b l o g o s

how writing and raising a toddler are analogous if at times conflicting efforts

About three and a half weeks ago, our toddler, normally a Very Good Sleeper, decided that good sleeping would be a 2.5 year phase, one with which she was finished. She screamed and kicked her way through bedtime; once she fell asleep, just as *we* were settling into bed or even falling asleep ourselves, she would rise up as if from a horror movie (and for us it was very much a horror movie) and prompt sleep-destroying andrenaline surges on our parts by bursting into our room and announcing she didn't WANT to go to sleep. It was horrible. We hated life. We consulted our baby-sleep bible (we are committed Weissbluthians, and believe me, this book takes commitment--the guy is a terrible writer). Anyway, the toddler section reassured us with a couple of techniques and reminded us of the importance of sticking to our routine. I doubted it. Everyone doubted it. We bickered. We withheld the iPad (she didn't care). We fielded advice--wanted and unwanted--including (commonly) that she needed to be kept awake until 9 or 10 or 11 at night. The thought made us shudder: we didn't stay up that late. So we decided to stick with the method that we believed in, the philosophy of which is pretty simple: 1) sleep begets sleep; and 2) a routine is crucial. Tonight, after several nights in a row of improvement, I think it's safe to say that Weissbluth and his horrid prose didn't fail us. She is now leading us through the sleep routine, which in recent days (in response to the sleep-deprived hell of the previous two weeks) had become even more regimented and predictable. By 6:45, magically, she was asleep. We looked at each other in disbelief. We ran for our computers.

At this point I should stop and make an important caveat, lest I step into a fray I know better than to step into: I don't wish to claim that the "sleep-begets-sleep" applies to all toddlers or babies. The point here is choosing an approach and having some patience with it. Even that doesn't work for everyone, and I'm really sympathetic to those who continue to struggle in the sleep department. It's an awful, awful hell.

Anyway, sometimes the writing we do is an analogous (though perhaps quieter) hell. It's slow-going. The time creeps. Other stuff tries to distract. It grumps us up. Sometimes we give in and depart from habit.

But a daily routine with incremental effort is still the most likely to yield results. 1) Writing begets writing. 2) A routine is crucial.

 

 

mama 2 mama

There are a few things to say about the washed-out photo at left, taken with my iPad on a return flight from the RSA Institute at Boulder. The first is that I took it while reading the introduction to a dissertation scheduled to be defended in a few days. Reading a dissertation on a plane isn't all that momentous--people in jobs like mine do it all the time--but reading a dissertation while flying solo with a toddler is a major event for this mama. During the first hour of the nap, I rested. And then I found myself getting restless and then... could I? No. Maybe I can just reach down into my bag with my free hand. Yes! There it is. My wrists hurt like a mofo from having to hold it in the same position for an hour, and typing notes and making annotations was next to impossible, but I managed. The Bean woke up just as I wound down the last sentences of the introduction, delighted to see that she could switch the iPad over to the baby-appropriate counting app.

The second thing to say about this photo is that CGD, the author of said dissertation, wrote pretty much the whole thing with a baby sleeping in her own lap, having given birth, completed a job visit, and negotiated a job offer all within the space of (no joke) a month last winter. After the postpartum/post-job search (!) phase wound down, she had to write up the study she had been conducting for three years now (a really remarkable study of the rhetorical practices surrounding a watershed in Eastern Iowa). CGD posted onto facebook photo after webcam photo of herself in a room lit only by the glow of her dissertation screen, with the little--growing--bundle sleeping in a carrier or wrap or her arm. (We mamas get pretty fast with the one-hand typing.) By the time she finished, he--the baby--was sitting up gazing in wonder at the screen. As well he should.

One would expect a dissertation written with such speed under these conditions to be a little rough around the edges, at least typographically speaking. If the introduction is any indication, though, this one is as clean as a freshly diapered baby's behind. And the writing is so strong, the study so capacious and downright fascinating, I can't wait to post this and get back to reading it.

CGD, I promise I will post the requisite diss-with-whippet, but I wanted to post this one as well, as a visual response to your writing series, a further chronicling of the lives that share the spaces of our work. Way to go, mama.

conference childcare--what conference childcare?

I have written here before about the difficulties of attending conferences with a baby in tow. This is on my mind because CCCC is coming up, and the Bean and I are flying there alone. I am lucky because my parents live fairly close to Atlanta, and they are going to come help out so that I can attend my panels, meetings, and a memorial dinner and know that the Bean is safe with Nana and Pops. 

