Writing Maternity

solo parenting

In Kyla's comment on my last post, she mentioned being incredibly grateful for a partner in the work of child-rearing, particularly in light of realizing just how tough it must have been for her mother to raise her alone.  That, combined with M. l'O's current five-day trip to New York for work and my ongoing amazement on how W2 and her military-wife peers do it for months on end, has me thinking about how the psychological burdens of being a single parent change with the age of your kids.

(The other theme, clearly, being that of this fall: holy crap my kids are growing up.)

Neither M. l'O nor I travel for work an enormous amount.  It probably comes out to a total of less than three weeks per year for each of us, and it's generally pretty widely spaced.  And it's interesting to think about how the challenges differ.  When it was just Squiss, or when the girls were both much younger, it mostly felt (to me) as though it was about entertainment: What am I going to do to keep these small children occupied?  Toddlers are exhausting: they run around, they get into stuff, they need lots of new things, and they (mostly) can't quite play the games you remember playing as a kid.  I was lucky, and had kids that mostly slept through the night early on, and so that particular problem wasn't as serious.  But I can remember one day when M. l'O was away to meet his new nephew when Tricksy was 4 weeks and Squiss was 3, when Tricksy refused to nap all day and (of course) wasn't yet sleeping through the night, and I can't really remember how I made it through.  I do remember that friends came over that night with pizza, and that their presence may well have saved us all.

Now that the girls are older, the challenges with flying solo are a bit different.  Logistics are both easier and harder: while they can feed and mostly dress themselves, that means that we have to negotiate their rhythms in the morning to go off to school.  And being older means more logistical complications: Wednesday evening (M. l'O gets back Thursday), Squiss has soccer practice in the late afternoon -- and we've found that one parent can't take both kids and expect Tricksy to sit by the sideline and watch while the parent helps out; then, half an hour after soccer ends, it's Squiss's Back-to-School night, which isn't particularly kid-friendly.  I've solved the problems, with a late-afternoon playdate and a babysitter, but it feels like a lot of moveable parts.

(Columbus Day weekend he's going to Vegas with his college roommates.  In addition to usual Saturday morning chaos -- simultaneous soccer practice and music class, combined with French class for both kids right afterwards -- I've been invited to give a presentation to my institution's Board of Trustees.  [Big, huge, important opportunity for the program, so there's no way I'm saying no.]  So it's a structure that can't really be done solo, and now there's NO parent.  We're calling in the village, big time, and may skip something.)

The emotional complexities also get more fraught when it's just me with the two of them.  This morning, we were running a tiny bit late getting out the door -- more because we're still not used to having to get Squiss to school by 8:00 AM, after a summer of mushier start times -- and then Tricksy thew a good-bye fit when I dropped her off.  I was in tears as I drove Squiss to school, and then had to explain to my already superego-laden eldest why I was upset. 

Some of that emotional stuff has to do with the loss of nap-time, although with Squiss reading and Tricksy loving to look at books there are ways we get [short] breaks even without naps.  But it also has to do with the timing of this particular trip: It's my third week of the semester and Squiss's second week back at school.  I'm not really used to the new pace, and neither are we as a family.  So doing it all without my partner is*hard* -- harder than it would be to do it, say, in another week or two, once the new routine has sunk in a bit.

balancing acts

I've been wondering a bit about my recent silence. Some of it came from happy immersion is summer research -- I had so many words flying around my brain that, somehow and somewhat unusually, I didn't have them flying around here.  And then the semester started.  It's all been good, but it's all added up to . . . silence.

But now my semester is off and running, with various administrative crises resolved or at least mitigated and what looks to be shaping into a wonderful class.  My daughters are suddenly among the bigger kids on campus, as I watch my colleagues' infants and toddlers running around campus events.  We've complated and started various household projects.  We saw family.  We went camping.  We swam a lot.  Not only did I not blog, but I barely read blogs (the two go together, for me, because it's always about the conversation[s].)

There was lots of talk this summer about balance, and I've been meaning to weigh in.  But, in fact, my own pursuit of synchronic balance made it difficult to find time to write here, so I'm belated.  So be it.

What's pulled me back in is the question of whether work-life balance is possible, and particularly whether it's possible for academic women.  (It connects with some of what people were talking about over the summer.  And it pings both what bluemilk discusses about working mother guilt and what mommy is asks about mommy blogs more generally, since this is what I think they're for [at least in part].)  And then there are other connections with Tenured Radical's post this weekend about saying no.

