letters to myself

In honor of my upcoming 41st birthday I wish that I could send these notes back through time to my former selves. What a difference time and experience make. As they say, youth is wasted on the young. I love being older, if only it didn't come with being old.

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Dear InB at 18 years old,

Care about the details of life, as I know you do. But also pay attention to the big picture. The world at large is full of amazing things, many good and many bad. And you should care about these things. And you shouldn't feel afraid to be outspoken. Join a demonstration, a public advocacy group, volunteer. Get outside of yourself as it will help you better see your role in this world. You will learn that you do have a voice and that your voice can make a difference. You matter, don't think that you are insignificant.

love,
InB at 41

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Dear InB at 32,

I admire your motivation, determination, and drive. Trust that this will take you far. But also give some thought as to where "far" is. What do you mean by "success"? How is that defined and who defined it? Is that really your meaning of success? Who are you trying to impress? The only person that really matters in this regard is yourself. Do the things you need to do for you. Find a way to let go of wanting to impress other people. Most of them wouldn't be impressed even if you figured out a way to walk on water. And if they are impressed they won't let you know about it. In fact, the more you do the more they will try to hurt you, make you feel bad, and push you down. So don't work hard for them. Work hard because you enjoy it. Accomplish the things that will make YOU feel proud of yourself. Figure out what those are and let go of the rest -- it is a waste of emotional energy and time.

love, inB at 41

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Dear InB at 39,

I know you are terribly sad about the miscarriage and the infertility that is following it. You feel hopeless and filled with regret that you waited too long to start your family; regretful and embarrassed that you likely sacrificed too much for a career success that ended up feeling hollow. A baby feels like the only way to fill that void.

But it isn't. I know this is impossible to know from the side of the equation you are on right now, but now that I am on the other side I can speak with confidence. I now grasp the feelings that your baby would bring you and I can honestly say that you can fill that void in other ways if your baby doesn't come.

First off, you need to do some reshuffling of your goals. Come to appreciate that happiness is a decision you make. You know this already, but let me give you some specific suggestions to help with this. I know that you are wanting a project with meaning, and that a baby in your arms is a sure-fire way to get that. But there are other ways too.

You feel strongly about public education and defending excellent public universities, jump into that. It is a fight worth fighting and *you can make a difference*. Remember what I told you at 18 (see above)? Don't sell yourself short. Your lack of self-confidence is unfounded.

Be strong, be the woman you admire not the woman you fear you might be.

And speak up. Join a demonstration, lead a public advocacy group, volunteer. You really do have the power to change the world. What you have accomlplished professionally has brought you more power and recognition than you realize. Shake off the insecurity and use it, dammit.

You will find the same fullfillment and satisfaction from those pursuits as you will from a baby.

The part that will be missing is the physical intimacy, the snuggles. But you should push hard to regain more physical intimacy with dh. Hugs, snuggles on the couch, intertwined legs as you sleep. Make these a more prominent part of your relationship. That physical intimacy will go a long way.

And last, make sure you smile. Make a serious effort to make other people around you realize they are loved and appreciated and you will get the same sense of nurturing that a baby will bring. It is easier to love a baby and nurture them, but those young adults that you teach, they could really benefit from it too. Be there for them in ways you haven't been before. Get involved more specifically at the campus level. It is ok to love someone else's child, from your nephew to your students. Open your heart more. Don't be afraid to be a woman in a man's world. It will make you happier.

You can do it, and you can have a beautiful and equally fulfilling life without a baby. I wish I could have shared this with you at the time so that you could have felt less angry, less sad, and less desperate. You likely would not have believed me though. In fact, I know you wouldn't have, but maybe my advice would eventually sink in and you would have been ok. I love you InB. You are much too unforgiving of yourself.

love, InB at 41

thoughts on coffee shops

1) I have always loved the feeling you get after a dinner party at your house.  You know the one where everyone had a nice time, all the food turned out ok, the dishes are all cleaned and put away and there is no evidence of a party except for the wonderful memories that you linger over as you sit on the couch and catch your breath? 

My mornings now feel like that, every day.  By the time I drop M off at "school" I have been up for at least 3 hours and have accomplished so much but there is very little evidence of it other than that we are all dressed, fed, and where we need to be for the day.  It's the exact same feeling, and it's a nice high. 

I have gotten in the habit of stopping by starb.ucks on the way to school as a transition and a sort of "congrats" gift to myself every morning.  Since I registered my gift card I get the soy part of my grande chai for free, so this feels like it's not so much of a splurge.  Whoever came up with that idea was brilliant, as the psychology of it totally works on me.