At one point, though, I thought I would need to use the conference's recommended sitter service. (And I am imagining there are others who have no choice.) Mind you, this is not childcare provided by the conference. Several months ago, when I emailed the NCTE offices to find out about conference-provided childcare (because I know I had seen a drop-in option in the past), I received a note saying that they stopped arranging for on-site service. The note went on to offer information about a recommended service and the charges. I thought I needed someone for two hours, and with all the additional charges (including some mysterious "referral fee," parking, and a minimum four-hour charge) it was going to cost me nearly $90.00. I wondered on facebook just how many CCCC attendees with small children could afford that sort of fee. I suspect the answer is not that many.

Since I am planning to attend NCA in New Orleans this November with just the Bean, I decided to look up their policies. This is even better. My search for the term "childcare" of course turned up nothing, but digging in the conference FAQs, I found this gem:

Q. Can my partner, child, or family member accompany me at convention? 

Absolutely! NCA’s annual convention, for many members, is a family affair. The NCA convention has many social aspects in addition to its fine intellectual tradition. Your family members or friends do not need to pay the membership fees if they do not plan on attending programs, convention receptions or visiting the exhibit area. For a $50 registration fee, they are welcome at all sessions, events and receptions.All partner, family, spouse registrations must be purchased onsite in New Orleans.

So I emailed someone at the NCA offices asking whether the conference provided any sort of childcare or at the very least recommended a service, like CCCC and MLA (MLA, which provides vouchers to help curb the cost of the service, is starting to look like the winner here). Here is the response I received:

Hello Debra. NCA does not arrange special childcare services but often the hotel can recommend local services. I would suggest contacting the concierge desk at the hotel at which you are thinking of staying. Thank you!

 

Michelle Randall, CMP
Senior Manager, Convention and Meetings
National Communication Association
1765 N Street NW
Washington DC 20036

In case you have just been skimming, let me sum things up for you: the NCA encourages people to register their spouses and kids--that is PAY to bring them to the conference--but they will not lift a finger to arrange a certified care provider for people traveling with children to their professional conference. Note that I am not asking NCA to pay for childcare, just to make a service available for women (or men) who need to bring their children along with them. Though I do think they ought to also consider at least partially subsidizing childcare for contingent laborers, assistant professors, and graduate students.

I am not sure where the women's caucus is on this issue, and frankly, I would think that NCA would want to be in line with the large conferences and have some sort of childcare procedure in place if they really want to claim to be "family friendly" as they do when they brightly announce the registration fee for spouses and children. 

So here is what I am thinking of doing in New Orleans: I will pay $50.00 to register Nora. She will wear the nametag (a strangulation hazard for a toddler, if NCA must know), and she will come with me to my presentations. I will announce at the beginning of my presentations that I am performing what NCA must think we need to do with our families, and I will let her interrupt my presentation or run around the room as much as she wants. Perhaps I will buy her a noisy tambourine, adorned with the NCA theme, "Voice," just for the occasion.

I will call it a "baby-in."

I want to clarify that I do not think this issue rises to the level of import of the labor issues that NCA has turned a blind eye to in the recent past. But I do think turning a blind eye to the conditions of their conference attendees is of a piece with that very mentality.

 

feminism and lecture hosting

JM, the Bean, and I visited Philadelphia last week so that I could give a lecture at Temple's Center for the Humanities. Sue Wells, Eli Greenblatt, and Shannon Walters were such wonderful hosts. The usual food and conviviality were amped up on all sides.

But their hosting went beyond the usual. When they asked me to come give a talk, I was a little apprehensive, because I needed to bring JM and the baby with me, and we wanted to take the train, which adds further complications. But from the moment I mentioned these extra concerns, both Sue and Eli (the point people on the arrangements) helped make it not just possible but very easy to bring the Bean along. Sue very sweetly offered to borrow a car seat and meet us at the train station. Eli even arranged for a *babysitter* so that JM could join us all for dinner the night before the lecture.  

As a bonus, Sue took me and the Bean for a fun trek through the "Anatomy Academy" exhibit at the PA Fine Arts Museum. How lucky am I to get a tour of medical sketches, paintings, and displays from the leading scholar of rhetoric and medical training in our field! We peered at 19th century surgical instruments while Bean dashed from a bench to an electrical outlet, running out any heebie jeebies from the train ride. Here she is at right in the museum proper, taking off after my favorite fox painting (visible in the background).

