Cheerful Abundance

A few weeks ago, I started reading Sheryl Sandberg’s book, “Lean in”, a charming tome that blames educated white women and their poor workplace choices for being the reason that women make 77 cents on the dollar to men and are not advancing up the corporate ladder. Who knew women had the kind of corporate agency required to make it impossible for women to advance in great numbers in the workplace. All. Their. Own.Fault. For not leaning in. Oh, that wasn’t your take on it? Because it was definitely mine.

I didn’t finish the book, of course, before it was due back at the library, because I work a 60+ hour a week job, and the big joke about what I do is how flexible my career path is, because I get to choose which 60 to 70 hours I work each week. I am not complaining though: I chose an academic life, and I chose it thoughtfully and with care. And it turns out, I am good at it. Good at engaging college students in the classroom, good at using The Bachelor and other horrific pop-culture media to teach tricky theoretical concepts, and good at coming up with ideas. But I am not good at office politics, especially the byzantine grudge-holding and secrecy that permeates academia, and I am not good at hearing that I can’t voice an opinion in my field until after I am tenured.At the same time, I was becoming increasingly good at talents I never wanted to cultivate. Talents like, being so filled with anxiety that I could no longer open my work email without taking a Xanax first, and moving so far past the point of anger in my day-to-day life that the only thing left in my emotional toolkit was indifference. And what is so weird is that when I was at my most anxious, most stressed out, most emotionally bankrupt point, I won an award, got an amazing set of course reviews from my students, had 3 papers accepted at conferences. But I felt like I was drowning, and it was abundantly clear that my department was fresh out of life preservers.

So I quit.I just quit last week.

It is weird to quit something that you wanted so badly. I really wanted the academic life, at least the romantic version of it. I don’t exactly know what the fallout is going to be. I know I most likely won’t finish my PhD now, and that stings, but as I settle farther into this decision, I keep reminding myself that that is a pretty ‘first-world’ problem. Poor me, gentle reader, I didn’t get to finish my PhD. Poor ME! And I have to keep reminding myself that out here, in the real world that I feel like I have rejoined, pretty much nobody else has a PhD, either, and yet are somehow managing to live happy, productive lives.

I don’t have another job. I am not even looking, to be honest. I told my husband I wanted some time: time to let the anxiety leak out of me, time to read novels again, time to play with my kids without always running that academic voice in the back of my head that reminded me that any time spent away from the computer was automatically considered wasted time. Time with my children felt like wasted time, time I couldn’t get back, time I was losing, making me fall behind at work. It is crazy, so crazy to me, how that felt.  So now, I am taking time. Time to clean my house, cook some decent meals, volunteer a bit, time to breathe, time to be in the moment with my children, relaxed and happy.

Time to regroup. Time to just be still and silent, let the world pass by for a little while, and forget about me. And time to read.

The dirty secret of academia is that you don’t get to read. Or rather, you get to read constantly, but it is all journal articles and scholarly books, and you aren’t supposed to read for pleasure, and if you dared to, you certainly should never, ever admit it. A few years ago, I had a conversation with another graduate student about our summers, and I trusted her enough to tell her that, over the summer, while I still worked like crazy and wrote like crazy, I snuck in the time to read two popular novels. Two! I could never have told anyone else I worked with. They would have labelled me as lacking ambition. And then she whispered to me – whispered, like it had to be a secret – that she had read the entire Hunger Games Trilogy. And loved it. Three young adult books in 3 months? Not really allowed. Because if you think you have time to read, well, let’s face it, you also have an enormous pile of journal articles and french social theorists to plow through. So now, I am reading: light fiction, literary fiction, good biographies, trashy celebrity autobiographies, everything. Reading, and (whispers) writing.

All of my life I have been pursuing careers I didn’t necessarily want, as a means of creating a buffer between myself and what I really wanted to do in life, and my resume is as crazy as it gets with regard to career changes. I paid the bills, kept the lights on, worked in a number of completely disparate fields, and told myself I was being a responsible adult, but I have to say, that path feels less and less like responsibility, and more and more like lying to myself. Being good at something is not enough of a reason to do it, I have recently realized. And being happy is completely important.  No doubt I am being falsely swayed by the plethora of bad life-coach inspired self-affirmation quotations that show up on my Pinterest dashboard, but what is life for, if not making extravagant mistakes and being an epic failure, in the pursuit of your dreams?

