Baby Steps (an appropriately cliched title)

I did two things today. Well, two major things. I spent my afternoon in a marathon faculty meeting from which we emerged, I am proud to say, with a kick ass syllabus for this semester. The lectures are all assigned, the paper deadlines align with necessary deficiency report and midterm grade dates, all of the readings are accounted for, and we even planned in a few writing workshops and catch-up days. I can’t wait for the fall.

Slightly less productive but certainly as passionate was my morning mission to help my son learn to crawl. It’s hard, as an adult who has been walking for over thirty years and is far too evolved for crawling, to remember or have patience for how difficult it is. My little guy wants to hold your hands and walk around the house for hours. He’ll hold your hands and reach down to pick something up, bend his knees to sit down, even reach out to pet the dog. But he won’t do any of it on his own. Yes, he can hold himself up on furniture, but you have to put his hands there first. And he hasn’t figured out that if he lets go, he will fall. This always surprises him. (Thankfully, he rarely cries, just gives you a confused expression that says, “How did I get down here?”)

My husband and I have heard plenty of stories about children who never learned to crawl, so on some level, it’s not that important to us. But we do want him to be mobile. So much of his development—being able to pull up on furniture, to lower himself to a sitting position, even just to get some good exercise—depends on it. So every day we do the same thing: put him on his tummy, place some toys out and a pacifier out of reach, and wait. And every day he responds the same way: he flips to his back and cries. Screams, rather. All the while wearing this confused expression that makes you feel like perhaps you are traumatizing him and it may come back to bite you later.

Patience, in general, has never been my strong suit. Perhaps this is why I love working with college students. I know they have developed the cognitive abilities to comprehend what I am teaching them, and the skills to immediately follow and adapt my instructions, honing their talents until they have come up with a finished product all their own. I love witnessing this development over the course of a semester-long writing class, and if I am lucky enough to have these same students in class again, it is an added treat. Teaching a person to write doesn’t happen overnight, of course, but there are so many more benchmarks to celebrate.

Babies, on the other hand, seem to go from seem to go from not crawling to crawling everywhere, from being too scared to walk on their own to taking off and never stopping. I’m sure there are far more stages that I just don’t see, probably because I’m not trained to see them. It is frustrating, though. I spent two hours with three fabulous colleagues and we solved every scheduling issue and came up with a great syllabus. It’s a strange position to find yourself in when you realize that the reason your son can’t crawl is not because you haven’t demonstrated the positioning well enough, or because you haven’t given him enough incentive—it is simply because he’s not ready to crawl yet. At school, my job is not about waiting for students to decide they’re ready to attempt a daunting task; it’s about instilling them with the confidence to do things they’ve never done before, and encouraging them along the way. I can certainly encourage my son, but somehow smiling and squealing, “Come on, you can do it!” just seems to piss him off.  

Then again, my students were made ready for college by countless dedicated teachers before me, teachers who taught them to write in cursive on that funny lined paper, to follow the adventures of Nan and Dan and their dog Spot, to underline topic sentences and circle supporting sentences and use commas and spell (well, sometimes) and I’m sure at times those teachers felt like I do—that they will never see the end result of all their hard work. But maybe each step is an end in itself. A middle school teacher will never be satisfied if he expects to see a college-level research paper. But a soul-baring personal narrative with correct paragraphing and dialogue? Now that’s something.

My son will progress at his own pace. This I’ve learned. He will reach for toys in front of him, pulling himself onto his tummy and for a few optimistic seconds I think he might just do it … but then he flops his knees behind him and lies whimpering on his tummy while his pacifier remains ever so slightly out of reach. I’m learning to appreciate these moments for what they are—steps in a gradual process—rather then viewing each one as a failure on my part to help him crawl. It’s a learning process for both of us, and I am learning to see and celebrate these small victories a little more each day.

Where's My White Flag?

Some days are better than others. Today, I feel defeated. I am a dirty, tired mommy who is alone and covered in spit-up. I want to get dressed in the morning. (Real dressed, not yoga pants and a t-shirt dressed.) I want to go four or more hours knowing that no one will spit up on me. I want to expend mental energy on something other than researching ways to encourage a 9-month old to crawl. I want to be there for my friends. I want to be able to act on thoughtful intentions rather than just have them. I don’t want to wipe oatmeal out of fine baby hairs only to find another clod of it during bathtime. I don’t want to search under furniture for dusty, hairball-covered pacifiers or chase balls across the room or run to get one more burp cloth only to arrive a minute too late. And did I mention that I don’t want to be spit up on?

