And now that Mr. T is almost nine months old (?!!??!!) and we’re back from Europe, I am about to dip my toes back in to being a professional X, Y and Z again.

I am not, in any sense, prepared to give up being Mommy at home with Torsten, but since many of the things I do can be done either from home or part-time (and all of them privately, if I so choose), I will soon be firing up the old brain and integrating some work (some combination of programming, writing and teaching – you didn’t think I got that CELTA for nothing, did you? ) into my weekly schedule.

We’ve always planned that I’d start working on getting this together once we got back from abroad, but now that we’re really back and Christian has Torsten for the day, I’m finally sitting down over a cup of coffee to work out the details, and I must say it feels pretty good. At the moment it’s low-pressure while I work things out, but it’s still nice to be on the path.

More on this as things come together…

(“Knowledge” picture from Scott Meyer’s Basic Instructions comic strip)

So the mind-blowing month of CELTA is officially over, and it was totally worth it. It was stressful and intense, and I learned so much I think my head may yet come apart at the seams, but it was awesome. Sometime after we get back from Europe this summer, I’ll start looking for part-time work around here so that I can put it into practice, but in the meantime, it’s just going to sit in there and stew, and that’s quite alright.

Meanwhile, I’d just like to congratulate everyone in my CELTA class (CELT-ites?) for surviving!

(Click to enlarge)

To Aram, Jon, Jedidiah, Joe, Nick and Richard: it was a pleasure working with you all, and I fully intend to be extremely jealous as you traipse off to the far-flung corners of the world! Thanks for being so collegial and for making the course a great deal of fun.

To our wonderful trainers, Giles and Betty: thanks so much for your candor and sense of humor, and most of all for sharing your expertise with us. It was well worth the pain!

And to anyone who’s thinking of doing the CELTA here in Denver, I highly recommend it. It’s a lot of work and not for the faint-of-heart, but as far as professional development goes, it’s a great experience.

Bah!

So I have a listening lesson tomorrow, and I still have a grammar lesson on the passive to teach Friday. And I am so ready to be done. And if not enough students show on Friday, I’d have to do it the next week with the new CELTA students, which would really suck, but it doesn’t look like that will have to happen.

Still, I hope I get to do this early enough on Friday that I can join the CELTA peeps for beer, because we all so need one!

We’re all pretty sick. I’m the most obviously ill, but Christian’s been coughing horribly for weeks, and the baby got to visit the urgent care last night (although, to be fair, he isn’t apparently feeling all that bad – but he was breathing a little hard, so they wanted us to bring him in). I’m probably only so ill because I haven’t been sleeping, but it’s not good, because I can’t give Christan a break after a long week with the baby, and I can’t play with Torsten, which sucks, because I miss him. Terribly.

The course is going really well, though. I can’t believe how much I’ve learned in the past three weeks, although given the intensity of the course, I’d hope I’d learned something. I love doing this. I really, really love it. I can’t wait to be in the classroom outside of the training environment, though I am going to miss our students here. They’re pretty fantastic. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to use this training yet, but I’m so pleased with having decided to do this.

The downside is that I’m never home right now. I simply cannot wait to be back home and spend time with my family. My baby is growing up without me! Now, granted, he and his papa do just fine, and I’m happy they’ve gotten to spend the time together, but I’ll be happy to have a few more hours a day of my own with my family again.

Hopefully this cold won’t kill me so I can get back home to enjoy them.

I’m sick. As in coming down with a bad, bad cold.

And I teach tomorrow.

And Thursday.

And I have a paper due Thursday morning.

Sick.

Grrrr.

I win.

I feel like I’m learning so much about teaching in such a short time. It’s going to be a while before I can integrate all of this crap into my own brain and teaching, but I’m having a blast. Of course, the other folks in the course are a riot and great to work with, so it helps, but I feel like I’ll really be in a good place for teaching when I decide to go back to work.

Of course, being home with Torsten and Christian this weekend (well, only today really – I was in Colorado Springs this Saturday at the State Democratic Convention which completely sucked for various reasons I’ll disclose in June, after my course is done and I have some time to really write) made me realize that I’m totally not ready to be back at work yet – having the opportunity to enjoy my son’s early months with my husband is so wonderful that I can’t wait for June to come and to be at home with him again, even if I go stir crazy from time to time.

Anyhow, five minutes of non-course writing is all I can allow myself – if I do anymore, my paper and lesson plans will never get done, and that is, quite frankly, not an option!

It’s my first Mother’s Day as a mama, and what am I doing?

Yup, writing lesson plans in a café, several blocks away from my baby.

We don’t celebrate many holidays/occasions as a family, but I have to admit, I was hoping to celebrate this one.

Oh well, there’s always next year, and given that I had a near-complete meltdown this morning over the fact that I couldn’t find my keys, of all things (and haven’t seen them for several days), I’m not feeling like supermommy anyway. Even if I’m usually a much better mama than that.

