Writing Maternity

various transitions

One of Tricksy's best friends is about to move across the country.  When I saw Angelina yesterday, I asked her if she was excited.  She looked at me, pensive.  "I'm excited," she said, throwing me a bone.  "But I'm also a little scared."

I can't imagine a more logical way to feel about moving cross-country at any age.

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Tricksy put all her pacifiers in the trash on Sunday.  We'd been planning it with her for months, and she thought she might be ready to do it on Saturday, but then backed off.  She was got to throw them away in the morning, but then the prospect of napping was pretty traumatic.  I held her, singing songs different from those we usually sing, until she fell asleep.  Bedtime was fine.

Bedtime since was been rocky with both girls.  Lots of requests for water, for additional hugs and kisses, lots of complaints that they aren't tired (Squiss) or don't waaant to go to bed (Tricksy).  Two nights ago, at NINE!, I told them the time and that they needed to pull it together.  Although she doesn't ask for it in advance, as she gets increasingly upset that she actually has to go to sleep, Tricksy starts moaning: "I miss my . . . " and runs through every extended family member she's seen in the last month.  (It's a long list.)  Then she collapses into "I miss my doux-y" with tears and sobs.  At that point, we pull her into a cuddle and talk about how growing up is hard, and how proud of her we are.  If she were waking up overnight, or if it were taking her more than 45 minutes to fall settle and fall asleep, it might seem like we needed to reconsider. 

(That makes us both sound more blase about the difficulty of the transition than we are, I think.  At one point last night as I was cuddling Tricksy and Squiss was trying to understand, I made an analogy to the adjustment to becoming a big sister that Squiss had to make at about this age.  It's not small, but she's been napping with a pacifier at school for more than six months.  And she seems to miss it most when she just wants to veg, rather than when she needs to go to sleep.  So we're trying to help her learn new vegging out strategies.)

She's trying to use the "but now I'm big" angle on everything.  Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't.

A smaller loss: When she concentrates, Tricksy can now make a "th" sound.  So instead of "sanks" for thank you, she can say "thanks."  But only when she concentrates.  As with the "r" sound that may soon replace "w", I'll miss the toddlerhood pronunciation.

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I always -- always! -- have difficulty with transitions.  The transition from academic year to summer work is a particularly tricky one.  It's about finding a new working pace without simply overloading with plans and resolves and projects.  (The current dilemma -- for the last two years, at least -- is that I look at the summer and think that I'll be able to 1) spend more time with my kids doing fun things, 2) work out regularly, 3) move at a generally slower, more relaxed pace, and 4) make massive headway on my various scholarly and other projects.  You do the math.)

When M. l'O still worked a bazillion hours a week in an office far, far away -- which was also before we had kids and before I lived spitting distance from my office with lots of friends nearby -- this was even harder.  I suddenly went from all the social input of the academic year to near isolation from 8:30 in the morning until 9 or 10 at night.  It wasn't a pretty couple of weeks.

Now, it's more a question of finding the rhythm.  We got back from vacation in mid-June last year, but I don't think that I felt it until early July.  I'm hoping to make it more quickly this year, on the writing teacherish grounds that if I become more aware of my process I'll be better able to work with it rather than against it.  So I've tried both to set smaller goals and to forgive myself for the perhaps necessary inefficiency of this particular week.