2) One of the best perks of being a cop must be getting to park illegally in front of starb.ucks while you run in to get your coffee fix.

baby sleep

I long ago realized that there was no way that I could do the "cry-it-out" sleep thing. I love holding M in my arms. I love gazing at her peaceful sleeping face and breathing in her sweet breath as she falls deeper and deeper into sleep.

Plus, the sheer agony of her crying breaks my heart and makes me feel down right cruel. Sometimes I let her cry for 5-10 minutes to get some of her tension out, she then just collapses into my arms and falls right to sleep.

So the usual sleep routine is that she goes to bed in her crib around 7pm. When she wakes up the next time I bring her to bed with me. This may be any time between 10:30pm - 1am, and once it was 3:30am (that rocked).

M is getting her top two incisors. OMG this has been such an event, off and on for the last month. But the last 3 days & nights have been particularly tough. I can see her teeth now just about to break through. I am glad I don't remember this phase, as it seems like it really hurts. The uppers seem to hurt much, much more than the lowers did, as she hardly fussed at all -- honestly I didn't even realize she was teething until she was chewing my arm and I felt something really sharp.

As I said, the last 3 nights have been rough, like up-almost-every-hour rough. This is hard on her and hard on me. Remember, dh is out of town.

Last night she woke up at 9:30pm and I could not get her back to sleep. She has a remarkable talent for keeping herself awake. And last night she just kept getting herself more and more awake. I decided to go to bed with her to see if that would help but she started crawling all over my bed and getting really wound up.

At 10:21pm I decided that this was not heading in the right direction. Being with me wasn't helping. So, I took her to her crib and said goodnite, intending to let her cry out some of her tension and get her in about 10 minutes and bring her back to bed with me.

I went back to snuggle in bed and watch the clock. I remember looking at the clock again at 10:27pm. And then I woke up suddenly at 11pm. Mads wasn't making a peep. Freaked.me.out. I left her!!! I felt terrible, and I have no idea how long she cried before falling sleep.

She called out again for me around 1am, and I brought her to bed and all went on as usual after that.

But I feel bad. My baby was crying, and I.fell.asleep.

Confliction

Love taking M out shopping as lots of people comment on what a cute baby she is.
Feel bad that I do this when I am getting frustrated with her and need a "re-set"...Thank heavens for Target.

Love making new, homemade foods for M to try.
Feel bad that it hurts my feelings when she gags at the new flavor/texture...

Love holding M asleep in my arms.
Feel bad that I get so frustrated when she immediately starts to cry when I set her in her crib...

Love seeing M in real shoes and jeans and enjoying her new-found ability to stand.
Feel sad that baby M is gone...

Love getting things in the mail that I ordered.
Feel bad about all the boxes...

Love driving.
Feel bad that I now do this when I need some quiet time and it means M is safely strapped into her car seat...

Love dancing with M to cute nursery rhymes.
Feel bad that I only just discovered this...

Love that M has learned to do "bunny kisses" with me (touching foreheads, rubbing noses).
Feel bad because I have always called them "eskimo kisses", and I am guessing that is too racist to use now.

Love to paint my toes.
Feel sad that it takes so much time that I have not done it in ages, and have yucky chipped nails as a consequnce.

Love that it is getting colder so that no one can see my toes.
Feel bad because I really need to replace my socks and undies. All are very old and falling apart, but I just can't bring myself to spend the money.

Love the super cute santa dress I got M to wear on Christmas.
Feel bad that I didn't get a bib for thanksgiving, were they ever even out there? did I just miss them?

Love the idea of M's first christmas.
Feel bad that I am kind of sad that we won't be home but rather visiting relatives.

Love that I will set up a tree at home anyway.
Feel bad that Every year I mean to buy a live tree, but this year I just gave up and invested in a fake tree. (on sale at Target)

and the list goes on...

grad student follow up

Remember the guy that was causing me all kinds of annoyance? Well, I did fire his ass, as much as you can on an academic semester schedule. He is so clueless that he asked for a letter of recommendation for a fellowship he isn't qualified for, as I mentioned before as well.

The latest update is about an ongoing saga around the project he was assigned to do in the field last summer. So he got to go to the field, all paid for on my grant and including a salary, which is rare and unusual in my discipline. Field opportunities, esp paid ones, are few and far between for grad students, but much sought after.

He proceeded to not only ask that I pay for all of his unecessary vaccinations but also for sunglasses and boots. I had to say no to the latter two, but did cover the former out of my personal money, since my grant can't pay for vaccinations (and he never gave me the proper reciept documentation for me to use my more flexible funds despite my repeatedly explaining what I needed).

He went to the field with my colleague. I stayed home with the baby.

