Abstract
In this article, we employed collaborative autoethnography to explore the experiences of ourselves as four Vietnamese PhD student mothers who crossed national borders in pursuit of further education and encountered multiple challenges along the way. Based on Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism, we unpacked our experiences by presenting ongoing dialogues that influenced thoughts about our doctoral studies and mothering practices. On the one hand, we recounted our experiences of mother guilt, life–work balance and escalating tensions in the academic journeys and our constant struggle to conform to the moral norms bound by the political and cultural ideologies prescribed to Vietnamese women. At the same time, we displayed our resilience through our self-dialogues, which helped us counter the social norms to author our voices.
In the last decades, we have constantly witnessed the burgeoning inbound and outbound streams of students crossing borders to pursue doctoral education internationally, mainly driven by the motivations of better access to quality education and migration purposes (Lockwood et al., 2019; Phan, 2022b; Robertson & Nguyet Nguyen, 2021; Ye & Edwards, 2015). Vietnamese students are no exception. There has been a steady increase in the number of Vietnamese students seeking international degrees overseas, including female students who are married with children (Phan, 2022a, 2022c). Influenced by numerous peculiar historical and socio-cultural developmental features of a Confucian-inherited Asian country, an emphasis on the roles of women and the ideal of ‘good mothering’ has been embedded within Vietnamese ideology and culture (Le-Phuong Nguyen et al., 2017; Vu, 2021). This has led to invisible pressure on them as graduate student mothers. However, there is a paucity of research into Vietnamese doctoral student mothers who take multiple roles on their shoulders during their academic sojourn: mothers, international PhD students, Vietnamese women and temporary migrants.
This paper aims to address the lacuna in the literature by reporting our own experiences, four Vietnamese PhD student mothers who are international doctoral student mothers. In this paper, we define doctoral student mothers as females who cross national borders with their children to pursue their doctoral degrees, regardless of their marriage status or gender identity. In order to seek the answer to the question of ‘How we, four Vietnamese PhD student mothers, reflected on our experiences navigating different roles as mothers and international PhD students’, we used collaborative autoethnography to analyse our home–work balance challenges, and our constant struggle to both conform to and resist the moral norms structured by the political and cultural ideologies prescribed to Vietnamese women. Through the lens of Bakhtin’s dialogism, in our vignettes we authored ourselves by investigating how our sense of guilt resulted from the multitude of voices that we encountered and grew up with in the social world of a Confucian-heritage culture, and our resilience emerged as we narrated the ongoing self-dialogue that constituted both our academic and social lives as a PhD student and a Vietnamese mother and woman. As we found ourselves in others’ stories, we hope others can also recognize themselves through our vignettes and feel inspired to author themselves (M. Bakhtin, 1984).
Literature review
International graduate student mothers’ experiences of guilt and juggling roles
Motherhood requires significant household and children caring responsibilities. At the same time, engaging in a doctoral study is an intensive intellectual process with a heavy professional and academic workload and responsibilities. Therefore, the conflicting demands entrenched in the dual identities of being a mother and a PhD student make it challenging for doctoral student mothers to segregate one role from the other. Utami (2019) contends that such competing demands of juggling roles highlights the intricacies of those doctoral students who sometimes ‘inhabit the margins and periphery of stories of either motherhood or international student life’ (Lockwood et al., 2019, p. 17). In the case of women working in academia, as they stand at a cross-road of conflicts among maternal duties and work productivity, they are likely to blame themselves once expectations are not met, which renders the sense of guilt. As an academic, this guilt is defined by Collins (2020) as a ‘socially induced feeling of negative self-judgement’ (p. 3) and argued by Walters et al. (2021) as ‘a negative emotion that results from the perceived failure to meet an academic obligation’ (p. 2). As a mother, this guilt, with its long-standing history of development, is identifiable across authoritative discourses existing among social values and social norms. It is itself ‘cultural in origin’ (Walters et al., 2021, p. 2), and it intersects with various factors and sets of norms such as traditions and gender. Early-career women researchers such as doctoral students are the most susceptible subjects as they are ‘more guilt-ridden over trying to juggle work life and family life than their male counterparts’ (Walters et al., 2021, p. 2). This maternal guilt is a cross-national experience that facilitates the definition of ‘good mothers’ (Collins, 2020). The guilt portrays the ongoing internal conflict within academic mothers due to the external and internal expectations to achieve a work–life balance (CohenMiller & Demers, 2019).