Some examples,

• I've not resolved to pick up both daughters at 3 every day so that we can swim before dinner.  Instead, I've picked them up between 4 and 4:30 and we've moved homeward leisurely.  Squiss swims many afternoons at camp, so I may start getting Tricksy earlier and taking her for a swim on those days -- but at most two days per week, to protect my time.
• I had a great conversation with W2 last week about setting reasonable exercise, etc. goals.  She worked as a personal trainer a few years ago, and one point she made was that there seems to be consensus that it takes eight weeks to build a habit.  So, we decided, my goal for the summer should be to build a *reasonable* habit -- one that I might be able to sustain over the academic year.  So far, so good, and it feels like a more manageable goal both for the moment and for the long haul than my usual summer oh-my-god-maybe-I-can-totally-transform-myself bullsh*t.
• Because I met with my beloved co-authors two weeks ago, I have a very concrete sense of what I need to do and the immediate time-frame.  The great thing about our book is that it's feeding all of our interests -- we kept joking, as we looked at some of the data together, that it was hard to tell when it was research and when it was gossip.  I'm having the same sense now, as I dig through the historical record.  Who *knew* that Bryn Mawr had the first named professorship in rhetoric and composition that was held by a woman (from 1917 to 1933)?  And . . . hmmm . . . what happened in 1950 that the fund seems to have been redirected into a scholarship fund?

20 years later

I wrote some weeks ago about how doubly surreal I expected my 20th high school reunion to be.  (Surreal, because I think that it's rare when 20th HS reunions are not so; and doubly surreal because most of my HS social life was spent with the class a year ahead, who wouldn't be there.)  And it was all that, but was also *good.*  I'm glad I went; we all seem to have grown up well, and that's really nice to see.

It was particularly interesting to go to my reunion the week after M. l'O's.  He went to a small prep school (his mother taught French there) located just outside Big City in Small State of Old Houses.  He was part of a really close-knit group of friends (they spent a week skiing together every January through college and perhaps a bit beyond), and so he's gone to every single reunion they've had.  (Prep schools, it is unsurprising to learn, do the show every five years, unlike Big Publics like the one I went to.  Fundraising, anyone?)  I've been to three of his reunions, now (10th, 15th, and 20th) -- so while I'm not catching up with old friends, I'm spending the evening talking with people I already know.  Some we see between-times, when we're back in Small State to visit his parents.  Until recently, they still lived just outside Big City, and several of his friends have settled nearby.

It's all cosy and familiar and known.  Reunion is less about journalism questions (who-what-where-when-why-and-how) and more about catching up.

My reunion was a big contrast.  This is the first we've had (as far as I know, and I might not know); it was a single evening rather than a whole weekend; and since roughly 1991 I've spoken to two people from my graduating class, neither of whom was going.  So I was going for precisely the journalistic reasons, although the questions I asked and answered over the course of the evening really boiled down just a few, because we omitted the trickier ones: where (are you); what (are you doing); who (are you partnered to, are you a parent to, and so forth).  The whys and the hows -- at least for me -- for the most part dropped by the wayside.

(At one point, describing the evening to my sister, who came up to City of Parks and Rivers while we were there, I compared it to speed dating: we/I whirled through conversations, touching base with many and getting into further details with very, very few.)

It felt both like enough and really, really strange.  But I had a couple of realizations over the course of the following days:

One of the things that happens (ideally) at reunions is that you pick up threads and habits of hanging-out time with people you used to hang out with.  But the habits I can/would pick up with my graduating class are tenuous and flimsy -- because, as I've said, for most of high school that *wasn't* the crowd I was eating lunch with, going to parties with, and so on.  It was never something that happened consciously -- about halfway through freshman year, I made a couple of friends in that class, and then fell into hanging out with a group that formed.  That lasted through sophomore and most of junior year, at which point 1) they were all going off to college, and 2) First Love and I broke up (and he was part of that group, and teenagers are immature, and . . . you get the picture).  Senior year I fell in with another group, but the social glue was never as solid.  We went off to college, and (frankly) after the first couple of summers I didn't go back to City of Parks and Rivers much -- when I did, it was to see family.  I didn't have a sense of having more than a single friend or two to reach out to.

In my brief chats with people at reunion, I felt a bit as though I'd vanished after high school -- and, well, I guess I did.  There's a way to tell the story as being about my decisions: I didn't go back to City of Parks and Rivers much; I didn't call people; and so on.  Email was new when I got to college: we all automatically had email accounts as freshmen, but Transitional Boyfriend (who went to a different school) didn't -- he got one, and then we had to have many, many talks with our respective ITS's in order to figure out how to write to people on different networks. 