I love my dreams. So why haven’t I been pursuing them?

I am giving myself a year. A year to put my mental house back in order, to stop stress-eating crap in the middle of the night because I can’t sleep, to stop pursuing everything career-wise that I don’t want, and to finally be honest and just admit to myself that all I really want to do in life is play with my kids, bake, read, and write, and that is perfectly okay. A year to Lean Out, a year to write without pressure, a year to lower my blood pressure and my cholesterol and golf and clean and have a completely unstressful Christmas and learn to knit and hopefully publish something and bake things and be happy. I just checked the latest Tori Spelling memoir out of the library. I made hors d’ouevres for my husband and I to snack on after the kids go to bed tonight, so that we can have cocktails, snack, and watch a movie. After I finish writing this, I am going to make some homemade macaroni and cheese for the kids, revel in the domestic life a bit, and then read until they get home. It feels good. I feel guilty, still, about it, but hopefully that will fade.

That’s enough feels for one day, I think. Time to slip back into my unfeeling robot-like Episcopalian skinsuit and go dust some baseboards. Here is Danny Trejo, to read us out.

This is our second Hallowe’en in the new house, which means that this time around, we knew where the bins of holiday decor were, the living room wasn’t filled with unpacked boxes, and it was easier to get into a ‘holiday’ state of mind. Since this is my husband’s favourite time of year, I try to go big, adding a few new things every year, and generally spookifying up the place, and this year he chipped in, helping me do our front windows.

Held hostage by monsters. Please send candy.

Some people buy Styrofoam grave markers and plastic body parts and scatter them on the front lawn, others drape polyester spiderwebbing all over their hedges. We go simpler, and spookier, creating a houseful of monsters, aliens, serpents and fiends, covering the front windows of the house, lighting them from behind, and then turning off any outside lights so that the house is pitch black, except for the glow of the windows, illuminating the horrors within.

Release the Kraken!

This is my favourite thing to do all year, holiday-wise. We have already had a total stranger stop and knock on the door just to tell us how much she loved the octopus, and while we were finishing up the fiend and the 22-eyed monster in the kitchen, some neighbourhood kids stood on the lawn, alternately giving us the thumbs-up and pretending to be zombies, which I believe are the two highest compliments a little boy can give. It’s creepy and weird looking, and people stop and take pictures, or stop and laugh, and it is kind of funny to be cooking dinner and hear someone out on the front sidewalk talking about them.

Could you pass me that knife, please? I have got a lot of Julienning to do!

Five dollars-worth of black construction paper, two pairs of scissors, and two rolls of transparent tape. And a lifetime of watching old horror movies, of course. That is all it takes to transform a boring little bungalow to a house of horrors. I can’t even get over how much this silly little craft delights me, or how thrilled my girls were to come home from school to find the house ‘filled’ with monsters.

Today is a day off for our school district, so the kids are home, ready to be put to work pulling pumpkin guts out of pumpkins [ed note: euw! so cold! so slimy!] so that we can add some pumpkins in the garden down below, but for now, we are sticking with monster minimalist. And I like it.

I thought we were done with the drama of the kindergarten registration process, but apparently, we are not, because yesterday we got a call from the school district, informing us that the kids are missing 3 DTaP vaccinations on the medical forms we turned in. Forms that our doctor signed, stating that the kids were up-to-date. Because they are. Because we are the anti-granola family, all vaxx’ed up and stuff.But the district is adamant that we are wrong, and our doctor is wrong, and why doesn’t the paperwork for my kids match those of kids born in an industrialized nation, and also, maybe we could just get them three quick TDaPs before mid-October, when all this is due, and did I mention that I turned this paperwork in two months ago, and if there was a problem, maybe the woman who checked it and said it was complete should bear the brunt of the blame here?

courtesy, mtv.tumblr.com

It never ends, adoption paperwork, and every milestone brings more with it. In this case,  my kids spent the first 7 months of their life in Africa, and since TDaPs are given at 1, 3, and 6 months, we had to do titre testing. Medicine that ends up in Africa is often expired, often watered down, often is mislabeled, and even if your records look good, the only way to know for sure what inoculations were given is to check for the presence of them in the blood, which is called titring, or titration testing. Which we did, which demonstrated that the kids had in fact lucked out and had their three TDaPs, and that the dosage levels were appropriate and good, and so they only needed 2 more, at 15 months and 4 years, which they got.

