Geeky Mom

Total pages written this week: 1

Running total: 1

I am struggling to keep up at work. It is a good and a bad thing. The fact that I’m struggling actually means that I’m doing a key part of my job and people are starting to come to me for projects and help. However, I’m not sure I can handle the work I’ve created for myself. I have some strategies for dealing with all of this which I will hopefully begin implementing tomorrow. I’m also–reluctantly–planning to do a little work tonight.

One of the hardest things to deal with is all the little stuff. And nothing bothers me more when the little stuff that falls in my lap is the result of some other system not working. For some reason, for a lot of these things, I am where the buck stops. Another thing that bothers me is people that ask for help on things that are clearly documented, right in front of their face and they haven’t tried following the instructions; they just call me. And I end up saying, “See that big button? Click it.” It’s like people who look in the refrigerator for pickles and they’re right there on the eye-level shelf, but they don’t see them and they don’t really look either–no moving around of jars or anything–and then they yell, “Honey! Where are the pickles?” Too much of my job is like that. At least I get paid for it, I guess.

What’s funny is I was telling someone that I do realize some things need to be clearer, have better documentation, etc., but I haven’t had time to do that cause these people keep calling me.

Why, oh, why, can’t I get a handle on paperwork? Why do I wait until the pile is overflowing, spilling into the floor, before I go through it?

I wish I could hide away from people at work today, so I can get some things done.

Want to make a trip to the library and get some books I need. Maybe I’ll print out the references before I leave.

I need a day off. Can I take Friday? Maybe. Maybe I can let the kids come home that day. Oh, wait, can’t take Friday–running a workshop. Ugh.

Really need to work on the presentations.

Lists, I should make lists.

Put the headphones on and block everyone out.

Why won’t the snow go away?

One of the things the NYT article implied, but didn’t outright state, was that blogging was a little selfish. It was taking away time from the kids. I’ve been thinking about this lately, simply because my own extracurricular activities have taken some time away from things I could be doing with the kids. And the home kind of fell apart over the last few weeks. I mean, we were living on pb & j and hot dogs, mostly because I had too much other stuff to do, none of which I really had to do. The world does not need another novel and it won’t be the end of the world if I don’t finish the book club book. But I was driven, nonetheless. And I feel a little selfish when I take the time to do this. But in a way, I feel entitled. I sacrificed a lot when I had kids–career, money, and mostly time. Now that I feel like I can afford to regain some of that, I feel like I should rather than donate it all back to the kids.

I spent this afternoon at a play date and spent a lot of time talking to the mom–who has five kids, aged 9 mos. to 12. She works one morning a week. She has no time for herself. She’s very organized, but she has activities for the kids 4 out 5 days a week and one on Saturday. I really enjoyed talking to her, but I thought, wow, she would never understand my reading and writing habits.

Which brings me to the room of one’s own. We have a 4 bedroom house. One bedroom for each kid, one for us, and one is Mr. Geeky’s office. My “office” is in the bedroom. It’s not bad, except that my desk is too small, I have no bookshelf (instead, there’s a closet with shelving and the books share space with the sheets), and there’s very little space for filing and computer peripherals. And it’s too dark. I was complaining to Mr. Geeky and he made all these suggestions–a new desk, some good lighting, move the sheets. And I said, but it’s still in the bedroom. I’m not entirely sure what would make me happy in terms of space, but I think the reality is I would like my own room. Not going to happen any time soon. I’ve been using the laptop from work on the weekends (blogging in bed at the moment) and I light being able to move from spot to spot. I’m not really fixated on being in one place. I like changing locations to do my work. So maybe the answer is a laptop and a moving desk. I don’t know. I just know that I feel cramped in my current space and I don’t like working there. I have made a goal for myself to write 15 pages/week in hopes of getting to 200 pages by 5/1. I need the space in order to accomplish this.

