Light and Momentary

My Bunyip

I lose things in January.

Two years ago I wrote about my laundry-chute-cum-wormhole; two years before that I wrote about losing a friend's charitable contribution. So maybe I only lose things in January of even-numbered years. But it makes some sense to me that I'd lose things in January: all of the Christmas gifts need new homes, and at the beginning of the year I am usually resolving to Organize All The Things. Putting things away in whirling dervish mode is an excellent way to ensure that some of your family's belongings will end up in Secret Hiding Places.

My husband gave me a pair of black yoga pants for Christmas. They were perfect -- not too snug and not too loose. I tried them on in the downstairs bathroom, and then I...

...I've been trying to finish that sentence for the past three weeks. At last, I think I have an answer.

At my 12yo's urging, I read His Majesty's Dragon right after I finished my Crazy Shakespeare Project. It was so much fun that I galloped through the rest of the series. (Recommended, by the way. Uneven -- she's no Patrick O'Brian -- but laugh-out-loud funny and an interesting jaunt through alternate history. I've been dreaming of dragons.) In the sixth book they travel across Australia, where they have repeated and alarming encounters with creatures called bunyips.

The bunyips engineer underground streams to create water holes, and then lurk nearby to snatch their unsuspecting prey. At first the novel's characters have no idea why the members of their party are vanishing; later, they can hardly credit the speed and rapacity of the bunyip they observe in action.

Obviously, that's my problem.

I put an important piece of paper in a sensible place, like the file labeled "Taxes 2011," but the bunyip tunnels through the back of the file cabinet. Sluuurrrrp! I go back in search of that paper, but there is only a telltale trace of bunyip drool. I toss that pair of hand-knit socks in the washing machine, but the bunyip is hungry and only one appears in the laundry basket. And my yoga pants? Imagine the stealthy bunyip, disappearing into the ductwork with black Lycra trailing from his greedy jaws.

I suppose I should be grateful he's not the man-eating variety, but I'd like my yoga pants back all the same.

Messy

I have a complicated sister-in-law.

She has been complicated for a long time, but the level of complicated increased exponentially last summer, when she found herself pregnant, single, and unemployed. The baby's due in a little over 3 weeks.

Her parents persuaded her to leave the West Coast, where she was pretty much alone, and stay with them instead. There's been a lot of drama this week surrounding her attempts to get on a train to the Midwest, and it has made me keenly aware of my shortcomings as a Christian.

I was trying to tamp down my unwelcoming feelings when it looked like she would be here for Christmas. "Excuse me?" I said to myself. "What kind of Christian would even contemplate turning away a pregnant woman on Christmas??" I will spare you the blow-by-blow on her changing travel plans and my roiling inner landscape; suffice it to say that it's been frustrating.

She was due in today. Her parents called to check on her and she said she was very sick. Headache. So congested she couldn't breathe. Very swollen hands and feet. Felt so bad she couldn't walk. They should find her a wheelchair for when she got off the train. I was not filled with compassion when I heard this litany of complaints. I thought, "Oh, honestly."

Not long afterward, I took three of my boys ice-skating with their cousin, my other SIL and her husband, that SIL's best friend, and the friend's daughter. On the drive to the ice rink the litany of woe rearranged itself in my brain: Headache. Very swollen. Felt so bad she couldn't walk. Older mom. First pregnancy. What's it spell? Pre-eclampsia. Louder? Pre-eclampsia.

Just typing that brings back the frisson of horror I felt in the van. Here I had been rolling my eyes inwardly at what I thought was more drama. What if she was seriously sick? I know a woman who had fulminant pre-eclampsia, who went from feeling fine to death's door in no time flat. I know many other women who have had a slower-developing form of pre-eclampsia, and another tendril of fear snaked around my heart when I remembered my MIL saying that she had missed her last few prenatal appointments.

We got to the skating rink and I talked it over with my other SIL and her friend. We tried to call Anne. No answer. We texted her, saying, "Please respond -- we are very concerned about you." Nothing. The friend tried to contact her OB's office for advice. Nobody picked up. We were all terribly worried.

I called my MIL, who had been planning to take Anne straight home for a nap. I said, "I'm worried about pre-eclampsia. If she still has a headache when she gets off the train, she should go immediately and get checked out. This can be really serious. It can even be fatal. In fact, we should ask if she's been having vision changes, because if that's the case maybe she should get off the train wherever she is and go to the hospital instead of staying where there's no medical care." I told her that she should call someone who knew more than I did to find out what questions to ask, and we talked about some possibilities.

She hung up the phone and said, "Anne's going to die."

My husband was with her and did his best to get her calmed down. After talking to the local L&D unit, they agreed to pick her up at the train station in town as planned. They took her straight to L&D, where the staff immediately checked her blood pressure and her urine and determined that it wasn't pre-eclampsia. They wanted her to wait until a doctor could check her out, which took some time once it was established that she wasn't an obstetric emergency. There was further drama; there was tearing off of fetal monitor belts.

She came home a few hours later, highly displeased with my meddling. "They didn't do anything," she said scornfully. And I stepped out of the kitchen and into a quiet corner, where I started to cry. My MIL and my other SIL spotted me, though, and were very kind -- so kind. My husband, who hates unnecessary fuss, also tells me that he thinks my reaction was reasonable. But I am still feeling sad and weighed down.

