A Mother’s Odyssey
The Journey to Integrating the Roles of Scholar and Mother
I’d envisioned our journey unfolding across the country like the cinematic progression of the painted Odyssey landscapes on the Esquiline Hill, as we read Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey aloud in national parks and on the steps of museums along the Northern route, relocating from San Francisco to Charm City for my job. But I will pass over each Instagrammable moment: the children picking and eating too many cherries, learning the Egyptian game Senet, riding horses through wildflowers, and unpacking and repacking our tent so many times as the landscape changed around us. One evening spent reading Helen’s description of good pharmaka with a friend over milkshakes in a diner in Minneapolis offered the children a context for understanding my husband’s medicinal marijuana (abandoned before we hit the felony states). These vignettes will, I hope, live on in the collected memory of our family, but the Odyssey has shown me that my nostos would be less this particular journey and more the integration of selves that it mapped.
In her bright new translation, Wilson refuses comfortable euphemisms for gender identities, class positions, enslavement, rape, and other forms of violence. The complicated man with which she opens signals the complexity of the spaces he inhabits and her translation reopens a world I’d thought safely familiar. I could not, however, hold the possibility of the author’s complex personhood in mind when I noticed that Wilson has dedicated her spectacularly successful translation “To my daughters, Imogen, Psyche, and Freya.” I confess that my first instinct was to assume that she meant the phrase figuratively rather than to refer to her actual children. My disbelief feels particularly problematic because I, too, have three children.
My third child was born in Los Angeles, just a few days before I began a post-doctoral fellowship. Without the fellowship, we would have had no housing. I was vague about how recent her birth had been and agreed to take the stairs with an oblivious colleague just a few days after she’d been born by c-section, following several repeated attempts to turn her. Unlike the previous two pregnancies, I’d been seated for most of this one, finishing my dissertation. I hadn’t thought of the possibility of a standing desk. Maybe she’d have been upside down anyway, but women are taught to look for a reason. The midwives kept lamenting that I had a “proven pelvis” and the MD who made the cut complimented my abs as she sliced through them. I brought her to my office, the last private office that I would have for years. A male colleague proudly told me of the pumping room just a building over. I’ll just close my door, I replied.
My oldest child was born in San Francisco. At that time graduate students received no formal maternity leave. My husband took only that first week off, which was what we could afford at the time, but in the fall he used his mandated California Paid Family Leave to travel with me and our son to Athens, where we first encountered the Greek love of babies. The old lady behind us in line for a taxi at the airport who leaned forward to kiss our baby repeatedly on the mouth was not an anomaly. By the time our second child was born we did not hesitate to hand him to a woman on the metro, who bounced him on her lap for the duration of the ride to the city center. My older son had given his brother the middle name Delphi after a research trip to the ancient Mediterranean omphalos.
Research continued to take us to new places and experiences. In Naples, a taxi driver slammed the trunk shut on my older son’s head. Although we underreacted to the blood, a pharmacist told us to go to the Children’s ER. After they’d patched up the wound, I asked where I should pay, and the nurse replied: “Pay? This is Italy!” My younger son was born in the now defunct Maternité Mona Lisa in the Clinique de Vinci, into the arms of a very calm sage-femme, a counterpoint to the highstrung OB who’d delivered my first. The amount billed to our insurance was an order of magnitude less than what had been billed for the US birth. I don’t know what was billed to our insurance for the c-section in Los Angeles, but I remained grateful to be insured. Years later, when my daughter lamented that her birth required doctors to cut open my body, her brothers offered the dubious reassurance that this gave her something in common with (likely apocryphal) anecdotes about Caesar.
After the unavoidable visibility of my first pregnancy, I did my best to avoid meeting any advisors or colleagues throughout my second. But at one unavoidable meeting in month six a tenured male professor asked if I wasn’t getting tired of this [pregnancy] yet? He has children himself, but was never pregnant with them. Going through papers at my parents’ house one summer, I encountered a surprising letter from my father, then working at Idalion on Cyprus, to my mother, who was pregnant with me and back in the States. In it, he wondered what it must be like to be pregnant and expressed a kind of regret that it was an experience he could never share. This rhetorical interest, while charming, obscures the lack of negative impact that my birth had on his excavation or his career.
