Tiger Mothers, Drifting College Students...

Was it possible that the whole Tiger Mother thing would blow over before I mentioned it? No, it was not...

a new stage in parenting

Over the 15 years that we’ve had children in school, my husband and I have managed not to have latch-key kids. Until now. For years, one or the other of us could be at home in the afternoon when they got home. Sometimes that meant picking them up from school and bringing them up to campus while I finished the work day, sometimes it meant finishing the work day at home, but one way or another we managed. It helped, of course, that we both had very flexible schedules, and that we (and our department chairs) were able to schedule our classes for prime times, so that one of us could get usually home before the school day ended. I did once teach a night class rather than teach during homework-and-dinner-prep time, and I’m in awe of those who do so all the time — that is really not my time of day. For a while one or the other of my kids was often in after-school soccer because it bought us an extra hour before pickup time on practice days—that ended, though, when it became clear that neither one had any interest in soccer beyond the camaraderie, so when the games got serious they gave it up. (And, for the record, no, I’ve never asked a childless colleague to teach late so I didn’t have to, nor has my chair ever made such a request for me. So far — fingers crossed — it’s all worked out fairly easily.)

More recently, my husband has picked up much of the slack, working from home as my administrative load has increased. So now, though I still rarely teach late in the day, I do occasionally have meetings that go until 4 or 5 pm — or even, as today, beyond. (Sometimes I even schedule them myself.) The first few weeks of classes when it was clear that this would become a more regular occurrence there was still no problem — my middle-school son wasn’t back in school yet anyway and was at home with his dad.

But school started last week and his dad’s out of town right now, and I’m solo parenting it for once. And today and tomorrow I have late afternoon meetings. Since my son is thirteen and reasonably responsible, we decided he could have a key and let himself in, and he’d call to announce his return.

I’m waiting for that call right now.

And after reading Susan O’Doherty’s blog post today I’m already counting the ways this could go wrong. A party in Central Park isn’t at all my concern, nor do I expect the cops to get involved, but there are many different kinds of near misses. He left a lunchbox at school last week; did he somehow lose his key? Or is the bus running late? If he missed the bus I would already have heard, I imagine, but what if he just couldn’t manage the rather sticky key in the very old lock?

Of course the call just came and all is well. There’s homework to worry about, and I do still have that meeting to go to, but for the moment another milestone’s been passed and all is well.

I do know I’ve been fortunate in this one. My milestone is a lot of other people’s day-to-day existence, and more parents than not patch together after-school programs, childcare arrangements, swing shifts, babysitting co-ops, and various other maneuvers to make their days work. I’m grateful that we managed to do all right for this long. And, like a lot of other parents every day, I’m glad that call came in when it did.

(cross-posted from Mama, PhD at Inside Higher Ed)

Summer Jobs

One of the best things about being an academic is that summer is still really different from the rest of the year, just like it was when I was a kid. I remember some long summers spent reading on the couch, or outside--really, reading wherever I could. But what I really remember most are the various summer jobs I had starting when I was about sixteen. They weren't good jobs, of course--when you're sixteen you've got no skills, after all, and no experience--but they were formative in some significant ways. Now it's Mariah's turn.

Read more about summer jobs at the Mama, PhD blog at Inside Higher Ed...

Advice to my daughter (and other bright humanities undergrads) - Mama PhD - Inside Higher Ed

Mariah goes back to college today--I couldn't resist giving her a little advice before she goes...

Blog U.: Mothering at Mid-Career: Advice to my daughter (and other bright humanities undergrads) - Mama PhD - Inside Higher Ed

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Blog U.: Mothering at Mid-Career: Parents' Weekend from the other side - Mama PhD - Inside Higher Ed

As a professor, I'm rarely all that aware of Parents' Weekend on our campus. Occasionally an advisee has brought his or her parents by to say hello; sometimes I've run into a student with parents in tow and have stopped to chat. But most often I simply register the additional folks walking around the campus and then go on with my own business.

