Life Outside the Box: An Interview with Melody Grubaugh

Keeping the Intellectual Life Alive, Being on the Same Team in Marriage, and Saying 'No' to Sourdough

Aug 16, 2024

Welcome to all new readers! This is the eighth interview in a series where we celebrate the intentional choice to live as whole persons and not just one-dimensional job titles.

The overwhelmingly positive response to my essay, Leaning (In and) Out, (Not) Having it All, suggested to me that there are a lot of women (and men) who are keen to set aside the societal pressure to hustle hard and put all their energies and decades of life exclusively into one single career box.

This series offers interviews with those who have chosen a life outside the box, in a variety of ways. It’s my hope that in getting to peek into the lives of others, we’ll all be inspired to step outside the pressure chambers we may feel stuck in - even if our lives are very different in practice from those shared here.

Encouragement, permission, examples - I hope whatever it is you need to step outside the box, you’ll find it here.

Today I’m welcoming Melody Grubaugh: wife, mother, homemaker, and Managing Editor at Fairer Disputations.

I met Melody through a reading group on feminist writings, which she not only co-led, but brought her nursing baby to as well. I loved the witness she bore to both the gift and challenge of being a woman who is caring for others and keeping up an intellectual life. As you’ll see, she’s very much embracing a life outside the one-sized-only boxes prescribed by so much of modern culture.1 I know you’ll appreciate her openness about the trade-offs required!

(1) What does your life outside the box currently look like? Tell us about a day/ week in your life.

When Kerri asked me to participate in this series, my initial impulse was “No! I really don’t have my life figured out enough to be interviewed, especially alongside some of the other women who’ve been featured in the past.” But in the interest of featuring different seasons in life, I humbly set before you my own thoughts on the matter.

I’m a mom and primary caregiver to my two little girls (currently 2 and 8 months), a homemaker, and the managing editor at Fairer Disputations. I also have a Ph.D. in political theory, though right now I’m not “using” it in the way most academics mean when they talk about “using” their degrees. In this season of my life, I’m striving to both be present to my girls and my husband and keep my intellectual life alive (more on this struggle later).

A day in the life: I wake up around 6 with the baby, and soon after my toddler joins us. Our day-to-day schedule varies, as some mornings we head out around 8:30 to take the girls to childcare, and other mornings we stay home through my baby’s first nap.

If I have childcare that morning, I sit down to work done in a room adjoining where the girls are so I can pop in if I need to feed the baby, etc. These two mornings a week are when the bulk of my “work” gets done. I work on average 12-15 hours a week, and squeeze the rest in one evening a week and during naptimes.

If I’m not headed to childcare, my morning routine is built around my baby’s naps—in the gaps, I’ll often go meet a friend to allow our bigger girls to play, either at a park, play group, museum, or the botanic garden. Other days I’ll stay home and try to do some cleaning; still others I’ll meal-plan during baby’s nap and make the trek to the grocery store.

Between 12ish to 3ish is my favorite time of day, naptime (it’s never three hours, but always fits in this general range!). My daughters don’t always align their naps perfectly, but I try to get at least an hour of overlap somewhere in there. Most of the time I use this to work, but other days I just need to catch up on sleep.

In the afternoon, I’m most often at home with the girls, or in the courtyard of our apartment complex, trying to read a bit or listen to a podcast while my toddler plays. Now that the weather has finally started to warm up, I’ll sometimes head the nearby playground.

I prepare dinner around 5, and my husband comes home around 6 for a family dinner. The next hour and a half can get a bit hectic, each putting a baby to bed, doing dishes, and restoring the house to order, but most days quiet descends around 7:30.

Evenings are spent relaxing with my husband—watching a movie, chatting, playing cribbage, or reading together or separately. If I’m reading, it’s nearly always a novel—I admire those who can read nonfiction for pleasure but I can never get as excited about it. Recent authors I’ve enjoyed include Dorothy Whipple, Dorothy Baker, Nancy Mitford, Elaine Dundy, Margaret Drabble, and Edith Wharton. Once in a blue moon we’ll go out. I’m hoping we do a bit more of this as the girls get older and we’re not hit with exhaustion as soon as they’re in bed!

