Lady of the Flies

In Lord of the Flies, after wandering aimlessly for a time the shell-shocked boys begin to drift into two directions. Some turn savage, adapting to life alone on a desolate island, a life sustained by killing wild pigs and sleeping In trees. Others cling to a belief in rescue, maintaining the habits to which they’ll return, wearing clothes and sipping tea, even if it really was only drops of rainwater in coconut-shell teacups.

It’s the third month of unemployment, and I’m considering going savage. For the first month, beyond not buying things or going out to eat or getting a sitter — none of which was that much of a stretch — things seem relatively unchanged. Some down time. It was kinda nice to have him around. Things would pick up again in January.

January came and went.

We’re now in full-on joblessness. I’ve learned more of the story at the company, which explains things a bit better but which wouldn’t have changed our decision to move here. We gambled. There’s a reason I don’t gamble, and this is it.

It’s tight around here.The grocery is a chore, all the comparing and measuring and searching for value packs and discerning needs from wants. Sleepytime out, generic chamomile in. Soon that may go, too. I eat at school as much as I can — it’s covered — and I don’t drive much. We only go to free events, except for the school play, and we had to wait for Friday to buy even those tickets.

Should we be spending emergency money on entertainment of any kind? I haven’t time to entertain such existential questions.

Last weekend we were invited as guests to a benefit for our school, a dinner auction where bids were cast for art and trips and jewelry, none of it trinkets. I was thrilled but Allan refused so I took a girlfriend and it wasn’t until I got there that I understood what he meant by the disorienting feeling that came with pasting a smile on and chatting over a plate of risotto that my host had paid $150 for. It felt like nausea and I couldn’t count-my-blessings the discomfort away, no matter how many happy thoughts I forced up.

But mostly, like always, it’s the unknown that yawns and swallows. I have faith that we will be okay, somehow, i really do, but I don’t know what that ‘okay’ will look like, where it will take us, what it will demand of us. What adjustments and alterations. Our house is threatened, and this is real, and we can talk of little else. Ugly, awful words we once heard only on the news now apply to us.

I will stop here, and I will first recognize our own culpability, how deeply flawed our money management was, the many ways this might have been avoided. I know this, it wakes me every single night, and it will forever change my financial habits, and this is important but right now I have to encourage my despondent husband and protect my little daughter and feed two dogs and make Valentines and that’s what occupies my waking hours.

If I had been in that plane, I have no doubt which camp I would have joined. I’d have kept my handkerchief in my pocket and brushed my hair and looked to the horizon.

And sipped my ‘tea.’ Even when there was nothing in my coconut-shell cup.

Published in: on February 11, 2012 at 8:10 AM  Leave a Comment  
Tags:

It’s not the worst problem in the world, but it’s the worst problem in MY world…

The thing about a job is, it’s sort of like a heartbeat: you either have one, or you don’t. It’s hopeful when former managers phone, expressing sympathy and saying they’ve got their ears open; it’s heartwarming to hear how hard the boss tried to save the contract. But in the end it doesn’t pay the mortgage.

I worry sometimes that this might be the universe correcting course, that I am somehow responsible for dragging our family east by the sheer force of my will, an act so pushy the universe could not allow it to slide. I won’t let it happen again.

If the lesson I’m supposed to take away from this is to live and let live, then I’m in a crash course not of my choosing. Allan is home all day now, which means the house is adapting, in ways subtly and … not. He’d rearranged the kitchen (the horror) before a week had passed, and is now eyeing the rest of the house. The Christmas tree came down in record time and for the first time since we moved in there is food in the cupboard that I neither had to purchase myself nor will be responsible for cooking. We share pickup, and dishes, and vacuuming… I don’t know which has surprised me more: how much I used to accomplish each day, all by myself, or how miserable it actually was for him to be gone from before sunrise to after sunset every single day.

If this is in fact the universe correcting course, then the universe clearly has a thing or two to learn about balance.

Which it’s welcome to get on with: the sooner, the better.

Published in: on January 11, 2012 at 5:11 PM  Leave a Comment  
Tags:

To work or not to work… and on and on and on it goes

There’s a great discussion over at Motherlode today about planning for career and family. The conversation is a bit specific to careers requiring a lot of education (a pharmacist and a doctor) but I thought I’d take it into academia. What do you think?

My contribution:

I can only speak to my own plan, which was to go to graduate school (check), land a tenure-track position in academia (check), get married and travel/save/enjoy life as a DINK (check), start a family (check), hire a nanny (check), cut back my hours at work (check) and then …. I quit.

This is such a deeply personal issue, and fraught; whichever path we choose dictates our perspective. I sense an undercurrent of ,”How much can/should my advanced education help me control the outcome?” and while I cannot imagine a world in which pursuing education is a bad idea, that does not mean that whatever plan you devise won’t need an escape clause.