I have expended a lot of emotional energy on Anne over the past week: fretting and trying not to fret, chewing on her past visits and trying to let go of those old frustrations, praying for grace and trying to muster more compassion, mentally revising plans and re-revising them when she missed another train. And then there was today, when we didn't know for a while if she wasn't answering the phone because she was busy having an eclamptic seizure in her sleeper compartment. I've been hoping that I could show the love of Christ to her (or hey -- at least not provide further evidence to support her contention that Catholics are hypocrites), and instead I just made her mad.

So I am thinking about Christmas trees. My husband and I are real Christmas tree people, even though they shed needles and need watering and poke small children who get too close. Every year when I see the needles on the floor I tell myself, "Life is messy." You can have a tree that doesn't shed or need watering or poke small children, but it won't be real. And there's much to be said for real.

In the same way, I think, love is messy. You could live a life, maybe, where you never had to deal with prickly people and the stuff they strew across your life, but God calls us to love the prickly. On the long drive home I was trying to pray through my frustrations. In response I felt a wordless surge of loving tenderness from the Lord -- a momentary assurance that I didn't need to berate myself for being wrong about Anne's health. I hope she can find that same tenderness, somehow. I'd appreciate your prayers for her and her baby.

I know a girl named Moany McGroany

Ooohhh, you guys, it's been a tough week. The toddler is sleeping terribly, I was trying to get a manuscript draft finished, my other manuscript got rejected after I spent MANY MANY HOURS making the changes they requested, and I'm weary of being on my own with only the slavering Rottweiler and the shrieking home security system for company. Today my 9yo woke up sick and got worse, until I wondered if he might have meningitis: fever rising sharply in defiance of the ibuprofen, headache, neck pain, no appetite.

Blessings to be counted: (1) He's much better now and the doctor's office was very helpful over the phone. (2) I did send off the manuscript draft to one of my co-authors, even though Figures 1 and 2 still need to be smacked around. (3) My 11yo comes home tomorrow -- hurray! (4) There is ice cream in the freezer and I'm going to eat a little more of it. For medicinal purposes, you understand. (5) Oh! And! I found out today that my current contract might be extended for a year, possibly. Not sure if it will come through since the bureaucrats in DC have to sign off on it, and not sure if it's best even if it comes through, but I had been feeling really weighed down by the fact that I was almost double digit days into July and still I had no idea what I'd be doing with myself after August. I had almost persuaded myself that I ought to write a book but really the postdoc option would be more prudent.

I have about 45 blog posts kicking around in my head but oh goodness I am not feeling very energetic just now. Buona notte.

Practical Anatomy

Oh, you guys, I am just back from the dentist and YIKES it was a rough visit.

I've mentioned before that I have that redhead mutation that makes me resistant to the -caine family of drugs. I need a bigger dose to get numb and I seem to metabolize them faster than most people. I mentioned it to my dentist and he told me he'd pull out the big guns.

Alas, fifteen minutes later I told him I could feel him drilling. "It's not bad, though," I told him. I could feel a little more of the next pass, and then a couple of passes after that he made me jump involuntarily. He stopped to give me another shot. It helped a little, but I could still feel the drill intermittently.

My tooth had cracked around an old filling, and he had to drill it out to replace it. I didn't know how big it was, but it seemed to go on for a long time. The unpredictable nature of the pain made it harder to handle: with a labor contraction, you know approximately when it's coming and approximately how long it will last. Not so with the drill. I was too distressed to pray the rosary, and this is coming from a person who prays the rosary during transition contractions. Instead I prayed like this: Jesus? Jesus! Jesus!! Jesus? etc. It helped more than you might think, but the dentist was talking about his gardens and his bees and I couldn't really focus. (I should have told him I was trying to pray -- he's a Christian himself.)

Instead I found myself thinking about cranial nerves: "Okay. He must have hit IX and V both pretty hard. Maybe that's why you're feeling gaggy, because your numbed-up uvula is flopping on the side of your posterior pharyngeal wall that still has sensation? Except, wait, motor innervation of the uvula is X, isn't it? and X isn't out, is it?"

I am not sure that I was thinking accurately about cranial nerves, but it was comforting nonetheless. It was all the more so when I lurched into the bathroom afterward, resolved that I would get out of that office without crying or puking but not exactly sure how I would manage it, and wondered what in the world was the matter with my eye. He hadn't given me a shot in my eye, for Pete's sake. I was grateful to recall that V is the trigeminal nerve, with a branch that does indeed run up to the eye. The Wikipedia picture makes me wonder if I have a mutant CN V anatomy to accompany my mutant I-scoff-at-your-local-anesthetic trait, because I'm not sure how he could hit that top branch with a shot to my upper gum.

Even as I finish writing this post I am feeling better, an advantage of metabolizing those drugs rapidly. Glad that's over -- that's really all I have to say.

Funk

I've been kind of down lately. There are a couple of unbloggable things weighing on me, and that's why this space has been quiet but for the occasional serving of mishmash hash. Also, I decided that for Lent I'd write each day in an actual paper journal (I know! so retro!) and maybe I'm just journaled out.

