Summer voice mail and sick kids

Hello, you’ve reached the voice mail of Dr. Lisa R. at University X. I’m not keeping regularly scheduled office hours this summer, but will be on campus periodically and will also be checking my voice mail several times a week. If you need to reach me quickly, however, please email me at famousdoctorr@universityx.edu.

Now that sounds clear enough, doesn’t it? If you were a school secretary, wouldn’t you think this might indicate to you that you should email the famed and busy Dr. R, after which you might expect a quick response? Instead, after hearing this message, the secretary at Laura’s school called my house (where surprise, surprise, even thought it’s summer, I was not at home), called my cell phone (which I leave off during the day until driving time), and then called my husband (getting him out of class so that he could call me at school). I was at work, down the hall at the photocopier, out of my office for ten minutes. And because the secretary didn’t leave a message or email me, it was almost an hour before the message got to me that my daughter was sick and lying around in the nurse’s office—and then I still had a half hour drive to get to her.

This whole taking care of sick kids thing really needs to be better handled. Frankly, I think this particular woman at Laura’s school is punishing me for being not only a working mom, but also a working mom with an unconventional schedule. Sometimes she’ll call and I’m in class—so I don’t get the phone message until two or three hours later. Sometimes it’s a day I don’t have classes. Sometimes I’m at a meeting out of town. She just never knows how to reach me!

This despite the fact that I have a serious medical disorder known as obsessive compulsive emailitis (I’m only lacking the formal diagnosis). This despite the fact that Laura told them this morning to email me (the school nurse does email me, and we get Laura settled quickly those days—when this secretary’s not in charge). This despite the fact that it actually says on Laura’s contact card at school across the top: “Email Mom at work to reach her quickly.” I check email between every class, and sometimes during it. I borrow my friends’ and colleagues’ computers when I’m away at off campus meetings. Even when I’m traveling to conferences, even the time I was at a convention in Mexico, I still found ways to check my email. (And believe it or not, it was easier to do that in Mexico, which has internet cafes, than in many US cities, which have loads of wireless Starbucks, but no communal computers.)

I am so just angry and frustrated right now—Laura was in the nurse’s room for almost two hours this morning waiting on somebody to pick her up. She’s all sick and pitiful, and the worst part is, she understood when I apologized that she’d been waiting so long—she understood, and she told them to email me, she said. Of course all this is aside from the question of how Chris and I negotiate who picks up and takes care of the sick kid, which is part personal problem and part larger societal expectations (and by the way, before you wonder what kind of bad mom I am, blogging while my daughter is sick, she’s asleep on the couch—I wish I’d been at work long enough to back up my hard drive so I could be working now!).

Like I need any more excuses to be angry and frustrated anyhow. I swear, I thought this college professor gig seemed compatible with having a family—summers sounded like summers off. Teaching meant you had some hours you weren’t teaching and might be able to leave early to pick up a child or go on a field trip. I had no idea that if you intended to be a professor, you’d really be better off being a man (or at least having a wife), and that school secretaries and some other mothers would look down on you for making choices that meant your own work was as important as soccer practice (God forbid it should be more important).

Let’s see. Ramp up the expectations for after school extracurricular activities for students (want scholarships? your kid better be in Little League). Retain a rigid structure of academic culture that conflicts with women’s fundamental biology (think about the tenure clock versus your biological clock). Figure out how to get in a whole day’s work, pick up children, and get dinner cooked for two kids, one of whom might eat part of it (and thank God while you’re at it that you have a husband who washes dishes). Sprinkle in one school secretary with an attitude—and maybe that’s the straw that breaks the woman professor’s back. So many of these questions are intangibles. One person’s crappy attitude. But when you’re hanging onto your work and your family by a thread, it doesn’t take much to make that thread seem really fragile.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand that I’m writing from a position of privilege, from my home computer with my cable modem, my still mostly manageable student loan debt from graduate school, my two-parent household. But my daughter is sick on the couch and was miserable at her school all morning, I’m another day behind at work here at the beginning of summer, and I swear, if I could wring that damn secretary’s neck today, I would.