List-keepers and other carrier bag stories: Academic mothers' (in)visible labor during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Beginning in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted familiar rhythms of work and life when academic women from the United States sheltered-in-place in their homes. The pandemic brought forth challenges which accentuated that caregiving with little or no support disproportionately affected mothers' abilities to navigate their new lives inside the home, where work and caregiving abruptly collided. This article takes on the (in)visible labor of academic mothers during this time–the labor mothers saw and viscerally experienced, yet that which was often unseen/unexperienced by others. Using Ursula K. Le Guin's Carrier Bag Theory as a conceptual framework, the authors engage with interviews of 54 academic mothers through a feminist-narrative lens. They craft stories of carrying (in)visible labor, isolation, simultaneity, and list-keeping as they navigate the mundaneness of everyday pandemic home/work/life. Through unrelenting responsibilities and expectations, they each find ways to carry it all, as they carry on.

Introduction

“She [Cheryl Strayed1] once referred to herself as the keeper of the lists. Where her partner was like, ‘Well, I can do whatever you need me to do if you just tell me what it is.’ And she's like, ‘I can't just simply tell you what it is because I'm the keeper of the lists.’ And this feels like being the keeper of the list times 100,000. Um, so anyway, that is not really a very linear response but…”

-Essie, Academic Mother

When the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe in 2020, the familiar rhythms of work-home-life were disrupted when academic mothers in the United States found themselves sheltering-in-place; their homes becoming, whether by choice or by necessity, the center of their lives. However, for mothers and, specific to our research, academic mothers 2 this pandemic brought forth challenges which accentuated that caregiving without, or with very little, support disproportionately affected mothers' abilities to navigate their new lives inside the home where work and caregiving abruptly collided (Kramer, 2020; Pinho-Gomes et al., 2020). As Essie explained in the interview excerpt that begins this article, the pandemic only amplified what many mothers in our study experienced: the labor they carried was labor that was not easily delegated to partners or spouses–they were, in fact, the keepers of the lists. They were the ones carrying the mental loads of everyday life, attentive to, and often responsible for, the nuances of their family's schedules, preferences, patterns, and flows–remembering the babysitter's schedule (and to pay them), planning meals and detailing grocery lists, earmarking an afternoon for a child's dentist appointment. They were responsible for keeping track of these lists of tasks that are rarely noticed, except when they are forgotten, or undone. Thus, Essie's description of herself as a “list-keeper” became an apt naming of what we have come to call the (in)visible labor of academic mothers during the pandemic. (In)visible labor is that which mothers see and viscerally experience, yet the labor remains unseen in the patriarchal norms that guide policies and practices in academia and beyond.

To be sure, the unequal struggles faced by mothers in the workforce were known and lived before COVID-19. Prior to the pandemic, academic mothers were already featured in the literature as facing significant obstacles during the tenure process, while men academics actually saw a boost to their careers upon becoming fathers (Harris et al., 2019; Windsor & Crawford, 2020). Academic mothers also experienced delays in their career trajectories, decreased time for research and writing, and placement on campuses that were (and are) ill-equipped for supporting academic motherhood (McCutcheon & Morrison, 2018; Mirick & Wladkowski, 2018; Trussell, 2015). Thus, we recognize that this is not a new phenomenon, but one that has been exacerbated and necessitates new scholarship. What our work seeks to do differently is twofold: First, we focus on a diverse group of mothers employed by higher education institutions in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. These mothers: 1) were employed by U.S. institutions ranging from community colleges to very high research universities, 2) ranged in roles from adjuncts to full professors, 3) described themselves having various racial, ethnic, and sexual identities, 4) and worked in both faculty and administrative roles. Second, through a feminist framework and narrative inquiry qualitative methodology, we center their stories as told to us through semi-structured interviews. Through these approaches, we elevate storytelling as a valuable and relationally vital means of sharing academic mothering experiences.

Turning to feminism, this work thinks-with Ursula K. Le Guin's (1986/2020) The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction as a conceptual framework that inspires us both theoretically and methodologically. This frame awakens us to mothers' stories of the everyday, the (in)visible “things” that they carried during the pandemic. We, therefore, consider the questions:

• •What family-based labor did academic mothers in the United States carry during the COVID-19 pandemic?
• •How do mothers story this labor?

In what follows, we introduce relevant literature, followed by our conceptual framework. After, we discuss our study and methodology, and get to the heart of this work–the mother's stories. We conclude with implications for this research as we now consider a post-pandemic world, wondering how academia might take seriously the experiences and learnings of academic mothers' pandemic lives.

Literature review: academic mothers during COVID-19

It is not that the COVID-19 pandemic suddenly made the invisible visible. Considerable scholarship previously detailed the ever-present obstacles faced by mothers in academia. Related to these obstacles and their entrenchment in gender roles, we would note that a substantial portion of related scholarship unfortunately and consistently conflates “mother” with “woman.” Thus, we work throughout this section to clearly delineate between the two, given that “woman” is a gender category, and, including for some participants in this study, “mother” is a typically gendered role that is not synonymous with “woman.”

In examining United States-based mothers' work experiences, researchers have often focused on a “motherhood penalty” (e.g. Baker, 2010; Budig & England, 2001; Portanti & Whitworth, 2009; Vomvoridi-Ivanovic & Ward, 2021). While such discourses are relevant to our contemporary mothers, we feel it necessary to explore how this came to be. Thus, we trace this penalty back to the 1800s in which a “pre-Enlightenment model of male and female bodies as hierarchically ordered versions of one sex gave way to a picture of distinct sexes” (Tseëlon, 2003). In this time, Laqueur (1990) asserts that, “at stake, are not biological questions about the effects of organs or hormones but cultural political questions regarding the nature of woman” (p. 22). These “differences,” then, are not limited exclusively to gender, but extended into the realms of race, ability, ethnicity, among others. “The discourses of science and empiricism” were then “mobilized to legitimize all these presumed categorical differences (which were, in fact, differences of social power) along biological lines and ground them in the body” (p. 7). These discourses had, and have, material effects.

Along with these socially-constructed differences came the “gendering of space” (Siwach, 2020, p. 33), with spaces like our work and our homes also delineated along gendered lines. Home became a space in which woman's work was often relegated, therefore always accessible, was/is defined by the nature of her work, “her mobility is restricted only to those spheres where her labor is required” (Siwach, 2020, p. 2). Historically, home has been gendered as a “feminine” space. As men worked outside the home, mothers remained in the home and took care of domestic duties and child care. This shifted in the 1960s, as more mothers chose to work outside of the home with the result being an increased social acceptance of women's employment (Shu & Meagher, 2018).

