finding my son (he was about three) sitting in “the corner” at one such place. When I asked the provider, a grandmotherly woman, what he did wrong, she said a construction worker had found him at the nearby work site and had carried him back. He had wandered off because he wanted to see all the big trucks and backhoes. She was upset because he did not stay in the yard—even though she clearly wasn’t watching him. I remember feeling lost and frustrated that once again my son could not get the supervision he needed. But I did not feel alone.
My aunties in the Writing Program were incredibly patient and supportive of my problems with child care. Their constant, straightforward advice to stand up for my son and myself helped ease the guilt I harbored for leaving my son in day care, especially the days after the aforementioned incidents and the guilt I felt for possibly having to miss work again because of no child care. My aunties tamed my overwrought emotions as they convinced me that my son’s well-being should take precedence over any job and that the day-care provider was not competent. When my son began kindergarten, my stress lessened because he would be in school, and I had space to breathe. As he started school, I began to think about taking advantage of what the university had to offer while also setting an example for my son.
BECOMING A NEW STUDENT
I received more than emotional support while working at the university; working in an academic department was intellectually stimulating. There was an “aha” moment one day when as the usual summer lunch crew of graduate students and staff were sitting around talking about a particular book that I knew nothing about. I thought to myself, “I need to take classes so I can feel more a part of these conversations.” So in the spring of 1987, when my son was five years old, I enrolled in an English literature class taught by one of the graduate students in the Writing Program. As one of my university benefits, I could take up to six credits a semester for free while working full-time. Taking a class was empowering because I was doing something for myself; it motivated me to step back and look at the broader picture of what opportunities could exist for my son and me. I was becoming part of the ever-growing group of “new traditional students” (once known as “nontraditional students”)—those who were older than twenty-five, had a child, worked more than twenty hours a week, had a long delay between high school and college, and were now becoming a substantial part of the college student population (Belcastro and Purslow 2006). My taking classes improved both my and my son’s well-being. He was happy because I was happy. He was a student, and I was a student. The Writing Program environment stimulated my interest in taking classes not only because it meant I could participate in and listen to fabulous conversations, but also because it challenged me in my work and gave me the freedom to grow.
Interestingly, when I started working at the university in 1980, I was the same age, if not younger, than most students. While they were embarking on college careers for the next four years, I was beginning a lifetime of work at the university. As I think back, I realize that my own lack of self-confidence was a constant battle, especially during my pregnancy, when I interacted with the undergraduate students who were my age. I felt they judged me—not only my physical state, but also my class status because I was not in college. However, when I was not pregnant and in my midtwenties and thirties while taking courses, I felt like a true undergraduate student largely because many did not know I was a mom or full-time employee.
By the fall of 1988, I was a stronger, more confident young woman and mother. With support and encouragement from my university aunties and coworkers, I found the strength to change the direction of life for my six-year-old son and me. The class I was enrolled in that semester was coincidentally “Introduction to Women’s Studies,” taught by a professor who would be part of my student life until I graduated in 2007. The campus’s discrete Al-Anon meetings also empowered me to separate from my son’s father and begin a new phase in my life. Becoming a single mother at the age of twenty-six was liberating, but it was also intimidating. My son and I struggled for a time, unsure of how to live as a family, just the two of us, but a huge burden had been lifted as I began the next stage of my life at the university. Just as I had walked down that hallway to Bartlett 305 on my first day of work eight years earlier, I walked down that same hallway the day after I left my husband. Some people said I was “glowing” that day as I walked with my head held high.
During the period after my separation and divorce, work and school became a haven for me, similar to what Arlie Hochschild describes in The Time Bind (1997), in which many employees experience the workplace as a haven because of stresses and hardships at home. The Writing Program continued to nurture me and to give me the autonomy and freedom to learn new skills and take chances with projects. My life continued to change personally and professionally. In 1992, I moved to a position in the English Department, leaving my aunties in the Writing Program. I felt as if I were leaving home. Yet as I moved forward in my career, I soaked up as much knowledge and took advantage of as many opportunities as possible, always remembering the lessons learned from my aunties. And as my network of women grew, my confidence also grew. Three years later, when my son was thirteen years old, I accepted a professional position at the university and met my current husband. I was indeed moving forward.
As my career at the university reaches thirty-one years, I am proud of the many things I have accomplished. I learned how to balance and navigate life between two worlds, work and home, and in the process I have raised an incredible son while also obtaining a bachelor’s degree and moving successfully from classified positions to professional ones. Over the years, I have formed many professional and personal relationships, mostly with women, many of them mothers, and now I find myself also becoming an auntie and mentoring younger women.
BECOMING AN “AUNTIE”
Many working mothers share challenging experiences and missed opportunities that later become stories of triumph and accomplishment. This is especially true for those of us whose backgrounds limit our experience and understanding of such a diverse world. I believe my successes are rooted in the culture of higher education, which allowed me to grow intellectually, professionally, and emotionally through relationships with the women who worked and continue to work at the university. These women helped me raise my son and nurture myself.
My entry into the workforce at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst was molded through a working culture that enabled me to mature intellectually and emotionally while also empowering me to become a compassionate individual. At a young age, I knew I wanted a different kind of life than the one my mother experienced, and as I experience daily life on campus today, I am grateful for the larger network of women and mothers who are intellectuals, students, and employees and who influence my understanding of the world. My early network within my work environment in the Writing Program was limited in scope because the university had limited resources to support the women and mothers who were its workforce. The university still has limited resources, but today many of us take an active approach to creating support networks, and my own network now spans across the university. Working within campus groups such as the Community, Diversity, and Social Justice Committee (in which I was both member and chair), engaging in various studies, participating in courses, and sustaining personal activism in two labor unions have created spaces for me to share my experience and knowledge as a working mother. Although the university is a bureaucratic environment that is not always family friendly in terms of policies, it does offer a space for collegial collectivity among the people who share common personal and professional goals.
My personal experience of having low self-esteem and overcoming it became a useful tool as I advised students. I tend to attract students who are not typically supported in university settings—students from a working-class environment, students of color, first-generation students, and students who struggle academically. I can relate to them on a personal and experiential level. They, too, want to be successful in life and prove to themselves and their families that they can do it. And they can, just as I did.