Still, I think I’ll try to get home sooner than intended, if for no other reason than to snuggle my little pumpkin. I miss him. One more indicator that I am not quite ready to go back to work, I guess

*stress stress stress*

So when I say that I read somewhere that around the 4-5 month mark, most parents start to feel as if they’ve emerged from a cave and begin to start to see glimpses of the life they led before the baby, I mean that I read it somewhere. Like maybe Parents magazine. Or the back of a can of formula. Or a diaper advertisement. I have no idea.

That said, it is true. All of a sudden, life is returning to something which, if not normal, is at the very least human. I’ve been writing on my book all week for the first time since Torsten’s birth (and my spectacularly impossible post-C-section last-minute NaNoWriMo win), and I’ve decided to enroll in a CELTA certification course next month which will presumably eat all of my non-sleeping time for the month of May so that at some point after the summer I can either teach ESL/EFL part-time here in the area or can privately tutor foreign students. (Note that I can only do the course right now because Christian is a) officially on paternity leave, and b) a really nice husband…)

Oh, and this week I got to plan a few days of research in London while we’re in Europe in August. Muahahaha.

In other words, for the first time in months, in addition to being Mama, I get to be Krista too.

Not that I don’t love being Mama – I love being Mama – but it’s sort of exciting to be able to be doing other stuff too. A Mama who is also Krista is a better Mama for Torsten to have – I’m sure of it.

And let me repeat this: my husband is awesome.

Apparently, the guy who writes xkcd has had similar experiences – here’s his variant: ( ):

Can I just say again how much I love xkcd?

Oh, and I guess this puts me into R-rated blog territory, even if it’s harder to detect. Bad me

This post is not, primarily, about that, though I’ll write about it briefly, and maybe more than once. In general, I haven’t been writing enough lately, and when I don’t write, I find it hard to keep my life straight. The one thing I’ve been doing a lot of lately is trying to keep my life straight.

So here’s the state of things, with some background:

When we lived in Los Angeles, it is no secret that I was relatively miserable with life there. Neither of us wanted to move to Los Angeles – I’d told more than one person that it’s the one place I’d never live – but it was necessary. One of us was working on a dissertation all the time in a cramped poorly-built one-bedroom apartment, and the other was stuck in an endless cycle of sleep 6 hours, spend 3-4 hours on trains and buses, and work 8-12 hours for The Man ™, with little time for anything else, including the cramped one-bedroom apartment and the beloved dissertation writer sequestered within. It is a sad state of affairs when the guy working on the dissertation in the drab, dark apartment under tremendous time pressure is the happier one. But it was to be expected from the circumstances, and it was ok because we knew it was temporary.

And now, now we’re in Denver. The dissertation-writer is now a professor, doing what he loves, and the former drudge for The Man ™ is drudge no longer, having the time and space to figure out what it is she wants. We’re in a good place, both literally and figuratively. And now it’s time for me to figure things out.

When I left my job with The Man ™, I returned to grad school after a year off. All of the coursework was done, and all that was left was research, so I figured it was worth a go. I won’t say I didn’t do this with some reservations, because I did, but having finally gotten my crap together after a decade in which my life hit more highs and lows than a bipolar heroin addict (no offense to bipolar heroin addicts), I thought I’d go back and try to finish things on my own terms, under my own expectations, and without 10 tons of other people’s problems on my shoulders while I did it. My husband, as always, was remarkably supportive. So was my absolutely awesome advisor.

And so I went back. I flew back and forth to the armpit of America all semester (I don’t care about those of you who’ve voted for New Jersey or West Memphis, Arkansas as The Armpit ™ – as far as I’m concerned, Lafayette, Indiana really does take the cake, and you’ll never convince me otherwise), and I frantically packed about 6 months worth of background reading and analysis into less than a semester. I wrote a prelim document which, while it was not perfect, was a significant chunk of work which would have pushed things forward (my advisor and I were both happy with it).

All in all, it went about as well as it could have gone. I can’t say that I didn’t get excited about the research or about making progress, because I did. Sometimes.

Of course, as always in life, other things were going on too. And those things are not the reason for what I’ve decided to do, although I’d be foolish to deny they may have had an impact.

But, you see, my husband and I had been having a conversation all semester about whether or not I really want this PhD.

I’m going to say something here that will perhaps offend some people that love and respect me, but it needs to be said. In the past 5 years – particularly since I left the Purdue CS department so unhappy (most grad students I know, it should be said, leave the Purdue CS department unhappy, and many very smart ones without the degrees they came for, but that’s a story for another day…) – the number of people that I love, respect and care about who’ve said something to me to the effect of “You’re so smart – you really should finish this PhD”, or “You really need a PhD” (for my own ego reasons, or because no one wants to see another woman give up her career for her husband’s – one favorite professor of mine was worried about me for feminist reasons – or because the speaker simply thought I’d make a good professor) , or “You’re so close to done – how can you stop now?” has been staggering.