So, in order to not feel so selfish, I got off my butt in the late afternoon, went to the grocery store, did all the laundry (including putting it away) and straightened up a little around the desk area. At least I can sail through this week without worrying too much about housework. Now if I can get the work area settled, I’ll feel a little less cluttered in both the house and in my mind.

For the last week, I have not really left the house–except for work. We are totally out of food, except for hot dogs. My solution? Go to 7-11 and get buns, chips and soft drinks. We also have milk and cereal. It has been freezing and the snow is still around and I’m just tired of it all. We’ve also been scrimping a bit on the money–waiting for my reimbursement for my conference. I can’t seem to muster the strength to make a a full-blown trip to the grocery store. Basically, I’ve done nothing but watch tv and blog all weekend–in between loads of laundry. I feel like a slug.

I had a particularly rough week at work and I think that’s my main reason for feeling sluggish. Usually I do something on the weekend-write or read. There’s still time I suppose, but now I’m thinking–who cares. Too bad there’s no football. Then I could gorge myself on beer and junk food. That would really round things out.

Bitch Ph.D. posted today about the NYT article on parent blogs (or mommy blogs). And Clancy had her two cents to add, which was worth at least a quarter since she was interviewed for the article. I think about this whole mom and dad blogging thing quite a bit. I don’t think they’re narcissistic as the NYT article claims. There are only a handful of them that I enjoy reading, mostly because I find them amusing or interesting or they cover topics besides parenting. There are a few blogs I’ve visited that mostly talk about their kids–all day, several times a day. These I don’t read. Blogs that show how kids are interwoven with the rest of their lives appeal to me more. It’s just like my not reading parenting books or magazines anymore. I don’t need that kind of information or reassurance anymore. But I think a lot of people do, and blogs are much more personal, specific and immediate than magazines. People you know are even more immediate, but if many people out there are like I was in the early days of the kids, I didn’t have a lot of people to turn to.

I have Mom in the title which I suppose implies that that is a key part of my identity and that I’m going to write about being a mom quite often. I don’t really though. In fact, using a quick and dirty search and count, it seems that about a third of my posts are kid-related. I think that’s probably about right. About a third of my life is taken up with kid stuff. Now figure that I’m at work 40 hours/week and you can do the math about how that adds up.

People who blog about their kids rather consistently have legitimate reasons for blogging about them, especially those at home with their kids or not at home with infants. They probably spend 75% of their time dealing with kid stuff. The NYT article said something about how no one seems to realize how hard it is to have a kid and that’s what people write about all the time. Well, yeah, it’s hard and hard in ways you don’t think about. I started thinking about why it’s hard and came up with a partial list.

The Practical:

1. For the first year of life, you get no sleep. If you’re crazy and have another kid before the first one is sleeping through the night, then god help you.

2. Even after the first year of life, there are still plenty of times you don’t get sleep. Nightmares, middle of the night vomiting, fevers, bedwetting. This can last until the age of five or six at least.

3. Laundry increases dramatically. I told my bil that I do 2 loads a day. He gasped. It’s not really true since I tend to do it on the weekend. I did about 6 loads of laundry today and probably have 3 more to do, not counting the sheets. It takes a long time to do laundry.

4. You feel obligated to cook healthy meals. This costs more money as well as takes more time in terms of cooking and cleaning.

5. If you’re working, you shell out for child care. Oddly, this means you can’t afford nice clothes for work anymore.

6. If you’re not working, you spend a lot of time speaking in monosyllables (if your child in under 3). You also spend a lot of time coming up with creative and interesting things for you kid(s) to do. (I know a woman who is a master at this).

7. Carting your kids here and there, to activities, birthday parties, friends’ houses.

8. College fund–need I say more?

The emotional:

1. Post-partum depression. I had it. Not fun.

2. Fear. Fear of something horrible happening to your kid. First, this is fear of you doing something horrible to your kid. Who lets you go home with these tiny things anyway? Then you start fearing they’ll do something to themselves, like jump off the roof thinking they can fly or trip while walking down the sidewalk and crack their skull open. Then you start fearing other people. My current fear: sexual assault on my 9 year old. I didn’t say these were rational fears.

