Writing Maternity

defeated

I feel utterly beaten down.  Tricksy has been sick all week -- it's summer 'flu, which in her case has manifested as runny nose and eyes (complete with infection in the latter) and a fever that has generally stayed below 102 during the day, but every night since Monday has gotten up over 103 at some point between midnight and 2 am.  Between medicine, cool compresses, and a bottle of water, not to mention general soothing, it takes her about 45 minutes to get back to sleep after she's woken up when the fever rages.  So we're tired.

Squiss had this same 'flu last week, although we didn't realize that that's what it was.  She only missed one day of school and left early another day, but she was tired and low energy (and whiny) all week, as a result.

One of the girls being sick means that G and I both take time off work.  Our normal pattern is for me to take the morning shift and for him to take the afternoon.  It's always complicated a bit by when nap happens -- since we try to share that wealth -- and it's complicated further by anything in my schedule that is hard.  That is, classes, meetings that can't or really shouldn't be postponed, and the like.  Both taking time off work means (often, typically) both staying up late to get that work done.  For better and for worse, we both have jobs that both do and don't observe the hours of the work week: we need to be "on" and available during those hours, but we also simply have to get the work done.  It can be done at home, but it still has to get done.

This was the week before classes start.  In some ways, it's much better for someone to have been out for an entire week this week than next, once the semester is truly rolling.  In other ways, it was actually worse: the Writing Center Coordinator started this week, but I couldn't do more than orient her for an hour; worse yet, our admin person leaves tomorrow for a medical leave that is likely to take three weeks, and there are many details that I'll have to field that I'm not used to fielding.  And I didn't have a chance to sit down and go over them all with her.

As a result, I'm feeling scattered -- I've misplaced both my cell phone and its charger, and I don't tend to misplace things except when it's symptomatic of a larger dis-ease -- and unsurprisingly panicked.  There are things that need to happen tomorrow that probably won't; there are other things that I should be remembering and simply am not.  And there's no room in the weekend to catch up: I'll spend most of Saturday in a workshop for academic advisors and then meeting with my advisees; I'll spend Sunday evening leading a discussion of The Weather-Makers. 

And, finally, G was feeling really crummy today and so spent most of the day that he wasn't doing Tricksy-care lying down.  And -- partly out of a desire for some of the attention her sick sister is getting, partly out residual feeling-not-great herself, and doubtless partly as a response to the triple digit heat that she's been outside playing in the last several days -- Squiss has been something of a pill.  This is characterized, for Squiss, by whiny (and sometimes not-so-whiny) orders to do things, which dissolve into overly dramatic tears when met with resistance of refusal.  Having spent the day being the familial rock (as G described me this evening), I just lost it with her as we were cleaning up a game and getting ready for bed.  And then Tricksy woke up.  G was outside watering some of the baby plants that the sprinkler doesn't quite reach, so I had to go out and get him, having told Squiss to get into the bath, before going in to quiet Trix.  Then Squiss got stuck halfway through taking off her shirt, and starting crying about it loudly, so I rushed back in while G turned off the water, so that he could take over Squiss's bath and I could go into the (screaming) Tricksy.  It was a bad mom moment, all 'round.

There are days when you just feel as though trying to do it all means that you do none of it well.  At this moment, the feeling of defeat comes not just from the day or the week but the fear that this is going to be the salient quality of the entire semester.

2 Lessons

In the last four days, I've found myself trapped in two unwelcome conversations with strangers.  Strange men, specifically, and I mean "strange" both in the sense of unknown and in the other sense.

On Saturday, at the carwash, I found myself utterly unable to extricate myself from a conversation with a 55ish man who wanted to talk to me (apparently) because he noted a Cambridge UP book under my arm.  I now know where he went to college, where he works, where his kids go to college, and, well, you get the idea.  Because I'm generally a trusting soul he finagled my name and institutional affiliation from me, and sent me a follow-up email on Monday.  (Goodness, no, I haven't replied.)