I think that I've long felt a bit guilty, as though I should have tried harder to stay in touch -- as though, frankly, I should have been friends with the class of '89 rather than the class of '88 all along, and so on.  (It isn't as though there was a shortage of people in my own class who I liked; it just happened.)  Or, if not guilty, down on myself, for being so socially passive as a teenager (indeed, through college). 

Whatever.  My biggest realization, post-reunion, was perhaps unsurprisingly not about my relationship to the members of the class of '89 at all, but rather to the class of '88.  I can see that there were missed opportunities for me with the '89ers, but life is filled with missed opportunities, with roads not taken, and I'm at peace with that.  But I've also felt as though *I* should have been able to stay in touch post-high school with the class of '88.  It seems as though, by the time we were *all* dispersed and *all* in college, but many returning to the City of Parks and Rivers for vacations and summers, that I should have been able to reconnect with them, to salvage those friendships, to turn them into something other than friendships-by-proximity.

But that's wrong.  It wasn't all on me.  I've had intermittent contact with First Love throughout the years, and so have a kind of contented sense that I know how he's doing (very well) and that I could easily get back in touch with him if I were going to Grad School City, where he now lives.  And one other -- probably my closest friend from that group -- and I exchanged letters a bit in the few years after college.  And there are other distinct things that I could have done, but didn't -- and only realized were possibilities much later.  And the members of that class didn't call me when they got back into town from college, and I think that it was on them to call me at that time, rather than vice versa.  So it wasn't just on me: it wasn't my passivity, my (fairly lazy) habits about keeping in touch.  It was on all of us, a shared responsibility.

For a long time, that just seemed to me to mean that my friendships with the 88ers had been meaningless: they were *really* friends with one another, and I just got to tag along.  But instead, I can now see that this is about the fluidity of friendships in general.  And that's okay, because the fluidity moves and doubles back, too: it's really just a great and shifting dance. 

That's a good thing for me to realize, but it's basically just the bonus.  The really great thing about reunion was to get the answers to those journalistic questions, to get a sense of who people are and what they're doing, to see continuities between that and what I knew of them 20+ years ago.  We've all grown up. 

Vacation was great, as were the reunions.  Obviously a vacation spent visiting family and friends isn't quite as relaxing as a vacation spent, well, lying around lazily at a beach on our own, but this was the longest we'd spent east since we moved west, and so it was good to have that kind of time.

There's more, of course, but it will come once I've dug myself out from under the work that accumulated while I was gone.  But -- tra-la! -- it isn't administrative work but research-related work, and so the prospect of digging is rather more enjoyable than otherwise.

In the mean time, I offer you a glimpse of Tricksy testing theories . . .

The scene: last night at dinner.  Tricksy is sitting next to M. l'O, who has couscous on his plate.

Tricksy: What's that?

M. l'O: It's couscous.  Do you want some?

Tricksy: No.  But . . . Papa!  Couscous and wice WHYME!!

M. l'O (not quite getting that last word): What did you say, sweetie?

Tricksy: Couscous and wice whyme.  They'we just the same!

M. l'O (getting it this time): You know, they don't rhyme, but you're right, they do look a lot the same.  Rhyming is . . .

(and so on.)

taking a poll

So, here's a question.  If you and your partner both work full-time and you have smallish kids, do -- and, if so, when and how, do you find time to exercise? 

(M. l'O and  I haven't even begun to solve this problem yet, and I really need to know other people's solutions.  Even if they're not perfect.  No, actually, especially if they're not perfect.)

friendly dynamics

Yesterday, Squiss and I had Gemstone over for a playdate.  (As you may remember, Gemstone goes to High Test Scores West now, but for most of the academic year she and Squiss had a weekly afternoon playdate.  Same deal with Sidecar, who goes to Hippie School.)  It had been close to a month since they'd seen each other -- the academic year ended and so Well-Traveled, their babysitter, left for the summer (and now for a year abroad), and their parents were too busy.  And it was interesting to see how rocky the first half-hour or so was.

