When the Fish Come

Sometimes in my academic career it feels like I am never going to get to another productive period.  I feel like I am out of ideas and I can't make any progress.  When I emailed my advisor in early June to say I was having trouble getting much done, he reassured me and gave me a pep talk along the lines of the scene I always return to from The Old Man and the Sea: the one where Santiago reminds himself that he'd rather be exact than lucky.  So I went back and read that again.

Then the sun was brighter and the glare came on the water and then, as it rose clear, the flat sea sent it back at his eyes so that it hurt sharply and he rowed without looking into it.  He looked down into the water and watched the lines that went straight down into the dark of the water.  He kept them straighter than anyone did, so that at each level in the darkness of the stream there would be a bait waiting exactly where he wished it to be for any fish that swam there.  Others let them drift with the current and sometimes they were at sixty fathoms when the fishermen thought they were at a hundred.

          But, he thought, I keep them with precision.  Only I have no luck any more.  But who knows?  Maybe today.  Every day is a new day.  It is better to be lucky.  But I would rather be exact.  Then when luck comes you are ready.

         The sun was two hours higher now and it did not hurt his eyes so much to look into the east.    

Okay, I thought.  Set the lines right.  Turn your back to the sun when it hurts your eyes.  Soon it will not hurt your eyes so much.  And then maybe some fish will come.

So Billy and I talked about how we could try to set my lines more precisely.  We rearranged our schedules slightly to help me make the most of the time Nora spends at school.  He took over even more household responsibilities.  I started getting up to work when I woke up at 4am instead of trying to go back to sleep while my mind ran in circles.  I began drinking ice coffee in the afternoons.  And slowly, I started getting some work done.  Once I started getting some work done, it was easier to get more work done.  Although I didn't get done as much as I'd hoped, I have managed to get the most important things done, so I wanted to take a minute to document those things here.  This summer has been a success because I have:

-completed "enough reading and research" for my dissertation prospectus (according to my advisor)
-written and submitted the first draft of my prospectus (my first written assignment since giving birth to Nora!)
-revised the first draft to address my advisor's initial critiques
-submitted the second and much more polished draft of my prospectus
-recruited two new professors to serve on my dissertation committee who are enthusiastic about my project and have backgrounds in feminism, archive research, and modernist women's writers
-came up with a plan for passing the translation exam in order to satisfy the foreign language requirement that is currently preventing me from advancing to candidacy
-worked 10 hours a week on the Katherine Anne Porter project
-set up my syllabus and lesson plans for my fall teaching assignment

Phew.  It's been busy.  I've also managed to enjoy some fun with family and friends along the way.  Here's to hoping I'm getting closer to achieving a sustainable work/life balance!!

The Silencing of Women's Voices

One of the main focuses of my academic work is the way women's voices from the American Modernist period have been silenced.  There are a lot of ways this happens to female writers: the restraints they're working under prevent them from producing work, they have difficulty finding reputable and/or profitable avenues in which to publish the work they do produce, the work they do publish is evaluated by gender-biased standards and is sometimes given limited printing runs as a result... the list goes on and on.

Perhaps most troubling for me are the examples of women who were widely published and well-respected during their lifetimes but who have largely fallen out of print and out of consideration in the intervening years.  These are the women who somehow managed to overcome all the obstacles I named above, who found ways to speak and to be heard, but who could not prevent their words from being subsequently erased.

I can (and will eventually have to) write a lot of words about this silencing and erasure.  But I thought some of you who read along with me here might be interested in what it looks like, materially, to do this type of work.

Several weeks ago I had to request a copy of Kay Boyle's My Next Bride through interlibrary loan because we do not have it in our own holdings at UMd.  It arrived in a box because the book itself-- a first edition printed in 1934-- was falling apart.  I supported it with a pillow the entire time I read it and still could not keep it from falling apart in my hands.

Today, I went to pick up a copy of Mary Hunter Austin's A Woman of Genius.  It was then that I realized we had exactly two-- TWO-- books on the shelves that are written by or specifically about Austin.  In a library that has four bookcases, with six or seven shelves each, shelves devoted to William Faulkner.

I realize that we may have several more books about Austin in the holdings that have been checked out, but as you can see, there was no big gap on the shelf from their absence.  This is one of the most prolific female American writers of the 20th Century, and she has been all but forgotten for everything she published except for The Land of Little Rain.  For me, seeing these two books alone on this shelf felt like getting punched in the gut.

But perhaps I should accept it, instead, as a kick in the ass.  Due to some changes in my advisor's travel schedule, I have 4 days to write the first draft of my prospectus, start to finish.  In other words, I have until Monday to figure out how to articulate what specific research project my dissertation will undertake, how it relates to the current scholarship in my field, and how it will significantly improve upon that scholarship.  Here goes nothing.

Breastfeeding Through the Minefield

Updated 6/21

I have some (okay, a lot of) things I want to say about breastfeeding.  In the original version of this post, I said: "The best way I can think to express them is to borrow the conceptual framework Annette Kolodny uses in her powerful and influential 1980 essay, "Dancing Through the Minefield" because for me, trying to reach one year of exclusively breastfeeding with my daughter felt like I was attempting to navigate a large field that was full of hidden land mines that might detonate at any moment."  But after an interesting conversation on facebook about the undertones of antagonism this framing device might suggest, I've decided to modify it to better articulate what I mean.

Perhaps, rather than suggesting breastfeeding is like navigating a minefield, it is more accurate to say it can feel like traveling a path that already has some obstacles of its own, but which is made much more treacherous by hidden mines that are planted along it.  The mine image still resonates with me because, if one of these mines detonates on you, there is no way to predict how much it will derail your progress.  Depending on how negatively these obstacles and mines impacted you, you might decide to take another path even if you were initially committed to the breastfeeding path.

