Un-hyphenated

I am acutely aware of the many roles I play in my life, the many hats I wear: woman, wife, mother, professor, blogger. This whole business of questing for balance is based on an acknowledgment that different forces constantly assert differently-angled but nonetheless cumulative pulls and pushes on the (un)stable self. Right?

I have been trying to find--well, create, really--balance in my life, so that I am able to best enjoy all the good and least suffer the ill. I have done this, largely, by acknowledging my limited energies and by blunting some of my sharper ambitions. I have devoted the bulk of my energies and passions to my family. I have cut myself slack. I have lived in the hyphen: I am a wife-and-mother now, having been a wife-and-woman before that. I am still a woman-professor, but am now also a professor-mom. My house is cleanish, the renos advancing, if glacially; my marriage is maturing but remains a work in progress not yet perfected; I've managed to lose the baby weight and occasionally to read the Saturday paper in its entirety, even if this might take me until Thursday. The hyphen explains, the hyphen mitigates: the hyphen denotes multitasking. Twice the work, but spread over just one person.

I've been a 'good-enough professor.' I've been a 'good-enough' everything really.

As you know, I love my job. What I have really loved since becoming pregnant is the flexibility it has offered me in terms of scheduling, the freedom to work from home in my pajamas, the freedom to rearrange my work to suit my needs. Of course, this largely meant less work and less intensely. I'm a competitive, ambitious academic by nature: you kinda don't get to the professoriate without a strong drive and a will of steel. It's been hard for me to take naps on the floor of my office while pregnant, and hard for me to see my course evaluations dip in the semester since my return from mat leave ("It's hard to get hold of Professor Mimi"). Now that my summer research term has begun in earnest, and as the tenure clock suddenly seems to tick loudly than its biological counterpart ... I want more than good enough. I want to be un-hyphenated.

Isn't that a terrible thing to say? The pull of my research, my feeling that, really, I can do much better and much more work on this than I have been, yanks hard at me. I feel my own ambition returning. I like it. Pynchon can see it in my eyes, hear it in my voice as I rapid-fire the day's research at him over the cell phone as I march home through the park while listening to radio documentaries on the history of science and jotting down notes. "Sloooooow down! You're talking really fast." Because I'm excited. I'm in the zone, and I could lose myself there. When we started dating, just as I was finishing up my dissertation, Pychon gave me the nickname, 'Academimi'--he said my whole self changed when I got in that word space, and once, when he stopped by my office unexpectedly, I blinked up at him, and called him "Dude"--I forgot his name. That's what I get like when I'm working. I love the focus.

But how can I do this--the conferences, the intense, manic head-game of deeply researching a topic, the deeply interior process of thinking-by-writing--without throwing all the rest of it out of whack? How can I be a devoted mom, a fun and attractive wife, a contented woman and an accomplished professor, all at the same time? I can't create more hours in the day, nor do I have much left that I can really give up in the hours that I do have.

I feel the pull of the supermom stereotype. I don't want to be that person. But how can I reconcile this career drive and everything else that I want just as much?