30 Days of Blogging, Day 2: Something you dislike about yourself

I don't like the fact that I'm so shy.  I'm not even sure if that's the right word for it at my age--I'm not comfortable talking to people I don't know well.  Is that shyness?  I can do it, thanks to my sorority training, but I really don't enjoy it.  Maybe that's just the sign of an introverted nature--I'm energized by time spent alone, not time spent with others.  I'm perfectly happy hanging out by myself, and I'm happiest when I'm at home with my family.

Whenever I'm asked to attend some social event, my immediate response is to say "Oh, sorry, I can't."  Even when that occasion involves people I know well, that's my first reaction--I have to make myself pause for a moment and actually consider the possibility.  This has a tendency to make people think I'm standoffish and conceited, but I don't think I'm either of those things.  Just borderline agoraphobic.  

30 Days of Blogging, Day 1: Something You Like About Yourself

I'm glad this project begins on a positive note--with a metaphorical pat on the back, so to speak. 

I have a hard time thinking of things I like about myself because, as the child of Midwestern parents, I was raised to be unfailingly humble and self-deprecating.  My usual response to a compliment is, "You're so kind.  Thanks.  But I wish . . ."  And from there I go on to explain what was wrong with whatever had been complimented.   Secretly, though?  (Not so secretly now, I realize.)  I like that I'm able to reach people with the things I write.  Whenever I publish an article in The Chronicle, I love getting email from other professors who tell me I've expressed something they too have been feeling.  After my novel was published, getting email from readers who were moved by that story meant a lot to me.  When my colleagues read my work and tell me they enjoyed it, I feel like our personal relationship changes--like we know something new about each other.

Putting your writing out into the world is a scary thing, but getting positive feedback makes it worth the risk.

30 Days of Blogging

As some of you know, I've been busily posting on my other blog and, in the process, ignoring this one entirely.  I've been feeling regretful about that lately  because I started this blog with good intentions: to give myself regular writing practice, and to make myself think about something beyond the daily details of my life.  These are still things that matter to me, though I haven't been making them a priority.

So.  With that in mind, I'm going to embark on a project:  30 Days of Blogging.  I saw that my niece was doing this on her blog, and when I did a quick Google search I found many different lists of daily blog topics for a 30-Day challenge.  I've picked the topics that seem most relevant to me and I'll be responding to one a day for the next month.  I'm going to try to keep my responses brief, so the project will stay manageable.

Does it bother me that I'm beginning a month-long project 5 days into the current month?  Yes, it does.  Very much.  (More on this when we get to Day 17 of the challenge.)  But I don't want to wait until October to get this started.  I hope you'll check in daily and read my responses to each of these prompts.  Better yet, why not blog along with me?  30 days of writing practice never hurt anyone.


Day 01 → Something you like about yourself.
Day 02 → Something you dislike about yourself.
Day 03 → Your favorite quote and why it's your favorite.
Day 04 → A list of 20 favorite things.
Day 05 → What’s the best thing in your life right now?
Day 06 → Someone from the past you'd like to get in touch with.
Day 07 → Someone from the past who disappointed you.
Day 08 → The reasons why you love your significant other or best friend.
Day 09 → A piece of art or sculpture that you really like.
Day 10 → A photo that makes you happy.
Day 11 → A photo that makes you sad.
Day 12 → An old photo of you (taken at least 10 years ago) and a story to go with it.
Day 13 → Your favorite song, band or artist.
Day 14 → Your favorite TV show, past or present.
Day 15 → Something you couldn’t live without, because you’ve tried living without it.
Day 16 → Something you definitely can live without.
Day 17 → Something you're a little neurotic/irrational/OCD about.
Day 18 → Your views on a current controversial topic.
Day 19 → Your faith, or your political views in general.
Day 20 → A book that really meant something to you.
Day 21 → A story about your best friend, past or present.
Day 22 → Something you wish you hadn’t done.
Day 23 → Something you wish you had done.
Day 24 → Make a playlist for someone, and explain why you chose all the songs.
Day 25 → A song that makes you think of someone besides your significant other.
Day 26 → Describe your dream house.  Post pictures, if you want.
Day 27 → Something you have to forgive yourself for.
Day 28 → Something you have to forgive someone else for.
Day 29 → Something you still hope to accomplish in your lifetime.
Day 30 → Write a letter to yourself at 20. Offer some advice based on what you've learned in life.

Reinvention

My sister and niece came for a visit last week. I love having family around, and I often wish we lived a little closer to my sister and parents-but when she was here, my sister said "I know you like having some distance between us," and that caught me off guard. I had to stop and think for a moment about whether I actually like living away from my extended family or if that's just a function of the way my life has worked out.

