Planning for four

I was asked to give the details about the new job. And I will - as soon as everything is settled and the contract is signed. It takes an awful lot of time, that's for sure.

There is also some negotiations coming up about the Goose. Is she going to stay with her dad and her little sister when they move to Norway or settle with me when I move from France back to Sweden? I don't expect a battle. As I've indicated earlier, the Trønder and I communicate well, but we've never really had to make any difficult decisions. When I got the opportunity for a postdoc three and a half years ago I volunteered to leave the Goose with him knowing it would be temporary, lots of hard work and lots of travelling. Little did I know at the time that I would get another postdoc in a remote place, hook up with a new guy native of another continent and that this guy would get a job in the UK to further complificate and messify things.

My new job will still be a temporary one - and there will be lots of hard work obviously - but I will be more settled than I've been for many years. And I would very much like to spend some everyday time with my kid, not just the holidays. But I would be a single caretaker on a daily basis and will I then have time for all the large-scale experiments I plan to do? And the Goose will miss her little sister. I don't see that as a brilliant solution either, the whole situation is just a "best of a bad job" scenario. What is worse, missing mom (she's used to that) or missing dad & sister? She will of course not have to decide that, but I hate being one of those who have to make that decision for her. And after my four years in Sweden, who knows what happens then? I should obviously have thought of these possible scenarios a little earlier - like before letting myself get knocked up - but I've never been very good at planning far ahead.

And that reminds me of this months Scientiae carnival theme. Which makes this contribution about as unplanned as my career. I ended up as an evolutionary biologist by responding to opportunities along the way, not because I wanted it ever since I was a child. And to be honest, even when finishing my PhD at 31 I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life. Now at almost 36 I think I want to be a scientist, but it's not an easy task to co-ordinate the careers of four people with PhD's in biology. We're not a two-body problem; we're four-body. Planning is more difficult than ever.

scientiae-carnival