I've been unusually tired, so much so that I wonder if I'm anemic or something. My attempt at a bike ride this afternoon left me so breathless that I went immediately to the natural food store to buy myself some Floradix. It's that same kind of bone-deep unfixable exhaustion that I associate with the third trimester. (Nope, not pregnant. Just tired all the time.) Alas, it was closed.

As you all know, I am embarrassingly drama-prone. This tendency sometimes causes a funk to explurple itself into a FUNK. (Explurple is a word I just made up to describe the thing that sometimes happens in the microwave, when you heat something doughy that expands and expands until it has burst forth from the confines of its dish and spread all over the place, hellbent on microwave hegemony.) Over the weekend I found myself thinking woeful dramatic thoughts about what a hash I have made of things in my life.

Remember the Gong Show? I need a miniature gong for the moments when the woeful dramatic chorus starts doing its thing.

So. A little extra sleep, a little extra sunshine, a big bottle of Floradix, a heaping helping of patience. That's my plan.

Career Angst Unpacked

I am a postdoc, if you are new here, which means I get paid to do research. It is a half-time position, which is unusual for research jobs, and when I started out I thought it would be ideal.

I guess nothing is ever ideal.

One of the big advantages of the job is its flexibility. I work from home about two-thirds of the time, which means my commuting time is limited (a big plus, since the campus is an hour away).

The single biggest problem I am having, I think, is that it is a lonely job. It would be possible for me to connect with postdocs from other departments who are doing similar work, but I'm not quite sure how to get that ball rolling -- or if it's a good use of my time.

Time is an issue, because it turns out that 20 hours is a few too many given the childcare arrangements that I currently have. (Fifteen would be perfect, but that's not what I agreed to. I could put in more post-bedtime hours now that my dissertation burnout has diminished, but I haven't been doing that.) This year is clarifying something important: I don't want a full-time job in the immediate future. I want to pick up the kids from school most of the time, and hear about what happened that day while it's fresh in their minds and they're eager to tell me about it. I want to spend plenty of time with my toddler. (Two is one of my very favorite ages and I do not understand why it gets such a bad rap.) I want to stay on top of household responsibilities, instead of feeling like the laundry juggernaut is always at my heels.

There are no part-time tenure-track jobs.

When I was writing my statement of purpose in 2006, I did not write what I really believed my purpose to be, because I knew that the admissions committee would frown on a statement that said, "I want to be an adjunct faculty member." That was my goal: a part-time teaching job without the push to get grant funding and serve on committees and all the rest of the tenure-track package.

After four years of immersion in the doctoral program, I was hopeful that I could find a way to make a more permanent faculty position work. Now I'm not so sure.

I am kicking around a bunch of ideas for next year. There are six months left in my contract, so it's not as if the wolf is at the door. But this is the time when people are making decisions about adjunct positions for the fall. This is the end of the interview season for tenure-track jobs, and I am not entirely at peace with my decision not to apply for out-of-town jobs. At this point there's no way I'd pick up the family and move so that I could take on a demanding full-time job. Part of me, though, wonders how I'd fare in the interview process.

Listen to me: angst angst angst. A roof over my head, a husband who's on board with a whole range of possibilities, a marketable set of qualifications, and still I am wringing my hands. It's mostly because I'm bad at uncertainty. And right now, what comes next is uncertain.

In which I grumble

Oh, internet, I'm really ticked off. Remember that email I sent last night to my sleepless son's teacher? The movie in question was The Watcher in the Woods. I remember seeing previews for it on HBO in the early 80s and hoping to heaven that I was never in a situation (slumber party, etc.) where I had to watch it. Alexa Flotsam wrote about it recently here, if you don't have similar memories of your own. I politely requested that he be allowed to complete an alternate activity.

So I got an email back, along with a PACKET from the teacher. She said she was surprised that my son was frightened. After all, he's reading Eragon, in which people get decapitated. She's using the movie to teach literature, so she'd like us to choose an appropriate book for him and he can complete the packet over Christmas break.

Did I mention that I'm ticked? Is it really so surprising that a kid would be more comfortable with a book, which he can put down if it gets too intense, and which has no pictures and no scary soundtrack and which is, let's not forget, fantasy, than with a movie designed to be suspenseful?

And teaching literature? Come on. It's December 16 and everybody wants a break, kids and teachers alike. Don't tell me it's about literature. And don't even THINK about giving my son (and only my son) homework over Christmas break, a packet full of character maps and examples of foreshadowing and symbolism charts. (Apparently they are spending a little time on the packet in class but it's pretty informal.)

And ALSO?? Don't send my kid off to write about worms by himself for an hour when everybody else is relaxing in a big gaggle. Couldn't he just go to the library? That sounds more like punishment for my (perceived, not intended) arrogance in requesting an alternate activity than anything else.

One of his brothers is on the case. He thinks the solution is to do that packet up right. They are kicking around book ideas, trying to come up with one destined to create a character chart to remember. War and Peace! Decline and Fall! That book about a day in the life of that guy in Dublin!

Reading Ulysses was not on my list of things to do over Christmas break.

PS Did I mention that my third-grader was required to write a letter to Santa Claus? I don't know what these teachers are smoking.