This morning, I took Tricksy out to run a couple of errands.  She was more tired than I realized when we set  out, and she'd barely eaten yet, so I stopped at Barnes and Noble to get a muffin to see if I could convince her to eat something before we went home for her nap.  While there, she made baby eyes at a man in the cafe who, in addition to complimenting me on the gorgeousness of my child, proceeded to tell me that 1) he was adopted, 2) that he met his birth mother seven years ago, 3) that he has one adopted sibling and something like 10 birth siblings (he was specific about the number, I just can't remember it now), 4) that both his adopted mother and birth mother are part Cherokee, and, well, you get the idea.

So, 2 lessons:

1.  I need to come up with an obvious fake name, one that I know is my fake name so that I don't have to think of something on the spot.  (I still haven't thought of a good one.  Any suggestions?)
2.  It's time to move back to the city.  I clearly don't have the don't-fuck-with-me face that I perfected as a junior high and high school student on Philadelphia public transportation anymore.

"There is no fundamental human right to be a Mum in the workplace"?

G just sent me the link to this Financial Times article, with the understated comment, "I find the tone of this pretty awful . . ."  You have to pay (or sign up for a free 15-day trial) to read it online, so here are the opening paragraphs:

In a recent episode of the hit US television sitcom, Desperate Housewives, a hip young advertising executive threatened to sue her employer for sex discrimination – because her boss asked her to stop breastfeeding her five-year-old at work.

Even in America, breastfeeding a strapping young chap at the desk is scarcely common. But determining the proper boundary between work and motherhood (or for that matter, fatherhood) is an increasingly tough task for US employers. Today's Mums and Dads seem to think they have a fundamental human right to be parents and employees – including the inalienable right to work only until school lets out, without ever missing a promotion.

Increasingly, US courts and juries are siding with them, feeding a whole new breed of job discrimination lawsuit: litigation over "family responsibility discrimination". And where America leads, other nations' courts often follow: policing work-life collisions is a global problem, so US experiments at the work-life frontier could have an impact from Stockholm to Seoul.

US workers who care for dependants – from the new baby to the senile Grandma to the nephew with autism – are suing their employers much more frequently than before: according to a report from the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California's Hastings College of Law, such suits shot up by 400 per cent over the past decade. And now the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal job-bias watchdog, has issued guidelines to help America's bosses pick their way across the minefield where life intersects with work, without falling into the trap of "caregiver discrimination".

The guidelines, issued in May, are replete with real-life examples of how to break the laws that protect caregivers, and how to avoid breaking them.

"Charmaine", a hypothetical mother of two pre-schoolers who is told she is not "executive material" (presumably because of her kids) has a strong case for claiming discrimination based on sex, the EEOC advises. But "Carla", a young lawyer who misses work and deadlines frequently because she cannot find reliable childcare, can safely be relieved of her high-profile job even though motherhood was the cause of her poor performance.

The EEOC makes clear that penalising caregivers is not always illegal: companies can refuse to promote everyone with young children – so long as they punish Mums and Dads equally (and not just women, who are a protected class under federal job discrimination law).

and then the concluding paragraph:

No boss should be allowed to tell a Mum in advance that she has "too much on her plate": but if she repeatedly fails to do her job because she has too many kids, or too few babysitters, she should not expect childless colleagues to pick up all the slack all the time. The laws of discrimination have not totally suspended the laws of economics. There is no fundamental human right to be a Mum in the workplace

The link and the topic are particularly timely, as we grapple with Tricksy being down with a feverish cold that had Squiss out exactly a week ago (and on her birthday!).  This is the week before classes start and the day before G's weekly update is sent, and so it's not an ideal day (to put it mildly) for either of us to take half a day to take care of a sick child.

And so, now that Trix is down for a much-needed nap[1], I'm working through the email that built up yesterday afternoon and this morning, replying to people who already received my out-of-the-office reply: "I'm out of the office today (Tuesday, August 28) caring for a sick child.  I'll reply to your email as soon as I can."