None of these people are entirely wrong, with the exception of the person who was worried that I was giving up my career for my husband. My ego took a pretty good bitchslapping in the Purdue CS department, and being married to a very intense academic professional does mean needing to hold one’s own, ego-wise (this isn’t a commentary on my husband, by the way – my father is a professor, and from a lifetime of samples, I’d say the need to have an intellectual backbone just goes with the territory of being with smart people). So, sure, ego is a concern. And once upon a time, when I was very young and naïve, I undersold myself so that I wouldn’t intimidate people, spending a good bit of time hiding the fact that I was smart until it got me into a relationship with a lunatic that I almost failed to make it out of. That wasn’t good. So no, I’m not an idiot, and yes, I could get a PhD. And it is certainly inarguable that I have put a great deal of time and effort into getting through this many academic hoops. There are only a couple of hoops left. Those hoops, it can be said, are very big and would take a lot of my time. And the payoff at the end – emotionally, intellectually and financially – really wouldn’t put me ahead of where I am now. As for the possibility of “giving up my career for my husband”, in a strange sense, the move to linguistics itself was a career decision based upon my then-boyfriend-now-husband long ago. That decision was to stay at Purdue but transfer to a different discipline rather than transferring to a less dysfunctional CS department at another university while he finished up. Whether or not that was the “right” thing to do, from a feminist point of view, is irrelevant – it was my choice to make, and I’m happy I gave the relationship a chance to be what it is, regardless of professional outcome.

In any event, to those I love and care about who are in academia reading this, let me just make something clear: just because I am not choosing to become a high priest of the religion doesn’t mean I don’t worship at the temple or respect its rites. The long and short of it is this: it just isn’t what I want to do. And after I’d finished the prelim – after the only thing this was about was me and what I wanted, because my ego was satisfied that I could do this and that I’d done very well so far – I could finally step back and decide that without anyone else’s expectations or desires in the way. That perspective was worth all of the flying back and forth and reading and crunching ideas and wracking my brains to try to make a cohesive whole out of a bunch of disparate research.

Of course, there is this “something else” that was going on at the time too. Right around the time I defended my prelim, I was about 6 weeks pregnant. This was our first pregnancy – we were guardedly excited about it, but hadn’t told anyone. Looking at having a baby in the not-too-distant future and at where I really want my life to go certainly was an impetus for trying to get some real perspective, but it wasn’t the reason for my decision – in fact, being a grad student and taking care of a kid is a lot more compatible than working 9-to-5 and doing the same. But it played its part in getting me thinking. It emphasized what I already knew – that I cared a lot more about getting into a position where I could teach and raise a family than I did about being called Dr. Grothoff. Mainly, I care about being happy. A piece of paper, a “significant contribution to the field” and a ticket to possibly get in line in the tenure rat-race just aren’t going to do that for me personally right now.

And so I made a decision and gave myself a few weeks to think about it to make sure. I’d leave the linguistics program for good, work on my German and refresh my math skills, and go back to school for a teaching certification in a year or so. That decided, I set off to get through Christmas and not do a whole lot of thinking (or anything else). We planned to tell my parents about the pregnancy at Christmas, and I planned not to worry for a while.

Of course, I’m finding that people never talk about these things unless they go well. And this did not, unfortunately, go well. A couple of weeks later at the ultrasound – hours after my last post – we saw that the embryo had stopped developing right around the prelim, and that I would soon miscarry. The next day I went in to the hospital to complete the miscarriage (there was absolutely no chance that it would continue – there was really nothing there), and it wasn’t pleasant. But it happened, and we’re all right. It was a pretty routine occurrence, and as much as it might seem like I should be devastated right now, I’m really not. Disappointed, certainly, but since most first-trimester miscarriages are due to one-time genetic defects, I’d really rather it have happened early on. Mostly, it was just uncomfortable and weird. Thursday, you’re pregnant. Friday, you’re not. And there wasn’t a damned thing to be done about it.

Now, you may be wondering why I’d mention this on a blog to begin with if I’m OK and don’t want pity (which I really, really don’t). Well, first of all, it’s part of the story, and it’s my story to tell. One thing I’ve discovered in the last few years is that people may not want you to tell your own story because it makes them uncomfortable, but it’s your story to tell, as long as you don’t shove it down anyone’s throat. But I’m also discovering that nearly every woman I’ve talked to about this – let’s just guess 95% – has been through one or two early miscarriages, and no one talks about it until they run into someone else that has. Yes, its traumatic, but geez… it’s much worse if you think it really only happens to people who are sick or ill or somehow defective, and clinical numbers from the doctor’s office don’t really fix that perception. The thing that made me feel the most normal was having someone tell me, “yeah, that happened to me too.” Because even when you’re emotionally ok with it, it’s about 2 weeks of Teh Suck physically afterward, and so you really do need someone to tell you, “Yeah, that happens.”

So anyway, that was more than I wanted to say about it, but that happened too.

So it’s been one of those months. Up and down and back and forth. And now, now I’m studying for a math exam required by the state to teach, and looking at taking the GRE again, since they won’t take my 7-year-old scores (rip-off!).

And so with all of that, here’s the executive summary: I’ve finally decided to do what I want to do, regardless of what anyone else thinks, even the people I respect most. And for the next year or so, I’m going to work on my own projects and being with my family and doing what makes me happy.

And that, my friends, is just about as good as it gets in life, even if it takes 10 pages to give the setup for it.