It seems to me that it's important to remember amidst all of this that careers, as we understand them in the 20th and 21st centuries, are not meant to be one component of a whole, balanced "person."  They developed unevenly over the course of the 19th century as one component of a whole, balanced familial unit.  And, so, yes: basically, professional careers all assume 1) that you have a wife at home, and 2) that you are happy seeing your kids for a few hours in the evenings and on weekends.  (And that, in fact, it would be fine to miss the periodic evening or weekend as when, say, your institution requires to spend AN ENTIRE SATURDAY meeting with incoming first-year students.)  One of our current struggles is that we're trying to graft new(ish) notions of parenting and family onto old(ish) careers. 

They don't mix well.  And, yes, they're harder on individuals and families who are crossing the gender lines that were written into the original roles.  In other words: on women who want careers, and on families where two people work. 

But there's another new concept that's troubling things for us all, and that's the concept of balance itself.  I wrote about synchronic balance above because I think that it's important to remember that balance -- think of balancing acts -- doesn't have to be understood as static.  M. l'O taught me this, although I struggle with it.  My notion of balance is the notion I see circulating: a little bit but not too much of everything, all the time.  It's a static notion: we're poised, forever balanced and perfect.  His notion, by contrast, is that you're constantly in motion, tilting in one direction and then compensating by tilting in the other.  Balance, then, is diachronic, achieved through time rather than in a single moment.

I tend to think that I'm not so good with lurching from extreme to extreme, but then I realize that as an academic that's what I *do*: I burn every single cylinder to ash during the semester, and then use the summer to re-charge.  I take more time with my family.  I read novels and watch TV.  I read and write without worrying about how to generate discussion questions with students.  I luxuriate in long expanses of time, of days that go uninterrupted by meetings. 

I would love to achieve a daily, moment-by-moment balance that gives me enough time for children, husband, self, friends, extended family, research, teaching, and administrative work.  But that's a dream -- not just because the days aren't long enough, but also because (frankly) life isn't still; it's constantly in motion, and so we have to be, too.

Must be the middle of August.

I have two major indicators: one good (especially the final paragraph), one annoying.

when you have a spare half-hour

In graduate school, I felt as though I was constantly tripping over writing advice.  One professor advocated writing religiously for an hour a day, no matter what.  Another recommended defining your daily goal in terms of tasks rather than time, because that way you could reward yourself if you finished early.

I find myself, this afternoon, having finished my writing task for the day with a half-hour before I'm due to pick up Squiss and take her home.  She loves camp so desperately that she won't thank me for coming too early, and the cafe on campus closes right after lunch during the summer.  I'll probably wander over slowly, staring at far away things in lovely contrast to my computer screen, and swing by the library to pick up a book I'm excited to read.  (Perhaps I'll get some light reading while I'm there.)

What do you for a reward when time is limited?  Particularly when the most urgent and necessary part of the reward is walking away from your computer?

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.

----------

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.

-----

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. 

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.

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.

palimpsests

Two good high school friends of M. l'O's got married (years ago).  They didn't date (seriously) until after they were both finished college, although he asked her to their senior prom and she said, "no."  At their fifth reunion, someone asked her, "So what do you think you'll tell your children; what's the moral of that story?"  Without skipping a beat, she replied, "Be nice to everybody."

I'm having one of those months.  Last week, my institution had one of our visits for our re-accreditation.  One of the reviewers was the dean at an institution at which I just turned down a job offer.  (And, yes, I turned *him* down, not a department chair or some other individual.)

This weekend, I have multiple layers going on.  I'm visiting a small college to consult about their writing program.

1. It's a program with which, years ago, I interviewed unsuccessfully for a position as assistant director.
2. The "panel of experts" includes someone at that same institution where I just turned down the job offer.
3. Another person on that panel is a good friend and former colleague.
4. Two other people on the panel are professors at my alma mater, with whom I consulted about writing in the fall (and who, although not trained in the field, are now in charge of the writing center).

(Another person on the panel is the friend of a friend, but that hardly seems worth mentioning in this context.)

But then, to top it all off, the same institution is hosting *another* gathering on a different topic this weekend, for which many of the participants are staying at the same hotel as I am.  As a result, one of my current colleagues and two of my favorite undergrad profs. are staying at my hotel.  I've already met up with the latter.

I'm just sayin', M. l'O's friend had it right: be nice to everybody.  After all, you never know what might happen.