I won't deny that I really like the way my immediate family operates as an autonomous little unit. Because Mike and I never had our parents, aunts or uncles to lean on, our four-person family team has pretty stable borders. We enjoy each others' company a lot, and my kids get along with each other really well, for the most part. People routinely comment on the fact that they're so good together--when they were younger, they walked home from school holding hands every day. (My daughter took her Big Sister role very seriously.) In fact, when someone recently gave my daughter a mini-lecture about how much she'd miss her annoying little brother if he weren't around, she came to me later and said "She obviously doesn't know me very well if she thinks I need to hear that." I had to agree.

I also won't deny that I love living in Texas. If you'd told me, ten years ago, that this is where my family was going to end up, I would not have been happy. Texas was never on my list of Places I Hope To Live Someday. I have a very clear memory of seeing the ad for the job I now have and thinking "Come on, it's a church-affiliated school in Texas. Are you really that desperate for a new job?" Because the answer to that question was a firm "Yes, I am," I went ahead and applied for the job, thinking of it as a last resort. When I got a job offer--my only offer that year, as it happened--I accepted. And I'm glad I did, because I would have missed out on many wonderful friends, students and experiences if I'd let my preconceptions about Texas get in the way.

And, finally, I have to admit that I like the way my kids have grown up, which is very far removed from the way I grew up. Because Mike and I have always worked at universities, our kids spend a lot of time around people who grew up in lots of different parts of the country (and, in some cases, different countries altogether.) These are educated people who have intelligent conversations with each other, people who travel often and view all kinds of a diversity as a strength rather than a threat. They're great role models for my children. We did more traveling when the kids were small and easily portable than we do now, but they're still great travelers. They know their way around an airport. I didn't set foot on an airplane until I was 17 years old. Partly that was because my parents didn't have a lot of money to spend on family vacations; partly that was because my parents didn't see travel as something we needed to experience. My dad spent 22 years in the Army, and my mom followed him around for 14 of those years--I imagine they'd had their fill of travel by the time they had children. I imagine they thought we could travel on our own, when we were older, if we wanted to.

Still, I didn't choose to leave my family in Idaho because of anything they did or didn't do. I left because I never felt like Idaho was where I belonged. As a teenager, whenever I was sick of my parents and angry at the world, I'd drive up to the airport and sit at one of the gates and imagine I was about the leave for wherever that plane was headed. (This was in the 1980's, when anyone who wanted to could walk through the metal detectors and sit at the gate.) I'm still not exactly sure why I felt that way about the place, and I still get nostalgic for Boise every now and then; it's not as if I shook the dust of my hometown off my feet when I headed out.

But when I go back to visit, as I've said before, I often find myself feeling claustrophobic. I always thought that had to do with the landscape, with the fact that Boise is situated in a valley, and I still believe that's true--but I understand now that it also has something to do with absent possibilities. When I left Idaho for graduate school, I had to become a different person. The role I played in my family wasn't relevant anymore; I had to figure out what role I wanted to play in the new networks I was creating. And, of course, I had to create those networks--professional contacts, yes, but also friends. I had to find people I could talk with before class started; I had to figure out which of those people I could count on to help me out in a pinch; I had to decide who I was willing to help, and who asked for too much time and energy in exchange for friendship. This wasn't an easy thing to do, since I'm not social by nature. But once I'd done it the first time, I knew I could do it again. Moving on to new places wasn't the least bit scary after that. It was an opportunity for reinventing my life, something I actually looked forward to.

In Boise, I always knew who I was--within my family and my hometown, among the people who'd known me since I was in kindergarten and the people who knew me only in high school. The place has changed a lot since I lived there, but the old Boise is always in the back of my mind--I see the absence of the old places every time I look at something new. So I have to believe that, no matter what I did while I was living in Boise, I would continue to be the person people used to know, at least in some small part of their minds.

But when I moved away, I became who I wanted to be. The girl from Idaho, who'd rather drive in snow than rain. The girl who used to sing all the time, but doesn't anymore. The girl who hadn't seen lightning bugs until she moved to Kansas. Who hates butterflies. Who never played sports and was never anything like athletic but discovered, at age 41, that she loves to run.

I love the life I'm living now precisely because it let me leave my old self, and the people who knew her, behind--and I didn't do that because I wanted to hide anything, or even escape anything or anyone. I just wanted to be who I chose to be. I don't know who I would have become if I'd stayed in Boise, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be who I am now, because there's little room for reinventing yourself in a town where people insist they already know what they need to know about you.

