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?

Time

My watch battery died about two years ago. I haven't replaced it yet, and so go without a watch. I read somewhere that watches are becoming more and more status symbols as their actual utility declines: who needs a watch when your cellphone, laptop, iPod, Blackberry, etc. all flashes the time at you as a matter of course?

In the course of a day, there is, in fact, very little that depends on a strict adherence to schedule--other than getting into and out of class, and attending the occasional meeting, my workdays are stretches of flowing time, broken up by interests rather than appointments and obligations. I actually found that I didn't much care what time it was, most of the time. When I teach, I can check the time on the classroom clock; to make sure I get there on time, I glance up at the corner of my laptop screen. Even my office phone just silently tells time while it waits to ring, or to be dialled. Every hallway in my building has a clock, and the circulation desk at the library has two.

The longer I went without a watch, the less I found myself wondering what the time was.

Until I got pregnant, of course. Then it wasn't a constant checking of the progress of the minute hand, or even the hour hand. I constantly tapped out a calendrical rosary on my fingertips: months and weeks of gestastion accomplished, portion of pregnancy elapsed, trimester milestones attained or approaching.

Minute-time arrived with Miss Baby, a warping of my time-sense: she's been crying for an hour, or maybe one minute. She's been asleep for only twenty minutes! Or was that an hour? When did she eat, or better yet, when did I? "She's two and a half weeks old," I somewhat blearily, if proudly, told a friend of my mother's. "Mimi!" my mom admonished, "She's 17 days old! Two and a half weeks. Sheesh!" (My mom is the kind of person who says sheesh when provoked in ways like this.) I counted days and weeks, I counted hours and minutes: naps, feeding, growth, maternity leave, days until the weekend, minutes at the breast. I became obsessed with knowing exactly what time it was. If I couldn't see the clock on Pynchon's side of the bed when I got up at night, I got angry. We put a clock in Miss Baby's room, so I could watch the time pass as I rocked and rocked. Somehow, if I knew she fed from 3:07 until 3:18, that made getting up so much more bearable: if I could name it, I could control it?

Still, now that she's getting older--almost 1!--we're settling into an easier routine, one with softer targets and gentler rhythms: we get up 6:30-7:30-ish; we get to daycare 9-10-ish, and come home 5-ish. Whatever. I find, though, that I'm able more to enjoy our time in the evening, when work and daycare are done--there's nothing left but dinner, and bath, and bed, and that all flows without too much effort. I'm a little more stressed in the morning, even though we're really not on a strict schedule. I'm still driven by a forward momentum that can't help looking at the clock.

Pynchon goes back to work in three weeks--a real office gig, you know, the kind where you have to show up at a particular time and stay put for a certain number of hours. I wonder what our time will feel like then?
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And speaking of time, I'm sorry if I haven't been around to your place lately--I'm getting caught up tonight. Work's been very intense, and I've been spending whole days on the internet, and coming home to paint windows in the garage before conking out in bed. Whoops.

Perspective

Here's the view from our balcony in Cuba. Bear in mind we paid more money than we could really afford to attend our friends' beachfront nuptials, a getaway we imagine to be our last for some time. Ready?


Nice, eh?

Here's the view from the newlyweds' balcony. Hope you're not afraid of heights:


In fact, the whitish blur on the point is, in fact, the newlyweds, newly wed. The striding figure is the photographer: they always move with such purpose, don't you think?

Anyhow. We had a crappy room with a crappy view. But sometimes you find something worth looking at in the unlikeliest of places.

Not here, though:


That's the 'art' above our bed. Amazingly, we managed to get to sleep despite this assault on good taste. No, I'm thinking more of stuff like this:


It's not really all about my feet. I think this is a post about perspective, about the benefits of mixing it up. This photo is of a road paved in wood blocks: the homeowner who did the paving really detested the sound of horses galumping over cobblestones of a morning, a time of day said homeowner much preferred to be asleep. How funny! And what a novel solution to an end I can really get behind: more sleep, and quieter! When we show our pictures, everyone always asks me about this. I tell them the story, and I know I will remember it now. Will marvel.

Sometimes the wide angle offers a panorama worthy of contemplation:


The diagonal can emphasize distance, give a sense of sweep and scale; connote motion or direction.

Or a grander field of view can suggest unlikely juxtapositions; here it's decay and care.

