Pain transmission II

Well, is there?

I'm giving more money to charities, which is not enough.

Campaigning? I don't believe it's right to tell other people what they should think or feel. I don't value gimmicky stunts. I'm not prepared to tin-rattle at other people when I can directly give more myself. (This train of thought always ends in donation.)

Educating: yes. I believe in education. But I'm ignorant in the face of the deep-rooted and tangled, eternally complex social and political circumstances behind the news stories. And you can't educate from a position of ignorance.

Well, I suppose the response is there, isn't it? I need to know more about some really important things, I need to get more clued-up about the work that different charities do, and what's actually going on under my nose. It's been a long time since I did any actual, practical volunteer work.

Not enough time in the day or hours in the week. But getting the priorities straight: life's too short NOT to try and make a change, I suppose.

I wonder how long this resolution will last? How do I make it more realistic? Might have to be small scale. OK. The commitment is: pay more attention to the way that I translate my beliefs and ideology into the habits of my daily life.

Worth a try.

Pain transmission

I've got a completely different view of pain these days. It's familiar now in new, physical and emotional dimensions. I've got more respect for pain, and more understanding of how little I know of it. Pregnancy and childbirth put me through my paces, but motherhood makes you feel other people's pain, too.

All the suffering that's broadcast in the news at the moment, it is all real, it all comes home. I was numb to this before. Now I understand that every infant and every adult who suffers in wars, in hunger, in poverty - they are all someone's child. This must sound familiar to any regular church-goer. Well, I'm not - but even so I have echoed the sentiment in the past, imagining that I was imagining how terrible it all was. I wasn't, I can't.

I've taken a few days off work, and it's not quite been the alcohol and caffeine-fuelled knees up that I was hoping for. A side effect of the mental decompression from just... stopping is that I've paid more attention to the reported news.

I don't really have words at the moment to think or process all of it: the Victorian-age inequalities exacerbated by welfare cuts; the utter, brain-numbing awfulness of one couple's self-serving behaviour; the scale of the refugee crisis in Syria...

Is there anything we can do?

Coffee and alcohol

Baby-brewing being all about denial, I've spent much of the past two years resisting both of these delights. Pre-conception, post-conception, post-natal, breastfeeding... I've been SO GOOD during all of these periods, and the last one went on for bloody ever.

If we decide to go through it all again, that will be another couple of abstinent years of my life.

I just realised that I now have a window of opportunity to GO CRAZY!!!

That'll be me chewing my fingernails, talking very fast and teetering into the gutter.

Deferred Groceries

We moved house a few months ago. Between the work hat and the mummy hat I haven't had much time lately for the home-maker hat (knitted with a bobble?).

As a consequence, the decor is nondescript (as when we moved in), the furniture is inappropriate (some of it quite literally picked up off the street), and the location of anything that's not used every day is anyone's guess.  Husband has done marvellous things with essential maintenance, but I NEED to paint over that desolate wallpaper in the hall. When will it ever happen?!

Although I'm desperate to do some organising and sorting and decorating, the daily hat-swapping routines are all-consuming. I'd promised myself that I would take a week's proper annual leave during this sabbatical, to peruse some colour charts and indulge in a bit of home-love. But I'm as preoccupied as always at work. There are always more deadlines, nothing ever feels FINISHED so there are no natural break points. Not even for grocery-shopping. I need to make sure dinner is on the table. And right now the food cupboard is - well, not bare, but very random.

Q1: If there isn't a perfect time to take annual leave, is next week as good as any?
A: Yes.

Q2. Is tinned tomatoes with capers an acceptable tea-time food for a 1 yr old? 
A. Yes! If I put it on toast.

Grown up shoes

The Boy has a new pair of wellies, and I have a new pair of shoes. We both look great.

Now I just have to resist the urge to slip back into those disgusting old boots that I've worn all winter.

I've been contemplating my wardrobe quite a lot lately, in a bemused way. I'm the same dress size that I was before I was pregnant, but I feel a totally different shape. Clothes that (I'm pretty sure) used to look special now look...wrong.

Once again, I'm grateful that I'm on sabbatical - the meetings are few and far between so I only look a wreck in the eyes of my PhD students. Not good for my self-esteem, but not doing anyone any harm.

The shoes should help. But will I be able to resist the powerful lure of those sloppy winter boots?!

Murphle luffle massive generalisation

Once upon a time, I used to wear the sharply turned Trilby of Eloquence.

Nu-uh. No longer.