After delighted shrieks and excitment and the like when we picked Gemstone up at HTSW, they simply couldn't agree on what to play.  Squiss wanted to play dress-up; Gemstone didn't.  Gemstone wanted to do a puzzle; Squiss didn't.  Squiss wanted to build a castle; Gemstone didn't.  And so on.  First one would come and get me to adjudicate, then the other.  (Meanwhile, the plan had been for the six-year-olds to entertain each other while I got some work done.)

They worked it out, of course, but the period of adjustment surprised me, because a year ago I would have described playdates with Gemstone as the easiest of any of Squiss's friends.  When Squiss was two, the most emotionally-fraught playdates were with Sidecar.  Later, there were habitual tiffs with Princess Towhead during almost any playdate.  But with Gemstone (with whom, I'll grant, Squiss didn't become close friends until she was four), it's always been easy peasy.  And the difficulty with Gemstone this time was in contrast to the ease of both of the other two.

Basically, I think that it's about habit.  PT and Squiss have countless games that they just slip into, because they're in the same class at school: they play every single day during the week, and some weekend days, too.  (We're actually pretty sure that they'll go into withdrawal during summer camp, so PT's mom -- who's at home with the kids in the afternoons -- has offered to have Squiss over 1-2 afternoons a week.)  Sidecar's mom is one of my colleagues and one of our close friends, so there are college events and grown-up parties that bring the kids together, as well as playdates.  But Squiss and Gemstone have longer breaks in between seeing one another, and so despite thinking of one another as best friends, it makes sense that they'd have to figure out anew how to do things.

Not unlike adults, actually.  It's the rare friend with whom you can pick up after weeks or months of silence, as though the conversation(s) have been momentarily interrupted.  More often, it takes some time and effort to re-start, to figure out and identify the contours of the terrain again.

a rambling post about parenting and education

Over the course of the last couple of weeks, I've found myself sucked into multiple conversations about the local elementary schools.  (I thought that perhaps I'd escaped such conversations for a couple of years, now that Squiss is happily ensconced at Neighborhood School,* but apparently not.  I now have a sinking suspicion that they'll be never-ending.)  I have mixed feelings about these conversations: I think that Neighborhood School is distinctly under-rated by the other highly educated, progressive, upper-middle-class parents I've been talking to, and I think that it's under-rated in ways and for reasons that they're both aware of and not.  So there's a part of me that wants to launch into these conversations full throttle, as an advocate for a school that I think is habitually under-rated, that is doing good things for a wide range of kids.

(Caveat: These conversations have not been with people with whom I'm already friends.  They've been, instead, the kinds of conversations you have with the parents of other children at a kid's birthday party, or while your kids are playing together at the playground for a first playdate.)

They go something like this.

Parent 1: So, where does your [son or daughter] go to school?

Parent 2: Hippie School [or High Test Scores West or High Test Scores East].

Parent 1: Oh, that's great.

Parent 3: And where does Squiss go?

dr: She goes to Neighborhood School.

Parent 2: And how is that going? 

Here's my point: Hippie School, HTSW, HTSE -- none of them need explanation.  Although each of those three schools has a very different climate, parents are rarely asked to gloss their experiences at any of them.  By contrast, I'm *always* asked how we're liking Neighborhood School.  Because, you see, we might not.

I'd happily interpret this as interest: because relatively few highly educated, progressive, upper-middle-class parents send their kids to Neighborhood, it's unknown.  (I wrote about this last year.)  And they'd like more information.

But, you see, the conversation then further unfolds:

Parent 3 (who lives in our neighborhood): You know, we thought about sending [older child] there, but then we sent hir to [Hippie/HTSW/HTSE] instead.  We wanted to support our local school, and we love the diversity, but we just couldn't do it.