3. Anger. You get mad at your kids sometimes. They get mad at you. You get mad at your spouse for doing this to you.

4. General anxiety about how your kid is doing. Are they happy? Do they have enough friends? Are they doing well enough in school to get into the college of their choice? Will they hate me later for not letting them participate in some activity or another?

5. Joy. I was not joyous when my kids were born–didn’t have that moment they always show on tv where the mom says how beautiful the kid is and oohs and ahs. Not that kind of person. But I like looking at my kids asleep. They seem so peaceful then. I feel joy when they do something nice for another person. Really. I am most proud of them when they’re showing compassion and empathy. It means I’ve accomplished something and reminds me that they’re paying attention.

6. Laughter. Lots and lots of funny moments. Today, Geeky Girl got her first zack (aka zit). At Christmas, this quote had us laughing for days: “Look dad, Santa already came in your stocking.”

Those last two aren’t what makes parenting hard. But they the emotional roller coaster you tend to be on. On any given day, I might go through all of those emotions and have to deal with all of the practical things. No one tells you all of that going in. I don’t think there’s any way to.

Funny, this was going to be a post about how I don’t really identify as a mom, so it’s weird that I have it in the title, but it turned out quite the opposite. I guess you can’t take the mom out of the geeky mom.

Jocalo writes today about the problems of the continuing reliance on part-time faculty and how they might be resolved. I have been thinking about this because I have thought every once in a while about going back to teaching on a part-time basis, but then I remember what it was like to be an adjunct. Jocalo says that some places still pay $1000/class. It’s not that bad around here. The going rate is about $3500. I used to teach two classes a semester for a grand total of $14,000/year. Woo hoo! Part of the reason for the need for part-time faculty is the reduction in state spending on education. While this doesn’t affect private schools, they often follow suit. I’ve seen that happen around here. In fact, I started out at a large state institution, then moved to a private school and the private school actually relied on more part-timers proportionally than the state institution.

An administrator suggested that the public would never support the increased spending necessary to support teaching in the humanities. This is one thing that completely frustrates me. At a previous state institution where I worked, the state legislature cut spending every year I was there. This meant that our composition classes increased nearly every year. I started out with a fairly reasonable class size cap of 18. By the time I left 6 years later, that cap had increased to 22 and there was talking of bumping it to 25. Nearly all those classes were taught by graduate students, many of whom were excellent teachers. It’s just a fact of life, though, that the larger the class, the harder it is to teach well. Composition teaching requires a lot of one-on-one time. I used to hold at least three require conferences a semester. The more students you have, the greater the chance of having to reduce those conferences. One might even reduce the number of papers required, giving the students less practice at writing. And it is definitely possible that the comments you make on those papers will decrease and be less specific to the particulars of the paper. All this increases the possibility that students leave the institution without having the skills necessary to write well.

We consistently heard from business leaders that this was indeed the case. Students were graduating with the inability to communicate well. To my knowledge, these business leaders never went to the legislature and said, we need to increase spending on education. Everyone expected us to do more with less.

At another session at the same conference, discussion centered around offering more flexible full-time schedules. I might have stuck with teaching if I could have found a full-time gig that offered a decent salary and benefits. I’d even do service. I just wasn’t interested in the research treadmill or tenure. I could imagine myself teaching a 3-3 course load and being required to do a certain amount of service. There was only one place that offered non-tenure track full-time positons. The pay was good, the benefits were good, but the load was 4-4, which is pretty hard to do in composition.

There just are that many inroads into academics. Talk about lack of choice. You either get a tenure-track job or you’re relegated to the adunct track. Surely there are lots of options in between.

Not only did I get to read Paradox of Choice, but I also got to participate in a rather lengthy discussion about it with some really smart people (including Eric Behrens, who organized it). It was kind of like being in a class where everyone really wanted to be there, had done all the reading, and were at basically the same level of aptitude. You don’t get that often. I’m going to talk about both the book and the discussion here.