For those who opt to cross borders for doctoral studies with their children on board, the intensity can be much elevated since they not only learn to acquire the disciplinary knowledge and language but also cope with the differences in culture, lifestyle, tradition, the demands of graduate study and institutional knowledge in a foreign language (Goff, n.d.; Gold, 2006; Katz et al., 2000; Klein & Liu-Shea, 2009; Phan, 2022b; Zhang, 2021). Apart from taking on multiple roles, which results in inter-role conflicts and stress (Goff, 2004), the discrepancies between the students’ pre-departure expectations and the lived reality in the host country could lead to anxiety, isolation and financial constraints (Lefdahl-Davis & Perrone-McGovern, 2015; Maundeni, 1999; Myers-Walls et al., 2011). In addition, family, marriage, parenthood and gender issues are critical in international students’ adjustment to the new environment and can be argued to influence their academic studies and future careers (Phan, 2022a; Zhang, 2021). For many international PhD mothers, especially those who come from Asian backgrounds, these are even intensified by the variations in the perception of women’s roles in their home and host countries as their transnational mothering practices are caught up in the pressure of living up to cultural ideologies and the perfectionism of a ‘good mom’ rooted in the discourse of intensive mothering (Phan, 2022a).
Against the sense of guilt, resilience has emerged among PhD student mothers. According to Kirmayer et al. (2009), resilience is ‘not a simple linear causal process in which an abundance of strength leads directly to a good developmental outcome’ but rather ‘involves tradeoffs, in which something is gained and something lost’ (p. 72). Balance and sustainment of the status quo are also part of the imagery of resilience, but Oldham and Bradley (2022) argue that graduate student mothers should not feel obligated to compartmentalize everything to stay resilient. Instead, engaging in open emotional expression, making their struggles visible and knowing that failures need not be cloaked is important in maintaining resilience. As culture plays a role in resilience development (Ungar, 2012), resilience can be characterized both as a coping process and as a capacity of doctoral student mothers to ‘survive the vicissitudes’ of their maternal performance while facing challenges emanating from their PhD research work (Baraitser & Noack, 2007, p. 172). In this study, resilience can be understood as a reactive response to the ongoing negotiations displayed in the female students’ attempts to balance between their professional aspirations and the sense of guilt, and their acknowledgement of emotions and struggles. Our understanding of resilience in this paper will provide nuanced portraits of resilience in a specific context of international PhD student mothers.
The good mothering discourse in Vietnamese culture
The central role of discourse can be broadly defined as ‘a pattern of thinking, speaking, behaving, and interacting that is socially, culturally, and historically constructed and sanctioned by a specific group or groups of people’ (Miller Marsh, 2002, p. 9). The discourse of good mothering, which advocates that women are naturally attached to child-rearing and making home, has been generalized across time and multiple contexts (Aiston, 2022; CohenMiller & Demers, 2019; Collins, 2020; Phan, 2022a).
Good mothering has become an influential discourse in Vietnamese culture for decades, where a child’s academic and social achievements are perceived to be critical to a family’s happiness as it carries mặt mũi (‘the face’ = pride, reputation) for everyone, especially the parents. In the Vietnamese political and cultural setting, the roles of a mother are intrinsically entrenched across various themes of the socialist frameworks and embedded in the Confucian thoughts in Vietnam (Le-Phuong Nguyen et al., 2017; Nguyen, 2013). Similar to other cultures that are heavily influenced by Confucian ideologies, such as Korea or Hong Kong, in Vietnam, power and patriarchy are often identified as influential factors limiting women’s potential (Aiston, 2022; Kim & Kim, 2021). Regardless of social transformations over the years, the thiên chức người mẹ (natural vocation of motherhood) is an established authoritative discourse that has been instilled in the Vietnamese traditions where it is endorsed and extensively practised. It predetermines the innate feminine capacities and duties of women (and is even incorporated in education for girls at a younger age), including hardship-enduring and interest-sacrificing for the sake of their families. These dispositions are considered ‘acts of selflessness and compassion’ (Hoang, 2016, p. 893), whereby women are obliged to circumscribe within the home space. Historically, women’s responsibilities towards home-making and children-rearing are often taken for granted (Pham & Phan, 2022). This is reflected in Vietnamese proverbs such as Đàn ông xây nhà, đàn bà xây tổ ấm (‘Men make house, women make home’), Phúc đức tại mẫu (‘Children’s happiness and virtue are decided by their mothers’ characters’), Con hư tại mẹ, cháu hư tại bà (‘When a child is unwise, the mother and grandmother are to blame’).
A proliferation of literature has attempted to investigate how Vietnamese women’s mothering practices have been stigmatized, especially for those living and migrating overseas for work (e.g., Singapore, Taiwan, Australia). Yet, little is known about the mothering experiences of Vietnamese international doctoral students, who are unvoiced and marginalized within the discourse of international education, and who arguably are put in a very challenging situation caused by the COVID-19 lockdown mandates (Walters et al., 2021). It is this gap in the literature that this paper attempts to address.
