Writing Maternity

limbo

I've been waiting for news from my institution since late May on a major proposal.  It's not the first step in the process, but it's nevertheless a major proposal that my department put together on my behalf (and with lots of my input) and asked the administration to consider.  We thought that we were going to get an answer fairly quickly, but in fact we've heard nothing since several of the senior faculty met with the President at the beginning of the summer.

At first I was glad not to hear, in part because I was on vacation and getting bad news while on vacation would have sucked, to put it mildly.  And then once I was back it seemed kind of moot, because, really, it's summer.

I finally realized last night -- as part of a longer conversation with M. l'O -- that the waiting is really wearing me down.  The proposal has wide-reaching ramifications for my work life and trajectory, and certain setbacks in the process last spring had me deeply angry at the institution in a kind of blanket way, as well as my non-departmental colleagues.  As we've passed the apex of summer and are starting that inexorable downward slope into fall, I'm finding it incredibly difficult to feel energized because I still don't know what the outcome to this proposal will be. 

reunion season

Driving me back up to campus Thursday afternoon during our near-daily car swap*, M. l'Oignon looked around at the various white tents and other party paraphernalia in place for the college's reunion weekend and observed that it made him all the sadder that we won't be going to our 15th reunion this Memorial Day.

(Instead, thanks to his employer's semi-annual trustees' meeting and a research grant from my institution, we're going to Europe for three weeks, specifically [and in this order] to the south of France, Paris, and London.  I know, it's rough.)

I'd looked forward in the abstract more to this coming reunion than to previous ones.  I felt lukewarm about the 5th, whose chief value, to my mind, had been that it would be a kind of coming-out party for M. l'Oignon and myself: we'd gotten involved the previous fall, but hadn't been involved during college, and so outing ourselves to people who knew the pre-history was something to look forward to.  (It was, indeed, quite satisfying.)  And I felt downright negatively towards the 10th, as though I'd simply be hanging out with a bunch of people who'd been his friends but not mine, as though my college friendships had withered, and so on.  I was also seven months pregnant at the time, so part of my crankiness may have been the sense that I'd be hanging out with a lot of drunk people when I couldn't drink myself.

The 10th turned out to be a blast, not least because of the pleasure of really connecting with people who *hadn't* been my or our closest friends in college, the people who felt like missed opportunities.  And I may have felt less alienated 10 years out than I had five years earlier.  At the 5th, I was in the midst of dissertating and was possibly at the height of my graduate school disdain for non-academic professions.  At the reunion, I was reading "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" for a summer seminar on narrative, and so hearing about my classmates' plans to enter business school or to work for this or that law firm felt deeply ironic.  ("I really like M[ergers] & A[cquisitions]" I remember one woman saying.  After making partner at a big firm, she left and, last I heard, had gone to cooking school.  That seems to be the great escapist fantasy of our generation.)

At the 10th, by contrast, people in those careers were less enamored of them, more able to see them as, well, careers.  And I, having -- frankly -- grown up a good bit, could also see that my choice of the academy was also simply the choice of a *career*, rather than some morally superior state of being.  (I'm probably being a bit harsh to my younger self, but I do think that one of the unfortunate and necessary elements of graduate school is a kind of conviction that your world is better and more satisfying than any other.  This may be true of any incredibly time-intensive career during its apprenticeship period.  I'm deeply torn when I hear about smart, interesting students who plan to go to graduate school: while I'm excited for them, I worry that they don't realize just how impossible it is to get the perfect job.)

The 15th feels in the abstract as though it would be more like the 10th than the 5th, with the added pleasure of the fact that there are sure to be lots of kids running around Squiss and Tricksy's ages.  In addition, I think that it's easiest to see people from your past when you're happy with your present; the current unbloggable firestorm aside, I'm deeply happy with where my career has taken me and most days I like my life enormously.  I don't have much to prove to my college classmates, and can even look forward with humor untouched by bitterness to seeing Famous Poet.**  In addition, I've corresponded more in the last year with my undergraduate mentors than I have since my first couple of years out, and so the thought of seeing them seems more natural and less random than it has in the past. 

