Improvised Carpentry

Squishy has very little to do with this post, but his expression speaks to how I felt as this went down. 

(As we find out, my interview is available to stream here, so go listen to me speak very slowly.  I'm clearly out of practice when it comes to adult conversation.)

I've been scrambling this afternoon trying to figure out how to listen to my interview online.  It appears to have been superseded by a BYU soccer game (Too bad they can't predict when those are going to come up and make that information more widely available so poor fools like me don't get all misinformed?)

But this is the sort of punch I roll with pretty well by now.  If one of my pre-earth-life objectives was to learn to be flexible and deal admirably with stress-level-whiplash, then I'm well on my way to checking that one off the list.  There's not really even energy left for resentment as I emotionally shrug "well, this is consistent with my current karma," and soldier on.

Soldiering on looking like responding to a dozen texts and a few Facebook comments wondering why they can't find my interview, and me suddenly wishing I hadn't made such an announcement out of it. It's clearly not a big deal to anyone but me.



Is it ok if it's still a big deal to me though?  It was the most momentum I've mustered toward taking myself and my efforts and their necessary next-steps seriously in a long time.  Probably since my MA graduation over a year ago.  I need the energy of considering this to be a "big deal" so that I can prioritize finding time to write that book I've had almost 2 years to write, and for which I have only a few notes and articles in a neglected email inbox folder to show.

_________


In the wake of the interview, though, I did find the time to re-visit several of the texts that I brought up.

Ian Bogost's 'Carpentry' - from Alien Phenomenology: This talks about a lot of the frustrations and shortcomings of creating academic writing.  Especially how philosophy and criticism are in some ways diametrically opposed to creativity and creating.

Briefest of intros to Laurel Ulrich.

Rufi Thorpe's Mother Writer Monster Maid - which is a tremendous exploration of modern woman-ness and how motherhood informs absolutely everything and how that can be both good and bad and wonderful and terrible, but maybe shouldn't be assumed to always be a liability.  Also - language warning, but worth it.

__________

I happened across this sentiment on Meg Conley's Instagram a few days ago:
                              "Problem 1: I may never get over how selfish it feels to spend five hours a day
                                writing something no one else may ever read. Problem 2: I know I'd never get 
                                over spending those five hours doing anything else."

I have problem envy.  I haven't spent 5 hours in one day writing since I was in the thick of my thesis writing, and I miss it like crazy, but I'm also in the crazy-thick of the thinnish things that are 5 small children and a too-busy husband and another debilitating pregnancy.  I'm not even managing to brush my hair properly every day.  

But, at least the debilitating pregnancy part has an end (in sight!) which leads to that challenging 4th trimester, which also, mercifully, ends.  So by next Spring, I know I shall be an entirely different human.  And if I can aggressively restock my poor body's depleted iron supply, I can have hope that that entirely different person shall be infinitely more productive, and (dare I hope?) creative, than I am today.  That is placing a lot of stock in the future, but it is also something to be optimistic about.  Which is not nothing.

_____________

In the process of re-reading my thesis to prepare for this interview, I found that the appendix I had created as a blogger resource (quick read) was actually also the incredible first few steps toward outlining the book I need to write.  That I had somehow forgotten how I'd compiled it, and how useful it had the potential to be for me, is kind of a cruel irony, because that was a hurdle that kept me from moving forward for a good chunk of those 2 years since.  But now that I'm reacquainted with it, onward and upward and baby steps forward toward creating something useful, and then finding the best way to share it far and wide. 

The terror of articulating my thoughts

One of the petty comforts of not finding the time to write and articulate my thoughts is not having to wrestle with the strength of my arguments and my logic.  So if nothing else is worth taking away here, let's just assume that more of the people who argue in the world should also have to write.

Since the world is on fire with every flavor of enmity, and I have that insecure temperament of a moderate, someone who is never really sure they've got it figured out and who tries really hard to listen with my best effort at dispassion to every side of every argument, I tried really hard to dig through this interview with Renauld Camus.  (Because said temperament makes me inclined to slog through all the political philosophy I can stand.)  It's a really difficult read, partly because the interview itself was clearly uncomfortable, and partly because it's easy to quickly disagree with elements of Camus' argument and then summarily dismiss it in its entirety.  I briefly debated it with Michael Austin and while we both agreed that (this) Camus treated race and phenotype as entirely too static of a thing, I still came away unsettled about this idea of a universal fear (or at least propensity for a fear) of replacement.  And here's where my brain went.

From what I can tell, especially after my long incubation period of studying identity construction and performance during my Master's Thesis research, the tools most people use to build their senses of self are very language-centric, and are subject to all the limitations of semiotic meaning making.  So as a person making sense of life, I latch on to words that describe to me what I am or what I am not, but by so doing I inherit the boatloads of baggage that come with those words.  Rarely/never does all that baggage actually apply to my lived experience, but as I claim that word, over time I absorb at least some of that baggage.  So each of us should, perhaps be extremely thoughtful about this process, but a huge proportion of it has already happened long before we are old enough to even be taught what "semiotics" means.

The direction I'm headed with this is that these words, these self-identifiers, have the potent ability to become idols and false gods for us.

An example: at the end of the year in 4th, 5th, and 6th grade, my elementary school teachers handed out individualized certificates to each student, saying "you win the class award for most _____."  My award for each of these years was the same: "Most Creative."  With that kind of reinforcement, it was easy for me to accept and internalize an identifier for myself: I am creative.  Only I knew there were a lot of ways to be creative and that I wasn't most of them.  I lacked the ability to purposefully create anything visual.  I couldn't draw or paint worth beans and my handwriting was utter chicken scratch. So I dealt with some cognitive dissonance as I tried to define myself as a "creative" person who would have perhaps been better described as "imaginative."  But as long as I clung to "creative" I felt guilt and failure at being.   And as long as I felt like the primary "thing" I was supposed to be was "creative" I was going to feel that way.

The same thing happened in high school, where I was flagged as a "high achiever" and "valedictorian."  I left high school feeling like if I didn't achieve something tremendous then everyone would view me as a disappointment.  (Hint: I often struggle with feeling like a disappointment.)  If I hadn't absorbed "high achiever" into my identity construction, and given it such precedence, then perhaps it'd be easier for me to believe my perennial affirmation "you are enough."

So, back to applying this to the world at large.  Here's where I am.  I come back to wondering what sort of an identity construction could we engage in that would ease or eliminate this fear of replacement?  What things could we believe about who we are that would make the world wide enough (for Hamilton and me)?

Well, here's where I get spiritual/religious.  But I'm also being philosophical/metaphysical (as much as I'm able) - so take whichever of those avenues makes this most meaningful for you.

If I am able to set and maintain my primary identity construction around "I am a child of God, of infinite and anti-fragile worth."  Then it has the power to eliminate this fear of replacement that, perhaps, lies beneath and behind a lot of the anger and hate and poor logic in the world.  If I am a child of God, then you can be too, and it does not diminish me or render my value less certain.  My heart gets cracked open wide enough to allow wishes for successes and love all around, without any fear of anyone else's value to threaten my own.

It occurs to me that placing any other primary identity marker above this one, has the potential to pinch off our hearts and create space for that fear of replacement.  If the primary thing I am is smart, then someone else could be smarter than me and what does that leave me to be?  If the primary thing I am is pretty, then who am I once my beauty fades?  If the primary thing I am is part of a normative culture, then who am I if that culture is being shifted and challenged?  If the primary thing I am is my ideology or political party, then who am I if I ever allow for the strengths of a counter-argument?  If the primary thing I am is my race or my phenotype, then who am I when I'm confronted with the fluidity and messiness of empires, invasions, barbarism, and cultures throughout history?