More Annoying

So I went to Philadelphia for two days with Stella. My professional organization's big meeting was there, and I was supposed to present but I wasn't quite ready to leave town without my little girl. I found a college-aged babysitter through a La Leche League friend-of-a-friend (all hail the Old Boobs Network), and cajoled a grad student I actually knew into being my backup during my session just in case the unknown babysitter didn't work out, and off we went.

She did as well as you could possibly expect a not-quite-23-month-old to do under the circumstances, but it was a relief to head home. We were boarding the plane in Philly, along with several other mothers traveling alone with little children, when a sneering pronouncement from behind caught my ear:

"God, I hope these kids go to sleep. There's nothing more annoying than kid noise." Her companion agreed: "Yeah, I know."

Nothing?? Nothing more annoying than kid noise?? In a world that includes dengue fever, sewers that back up into people's basements, horseflies, the My Humps song, and Big Mouth Billy Bass, the thing you find most annoying is kid noise? Because -- whoa.

A partial list of things more annoying than kid noise (want to add your own in comments? go crazy): PMS. Lemon meringue pie filling that has been dyed neon yellow. Mud tracked on freshly cleaned floors. The Superbowl. Pokemon movies. Library fines. Bounced checks. Chitchat in movie theaters. Oh!! People who take phone calls while in the audience at a conference presentation!! (The rudeness!!) My own absent-mindedness. Stockings that run the first time you put them on. Unannounced reformulations of the few products to which I have fierce brand loyalty. Bloviating politicians.

I get it that some kids out there are terrible travelers. I get it that some parents are lax disciplinarians. And I get it, I really do, that my 14-year immersion in kid noise might leave me with less empathy for people who are seriously bothered by noisy toddlers.

BUT STILL. These women were SLPs returning from the same convention I'd just attended, and you'd think they of all people ought to know: it takes a long time to learn to say, "Mom, I'm bored and uncomfortable. Could you help me find a distraction?" So sometimes toddlers might squawk instead. You can't become an SLP without learning that communication and self-regulation are complex skills, and that's why toddlers are still working on acquiring them.

I thought to myself, "They must work with adults." But working with adults shows you every day that the human frame is fragile. It doesn't take a lot of self-awareness to realize that thirty years from now, when you have your stroke or your basal ganglia circuits are shorted out by Parkinson's, the people who will take care of you are those same kids you're so hostile towards today. How about a little bread on the waters, ladies?

I have been thinking over my reaction to their exchange, mindful of that plank in my eye. (In the moment I said nothing. I turned around, with Stella sitting on my hip (silently, TYVM) and my poster tube in my hand, and looked at them with a look that meant, "Wow, did you really just say that while standing next to a colleague who is also the mother of a toddler?" After I turned back around one of them said lamely, "Well, it's true.") It's possible that I feel unreasonably entitled because I have children who've been known to make noise. It's possible that they're voicing a majority opinion and I'm the weird one here.

But you know, I'm not looking for special treatment for my family. I think all kids deserve compassion from the adults around them, from strangers as well as friends and family. I'm still seeing the face of the little boy who was crying on that flight -- he was traveling with an ear infection and he was in terrible pain. An adult might suffer in silence; most kids can't. In my view their limited capacities mean that they need more kindness, more understanding -- not less.

The Cruellest Month

November gets me down. I've never bought the idea of a cruel April: the cruel month is November, or maybe February. At least in February the days are getting longer, and you know there will be crocuses in a few weeks.

It was gray all day with intermittent spatters of cold rain, and I'm in a matching mood. I've been trying to buck myself up to no avail. If it weren't NaBloPoMo I would have just gone to bed, but here I am with your daily dose of Gloooooom. Vitamin G, let's call it.

This morning I was getting an unusual amount of traffic from Facebook, linking to the post I mentioned here and finished last night. Usually I love it when that happens. I think, "Hi, new visitors!" and send cheery cyber-waves in their direction. Today I thought, "Is there a cave I could hide in? Because I just do not have it in me to deal with a comments brouhaha today." I decided it was wiser to send the post back to my drafts folder than to go on a spur-of-the-moment spelunking expedition. Maybe I'll put it back up when the sun comes out.

Stella took a monster nap today and was not at all tired when bedtime rolled around. I have changed CDs for her about fifteen times in the writing of these four paragraphs. (I know I am given to exaggeration, but fifteen is actually pretty accurate. She likes to listen to the first 45 seconds of a song and then request a new one.) She is finally slowing down, nursing in my lap. Oh, and she is cute even when I'm ready to slip her a little laudanum. (Wholesome, organic laudanum, of course.) She kicked her foot into the desk with a fair amount of force. Still nursing, she grabbed the foot and drew it up to her mouth so she could kiss it better herself. She's an independent little thing.

Amblers make me stabby. Even stabbier if they are yakking on their cell phones while ambling.

Do you know, my friends, what my very most detested part of work is? Do you?? Probably not, so I am helpfully writing a blog post aaalllll about it. Aren't you glad? Here it is: I hate the drive.

I don't hate the whole drive. That might be a reasonable hatred, since it sucks up an hour of my time each way. I'm only grouchy about one little chunk of it at one specific time: the five blocks right around campus, between ten 'til and the top of the hour.