Theoretical framework: Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism
In this paper, we adopt M. Bakhtin’s (1984) theory of dialogism as the theoretical framework. According to M. Bakhtin (1981), dialogue is a structure within and through which we understand and give meaning to our existence. In his theory, the selfhood can be understood as a dialogical formation through which the process of ideological becoming, or the formation of an individual’s ideology and thus identity, occurs when the individual appropriates and assimilates others’ words or discourses to construct his/her own ideological perspective on the world. Bakhtin argues that there are two types of discourse: authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse. The former, authoritative discourse, ‘demands our unconditional allegiance’ (M. Bakhtin, 1981, p. 343), which means that we have to acknowledge it and make it our own because its ‘authority was already acknowledged in the past. It is a prior discourse’ (M. Bakhtin, 1981, p. 342, original emphasis). Authoritative discourse can be ‘religious, political, moral; the word of a father, of adults and of teachers’ (M. Bakhtin, 1981, p. 342). Internally persuasive discourse, however, is much more open, flexible and dynamic than authoritative discourse. In M. Bakhtin’s (1981) explanation, ‘it is affirmed through assimilation, tightly inter-woven with “one’s own word.” In the everyday rounds of our consciousness, the internally persuasive word is half-ours and half-someone else’s’ (p. 345). In this sense, internally persuasive discourse has gone through a process of being questioned, doubted or explored, before becoming ‘one’s own word’. M. Bakhtin (1984) claims that an individual always lives in ‘an open-ended dialogue’ (p. 293) with themselves and others. To this end, the structure of self is dialogical and unfinalizable, meaning that each individual’s selfhood is constantly formed and reformed by engaging with different discourses, or voices. As such, ideological becoming, for Bakhtin, entails gradually coming to authorize and claim authority for one’s own voice, or self-authoring, while remaining in constant dialogue with other voices. M. Bakhtin (1984) suggests that the authorship of the narratives that an individual as a self-authoring subject tells about his/her life do not arise ‘from a single, solitary mind, spoken by a single, monotonic voice’ (Tappan, 1999, p. 118) but emerge from multiple voices in social interactions that an individual encounters every day. Following M. Bakhtin (1981, 1984), in this paper, we attended to the ongoing dialogue within and among ourselves about our guilt and resilience as international PhD student mothers which comes from conflicting discourses or voices and our self-authoring of our own voices.
Within the scope of this paper, we are not going to recount our lives or our whole PhD journeys. Rather, we chose specific moments we encountered as we authored ourselves. We thus further employed the concept of chronotope for our analysis. M. Bakhtin (1981) develops the term chronotope (in Greek, chrono means time, topo means place), which refers to the components of time and place in which an event occurs. According to M. Bakhtin (1981), ‘the chronotope is the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied’ (p. 250). He contends that time and place are inseparable components of meaning-making and identity formation, and that time and space are not transcendental but positioned in the relationship between the self and others. M. M. Bakhtin et al. (1987) conceives the self and others as dialogic, stating that ‘I enter into a spatial world, but the other has already resided in it. The difference between space and time of I and the other’ (p. 147). It means that space and time are not given but experienced, and thereby every participant in a dialogue has different experiences of time and space. Even one person can make changes in experiencing time and space because ‘experiencing an object [. . .] becomes a changing moment in the ongoing event of thinking’ (M. M. Bakhtin, 1993, p. 32). M. Bakhtin (1981) emphasizes the diversity and complexity of chronotopes in the process of humans’ meaning-making. When narrators generate words, they immediately position themselves in diverse chronotopes with other interlocutors who may be present or hidden and construct their worlds culturally and historically (Holland & Skinner, 1997). In other words, the time and place in which people communicate with others play a key role in their identity formation.
Some Bakhtinian researchers (Marjanovic-Shane, 2011; Matusov, 2009) also assert the importance of chronotope in speech in performing and constructing subjectivities. In a dialogue, the pronoun ‘I’ represents the speaking subjects. When a speaker utters ‘I’, the word is filled with meaning by providing a central point that marks between ‘now’ and ‘then’ as well as ‘here’ and ‘there’. As soon as a narrator who utters ‘I’ has described an event that has happened or one that will come soon, he or she immediately goes outside the contemporary chronotope where his or her telling event is happening. The narrator, simultaneously, marks himself or herself in relation to other chronotopes of narrated events in utterance. The diversity in chronotopes of speech reflects the diversity in living experiences and subjectivities. The structure of chronotopes in utterances is influenced by historical, institutional and cultural contexts that give meanings to human social interactions (M. M. Bakhtin, 1993).