So what I'm wondering, and it's a pulsing, nascent, developing idea, beyond whether this concept has any merit, is whether it has any application.  There's a lot of people wanting to resist hate, but how do you effectively eliminate or change these kind of tensions?  How do you change hearts?  I concur that education is a powerful tool, but you cannot teach someone who doesn't trust you.  You really cannot teach someone who believes you dislike them.  "Kids don't learn from people they don't like."  So there's something - some kind of work, that has to precede any effective education.  What might that look like?

I'm drawn into a couple of non-competing corners here.  There's Paulo Friere and his Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  His concern with treating people as agents in their own education and not just subjects to be acted upon by teachers.  The importance of waiting to teach until the student's mind and heart are ready.  He was mostly concerned with the minds and hearts of oppressed people: those in poverty and minorities.  But I wonder how many of his principles can apply to any population that is clinging to dysfunctional beliefs that resist the love and equality required for a Zion community (of "there were no poor among them" i.e. - there are no hearts set upon inequality).  It's a lofty vision, but possibly a constructive direction?

Another thought is of Crucial Conversations and it's attendant tools.  There are absolute minefields of safety problems being ignored in social discourse today is mind boggling.  What if everyone took the idea of "safety first" to heart and tried to make sure their conversations were safe places where people could come to the table vulnerable and open-minded before dispensing with their logic and arguments?  Can you even imagine that world?  Is it possible that  THAT is the primary issue at the heart of all the rancorous discord in the world?  Is the issue as much HOW we are engaging in dialogue as WHAT we are debating?  Admittedly that would be a hard point to measure or prove, but it would give both sides of any debate something to work on in themselves.  And we all know that we're far more likely to make progress at changing ourselves than at changing anyone else, right?  (Please tell me we've figured that one out.)

It also strikes me as far more... constructive?   To be trying to convince someone else "you are a child of god, you are enough.  You have a value beyond your imagination that no power on this earth can diminish (and that you cannot yourself measurably increase) - rather than trying to convince them "you are wrong and you are a horrible person."  So there's that.

But obviously I haven't completed any rigorous thought experiments here.  This is just a lady with an overactive penchant for philosophy, who happens to be trying to keep a household with 5 small children afloat while she gestates a 6th one into being.  Pondering these things is more appealing to me than more domestic tasks, but I haven't exactly got the resources to do anything justice right now. Still, fleshing my thoughts out and forcing them into paltry, stumbling words felt like a justifiable act.

In which I discover that gender disappointment is diagnosable and has a name

When we found out Squishy (the Duke) was a boy, I was totally thrown by how gutted I was.  The (distinct) impression I was basing my life on since 2009 was one of 4 boys and 2 girls.  Still outnumbered, but still a mother of girls.  It felt like a compromise and I shook mental/spiritual hands with it and moved forward.

It meant about 4 more pregnancies than I really wanted to live through, but I learned after Sir O was born that it was possible to feel like it was worth it, once it was over.  And at the point I got pregnant with Squishy (the Duke) (pregnancy #5) I had 3 boys and 1 girl, so if I was 'expecting' one more of each, it didn't much matter which, right?  Only every time you have more of one gender/sex, your actual statistical odds of having more of that gender/sex increase.  So to find out I was having a boy then meant the chance of that last girl coming got slimmer.  So I struggled. I floundered, I surprised myself at how unnerved I was.

(I will interrupt myself here to aside that I am fully aware that being capable of birthing healthy children is a blessing.  Like really, really, really, shamefully aware.  It's a thought that beats me up about every 5 minutes of my life like a playground bully and threatens to punch me in the face every time I have a less-than-grateful feeling (over which I have really very little control.) Like so many things in life, it is possible to live with seemingly contradictory truths here.  Cognitive dissonance is my permanent roommate.  For life.  Get comfy with it. I cannot find a way around it.)

I have been saying since before this pregnancy that it REALLY needs to be my last one.  As much as I've become a pro at rolling with punches and lowering the bar, the bar is at rock bottom.  For the sake of my older children, I really need to be able to step up and parent more whole-heartedly.  Which is nigh unto impossible to do when one is mired in the pseudo-food-poisoning knockout known as the first half of my pregnancies, or the depressed and anemic quagmire known as the second half of my pregnancies.  Despite my apparent fertility, I am not a seamless baby making machine.  Every pregnancy kills me a little, in the very most literal sense. By my estimation it takes me 2 years postpartum to recover fully, which means I have recovered fully all of 1 time in the midst of 6 pregnancies.  My body and my mind are quite literally worn out, and to keep doing this would without a doubt shorten my lifespan significantly, to say nothing of the implications for my quality of life.

SO it has been, and has felt like a very real, very valid and valuable sacrifice on my behalf to try to live up to that 6 child impression from 8 years ago.  I felt like I was expressing my faith by cooperating with it when it was so hard for me.

Today ultrasound # 6 showed boy #5.  Not only that, but the ultrasound tech said, "that's a boy all day long..." just to let me know that there was not an iota of room for doubt.

Remembering how the rug had been pulled out from under me last time, I had been trying to prepare for this possibility for months.  I had never once allowed myself a verbal expression of a hope for a girl.  Despite the dozens of inquiries about my preference (because what else do you talk about with a sick pregnant lady?) I had firmly stuck to my "you can't have a baby because you want a boy or a girl, you have to just want a baby" mantra.

But the truth of the matter is that the moment Squishy was revealed to be a boy, the words that popped into my head were "well, I guess the girl will have to come next."  As hard as that day was (and it was hard, and I cried then too), there was still an open, if unlikely door.

Today, as hard as I tried to avoid repeating that struggle, the door appears to have actually closed.  And it's totally eclipsed the struggle I had last time.  This time, it actually feels like someone died.

Do you have any idea how much shame lies inherent in feeling like you've miscarried when you're actually carrying a perfectly healthy baby?  To be swallowed by these huge and awful and unexpected feelings and to be shocked and horrified by them?  The compounding, complex awful emotions that swallow you whole, and you rock violently from one to the other?

So today has been a relentless ride on waves and undertows of sorrow.

That daughter, that I hoped would give me the peace of mind that my journey through rough pregnancies was an acceptable and complete offering to God, is gone.  She doesn't exist.

That impression of my completed family, on which I based my willingness to go through the most excruciating months (accumulating to years) of my life, is shattered, is false.

My faith in God is stout enough that I'm not totally thrown overboard, but I'm shaken.  This is the 3rd such experience in 4 years that has left me totally upended regarding my relationship to and interpretation of divine influence in my life.  Today I totally get the idolic interpretations of deity as capricious characters willing to play cruel games with men and women's lives.  (Looking at you, Aries) In the thick of it, as things are happening that just can't be made to not hurt, it's the only easy way to make sense of the pain.  God has betrayed me, made a fool of me, let me make a fool of myself.  I know all those feelings will sort out over time, and that it's even possible that I'll arrive at a place where having only one daughter will make sense to me.  You know, before I die.  But today I'm not banking on it.

So today, as I quickly realized that Mr Renn is good for many things, but he's not much good for emotions so complicated that you can't even talk about them out loud because you cry so hard, I found through the wonder of the internet, that I am not the first person to ride in this horrid boat.  It's so common that it has a name and is considered a consistent and relatively common factor in postpartum and antenatal depression.  Gender disappointment is common enough to be shortened to an acronym: GD.

Unfortunately for me, the majority of discussions around it revolve around parents of only a single gender (i.e. mothers of all boys) and don't address the huge heaviness I feel about my failure to give Bunny a sister.