"We just couldn't do it."  Because, clearly, I'm sacrificing my daughter's education for some other value -- a value they appreciate and share, but are unwilling to sacrifice *their* kids' educations for.

I'm saying this here because I only say gentle versions of it in person.

#1.  I am NOT sacrificing my daughter's education by sending her to Neighborhood School.

When someone asked me over the weekend how the transition had been for Squiss from Montessori to Neighborhood, I answered, "seamless."  I then explained a bit (she now gets to go to school with Princess Towhead every day, she's a pretty adaptable kid . . .), but then ended, "although I think she's lost a bit of some of the academic stuff this year."

Her reply, "And so do you find that you have to do a lot at home, to compensate?"  Got directly at *her* anxieties, and I responded: "No . . . I mean, she's still adding and subtracting." 

(I didn't say, AND READING AT A SIXTH-GRADE LEVEL!!! because I don't like to get into that kind of, well, pissing contest.)

The conversation peetered out there, but I think it's worth continuing.  Squiss had started doing what Montessori calls "skip-counting" which is basically the multiplication tables, and she was strating to learn the concept of fractions, when she was four-turning-five.  Those concepts have mostly leaked out of her brain over the course of this year, but she's consolidated other math skills in really solid ways: she's clearly in a concrete operations stage, but adding and subtracting are familiar, usual skills.  She's numerate now in the way that kids become literate when they look at the world and see that it's filled with words.  In addition, she's now willing to write sentences and stories, while at the beginning of the year she studiously resisted it.  (Her tooth-loss story seems to have been a kind of catalyst.) 

She's learned about six different biomes.  She's raised trout from eggs and learned the life stages.  She's performed in a short "opera" and has learned what an aria is.

And she's done it all in a class with kids who speak Spanish and Chinese and Vietnamese at home.  A class in which she (a white girl) is in the minority.

#2. I am largely DELIGHTED not to be at a school where the highly educated, progressive, upper-middle-class parents are obsessing about their children's educations all the time.

I had a conversation with Ms. Froggie this morning.

I want to make sure I haven't missed filling out a form or something about classroom placement for next year.

No, there's no form, but we do try to honor requests.  She'll be in one of two classrooms.

Oh, I don't know either of the teachers.

Well, it's Ms. Q and Ms. L; I could arrange a time for you to meet them both, if you'd like.

You know, that's okay.  I'm going to trust you all to look out for Squiss.

Oh, we'll put her in a good place.  And, honestly, Squiss will do well wherever she is.

I have a kind of visceral recoil from the prospect of being at a school where your child gets placed in a more "desirable" class for the next year based on your advocacy.  (Yes, all our children are exceptional and unique and need special attention.)  Part of this is because I'm an academic administrator and teacher: I know that the parents of my college students know their kids better than I do.  But, frankly, I know college students IN GENERAL better than they do, and I know more about EDUCATING college students than they do.  Similarly, I trust the principal and teachers of Neighborhood School as professionals.  That means that 1) they know more about educating K-6 kids than I do; and 2) that they know the other kids in question better than I do and so will not simply place Squiss but will create a group in the classroom.

The corollary to this is that I don't like the mentality that squeaky wheels get better treatment.  I know that it's often the case, and it almost always pisses me off.  (With the caveat that I'm lucky: my kids aren't special needs in any way.  They don't, in fact, need additional or particular kinds of support.  Those parents have to advocate -- although, again, I think that's a bit of a crime, since I think that the system should be better at supprting the diverse educational and social needs of kids and families.  But I think that there's a lot of highly educated, progressive, upper-middle-class parental conviction that their children need special consideration when, in fact, those kids' needs, learning styles, and so on fall well within the range of what our tragically under-paid and under-supported public school teachers know how to work with.)

* On the way home from school on Friday we had this conversation:

I can't BELIEVE I only have FOUR MORE DAYS of kindergarten!

