Yesterday I was making Jello (the industrial kind–is there any other?) for Wizard  because he’s been in a Jello mood lately. I feel it necessary to add that I have to cook anything involving boiling water (e.g. pasta) because his coordination is so off that making him do it himself would result in a trip to the emergency room.  No, really.  This isn’t one of those “oh, honey, let me do it!” scenarios.  I think I’ve mentioned here before that he’s one of those genius-y people who can’t tie his own shoes.  Yeah.  So that problem extends to things like pouring hot water into a bowl, tying anything into a knot, and standing on one foot.  It’s weird.

I’d think this was just some huge ruse to get me to do shit around the house, except that I’ve heard a neurologist tell him that his scores on a series of hours-long tests were so abnormal that something should be wrong, except that it wasn’t, and it was probably just the same wiring that helps him compute things reallyreallyreally fast, so go along your merry way, and by the way I hope you don’t want a pilot’s license because there’s no way in hell anyone would sign off on one of those.

He was sad about the pilot’s license thing, surprisingly, not so much because he wants one as that he doesn’t like feeling “differently abled.”  And I’m, like, dude, I hate to break it to you, but you are the most differently-abled person I know, in all the senses of different one might imagine.

But anyway. Jello.

It’s pretty simple, that jello.  Powder in bowl, plus a cup of boiling water, followed by two minutes of stirring, followed by a cup of cold water and refrigeration.  If you came here looking for jello directions, there you go.  But it struck me last night that my mother always screwed up jello.  Either it got thick on top, or all the powder was clumped at the bottom, or something.  And as a kid, it annoyed the crap out me.  Who screws up jello?  Why does this taste so bad?  Why is it either watered down or gritty or both?

And then last night, I figured it out  While raising two kids, working full-time, keeping a house, and doing all the other crap you have to do to function as a human in the U.S., my mother didn’t have two spare minutes to stand there stirring the water into the powder. She just dumped it all together, shoved it in the fridge, and ran off to supervise sentence diagramming, or iron clothes, or grade math tests, or whatever.

It’s facebook, actually, that’s making me think more about time and how we use it, as people and as parents.  My facebook is divided rather unevenly into college/grad school friends (lots) and women I knew in high school who had two or three kids and are now trying to finish their college degrees (a few). At this time of year, you see a lot of status messages by grad students complaining about staying up all night, and not having a minute to do anything but write, and the rest of the hell that is a full schedule of course papers and teaching and grading at the end of the semester. I used to complain about those things too.  But now that I’m trying to write a dissertation and co-run a tutoring lab and take care of The Baby and sometimes even be a partner to a person who has yet to submit his dissertation revisions because he’s busy working full-time so the rest of us don’t starve AND because he takes the baby from me the minute he gets home so I have some time to work…(RUN ON!!!)…sometimes it’s all I can do not to post something snarky, like, hey y’all, why don’t you bring a thermos of coffee on over to my house and spend your overnight reading hours watching my baby, who tends to like chilling in his exersaucer at 3 in the AM?

That is, until I read the statuses of my old high school crew, whose lives involve getting three kids to three different places and doing  part-time work to supplement their husbands’ two or three jobs, all while busting ass to meet the demands of college coursework that will hopefully  score them a decent job in five years or so.

What am I trying to say here?  That it’s all relative, I guess?  That I thought it was tough being a student until I was a student-mother?  That any and all sets of circumstances are often difficult?  That I whine too much? That my friends whine too much? That my friends think I whine too much?  That my friends don’t want to whine to me because they feel guilty, even though I remain a good listener and am not nearly as judgmental in real life as I appear in this blog?

Maybe I’ll just say big ups to those of us trying to live in the mind and in the world at the same time, whatever that may mean. And good luck with finals.  And try to resist the urge to fail the kids whose full schedule of sleeping off their heavy drinking is the only thing preventing them from turning in their portfolios on time.

Note: if you don’t want to hear me talking about breasts and vaginas, you might want to opt out now.

Note the Second: I wrote this a long time ago and am posting it now because: a) I haven’t posted anything in a long time, and b) I feel like it.

It never occurred to me to write this post until after reading this, a husband’s account of his wife’s failed attempts at breastfeeding.  (Even if you don’t much care for things kids-related, it’s a worthwhile read just for the powerful writing.)  I read a lot of parenting stuff, but this was the first time I saw a story about breastfeeding gone wrong, no doubt because for many of us, the guilt and shame that accompanies this failure is a bit too much to blog.  Right now my son is sound asleep, his near-empty MAM bottle of Similac Advance in front of me.  So how did I get here?