While teaching has been a space that has been traditionally welcoming to women's employment (Lassibille & Navarro Gómez, 2020), higher education has remained primarily man-dominated, consistently a space of struggle and inequality for women and, more specifically, mothers. The race for publications, rank, salary, and job security puts academic mothers behind women scholars without children, single men, and fathers (Delaney et al., 2021; Matulevicius et al., 2021). It is a race built upon the valuation of labor through specific results: research being conducted, grant proposals written and funded, conference presentations, number of publications, committee appointments, awards, tenure and advancement, none of which account for or reflect the invisible, often inequitable, labor that produces these forms of productivity.

To be sure, the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated these highly gendered aspects of higher education work. For instance, researchers found that “82 percent of women professors said their workloads increased, compared with 70 percent of men” (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2021, p. 13). Related, the pandemic saw a notable decrease of research manuscript submissions by women, with men conversely “submitting up to 50 percent more than they usually would” (Kitchener, 2020, p. 1). Even pre-pandemic, these inequalities were present. For instance, in the discipline of computer science, specifically, researchers found that in the first ten years after the birth of a child, “mothers produce on average 17.6 fewer papers than fathers - a gap that would take roughly five years of work for mothers to close” (Morgan et al., 2021, p. 5). Similarly, a survey of over 20,000 people with PhDs from May to July 2020 found that “mothers suffered a 33 % larger drop in research hours compared with fathers” (Langin, 2021, p. 1). The research on the gaps illuminated by the pandemic's effects is still underway as scholarship continues to examine the impacts on the career trajectories of academic mothers who “perceive academia as unwelcoming toward parents and thus seek careers outside academia” (Morgan et al., 2021, p. 1).

Perhaps in an effort to inspire academic work to continue during the pandemic, Lewis (2020) described how both William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton produced some of their greatest works during the Great Plague. And they could. They were not sheltered in place with children underfoot as they navigated no childcare alongside increases in both familial and workplace responsibilities. According to Hermann et al. (2021), “Prior to this crisis, women comprised approximately 50 % of the labor force; and the participation rate from women with children under 18 was 72.3 %. Yet, by the end of 2020, there were 2.1 million fewer women in the workforce than before the pandemic” (p. 15). Similarly, after analyzing United States census data, Wynn (2021) found that “Americans missed more work than ever before due to child care problems in 2020, and the burden was shouldered almost exclusively by women” (p. 1), as the “the number of women with child care-related absences in any month more than doubled from 2019 to 2020,” with “[w]omen account[ing] for 84 % of all workers who missed work in the average month last year due to child care issues – a five-year high” (p. 1).

Often under pressure to perform in both work and home, Clancy writes, “women's academic productivity seems primarily to be discussed in relation to a different kind of productivity – motherhood” (2020, p. 857). For instance, Shalaby et al. (2021) explain that women in academia, while not ‘mothers’ in the traditional sense of caring for a child, are still “mommy-tracked” (p. 665), as they are often burdened by “a disproportionate share of service and mentoring” (Shalaby et al., 2021, p. 665). In this way, the burdens of academia (and beyond) remain squarely shouldered by those who, whether correctly or incorrectly, are gendered as academic mothers. This literature is worth bringing forth because, even as we attempt to disentangle the role “mother” with the gender identity of “women” in this article, the scholarship with which we engage keeps them entwined.

These data, though compelling, paint a limited picture of mother with other identity intersections, especially “multiple marginalized identities within academia and experiences of discrimination and oppression” (Wagner et al., 2022, p. 343). Multiple marginalized identities extend to academic mothers who are People of Color, nonbinary, trans, genderqueer, disabled, etc. A consistent institutional response to pandemic-related disparities has been for universities and colleges to offer tenure-track faculty a one-year extension to their tenure clocks. However, “women and faculty of color will continue to face discrimination, and in some cases, more difficult economic situations, that don't stop when the tenure clock stops – on top of the extra burdens they shouldered during the pandemic” (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2021, p. 17). Fulweiler et al. (2021) described how Women of Color have “experienced disproportionately higher rates of unemployment, hospitalization, and death during the pandemic” with “higher proportions of these faculty employed as lecturers and clinical faculty- positions which typically do not have tenure and are renewed annually” (p. 1). As a whole, COVID-19 itself had a negative impact on academic mothers, particularly in regard to their mental health and well-being (Burk et al., 2021; Miller, 2021; Wagner et al., 2022); however, it may take years to understand the profundity and longevity of its intersectional impacts on marginalized academic mothers.

As Vialette (2020) wrote, “COVID-19 has changed not only how we (women) approach our work but also how we let work infiltrate our most intimate spaces. This, like many forms of inequality, has hit women especially hard” (para. 15), and, we argue, mothers. The many realities of the pandemic have left academic mothers physically and emotionally exhausted as academic work came into direct tension with responsibilities of various family-based labors: housework, meal preparation, list making, planning, organizing, to name a few. Home, previously a place of refuge and family, became an impossible amalgam of labors and identities, and though both men and women sheltered-in-place during the COVID-19 pandemic, women overwhelmingly bore responsibility to keep families upright, as separations between family and work collapsed around them (Hermann et al., 2021). Vomvoridi-Ivanovic and Ward (2021) explained,

In addition to doing most of the physical housework and childcare, mothers also are the ones who most often manage, plan, anticipate, and organize both routine and unexpected household tasks and family events, as well as support the daily well-being of family members.

(p. 46)

The narratives of the academic mothers within these pages speak to these realities, both within and beyond the home. Their labor and the accompanying institutional work expectations, alongside the absence of child care and shelter-in-place directives, took an enormous physical and emotional toll on academic mothers. Indeed, many academic mothers were caught amidst the constancy and ongoingness of lives in which the home became the place where mothering and academia collided, where all work was home work.

Conceptual framework: carrier bag theory

Ursula K. Le Guin's (1986/2020)The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction serves as the conceptual framework for this study. To clarify, the stories featured in this paper are not fiction but academic mothers' actual pandemic experiences. However, Le Guin's work informs how we conceptualize the carrier bag concept as theory and methodology. As theory, Le Guin drew from anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher's (1979) book Woman's Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society. According to Fisher, carrier bag theory explores the historical need of women to create and carry containers and vessels transporting sundry “things” in women's everyday lives–gathered food and even children–so that they could carry on with their domestic duties. Fisher argued that both “historically (and currently) the more useful life-sustaining tool for the human species is the container” (Adsit-Morris, 2017, p. 45), rather than what is elevated in historical writings, such as hunting-related weapons often used by men. Thus, she flips the narrative to center containers (or carrier bags), which through a phallocentric lens appear trivial; yet, when seen through a feminine/feminist lens, were and are critical to choreographing an effective and efficient everyday life.