I don't feel much nostalgia for college itself.  I never quite found the intellectual and social community I craved there, and if there's a period that feels as though it was, in retrospect, quite nearly perfect in that regard, it was probably my first two or three years of graduate school.  But as I write that I realize that my current situation goes that one better.  The one great thing about the firestorm is that it's made me all the more aware of my extraordinarily supportive community here, and the ways that it actually one-ups that grad school life because it's more varied (in discipline and field) and outward-looking. 

* We live close enough to campus to walk, but I drop both girls at school in the morning, which requires enough travel in a variety of directions that I take the car.  In the interests of fairness, as well as for a variety of other reasons M. l'O picks them up.  This means that at some point during the day I drive the car back down to him, either walking up or (more often) catching a ride.
** Famous Poet and I managed to be English majors at the same small college, graduating the same year, without ever taking a class with one another. That's largely because he gravitated toward Famous Old-School Critic and others of the senior faculty, while I gravitated toward several professors who (honestly) seemed both younger and More Hip.  There was always seem slight antipathy to our awareness of one another, I think, but I've never been able to pinpoint its origins or reasons.  When he came to Big Nearby City to start graduate school at Big Old Rich U (I went to Small New Poor U, in the same town), he then acted -- when we ran into each other at mutual friends' parties -- as though we'd been best friends and had some kind of shared history.  That pattern continued for some time as we crossed paths at reunions, and it always struck me as vaguely bizarre. He'd been or seemed to impressed with himself to talk to me while we were in college, and yet 2 or 5 or 10 years later always seemed delighted to see me.

arguments

There's a discussion going on over at The Valve about arguments in academic writing.  We humanists seem to need to have this conversation periodically, particularly in the last couple of decades, over whether or not we make "arguments" and, of course, what exactly we mean when we say that we do or we don't.  I think that we make arguments.  But I think that "argument" means something slightly different in academic discourse than it means in popular discourse, and I think that this difference confuses all of us.

Because I think that at their best, academic arguments aren't nearly as oppositional as popular arguments are.  They engage with other thinkers' and writers' ideas in order to develop and advance an idea or interpretation.  But "engagement" doesn't have to mean "disagreement."  Versions of this idea inform both Joe Harris' textbook Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts and the pedagogy of the Rutgers Writing Program.  At their best, academic arguments -- or, rather, at its best, academic inquiry -- seeks answers to pressing intellectual puzzles or problems or questions.  Those puzzles might arise from a sense that criticism had been blind to the complexities or nuances of a particular text, or that it as overlooked certain crucial issues; or they might arise from a reading of critical disagreements; or they might arise from the realization that a certain idea or issue or question or theory helps us understand something better than we did before.  In order to develop a response to the puzzle, you're going to have to make assertions.  And offer evidence (which must be analyzed to be evidence).  And you're going to have to engage with the ideas and writings of others.

It's not "argument" in the sense that Op-ed pieces are "arguments."  But it's more than "insight" or "description" because it cares about the implications or broader significance of the initial insight that gives it birth.

and, in yet another small world moment ...

my high school boyfriend's younger brother just found me on Facebook.

discipline

The price of a phenomenally productive December and early-to-mid January seems to be a late-January and February in which I'm finding it extraordinarily difficult to settle down and focus.  This is in part the problem of the beginning of the semester.  There are myriad small details of things that I have to pay attention to and, in paying attention to them in order to launch everything, I seem to sacrifice the longer and more sustained kinds of attention that I require for writing. 

I've tried blocking out writing time on my calendar and thus far it hasn't been working.  I probably need to think more in terms of writing goals than writing time, and wait to reserve the time until I know how I want to use it.  (This seems banal and elementary, as I write it, but I hadn't quite put it all together yet.)

In the fall, I did set out my writing goals and I actually met them.  The problem is that they were all tied to Big, Immoveable Deadlines and so, of course, I had to meet them.  I'm now facing a more amorphous period, and have to figure out what deadlines I want to set and how I want to make them also Big and Immoveable. 