Methodology
In this study, we employed a collaborative autoethnographic methodology to integrate our personal reflections into the extant literature in the field. Autoethnography has been used as a qualitative research methodology to ‘describe and systematically analyse (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno)’ (Ellis et al., 2011, p. 273). Consequently, autoethnographers use personal experiences as their data sources to reflexively interpret these experiences in order to understand social, cultural and political features of a particular phenomenon within a specific setting (Ellis et al., 2011; Pretorius & Cutri, 2019). Collaborative autoethnography shares all elements of solo autoethnography but goes beyond autoethnography. It represents a new qualitative investigation method that can employ ethnography, autobiography, as well as researcher partnership (Chang et al., 2016). Collaborative autoethnography allows the researchers to tell their stories and experiences together, to explore a shared discourse, to discover diversity and opposition, and to balance individual narrative with ‘greater collective experiences’ (Blalock & Akehi, 2017, p. 94). In the description by Chang et al. (2016), this methodology involves ‘engaging in the study of self, collectively’; it is ‘a process and product of an ensemble of performance, not a solo act’ (p. 11). The collaboration process not only helped us to create a community among us as a source of support but also added variety and depth to the topic of inquiry. We found collaborative autoethnography a suitable methodology for a study in the doctoral education scholarship and our chosen theoretical framework of dialogism. First, doctoral education is considered a unique environment which ‘cannot be fully explored or written about from an outsider’s objective experience. It is complex and multifaceted, incorporating various influences, opinions, thoughts, feelings, and experiences’ (Pretorius & Cutri, 2019, p. 30). Therefore, the voices of insiders like ourselves can help to contribute to this scholarship area. Second, since collaborative autoethnography embraces the voices of the researchers, this methodology helps to best present our self-authoring practices. It means that we reflected on our own experiences, wrote about ourselves, analysed our own identity development and thought about, through and with our own writing. We authored a dialogic self, following Bakhtin’s perspective. According to Ngunjiri et al. (2010), collaborative autoethnographers work cooperatively and usually adopt various models of collaboration. In this research, our collaboration happened partially at certain stages (self-reflection, writing vignettes) and fully at other stages (analysis, discussion and manuscript-writing). In other words, collaboration was both partial and dialogical as our independent self-exploration and collective exploration were interlaced.
The data for this study come from our reflective notes, personal diaries and images that we exchanged through shared Google docs. We each delineated our experiences through our self-reflection and vignettes. Vignettes are typically used to start a discussion and gain reactions from participants. The use of vignettes as stories and moments in time have been explored in several studies (Humphreys et al., 2015; Pitard, 2015). When vignettes are used with autoethnography, it is helpful to describe and explain various phenomena through exploring the intersections between epiphanies, reforms and changes in the autoethnographer’s thoughts, observations and actions (Humphreys, 2005). As Riessman (2005) explains, narratives do not speak for themselves but ‘require interpretation when used as data’ (p. 2). As we are both the researchers and the researched — the writers of the vignettes — we had to reflexively interpret the underlying themes that our vignettes highlighted (Riley & Hawe, 2004). At the same time, we were reminded that our interpretations of our own experiences written in the vignettes must be related to the purposes of the inquiry. Therefore, the going back and forth between the individual and the collective allowed for the deeply personal understanding from individual accounts of experiences to become enriched and mutually informed through wider engagement that extends beyond that single account to be interlaced with a collective account. By having individual and collective engagements, or termed by Ngunjiri et al. (2010) as divergent and convergent activities, iterations of writing, listening and learning enabled us to share, reflect and discuss on our shared and yet differing experiences.
Data generation and analysis followed this process:
(1) Authors individually reflected on and shared their lived experiences in a Google doc accessed by all authors;
(2) During our first Zoom online meeting, we read our reflections together, agreed on the similarities and differences from our experiences and provided suggestions for improvement;
(3) Each author worked on our own vignettes to address the comments and suggestions from the co-authors;
(4) After all authors were satisfied with our vignettes, we discussed the issues we wanted to focus on (juggling roles as mothers of young children and being international PhD students) and decided on the chosen framework: Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism;
(5) Authors engaged in collective exploration, interaction and critical reflection on each other’s vignettes and started to explore extant literature;
(6) Throughout the manuscript preparation process, we constantly exchanged ideas and comments via multiple platforms such as Google docs and Facebook messenger. We aimed to equally and democratically contribute to the analysis and writing process, attaining the rigour of our analysis by reflexively examining each other’s understanding of the theoretical analysis and literature review;
(7) Authors shared our final thoughts and considered, analysed and discussed the findings and patterns which have emerged from our understanding and interpretation of our own narratives.
