I hope everyone enjoyed a nice Father's Day. Since the sun has come out and the weather has been warmer, it has been easier for me to miss Dad in a more positive way. This seems appropriate, since Dad always cherished the sunshine and a lot of my favorite memories with him took place on sunny days. Still, I wasn't sure how I would handle Father's Day when it arrived. Last year, I bonked in my Father's Day 10k, and after I wrote about it here, Dad sent me a nice message about not getting discouraged. I was disappointed that I'd be unable to run in the 10k this year because that would have been a great way to commemorate my dad and the ways he has influenced me. Though 6.2 miles is my favorite race distance, that is just too far these days. Instead, I tried to find different ways to commemorate Dad.
In preparation for Father's Day, I put together a package of items and sent them to my good friend Krista. She took her girls to Dad's niche on Father's Day and sent me pictures of the visit.
Krista put my card, a livestrong bracelet, and a copy of the CD Aunt Carrie made for Dad's Lompoc Memorial in the potted flower she took to set on the ground. (I should have known she would find one that matched everything else perfectly!) I had also made a small bouquet of paper flowers to put in the vase on Dad's niche. On the flowers, I included a few ultrasound images of the baby as well as pictures of what Vickie, Nate, and I have been up to since Dad passed away. I am sorry I was unable to visit the niche myself, and it meant so much to me to have Krista take these things up there. Dad was pleased to see Krista, Jordan, and the girls in his final days, and I know he would have been happy to have these visitors on Father's Day, too. And look how big Evie is getting!
From here in Maryland, I also tried to find little ways to commemorate Dad. I went to the gym when I woke up, and while I was there, I listened to the songs from Aunt Carrie's CD on my iPod. Nobody seemed to notice that I was tearing up as I listened to "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes" while doing my leg presses. : ) When I got home, I read a few random old emails Dad sent me through the years. Every time I read his writing I can hear his voice, and it was funny to be reminded of minor incidents I'd forgotten about. Since the US Open was finishing up, I also made a point of tuning into that for a few hours... but I slept through most of it. Even that felt appropriate, though, since I can remember many a weekend afternoon spent dozing on the couch while Dad watched golf, only to be awoken when he yelled "get UP!" or "GET in the HOLE" after an important shot. I was happy to see Rory McIlroy hold it together after a great week, and I really wished I could hear what Dad would have had to say about his performance both at the Masters and at the US Open.
We also had a nice, low-key Father's Day get together with Billy's family. We were planning to attend a Father's Day Shrimp Feast, but we found out at the last minute that it had been canceled. Instead, Billy, Chuck, Patti, Brian and I went over to Nana and Mr. Dick's house to spend the afternoon with the DePriest side of the family. We ordered Italian take-out, so I likely ended up eating better than I would have at the Shrimp Feast. I also had Patti take a picture of me and Billy since I don't have any pictures of the two of us since I've been pregnant.
It seems a little less noticeable here, but my belly has finally gotten big enough that strangers seem to recognize that I'm pregnant. I'm right around 5 months along now, and I've been feeling much better lately than I was feeling for the first four. I haven't had to take my nausea medication for several weeks, I've been sleeping better, and though I still don't have much of an appetite, I've been able to eat better. Now that Billy and I can both feel the baby move, the pregnancy seems a lot more real, and we've been trying to tackle the projects we need to get done before she arrives. Last week I repainted the guest bedroom in "minted lemon," but the name is a little misleading; I'd describe it as a pale sage green. Now we are getting ready to start figuring out which "stuff" we need to have for the baby, trying to decide which childbirth classes to take, and making sure we know which questions we want to ask on Thursday's tour of the maternity facility at the hospital where I'll deliver.
This year, Father's Day helped me to spend some time focusing on how important my dad has been to me, and it also gave me a chance to appreciate the other people in my life who have helped me cope with losing him. Since January, several people have expressed a similar sentiment to me-- that you don't ever get over the loss of someone you love, but that in time, you begin to get used to the idea of living without them. It still breaks my heart that there are so many experiences yet to come that I won't get to share with my Dad, but I feel encouraged that I'll continue to be able to find ways to remember the influence he has had on my life as I move forward.
