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Thanks LisaCA - its nice to have an opinion of someone in academia! I am actually still a postdoc and just work for a tenured professor. Unfortunately, he is a really old school boys club kinda guy.....he doesn't feel that women who have children before they are tenured will ever by tenured AND has even been known to tell female graduate students he wouldn't support them if they ended up pregnant! Ugh - didn't know this when I accepted the job almost 2 years ago.
Although for some reason I am really optimistic that he'll let me reduce my hours to 3 or 4 days a week after we adopt. If he won't I plan on staying there to finish up some stuff in the lab and moving on. I know doing that could really hurt my chance of getting a tenure-track position somewhere down the road, but I'm not even sure if that is what I want anymore. Like you said its a lot of hours and I wouldn't even be doing what I really love -the research!
It actually really stinks b/c for the past year (with infertility treatments first, now the adoption stuff) I feel I have really isolated myself from my school/work friends. None of them know anything about all of this, although I am sure most of them would be very supportive. I am just afraid of the wrong people finding out (i.e. my boss).
My husband also told his work when we first started the paperwork. He needed to take a day off for the intensive weekend (adoption workshop) and figured it was easiest to just be upfront. Of course he also felt comfortable telling them about our infertility treatments - mainly so he didn't have to keep making up excuses for missing work. His job is very understanding and supportive. No fair!
OK I've babbled on long enough. Thanks for your story LisaCA - it was helpful!
-m
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