gendering seasonalities: transcendent meta-narratives of pumpkin chai latte

It’s been a hard push these days. Well, within the parameters of maintaining family time. I still spend three hours with the kids each morning, easing into the day and then getting them ready for school. And evenings are theirs as well, from the time we get home from work until bedtime (another 2-3 hours). But Gimli has been taking them out for at least a half-day each weekend so I can get some writing time in, and within the parameters of the work day I’ve been ignoring pretty much everything else except the dissertation.

The other afternoon I closed my computer feeling like I had taken the document as far as I could on my own, without external feedback – but that evening in the shower I realized that I had left a certain aspect of the argument completely unaddressed. It was going to mean either a good 10-page addition to an already-completed chapter, or a whole new [albeit short] chapter on its own… and sure enough, it has turned into the latter.

The goalposts keep moving.

I’ve taken to entertaining myself as I walk to and from places by inventing fake dissertation titles that are mostly nonsense (e.g. “Transgressive Simultaneity in the Aphorisms of Yoda,” e.g.) but sound erudite. Parody will keep me grounded. (Hence the completely bogus title of this post) 🙂

Microblog Monday: Telling

Saturday I was at a workshop with a lot of church people, some of whom were meeting each other for the first time. During a small group exercise, one pastor’s wife mentioned to another pastor’s wife that she had endured infertility for seven years before becoming pregnant with her now-2.5-year-old son. The second pastor’s wife rang my infertility alarms, as she’s been married seven years and they have no children. This is extremely unusual in this social context, especially within the church. What struck me was how openly and easily the first woman talked about her struggle, how much she cried every time one of her sisters or cousins got pregnant, how painful it was to see a pregnant belly.

It has begun to get easier for me to talk about our experiences with IF, but I still marvel at and admire women who can be so open about it.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is?Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

Butterflied

A friend of mine in college had four cats named Neurosis, Psychosis, Obsession, and Compulsion. It was always an adventure visiting that house.

Anyway, I seem to have hit a magical tipping point in the long march to dissertation defense where physical anxiety symptoms are kicking in. 54 more days. My committee has generously agreed to allow me to turn in my final defense-ready draft just four weeks prior to defense instead of six, but I’d still like to have a draft I’m happy with six weeks prior. So, October 30.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Today I’m cleaning up the last major section that needed heavy re-writing. I’ve realized that the hardest part of this enterprise hasn’t actually been the writing at all, but the THINKING. Except that in order to do the thinking, I have to do the writing first. It’s an iterative write-think-write cycle. Why didn’t anyone tell me this before?!??

Oh, and the other hardest part is getting feedback from my committee. It was SO worth it to go to campus and meet up face to face. Cause I’m not actually sure I’m going to get any in far enough advance to incorporate suggestions anyway. Oh well.

If I ever get a tattoo I think it will be the letters PhD on my shoulder blade.

Groundedness, Stability, Confidence

“As a Four, surprisingly you are least developed in the real qualities of the Instinctive Center (groundedness, stability, and confidence). You use your Thinking Center to artificially stimulate your Feeling Center. See if you can notice this subtle pattern in yourself today.” (Enneathought for the day from the Enneagram Institute)

~::~

I have lots more thoughts about my evolving relationship with my boy, and how little confidence I have in my own parenting style/skills. A lot the things I do as a parent are not what I believe I should be doing, or how I should be doing things. Part of it is just because I find the whole thing so exhausting, and part of it is that a lot of the changes I’d like to make would mean swimming upstream against how my partner prefers to do things.

So we all compromise a lot.

~::~

I’ve also been mildly neurotic about an exchange at work on Friday, implied criticisms, and so stewing about it all weekend. There are fixes Gimli and I can implement right away but I still feel really, really BAD. And I wish it didn’t affect me so much emotionally.

A Big Day

I can’t call this a micro-blog because I think it’s going to be pretty long. Yesterday was a big day for my little boy and me. I feel like suddenly I understand our dynamic so much better – and can see more clearly what I need to let go of right now.

The day started with the Sound of Music – we just introduced the kids to this movie on Saturday, and they wanted to see parts of it again first thing in the morning. So Oz was sitting on the couch with a glass of juice, which I had handed to him with some trepidation – one thing I’ve discovered about myself through parenting is how freaked out I am about spills and messes that might take a long time to clean up. It’s not like it’s a great couch – it’s an old fold-out we inherited, but it’s currently our only couch. So there they were and sure enough within minutes there was a big spill.

I took the glass out of Oz’s hand and put it on the table. “If you want to drink out of a glass with no lid, you have to sit at the table,” I declared. And he was so mad. For the next hour I could do nothing right. He kept attacking me, with his toy sword (really a flute made out of a piece of PVC pipe), with his hands, his feet. I was trying to make breakfast and finally I just sat down on the floor in the kitchen and started crying. He looked at me for a long second, then his own eyes filled with tears and he sank into my arms. “I feel like I want to cry too!” he sobbed.

Somehow as we got eye to eye I realized what was wrong – I had completely disrespected him by taking away his cup and putting it on the table. I was mad about the spill, but really? I had to let it go.

~::~

A few hours later we were on a bus with Illyria’s schoolmates and their parents, for an outing to a farm outside the city, where the air was pure and clean and the mountainsides green. It was a really fun day, a very cross-cultural experience and lovely time outdoors. A tree had fallen on the property and the kids were having a blast climbing around on the downed branches. And I let Oz climb too. From time to time he wanted a helping hand, but at one point I could only stand back and marvel: “You are getting so big! Look at you, climbing a tree like a big boy!” He found a branch to sit on where he could look out over the valley and he pretended the tree was his pirate ship.

That evening when we got back to our neighborhood I offered to carry him the few blocks to our house, and he said “No, I want to walk. I’m getting so big I can even climb fallen-down trees!” We had a quick dinner and bath, and as I helped him dry off and get into his pajamas, I noticed him staring for into space. “What are you thinking about, Bug?” I asked. He looked at me and said “I’m thinking about love!”