This is where the irony sets in. Even though my job often results in stress and divided attentions, as well as the inevitable guilt that accompanies both, in times like these, I am so grateful to have it. When the little guy lays down for his nap, I can brew a cup of coffee, sit down with my laptop and moleskine, and remember, if only for a few hours, that my world is not all diapers and spit-up. Over the last few months, it has slowly become easier for me to shut off the mommy brain and turn on the professor brain. There were days that I thought that might never be possible. But today, making progress on this book proposal actually saves me from searching for a white flag of surrender. Because really, that isn’t an option anyway. 

Dinner Dancing

I used to have time to cook. Starting around 5:30 every evening, I would pour myself a glass of wine, pull out my cutting board and chef’s knife, and leisurely prep vegetables and meats for the evening meal. I would draw out the cooking process as long as I could, because I found such comfort in the slow, methodical process of dicing an onion, the quiet sizzle of vegetables in the pan, the anticipation of every tiny bubble in a simmering pot. Some days, I might start even sooner and get some brownies baking or mix up some cobbler before the dinner preparations began. Even on a weekday, dinner was an event.

I still love to cook, but these days dinner looks like a complicated pairs ballroom dance a best, and a frozen pizza at worst. A typical evening goes something like this: chop some vegetables during the little guy’s afternoon nap and store them in the fridge for later. (Note to self: Don’t forget to tell my husband about this so he doesn’t prep the same veggies later.) We run a few errands and play with him until 5:30, when I feed him his solid food. My husband bathes him while I fix as much of the meal as I can, and then we play a bit more—what we lovingly call “Wear Out the Baby” time—then I rock him and nurse him while my husband takes up the next part of the dinner prep. When the little guy is finally asleep, we finish dinner and eat as quickly as possible, since our son wakes up and cries 30 minutes after falling asleep. (No we still haven’t figured out why.) I often feel like dinner is a bit like those Top Chef team relay challenges when each chef has 10 minutes to prepare part of the meal, but they can’t tell the next chef what they were making. They just have to strategically prep, cook, and lay out ingredients to give them as many clues as possible. Last night this meant a stack of diced onions and tomatoes, a bit of shredded cheese, a pound of ground sirloin, and—the giveaway—taco seasoning. And he figured out that the cookie sheet with taco shells on it meant that they should be warmed prior to dinner. Good for him.

Ah, the intellectual work of cooking dinner. The criteria for choosing a recipe changes once a baby enters the picture:

1. Does the recipe require a large amount of prep work? (More than the 15-minute bath-and-pj time allotment, that is?)

2. Can the recipe be made in stages? (This includes anything from complicated stir-fries, which require you to keep going once you start cooking, to prepping fruits and vegetables that will turn brown if they sit for too long—think apples, pears, avocados, etc.)

3. Once the prep work is done, how long is the actual cooking time? (The target is either 10 minutes, meaning it can be cooked once the baby is asleep and can still be eaten before he wakes up, or an hour, which means it can go in the oven or on the stove and I have time to nurse him before the timer goes off. Or it can be grilled, which means my husband can sit outside with a beer and, if the little guy goes to sleep easily, I can join him.)

4. Once the meal is finished, how long can it sit before it a.) turns mushy, b.) gets cold, c.) overcooks, or can it d.) be eaten cold?

5. How many dishes are there? No one wants to spend their exhausted quiet time doing dishes, and no one wants to drop a heavy pan in the sink and wake up the finally-sleeping baby.)

6. (And this only applies if you’re searing meat, and I would never have thought of it until it happened on our anniversary.) Is there any possibility that the meal will set off the smoke alarm? And no, this does not just apply to novice or distracted cooks. Searing a steak perfectly does produce some smoke. Open windows, we learned, may not suffice. Thankfully, the steak sat well under foil and did not cool off or overcook, thus satisfying both b.) and c.) of item 4.

And all of this only applies when we eat what we want after the baby goes to sleep. When he starts eating the food we eat—and we start eating dinner at 5 pm like all of the parents I used to judge—I’ll have to add considerations for textures, spices, potential allergies, meaning has he eaten the food for 4 days without breaking out, etc. And while we’re on the subject, this is one of the hardest solid food rules to follow. Am I really going to give him a dish of pureed onions or garlic for four days to make sure he’s not allergic before I can blend up our casserole?