I know it was pinning all my hopes on the agency of others, but I had hoped to give all of my children, through siblings close enough in age, a support system of people who'd be going through similar stages of life through adolescence, adulthood, and hopefully to sustain them once I'm gone someday.  While Bunny can still have a great relationship with her brothers, they will experience life and the world differently than she will.  While I have hope that the world will continue to treat women better in her lifetime, there will be a difference.  She may have stellar relationships with sisters-in-law someday, but she may not.  She will not have a sister who will have shared the quirky family background and know her from the ground up.  It's something I would have given blood and guts to have provided for her.  And I tried.  But it's not happening.  It's a huge, heavy thing to grieve.  She may be fine, this may not be something that even matters to her.  But I've been lonely for a sister my entire life.  ( I got a sister when I was 13, we lived in the same household less than 5 years, and we've never yet been in similar stages of life, so we'll see if we get closer as we age).  Having someone to reach out to who was already permanently invested in me would have made a world of difference in my life thus far, and I'm not charismatic enough to have filled that void with friends or mentors. So this is a grief I feel for Bunny's future that is far heavier than my own personal disappointment in not getting to have a group of girls to do girly things with.  (Though that's real too.)

So yes, there's this nonexistent girl who's lived in my head for 8 years, who was going to signify so many things for me.  My girls were going to take care of each other.  My family was going to feel peacefully complete.  I was going to get to have "girls" and amidst the ferality of our wild boy house, we were going to put on plays and have high tea and wear aprons and watch foreign films .  Poof.  Gone.

So yeah, nobody died, but it's a grief like someone did.

It's not like there's nothing to salvage here.  I have to start the really painful process of peeling off charred skin and evaluating the carnage beneath to evaluate what can be saved.  What's actually not necessarily incompatible with my real life?  Where can I graft?

I tried to look up ways to enjoy being a mother of boys, and I didn't get the kind of answers I was hoping for.  The advice this kind of search gets you is to find the beauty in their wild, forgiving, fiercely alive ways.  And I've been playing that game for years now.  I've got to figure out which of my "girls" daydreams can be transplanted into my real life where there's a "strong-willed girl surrounded by a grundle of boys with wildly different temperaments".  There can still be baking, and if I can get my health and stamina under me, there could still be plays (probably with more gore), and I can share Hedgehog in the Fog with all of them.  It will just take more work than I was planning on.  And I will have to learn to go with the flow of their personalities and interests, which is a fact of parenting regardless of boys or girls.

I have never properly bonded with any of my babies before birth, and sometimes even then it's taken a day or two.  The ultrasound has always helped though, to make them seem more human to me.  I was alarmed when that didn't happen today.  This boy baby didn't feel any more a person for having seen him and his parts move.  I'm attributing that to the ultrasound tech showing and announcing his boy-ness before even sharing his profile with me.  I had to put up my "I'm totally cool with this" guard right off the bat, which stifled my vulnerability and bonding mojo.




The other clincher is the weird, societal anathema of being pestered to make a public announcement of some sort of "gender reveal."  This would have been easy if it'd been a girl.  Tada!  Our family is complete and makes sense and everyone is excited and happy and aren't we cute?  Pop a confetti-filled balloon and call it a day.

But this is my real life and nothing in my real life lends itself to being cute or making sense.

So instead I have confused children who thankfully didn't take it too hard, but aren't the least bit excited, and a self/pregnant lady whose hormones aren't helping her out as she hasn't been able to talk without weeping bitterly for 16 hours now.  And Mr Renn, trying to manage us all and trying to minimize my ocean of emotions into a single palatable sentence so he doesn't have to think about it too long, and wishing to God that his wife could just function again because he's so tired of living that second shift that every working mother knows but never gets to chuck.   We are not the stuff of viral instagram feeds.

And here I am (it's 3 am now), sitting forlorn at the bottom of the barrel, hoping that when the sun comes up tomorrow I am able to function better than today (despite not sleeping) and that I can find some bootstraps.

I am absolutely certain that I will get over this, but I'm also certain that it will take me some time.  This is why we did this today.  I knew that I would need time to adjust, and the kids would need time to adjust and that we needed to get that adjusting out of the way before there was an actual baby in our faces.  This because I locked myself in the bathroom and cried for hours when my 3rd brother in a row was born (when I was 8) and I didn't want my kids having that experience on what I hope is a very happy day for our family.

Anyway, where is the value in writing this all down and posting it in a public-ish place?  Well #1: I need to be work things out in my own head and #2: It would have been valuable for me to find a post like this today.  I found a few that helped a bit, but felt like most of what I found excluded the possibility of a mother who already had children of each sex/gender experiencing this intense whiplashing ride. And most people who mentioned religion/God at all seemed oblivious to the possibility of feeling a little abandoned by/peeved at Him.

Thankfully my best preparation for today was reading (and almost finishing) ReReading Job years ago, wherein I discovered that A) extolling the patience of Job totally misses the point and that B) God would rather have my honest messy struggle than my pious martyrdom.  So I'm comfortable talking to God about how I honestly feel today.  I have trust that those feelings aren't permanent.  I feel comfortable being honest that I felt them.  My identity isn't every emotion I experience.  I can recognize them, try to honor and learn from them, and then let them go.

I am not a horrible person or a bad mother because I am dealing with grief today.  I have lots to be thankful for and I know it and I know that will be the long shot take away from this stage in my life.  But at this apogee, we have grief to deal with and expectations to adjust and that takes time and work.  We will do the work and the time will pass and I will outlast pregnancy and life will take on color and buoyancy again.  I will adore my untamed children and I will find renewed energy for teaching them how to stay fully alive in a world that expects manners and conformity.  I will feed and teach and cloth them and read to them and pray for them.

And God will laugh, as He does.

Deeper Dog Days

Last Pregnant Summer
Last Pregnant Summer
Last Pregnant Summer

I am bored to tears of my own broken records, but it's been rough.  My kids who have historically gotten along pretty well have become prone to teasing and bickering, and there are just no breaks for the tired pregnant lady.  So far this summer everyone's home all the time, minus two weeks of swimming lessons, which gave some structure, but not much that I could call "breaks."

I did break down and buy a $30 inflatable pool, which has been good for giving kids something to do, but has not done a thing to reduce the fighting.

I'm sure I'm not done evolving, but I am so much more able to let life roll like water off a duck's back than I would have been 5-10 years ago.

This morning the baby (who got pseudonynm-ed the Duke, but I call him Squishy in real life), pooped in the tub, and I just sang a song about how it's not an emergency if it doesn't require an ER visit while I cleaned it up.  It's extra work, it's exhausting, but there's no resources in me to turn it into drama.

Anemia and low blood pressure are back with a vengeance.  I get short of breath and dizzy just standing up.

So, in that state of "I can't think of anything more unpleasant than trying to find clothes that won't hurt to wear and spending my energy getting into them," I indulged in some long-term planning in my pajamas this morning.  It was a really rough, loosely shaped 7-8 year plan.  But I'm giddy about it.

Because if I can make it to the other, more human, side of a last pregnancy, I can go on being human and having ambitions and goals without ever being T-boned by a pregnancy again.  6 pregnancies have pretty well decimated the last 12 years of my life, as far as personal goals, dreams, and ambitions go.  I do not manage to have them, let alone foster them, while pregnant.  So, is that worth it?  Well, I wouldn't ever change anything to un-have any of my kids.  I absolutely would make different choices to re-prioritize my education and goals way back in the days of being a newlywed though.  If, for example, I had insisted on prioritizing my own goals as a newlywed, I could have completed a masters degree instead of working a soul-sucking desk job for 2.5 years.  That would have left me eligible to apply for a PhD program while Renn was in Dental school.  For most of that we would have had one 1 kid, which is hard, but consider that now I'm having to manage 6 kids if I go back for a doctorate.  Doesn't compare.

It was dumb, fear-based decision making that led to 4 of the roughest years of my life, holed up in a cave of an apartment trying desperately not to atrophy beyond recognition.  Treating myself as nearly less-than-human and waiting for things to happen to me in order to start living.  Top that off with the skeletal and shrinking support system we had as a family at that time, and it was just unnecessarily rough. I would never advocate for anyone to replicate my path.

