The Struggle Juggle – Balancing Research and Family Life

Author: Alex Callen

I love my research, but I probably don’t eat and breathe it as much as younger researchers do. As a conservation scientist my research frequently takes me into the field, and I am fortunate to have spent many nights tracking animals under starry skies (or rainy skies, or a blanket of fog). And that is my happy place. But being a mum and wife is my other happy place (I am lucky to have two happy places), and I try really hard to balance family time and research time. I mostly fail dismally at this struggle juggle, and instead swing like a pendulum trying to give both my research and family what they need. I often get asked how I do it; My answer is always the same- not very well. Being a researcher (whose study subject – frogs - largely requires nighttime work) and a mother (whose family largely requires daytime attention as well as nighttime affection) means I feel like I am trying to keep many balls in the air, minus the skill and training of a juggler.

So the lines of research and family can get blurred as you absorb yourself in both. I know I am not alone in this dilemma. Here’s a sad and sorry example exemplified by the wonders of modern technology – The other day Google photos sent me a notification of a collection of photos (‘Memories’) it had compiled under the title of ‘Underwater Adventures’. I got quite excited. I was having a bad day – the tech had failed in my lecture, our captive animals were not doing so well, the kid’s school had phoned and my emails were mounting up quicker than a line of hungry undergrad students at a free Uni BBQ. These Google ‘Memories’ offered a moment of escape in my frenetic world.

I opened the Google ‘Memories’ quickly. In my mind I was already seeing snapshots of our last (long ago) family holiday to Queensland snorkeling off Moreton Island, or Li-Loing down a creek in the Daintree Forest; the kids attempting surfing with their school friends on our annual beach camping trip on the NSW North Coast; paddle boarding and kayaking on the clear and magical saltwater lake close to home. You know – turquoise water and white sandy beaches kind of stuff.

Those things are truly part of my life – I swear. But that’s not what Google Photos had in mind when it trawled my photos and collated the ‘Underwater Adventures’ album. I was instead presented with a reel of photos that comprised muddy puddles, frogs in wetlands and streams at night, frogs in tanks, people in waders, dip nets, tadpoles, macroinvertebrates, pond construction and, one lonely photo of myself and a colleague snorkeling off the coast of New Caledonia with frog bags (as a joke, because ironically, we spent our evenings in New Caledonia in a muddy wetland studying an invasive frog species that was threatened back home). Only the latter photo bore any resemblance to an ‘Underwater Adventure’ I would feel was worthy of a trip down memory lane.

Google’s Photo ‘Memories’ had captured my most frequent work photos and interpreted them as something I would like to see more of. It appears I have more research-related photos worthy of the ‘Underwater Adventures’ category than recreational family adventures. Hardly worthy of Mother of the Year Award. And while I have watched my academic mentors (Fathers) seemingly magically master this delicate balance of the twin peaks of their life, I am yet to achieve it myself. And maybe I never will. My family does not resonate with Peppa Pig, and my daughter is not Princess Fiona from Shrek. I may as well be the only Einstein of the Swamps in my family and that’s ok. Because maybe I don’t want any more donkeys in my swamp.