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.

Tell me this: when did I turn into one of those people who considers college students to be consumers and sees her job as providing exceptional customer service?

Probably since I moved from the classroom to administration. I used to grandstand about the life of the mind and goods and services and commodity culture and all the rest.  I used to think college was more than just an exchange of cash for degree.  But now? Now I’m working my ass off to make sure that there is a tutor for every tutee, and I’m not doing it because I’m concerned about their education.  No, I’m thinking about how if a student is turned away, that student will complain that s/he didn’t get what s/he wanted, which will in turn piss off the dean-ly people, which will in turn jeopardize our funding.  Our cash.  Our Gs.

I’ll tell you more about it later. Right now I’ve got a customer.

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.

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 was supposed to write about being disorganized, but why tell when I can show?  Instead of a coherent post, here’s a list.  A lovely little whiny little list:

• I decided to start playing the clarinet again. I don’t know why.  Just an urge.  I was never that good at it;  I was average, maybe.  And I haven’t played seriously in ten years, though I still remember the mechanics of the thing.  Likely I will play for a couple of a days, realize I sound like crap, and quit.  But I think I’m hoping it will take my mind off the fact that, beyond the perils of the dissertation,
• I have an ugly soul.  Mein soul, she is plagued by envy, greed, jealousy, hatred, and all the other smelly bottom dwellers of personalities.  This is clearly the fault of grad school.  Over the past six years, I’ve become so…mean.  I’d be happy to see my classmates fail at any and every thing.  Okay, not all of them.  But generally the lot of them disgust me, and I in turn disgust myself. I want them to fail…at school, at marriage, at child-rearing, at friendships, at grocery shopping, at walking down the street.  I want their computers to break, their spouses to cheat, their children to smoke crack, their friends to hate them, their food to rot, their sidewalks to crack.  I want their well-manicured lives to implode.   I can’t survive this way, and I know this.  I don’t even know what fuels this ire; it can’t just be work-envy, because there will always be someone better than I am at the work that I do.  You can’t out-Butler Butler.  Or out-Fish Fish.  And you certainly can’t out-Bloom Bloom, though I’m convinced that someone eventually will–all it takes is an army of RAs and a closet full of jaunty scarves.  But it’s not about the big names; it’s about the desk next door, and I want a meteor to fall on that desk.  I have to get over this shit.  I swear to god it’s giving me jowls and a pot belly.  But on the bright side,
• I’m seeing the point of blogging.  I used to view it as merely an exercise in self-absorption…and it is, of course.  But self-absorption might not be so bad if it makes you face up to things, such as the fact that you haven’t been reading as much as you need to, or that you spend too much time worrying about office politics, or, you know, that you’ve become a mean little nasty ugly person.