Shakira Quiñones-Lebrón
BIO
I’m a PhD Candidate in evolutionary biology at the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). I’m a Puerto Rican immigrant in Europe and mother of a 3-year-old.
Twitter: @shakiguani
Instagram: @shakiguani
Shakira Quiñones-Lebrón
“It all comes down to having a safety net and a support system.”
My story is a positive one, regardless of the normal challenges that come with parenting. I’ve been in a very lucky and privileged position, and I’m hoping my story inspires positive systemic changes.
It all comes down to having a safety net and a support system.
I moved to Slovenia in 2014 to pursue a PhD in evolutionary biology. The program here is very different from those in the USA. For example, I didn’t have to attend many classes and I didn’t have to teach. Here, PhD students are hired as employees which grants them a living wage, sick leave, and vacation days. It also came with an attractive paid maternity leave policy, so when my partner and I were weighing in the options, we decided it was best to have a kid during my PhD.
I took a year of maternity leave, and during that time I forgot about my PhD and really submerged myself in motherhood. I was so glad we had all this time together, but I was ready to go back to work.
Going back to work was incredibly hard for me. My one-year-old was going through a separation anxiety stage and didn’t adjust well to daycare at first, and was getting sick every week. In that first years he was hospitalised 4 times on top of the hospital visits for bronchiolitis many more times. He was pre-asthmatic and couldn’t be around sick children.
Luckily, we were able to afford private childcare for him, but my thesis work during that year got a big hit. I had to be in the lab daily to do experiments and care for my model animals, which became a huge challenge because my lab is 1.5 hrs away by bus. That meant 3 hrs of commuting when my husband stayed home with our child and couldn’t drive me to work…
Having my husband working in the same institute was a huge help because he could cover for me sometimes when it came to lab work. But I still struggled a lot because I was absent from work about a quarter of the time.
Working full time and having a sick child can be challenging unless you have a family member who can take care of your kid. It’s ok if you can’t do it all. But this isn’t a problem only in academia, it’s a challenge for all working parents. For the most part, we had nobody to take care of our son while he was home recovering from his constant viruses.
This was the lowest point in my PhD and it created tensions with my mentors, and a lot of stress. Although my funding program is amazing and has many benefits I also have a very strict deadline. Not meeting the deadline results in having to pay back 10% of the grant I was given, which sums up to thousands of Euros I don’t have. The pressure was very real.
As we got our son in preventive treatment for asthma, I also got treated for ADHD and I’m writing this piece from a place of relief. We no longer spend two weekends a month in the hospital and my thesis will be submitted in a week. I DID IT! We did it!