Thoughts on a Long Marriage

This has been a really awful semester, for a number of reasons: difficult students, budget cuts and the attendant layoffs at my husband's university, crazy over-packed schedules for kids and parents alike--and now, today, the sudden death of my husband's dear colleague. If this weren't the last week of the term, I might be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

It's funny, though, that difficult periods like this function primarily to make me grateful for my family. I come home from a terrible day on campus--and there's my husband, reminding me of all the ways in which I'm fabulous. Last week, my daughter had a really terrible day--and I watched with great pride as her little brother worked to cheer her up. We're a team, me and my family. We take care of each other without being asked to do so. We enjoy each others' company.

I sometimes marvel at the fact that I've been lucky enough to wind up living with this group of people. And then I have to remind myself that family doesn't happen by accident: we are who we because my husband Mike and I worked hard to make it this way. Even before our kids were born, family was the priority. I turned down the first full-time job I was offered after I'd earned my MFA because taking it would have meant living two hours away from Mike for at least a year. Two hours might not seem like a great distance--many married couples live with much more distance between them, and that's certainly not uncommon in the academic world--but I wasn't willing to make that sacrifice. Many people thought I was nuts, given the state of the academic job market, but I really didn't care. I wanted to live with my husband, my family, more than I wanted to be a professor.

That turned out to be one of the smartest decisions we've ever made, over the course of our marriage. We've often talked about how our lives could have changed directions if we'd made a different choice at that moment; none of the outcomes we've imagined are good ones. Sometimes I think that the main reason Mike and I ended up getting married is that we're both supremely practical people. We don't do what other people think is best for us; we do what we know is best for us. These things are often at odds with each other, it seems, but we rarely worry about that. Sometimes we actually take pleasure in doing what others find crazy. But we never do the crazy thing for its own sake.

For instance: we'd been good friends for a few months, but we had dated, officially, for just a few weeks before Mike moved in with me. We got engaged shortly after that, and we married six months later. Essentially, we went from getting to know each other to getting married in less than a year. No one thought this was a good idea--no one except Mike and I. We didn't get married so quickly in order to shock anyone: we were genuinely excited to get married, be married, and stay married. We knew we'd found the person we wanted to do that with, so waiting didn't make any sense.

Though it did make sense, we decided, to put off having kids. We both wanted children; we had no doubts about that. But we enjoyed hanging out with each other, living a grown-up life. My sister had three children, and we saw how our lives would change once our own were born. So we waited six years, until we were tired of seeing movies and trying new restaurants and traveling, all the things that couples without children can do. Many people had told us that waiting so long, getting settled in the life of a childless couple, would make it harder to adjust to having a baby in the house. Still, our adjustment to parenthood was no more (or less) difficult than any of our friends', as far as I could tell. And once we got over the initial shock, we loved being parents--because that was a choice we'd made together.

It hasn't all been wedded bliss, of course. Mike and I have been very poor--we once had exactly $7 with which to buy groceries for the last week of the month. We've lived in a cruddy basement apartment with fungus growing on the walls. We've had sick kids and no health insurance. All those moments in our life were difficult, but at every point on the time line of our marriage we were doing what we thought was best. Going to grad school in Columbia meant moving away from the support network of our extended family; it meant ignoring people who told us we were neglecting our children by putting them in day care; it meant believing the time we spent as a family in the evening was worth the time we lost in building friendships with other grad students and connections with faculty members who might help us out professionally. None of those things were easy, but we worked through them because we believed they'd pay off. We believed that together.

I went into my marriage expecting nothing in particular, except to be married to Mike for the rest of my life. I didn't expect that we'd end up in a particular income bracket, in a particular sort of house, or even in a particular state. I'm not sure either of us expected to have everything we have now. We just signed on for the ride, wherever it took us.

The anniversary of our first date, May 5th, is coming up next week. I can't tell you how many times I've been asked "How can you remember that?" Well, it was Cinco de Mayo. That helps. But it was also the very first time I remember thinking "This is exactly who I've always wanted to be." I was sitting beside Mike on a picnic bench at that moment, snuggled up to him against the chill of a late spring evening. I was in love. I was feeling optimistic. I was absolutely happy. And still, even after all these years, that's who I am--and exactly who I want to be.

This Is Why I Teach

I've had a pretty rough spring semester this year. The difficulty began almost immediately: I had a very smart but very lazy student in two of my classes, a student who didn't like to come to class and couldn't seem to get there on time under any circumstances--and who didn't understand why this was a problem for me. This students is of the "I'm paying for these classes; I shouldn't have to show up unless I want to" variety. My only response to that, usually, is a quick point to the syllabus, which makes it very clear that we have different attitudes on the question of attendance.