We’re in a very busy season where my husband works six days a week, but we try to spend Sunday together as a family—going to church, taking a stroll, visiting a pub, etc.—the time together always resets me for another week.

(2) How did you get there? What intentional choices did you make?

Honestly, it’s hard to say how much of my current situation has resulted from intentional choices, and how much has just...happened (and happened in a temporary, ever-shifting way!). Since I’ve been married, we’ve had different stints of who works, who earns more, etc. As we’re on the same team, apportioning responsibilities is a question of what it means to support each other through each stage.

Right now, I’m also very much learning from others about what it means to be a mother and homemaker, while remaining true to my intellectual life. It’s a challenge that struck me more after the birth of my second daughter than my first. I was able to finish my dissertation and defend it in my elder daughter’s first year of life, thanks in large part to my husband jumping in on the caregiving end.

But now we’ve swapped places—he’s working to finish his dissertation and I’m the one supporting him (though he still handles most of the cleaning at home!). And with a toddler and a baby, it’s much harder to give focused attention to anything. With one child, I felt like I had it down and was really able to do it all. But now, I’m forced to be honest with myself about what I can and can’t manage. In some ways, I constantly feel like I’m falling short of what I’d like to be doing, which I largely attribute to “mom brain.” I swear I’ve had the same conversations with the same people, multiple times, without realizing until 10 minutes in.

Often, this is incredibly frustrating: as one friend put it, I sometimes feel I’m being subsumed into motherhood, becoming less “me” and more “mom”. At the same time, I appreciate that this is just a season in life, and that this subordination of my own desires is actually doing the work of making me a less selfish person.

I know I’m far from alone in combining homemaking while striving to maintain some degree of intellectual life, but it’s something that isn’t often talked about. Or—perhaps more accurately—I’m only starting to pay attention now that I’m in this position myself. But lately I’ve been immersing myself in writing from other women, both at similar stages or a bit further along this path than me; including but not limited to my friend

, and my colleague

One intentional choice I am making now is to continue to work in some capacity, even if this ends up being a very part-time capacity. Motherhood and homemaking could easily subsume my life and attention, but as they grow, I want to give my girls the gift of not being so wrapped up in their lives that they are afraid of disappointing me merely through gaining their own independence. They are my priority now, but I also want to be sure to retain an identity alongside my relation to them. For me, right now, this takes the form of paid work (and at this point, my income is necessary to our family). Down the road, I could easily see this taking the form of some sort of volunteering, more writing, or teaching in some form.

(3) What are you intentionally choosing to say “yes” and (maybe more importantly!) “no” to in this season of your life?

Right now, I’m saying “yes” to embracing these last few months living as a family in England—we’re moving to North Carolina in a few months, and I fully expect my life to change in many ways. So I’m trying to appreciate the things I particularly love about living here: getting everywhere on foot (even if that means allowing at least 25 minutes of walking to get anywhere!), spending time with friends here, gaping afresh at the architecture and tromping through the meadows, and participating somewhat in the intellectual life through reading groups at the Canterbury Institute (I co-lead a group on contemporary feminist works, and I participate in a Classics group my husband leads).

Two concrete things I’m saying “no” to are working out and sourdough starter. Both of these things are good, and things I really *wish* I could say yes to them. But right now, I need to do editing work in the time when I could exercise uninterrupted. And trying to do a pilates routine—even in my living room—with two littles in tow makes us all crankier than it should. And while I want to perfect the art of sourdough, at this point it’s just too much to remember to feed the starter, to get through the dozens of dense loaves before I make a really good one, to spend my evenings mixing.

These two “nos” are representative of a bigger truth: my time is limited, and as much as I’d like to, I simply can’t squeeze every good thing in right now! So for now, I’m leaning into those long walks and my bread machine, and I am grateful for the free time they create for me to read and think.