The article also resonates with the issues of child-free spaces that I commented upon a few weeks ago, and the discussion going on over at MMF about the same (and the relation of liberalism to children, more generally).  It seems to me that the "pretty awful" tone of the FT piece can be located in the phrases that assume or attribute entitlement, to wit: "Today's Mums and Dads seem to think they have a fundamental human right to be parents and employees – including the inalienable right to work only until school lets out, without ever missing a promotion."

I'll tackle the first clause first: do we not have a fundamental right to be both parents and employees?  Is there a law in the universe -- a recent law, I'd imagine, dating to some time in the late eighteenth-century, when industrialization, capitalism, and a thousand other factors contributed to an increased separation of workspaces and homespaces -- that says one must choose between being a parent and being an employee?  And isn't that a rather classed and racialized assumption, given the many people in this and other countries for whom the decision isn't all that much of one, assuming (and I do) that one wants to feed one's children?

Or, to put it more broadly, aren't there basic human rights (see articles 16, 22, and 23) to have children, should one want to, and also "to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment"?

I'm willfully ignoring the second clause, of course, the clause in which Waldmeir attributes a desire for special treatment to working parents: a desire, it seems, to be able to work part-time without losing out on the benefits (including advancement) of full-time work.  And I'll say, I hope calmly, that I don't think that she's being fair.  There may be parents who use their kids as an excuse for not pulling their own weight in the workplace; I've known some, certainly.  But my hunch is that most of these individuals find ways more generally to exempt themselves from the least desirable aspects of their jobs, and that parenting simply falls into the niche that already exist. 

In fact, most of the examples Waldmeir cites ultimately come down to (gasp!) whether or not the individual is doing his or her job: you can fire someone who demonstrably doesn't do her job, even if that failure is because she's overloaded with kids; you can't fire someone who is overloaded with kids, simply because you're worried that she's going to have trouble doing her job. In other words, to quote Waldmeir quoting the EEOC, "The crux of the problem . . . is stereotyping: the boss is not allowed to make employment decisions based on how he [or she?] thinks a caregiver will (or for that matter, should) behave, but on how they do the job."

The writing, ultimately, is facile, creating a brouhaha out of a perfectly reasonable piece of legislation.  The question in the EEOC guidelines -- and in the various cases coming up through courts, as Waldmeir presents them -- isn't so much whether or not there's a "right" to have children and work; it's whether or not there's a "right" to be a shirker.  We all know that there's no right to be a shirker, but there's no inherent connection between child-rearing and shirking -- ahem, regardless of gender.[2]

And now, back to those emails, although I managed to stay on top of the urgent ones over the course of the day.  Oh, and reading The Weather-Makers so I can lead a discussion about it with incoming first-years on Sunday night.  Yes.  Sunday night.  Of Labor Day weekend.  After I spend all of Saturday meeting with my new advisees.  That's the schedule at my institution, and has been apparently for hallowed decades.  And yet, many of the faculty who advise incoming frosh are women.  With kids.

 

[1] Yeah, okay, that was 9 hours ago, when I started this beast.  It's been a long day, and tomorrow looks like another one.

[2] I have a post in me about the different perceptions of what it means when fathers say, "oh, I can't meet at that time, I have to take care of my kid" versus when mothers say precisely the same thing.  But that will have to wait.

creative problem-solving at Rutgers

It's a case where many people kept their eyes on the big picture rather than on local and particular interests.

aaaaahhhhhhh

That's a sigh of relief.

something to chew on

from Kurt Spellmeyer's essay, "Education for Irrelevance? Or, Joining Our Colleagues in Lit Crit on the Sidelines of the Information Age" (in Composition Studies in the New Millennium):