None of this would be an enormous issue if not for the fact that the student was scheduled to graduate in May. Note the use of past tense there: was scheduled. Not anymore. As you might imagine, many people are unhappy about this. So I've been dealing with associate provosts and provosts and parents for the last month, trying to explain why I don't think it's unreasonable to expect students to show up for class, and why I drop students from my classes if they don't attend. In this particular case, I've been explaining how I warned and warned and warned the student what was going to happen, and how those warnings were flagrantly ignored. People on campus have supported me; people in the student's family are, as you might imagine, not my biggest fans at this moment.

If I taught courses in another discipline, I might feel differently about the question of whether it's important to come to class. Perhaps it's possible to read the biology textbook on your own and get from it what you need to pass; I don't know. I don't teach biology, so I wouldn't presume to say what is or is not possible. What I do know is that, in my classes, I'm not teaching the contents of a book. When you take a test in one of my classes, I'm not asking you what happened and to whom (or, not only that--obviously, you need to know those things.) I'm asking you to work through specific questions about the text using specific tools. Theories. Techniques. You'd have to be in class to get those tools, and to learn how to use them.

But even if that weren't the case--let's consider, for a moment, the possibility that I only tested my students on the content of a text. If you read the text on your own and understood it, maybe you wouldn't need to come to class. But what it you only thought you understood it? (I can't tell you how many times students have completely missed an author's social commentary or sarcasm.) What if you missed a symbolic motif? What if you understood the text through the lens of your own contemporary experience, but not as a representation of its own time period--then did you really understand the book?

But let's say you understood it just fine on your own. What if the only people who came to class were those who didn't understand the text, or didn't read it? What, exactly, would be the purpose of a class meeting with that group of people? Other than providing time to read, I don't know what I could possibly do with them. You can't discuss a book with people who haven't read it carefully. Students who get the reading are essential to a good classroom discussion.

Juxtaposed with this student is another--an excellent student who's been facing some very serious health problems since mid-February. In spite of the fact that this student is struggling with mobility issues and barely able to move around independently--and in spite of the fact that she commutes half an hour each way to campus--there hasn't been a day when she's arrived late for class. For that matter, she's missed only one day this semester. And that was before her health problems began, when she had to take care of a completely unrelated medical procedure. This student values her education so much that even when I tell her it's okay to take it easy, she refuses to do that. She wants to receive everything I have to give.

Students like that are why I teach. Because they make me realize that what I have to offer is of value--such great value, apparently, that some of them are willing to put their own pain aside in order to receive it. Students like that make me a better teacher.

Many years ago, in graduate school, one of my professors told the story of a student who'd gone through some financial struggles and become homeless for awhile--a student who'd done his reading under streetlights and slept under bridges, but still never missed a day of class. "He made me a better teacher," my professor said, "because I wanted to be worthy of the sacrifices he was making for his education. And now, every day, I remind myself: teach for the students who are sleeping under bridges to be here."

It's hard to keep this in mind when you're faced with a student who's throwing away the privilege of a college education. But I thank the student who helped me keep my balance this semester--the one who compelled me to follow her example and do my very best work every day, who kept me humble and, above all, counting my blessings.

Loving The Difference

I had a great day with my family today--the sun is finally shining again, so we headed out to the zoo and surrounding park. Part of the reason for this trip was to take pictures my son needs for his next science project, and part of the reason was to spend some time together as a family, which we don't get to do often enough these days.

My daughter is fifteen. She has a pretty terrific boyfriend, and he's easily become part of the family. We even added him to our zoo membership, so he could come with us whenever we head across town. Today, though, he couldn't go. I was a little pleased with this, since it meant my daughter would actually be interacting with us for a change, but I knew we were also running the risk of dealing with Surly Girl all day.

I adore my daughter. She's smart and beautiful and friendly and practical, all the things you'd want your daughter to be. From the time she was a tiny girl, with a head full of Shirley Temple curls and a 100-watt smile, she just drew people to her. Complete strangers would stop us on the street or in an airport and strike up a conversation with a two-year-old. Once, when we were in Memphis--Jordan was not quite three at the time--an elderly woman walking slowly past us on the sidewalk stopped and openly stared at my daughter. "My gracious," she said. "You really are a little angel." Then she asked if it would be all right to touch my daughter's hair. Jordan was used to the attention, so she didn't mind. I said it was fine. The woman fingered Jordan's curls, then smiled and thanked us both before she went on her way.

I'm pretty shameless in my admiration of Jordan. And while I know I'm supposed to feel this way--she's my kid, after all--I know many people who feel the same way about her without being compelled to. It's hard not to like her, honestly. (Well, except for the few girls at school who seem to hate her precisely because of best qualities. Those people, I tell her, aren't worth being concerned about, and most of the time she believes this.)