("Morning Has Broken" is an old hymn that Cat Stephens popularized in the 70s. Dad asked us to play it at his memorial, but I didn't. I hit the wrong button on his iPhone, so I played "Father and Son" instead, which is considerably more depressing but ironically still fairly appropriate for a memorial. Sorry, Dad. I didn't even know I'd done it until I played back the video. The mistake was an inadvertent one, but is perhaps appropriate because morning had not yet broken for me in March.)
I have been reading Mama, PhD, the book whose title I borrowed for my pregnancy announcement post. In the book, many women write about various struggles they have encountered in trying to balance the desire to be a mother with the desire to be an academic. The problem that keeps showing up from different women, in different disciplines, is that academia expects its members to behave as if they are disembodied minds which focus solely on their work. I have also found that the expectations of academia suggest the “best” academics are wholly absorbed in their intellectual work, unhindered by the presence of their bodies, and not distracted by the influences of everyday life. Every graduate student, I imagine, has heard some variation of the phrase "You're in graduate school; you're not allowed to have a life" from a professor at some point. It seems pretty obvious to me that this results from the discipline’s predominantly male past, and Cather’s The Professor’s House demonstrates one example of what this looks like. The professor has an isolated study in his home where he performs his work, while his wife cares for his growing daughters in the house below. He engages with them during prescribed times every week, but for the most part, his wife is responsible for keeping the family and the home running. He ignores hunger and cold because venturing out of his study to eat or get warm leaves him susceptible to familial distractions. He even remembers fondly that his favorite daughter sat outside his office when she was 8, waiting for him to finish his work before she told him she had been stung by a bee.
Since I began graduate school, I have been pressing up against the limits of the unreasonable expectation that academics should prioritize their work even at the expense of other aspects of their lives. My work has been a top priority for me these past three years, but it has not been my only priority. I am happily married, my husband and I are currently unwilling to move away from the house we own, and though I have good friends in my program, I insist on trying to maintain relationships outside my academic life. With one exception, I managed to schedule my classes each term so that I’d never have to be away from my husband more than two nights a week. I have carefully selected as mentors those professors who care about me as a whole person, and I often disregard the opinions of those who suggest I should devote even more of my time or energy to my academics. I know myself, and I know that if all I did was school, I’d burn extra bright for a short period of time before burning out. Attempting to maintain a balanced life helps me to keep enough fuel in my various fires for them to burn at a more sustainable rate.
So far, I have been largely successful in managing the work/home balance, if only because those in my domestic life are so supportive of my academic priorities. I love Billy more today than I did when I began graduate school. The patience and support he has shown for my dedication to my work has better revealed to me what an excellent man and husband he is. I almost always feel like a good academic, and I usually feel like a good wife. But I realize, and I worry, that choosing to have the baby could upset this balance and leave me feeling like I am not a good wife, mother, or academic. The traditional expectations for these three roles are mutually exclusive in a variety of ways. The women who’ve written in the Mama, PhD anthology suggest this fear is not an unreasonable or unusual one.
This anxiety makes me reflect on the story that allowed me to give myself permission to have the baby as a graduate student. That story is Mary Austin’s “The Walking Woman,” in which the title character shares her tales of living, loving, and mothering in the desert with the short story’s narrator. After talking with the Walking Woman, the narrator concludes that there are three things a woman needs, and if she has them, she can live without anything else. These three things are “work—as I had believed; love—as the Walking Woman had proved it; a child—as you subscribe to it” (261). For the Walking Woman, these three things are tied together and each is enriched by the others. I already know that work and love are richer when they inform one another; I have undoubtedly been a better thinker, writer, worker and teacher since Billy and I have been together. Thus, when the story suggests the inclusion of a baby can strengthen this dual bond into a triangular one, it caught my attention. After drawing this conclusion about work, love, and a child, the narrator elaborates carefully, “a child; any way you get it, a child is good to have, say nature and the Walking Woman; to have it and not wait upon a proper concurrence of so many decorations that the event may not come at all” (262). I knew before I read this story that having the baby would enhance my life—that is why I wanted the baby to begin with. But nothing had yet suggested to me that having the baby could enhance my work. This story did this, and at the same time, it warned me against waiting for the absolutely perfect circumstances to introduce the baby because those circumstances might never occur. I know it might seem strange to people who don’t have the relationship with books that I do, but this story gave me the confidence to make the decision that I had been wanting to make about having a baby and to trust that I’d be able to work out the remaining details as I went.