The collaborative autoethnography required each author to revisit her experiences of balancing roles as a mother and a PhD student, describe these experiences and the associated feelings and share these with other members of the research group. Thus, experience was reflected on as lived, felt and told. The process of sharing and discussing vignettes individually and then collectively allowed us to both reflect on our own experiences and learn from others, which enabled further interpretation of our lived experiences. As such, ‘narratives become participative, dialogical, and process focused’ (Bailey et al., 2021). Our collaborative autoethnographic approach is both a meaning-making process of our experiences and a learning process of using the methodology.
Findings
Anh’s vignette
While I have been trying to not let having children distract me from pursuing my academic goals, I have learned to not jeopardize my bonding with my children because of my study. But being a mother while doing my PhD and maintaining research productivity becomes a non-stop, everyday challenge. In order to keep myself not being totally consumed by my roles either as a mother or as a doctoral student, I have learned to restructure my day as separate ‘episodes’ of day and night: day for work, and when ‘the sun goes to bed’, as my children often say, they have 100% of me. However, when COVID-19 came, and the subsequent childcare centre closure, no time division could be possible. My motherhood journey and my candidature blended into one, like a mosaic. I constantly felt guilty when I could not completely focus on my children when I was with them, and at the same time, I could rarely concentrate 100% on my research project. I was not sure about failing which role would be worse. I was afraid that I would fail both roles, and would be judged twice: a bad mother and a bad student. I lived ‘on threshold’ (M. Bakhtin, 1984) of merged chronotopes between work and mothering spaces.
While I was trying to close the door in my bedroom, lock the children out, give myself some private space to write, my little girls attempted to ‘break’ the door to join me in this space. They kept knocking, shouting and then crying. Inside, I was thinking about the options that might buy me some time to work. ‘Should I open the door and let them in, on the condition that they would not make noise?’ I thought. Of course, they would make noise, and they would try to sit on my lap and ask me millions of questions. They would attempt to type on my computer and laugh happily, despite my warning that they were going to ‘cause me troubles’, ‘damage my work’ or that ‘I will not be able to meet my deadlines’. They would just smile mischievously. Their eyes would spark with joy as they shared the workspace with me, and even consumed it, took over it. They seemed to not care that I had to work. The notion of their mother being a PhD student made very little sense to them. I am just their mother. Being their mother is my only role that has mattered to them. This ongoing dialogue that I had with myself required me to listen to and understand my children’s voices, that they only saw me as their mother, not a doctoral student.
My world would not be one without my children. That I know, and I have been told. But my world does not only revolve around them. That I know, and I have done so. My maternal chronotope has intertwined with the doctoral journey I chose to pursue for my own development. There were times when the children asked me to watch Peppa Pig with them and I could not decline. My younger daughter sat on my lap, and my first-born sat next to me. But I held my phone in my hands, kept reading and taking notes in that little phone without paying attention to what they were saying to me. ‘Are they asking me a question?’ I thought as I heard something. But I was in the middle of writing, so I had to let them wait. I mumbled, ‘Yes? Yes?’ They kept talking, and I kept mumbling. They started to notice my distraction and felt furious, pulling my arms to get my attention. ‘Wait, wait a moment,’ I said. ‘Humhhhhhh,’ a long sigh from my four-year-old girl. When I finished several minutes later, I turned to her, asking what she told me earlier. She frowned and said, ‘I forgot. I asked and you didn’t say anything.’ She turned her back to me. A stab of disappointment was clearly shown on her face and in her voice while I felt a pang of guilt filling up my whole body. My daughter’s words reminded me that I entered a monological arena in which the connection and communication between two interlocutors (my daughter and I) were broken. ‘She must have felt rejected,’ I thought. The speaking voice and the words of my daughter were central to my self-dialogue, revealing that I was not fully present in both personal and academic chronotopes. This was in contrast to her idea of a mother who would be there for her, and my own form of discourse of a mother who would never let my children feel I was not present for them. It was true that I was present, physically. But I was absent, emotionally. I never wanted my children or anyone to think that being a mother was the reason I could not work on my thesis. But neither did I want my study to be the culprit of my failing to perform my maternal duties. So who or what to blame? I told myself I had to (re)set the work–children boundary. I would and could not expect my children to tolerate my absence. But I would explain my situation and ask for their patience. I would try to tell my student self that I would finish work, but later. I had to find ways to balance both roles.
Hoa’s vignette
My maternal experiences during the doctoral venture were associated with the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic in both New Zealand and Vietnam. I lived in between two chronotopes, Vietnam, my home country, and New Zealand, the host country. At the beginning of COVID-19 in 2020, I was a doctoral student in New Zealand. I stayed in New Zealand by myself while my husband and two children, one of whom was a toddler, lived in Vietnam, my home country. While New Zealand was a physical space in which I resided, Vietnam was the imaginary chronotope that secured the flow of my narratives during the lockdown period.