But, hey - I can still control/influence the future.  So sometimes I explore options and their timelines instead of adequately supervising my zoo.  It gives me just enough buoyancy to feel a flicker of hope and resiliency.  22-ish weeks to go.

retching rumination from the tired lady in the corner

(There are photos and happy thoughts at the bottom of this post.... if you need those and not my self-assessing teleology)

My go-to phrase this summer has been "holy smack" - which is code for "I keep discovering new levels of physical overwhelm."  There is a lot going on, most of it less than thrilling, and some of it downright awful.  Plus not-writing is not good for my mental health.  (Kind of like how not-sleeping isn't working out for my mental health either.)

It's hard to write though when I'm feeling so negative.  I get in a place mentally where everything that actually expresses my experienced reality sounds whiney, but if I try to write more positively it lacks any semblance of authenticity.  Living with imperfect mental health is such fun.

It's summer break, I have all 5 (5!) of my kids home all day, in a house full of unfinished projects and homeless things waiting for their homes to be built.  I cannot even begin to stay abreast of the clutter, I am swimming and drowning in clutter in that slow-mo dream chase scene sense. It makes me grumpy.

Between my parents trying to get their house ready to sell (and my dad having already moved ahead to Chicago, and that's it own whole story but it's not my story) and my sister about to get married - lots of extended family upheaval.  Thankfully nothing tragic, but just disruptive (to our efforts to make headway in the chaos at home... every weekend is spoken for the rest of summer.)

You know what is my pet-peeviest peeve?  The thing that gets under my skin and makes me absolutely nuts?  Things that go missing inexplicably.  So currently that's my prescription sunglasses, though the list has been much longer at previous points this week.  The craziest stuff sprouts legs and walks away at my house and it makes me bonkers. My children embrace irrational behavior with wild abandon.  There's a constant soundtrack looping in my head asking "why? why? why? why? why?"

With all of that on my perma-front-burner, I have to manage my emotional energy pretty carefully. Which pretty much means that Facebook is always a bad idea.  I have to be hopeful that true digital natives will be smarter about how they engage in rhetoric on social media than my generation is.  I know it's human nature to seek echo chambers and content that reinforces existing biases, but hopefully kids will eventually figure out that the things they put out on the interwebs are more like giving a speech at graduation than they are like speaking to a room of like-minded friends.  But really, the safest bet is never to assume anyone you speak to is 'like-minded,' because at some point in your opinions or experience, you're going to differ.  So, the rule-of-thumb 'seek first to understand, then to be understood' - it's sound and seldom minded. Let's just collectively recommit to doing better, ok?
(I guess I can promote that behavior because I'm not afraid of being wrong, as many are.  I do still have the socially conditioned irrational fear of being rejected though, so I'm sympathetic to all socially conditioned irrational fears.  I get how hard it is to be perfectly logical, and get to practice being sympathetic to intense irrationality at least 12 hours a day.)

Mostly though, at this point I would just really like to devote an hour or two each day to doing things that make life more pleasant or joyful for myself, and being the kind of introverted, aesthetically sensitive nerd that I am, that would probably look something like fixing myself a cup of tea and perusing a gardening catalogue IN A CLEAN, WELL-LIT ROOM. BEFORE MIDNIGHT. WITHOUT SPENDING 2 HOURS CLEANING IT FIRST. Maybe while listening to some moody Billie Holiday.

Mostly I'm just saying that Virginia Wolf was on to something.

There are lots of funny moments in this phase of my life, and I suppose I will feel a bit lonely when things slow down someday. But I will also, I hope, be sleeping more regularly by then which means I will be infinitely better equipped to handle that sentimentality than I am to handle my current intensity. It's just... really intense. Constantly having short people hanging from my body.....

In my efforts to live vertically by my bootstraps, I turn in a lot of spare moments to beautiful or exceptional stimuli (well, that and emotional compulsive eating...)  A lot of things that are beautiful feel kind of flimsy or cloyingly indulgent next to my reality, and unfortunately all the best beautiful things are openly wrestling with the complexity of humanity, which I'm also not well-equipped to deal with in my state of running on vapors.  I vacillate between the two impulses and can't spend much time with either one before I start to get emotionally seasick.

So yes, the takeaway is that I'm perpetually just barely hanging in there... yet again.  The perpetual part being what makes it exceptional.  I wish I had the emotional turgor to be more springy, optimistic, ambitious; to just be a bigger personality than I am.  Bigger than my kids - that I could influence their choices and behavior without having to do behavioral gymnastics (which are exhausting) to try to convince them that what I want/need them to do was their idea in the first place. I need charisma and I could not be further from charismatic right now.  I'm constantly leaning into my most insecure mind, trying to tip it toward more rational and level-headed thoughts and away from a pessimism and insecurity so deep and wide that I fear it would take me years and miles to dig myself out if I let my guard down. Maybe half of that phenomenon is mental health, and the other half is just what all women deal with in a culture that is emotionally brutal towards women and caretakers.

But hey - there is a fair amount of delight thrown in this mix. There's Bunny's Margot Tenenbaum face at her first ballet recital (dress rehearsal).

(Which, she surprised me and was delightful and obedient for her actual performance.  With a low-grade fever no less.)

There's all my kids being madly in love with swimming lessons, and the ease with which I can hand them over to their teachers and then sit in the shade with the baby for half an hour.

There's the odd set of circumstances that had us dog-sitting for two weeks, and my kids finally learning how to fall in love with a dog.  (Mr Renn remains unconverted, feel free to proselytize)

The Captain's sentiments about my parents' impending move: 

And Sir O, that tricky devil, managing to nearly never be in the photos I manage to take. He's about to turn 10 folks. (To which I say to myself: "Holy Smack" yet again.) You know that line in Hamilton, "Hamilton is a host unto himself, as long as he can hold a pen he's a threat." 

Sir O doesn't need a pen. 

22 minutes left in Mother's Day, and how I feel about it.

First of all, lets just put it out there that my Mother is a stellar human being, and a tremendous support to the many people who rely on her in order to function at all. I don't know whether she self-identifies as a feminist, but she was born with an indomitable spirit, an has always known that she was capable of absolutely anything she put her mind to.  She just happens to be extremely accommodating toward other people in deciding what she will set her mind to, which pretty much makes her the most ideal employee on the planet.  I know her bosses know how lucky they are to have her, I just hope they remember to let her know that they know.  Sort of like what we, her 5 children, ought to do more often as well.

Gee, I wonder where I get my squinty eyes from.... 

There's a meme going around Facebook today (Mothers' Day) saying "post a picture that makes me proud/happy to be a mom."  I'm not quite far enough out of postpartum land for those to be the first two adjectives I'd attach to my motherhood, but I can attach them to my recent graduation, which is so tightly wound up with motherhood in so many ways.  I mean, I spent a year writing a thesis about (blogging) mothers.  I am like a high priestess in the order of over-thinking all the complexities of motherhood.  So here's the thoughts I do have about motherhood today.  They aren't super glossy, but they are coming from my authentic place of wanting to find a way to be honest and still find beauty in things.

We pulled Sir O and the Captain out of school to take this photo.  They were not about to miss class parties for mom's graduation.  After 3 minutes of having my feelings hurt, I figured fewer greased pigs to wrestle during the convocation was probably a good thing for Mr. Renn. 

I am really grateful, but mostly just awed that I've been entrusted with the care and keeping of such giant, unwieldy personalities as the ones that have landed in my lap. These kids have so.much.energy. You would think God would have sent them to a less-easily-overwhelmed mother.  Someone who found tremendous fulfillment in keeping their days filled with structure and wholesome recreation and silly songs and who didn't want to crawl into a cave at the end of everyday just to have some time to be alone and not be so tangibly needed and touched every, every minute.

I mean, motherhood is deeply, deeply humbling.  And not just because the world talks about mothers as angels when we all know very well we are human, human beings.  Motherhood is humbling because when you love these little ruffians so fiercely you want the very best for them, then you continually catch yourself being unable to give them the very best mother.  You can only be you, and you are invariably selfish and short tempered and irritable and tired and burnt-out.  Or whatever your particular shortcomings may be - those are mine.  I wish my kids could have a parent who never lost her temper, and was always level-headed and able to think before she spoke.  But, instead, they have me.  I sometimes manage to make progress toward being the parent I wish I was, but there's a lot of backsliding on my journey toward being a saintly mother.

