Bridgette Semple
BIO
Associate professor and group leader in neuroscience at Monash University, Melbourne (Australia). Mother of two.
Bridgette Semple
"Returning to work and adjusting my identity to now being a mother as well as a scientist was an unexpectedly challenging hurdle."
My journey into parenthood began during my early faculty years. I had previously obtained my Ph.D. in neuroscience in my home city in Australia, then ventured to the US for a postdoc. Four and a half years later, I returned to Australia to start my lab. I was fortunate to receive independent funding while working within a larger collaborative space with shared resources and equipment available. My husband and I had our first daughter in 2017, then our second daughter in 2020, at the beginning of the COVID pandemic.
I took six months of maternity leave (partly paid) after each birth, then returned part-time. Each period of maternity leave was different, partly due to my expectations but also primarily due to my career stage at the time. With baby #1, I stepped away when I was just starting up my lab group, so productivity almost ground to a halt in my absence. With baby #2, I had a more established group, including an excellent research assistant and a team of collaborators and co-supervisors for my students, who helped to keep things running more smoothly.
I’m not going to gloss over it – the early childhood years were HARD. I had many moments of despair while juggling being a mother and working, particularly in the sleep-deprived haze of breastfeeding, pumping, and endless childcare-derived illnesses – some days, it just felt impossible.
Returning to work, and adjusting my identity to include now being a mother as well as a scientist, was an unexpectedly challenging hurdle, and I struggled for a long time with feeling dissociated and like an imposter in the lab.
The juggle has gotten easier with time, and as the kids have gotten older – or maybe we’re just getting better at managing! We have been fortunate and privileged to live close to our extended families and are so lucky to be emotionally and logistically supported by our daughters’ treasured grandparents. I still struggle with striking the right balance regarding how much to blend my work and personal life. Perhaps I have a very short fuse for inefficiency, as time is a valuable commodity now! So I have learned to be more decisive and efficient, particularly at work.
Instinctively, I have tried to keep my identity as a mother separate from my work in an attempt to maintain a professional persona and avoid being negatively labeled as ‘a mother with kids’ in the workplace.
At times, though, I have realized that this approach is doing a disservice to those around me, both my peers and the next generation of scientists, by not disclosing what my reality looks like. Being a parent has brought more emotion into my life in every direction: more tears, more anxiety, more frustration, more joy, more laughter, more pride. Becoming a mother has certainly made me more empathetic and understanding of my colleagues and their lives outside the lab, whatever that may involve.
My girls are now 6 and 3 years old and are full of boundless energy and words. My husband works full-time, while I’ve chosen to remain part-time (4 days/week). This gives me the flexibility to be present at school events, have some one-on-one time with my pre-schooler, and manage much of the mental and physical load of co-running a household.
I regularly reflect on this conscious choice to work part-time and be as present as possible in my kids’ lives while also trying to maintain a productive scientific career as an academic.
I reconsider and reaffirm this decision regularly, as it does require that I reconcile with the reality that I will never be as productive as my peers who do not have children or other significant carer responsibilities. Accepting this, and adjusting my internal expectations, has taken some time.
If my academic career ended tomorrow, I would be proud of what I’ve achieved in the field and in the students I have trained and mentored, alongside the two happy and healthy children we are raising.