As New Zealand went into the first lockdown in March 2020, there was no way for me to go back to Vietnam. For me, the pandemic was a knot to break the connection between two chronotopes, prompting me to reconsider my identity as a mother. Day by day, I asked myself if I was a bad mother because I could not stay with my family during the global pandemic. There is a Vietnamese norm that a good mother is a full-time carer of her young babies during their early years. Against this belief, I was not qualified to become a good caregiver of my children. Even when my extended family and my husband showed their empathy with my challenges while I could not be in Vietnam, I could not forgive myself. I lived in great guilt for not being a good mother. I was just a ‘virtual’ mother, not the ‘real’ one whom my daughter needed. The only way to sustain the communication with my children was via video calls. One day, my husband told me a story of my fifteen-month-old daughter when she was watching her favourite song, ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star’, on YouTube. Normally, she was very happy watching this video song. She often sang and danced along with this video. But on that day, when she saw a mother bear hugging her baby bear, she burst into tears. When I heard the story, I cried, halfway around the world from her. My little girl just grew more mature and sensitive than I could imagine. I thought of giving up my study, going back to Vietnam. But I did not. I was a doctoral researcher and a mother. My daughter taught me a lesson of resilience. I wrote in my diary that I had to go through this challenge for a future that I could show and teach my daughter how to grow up and how to cope with challenges to achieve aims.
I came back to Vietnam in July 2020. At the beginning, I enjoyed moments of physically being with my husband and children. That feeling, however, could not stay long. I soon realized myself being trapped in two new chronotopes — mothering and doctoral studies. I continued working at home in Vietnam as a full-time doctoral student. But the number of COVID-19 cases rapidly increased, eventually leading to a long lockdown in Vietnam. All the schools and kindergarten were closed in Hanoi, where my family lived. The children stayed at home, my husband worked full-time, so I became their main caregiver. There were moments when I was depressed, learning ways to navigate between two roles: a doctoral student and a mother. My normal day during the lockdown time started at 5 a.m. and finished at 11 p.m. I switched between many duties: feeding, entertaining kids, doing housework and writing my PhD project. It was also the time when my doctoral progress was not smooth. I could not find ways to build the argument for the discussion chapter of my thesis. The academic duties cut across my motherhood space. One day, my son asked me to go for a walk with him. When I saw yellow flowers on a tree, I realized that my life was totally led by the PhD study, but the PhD should not have been the only thing in my life. I wrote in my diary, ‘I will definitely find ways to lead this PhD, but not let the PhD lead my life.’
Ha’s vignette
Driiiiin. . . Driiiiin. . . Driiiiin. . .
Two a.m. The familiar whirring of the old-fashioned alarm clock on the vanity table of our bedroom startled me back to consciousness, as usual, somehow leaving a ‘first-time mama’ like me in a hypnotic trance which seemed endless. Pillow up, light high, eyes wide open, I rose out of bed and held my three-month-old little bub closer to hand, ready to breastfeed her while struggling not to drop the notes for the supervision meeting the next morning off my lap. Against all the professional advice of our midwife and my in-laws, this was a perfect nursing position I had decided to adopt for myself since I embarked on my academic motherhood journey. The doctoral chronotope took up my mothering space.
Having to relocate from continent to continent, country to country, city to city, for me to pursue this doctoral research, I owe my family, including my daughter, for their ongoing sacrifice and unconditional support, which stays true to the ăn quaг nhó, keг trô´ng cây (‘gratitude is the sign of noble souls’) values of the traditional Vietnamese culture in which I was born and raised. Both the senses of gratitude and guilt have grown powerfully within me over time and subsequently triggered a harsh self-demand in me for fulfilling the maternal role, as perfectly as I can, and so much similar to the role model of my dedicated mom. Due to some external unwanted factors, I enrolled in a PhD programme when our little one was only 74 days old. For the first few months, her touch, her smell, her breath, her look, her smile, everything that belonged to her persistently haunted me in every lecture that I attended, every article that I read and every word that I wrote. I could not find myself in a separate time and space but instead, consistently kept being haunted by endless internally persuasive discourse. ‘Why am I here on campus now? Is it not time to bathe her? Feed her? Sing her a lullaby inviting her to sleep? Bonding with her? Am I a bad mother? Is she a disadvantaged girl for having a mother like me?’ I was often tortured with these thoughts. During lunchtime or lecture breaks, the common routine for me, a Vietnamese doctoral student in New Zealand, was neither networking with other international peers nor engaging in an interesting discussion about a topic of my research interests. Instead, I had to quickly find a quiet and discreet corner where I could breast-pump, then find a place in the fridge for keeping milk before bringing this ‘gift-of-the-day’ to my daughter in the evening. But even when I was back home, the adaptation was not easy. ‘Your development of the theoretical framework and methodology sections needs to be sharpened with more depth into them’ — the words of my supervisors were still echoing in my head as I was preparing dinner for my family and the next feed for my baby. I ended up forgetting to add antibac tablets to sanitize her milk bottle and putting too much salt into our soup. ‘When will these juggling roles of a mother, a wife, a daughter, a student/researcher end? Where are they leading me to? Is it the quantity or the quality of time that I spend with my family, especially my little daughter, that really matters? By the end of the day, who am I actually? How can I leave my academic identity behind that door to be with my daughter not just physically but emotionally once I reach home? How can I be there not only with my baby but also for my baby? She really wants all of me, ‘purely’ as her mother, as much as I should be, should I not?’