I mean, I love my kids, and I love spending time with them individually.  Collectively they tend to run me ragged.  I do not love feeling like an unpaid maid, being ignored, bearing the brunt of their anxieties and frustrations, and being the only place where the buck stops most days.  (Nor am I enamored of sleep deprivation.... which makes all those other things that much worse.) Kids save their ugliest behavior for their parents, and unfortunately we, their parents, tend to reciprocate that favor.

So some days I despair and become convinced I'm raising a small army of psychopaths.  And because of my personality and the way I (and most other women) have been socialized, I internalize failures and give credit for successes to others or to good luck.  When my kids show a stunning lack of capacity for logical thinking, my first reaction is to try to figure out where I failed. When my kids exhibit repellant behaviors in public, I am mortified for myself because I assume everyone will use their insanity to index my worth as a human being.  There's all that cultural baggage of womanly virtue being tied up in trying to control things that aren't entirely controllable.  A virtuous woman will have her house in order and her children will be well-behaved.  I mean, crimony.  I will never have enough 'virtue' in me to stay one-step ahead of my children's capacity for entropy.  I am forever and ever trying to figure out what makes each  of their vastly different personalities tick and how to leverage that toward better social graces.

My favorite features of myself, and the things that make me like myself as a human being in my less-depressed moments are virtues of quite a different stripe.  I like my willingness to consider the possibility that I'm wrong.  I like the extra effort I take to say meaningful things (and not quip deepities) when I think people are in pain.  I like the delight I find in making things fancy or celebratory when they could just be plain and serviceable (you know, when I feel well enough to find energy to spend on such things.)

I even kind of like some of my features that are on the verge of being vices.  I like my penchant for dramatics, because it opens up space for vulnerability and honest talks about feeeeelings.  I like my advocate heart that speaks up when people voice ideas that are incomplete, and need to expand to include ideas, people, and experiences that are uncomfortable for them to acknowledge.  There was probably a time when Mr Renn would have changed these things about me if he'd had the choice, but I think they've grown on him.

See, no matter how much my life revolves around being a mother, I'm still a person first.  A real, whole, messy person with my unique set of gifts and failings.  And when you hand me the stewardship of a grundle of other such complicated persons, and the responsibility to train them to function within a cultural framework that often runs contrary to their natures, it's just not always a pretty process.

So I hope we can value motherhood without having to say it's pretty.  Sure, I love my mother because she was endlessly patient with me and cheered me on, and other platitudes, but I also love her because she made lists she never managed to check off, occasionally played solitaire when real life was just too-much, couldn't resist reminding me what a hard time I'd given her over her inability to force my brothers to keep their rooms clean when I turned to her for solidarity over my discovery that kids are gross, and probably gave me a therapy-worthy complex with her struggle to embrace healthy vulnerability (she's getting there).  I love her not just because she was a great and dedicated mother, but because it was dang hard for her to be a great and dedicated mother.  She knows what it's like to realize that your kids aren't going to cooperate with your preconceived notions of what motherhood is, and to slowly, painfully peel yourself away from those preconceived notions (which were reasonably pleasant and modest and circumspect, we were smart enough to know were were raising humans, not creating stock footage.)  I love that when I criticized her as a 9-year old for not being imaginative enough, she entertained my attempts at giving her imagination lessons.  I mean, she accepted criticism from her bratty kid, because she was so keenly aware of her own failings that she acknowledged the truth in what I was saying and discarded the hubris of it without a thought. I catch myself responding in the same way to my children's complaints.  We both probably needed to be kinder to ourselves and tell our kids to cut us some slack, but there we are being human and broken and keenly aware of it.

SO anyway - I'm happy and proud that I graduated.  I mean, it was insanely hard to push that project to completion.  I did grad school while raising 4 kids, through a nasty pregnancy, and through a move to a new house.  It was not pretty.  I tell that to everyone who says "I can't believe you (did grad school and x,y,z.)"  And you know who found the most delight in my accomplishment?  My mom.  she just thinks it's the coolest thing in the world that I managed to pull it off.

But hey, I think we learn and grow the most from putting ourselves in uncomfortable situations.  The ones where we are so stretched that we can't manage those traditional markers of virtue.  If life is hard enough that you aren't quite managing to keep your house in order and your children well-behaved in public, then you must be learning some of the best and brightest life lessons, and pursuing some of the most difficult-to-attain virtues.  I bet you could use a cheerleader.  I will cheer and validate you from my messy corner. And that's how I'm feeling about motherhood today.

4 weeks in

A sweet, well-intending lady in my ward tried to comfort me recently by giving me verbal permission to get absolutely nothing done right now.  In one sense it worked, because I am getting alarmingly little done right now, and it does sort of have to be okay.  This is the stage where my babies sleep soundly in my arms but their eyes pop open the moment I move to lie them down.  I have found no way around this but to outlast the stage.  There are no other bodies both present and old enough and responsible enough to do much baby holding (Sir O only has about a 5 minute attention span for such a thing), so I am it.  I splurged on the 4Moms mamaRoo before our baby burrito duke was born, and it's definitely earned its keep, but even so I find precious little time each day when both of my own hands are at my disposal.  People get fed meals, laundry gets done, and I make futile attempts at decluttering and straightening in microbursts.  It feels kind of mean, actually.  I finally have the  energy to want to tackle all the decluttering and organizing that's been shoved to the back burner since we moved here a year and half ago.  I'm finally neither impaired by grad school nor pregnancy, and I can both see what needs to be done and come up with the emotional energy and focused thinking to figure out how I want to do it.  I just can't act, because my hands are occupied.  This has led to some grumpy moments.

Luckily, I have done this enough times to know that it will feel like it went by quickly once it's over, even if it doesn't feel like it's passing quickly while I'm in it.  Two months from now we'll have settled into a routine, and I should be able to plan and calculate what I will accomplish during semi-predictable nap times.  Three months from now the tide of baby vomit should start to recede. Five months from now I should be able to lay this little man down in his own bed when he's supposed to sleep and trust him to figure it out on his own.  Everything changes so much and so fast in the first year, I know I just have to give myself tiny serenity talks when I'm feeling oppressed by it, and choose to be okay with the way things are now, because they are changing and soon enough they will be different again.

So yes, if you stop by unannounced, you will get the alarmingly messy version of our home.  (And feel free to jump in and improve the situation, by all means),  but I'm doing my best to not beat myself up for what I'm not getting done.  I'm still doing a rockstar job of growing this baby.  He's enormous (compared to my other babies at the same age), and he's snacky.  I see rubber-band-rolls in his near future.  I have reason to believe he's getting enough attention and affection from the whole lot of us (but mostly me) to develop healthy attachments and to feel perfectly secure (I dissolve into a hormonal heap of sniffle-tears when I think about babies who lack those very things).  I try to remind myself it's a good thing that he cries and fusses whenever he realizes he's been laid down and left alone (usually 5 minutes after I laid him there, having spend 30-40 minutes trying to get him soundly enough asleep to attempt such a feat) because it means he trusts that crying will get his needs met.  At least thinking such a thing helps keep me from getting too frustrated.

So, my to-do lists are very short just now, and even so they are never quite completed.  I'm working really hard at being okay with that, for now.  This also involves working really hard at not losing my cool when my other kids make messes that I know I won't have time to address, and then lose their ability to either see the mess or to stay on task when I ask them to clean up after their (dang) selves.  Sir O has especially entered a phase where it is apparently traumatic to be asked to do chores and contribute to maintaining a family home.  Life is hard, buddy.  Welcome to it.