Here we go.

irons, toasting

I have too many irons in the fire right now and, as a consequence, am feeling stretched thin and constantly distracted.  I'm supposed to hear "by the end of January" about the national grant that my institution nominated me for, and I'm the midst of a high-stakes conversation with the Dean, so there's always a question mark in my mind about both when and what I'm going to hear next.

post-holiday rboc

• I learned this last summer, and it isn't as though it comes as a surprise, but three toddlers + one big kid + four adults does not make for a relaxing three days, under the best of circumstances (and we had the best).
• Squiss is quite forgiving of minor mishaps.  Due to post office blunders (mostly beyond our control) Santa delivered two of her most-desired presents late.  Not only did she forget about them on Christmas morning (totally sidetracked by the "billion of presents" she found under the tree), but she also explained quite calmly when the gifts arrived that Santa had delivered them late because "the elves didn't finish making them in time."  No big deal, guys.  Unfortunately, 1) this is probably the only year we'll be able to get away with this, and 2) this may set us up for endless hoping for the desired-but-unreceived gift in later years.
• One of those gifts was this toy kitchen.  I have no maybe-this-isn't-feminist-enough anxieties with this particular gift because cooking and food shopping are some of the most easily shared chores in our house -- I'm not even entirely comfortable thinking of cooking as a chore, given how much G and I both enjoy it.  And if I'd had any concerns, they were immediately put to rest when Squiss took the kitchen's arrival as an opportunity not to play "mommy and sweetie" or some other version of "house" but to open a restaurant.  (There's irony to this: G has long harbored restauranteur ambitions, which I've tried to laugh out of him.  My father grew up in the Jewish deli his parents owned, and I've worked a number of food service jobs in the last 15 years, so it was quite clear to me that G had no real idea what he was talking about.  But my mom gave him Kitchen Confidential this Christmas and it may just have cured him -- only to have Squiss break out with it.)  She talked a good bit about how Tricksy was her "assistant," so we offered "sous-chef" as an alternative.  Our first meal was a vegetable soup with a fruit sauce, which she assured us she'd made sure to serve very hot.  (The set of dishes we got to go with it came with an oven mitt -- she scolded Tricksy for opening the oven door and taking pots out with her bare hands ...)
• Tricksy's language is coming along by leaps and bounds.  She's also playing with similarities in sound, proudly showing me both the "guck" and the "dguck" this morning.  (That's "truck" and "duck," for those who don't speak toddler.)
• Speaking of language, Squiss read me all of Hop on Pop a week ago, and the other day worked through most of Are You My Mother? [*]
• Oh, and the MLA paper?  It went really well.  As did my MLA generally -- for the second time in a decade of irregular attendance.  The last time it had to do with the job market, and this time it was more about general schmoozing and seeing friends.  It looks as though I'm going to get a consulting gig out of this.  Not bad for a day and a half.
• My office was so cold yesterday (59 deg.) that I called maintenance and then went home.  Today it seems a bit warmer (maybe 65), and I was better dressed, so I'll stay put for a bit.  I went to college and graduate school in Newingland, so I can work at 65; at 59, my hands get so cold I start to daydream about a set of matchgirl mitts.
• While a full week off of school and work was lovely in many ways -- and G and the girls had a good time while I was away -- we were all happy to be back yesterday.  Tricksy ran in delighted this morning to see Wild Duck, her head teacher, back from vacation, and practically broke down the door when we asked at home if she wanted to go see The Wiggle and Alpine Al, her two best friends.  And Squiss was so excited to see Haggis and Gemstone (not to mention Gemstone's little sister, who just started at the school), that she could hardly be bothered to kiss me and Tricksy good-bye.

*  I have very, very fond memories of that book as a child, centered on two things: the simple image of the intrepid baby bird going around and asking his question (not to mention his conviction, evidence from the world aside, that he's right), and the name for the big truck: a "snort."  (We called many of them this, in my family.)  Re-reading it with Squiss a few years ago, I discovered that I can still live with it, except for one page, which ruins the entire thing.  As the baby bird sets off to find his mother, he walks right by her while she's pulling a worm out of the ground and doesn't see/recognize her.  In other words, her food-gathering activity doesn't separate them once but twice.  Mothering and food-gathering end up being antithetical to one another.

