So now that Wizard has successfully defended his dissertation (I wrote “situation” originally.  Am I alone in finding this hilarious?), and is a DOCTOR, but not the kind that makes a lot of $$$, we’ve been trying this thing where as soon as he gets home from work I pass him The Baby, and he takes over for the evening while I go out to work.

The result of this has mainly been that I am spending too much money/caloric intake on cafe sandwiches.  But I also manage to get some stuff written, sometimes.  On good days.  Because you know what? Kid or no kid, writing is HARD.  Just as hard as it ever was.  When I think about my project, when I envision it as a whole in its parts and its potential smartness, I’m happy.  I’m energized.  But OH the slog to get it there, to the whole as it is in my head.

In other news, Sir Baby has started daycare.  Well, okay, he went to daycare for two hours on Thursday while Wizard hovered in the lobby and joined him on his walk.  He likes it so far, if we can take “like” to mean that he didn’t cry too much and was easily quieted by the plethora of daycare ladies, all of whom envy his eyelashes. (Incidentally, the kid is a looker.  If he didn’t spring forth whole from my own vagina, I’d swear he wasn’t mine.)

Which goddess was it who popped out of Zeus’s head whole?  Athena?  Yes.

I was thinking today how I wished the dissertation had a biological-imperative component.  Like, I wish my diss director would lop off one of my fingers if I didn’t turn in the chapter on time. I know I’ve mentioned this before, how a dissertation is not at all like a baby because, well, the baby HAS to come out, one way or another.  It simply must.  There is no alternative.  But not so for dissertations.

(Oh, wow, sidenote:  There’s a ten-year-old talking about the South Beach Diet across the room from me.  Jeez.  I mean, we’re just moving on to squash with my kid, so I know nothing of pre-teen nutrition.  But I’m thinking it’s a big N-O to South Beach.)

Anyway, I need to in-eloquently end this post so I can use my three hours wisely.  But I think it’s fair to consider this pre-writing, right?

I’ve written a page in a week.  I cannot work in short bursts.  I cannot.  I try, but I can’t write.  I can think, and jot, but not compose.

Translation: I am seriously fucked.

My advisor, bless her “no babies before dissertations!” heart, has been nothing but absolutely supportive.  She’s a feminist theorist, so I had every right to expect this, but you never know what you’re going to get, especially since she told me DON’T GET PREGNANT after I got married.

Which is weird, come to think of it, because of everyone in our program getting married, I was the least likely to get pregnant.  What I mean is that I didn’t come across, I don’t think, like a family planner (which makes sense because the pregnancy wasn’t planned).  Of everyone around me having these big Christian t0-do weddings and buying houses and changing last names, I had a quick and dirty Unitarian ceremony followed by ice cream cake.  Kept my last name, as well as the apartment Wizard and I lived in before getting married.  I didn’t seem like the reproducing type, is what I’m sayin’.  But tell that to my left ovary.  (Did I mention that I know the pregnancy came from the ovary on the left?  It did.  Weird.)

Anyway, she wanted a chapter before the baby, and I didn’t produce (ha).  So I tried to get something together over the summer, but I failed.  She said this was fine because “it’s normal to need some time to get your bearings.”  But now that I’m back at work, she is laying down the law.  And she’s right.  I need rules.  I need someone to tell me DO IT NOW.  She has gladly played the role of hand-holder and hair-smoother for the past few months, but…I’m running down the clock.  And I can’t reasonably expect her to be patient and okay my slow slip into dissertation-abandonment.

I wish Godzilla  (that’s what he’s nicknamed for now.  You are welcome to suggest far-better alternatives) were more cooperative.  Yes, I know, he’s a BABY.  Cooperation is beyond his control.  But right now, for example, he is sitting on my lap, just barely keeping it together without my undivided attention (and even so, I have to stop every few seconds to re-engage him in a mirror game of “who’s the baby?”).  He won’t nap unless he’s on me, which for a while meant I was neutralized in the afternoon.  Just recently he’s started napping on me in a sling, which means I can work if I do so quietly and don’t move too much.  Ever since his cold he has refused to sleep in the crib for more than a few hours at a time, and after 2 am he’s done with the crib completely.  Wizard keeps insisting that we’ve gotten screwed in the Cosmic Baby Habits Lottery, that he is just far more difficult and time consuming than the average baby, but I know that’s not true because I read you guys (Hi, Accidents!) and know you’re soldiering through these messes, too.