First, the book. I liked it generally. There was a little bit of economics (opportunity costs and such) and a little psychology (happiness scales) and a little bit of sociology (how does this issue affect broader social patterns). I like that mix of information. The Paradox of the title is simply that we think having more choices makes us happier when, in fact, for a lot of people, the more choices they have, the more unhappy they are. The rest of the book went on to prove this premise using a wide variety of actual studies.

Schwartz divides people into two basic camps–satisficers (those who make choices using a certain number of critera and when those are met, they choose) and maximizers (those who have lots of critera and who must be certain they have chosen the best possible option). In realty, he says, we are often satisficers about some things and maximizers about others. In buying a house, I became a maximizer. I had to see everything. I always was afraid to commit to something because something better just might be out there. I spent many, many weekends driving around and looking at houses and hours and hours on the internet finding more choices. To some extent, I still think about what might have been and have moments when I’m not happy with my choice.

And there’s the rub. We pay a lot to make choices–in time and energy. If we don’t like our choice in the end, we not only regret that we might have made the wrong choice, but we regret the time we spent making it. We feel depressed. One thing Schwartz points out is that people often have expectations that are way too high. In the case of my house, I imagined from driving around here that I’d find the perfect house, an ideal house that I’d built up in my head. No house could meet those expectations. Even if I did find the perfect house, I wouldn’t be satisfied because those expectations could never be met. I’m already disappointed even before I’ve bought the house.

The other insight I garnered from this book was about how our choices or our reactions to our choices are affected by our obsession with status. I have always had problems with this myself. I’m always comparing myself to others, mostly in terms of financial status. I’m always thinking my car isn’t nice enough, my clothes are nice enough. This was a real problem when I lived in a wealthy area of town. When I would go to the grocery store, there were bmw’s, jaguars, and mercedes in the lot next to my pontiac minivan. Inside the store, women were drowning in jewlrey and furs or looking sleek in a designer business suit. I felt shabby by comparison. I knew I couldn’t live like that anymore and moved myself to a more moderate part of town. Though I certainly try not to do any comparing at all, now when I do, I’m just as likely to compare favorably as not, so it all evens out. Schwartz points out that there are so many forces that make us do this comparison–advertising, the cultural push to always progress.

How do we stay happy even faced with all these choices that make us unhappy? The most important thing we can do is to be more grateful for what we have, to constantly remind ourselves that what we have is good enough. Just reading the book and being aware of things like expectations, adaptation, regret, and opportunity costs helped me to put some things in perspective.

The discussion was great. We’re reading this in the context not just of how we might use the ideas in it for ourselves, but also apply them to our organizations. The biggest issue that arose in terms of this was our culture of consensus. All of our schools are founded on Quaker principles. The principle of consensus functions in all of meetings and decisions. All of us find this frustrating at times and just want someone to decide something already! We talked about setting criteria ahead of time and limiting the number of criteria, of perhaps designating someone to be the ultimate decision-maker as ways to resolve our frustration.

We also talked about recognizing when you’re dealing with a maximizer and how to alleviate any disappointment they might have as a result of something you decide for them. The group had a lot of librarians and they talked about limiting the search choices when working with students on doing research. Those of us in IT talked about people’s high expectations about the end results of projects or people’s indecision to choose colors for a web project which might be helped by limiting their choices to just three schemes. Or we discussed filtering choices for people. Having a small group narrow the field from 50 to 3 and presenting that to a larger group.

There were so many really good things that were said that I can hardly bring them all up here. It really was wonderful to be talking about this with so many interesting people.

I got nothing done today! After several emergencies in the morning and a pleasant book discussion over lunch, I got a flat tire on the way back to my home campus and waited by the side of the highway for an hour for AAA. Thank God for AAA! I’m feeling really stressed out now and have done nothing but work–after dinner and a bath–since I got home. I’ll be doing more work after the kids go to bed. There are just too many things that need to be done. Sigh.

