KALAMAZOO, OR, I AM MY OWN WIFE


This week there will be my family, and lilacs blooming. And there will be low horizons, and too many crappy papers, and dudes drinking mead from cow horns, and real monks and real nuns. (I think here of Moore's "Poetry," the line about "gardens with real toads in them.") And it will be my first K'zoo with a job!

I will not be giving a paper; instead, I will be presiding over a panel co-invented with a New York colleague. And I feel some twinges of guilt at not presenting "new" research. Indeed, I feel guilt at having produced very little "new" research over the past year. This is kind of the academic's albatross--no matter how hard you work, you always feel like you could be doing more, more, MORE! And yo, I been clockin' the hours. But there are only so many hours in the week, and I already have been struggling with the physical effects of overwork. I somaticize most things, and this year has been no exception.

I got diagnosed with asthma, and so added a fourth inhaler/antihistamine/steroid Rx to my daily mix. The weird foot problems I inherited have increased, and now my "good" foot is on the road to eventual surgery. When even your Dansko clogs hurt, you know you're in trouble. I have a new crown, and will likely need a root canal at the month's end. I keep getting woken from sleep by leg and foot cramps, which is not fun, and is likely related to not getting as much exercise as I need. I've also had continual struggles with what can only be called "intestinal distress," probably from a suppressed immune system, from something viral, and from not having a regular schedule. Blech. I just don't feel 100%, despite my best efforts at self-care. I eat reasonably well, I don't drink too much, I try to get enough sleep, and since I don't have a car, I walk. A lot.

The sweet, sweet dog has stuck it out without a dogwalker since October, and he held it together until last week. (We've gone through 3 dogwalkers, all female, all ... soft with him, and afraid before they met him of the breed. All he had to do was bark, and they were done. The more brave male walker who I'd wanted to use lost a dog on the Brooklyn Queens Expwy. Not auspicious.) Most days, the dog goes 12 hours between walks, and last week I came home to a pee-puddle on the kitchen floor. This is only the second time he's done that, in 3.5 years, so it's likely not a pattern. But he was so abashed, and I feel really bad for him. I am constantly thinking about how I need to get home to him, and calculating how many hours it'll take. That makes it hard to just get a head of writing-steam going, when I'm in my office.

And I've also been plagued by insane and frequently upsetting dreams. They are a variation on the usual: I haven't actually received my BA! I have to go back to college and live in the dorms, despite my objections ("I am 32 years old! I cannot do a bunk bed!") Or, I have to become the third person in a marriage with Beloved Advisor and Second Reader, because my mother is forcing me to do so, despite my strenuous protestations ("No! They're gay men! And they're married! To each other!") My two recent favorite dreams were these: in one, I had to teach calculus, and I had no choice. Now, in real life, I last took a math class during my Junior year of High School. I never took calculus. And so, in the dream, I was merely a step ahead of my students, and had no way of explaining any of the problems because I barely understood what was happening myself. In the other dream, I found myself dispassionately stabbing my dear friend the Professor-Poet, in a little bloody slot in his sternum, with an ice pick. I didn't really want to stab him, but I was being harshly instructed to do so, and so I shrugged and went right on with it. We stood on the Union Street bridge, overlooking the Gowanus, where we'd taken a photo together right before he and his wife left to go to his TT SLAC job in the rural Midwest.

My analyst is good with the dreams. He helpfully points out, about the going-back-to-college dreams, that what's at issue is not that I am fraudulent, but that I will never be a student again. I have to be the authority, now, despite my hesitations and fears, my frequent wish to just be a private citizen again, a passive receptacle waiting for someone else's knowledge to be impressed into my head. And he said that he thinks the stabbing dream is about my own very real anger and resentment towards the academy and the sacrifices that I have been and am continuing to make. If I was open and gave in to the extent of anger that I feel, there might be dire consequences. So in my dream I take out my resentment and envy on Professor-Poet, a colleague who is driven, and hardworking, and committed, and already has turned his diss. into a book, and has a fantastic wife who trailed him. They're trying to get pregnant. He's working the academic life, and doing pretty well.

And I frequently fear that I will be unable to work it quite so hard as Professor-Poet has, what with being a single female with a two-body problem and a 4/4 comp.-heavy load. (He teaches a 2/3, the bastard.) My desire to start a family has to be shelved for a few more years, and I am edging ever closer towards "advanced maternal age." Plus, I don't have a wife to help with the organizing and the cleaning and the emotional support. I gotta do that shit for myself. And as wonderful as Mr. Legal is, he can't, by definition, be my wife. He's not trailing me; he's going to law school here.

I can be uber-domestic. But doing the "good wife" thing while also doing the "good academic" thing and living alone is fucking impossible. So I will have to live in a certain amount of filth and disorder, I will have to live in a different region than my partner, I will have to rush home from my writing to walk the dog, I will be physically out-of-sorts. And I will never be able to "take a year off" to focus on caring for a baby. Not, at least, if I want to remain in this career.

It isn't that I haven't committed myself to this here "life of the mind." Rather, it's that I wish I had some more ... help. I want a wife, goddammit. The model of the female partner following her husband "to support" his career is the conventional one. But there aren't many models for the female academic with a partner in another state who also wants to have a family sooner rather than later, much less HOW THE MOTHERING is supposed to happen. (By the way, if one more MAN tells me that I have "time" to start a family, I may deck him.)

I started this post thinking about a colleague with whom I had dinner at last year's K'zoo. We were on the VAP circuit, and she and her husband had finally gotten TT jobs. They were now living in separate states, and she was trying to be cheerful about it all. I'd given up the cheerful pretense and said out loud that I wanted to have a child, and I couldn't wrap my head around how the whole thing--the living separately, the teaching, the research, the service, the wife-ing AND the childbearing and -rearing--was supposed to happen.

"You could always get cats!" she said, brightly. I must have looked aghast, because she then said, "I mean, they're not a substitute, but I love my own cats..." Now, I love me some animals, but for fuck's sake, pets do not and cannot equal human generation.

So here's to hoping that K'zoo will rock the hell out, that it'll be somewhat restful, and that I'll find some more feminist colleagues with whom these questions might find slightly more nuanced answers.