Hang’s vignette
‘Mommy, don’t you want to play with me?’ ‘Mommy, I slept alone last night without you. I was crying when you went to the lab.’ ‘Mommy. Please take me to your lab, hug me, and let’s study together.’
These are familiar conversations that my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter often said when she knew I could not spend time with her. I struggled to navigate myself between the lab and the home. I sometimes took time to explain what I would do, occasionally giving her the options. And when I did not have enough time, I simply informed her that I had to go. I said goodbye to her and ran away to avoid hearing her cry behind me. I could not count how many times we went to the elevator of our building, and as the door closed, my little girl waved her little hand to reach for me. She wanted to touch me and hold me a bit longer. I could not describe how broken I felt when I heard her sobbing or when she just sat alone, waiting for me while her friends were all picked up and her teachers were busy cleaning up before the school closed. People may think that as it happens every day, I will get familiar and grow indifferent. I do not. The feeling of mother guilt still exists. Indeed, it is invisible, but it is here.
I imagine my different emotions, experiences and feelings when taking on two roles simultaneously — a Vietnamese mother and a doctoral student — like a picture having both bright and dark sides. The bright side of the picture is the peace in my mind because I now live with my children in a developed country with good conditions for their development. I accompany them and witness them growing up day by day. They are my motivation to overcome the challenges in my student life in a foreign land. But the dark side of the picture is that balancing the dual roles has caused me mental issues. I often think that I am a terrible player in both parts — not a good mother and not a good student. I do not spend enough time with my children, nor with my research. Spending time with my children makes me satisfied with my mother’s role but throws me far away from my study progress. Sometimes I had to stop working on my research, temporarily for some days (when my younger child got sick, sometimes both of them were sick simultaneously), or for a few months (when the schools were closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic). I became a full-time mother, doing nameless duties. When I returned to my study, I struggled to resume my research project. I had to spend more time relocating where I was on the study map. Being a dedicated mother of two has withdrawn all my time and energy. I felt exhausted and unable to focus on my study, even after my children were already asleep.
I remember my elder daughter sometimes saying, ‘Mommy, remember that you are an educator, especially an early childhood educator. You should know what is good for your children.’ She often said that when I talked to her in a loud voice, when I lost control of my emotions due to stress or when I told her that I could not attend some event at the weekend with my family. What she said reminded me of my role as a researcher in early childhood education and care. My reading is all about children. I supposedly know what is good for a child and what a parent should do to create quality time for children, especially children aged 0–6. The contradiction between the ideal mother/educator that my daughter expects me to be and the reality pushed me into a struggle. As an early-years education researcher, I understood the importance of quality family time. The workload that I have been carrying as a doctoral student, however, made me feel overwhelmed. Self-authoring emerged in my inner struggles when I reconsidered what I should do to balance the two roles — a mother and a doctoral student. I asked myself, ‘What am I doing? Am I missing out on valuable things that are important to my children’s development, and will I be able to return to these milestones?’
Discussion
The four vignettes reflected how we, as the four Vietnamese doctoral student mothers, authored ourselves through negotiating the relational chronotopes of home and work, finding our own responses to discourses of being Vietnamese mothers and PhD students, and staying resilient.