Attend to some administrative Blackboard stuff

E-mail someone about a video editing workshop

Prepare for discussion about Paradox of Choice (more on this later)

Finish re-designing two websites

Finalize documents regarding summer program

Send out e-mail announcing tomorrow’s workshop

Prepare for tomorrow’s workshop

Finalize student worker schedule

Set up account for someone to use image viewer

Help internal candidate prepare for job talk

I’m sure I’m forgetting something, but that’ll do for now.

How did I get here? Is this my beautiful wife?

I started this post writing about choosing college, a major and graduate school, but realized that though some of those choices had cultural elements to them, they were primarily made separate from those issues. My choice of graduate school I made for two reasons: 1) it was the best school I was accepted to and 2) it wasn’t in the South. I was feeling stifled in the South as a woman, so in some sense that was a cultural decision.

My bigger choices didn’t come until I met up with Mr. Geeky. After a whirlwind romance, we ended up living together. Initially, we thought we’d finish our graduate programs at the same time. He’d just taken–and passed–his qualifying exams and I was in a three-year writing program. By our calculations, we’d be on the job market at the same time. So we began our enterprise thinking we were giving equal value to both our careers and that we would weigh any decisions about the future based on this premise.

My career faltered. In the last semester of my last year, I was denied funding. It had been a struggle for me to get funding in the first place, so after a long battle, I felt defeated. In addition, Mr. Geeky was not going to be finished at the end of that semester and in fact, could not pinpoint an exact date. Then his career falter, when he had to do major revisions on his dissertation proposal, making a date for completion even harder to determine.

As I saw it, I had two choices with regard to my career. I could find the money to finish, apply for jobs and get the heck out of dodge. I had applied for some jobs and was getting soundly rejected–and the pay sucked. I considered Ph.D. programs. I knew I couldn’t get into the Ph.D. program where I was and after taking classes with the students in that program wasn’t sure I wanted to. My other option besides getting an academic job or going to a Ph.D. program was to find a way to stick around with Mr. Geeky. Of course, this depended to a great extent on where we both thought this relationship was going.

So I asked Mr. Geeky to marry me. This was really difficult because I had decided that if he said no, I was going to pursue options that took me far away. I would basically be leaving him. Of course, he said yes. So now, I could still scrape up the money to finish my program, but it wouldn’t really gain me anything since I had punted my plans to pursue an academic career or a Ph.D. I chose to get a corporate job and support Mr. Geeky in his sprint to the finish. Though I made some efforts to finish my degree at first, after a while, I just gave up. I didn’t have enough money to pay for the classes I needed and I didn’t have enough time to do the classwork or work on my thesis while working a 9-5 job.

An alternative to this whole scenerio, I suppose, is that Mr. Geeky and I could have decided to privilege my career over his, but we didn’t. The chances of my career actually going anywhere were slim (given the academic market and given the slim demand for poets). Mr. Geeky was in a field with plenty of opportunities, both in academics and in industry.

We married; we had our first kid. We had our first while I had good insurance and we had money–a very practical decision. We had no idea what our future would bring, so it seemed like the right thing to do. What I didn’t realize at the time was how hard it would be to juggle having a kid and a career. If making decisions was harder with Mr. Geeky in the picture, it was even more difficult with a child. Having a child in the picture meant you had to think about child care and where you lived in relation to both child care and work, and how flexible your work schedule was in case the child got sick or their school was closed. A lot of little things suddenly factored in to every decision we made.

Mr. Geeky’s first job took us to a third-tier state school. I spent a year at home with the first child deciding whether I wanted to find another job or go back to school. I didn’t like just having a job–like I’d had for the end of Mr. Geeky’s graduate years–so I opted to go back to school. I enrolled in the Ph.D. program (a requirement when Mr. Geeky was looking for a job) in English. I loved it. I was doing well. Since it wasn’t a ranked school, there wasn’t a lot pressure. I went to conferences. I ran the Graduate Student Association. I was having a great time.