Between my two stints in grad school, they posted signs all around campus: vehicles are to yield to pedestrians in the crosswalks. And I see the importance of that, really I do -- I have logged a lot of miles as a pedestrian myself. I have perfected a wave to the drivers of turning vehicles that straddles the line between friendly and imperious; it says, "We'll be out of the crosswalk in a jiffy so don't even think about mowing down my children. Got it?" I understand that when you have a lot of foot traffic in an area, it's important for drivers to be aware of the rules.

Somehow, though, the students have taken those signs to mean something different. Like, "Please fling yourselves in front of oncoming cars, serene in the knowledge that they will stop for you." Like, "Why worry about blocking all traffic at a four-way stop when you could be continuing your oh-so-important cell phone conversation instead?"

You know, I have been an undergrad scrambling to get to class on time. I get that too. But OH OH OH if you are in such a hurry that you must lunge in front of my vehicle, why would you then ease across the intersection at the speed of molasses? Not even molasses in January -- molasses on Mars. Molasses in space. A barnacle could beat some of these kids across the street, with both shells tied behind its back.

These kids. Listen to me; I sound like Andy Rooney. You don't have to get off my lawn, kids, you just have to let me drive on the street -- the street, which was built for vehicles -- sometime in the next ten minutes.

In my (apparently idealistic) view of the world, it's all about mutual courtesy. You shouldn't lay on the horn as I walk across the street legally, but I shouldn't keep you waiting in your car any longer than necessary either. That's the thing that makes me most crazy about campus pedestrians: the reluctance to recognize that the drivers should eventually get a turn too. If I needed to cross an intersection twice (to wind up kitty-corner from where I started), I would never keep a turning vehicle waiting while I walked through both legs of the crossing -- I'd cross one way and then wave to the driver to say it was his turn to go. If I saw that a car had been waiting for another group of pedestrians to get across, I wouldn't amble out in front of it -- I'd wait the few measly seconds for it to go.

It's easy for me to impute nasty motives to these students, to imagine little blinky signs on their chests that say SELFISH and ENTITLED and NEEDS TO GROW UP AND REALIZE THAT OTHER PEOPLE ALSO HAVE PLACES TO BE. Today I was pretty vocal, through closed windows, to one conspicuously distracted woman. "Honey. Close UP the phone and watch where you're GOING." (She didn't even glance in the direction of my vexed-sounding voice. Must have been a riveting conversation.) That's not who I want to be, even when I'm exasperated. But honestly? I think from now on I'm going to stay in my office until the whatever o'clock bell rings to tell me most students are in class.

I'll probably get where I'm going just as quickly anyway.

Dust

So I was standing on the dining room table a few days ago, having a pocket-sized existential crisis. I had just squashed a second tiny spider easing his way down from the blades of the ceiling fan, and I was having visions of an egg sac hatching out up there. Which, no. Just no.

Mercifully I saw no arachnid families plotting parachute parties over our dinner table. What I saw was dust aplenty. I do clean my ceiling fan blades periodically, but for pete's sake: it hasn't been that long since I was up there with a pail of soapy water. August, maybe? Shouldn't I be able to get by with the feather duster for a measly two months?

In the moment it was overwhelming: the cleaning, the laundry, the never-never-but-never-ending paper. I had just put down the day's mail, thinking I didn't have it in me right at that moment to deal with the pile yet again, knowing that one day's undealt-with pile turns into a fanged and fire-breathing heap of time suck in no time flat. (I expect all y'all even-tempered types are thinking a soupçon of Zoloft might be appropriate. Welcome to my peaked-and-valleyed inner landscape.)

And then I thought about what that dust was, exactly, those tiny bits of skin and clothing fluff (and, okay, the carcasses of dust mites if you must be buzz-killingly precise about it). I was surprised a few years ago when I realized that unused rooms don't actually get very dusty -- the dust piles up where the people are. My house gets full of dust because it's full of life.

One year we had a Christmas tree that shed needles to beat the band. I think it waited until I wound up the vacuum cord and then did a brisk shimmy, showering the carpet with a fresh crop. I did not want to be ranting about our Christmas tree. Better a slightly prickly carpet where peace is than an immaculate floor in an apartment where Mom is ranting about how the Christmas tree is out to get her, to...um...totally mutilate Prov. 15:17. I knew that I wanted a live tree and not a fake one and so that Christmas I kept telling myself something I've been saying ever since, "Life is messy."

It's a good mantra for mothers, I am convinced, and I used it again to talk myself down from my perch on the dining room table. This is where my family gathers, I said, to share meals and play games and finish homework. Ergo, dust. The bedrooms get dusty because they are full of people, who pray and sleep and dream there. The living room gets dusty because of the children who sprawl there happily to talk about their elaborate Lego civilization with its own currency and constitution, to read the books that pile up relentlessly on the end tables, to wrestle until a parent says "Take that game outside!" It's good dust.

This is the season for stripping and shedding. The trees are telling the glory of God; I cannot walk outside without praying, "Me too, Lord: when I go to lay down something you have given me, let it shout out your glory. Teach me how to let go, to trust that you can make something beautiful of the letting go." The detritus in my home -- the cast-off papers, the flaked-off skin, the fallen hair -- it all reminds me that this life is given us to be laid down.

