“What about monthly expenditures?” the birth center’s attorney asked.
“Well, student loans between the two of us—that’s about a thousand dollars a month. And we pay two hundred dollars per week, per child, for day care, so that’s about twenty-four hundred a month.” Just as addicts go broke on drugs, we were going bankrupt on children. Eventually we came to a settlement agreement and paid off the debt, but we learned, quite quickly, that being uninsured in America and being a deadbeat were synonymous. The plaintiff’s attorney had treated us like crooks. We reminded ourselves that Ryan advocated for criminals but was not a criminal himself, even though, humiliated and deeply ashamed, we knew dividing lines were not so easily drawn.
While I was pregnant with Fern, two years later, I interviewed for and was offered a tenure-track position at my current institution in Oshkosh, which meant blessedly fewer classes per semester at a higher pay rate. At the Modern Language Association convention in Chicago, where the national search and interview took place, I ran into an old friend from graduate school. “You have a lot of guts coming to an academic interview pregnant,” she said. Her sharp tongue cut both ways: compliment (for my courage) and warning (for my naïveté). When Fern was finally born, in a hospital, under our new insurance, she slid from me like a buttered noodle in under two hours. In my mind, governed by metaphor, her birth was cheaper because I had labored so much less.
High on Fern’s recent birth, I plunged into my three-week literature class, five days postpartum. Fearful of making a bad impression on my colleagues (many of them childless or child-free) and in dire need of a paycheck, I taught through my recovery period. My mom, Fern, and I, three generations of women, set up an ad hoc nursery in an empty classroom. Whenever Fern awoke, I’d give students a break as I tucked Fern beneath a blanket to relieve my breasts. A College of Nursing student cohort expressed support for my tandem act—teaching and mothering—as did others, mostly women, one of whom thanked me months later. “I didn’t know it was possible to have babies and work too, until I took your class,” she said.
But the following academic year, a new director for the Office of Equity and Affirmative Action was outraged to hear, through the grapevine, about my breastfeeding in front of students. She asked the associate dean to reprimand me, even though no student had filed a complaint. She glared at me in the tiny cubicle where we met, after I requested further explanation. “On behalf of the chancellor, we feel you crossed a line.” Although not formalizing the incident, she said I jeopardized my students’ classroom safety and their right to learn. “Students in the Midwest are just too polite,” she said. “If this were New York, they’d come right out and tell you, ‘Professor, that’s gross.’”
Shortly thereafter, a clerk at an educational resources store said, “So, you’re not going to believe this, but I heard a professor breastfed her baby while she was teaching!” Holding a now one-year-old Fern on my hip, clamped there with paws like a koala’s, I cleared my throat and said, “That was me. Guilty as charged.” After this incident, when the draft of a child-at-work policy for UW Oshkosh stipulated termination of employment for bringing children into classrooms, I knew, deep down, some ghostwriter was anonymously lashing out at me, somebody who’d been emboldened by our former chancellor, no doubt. When Fern was still a baby, he had hosted an orientation for new faculty in the union ballroom. As I stood, obviously not as inconspicuous as I believed, at the back wall, he pressed his lips against the microphone and said, for all to hear, “Not all of us are fortunate enough to have our children with us here today.” He pointed to me and winked oh so cleverly. Years later, I’d feel vindicated—if just a little bit—when that same chancellor was sued by the UW System after being accused of illegally transferring $11 million to major real estate developments, a controversy that would taint his legacy.
A baby’s fetal cells can remain inside a mother’s body for as long as twenty-seven years after birth, free-floating biological units comingling inside us, overlapping, little Venn diagrams of our children’s predispositions, nature before it is nurtured. Like most parents, I hoped to mitigate the worst and cultivate the best of their genetic makeup. I was quick to admit my flaws, in the interest of honesty, and I tried to set good examples, in hopes of nurturing conscientious children. If we found ourselves accidentally shoplifting baby wipes, left on the bottom rack of the shopping cart in the chaos of checkout, I returned them to customer service immediately, swiping our debit card for an apologetic second transaction. Sometimes, though, we didn’t return the wipes. It was raining or snowing, or maybe one of our babies was screaming for milk, already buckled into a car seat.
Early on in Ryan’s career, we took our children to see a local abridged version of Les Misérables, all of us becoming enamored of Jean Valjean’s story, learning the lyrics of the songs by heart long before our children could truly pronounce the words. Oblivious to the Broadway musical’s complex themes, they became fixated on one detail, repeatedly asking, “Would somebody really be sentenced to nineteen years in prison just for stealing bread?”
Answering our children’s questions was never clear-cut. How might we explain to them, for example, the disproportionate number of poor people or people of color in the system, even here in Oshkosh? It’s a majority white city, only 2 percent black, yet Ryan estimated, roughly, that one-third of his clients fit the latter category, no surprise given Wisconsin’s highest incarceration rate