Taking up this re-centering, Le Guin (1986/2020) created a woman narrator who shares her carrier bag counterstory. After considering the oft-told heroic stories of hunting, the narrator expresses frustration with phallocentric stories, dismissively asserting:

We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news.

(p. 167)

For Le Guin, carrier bag theory provides both a theory of de- and re-centering, even as it also cultivates a conceptual vessel for the stories she needs to hear, the stories of a feminist temporality, a heroine doing ‘woman’ things, a focus on feminist perspectives, a keeper of lists. Carrier bag theory lends itself to both a what (theory) and a how (practice), both of which inspire our work.

With Le Guin (1986/2020), we envision the carrier bag literally and figuratively. Literally, the carrier bag centers women's (in)visible work and allows spaces for new worldmakings through storied tellings. Figuratively, the carrier bag serves as a metaphor for the stories untold, unseen, un(der)valued in a phallocentric and patriarchal world–the stories carried, but rarely heard, and the lists kept, but rarely seen. The bags over the weapons. Our study wonders about the stories academic mothers have yet to tell, the carrier bags of the COVID-19 pandemic. These wonderings inspire our theorizing and our methodological practices, as we discuss below.

Carrier bag methodology: a feminist-narrative approach

Le Guin (1986/2020) explained, “It is the story that makes the difference” (p. 168). Accordingly, we have focused on participants' stories. But, this decision did not tell us what sort of story to tell, or what role we would have in the telling. We turned to feminist methods, which guided us to approach these questions in multiple ways. First, whatever type of story we told, it was essential that we understood it as a re-telling and co-telling; we, as researchers, are active participants, co-narrators, shaping the stories we have evoked and now share through prompting, responding, interpreting, and writing (Chase, 2005; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; Squires et al., 2013). Second, because multiple types of stories can and do co-exist, we had to decide which story to foreground, what sort of story to tell about the stories. Guided by Le Guin (1986/2020), we attended to “the nature, subject, words of…the life story” (p. 33), the narratives of the everyday, mundane, and unnoticed labor of mothers. These life-stories, we assert, were more than simply records of a life. Rather, they were cosmological performances (Haraway, 2016), whereby mothers “c[a]me to understand and narrate [their] experiences in particular ways” (Woodiwiss et al., 2017, p. 5) that were both humble and world-shifting. We paid attention to these stories of everyday essential labors and found that the lines between the ‘heroic’ and the ‘life story’ became unclear. They exceeded the roles assigned to them – wife, mother, academic, list-keeper; it seemed that the type of story being told was continually in excess. Rather than curbing this overflow, we paid attention to it. What if these mothers' life-stories were about more than making sense of their livings? What if they also made living differently sensible? That is, what if they performed a larger feat than understanding? What if they shifted the very structures of narrative, making space for her as she over-filled the container, crafting a more expansive, heavier carrier-bag? With this thought, we began to read their stories as blurring the lines between ‘humble tasks’ and ‘legend.’ We began to see in their tellings a life-story hero, performing the labors not of Hercules, but of Laundry-Folded and Appointments-Kept and Babysitters-Scheduled, during A-Pandemic-That-Shut-Down-the-World.

Unlike the man's heroic story – the “killer story” (Le Guin (1986/2020), p. 33), a narrative about life-turning, course-altering moments accomplished through “bashing, thrusting, raping, killing” (Le Guin (1986/2020), p. 33), the carrier bag/life story pursues life-sustaining and life-containing through the repetition of mundane tasks. It features breast pumps and calendars, not swords. Mother-narrators articulated a strange tale through which families, communities, a nation, a world, were balanced (again and again) on the brink. A tale in a strange time with a strange plot–merging the dire and humble, the life-threatening and the boring–in a setting that flickered between home and work without the separation of scene changes. A new sort of character that overflowed her bounds–that should be impossible but yet here she was! A feminist narrative hero, a life-story hero.

Her tale was filled with the sorts of tasks that repeat and repeat and layer and cycle, the tasks of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) that require turning swords into plows, and digging, seeding, weeding, watering, harvesting, threshing, milling, and baking. The tasks that would never make it into The Iliad or The Aeneid. With these actions, she nonetheless was a sort of conqueror, claiming the roles denied to her–storyteller, human, hero–with a ferocity and a sort of violence, one of cutting-together a self, while gritting-and-bearing the knife against herself, cutting off, for a time, parts of herself (perhaps, researcher or performer or athlete or quilter). She is told, like Le Guin's (1986/2020) character that “…what you are is a woman. Possibly not human…Now be quiet while we go on telling the Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero” (p. 32). But she would not be quiet. She told how she carved out space in bedrooms-turned-offices and offices-turned-play-spaces. She explained the schedules whereby she sustained a world. She told a story that revealed how she was everything they said she was – woman, mother, wife – and everything they said she wasn't – human, narrator, life-story hero, and, and, and.

Methods

And. Fifty-four academic mothers consented and were interviewed virtually about how COVID-19 had affected their professional and personal lives. We recruited mothers employed by higher education institutions across the United States through two means: 1) emails sent to those who self-identified as academic mothers, encouraging them to share our study with others, and 2) social media–specifically within groups whose membership was primarily academic mothers and, more generally, academic women. Though we began with a focus on mothers who had already attained terminal degrees, we quickly expanded our parameters to include those pursuing such degrees because those mothers wanted to be heard, and we wanted to listen. A range of pandemic academic mothers, including heterosexual, queer, lesbian, white, Black, Arab, and multi-racial participants navigated different academic pathways, including tenure-track, tenured, and clinical faculty, as well as adjuncts, instructors, and administrators. Within the 54, our analysis based on the concept of list-keepers led us to focus on the narratives of 31 mothers (Table 1 ).

Table 1.

Participants.