The next day, when Sue and I were heading up to the building before my lecture, I mentioned to her that it strikes me as decidedly feminist to be so supportive of my little entourage. I feel very fortunate to have had a string of hosts this year who have been exceedingly accommodating: the Chicago Humanities Festival offered to pay for an extra room for my mother-in-law, who came along to keep the Bean while I gave a talk one day and interviewed KAJ another; folks in the Comm department at Pitt booked a larger room to allow for her pack-n-play, and welcomed the Bean to their happy hour. Such hosting graciousness is, yes, a feminist act--it makes it possible for me to say yes to a handful of invitations.* Or as Sue put it in her friendly, blunt reply to my gratitude, "what, are we just going to not hear from you for seven or eight years?"

While we were driving around Philly the next day, she told me about how she took her 6 month old daughter to a conference in Italy, and when she and her friend asked one of the conference organizers if it would be all right to have the baby at a session as long as they promised to rush her right out of the room as soon as she made a peep, he responded in Italian (Sue translated for me): "The baby needs to be outside. Fresh air is good for it." We had a little laugh about this response.

And while the Italian conference organizer's attitude is still, twenty years later, remarkably commonplace, it is refreshing to have flexible, accommodating hosts, hosts who recognize not all scholars fit into a standard itinerary, hosts who embrace the difference.

 

 

 *I would be remiss if I didn't mention the family members who have given so generously of their time to help make this year's travel schedule work as well: JM, JM's mom, my sister, and my mom.

 

here's what's sacred about family time

The status update was going to say this:

"Debbie notices that 'family' is sometimes deemed a sentimental category at times when it is really a category of labor."

But I quickly realized that this was too cryptic, and that the update probably belonged over here at blogos. What I mean is this: JM and I are unable to meet requests to do work-related things on weekends [updated to add: and] between the hours of 5 and 7 pm (because this is when we are feeding and putting the Bean to bed, and that process is best handled by both of us and pretty much has to involve me at this point). My most immediate colleagues get this limitation, and we work around it. As an example, I am taking the Bean over to a colleague's house tomorrow afternoon (a Saturday) to talk with that colleague about promoting the English major. This is how we planned it from the beginning (at the colleague's suggestion).

Even so, others don't get it, and I suppose they wouldn't really have any good reason to get it. Weirdly, though, the way they don't get it is by claiming to get it, and then saying something about the sacredness of family. Sacred my ass. It's work.

Departing from carefully divided weekend childcare routines is not only difficult, it is often unfair in that it leaves the other person trying to take care of house-related stuff while keeping a toddler from falling down the stairs, and it means leaving the other person to do that without a break (which in our house means a break to go do work). It is difficult because "trading" time means losing double the amount of time one spends doing whatever one has committed to do. That childcare time needs to be made up in the name of equity. And without equity this whole family thing does not work--not for us, anyway.

So that's what I mean: it's not about a sentimental or sacred protection of time with family, it's about work and an insistence on familial equity. Which are, come to think of it, sacred. 

scattershot 6, whatever-it-takes edition

1. My pilates instructor is a lovely, fit, compact woman with a lilting English accent. (So, a little bit the opposite of moi.) When we are reaching the end of a particular sequence on the reformer, she will say something motivating like "that's it, ladies," or "you're nearly there." The latter is my favorite, because of the way it plays her accent*. She sounds for all the world like Natasha Khan of Bats for Lashes. Earlier today I caught myself repeating this phrase while working at my desk. Having just re-edited our chapter on Delivery, I set it aside and whispered to no one but myself, "ya neely theh."

*another fave is "beautiful," which is deliberately divided syllabically, more like "beeyouTEEfull"

2. There is an item on my to-do list that says "get started on X, so you don't lose your mind." This is what it's come to.

3. I will spend most of next month fantasizing about spring break when we will stay home, and I will finish writing a couple of talks and paint the baby's room.

4. All the time you hear "you've got to learn to say no." For me, it's less about learning to do this--Nancy Reagan must have taught my generation well--and more about being realistic about what one person can take on. What this means is that I have had to turn down things I really really wanted to do, and that three years ago I would have said yes to in a snap.  But that was because I was doing less three years ago, national service wise and admin-wise. And my life was such that I had lots more cracks into which I could wedge yet another thing. But with those cracks sealed up, I have had to re-learn, not how to say no, but that I have to. And to realize that the world won't end when I do, but instead I will have energy and time for the stuff that I find most vital and energizing (teaching, my work for RSA, the CDD, lectures, and my book).