He proceeded to almost completely screw up one of our field vehicles and caused a huge nightmare getting into the field. He forgot his pen and field notebook on a regular basis. He forgot to bring a hat, as I had explicitly told him to bring, and got some sun poisoning despite the fact that I had given him 2 verbal warnings about how to avoid this and to be carful and written along detailed email about this. He didn't follow any of my advice on this front. All of the field crew guys kept saying that he was super lucky that I wasn't there. My colleague asked that he not come back next year, and has made it very clear that he thinks the guy is sloppy too.

And then he came home. I asked him to write up the rsults from the little project he was supposed to do. It is still not finished despite the fact that he has been working as a graduate student researcher for me all semester. He keeps sending me crap. No coherent outline, no proof reading, very poor writing.

On the latest version I told him that this was unacceptable and bad science.

He was pissed because I had cc'd the co-director on the project, who had been a part of all of the email correspondence and various draft edits. He was embarrassed and outraged that I would say he had done bad science in front of my colleague.

We met, although I really didn't want to because my patience is exhausted and I knew I'd get angry. He had all kinds of excuses about how mac and pc files don't transfer smoothly, etc. I forcefully told him that I really didn't care to hear any excuses because no matter what had happened he had sent me something that he hadn't proof read or put any serious effort into. He really pushed back and kept saying that he is wonderful and that I am a bad advisor. I told him that he is uneducable if he can't take constructive criticism, be self-critical, or willing to admit when he fucked up. I tried to explain that it undermines my confidence in the quality of the work done when the write-up is so sloppy, and that I was going to have to come up with the money somewhere to re-do everything he had done because I didn't trust him. I told him that I want him to vacate his desk on the last day of the semester whether he has a new advisor or not; he is not my student any longer as of that date.

The weird thing about this story is that I had given examples of the appropriate behavior he should have demonstrated, i.e., apologizing for sending work that wasn't complete, running drafts by only me if he didn't want the co-director to see my comments, etc.

He left the lab and was out all day after that. And then, you'll never guess this one, he did exactly what I had outlined that would have been the appropriate response rather than blaming me. Today he sent me a draft that he had actually worked on for the first time all semester, that included questions back to me about whether or not his writing was clear enough in certain places, etc.

Two questions for you:

1) what do you make of that odd about-face?

2) this is the first student I have had this kind of trouble with. He is also the only new student who came in during the year I was pregnant and then had a baby. He is a stereotypical big guy football-loving doofus. I have had trouble with him from early on sensing that he didn't really respect me. Because I am a woman? Pregnant and then had a baby? He seems obsessed with where I am from (a very poor part of the country). Is that more likely his problem? Or is he maybe just so insecure that he felt most comfortable working ith a female adviser but then felt like he's better than me, for whatever reason? He really really has trouble with my role as adviser and acts like he is a colleague rather than a very early graduate student... he even seems to think that he deserves all kinds of intellectual credit for the project he was hired to help with. What is your take?

no respite

This morning M had had enough of her play-yard and wanted to be held.  We had just survived a meltdown in the highchair -- she has decided that solid food sucks and the tray on the highchair shouldn't be there.  I ended up picking her up and nursing her instead.  This meant no breakfast for me since I can't prepare food and nurse at the same time with a 22 pound baby.  But that's ok, I can deal. 

I was hanging in there, but those meltdowns are really tough on the nerves.  And she'd had a few last night too.  And we got up three times last night to nurse.  But I was hanging in there.  I honestly can't remember the last time I slept more than 3.5 hours in a row, since I didn't sleep well when I was pregnant either.

Then I really had to go to the toilet.  So I managed to hold her on my lap.  Then the phone rang.  So I rang to the phone with my pants around my knees while holding M.  Dh calling from the field, saying that he was going to go to bed early.  (no comment)

I had a meeting at 9am, which is always a bad idea.  As soon as I have to be somewhere that is when the shit hits the fan, almost literally every time.  Clingy baby, uncooperative cat, every red light along the way, and of course, a poo-poo blow-out by the time we reach day care. 

And why is it that I have so much stuff to carry around everywhere I go?  Between the pumping supplies, milk, diaper bag, and computer jump drive, I carry three bags plus the baby-in-car-seat every morning when I leave the house.  And this morning I also had the dirty diapers for the garbage and a bunch of new diapers for the day care supply.  Some days I wish we could go back to nomadic hunter-gatherer times.  So much less gear to carry everywhere.

We get into the car and all is fine on the way to school, except that we are already 30 minutes late for my meeting and I hit every single red light.

We arrive.  I pick her up and carry her in.  And of course, there is poo all over her pants.  This is like the third time in a row this has happened on the way to daycare.  Maybe I should just skip putting her in pants, but then what would catch the poo-overflow? 

I made it to my meeting at 10:07am, as the last person was locking the door behind them.