But, yeah.  Won’t sleep in the crib.  Must nap on me.  Won’t spend more than 20 minutes entertaining himself (even though on a car trip he once entertained himself for TWO HOURS with a book about puppies.  Where the hell did that baby go?)  Hates to sleep and won’t settle down without lots of cuddles and walking about.  Oh, and I’m pretty sure he learned how to control his pee stream, because he squirts me, just a wee little bit, at every change.

Oh, and solids?  Damn, it takes a long time to feed these guys.

So go ahead and report me to protective services now, because I’ve basically listed out all the normal behaviors of infants and said they’re too much for me to handle.  But they wouldn’t be, if I didn’t have the whole “thinking thoughts and writing them down” thing going on.  I’d be fine if I could get two or three working hours in a row, but that’s not going to happen.  I was silly to think it would.

I’ve been whining a lot here, so it’s only right to follow up that behavior with a plea.  Are you a short-bursts writer?  Can you pump out a paragraph in 20 minutes or less?   That is, after being interrupted, can you pick up where you left off?  How do you do it?  I need writing strategies and would appreciate anything you’ve got.

My mother-in-law is here, and will be in-residence through the middle of October.

Ahem.

I don’t go in for the classic MIL hatred partly because it’s a bullshit girl-on-girl crime sort of thing, a relationship shortcut that refuses to recognize the reality of female relationships in their full range of animosity/love.  Partly I just don’t have that kind of relationship with her, either.  I’ve spoken before of the reasons she intimidates me, and in general I have a hard time talking to her because I fear pissing her off, but I don’t dislike her.

However.  She’s been getting on my last damn nerve due to her constant not-quite-criticism of our parenting (i.e. she never tells me anything, but she tells the baby what she thinks.  Infuriating?  OH HELL YES).

First of all, the baby (whatever his nickname is, let’s go with Wizito, “little Wiz”), Wizito (I hate that, I’ll be changing it later), is four and a half months old.  There’s not a whole hell of a lot of “parenting” to be seen here.  You take care of a baby, you love the heck out of him, you provide mental stimulation…and you’re pretty much done.  It’s not like we have to figure out when to have the sex talk or how to set up cell phone rules.  Yet apparently we’re already screwing up.  He has too many toys.  He shouldn’t nap on me.  There’s other stuff, but she’s not saying it in English, so who the hell knows.  Oh, and we also need a second car, according to her, and a nanny.

A fucking nanny.  Like we live on the UES and can hire Fran Drescher.  Which would be kind of awesome, come to think of it, because she’s really funny, but the point is I’m a graduate student.  I can be a nanny, but I can’t HAVE a nanny.  This has spawned a joke between my brother and me regarding the opportunity for him to quit his job and come to live with us, Tony Danza style.  He would cook, do some light cleaning, watch The Baby, and provide comic relief for MIL, who I suppose would fill the Mona slot. Which makes me, what?  Not Angela–that’s a tad too incestuous for my taste.  So…Sam, I guess.  Which means I have to go bra shopping with my brother, and he has to have a pot of spaghetti sauce on the stove at all times.

(BTW: the lyrics to the “Who’s the Boss?” theme song?  Trite yet profound.)

In the midst of this I have a due date for the draft of my first chapter:  mid-October.  And it isn’t even a loose due date.  I joined a diss writing group, so I have to produce something real and readable in a little under six weeks.  My director wants me to focus on producing six pages a week, which means that by her watch, I should have something by mid-October as well.

So.  There you go.  I’m supposed to write a chapter while Mona is here.  Oh!  And Wizard is supposed to finish HIS diss and defend by then, too.  It is an academic disaster of sitcom proportions, I tell you.

I don’t know how to write a dissertation after having a baby.  I truly don’t.  But I titled the post as such to lure here those of my ilk, the other parents and caregivers of children who have dissertations to write and babies to raise.

See, every once in a while I google that phrase above, and I get some crap from the Berkeley something or other network (nice people, it seems, but they are different from me in that they have access to nannies who themselves have access to public transportation), and advertisement websites from dissertation coaches.  I’ve yet to find people blogging about the hell I’m currently in, the hell of my own making, which for me can be defined as wanting to lay on the couch and stare at the baby as he figures out how to use his fingers when what I really need to be doing is working.

I don’t think childrearing-while-dissertating is that different from any number of “personal issues”–caregiving, illness, divorce, dating, whatever–that chew up your brain.  Kids are just one branch on a particularly gnarled tree.  But.  It does have its particulars–difficult sleep schedules, absence of solid blocks of writing time, occasional guilt, whatever–and man do I wish there were more folks blogging about those particulars.  It’s hard enough to find dissertation bloggers as it is (hi, PauvrePlume!), let alone dissertating parents.

