The Labor of Graduate School
By: Joe Fair Phd
Tags: Graduate School, Marriage, Pregnancy

Having endured multiple years of graduate school, and witnessing my dear wife carry and deliver multiple children has brought me to the conclusion that graduate school has some similarities to a prolonged pregnancy and labor. Each involves a paradoxical blend of fatigue and frustration somehow paired with satisfaction and deep purpose. (Equally applicable here is the Kamikaze combination of having both a graduate student and a pregnant spouse in the same home.)

During the months of weariness, you often ask yourself, “Why I am I doing this? Why did I bring this upon myself?” The tribulations are pronounced and troublesome: Your marriage is strained, sleep deprivation is standard, the children in the family wonder what’s going on with you, why you’re moody and stressed, why you look funny, why you’re constantly looking for food, and holding various parts of your body in discomfort. The days too often drag on and you’re dreaming, counting, and eventually begging for the day of deliverance to arrive. All you want is to be done- to have the entire ordeal be over.

Towards the end, things get bad. There’s lots of intense discomfort, then splitting pain; pushing, gritting of teeth, heavy breathing, plenty of anxiety, and then some screaming. Although not required, various kinds of drugs are a common coping strategy. The pain on your face is unmistakable, and the fatigue in your eyes and body is like cement. With one final explosion of effort, it is finished, and you collapse. At last the trial is passed and you find yourself slumped in a bed or a chair trying to process the sensation of feeling terribly alive and accomplished.

Then, a period of recovery takes place. You are free! People call you on the phone and send you cards. You feel like you can breathe again, and color finds its way back into a previously grey world. You are satisfied and proud with what you’ve accomplished, but your achievement born of passion and suffering somehow continues to keep you busier than you anticipated, and still very much un-rested. Amazingly the pain of the path that led there somehow manages to fade; the intensity of your trial softens in retrospect. When asked how it was or how you managed, you reply with a certain solemn vagueness with layers of potential meaning, “It was really hard, but it was worth it.”

But there is rarely any clarification. How hard? So hard you wanted to die? So hard your relationships were continually at risk of catastrophic failure? So hard you lived some days in complete misery? So hard you wanted to run away, crawl in a cave, and live off worms and berries? So hard you came out penniless and with so much money in the red the figures left you pale?

How worth it? So worth it you’d go through it all again? So worth it you have no regrets? So worth it you wouldn’t hesitate sending a dear friend down the same path, or encouraging your children to follow? So worth it you can smile and shake your head at how bad it seemed because now, life is so much better?

No, with little elaboration the words, “It was hard but it was worth it” sink deep into a green young mind and for some reason they are inspired and tricked into believing it’s a good idea. With several thoughtful, apprehensive, and slightly perplexed nods the hearer may then set out to follow a similar course. And so the suffering and victory of those who tread the path of pregnancy and graduate school are passed on to another eventually grateful victim.