This time it was different. I was the one in tow.

read the rest here: Blog U.: Mothering at Mid-Career: Parents' Weekend from the other side - Mama PhD - Inside Higher Ed

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Let's talk

Do you talk to your kids away from home, or do you "talk" on facebook? How about your colleagues--e-mail, or phone? Does it matter? I'm trying to do both...with mixed success. Here's today's blog post over at Inside Higher Ed.

Getting ready

The Yarn Harlot (Stephanie Pearl-McPhee) has a great post today about letting a child go. My daughter's not going quite so far away as Australia, but tomorrow we take her to college and leave without her. It's all new. I said a little bit about it today over on the Mama, PhD blog at Inside Higher Ed--more later.

Mothers Movement and Mama, PhD

Here's a great conversation, among Caroline Grant, Elrena Evans, and Andrea O'Reilly, about Mama, PhD and the issues facing mother academics (and other parents, but you'll see why the focus is on mothers, I think). This is particularly pertinent to me since I've just been to (yet another) meeting about child care on campus. (No, we don't have a child care center here; yes, we are still talking about it.)

Here's a brief excerpt:

Andrea O'Reilly: I am beginning year three of a large, government-funded research project on "being a mother in the academe." I have interviewed approximately 45 women and hope to interview another 50. A central finding of my research is the pull mothers feel in trying to live up to impossible standards of perfection in both the university and in the home. As the "ideal worker," a woman has to have a book published before 35, etc. and as an ideal mother, she has to be the perfect mother, with the perfect house, perfect children… i.e., a child who reads before two and speaks two languages by age four. With the contemporary discourse of ideal motherhood, what Sharon Hays calls intensive mothering, it is impossible to be a "good" mother and "good" academic.

There's an interesting conversation about this stuff going on at 11-D as well, where I find myself taking the unusual (for me) glass-half-full position. The thing is, having given up on the "impossible standards of perfection" O'Reilly mentions above, I'm doing OK. But I do still see plenty of room for improvement.

Parenting and Pedagogy

Tedra Osell's recent post on her "Career Coach" blog at Inside Higher Ed's Mama PhD got me thinking: what is the relationship between parenting and pedagogy? How has my pedagogy changed since becoming a parent? It's hard for me to answer the latter question, as I had only been teaching as a grad student for a few years before I became a parent; the two have really always been intertwined for me. But I do know that I don't answer the question the way Tedra does; here's a stab at how I do answer it.

(cross-posted at the other blog...)

Mothering at Mid-Career

Did I mention that I just finished my annual report? Why yes, I did. It's put me in a reviewing mood, it seems; over at Inside Higher Ed, I speculate on what it would be like to report on my work as a parent.

Parenting in the News...again

Over at the Mama, PhD blog at IHE today I'm talking about Lisa Belkin's shared parenting piece in the NY Times magazine, as well as two pieces more specifically focused on academic women and academic parenting. Let me know what you think!

Shifting Focus

So it really wasn't that bad a day yesterday. The computer, modem, and router are actually not broken, for example, even though it took six hours, eight phone calls (two to India), and much hair-pulling to determine that. Here was the dialogue at one point:

[Me]: But everything worked yesterday with the set-up I had. Why are you telling me to change it today?
[Him]: Well, sometimes things just don't work any more.
[Me]: OK, but then why would changing the settings help?
[Him]: The settings you had shouldn't have worked. These are the right settings.
[Me]: Even though the old settings worked yesterday.
[Him]: Yes.
[Me, tearing my hair out, ready to slam the phone down]: Well, thanks, then, I guess.

Actually the old settings were the right ones. The new ones caused all kinds of problems. But they are, um [knock wood], fixed now.

Moving along. It is also a good thing that the new couch for the study/guest room was delivered, so I will ignore the fact that we have not yet moved the futon out of the room and that therefore the study (where I spend most of my time these days) is both crowded and somewhat dingy-looking. I will assume that the new couch will look fabulous in here once things are cleaned up.

It's also a good thing that I didn't have to drive to Petersburg yesterday to deliver a choir dress to Mariah. She called soon after arriving at school to say she needed it for an unexpected performance, so I went and found it in the laundry basket (no comment), along with appropriate shoes, and readied myself for the drive, but then she called to say they decided to perform in street clothes instead. Thus I was able to spend that time talking on the phone to people in India. Let's not discuss which was more satisfying.

