flea

I have been trying hard to do a little more self-care this week. I am ashamed to admit that it started from reading Redbook and Good Housekeeping at my MIL's house last weekend, but, you know, it's still a good thing. My current goals are:

Take my meds every day. I had been forgetting a LOT, or getting too busy in the mornings. So I put a spare bottle of pills in my purse, so I can take them at work if I don't before leaving the house.

Wash my face every morning and night. I am sure for many of you this is basic. For me, not so much.

I walked home with Dillo in the stroller from his day care twice this week, and will again today. He is very happy (we walk along the bus route, so BUS!) and the weather has been lovely and exercise is good for me.

I am also seriously considering shaving my legs this weekend. I am afraid I will hate the upkeep, but right now I am tired of the furry.

Ask Moxie got me in the gut today with: "Can we talk about one of the central themes of the book, that everyone's "supposed" to be passionate about something according to society, and what if you've never found that thing, or are no longer passionate about something that you once loved?" (http://www.askmoxie.org/2008/03/book-review-the.html)

My reply was:
I am meeting with my counselor next week to talk about the issue of what I am passionate about. I have a job, am in school taking steps to a (second) career, and have 2 kids, and still am not passionate about, well, anything. I never have been. For me, motherhood hasn't changed this, though it has significantly lessened my time to wallow in worrying about it. My older child is 4 and my younger 20 months, so I'm still head-down and moving forward as best I can. No room for big picture, "what do I want in life?" worries. Except with some coming changes in our family, I NEED to think about what I want, so I can start advocating for it. Hence the counselor.

Honestly, the only way in which I am different from my wastrel brother is that I work despite not knowing what I want, while he is waiting to know what he wants and just passing the time until then. But, you know, what if you never know what you want? I hope the counselor can work some magic with me.

It's the little things, like:

I am taking the GRE tomorrow. I guess I am not going to study. I recall 3-4-5 triangles, sohcahtoa, need to look up circumference vs area of a circle (one is 2pir and the other is pirsquared and I can never remember which is which.) Have figured out where it is, printed out directions, written down the number to send my score to. Still need to talk to mr. flea about the plan, since Saturday is usually errand day.

Trying to get Casper into swim lessons for the summer, and maybe me and Dillo, too - but the incompetent city parks website doesn't have a summer schedule up yet, and when I called the pool the even more incompetent person said that they were full for now, and I said I don't want now, I want summer, and she said to call back the first week of May. And now I have to remember to do that. It's $50 for I think 6 weeks, which is reasonable, I guess. Maybe it would be a good idea to try and get one of Casper's friends to do it with her.

mr. flea mentioned this week, for the first time, that he's giving a paper in Tampa the week of May 15, and the conference runs Tues-Sun. He said, "Can't your mother or your sister come down to help out?" Well, I suppose (if you plan to still be unemployed and on a road trip that week, do let me know, sister), but some people do tend to plan things in advance, you know?

I am desperate to do the Quicken - it is long overdue and who knows how much money we have. Also, I have to attach W-2s and re-file our state taxes, since stupid Turbotax wouldn't let us e-file and gave us wrong directions for print filing.

Like that. I could add to the list. Why is everything so complicated?

Casper just came up to me and said, "Here's some cake my sweet love." (It is pink play-doh cake.)

This aside, I feel lately like this journal should be titled the above, as I don't seem to be doing much garden-cultivating lately. The endless laundry (spit-uppy baby plus pee-prone 3 year old means I do about 6 loads a week, and that's with paper diapers), the round of dinner and dishes and eating the leftovers, how often can a freaking toilet need to be cleaned? (answer: more often than it gets cleaned, that's for sure) - life feels like a long trudge right now.

Partly it is the fall, the darkness and the rain the past few days. Partly it is the sleep deprivation, as the Dillo has been going 4 hours at best, and usually only one of those a night, and I am often up for the day at 5:30am following a wiggle-fest at 4 and a 2:30 nursing. Partly it is the stuckitude of mr. flea not being done, me not moving forward with a career (I made an appointment with a counselor about that - one of my work's less-touted but actually pretty heavily-used benefits is 6 free counseling visits for just about any reason, and I thought talking this out with a starnger - what I want in my life - might help). Partly it is an inability in me to truly savor and enjoy life, which I think is constitutional and nothing that anti-depressants can overcome. I'm not depressed, really; I'm just an observer of life, not a liver.

Ah well. This too shall pass, and we are all healthy and clothed and fed, with pink play-doh cake even.

Ex-nanny's daughter called to say she is not interested in sitting for us at all.

I have received a number of emails from other people looking for child care, but only one from someone providing child care, and that only 9:30-12:30 two days a week, which would not even halfway meet our current needs.

(In better news, mr. flea talked to our nieghbor, a SAHM with a 9 month old, and she'll watch Dillo from 10-12 for the next two weeks, while mr, flea is two houses down for emergencies, so that will get us started and him more work time.)

Dillo was cranky pants all afternoon and wouldn't nap.

The reason I can't print at work is a problem with the move that Looniversity IT has to fix, and god knows when that will happen.

The washing machine got a blockage and began vomiting water all over the basement floor, and also depositing unknown blockage-related schmutz on the load. Which happened to include the fabric part of Dillo's car seat, without which he cannot go anywhere.

(In better news, mr. flea ran the load out to the laundrymat, and it is already drying as we speak.)

To sum up: day sucks. mr. flea rules.