5. Relatedly: energy can beget energy, but there is a limit, and you gots to keep an eye on quality.

6. My co-author rocks.

 

 

 

inauspicious pre-beginnings

Around these parts, this week is the week before the semester starts, which means it's a week of trying to get my head around the new schedule. The ever-changing schedules used to be something I loved about academia, and now that we've added an extra family member, it's become way more complicated. This semester is particularly complicated, with childcare swappage, meetings that happen every second Wednesday and every fourth Monday, and a class that meets Tuesday-Thursday-Friday. Add in a couple of regular class sessions of the bodily kind (yoga and pilates), and if my online calendar could sag momentarily and then explode, it would.

This is why when I successfully scheduled my pilates reformer sessions for Thursday afternoons, coordinating my co-sufferer's schedule with my insanity and our instructor's kid's bus schedule, I had to consider everything from my new office hour schedule to the route I would take to get there after my class to make sure that time would work. When it appeared to work, I rejoiced!

Until I realized--two days later--that the appointed time is also the designated time for my other course, which meets once a week. Blam.

shifting logistics

I joined a dissertation committee a few weeks before the defense, and at two weeks out, I decided to try only reading the dissertation while nursing to see a) if such a thing were possible, and b) if so, how far I could get. N has one or two long sessions in the morning, and a long one at night. I started reading the dissertation about eight days ago, and this morning I finished it. Writing comments was sometimes challenging, and I'm not sure the comments are always legible, but reading one chapter at a time on a clipboard helped. I took notes and wrote questions on my iphone and then emailed them to myself. It's a perfect time, really--everything is quiet; I'm (usually) alert. The well lit room and the cushy glider rocker helped too. Next up for nursing reading: Sh*t My Dad Says. Immanuel Kant, the subject of said dissertation, would be proud.

conferencing with baby (after)

RSA remains something of a blur--of handshaking, of elevator waiting, of waving, of hurrying, of attempts to extract myself from welcome greetings and to do so with some modicum of grace. With the possible exception of the nonhuman rhetorics panel, I feel like I was barely able to glide across the surface of the conference.

One of the authors in (I believe) Mama PhD--or maybe I read it on the  blog by the same name--mentions the enthusiastic reception of babies by senior men colleagues. At RSA I noticed this phenomenon too. It was fun to watch them get all googly-eyed. Really everyone was super nice about the bambino, but more than one generationally senior man pulled me aside to tell me that "this" [gesturing or referring to N] was "important work."

N also became the occasion to meet and chat with other conferencing mothers, many of whom left their children at home because they (the babies) are a little older. One such woman wanted to hold N because she left her baby at home for the first time. Others told me eye-popping stories about conferencing with babies when they were graduate students. I traded birth stories with my peer colleague KH and provided cell-phone pictures on request.

These were all new ways of relating for me and added a new dimension to my conference. The Bean pulled me away from usual conference habits, some good some bad. For example, since there isn't much to do in a hotel room with a sleeping baby, I slept really really well, and we ordered LOTS of room service, whereas I typically spend conferences sleep deprived and in large groups looking for food. More than once I had to excuse myself from conversations people struck up while I was making my way toward--or waiting for--an elevator to rush up and feed N (see previous post about what happened to the expressed milk). Relatedly, I had to check my phone for texts and messages more frequently than I would have liked, and I missed more than JM would have liked (sorry honey!). 

All of this kept me at the surface, and barely. Even so, to go from talking about dolphins and lions in ancient texts to N grinning in her little monkey t-shirt was awesome in its own not-so-surfacy way.

conferencing with baby (during)

A recipe for a successful day at a conference (with a baby):

- A good-natured spouse who can calm a baby easily and walk her around downtown (which she loves)

- A cell phone that works in all parts of the hotel

- An advisee willing to move your meeting (mid-meeting) up to the room for "lunch."

-A working refrigerator so that said spouse can feed the baby when you are in back-to-back panels

-A yummy gourmet pizza joint that will deliver a pizza to your hotel room

-A field full of people who love to hold babies. Even the publisher of our journal squealed and took her right from me.

- A baby who responds excitedly to all the smiling, gooey faces

-Swaddles

-Douglas the Dog (thanks, Beattie-Moss family!)

-A dual-purpose conference/diaper bag (pictured below)

All of the human elements were in place today, which goes a long way to making up for the technology shortfalls (cell and fridge). So in all, a quasi-successful day. I think I'll go to sleep when the bean does.