Anyhow, I'm now in that place I prepared for.  People asked me what I was going to do after grad school ended (presumably digging for insight into how I was going to use my degree?) and my answer was always that I was going to have a baby, and then do damage control on all my family relationships, and then see how much energy I had for anything else (thinking, maybe 4-6 months postpartum I'd have my act together enough for such thinking.) The baby's been had, he's lovely.  The damage control is being beastly, but I feel like I'm making headway.

My body is being rather pokey with postpartum recovery, I'm anxious for about a dozen parts of me to tighten up and function properly.  I'm hoping, but not certain, I'll get the green light for exercising my tail off at my six week postpartum doctor visit.  I haven't done one lick of working out since last May, and I miss it.

So my prayers, of late, contain a lot of "let the baby sleep" and "let me sleep," because those seem to be the keys to all my hopes and dreams right now.  It'll come with time, but how much time?

immersion

Greeting universe - I'm a-goin'-a try to s'plain some things.

Most of these things aren't perfectly logical, so try to stick with me. The inside of one's head is never a perfectly logical place, but pack in all the baggage of pregnancy and you get extra nonsensical circles.

Today is my due date.



I wanted to let my body and the baby's body decide between themselves when he was done cooking and experience going into labor on my own.  People tell me that non-pitocin labor contractions are a little kinder on the body than pitocin ones, but I've only ever experienced piton-induced labor (4 times over now) - so it kind of felt like the final frontier for me, the part of pregnancy I'd never yet experience and was running out of opportunities to try.  Something like that.

Only now that I'm sitting around being as uncomfortable as can be and wondering why I'm dragging this out if I don't have to.  I've been kind of surprised how eager every OBGYN I've ever had has been to offer induction.  Obviously scheduling labor is more convenient for everybody.  Mr Renn is not particularly pleased with being inconvenienced by having to be available for an unscheduled labor and delivery.  It's messing with his penchant for feeling in-and-under-control.

I'm wondering if my body is waiting for me to "feel" ready, and whether that will ever happen.

I've been as open and honest as I know how to be about the extent and reality of my antepartum depression.  My brain and emotions are whacked, I don't feel the feels I'm supposed to feel, and the only emotions that hang around much are anger (the impatient kind) and apathy.  My ability to think and to feel are impaired, and while I try to be very careful to keep from making regrettable decisions on a grand scale, little regrettable interactions happen every day I'm like this.  Every one of them make me feel worse about myself.  I start out feeling guilty for being impaired by nausea and malaise, then my brain spirals until I'm in a deep pocket of self-loathing by the end of it.

I can distinctly remember thinking how nice it felt to actually like myself last Spring.  Having had a longer break between babies, and finally sleeping at night (after my comprehensive exams),  I was in a comfortably buoyant state.  It was kind of like, "Oh, hello actual self.  It's so nice to spend some time being you.  Too bad this will be cut short when the next pregnancy hits and the clouds roll in."

So yeah, among other things I don't manage to bond with my babies very well in that cloudy state.  Only after they are born and the pain-med cloud lifts do I start to feel like a mother to my own child.  At least historically..... which is (coincidentally enough) about the time that many women get slammed with postpartum depression, and around the time that people start to check on a woman's mental health in earnest.  When people are finally ready to take my mental health seriously is the time my ducks are just getting to be in a row again.  There is something kind of cruel about that.  I've never been able to get anyone to be concerned enough about me to suggest any kind of intervention, and when I'm in the dumps I'm certainly not able to navigate what kind of help would be appropriate.  My sense of scale and emotional proportion are all messed up, I become kind of impossible to live with, and it becomes easier to just avoid being around people than to try to navigate interactions.  I go from being a somewhat social introvert to being a complete hermit.  (Never mind how hard it is to muster the energy to make myself presentable for being around people....)

So yeah, just for the record.  I really struggle.  The silver lining, I suppose, is that I'm not likely to go through this many more times.  (Maybe one more, is the dominant line of thought and prayer over here).  In a way that is simultaneously totally selfish and yet really not, I look forward with all my earnestness to the day that I am forever done being a pregnant lady. Despite the parts where I never experience life-threatening complications, excessive weight gain or water retention, and have so far been able to have uncomplicated vaginal deliveries, I make a lousy pregnant lady.  I'm a lousy human when I'm pregnant, and as such I am utterly unable to write anything anybody else would ever want to read.  (So, radio silence for the last two pregnancies - EXPLAINED).  I'm a much better human, and an infinitely better mother and wife, when I'm not battling hormones that turn me into a zombie.

So, hey! Here's to timing contractions and waiting impatiently for labor to just happen to me.  Any day now I get to start turning back into my own self - the person I know I can be, and have been, and want to be.  Eventually she should stop getting smothered in the name of making humans.  (Luckily I am quite fond of my humans, I just hate getting them here.)

(And yes, I am and know I should be grateful for my fertility.  I don't think being grateful for my children and hating pregnancy are mutually exclusive.)

Anyhow - see you on the other side of labor.  I'm really hoping I can turn back into the mom who takes photos and documents life.  I miss her.

On finite resources (and prolonged disappearances)

If my long-neglected blogging platform is accurate, I haven't made a peep around here in 8 months.  That unequivocally breaks my previous records, and wasn't even an intentional sabbatical.  There just wasn't enough of me to go around, and lots and lots of balls got dropped.

On the one hand, there is very real value in getting to know what one's limits really are.  There's value in finding out what you can live without, and what you really miss when you cannot make it fit in your life for a good long stretch of time.  I'm sure I'm wiser and a better person for all of it.  But it has not been pleasant.

2015 has been a lonely year of stretching.  In theory I was supposed to finish my thesis by June, but I just "finished" it 2-3 days ago (Dec. 18th).  The thesis thing has eaten up the front burners of my brain for an entire year at least.  (I technically started working on it in July of 2014, so it's pretty well been like gestating an elephant.) I am still in a psychological place of limbo, not sure what to do with my focus and worry and limited ability to create without the heavy thoughts of "thesis thesis thesis" breathing down my neck.  At some point I expect to feel like a burden has been lifted, but so far I just feel lost in a fog.

Also on the limited ability to create front, we are 33 weeks along in pregnancy #5.  I am definitely older than I was the first time I did this, and unfortunately more anemic too.  When I read this post last week suggesting that sometimes a woman's ability to create externally is limited when her body is creating so much internally, it really resonated with me.  This is the second pregnancy in a row where I haven't been able to write much at all, and certainly all of my limited capacity to write got thrown into the thesis basket, leaving other outlets to shrivel up and taste solid neglect.  I still feel that is my most profound symptom of some very real antepartum depression - I am a totally different, significantly less likable person when I am pregnant.  My mind goes lots of anxious, apathetic, cynical places it never visits when I'm not gestating. It's very hard to see it all as anything other than something to be endured and waited out.  It's never pleasant to think one is wishing their life, their todays, away.  But my pregnant todays are often oppressive little antagonists.  The only thing that makes them bearable is their impermanence.

Also contributing to my not-blogging has been the way all my hopes and dreams for home-ownership have slowed to an imperceptible crawl.  Buying one's first home in the middle of grad-school ( and then quickly getting mind-glowingly pregnant/incapacitated) is a surefire way to prevent any kind of purposeful settling in.  We've been here a year and almost 3 months, and everywhere I look I see things I was sure I'd have addressed or changed by now.  It's not doing much for morale, and considering that I'm already battling mental health demons (see antepartum depression above), I can get pretty caught up in cycles of hopelessness that are the polar opposite of socially-supportable shelter-blogging.

But tonight I'm out of excuses.  I need to start recording my life again, and not putting it out there for an audience (even if the only audience I have left are my stalwart grandparents) has unfortunately prevented me from doing any kind of record-keeping for this entire year.  I've taken only a smattering of photos, I've hardly edited any of the ones I've taken, and I haven't taken the time to process any of my experiences, insights, memories, let alone to keep a record of the crazy phenomenon that is my babies turning into full-blown people.