Do I overthink things? Possibly. But for me at least, it’s worth it if it allows the few quiet hours after he’s gone to bed to be stress-free. And, slowly, this method of meal-planning becomes second nature. And if I want something more complicated, I know I can have it—thankfully, my husband is a great cook (wink). 

The Guilt We Choose

Yesterday my husband asked me if, after 9 months of juggling part-time teaching and being a stay-at-home parent, if I thought I could ever do the stay-at-home thing full time. Just a hypothetical question. We were cuddling with the little guy while he was napping and the world seemed so quiet and peaceful and I know we both wished we could have moments like that every day—a respite from the stress of academia with the little one who won’t be little for long.

I have mad respect for stay-at-home parents. I’m wracked with guilt because I want to love every moment of what I know are such short years. I want to cuddle him and laugh with him and walk around the room with him while Disney songs play in the background. I want to savor every peek-a-boo, every giggle, every cry, every smile. And I do, I love them all. I live for those moments.

So what’s the problem? That’s the confusing part. I love being with him, and I’m rarely bored. But a tenure-track academic job requires my physical presence about 12 hours a week—in class and office hours—but expects me to be working—on articles, conference presentations, grant proposals, committee assignments, not to mention grading and class prep—for an indeterminate amount of time, which essentially means every other waking hour and probably a few sleeping ones. And the thing is, I love my job. I love my research, I love teaching, I have amazing students who seem more like family, and I feel so lucky to have my dream job in a great department. So where does loving my son and loving my job get me?

Answer: A one-way ticket to Guiltsville, population me. And probably every other Professor Mom. And quite a few Professor Dads.

I often resent the academics who can still determine their own work schedules, who can spend all day in the office and not feel like a meeting or lunch date is eating up their carefully carved out work time. I know it’s not their fault, and I don’t begrudge them their time or their success. But that doesn’t keep me from feeling resentful. And then I feel bad because it sounds like I don’t like being with my little guy, but I know I still have a job to do, but is my job really more important than my family, and what does it say about our society that we ask such an asinine question anyway …

Guilt spirals. This I know.

I can’t imagine how I’ll feel when my son starts daycare in two weeks. The idea of not spending the majority of my day with him after 9 months of being at home is, well, saddening seems like an understatement, but it’s the best I’ve got at the moment. It makes me feel lonely, like I’m abandoning him even though I know he’ll have excellent care and other children to play with and I know he’ll thrive in such a social environment. But when I think about his beautiful, smiling face that I have the privilege to see all day (and honestly I do feel so incredibly lucky that his smile is for me) and realize that it will be directed at someone else, I feel so empty inside.

And then we’re back to the guilt.

If know how much I’ll miss him, why can’t I just turn off the professor part of my brain and enjoy the moments we have? I keep telling myself that this is what I need to do—make the work time count so that I can turn it off when I get home. And on my better days, this works. Today was not one of my better days. It’s funny how writing a book proposal can make you and your ideas feel so small, and then that little face can look up at you and make you feel so big and important, and yet you still end the evening with a glass of wine and a nagging sense that you haven’t accomplished enough.

Which brings me back to my husband’s question. I thought about it, and finally answered that, while I often grow frustrated during my time at home because I know I have work to do, when I’m at work I miss him and constantly take 5-minute Instagram breaks to look through old photos. I love my son and I love my job, and while not working would alleviate the guilt of feeling that my attentions are divided when I’m with him, I wouldn’t be wholly fulfilled without my job.

A person can attend any number of academic seminars that discuss how to balance work and family life, and I’m sure they’re very useful. But I wonder if, underneath it all, we just have to realize that guilt will be a part of our lives? Especially if we love our families and our jobs, will we ever feel like we’re good enough at both? I think this question is bigger than academia. I’m pretty sure all parents (working and stay-at-home) might feel this way. Maybe what no one tells you is that you can balance work and family in any number of ways, but you’ll always feel a twinge of guilt. Maybe the trick is making the choices the give you control of the guilt—not working to rid yourself of it completely, but working to make the guilt the inevitable outcome of your good choices. I can’t be in two places at once. I can’t spend all of my time with my son and at my job. I will always wish I could. But guilt can’t dictate my choices. It has to be the other way around.

I’m not sure if that comforts me or not.