I assumed from the start that I would breastfeed.  I took the class, I practiced the “sandwich hold,” I read the book.  Of everything, it was the one thing I could bring myself to do. Crib? No. BF class? Yes.  I’m not sure why this was.  I didn’t even buy bottles ahead of time, partly because I assumed exclusive breastfeeding and partly because it would have been another thing to throw away if he didn’t make it. So perhaps I was able to take on BF prep because it didn’t carry physical signs of impending parenthood the way purchasing feeding supplies would have. (See last year’s posts, November through March, for an explanation of the underlying causes of my neuroses.)

I prepped myself solidly for a natural labor but didn’t think it would actually happen; I breezed through the breastfeeding prep and scoffed when I heard that most women give up after the first month.  I planned to go for at least six months and then figure out what would be best for my child from there.  I don’t know why I thought it would be so easy.  Partly I just trusted my body’s ability to do its job.  But under that–if I’m going to be completely honest here–there lurks a mild though significant dose of classism.  Those puny plastic 2 oz. bottles of formula with the screw-on nipples?  Those are for 16-year-olds and bottle-proppers.  They aren’t meant for me.  I’ve got a doula, a birth plan, an organic diet.  Breastfeeding is my birthright.

Except that it wasn’t.

I know I’ve said it in various comments, but I feel lucky that I was able to give birth the way I wanted to.  I had a fever during labor whose source couldn’t be pinpointed, and IV fluids and tylenol didn’t bring it down.  (We didn’t understand the gravity of the situation until much later, when we realized that, hey, that whole team from pediatrics? They aren’t in the room for everyone’s delivery.  Our OB, smartly or not, did not tell us what the worst case scenario was that made her call them in; we still don’t know.) Due to my own panic about the possibility of infection, labor stalled around the 6-centimeter mark after progressing really well in a matter of hours.  Because of the fever my doctor insisted on augmentation with pitocin to get labor going again, which, if you’re familiar with these things, you know is the first step on a short road away from vaginal delivery.   In a usual-case-scenario, pitocin brings on contractions quickly but intensely painfully, thus increasing the need for an epidural, which can then either slow labor again or impede pushing.  And it only gets worse from there. Because I knew about that possibility (because I read the book, dammit!  because I was prepared!), I refused the epidural and went drug-free, giving birth vaginally after about 12 hours of labor.

(Note: Pitocin isn’t as bad as everyone says it is.  It’s worse.  For me it was particularly bad because I needed to push before I was fully dilated, which resulted in 3rd degree tears.  For those of you who don’t know, that’s one degree before the kind of tear that opens the wall between vagina and rectum.  When it rains, the stitches hurt. I’m like an old guy with a bum knee. Only, you know, in my vaginal wall.)

My ability to give birth vaginally without an epidural gave me incredible confidence. Of course I would breastfeed.  Of course this body, capable of delivering a healthy child, capable of withstanding the pain and effort of labor, would be capable of feeding my child now, for the next month, the next six months, the next two years, if that’s what I wanted.

Except that it wasn’t.

My son weighed 8 pounds, 10.5 ounces at birth.  As soon as he was returned to me, my doula helped him to latch for the first time.  He was never great at latching, and it was never easy–I couldn’t just “pop him on the boob,” as I’ve heard it described–but once we were set up he would do pretty well.  He knew what he was doing, and I was doing my best not to get in his way.  I saw the hospital lactation consultant, but that was just a formality.  We were good.  We were Earth Mama and Earth Baby.  Before we were discharged two days later, the pediatrician asked that we return the next day for a weight check and a jaundice check.  His jaundice levels were hovering at a not-good-not-bad level, but his weight had already passed the 7% loss mark.  I wasn’t terribly concerned about either thing.

I should have been. By the next day he hit 10% and was going lower.  And in the meantime, our breastfeeding bond started to break.  He was weak, and tired, and weak some more.  He’d latch and stop, or latch and pop off, screaming.  He fell asleep feeding a few times, and I just left him there for two hours at a time, but he wasn’t getting what he needed.  In the meantime, my milk wasn’t coming in.  In a month of breastfeeding attempts, minor successes, and glowing failures, my breasts felt full exactly one time.  I never leaked.  I never felt the exploding pain of a breast that needs to be nursed. For whatever reason, my body failed.