"To a greater or lesser degree, all the humanities and social sciences appear to be in crisis.  In 1991 at an international conference, two prominent anthropologists openly acknowledged the prospect that their field no longer served any purpose other than to perpetuate itself (Grimshaw and Hart).  No discipline in the entire curriculum has fallen farther and faster than sociology, but a similar decline has begun to overtake the foreign languages.  Economics, linguistics, and philosophy -- within each of these fields the question of survival itself has been raised by some of each discipline's most creative figures.  The problem is not simply that anthropologists and philosophers have turned their back on a public readership, although that is one part of the problem.  There is also the question of the pertinence -- the question what good one's research does -- no matter how many readers one might reach.  Do we really need another book on John Donne or Herman Melville?  Does anyone seriously believe that ethicists writing on stem-cell research played any significant part at the events leading up to the announcement of President George Bush's policy?  Can we redibly claim that work in acadmic religious studies has had a significant impact on American religious life?  . . .

"It seems to me . . . that the most pressing issues our society now [he's writing in 2003] must face are not only quite far from the purview of English studies but also more complex than any single academic discipline can do justice to. . . .

"I have long believed that writing courses offer the one place in entire curriculum where issues like these might be addresses in the synthetic way they require.  To reimagine our undergraduate courses along these lines -- as we have already done for some time now at my own institution -- is to place composition, of all things, at the center of the undergraduate experience.  In economics, students learn about markets; in biology class, they learn about natural systems; in political science, they learn about world politics.  In their writing classes, they might have the chance to connect market forces with ecology, and both of these with global politics, and this is likely to make the lowly writing course the most-coherent educational experience the students will ever get" (85-86).

classes start in 13 days

and, yes, of course I'm counting. 

This means that all of my writerly energy is currently being poured into generating the prefatory material for my syllabi.  The details of course planning are essentially done, and most of the necessary documents and books have been ordered and/or scanned and uploaded to the appropriate places.  So things are falling into place -- even if it feels a bit as though I'm lashing and stowing all the cargo so that I can sail across the North Atlantic in mid-winter.

There are two Really Big Things that I'm ignoring at the moment.  Not blithely, but I am ignoring them.  Both involve communicating with the Dean, which isn't a terribly onerous task.  But he's been a bit slippery on both of these issues over the summer, and we're at a time when I need the slipperiness to end.  Wish me luck.

Wonderful things are going on at home as I speak -- 70s Handyman is putting ceiling fans up all over the house, as well as doing various other necessary maintenance tasks beyond G's and my meager abilities and limited time; and -- AND -- the landscapers are planting beautiful, drought-tolerant things in the front yard.  Pictures will follow, in due course.

I'm mulling over a longer post about not just integrating work and motherhood but some of the other stay-at-home/work-outside-the-home debates that Aspazia's been considering, but that will have to wait.  Ironically or not, I've been mulling it over this week, when Squiss had a day home from school because she had one of those freak 24-hour fevers.  (She woke up this morning practically bouncing off the walls, she was so excited to go back to school.)

Last thing: one of the reasons I've been re-writing my prefatory syllabi stuff is because I'd stopped feeling as though the voice worked.  That's probably because it was a voice generated for that material in a different program at a different institution, and a number of years ago, but I think that it also has to do with blogging.  So here's a short sample from my first-year seminar syllabus, with my thanks . . .

[First-year seminar] moves fast.  There’s no way around it.  This is the only “writing-intensive” course you’ll take at [at this college] – although you’ll find that many courses, in fact, require you to write quite intensively – which means a number of things.  First, it means that you’ll write a total of four graded essays this semester, which will total 20-25 pages of writing.  Second, it means that for each of those graded essays, you’ll do a lot of additional writing: you’ll turn in (and get feedback on) a complete draft, and you’ll do outlines, brainstorming activities, blog posts, and the like as you develop the draft and then develop it further through revision.  Third, it means that you’ll be writing to one another a lot – in the aforementioned blog posts, of course, but also in response to one another’s drafts and other works-in-progress.