When I’d returned to teaching as a TA after the birth of my son, I tried to separate my new identity as a mother from my developing professional identity. I thought I was deploying some kind of cap of invisibility to hide the part of my life that might impact how senior academics saw me and my work. This splitting came, of course, at a cost, but it would be years before that became visible to me. Even formal channels designed to support mothers returning to work often fall short. For example, the university had a pumping room, but to use it would have required a fifteen minute walk to and from, plus the pumping, which would have cost me an additional hour of childcare. Pumping while I drove home was cheaper and more efficient and, while visible to anyone driving over the bridge alongside me, it took place in the transitional realm between my work self and my maternal self, and it wasn’t strangers from whom I was hiding. When that course wrapped up, we started traveling again.
Shortly after we moved back to San Francisco after five years away, my husband nearly died in an accident, a stairwell fall, that left him with long-term yet sometimes invisible disabilities. And then last November, my middle child was playing with his siblings and friends when one of the friends threw a piece of bamboo as part of the game. She missed the mark, in the Homeric and not the New Testament sense, and hit the very center of my son’s eye.
After three eye surgeries, a week of IV antibiotics, and a month at home, my son returned to school. The child sitting behind him at the Peace Assembly called him a cyclops. Once he finished crying on the play structure we joked together that the kid clearly didn’t really know what a cyclops looks like. Still, his older brother later tried (unsuccessfully) to hide Roxane Gay’s World of Wakanda because of a particularly gruesome eye piercing scene and in our read-aloud of Wilson’s Odyssey I avoided the blinding of Polyphemus, despite her deft capture of the social anxiety surrounding difference in Odysseus’s world. Recently, my son picked out something for himself in an airport gift shop: a keychain effigy in the shape of a little red cyclops. After signing the paperwork for my new job, I texted my younger brother that I felt incredibly proud to finally be the parent through whom my family would be insured.
Injury and illness are expensive, even with insurance. In my case, I worked less in order to be the gatekeeper that a person with brain injury needs in the early phase of learning to live with a chronic condition. The money that we’d once earmarked for childcare was now directed towards therapy. I canceled a class that I was supposed to adjunct at a research university because my husband was still in a coma; word reached me that an administrator had declared me a diva.
In the moment I had little time to reflect on that term or to care much what was said, but in the intervening years I wondered whether she was right — not that I should have taught the class with a beloved’s life in the balance, but whether I might have been a diva prior. I’d given little thought to whether it would be a problem to have children and to become a successful academic. I’d simply assumed that I could have both. I assumed this because of my unreflective white feminism and my presumption that all I needed to do was to lean in, even though in 2007, when my first child was born, no one had yet been forcefed that term.
I first learned that I was pregnant a few days before my qualifying exams, the successful completion of which our department celebrated with champagne. I allowed one of my examiners to assume that the pallor on which he commented came from nerves and not persistent nausea. I didn’t question how I’d made it this far in graduate school without regularly engaging with feminism, why we discussed ethnicity in the ancient world and never race, and why engaging with class seemed to obviate the need to engage with other aspects of identity. I never tried to unmask the seeming neutrality of aesthetics. I feigned a sip and smiled, grateful to have passed before anyone knew my secret.
In an interview for The Uncommon Muse, Wilson addresses the question of how she came to translate the Odyssey. Her editor solicited the translation and she signed a five-year contract to work on it. She is clear that the project would not have been possible without this support, responding: “I am a single mother of three with a full time job and a mortgage to pay on my own. There’s no way I could have taken on this enormously challenging work just as an amateur pursuit, to keep in the desk drawer. I do this work because I love it and am endlessly fascinated by the ancient world, ancient literature, and because I get obsessed with the impossible thrilling process of trying to create the best English verse I can, out of non-English verse. But I couldn’t do it without a structure that supports my work.” Wilson’s candor, offered from the hard-won but less precarious place of tenure, felt as new to me as her translation. Her answer also helped me to see that my attempted erasure of her children was tied up in my own practice of trying to keep mine invisible.