We were seeing the doctor daily for weight checks at that time, and we weren’t given any option but to supplement with formula.  The jaundice was still there (remind me to tell you about the time Wizard and a 3-day-old had to wait THREE HOURS in a scummy hospital waiting room for a heel stick), and the weight was still dropping. Those 2 oz. bottles with the screw-on nipples? Here, Perpetua, these are for you.

And then I hit Day Five.  Do y’all know about Day Five?  Statistically speaking, it is the absolute worst postpartum day in terms of roller-coaster emotions, mounting physical pain, and, for me, dead black despair. (I didn’t know this until long after Day Five, or else I would have thought I imagined it).  That day I called my doula and asked for advice about the breastfeeding, which at this point was happening overnight, with bottle feedings during the day.  And she? She recommended cup feeding.

That was her answer.  I’m telling a person who has seen me at my most-intimate-of-intimates that my baby keeps losing weight and my milk isn’t coming in and I want to jump out the window or board a jet to New Zealand or both, and she tells me to go massage my breasts into a paper cup and tip the milk down baby’s throat.  Cup feeding is recommended because if you use a bottle, you’re impeding the baby’s natural ability to latch and giving him an “easy out.”

I want to make this clear: we wanted to breastfeed.  We didn’t even use a fucking pacifier.  I got upset when they gave him one during his hearing test, even though they had to because he was screaming like the little instigator that he is and they couldn’t perform the test. (He also pulled the plugs out of his ears because, as I’ve said before, He. Is. Hilarious.)  But for some reason, the cup feeding thing?  Pushed me over the edge.  That was the moment I refused the cult.

So we rented a hospital-grade breast pump. Screw the mama-baby bond, at this point I just wanted to get as much breast milk into The Baby as possible.  So I sat and milked myself for hours at a time.

And it was a good day if I got four ounces out of both breasts.

You are welcome to tell me that amounts don’t matter and that breastfeeding doesn’t concern itself with amounts and who knows how much comes out of a breast, anyway.

You are also welcome to go fuck yourself.

I don’t even remember where he was when his weight bottomed out.  Somewhere in the seven pound range, I think. It’s written down somewhere, along with a painstaking diary of every drop of food that has ever entered my child’s body (because did I mention that I am totally OCD about his eating and to this day write down everything he eats? I know, I need to clear that up. I know it has the potential to damage him. But I just can’t right now.)  I know my baby better now and know that he is just a beanpole, as my best friend says. He’s really long, and he’s not chubby, and that’s who he is.  But tell that to Perpetua, mother of a 2-week old, and see what she says.  She’ll probably tell you to go fuck yourself.  She’s fond of saying that.

Oh! And! I forgot to tell you! He had a cold (or SOMETHING, we never figured out what it was) during his first two weeks that interfered with his ability to latch because his nose was completely blocked, and who wants a boob in their mouth when they can’t breathe through their nose? (Well, some fetishist, probably, but my baby wasn’t interested.)

So, in sum: baby loses weight, baby gets jaundice, baby gets cold-thing, baby loses more weight, parents forced to supplement, parents told to cup feed, mama cries and cries and cries, mama gets breast pump, pump doesn’t produce much more milk than baby, mama cries and cries and cries.  Repeat last two steps for a month.

A month to the day of my son’s birth, I returned the pump.  I did it.  Me. I took it to the security room at the hospital. (I’m going to go ahead and tell you that I’m crying now, because that? Was one of the more fucked up failures of my life. And I’m no stranger to failure.)

So, here’s where we are now:

Every time he seems like he’s getting a cold, I obsess over whether breastfeeding would have made a difference. I can’t buy formula at the store because I’m too embarrassed, like I’m a pregnant smoker. I’m the Queen of H1N1 Obsession because, hey, you know what will mess you up?  A pandemic that starts three days after your baby who won’t feed is born.

The good part is that these thoughts only encompass about 10% of my day.  They used to take up 50%, and in the first two months or so, it was all I thought about.

