Bloggers like to talk about why they blog. I will talk here about why I have not been doing that (blogging, or talking about it) and what that’s meant for me.
The main reason is the obvious: having a kid takes away all your free time. And blogging, unless it’s done as part of your professional workload (or as an attempt to kickstart one of those into existence, like some spiritual entity one forms in effigy and then enchants into life through the appropriate charms, chants, invocations, and ritual gestures), is done during one’s free time.
As anyone who’s had one probably knows (at least anyone with even a modicum of egalitarianism in their co-parenting ideals), having a kid generally means disappearing from the world and hoping that when one reappears that world will not have changed so much as to be completely unrecognizable. One hopes not to wake up like Rip Van Winkle, but some measure of Van Winkledom is inevitable.
What it’s meant for me is not listening to the radio (hardly), watching the news or keeping up with podcasts (at all), not seeing friends and relatives for long periods at a time — unless, of course, they have young kids, but when you’re our age, that’s not nearly as likely as it would have been 20 years ago. It’s meant allowing mail, books, magazines and journals to pile up, unread. E-mail doesn’t pile up — it just disappears somewhere, leaving behind a vague sense of guilt for letting down one’s friends, students, colleagues, and other e-mail correspondents. I now understand my mother’s old Ukrainian saying that the thief’s hat is always on fire. If I could have, I would have proclaimed e-mail bankruptcy a few times in the last year.
It’s meant forgetting appointments, and allowing an impossible backlog of professional obligations to pile up (thesis drafts to read, books to review, articles to complete, committee meetings to follow up on, etc.). It’s meant hardly watching movies — even though I write about them. Forgetting Facebook, Twitter, and all that. And feeling a little dazed much of the time.
And while it’s meant not — or hardly — blogging, the more impactful thing it’s meant is not keeping up with other people’s blogs. I’ve realized that they have constituted a community for me, and that by not keeping up I’ve simply eliminated that community from my life. I have missed it — and will try to regain a bit of ground with that in the coming months.
It’s meant all those things despite the fact that I’ve always justified many of them — the news, the magazines and journals, the blogs and podcasts — as part of my job. (Who else but an academic gets to say that with a straight face?)
I have gotten some things done. At work I’ve probably been busier than usual. (Administering a program of 500 majors, which I did in the fall, tends to have that result; and when you add a search committee chairship, still ongoing, a grad studies committee chairship, and on and on, that’s what you get.)
And I’ve even — finally, last week — completed and sent in a book manuscript to the publisher. Yes, that’s the film book (Ecologies of the Moving Image), which turned into a monster: over 450 manuscript pages, some 550 footnotes, lots and lots and lots of movie references along with several dozen more detailed analyses, and a philosophical framework holding it all together that I feel surprisingly good about, for the moment. It’s now off to the peer reviewers. Two other half-completed manuscripts await me, along with book chapters, articles, conference papers.
All of that means that when I do come up for air to say hello, I feel like a groundhog, or a prairie dog (see above), poking its head out of the ground to see what’s going on and wondering, what did I miss? What all has been happening here?
But most of all, it means that I have a boy who looks and acts happy most of the time. (Even if we aren’t feeling so great most of the time, with our interrupted nights, strings of colds one following another, & all that…)
That ultimately has got to count for something.
Adrian,
Thanks for this, I agree and empathise with pretty much everything you’ve said here; and here is a certain pleasure in knowing that one isn’t alone in this transformation of one’s professional life. It certainly seems to be the case that one acquires a new sense of what is “absolutely” necessary at work, and then one also has to accept that this will often be done less well than it might have been in the past. Maintaining a commitment to one big other project seems to be the very best that can be achieved when balancing the number of plates created by young children, so congrats on getting the book manuscript to the publisher. I always appreciated the feminist analyses of such efforts and had a healthy respect for colleagues who seemed to manage both academic life and children. Since having kids myself, though, my male feminist consciousness grasps this reality far more firmly (when it isn’t addled by sleep deprivation and the constant cycle of colds and other minor ailments, that is – which is rarely).
But, yes, pretty much everything that can be jettisoned soon goes (TV, film and other media, hobbies, projects etc.) and one has to be very selective about what one struggles to retain, whether for reasons of professional development or simple sanity. Ground can gradually be recovered, but only a fraction, and with time. No point talking about the upside of kids, too easy. Besides, its not some simple hedonic calculus. Yes, some colleagues seem to manage this far more easily than others, but I rather think they are the exception than the rule, or else have struck some infernal pact to make it possible.
Anyway, cheers, I enjoyed reading this. I perhaps should add that this was typed while my six and two-year olds pretended to be dogs around my feet and demanded that I throw a ball for them.
Paul
Hi Paul,
Thanks for your supportive comments. I had to laugh at your line about “balancing the number of plates created by young children,” as I couldn’t help thinking of the plates they destroy as well (literally, those that come crashing to the ground).
I do wonder about that infernal pact (and to what extent it used to be the norm, with women taking the unreasonable brunt of the pact)…
Enjoy those dogs at your feet 🙂
You two men just took on the more-than-awe inspiring side of Spring blooming with vigor and beauty just outside my office window. I came to Adrian’s blog this morning with deep trepidation, having to go “dark” with blogging since, well, January I think. My first stop on the blog was this page and ahhhhhhh, what a comfort to see this dialogue between two plugged-in parents. I too feel deeply the tensions that time, in its seeming rush, rush, rush presents as we scuttle about trying to prioritize little people over bigger people, being present and hospitable over being absent and groundhog-like. Part of my time underground has been spent with all things Rosi Braidotti (as well as with my 9 year old son; a taller version of the plate-dropping, anthropomorphic canine types described above). A snippet from the intro. to Braidotti’s (2011) revised landmark text, Nomadic Subjects, seems to plunge itself into the middle of Adrian’s motivation for providing this post and for both Adrian’s and Paul’s commitment to ‘multiple belongings’ despite plenty of (still) normative influences that would deem their public pronouncements of struggle over professional/personal balance suspect: “This [nomadic] subject actively yearns for and constructs itself in complex and internally contradictory webs of social relations. To account for these, we need to look at the internal forms of thought that privilege processes rather than essences and transformations–rather than counterclaims to identity. The sociological variables (gender, class, race and ethnicity, age, health) need to be supplemented by a theory of the subject that calls into question the inner fibers of the self. These include the desire, the ability, and the courage to sustain multiple belongings in a context that celebrates and rewards Sameness, cultural essentialism, and one-way thinking.”
Thanks, Paul and Adrian, for re-inspiring my commitment to follow and contribute to this community, even if between meal planning, teaching, laundry folding, meeting agendas, and the sniffles. Here’s to belonging and becoming among the pack of multiples.