I want to explain what I know about this breastfeeding path, how I navigated it, and how I try to help other women do the same.  So I am going to do those things here, as directly and as best I can.  I am not going to address the specifics of why breastfeeding is beneficial for mom and baby-- neither in terms of nutrition or nurturing-- because a google search would be more productive toward those ends.  If you are interested in reading this post, please keep in mind that it takes for granted my basic attitudes about breastmilk and baby formula, which are these:  Breastmilk provides babies with precisely the nourishment they need.  Baby formula meets many of a baby's most fundamental nutritional needs, though it does not have all the nutritional benefits of breastmilk.

I believe that the best thing a woman can do to meet her breastfeeding goals is to familiarize herself with the breastfeeding path, its obstacles, and the mines she might encounter along it.  And I believe that people who want to help women reach their breastfeeding goals can best do this by helping them navigate these obstacles.  We can help moms overcome the obstacles, show moms what the mines are and where they are likely to be encountered, help moms to deactivate them, and avoid setting additional mines for moms to navigate around.  Before I elaborate a bit on those beliefs, I want to describe, in as concise a way as possible, what I recognize as some of the obstacles that seem to be inherent to the path as well as what are, in my opinion, the most common among the many land mines one might encounter on this path.

In this framework, it is helpful for me to think of the first three obstacles on the breastfeeding path as precisely that-- obstacles.  This is because they are not actively "set" by anyone, as the mines are, though they may be exacerbated by the mines.  These obstacles are some of the complications of breastfeeding itself, and most of them come at the beginning-- as if a woman has to climb a steep hill immediately upon starting on this path.

Obstacle: The demands breastfeeding puts upon a woman's body
Breastfeeding is physically draining, especially in those first few weeks when the baby is likely to nurse every 1-2 hours (sometimes for an hour or more at a time).  It depletes a woman's body unlike anything else she will ever do-- even more so than pregnancy.  It also requires that she wake up frequently in the night to feed, which interrupts her sleep, further exhausting her physically.  I'd wager to say every mother faces this obstacle, and how much it derails her depends on how much support she has.

Obstacle: The demands breastfeeding puts on a woman's time
Breastfeeding takes a long time.  When Nora was a newborn, I once calculated that I spent over 6 of the 24 hours in one day nursing her.  Even once the child gets older and spends less time nursing, the demands are significant.  Mothers who must rely on pumping breastmilk must also devote considerable time to that endeavor.  Again, I think every mother must grapple with this obstacle, and whether she can overcome it depends on how much freedom and/or flexibility she has with her time.

Obstacle: Breastfeeding complications
There are quite a few "naturally occuring" obstacles to breastfeeding which can affect baby and mom.  These include, but are not limited to: tongue tie, shallow latch, oversupply, undersupply, inverted nipples, nipple soreness, thrush, plugged ducts, mastitis, and milk blisters.  These obstacles are different for every woman, and some of them can pop up at any time.  But in general, how much information the mother has about them when they strike has a large impact on whether she can overcome them.

So that brings us to the mines a woman may encounter along the breastfeeding path, by which I mean social, medical, cultural, and political factors that interfere with a woman's ability to successfully breastfeed her child.  Some of these are set intentionally, and some unintentionally.  Some were set long in the past and some continue to be set today.  But they can all be damaging enough to cause a woman to choose a different path for feeding her child.

Mine: Misconceptions about what to expect from breastfeeding
Partly because Americans have relied heavily on formula in the past, there are many widespread misconceptions about how the breastfeeding relationship should develop and how breastfed infants should behave.  When this mine detonates, women might be told their milk did not come in soon enough, they are not producing enough milk, their child is not getting enough milk, their child is feeding too frequently, their child is not gaining enough weight, and so on, even if none of these things are true, simply because many people do not know what to expect.

Mine: Obstetric Practices
There are many obstetric practices that can help save the lives of women and babies in extreme cases but which also reduce a woman's chances of successfully breastfeeding her child.  These research findings are sometimes controversial, but there have been studies which show that induced labor, the administration of certain medications to the mother during birth, cesarean section, delay in the first opportunity to breastfeed, and separation of mothers and babies in the immediate postpartum period decrease a woman's chances for breastfeeding success.  Not all healthcare providers educate their patients about these risk factors, so many women agree to these procedures in less severe cases with no idea that they might impact their breastfeeding outcomes.  When this mine detonates, it can stack the cards against the mother from the beginning, making it more difficult for her to reach her breastfeeding goals in the long run.

Mine: Patriarchal attitudes about women's bodies
I'm happy to go into more detail on this in individual conversation, but in brief, I will simply say that it serves the goals of male-dominated structures of power to sexualize the female body.  The power of patriarchy is so strong in our country that men and women alike often think that baring the breast for the purpose of nursing is "inappropriate," "weird," "disgusting," "pornographic," etc, even though nursing seems to be the primary biological/evolutionary function of the breast.  When this mine detonates, it can make women feel ashamed about using their bodies to nourish their children in public but also within their own homes.  It can also cause them to stop breastfeeding before they are ready if they are told their child is "too old" to be at the breast.

Mine: The pushing of baby formula
The World Health Organization has established a code that formula manufacturers are supposed to follow, which forbids them from doing anything I would describe as "pushing" formula on women.  But they don't always follow it.  They're trying to sell baby formula, so they find ways to make it seem desirable to women.  There are other ways that formula is pushed on moms, too.  I've read about and spoken to mothers who suggest they have been coaxed against their wishes into giving formula by OBs, pediatricians, administrators of social programs, and family members.  The list goes on.  When this mine detonates, it can inhibit breastfeeding success by upsetting the mother's breastmilk supply, perpetuating misconceptions about breastfeeding, and making women feel like the only way they can properly nourish their child is by providing baby formula.

Mine: The "Breast is Best" Campaign and other attitudes that position mothers in a hierarchy
I would like to believe the "Breast is Best" phrase was supposed to be an easy-to-remember reminder that breastmilk has nutritional advantages baby formula does not.  I can see how that would be useful given that in years past, a lot of women were taught to believe their breastmilk was nutritionally insufficient.  But I think the inclusion of the word "best" in this phrase is highly problematic.  When people to go around saying "breast is best," they erase all the many complexities of the mother/child breastfeeding relationship.  "Breast is best" ignores the situations in which breastfeeding might not be best for the mother, and by implying that breastfeeding is always best, the slogan creates counterproductive competition between mothers.  By positioning women who breastfeed as those who give their children the "best," it implies that women who use formula in any capacity must be inferior as mothers because they are not giving their children the "best."  In my opinion, that's just plain wrong.  When this mine detonates, it alienates would-be breastfeeders from the very women who could help them improve their chances of breastfeeding success.

