This is us now. Collectively making sense of our new identities as parents and early career academics

In this paper, we draw on our subjective experiences as Early Career Academics (ECAs) at a Dutch University to demonstrate our complex relationship between academic life and parenthood. Building on the sensemaking literature, we employ a collective autoethnography to unveil six distinct new parent scripts that ECA parents, like us, adopt when navigating boundaries between work and non-work tasks in academia. Our scripts are dynamic, and full of emotions, showing our raw and unfiltered experiences of becoming mothers and fathers by reflecting on identity sensemaking processes that we undergo, as individuals and as a collective. We hope by writing differently and showing vulnerability our study can encourage more understanding of the complexity of new parenthood within academia, and at the same time stimulate further debates to challenge current structures that hinder ECAs from balancing their work and family lives by creating a more inclusive academic environment for all of us.