I birthed a dissertation

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 Left to their own devices, they gather dust, take up hard drive space, become outdated, and eat a gaping crevice right through your soul.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.

Girl Scout Gains

I used to be a Girl Scout. Not that I was a good scout—I really wasn’t. If I remember right, I was usually late for meetings, always forgot my dues, looked jankity in my uniform because I was abysmal at arranging the various pieces, and had a tendency to be a bit on the insolent side with our leader. Even in those tender pre-tween years, I don’t know if I ever quite bought into the concept of Girl Scouts.

Regardless, Girl Scouts taught me at least one valuable lesson. It came in the form of this little ditty we used to sing: “Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver and the other gold.” I’ve sung this tune to myself throughout the years (literally! But in my head), to remind myself that it’s okay to make new friends. I know it might seem silly that anyone would need to remind themselves of this—shouldn’t it be straightforward? For me, it hasn’t been. And I’ve often asked myself why this is.

I tend to explain this hesitation to delve into what I consider to be a “true friendship” (which perhaps I shall define in a latter post) with someone else by explaining my roots. I grew up in a town bordered by cornfields (or wheat or milo or soybeans, whatever), where the population vacillated between 650 and 700 people. My graduating class had 16 kids. Eleven of us were together through every year of school—preschool to senior year. Of that group, many of us ran around in diapers together, as our parents were friends. (I was even known to share a pacifier with one special friend.) I watched them learn to read. I watched them hammer balls over the fence playing kicksoccer. I watched them fall in love for the first time, get hurt for the first time; I laughed and cried and loved and lost with all of them. For 18 years.

It’s a special thing to be raised in this way. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. But to go out into the world beyond my hometown, where I was expected to pick up and make “friends” with people I’d never met? It was, to say the least, difficult for me. I didn’t think it was going to be this way. I was really good at meeting people, at introducing myself and striking up casual conversation. But I was really bad at taking a casual friendship to the next level. It felt like I couldn’t do that, like no matter how much I liked the person, they would never be a real friend. There wasn’t enough depth. These new people weren’t there when I’d been rejected by my eighth grade crush, they’d never driven with me on a sidewalk, they didn’t pick me first for their spelling baseball team in third grade. They didn’t know me; they couldn’t possibly. And I didn’t know how to let them know me.

Midway through college, I hit my stride. I had what psychologists might call a series of “corrective emotional experiences”—first I (accidentally) let a smaller group of folks know me, and I was surprised and grateful when they accepted me, even when I was real with them. And then I let a larger group of folks know me, when I joined a staff of resident assistants who I lived, worked, and played with. I came to know that friendships with people I’d just met could be just as meaningful—if not more so—as lifelong friendships, just in a different way. And, importantly, I learned that I was at least a somewhat likable person, which I hadn’t believed prior to college (yet I also hadn’t known that I didn’t believe it! See?! Knowing is half the battle.).

I still struggle. I still tend to take awhile to move things past superficiality in new friendships. In some situations, this has been a detriment to me. Yet in other ways, it has been a boon, because those friendships that I have taken the risk of moving forward with have been amazing. And because there are relatively few of them, I’ve been able to invest in them a great deal of emotional energy.

In my next posts, I plan to pay homage to both my silver and my gold friends, because they are both irreplaceable parts of my life story, and of me. So thanks, Girl Scouts…I guess you were good for something after all.

On being a defective woman

Okay, I need you to be honest with me here. Dig deep if you have to. Have you ever done something, said something, felt something that made you feel like you were somehow transgressing on your gender? As if somehow, whatever you did made you that you were *less* of a woman or *less* of a man?

A couple of months ago one of my male friends jokingly asked me if I’d do some ironing for him. I laughed at him, and my amusement was twofold: first of all, it’s laughable that he’d ask me to do this for him. (Guess he hadn’t seen me: sporting my awesome, bright green “Please pass the Gender Equity” t-shirt? Sitting on the UNL Chancellor’s Commission for the Status of Women for two years? Critically analyzing gender messages in every effing commercial, ever, because I can’t/won’t turn “feminist brain” off?) Second, I’m terrible at ironing. I use the “wrinkle release” setting on my clothes dryer rather than iron my stuff.

So I laugh at this friend, but what do I say to him? Well, first I chide him for asking and tell him to do his own damn ironing. I ask why he didn’t ask one of the other boys to do his bidding. The next thing out of my mouth: “Anyway, I can’t iron. I guess I’m a defective woman.” And we all laughed and it was all sunshine and rainbows over cocktails, and it was a joke, but in hindsight…was it a bonafide anxiety slipping out of my mouth, albeit couched in sarcasm?