I mourn my lost milk.  And I wish I didn’t. But I can’t separate truth from hype. I know “breast is best” even if I don’t believe in it as a cure-all wonder-food.  Failing your child is completely different from failing yourself.  I mean, I’ve screwed up all manner of things over the past 30 years, but that’s my business.  But in this case, I made a person, and then I didn’t give him what he needed. It’s like I invited my friends over for dinner and then asked them to cook. Only it’s not at all like that, because in that scenario I’m just a minor asshole.  In my reality, I’m a person who has not done best by her child.  That’s 4th degree asshole, the kind where your intestines are hanging out your vag and dragging on the floor.

I was supposed to be writing a chapter today, but somehow this seemed more important. Thanks for being a trooper and making it through to the end (even if you skimmed).

AKA, Somebody stop me before I unleash my pent-up fury on not just the MIL but my own parents as well.

All three of them are in the house.  In the livingroom. Right outside my door, the door behind which I’m supposed to finish at least another quarter of this fucking chapter before I send it off (days late) to my diss group.

I’d fare better if there were three elephants out there.  Or one ovulating monkey.  Or a clutch of finger-painting four-year-olds.  I could go on.  I’m not proud. Or tired.

Today’s barely suppressed scream is brought to you by: “Your mother came here to help with the baby, not clean your house.”

Um, yeah.  But see, I didn’t say clean the HOUSE.  I said it would be good if she could CLEAN THE BOTTLES.  Because I need to sit and work, and if I start in on household chores I’ll just keep going.  So yeah, it would be helpful if she washed the bottles while MIL plays with baby and Wizard goes to work and I go to write and my father, I don’t know, sits around watching Turner Classic Movies. It would be abundantly helpful.

But apparently it’s only okay–with my father–if my mother does something on her own; I’m not supposed to ask.  My mother, meanwhile, doesn’t care.  I could ask her to paint the ceiling and she’d do it.  She’s like that.  So I’m careful to not ask too much, because she’s naturally inclined to do too much.  I figure cleaning the bottles isn’t anywhere near too much. I see where my father’s (over)protective impulse comes from, but, really? Dude? How big of an asshole do you think I am?

A pretty big one, I guess, since what was once a diss blog is now a “Listen to me complain about my family, everyone!”

But it’s that or scream and throw shit, and that kind of stuff you can’t do around infants.  Dammit.

I don’t know whether to get the H1N1 vaccine, and I don’t know whether to get it for The Baby.

Yesterday I went to the GP to get some blood tests (Hi, ridiculously low iron levels!  How are we doing now?) and a flu shot (which they ran out of, so I ended up getting it at the drugstore anyway).  The lovely GP also put me on the list for the pig flu vaccine because The Baby is just shy of 6 months. I was really excited about this because I’ve been wanting that sucker since May.

Now, Wizard is completely and utterly against Baby getting vaccinated for H1N1, even though he is pro-vaccine otherwise.  And he is a scientist person, so while he isn’t a medical doctor he is good with medical journals and such.  As am I, because if you can read Derrida you sure as hell can read medical statistics. Anyway, he doesn’t think any of us should take the vaccine because, in his view, it hasn’t been tested extensively enough. I am of a mind that it is just a flu shot, so who cares?

That is, until my mom’s GP told her that he wasn’t taking it and didn’t want her getting the shot, either.  And he is generally pro-vaccine as well. He says it needs more testing, especially for kids.

Now I don’t know what to do.  What are you guys doing?  Are you taking it? Getting it for your kids?

ETA: Not that y’all don’t know this, but I work at a university and Baby is in daycare.  Exposure.  We has it.

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.

Question:  How many times can one (passive-aggressively) express one’s disagreement with the number of toys one’s grandson possesses via conversation with said grandson?

Answer:  I lost track.  But I’ll tell you what, the woman’s capacity for invention is endless.  Every game with the baby is a game that starts with “You don’t need a _____ when you can use a ________!”  Example:  “Let’s see if you can make noise.  You can play drums with a spoon.  What else do you need if you have a spoon?”

And the thing is, it’s not like the baby lives in a Palace of Fun and Amazement.  He’s got a thing he lays on with toys over the top, an exersaucer, a seat with some toys attached, and some other random stuff, like Lamaze dolls and rattles.

That’s it.

But it’s too much.  We’re “confusing” him.  Or at least, that’s what she tells him.  He’s confused by the number of toys, can’t get to know just one at a time, and thus knows not what he wants.

Nevermind that the kid gets tired of certain toys after awhile and clearly expresses his desire to move on to something else.

Christ.  Perhaps I’ll just stick him in a wooden crate with a spoon and a towel and call it a day.

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.