I know, though, that we’re out there.  So if you’ve come here looking for an answer re: living a human life while managing a (sometimes inhuman[e]) academic task, I don’t have it.  But you should stick around anyway.

Some people are very good at weekly features.  I’m not one of them.  But I am in favor of keeping this whole posting thing going, so here are some baby feet from back in April:

By the way, I’ve done two work-positive things this week:  I’ve committed to the diss. writing group at school and have decided to go ahead with Infinite Summer.  It has nothing to with the diss, but it is post-1945 lit (my area), so I’m counting it.

I had the much-dreaded meeting with my advisor on Monday.  It didn’t go as badly as it could have, partly because I bluffed a little on what I’ve been doing with the three months since I passed my proposal.  Wait, make that four months.  Anyway, she wants a draft of a chapter before I have the baby.  So…I’ve got roughly six weeks.  I’d panic but I’m just not in the mood.  Also, we ended up at the hospital yesterday because the Lovely Fetus went completely off the radar for three hours, and despite practically begging my OB to see me, I had to go through hospital monitoring anyway.  So, you know, priorities.  Hard to worry about writing when you’re sucking down juice and waiting to feel a ripple in your gut.

It turned out fine.

Lesson of the Day:  My OB office STILL sucks ass.  But nurses who say things like, “Don’t sit around at home worrying, just come in any time” are awesome, thus supporting the long-held truism that nurses>doctors almost always.

Oh, highlight of the diss. meeting:  I tell my advisor that I am having a little trouble  reading/researching because these books, they are depressing and make me cry.  My project, by the way, could be subtitled, “Very Sad Stories about Very Sad Events and the People Who are Made Sad by Them.”  So she says, without blinking an eye, “Well, you’re pregnant.  It’s a normal biological function to cry more than usual.”  Boom.  Just like that.  I mention this because there’s something about her natural acceptance of my emotional state, coupled with an acknowledgement of its right to exist, but lacking any sense of condescension or “oh, you’re a girl!”-iness, that was very cool.

She also said I have to stop hiding from her, which is true. And most of all, that I have to stop hiding by doing work that doesn’t need to be done.  Also true.

OH, and I have a new computer, a macbook.  This means that I also have photobooth, which means that I can marvel at the very slack double-chinny skin under my neck that had better be baby-related, or else I am in trouble.  Mmm, pasty dough neck.  That’s right, I’m looking at you, baby.  I am so hot for myself right now.  :)

I am so royally fucked, and I’m depressed about my state of affairs, which makes me want to crawl back into bed, which has necessitated the drinking of coffee, which I feel bad about because it’s bad for the baby.

So I have two major problems.

Problem One:  We are completely unprepared for the possible impending I-hope-so coming of this baby.  Possibly because of the major drama at the beginning of this pregnancy, but most likely because we are just neurotic people to begin with (and thank god you don’t have to pass psychological tests to get pregnant “naturally,” because Jesus Christ if we had to pass the kinds of tests people who want to adopt have to pass…I just don’t know.  And thinking about the implied injustices there…well, let’s just not think about them, either).  Right.  I really need to stop with the parentheticals following subordinate clause intros because how can I reasonably expect you to follow that train of thought? Let’s start over.

The just-so mix of reality and neurotic fantasies has made us afraid to buy baby stuff before the baby comes out alive.  So right now my parents are taking care of the clothing needs.  But as far as I can figure out, we can’t take him home (assuming there’s a him to begin with–see how I have to qualify every fucking sentence?  CRAZY) without a carseat, obviously, and he needs somewhere to sleep, too, seeing as he can’t exactly sleep 19th-C. style in a chest of drawers.

So.  We have to get over it and buy some stuff.  Because he is due to come out in two months.  And unless we get it together, if he does come out, in 20 years he’s going to probably report, while sitting with the sixth therapist who doesn’t know how to help him deal with his problems, a strange feeling of nakedness that manifests every time he hears someone open a drawer.

Problem Two:  I have no career prospects.  Last night, awake in bed at 3 AM, I realized why I can’t make progress on the dissertation.  And the reason is:  I no longer believe in what I’m doing.  The way I got through my MA thesis (which can’t compare to this kind of work, but it’s the closest I’ve got) was by believing, really believing, that the work itself deserved to be done.  That even if nothing came of it and it were never read (and it hasn’t been), the work itself was ethically necessary in the sense that “attention must be paid.”   Even if I were the only one paying that attention.