You see, bias (which would include racism and sexism, among other things) has a funny way of being implicit, which is cognitive psychology jargon for “so deeply ingrained into our minds that we don’t even have control over it.” Explicitly, I most definitely strive for equality and attempt to battle oppression across multiple domains. However, those firmly implanted nasty little implicit prejudices come tumbling out of my psyche sometimes, unwelcome as they might be. (Think you’re above racism, sexism, religious bias? I encourage you to go to https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/takeatest.html , try some of the tests, and see how they come out. Very few of us are immune to implicit -isms.)

Gender-wise, this implicit stuff really bites me in the ass sometimes. As in when I feel that the disorganization of our home reflects that I am some kind of organic snafu of a woman, some aberration of nature. (This is demoralizing to admit. I cringe as I write this.) As in when I internally feel like an utter failure when I think about all of the domestic stuff that my mom and my grandma were able to do that I really suck at. As in how awful I sometimes feel in acknowledging that I have little aspiration to be a stay-at-home mom because I love my work and enjoy having a professional identity. Explicitly, I can self-soothe by reminding myself that there’s no right or wrong way to be a woman, that I’m not defective, and that I can be whatever kind of woman that I want to be and she will be great. Implicitly…shades of self-loathing and guilt rage on. Damn you, generations of societal brainwashing.

I think I’m on the winning end of this, though. I’m well aware of some of those ugly, embarrassing implicit beliefs that run so counter to the beliefs that I explicitly hold dear, and knowing is half of the battle (thanks for the wisdom, GI Joe). And I’m not going to stand for them. I’m going to continue to stand up to them, to make conscious and concerted efforts to transcend them. So take that, brain. And by the way, screw you, social convention. This woman is too awesome to be defective.

Irony in the air: You say goodbye, and I say hello

There’s irony in the air tonight—at exactly the same moment that I’m saying goodbye to my grad school family, I’m saying hello to my high school family. This weekend is my ten-year high school class reunion. Thus I said my first goodbye to the Exeter Class of 2001 ten years ago, almost to the date. Looking back, I struggled with that goodbye as well. I remember being the sodden mess (the one I expected to be last night) the night of our senior party. I remember listening to that damn Vitamin C song about graduation and “friends forever” in my car every day of the summer and crying every time. I remember feeling like I’d never find another group of friends, that I’d never love anyone like I loved my classmates. And actually, pieces of that worry came true, I suppose…I did not and can never “replace” my high school friends. They are unique, and awesome, and the friendships that you make in high school—especially a tiny rural school like the one I went to, where most of us were together every day from kindergarten to senior year—are precious for a lifetime. However, continuing to love my high school friends did not have the catastrophic effect that I’d expected at the time: that I would never have other friends that meant as much to me. The truth is that I did make new friends, in time. I did find other places and other groups with which I belonged. I need to tuck that fact into my mind and let it breathe hope into me, because I’m struggling with the very same set of worries today, only this time it’s because my grad school friends are leaving. Ah, it’s funny how history repeats itself. It’s also funny how even when know we have changed and grown, in times of stress we default to the same old set of insecurities.

As recently as a few short months ago, I might have looked back and scoffed at myself for being so “dramatic” about the way I handled my high school ending. I would have probably thought something like, Oh, well, you’re just a lot better at emotional regulation now than you were ten years ago. Now, though, I’m not so sure that what I did back then was overly dramatic or “wrong” or “immature.” I was definitely not blunting any emotion or avoiding anything; I was merely feeling what I needed to feel in the moment and coping with that in the best way I knew how. I’m doing much the same thing now, in different ways. Is my emotional regulation or my coping any better or any worse now, really? I honestly don’t know the answer to that.

This all being said, what I’m ready for is a weekend of fun with my high school friends. I fully expect to cry at some point over the weekend; after all, we’re all going to have to say “goodbye” again at the end of it. (Have you figured out by now that I’m not very fond of endings?) But mostly, I expect to greet, eat, drink, dance, and be merry. I’m gonna see that irony in the air and laugh my way right through it.

The infinite hug

Tonight I said the “official” goodbye to my spoon—after tonight, she will no longer be a Lincolnite. In saying goodbye to her, as I discussed in an earlier post, I kind of also say goodbye to the peer group that has been my second family for the past several years. I feel mollified that we have several reunions slated for later this summer and in the fall, and some of these events are pretty much set in stone—i.e., our attendance is absolutely requisite. I like the formality of these events; it makes me feel certain that we will indeed all be back together again, and relatively soon. Still, though, it’s the end of an era. The gang is breaking up.