Now that I’ve conceived the baby, and I’m trying to imagine how I can simultaneously occupy the roles of wife, mother, and academic, the story strikes a different chord with me. For the first time, it stands out to me that the Walking Woman walks. I’ve often written here about how my running habit informs and influences my academic pursuits. I absolutely believe that I have been a better graduate student because I have been a distance runner. This past semester was difficult for me for quite a few reasons, but being unable to run has made it even more so. This may seem trivial in comparison to the other obstacles I was facing, but for me, being unable to run has forced me to figure out how to continue moving forward without the sense of personal satisfaction I get from running. The irony here, of course, is that pregnancy has turned me from a runner into a walking woman. For a few months I was doing what I’ve been calling wogging—alternating between walking and jogging—but in recent weeks I have been walking almost exclusively. And I don’t hate it anymore. It doesn’t feel like enough exercise, so I’ve joined a gym to supplement the walking with anaerobic exercise, but I’m beginning to learn to appreciate the slower pace of all these activities and the different view of things they give me.
As I continue to adjust to a different exercise regimen, I wonder if I can learn to adjust my expectations for myself as an academic in a similar way. In grad school and in distance running, I’ve pushed myself to the limit with single-minded devotion, exhausted myself, and gained satisfaction from proving that I am capable of achieving success. So I wonder what walking in my work might look like, and whether I will find that covering the same ground at a slower pace reveals my surroundings to me in a different way. I hope the baby can help me redefine what it means to be successful in my work and in my life as a whole rather than making me feel like I'm failing to live up to my earlier expectations. “The Walking Woman” suggests this is possible. The narrator also says of the Walking Woman, “she had walked off all sense of society-made values, and, knowing the best when the best came to her, was able to take it” (261). I don’t know what “success” looks like when one is simultaneously attempting to be a wife, mother, and academic. I know it will not look like the disembodied, focused mind that academia expects of its thinkers—but if I’d wanted that life for myself, I never would have gotten married or pregnant in the first place. I hope that, as I move forward in this balancing act, I can learn to walk off academia’s unreasonable expectations and values and walk into a better understanding of which measurements of success work for me.
I realize that the balancing act is always going to be a struggle, but I feel obligated to attempt it for myself and for my baby. It’s a little girl in there, after all. If I want to bring her up to believe that she’s capable of balancing her various interests, it will be important for me to learn to do the same. I hope I can remind myself that how I feel about what I’m doing is much more important than how anyone at school feels about it. In this way, I hope, I can know “the best” when it comes to me and be able to “take it” as it is, rather than getting discouraged when I fail to live up to academia’s expectations. Whether academia is willing to make room for me, with my own priorities, remains to be seen—but that is outside my own control. I want my daughter to believe she is successful when she has met her own standards of success, and I don’t want her to feel inadequate just because she may fail to live up to outdated, discriminatory, and unhealthy expectations of accomplishment. I hope that as I go, I can teach myself to do the same.
(I'm citing the version of Mary Austin's "The Walking Woman" that appears in this collection, but you can read the entire story online here. And you should. It's so good.)
I've just returned from California. There are authors who know California the way I know California. One of them is Joan Didion. She begins "Notes from a Native Daughter" by suggesting that people from the East "have been to Los Angeles or San Francisco, have driven through a giant redwood and have seen the Pacific glazed by the afternoon sun off Big Sur, and they naturally tend to believe that they have in fact been to California. They have not been, and they probably never will be, for it is a longer and in many ways a more difficult trip than they might want to undertake, one of those trips on which the destination flickers chimerically on the horizon, ever receding, ever diminishing. I happen to know about that trip because I come from California, come from a family, or a congeries of families, that has always been in the Sacramento Valley" (110-111).