I chose to finish my PhD and pursue tenure before adopting my daughter, and I still made the choice to leave the workforce when she was two. I was used to leading with my head, so my emotional response to motherhood was startling; I was also used to doing well in my endeavors, and motherhood required of me a whole new skill set, one I hadn’t even imagined. Our nanny was fantastic and my university was flexible — sort of — and yet I still found myself dreading leaving her for the day. It was (and is) as strong a passion as I had ever felt for anything.

For me, it didn’t come down to money or time. It was all about how I felt when I became a mother. I feel amazingly lucky that what an education and Type-A planning ultimately provided for me was the foundation and freedom to make the choice I did.

Published in: on June 24, 2011 at 10:38 AM  Leave a Comment  
Tags: ,

Cultural divide

From Heather Rigby, over at Babble, questions to help spouses bridge the communication gap between the stay-at-home and the working parent:
  1. When you walked into work this morning and pleasantly greeted your co-worker Jim, was his first reaction to scream “NO! WANT JASON!” followed by an office supply being thrown at you?
  2. Has a colleague ever climbed up on your lap while you were using your computer and slammed the keyboard with both fists until the up arrow no longer worked?
  3. Do you have to lock yourself in the supply closet or bathroom on a regular basis in order to make phone calls?
  4. Did you finish a complete thought at any time during the day?
  5. When you went out to lunch with your fellow workers, did you have to pack a diaper/juice/extra outfit for them? Did you have to wipe their faces? Smile an apology and leave an extra tip for the waiter on their behalf?
  6. When a co-worker needed you for something, did she sit at her desk with her head tilted back toward the ceiling and repeatedly scream “SEAN! SEEEEANNNN! SEAAAAAAN!” until you came to find him?
  7. When you needed a specific colleague, did you search all over for him, only to finally find him giggling in the cabinet under the sink? Did you also find six pairs of your church shoes under there with him?
  8. Have you had to come to an associate’s aid because she fell off her desk after trying to climb on top of it using a rolling chair?
  9. When you reached for the report a co-worker was handing you, did he snatch them away at the last second and scream “MINE!” while shoving you backwards?
  10. Does your colleague lift up her shirt and pick things out of her belly button every time she comes over to ask a question?
  11. While you are using the restroom, do various co-workers come in the stall and ask you to settle a disagreement or open a packet of fruit snacks?
  12. During a board meeting when everyone is present, do you notice a smell and then have to check all your colleagues’ pants to locate it? In fact, at ANY point in your day do you have to deal with another person’s feces?
Published in: on May 29, 2011 at 9:49 PM  Leave a Comment  
Tags:

Now that I have time to hull the strawberries…

My grandmother never ate a strawberry that wasn’t hulled. My grandmother was deeply Southern — president of the Women’s Club for all of Tennessee Southern — but I don’t think that was it. It wasn’t gentility, either: she could have taught Liz Taylor some colorful phrases. I don’t recall her ever demanding hulled berries or anything as ill mannered as that. It was just on those rare occasions when she sat down to whole strawberries, she would take one dainty ‘no thank you’ nibble and leave the rest on her plate.

When I one day found myself in charge of my own kitchen, I turned my back on all that and built my culinary repertoire according to the concepts of “convenience” and “making reservations.”

Now that I’m home, this is slowly righting itself. To not have to squeeze dinner prep into the 17 minutes between getting home and eating completely changes what I put on the table. It makes more sense to keep a basket of fresh fruit in the kitchen now that I know it isn’t sitting alone for nine hours a day. I don’t worry at all about sending Anna to school with enough lunch; if it’s too anemic one day I know I’ll be picking her up half an hour later with a ready snack.

I wonder if the habits of old, hulling strawberries and eating fresher food and so on, were more a function of how people spent their time than of beliefs or limited technology. I doubt it was because transfats and MSG weren’t yet invented. I love my cranky old clothes dryer, for instance, but I really love the smell of sheets and clothes dried in the sun. Our almost-100-year-old California Bungalow is all thick walls and windows, a natural heating and cooling system now that I’m here to open and close the windows. I can go days without touching the microwave.

It seems counterintuitive to say it’s easier to entertain Anna all afternoon TV-free because we actually have all afternoon, but it is. Much. We aren’t locked into the too-much, too-little time yo-yo that our gone-all-day schedules required of us; time flows differently. I do hold regular DVD-and-frozen-pizza evenings, of course; they’re just rare, now, exceptions instead of standard fare.