It's a very good thing that we had choir rehearsal last night, always a high point in my week, and even more that we went just before rehearsal, a small group of us, to sing at the convalescent center where one of our members (along with his wife) is recovering from a devastating car accident. They--and others who gathered when they heard the music--were so appreciative, it made the singing really matter.

As I said, really not a bad day at all. It's just a matter of perspective.

blast from my past

This week's New Yorker has an amazing piece by Jerome Groopman about colic (alas, not on line). Those of you who knew us when, know we went through a rather trying time in Mariah's first months on earth. She had colic, so we all did. She cried most of the time she was awake--but particularly in the evenings--for the first nine months of her life. She slept well at night from a fairly early age (our saving grace) but the colic, oh, it was relentless. We tried rocking, swaddling, "the colic hold," dietary changes (mine), schedule changes (hers), singing, dancing, changes in environment (for a brief period we tried taking her outside when she cried--sometimes the cold air seemed to change things), and everything else we could think of. Nothing worked, or at least nothing worked reliably. If swaddling worked one night, we tried it the next to no avail. Mostly I think we did what we did for us, to make us feel as if we were helping. She cried for no reason, and when she was done she was done, but we awaited the next bout in exhausted trepidation.

Our doctor, however, informed us that "colic is when the bell curve of parent irritability intersects the bell curve of baby irritability." I invited him to our apartment any evening to witness the ridiculousness of that statement, but he didn't take me up on it. It was something of a relief, then, to find that medical researchers now study colic--some of them must actually believe in it, even if our doctor didn't. It seems from the article that as many as 25% of babies may suffer from colic, which has, according to one expert cited in the article, "no known cause and no known treatment." Babies eventually outgrow it, of course, but to me the heartbreaking part of the article comes in the speculations about the long-term effects: sleep disorders, for example, seem more frequent in kids who have been colicky babies (check!). As for the effects on family life, well, let's just say Mariah's colic wasn't as bad as some documented in the article, but I have no problem believing that "the parents of colicky babies were found to be more dissatisfied with family life . . . than parents of children who had not had colic."

Colic is well in our past these days. We have two fabulous children who delight and astonish us daily. But reading this article put me right back in that place of helpless new parenting, when I first learned that I couldn't make everything right for my daughter no matter how much I wanted to, no matter how hard I tried. That's not a bad lesson to learn, of course--but reading this article reminded me of how hard it was to learn it so early, in quite that way.

Back to School

So it's the Tuesday after Labor Day, back to school day here where we live. Of course Mark went back to school over a week ago, and if I weren't on sabbatical I would have gone back last Monday; fall starts slowly around here. But I put Mariah on her bus at 7 and took Nick into his classroom at 9 this morning, so it really is back-to-school day. Both kids are in their last year at their respective schools. As I was walking Nick in this morning, a woman I know who lives in the neighborhood (whose son is Mariah's age) called out to me, "Aren't you ever leaving this school?" Her kids are in middle and high school, but here I am still walking into the elementary school. Indeed, I've been a parent at this school for 12 years now, ever since Mariah was in kindergarten. Nick started pre-K there the year she started middle school, so they never went to the same school but we haven't had a break, either.

Not that we wanted one. It's been a great elementary school for both kids. If not every teacher was fabulous, still the kids have done fine and over all we've been satisfied. The only teacher both kids had was their fourth grade teacher, and she was wonderful. So were both second grade teachers, one third, one first . . . and so on. In fifth grade, the kids have a "homeroom" but they move around a bit, in preparation for middle school. (They've been switching for math and, last year, science, since third grade anyway.)

Nick's class seemed smaller today when I dropped him off. I know there are fewer fifth grade classes than there were fourth grades--parents start fleeing the elementary schools a year early in the hopes of heading off middle-school woes. So several of Nick's friends won't be around this year, and we're sad about that. Still, he was eager to get started and seemed happy to see old friends when he got in this morning.

Mariah's last year of high school will, of course, involve the college search. We spent so much time thinking about college this summer that right now high school feels like a little bit of a let-down to her. I'm hoping that changes as her classes get started and she settles back into her various activities.