This is related to my adult objection to Horton Hatches the Egg.  For all that I (still) love the message about blended families, not to mention the message about nurture trumping nature, I really don't like the demonization of the mother who doesn't want to spend all of her time in the nest sitting on the egg: she's frivolous and selfish and basically unredeemed -- despite the vivid depiction of how miserable it can be to spend all that time sitting on the egg (how else to dramatize the power of Horton's faithfulness?).

feminism and motherhood

It turns out that when you lean really heavily on something that you've already written to write a conference paper, and when said conference paper is going to be held absolutely, positively to its time limit, it's relatively easy to get the draft of the first two-thirds of it done.  (I can't really write the final third until next week, after I've met with the Director of Institutional Research, since she's analyzing the data for me.  I'm also pretty sure that that final third is going to be a bitch to write, so please don't hate me now.)  This kind of thing often doesn't work for me, but this time my MLA paper is reporting on a pilot program of courses that we ran last spring and the study of student writing that we did to assess the program.  Both the grant proposal I wrote earlier this fall (for more funding for the study) and the MLA paper have to describe the local conditions and the pilot program itself -- which I've had to write up before (to propose the program, to report on it in my annual report last spring, etc.).  While they're doing so to different audiences (SLAC for the former, WPA for the latter), the essential building blocks are the same.

Papers are trickling in, as are the course evaluations for the first-year seminars.  (I really like seeing the students from my first-year seminar at the end of the semester.  There's something triumphant about getting through the first semester of college, and it's nice to get to celebrate that with them.)  I'll turn to the papers on Monday and spend two days in a complete grading vortex.  Then I'll turn back to the MLA paper on Wednesday, finishing it by Friday so that I can enjoy a few days of real holiday time with G and the girls before heading off to Chicago in late December.

In the mean time, I want to work through my answers to these questions from bluemilk.

How would you describe your feminism in one sentence? When did you become a feminist? Was it before or after you became a mother?
I often resist definitions, but I think that my feminism rests on three intertwined convictions: that gender is and must be a primary analytic lens ("a" not "the," mind you); that all people have what Martha Nussbaum calls "Central Human Functional Capabilities" and that societies, cultures, and governments are unjust if they systematically block individuals' access to resources that allow them to develop those capabilities; and that I want my daughters to grow up and live in a world where notions of "appropriate for girls" and "appropriate for women" aren't really operative -- and particularly aren't limiting.

It's hard for me to remember a time when I didn't believe these things -- perhaps not quite in these words -- but I know that my arrival at college coincided with a significant feminist awakening.  At my undergrad. institution, we called female students "women" rather than "girls," and that was a dramatic shift for me.  In addition, that fall was the most active period on campus in my entire four years there around issues of sexual violence.  There was a lot of publicity around issues of rape and sexual harrassment, and a number of "Take Back the Night" events.  It was a huge eye-opener.

What has surprised you most about motherhood?
I'm really not sure.  All of it and yet none of it.  Perhaps how difficult it is to strike balances of all different kinds.

How has your feminism changed over time? What is the impact of motherhood on your feminism?
I'm much more oriented on questions of the future than I used to me, and much more aware of how coded all kinds of expectations and ideas are.  Perhaps most of all, feminism is now about a strange third category for me.  It isn't simply about my choices  -- about how I live my life, about kinds of activism -- it's also about how to help my daughters fight resist an incredibly gendered culture of childhood.  It's not unlike the impact teaching had on my feminism since, in this instance at least, my role as a teacher and my role as a mother have significant similarities.

What makes your mothering feminist? How does your approach differ from a non-feminist mother’s? How does feminism impact upon your parenting?
I think that I worry about the effects of popular culture more than the less-feminist parents I know, and try to establish more of a bulwark against them.  I'm also aware of providing a feminist model in the ways that I try to balance career/vocation and family -- a career that 's just as important to our family as G's.  And while dividing parenting is a neverending process, we work hard to share it equally: we're both engaged with our daughters' schools, we share cooking and food-shopping, we alternate who puts them to bed, and so on.  All of those choices are ones that I think of as feminist.  They're also the only thing that makes sense for who G and I are as people and as a couple.

Do you ever feel compromised as a feminist mother? Do you ever feel you’ve failed as a feminist mother?
I don't quite know how to separate these from feeling compromised or like a failure more generally.  G was away for four days a couple of weeks ago during an incredibly busy time for me, at the end of an utterly exhausting semester.  I always struggle with patience, and I failed completely in the kinds of patience I needed with the girls during those days.  That's a failure on all counts, to my mind, although I also wonder if it isn't important for the girls to see that sometimes Mama is tired and overwrought by daily life -- so that their expectations for themselves don't insist on seamless perfection.