Somehow I lost that focus, and I think I lost it because I rushed through the proposal process without really making sure that what  I was proposing had that kind of personal relevance.  Because let’s face it, I’m getting a Ph.D. in English.  I cannot pretend that what I’m doing will ever be relevant to anyone but me.  And if I can’t make the argument for ethical necessity, then I’ve got to come up with something else, or I will be ABD for ever and ever amen.

P.S.:  Found this article on the untenability of Humanities Ph.D.s a little too late.  Do not read if you are in a “mental place” similar to what I’ve just described.

Because I have to.

Yesterday I got the “so, when are you sending me a chapter?” email.  I couldn’t exactly tell the truth, which is “I don’t have a chapter yet,” but I couldn’t lie and say something like “it’s almost done” because then I’d have to bang something out really fast, and I don’t think I have enough material to do that.  So I said something like “I have some fragments” and “it’s a mess,” hoping that will buy me time.

Remind me that I should be grateful for having an advisor who doesn’t see pregnancy and academic work as incompatible.  Because right now, I’m wishing she had written me off as one of the lost ones who may or may not produce a chapter or two or four.  And of course it’s wonderful that she hasn’t, but man that email made me anxious.

In the meantime, I’m wondering if I should post a mildly snarky comment on a blog that I read but have never commented on before (it’s none of you guys).  This is another grad student blog that I read because I like to see what mine brethren are up to, and this one is especially nice because the writer is also working on a lit dissertation.  It’s not my area, or even close to my area, but it’s still interesting.  None of my classmates are working in my area either, but we still keep tabs on each other’s projects.

The thing is, just as my blog as taken a turn toward my ever-expanding body, hers has done the same, toward her ever-shrinking one.  Apparently she was once “dangerously” overweight but is now close to reaching her ideal skinniness (in a healthy way, mind–the girl is literally working her ass off, so you’ve got to give her credit there).  What bothers me, though, is the way she talks about her former fatiness and her approaching goal.  For example, she wants to know whether it’s time to buy new clothes at the “real girl store” or if she should wait until she loses a little more weight.

Um, real girl store?  Since when weren’t fat women “real” women?  It’s obvious what she’s referring to, and she’s made these references to “real” sizes as opposed to the dreaded “plus” size before.  It bothers me that she hates her old self so much that she basically just wishes it into the cornfield (and with herself, perhaps everyone who’s still her “old” size?).  What bugs me more is that, honestly, I expect more of “my people,” especially the women.  If you’re getting a Ph.D. in literature, and your diss is on women’s lit, and you have some background in women’s and gender studies (these things are all true for her), shouldn’t you think a little more deeply about your relationship to your changing body?  I’m not saying that “real girl store” won’t still be her first reaction to the clothes she wants to wear, but I’d at least expect her to think about why she’s thinking that way.  Maybe she does and just doesn’t dwell on it in blog form.

Or maybe she’s closer to finishing her diss than I am because she doesn’t sit around thinking about crap all day.  Maybe.

So I FINALLY told my childfree friend about the contents of my uterus.  For the love of god, it’s the third trimester.  It’s about time.

Anyway, all my fretting was pointless.  Paraphrase:  “I don’t like kids, but I’m happy for my friends when they’re happy with their decision.”  There was a wee “You did plan this, right?” subtext to the conversation, but I’m ignoring it.

On the dissertation front, I had to email my advisor to ask for something and now I’m afraid to look at her response because it will probably include the words “how far are you?”

I admit to being cryptic in that last post, but not by design. It was more of a cryptic-by-exhaustion sort of thing.

I’m stuck in a state of perpetual in-between-ness. Looking back at the beginnings of this blog, I realized that when I started, on June 26th,I was just about a month away from finding out I was pregnant.  The irony is that I started this blog out of a desire for something new, but I had no idea what new would come to mean.  At the time, “new” just meant that I was transitioning from a year and a half of exam purgatory to the greater unknown of dissertation writing.  So it was fairly simple:  I was writing a dissertation blog.

Now I don’t know what I’m doing, though I admit that this has more to do with how I feel about my life than how I feel about this particular space in it.  It’s true that a blog, like a person, is never merely one thing.  My life would have made its way into my writing with or without the baby.  But I think there’s such a thing as a primary versus a secondary identity, and all of those pieces are in flux now.  Join me, won’t you, on a trip through my currently fracturing selves?