Pseudonyma	Disclosed race or ethnicity	Disclosed sexuality	Academic position at the time of interviewb	Children living at home at time of interview
Adelaide	White	Heterosexual	Assistant Professor	1 child - infant
Angela	White	Heterosexual	Assistant Professor	1 child - infant
Camilla	White	Heterosexual	Associate Professor	1 child - elementary-aged
Charlotte	White	Heterosexual	Associate Professor/Director	2 children - middle and high school-aged
Danielle	White	Heterosexual	Assistant Professor	2 children - preschool- and elementary-aged
Dawn	White	Heterosexual	Assistant Professor	2 children - elementary-aged
Elizabeth	White	Heterosexual	Associate Professor	1 child - elementary-aged
Emma	White	Heterosexual	Associate Professor	3 children - elementary-aged
Essie	White	Queer	Assistant Professor	1 child - elementary-aged
Rinne	White	Heterosexual	Doctoral Student	3 children - 2 elementary-aged and pregnant
Gail	White	Heterosexual	Research Scientist/Administrator	2 young children - newborn and preschool-aged
Genevieve	White	Heterosexual	Associate Professor	2 children - toddler and elementary-aged
Gwen	White	Heterosexual	Associate Professor	1 child - elementary-aged
Jada	Black/African American	Heterosexual	Doctoral Student	3 children - 1 elementary, 1 preschool, and 1 infant
Jessica	White	Pansexual	Professor/Director	1 child - elementary-aged
Jessie	White	Lesbian	Adjunct	2 elementary-aged children (twins)
Karina	White	Heterosexual	Associate Professor/Director	2 children - elementary-aged
Lucille	White	Heterosexual	Clinical Researcher	2 children - infant and toddler
Maegan	White	Heterosexual	Adjunct	2 children - 1 preschool, 1 elementary-aged
Marie	White	Bisexual	Associate Professor	2 children - 1 elementary-aged, 1 adult
Marisela	Multiracial	Heterosexual	Lecturer	1 child - middle school-aged
Melina	Greek	Heterosexual	Associate Professor	2 children - elementary-aged
Michelle	White	Heterosexual	Adjunct	3 children - 1 infant, 1 preschool-aged and 1 elementary-aged
Nora	Arab	Heterosexual	Assistant Professor	2 children - elementary-aged
Sade	Black/African American	Heterosexual	Assistant Professor	3 children - 1 infant, 2 elementary-aged
Sally	Black/African American	Heterosexual	Doctoral Student/Adjunct	1 child - infant
Samantha	White	Heterosexual	Associate Professor	3 children - preschool- to elementary-aged
Sasha	Black/African American	Heterosexual	Post-Doctoral Scholar	1 child - toddler
Shannon	White	Heterosexual	Associate Professor	2 children - pre-school and elementary-aged
Shauna	Not Disclosed	Heterosexual	Assistant Professor	1 child - toddler
Tara	White	Heterosexual	Instructor	1 child - infant

^aIn most cases, pseudonyms were self-selected by the participant.

^bIn order to protect participant identities, we have provided limited information about their institutions. Several participants expressed their vulnerabilities as untenured or holding non-tenure earning positions.

We pause here to unpack the ‘we’ mentioned above. Kelly and Stephanie are associate professors of qualitative research, Shelly earned her Ph.D. in Instructional Leadership - Social and Cultural Studies, and Carlson is a doctoral student in educational research. We came to this work as feminist scholars and qualitative inquirers, with varied understandings of what it was like to be an academic mother during the COVID-19 pandemic. Kelly, who initiated this project, was mother to a 1-year old and 7-year old when the pandemic began, and her struggles were a catalyst for wanting to take on this research. Kelly had submitted her tenure and promotion materials in August 2019 and learned that she was tenured and promoted while sheltering in her home during the summer of 2020. Shelly was finishing her dissertation and planning on graduating in the summer of 2020 when the pandemic hit. As research halted and the academic job market slowed to a crawl, she decided to push graduation back one year and signed on as a research assistant for Kelly and Stephanie, and was introduced to this project. Shelly has five children, all over the age of 18. Carlson, without children, spent the pandemic quarantining with her fiancé and family, taking classes and working from home. Stephanie, a single queer woman, endured the lockdown alone. Herself childless, she worked remotely to support siblings, cousins, nephews, and nieces who found the previously tidy work/life divisions crumbling during the pandemic. She and Kelly also remained in daily contact, as Kelly shared her efforts to navigate the conflations of home and academia, and when Kelly proposed inviting other women to share their experiences, Stephanie was ready to support, listen, and learn.

Our interviews, conducted via Zoom, ranged from approximately 1-hour to sometimes well over 2. Informed by feminist interviewing practices, we approached these interactions with the understanding that “no two women's [mother's] experiences are identical” (Reinharz & Chase, 2001, p. 220). Thus, our semi-structured interview protocol, a consistent approach in feminist methods (DeVault & Gross, 2011; Hesse-Biber & Leavy, 2010), asked participants to examine their experiences as mothers. This emphasis on experience is central to feminist interviewing, as these interactions work “to make sense of experiences that [are] both ‘personal’ and ‘political,’” within their homes and broader society (DeVault & Gross, 2011, p. 213). The benefit of this approach was that we all shared, as researchers, an interview protocol that explored the intersections between the personal and the political, while offering the mothers flexibility to determine where their discussions would go; guiding us to ask participant-specific follow-up questions. Afterward, we listened again to the audio to ensure that transcriptions reflected participants' contributions, before readying them for analysis. Throughout the transcription process, we were in regular contact with participants, as we asked clarifying questions, they offered additional insights, and we continued the process of co-creating the research with them.

Our analytic process began with each of us individually examining the transcripts and identifying narratives–both partial and complete–that described (in)visible labor between home and work, in which these mothers described themselves in ways relative to our guiding concept of list-keepers. We then looked across these excerpts with an eye toward our theoretical framework, Le Guin's (1986/2020) carrier bag theory, thinking about the tenets we have articulated above. The four of us met bi-weekly to discuss the narratives that stood out, jotting notes, organizing and reorganizing the narratives, as we constructed new connections and understandings. After several weeks of engaging with the transcripts, we narrowed our focus to two threads that we discuss below. We call them threads, not ‘themes,’ because the experiences our participants shared are not woven tightly and neatly into lessons but rather are bunched together like skeins of thread, containing moments that resist tidy knots. There is not always a point to what is told, to what is contained, except that these moments are the substance of their living. Stories–like the lists kept and performed by the participants–are both the phenomenon and the methods of inquiry (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). We took that dualism seriously by thinking of the narratives as content and as processes shaping the analysis. We also call them threads because it references back to the very construction of the carrier bag. Below, we tug at these threads, co-composing academic mothers, carrier bags, and list-keepers.

Findings: threads-laid-bare

As we listened to the participant's stories, we were drawn to two narrative threads. With a playful nod to the novels, The Invisible Man (Ellison, 1995) and The Things They Carried (O'Brien, 2009), which also examine carrying societal burdens, we frame our threads as ‘The (In)Visible Mother’ and ‘The Loads They Carried.’ To be clear, we do not intend to draw connections between these threads and the novels; rather, using Le Guin's (1986/2020) concept, these namings acknowledge the mothers' experiences as carriers, bearing too frequently unnoticed loads – identities, experiences, tangible and intangible things – in their mundane (yet profound) everyday lives. Notably, these threads behave as threads. That is, although we name them separately, we acknowledge that they frequently twist and knot together: here we move with them across, stitching-with an overarching pattern; here, we linger with an exceptional moment, a place of particular complexity and proliferation. In this process, we dart with the threads within and between the stories of our participants–attending to the local and the global, the unique and the common, the linear and the non-linear–to attune to their specificities and commonalities.