Too much distance, though, and you wind up with a series of postcards. To make it your own, move in closer:


What matters is the look of joy, of relaxation, of well-restedness and couplehood that you can see on our faces. Beach be damned--it's not the story here.


Here is a detail from the ceiling of the Capitol building in Havana--now the building serves purely a museum function, but the level of attention to detail, the artistry and the fussiness, is just incredible.

This is one carved panel from one of many many doors in the Capitol building. It might be too small here, but try to note that the figure on the far right has had his name removed and his likeness scratched from the panel. Why? These are all historical political figures in Cuba, including, presumably, the blanked-out figure. This is historical revisionism before Photoshop, I guess.

You probably don't know I took a lot of fine arts photography studios in university, that I've shown prints in shows, or shot more than one wedding. Or that I occasionally teach photography. And the first thing I teach is perspective: look at it differently, I implore my students, look at it to find a meaning or to make one.

Isn't life like that too? Best contemplated, by turns, from a greater distance to give depth, and from a nearer one for detail? To have long range goals is to lend purpose, a narrative arc, a context for the mass of details; to focus on the telling detail is to remain aware that, really, deatils are all there are, and that they matter. Most deadly is that middle shot, encompassing neither broad sweep nor telling detail, a knees-to-ceiling framing that is unsure of its focus.

Lately, I've been trying to think of my life from the wide-angled and from the closeup views. Where do I want to be in twenty years and how do I get there? How does my life in the everyday living of it it bring me joy or reflect my authentic self, right now? I'm trying to get away from the middle shot, a contemplation of life from one set of bill payments to the next, one weekly rotation to another. This is not where the richness is: it's in the big picture, and in the small one.

All I ever needed to know, I learned from photography? Chicken soup for the photographer's soul? Or a cheap post built from photos that otherwise very few people will see?

Threshold

"Has she said her first word yet?" Uncle J asked on Saturday.

Yes: at eight months old, she looked her father square in the eye one morning, and with a good deal of love and intent, said, "Dada." She did this reliably for a whole morning. No: at nearly one year old, she often calls the cat, the ceiling fan, and her own feet "Dada." It's hard to tell. We know she understands many words, and she can say "cat" and "daycare" and "mamamamamama" and "d-d-d-d-DADA-da-da", but not consistently or with purpose. There will be a threshold moment where she makes sense more often than she does not, and her 'first word,' I thus imagine to be more like the one feather that broke the camel's back, more of a tipping point than a milestone.

Monday last week, she crawled: that was pretty clear. One day she wasn't locomoting, and the next she was. It was hesitant but incontrovertible. Monday. But sometime last week, too, she seems to have developed the capacity to wave hello and goodbye, apparently using her arm in a waving gesture purposely and socially where before her whole body just flailed with joy when she saw someone she knew appearing: Hello! And: she can clap when you ask her, all of a sudden. You don't need to clap, yourself--you just say 'clap' and she will. When did that happen? Last week. She can also play peekaboo, putting her hands more or less over her eyes when you ask "Where's the baby?"--she claps like mad when you shout "Peekaboo." Last week was a tipping point for gross motor skills, I guess.

Uncle J, over for dinner, and playing on the floor with Miss Baby as she showed him her crawling, sitting, flailing, and charming skills--she kissed him, even--might well note her attainment of milestones. He sees her every six weeks or so. Pynchon and I, too, though, seem to be caught unawares, wondering with a start when she was able, more often than not, to sit by herself. When she became more interested in our grownup food than her baby food, when she noticed that we were not all eating the same thing. When she started singing to herself as she thumbed her books. We are brought up short; we consider her anew as if she were a stranger. When did ... ? We constantly reinterpret her, rebuild in our ideas and our hearts just who 'our daughter' is, what she can do, what are her likes and dislikes. She is an object lesson in the inexorability of change.

I have been pondering the fuzziness of milestones, the elastic threshold of much that we would instead think of a binaries: does she talk or doesn't she? It's more like sprouting teeth, I think--a bump that approaches and recedes, a sharp little point that protrudes and then disappears, a tenuous achievement made certain only by its duration. If it's still here in two days, we'll believe it.

I pondered this as insomnia gripped me again for most of late last week, as I lay abed noting the moment when the fuzzy continuum between asleep, stirring, settling, stirring, conscious, and fully awake shifted irrevocably from my being able to imagine getting back to sleep, and to my knowing I might as well just get up.

