identity crisis

Another trip to campus, another opportunity to revisit the ol' identity crisis. For, as I discuss my dissertation with my advisor while Axel reads his board book in the stroller next to me, I am supremely conscious of the need to self-edit. Generally, in Axel's company, we have a running dialogue; I describe our surroundings and actions, he contributes his all-time favorite word, "cat," or other exclamations (wow! ok! alright! oh wow! dat? dis!), or he tries out the new words he hears (be-rah, rwaihn, a-plane). I've noticed, in the company of others, that this behavior falls squarely in the "mommy to so-and-so" pigeon-hole of motherhood: those women who disappear completely into their children's lives, to the point that their name is actually hyphenated with their child's. A group I've always mocked and found slightly scary.

So, as I sit opposite my committee advisor, talking too fast about work she hasn't yet seen, I am intensely aware of Axel's unanswered contribution to our conversation. I know better than to interrupt the adult conversation to respond to him, yet I feel that on some level, I'm doing him a disservice. And while I wouldn't describe my feelings as being "torn," I am acutely aware of the multiple selves jostling one another in the too small and too hot room.

The semester Axel was born, I returned to teaching when he was four weeks old. It was pretty horrible trying to juggle nursing every other hour with grading papers, lesson planning and clothes free from milk stains. I was very tired. But: I drew immense pride from the fact that I did it, that I managed to maintain my professional self and mother a newborn.

And, more importantly, I drew immense satisfaction from incorporating Axel into my campus routine. Many days, Axel came to campus with me, hanging out with our fabulous administrative team while I was in the classroom, and hanging out in my office while I held office hours. I loved that students could see me discussing theory while holding a baby. Because there are too few female professors with children in these ivoried halls. And it is perhaps for this reason alone--to model academic mother--that I keep on keeping on.

heart outside body

When I first came across this phrase as a description of parenting, I think it was here (but I can't remember for certain), I found it a little excessive. This was before I was pregnant, or possibly right after I had found out I was pregnant, and I very much subscribed to the philosophy of discrete identities. A notion of myself as a whole entity, a discrete being clearly differentiated from others--be they my family, my husband or a possible child. I felt that the culture-wide identification of parents with children--parents whose identities are subsumed in their children, whose entire existence is wrapped up in their child, and children wholly dependent on their parents--baffling and somewhat off-putting. It was not for me. If I were to go through pregnancy, bear a child, and then raise one, it would all be accomplished with my self clearly differentiated from this child. In pregnancy, the harshest version of this line of thinking had me making Mychal swear that should anything go wrong during the pregnancy or the delivery that the doctors would save me first. Me first! was my overwhelming thought. My thoughts for after the pregnancy involved returning to work immediately, a child in nearly full-time childcare, who marched merrily along towards independence and activities that did not involve me.

All of this thinking went out the window, not quite during the pregnancy, but almost immediately after Axel's birth. Certainly within the first two hours of his life, as I waited alone for the nurses to bring him back to me after having whisked him away about a minute after he was born. I waited, getting increasingly pissed off, thinking nasty things about the incompetent nurses who were keeping me from this newborn, until Mychal showed up to tell me where they'd taken him. Of course, I immediately got up from the bed and ran to the nursery (it took my nurse about half an hour to find me there).

Now, fully sixteen months into Axel's life, I understand the phrase "my heart outside my body" differently. Having a child is having your heart suspended out there in the open, vulnerable, exposed to the elements and, at times, fully beyond your reach. My heart, as the seat of my emotions, is no longer protected within me; nor is it exclusively of me, having exceeded my own physical boundaries, it bops along to its own beat in the world at large.

Axel moves about in the world; he has my heart in his hands, and he is oblivious to that. He can be frivolous with it, as only a toddler can be: he treats himself and the world with absolute disregard for the fragility of life. With the at times brutal single-mindedness of a toddler, he pursues the world, reckless with his body as his knowledge of consequences is limited. In this reckless pursuit, throwing himself fearlessly at the world, Axel exposes my vulnerability.

and baby makes who?

Last week I had to go to campus to rescue my dissertation from the uncertain hell that returning all sixty-eight of my dissertation books would have caused. I had to show up in person to convince the library privileges adjudicator that hauling sixty-eight books to the library (for the visual, that's six linear feet of books or twelve round trips from car-to-library carrying boxes of books while pushing a stroller) would be the kiss of death for my dissertation. I also brought him home-made caramels. Begrudgingly, he both restored my library privileges and waived the requirement of physically returning all my books. (But he did not thank me for the caramels!)

Anyway, the trip afforded me and Axel the chance to visit my department, where all the ladies were swept away by Axel's charm. While Axel ate bites of chicken and took things off shelves, I got to watch a video of a trapeze performance starring one of the department ladies.

As a child, I gave considerable and serious thought to becoming a trapeze artist; my first sport love was gymnastics, and swinging on the uneven bars my favorite event. That adults could be paid to experience the exhileration of swinging, flying and leaping while wearing spangled outfits boggled my mind.

Her performance was great--too short, in the opinion of one who can all too easily picture herself up there. And when it ended, we found ourselves in the middle of a discussion about what changes for a woman's identity after becoming a mother. "We" included the trapeze artist, childless by choice, a woman with three grown sons, and myself. There are so many ways to look at this question; yet without pausing to consider the question, I found myself blurting out: my autonomy.

