College...and Kids

"That time did come, when my children had gone to school, that I just felt that horrible feeling inside. I was frightened. I mean, on the one hand I wanted to go, because I was always intimidated by the various people around me, but I was really frightened of going back to school. I was afraid of the responsibility, of what it would mean. But I also knew that at the same time there was something in me; I just didn't feel right about not doing anything, not achieving anything. So I took the plunge, and I applied to Harvard." --Katiti K. Jean-Baptiste '79

While several thousand Harvard students headed down Boylston St. to a football game on a recent Saturday, I sat talking with Susanna Rodell '80 in her house near campus. There were three other women in the room, women who, like Susanna, combined being Harvard students and mothers.

There are about ten of these women. Most have come to school after several years of attempting to make a go of being a traditional housewife and mother. At times during the afternoon the discussion became heated, as Katiti, Susanna, Gail S. Macdougal '78-4 and Marguerite B. Walker '79 talked about an experience far different from that of the average Harvard student. The talk ranged from how they decided to return to school, to the nuts and bolts of combining children and college.

As the women talked, Kristopher Walker, 18 months old, maintained a steady drumbeat on the walls of his crib upstairs. The noise highlighted the basic fact of a lifestyle that is part of, and yet to a large extent cut off from, the rest of the Harvard community.

That central fact is the child. "You are always conscious of the child," Susanna said. "I brought her to one class when I just had no other option. And even though she was made to feel very welcome, the entire time I had to worry abut whether she was going to fall down the stairs or bite somebody. And it's like I can't function. Even if people are optimally nice, there is still nothing you can do."

If the children are in school themselves, as are Katiti's and Gail's, then the problem is just a little more removed. And for those with younger children, day care is always the sought after, if not always the available way to gain a few hours in which to go to class, get to the library, or study quietly alone. But day care is neither cheap nor easily found. "One day care center told me that there would be no slots open for at least two years," Marguerite said.

But, Marguerite told me, the real problem is that even with school for older children and day care for younger ones, the children are at home, and the mother's responsibility, most of the time.

"My child is in care 35 hours a week," Marguerite said. "During that time I have to attend classes and run errands in the Square. Everything has to be done. There is no free time on weekends. And when I am at home I am always aware of my child. When I am studying while he's taking a nap, there is always tension: when will he wake up and place a demand on me. My life really revolves around him. It would be so nice to be able to go to a library and study till I'm done."

On the plus side however, they all agreed, is that being mothers has given them a discipline that none of them had when they graduated from high school, so that when an opportunity for studying arises, they are able to take full advantage of it.

One experience shared by all the women was the trauma of both living and breaking with traditional roles as wives, lovers and mothers. Marguerite was living in the South, working on dead-end jobs, when she decided to return to school. Her son, Kristopher, was born three weeks before her first final exams at a small southern college, and his birth marked a change in Marguerite's life. "I wasn't aware of my abilities, and then I found myself doing impossible things. My mother-in-law couldn't believe I was going to school. She thought that was an awful thing for a mother to do."

The trials of spirit and psyche that all women faced from the time they decided to return to school made such comments by in-laws seem trivial; they were far overshadowed by the logistical problems that all the women there dealt with daily.

"They all asked me, 'How can you do that to your child,'" Susanna said. Susanna, 30, is a small, quick woman. Married and divorced, she was living in Australia when she made the decision to apply to Harvard. "I was tired of living on the bottom end. And it frightened me to know I was so dependent on the man I was with to keep me from starving or working as a waitress for 40 years. I became a bitch, feeling like a passive participant."

Katiti, a tall and vibrant woman, is about 30. She has three children and has lived all her married life in the Harvard community, beginning by working to help her husband through Harvard Medical School. She said of the decision to go to Harvard: "It must be rewarding for every family member. I want to provide role models for my daughter and for my sons in the kind of wives they will choose."