The (in)visible mother

Women often feel (in)visible in many spheres of life. In this section, we turn to the (in)visible woman, an everyday hero, who goes by the name “Mother.” The academic mother in the pandemic is clearly visible to some – too visible, too accessible, as she works at kitchen tables and in playrooms – and yet is often overlooked. Of course, these mothers' efforts were already largely (in)visible before the pandemic: they already struggled with being seen in their workplace, in their fields of expertise, within their homes. But, then, during the pandemic their invisible work was noticed, if only because of how they scrambled for quiet places to teach courses (Adelaide, Karina, Shannon, Sade), attend meetings uninterrupted (Marie, Charlotte, Genevieve), and finish research that was still expected and even required (Camilla, Sasha, Genevieve). As Bateson (1990) wrote,

The caretaking has to be done. Somebody's got to be the mommy. Individually, we underestimate this need, and as a society we make inadequate provision for it. Women [and mothers] take up the slack, making the need invisible as we step in to fill it.

(p. 115)

When a mother's work is done so well it appears seamless, the labor is taken for granted. Gwen, for instance, struggled with the mental load during the pandemic and subsequent shut-down. The struggle encompassed what she had always done (in)visibly, but in the pandemic these responsibilities increased and demanded her family see them. Gwen mentioned how it took their being quarantined at home for her husband to realize, “wow, yeah, there are a lot of things that aren't visible that Gwen does, like all the scheduling, all the coordination with the babysitter… those things that are a time drain that suck that up.” That is, Gwen's labor was invisible because she did it so well – it was effortless, seamless. To not do that work alone anymore is to make that labor visible. To allow someone else to intervene and take some of the load requires a willingness to have it not done in that same way and forces others to see the seams. The same occurred for Melina. She attempted for years to explain to her husband about the invisible work of mothers, of academic mothers in particular, “but he just didn't get it, you know, because he could only see like the world that's done that is actually there, visible.” Visible only because we make it so through our masterful day-to-day heroism– laundry folded and put away, clean dishes when hungry, appointments managed, floors vacuumed, publications submitted, meetings completed, emails answered, babies read to and put to bed. All this so we can start anew, fresh, (in)visible the next day.

Michelle also spoke of this feeling of her labor being invisible - particularly in the eyes of her own family. She said, “So, you know, I do feel like there are times, sometimes, I do very much feel like my work is invisible to my family, which is in part my own fault by waiting for the space to become available, by not trying to do that work in front of them.” By trying to divide her roles according to space and time, she was – unintentionally or intentionally – hiding the realities of her everyday balancing act. Again and again, the academic mothers in our study told stories of how they allowed balance and grace for others while often withholding it from themselves.

This (in)visibility extends to academia where Danielle felt unseen and unheard, her voice not mattering even as she struggled to give voice to concerns, the need for support from department heads and faculty administrators, silenced by the:

male voice that dominates with people who weren't parents at the time, constantly wanting meetings and wanting emails and wanting this and that. And I guess it's a lot easier to assume that everyone else is doing what you're doing during that time. But that's what I would always think during the meetings is: people have no idea what I have done today, what I have accomplished, because I just jumped on the meeting. And you can see my little face in the box. And that's it. You couldn't see the struggle and constant back and forth that was behind all of that. All you can hear is what I allow you to hear when I unmute you. The songs I've sung with my little ones, you can't hear me rocking them to sleep, you can't hear me changing their diaper, you can't hear me, see me, you know, blowing bubbles and playing with them, you can just hear what I allow you to hear, which is very different than if you could ask me, you know, ‘how's it going? What's going on?

Here, Danielle was acutely aware of the ways in which her life was visible through a curated box on Zoom, just as she expressed her struggles with what was not visible and not heard–all the mothering labor exceeded the confines of what was visible in a Zoom meeting screen and audio.

Melina had a friend recovering from COVID and saw/heard her struggles firsthand, which added to her own anxiety, pressure, and fear. She was already struggling finding ways to juggle all that was expected of her, coupled with the fear of catching COVID due to pre-existing medical conditions within her family. These fears and anxieties permeated all she did, invisible yet heavy during a time when even the air took on a weight before unfelt, unseen. She turned to research on academic mothers during this time to feel less alone and she still felt unseen and unheard, invisible, within the research,

And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, and then I was like, ‘Why the fuck is nobody talking about that?’ Like this culture of silence is just killing me…I knew there was this motherhood bias, I just didn't know that it, it was like one of those things that, you know, you think is your fault, you know, for not being able to handle everything.

Handling it all. Proving she belongs. In what little spare time Melina had, she searched databases for scholarly work being done on other academic mothers during this unprecedented time – still invisible to others, yet a kinship formed across blue screens and white pages that let her know she was not alone.

Both Karina and Camilla spoke on the competing interests of academic motherhood. On the one hand, they relished the flexibility that academia offers mothers. But that same flexibility became a moot point with many of the colleges and universities in the United States functioning remotely. Karina recounted the demands of writing and research and the level of “deep work concentration” those roles entailed, while to her family, “it doesn't look like I'm doing anything.” For her part, Camilla felt “unacknowledged, which means unsupported, and unsupported by my institution. And not as a faculty member, necessarily, but as a parent, definitely.” Drawn to a career of knowledge, research and scholarship, and flexibility and finding the roles of academician and motherhood are not compatible. Camilla mentioned how,

Academia was built for white, cis[gender], privileged, you know, wealthy men who have wives at home to do everything at home, that is what I think academia was built for, and it has not changed, and I see a few more women in leadership roles, and I think that's helpful. Because that, you know, whether or not they're mothers doesn't really even matter. We know from data that most of the invisible work both at home and in the workplace fall to women.

When their flexibility is visible to others at the same time that the requirements of their work (requiring deliberate, thoughtful, willful cultivation) is (in)visible, academic mothers' time and effort is misvalued and misunderstood. Nora mentioned how “there's always room for everyone to ask you to do stuff during the day” because they interpret that flexibility as availability. The work (that still needs to be done) is pushed to the margins; it does not carry its own momentum. Done or not (yet) done, (in)visible, all that must be done still remains. And, it still matters in how academic mothers are evaluated, interpreted, defined.

This (in)visibility was compounded by isolation. The work of an academic mother is work often done in isolation, even in a crowded room, within an equally crowded mind. But, in the pandemic, Samantha found herself amidst two worlds. One where colleagues were publishing, writing, and submitting grant proposals, and another where she sat alone in a room with her five-year old son who was “really, really suffering.” She elaborated, “He was talking about self-harm, and he was banging his head on the wall.” To help her cope, she found another academic she follows on social media who was writing of a similar experience with her own son–an academic mother taking the invisible and making it visible through her own vulnerability.