In the meantime I need to put these hours to good use. I have 11-1/2 months of my sabbatical left, and so far it's been slow going. Time to get into gear now.

random bullets of catching up

• I think I may again be competitive for bad mother award--who else takes her kid to the library and won't let him check out books? Twice? (I saw the librarian looking at me as I was telling Nick that no, we'd agreed we were just there to return books, not to check out, and I really felt bad...)
  
• In my defense, it was the second (and third) time we'd been to the library (three different ones) this week and he still had plenty left to read. And I'm tired of hanging around the graphic novel section finding all the "how to draw anime villains" books.
• We are all (knock wood) recovered from our malaise, but only Mariah is really making use of her good health. She's been working non-stop, baby-sitting and bagging groceries. I expect to be hitting her up for a loan soon.
• When she wasn't working Mariah took Nick to the movies, as I mentioned before. They went to see Ratatouille. Unfortunately Nick decided it was no good so they left before it was over. I'm still not quite sure what he didn't like about it--this is a kid who has sat through Valiant (recently!) with pleasure, after all.
  
• Mariah "treated" Nick to the movies but then had to borrow cash from him. She had deposited all her paychecks in a new bank account and didn't have an ATM card yet. (I know, a likely story!) Maybe I need to be working Nick for a loan rather than Mariah.
  
• Nick is a saver, Mariah a spender. When Nick was about three I brought two large cookies home from some kind of campus event. When I picked the kids up from school/daycare I distributed them. Mariah's was gone before we got home; Nick's was in his lap, still uneaten. Both Mariah and I found this behavior somewhat disturbing. But then again this is a kid whose Hallowe'en candy often lasts until Easter (at which point it has to be thrown away).
  
• We had a wonderful trip to the beach yesterday. Mariah was working, but the rest of us drove out to visit an old friend who was staying there with his family. It was a lovely, low-key visit: mostly sitting on the beach or jumping in the waves and talking. His daughter is a year older than Nick and gets along with him beautifully--it was really nice to see them taking turns on the boogie board, digging in the sand, building a sand-castle.
  
• I am now half-way through my re-reading of Half-Blood Prince and am confident of being ready for the new one when it arrives. Nick is working his way through Order of the Phoenix and I think he's going to make it, too. I get it first; Nick next if he's finished with #6, otherwise Mariah. If he does get it before her, she's allowed to take it at night after he's gone to bed if she promises not to mess with his bookmarks.
• What does it say about us that we have absolutely no routine for the summer, and it is impossible to set up a workable chore schedule, but our reading schedule for Deathly Hallows is already set in stone?
• I have been blogging for four years as of today.
  

The House of Lethargy

While Nick's been getting over pneumonia, I think the rest of us have been succumbing to the bug that bit him. The pediatrician, when she saw Mariah, called it mycoplasma--all I know is, it's kicking us, hard. Nick is at the stage of thinking he's better and overdoing it, then crashing. (Today's a crash day.) Mariah refused to believe she was sick and threw a birthday party for a friend on Thursday--necessitating a trip to the doctor on Friday. The pediatrician mentioned at the time that I might want to call in for a prescription as well, as my throat was sore and my energy completely drained. I waited until today to fill it, but finally gave in when I woke up too early for the third morning in a row, unable to sleep for the pain in my throat. Mark started coughing yesterday and has uncharacteristically spent most of the day in bed.

A houseful of sick people is no fun. I'm glad there are no babies involved, though--no one's too terribly needy, so we're all just lying around watching movies, reading the paper (I've already finished the crossword puzzle, for a miracle!), knitting, and napping. It's a lovely day outside, and I wish we could enjoy it more, but it could be worse.

Things I've Learned Lately

• When I began the 48-Hour Book Challenge I piled up the recent library books on the stairs and just pulled volumes off as they appealed. One that I had also picked up, not for the challenge, was Elizabeth Zimmerman's Knitting without Tears. It's one of those books that you hear about all the time. It's not one of the pretty new knitting books with lots of pictures; it's all just practical advice. And I learned that not only did I learn to knit wrong, I purled wrong as well. This sort of makes sense, as she explains it. Somehow my "German" needle-holding technique led to the wrong-way purl, which makes the wrong-way knit almost necessary. So now I know how to purl the right way, it makes knitting the right way easier. Sometimes the secondary technique is actually the one that matters.
• I'm not good at following the rules right now. So while I did indeed start the notebook described here, I have not yet used it in the way she describes.
  