Mine: Judgemental breastfeeding advocates
Unfortunately, there are a lot of lactation consultants and breastfeeders who engage in active shaming of women who do not exclusively breastfeed and/or do not know as much as they do about breastfeeding.  This upsets me for a lot of reasons, but most fundamentally, it is upsetting because shaming the mothers ignores the fact that they are not responsible for all the mines I've described above.  Further, shaming others is not only wrong; it is also not the way to get anything positive accomplished.  When the shame mine detonates, it can make a woman who needed more help or information about breastfeeding feel like the people who are supposed to help her do not have her best interest at heart.  It can make her feel like she is being persecuted by "lactation nazis" who do not understand her struggles, who judge her as a bad mother based on this single factor, and/or who think they are superior mothers or people just because they were able to breastfeed more successfully.  I imagine the detonation of this mine is painful at the deepest level and can see why it would turn mothers away from the idea of breastfeeding entirely.  If a woman wants to breastfeed but is unable to do it for any variety of reasons, she likely experiences feelings of disappointment, frustration, sadness, guilt, and/or insecurity on her own.  So to have someone add insult to her injury, even when the mom tried her best with the information she had, would give her good reason to never want to speak to a "breastfeeding advocate" again.

Believe it or not, that is the nutshell version of what I have learned and figured out about breastfeeding since 2011.  As you might already realize, part of the reason I have access to all of this information is because my socioeconomic and educational backgrounds afford me privileges that the vast majority of Americans do not have.  Breastfeeding success rates among different demographics in our country demonstrate that, like most types of success in the US, certain people of privilege have a much easier time accessing the most useful information and making use of it.  I am, of course, happy to talk to people in more depth about any of these ideas on an individual basis.  But now that I've outlined some of the most common obstacles and mines women encounter in this path, I want to explain what I did to navigate around them and what I try to do to in helping other women do the same.  My hope, I guess, is that people will take what they can use from my experience to help them reach their own breastfeeding goals and/or help empower other women to meet theirs.

What I did to navigate the path
If you want to breastfeed your child, you increase your chances at success by educating yourself about this path before and after the birth of your child.  (As an introductory overview, I recommend Breastfeeding Made Simple: Seven Natural Laws for Nursing Mothers, and as a web resource, I recommend kellymom.com.) I made clear to family and friends from the start that I intended to exclusively breastfeed.  Continuing to learn about breastfeeding after Nora was born allowed me to maximize the luck that came my way and minimize the effects of the mines that detonated on me.  I accepted that I could not expect healthcare providers to give me good information all the time-- whether they are obstetricians, midwives, lactation consultants, or pediatricians-- and I ignored examples of "advice" I felt were ill-informed.  I found one woman I trust who values me as a person and has breastfed successfully, and leaned on her help and support.  My lifelong friend, Krista, also put me in touch with a whole network of women to answer my questions, which helped a lot.  But I found that having even just one woman who knew what I was up against, who treated me like a woman instead of a milk delivery vessel, and wanted me to succeed had a huge impact on my success.  She helped me learn to navigate the minefield for myself.

What I try to do to help other women navigate the path
In fact, Krista has been such a help to me that I largely follow her model of support when trying to help others reach their breastfeeding goals.  I try to let all my pregnant acquaintances know that I'm happy to share my breastfeeding experience and advice with them, and I hope I don't make them feel like I am pushing it.  When friends and family members reach out to me for more information, I explain what worked for me.  I try to pass along the information that was most useful to me about where to look for proper information and what to expect.  I encourage them to get in touch with me at any time if they're having trouble.  I hope to make clear that when they face these obstacles or any of these various mines detonate on them, and they begin experiencing breastfeeding complications, I will be there to share the information I know, help them find answers to questions I can't answer myself, and point them in the direction of additional help and resources when they need more experienced advice.  I also think it's important to tell them they don't have to follow all the "rules" of proper breastfeeding all the time, and I try to help them figure out which shortcuts might help make breastfeeding more sustainable given their particular struggles.  If you're looking for help with reaching your breastfeeding goals, please let me know.

In every conversation I have about breastfeeding, I try to keep the following things in mind-- because these are the things I wish some people had been more cognizant of when they have discussed it with me.
-Every woman has a right to choose whether to breastfeed, how much to breastfeed, and how long to breastfeed.  While I can encourage what I think are healthy choices by sharing what I know about the advantages of nursing, especially with those people who are closest to me, I do not have a right to try to push my values on anyone else.
-As such, I feel it is my job to help women meet their own breastfeeding goals, not the ones I might set for them.
-Breastfeeding can be very difficult, especially at first.  The more encouragement and support a woman gets, the more likely she is to get over that initial hump and into the zone where it is beneficial and rewarding for everyone involved.
-Mothers are not the ones responsible for any of the obstacles or mines I described above, so they are not to blame for the vast majority of factors that complicate breastfeeding attempts in this country.  I try to make sure they know it's not their fault when trouble arises.
-Practices that empower women help them and their babies.  Practices that disempower women, even if they are done under the auspices of "helping" the child, often end up failing to benefit the child in the end.   The better physical and emotional shape a woman is in, the better off her baby will be.
-Shaming women will not lead to an increase in breastfeeding rates.  It contributes to a mother's feelings of alienation, which decreases her likelihood to breastfeed successfully.
-Everyone experiences these obstacles and the detonation of the breastfeeding mines in different ways.  Only the mother attempting to navigate the path can decide when it would be best for her to choose another path, whether that might mean introducing baby formula or switching to entirely.  I have, instead, an obligation to support the women I know in their efforts to feed their children as best they can.  And sometimes that means reminding a mother that any amount of breastfeeding she is able to do is beneficial to her baby-- whether that is nursing for two sessions, two days, two weeks, two months, or two years.  At other times, it might mean reminding them that there are plenty of other ways to nurture infants.

