Wow.

It had been almost a month when I wrote all them questions! Anyway, here is where we are...

We should be closing on our house any day now. I have to start teaching again, so I would like to get settled, but I am sure we won't be moving until after labor day. The mortgage guy is talking with the bank today, and the seller is getting an affidavit from one of the neighbors acknowledging that their fence is on our property. What a way to make friends with the new neighbors. Doesn't matter, tho. We aren't going to make them take it down.

I am starting to dread teaching. I wasn't, but I am. Before I started this grad school thing I had been teaching (mostly) freshmen for several years, and I was ready to run far far away in order to make a change. Now I only have to teach a couple of classes a year, instead of 10-15, and that is pretty nice. But I still kind of hate it sometimes, and particularly now that it involves leaving my baby at home.

You might ask, why go to PhD school if you hate teaching, and that is a fair question--for an idiot. Ahem, kidding. First of all, the love of teaching is probably the worst reason to go to graduate school. (Go be a middle school teacher if you 'love teaching' because college kids will make you hate it right quick). You go to be a scholar--for a living, unlike armchair scholarship, it doesn't involve much TV or internet research--and because you are good at teaching, maybe, which I am. Also, the intro-level classes that they make you teach as an adjunct and during grad school are not in your favorite aspect of the field, they are not in your student's subject area, and they are no fun for anybody unless you try really, really hard to make them fun, and even then you probably won't succeed. I will blog in more detail about how this works when the studenten make their appearance in about two weeks. IN the mean time, check out the blog Rateyourstudents if you want to see what undergraduate teaching is really all about.

So, I have to teach. Blahh. Okay. I will do it, and I will do it well. I hope. As far as everything else, my advisor is annoying the crap out of me and wants to talk to me about everything except my work. I have a paper that is three days late and three quarters written, and major issues surrounding in-laws. (They don't have issues with me but I am involved and trying to support). Also, in case you have not heard WE NEED TO MOVE. NOW, before we are taken over by our stuff.

Oh no, the giant baby (21 pounds!) is awake.

When am I going to stop nursing my baby?

When am I going to "let" him sleep in his crib? When am I going to finish this paper? When am I going to move? When am I going to have sex with my husband? When is he going to want it when I am not in the middle of doing some fucking miserable chore or another?

Does being a doctoral student mean repeatedly handing in work without getting any feedback, or any response at all? Do anyone's babies entertain themselves for any length of time during the day? Does tummy time suck that bad? Why? Do I look like I need another person in my face?

Why do people think I have time to chat on the phone? Why do people think that I ever wanted to? Why would I rather answer a hundred text messages than return one phone call?  Why am I typing up all of these questions instead of taking a shower? 

What is that noise? What is that smell? What do I need from the grocery story? What is that thing called? What's her name? What's my name? What's it all mean? 

Who is this tired person in the mirror? Who is this sarcastic bitch? Who stole my sports car and replaced it with a sedan? Who can carry one of those baby carriers around without mortgaging her second child to a chiropractor?
  

Should I just quit? Shouldn't this be impossible? Should I have said that? Should I have eaten that? Shouldn't someone rub my shoulders?

How am I going to finish all of this shit I have to get done? How am I going to paint a nursery if Baby Apollo doesn't want to be put down? How is my husband going to build a bathroom and a laundry closet if he works all day long? How DO you entertain a five month old? How can I get more sleep, look better naked, simplify my life, take a vacation? How am I ever going to feel like myself again?

And how, how the fuck will not nursing my baby anymore make it easier to answer any of these questions?

Sleep deprivation + tired brain= nothing but questions...

"I can relax...everything is finally where it is supposed to be..."

Ha! Not even close. I am a neglectful blogger, but I was inspired this morning, at about 7AM, by an ad in the monthly coupon packet for custom closets. There is a woman who from her dress and bearing is about forty (who can tell by things like skin or teeth anymore) throwing her head back in relief before her $20,000 closet, and then the tag line in my title. What does she do with her relaxation time? What is the indulgence she finally allows herself after what must be two decades of cleaning, straightening and fretting about the cluttered state of her home? A FUCKING CUP OF COFFEE!

Excuse my "fuck" but this was just too much for me this morning, when I was choosing whether to drink my coffee with milk or take it black and assemble the recycling. I am not going to be so vapid as to say 'this is everything that's wrong with the world,' because it's not. I have always found the media's demands on a woman's time conspicuous, yet I feel the same force compelling me to take care of my home before myself--or, at least I could not sit and enjoy a cup of coffee in the midst of last night's dinner and dirty wine glasses. I am also guilty of the following: No, Husband, I can't have sex until the sheets are straightened....I will only shower when I finish this article--and maybe a few more emails.....I will just stay in my pajamas this morning while I do the week's food shopping. 

