This entry comes from Jenn Crowell, a student, novelist, and dear friend with whom I share far too much in common.

This piece, on explaining to her young daughter the nature and importance of her work/school studies, resonates strongly with me, as I’ve dealt with similar concerns over work, school, domesticity, and trying to make sure the Boychick understands that I have a life and aspirations of my own. She describes going back to a non-traditional grad school — at the “late” age of 31, as her child enters school for the first time — and the forces that pull on her and weigh on her as she struggles to make her work seem “real” to a child who can’t yet conceptualize the cerebral quality of her pursuits.

Jenn’s story is a humorous and insightful piece on the way one woman navigates the treacherous maze the kyriarchy sets before her.

Back to school: solidifying the cerebral

When my daughter and I both went off to “school” this year (she to a pre-K program at age 3; I for a long-overdue MFA in Creative Writing at age 31), I knew in advance that student parenting would present me with challenges. I was not prepared, however, for one challenge in particular: how to explain, much less validate, the amorphous-appearing nature of how I occupy the hours of nine through five, Monday through Friday, when speaking about my unconventional workaday life with my toddler.

These difficulties, of course, preceded my foray back into academia. For her entire short life, my daughter has always known that Daddy goes off to some important-sounding “work” on a train, his home/employment boundaries clearly demarcated, while, depending upon our childcare budget at any given moment, Mama alternates between chasing her around and frantically typing on a computer keyboard, all under the same integrated (ish) roof.

To be sure, the ratio of chasing-to-typing has always been pretty skewed. By the time she was two, anytime she saw a picture of someone writing (even an anthropomorphized duck in a children’s book), my daughter would gleefully shout, “He type just like Mama!”

You can imagine how this warmed my authorial heart – until I realized that my daughter had absolutely no idea what I was typing. For all she knew, I could be digital scrapbooking or dinking on Facebook. Not that there’s anything wrong with those time-tested methods of procrastination, of course (and not that I’ve ever used them, mind you!), but it felt disconcerting, even troubling, that my daughter had no concept of my key-clacking absorption as “work.”

When I entered graduate school, these feelings intensified. Wanting to assuage them before I flew to LA for my first ten-day residency (*cue self-flagellating whip-crack of maternal guilt here*), I explained to my daughter that Mama was going on an airplane — not to Grandma’s, this time, but to school. She understood that concept surprisingly well (and coped way better with our inaugural separation than I did, let me tell you), but once I got back, the poor child seemed utterly confused by the whole “Mama’s back, but she’s still in school” aspect of my low-residency program.

The main reason for her bewilderment, I think, was that, even though she was going to childcare eight hours a day (*crack* dang, that whip hurts!), she had absolutely no reference point, no concrete sense of what I did all day. In the mornings before preschool, she saw me emptying the dishwasher and packing her lunch; in the evenings, when she and her dad came home, she saw me cooking dinner. (Before y’all get twitchy about the division of labor in my household, rest assured that my decision to cook most of our meals is my own, made to provide myself with a badly-needed mental transition between “work” and “home.” That, and I’m just a big ol’ hopeless foodie. I blame my Anglophile crush, Nigella Lawson. Woman could crack my marriage just by crackin’ an egg, but that’s a whole other post entirely.)

As cute as it was my first weekday back from LA, watching my kiddo jump up and down with glee that “Yay, Mama have dinner ready when I come home school!” (not so much a commentary on her dad’s cooking, I think, as one on her delight at me being back), I found my disconcerted feelings increasing, as well as a niggling need to address them. The last thing I wanted my child to think – particularly my girl-child, for whom I desperately desired to model economic and creative self-sufficiency — was that I sent her off to preschool every morning, and then came straight home and metamorphosed into June Cleaver, when in reality I was annotating Great Works o’Literature, and planning field studies, and pounding out new chapters on my own novel for eight hours a day.

Lest this statement inspire yet another misconstrued Mommy Wars smackdown, let me be clear here: I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with a life devoted to domestic pursuit, if it’s a freely-chosen source of fulfillment (though, mercy, that’s a ginormous caveat, innit?). I just didn’t want my child to automatically assume that domesticity was the life I had chosen for myself, simply because of my Nigella Lawson fetish and/or my compulsive need to tidy the kitchen in the morning before getting down to literary bidness.

And so I began to talk to her about what I was up to. Nothing too somber, or didactic, or melodrama-laden (“Mama is racking up student loan debt, honey, so she can pursue her passion and have a future!”), just a simple “Hey, did you know that while you’re at school, running around with your friends, making a mess with the glitter glue, Mama is working on her school at home, too?” kinda conversation.

Not only did my girlie get it, she thought it was pretty neat, this idea of she and Mama engaged in parallel lives. Pretty soon, she started reminding us, with her three-year-old’s firm penchant for categorization, that, “Daddy go work, I go school, and Mama go school, too!” It was just a matter of time before she had her teachers convinced I “worked” at Starbucks, thanks to my coffeeshop-frequenting marathons while on deadline.

The day I heard that out-of-the-mouths-of-babes quote, I dropped her off and walked all the way up the street to my overpriced caffeine with a messenger bag full of new ideas, a grin on my face, and a somewhat-calmed feminist pulse. (I say “somewhat,” because it’s still elevated over the fact that my non-governmentally-subsidized childcare costs as much per year as my MFA tuition, but that, like my transatlantic lust over Nigella, is Another Post Entirely.)

Jenn Crowell is a freelance editor, author of the novels Necessary Madness and Letting the Body Lead, mother of a 3-year-old girl and a spoiled longhaired dachshund, and a full-time graduate student in the Creative Writing MFA program at Antioch University. She’s currently at work on a novel in which both her crush on Nigella and her righteous indignation at discrimination against mothers with mental illness figure prominently.