Those could be gloomy thoughts, remembering that the children whose bodies I have tended so carefully will leave them behind someday. But they don't have to be gloomy. I am thinking about the privilege of carrying an immortal soul in a mortal body, about the truth that shocked Wormwood into heresy: "For we must never forget what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our Enemy; He really loves the hairless bipeds He has created and always gives back to them with His right hand what He has taken away with His left."

In My Dreams

One of the reasons I've been quiet lately is that I've been stewing. I have this long-haul prayer intention that I've mentioned here occasionally, and lately the situation has been making me crazy. Crazy crazy. I started a post about it that I called "My Little Pony," as a reminder to myself that I need to not be the little girl wailing to her father "But I neeeeeed a pony RIGHT NOW." If God is sovereign, and if God supplies our needs, then I need to trust his timing. My grace is sufficient for thee, and all that.

But I have to tell you-- I went back and re-read another post on the topic that I drafted in April of '09 (but never published), and I was a little shocked to see how much grimness had crept into my thinking. The waiting has sucked a lot of hope out of me.

Last night I dreamed that it was the beginning of Lent and I was deciding what to give up. In my dream the voice of God said to me, "Give up worrying about that pony." I said, "Really?" -- and oh, the peace that washed over me.

I am a worrier by nature and it is a worrying state of affairs in itself, but I am going to try it for forty days. I'd appreciate your prayers.

The Sound of One Small Virtual Violin

Oh, you guys, it's not the best afternoon I ever had. The baby's in that crazy toddler stage where speed is more important than balance, and she has smacked her forehead hard three times in three days, with the results being one ugly green bruise on the right, one ugly graze in the middle, and one ugly flirtation with stitches, just now.

I took the kids to the park and she was having a blast, running back and forth across a little bridge. She miscalculated, fell, and hit her head. I ran and scooped her up. She wasn't crying terribly hard, but she had an ugly purple line across her forehead, more than an inch long. As I watched, I could see the goose egg forming. Almost instantly it was huge -- she looked like a baby Klingon. (My very own beautiful baby Klingon, you understand.) At the point of impact the skin was taut, shiny, deep purple. I said a little prayer of gratitude, because if that skin had split we would have been off to get stitches for sure.

The icy calm version of me took over and announced that we were leaving immediately and going to get ice for the baby's head. We drove to the Culver's a few minutes away, where I figured the boys could be distracted by ice cream while I applied ice and sympathy. The woman cleaning tables had a lot to say about the situation. "That's really bad," she volunteered helpfully. "How are you gonna bring that down?" Stella regards the application of ice as an Eighth Amendment violation, and as she tossed her head trying to avoid the ice pack, she managed to get a fair amount of ice cream in her hair.

It looks a lot better but it will be another nasty bruise. Poor thing.

The end of school is always a bumpy transition, where the boys get used to being with each other full time again. By the end of the day I am ready to take my introverted self into the nearest closet in order to get some quiet. I know it will just take a couple of weeks for us to settle into a good groove, but they may be a long couple of weeks. The teenager is being teenagerly; the sensitive boy is being very very sensitive. But do you know, the baby just stopped nursing so she could smile and wave at me. You take your consolations where you can get them, I guess.

Pride, Humility, Christians in the Academy, and the Spouse of Dr. No

Remember Dr. No? Her husband is also on faculty in my department. He coordinates the departmental seminars, and he emailed two of us who were defending our dissertations in March, asking if we would please please present our findings in April. His emails were very jocular and encouraging, and so I was blindsided when he took over the Q&A time after my presentation last month.

"Are there any questions?" I asked.

"Oh," he said instantly, "I have about a BILLION questions. Did you have a hypothesis?"

Thoughts on why

Thanks, everybody, for the supportive comments.

Celeste asked why I thought these two women reacted the way they did, and I think there are a couple of reasons. One is that even in a neighborhood where kids can roam a bit, there will be variation in how the neighbors view the roaming. We're all going to have different ideas about how much freedom kids should have. It makes sense that a neighbor who is more cautious about letting a kid play unsupervised would be the one to approach an unsupervised kid.

I also think that it's hard for people to back down. If you've taken a stand with a kid -- "you shouldn't be out here alone" -- you might prefer to hold your ground rather than say something like, "Well, it sounds like you do things differently in your family." I remember feeling baffled about how to re-negotiate boundaries when my oldest son was little. Wouldn't it erode my authority if I changed my mind? (It was a pleasant surprise to discover that a general willingness to negotiate made it easier for him to hear "That's not negotiable" when I needed to say it.) I think many adults feel that if they tell a kid something they need to stick with it.

Two years ago when the police showed up I resolved to be the calmest, most rational version of myself that I could be. And I was -- waves of calm emanated from me and nearby birds ceased fluttering because I had sucked them into my Vortex of Tranquility. It worked in the moment: the cop agreed with every point I made and he filed a report that called it a harmless misunderstanding.

But I think it also backfired on me. Have you ever been in a conversation where the other person gets calmer and calmer and you find yourself feeling crazier and crazier? I think if you leave the other person holding the bag o' crazy, it might come back to bite you. I think if you call the cops and they tell you your concerns are unwarranted, you might go looking for someone else to tell: this kid was only 6 years old and his mother drove away while he ran across the street without watching for cars. That's my best guess about what happened in '08.

