Exhausted at end of semester as a new mother on tenure track
I always *thought* I was constantly busy and tired, but I didn't know busy and tired until I became a mother. Assistant prof in the humanities, crawling past the finish line on my first semester back at work with a 9-month old (who is in daycare) and a spouse whose job requires significant travel such that he is out of town most of the week. My baby still wakes up 1-2x a night, so I can count on one hand how many times I've gotten more than a 6-h stretch of sleep. We also don't have family in the area and so we can't lean on them for support.
While I'm proud of myself for making it through these last several months back at work, I'm also disappointed at how little I've accomplished with respect to my research over the past 3-4 months. I had a new lecture course this semester, one that had to meet a slew of different breadth requirements in terms of chronological/geographical coverage, so I've had to quickly assimilate knowledge about and produce lessons on topics far outside of my research wheelhouse. Ordinarily, I'd find this kind of thing particularly energizing, but this past semester I felt nothing but resentment about the fact that I'd agreed to take this on when I was pregnant. Also had an extremely heavy service load, serving on our graduate admissions committee, giving talks, supervising grad students, organizing a workshop in the dept. With all this going on, I was facing new deliverables/deadlines/fires to put out nearly every other day. Sadly, my research time was almost entirely squeezed out: I worked on revisions for a couple of articles, submitting one of them and nearly finishing the other one (turning back to it this week). My main book project, meanwhile, has simmered on the back-burner this entire time, and I'm feeling so guilty about it.
My institution has a policy of pausing the tenure clock for a year for new parents to account for just these kinds of eventualities, and I'm in no danger of being behind schedule on my research based on when I go up for promotion. Still, the First Commandment of the tenure clock is to make time for your research every day/week, but with everything else at work (not to mention my baby!) demanding my more immediate attention, I simply failed to carve out time for this and I'm upset and disappointed about it. I also miss my research tremendously: it's really all I want to do, and the main thing stopping me from getting to it is my embarrassment/shame at the prospect of showing up to class with no lecture, showing up at the meeting without preparing, not reading my students' work properly and giving bad advice to them, etc.
One lesson I'm taking away from this experience--besides that i have to get better at cutting corner-- is that I will for the foreseeable future only teach on my very narrow specialism. I've really branched out with my teaching over the past couple years to try to pull in students (who don't tend to flock to my research area, for whatever reason--it's a bit remote in time, not as trendy/of the moment), but I think I've stopped caring and will happily teach a small class simply to engage with my research some more through the teaching I do.
I guess I'm looking for solidarity and encouragement from who've walked this path before: that motherhood in academia is hard, that the research will get done, etc.