You’ll probably feel as though you never stop writing.  The good news is that you’ll get feedback from me, Zombie [the student intern], and your classmates at most steps along the way. 

Participation in the written community of the course – like participation in the embodied community of the course – is required.  That is, you must contribute to the class blog, you must write your papers (and drafts, and so on), you must respond to one another’s writing; similarly, you must come to class; you must participate thoughtfully, substantively, and even humorously in class discussions; you must do the assigned reading.  None of these requirements are arbitrary or petty; every single aspect of this course is designed to help you become a better critical writer, reader, and thinker.

For this reason you’ll get lots of feedback.  After all, how do we learn without it?

If you hate it, let me know sooner rather than later ...

procrastination

I've been working on my freshman seminar furiously for the last several days.  This means that I dive in breathlessly for 90-minute intervals, only to suddenly be thrown out by a big way and need a serious breather before I dive back in.  At its best, writing works that way for me, as well.  I seem to have a 90-minute attention span -- in fact, in while writing my dissertation, I would go through stretches where I organized tasks into chunks that I estimated would take 90-minute intervals.

But life and work are often more fragmented than that, these days.

In any case, I've spent my today's breaks reading (for the most part), so here are the interesting proceeds:

• Mimi Smartypants on the magazine many of us hate to love . . . (hat tip, meg)
• Helen DeWitt on p-p-p-p-punctuation . . . (hat tip, Jenny)
• A brief post from Grace on child's play that includes several good links, including one to an NYT article that will only last a couple more days . . . (as you know, this is something that I have a low-level obsession with)
• Incredibly depressing musings from Timothy Burke about the current financial climate . . .
• And, finally, I give you Aspazia's "birthday wish for integration" of maternal, professional, and spousal identities -- in part because I want to remember to post in response to it sooner rather than later.

bloggy ethics

So here's a question for you ...

G works for a small non-governmental organization (NGO) that concerns itself with collecting and making available (via a searchable database) news items and other reports around human rights issues.  They're researchers, in that sense, although they don't do the "original" or "primary" research themselves.  One goal of the organization is to find and make more widely available reports issued by small NGOs worldwide that otherwise have difficulty publicizing their work.  Another goal is that by creating a single place to find more information on this stuff they'll put more pressure on The Man to address these issues.

(I'm being helpfully vague, aren't I?)

In addition to posting items to the website constantly, they send out a weekly email (signing up is free -- email me if I've now made you wildly curious and/or you want to sign up for the weekly update) that highlights the most significant things they've added to the site.  The email has a huge distribution list, at this point -- journalists, various industry folks, lots of NGOs, random thoughtful individuals, etc., etc.

Yesterday, G found a new blog -- run by Big Name NGO's working group on the same specific area of human rights -- that posts the weekly email to the blog in its entirety, minus the final invitation to sign up for the weekly email yourself.  (That invitation is part of the standard footer that goes out with the email -- although it's insanely long, since they run it in three languages.)  Big Name NGO's blog presents the information as coming from G's NGO, but it still seems slightly off to me.  The email itself is basically a series of links with brief explanatory notes, but there's considerable intellectual work that goes into putting it together.  All the links are (of course) to G's NGO's website, but still ... Why paste the email text into the blog in full, rather than a notice that it's out, and here's a link to it?  (G points out that they couldn't do that as immediately, since his NGO doesn't post the update to their website until a day or two later . . . to encourage people to sign up for the update.)

What do you think?

learning curves and literacy

My former boss is someone who describes herself as "working to deadline."  "In other words," she continues, "I procrastinate."  Seeing as she's also a phenomenally motivated and productive workaholic, and that she's OCD, she actually combines these traits to figure out ways to use her procrastination productively.

For example, she almost always some task that she isn't doing that she calls the "engine": it pushes everything else along because she'll go to such great lengths of avoid doing it.  (For example, she did triathlons while in graduate school.  "I had a lot of time on my hands in graduate school," she'll explain.  "You see, there was this really big thing I wasn't writing.")