Yes. I miraculously avoided the similar evil, whispering monster who tells me to dye my roots, shave my bikini line--slather my tired skin in creamy foundation. Why, then, do feel the need to keep house as though it were so...biological? (Don't flame me; I know it's not). Could I relax any better if my house really were perfectly clean and straight all the time? (Well, no. I still have an infant to take care of--but you get the point).  These things I do not know.

At any rate, I think I am beginning to find a balance between work/Baby Apollo. It's kind of a 15/85% ratio. I am looking forward to the days when it will be more like 35/65. One of my more difficult bosses has praised my dedication--apparently everyone really DID expect me to drop off the face of the earth when Apollo was born.

But no matter what I do, there is always something lacking. When I went to pick him up to put him in bed last night, Apollo's head was bleeding! because he gashed himself with overlong nails. Crib training....I haven't even started it. Am I too attached to cosleeping? He is cuddly. Will I eventually find his cuddliness more alluring than Husband's?

Anyway, I guess I have a lot of questions about myself today. A good thing.
Stay curious,
Asteria

I've had my share...of the crying game...

So this week I learned that Baby Apollo does not like the heat. He had three major crying fits. One in the house, one on our attempt at a grown-up lunch date, and one during the entire ceremony of his christening. We thought that taking him to the wine bar--the one with the old ship's door and the tattooed Sommelier--would be okay at 11:30, but of course hipsters even come out at that hour. Apollo was fine until the food came. Important lesson: do not assume that just because the restaurant feels cool enough, and baby isn't crying yet, that he is going to be okay for the rest of dinner. Because he is not, and the more annoyed he gets, the hotter he gets.

And because it is 100 degrees up here in home-buyer's purgatory, Baby Apollo rarely goes to sleep without doing a lot of loud complaining first. But by far the worst was at his christening. Normally, a deacon does the head dipping, but since it was high school graduation weekend, they must have all been busy that weekend. In case you do not know, the difference between a priest and a deacon in the RCC is that the deacons are almost always married with children. So we had this childless priest extolling the wonders of children in his homily. He talked about children who run to their parents laughing with their arms open, who repeat with glee everything they hear, who make their grandparents feel young again.  He talked about Jesus loving little children for just those reasons. None of the children he spoke of were anything like my screaming, helpless, unhappy infant, who made everyone around him feel hotter and older and more miserable. When it was all over, Husband went to hand him the check and heard him commisserating with a woman about how hard it was for him to preach over our child crying, and how we should have used the "crying room."

I was seriously going to start going to church, but this has bothered me. Apparently, to this guy, Jesus only loves smiley, happy children, who are old enough to understand that the situation in the un-airconditioned church is temporary. Apparently he has no interest in blessing or baptizing a suffering infant. Apparently, I should have removed my baby from HIS OWN BAPTISM so that the priest could hear himself talk.

Poor Apollo. He is such a good baby, and now he has a rep. In other news, we are in contract on our house, and my brother moved in downstairs. It's hot, and going to get hotter. The universe is conspiring to make our last months here as difficult as possible.

I have finished my paper on stuff dead people used to think and write about before they were dead, and now I have three more projects to start, two of which are so vast they make me want to drink heavily when I think about writing about them. One of these is a coauthored job, where the lead decided we should take on a third writer, and now (accidentally?) leaves me out of the loop on emails, and asks me to do things and then acts like he never got them. Fun. I wonder if this has anything to do with me being a mom and not a typical, maleable, anxiety ridden grad student! I am a mommy, and I am fucking melting!

Anyway, I am pissed off this week..

Quickies

I am going to do this really quickly, while Apollo is doing tummy time and I want to talk about sleeping arrangements.

I just woke him up because I was checking to see if he was breathing, and making sure he had enough air flow. So I will have to write this to a melody of grunts and squeaks, collectively what we call "cranks." I have learned that part of being a mother is being forced to listen to stories about babies dying, being hurt, or being killed. Perhaps I had heard these stories before, but now they turn my insides to ice, and I remember them. One woman just lost her 6 month old to SIDS, and was told it was because one of the parents was sharing a couch with the sleeping infant--no rolling over, no burying of face; proximity was the only cause. This is horribly sad, and I would probably have to be locked in an institution if it happened to me, but since she is still alive to talk about it, she must be an incredibly strong and (emotionally) well-supported person.