• I think the not-following-rules thing is a function of age. It began just as I entered my forties. I remember one morning standing up to Nick's preschool teacher, who didn't like how long it took us to say good-bye in the mornings ("Y'all linger," she said disapprovingly). I ignored her, figuring I could take as long to say good-bye to my baby as I --and he-- wanted. That didn't bother him, but he did get upset with me when I didn't cross the street at the crosswalk and backtalked the security guard who gave me a hard time about it. I was ok with Nick wanting to follow the rules--that's appropriate for a four-year-old, after all. But I sure wasn't going to let a guy in a uniform tell me I didn't know how to cross an empty street, holding my son's hand.
  
• The thing is, I was like Nick long into my adulthood. Rules matter. I like rules: they tell you what's expected, they simplify decision-making, they provide order and continuity in what can be a disordered world.
  
• But maybe what I really like--and certainly what Nick liked at that age, and still does--is ritual. The calming certainty that things will be done the same way as before. Nick's good-bye ritual at age three was a fascinating thing to behold (and worth its own essay, another time); one of my favorite things about it was that it seemed such a child-sized reflection of my own need for order and consistency.
  
• I've become one of those people who says "when I was your age" or "when I was younger" even "at my age." This, too, is obviously a function of age (middle).
  
• When I was younger order mattered to me more. I need to think about this for a while, but I'm seeing the signs everywhere--not just in petty defiance of preschool functionaries, or the refusal to follow directions in a writing book. In unpaid bills and missed deadlines (not so good); in messy creative re-thinkings of previous projects (maybe ok).
• At a party the other evening I found myself saying "at my age" and being called on it. Turns out no one there believed I was over forty (or at least they were really really flattering me, for no particular reason). I think I might start telling people I'm fifty just to hear the flattery. (Yes, I'm aware of how this one might backfire. So probably not.)
  

MotherTalk Blog Book Tour: Writing Motherhood

I began reading Writing Motherhood on Monday evening, and Tuesday morning I went out and bought the notebook I'd been eying for months. I had a little notebook in my purse already, but it's littered with to-do-lists, dimensions of the refrigerator we replaced last fall, lists of books to read, knitting patterns, the model numbers for the bionicles Nick most wanted for Christmas—well, you get the idea. It is, in fact, a mother's notebook par excellence. But it's—mostly—missing what I most want to have in it: my writing, daily reflections, ideas for further exploration. Inspired by my reading of Lisa Garrigues' new book, then, I got a bigger one, one that can hold all I'm already carrying around and my own words as well.

The Mother's Notebook is only one of the helpful ideas in Garrigues' new book, but it's probably the central one, the one on which everything else depends. Once you get the Mother's Notebook going, you've got invitations to write, inspirations from other writers, reminders that you're not alone, and suggestions for ways to share your writing. It's almost a parent-writing class in volume form: just add students and stir. That's not surprising, as it comes out of Garrigues' experience as a teacher and workshop leader. It gives the book a useful structure: one really could just work through it, preferably with a group, and jumpstart a writing practice that had gone stale, or get one off the ground for the first time. But it can also be a useful reference tool, a resource like other writing books, to dip into for inspiration and useful reminders. The writing prompts Garrigues crafts—she calls them "invitations," which makes them sound, well, more inviting than "prompts"—are mostly linked to motherhood, but little in the book would be foreign to any writer, especially any writer who does something else, whether paid or unpaid work. (And, really, how many writers don't do "something else"?) What motherhood adds to the writing process, then, in addition to great material, is a sense of balance: other writing books may assume all you do, or all you want to do, is write, but Garrigues knows you've already got a lot on your plate. Fifteen minutes a day is all she asks, for starters; then she adds play-dates and time-outs as well as regular writing group meetings, making it all seem manageable and even fun for a time-pressed parent.

