Taylor van Doren
BIO
PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Missouri (US) and a mom of one.
Instagram: @taylor.van.doren
Twitter: @taylor_vandoren
Taylor van Doren
“My feelings about needing to keep my child out of the office made me reflect about how workplaces perceive motherhood.”
I am a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Missouri studying social inequalities, pandemics, infectious diseases, demography, and population transitions from a biocultural perspective. I have always been interested in infectious diseases but struggled to narrow my focus into a manageable research arc until a couple years into my graduate career. Since then, I have been studying the 1918 influenza pandemic on the island of Newfoundland, and I will continue my 1918 pandemic research with new questions and in new sociocultural areas as I move into the next phases of my career.
Ironically, I am also a true pandemic academic mom in almost every sense of the phrase. When my daughter was born in November of 2019, I was in the fall of my fifth year of graduate school, teaching independently for the first time, and trying to nail down my timeline for graduation. Only a few weeks after she was born, the first whispers of a novel virus (not yet named) were circling.
Because I gave birth to our daughter so close to winter break, I essentially had a baked-in “maternity leave”. This was virtually ideal, because there are no means by which graduate students can get support for maternity leave at my institution.
By the time the spring semester began, our baby was almost two months old, and I recovered enough from my c-section to return to the office. Doctors will say that it takes about 6-8 weeks to recover from a c-section, but the reality for me was closer to about six months.
That lengthy recovery severely impacted my ability to stand for long periods of time, the exercise I could do, and my own mental struggle with reckoning my drastically changed body from the one that was an NCAA Division I swimmer who then went on to run several half marathons.
It was a constant battle to balance the love for my new baby, my (often very negative) perception of myself, and all my work responsibilities. I forgot that I was allowed to change.
I have been lucky to have an incredibly supportive advisor—a mother herself—who has provided unwavering encouragement throughout my pregnancy and motherhood. I am acutely aware that without her, I would not have made it to the point of preparing for a dissertation defense.
My baby, now a toddler, very often comes to the office while I teach and do work. As full-time childcare is out of the question right now, I cannot help but feel as if I am a significant burden to my officemates by having to wrangle a toddler in their presence. Babies cry, need attention, want to interact with people, and eventually, they learn how to walk, then run, and open office doors all by themselves.
My feelings about needing to keep my child out of the office, compounded with my training as an anthropologist, made me reflect about how workplaces perceive motherhood. Why do we feel the need to be so secretive about doing things that come naturally to us as mothers: keeping our babies with us, breastfeeding, pumping, holding them while sitting at our desks doing perfectly professional things? Why can’t I teach a class while wearing my daughter?
I have, in fact, done all these things in the workplace, and my daughter has made many guest appearances in my Zoom classes to the extreme delight of my students. I was even humbled to hear from one that she respected the heck out of me for teaching for 75 minutes straight during a particularly clingy baby stage.
Now, as I approach my final semester of my PhD candidacy, I have begun to reflect on how much I have changed in the last two years. I have become a mother of a fearless and brilliant daughter and a wife to a steadfast and loving man, but I am fundamentally a different person now that I have experienced both a pandemic and motherhood in ways that I cannot—and will likely never be able to—fully explain. There are surface level things, of course (I began to notice grey hairs on my head at age 26). I have, however, truly begun to take stock of the most important things to me, and my identity as a mother is at the top. I’m so privileged to be the mom to a truly incredible small person. My career trajectory at this juncture is uncertain, tenuous, and scary, but everything I do is to leave the world a bit better than I found it so that she can bloom.