This paper draws on autoethnography and theoretical scholarship on care and disability studies to address how the neoliberal model in contemporary universities in the United States hinders and hampers music scholars experiencing parenthood. Following Audre Lorde’s formulation of anger as a source of energy for progress and change, together with Sarah Ahmed’s use of writing from the own experience to make sense of it, I present what I call a rantflection – the combination of the words ‘rant’ and ‘reflection’ – to present some thoughts originating from my anger and expressing them critically to create a dialogue about the experience of parenthood in relation to the practice of music scholarship. While care and disability studies have increasingly gained scholarly attention in the last decade, the focus of these debates has been centered on practices of self-care and the challenges that the structural hostility of academia poses on scholars with disability. Meanwhile, ongoing discussions about the ethics of fieldwork and the figure of the researcher have been present in ethnomusicology and anthropology, and yet, dialogue about care-related day to day activities and how they shape our experiences and decisions have largely remained in the dark. In this paper I set an invitation to think collectively about how acknowledging our own relations to care and the sociability within it could impact our work in the field, but also what possibilities would it open to shaping our discipline into the future.