This blog has been collecting spam comments like dust bunnies, and so I figure I better get in here and add to the mix. I've been busy wrapping up reviews, getting ahead on editing, matching teeny little socks, and yucking it up on facebook, and so haven't been paying as much attention to this space--I've been too busy waiting.
The longer I've been in this profession, the better I have gotten at Waiting for Something to Happen. I blogged about this phenomenon around the time of my tenure decision here, and since then I've gotten even better at this waiting business. Part of it is that our jobs provide lots of other work to fill the waiting maws--little piddly stuff as well as big, chewy stuff--and I am ever grateful for both kinds of work at the moment, as JM and I endure a Big Wait.
I was thinking this morning about how this wait resembles the wait for tenure, (only) insofar as there is an imagined reality shift that happens after the moment arrives. I say imagined because that shift can only be imagined before it actually transpires, at which point it becomes real in ways previously both imagined and unimagined. For example, tenure, for me, brought interpellative changes (how I was hailed by colleagues and institutions), as well as responsibility changes--more like a heaping-on of new responsibilities. No longer is there the singular goal that governs pretty much all professional activities up to that point. There was, for me, a shift from being primarily a "taker" (of time, reviews, tenure letters, etc.) to becoming primarily "giver" of these same things (though to pretend like we give nothing pre-tenure would be dumb--there's just a more noticeable ratcheting up of the requests to give, if not the giving itself). I rather like that about post-tenure; pre-tenure was a bit all-absorbing to me professionally.
And there is also the crucial point that these Big Changes are not the same for everyone. In different departments, or fields, or institutions, or for people with completely different constitutions or attitudes toward their jobs, tenure can bring both more and less change.
Similarly, everyone with a kid or more tells me that having one will change my life, and I know that. Some changes can be generalizable--less sleep at the beginning, a reorientation of daily schedules (or, schedules, what schedules?) and priorities. But the specific contours of what will change are still not the same as they are for parents everywhere, much as the realities of tenure or any other professional milestone vary widely. This seems to me an important lesson as we consider the ways we talk about such changes.
Such are the matters I contemplate while I wait.
