To Archaeologists Who Happen To Be Mothers

in response to https://middlesavagery.wordpress.com/2016/06/02/archaeologists-who-happen-to-be-mothers/

When I was a kid, this was my favorite photo of my parents from before I was born.

My parents met on an archaeological dig on the coast of Peru, in the mid 1960s. In the decades that followed, they raised my sister and I largely in Peru while doing ethnographic fieldwork.

Today, a colleague shared a link to this post about archaeologists who happen to be mothers. As the grown child of a field researcher for whom archaeology was always close to hand — I think anyone would be hard pressed not to find it such in the high Andes — I started to write a comment in support, mentioning my appreciation for my childhood and assuring these mothers of the field that their children would thank them later. But as is my tendency, I discovered I had a lot to say on the subject. You know, more than a comment’s worth.

Thank you, Chris, for taking that postdoc gig in Japan when I was seventeen. I still don’t know anybody else in the USA who has been dressed and trained by a kimono sensei for an important event at her tea ceremony school.

Your children will thank you.

Seriously. There was a time, when my own child was small, and my mother said to me that she often wondered whether she had done right by us kids, raising us in such unusual circumstance. I was shocked and angry. “You mean to say,” I retorted, “that you would have deprived me of the incredible, astounding childhood I had in exchange for, what, conformity and false comfort?”

She really didn’t seem to know how very proud I was of her and her achievements, either. To me, it was obvious that I was proud to have been there and part of her voyage through all of it, the fieldwork, the doctorate, everything. I think we were both a little stunned by the baldfacedness of our exchange on the topic. From that point on, I redoubled my efforts to make sure she knew how glad I was to have grown up like I did.

Here are just a few thoughts likely to be recognized by adult children of field researchers. Perhaps you might keep them handy and see if your own kids relate.

My mother (right) and her colleague Deborah are actually probably in McGraw Hall at Cornell University, but really, the truth is, the houses we lived in had the same general decorating theme.

None of the friends from school will get the decor at your house.

This is true whatever kind of school you go to, wherever you are. You’ll be in the USA and the kids who come over will get completely bogged down looking at rubbings on the walls and sundry trifling artifacts on the coffee table, and you’ll have no hope of experiencing anything cool and interesting like playing a video game, because now your mom is explaining the potsherds again.

Or, you’re in school with all the kids who live wherever is considered “the field,” and they live with eight people in a one-room adobe house, and you’ve got a sleeping bag instead of blankets. And crayons and paper, just to play with. But their houses are still more interesting. Yours is just a little foreign.

Sometimes the other researcher kids were in schools that were all diplomat kids. So they didn’t usually have houses full of artifacts and field notes either. I never met one who lived with a plant specimen dryer, and they all thought it was pretty cool I had to beat my mom at tank games to earn computer goof-off time, but it was a bummer how there was no chance when she was working on her thesis. Whatever that means.

The caveat: yeah, the other field researcher kids will totally get it. They’re just probably thin on the ground.

The author, middle, demonstrating weaving while her mother presents to a class at, if memory serves, the Boston University lab school, in 1980

Why is this something any kid will thank anyone for?

Because you grow up diverse of mindset, whether you wanted to or not.

This is an ever-increasing asset to any human being who walks the face of the earth. C’mon, you’re an archaeologist who, by dint of happening to be a mother, knows there’s a little progress the world could stand to see.

Your kids will have the context of today, out and about in the field, and awareness that more experiences exist than whatever is presented to them by, frankly, probably anyone other than you. Are school teachers really going to tell kids they can grow up to be field archaeologists? Nah. Is mainstream media going to tell them the world is vast and fascinating and the past matters? Yeah, right.

And you, you archaeologist, chances are you spend chunks of time immersed in the material culture of those who have gone before, and when you come up for air and go to make dinner and do homework, you wonder about the dumps full of frying pans like yours and how your counterparts of the future will extrapolate about what you’re doing right now. You say this aloud, and your kids roll their eyes. You go to help with homework, but it turns out you take virulent issue with an aging textbook’s characterization of Sumer, and foist other reading on your hapless child. Yes, you do. Don’t pretend. Sometimes they even read it.

The author’s mother, center, discussing wool and some small textiles with their neighbor and a volunteer for their Chinchero museum project, about 1980–1981

But whether your kids wanted it or not, there’ll come a time when they realize how much sank in. Your kids will never look at the dump the same way as anyone else. Your kids will never be able to understand why nobody else thinks their plan to be buried as a planned archaeological find is the coolest thing ever. And in time — not even that much time, says I, from the standpoint of being the mother of a recent high school graduate — the thing is, your kids are going to love that they’re interesting people. And they’re going to know that so, so much of it is because you had the audacity to be an archaeologist who also happened to be their mother.

People wish they were you. And they wish they were your kids.

I mean, I wouldn’t say I think everyone has what it takes to be a parent in the field. But I’d definitely say that I’ve met lots of folks who wish they could do it. You know, and I know, that if they really really wished they could, they would, and all, but… what I’m saying is, your life really is the stuff of fantasy. It’s just that the reality of the fantasy is, well, you know. It’s how it is. But seriously, people wish they could be you. And they wish they’d had parents who took them all over the world and took their picture at Machu Picchu when nobody thought it was cool.

The author’s little sister, in her kulis (indigenous toddler garb) at Machu Picchu. Nobody else was there that day who wasn’t actively working on the ongoing excavations at the site. You had to walk to get there. Or if you were only two years old, get carried. Like by your mom, if she happens to be, I dunno, interested in archaeology or something.

A lot of the time, that’s a shallow wish. But sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it is this deep, heartfelt awareness someone has of how much more their life could have been if they had truly only had the great good fortune your children do in having for a mother someone who also happens to be an archaeologist.

Your kids will see the world through the lens of your fieldwork, and modeled in what it takes for you to get to do it.

And that’s a good thing. Really, it is. My mother’s career experiences greatly informed the decisions I’ve made about my own over the years. She deftly (and with my father’s assistance) set the stage for me to truly own mine and my decisions about how to get on with this business of making a living and raising a family and trying to put my life in a larger picture context. The years of living on food stamps and grant stipends while she and my father presented papers at international conferences left me few illusions about academia and research.

And I know that’s what my mother meant when she wondered if she’d done right by us kids. And I know that she questioned what it all meant and gauged herself and her success to a degree by how we felt about our lives. I wanted her not to, even as I understood — being a mother myself — how and why she did. I wanted her to literally see her laurels, you know? I wanted to be acknowledged as along for the ride when she put that Cornell doctorate above that Radcliffe diploma, but not to have been something other people used as an obstacle to her achieving it and all the other things she did. And she, I think, felt almost unworthy of the fierceness of my cheerleading, knowing what compromises and choices she made and other mothers did not.

Please take your kids to the field, because this is what happens when you do. Seriously. This is about the worst of it. We were coming to the USA after a year in the field. Don’t we look haggard? I mean this is how bad it can get.

So I feel compelled to say to you, mothers of fieldwork, archaeologists who happen to be mothers,

Stay the course! It matters! Your children will thank you, too — your lauds and accolades for busting your ass will come not only from the ivory tower and its future generations, but from the future generation’s members for whom you are immediately responsible. You got this. And thank you.