The Wife/Mother?/Woman Sort of Person: I am okay enough about my marriage to be able to admit that when I got married, I wasn’t thinking in terms of “forever.”  Don’t take that the wrong way.  I wasn’t treating it as an experiment or a starter situation.  But my mother gave me the same advice her mother gave her:  Try it out.  If it doesn’t work, you don’t have to stay married. That looks pretty bad when you type it out, I know, but it was the only sane way for me to enter into such a huge commitment.  If I looked at marriage as this complete and total identity shift from “Ms.” to “Mrs.” I wouldn’t have been able to do it, no matter how right a choice it was.  So when my co-workers (my helplessly heterosexual imperative co-workers) ask me, “What’s married life like?”, it’s true when I say that it’s no different from unmarried life.  I remain in a committed relationship to a person who is my best and sometimes only friend.  But I kept my name, I kept my bank account, I kept everything else the same.  I’m married because I don’t want to have a life with anyone else. But I’m still the same person I was when I was a girlfriend.

But being pregnant feels completely different.  Motherhood seems like the radical shift that some people find marriage to be, and it’s scary.  And it’s even scarier when I see my new face reflected in the people around me.  In my OB who says, “everything you do, you are doing for the both of you.”  In everyone who asks how the baby is doing before he’s even outside of my body, before he is more than just a part of me.   But me?  I’m still me.  I still feel like me, I still act like me.  But I don’t know who that person is going to be in a few months from now.  I know I’m supposed to embrace this shift, and I know I’m lucky to have the chance to do it.  But I’m afraid of losing myself, and more so of losing the self others see me to be, along the way.

The Daughter of Parents/The Parent of Son: The good and bad thing about graduate school is that you sometimes feel like the 5th-year senior who never moved on.  Sure, my breaks are working breaks, but I can’t deny the fact that this is like the fourth friday afternoon in a row that I’m not on the job.  And in that sense, I’m not quite a grown-up.  Some graduate students are better at this than I am; some of them are straight-up 9-to-5 adult-y old people.  But not me.  And nothing drove this point home like staying with my family for a week over break.  I slip right back into “kid mode.”  I don’t have to cook for myself!  I don’t have to wash the dishes!  Oh my, the floor, how miraculously clean it can be!  And I LOVE it.  I love being taken care of (and the pregnancy just makes my family all the more care-oriented.  Not that they weren’t before, but man, I’m not even allowed to carry the groceries?  Nice.).  I ended up depressing myself over the fact that this is the last winter break where I am the youngest at the table.  I have to grow up.  And I don’t like it.

It’s not like my family won’t still take care of me in many respects.  Hell, if I manage to go through with this crazy exclusive breastfeeding business, someone is going to have to feed me and remind me to shower.  Every two hours, these babies eat?  Seriously?  Holy good lord.  But I’m going to be somebody’s mother, and I can’t fuck it up (speaking of which, going to have to curb the foul language around the house as well).

The Student/The Slacker: No one at work/school knows yet.  And I don’t know what’s going to happen when they do find out.  Once again, I work in a very…family values sort of environment.  So I anticipate that I will shift from scholar to mother/scholar in an instant (and perhaps, to some, I’ll just be “the one with the kid”).  I have a problem with this for the regular reasons, of course:  it makes me squeamish to think that there will be people on both sides of the motherhood fence (the “kids come first” side and the “you can’t expect us to take you seriously now” side) who effectively demote me based on the contents of my uterus.  But there’s another, bigger problem looming.

I’m kind of lazy.  Maybe you noticed.  I’m not proud of this.  I wish I was as driven as I used to be.  But I’m just…not.  Blame it on burnout, burn it on life changes, blame it on whatever, when you come right down to it, I’m not casting myself as Superwoman.  I’m not going to be the department’s example of how you can do it all and finish on time.  I could be, if I pushed myself harder, but it’s unlikely that I’m going to push myself harder.  However, it was easier to be an academic slacker when I only had myself to blame.  Now I’ve got both a legitimate reason and a convenient excuse to keep pushing back that dissertation completion date.

Sometimes I think, “Hey, if I can make a baby, I can make a dissertation!” or “Look at me, I’ve got dual production value!”  But most of the time I just think, “Damn, if I can’t focus now, how am I going to focus on zero sleep with a stinky person clamped to my chest?”

***

So.  That’s what I was trying to say with the video below.  Somehow it summed up all of those conflicts:  parenthood, selfhood, slackerdom, childishness, responsibility.  Plus, it has puppets and fiddles, so you really can’t go wrong there.  Oh, and also:  I fessed up to a lot of not necessarily popular feelings here, on marriage, on mothering, on the whole bit.  So go easy on me, won’t you?  I am but a hapless, confused gamine-with-child, and I know not what I do.