For the past few years, I’ve been in a habit of giving birth every twenty-one months. We welcomed our sweet Evie in late November of 2007. Twenty-one months later in early September of 2009, dear Jonah joined us. And twenty-one months after that, in June of 2011, I birthed something entirely different: a dissertation. It tickles me that things just happened to turn out this way: for the past several months various people have been taken with asking me, “So, aren’t you about due for another one?” while glancing down meaningfully at my babyless midsection. And after all of the eye-rolling that I bestowed upon each and every person who asked me, I guess I was ready to give birth again. Just not to a kid.
Granted, this damn dissertation has been gestating for quite some time; in fact, I’d mark its conception at happening in late January 2008, when my topic first occurred to me and I started reviewing literature. (Yes, conceiving a dissertation is actually a lot less fun—and a lot more of a solitary activity— than conceiving a child.) So, we’re talking a whopping 42-month gestation period here. Makes the nine+ months that I carried each of my children seem like chump change. Though carrying the babies around in my ever-expanding magic belly was definitely physically harder, psychologically carrying around my dissertation caused increasing amounts of stress, discomfort, and urgency as the time of birth drew near— just like being pregnant. True, my dissertation didn’t make me have to pee in the night, but it did make me nauseous from time to time. I’m pretty sure it even left stretch marks somewhere in my brain.
And you know, babies kind of grow themselves while they’re still in the womb. I mean, there are definitely do’s and don’ts for a healthy pregnancy and all of that, but even under dire maternal circumstances, babies have continued to develop normally and on a set timetable (for example, week 11: fingernails and organ function begins. Week 20: tongue is fully formed). People who don’t even know they’re pregnant can grow a baby, for crying out loud! Dissertations, not so much. Left to their own devices, they gather dust, take up hard drive space, become outdated, and eat a gaping crevice right through your soul. Maybe writing a dissertation is more like taking care of a baby that has already been born, because you have to actually do something to it to ensure that it grows properly. Yeah, that’s probably closer.
Yet it still feels like I just gave birth, that something that has been developing within me for a long time is finally out of me. Where there once was nothing, now there is a 176-page document, and I made it. Granted, it’s definitely not as wondrous as looking down into the eyes of your newborn child and knowing that you made that. But finishing my dissertation is still a pretty okay feeling. It’s a little bit of a bummer that no one threw me a shower, unless you count the proposal meeting with my committee, and there were no cute party games or mixed nuts at that (arguably). I have received some very appreciated congratulations and well wishes, though no presents have arrived just yet (for my mailing address, please contact me).
All in all, yeah, I think this was a good thing for me to do in 2011. It seems to have given me small pieces of the fulfillment of having nurtured and birthed something without the aftermath of losing tons of sleep and having sore boobs for 6-12 months. However, upon reflection, this all does beg a question that I for one find to be rather intriguing…what the heck am I going to be up to twenty-one months from now? Guess I'll let you know come March of 2013.
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