Dream of Stability

One of the most frustrating things about choosing a career in academia is the long wait to become settled. You start off with these ideas that getting to a stable, tenured position is perfectly reasonable and attainable. You push on through the seemingly endless trudge of graduate school, thinking you just have to get that PhD and then do a postdoc, and then you're there. Reality kicks in sometime near the end of graduate school, as you have seen people come into the lab on their second or third postdoc, or those who went into industry to a short time and then came back to academia, and you begin to realize that figuring out what you want to do, and getting a stable job doing it, is not so easy. Then, maybe your project doesn't work that well, or you get scooped, or you end up on a long detour to your eventual completion. Even those that work long hours at expense of any sort of life have their rough times. You find that even after your PhD, in your postdoc, that those rough times can add up.

Then you want to have a family. Everyone tells you that having kids in academia can be rough. There is really no good time. Some even suggest that you should wait until you have tenure to start family. You wonder if at that point you'll even be biologically able to have kids. So you make a choice, at some point, that you're "stable enough". You start that family after all. Then things get even more scary, because now you've added another life to your unstable situation. You just hope that at some point, things will settle out.

Husband and I are in our 30s. If you count postdocs as continuing education (they are not really "real" jobs), and you count from kindergarten on, we have been "students" for about 85% of our total life span. Over 25 years. We want a house. We want to be able to know where we're going to be in 5 or 10 years. We want to be able to set down roots and commit to a life in a place where we know Imp will grow and learn and call "home". We are tired of the fear of uncertainty.

Husband is on a fellowship that ends next summer. He is trying to figure out if his boss will pick him up on a different grant or if he should look for a job. My fellowship goes until the following February, and I'm pretty sure my boss will pick me up for a few months after, but we are looking at the possibility of having to live in two different places -- for maybe as long as a year. We're lucky that we have Aunt Nanny to help, but we have to make a decision about things by January. The fear that we once again may have to drop down to one salary, as we had to do when Husband was waiting for grant funds to be released when he first started his current job, is very present. 

So we keep on moving on, doing our best, hoping that Irish luck will once again win out, and things will work out in the end. We dream of the day when we will look back at this time with a sigh of relief and say "well, thank God we never have to go through that again". We fantasize about the simple joy of knowing where Imp will attend school in 4 years. Just to be settled, to be done with "training" seems like such a far off thing. Someday, I suppose, we'll get there.