Oh sleep. How I miss you. I last wrote about 'settling', about the calm that slowly drains the day from Miss Baby's little self, how peaceful she was on Thursday when I set her down, so peaceful, indeed, that I felt compelled to write about it.

You know where this is going, right? Yes, Thursday night she did in fact get up. At 10:30, and was settled back into bed three times between then and 12:30, when Pynchon came home from the movies and managed to get her down for good at 1am. Friday night my own damn brain woke me up and wouldn't let me sleep. And then Sunday night, Miss Baby arose in a pool of vomit at 10:10--ironically, just after I had taken two Gravols as a means of ensuring my own peaceful and uninterrupted night's sleep--and went through three sets of pyjamas, two sets of sheets, one doudou and and emergency doudou, two bathtowels, two baths, three soothers, and the endurance of both of her parents before dropping to burfless sleep at 1am.

We are fast nearing another threshold: in less than three weeks our Miss Baby will be a year old. 1! The first weeks seemed to last forever but the year has whizzed by. Our Miss Baby will soon be Miss Toddler--she can't, I think, keep her baby pseudonym, but Miss Toddler hardly has the same ring to it. So I'll put my thinking cap on. If you have any ideas, I would be happy to hear them.

Groggily yours, Mimi

Settling

'Settle' has such negative connotations, doesn't it? As in, settling for a particular job, or life partner, or a less-than-optimum room at your hotel in Cuba. Settling in this sense means giving up your higher ambitions, shrugging a 'to hell with my ideals' shrug, and abandoning forward momentum for a soft glide in a more frictionless path, where sheer inertia is keeps effort unnecessary. Settling is apathy, a loss of passion or higher purpose, a deadly sin in a culture that prizes entrepreneurial pluck and get-up-and-go.

In another sense, settling can mean 'settling down.' Again, the connotation is of giving up: giving up loud music and recreational pharmaceuticals and outrageous political opinions and wild haircuts and distression body piercings. Settling down marks the end of carefree nomadism and the beginning of a 25 year mortgage. When you settle down, you settle for a job and a life partner. You settle for less than your dream life. It's the kind of stuff mid-life crises are built from, the slow stifling diminution of the authentic self eaten away in routine.

We are not a culture that looks kindly on settling.

But settling can have positive connotations, can't it? After a bad fright, we can settle down into a more tranquil state of mind. After a hard physical effort, we settle into a soft chair and relax, eyes closed and heart slowing.

I've been thinking a lot about settling, as the obligations in my life pile up and Pynchon and I take on a whole new person in our lives to care for and provide for. I'm happy with my life, my life of car payments and a mortgage and bus tickets and lattes and home repair and $200 trips to the grocery store and couple-time carved out of naps and bedtimes. Of a screen saver perpetually cycling baby photos. I like all this. I'm content and ... settled. Despite my contentment, I can't help but sometimes feel as though I've failed somehow. Settled: there's no way to spin this positively and sound vibrant, dynamic, alive? Is there?

Settled.

Even though Miss Baby is on formula now, and the Magic Boobies have been retired from service, it still largely falls to me to give her her final feed at bedtime, before depositing her in her crib, kissing her forehead, and pulling her blanket up. She's always tired, but she's sometimes not sleepy. When I feed her in the dark, rocking slowly and sh-shushing her, I feel her settle. It is the most calming, beautiful thing to watch, to be a part of. Now that she faces up at me, she locks her eyes with mine. Full of beans as we sit down, she flails her arms, pulls hard on her doudou, smacks my arm, digs her thumbnail deep into the palm of my hand, pushes the change table with her rigid legs. Yanks the bottle, bites the nipple. As she settles, she becomes gentler, quieter. She watches my face carefully. Her legs still, and she feels heavier on my lap. She coos and her breathing becomes rhythmic. The best part: the hands that have been pinching and smacking become so gentle. She rubs the hair on my arms so softly I get goosebumps. She reaches up and pats my face. With one finger she rubs my lip. Inserts a hand between my arm and my sweater and absentmindely wiggles her finger, feeling what it feels like, all these new sensations that she's settled enough to take the time to experience.

Eventually the bottle empties, or her eyes start to droop. I kiss her on the forehead, and lift her limp little self up--really, it's all I can do not to scoop her up into a hug, but I put her down in her crib, tuck her in, surround her with bears. She watches. Settled. And goes to sleep. And then I don't feel so alone in my contentment--so maybe I'm not living my childhood film star glamour life hard party fantasy. I really think, after mature consideration, that this is better.