Has identifying as a feminist mother ever been difficult? Why?
No.  It's too much at the center of things, I think.  I'm also lucky to be in an environment where most of the people I know and see regularly have parenting values that are similar to mine.  Perhaps the stickiest wicket is with the parents' of some of my daughter's friends, who are imprinting a very different kind of femininity on those girls than I want to on mine.  I try to go with gently identifying differences, and so far that seems to be working.  The princess thing is one of the hardest to negotiate, as I've written about here before.

Motherhood involves sacrifice, how do you reconcile that with being a feminist?
I think that being a social being involves certain kinds of sacrifice; feminism, for me, doesn't mean an automatic free pass from difficult choices -- choices that at times involve sacrifice.  I guess I'd refer to Nussbaum's capabilities list, for one avenue toward reconciliation.  But I'd also worry if I felt that I was sacrificing more than G, and I don't think that's the case.  We've both made choices.  We're both constantly balancing all kinds of demands and desires and priorities.

If you have a partner, how does your partner feel about your feminist motherhood? What is the impact of your feminism on your partner?
He's right there with me.  I think that our choices require certain kinds of awareness and self-consciousness in him, but I think that overall those are awarenesses and areas of self-consciousness that he's drawn to, anyway.  A case in point, that's about partnering as much as parenting: when we got married, we both changed our names.  And there was never a moment when he thought that I should simply change my last name to his.

If you’re an attachment parenting mother, what challenges if any does this pose for your feminism and how have you resolved them?
While there are elements of the philosophy that fit with my mothering, I don't really fit the category. 

Do you feel feminism has failed mothers and if so how? Personally, what do you think feminism has given mothers?
I think that feminism has given mothers -- and women -- a better sense of options, and I hope a sense of the struggle and balance that any set of choices embody.  I worry that certain strands of feminism have difficulty reconciling the complexity of people's lives, and that the critical judgment necessary for activism can sometimes collapse into a judgmental attitude that divides unnecessarily and counter-productively.

powers of imagination

I have three intertwining thoughts batting around my head this evening that I’m trying to sort out; we’ll see how it goes.   (long post ahead)

The first comes out of tonight’s bedtime reading of Astrid Lindgren’s Mirabelle.  It’s a somewhat bizarre story – a little girl is given a magic seed, the seed rewards her assiduous over-watering by growing into a doll, the doll comes alive (for her) and becomes her beloved companion and daughter-surrogate – but nothing out of the realm of the norm for twentieth-century picture books vaguely inspired by folk and fairy tales.  The thing that I find the most interesting about it is the narrative voice: it’s narrated by the little girl herself to an audience she addresses very specifically; and she’s quite concrete about timing (she’s 8 now but got the doll seed when she was 6) and a final invitation to come and visit to meet the doll (I’m paraphrasing, but it’s basically, “Follow the narrow lane that leads to our house, and you’ll find me and Mirabelle at the gate, waiting!”).

We got the book about a year ago when a local kids’ library was having a book sale.  It was in heavy rotation for several months, but hasn’t been a favorite recently.  When she pulled it out this evening, Squiss announced, looking vaguely amused at herself: “This is a silly book!”  When we read the final page, she shrugged philosophically and remarked, “But we can’t go visit because [insert shrug here] we’re not in the book!”

She’s figuring something out about fantasy and reality, as well as fantasy and realism as literary genres, and I’m finding it fascinating to watch it all unfold.  I’ve blogged before about how she’s an imaginative kid and also a storyteller.  She’s been narrating her life since she was less than three, and she freely appropriates characters from stories we’ve read to her or that she’s learned about on the playground.  3 and 4 are, for that matter, the ages when kids tend to have imaginary friends – I had one named Betty, and my sister had an entire family (called the “Sillees” [accent on the second syllable]); but what interests me about Squiss’s version of this is that, unlike many kids with such fantasy playmates, she always maintains a clear distinction between the things she’s pretending and the things she isn’t. 

