As I type these words in early April, ice-coated limbs are falling off the trees in my yard. When I called my mother, who lives in a much warmer climate, to complain about the weather, she merely said, "You need to get out of there."
Well, yes. I've been trying.
My first stab at escaping the academic "D list" has not gone well. I knew from the outset that I would face long odds, but I had hoped to make some progress. Instead I'm pretty much 0 for the cycle: I found only a few viable positions to apply for, heard no response from any of those places, and got no real indication that next year will be any better.
To be honest, I'm not all that disappointed, largely because I did not really expect to get anywhere this time around, and there were no jobs that would have been "perfect" for me. No, my current melancholy is the result of pure, unadulterated weariness. If I am ever going to get out of here, I have a lot of work to do, and right now that seems like a tall mountain to climb.
Which brings me to my other news: We're having a baby!
We actually learned the happy news last fall, but with everything else, along with the fact that this will be our third child, it has been relatively easy to act as though nothing were happening.
It has been especially easy for me, the nonpregnant half of the equation, to avoid facing facts. But now, with the birth only a couple of months away, even I have to come to terms with what is about to happen. And, here again, just thinking about it makes me tired.
It's not just the prospect of three or four months of limited sleep. It certainly doesn't help, but that is much worse for the mother than for me. I'm mostly worried about all the little sacrifices that collectively take up a lot of time and ultimately make any other task, such as completing an extra article or two, all the more difficult.
For example, I will have to give up my home office to make room for a nursery. (I'm pretty sure the crib will fit in the closet of our kids' room, but my wife assures me that space is too small. She always has the last word on these matters.) And I've already had to cancel a paper I was planning to give at an important conference this summer because it was scheduled too close to the due date.
I keep thinking about a line from Tolstoy. He is talking about marriage, but it applies just as well to parenting: "To do it, though very delightful, was very difficult."
That seems about right. I first thought of that line when our first child was about 7 or 8 months old. Since her birth, I had been telling everyone that being a father wasn't all that hard, which it wasn't, since my wife was doing most of the work.
But around the seventh month, my wife had to be away for several days, so it was just me and the baby. As luck would have it, L.B. ("little bleater," so named because she would bleat every time she was hungry) contracted her first virus and got really sick. I initially thought about calling my wife so she could come home and fix this problem for me, but then I decided I was the dad, and it was up to me.
So I hung up the phone and took L.B. to the doctor's office. The doctor looked the baby over carefully, gravely sat down beside me, and said, and I quote, "She's sick."
The only remedy was to wait for the virus to pass, so back home we went to ride this thing out together. The first night was the worst. The doctor had instructed me to keep giving her fluids, but she couldn't keep anything down. So that night, she kept throwing up, and I kept trying to keep her hydrated. I finally put her in bed with me so I could catnap, but I would have to wake up every 45 minutes or so to tend to the baby.
For the next few days, she slept almost all the time but, in some ways, that was worse, because I couldn't shake the fear that something was really, really wrong. I made several calls to the doctor, just to be sure her behavior was normal. And even at night, I kept waking up to go check on the sleeping baby for signs of dehydration, malnutrition, or God knows what.
It turned out the doctor was right, though, and after sleeping through a couple of days, she got better. I even have a pretty good idea of when the virus passed. It was around 3 a.m. on the third day. I woke from an exhausted sleep to a lot of noise from the baby monitor. I went to investigate, and I found L.B. sitting up in her crib, bright-eyed and happily playing with her stuffed animals. I took her out to the living room, where she proceeded to play and bounce around for the next two hours. We had a great time, although I was so tired I could barely keep my eyes open.
In short, it was delightful, but it was difficult.
I want to be clear that I am not merely saying that hard work produces great results, though that may be true and, anyway, who am I to go against the wisdom of my ancestors?
I am trying to say that it is the work itself that matters. I am not a good parent because I sit up all night with my kids or because I clean up their messes or whatever. I am a good parent when I do those things. What is so unexpected is that the delight is in the work itself, even more than it is in the results.
Which brings me back to my job search. By its nature, a job search lends itself to a results-oriented mentality. The goal is clear, and conventional wisdom is that the best jobs go to those who do the most work. A job search is all about the job.
But maybe it shouldn't be. I recently sat down to try to churn out another article, one that wasn't going to be very interesting but promised to be both doable and publishable in a relatively short period of time. The introduction took me forever to write, however, and as I struggled to put coherent sentences together, I realized that I was really starting to hate this project. That is clearly unacceptable.
So here is my new plan: I have been toying with an idea for a new book for some time now. I'm very excited about it, but it's going require a lot of research, and I have been assuming that it's the kind of project that should wait until I find a research position. But I am going to crank it up, starting as soon as I finish this column. It is going to take a lot of work, and I am already starting to feel tired as I contemplate exactly how much work, especially since I'm going to have to write it from our kids' closet.
And you know what? I can't wait.
Before I go, though, I have a question. Should we sell our current home and buy a bigger one, even though, if lightning should strike and I get a new job next time around, we would only be in the new house for one year? Or should we stick it out here and hope that next year we'll be moving to a much different place altogether?
I'll be in the closet waiting for your answer.
