Welcome

This parenting thing is exhausting. Add the academic thing to it, and I feel like an intruder in most areas of my life: Not maternal enough to be a mommy, not cerebral enough to be an academic. My first semester on the job(s), I was a working and a stay at home mom, and if I'm going to be honest, I don't believe I truly succeeded at either.

Though I love to cook, I rarely cooked a full meal, and I threw away plenty of groceries-gone-bad after planned meals turned in to frozen pizzas or runs to Panda Express. I drove past a Mexican restaurant yesterday, and I was overwhelmed by--I don't know, amusement? Naïveté?--when I remembered that we used to make our own tortillas on a typical weeknight if we'd planned to have tacos. Let me repeat that--we made the flour tortillas from scratch. Now I balk if the crockpot recipe asks me to precook the ground beef.

I had grand plans to crochet my son some baby caps and booties. I pinned and pinned sewing patterns for cute DIY onesies and Halloween costumes. Have I made a one? Ha. I haven't even bought the yarn.

And then there's work. I love to shop for clothes. I love to creatively mix patterns and styles, to try to express something of myself in everything I wear while still remaining completely appropriate for the classroom and faculty meetings. My students told me I was a role model. And yet I'm afraid that all I demonstrated last spring was that everything goes with jeans. While I do love the blazer and cowboy boots style tips I inherited from my advisor, I know it's time to branch out again. But it's so inconvenient to pump in a dress, and its so hard to match separates when your son is having his usual mid-morning meltdown and you can't remember what goes with a black pencil skirt. (Answer: Everything.)

So that's where this blog comes in. In an effort to reclaim the parts of my life I feel I've lost in the last few months, I want to write about all it means to be a mother and an academic. I’m not worried about “having it all” and I know I won’t be perfect. Instead, I want to write about my daily realities, in the hopes that many of you, whether you share my particular profession or not, can share in these struggles that individually seem so insignificant but that, together, often dominate our daily allotment of mental energy. Which, let’s face it, is pretty small to begin with.