So there you go.  Everything Liz has wanted to say about breastfeeding, in 3,000 words or less.  I recognize that my form of activism only really works on women who want to breastfeed already.  But I firmly believe that by empowering those women, we will make breastfeeding more appealing to other moms, too.  Learn about the path, the obstacles, and the mines so you can best navigate the journey.  Help other women do the same.  And do your best to avoid setting additional mines that may inhibit their progress.

Literary Words of Wisdom: Adrienne Rich

Sometimes it's best to just let the genius speak for herself.  From Adrienne Rich's ground breaking 1976 study, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution:

"The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities.  For a mother, this means more than contending with the reductive images of females in children's books, movies, television, the schoolroom.  It means that the mother herself is trying to expand the limits of her life.  To refuse to be a victim: and then to go on from there.

Only when we can wish imaginatively and courageously for ourselves can we wish unfetteredly for our daughters.  But finally, a child is not a wish, nor a product of wishing.  Women's lives-- in all levels of society-- have been lived too long in both depression and fantasy, while our active energies have been trained and absorbed into caring for others.  It is essential, now, to begin breaking that cycle.  Anyone who has read the literature in the obstetrician's waiting-room knows the child-care booklets which, at some point, confess that 'you may get a fit of the blues' and suggest 'having your husband take you to dinner in a French restaurant, or going shopping for a new dress.'  (The fiction that most women have both husbands and money is forever with us.)  But the depressive mother who now and then allows herself a 'vacation' or a 'reward' is merely showing her daughters both that the female condition is depressing, and that there is no real way out.

As daughters we need mothers who want their own freedom and ours.  We need not to be the vessels of another woman's self-denial and frustration.  The quality of the mother's life-- however embattled or unprotected-- is her primary bequest to her daughter, because a woman who can believe in herself, who is a fighter, and who continues to struggle to create livable space around her, is demonstrating to her daughter that these possibilities exist."  (246-247)

So next time I write something like this, please remind me: when all else fails, pick up something by Adrienne Rich.

New Work Opportunities!

Another reason for the lapse in blog posts lately is that we're in a bit of a transition period around here while Billy and I both adjust to exciting new opportunities at work!

Billy was recently named the Science and Operations Center Test Team Lead for the James Webb Space Telescope.  He has been working as a member of this team since he began working at STScI almost exactly five years ago, and in the past few years he has taken on an increasing number of supervisory roles.  He and his team work on making sure the "ground segment" portion of the telescope will work properly-- or, in other words, they test all the computer systems that will control the telescope and make sense of the data it collects.

I think Billy was a little unsure about how the news of his promotion might be received, since most of his coworkers are older than him and have been working on the project longer.  However, it sounds to me like the transition has gone very smoothly.  But since it's my blog, I will speculate for a minute: I would guess nobody who works with Billy on a daily basis could possibly be surprised when smart people put him in charge of more things.  Putting Billy in charge of things is what smart people should do.  And if you are a person who has to do smart things, and someone has to be in charge of them, you want Billy to be that person.  His work ethic came to mind a few weeks ago when my professor was emphasizing of a passage about a bull fighter from Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. He writes, "Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and natural in line.  The others twisted themselves like cork-screws, their elbows raised, and leaned against the flanks of the bull after his horns had passed, to give a faked look of danger.  Afterward, all that was faked turned bad and gave an unpleasant feeling.  Romero's bull-fighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close each time."  Billy keeps an absolute purity of line in everything he does.  This is such a part of him, actually, that he sometimes fails to recognize that other people resort to twisting themselves like cork-screws in their attempts to achieve the effects that he achieves naturally.  But the spectators who get to spend a lot of time around him, like me and his coworkers, can easily see the difference.  I'm very fortunate to have a husband who is so smart, and who works so hard, and is employed by people who continue to foster his excellence.  To say I am proud of him is such an understatement.  I admire him and learn by his example so much every day, that most of all I am happy for him in moments when he is rewarded for being who he is.

For my part, I've picked up a new part time job with the Special Collections department of our library system.  As you may know from my earlier posts, the University of Maryland holds the personal archive of Katherine Anne Porter, one of the authors whose writing figures prominently in my work.  The libraries have received funding from her literary trust to digitize a portion of her personal correspondence.  Eventually, the hope is to secure outside funding so that all of it can be digitized and hosted on a sophisticated online database.  They've hired me to work as the graduate assistant on this project, so I'll put in about ten hours a week.  For the next few months, it will be my job to organize and itemize the letters, prepare them to be shipped out for digitization, check the letters and the digital files for quality and accuracy when they return, and help to get the digital images posted to our library's KAP site.  Thereafter, I'll get to help with helping to create web interest for the project and its contents. For this portion of the project, we'll only be starting with the letters Porter wrote to her family members, which is roughly 5,000 pages of correspondence.

Those of you who are interested in my academic work can already imagine how unbelievable this opportunity is for me.  It will provide me with invaluable access to the Porter collection, a chance to learn more about archival research and digitization, and help me get my foot in the door in the field of Digital Humanities studies.  Since I'm approaching the point where I'll have to nail down the topic of my dissertation, the timing is also perfect.  One of the most thrilling things about archival research, for me, is the likelihood that you can discover a tidbit of information at any given time that will radically transform your understanding of the subject.  The opportunity to spend this much time with the materials and the people who can help me learn how best to make use of them is something I couldn't have even dreamed up if I'd tried.  Once again, someone has agreed to pay me for something I would gladly do for free if time permitted.

A note to future Nora:  I sometimes worry about what you will think when you discover that the universe planted you in this house with these two nerdiest of parents.  This basically ensures that the things you will be wildly passionate about in your life will be perceived as super lame by a large portion of the population.  But I will promise you this: Here, in this house, you will be encouraged to follow whatever paths those wild passions lead you down.  For however long you want.  With the force of our combined nerdiness and passion behind you.  When you look back up, you will be surrounded by people who understand why those wild passions are super interesting and valuable.  And that, little one, is exactly where you deserve to be.