On Monday I hardly talked to the neighbor at all. Pete was so upset that I was focused on him, and I wanted to be certain that I understood what had happened before I told the neighbor I was unhappy about the way she handled it.

One of the hazards of living near a college campus is that we get occasional cars zooming down the street at 45 mph -- driven, almost always, by 19yo guys. She said, "This is Crazy Corner here. They take out that streetlight once a year." (I think this is a wild exaggeration. I have never seen any damage to that streetlight, ever, but I do live on the other side of the block.) She's right that an out-of-control car could hurt my son. I think the risk is minimal at 1:30 on a Monday afternoon. I think my son, who has been going for walks in this neighborhood since he was less than 24 hours old, understands that we need to listen for cars going too fast. Because her kids are grown she probably hasn't thought much about how to teach kids to avoid that hazard -- only that it's a hazard.

I'm optimistic about our follow-up conversation. I will tell her that Pete is small for his age, but that he's heading to kindergarten in the fall and I want him to feel competent navigating our neighborhood. Not cocky, of course. But I also want to say that I think we do kids a disservice when we teach them to be too fearful. I'm going to ask her to help me strike a good balance when she sees my kids outside. I'll let you know how it goes.

"She shouldn't have done that"

Do y'all remember when I got investigated by CPS in the summer of '08? I blogged the whole saga, but the nutshell version is that a neighbor thought my 6yo son shouldn't have been told to walk home by himself from a quarter-mile away and drama ensued.

A little necessary background: we live in a quiet pedestrian-friendly neighborhood on the edge of a college campus. We walk a lot. Yesterday Pete and Stella and I enjoyed a rambly walk home from preschool, detouring to collect a handful of last season's battered walnuts and horse chestnuts in a neighbor's yard, and stopping by the creek to admire an underwater worm. (A suspiciously still underwater worm, but I kept my suspicions to myself.)

When we got to our house Pete asked me, for the first time ever, if he could walk around the block once by himself. He's 5. Our block is tiny. I said yes.

I stopped in the house for about three minutes, and then I started around the block clockwise to meet up with Pete. He was on the sidewalk with a neighbor, who said, "Is he yours?"

She had stopped him and said, "Where's your mom?" He told her, "Over there," pointing to our house -- clearly visible from where they were standing. (For perspective, this picture shows a chunk of our little block. Pete was standing to the left of that gray house.) He told her, "My mom said I could walk around one time by myself."

And the neighbor said, "She shouldn't have done that."

She said, "Maybe we should walk around together to find your mom," but then she just stood there with him, telling him how dangerous the street is. (For perspective, our side of the block sees ~3 cars per hour during the day and theirs is similar.) That's when I arrived.

"Is he yours?" she asked me, and proceeded to tell me a story that made me think he had lost his mind and run out in front of a car without looking. In reality, he was walking peaceably on the sidewalk and paused to look across the street at her and her dog -- a story I had to work at extracting from her. While she was talking, I saw Pete's little face working as he tried to hold back tears that wouldn't be held back. He crumpled onto the grass and sobbed.

"You didn't do anything wrong," I told him quietly. "You had my permission to walk here. I'm glad you're a brave guy."

It didn't help. He sobbed for a long time while I sat beside him and rubbed his back. His lovely big-guy idea had soured, and he was crushed. Unapologetic, the neighbor kept saying, "I was just trying to keep you from getting hit by a car." (While you were standing on the sidewalk. In the middle of the block. With no cars in sight.)

So this is twice now, that a neighbor has been so determined to keep my child safe that she prevents him from getting home as instructed. This time, I need to have another conversation with the woman in question. I see her often; we regularly exchange pleasantries while she's walking her dog. She can't make my 5yo son cry because he is on the sidewalk 50 yards away from me, having spent four minutes out of my sight with my permission.

I'm feeling puzzled here. There seems to be this crazy divide in my neighborhood: there are the parents who think it's a reasonably safe place for kids to explore, and there are the residents waiting for the CSI Gladlyville team to start excavating the dead bodies of children whose mothers failed to swathe them in bubble wrap while they sat safely indoors watching television.

This is a battle I am willing to fight, because I believe it is important. I have thought a lot about my children's abilities and their limitations, and I continue to monitor the safety of the neighborhood -- keeping an eye out for changes in traffic, changes in the sex offender registry, changes in nearby rental housing.

I just don't understand why it has to be a battle.

P.S. The CPS investigation was traumatic for me, and it is still a tender spot. If you disagree with me, please be kind.

A cranky pep talk

Oh, internet, I have been in this ridiculous tailspin, not getting anything accomplished. Anything! It's like I got all stressed out about having a completed draft, like part of me doesn't really want to finish this degree or is afraid of what comes next or is perhaps just a raging wackaloon.

I am applying for a job and I am nervous. I got rejected for that faculty position, which is fine because I really didn't want it, but now I'm braced for more rejection. I can't get past the first paragraph in my cover letter. If I don't apply they can't reject me, right?

I am applying to present at a conference in June and I am stuck on that application too. It could be really fun -- I was trying to persuade my husband that we should slip away to this cool city for a few days, just him and me and the baby -- but I have to get unstuck first.