Mr. Geeky, not so much. And once again, we were faced with choosing which career to privilege. And once again, we chose his. Unfortunately, the timing of our move couldn’t have been worse. I had just completed my exams and was ready to start writing my dissertation. At the time, I thought that it was good because I’d be surrounded by resources and great libraries and it would be great and I’d finish in a couple of years and then look for a job in the area–probably at a community college. What I didn’t realize is that I didn’t need resources, I needed support. It’s hard to cobble together support from people you don’t even know. I was an adjunct, so I never became part of a community where I could participate and get support. I was surrounded by women who’d all put off their careers to support their husband’s academic careers instead of trying to cobble something together the way I was.

I struggled to write. I had primary care of the children. I met my son after school. I stayed home when they didn’t have school. I treated my writing like a 9-5 job. I got the first chapter done. I sent it off to my advisor. I continued to write and read and I waited. I got a devastating letter back. The first chapter was horrible. Good ideas, not quite connected, not enough footnotes, parts are poorly written. My one source of support had shriveled up. Once again, I had to decide. Do I struggle through this and finish? Or do I give up and move on to something else? I had been very resentful about moving here in the first place. I think deep down, I knew that it would be hard for me to finish my degree away from my support network. This was the second time I’d had to leave friends behind against my will.

My new friends gave me lots of advice, which was useful because they were somewhat objective. Mr. Geeky was mad at my advisor and he said I should switch advisors and topics and write a thesis about technology and writing (my real interest at the time) and just whip through, be done and decide what to do after that. Someone else suggested sitting down, writing the whole thing fairly quickly and submitting the completed thesis without any input from my advisor. Another person suggested abandoning the whole project, turn it into a novel, become famous and throw it back at my advisor.

The truth is I was tired of being poor, tired of struggling through something that wasn’t going to gain me much financially. I had been looking at my job prospects and the best option was a non-tenure track job teaching 4 comp classes a semester (talk about 80 hour work weeks). My last semester as an adjunct had been disappointing. I hadn’t enjoyed it that much. Did I really want to pursue a teaching career? Because that’s what the degree would get me. Not a teaching and research career, a teaching career. I decided against. It took me a year to make it official but I didn’t regret it at all. It was painful writing every day. I didn’t like it. It wasn’t going to end in something wonderful. There was no potential in it.

Perhaps if Mr. Geeky had been willing to stick around at my home institution or if I had been willing to live without him until I finished, I might have finished. But neither of those were options for us. In the end, I suppose I didn’t care about my career enough to push options that would have benefited me. Is this a result of a bias toward always privileging the man’s career? Possibly. Maybe I didn’t push because of that bias. I don’t know.

Though I struggle to some extent with my decision to work as opposed to staying home. In reality, my working has given us as a family a greater chance to succeed. We had racked up a considerable amount of debt getting each other through graduate school. My working has allowed us to get that debt under control, to purchase a house, to enroll the kids in activities and camps, to go on family vacations. We would not have been able to do those things without my career.

And now, even my dissertation has a new life as a historical novel. I don’t kid myself that it will be sold or that anything will become of it, but the process of writing it has made me enjoy writing again and I now have two other book ideas going. I’m reading more than I ever did (well since junior high). I feel intellectually stimulated both at work and in what I choose to do outside of work. In the end, my choices led me to this place. I think I have constantly asked myself what would make me happy and that has always been a balance of financial security, intellectual stimulation, and opportunities to be with my family. It’s hard to find that balance. And I think there’s always a struggle between balancing one person’s needs and desires with another. I’ve been lucky in some ways in that Mr. Geeky usually took my needs into account, but certainly this last move was primarily his needs to move his career foward.

Well, that’s a long winded way of saying nothing happens in a vacuum. And I didn’t even give all the details, all the little things that affected our decisions. If you read this far, I commend you. I hope it was worth it in some way.