But tonight, less than a week before Christmas, I'm in the process of trying to bake as many sourdough boules as I can in 48 hours to give out to neighbors.  (I've made a pretty good go at neglecting my sourdough starter to death three times now, and it just keeps on recovering beautifully - and sourdough is my favorite of all the homemade superfoods I started making before I got pregnant and my life fell on its face - because it is easy and cheap and has basically 3 ingredients, but tastes like it is both difficult and expensive.)  While the bread bakes, I'm trying to make myself create words instead of just consuming them, mediocre and tangential as they may be.  The only way I'm going to get any better, or regain any kind of a groove, is to jump in and start somewhere.  I'm actually really excited to write in a space where my formatting doesn't have to be just-so, I can create footnotes all willy-nilly without consulting a style-guide, and I don't have to tie every paragraph back to a main thesis.  This is a much more accommodating platform for my very busy life, where most of the creating happens in little stolen bursts of alone time.

There are a million other, neglected, things I could say, but this post is already too long for most people who might read it.  I'm excited to come back, and give each of them their own few paragraphs of glory.  There is something heartily healthy about self-expression, and I have missed it like crazy.  Let's see if I can't get back into a groove of using this platform to not only express and record my self and my life, but to use it as a tool in the process of becoming who I'm going to be.  I've learned so may great things in the last year, and I'm anxious to put them to use.

You'll never run out of insecurities

2015 has been brutal so far.  Thesis-writing is an ethereal mistress, and she is requiring me to spend an alarming amount of my time swimming inside of my own head.  Usually I'm stuck there wondering whether anything I'm doing will make sense to anyone else once I find a way to spit it out in words. I am really good at thinking (overthinking) things through until I am less certain rather than more certain about any conclusions I might draw, and the only thing I sometimes feel safe being conclusive about is that the world and people in it are complicated. 

I want and need so badly to just muscle my way through this process and arrive safely at the other side, and that may be all I can manage to do, but on a number of levels people expect me to have, or to be establishing, a plan of what I'm going to do next.  How am I going to use this degree after I finally procure it? I think I am supposed to have an answer for that.  I do not. 

I have come up with approximately 50 possible plans for establishing a long-term career for myself.  I have a number of skills with which I could be constructive, but which ones would be the most flexible with my family life, and which ones I would find myself least-drained by are not very answerable questions.  I am very lucky, and privileged to be in a position where I do not absolutely have to work in order to provide for the needs of my family.  I just need to be making compensated contributions somewhere for my own emotional health, and so I need to be very picky and find a way to onramp into an incredibly flexible career at a snail's pace.  I have no template for this, and it terrifies me. 

I waffle between entrepreneurship (the bookkeeping might kill me) and trying to convince someone to hire me to do something I might be good at.  Like a lot of stay-at-home-moms, my resume has some gaping holes in it. I sort-of committed resume suicide when I took a soul-sucking desk job 11 years ago last month, then quit it after Sir O was born.  

But, although I make it sound like I want a full-time career, I really don't right now.  If I could spend only half of the hours I've been spending on Grad school on something that paid me back in cultural, social, or fiscal capital (preferably all three) I suspect that'd be tremendously helpful in patching up my sense of self-worth and identity.  But since I live with the cost of spending time (and brainpower) away from my kids, I know that I need to be very picky about it.  I need to minimize the quantity of time and maximize the effectiveness of that time.  I need to be doing something that fills my cup, because I must not be going back to my kids with an empty cup, and I need to feel like my time is valuable.  The more valuable I believe my time to be, the more productive I will be able to be with it.  

I think that's the danger and the hardest part of stay-at-home-parenting.  Being your own boss when there is no value being placed on your time makes it incredibly hard to stay productive.  Trying to function in your own home where there are a million things screaming at you with their un-done-ness leads to the sort of "housekeeping ADD" that births those horrible "what have you been doing all day" questions.  To my knowledge, very few people have institutionalized training for stay-at-home-ing.  Some people have enough internal rigidity to keep impeccable homes, but most of us flounder. 

I have accepted that I will never excel at homemaking, my rarely contented and frequently emotionally unstable sides will always make it hard.  I will always procrastinate mopping the floor.  And the overachiever in me is not entirely okay with devoting so little of itself to things I'm actually good at.  I'd like a small corner to turn to for validation, and for fun.  But it does need to be small, for the foreseeable future. 

All of which is to say, even for the very, very lucky, womanhood can be infinitely tricky to navigate. 

Identity Construction, scholarly voices, and other places to get lost.

from my february instagram feed, where I'm trying to vent my vanity and creativity.

The biggest concern voiced at the defense of my Comprehensive Exams was the fact that everything I write reads like an encyclopedia article. I can, apparently, list and explain concepts adequately, and can find and demonstrate salient points of intersection between them too, but I haven't managed to assert my own voice, my own authority, or my own conviction into anything academic.  I am totally on-board with this assessment of my work, because to presume that I have gathered enough information and perspectives to be conclusive feels dangerously presumptuous to me.  I am a chronic ponderer, and open-minded enough to know that if I assert my opinion, I will inevitably turn out to have failed to take something into account.  I kind of can't fathom writing as though I knew enough to speak with authority.

But then I start to wonder if I will ever arrive at a place where I will feel confident enough in my research and theory to assert myself, and it seems highly unlikely.  So I wonder how in the world anyone ever arrives at a place where they can write like that. On some level they are faking it, the lot of them.  The terrifying reality is that nobody, no matter how confident they seem, actually knows what they are doing, or whether what they are doing is any good.  But the vast majority of writers who aren't me manage to embrace some form of an authoritative or scholarly voice anyway.  Whether they do it out of ignorance or pride or desperation or something better, I cannot figure out.

All the advice out there on strengthening SEO and writing catchy headlines tells you to write with brazen authority.  Use words like "the best" "the secret to" "how to" and "100 ways to" as though it were possible for you to actually conceive of all the possibilities and arrive at a definitive conclusion about them. Scholarly writing apparently requires a similar assertion of knowledge, and it terrifies me.

Sure, my bibliography is more than 3x longer than it needs to be, and I'm at a point where I need to just stop and limit the scope of my research, but to write as though I knew enough to be an expert when I can hardly turn around without confronting a new perspective to consider seems impossible to me.  I am not an inherently confident person.  How much I have yet to learn is never far from my mind. I am insecure, and particularly sensitive to vulnerable failures, and I just don't get enough positive interpersonal feedback in my life to counter the sundry cataclysms of shame that come up and bite me.

So if I'm never going to arrive at a place where I feel I can speak like a qualified expert, how can I situate myself to still feel valuable, capable, or able to contribute something of value? I'm working that out, but I'm also really curious to figure out how other people conceive of themselves and their own authority and reason their way through asserting it.  If everyone is faking it all of the time, then why don't more people stop the bus and want to get off?  Where does confidence come from?  Is it inevitably tied to ignorance or fear? Should it be? Wouldn't that make it a negative trait?  Why do we want so badly to listen to confident voices? What do they instill in us?

Why am I such an introvert, and so terribly terribly slow to develop opinions?

Why does holing away to write this thesis bring out such paranoia in me?

I need a cookie, and an uninterrupted week to write. Neither seems likely.

But I haven't quit yet.

Lightness of Being

Bunny is buoyant.

Despite being a whirling dervish of physical energy, she is also radiantly pleasant. She has the attention span of an attention deficit puppy, but she's polite about it. This girl must say "thank you" more than a hundred times every day.  And she still says "come see me" when she wants to be held (which is pretty much always), and she's got emotional radar.  Whenever anyone else in the house is feeling grumpy or sad, Bunny is instantly underfoot offering hugs and snuggles or to have your cheeks held between her palms.

She also calls her belly button a belly butt.  Which cracks me up every time.

Her inherent interest in the well-being and emotional state of the people around me brings me joy.  It kind of feels like there is a tender plant growing that will one day become the type of a tree I could pass all of my stewardships over to when death comes for me.  There will be someone around to love my people the way only I know they need to be loved.



