If you have a few minutes, read this article about initiatives to prevent unplanned pregnancies among community college students.  If you don’t, here’s a summary: community colleges don’t have health centers, and often CCs serve populations that wouldn’t otherwise have access to birth control, for financial, logistical, or other reasons.  So, says this article, we need to get those kinds of services onto CC campuses in order to help young women prevent unplanned pregnancies and thus finish their CC degrees.  Long story short: info and services related to pregnancy prevention shouldn’t be limited to high schools.

Ok, so.  I’m kind of surprised by my reaction to this.  Because, on the one hand, yes, unwanted unplanned pregnancies suck ass, and if you find yourself in that situation, it’s important to have access to birth control, emergency contraception, or abortion.

However.

Doesn’t this stink a little bit of classism to y’all? I’m not talking about the issue itself, I’m talking about the way the issue is treated in the article.  The assertion is that unplanned pregnancies occur in high rates among single women in their 20s, and that these pregnancies are probably unwanted, and if they are wanted, they shouldn’t be.

Right? Is that how it sounds? Or am I getting all weird and fundamentalist-y?

I guess I’m bothered by that core assumption that unplanned pregnancy = unwanted pregnancy. I’m also bothered by the notion that a pregnancy must be either wanted 100% or unwanted 100%.  Can I get a little nuance up in here?  Because I hate to break it to the patriarchy, but a good lot of us hover around the 50-90% mark most of the time.  When I found out I was pregnant, I freaked the hell out.  I didn’t actively consider abortion, but I did think, “Well, this isn’t the best time for this, and I’m not sure I can handle this.” Am I glad I’ve got a little dude sleeping on my belly right now?  Indeed.  But that doesn’t mean I was dreaming of onesies and playgroups from day one.*

So I guess what bugs me is this: my pregnancy was unplanned, but hey, that’s cool with my university because I’m 30 and married, and I’m in school but I’ve already got an M.A.  So finishing my degree isn’t that important to anyone but me and the fam.**  But if you’re, say, 21 and unmarried, all of the sudden folks have the right to judge the appropriateness of your pregnancy to their institution. NOT that people didn’t judge mine, and continue to judge it.  But those are individuals, not systems, doing the judging.  Big Difference.

Again, I’m not saying that these services SHOULDN’T be provided, because we all know that one thing this country definitely needs more of is cheap and convenient access to birth control. But by likening CCs to high schools, you’re saying that a 25 year old is as immature and incapable of making decisions as a 15 year old, and that’s just not true.  It’s troubling, too, that the people who want to help women gain access to birth control sound just as controlling and condescending as the people who want to take away our right to abortion.

Perhaps most of all I’m bothered by the emphasis on “retention rates,” which, again, would be cool if The Man were worried about the fact that these women want, and need, to get their degrees.  But what they’re really worried about is money, and the fact that pregnant student = drop out = less money in the bank for the CC.  Show me a woman-centered approach to this topic (free day care, anyone?), and maybe we can talk.

*Let me just remind everyone that we actually thought we were going into this marriage with fertility problems, so on one level we were SUPER super happy to know that we could conceive.  But we obviously didn’t time it, because we didn’t think we had anything to time.  So it was a bit of a mindfuck of, hey, praise be! my uterus works!  But, um, did it have to work right now?  BUT! Don’t take it away, god-like entity who might punish me for not being thankful 24/7!  Yeah, because in addition to the whole “your baby might not have a chin! and you might need an abortion at 22 weeks!” thing, we didn’t think we’d be able to get pregnant without the help of Science. So when I freaked out about being pregnant I automatically assumed that Ye Gods would have their way with me because I didn’t leave cookies on the hearth in their honor or something.  And to a degree, I still freak out about that, which is why I’m always qualifying statements about the unplanniness of The Baby.

** They’re also spending more on me than they make, but that’s a whole other issue.

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).

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 wish my dissertation were still of feminist interest and import, because what I think (and subsequently blog) about often has to do with feminist-ish topics.  So what I’m saying is that this would still be a diss blog, sort of, if my diss were on something else, something more central to my everyday thinking.  Which it isn’t.  Which might explain why it’s languishing in a dark, wet corner.  I poke it with a broom every once in a while just to keep the rest of the world happy, but…ugh.  “Omelas” reference FAIL.