I am so tired that I physically kind of ache.  How many more weeks before Dh gets home?  And then how long before he can mesh back into daily life and be helpful?  Too many to be thinking like this. 

Mads crawls these days, and as of yesterday she crawls fast.  So amazing and so freaking cute, I love it.  But the level of needed supervision just increased 10-fold.  My clever little gorilla baby... 8 months old today!  And honestly, I wouldn't change a thing.  This is the happiest I've ever been in my life, but that doesn't mean it's easy.

My hat is off to all the single moms out there.  I really don't know how you do it with a smile.  It's hard, and I am finding that I have to catch myself a couple of times a day from getting really frustrated.  Breathe deeply. 

A rant post, be forewarned if you don't like controversy

I am feeling disgusted and frustrated today.  Not by anything specific that has happened in my little microcosm of the universe but by things in the national news here in the US.

1) Herman Cain

It goes without saying that I think sexual harassment says a lot about a person's true feelings about equity between the sexes and personal entitlement.  Let's ignore that for a minute and go to my jaded disgust.

Why does anyone think that accusations of sexual harassment will have any negative effect on Herman Cain's campaign for president?  From what I have seen very few people in this country seem to think that disrespecting women is a problem. 

I mean really, we live in a country where more and more people think that women shouldn't have access to birth control but rather be taught to save themselves for marriage, shouldn't be given a vaccine to protect them against cervical cancer because they shouldn't be having sex anyway (but it's a different story for boys), and that if they do have sex they shouldn't have to the right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.  It's like we are moving back towards medieval times in terms of women's rights.  What happened to us?  I am so afraid that I will end up having had more freedom and control over my body than my daughter will.

2) Penn State

I am not a huge fan by any measure of the financial burden that Division 1A collegiate sports puts on the academic mission of universities (for example, my university spends on average $13million a year out of our academic funds to support an increasingly expensive intercollegiate athletics program -- yes it brings in a lot of money but it spends $13 million more than it raises, at the same time that we are closing down the recreational facilities for all the other students on campus, oh, and no longer have a gynecologist at our student health center...)

But I did think that if there was a big-time football program that might have some dignity to it that this would be Penn State and Joe Paterno.

How wrong I appear to have been.  If Penn State can't even do it then I don't think there is a respectable Division 1A football program out there.  Disgusting I tell you, disgusting.

It will be an interesting test of moral decency to see if people's love of "the gladiators" amongst us overwhelms their aversion to abusing children.  I hate to say it, but I'm afraid that most people will defend the gladiators and forget about those little boys.

things I did today

I bought this hat. I might look like a dork but it sure makes me feel cute.

I made a pan of ghiradelli brownies and ate 2/3 of them. Yes, it was a big regular-sized pan. And yes, I really did eat 2/3 of it.

I wrote 6 paragraphs of a research paper that I am extremely excited about. Like, extremely excited. It is the finale of three grants I have had & something I have wanted to do since graduate school.

I met a woman who took her 11 month old to the field. She agreed that my field site is a bit too remote for taking M, but it was nice to have some comaraderie on the women-with-babies-who-do-fieldwork-in-africa issue. There aren't very many of us that I know of.

why?

First off, where does time go? I kept thinking that I needed to post and catch up on my blog reading, but it wasn't until I got those sweet "what the heck happened to you?" cooments that it dawned on me just how long it has been... thank you all for checking in on me!

Life is good but busy, and busy good not busy bad. M and I have been on several adventures. We flew to DC and then Nashville to visit family. Which begs my first "why" question.

Why do some airlines not have changing tables in their bathrooms? We were on 2 United Airlines flights and it totally sucked, not to mention seems pretty dangerous. And M wasn't the only baby on either flight.

Why # 2... why did the grad student who I have kicked out if my lab as of December ask me for a letter of recommendation for a fellowship application? Just goes to show how stupid he is...

Why # 3... why did the kind lady in the YMCA dressing room who offered to hold M while I changed out of my wet bathing suit (we went to our first swim class!) not finish putting on her shirt before taking her from me? M was all kinds of confused about why she couldn't try the new milk source... weird I tell you. But I was really grateful for the help. The logistics of swim class almost overwhelm the fun of swim class. BTW, do you really think that baby swim diapers actually do any good or is it just a charade? seems sketchy to me.

Why # 4... when nursing in public, and only in public, why does M like to hold onto my shirt and straighten out her arm, therby raising my shirt the full length of her arm and exposing all of my bosom? The only time I didn't mind was when the guy sitting beside me on one of those plane trips was kind of a jerk and I could tell the nursing made him really really uncomfortable. So we nursed a lot on that flight... :)

Why # 5... Dh is out of town for 3 months. I hate to say this out loud, as I do really miss him, but why does it seem like things are in many ways easier without him around?

Love, inB