A view of the Katherine Anne Porter Room inside Hornbake Library; or, Where My Nerdy Passions and My Parents' and Husband's Encouragement of Them Has Led Me.

Literary Words of Wisdom: Virginia Woolf

In re-reading A Room of One's Own for my exam, I came across the passage in which Woolf imagines the young woman whose novel she's been reading as a jumping horse.

"At any rate, she was making the attempt.  And as I watched her lengthening out for the test, I saw, but hoped she did not see, the bishops and the deans, the doctors and the professors, the patriarchs and the pedagogues all at her shouting warning and advice.  You can't do this and you shan't do that!  Fellows and scholars only allowed on the grass!  Ladies not admitted without a letter of introduction!  Aspiring and graceful female novelists this way!  So they kept at her like the crowd at a fence on the race-course, and it was her trial to take her fence without looking to right or left.  If you stop to curse you are lost, I said to her; equally, if you stop to laugh.  Hesitate or fumble and you are done for.  Think only of the jump, I implored her, as if I had put the whole of my money on her back, and she went over like a bird. But there was a fence beyond that and a fence beyond that.  Whether she had the staying power I was doubtful, for the clapping and crying were fraying to the nerves.  But she did her best."

Think only of the jump, she says.  Duly noted.

"Mother's Intuition": A Feminist Intervention

I think "mother's intuition" is a made up idea that serves a patriarchal power structure, and I want to explain why.  It's going to get very feminist here for a while, so if that's not your cup of tea, you might want to skip this post.  Conversely, if you're one of those people who frequently tells me they don't understand what the point of literary studies is, or you don't understand what I mean when I say I can apply what I learn in my studies to my everyday life, this might be the perfect post for you to read.  

Last spring I wrote a paper on the role of mothers in George Eliot's Middlemarch.  Doing so required me to do a lot of research into the figure of the idealized “Victorian Mother.”  If we think the idea of the "supermom" sprung up after women joined the workforce, we're wrong.  The societal expectations for mothers have never been higher than they were in Victorian times.  Most Victorian mothers didn't work outside the home, but they were much more likely to die trying to have children, they were expected to have a whole gaggle of kids, they were supposed to care for their children without much (if any) help, and their childcare responsibilities were not supposed to interfere with their ability to keep a perfectly clean and orderly house.  AND-- let's not discount this, either-- they were expected to do all of these things in really, really uncomfortable clothes.

 Carolyn Dever has this excellent book (Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud) in which she examines how and why Victorian fiction frequently depicts mothers as dead or otherwise absent.  What she learned from her research is that the frequency of absent mothers in novels far exceeds the real life statistics of maternal death and abandonment during the period.  Working from this discovery, Dever analyzes how the "absent mother" figures as a vehicle through which the role of the mother becomes idealized.  This idealization of the "angelic" or "perfect" Victorian Mother contributed to the creation of an impossible cultural standard of motherhood to which no living, breathing mother could possibly measure up.  Queen Victoria herself, who had 9 children, was often upheld as an embodiment of the perfect Victorian mother, but her personal correspondence reveals that she actually found motherhood quite difficult.  If the woman with the most privilege struggled to raise a family, imagine what motherhood must have been like for women without her means.

This feminist analysis of the paradox of the idealized Victorian Mother reveals the ways that this socially constructed notion served to limit female power.  On the one hand, the highly patriarchal Victorian culture claimed to celebrate the role of the Mother-- to prize her over all else.  While this would seem to elevate a woman's status, it actually worked in quite the reverse.  Because this standard of motherhood was impossible to achieve in everyday life, the image of the Victorian Mother functioned to bind women to their domestic roles.  The expectations created by the Victorian Mother figure were nearly impossible to meet and literally impossible to exceed.  Female correspondence of the period reveals that feelings of maternal inadequacy were commonplace.  Society limited the power of women by making them feel like their successes were not noteworthy and like their inability to measure up to an impossible ideal proved their incompetence.  Further, attempting to live up to these expectations put these women on a hamster wheel of futility that limited the amount of time, effort, or intellectual energy they could devote to anything else.

So what does this have to do with the idea of “mother’s intuition”?  I believe the widespread belief that mother’s have some kind of psychic connection to their child and can know implicitly what their child needs functions in a similar way.  I’d been told about “a mother’s intuition” so many times that I was waiting for it to kick in.  It didn’t.  When Nora was born, I had no idea what to do with her outside what I read, was told, or figured out through trial and error.  Now that she’s eight months old, I can usually decide out what’s wrong with her almost instantly and quickly mend the problem.  This is because I’ve spent the past 8 months constantly tending to her needs and succeeding and failing in my attempts to perceive her state of mind.  I have so much practice with caring for her that it almost seems to come naturally.  I don’t know she’s hungry because I recognize a special tone in her cry: I know she’s hungry because I know when she ate last, I see that she’s fussing while doing something that normally placates her, and I recognize this scene because it has played out 8-15 times every day since she was born.  As my friend Anne-Marie recently pointed out on facebook, Katherine Anne Porter once wrote “I don't believe in intuition. When you get sudden flashes of perception, it's just the brain working faster than usual. But you've been getting ready to know it for a long time, and when it comes, you feel you've known it always.”  As usual, I think Porter’s right on the money here.

So how did this idea of “mother’s intuition” develop such a strong cultural cache?  I don’t know, but I have a theory.  I don’t believe that women are “naturally” more attuned to their children than men are, but because of the way domestic duties have historically been distributed, women have had to be more attuned to their children.  I imagine mother’s intuition took off as an idea that explained why women seemed to understand their children better than men did.  It serves a patriarchal power structure to suggest that women are “naturally” more attuned to their children: it lets men off the hook for not being attuned to their children and it reinforces the idea that women should be wholly responsible for childrearing.  Additionally, the cultural belief that this intuition is something all “good” mothers naturally have functions as a way of minimizing their own perceptions of the value of their work.  Mothers who develop this knowledge about their child’s needs through round-the-clock hard work are taught to believe that this knowledge is not a product of their hard work but is, rather, something they naturally had.  Women who do not feel like they have this knowledge, or who feel like they don’t have enough of it, are made to feel abnormal and inadequate.  It’s easy to control someone when you are able to convince her that her proficiency at something is not something she has earned, but rather, something she automatically possess.