So this morning I was fixing lunches, listening to the news, and I found myself hulling the strawberries. I have no idea when I started to do this again. I hadn’t thought of a hulled strawberry in ages. But I popped one in my mouth and …mmmmm… remembered again how lovely a hulled strawberry tastes as it melts in your mouth. And I stopped, for just a moment, and savored it all.

Published in: on April 1, 2011 at 12:02 PM  Leave a Comment  
Tags: ,

Something I’ve been meaning to tell you…

We ran into one of Anna’s former preschool classmates, and his mom looked as put together and happy as she has every single time I’ve ever seen her, whether she was hosting a bouncy-house birthday party or dropping her son off at o-dark-hundred in the morning.

I was reminded of how much I’d always admired her, and even more so now that I’ve left the workforce. I admire her differently, now, in a way, the way a finalist admires a champion, that only someone who has attempted the same feat can relate to. She asked how things were going and we agreed I’m very lucky to have had this option but I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t man up and tell her the most important thing, the context, if you will: I would be a working mother if I could have managed it. I wanted to be, had always intended to be, tried to be… but I couldn’t.

That’s the heart and the truth of it. I simply couldn’t do both. I don’t mean that as an excuse or to be flip or … or really as anything; it’s just the way it is. For me. Maintaining a career and taking care of my daughter proved, for me, exclusive. In part that’s because I lack what seems an essential skill; I can’t, I don’t know, cognitively multitask? Intellectually sort and pile? Cerebrally categorize?

What I’m getting at is that while I am as capable as anyone of preparing dinner with one hand and braiding hair with the other while sweeping the floor and phoning my mother, I can’t think about more than one thing at a time.

I understand that the idea is to compartmentalize, and I tried. I had schedules and Google Alerts and a BlackBerry and a hands-free headset. I reflected at night and planned in the morning and wrote everything down in a hundred places. It all looked great on paper but in execution, my mom self overflowed her banks, snarfing and gobbling everything in her path. I’d open my briefcase to find it stuffed not with academic journals but with picture books overdue for return to the library. I’d grade papers while I supervised bathtime, only to get them blotched with bathwater from an exuberant splash. I can’t count the number of swim-lessons days that I dropped Anna off without her swimsuit — a high crime for the preschool set — or how many times I made her nanny late to class or forgot to re-stock diapers or missed faculty meeting.

And there were plenty of days like the one when the nanny was sick and I had to take Anna to class with me. Allan was able to collect her about an hour into the session, but that left plenty of time for her to throw all of her toys out of her pack-n-play, squawk “Slippery Fish” over students trying to speak, screech to be picked up, crawl around everyone’s feet and, loudly and fragrantly, poop. It’s no wonder I was asked to, well, make more secure arrangements next time.

In short: for a full two years, no matter where I was, I felt like I was supposed to be somewhere else.

Perhaps it’s the nature of my profession, at least as I know it to be. Once you’ve pledged your troth, academia hugs you to its bosom and does not like to let go. For me this affair began long before I met my husband and it remained sustainable well into marriage, when we were DINKS, when my husband could travel to conferences with me and when staying up all night to finish a paper didn’t destroy three schedules and when travelling for work to Qatar or Pakistan didn’t feel flat-out impossible.

Whatever the reasons, the result was what mattered: we weren’t functioning. More to the point, I wasn’t functioning. I got sick, scary sick. That the stress strained our marriage was unambiguous. My daughter cried too often, threw too many tantrums, had too many night terrors. We did the only thing we could do. It was survival.

My best heroes today are the women I know, the professors and researchers and teachers, who manage that world and do it so well, kids and all. I know how hard it is (cf finalists & champions, above). I’m not forgetting mothers who are doctors and lawyers and Indian chiefs — I just can’t relate as proportionately — nor, of course, do I discount dads (and to answer the next logical question, yes, Allan kept up his end of things. All I share here is my own story.). It’s probably salient that we live far away from our families, something I’d change in a heartbeat. Who knows what will happen when Anna is older; if I’ve proven anything to myself it’s that I’m more flexible than I thought I was, and that I’d better stay that way.

If I had thought for one hot second that I could have regained my professional standing and gotten a grip on motherhood and been able to do both reasonably, even tolerably, well, oh, I would certainly have done so. The decision to leave was the most portentous — and authentic — choice of my adult life, and I will never know the full effect. And it wasn’t pretty: it hurt, it was confusing, and it was messy.

But one of the key skills my beloved profession taught me is to recognize when a design is not working — no matter how dedicated to that design I might be or how many resources have been invested — and to know when to make the hard call that it is time to re-direct finite energies toward a different approach.

So that’s what I did.

Published in: on March 24, 2011 at 6:43 PM  Leave a Comment  
Tags: ,

Working mom to stay-at-home: 10 things I have learned

It’s been six months since I left my job to stay home with Anna, and I’ve learned some things.