Here's what I wrote in my notebook:

Tuesday morning, conversation w/Nick, ruling out causes for his stomach ache. I ask if he's pooped lately. Yes—so no constipation, I say. "If you got constipated, would you throw up, or would you just explode?" he asks. Much hilarity.

Ah, potty humor. It never loses its appeal. Maybe that's not the most interesting conversation we've ever had—indeed, I know it isn't. But it is representative of our conversations lately—equal parts true curiosity and nine-year-old gross-out. And I know I wouldn't remember it if I didn't write it down.

Will it ever make it out of the Mother Notebook? Well, it just did, didn't it? But no, I doubt I'll use it in a story or essay. Garrigues reminds us, though, that writing begets writing, and that paying attention is one of the skills both writers and parents need to cultivate. I may not need to remember our conversation about constipation, but I do need to listen, and writing things down helps me do that.

Now that I've finished reading the book I want to go back and reflect on it as well, pay attention to the parts I read through quickly, make a plan for how best to use it. This book came to me at a great time: as summer begins I'm thinking already of how to jumpstart my writing, and I have several projects I plan to work on through the next academic year. Inspired by Garrigues, I'm thinking of trying to get a small local writing group going (leave me a comment if you're in central VA and think that might be fun), and I'm making a resolution to write in my notebook every day.

Check out the conversation with Lisa Garrigues here, and the other posts in the blog book tour here.

more on boys and danger

Jody over at Raising WEG has a great post about the title and marketing of The Dangerous Book for Boys. Of course she's right, and I'm sorry I didn't really address it in my earlier post. I was interested in thinking about danger and kids in general, and the way that has played out with my particular kids--which has gender implications, but I didn't raise the implications of the book's title itself. It is, as Jody says, a problem to suggest that only boys are interested in dangerous stuff, or that you're not a boy if you're not interested in dangerous stuff (or not a girl if you are). So go read her; she's smart about it.

I was also thinking about stereotypes and gender yesterday when I went to the last of Nick's four dance performances of the weekend. (I was also backstage mom for one, and went to the second one with the rest of the family.) The kids were spectacular. For the opening and finale there were 700 (give or take) kids on stage, all dancing more or less in synch. They smiled, they clapped, they stomped and turned and bounced and swayed. I loved every minute of it, and as far as I could tell so did they. Nick liked it so much he's trying out for the advanced program, which involves a lot more ballet technique (and a lot more performance).

So on the way out I was more than annoyed to hear this exchange between parents. There were two couples, and the mom from one said to the dad from the other: "Wouldn't you be proud if your son got picked for the ballet?" Only, from her tone, it was clear that she didn't think he would be--that, in fact, it would be somewhat embarrassing to have a boy in the ballet. She followed up a minute later with, "well, ballet and soccer, I guess they balance each other out." (Doesn't she know soccer is European, and European men aren't manly, either? Oh, never mind...)

How you could walk out of the performance we'd both just seen and assume that somehow dancing wasn't quite manly enough for boys stymied me. (Never mind that nine- and ten-year-old boys hardly ought to be aspiring to manliness anyway...)

Luckily Nick doesn't think dancing isn't manly. Well, he wouldn't: his tae kwon do instructor, whom he reveres, danced with the ballet for years. And breaks cinder blocks with his hand. Take that!

on the X-chromosome...

I think Natalie Angier had a lot of fun with this article. Just check out this one paragraph:

Yet the X chromosome does much more than help specify an animal’s reproductive plumbing. As scientists who study the chromosome lately have learned, the X is a rich repository of genes vital to brain development and could hold the key to the evolution of our particularly corrugated cortex. Moreover, the X chromosome behaves unlike any of the other chromosomes of the body — unlike little big-man Y, certainly, but also unlike our 22 other pairs of chromosomes, the self-satisfied autosomes that constitute the rest of our genome, of the complete DNA kit packed into every cell that we carry. It is a supple, switchbacking, multitasking gumby doll patch of the genome; and the closer you look, the more Cirque du Soleil it appears.

Little big-man? Gumby doll? Cirque du Soleil? What's going on inside me, anyway?

A lot, it would appear. Fun piece.