But role modelling aside, the most powerful impulse uniting these women's experience was their very personal sense of frustration and dependence. Katiti had sold clothes and babysat while her husband was in school. She had done it, she said, as a kind of servant to her husband, riding on her husband's dream. And when these women tried to stop living only their husband's lives, some of the most powerful, if unstated opposition would come from the husbands themselves.

"Here are all these people, husbands and lovers who have been used to seeing just a nice little mommy or nice little underachiever, and they're comfortable with that." Rodell said. "And all of a sudden you start to blossom in one way or another. That really threatened my husband." As the experience at Harvard became a central part of the women's lives, some husbands began retaliating. Marguerite's husband accused her of not being a good wife, and she remembers he "couldn't understand why I didn't want to do housework." As the rate of personal growth accelerated for all of these women, old relationships became more and more untenable. Susanna told of being informed by one Radcliffe official of a "Harvard syndrome"--a condition that hits couples with one member at Harvard and one member outside, eventually destroying the link between them. These four women illustrate the syndrome: three either had been or were getting divorced, two of them--Gail and Marguerite--since they came to Harvard.

Gail, 35, is a brisk woman. Commuting from Haverhill, Mass, leaves her only six hours a day in Cambridge in which to accomplish all Harvard-related chores. Married at 19, she was divorced two years ago. "I had a 16-year marriage. I think the tensions associated with this particular experience made it just the straw that broke the camel's back."

Gail said that the friends and relatives with whom she had spent time before going back to college seemed to drop away, as their lives became more and more different. In their place came new people, many of them undergraduates. Though Katiti and Gail expressed fear that Harvard creates a mindset that in the long run destroys the diversity Harvard advertises, they envy the average House dweller's liberty.

Gail said, "what I love is their youth and lack of dehabilitating responsibility," compared with the restrictions that a child forces on each of these women, They felt that the average undergraduate lives a marvelously free existence. Where they are committed to the child, most other students "have the freedom to let everything go." What they love about relating to 18 to 20 year olds is that "they are so unspoiled, uncynical."

But Susanna said there are times when the different life experiences set up a wall between her and younger undergraduates. When at lunch with other older friends, she talks about supermarkets and other day-to-day subjects. But "I would feel so dumb if an undergraduate heard me. I would feel inferior in some way, like I sounded like a housewife."

Occasionally, Harvard officialdom makes these mothers feel inferior as well. An incident in Gayle's first semester demonstrates how the University often ignores the demands put on student mothers. In one of her classes, an evening hourly was scheduled. Some varsity athletes were permitted to take the test early, but Gail, though she told the head section person she had to be home with her children in the evening, was not. "They couldn't take into account my problem--I wasn't even as good as a jock. They didn't care about my children, as long as I took that fucking exam. I hated myself taking it."

The four women agreed that section leaders cause the greatest problems. These women, older than most of the section people who give them their grades, see many of them as narrow individuals, inundated with academia. Susanna's darkest hour came during her freshman year in biology class. Her section leader was explaining how wonderful were all the new machines that aid childbirth. Susanna "just started tentatively trying to talk about how I have had a kid and I hadn't wanted any machines around and it was very important to me to expose myself in some way to the furies of nature. And there were all these kids sitting there sneering at me, and this 23-year-old little asshole of a section man said. "I suppose for some women the emotional side of childbirth is important." I had exposed some part of me that was very intimate, and I felt wounded for weeks afterward."

There are difficulties involved in being both mother and student, these women knew. But still, each woman emphasized how Harvard, or at least college, was one of the best things that had happened in their lives. For all four, it has been important to break out of the lives they were leading. And, as Katiti said, other women, other mothers, might benefit, as well: "Women aren't just 18 year olds. There are women out there in the community who have the ability, but are living in homes that they use as a sanctuary. It is easy to hide in the obscurity of home. If they are really interested in educating women. Harvard and Radcliffe should reach those women. Women's integrity must break through."