So anyway.

Long-time listeners might remember my childfree friend, CF.  More on her here.  Since having the baby (Dang, did I ever nickname him?  I’m sure I did, but I can’t remember with what.), CF and I have remained in better touch than I would have expected.  She has even been over to my house a few times, my house with its wipey smells and scads of toys and, um, infant inhabitant.  She didn’t hold him, and I didn’t offer, because I didn’t want her to feel obligated to do something with which she wasn’t comfortable.  I’m trying, you see, to be respectful of her beliefs.

So when am I going to learn that she isn’t respectful of mine?

Before I go further, I suppose I should acknowledge the fact that she’s a bit of a, oh, I dunno, blowhard?  What I mean is that she is of the Open Mouth Insert Foot School, and while she isn’t always happy about this and openly acknowledges it, she is what she is.  So while on many topics–race, sexuality, gender, lots of the big ones–she thinks before she speaks, there are some–kids–where she just doesn’t.  And the reason for this, I suspect, is that when it comes to race and gender, not only is she generally progressive in her attitudes, but she also cares about not coming off an asshole or otherwise hurting peoples’ feelings.  But when it comes to children, her beliefs, and her belief in her right to hold them, supersede all attempts she would otherwise make to consider her audience.

I’m starting to sound like what I want is for my friends to parrot back to me what I already believe.  Not so.  What I mean is this: say you  think women look terrible bald.  Sinead O’Connor?  Made you puke a little in your mouth back in the day.  Now, this is a personal preference you have every right to hold.  But you wouldn’t talk about it in front of a friend who just lost all her hair, right?  It’s not that you have to change what you believe, but you should think of other people sometimes.  Right?

No, really, right? Or am I completely wrong here?  Because it matters.

CF has recently taken up with a childless married couple whom I believe to be a replacement couple for Wizard and me.  And that’s cool, I guess, because the truth is that we aren’t who we were a few months ago, and we don’t really go out much, and when we do we don’t go out late, etc.  We have a baby.  Life changes.  So anyway, she’s all BFFing it with them now, doing the things we used to do, and she mentioned a remark that this couple made regarding disabled children.

It was disparaging, and I won’t repeat it here.  Basically, though, they were making fun of a political figure’s mentally challenged child.

And it wasn’t funny.  But.  It wasn’t like the worst thing you could ever imagine someone saying.  It definitely could have been worse.  In other words, it’s the sort of thing I normally would have let slide in polite conversation.  I would have gotten quiet, maybe, or changed the subject, but I wouldn’t have bluntly stated, “That’s not funny.”  Because let’s face it, when someone is laughing at something, and you stop the conversation and essentially indict their sense of humor…it’s awkward.

But that’s the thing:  I cared more about the wrongness of the comment than I did the awkwardness of pointing it out.  And it occurs to me that I am changing, become more conservative, perhaps, or maybe just more defensive.  Maybe I’m just growing old.  I’m not sure.  I worry sometimes that I’m becoming a cliche, or worse, an essentialist.   Example:  you know how you always hear how difficult it is to put away your baby’s first clothes?  Well, it IS.  It’s tough.  You squeeze them into a too-small onesie one more time before putting it away “for the next one,” and you find yourself thinking about the next one far too soon.  What’s strange, though, is that I didn’t expect I’d be the type of mother who lovingly petted a newborn-sized diaper.  Yet there you’ll find me, kneeling next to the under-crib storage.  I don’t know who this person is, this person who pines for size 0-3m and can’t let a bad joke slide.

