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.