I've been doing that all this week, and trying to make peace with it.  I've gotten a great deal ticked off my list -- email messages sent, things put into motion for the start of the semester, errands run, and the like.  (A current colleague calls this "swatting flies."  Also apt.)  I still have much of that sort to do, but part of the reason I've been moving at this pace has been because I'm tired -- from all the travel, in part -- and re-entry is moving slowly this time.  (Both G and I have complained to one another about the downside of this summer of wonderful trips: the time at home has been pressured for work, and so hasn't felt terribly, well, summery.)  August 20 is when things will heat up on campus, and I'm both looking forward to and utterly dreading that moment.

The big thing that I'm avoiding is, as usual, working on The Book.  I made modest progress this morning in thinking about it, but then hit a small snag and have huddled down and hidden ever since.  (But I filed my entire to-be-filed stack!)  My current learning curve is a slow one with that particular project.  I suppose that's to be expected, since I'm in the midst of incredibly steep learning curves in my day-to-day administrative work and in the other realms in which I write.  I need this one to speed up, though, or at least the rate at which I feel competent to produce to speed up.  I'm getting worried (again) about my ability to keep going with it, about my commitment to it.  This is a cyclical worry, which is something that I'm also trying to make peace with.

I'm interested in the idea of learning curves more generally, in part because when we talk about them we (well, I, since I'm extrapolating from my own experience here) imagine them looking something like this:
smooth, consistent progress.  Now, anyone who teaches knows that learning curves and processes are much more uneven and interesting than that, but that doesn't stop us from being frustrated with our own progressions (and lack thereof).

I've been thinking about learning processes of late because of the conjunction of Tricksy learning to walk and Squiss learning to read.  Squiss has always been something of a slow-and-steady progresser, while Tricksy seems to move in more leaps and starts, with a kind of momentary lag between desire and success.  I was talking to Squiss's teacher about some of this this morning, because she brought a book (that she'd made by stapling together pages) home the other day.  She's made books before, but this was the first to include a substantial amount of text: cat, mat, vase (spelled "vese"), and so on.  But what was most interesting to us was that every single one of the words was spelled backwards.  So, T-A-C for "cat."

I wanted to ask her teacher if this was typical.  (And, sure, there was a vague dyslexia question in the backs of our minds, more in terms of wondering whether or not we should be keeping an eye on this than anything else.)  It is -- and, apparently, it's something that kids do before they can really read.  In a couple of months, she explained, Squiss will really be reading and this will disappear. 

I found this fascinating, and we had a great conversation about it.  Squiss can sound out words and sentences, but it takes a lot of effort.  And sometimes she'll see words and recognize them for themselves without that step in what is clearly "reading," but it's not the norm yet.  It somehow makes perfect sense that while you're focused on the letters that make up the words -- rather than the words as entities in themselves -- it would really matter in what order the letters go, as long as they're all there.  Montessori Maven further explained that many kids will start out with the letters all over the page, in no order or grouping that makes sense to adult eyes.

There's something about this logic that feels as though it could help me sort through my own writing issues right now: letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, books.  (Hmm.  That makes it all seem linear and necessarily progressive, doesn't it?)  I've written before about the local issues/big picture problem and I -- and perhaps we all -- have in working on a large project.  I think that part of the problem for me right now is that I don't quite know what order of magnitude I need to focus on.  I've spent the summer reading for the big picture -- the theoretical framework -- and while I'm not nearly done, I've made good progress.  But I'm feeling today a bit as though I'm trying to write a sentence without knowing what the letters are; and I'm not sure how to go about recognizing the letters.

I'm tempted to keep filing and avoid this until Monday, but that also feels a bit like a kiss of death.  The better alternative is probably to commit to a full hour of sorting this out before letting myself slide into the fussy work of tying up the week.