We got in an argument yesterday over the stupidest thing: the sheets came off one of the boys' beds. Minor, yes? Not a big deal, am I right? Except it was one of those arguments where -- whoosh! -- all of a sudden it's ugly for no good reason. I'm still mad.

I told my advisor I'd get her a batch of revisions by the middle of this week. That would be today, and I am nowhere. Nowhere! Perhaps the most exasperating thing is that I just need to put my head down and WORK for an hour, maybe an hour and a half. I've been busy thinking up passive-aggressive Valentine's Day cards instead, because I'm mature and forgiving like that.

Blargh. And blargh some more.

I am going to flex my atrophying diligensius muscle (oh, shut up, spellcheck, it is totally a muscle) and see what I can crank through before I need to get to bed. But sometimes a person just needs to say it out loud: internet, it's time for me to get over myself already.

A Tip From Me To You

Oh, I had such a productive dissertation day today. SO productive. I told my husband that I would hit my goals for the week today rather than Saturday. Pete asked to stay for the afternoon session at preschool. The baby had an unbelievable nap. I worked like a woman obsessed.

I left my stats program up and running because I had about ten minutes' worth of work to finish. [<-foreshadowing]

Alas, alas alas, when I came back to the computer it had shut down. All my pretty new dataframes are gone. I had written the results up in a Word document which did not get eaten by marauding data monsters, but I also need the stuff that was living inside my stats program.

It will not take me nearly as long to do it a second time. Some of the work I did this afternoon was brain work (deciding what to do and learning how to do it) and some of it was finger work (typing in the right commands to get it done). The redo will be almost entirely finger work. But still: ARGH.

Save your work, my friends; the data monsters are lurking out there.

On Deadline

The fall semester was really hard. I hope I wasn't too whiny here, but it was AWFULLY hard. If I'd had more than one semester left, I would have thought about taking a leave of absence from the program. Or maybe just dropping out.

I knew it would be harder once the baby got mobile. The combination of mobile baby + decreased availability of favorite babysitter + TAing for a class that wound up twice as big as planned when they opened it up to undergrads-- wow, that was a tough combination.

For the first time since I started the program, I found myself unable to meet self-imposed deadlines. I'll get this done by x date, I'd say -- only I wouldn't.

I hate missing deadlines.

I have some more self-imposed deadlines looming, and I am ready to get back into Person Who Meets Deadlines mode. I need to get a chunk of my dissertation written up and sent along to my advisor. (In a moment of madness I told her I'd get it to her by Wednesday.) I need to finish a Christmas gift for someone I'll be seeing on Thursday. (I'm into the toe decreases on the second sock, so I should be okay unless I break my wrist or something.) I have some end-of-year tax stuff to finish. And then I have two non-essential tasks that I'd really like to complete. Every year for the past decade I have read a Dickens novel and a Shakespeare play, but 2009 is rapidly drawing to a close and I have finished neither. It seems a little silly to spend time on those things when I have essentials awaiting my attention. But I miss being that person who can set herself a task and be reasonably certain of getting it done, and so I am going to make the effort.

We are heading off to the library, where I'm hoping I can finish a sock toe while reading to Pete and Stella. Perhaps I can even squeeze in a half-chapter of Hard Times if they get excited about the train table. Wish me luck!

Go Round and Round

That's what my thoughts do these days; they go round and round. Friday is the application deadline for that local faculty position. I think about it all the time. If they offered it to me, would I want it?  I think about that half-time post-doc an hour away. If they offered it to me, would I want it? I think about having a little home-based private practice. Is that what I want? I think about staying home for a year and catching up on all the things I have let slide around here, and having gingerbread ready for the boys at 3:30 every afternoon, and making really fabulous Halloween costumes.

I think I might run out of gingerbread recipes.

I think I am sabotaging myself by procrastinating on the application packet. I think that in my heart of hearts I don't want to teach three classes each semester in a field that's not my own. I mean, it's close enough that I could make it work. But do I want to?

Maybe this sounds elitist -- heck, maybe it is elitist -- but it's a less competitive program than the one I'm trained for. It's more satisfying to work with more motivated students.

Elwood and I have been struggling a bit with division of labor and I am trying to see it as a providentially timed struggle. If we disagree now about who ought to call the insurance agent and get up with a wakeful baby and handle the swim team drop-off, what should that tell me about next year?

Huh, that sounds really stupid now that I have typed it up: I might turn down a challenging job to stay home because I hate arguing with my husband about who will follow up with the state department of revenue. But it's a consideration. I have read that most marital arguments are about money, sex, kids, and in-laws. We never fight about any of those: we fight about time and responsibility.

Look at that-- I was just about to type something like "so I don't know what to do next year." But then I realized I'd already said it approximately 45 times already in this post and stopped myself. There is a line in an Anne Lamott book that was very helpful to me the last time I didn't know what our next step should be: she quotes the pastor of her church, saying that God doesn't shine a big floodlight on the path ahead. Instead He illuminates the next patch where we should walk, and then the next, and then the next, until this funny Charlie Chaplin gait gets us where we ought to be.

My next little Charlie Chaplin step is to write up a research agenda and a cover letter. And then we'll see. If I keep singing "go round and round" to myself, maybe I'll wind up as the roller derby queen. Dr. Roller Derby Queen -- it has a nice ring, don't you think?