Samantha was not alone in seeking community over social media and forms of separate-together communication. Many of our participants talked about joining apps and social media groups (Gwen, Essie, Emma, Jessie), Zooming with other working moms (Jessie, Marisela, Lucille), even texting conversations carried out at night while rocking babies back to sleep (Sasha, Danielle, Rinne). In different (crowded) rooms, squeezed within different (crowded) schedules, (crowded) minds and busy hands shared stories and advice and funny events. They sought ways to be separate-together. To be, in a fashion, purposefully (in)visible – visible to each other as a way to commiserate, to recognize, to treat, the symptoms of this strange experience of being an academic mother during the pandemic. Of being entirely-and-never alone. Of being simultaneously (un)available for their families, for their jobs, for themselves. Of being entirely and frustratingly (in)visible.

The loads they carried

So it was kind of this just there was no separation of roles that I could even find anymore. Because when I drive away from campus and leave my office and leave my work there, I pick it up when I come back. Now it's carried around all day, I carry [it in] the backyard when I'm playing with my kids. Carried into the kitchen where I'm making lunch. So there just was never a moment that I felt like just mom anymore. It was, it was kind of like they were blended and overlapping. And there was no, you know, there was no, kind of, separate moments of the day where I'm mom and then I'm professor…

-Danielle

The ongoingness of a disrupted home life experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic came to take on a particular weight for the mothers we interviewed. Danielle's story above discussed the ways in which she became aware of the inseparability of ‘mom’ and ‘academic.’ Thrust onto her shoulders, Danielle carried the bag of an academic with her throughout the day, in and around her home as she also carried on as a mother. Similar to Danielle, A new mother and early-career academic, Tara talked about her “big massive bag” that “weighs a ton.” Filled with the objects of academic and mother (laptop, masks, pumping accoutrements), it is “obnoxious to lug around” but central to her everyday experience. She play-acts packing the bag in the interview: “every day, before I go to work, I have to like think through ‘Okay, do I have my pumping bra? Do I have my pump? Do I have my lap-, like all of my things?” Roles: what we carry as we carry on. For Danielle and Tara, as well as for other mothers we spoke with, the loads they carried were many, but one of the most burdensome during the pandemic was the way their inseparable identities and roles became even more inseparable. It was living the ongoing simultaneity of mother/academic/and that caused their shoulders to ache from a carrier bag they could never put down.

Jada also spoke about carrying the load of simultaneity, describing a significant moment that occurred during the early months of the pandemic when her two older children and baby were home with her:

I was literally, like, the cafeteria person. I was the teacher, I was the mom. I was the daycare worker. And it was just really, really overwhelming, because I would be here all throughout the day with three of them, you know, giving them breakfast and lunch at the same time trying to teach them.

For many of the mothers, taking on additional roles, including the responsibility for teaching their own children while schools were virtual, added more of a load to what many mothers felt was, pre-pandemic, on the verge of unsustainable. Like Jada, several mothers discussed what it was like to manage caregiving in addition to carrying on as (un)usual with their own academic responsibilities, alongside the varied other roles they assumed during the pandemic. Some even shared strategies they used to keep their children occupied during work-related Zoom meetings, such as giving them special snacks and planning meal times around meeting times (Angela), stashing toys in bathroom drawers for quick-retrieval (Angela) or scattering them out of sight of the camera (Danielle). Some mothers dealt with the overlap by embracing the merging of space. They allowed toddlers to ‘work’ (play quietly) next to them (Shauna) or supervised playtime through a glass office door (Sally). Others tried to find separate spaces – meeting from closets (Danielle), front-porches during the height of summer (Dawn), and bedrooms (Jessica, Elizabeth, Gail) in order to create presentable or quiet backgrounds. It was not always easy, as Gail shared, the way many mothers, like herself, endured “the trauma of choosing between her children screaming outside their office door, or their jobs, you know, screaming at them from their computers.” The trauma was in making impossible choices as the weight of their carrier bags left indelible marks.

While the pandemic created these new challenges of managing home and academia simultaneously, Jessie explained that it was always hard: “It was never a job with boundaries. [Though] I would try to put boundaries around it.” The collapsing of the boundaries, though applicable pre-pandemic, rose to a new level for the mothers. Related to these porous boundaries, Lucille elaborated on how she sees the academic mother life not as balance, but as surfing:

I think about, like, I'm doing plenty at work and I'm doing plenty at home and I feel balanced like I'm doing tree pose in yoga or something. But that I think implies that there [is] some sense of stillness or calmness associated with finding a balance…When people say work-life balance, I think of somebody who's, like, still and balanced and centered. And that is never how I feel. I feel much more like I'm surfing. Like, I might be standing now. But if I don't keep an eye on all of the things around me and subtly adjust my body, I could fall at any time.

I could fall at any time. Lucille's description spoke to the subtleties and ever-present potential for instability she felt as she tried to keep both home and work afloat. It was the shift of the carrier bag that could either make her fall, or it could keep her steadied. Similar to Lucille's falling metaphor, Sally discussed the “unrealistic” expectations placed on mothers and the fear of letting any “balls drop.” She elaborated by posing a hypothetical question in her interview:

Why can't I concentrate today? Oh, because you're thinking about your child's next meal, or ‘Oh, I need to bring this to school’ or ‘Oh, they have this due,’ or ‘oh yeah, we need to make that dentist or doctor's appointment,’ or ‘oh yeah, we need to buy this gift for a birthday party’… It's just, it's a lot of unwritten things that go into that, and I just think the pandemic really put a spotlight on working moms, you know, and how they're suffering at higher rates than dads, and than men, unfortunately…

Whether balancing or surfing, or keeping balls in the air, these mothers shared the struggles of managing their varied roles as both pre-existing the pandemic but intensified by life during the pandemic.

It became clear through the mother's narratives that the mental load of balancing or surfing academia, parenting, household responsibilities, personal mental health, children's mental health, and, and, and, was often difficult, and sometimes even overwhelming. To combat the overwhelming nature of life, one thing that was often discussed was the practice of keeping lists. Harkening back to the quote that began this article, many of the mothers spoke about both the physical and mental lists they kept as they navigated pandemic life, whether explicitly discussing their lists (Gwen, Tara, Jada, Essie, Charlotte), or simply recounting their list-keeping practices (Sally, Michelle, Meagan, Danielle, Melina, Sasha). It is worth noting that list-keeping is not a practice specific to the pandemic, as many of the mothers explained this as something they had always done; however, it was naming these lists within the context of their interviews that shed particular light on the ways in which these lists were essential items in the mother's carrier bags for day-to-day pandemic life. The lists carried tasks, reminders, schedules, and other responsibilities that crossed within and between the mothers' varied roles that were collapsing gently for some, and for others, with great force.

