Adventures of the Stay at Home Geek.

I started using Linux in 1997, before that I was using FreeBSD. I
have a degree in Computer Science. I have been a system administrator/IT
person for a little over 10 years now. I co-run a community shell
machine as well as a part time IT consultancy while being a full
time mom to a one year old. I see no reason to turn in my Geek card
just because I have spawn()ed. I'm probably one of less than 20 people
to ever attend DefCon at more than six months pregnant. I IRC while
breastfeeding, getting in flame wars about how much PERL sucks.

I have found becoming a mom to be the most anti-stereotypical thing
a female geek can do. In my larval geek days, there was much learning
to be one of the boys. I have never worked with a female peer, as
is normal for a great many female geeks. I was so entrenched in my
male-geek milieu that I thought nothing of clicking the tentacle
pr0n links. Sexual harassment was something the guys I worked with
wish would happen to them. A fully formed post-feminist theory of
gender transgression and intellectual transvestitism of females in
male dominated fields was right out. When a boss asked me who my
favorite feminist was, and I answered "Camille Paglia" never more
was that F-word uttered. Basically, I found femaleness, as a geek,
to be something akin to being gay in the military: don't ask, don't
tell, don't pursue.

When you actually go out and do something all female-ish, like
getting pregnant, your "one of the guys" status is a shaky. The
dudes get a little tweaky. Lots of comments of the "oh, I never
realized you were the maternal type" sort.  Suddenly, those slashdot
posts about trying to make Linux On The Desktop easy enough for
Your Mom to use sound very unfriendly

I figured that now I was doing something female, I should go into
the female webspaces. I lurked on several pregnancy/parenting fora,
disgusted at the mutual sunshine enemas alternating with cliqueish
peevishness. My ten years in the geek realm had prepared me woefully
for the finer points of posts such as "DH took DD out to pizza last
night, but he forgot that she has a dairy allergy! should I call
CPS on him and get a divorce?" Reading these posts, I felt I was
likely to be eaten by a grue.

I am listening to my daughter cry. Her father is trying to walk her
to sleep. Up till now, I am the only one who could put her to sleep.
I'm not sure that this is working, but it is worth a try -- anything
to get some time. A room of one's own is no use if one has no time
of one's own to spend in it. 

It's fine and dandy to deconstruct gender performances and agree
upon and egalitarian parenting method, but there is exactly one set
of lactating mammaries in my house. It's not so easily outsourced.
Which is the crux of the stay at home geek's problems: time.

Such as, just when does the new version of the mail server get
installed when the baby needs to be held all day?  At naptime. My
attention to this task was so bad that this was followed by the
next conundrum.

When one notices an unusual amount of ssh connections from Romania,
and the baby is crying, which gets precedence? Mothering is completely
interrupt driven, so the baby is biggest non maskable interrupt ever.
If the system is 0wn3d, you're already screwed. Do a remote shutdown
and hope for the best. You can wait till nap time to try to figure
out what happened. If you're lucky, they'll have left their IRC
logs.  These are hours of entertainment reading to make a mind
numbingly boring system log crawl/ reinstall bearable.

Additionally, there is hardware which craps out. So how does one
wrangle a baby plus a hard-drive install in the colocation facility?
Before one year of age, my daughter has had two trips to the colo,
the roar of the 10,000 powersupply fans was an excellent sedative.
Though, I've learned that I can't let her chew on cat 5, much of
the cabling has lead in it.

I feel like I was a geek before I was any of my other labels: woman,
vegetarian, queer, mom. So it seems that being a geek will last
longer, at the very least inform all of my pursuits with geek
sensibility.

The Feminist Meta Analysis:
It's interesting, another mysterious case of an educated American
woman choosing the Mommy Track. Am I throwing away those opportunities
that my mother's generation struggled to provide? Doubtless a
post-feminist choice has been made. I must be actualizing my agency
to chose that path I find most fulfilling and have no regrets nor
suboptimal compromises.

But really, the mainstream American workplace is still unfriendly
to mothers. It wasn't just a coincidence that my SO is working full
time and I am not. It's because he doesn't need to be around to
feed the baby every 3 hours. It's because he had a higher paying
job to begin with, women still make less than men in tech fields.

The only career-solace being a geek brings retreating into consulting
projects. The messy paperwork is the price I pay for as much time
with my daughter as needed and the ability to keep my tech skills
at a reasonable facsimile of current. This whole Mommy-Track business
is the direct result of a corporate climate which requires Virago
Virgins or Sacrificial Mothers in its female-worker archetypes. I
don't believe in Sacrifice, so I'm opting out of mainstream work
until my daughter is school age. In the mean time, I have some
EL-wire and a robot kit. I'll make her a blinky toy, none of this
prepackaged, proprietary crap.