I know . . . you're almost a first grader!

Yeah . . . No more kindergarten playground.  (small unhappy face, but then interrupts herself.)  Oh!  Mama!  Did you turn in the pink card that says I'll go to Neighborhood next year!?

Yes, sweetie.  I turned it in.

Oh, good, because I REALLY want to go to Neighborhood School again.

bittersweet

In a couple of weeks, M. l'O and the girls and I will head out for our summer vacation. This year, it's been scheduled largely around his and my 20th high school reunions, which were fortunately scheduled a week apart in states not too distant from one another.  So we'll head to New England for his, and then we'll head to the mid-Atlantic for mine.  And we'll get to spend a week with his parents and my father and stepmother; so it's all about family and nostalgia and friends.

Perhaps because I'm taking a moment to catch my breath -- usual end-of-the-semester chaos, followed by big-huge-faculty-development workshop, followed by get-my-promotion-dossier-in -- I'm thinking concretely ahead to the 20th reunion in a way that I haven't since various classmates starting finding me on Facebook and talking about the reunion 9 or 10 months ago.  I haven't seen more than one person from my graduating high school class since about 1990 -- and that one person has been my friend since we met on the first day of second grade, in September, 1978 -- it's going to be pretty bloody surreal.  (Facebook contact doesn't really mitigate that.  But I'll confess that the surreality is part of what I'm looking forward to.)

But for most of high school I was closer friends with people in the class of '90 than in my own class, and so in many ways I'm also just plain sad that I won't be seeing them along with my own classmates in three weeks.  It somehow doubly weird, as a result: I'll be seeing a bunch of people who I last saw 20 years ago and, on top of that, I'll be looking around for a bunch of people who are perpetually linked in my mind with that bunch, wondering why they aren't walking into the room.

it's been ages, I know.

No apologies -- or even a real post -- at the moment.  But kind of a marker to say that it's been quite a spring, but that now that it's over I'm hoping to return.  Soon.

aw, shucks

Last summer I wrote a review of a book in a relatively new-to-me subfield.  I taught myself a lot in order to do a good, and I was pretty pleased with the review once I finished it.

It came out in the most recent issue of the journal -- we got the TOC a couple of weeks ago by email, and then the hard copies arrived this morning.

This afternoon, I got an email from one of the editors of the book, thanking me for the review.  Specifically, thanking me for having really paid attention, and for having understood what the book was trying to do.

Which is quite possibly one of the most satisfying professional compliments I've gotten.

missing Papa

Example 1:

Mama says some version of "No, you can't have that."  Or, "No, we can't do that right now."

Tricksy's eyes fill with tears.  Her face wrinkles up in reproachful despair.  "I wand my daaaadddyyyy!"

Example 2:

Bedtime, Saturday evening.  (M. l'O left in the wee hours Saturday morning, for a week in Senegal for work.)  Both girls are in bed.  Both want snuggles from their father.  Mama is inspired:

Shall I get Papa's pillows for you, and you can each sleep with one of his pillows?  Then it will be as though you're snuggling him all night long.

Squiss at first wanted the pillow on her face, but I convinced her to put it under her head instead.

Example 3:

Bedtime, Tuesday evening.  Tricksy was probably asleep, but the noise of Squiss climbing into the top bunk woke her.  All seems to be going well, until Squiss starts to get sad because I can't climb into the top bunk and snuggle her.  Once she gets a little sad, she gets a *lot* sad -- missing Papa.  Then Tricksy starts to cry, too.

I offer to pull out a twin futon mattress temporarily stored in their closet for Squiss to sleep on.  But then Tricksy wants to sleep on it.  When I tell her "no," she loses it (see Example 1, above).  Squiss still hasn't fully regained control.

They go to bed (again, thanks to maternal inspiration) together on the futon: Squiss's head points west, with one of Papa's pillows; Tricksy's head points east, likewise. 

Mama fixes herself a drink.