I know my daughter is aware of how much I like her, in addition to loving her. But I think that's what makes it really difficult for her not to boss her little brother around--all the things I've always praised in her are qualities her brother doesn't possess. In addition to the age difference between them--which always seems to make the older kid feel entitled to direct the younger one--Andrew is different from his sister in just about every way. He's shy and introverted around people other than his family, not at all social. His teachers are always alarmed by the fact that he doesn't talk to other people in class, or not unless they speak to him first, and I have to reassure them that he talks all the time at home. He has ADHD, the inattentive variety, which makes it hard for him to focus at school. He takes medication that makes this a little easier, and now that we have an IEP in place, guaranteeing some extra follow-up from his teachers, his grades have improved to the point that he isn't failing any of his classes--but A's are rare for him. B's are an accomplishment, and C's are the goal. Still, he's in Advanced Placement classes and his teachers often say that he's obviously very bright. He just can't express that in the ways they would like.

Although he doesn't have an official diagnosis, I've done enough research to understand that my son also has Asperger Syndrome (which was recently placed under the autism spectrum.) He doesn't seek out friendships, doesn't understand body language or social cues, and takes figurative language very literally--when he was little, I learned to be very careful about saying things like "My head is going to explode if you keep making that noise," because he really believed that would happen. He develops an intense interest in odd subjects (when he was little, he was obsessed with decoding circle/slash signs; these days, he can tell you anything you might want to know about hurricanes) and really needs to stick with a routine. He gets very upset when his life is off schedule, when he can't watch his favorite TV programs at the appointed time.

I adore my son, too. He has a well-developed sense of humor, which he expresses in the comic strip he's been drawing for several years now, and he's very smart--he just isn't able to demonstrate that at school. He's much more like his dad and I than his sister is. We're shy and introverted too; neither of us has a large friend network, and that doesn't bother us. For the most part, it doesn't seem to bother Andrew either. Once in awhile he talks about wishing he had some friends, and that's when my heart breaks for him, but more often he talks about being glad he doesn't have to deal with the kind of drama Jordan deals with on a regular basis.

Today the two of them were getting along pretty well, as they often do. But I couldn't help notice that Jordan spends a lot of time telling Andrew what to do, and he rarely ever questions what she says--he just does it. I might have just written this off to sibling behavior if not for the fact that, earlier this week, Andrew showed me a paper he'd written about Jordan for his English class. The assignment was to write about an important person in your life, and Andrew wrote about how he looks up to Jordan because she's so good at everything. A general theme of the essay was "She's better than me at everything." (Except at video games, where he acknowledged an ability to beat her occasionally.)

I know Andrew hears us telling Jordan "Good job" pretty often. I know he hears her telling us that she earned a First Division rating in band, or an A on the Spanish test that everyone else failed. It wouldn't be fair to her if we acted like these things don't matter, because they do. She deserves to be proud of her accomplishments. She works hard for what she gets--she practices her flute for competitions, studies for exams. I point this out to Andrew whenever he complains that she gets everything she wants.

So today I started wondering how I can let Andrew know that we love him because he's different from Jordan, not in spite of that fact. I've learned so much from being his mother. I've learned enormous patience; I've learned to swallow my pride and ask for help when I can't solve a problem myself, which is really hard for me; I've learned that, sometimes, problems can be addressed but not solved. I've also learned that, sometimes, a C is reason enough to celebrate. That's not an easy lesson to learn when you're a person who always did well in school--a person who earned a Ph.D. because school was the only place you ever felt you really fit in.

Watching Andrew struggle has made me a better professor, too, because I've learned there are many reasons why students don't do well in class, and some of those reasons aren't entirely under the student's control. I've learned that giving those students a break often makes them feel worse, not better. It makes them feel like you don't have faith in their ability to do what you've asked everyone else to do.

Earlier today I was reading a friend's blog. Her son was recently diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, but she's encouraged that he might improve in the long run because he wasn't a "weird" kid--he didn't, for instance, talk to himself or obsess over odd hobbies and subjects. Reading that stopped me cold, because Andrew is that "weird" kid. He always has been. I know schizophrenia affects young men more often than women, and mental illness runs in our family, on both sides. So, once again, the odds are against him.

But I'm determined to love that boy in every way I know how--supporting him, giving him a push now and then, expecting nothing less from him than I do from his sister. I expect him to do his very best, no matter where that leads him. And I'm determined to teach my daughter how to love her brother this way, too--for who he is, not who she thinks he should be.