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(4) When you were a child/ younger, what vision did you have for your life? Did you always want to live outside the box, or did it come later? Was it a surprise to you?

Well, in some ways my life looks like my dream from childhood: I always hoped to work in editing in some capacity, since college I dreamed of living for a time in Oxford, and I spent 5 ½ years of my life working towards my Ph.D. But I never expected that the realization of all three of these dreams would occur simultaneously with becoming a mother—I moved to Oxford just a few months before I got pregnant with my first, I defended my dissertation while my 8-month-old slept in the adjoining room, and I started my current role at Fairer Disputations three months pregnant with my second.

Perhaps I didn’t expect this because I never thought too much about what life would look like with my own children. I was never baby-crazy, and while I enjoyed babysitting occasionally, I was always grateful to get away after a couple hours. When I got married, I acknowledged that eventually we’d have children, but being a mother wasn’t something I particularly looked forward to, even throughout my first pregnancy. When my first daughter was born, a whole new world opened up to me, and I realized that this motherhood thing is actually lots of fun!

So it was motherhood that brought with it the chance—and the need—to live “outside the box.”Well, in some ways my life looks like my dream from childhood: I always hoped to work in editing in some capacity, since college I dreamed of living for a time in Oxford, and I spent 5 ½ years of my life working towards my Ph.D. But I never expected that the realization of all three of these dreams would occur simultaneously with becoming a mother—I moved to Oxford just a few months before I got pregnant with my first, I defended my dissertation while my 8-month-old slept in the adjoining room, and I started my current role at Fairer Disputations three months pregnant with my second.

So it was motherhood that brought with it the chance—and the need—to live “outside the box.”

(5) What dispositions/ attitudes/ skills helped you cultivate the life you have now?

For me, graduate school was a kind of preparation towards living “life outside the box” in its demand for commitment and self-governance. When you enter a Ph.D. program, you’re given a number of years, at the end of which you’re supposed to present a dissertation ready for defense. There’s structure at the beginning—course work, teaching obligations, comprehensive exams—but at a certain point you’re left to yourself to see if you can self-motivate enough to actually finish. Sure, you have an advisor to check in with, but in many cases that will only happen if you initiate. Each day is a blank canvas, which you can either use to get some meaningful work done, begin to work and then end up down a research rabbit hole serving your own interests rather than your project, or even decide to take the day off. There’s a kind of benign neglect that allows you the time needed to frame the project in your head, and see how pieces fit together—and then there’s total neglect, and most grad students know the difference.

Motherhood follows a kind of similar pattern: you have a number of years in which to raise a human being. At the beginning, you’re on a stricter schedule—babies need to eat quite often! As your child gradually becomes (somewhat) less physically needy, you’re left with a problem of self-governance. Sure, there’s no “taking the day off” entirely anymore, but you can get through parenting with various levels of attentiveness. Will you attend to your child, your home, your work? Or will you sit back down on your couch and read yet another Substack essay? Here, too, there’s the “benign neglect” that teaches your children to play by themselves without your constant interference, and there’s the point at which you’re just wasting time and ignoring the people in front of you.

(6) Where can people find you online?

I don’t do a lot of my own writing at this point in time and I am for the most part off of social media (though I do spend a fair bit of time on Substack, mostly as a reader!). But readers should be sure to subscribe to Fairer Disputations.

» I so appreciated Melody’s honesty about needing to be on the same team in marriage, with shifting responsibilities, depending on the season of life. Life outside the box can’t be lived in a vacuum! And how about the idea that a Ph.D. program can be a great preparation for homemaking and motherhood? It struck me as a great way to think about the various paths we pursue: underneath the particulars lie common threads of virtue and habits required for them all. (Including the discipline of saying ‘no’ to things that we’d like someday, but just aren’t realistic for now - anyone else on the ‘no’ to sourdough train?)

Now let’s discuss! When you envision life outside the box for yourself, does it have a particular structure or are you open to seeing where it’s going? What do you think about the relationship between motherhood and the intellectual life? And how are you finding freedom in saying ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to all the good things that *could* be done? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

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