On Writing With(Out) Sami
Michelle Colpean
Keywords: birth, child loss, academic job market
Categories: Parenting and Possibility in Impossible Times; As If the Pandemic Wasn’t Enough: Tales of Loss and Grief; Academic Pressures (or Critiques of Neoliberal Horseshit Productivity Expectations, as suggested by Amy Vidali)
Content warning: child loss
In March of 2020, when the pandemic lockdown started, I was preparing to defend my dissertation after six years in my PhD program. I was also in the midst of my third trimester of my first pregnancy and had recently relocated several states away as my husband began a neonatology fellowship. After struggling to write through loss and illness over the past few years, my relocation and pregnancy had lit a fire under me, and I soared through the final chapters and revisions from my adviser. After a successful defense, my husband handed me a mug that said “Dr. Colpean” on the side. I posed with the mug in front of my rounded stomach in front of the blooming magnolia tree in our front yard, celebrating two major milestones I had been looking forward to my entire adult life.
In late spring, I sat in a hospital bed and submitted a job application while I waited for my epidural. Labor was much more productive than my job search, and after a few hours of pushing in a sweaty mask, I was holding my son Sami in my arms. Our parents quarantined for weeks so they could meet him, and we shared him with the rest of the world only through photos. Newborn childcare felt like an enormous risk in a pandemic and would cost far more than I would make as an adjunct professor. Staying home was a privilege that also felt like a career sacrifice. I carved out a few hours of protected writing time for a new book project on Sunday mornings as my husband took the baby on long walks and returned home to wave at me through my office window.
In the fall, as my friends solicited letters of recommendation and faced a pandemic job market, I quietly applied for a local Visiting Assistant Professor position half an hour away while my son was (very briefly) napping. At the urging of an editor, I submitted an essay for consideration in a top rhetoric journal, a project that I had previously presented at a conference while uncomfortably pregnant. I emailed my department chair and asked to teach one class in the spring, online, as safely as possible. I found a nanny share arrangement with a friend in the department where I could send Sami to her home for just a few hours a week, enough time to upload lectures and grade a few papers. I felt powerfully productive in my role as a mother and a scholar.
In the winter, I spent a few days with Sami and the new nanny as he acclimated to being cared for by someone other than his parents for the first time. I struggled to work upstairs as he struggled to be without me. The next week started with a rejection email for the journal submission, and I moped on the floor of Sami’s playroom reading reviewer feedback while he laughed and climbed on top of me. The next day, I dropped him off at his nanny share without me for the very first time, and headed home to finalize and submit a syllabus for the spring semester—my first as a working mom.
Within an hour, I got a call that Sami wasn’t breathing. I rushed to meet him at the hospital, where my husband happened to be working. I could tell by the look on my husband’s face that Sami was already gone.
Three weeks after Sami died, I got a call to schedule a job interview. I worried more about trying not to burst into tears on Zoom than I did about answering their questions about teaching, an anxiety that reflected both my shattered emotional state and my lingering confidence in my teaching abilities. As I explained the gap in my employment history during my virtual campus visit, an administrator cried and then profusely apologized. I did not cry, and I did get the job. It is strange to see so many of your dreams come true without the one thing that gives them meaning.
And now, in the spring of 2021, I am struggling to wrap my head around all that has happened over the past year, the soaring highs and deepest lows. People keep suggesting that journaling might be helpful, especially because I write for a living. But after a few weak attempts, I quit, turning instead to jigsaw puzzles and my running shoes and the growing stack of novels piling up behind my couch. This is the only thing I’ve written in months.
It turns out the only thing harder than writing without childcare is writing without your child.
Bio
Dr. Michelle Colpean (colpeame@ucmail.uc.edu) is formerly a Visiting Assistant Professor at Miami University - Hamilton, and currently an Assistant Educator Professor in the School of Communication, Film, and Media Studies at the University of Cincinnati. She is fortunate to be Sami’s mom, and now Salma’s mom as well. This essay is the only writing she has done in an academic space since 2020, and that’s okay.