It's a strange thing, particularly for a woman who cherishes independence, to become the point-person for a small being. In ways big and small, meeting the needs of a child comes before going where- and doing what-ever you want every minute of the day. While it's the big moments--like the thought of carting sixty-eight books back to the library with a small child in tow, or swinging thirty feet above ground while a small child watches--that remind me of the limits on my autonomy, it's the accumulation of minutes, day after day, that do their work on a woman's identity. Who I am, what I do, what I say, what I feel, how I think --all of this is channeled through the lens of parenthood.

There is, of course, much more about identity that changes with the arrival of one's child. Perhaps best to consider this the first installment of many. Stay tuned for part two: my heart outside of my body.

like smoking crack

My first triathlon was a gift to myself for passing my qualifying exams.

I had given up just about everything I liked to do during the year of preparation that led up to the exams. Of course, this is all retrospective recapping and I'm more than a little bit bitter about the whole thing. I spent most of the year either reading or agonizing; even when we did get out of the house for dinner at friends houses or dates, my mind remained caught in the grip of agonizing about what I had not finished reading and what remained to be read on my lists. My head was a bit like a non-stop game of Tetris, constantly shifting titles and authors from one to-do list to another. But after nearly a year of scrapped runs, swims, rides and walks, I felt like I desperately owed myself the gift of exercise.

It is perhaps a sign of my Type A personality that I swapped out reading lists for training plans. In any case, I pored over training plans with far more excitement than any of my literature. The print was even smaller than my texts, but at least I wasn't going to be tested on the material.

My first race was a sprint triathlon in Sacramento. We swam in the American River; it was a downstream swim in what was claimed to be 70-degree water. It was a bit chilly. I knew nothing about triathlon or open water swimming, which is apparent in the photo above: there I am, in the front of the entire pack. What I didn't know was that even in triathlons marketed at new triathletes, the swim is a full-contact sport. Women swam over me, banged into me, pulled at my arms and legs. It didn't take long for me--a very confident swimmer who has swum since birth, practically--to have a panic attack. Before the first turn, I was gasping for air and on my back. Eventually I calmed down enough to do sidestroke, and with one turn to go, managed to get back into a freestyle rhythm. Based on this photo, I'm either last or first (according to my team photographer, I was kind of in front. Somehow.)

Anyway, the water was cold. My feet remained frozen for the entire race. (But I did not sit down and massage them to try to get some feeling back in them, as I did to Mychal's great chagrin during my third race. That race was in October and the water was 62-degrees. I thought I had frost-bite and was about to lose a toe.) I biked the 11-mile course on the aforementioned 30-pound hybrid mountain bike with my back rack attached (with a not-too-shabby 16 mph pace) and pulled out a 27-minute 5K. It was my first race ever.

I almost cried when I crossed the finish line; at no point during the training did I really think I could do it. And the feeling of pride for finishing this was so much more joyful than the feeling of bitterness that followed my successful qualifying exams. Of course, two 24-hour written exams and one 3-hour oral exam don't produce endorphins quite the way that triathlon does. So that was my first taste of crack; that summer (2003), I did two more triathlons. And it's just gotten more addictive with each season since.

why blog

This blog lacks a theme. It doesn't lend itself toward categorization. And that elusive quality--the read-ME (or is it READ-me)--aspect is still in development. So why blog?

I kept journals throughout my teens and twenties. I dropped off writing them about the month that Mychal moved into my studio, for no specific reason other than not enough time in the day. More abstractly, though, I think I stopped writing my journal because I had an interlocutor, someone who shared my space both physically and imaginatively. I missed keeping a journal, but not to the point that I ever overcame the accumulated inertia to pick up a notebook.

At some point (ok, I just checked: in 2001), I started to keep a journal on my computer. Through all the years that I had kept a journal in various notebooks, my media of choice was pencil. This always troubled me, because I knew that pencil smudged. Whatever I wrote began to evaporate as soon as I turned the page and the friction of pages commenced. But I loved the way the graphite felt on the pages; so a large part of keeping a journal was the physical sensation of writing. I also liked the physical object--its reassuring heft, the way the paper felt after it had been written on--somewhat softer, more pliant, and that it could be leafed through, providing different entry points for thought trains. The journal as text document never gave itself to random perusing. And once the document was closed, it was as if it had never existed: no notebook to be moved from bag to bed to table to desk to bag, reminding me of its presence through it's very physicality. In a sense, the lacking physical object of the text journal is what revealed to me why I write: because I like the medium of language. I simply like to put words next to one another, to see where they will lead, to see what they produce, to hear what they say. And that this all takes place in a silent realm is all the more satisfying to me, for some reason.

More than the unspooling of one's thoughts in silence, the public nature of a blog renders it not quite a journal. Yet, unlike standing on a crate in the middle of a public square, shouting into the heavens, writing in a blog does not necessarily mean we will be heard. It is quite possibly the most basic expression of hope available today: we blog, never knowing whether we will be found, whether we will be read.

A blog is not a journal; no matter how personal one makes it, its form distinguishes it as something quite different: public, searchable, infinite, hyperlinked, textual and graphic. Lacking concrete dimensions in time and space, it is something virtual; a something forever in the process of becoming.