I can still go through the motions of articulate, fluent speech - but the CONTENT, my god, the content is DRIVEL.




When I get the chance, I'm going to do a bit of reading and see if I can find advice on how to chair discussions properly.

Supervision Minefield

Having an enthusiastic group of PhD students around is great for motivation, camaraderie and intellectual stimulation. It can also be a bit of a minefield. As Occam's Typewriter blogger, Erika Cule touches on here, students are apprenticed to/by(?) their supervisor in 'hidden' ways, as well as through the obvious aspects of academic expertise. It's a special relationship in many respects, and yes, now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure that apprenticeship is the best way to describe it.

Once again, the parenting analogy comes to mind. There are things about yourself that you just can't know until you've been in a supervision/parenting relationship for a while. Where else do you get to see reflected, clear as a bell and right back atcha, not what you SAY but what you DO?

Ergo, if you don't want The Boy to run around while he's eating toast (how does the jam get behind his ears?) then you have to stay sitting down yourself all the way through breakfast. And if you want your PhD students to be ethical in their research, you can't cut corners yourself, or treat something like participant consent in an offhand manner.

PhD students are adults, but they're often pretty green ones. I certainly was (ahem. am.).  So, even the student who grumbles about their supervisor - and let's face it, what are the chances of getting through 3 + x (+ xx) years of regular contact without pissing each other off once in a while? - is still going to be deeply influenced by them. The way we behave at conferences, the way we interact with local colleagues, our attention to detail, how we deliver feedback... Whether we like it or not, we nurture attitudes and mannerisms, and whether we (or the student) think we're getting it right or not, we habitually model what it is to be a professional academic.

Minefield, huh?

Working with interruptions

Seems like I only just manage to sit down to a particular piece of work when

Complacency

Nothing lasts. Just when I feel like I've got the hang of something to do with The Boy, I notice that he's moved right on and my new skills are redundant. Today I realised that he's barely a baby any more. He's on the cusp of toddlerhood. This watershed moment was defined by two bona fide tantrums.

The first was small and actually quite amusing, on the kitchen floor (belly down, kicking, heart-wrenching sobs) and was triggered by ?

The second one was quite terrifying, in public, walking across the park (screams, tears, blotchy face, wriggling and kicking in buggy/while walking/in husband's arms/in my arms). Caused by ?

Ah, the weekend.

Most academics that I know work all hours: evenings, weekends, bank holidays - no time off is sacred. According to email time-date stamps, many are evidently online very early; most seem to work late. The job has a quasi-self-employed nature. Many academics that I know identify themselves so closely with their work that the idea of 'time off' is an alien concept: they can no more take time off from their work than they can time-travel.

At times this is wonderful: it's a blissful alignment of being and working -- all-consuming and satisfying. At other times, it's a dreadful, obsessive and selfish way of life that can accommodate only one person. It's anti-family, anti-social and it can be counter-productive: what's research about if it's not collaborative and outward looking? What's life about if we don't got love?

So I'm grateful to my husband who is far more down-to-earth about what his research job entails, which I think is something about doing lab work instead of ivory-towers humanities stuff. Monday to Friday, 9-ish to 5-ish. (OK, make that half 10 to half 6.) Evening and weekends are not for working.

Initially, I found his insistence on work/home delineations quite frustrating -- it was one of the biggest compromises when we moved in together -- but these days I'm glad of the discipline. The working day begins and ends around The Boy's nursery hours, and we can share the start and finish to give one another a bit of extra space. I'm grateful every day that we have each other: I genuinely don't know how single mothers (or fathers) do it.

And the feeling of waking up and realising it's The Weekend... Ah. Bliss.

Bad night, glum day

For the past week, The Boy has been sleeping through.

A run of undisturbed nights is not something I'd usually mention, mostly in case I jinx it. Also because it's rubbish to be a parent in the middle of a Bad Phase: what you don't need is to hear that someone else's child is snoring through the wee hours.

However, since the nocturnal peace ended last night, the topic is fair game. And it's rubbish. Tired and disoriented, slow, groggy, frumpy, lumpy and grouchy. The whole Band of Insomniac Dwarves.

The nature of my work at the moment is to scribe away on my own. I'm on a (long-awaited) teaching reprieve this term. I've been desperate for this peace and solitude. It's been so long coming that small publishing tasks have now become epic challenges, requiring me to scale mountainous literature reviews in order to relate any of my ideas and past research projects to current thinking. I can't believe how busy everyone else has been, doing real research while I've been settling into teaching and having babies. 