To help her attend to work and home tasks during pandemic life, Tara explicitly discussed a virtual list that she kept on her padfolio as necessary for remembering to do sundry things,

So like right now on it, this is like my weeklong list. I've got like, grading, got a conference proposal I've got to do. I've got to put together a lecture. And then I've got to schedule a photographer, that's for [my daughter's] six month pictures, schedule [my daughter's] baptism.

Her list did not end there. She continued as she described her daughter's first day of daycare:

I put ‘pump’ on the list three times because I was like, ‘If I don't, like, physically put this on the list, I'm not going to remember to do it, and I'm not gonna be able to, like, make enough milk to keep up with her.’

The practice of creating lists for Tara as well as others was not only about managing their own pandemic lives, but it was sometimes bigger than that, about the very livelihood of their children. Pumping, formula, and diapers. Things they literally carried in diaper bags, were also in their carrier bags. Unlike Tara's written list, Sasha explained the mental list she carried, calling it “mommy brain”:

Like, you're constantly thinking. But … it was intensified because it was like,

‘okay, does he have enough diapers for tomorrow?’ Like, ‘does he, is there enough formula for him?’ And I even tried, like, I bought paint like stuff that I could do with him like arts and crafts stuff. So I started looking at Pinterest, so it wasn't just like, okay, work stuff. It was also like, ‘what are we going to do for the day?’ And even if it was like, ‘Okay, let's walk around in the neighborhood. Does he have all of the stuff that he needs, like our clothes washed?’ ‘No.’ Like all of these things, to make sure that it was a smooth kind of day. So yeah, my brain never turned off.

Genevieve echoed these sentiments by explaining the ways in which she, unlike her partner, holds “these millions of details in my head.” The lists they carried to carry themselves and their families through daily life.

Through this carrying, the mothers recounted the exhaustion and challenges that came from “mommy brain,” talking about parenting as an ongoing, 24-hour job (Jesse, Michelle, Danielle, Nora, Genevieve). Carrying these loads was burdensome and heavy during the pandemic, and many mothers expressed their frustration and exhaustion quite openly. Michelle asserted, “It's just freaking hard, man. It just feels like everything is even more unrelenting … It's like all the same jobs and all the same roles but like, without a break.” Jada said, “I have no time for myself, every, every minute matters.” And Elizabeth confessed, “Okay. I'm not publishing, I'm not writing to publish as much as I typically would. Because everything is more exhausting than it usually is.” These mothers, meticulously crafting carrier bags for their lists – mental and physical – for carrying the heroic loads of: children that need care, papers that need writing, classes that need teaching, children at home who need teaching, grading, conference proposals, baptisms, pumping, lunch, dinner… all while struggling amidst the imbalance of work/life, the persistently crashing waves on which they tried to surf. To be sure, these loads have always been carried by academic mothers in hero-like fashion as they ensure each entry on their list is checked, each ‘body’ (human and institutional) is adequately cared for, yet knowing that very few will ever pause to notice it all. It was the pandemic that kept these loads on their shoulders 24/7 with unrelenting responsibilities, leaving them exhausted. Even still, they persisted. They carried. They carried on.

Discussion

As told through the narratives above, the findings of this study extend and expand the existing scholarship on academic mothers during the COVID-19 pandemic. As we considered the mother's narratives, we continued to pull at threads within their stories. Threads, often frayed, wrapped around each other in ways that, as we unraveled them, would separate only to come back together. Thinking with Le Guin's (1986/2020) carrier bag theory, we listened “with a certain feeling of urgency…[to] seek the nature, subject, words of the other study, the untold one, the life story” (p. 33), we listened to the mother-heroes of academe.

Through the narratives above, we bear witness to the tensions between academic and mother, a struggle that predated the pandemic yet continues to be omnipresent for mothers in academia (Raddon, 2002). As the mothers shared, the push and pull of both roles became constant and unrelenting when home and work collided alongside feelings of (in)visibility and isolation, as well as the stresses associated with simultaneity, balance, and list-keeping. Here, we pause to elaborate on these findings in relation to existing literature.

As several mothers alluded to above, Vomvoridi-Ivanovic and Ward (2021) spoke of the invisible labor of academic mothers during the pandemic as the labor they carried in their homes, contributing to their “mental and emotional load” (p. 49). The loads becoming heavier as (in)visible labor increased. Even pre-pandemic, this (in)visible labor disproportionately fell on the shoulders of women, an additional burden in busy lives that often contributes to feelings of emptiness (Ciciolla & Luthar, 2019). The heavier the bag, the emptier they feel. Similarly, (in)visibility often led the mothers to discuss feeling misunderstood, undervalued, and even isolated while confined to their homes with few opportunities for in-person interactions. Before COVID-19, research demonstrated the ways in which academic mothers, especially those with young children, felt as though they fully belonged neither in academia nor their social circles (Hirakata & Daniluk, 2009, p. 287). These academic mothers, particularly those with newborns and infants, felt substantial isolation even during normal times (Emms, 2021). Geographically, several of the mothers we interviewed in early 2021 were in areas of high COVID-19 transmission that were still largely locked down. Thus, the pandemic created new struggles as the mothers found themselves trying to manage their own mental health while taking on increasing responsibilities at home and with work. Coupled with increased (in)visibility, the mothers felt loneliness, even while denied solitude.

Through confinement to their homes, the mothers also expressed the effects of simultaneity – of concurrently managing caregiving, household responsibilities, and academia. Several mothers explained strategies they implemented in order to navigate the confluence of labors, while others simply spoke to the emotional toll simultaneity took (Guy & Arthur, 2020). For some it was about precariously surfing through the days, for others it was list-keeping that kept them going. It was clear, however, that balance between work and home was neither desirable nor achievable. The practice of list-keeping, whether through physical or mental lists, is likened to Offer's (2014) “mental spreadsheet” (p. 917) – a means of maintaining the tasks, activities, and reminders that mothers use to accomplish their necessary labors. Similar to the (in)visibility, those lists often are carried solely by the mothers, increasing the weight in their carrier bags (Offer, 2014). While the practice of list-keeping was often implemented to help them manage their myriad responsibilities, it was yet another thing they carried on their own.

Despite these academic mothers' struggles, it is not our intention to portray them as victims. Rather, to return to Le Guin (1986/2020), they were heroic in their efforts to carry the loads of the everyday. Theirs were the poignant stories of the carrier bag, not the weapons; what happened in the home, not the during hunt (Le Guin, 1986/2020). Faced with (im)possible situations, these academics pulled their carrier bags high on their shoulders, tightened the straps, and became heroes in their own day-to-day stories of mothering, offering new stories to narrate the pandemic through mothers' essential labors and exhausting burdens. If, like Le Guin, you had not heard them before, you have now.