I fell victim to this myself.  Especially when Nora was colicky, I spent a lot of time beating myself up about the fact that I had no idea what to do to help her.  I thought I should know.  There were plenty of days where I felt wholly inadequate as a mother and even wondered if my shortcomings were responsible for her colic.  I wish I could go back in time and have this conversation about mother’s intuition with myself.  What would I say to myself, or any other mother who feels like she doesn’t have “mother’s intuition”?  I’d say this: Nobody does.  It doesn’t come “naturally,” it comes through hard work.  If you put the time and the work in, you’ll eventually get the results you’re looking for.  And guess what?  Your baby’s father can do the same. 

What would I say to a woman who thinks she possesses mother’s intuition and takes pride in it?  I’d tell her: I hope you’re not offended by my suggestion that mother’s intuition is not a real thing.  I hope you realize that what I’m really saying is that you have done the hard work necessary to develop an understanding of what your child needs.  I’m saying you deserve to be commended for your perceptive abilities and the knowledge you’ve acquired through applying them.  I’m saying that you know what your child needs not because you’re a woman, but because you love your child enough to do what it takes to figure out how to care for him/her.  I’m saying this is real, valuable, meaningful work that you’ve done, and as such, you absolutely have the right to take pride in it.  And I’m saying your baby’s father and your society should recognize and reward your knowledge as valuable rather than suggesting it is some kind of unearned birthright.

And now back to my regularly scheduled program: Jean Toomer's Cane.

The Lathe of Heaven

My teaching semester is wrapping up.  Friday was my last day of teaching, today was the last regular lecture, my students turn in their final papers this week, and they sit for the final exam next week.  This means that while all of my preparatory work for the semester is completed, I still have quite a bit of grading to finish before I can call the semester complete and move onto more focused preparations for my comprehensive exam.

The last novel we covered in the class is the only one I hadn't read before: Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven.  This novel seemed like a strange choice to me, but I have now come to believe it should be required reading for all perfectionists with control issues, like myself.  (Added bonus if you're from Portland, because that's where it's set.)  The main conflict of the novel is between two male characters: one of them is capable of altering reality through his dreams, and when his psychologist finds this out, he attempts to manipulate the patient's dreams in order to "improve" the world.  What the psychologist finds out, of course, is that he is rarely able to initiate the changes he'd like to see, and even when he succeeds, the changes he envisions don't turn out to have the results he intended.

Le Guin uses the characters to present two completely opposite worldviews: the psychologist who thinks every man's "purpose on earth" is "to do things, change things, run things, make a better world"  and the Daoist dreamer who says things like "I do know that it's wrong to force the pattern of things.  It won't do. It's been our mistake for a hundred years" (82).  In using these two men as exemplars of two oppositional ideologies, Le Guin is not particularly subtle.  The psychologist says things like "it's not how you get there, but where you get to that counts," while the dreamer disagrees, suggesting "We're in the world, not against it.  It doesn't work to try to stand outside things and run them that way.  It just doesn't work, it goes against life.  There is a way but you have to follow it.  The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be.  You have to be with it.  You have to let it be" (139, 140).  I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to reveal that in the end, the psychologist is responsible for his own demise after trying to take on too much and the dreamer is left to with the opportunity to continue following "the way."

So anyway, I've been giving this a lot of thought.  The other insights the book emphasizes are likewise thought provoking.  It suggests that you can't really know what is best for anyone else, and if you think you know how someone else should behave, it indicates your desire to exert control over them even if you think you have good intentions.  Likewise, the novel argues that even when you do a thing that you think is undoubtedly "good," you can't know for sure that it will only have positive outcomes.  I would argue that the book advocates trying to find your place in the world without indulging in the fantasy that you can exert ultimate control over anything that happens to you or to anyone else.  In a moment that was particularly resonant for me, the narrator suggests the dreamer "took it as it came.  He was living almost like a young child, among actualities only.  He was surprised by nothing, and by everything" (126).

I guess what the book has allowed me to do is achieve some critical distance from my own attitude about life, which has given me the opportunity to consider what some of its negative side effects might be.  I align with the psychologist, not the dreamer.  I don't often try to tell other people what to do, but I absolutely attempt to exert complete control over my own life.  I don't follow any path; I try to blaze my own.  On some level, becoming a mother has helped me to realize that this is an ultimately unsustainable way of being.  It has also made me fear that, because Nora feels like an extension of myself, I may someday find myself trying to govern her choices and their outcomes while ignoring the fact that doing so would be a glorified attempt to control her life in the same way I try to control my own.  I've written before about how spending time with Nora has helped me appreciate the benefits of slowing down, focusing on the moment I'm in, and worrying less about strict schedules and milestones.  Perhaps this is another way of saying she has helped me to recognize some of the benefits of living "among actualities only."  I already know some of life's greatest moments come from setting a goal, working toward it doggedly, and ultimately achieving it.  I think I'm only now beginning to learn that some completely unplanned and unforeseen moments can be equally gratifying.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to achieve a more harmonious balance between attempting to steer my own ship and learning to take things as they come.  I have the sense that this is likely to be something I'll continue trying to balance for the rest of my life.  I'm thankful to my professor for including this novel I never would have read otherwise on his syllabus.  This speaks to one of the reasons why literature is great: it gives us the chance to look at ourselves and our surroundings through different eyes.  It allows us, through the crafting of and the immersion within fictional worlds, to take a fresh look at the one we're living in.  Reading novels is one way of putting us in touch with what it means to be human.

Maybe you're more of a musical person than a literature person.  In that case, I've got something for you, too, off the Jason Mraz CD I just downloaded.  The general message is the same.