So here I am, with the ultimate luxury of space, privacy and a to-do list consisting of research tasks. And what's occupying my mind? It's the moment last night, two hours into the 20-minute cyclic routine of cry-soothe-leave-the-room, where my patience wore thin and I slammed a kitchen cupboard trying to find a spoon to administer the Calpol that I wasn't totally sure was justified. Uncertainty, uncertainty, oh my Beanie Hat, when will you let me put the Bowler back on?

I didn't know why he was crying.
I wasn't sure whether anything was really wrong.
I didn't know if I was doing the right thing by NOT picking him up.
Then, when that didn't work, I was unsure if I was doing the right thing by PICKING him up.
Was it was right to give him medicine?
Have I made the prospects for tonight worse by the way I handled things last night?

Despite the fact that there's NO POINT TRYING TO FIGURE IT OUT, I am still trying to figure it out. The sound of him crying and me slamming the cupboard door is the soundtrack accompanying my solitude. I think I'll sit here and wail until someone comes and rubs my back, hands me my teddy and gives me paracetamol. That should do it.

Being maternal with students

Coming over all maternal with students - in a derogatory, clucky hen sense - is not a good idea.

I've always been a sucker for a sob story. I can end up going right out of my way to help someone with something just because they asked when, actually, they'd have been better off doing it themselves. I've often heard colleagues pooh-poohing these situations, with a bunch of bluster and a macho attitude (even the women). So sensitive have I been about this personality trait that I've tried, in the past, to be covert about my endeavours to support students.

And now, back at work, I can't deny that I'm sporting a new type of self-consciousness. This is basically a vanity project about not getting cast as a wimpy push-over. (Which, it seems, is a stereotype about new mums returning to work that I've cast in my own imagination. Yikes. How did that get into my head?)

But anyway, it's easier to be tougher these days because motherhood is NOT for wimps.  Yes, along with other new mums, I may dissolve at the sight of any scene of desperation or suffering and, just occasionally, fabric conditioner adverts. But the point is that I'm tougher now than I've ever been.

I haven't changed my mind about how far it's reasonable to go for a student who asks - and also  students who don't ask but clearly need a bit of extra support. I recognise more quickly when I'm being a bit soft with them. But being maternal with them -- it's not a clucky hen thing, it just means giving them what they're entitled to: some attention, thoughtful guidance, and compassion.

Motherhood vs Academe

4.45pm is far too early to quit work. I'm very lucky to live and work 10 mins from nursery -- but surely 4.55pm is far too late to collect a 1-yr-old from nursery. Bit of a dilemma.

But I get to have a lovely time with The Boy in the morning, and again when we come home and have tea. Dancing round the kitchen, eating spaghetti hoops on toast... I don't know a more effective remedy for the headache of lit reviews, paper-drafting-procrastination, graduate student supervision and general professional angst than being treated to a spontaneous and unambiguous performance of Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes, complete with self-applause. Once he's in bed, I don't feel so distraught about my impoverished Google Scholar citation stats. For a little while, anyway...

Steamrollers and Easylifers

I'm sure this is true of any profession, but a lot of the people that I come across fall largely into two categories: steam-rollers (unreflective, overbearing) and easy-lifers (change their minds with the wind, unreliable). The Beanie (see I don't normally wear hats post) equips me to deal with neither. Need another hat.

I don't normally wear hats...

...But metaphorically I seem to have a cupboard full. Full-time academic, mother to 1-year-old, wife to 32-year-old, daughter, sister, auntie, friend to others. Nothing unusual - not an especially large number of hats. We all wear lots these days.

The particular clutter of hats I'm referring to here, though, includes some that I THOUGHT I'd be wearing at this point in my life, as well as some that I thought I was rid of. Hats I was trying on before The Job, before The Baby. E.g., The Bowler of Self-Assurance, which will not stay on lately. It's been replaced by the ill-judged Beanie of Teenage Uncertainty. I thought I'd chucked that one out, but it's back.

Anyway, the idea of this blog is to try to reclaim some time to myself Between Hats. In the past I've found regular writing like this to act like a wedge, opening up a bit more space for those honest, unguarded thoughts that I occasionally glimpse on their way past. It's been a long time since I haven't felt watched or judged according to the hat that I'm supposed to be wearing, and the sense of being observed makes truthful reflection tricky. I remember that it gets easier if you just keep writing, little and often. So I'll give it a go.