I actually spent time today trying to guess how old she'd need to be to introduce her to several of my most indulgently favorite things.  Anne Shirley, first and foremost.  I see a lot of them in each other.

So while I'm not sure what I expected having a girl to be like, it's not what I expected.  It keeps surprising me with how awesome it is, and fun, and terrifying.

No excuses.

That was a long hiatus, wasn't it?  It's just as well I didn't make a detailed record of the last 6 weeks, because they have been pretty universally un-fun.  Thesis deadlines then comprehensive exams, then a couple of days then a Christmas I was unable to adequately prepare for..... complicated by more than one (unrelated) complete death of my one-and-only computer.  I am largely wallowing in emotional backlash that tastes the same as antepartum depression.  Too few happy thoughts  to penetrate the stress.



But hey!  Comps are over (other than defending them in February...) and Christmas is over (even if I resent how it turned out when I just couldn't do all the things I'm supposed to do for Christmas), so it's time to move on to new stresses.

Stress #1: I have a thesis to write, and while I am paying for my thesis advisor's time, there's really nobody who's going to keep me on schedule besides myself.  I have about 30 distinct insecurities that each bring me to tears when I try to figure out how to make this happen.

Stress #2: During an emotional high in August, I bought a ticket to Alt Summit.  Then deadlines and comps dissolved me into a puddle of introverted insecurity as well as rendering me totally unable to actually prepare for an over-the-top networking event.  I am terrified, and unprepared in most ways.  Plus, did I mention my computer problems?  It's hard to design a last-second business card for your thesis survey without any software. Plus, I'm not even sure if I can find the business cards for this blog...... haven't seen them since the move. ENTROPY.

Stress #3: Christmas Break.  All my kids home all the time.  I love my kids and I'm trying to enjoy their company.  But oh, the messes.  The energy, the hurt feelings, the drama, and the messes some more.   They make me tired, and sometimes make me want to hide in a closet to be alone for a few minutes.  They have all been sick and stir crazy and sugar glazed.

Stress #4: Money.  New homeownership (spending money on fun things like tree removal and a water softener) + a Christmas I wasn't very organized about + unexpected computer repairs + dentists don't get paid leave for holidays.   None fun.

None of these stresses feels quite as heavy or immediate as comps did, but half of the stress of comps was the way it was infringing on my ability to pull Christmas off.  I'm still emotionally recovering from the whole ordeal.

But, lest I leave you with that bullet train of whine, here are some silver linings.

Silver Lining #1: While our house has proven to be way too dark for me (and skylight windows keep getting bumped up my renovation priority list), the snow we've had since Christmas has done a lot to help brighten up all of our north-facing windows.  Plus my parents gave me a happy-light for Christmas.  (My life is so glamorous).

Silver Lining #2: While Bunny continues to be absolutely insane (so stinking strong willed and flat-out strong for a 2-year-old... let me show you the fat lip she gave me on Friday when she started flailing with a toy in her hand after I picked her up) she also says please and thank you without provocation.  It always thrills me when I get an unexpected "Thank you, Mom" out of her.

Silver Lining #3:  Sir O is as sneaky as the day is long, but he's also got an innate sense of paternal fairness, so when he sneaks a treat, he sneaks one for all of the siblings.

Silver Lining #4: Despite all the stress, illness, and lost sleep this month, I only missed my 6am M,W,F workout class twice. I am proving to myself that I can make a difficult lifestyle change and I'm holding my holiday calories at bay. I still hate doing it half of the time (especially when I'm sick and tired), but habits don't start sticking until you convince yourself they are not optional.  If you are me, anyway.)

Silver Lining #5: The list of house projects is mind bogglingly long, and the budget is hard to predict, as our income varies each month.  But we finished our basement storage room before Christmas and moved half of the bins and boxes living in our garage down there, so parking is less precarious.  Plus now we can move on to parts of the house that we actually intend to live in.

Silver Lining #6: Despite some really disappointing and emotional numb days, I've been pretty easily moved by the spirit this month.  It's been a humbling experience, but usually when I was most overwhelmed, I'd get subtle reminders of how small my stresses are in the grand scheme of things.  This didn't always keep me from being grumpy or withdrawn, but it helped.  Plus I cried a lot.

Silver Lining #7: Despite working on a thesis about blogging, I have not been able to string 10 minutes together to write anything coherent for my own blog.  I'd have lots of thoughts I wanted to write down during the day when my hands were full, or late at night when I was finally laying in bed and getting sleep was a high stakes game.  So here, look at me!  MAKING IT A PRIORITY!   Sometimes giving myself permission to prioritize things that don't matter to anyone but myself is really difficult. But this matters to me, and I think I am a much better person when more of my experiences have gone through the organizing filter of being interpreted and recorded in a searchable way. So while I can't currently edit photos (grrr to the computer problems again), I can write!

s'marvelous

I don't know how much longer I can keep up this facade of functionality.  Being constantly overwhelmed by a steady string of deadlines from school/thesis stuff, while managing a family that is consistently losing it's ability to be patient with their only-partially-present mother; it's using up all the me that there is.  It's like I'm splitting myself into two competing halves.

On the one side, there is the part of me that wants to get all of this over with as soon as possible.  Let's get back to a place where I can put more energy into my parenting and homemaking and not be a constant hairball of deadline stress. Sounds good, no?

On the other side, there is the part of me that is actually deeply interested in my thesis, and really genuinely enjoying the research process and having a hard time imagining going to live in a place where being an academic is back in the past tense again.

So I'm wondering, more with curiosity than with angst, because I've none to spare, where I'll find myself once I've got this thesis defended.  How will I find to exercise and retain this mental muscle I've built?

Mostly I think, I'm going to find myself writing more, and turning to the internet for an outlet.  I haven't unleashed much of my research and findings on the internet yet, mostly because it all incorporates feminist theory, and people who choose not to identify as feminists can be very quick to pre-judge anything feminist-flavored.

Luckily for me, I've found some terrific examples of women scholars who do identify as feminists, but who also very carefully take the time to value what women already do and already have done.  Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is lovely, and Neylan McBaine is always thinking in the most critical and kind way I've seen. Plus there are people like Valerie Hudson who only express opinions that they can back up with exhaustive research. (Truly, the scope of her research is mind-blowing and this podcast was worth every second of it's 81 minutes) So there's hope for me to be braver and to find a comfortable way to voice my research, insights, and consequent opinions. I will never be thick-skinned, but I do anticipate getting to a point where I'm confident enough about the quality of my research to not fear criticisms so much.

My personal approach, as I tackle the topic of "mommy blogging" - one that I find everyone already has strong opinions about - is to try to figure out what it is that is happening (phenomenologically) before I even consider placing any kind of a value judgement on it.  I'm not likely to arrive at radical conclusions that way, and I don't intend to find myself making a call for earth-shattering or subversive  behaviors.  I'm hoping to identify small paradigm shifts that women can make so that their blogging habits better meet their needs.  This will likely include small subversions to hegemonic norms, but not likely subversions to entire systems.  I really and truly land on the "moderate" portion of the spectrum no matter how you want to frame me.  Unfortunately, this sets me up to be masticated by liberals and conservatives alike.  It also makes it rather hard to find relevant conferences to present at.  Most conferences covering social media or technology and society aren't terribly interested in the activity of middle-class women, and most conferences dealing with women's studies are coming at it from the very liberal end of the spectrum.  So far nothing is a perfect fit.

So while I squirm under the stresses of deadlines and sabotaged study sessions, I'm also dealing with an uncomfortable identity shift.  I'm not likely to be able to go back to being a housewife and give up being an academic altogether.  But I also know I cannot feasible keep up my current pace of participation and production.  Something a little kinder and more flexible will have to evolve, which is ironically the precise problem with higher education for women and is addressed really well by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich herself.... come to think of it.