Along these same lines, she’ll often ask whether a particular figure or place in a new book exists “in this world.”  For example, we just got The Seal Mother out of the library, which tells the story of a selkie and her descendents.  So Squiss, understandably, wanted to know whether or not selkies exist, and I’ll admit that I didn’t have a great answer.  I want the realm of faerie to be open to her for as long as possible, but there’s also a worthwhile distinction between things that are simply (simply?!) made up by identifiable individuals and things that are, well, more mythic in stature.  Ultimately she’ll learn the difference, and I haven’t decided yet whether that’s a difference I want to start communicating now. 

This brings me back to the fantasy-reality opposition from another angle.  The one component of Squiss’s active imagination that we note with something less than pleasure (“concern” and “worry” are too strong) is her utter antipathy to anything she determines to be “scary.”  Scary things, interestingly enough, populate the cinematic realm more than the literary realm for her: after a few viewings, Mulan was deemed too scary (it opens with the Huns, and they are pretty scary), and although she’d been quite excited to see it, she insisted that we turn off Ratatouille after only a few scenes (which, again, are probably the most alarming of the film).  “Scary” certainly seems to have something to do with pacing, soundtrack, and general volume for her; it also seems to have something to do with perceived danger and/or emotional trauma – which makes me think that she’s imagining herself into the story in ways that are too powerful for her to make sense of, ways that she’s learned not to do with books.

(Two digressive notes here.  First, one of the first books I can remember her loving was a board book Curious George and the Bunny, in which George lets a baby bunny out of the cage only to have it run away.  There was a particular page where you saw George being sad because he’d lost the bunny, and Squiss didn’t care anything for the before or after at age 18 months: she just wanted that scene, over and over again.  Second, it’s probably obvious from this post as well as other things I’ve written, but I’ll say it directly: Squiss watches very little television.  This came about organically: G and I essentially never have the TV on except in the evenings after the girls are asleep, so it wasn’t as though we had to make a decision about whether or not we were going to “let” her watch.  When she was about two, we introduced her to Blue’s Clues and have since gotten her The Electric Company, both of which are a familiar and beloved treat, at this point.  She asks to watch TV very rarely, and has other ways to veg out when she needs to tune out the world.  But she may be somehow less equipped than some of her agemates to process the medium.)

It’s that sense-making component that brings me to my third thought of the evening, which has to do with Squiss’s relation to the whole princess thing.  (“I love princesses,” she’s taken to announcing periodically.)  A year ago, as we were starting to offer the occasional homeopathic princess, we rented Mulan and watched it with her.  (We also got that and Aladdin out of the library, which was a fiasco.)  She enjoyed it, hiding her face in the neck of the neighboring parent during the Hun episodes, and Mulan has since been a fixture in her fantasy games.  Part of this (no doubt) is the prevalence of princesses on the playground.  (Although I’m pleased to observe that Gemstone has no substantial interest in princesses.)  But Mulan is sometimes an alter-ego for Squiss, and at other times simply a (neutral) name for a character.  She’s just reappeared after a fairly brief absence (replaced by Cinderella).

While I can’t stand the plastic nature of the princess phenomenon in its current incarnation, I can remember being an eight-year-old who loved building and re-building houses for my Barbies, not to mention all the ways in which my friends and I worked out questions about sex by having Barbie and Ken go at it.  I actually bought Squiss a book of princess paper dolls the other day – partly because I’d given her free choice and didn’t want to go back on it, and partly because it seemed like a relatively innocent alternative to the small plastic figurines (etc) that many of her friends have.

And Squiss’s imagination feels to me like her safety net in this.  Her willingness to think about whether or not she can enter into the world of a book may be part of what helps her pull characters out of books and make them do her narrative bidding.  If she’s doing that with Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty as well as Mulan, we’re in good shape.  I wonder if part of the difficulty of the “scary” parts of movies is that they’re too deeply narrative – if she gets caught up in the story and can’t control it, can’t get herself out, somehow.  Who knows.

stretching, cracking my knuckles . . .

and trying to get back to work: these have been this evening's projects.