We need to be afraid of everything. Even the things babies want most--warmth, a cozy place to sleep, the closeness of a parent--could harm them. I asked my doctor, half joking, if I should just keep Baby Apollo in a dog cage, and he said that might be the safest place.  A million times a day I have to choose whether to give in to love or fear (and, yes, sometimes sleepiness. Love says pick him up, sleep with him, let him eat as much as he wants. Fear says keep him in his crib, don't overfeed--Apollo is FAT-- don't spoil.

But most times I just give in to sleepiness and attach him to my boob, put my arm behind him so I can't roll over on him, and go back to sleep.

But this sleeping arrangement hasn't been very good for my sex life. I look at Husband from the other side of a bed that is at once too small and to vast of a space for intimacy.

Dear Blog: I am sorry I have neglected you...

...but every time I sit to write you, Baby Apollo does something intolerably cute. Now he has his blanket friend over his mouth so that he is just peeping up at me with his big (are they brown or green now?) eyes. And he is saying arhiyyya arrahh. This is something that only impresses mothers, and people who really like babies. I used to be neither, and now I am both.

Baby Apollo ran the gamut with me this week. I took him to Baby Megastore again, with Husband, and Lowe's, and a University Library. He was very good at the library, not so good at Lowe's. The house is a (seller's) signature away from being in contract. Husband worked on them over the weekend and handed them off on Monday, but not before the idiot real estate agent sent him an email threatening to show the house again if we didn't get the house "in full contract." Now, this was stupid for a number of reasons. First of all, houses usually take more than a few days--after inspections are done and land maps are pulled--to be "in contract" and secondly, a house can't be "in full contract" until the seller signs the contract, which is kinda out of our hands. But more importantly, one should not threaten my husband--a man who is working seventy-hour weeks and sleeping two hours a day, a man who lives in a two room apartment with his dog, his wife and his baby right on top of him and his father-in-law in the apartment below him--that one is going to show *his* house, the house "on which all our future happiness depends" to contractors in an attempt to get another five grand. Not unless one wants Husband to breathe fire on one and everyone one works with for so long, it will seem like one is burning in the eternal flames.

Whoosh, that was a long sentence. But it is in every word true. And lately dear Husband has had little tolerance for "Grandpa" who knows we are leaving him and is kinda sore about it, because either he will be alone here, or one of my less-accommodating siblings will move in and not pay him rent. This, of course, is not our problem either, but I do feel bad for bringing this beautiful miracle of a giant baby into his house and then pulling him out after five months (fingers crossed!) but, you know, we are only moving across town. Anyway, it's difficult to put my finger on why Grandpa makes Husband so annoyed, besides that the former is loud and doesn't clean his house as often as Husband's nasal passages would prefer. I think they have little "who's the alpha male" battles when I am not looking.

So, that is the housewife realm, the stay- at- home- mom realm, the world in which I did way too much laundry this week and skipped the bathroom again, because--we're moving, right? It's where I had several bad crying days because it's hot as a jungle up here and Baby Apollo doesn't like it, where I railed about people not RSVPing to his christening party. Where I silently prided myself on what a good breast feeder I am, and openly chastised myself for not being very supportive of Husband at all this week. He is very stressed about the house, and I want to be stressed about the house, but I have all this work to do, and it keeps me from the exciting stress of home and the new kind of brainwork, a new knowledge and consciousness that comes from raising Baby Apollo.

All three of my advisors contacted me on Friday, each expressing some level of vague disapproval. I am in the middle of writing a paper on abortive marriage as metaphor for early English colonialism. I think it's going to be a good paper. They usually are, but I am slow. And in every case, they are calling on me because they have been ignoring me since March, and now they think I have finally had my fun with this mothering stuff and I am ready to get down to work. That is only half true. I have also heard from Editor about Big Project and from publisher on Big Project Part Deux, and co-author on Medium- Project- that- I- don't- know- where- to- start- on. I gave the last two a due-date of mid-January. Yeah, Ha! Good luck with that. 

I need a mother's helper. I need two days a week--four or five hours a day--and I could be straight. Three days a week when big projects come up. I wrote "Paper on German Atheism in Russia" with three hours a day, over five days, so I can do it.

I have to resist the impulse to give it up, though. I am dreaming of kitchens and Thanksgiving dinners, but I am also dreaming of that first-floor room as a study. My committee chair tells me to put Apollo in day-care, and other moms tell me I should give up and go back to school because I will be so much happier if I just stay home and raise my kid. They might be right, in a way, but I can't do that; I can't do either one. I really feel like Baby Apollo needs a mother who is a professor--even one with little or no job--he needs one who wears suits and knows the answers to all kinds of weird questions, a mother who flies him to cool places where she talks to people about bookish things for a few hours and spends the rest of the time showing him castles and museums and battlefields and feeding him interesting new foods.