The majority of my teachers and mentors from high school through graduate school have been white men. Some of them had children, but they were never visibly caregivers. When I disclosed my first pregnancy to a senior male professor, he responded by asking me how I would get my research done. I blithely responded that we’d simply take the baby with us to Athens, which we did, but that conversation set the tone for how I approached any potential intersection of my career and caregiving. Deny, deny, deny. Over the years my children have formed relationships with my colleagues, moved five or six times, learned different languages, read myths and visited innumerable museums, but my first instinct was to keep the walls up.
In the afterword of her Odyssey, Emily Wilson thanks the staff of her children’s school (more proof of their existence) and I, too, am grateful to the many caregivers who have made it possible for me to work, both the childcare providers and the eldercare providers who look after my mother at her nursing home. Wilson’s text also highlights the enslaved women who are forced to give care, including Eurycleia, wet-nurse and nanny to Telemachus. “Laertes bought her many years before when she was very young, for twenty oxen.” (1.429–430) In an interview for the New York Times, Wilson is quoted as saying: “In the second-wave feminist scholarship in classics,” Wilson told me, “people were very keen to try to read Penelope as, ‘Let’s find Penelope’s voice in the “Odyssey,” and let’s celebrate her, because look, here she is being the hero in an epic in ways we can somehow unpack.’ I find that’s a little simplistic. What happens to all the unelite women?”
In Athens my oldest son, then a toddler, had a playmate whose mother had a very high-profile job. The live-in nanny who cared for her daughter came from the Philippines. At thirty-two, she had lived in Greece in this job for three years. She’d left the Philippines a few weeks after her seventh child was born and she had not been able to go back. She’d flown from Manila to Dubai, where she waited for her papers, and then from Dubai to Athens. Her husband and sister care for the seven children with the money that she is able to send home, moving from the provinces to metro Manila. “It is like death,” she said, of her separation from her children. As we traveled, we met many women with similar stories of economic displacement by the forces of global capitalism and children left behind. They are the laborers who invisibly make other parents’ higher paying work possible.
After my husband’s accident, we renewed our commitment to the community and city that had held us in a dark hour and decided to stay put in San Francisco. As I became less visible in conventional academic settings, I found my split selves coming into greater alignment. I sought work with other mothers and when another person did not have children, I no longer tried to avoid mentioning mine. I also encountered writers and artists whose work I might have missed from the safe perch within the academy that my split selves had envisioned and pursued.
I first encountered Aruna D’Souza’s work in “Dying of Exposure” about compensation and the art world after the author left a tenured position in art history. Through her public profile as a critic, I witnessed how she integrates raising her teenaged daughter and her professional work. D’Souza’s incisive new book Whitewalling also exposes the destructive selective allyship of white feminists. That cap of invisibility that renders parts of white feminists’ lives invisible to make us more palatable to patriarchy often walls women of color completely off.
If I moved beyond the academy because of my caregiving work — children, injured husband, ill mother — these responsibilities also encouraged my return. Last summer as I struggled to move between the projects I have underway and what the children wanted from their time out of school, I realized that the precarity of my work undermined the geographic stability that I’d tried to offer them and I went back on the academic market. I worried that when I got to the part of my job talk about inlaid eyes and pieced-together vision, I might cry.
As I shelved books in my new office — color theory, ancient medicine, Greek and Roman texts, method and theory — I made space for the three books that carried me across the country: Wilson’s Odyssey, D’Souza’s Whitewalling, Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. For the past few years I’ve kept all of my academic books mixed together with my children’s books and the occasional appliance manual or cookbook. While I’d hastily sorted through the boxes from our new home before bringing them in, I’d overlooked a baseball mitt, George O’Conner’s Athena (somehow separated from the rest of the Greek Gods graphic novel series), and some assorted notebooks that it seems my children appropriated from me.
On my desk, I placed a small pile of plastic body parts acquired from the toy store in our new neighborhood that connect to my interest in parts and wholes. Although I’ve moved my workspace back out of our home, I’m no longer trying to hold each part of my life apart. Following Alexander Chee’s advice, I walked over to the shelf and made a space right at the center for what will come next. And with Johanna Hanink’s call for women in classics to write big in mind, I made the space a little wider.
Jennifer Stager is a writer and an art historian.