My family has not always been in the Lompoc Valley, but it feels to me like I have. And though I never lived there, this feels to me like the place where I grew up. I recognize the smells. I know how to pronounce the Spanish names even though I don't speak Spanish. I still visit the same places there that I have visited since I was born.
This time around, I went to California to attend my dad's hometown memorial service, hosted by my grandparents and my Lompoc relatives. First, we stood quietly as they placed a portion of Dad's ashes in a niche at the Lompoc Cemetery. Vickie took this photo, which shows the view looking out from the memorial wall, across the Lompoc Valley.
I loved having the chance to talk to the people who came. I only recognized a handful of them, but I spent the day hearing "I haven't seen you since you were...." various heights below waist level. I got to meet people whose names I've heard my whole life. I got to hear new stories about when my dad was a kid, when I was a kid, and when my grandparents were kids. I got to see my dad's whole family- his parents, his aunts, my aunts and uncles, and every one of my cousins. Everyone congratulated me on my pregnancy and told me how proud they are of my brother, my sister, and me. (Thanks! I am too.) The sun was shining and the wind was howling, so it felt like an appropriate Lompoc day. I missed Dad, but I missed him in a positive way, not a depressed way. I still feel his absence all the time, but on that day, it felt more like he was just off talking to someone else the whole time. That's the closest I've come to feeling his "presence" since he passed away.
Vickie and I spent the first few days at my grandparent's house. They let me sleep in. Mimi made me breakfast and the same hot chocolate with whole milk and Nestle quick she's made me my whole life. Papa told me stories and made me laugh. After such a rigorous couple of weeks, it felt great to sit on their couch with a full belly while I watched the French Open and to sit at the counter chatting with them about what's been going on around Lompoc.
On Sunday, we headed about an hour south to Santa Barbara with Mom to visit Gramma Kingston. This was the first visit Vickie, Nate, and I have made to her new room in her retirement community, so it was nice to see her settled comfortably in a different place.
After chatting with her for a while in her room, we headed to the Montecito Country Club for dinner. They used to live only a few blocks down the street from "the Club," so we spent a lot of time there as kids. (I spent most of my time at the pool.) My uncle and cousin met us for dinner, so we got to hear what everyone has been up to in Santa Barbara. Vickie took this photo of the view from the Club, overlooking the ocean, which is the same view my mom had growing up. Tough life!
After chatting with Gramma again on Monday morning, and watching some of Andy Murray's match, Nate, Vickie, Mom, and I headed to LA to Dodger Stadium. Vickie and I had never been before, and Nate apparently has but doesn't remember it. As far as I know, this is the only stadium that still serves chocolate malts. Since I consumed at least one chocolate malt at every Oakland A's game I ever attended, the first thing I did was buy one. It didn't have quite the right consistency, but it still came with a wooden spoon, so it was nostalgic nonetheless. Vickie got us great seats, it was a fun game to watch, and the weather was absolutely perfect. We spent a lot of time watching baseball when we were a young family, so even though this was the wrong team, it felt great to be at a game in California with Mom, Nate, and Vickie. The stadium felt very 60s to me because there's cement everywhere (it was built around the same time as the Oakland Coliseum I grew up in), and its location inside Chavez Ravine gave it a cool feel. Nate and I also noticed that there was a higher frequency of plastic surgery among attendees than we are used to seeing elsewhere. I'm sorry to have to give the famous "Dodger Dog" a thumbs down, even though they were only $1 that night. Mom took a photo of us at the game, decked out in our Lompoc Braves swag, which conveniently helped us blend in with all the Dodger blue.
Another highlight of the trip was getting to see my cousin Dalton's high school baseball team compete in two playoff games. Dalton is finishing up his senior season at Lompoc High School and is headed to Fresno State next year in hopes of walking on to their baseball team. Last time I saw him play he was about 12, so it was fun to see that he is, as my grandfather says "a good little ball player." The letter Dad left us to read after he passed away specifically instructed us to "go watch Dalton play baseball," so it also felt fitting that the Lompoc Braves had a home quarterfinal playoff game on the day of Dad's memorial. In that game, I got to watch what were described in the next day's paper as "Chambers' heroics." Late in the game, Dalton made an excellent catch in right field and threw the ball home to complete a double play that prevented a run from scoring. In the bottom of the 7th (the last inning in high school baseball), his team tied the game with two outs, after which Dalton ended the game by hitting a walk-off single that scored the winning run. That advanced the Braves to the semi-final game, in which Dalton ended the opposing pitcher's no hitter with an excellent bunt that scored the go-ahead run, which turned out to be the winning one.