I thought I would more of a sodden mess tonight, honestly. I anticipated and patiently waited for the waterworks to come gushing forth. Our last stop of the night was a bar that we often frequented during our program. Near the end of the night I was spacing out, thinking about the various times we’d been together there. It hit me that it was entirely possible that we would never all be there together again, that this was the last time, this was it. I felt the familiar sting of salty water in my eyes as I stared into my drink. Then someone caught my attention to ask me a question, and the moment was gone. That was the closest I got to sodden tonight.

I think I’m protecting myself by not fully allowing myself to experience my sadness yet tonight. I feel like maybe that’s okay. I expect that it will come in fits and starts over the weeks and months to come. I will feel it when I hear a certain song and think about singing it (horribly off-key!) in Boston in a taxicab. I will feel it when I read something about help-seeking or men’s studies and want to talk about the theory behind it all in person. I will feel it when I roll my eyes at Karl Rove’s latest, when I watch Glee, or when I have a question about a kids’ ability to talk. I will feel it at times I don’t expect. I will feel it.

I actually feel it a little bit more now, now that I’m giving myself space to process all of this. My initial reaction: Ah, crap! My next reaction: ah, there you are, sadness. I’m so glad you are here. I've been waiting for you. You are a part of me and of being human and I need you right now. Welcome.

At the end of the night my spoon commented that when she hugs someone, she is never the first person to let go. She joked that if she ever got into a situation where the other person was also inclined to hold on, they could be stuck in an infinite hug. I liked the imagery that came into my mind; myself wrapped in a never-ending hug with her, and with all of them….not physically, of course, but spiritually. And so that is how I’m going to hold on to them as we all move forward: a picture of us all wrapped in an infinite hug that transcends time and space. This is by far the most comforting thought I’ve had today. Thank you, my friends, for giving me something to hold onto.

Sucking at life...and laundry

In 1969, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross proposed a five-pronged model of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Scholars have argued to the moon and back about whether her model is “scientific” and “empirically validatable,” and all of these things that scholars care about. Basically, what they want to know is: does her model actually fit the typical grieving process? Forty-two years later, the verdict is still out on that one. In spite of this, the verdict is in regarding the first four of my stages of grief: 1) denial, 2) overreliance on psychologically numbing agents and behaviors (this is the drinking stage, folks), 3) sublimation, 4) CRANKY, and 5) ?  

Tonight I’d like to talk about stage four, CRANKY, because that’s where I am tonight. I’m actually so cranky that I thought I was too cranky to blog, and wasn’t going to. I was going to put up my feet, continue on in my sixth reread of the Harry Potter series (an attempt at a lateral move to numbing, see step 2), and go to sleep early. I know this is actually what I should be doing, because part of the reason I’m CRANKY is because I’m tired. Tired+ me= no good, for anyone, least of all me (or maybe you, if you get the pleasure of seeing me on a day like today. You tell me). 

As I prepared to leave my world for Hogwarts, I saw the jeans strewn across my bed and sighed— they’re physically dirty and they were starting to have that “reworn one too many times” smell. I need them for tomorrow, and there’s no way I could possibly wear them again without offending someone, probably myself. So I hefted my damn jeans and my damn dress pants and some damn shirts downstairs to throw in the damn laundry.

I put a bunch of crap in the washer and dump in the detergent. Now, Jeb and I got ourselves this fancy new-fangled HE Washer & Dryer set last year. The washer has very specific places to deposit each washer agent—the detergent goes HERE and only here, the softener goes HERE, etc. Well, I’ll be damned if I didn’t put the detergent in the fabric softener hole. SHIT. The other fun thing is that there is no way to dump the stuff back out; the stuff holder is attached to the washer. So I’m tired, I’m super CRANKY, and now I’ve dumped the wrong fluid into the wrong damn hole (shame on you if you had a dirty thought after reading that line). 

I consider putting the softener into the detergent hole and starting the load up anyway, just to “see what happens.” I consider yelling at Jeb and getting him to fix this issue for me. We’re down to our last “serving” of detergent, so I don’t want to waste it by wiping it out with a cloth. What to do, what to do. Suddenly I get this flash from my undergrad freshman biology lab, where we had to breathe through straws to inflate a rat’s lungs. Second flash is the bendy straws that we keep in our kitchen to populate Evie’s spill-proof cups. Viola!

