Simone Kolysh
BIO
Assistant Professor of Sociology, Hood College (US), nonbinary mother of 4.
Instagram: @furiousgemma
Twitter: @SimoneKolysh
Simone Kolysh
“I breastfed as I lectured and pumped as I interviewed participants for my project.”
I was a college senior and a Pre-Med when I was pregnant for the first time. The next time I was pregnant was during my Public Health Master’s program and when yet another recession hit, I left my child to my then husband who was now a stay at home dad and went to work for the American Cancer Society. I left work anytime they needed me and was clear with my supervisor, who was also a mother, that I prioritize being a mom. When I entered my PhD program in 2011, I was foolish enough to think that my purpose was to become a sociologist in a collegiate environment. Funding being what it is, too low and not enough to live on, I had to supplement my income as an adjunct professor from my very first semester of the PhD program. My graduate career had no place to flourish as it took a back burner to making a living.
I was pregnant with my third baby penalty (a term for children when you are an academic mother) when my course got dropped, with nothing but a week left to go before the start of the semester. Little did I know just how normal, how commonplace it is to commit to a university and have them not return the favour.
I was able to get another course at Queens College – all I had to do was travel more than two hours for an eight am course that I prepped from scratch in three days. What doesn’t kill you makes you a better teacher, right? So they lie.
The same is also true of motherhood, an impossible phenomenon for a graduate student that is an adjunct professor and a work-study student and, at this point in year three, a Quantitative Reasoning Fellow. By some unlikely miracle, my third baby penalty came into this world in the middle of winter break on January 14th, all 10 pounds and 7 ounces of him. I mention his weight because not even two weeks after an unmedicated delivery, I forced my barely healed body to get up and go to work – there was no maternal leave policy in place at the CUNY Graduate Center years later.
To avoid losing my fellowship and adjunct positions, I breastfed as I lectured and pumped breast milk as I interviewed participants for my dissertation project, a somewhat nebulous endeavour for which I think we entered graduate school, but it’s hard to tell these days.
They called me superhuman and a super mom and they were right but my powers came out of spite and deep resentment of being asked to devote a giant chunk of my life to an education that doesn’t understand why supporting mothers is important.
When the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) union fought some years back for an overdue contract for its faculty and staff, adjuncts were not prioritized. When I once spoke to a union representative at Brooklyn College, he told me that maybe it’s time for adjuncts to make their own group, if we feel so slighted by the focus on full-time faculty. Believe me, hearing that I, an utterly exhausted and underpaid adjunct professor, student and mother, should also be the vanguard of a labor movement was just about the last thing I wanted to hear from a straight white guy with a salary, but that’s how privilege walks and talks.
I finished my PhD out of fury for my incessant poverty and my not being able to afford a place in NYC for my growing family. I was now with my wife and she and I lost a pregnancy in her 6th month of carrying. We did IVF next. It was the month after I graduated and I had to teach with a broken foot, because quitting a summer adjunct position meant losing wages. I was sick of it all. I kept applying to 60-100 positions a year until I got hired and moved to Maryland. I chose Hood College in part because my department was chaired by a woman and a mother and I felt safe enough to reveal that I was pregnant with my 4th during my campus interview.
Not being able to find that kind of safety EVERYWHERE in academia is just morally corrupt. But what isn’t about academia?
I now meet in secret with others who want to ‘have it all’ like me – except the failure of motherhood as an institution is that you can’t have it all, but you can have motherhood as an anchor when you finally quit. Doing so as a marginalised person is ever more radical.