Dalton and the Braves are preparing for the CIF championship game as a type, so we'll be cheering him online from the opposite coast. I hope we'll get to see Dalton play plenty more baseball, and I will enjoy getting to bring Billy next time around.
After our trip to Santa Barbara, Dodger Stadium, and Dalton's game outside LA, Nate and I returned to Lompoc to hang out at our Aunt Carrie's until Dalton's graduation. Again, I really enjoyed having the chance to relax and spend a few lazy days with the family. I spent another morning watching tennis at Mimi and Papa's and caught up on my reality TV with Nate, Carrie, and my Uncle Steve. It's always hard for me to transition from the super-busy end of semester routine into the more laid-back summer routine-- I always feel like I should be doing something-- but being in a different place with plenty of family helped me make that transition smoothly. While in Lompoc, I slept well and ate well, and aside from missing Billy and Oscar, I had nothing to complain about.
It was fun to be with the family for Dalton's graduation. Since I haven't gotten to share too many of Dalton and Mackenzee's growing up milestones in person, I was glad to be there for his graduation. It was funny to think that their parents, my Uncle Craig and Aunt Kim, were around my age now when I spent the most time in Lompoc. I also enjoyed hearing about Kenz's freshman year, especially since she's the same age I was when Nate was a senior. I forgot to count how many of us were in the stands to cheer Dalton on, but I find it hard to believe that any single graduate had a larger fan section. (I can think of at least 21 people in the seats we saved for ourselves.) At LHS the boys and girls sit on opposite sides of the aisle and walk out in pairs. Below are photos of D making his entrance, Mimi and Papa watching proudly, and D giving his partner a piggy back ride off the stage after they accepted their diplomas. (Note to self: Bring the bigger camera lens next time.)
I can tell Dalton has a great head on his shoulders, and I have such fond memories of finishing high school and heading to college that I can't wait to see what the future holds in store for him!
My whole trip back was relaxing, refreshing, and restorative. I know Dad would have been so pleased with all the work his family put into planning the memorial, and he would have been happy to see all the people who turned out to pay their respects. Mostly, though, I think he would have been happy about the amount of time we got to spend together doing quintessentially Chambers family types of things. I miss my dad terribly, but I know he wouldn't have wanted me to lapse into depression or to think of him with sadness as a result of his death. He would have wanted me to continue doing the things he liked to do with the people we both love, so it was great to have a chance to do that.
I don't generally consider myself a Californian, even though I was born there and lived there until I was 10. But when I go back to Lompoc and Santa Barbara, I feel like I came from California. And not the California that I see in travel commercials or celebrity tabloids-- the California where people know my family history, where the wind blows, and where the air smells sweet and salty. That California is less of a geographic place and more of a "place of the mind," as Joan Didion describes it. I feel fortunate that even though my dad and I each moved away from home, this is still a place I can go. And while I was there, one of Dad's (and Vickie's) favorite songs was on repeat in my head: Madonna's "This Used to be My Playground."
Don't hold on to the past? That's too much to ask, indeed. Thank you to Mimi, Papa, Carrie, Steve, Kim, Craig, Dana, Nate, Vickie, Mom, Christine, Phillip, Dalton, Mackenzee, Gramma Kingston, Bob, and Blake for helping me to enjoy my trip, and to Billy and Oscar for sparing me for the week even though they couldn't join us.
("Notes from a Native Daughter" is the lead essay in the "Seven Places of the Mind" section of Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem. I recommend it if you're looking for a good summertime read, especially if you share my nostalgia for California or my appreciation for thoughtful memoir. I even mean this is a good book for regular people, not just literary studies people, since it has been recently brought to my attention that nobody really understands what I mean when I talk about books. : ) )