1. The moments I really want to be around for do not adhere to anyone’s schedule. Period.

2. Life at home is repetitious, yes, but in six months it has not once been boring. (Cleaning my own house, however, is. B-O-R-I-N-G.)

3. It’s an unbelievable luxury to devote each morning to getting my child to preschool and my husband to work without having to go to a job myself. This thought still strikes me every single day.

4. A stay-at-home mom has no excuse for not exercising regularly. The YMCA is affordable and it offers FREE  CHILDCARE. A half-hour on the elliptical machine with a magazine and my Ipod isn’t a chore; it’s a holiday.

5. Messy and dirty are two very different things. My sanity depends on knowing the difference.

6. Counting dollars until he gets paid does indeed suck.

7. Preparing dinner every single day can flummox anyone. I’ve got six go-to dishes to anchor meals and we always have the fixings on hand; I consider myself a raging success if I score two original meals a week. Our house is never without beans and rice, vegetable stir-fry, pasta, eggs and toast, grilled cheese, or loaded baked potatoes. We always have Irish oatmeal and cous-cous and almonds and granola-yogurt parfaits and bananas, apples, and berries in our kitchen, and we keep a frozen pizza around for emergencies. Always. We’re not exciting, but we’re fed.

8. There are few day-to-day problems that can’t be solved with a good nap.

9. Money and sex aren’t really the subjects of everyone’s fights; the true culprits are time and energy. If we had unlimited quantities of those, finances and romance would be easy.

10. There is no greater gift than to be able to spend life simply living.

I especially mean that last one. I’ve learned that when there is no externally determined purpose grabbing at my time, the meaning of each moment can take full shape. While I have no idea why it feels so very fulfilling to watch our garden grow, I do think I know why it is so much easier to do the things I struggled to get to when I was working full time. When I don’t have to sell my time, nothing feels more natural than to volunteer, to teach Anna how instead of doing it for her, to consider the social good, to research products, to sort-and-donate, to attend every performance, to bake from scratch, to stop and explain, to compost, to dance in the kitchen.

It’s beautiful, and it’s a blessing.

Published in: on February 22, 2011 at 9:19 AM  Comments (3)  
Tags: ,

A note to myself, for when I wonder why:

Allan’s got a massive interview tomorrow, I have deliverables due to Big State Uni, Anna’s been throwing up all night with a fever that has yet to dip below 100, and all I keep thinking is how much worse it would all be if I had to actually get dressed and wash my hair (it’s been three days) and hand her over to a nanny to go to an office. Easier, perhaps, and cleaner and better smelling but WORSE, and if you’re a parent you get exactly what I mean.

Published in: on January 27, 2011 at 5:44 AM  Leave a Comment  

A Different Excuse

In a move sure to make the University of Chicago demand its regalia back, I’ve begun doing some teaching online. And I must say to the U of C: if no one there is studying this, you’re missing a goldmine for social science research.

Why, I wonder, do 68% of my students who reside in the US  live in one of six states: North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, or South Carolina?  Is there a fence around the southeast? Interesting.

What is really taking some getting used to, however, is just how in situ this world can be.

Yesterday an assignment came in to be graded. I opened it and it was about halfway finished, trailing off mid-paragraph with this comment:

“I just found my neighbor dead in the next apartment. I have to go now.”

Published in: on December 8, 2010 at 10:28 AM  Comments (1)  

Silly stuff I’ll never, ever, ever take for granted.

Anna’s home from school all week this week, both of our jobs are demanding a full complement of time and energy and our babysitters are all on vacation. It’s the perfect storm of stress. All we need is an impromptu airplane trip on Wednesday night.

So you can understand, I’m sure, even if you have yet shared this experience, why I took a magazine and a cup of tea with me into the bathroom. Seriously. It wasn’t what you might think it was. It was five minutes of peace.

Unless you’ve had a full 24 hours on-demand you might have to stretch to empathize with my pathetic attempt at relaxation. That’s okay.

About three minutes into my five-minute holiday, she pokes a straw under the door and jabs my foot, giggling maniacally. I kick it back, which she finds uproariously funny. So, of course, she pokes me again: “Mommy. Mom. MOM! Look here. Here. Look! (poke poke poke) HERE. Kick it. kick it kick it kick it kick it HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”

Rinse, wash, repeat.

Another minute of this and I’m truly annoyed (and if you’re saying to yourself, “just tell her to stop,” you’re welcome to hang out with us tomorrow). I realize that I now hear her “Mommy. Mom. MOM!” in my sleep. And you know what?

That’s just fine with me.

 

Published in: on November 22, 2010 at 6:06 PM  Leave a Comment  
« Older Entries
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.