And I have one more, by Zac Brown Band:

On Breastfeeding

I've written about The Old Man and the Sea before.  I like this book because I can relate to the Old Man, who is determined to the point of stubbornness.  I can appreciate that his determination has its payoffs and its drawbacks.

There is a scene in the novella that I think about all the time.  Santiago has been trying to catch a fish for months without any luck.  The villagers say he is salao, the worst kind of unlucky, but Santiago still believes he will find success.  The part I relate to is the precision with which he attempts to catch a fish.  He takes great care in preparing his bait, setting his lines, and observing the signs of the ocean that indicate a fish might be near.  He says, "It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready."  I mentally rehearse this line all the time.  You can't control luck, but you can be ready to capitalize on it when it strikes.  This is my general approach to life, really.  I would rather be exact.  Then when luck comes you are ready.

For the past several months I have been lamenting that my approach to living and my strengths as a person are not particularly well suited to motherhood.  I may relate to Santiago's preparation, but I have less success relating to his patience.  I also don't do well in circumstances where there is a great deal of uncertainty or where success is hard to measure.  It's pretty tough to be exact as a new mom.

In recent weeks, though, I've been thinking about how this approach, and my strengths as a person, have helped me out considerably when it comes to breastfeeding.  I am obsessive about conducting research, evaluating information, and acquiring knowledge.  I am determined to the point of stubbornness, and I have a lot of experience enduring difficult circumstances in order to achieve a desired result.  All of these things have helped me make breastfeeding work for me and Nora.  She took to nursing better than some babies seem to, so I realize that there was some luck involved in our success.  But I've also been trying to give myself credit for doing the legwork ahead of time and for possessing the determination that allowed me to make the most of that of luck.  When the luck came, I was ready.

Despite his experience, determination, and belief in himself as a fisherman, Santiago repeatedly says "I wish I had the boy" during his fishing expedition.  He's referencing a young boy named Manolin, who was Santiago's apprentice until his family made him switch to a more successful boat.  Nonetheless, Manolin supports, encourages, and looks after Santiago while he is on land.  This kind of support is another thing I'm fortunate enough to share with the old man.  Through all my research on breastfeeding, I've learned that one of the main reasons mothers fall short of their nursing goals is because they don't have adequate support from their family, friends, and medical professionals.  Breastfeeding is really important to me on the level of intellect, because I know how many health benefits it provides my daughter and me.  But it's also very important to me on the level of the heart.  Now that we've established good nursing habits, breastfeeding Nora is emotionally rewarding and the bond it has helped us create is something I will always cherish.  So I also wanted to say a public thank you to the following people, all of whom have been instrumental in helping me and Nora establish and maintain a good nursing relationship:

Thank you to my mom, who taught me that nursing was natural and possible by breastfeeding all three of her children and by reassuring me, from the very beginning, that I was giving Nora exactly what she needed.
Thank you to Billy, who had to stand by helplessly when I was emotionally and physically exhausted by Nora's feeding demands, but who found ways other ways to lighten my load and never suggested giving up on nursing.
Thank you to my lifelong friend Krista, who showed me nursing was possible by successfully breastfeeding both of her girls, and who always responded promptly to my frantic late night emails with encouragement, sympathy, and advice.
Thank you to my brother and sister, who provided an extra set of hands during Nora's three week growth spurt, and who kept me in good enough spirits to survive those most difficult few days.
Thank you to my mother in law, Patti, who has embraced the uncertain task of learning to feed Nora expressed milk while she babysits, even though it is her first experience with on-demand feeding.

Breastfeeding is not easy.  There were some days when I spent nearly five cumulative hours nursing Nora.  Plenty of tears were shed.  I couldn't have done it without support from the people close to me.  But because I have friends who are currently pregnant, and others who are planning to conceive in the not-too-distant future, I wanted to say, publicly, that breastfeeding is one of the few things about being a new mom that you can prepare for, it is one of the few things about being a mom that gets easier in time and eventually makes your life easier, and it is one of the most rewarding things I've ever done.

Choose your words wisely: there's a mother in the room

There is a job opening in our department this year for a "20th Century Americanist," a position which I someday hope to be qualified to fill. This means that after sifting through hundreds of applications and conducting preliminary interviews, our department is hosting visits from the top three candidates. During their visits, each candidate has to present a lecture on his/her current scholarship, and those of us in the department are supposed to attend so we can share our opinions of each applicant. Those of us who are graduate students can also benefit from seeing how the candidates handle the job talk since we should be giving our own job talks when we go on the market.

Attending today's talk meant I had to renegotiate my entire Monday schedule in order to drop Nora off early, fight traffic, and arrive on campus before 10am. Just getting there felt like an accomplishment. But before the the candidate's introduction was even finished, I was already thinking "Well. If this is the type of person I am going to have to compete against, I am never going to get a job in this field." The longer the candidate talked, the more I realized I am many light years away from being prepared to perform the role of "job candidate for a tenure-track professorship."

But there was one flicker of hope midway through her talk. She referred to something as the "emblem of an aborted dream." I haven't read the book she was discussing, but unless I misunderstood her explanation of the novel's events, she should have said it was the "emblem of a miscarried dream." This is a significant difference, not only on the level of language. And at this moment, a lightbulb went off in my head.  I remembered:  "I think you will find that this enhances your scholarship," my mentor professor told me when I told him I was expecting a baby.  Love, work, and having a baby mutually inform one another, argues Mary Austin in "The Walking Woman."

When this woman said "aborted" instead of "miscarried," and I began thinking about what a significant difference that is, it occurred to me that maybe Mary Austin and my professor are right-- maybe being a mother is the thing that will make it possible for me to contribute something unique to the academic conversation.  I looked around the room and could only find one other mother in attendance.  This might be the only thing that sets me apart, actually, in a room where every single person has degrees from more prestigious institutions than I do.  (Valpo is many good things, but a literary studies powerhouse it is not.)