He needs me to be that because I need me to be that. He needs Asterea if he is going to be Apollo. And, as small as it is, our family needs my stipend, and my student employee health insurance.

Things I didn't know about babies and did know about getting paid.

Yesterday I took Baby Apollo to the megastore for babies, as he has grown out of all his clothing again. This happens about once a week: he gets clothes and then immediately grows out of them. (Also, baby clothes shrink, which is something I didn't know. None of my clothes shrink.) Baby Apollo is a huge baby. If I had to guess I would say he weighs about 40 pounds and that most of that is his head, but fortunately I do not have to guess, because the doctor told me he is up around 16 pounds, and the process of buying him sunhats told me his head is actually rather small compared to the rest of him. This is because Baby Apollo is apparently composed of some substance that expands to fit whatever it is put into, and I never make him wear hats. (I am sure there is some such substance, and that it has a name, but I am not in the sciences, so I don't know what it is. )

By the way, when an academic says "I am not in *insert field of study*" it usually translates to "this crap isn't important enough for me to worry about" or the more benign "Ask me what my field is. Pleeeeeeease ask me!" In this case it's the latter, but I don't want to give too much away at once, so I will just say it involves things dead people used to think and write about before they were dead. The manifest irrelevance of my field of study to the modern world of online banking is probably what led my supervisor to suppose I was incapable of reading my paystubs yesterday. Of course, I spend most of my brainpower either 1. reading old ideas out of musty books or 2. trying to think of an appropriate rejoinder to "aaahgahou." But I have been receiving the same paystubs for six years now and I think I have gotten pretty good about asking my husband what they mean. In this case, my check was short three hundred dollars. Boss man decided I must be reading the post-tax amount instead of the pretax amount and let me know, in the gentlest of terms, what an idiot I am.

You might guess that it's difficult for me to take such insults lightly, so I emailed a couple of people, including Husband, about what an arrogant ass my boss can be--a potential he means to live up to as fully as he can. Husband was particularly annoyed, since he noticed the discrepancy. This was all done to make sure boss didn't hear me sneering over the interwebz when I wrote him back, but I think I might have accidentally emailed him the whole conversation about his arrogant assness--damn Gmail and its "conversations"--and I have not heard back from him. I could get fired for this--if I were not a government employee on contract.

To be honest, I kind of like the guy. My supervisor. I am just really sensitive to being treated like I am stupid. I don't quite know where this comes from. Maybe not being put in the gifted and talented class when I was 8. I am still fuming about that one; Those little bastards got to learn Russian in fourth grade and the rest of us had to wait until seventh, and Russian wasn't even an option. Only the dull triumvirate: Spanish, Italian, French. By that time it was too late. My self-esteem had taken a blow. Besides, most of the time I am pretty stupid. Like when I told the neighbor lady we were paying 200k for a house we were paying 300k for (I bet she called her broker after that); and when I got poop in Apollo's hair after changing his diaper and couldn't get it out with shampoo or a comb, and had to cut it out with scissors; and when he peed into my ear twice within ten seconds and both times I screamed like I didn't know where the water was coming from. And that was just yesterday.

Anyway, what this all amounts to is that I had three hundred fewer bucks to spend at the baby megastore and I am going to need those bucks, 'cause Apollo needs nursery furniture and, by next week, bigger clothes.
So, I learned:
Baby scissors work really well for cutting baby hair, and may even be meant for the purpose;
Apollo has an unlimited supply of pee and really good aim;
Baby poop looks like peanut butter but works like gum;
NAK is fine for blogging but, combined with baby brain, a bad idea when emailing with/about your boss;
I am dumber than I thought, but not as dumb as some people want to think I am.

All good things..
Asteria.

My hoods and scarves

Thanks for reading. Here is a continued description:

In the next year I will blog about

1. raising Baby Apollo, being his primary caretaker and food source;
2. buying and remodeling a house with my husband, who hopefully knows more about the process than I do;
3. staying on track with my PhD program;
4. staying married, happily; and
5. fostering some faint sense of that witty and roguish irreverence I have always wished I had.

All names, places, and faces have been altered beyond recognition. By starting this blog, I have broken the cardinal rule of my profession--STFU! Also, I will risk the disappointment and ire of my family, if not their total mortification and, if I have any readers, leave myself open to attacks on my personal choices--parenting, interior design, professional and otherwise. The least I could do was to make this all anonymous.

Also, don't begrudge me the occasional typo--I am NAK.