Yet more often than not, I’ve not been “that mom.”  In the latest dust-up over definitions of the maternal and maternal normality, commentators have bandied back and forth the notion of “newborn qua narcotic,” the idea that one falls madly in love with a child, becomes obsessed with him in the same manner that an addict’s world narrows to the scope of the drug.  I’m sad to say that my baby never had that narcotic effect on me.  Would that he did.  I struggled (still struggle) with depression so deep I didn’t know it existed.  It was, like, 11th dimension depression.  I worried (no longer worry, happily) about the strength of my bond with my son.  We’re good now, but at first I’d have sworn he didn’t like me.  (Note: Much of this has to do with early breastfeeding and nutrition struggles which sadly didn’t end until the failed attempts at breastfeeding did.  So, yes, I’m THAT mom.  The one who says no to breastfeeding when it passes the point of hellish undoability.)  My point: “Moms” do things that I, Perpetua, don’t do.  And while on one hand I feel that this is right for me–that’s it’s right for me to explore motherhood outside its narrow definition in popular culture–on the other hand I find myself equally alarmed when I a) fit that definition to a letter (e.g. cry over clothes), and b) explode that definition completely (e.g. didn’t know what the hell my MIL was talking about when she asked, a day after baby was born, “how it feels to be in love”).

So when my childfree friend makes a remark that the pre-mom-me would have shrugged off, and I find myself, days later, still perturbed, I recognize that my worldview has shifted, that my child, and children in general, matter to me in a way they didn’t before.  And it bothers me sometimes that becoming a mother has changed me much, so quickly.  My academic feminist self wants to deny this power, not only because it leads to an essentialist mode of thinking and a glorification of the maternal that is more dangerous than useful, but also because, dammit, it’s not equally applicable in all cases.  That is, I am very much a traditional mother in some situations and not at all in others, and I think this range of mothering sensibility (for lack of a better word) exists in each of us as mothers and in all moms as a group.  Becoming a mother has changed me both radically and not at all.  Speaking as an academic feminist mother, then, I can say that it isn’t so much that we wish to deny the power of the maternal as we need to view it as one aspect of an infinite range of parenting experiences.  However, we fear that by accepting its power, we run the risk of allowing that version of motherhood to overtake all the others, likely because it is already so dominant in our culture.  Acknowledging the power of motherhood, then, requires an equal acknowledgement, and acceptance, of its lack.

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.

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.

I have a cold.  A motherfucking cold.  Even though I douse myself in Purell like I’m a nun with a holy water fetish, I got a cold.

Despite this I went to work today, where I proceeded to spread my germs around.  Because I’m generous like that.  However, I did give the students fair warning, sat far away from them, and didn’t touch their papers.  And they looked at me kind of like, “Hey, fat runny-nosed lady, I tongue-kiss dogs with mono.  It’s all good!”  Would that I had their strength.  Or stupidity.

By the way, did you know that MLA has changed its inclusive language rule so that a sentence such as, “When a person has the flu, they should go to the health center” is now CORRECT?  That’s right, MLA has changed a long-lived and -loved grammar rule so that you no longer need either the awkward he/she construction or the less inclusive gendered pronoun.  I DON’T LIKE THIS.  Really.  Not because I’m that into grammar (see present entry for evidence), but because I think you have to know the rule to break the rule, and students don’t know the goddamned rule.  Also, MLA just likes to pretend it changes with the times and recognizes the beautiful fluidity of the English language.  In reality, it’s just another academic hurdle designed to keep you down.  Or something.  Dammit.

Colds make me swear more.  I do not know why.  Maybe because I’m MAD AT THE UNIVERSE.

Speaking of which, RuPaul’s Drag Race is pretty fucked up.  Here’s the thing.  I like me some drag queens.  I like that they make us question sexuality and “the feminine” and gender roles and all that other stuff.  I admire their ability to make their eyebrows disappear under gallons of makeup and yet somehow fix themselves so as not  to look like painted clowns (unless they want to look like painted clowns, that is).  Yay, drag queens.  However.  WHY the soft focus on every other scene?  Why the weird cutaways to Ru’s panel presentations that make Tyra Banks look like a natural when it comes to voice-overs?   And most of all:

Why can’t someone give me a consistent guide on which pronouns to use when referring to a drag queen?  No, really, this is important to me.  Because when a queen is being a queen, I assume that means you say “she.” I   Then, a “she” when performing becomes a “he” when going about his usual business.  Yet when the men were out of costume and were just combing their wigs and stuff, they still referred to each other as “she.”  And I am totes confused.   Granted, maybe they were using “she” in the pejorative, but….  I don’t know.  I need help.  Help MLA can’t give me.  Because they’d just hand me some “When a drag queen has the flu, they should go to the health center” bullshit, and I’m just not having it.

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.