Being a mom could actually be an explicit advantage, given my research interests.  For years I have been trying to figure out why I am so fascinated by American women's writing of the First World War. I have known they had something to say which still doesn't register in public consciousness because male narratives of the war have always been privileged. What unique thing(s) are expressed in these women's works, I still don't know. Sometime in the past two years I began to think it has something to do with how knowledge of conception and reproduction help us to make sense of the war differently. Male and female writers alike refer to the war in terms of conception and birth all the time. They suggest that the war was a difficult period, like pregnancy or labor, but it was necessary and noble to endure because they believed it would deliver new ideas into the world. When the events of the war destroyed this optimistic view, and writers started mourning the loss of the idea the war was supposed to represent, they began comparing the war to miscarriage and stillbirth.  Maybe, now that I've conceived, carried, and delivered a baby, I'll eventually be able to make sense of these comparisons in a way I wouldn't have been able to do if I wasn't a mother.  I guess time will tell.

But for right now, I am trying to be encouraged by the fact that my reaction to a single comment during today's talk helped me to realize that, at the very least, being a mother has given me a new, more interesting academic perspective than I had before.  This is the second time this has happened to me, actually, so now it's a trend.  (I won't go into it here, but if you're curious, ask me sometime about the epiphany I had regarding Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath after I learned how breastfeeding really works.)

I had a good day as a mom today, too.  Nora was thisclose to rolling over for me and Billy!  I've been trying to help her with this for a while.  At first, when I'd roll her, she'd push back against the motion.  The other day she started rolling into it.  Today, I was putting a little ring in her hand and she was using it to pull herself over.  While practicing this back-to-tummy roll with my help, she flopped from her tummy onto her back all by herself a few times.  The video of her rolling over all on her own cannot be far off!

The Walking Woman

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.)

Notes From a Native Daughter

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. : ) )

Lothlorien

I remember writing this "just as..." blog post two years ago, when I was taking a class on Tolkien, and I noticed that the sun always comes out for his characters right when things get really tough for them.  I also remember talking to Dad about it.  He thought it was really hilarious that I had agreed to spend an entire semester reading about hobbits, dwarves, elves, and ents.

Yesterday, after what seems like 6? 8? 10? 30? weeks of walking to Mordor, the sun came out for me.  I long ago set this day aside as my "day off" before I began working on paper #3, but if I could have planned exactly how the day would go, I couldn't have imagined it this good.

It started Tuesday evening, actually, when my program director emailed the announcement that I had won the "Kinnaird Prize" for the best master's student paper written in 2010.  (Remember when I did my research at the Library of Congress?  Or gave my talk at the conference in the fall?  It was that paper, on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred.)  I didn't win in the PhD category, but my friend Katie did, so that was icing on the cake.  I couldn't help thinking to myself (and, okay, to a few others), Not a bad showing from the girls from the waitlist.  It should be a rule that every time you get an award, you get to share it with a good friend you have always believed in, even when other people weren't quite sure about the both of you.

Yesterday itself began with sleeping in.  Then I drove to campus in the sunshine, with the windows down and the sunroof open, for our Graduate English Organization's end of semester lunch and award ceremony.  I got to chat with several professors and classmates that I haven't seen much this semester.  Trying to figure out if people were congratulating me on the baby, the essay prize, or both was not a bad way to start the lunch.

We had selected one of my favorite professors, Tita, for the "Outstanding Mentor" award, and since I was one of the ones who nominated her, our president asked me if I would collect some comments about her and present her with the award.  I get really emotional doing things like this, but I managed to (almost) hold it together while I read through them.  Tita has been such a source of encouragement and compassion for me this year that I was really touched to be able to tell her how great she was and read the comments others had shared.  She was completely shocked and honored by the award, and all she could say to me for about 10 minutes afterward was "thank you" and "I can't believe you didn't warn me!"  Tita is one of those women who is so brilliant, kind, generous, and humble that she almost seems too good to be true.  To get to be a part of showing her the department's appreciation for her tireless support of our students really made my day.  It should also be a rule that every time you win an award, you are allowed to present one to someone else that will mean a lot to them.  That was way better than just getting an accolade to add to my C.V.

Then I came home and tried to clean up some of the mess I've been making the past several weeks before Billy got home from work.  Then he, Vickie, my friend Danielle, and I went to the Orioles game-- my first of the season.  I haven't seen Danielle in far too long, the weather was perfect, and once I've been to a baseball stadium the summer feels like it can officially begin.

Thanks are in order for my cousin Jeff, the current assistant general manager for the Mariners, who left us the tickets for the game since his team was in town.  We got to see their Cy Young winning pitcher Felix Hernandez (Vickie and Billy knew this-- I did not), who I assume has had better nights.  But the best part for me was that Adam Jones went 4 for 4 and hit a two RBI triple that put the O's up 4-2-- the same Adam Jones the Mariners practically gave away in a 2008 trade to the Orioles for Eric Bedard (before my cousin had anything to do with their front office decisions).  To him it probably felt like winning a best paper award after getting put on the waitlist felt for me.  The Orioles' starting pitcher, Chris Tillman, was also one of the minor league prospects the O's picked up in that trade.

I told you it was a good day.  Extra sleep + sunshine + award receiving + award giving + seeing friends + baseball stadium + 3 of my favorite Marylanders + minor redemptions = one of the best days.

(I don't know how to explain Lothlorien without completely nerding out on you, but basically, it's a really nice and restorative place in the forest.  The members of the Fellowship find themselves welcomed there after they think Gandalf has died protecting them in the escape from Moria .  It stands against the evil forces in Middle Earth, kind of exists outside of time, and has really nice trees and singing.)

The History of Pompey the Little; or, the Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog

Today is Oscar's 6th Birthday!  So it seems fitting that this week's reading assignments included a book that purports to be about a lap dog.  The History of Pompey the Little offers a pretty scathing criticism of the different types of people who trade him around as a commodity, so I informed Oscar that he should be happy to be living a fairly stable life with one devoted family.  To show his appreciation, he sat with me while I read the book.

For his birthday gift this year, I am hoping to give him plenty of sunshine, since it is the only thing that can coax him out of his lap dog ways into sprawling out all by himself.

If a little more Oscar is what your day needs, check out the photo retrospective I put together last year when he turned 5.