So how do I spend the next five minutes of my CRANKY night? Sucking damn laundry detergent out of the fabric softener hole and spitting it into the right hole. (I feel that by doing this I may have somehow bastardized my fancy washing machine.) On one suck I was careless and got a little detergent in my mouth. I rinsed thoroughly afterwards, but I still feel like I could open my mouth and bubble on demand.

I wish I could end this story with saying “And then the whole thing was so humorous looking back that all of my crankiness was gone! Rainbows and unicorns everywhere!!!” Nope. I’m still CRANKY as hell, and now I’ve got a nasty soapy mouth (and retainer. Yes, complete the image). When I opened up my computer to blog it was running slowly and I seriously wanted to punch it. 

And that, my friends, is all. I’m putting my CRANKY ass to bed. After Ron whisks Harry away from the Dursley’s in the flying car, mind you.

Emotional multitasking and saying goodbye to my spoon

I’ve always been a fan of multitasking. Given my current situation, it’s good that I have practice with this. In the kitchen I’m a whiz at having 3-4 different things going on at once—I strategically think about how to get everything done so that the meal components finish up at approximately the same time, and when I’m at my best, the kitchen is also clean when the meal is finished. The trick is that you have to shift your attention to each thing at the crucial moment—the noodles can boil in peace while you prepare the salad, but if you don’t monitor them enough to know to remove them at the right time, you end up with a pot of mush. And so forth.

So cooking can be an exercise in the purposeful shifting of one’s psychological presence to various tasks. This week I’m doing a lot of emotional cooking—that is, I’m emotionally multitasking. If you think about it, we all do this all the time, every day. We can’t pour our full emotional self and all of our awareness into just one thing at a time—we literally can’t. The epigenetically crafted cognitive machine encased in that hard round thing that sits on our shoulders doesn’t even allow us to do that. The ability to adapt our energies to fit with our situations comes naturally and without conscious effort to humans (after childhood), generally speaking. Granted, some situations will be more taxing than others. For me, this week is one of those difficult times.

I’ve got the issue of my father-in-law’s health on the backburner. He made it through one pivotal moment in surviving his surgery, and now, we just wait. In the meantime, I have other emotional tasks that I have to attend to. I shift my focus back and forth. I don’t want my noodles to turn to mush.

Today, much of my emotional energy has been focused on celebrating a friendship, and grieving her departure. This dear friend of mine moves away from Lincoln this week. We met when we started our graduate program together in 2007, and fortunately, allowed ourselves to become close to each other as well as others in the program. This person has been a game-changer in my life, and the lives of so many others.

I met with this friend today for one of our sacred-yet-infamous “deep talks.” We talked about the practical, the whimsical, the theoretical. We were both very honest about how we were feeling about this transition. We’re both feeling scared and a little vulnerable. We cried together. But we’re both hopeful about the future. And even though it really hurts to say goodbye, we feel we are better people for having grown this beautiful friendship, and plan to continue this friendship from a distance for a lifetime. We commend ourselves on being able to let ourselves be truly “known” to each other and to others in our program.

One thing about this friend is that she is what I like to call the “spoon” in our group of friends. The spoon is the person who is more or less at the center of the group; the person that everyone else gravitates towards. The spoon brings people together. (Side note: I picked up this whole “spoon” terminology at an earlier point in my life, and I don’t even really know what the original metaphor referred to. So she and I created our own meaning—we decided that the spoon “scoops everyone up”). Without the spoon, the group may have a hard time sustaining itself. If you’ve ever read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, the spoon is a little bit like the Connector, only maybe on a less grand scale. You all know who the spoons are in your peer groups…think about it. It may even be you.

So my friend is moving away. And my peer group is losing its spoon. These facts do not negate the incredible sense of gratefulness and growth that I come away with having known her. But I still hurt. I’m just going to let this hurt for awhile. I’m just going to let it be, and wait for it to heal. This pain is like a sauce that’s got to simmer for a long time, because it’s only time that will reduce it.

I will have much more to say about my friends as the summer wears on—unfortunately, this is not the only loss I will weather this summer. The emotional multitasking will continue. I’ll probably leave the cake in the oven too long, or realize that I don’t have any yeast for the bread, or put in baking soda instead of baking powder in something. Hopefully I don’t get my hair caught in the mixer, but I’m not going to get this just right. I just hope to deal with all of it well enough—  well enough that in the end, I’ll have food to sustain me. Well enough that I’m still recognizable….and maybe even a little bit stronger for having lived it. Just well enough.