One overarching theme across our stories is that we entered and experienced the relational chronotopes in our PhD journeys, though with little variances. Our here-and-now moments were not created by a single space at an isolated time. Rather, we formed and were formed by interlinked chronotopes of our research work and motherhood, which in turn led to our sense of guilt of not fulfilling our maternal duties and our stigma of falling behind our PhD studies. From a Bakhtinian lens, the happening of significant events allows people to enter transformative chronotopes and provides them a chance to author themselves (Morson & Emerson, 1990). In our paper, COVID-19 was a critical event that occurred in the vignettes of Anh, Hang and Hoa, leading to a movement within our chronotope. During the pandemic time, the home became the chronotopes of both maternal and academic performances. The lockdown urged us to accept the fact that there was no separate time and space between academic engagement and mothering performances. It is clear in our vignettes that we knew home served as an ideal time and space for maternity in which child-rearing was expected to be women’s main responsibility. Vietnamese culture also favours home as an ideal space to perform motherhood. To us, home as a space hosting maternal responsibilities was an authoritative discourse. Our homes, however, were not only a single chronotope of mothering practices but also a space of academic duties. We knew that living was an act of moving between home and work chronologically (Grzankowska et al., 2018; Zhang, 2021).
In all of our vignettes, we presented how we selectively assimilated the externally authoritative discourses of motherhood and academic work, and made them internally persuasive, allowing us to self-author our voices, in Bakhtin’s terms. The invasion of a doctoral student’s responsibilities into our personal lives rendered a sense of mother guilt inside us, though with nuances. Our self-dialogues of guilt and doubts described in these vignettes represented ourselves speaking the ‘good mother’ authoritative discourse. We appropriated the words, language and forms of mothering discourse such as trying to be emotionally present for our children, spending time with them and attending to their health, needs and emotions. When we struggled and failed to perform as we were taught and expected to, we felt guilty. We did not live up to the standards of being ‘good mothers’ if we framed ourselves within the authoritative discourses of Vietnamese motherhood (Hoang, 2016). We, however, critically examined how the authoritative discourses could influence our roles and attempted to find ways to balance our roles. We tried to listen to our daughters’ voices and incorporate their voices into our self-dialogues to reflect on what we failed to do, thus informing us of possible future actions. In Hoa’s vignette, for instance, the lockdown put Hoa in an isolated life in New Zealand and broke her connection with the home chronotope in Vietnam. Hoa, however, saw her daughter’s experiences of separation from her as an example of resilience, which helped her to stay resilient as well.
Engaging with self-dialogues, we argue, was evidence of resilience, allowing us to acknowledge the tensions we were experiencing (Oldham & Bradley, 2022). In our experience, resilience not only implies the power to overcome challenges as some studies of student mothers have indicated (e.g., Hannon et al., 2022). Our stories convey resilience as an act of revealing our struggles, displaying emotions and being aware that there were tradeoffs we had to make (Kirmayer et al., 2009) in order to find ways to manage both roles rather than giving up. We examined our maternal performance while doing our PhD and compared it to dominant ideologies of motherhood. The in-depth explanation of our chronotopes and our mother guilt that originated from the authoritative discourses of good mothering and our self-dialogues as we made those discourses internally persuasive to voice our tensions and display resilience highlight our self-authoring process. This move from authoritative to internally persuasive discourse also opened up the possibility for our future development and adjustment.
(In)Conclusion
This article is neither an indictment for gender stereotypes in Vietnamese society nor an excuse to relieve our mother guilt. Rather, this article portrays a snapshot of Vietnamese mothers who chose to devote themselves to international higher education. Our collaborative narratives contribute a voice to the marginalized and often overlooked discourses that doctoral student mothers must face, including the explicit and implicit pressure of childrearing, the challenges of multi-tasking and multiple-roles, and the pressure of academic study and PhD research. Self-authoring is unfinalized but an ongoing process. We will continue to engage with different authoritative discourses, challenge them, question them and transform them into internally persuasive discourses through self-dialogues. An analysis of relational chronotopes in the four vignettes provides a need to have a dynamic time and space ‘[with] a creative and generative time, a time measured by creative acts, by growth and not by destruction’ (M. M. Bakhtin et al., 1987, p. 201) to understand the self-authoring of Vietnamese doctoral student mothers. This form of chronotope will afford both educational providers and students potentials to deeply understand transformation and ongoingness when doctoral mothers move between home and academia, rather than perceiving students in any single site and role.
Our self-authoring emerged somewhere between silence (self-dialogues) and speaking up (writing about ourselves and with each other) about our experiences, thoughts and emotions. Our guilt and resilience showed not only how hard it could be for us, as Vietnamese-rooted women, to revisit the gender norms of good mothering, but also how we aspired to counter the stereotypical intensive mothering practice. Our experiences, hence, are expected as a signal of courage for women to consider an international PhD pathway not only as pressure but also as an opening to gain new knowledge of the self and the world. Through our collaborative autoethnography, we also had ‘sympathetic co-experiencing’, which M. M. Bakhtin (1993) refers to as an act of loving recognition that is needed to the degree that it ‘shatters [. . .] self-sufficiency’ (p. 50). As we engaged with each other’s experiences with empathy and compassion, we became visible to ourselves.