Academic Single Mother by Choice Times Two

(or, A Disjointed Update on the Goings On of the Past Week)

Combine LG's spring break, me being on campus 4-6 hours daily, my mother's visit, and Tiny Boy not sleeping and you have a recipe for something beyond exhaustion.

If this is what things are going to be like next year, holy crap, I might die.

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In some ways my mother visiting makes things much easier, as it should.  She rocked Tiny Boy while I read with LG; she took LG out to the mall while Tiny Boy stayed home and napped.  She stayed home with both kids while I observed a grad student teach at 8:00 a.m.  My mother visiting means that there's another pair of hands. 

But there's also another level of chaos, of someone else's stuff sprawling across my small (one minuscule bathroom!) house, of someone else's basic needs and preferences.  Like, my mother refuses to use cloth diapers on Tiny Boy.  I'm not asking her to wash them.  I'm not even asking her to do any complicated folding (I've got a stash of diapers that are basically like cloth disposables, in terms of how they go on).  But she won't do it, even though she has no problem putting a sheet that's been peed on in the wash.  How is a cloth diaper any different?

*

I'm feeling old.  I've been out of grad school 11 years.  I look at the grad students in our program and they seem ridiculously young; indeed, they could be as much as 18 years younger than me (though I don't think anyone of them actually is).  I'm not one of them anymore.  Hell, I'm not even junior faculty anymore.  Weird.

Occurred to me this week how much of my job involves judging others.  Writing contests, faculty merit review, grad student teaching observations.  And I don't like judging others, despite the fact that I am an INFJ on those personality inventories.

*

Tiny Boy isn't sleeping.  Or he sleeps so lightly he just rolls around and I don't sleep.  I spend probably an hour in the rocking chair in the middle of the night, because I figure if I'm not sleeping, he might as well.  It's been this way since birth, some weeks/nights better than others, for reasons I still haven't been able to figure out.  I thought the side-lying nursing/swaddle combo had changed things, but even that doesn't always work.  And then on nights he sleeps better, my own sleep patterns are so messed up that I'm awake anyway.  That makes doing intellectual work incredibly difficult.

*

I realize my maternity leave is substantially better than what some folks have.  14 weeks (an extra two because of the c-section) is long enough to get through the squalling newborn phase.  And if my job involved something mindless and repetitive--say, washing dishes all day long--I'd be exhausted but I could do it.  I'm not having trouble doing my own mindless work, like crossing entries off a 500 item spreadsheet to get it down to 200.  But putting sentences together?  Concentrating on complicated texts?  Not really happening.

I'd guess at this point I'm doing the roughly 50% of my job that involves teaching/service--which is actually all service right now--but not the 50% that involves research/writing.  But squeezing those hours into 15 hrs of paid childcare, plus what I can do during naps and after bedtime, is really difficult.

On Wednesday, I went to a grad class in the morning, met a friend for lunch, went to a department meeting and had 45 minutes in which to pump milk and get across campus for another grad class...and a student stopped me in the hall to see if I could talk.  (Umm, no.  My kid's life depends on me not talking right now.)

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I've reached starvation mode again.  I haven't weighed myself in a couple weeks, but the last I checked I was down to 106 (and now can wear pretty much all my pre-pregnancy clothes).  It seems like I'm eating all the time but I can't get enough calories in to stop losing weight, and I really can't afford to lose anymore (with LG, I got down to 93, which was bad).  I think it mostly has to do with my metabolism going haywire and milk oversupply.  What I need isn't paid childcare, it's another few months of leave and a housekeeper who keeps me fed.

*

I have a two hour meeting in the morning, and then we're going to my mom's for Passover.  Tiny Boy's first road trip.  I haven't packed, or even made a list.  I haven't finished prepping for the meeting.  I haven't done much of anything in terms of cleaning the house.  But I think I've been awake since about 3:00 last night.  I've got to stop typing this, email a grad student, and go to sleep before this baby wakes again to eat.  (I'm keeping myself fortified with peanut m&m's and a big glass of water.)

Just four more weeks and then it's summer.  And then, hopefully, I can actually get some work done.