Implications

As we have explored the threads of these academic mothers' stories, we note a different unraveling happening in higher education. Recently, scholars have noted “The Great Resignation” from academia (Flaherty, 2022; Gewin, 2022), as “waves of departures” of faculty across institutions, academic ranks and positions, and disciplines “call attention to widespread discontent” and inequity in higher education (Gewin, 2022, n.p.). To date, “there's no national survey to reflect current faculty departures or the reasons behind them” (Flaherty, 2022, n.p.), but the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (2021) most recent data does show an undeniable decline in postsecondary scholars, and there are ever-increasing social media accounts and communities specifically focused on academic exoduses.

While the overarching conversation has focused broadly on inadequate salaries, politicized climates, and institutional resistances to change, mother academics are unquestionably both affected by and a significant portion of these exits. Well before the pandemic and noted earlier in our literature review, these individuals “were already doing more, and then [after the pandemic] the expectation was increased,” with mothers facing “the parallel pandemic” of gender inequity while navigating all of the COVID pandemic's gender-based implications (Flaherty, 2022, n.p.). The “invisible service labor” that mothers have provided to the academy for centuries, combined with new “concerns about campus climate and workload inequities” (n.p.) have pushed many mothers, such as those presented in this paper, and other marginalized academics, to (re)consider whether they will remain in higher education at all (Else, 2021; Macalpine, 2021; Morgan et al., 2021).

Mothers have, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic, thought more about leaving academia, and given the notable exodus from higher education in general, the implications for academic mothers, academics generally, and higher education as a field are important (Else, 2021). And, as those examining this shift from academia ask, “Will institutions be forced to respond with real change?”, these newly focused considerations on systemic shifts present real opportunities for meaningful considerations and transformations.

Certainly, as previously noted, there is a need for more research on the range of ways that the pandemic and The Great Resignation have and continue to shape the academy. Coupled with scholars' existing suggestions for how academia can be more equitable, especially in relation to researching and supporting academic mothers (Doherty, 2021; Harris et al., 2019; McCutcheon & Morrison, 2018; Mirick & Wladkowski, 2018; Trussell, 2015; Windsor & Crawford, 2020), our considerations in this section are methodological and structural. The need for additional research necessitates discussions of not just what needs to be explored, but how it might be done, to support already-marginalized groups, such as academic mothers, rather than to institute new versions of invisibility. We conclude with implications for more research that explores the structural inequities that the pandemic exacerbated and that The Great Resignation spotlights, so that future research might work for and with academic mothers, rather than simply to be about them.

Methodology

Throughout this paper, we have played with language – such as being (in)visible and too visible – for a number of methodological reasons. First, it underscores a feminist perspective, in which knowledge is always situated, narratives portray complex sociocultural experiences, and researchers are co-tellers not authorities. We had been focused on visible, obvious aspects of mothers' work or invisible, devalued contributions, but these women narrated their experiences simultaneously, and often contradictorily, as both. By not forcing a resolution of this seeming set of opposites, we honored participants as mothers who did indeed feel both invisible and too visible – and hoped to emphasize the weight of the paradox. The refusal to resolve into ‘cleaner’ themes – for instance, into separate categories of ‘invisibility’ and ‘visibility’ – embraced the repetitions and variations of their stories. There was always an ‘and’ in these stories, always a continuation, another point, a doubling-back, a new (same) task, a new (same) day, a new (same) cycle. This attention to the various threads weaving back and forth, sometimes in contrary ways, is essential in researchers attending to the messy, unappreciated, and undeniably important experiences that participants share and emphasize. Feminist scholarship has long been invested in participants' experiences, and these methodological implications shift the personal from not simply being political, but being essential – being the point.

Future research

We recognize that research on academic mothers is also research on academia. In focusing exclusively on academic mothers, we do not ignore the very real consequences – physical and mental – of the pandemic on others within the academy. However, given the number of mothers comprising higher education and the degrees to which academia has historically and contemporarily failed to support them, this work emphasizes the need for further research with, not on, academic mothers: how they are seen and not seen, how they express their experiences, how they are often as (in)visible in the office as at home. Such scholarship invites systemic considerations of entrenched inequities that have existed long before and since COVID-19. Academic institutions often treat familial responsibilities as removed from scholarly ones, and so needs such as childcare, family leave, and personal time get situated as competing for academics' attention, rather than as simply part of holistic lives. And, that impossible choice of work or family is a major contributing factor within The Great Resignation, too (Flaherty, 2022; Gewin, 2022). By centering mothers' experiences, those most regularly marginalized by these unrealistic work/life divisions, higher education might consider how the mundane carrier-bags could reshape and remake the baggage that they ask faculty and many students to carry. Tasking academics to shoulder these burdens perpetuates isolated, individual-level efforts, as mothers, especially, continuously craft larger bags and wear deeper grooves into their shoulders. Systemic supports such as no-cost childcare and fully funded family leave policies reduce the weight of those bags and bolster the strength of those carrying them, while potentially humanizing academia as a space where people might choose to stay, rather than to pack their bags and depart.

(Not a) conclusion: carrying on

A single carrier bag lay shapeless on a hardwood floor. Until slowly, story by story, it began to fill and take on the weight of the things these academic mothers carried. Together, they, and we, have come together to both stitch and fill a bag we can all carry together – an act that pushes back against the effects of (in)visibility, and a bringing to light the weight of those things they carried, and still carry, through a pandemic that persists to the very writing of this article. Through this study, we strove to create opportunities to make the (in)visible, visible, through crafting opportunities for academic mothers to tell stories about both the burdens and joys of a time like no other. Recent discussions, such as the Chronicle of Higher Education's “The Quiet Crisis of Parents on the Tenure Track” (Doherty, 2021) highlight the contemporaneity of these struggle of academic mothers, particularly as they are pushed to the margins, subdued, and quieted through structural, societal, and institutional norms. These issues are (in)visible and quiet, not because mothers are not living and discussing them, but because the right people are not listening…or doing; therefore, there is little concentrated effort to enact substantive change. But she would not be quiet. The primal scream of pandemic mothers (Grose, 2021), heroes overwhelmed and underappreciated, rings out across homes and institutions across the United States. With carrier bags strapped to their backs, grooves deep in their shoulders, screaming into existence the (in)visibility, simultaneity, ongoingness, and labor – the weight of mothering in academia carried through a pandemic. It's time to listen and do. Keepers of lists, carriers of bags. Carrying, always, on.