So our doctor’s office faxed over the titre results, and an explanation of them, and I thought we were done, until the phone rang again today, and it was the school district, telling me now that the forms were incomplete because the kids didn’t have a Varicella vax listed. Which they don’t, because they had Chicken Pox as infants, another titre test we had done. Chicken Pox swept through their orphanage like a brush fire, 250 infants and toddlers burning up with it, including my own. Immunity through disease.

So here is where I was a tiny bit not so nice, because, as I tried to explain, wouldn’t it have been better if they had told me on the first call *everything* that was inconsistent in their records, so I did not have to keep bothering their doctor to write and fax letters for each individual issue, day after day? Now I have to chase down their doctor (again). And I get it, I really do. I have had Whooping Cough, and I wouldn’t wish it on a kid. It went through our PreK school, and was awful. I don’t want my kids to have the measles, and I don’t want anyone else’s too,either. I believe in herd immunity, and Doing Our Part in that. But it is also awfully tiring to always have to explain away the inconsistencies, the differentness of our records. I just, for once, want one thing to be straightforward and easy.

The best part of the conversation happened as I was trying to get off the phone, when the district caseworker said to me, “Oh, and make a note: the kids also need HepA,” and so I told her no, the kids had their HepA shots already, broken into the 2 dose schedule, but she interrupted me to interject that she meant they needed another dose by Grade 5, and I said, jokingly, well, we have five years to figure that one out, and she replied that she just thought she would tell me, because it seemed like maybe we didn’t really understand the importance of these vaccinations. And then I did this.

via http://realitytvgifs.tumblr.com/

Because I have seen, with my own eyes, people with Polio, and beggars with Leprosy, and children blinded by Measles and Rubella, begging and starving at the side of the road. I am fully aware of what these vaccinations mean to my children, and what can happen in places where vaccinations are not available. We aren’t non-compliant with the vaccination schedule at all: our records just look a little different. We look a little different. So if you need me, I will by lying on the floor next to my chair, the back of one hand pressed firmly against my forehead, moaning quietly to myself.

Some photos require more explanation than others, as do some marriages. Last Spring, my husband and I discovered that we were both trying to get a baker to make a “Happy Anniversary/Birthday, Asshole” cake for each other, to no avail. It is this stupid in-joke we have, that originated with freaking out over our Christmas cards one year, and now shows up randomly on holidays that are especially stressful, a way for one of us to remind the other to stop taking it all so seriously and just relax. Sadly, it turned out that not one baker in this whole town would write the word Asshole on a cake, so we were left cakeless.

My husband never swears, which makes it even funnier for me that he tried to get that iced on pastry. But even though he never curses, he can appreciate a good punchline, which is why he loves The Bloggess’ story about Beyoncé so much. I can’t remember when I read it originally, but I do know when he read it – on my Nook, after a long, irritating day, when I loaded The Bloggess’ site up in my Nook browser and handed it over, to give him the laugh he so desperately needed. That story, about that chicken, is my happy place; the place I go to in my head at the dentist, or when another Mom starts telling me how gifted her kids are. “Knock, knock, motherfucker” is a phrase I hear in the back of my head whenever I am confronted with the absurdity of suburban life.

So now we are here, the part of the story where you are wondering what on earth these two anecdotes have to do with one another. Where might the intersection might be between our troubling attempts to add pastry-based expletives to our marital communication toolkit and the Bloggess’ giant chicken? Well, I tell you … it has been a rough summer, one that culminated in me having to act like an adult, make some hard decisions, give up some dreams, and put my childrens’ needs ahead of my own, and it’s good, I guess, but charting a new course in life is never easy, which is why I was so grateful to see the delivery van for the best bakery in town stop in front of my house one morning, clearly sent by my husband. My husband who finally found a baker who works in expletives, apparently, because in that lovely bakery box was this:

Some days, when it feels like the whole world was designed just to punish you for having the nerve to get out of bed, there isn’t much that another person can do that can comfort you. Except to have delivered to you a delicious cake with a chicken iced onto it, along with the words, “Knock, knock, Motherfucker!” We hid it from the kids, who are learning to sound out words, and it took us a week to eat, and I think it might be the best cake I have ever had. Knock, knock, Motherfucker, indeed.