I got a call last night from an old friend from grad school, to tell me she'd defended her dissertation. She took 10 years, and was the second person in her class to defend. It got me thinking about my class...

In the fall of 1995 I entered a graduate program in Classics with 5 other people.
-T. was a Master's only student, in Latin. She didn't get her degree, and left in 1997 to teach high school Latin. She's still teaching in the same place, I'd guess succesfully and happily, though her web page has awful Flash animation.
-Z. was a PhD student in Hellenistic History. He didn't much get on with his chosen advisor, so left in 1997 after a Master's, returned to Greece to do his compulsory military service, and went on to to an M. Phil at Cambridge and a PhD at U. Washington. I'm not sure when he finished. He's now a lecturer at Newcastle.
-W. entered with a Master's, and defended his dissertation in Classical Archaeology in 2000. He was immediately hired at Wisconsin in a tenure-track position. Word is, he's returning to our alma mater in the fall. He's a great fellow, rather shy but very nice, not wildly creative but very solid, hardworking, nether a flake nor a jerk. Very mainstream, safe bet.
-B. enterested as a Master's only student in Classical Archaeology, but was successful and after her MA did a PhD too. She defended in 2001, and returned to Turkey, where she teaches in Ankara. She's doing very well - has a 2005 book with Oxbow and a 2005 article in Antiquity. She was always rather underestimated, as I think Mediterranean women can be; plus, she's not got a geeky/academic sort of personality (she's fun and laid-back), so I think people are surprised by her work.
-R. entered as a PhD student in Prehistoric Greek Archaeology. He defended his dissertation last week (TOTAL perfectionist; not at all a surprise that it took him 11 years.) He's been teaching on 1-2 year appointments since 2001, and is currently at Trent U. in Canada (his homeland). I hope that now he's done he'll be competitive for something more permanent. He does good work and is fun and nice to work with, but he undervalues himself and lacks confidence.

Then there's me; I left the program formally in late 2001, although until recently they still had me on their list of students for some reason. I guess my advisor had hope.

I don't think I made the wrong choice, though I do miss that life sometimes, and wish I was doing something more suited to my talents at the moment.

Well, the New York Times has been pretty quiet on the issue lately, but then Betty Friedan died. Plus Jesse's post from yesterday about needing to be reminded how recently racial segregation was enforced by public school got me thinking about these issues, again. I'm too stupid lately to claim any coherence to the comments below; I just want to get them out at the moment.

1. Aren't you glad you can't be fired for getting pregnant in most jobs now? Do you realize how recently that was made law? I'm remembering vaguely from a talk I attended over a year ago, but I think it was 1979. It's only since 1993 that you've been allowed to take 12 weeks unpaid leave to have a baby (or a do a variety of other family/medical stuff) and still have a job when you get back, and that's only if you work in a large firm. If your employer employs fewer than 50 people, you have absolutely no legal right to take any leave at all if you have a baby. Betty Friedan was fired when she asked for a leave of absence to have her second child, 5 years after having the first. Job advertisements used to specify that they would only hire a man. And people say feminism never did anything for them.

2. I think too much has been made in the media about the extent to which the choice of stay-at-home parenthood is only available for the wealthy. Yes, if you are a single mother, you cannot stay home with your child unless you have a trust fund. Yes, low-income couples often both have to work to be able to live. Yes, a large percentage of American mothers are either single or low-income or both. But you don't have to be an investment banker making million-dollar annual bonuses to support a stay-at-home spouse, either. Especially if you don't live in a major coastal metropolitan area. You *do* have to make some financial sacrifies as a family, sacrifies I think many middle-class people in the New York Times demographic are loath to make.

3. However, I personally have a strong opinion, based on my life experience, that no able adult should sacrifice her financial independence for the sake of family. Divorce is common. Death, happily less so, but it does occur. In divorce, a woman's standard of living generally (still, even a working woman) declines until/unless she remarries. A man's standard of living stays the same or rises, even if he pays child support, even if he remarries. (Yes, you can probably think of exceptions. I can too. They're exceptions.) I don't want to ever be in the position of being unable to support myself and my children at a basic civilized level all by myself if I have to.

4. Would I stay at home with my child(ren) if I could? Maybe. Part time. Some of this is temperament. I like small children, but I don't find herding them all day to be the most fulfilling thing I have ever done. It's harder work than most jobs I have held, and the fact that nobody hands me a check at the end of the day is grating. (I know, in an agreed-upon partnership, all money being earned belongs to the family as a whole. Emotionally, for me, if I'm working that hard I want cash in my hand.) On the other hand I do wish I had more time with my daughter, and I feel it would be better for her not to be in full-time group day care.

5. Would my husband stay home with his child(ren) if he could? Yes, if. He likes the work of taking care of children much more than I do (even though, to my critical eye, he is less conscientious. Okay, he does make sure Casper's teeth get brushed; I can't even brush my own regularly enough. We are differently conscientious. I certainly clean the house more than he does, though. I digress.) He'd have some obstacles, I think, in the social adjustment to being a full-time stay at home father. He's come a long way since we discovered I was pregnant with Casper and his first reaction was, "Well, I'l leave school and get a job and support you," but what would his father say? Would he really be willing to leave his career and face the incredible hurdles of getting back into it in 5 years if he wanted to go back?

Clearly, I should have been the engineer, and mr. flea should have dabbled in the humanities PhD ocean and then changed to the oh-so-lucrative field of library work. Whoops.