The strange and lovely thing about weekends -- including long holiday weekends -- when you have kids (at least in my experience) is that they become times when, for the most part, work is verboten.  G and I work hard, often before dawn (me) and after midnight (him) in order to protect our weekend time for family as much as possible.  This has been our choice historically; I'm not always sure that it's the best one for us, and I'm not always sure that it's the choice that we'll continue with into the future, but it's where we are now.  I feel the combined sense of rest and panic that comes from a mid-semester vacation: I took Wednesday off 1) to make the Thanksgiving desserts*, 2) to go to Squiss's school's Thanksgiving lunch potluck **, and 3) because I'd been working so hard Sunday night through Tuesday that I didn't have a brain cell left.  As a result, I haven't done any work in almost a week, which hasn't happened since early August.

Because of that, and as I've been scanning blogs these last few days, I've felt very intensely aware of the difference children make.  A friend of mine thanked her children in the acknowledgments of her book "for making the process of writing both much slower and infinitely more pleasurable," and this is resonating with me now.  Childless academic bloggers, whether single or coupled, have written about getting work of various kinds done this holiday weekend.  Instead, I spent time with my in-laws, read Squiss a million stories, cooked with a 25-pound toddler on my hip, and ran various kinds of errands.  I'm not saying that I'd trade my kids away, or that the childless are missing out on something -- or rather, I'm saying that we're both missing out on something.  I could use (and in some ways would love) the long days of reading and writing that I had before Squiss was born; I'm aware of that loss, although I'd never pay the price that would get me those long days back, and am more than happy with the choice I made to (essentially) give them up.

This brings me, a bit obliquely, to a couple of realizations born of my rapid transition from a binge of writing to total family time.  First, I've gotten a good deal more writing done this semester than I have in a couple of years.  Given the teaching and administrative overload, I'm feeling quite proud of that.  (It can't be over yet, though: I have an MLA talk to write!)  Second, I seem to be a binge writer in a way that I would have found hard to imagine becoming a decade ago, and this concerns me.  (Donna was writing about this, and also about setting goals, which is one catalyst for these thoughts.)  While there's some utility in the binge writing model -- utility that the image doesn't convey -- there's also danger.  Almost every time I've been writing something professionally important -- conference paper, article, proposal -- in the last three years, I've felt as though I had started it too late and was working more frantically in relation to the deadline than I was comfortable.  In working on my project last week, I was utterly blocked for one moment and then suddenly realized that it was because I had been essentially skipping the brainstorming step, which for me is typically some kind of freewriting.  I've re-acquired all the bad habits that I try to teach my students to overcome, and I don't quite know what to do about it.

Part of the problem is that my writing process relied on long stretches of time -- the kind of time one has in, say, graduate school.  The kind of time few (post-graduate school) academics have, but the kind of time that academics with adminstrative roles and academic parents of small children may find in particularly short supply.  I haven't yet figured out how to make small chunks of time work for me, which means that I'm not writing regularly.  That, in turn, means that I waste a good bit of time thinking myself back into my projects when I get a somewhat cleared desk, and that (I fear) the things I'm writing aren't as good as they should and could be.***

This is, I think, one my tasks for next semester.  It's a lighter teaching semester than usual, the payback for this semester's overload.  The challenge will therefore be to maintain intensity while losing some of the stress, and to learn how to keep a steadier pace.

I'll keep you posted.

* I'm the dessert chef in the family.  This Thanksgiving I made an apple pie and a pumpkin clafouti.  The clafouti recipe was straight out of Claudia Fleming's The Last Course, which is an outstanding dessert cookbook.  I sprinkled in pumpkin seeds that I'd first toasted in olive oil and then sprinkled with salt and demerara sugar rather than the hazelnuts she recommends because I'm not a big hazelnut fan.  G and decided this time that the clafouti, while good, doesn't really pack enough pumpkin punch for Thanksgiving.  I make an apple pie every year.  It along with my mother's stuffing, make the meal for me.  This year, I used the new piecrust recipe from Cooks' Illustrated (with vodka!) and am cautiously pleased.  I also sauteed raisins in butter, brandy, and spices before adding them to the filling.

** They'd set up all of the tables in a banquet style, and had the kids sit around them and say, one by one, what they were thankful for.  There was something utterly cliched, but no less moving and lovely for it, in hearing each of these pre-schoolers, with a vaguely embarrassed smile, say shyly some version of, "I'm thankful for my family."

*** The quality issue is mine, not one that I'd generalize.  I don't do my best work with the deadline in plain sight.  Many academics, of course, do.