Mamaphonic

In May of 2007 my husband Cedar was hooded. He had finally completed his doctoral studies. His graduation day was a proud, emotional, and bittersweet one for us. That he was finished was an enormous relief and cause for celebration, but it also meant that life as we knew it would change. Cedar, our three children, and I would be leaving our beloved Charlottesville, Virginia, moving across the country so he could take a job at a small liberal arts college in Oakland, California. I would no longer be able to use the circumstances of his being a graduate student and our living in a small city with limited career opportunities as an excuse for not finding and doing my dream job, whatever that was. Now that he would be earning gobs more money as an assistant professor (she says with sarcasm) it was my turn to figure out what I wanted to do.

My career angst was similar to that of my high school and college love life; it was always easier to pine away for someone I could not have, my excuse for not having a steady relationship was that my true love (and there were many of these) was not available; if only he were. So it was with my life’s work beyond being a mother to our three children, which I know is no small task. My first teaching job at a magnet high school for English Language Learners in Washington, D.C. became my "dream" job but only after I left it to join Cedar in Charlottesville (alas, it wasn’t always so beloved). After five years of teaching ESOL and Social Studies there, I left what became my second "dream" job, knowing that I could not do an adequate job at that job without shortchanging my children. I knew that on my deathbed, I probably would not regret not working more and spending that time instead with my children, so to keep my sanity, my children came first and I gave up classroom teaching. When the boys entered preschool at age three, I took a less interesting but also less stressful and time-consuming part-time teaching job.

Part of what led me to what I wanted to do, besides the circumstances and space afforded by Cedar’s getting a job, was going through the graduation event with him and our friends. For seven years, Cedar had slogged away at the graduate student thing--taking classes, teaching classes, doing research, running subjects, participating in lab meetings, attending conferences, going to department gatherings, and giving talks. Most of our friends in Charlottesville were academics, either professors or graduate students, many of whom were also concluding their studies. I had lived and breathed this process with all of them. I was happy for them, but turning inward, I also felt unworthy and inadequate. What had I accomplished intellectually in those seven years? What did I have to show for my seven years?

Certainly, plenty had happened for all of us during those six years. Cedar and I had planned and pulled off a wonderful and jovial wedding, the first of our generation in our parents’ immediate families, which friends and family members continue to remember fondly to this day. We wrote the secular ceremony ourselves and had a great Motown and blues band that kept everyone dancing late into the night. I had given birth two times, first to a set of fraternal twin boys and three and a half years later to a singleton girl. My twins, Liam and Caleb, were born a month premature amidst concerns about their health due to a severe pregnancy-related illness that had manifested itself when I gave birth, but they had long overcome those concerns and had been healthy and developmentally on track. Our childless friends had grown quite attached to them and their preschool teachers raved about what wonderful little people they were. Amelie, our daughter, was born at a low birth weight but by three months, was thriving, eating and sleeping well; guests at Cedar’s graduation party had competed for a turn to hold her. Still, I felt that Cedar could take as much credit for the status of our young children as I could.

After initially struggling to meet kindred spirits there I had made some deep and lasting friendships in Charlottesville, both with the community of parents at the boys’ preschool and with our graduate student friends. I had begun to tap into the resources for further education in our community, taking a photography class and a memoir-writing class. As a secondary school Social Studies and ESOL teacher, I had made a difference in my students’ lives. They received a decent education from me and no matter their educational background or literacy level, they knew that I respected them, took them seriously, and cared about their education. I had earned the respect of my co-workers and learned a great deal about teaching, language acquisition, the immigrant experience, not to mention all of the history, geography and political science that I learned while I was preparing my social studies classes. Before leaving Charlottesville, I proudly attended the high school graduations of several students who had started with me in middle school with very little English.

I find teaching to be fulfilling, stimulating, and socially useful work, but the population I serve tends to be a demanding one, especially with twin babies at home making their own demands; for example, Liam and Caleb would sometimes each wake wanting to nurse two to three times per night. Furthermore, with the current emphasis in public education on high stakes testing and tendency towards extreme standardization, or as I like to say, McDonaldsization, brought on by No Child Left Behind, the creative and intellectual stimulation I had found in teaching began to fade. I had begun to feel like a cog in a big bureaucratic machine, hired to do the bidding of the politicians who wanted to improve test scores to say they were tough on education without considering the quality of the education based on a curriculum of test prep. Teaching to the test and using the results of standardized tests to punish rather than to diagnose goes against what I believe and was taught in graduate school to be sound educational practice. I wasn’t being an intellectual or thinker. I wasn’t being told to base my practices on research or professional experience as I should have been. I felt proud of being a teacher, but not in that political climate and not in light of recent trends in education. Furthermore, I could not be the teacher or the parent that I felt I should be while doing both at the same time; the demands were too great.

In the midst of all of the celebratory events surrounding the culmination of my husband’s studies and in honor of our time in Charlottesville, people felt obligated to say kind and congratulatory words to me, too, only they weren’t in recognition of my own work or accomplishments as a teacher and a mother, but of my support of his. I heard, "You’re an honorary member of the Psychology Department", "You did this, too", and "You both accomplished this." These comments made me feel even worse in some ways. Yes, I supported him through the process, but I didn’t accomplish this; he did. Moreover, I did not want my crowning achievements in life to be that I was the woman behind her husband’s professional and intellectual realization and that I had given birth to his three children, no matter how fabulous they were. This was not enough for me and I had to acknowledge that the choices we made in support of Cedar’s career did not come without some cost to me and my professional and intellectual life.

During the summer following Cedar’s graduation, our family moved cross-country to take residence at the college where Cedar would start as an assistant professor. Initially, I was distracted by the tasks of moving, unpacking, and getting our children settled in. Also, I was deeply homesick. Eventually I was ready for some kind of work outside of the house and the kids, and once again, those questions plagued me: What do you want to do? What have you accomplished professionally and intellectually in recent years? At times I felt frozen by the burden of those questions, unable to find inspiration, motivation, or momentum. I started to feel like a protagonist in an animated film that must endure a maze of trials and tribulations in order to get home. Finding another job in education would have been the practical thing to do, but I didn’t want to fall back into the same routine, to flounder once again at balancing teaching young adults with raising young children, performing deficiently at both. It was time to explore another passion and surrender at least a bit of this life of abnegation. I decided to do something just for me, to truly commit to one of the constants in my life: writing.

I have some strong writers in my family. My maternal grandmother is a wonderful writer, my aunt (her daughter) is an accomplished journalist, my mother has always been a strong writer in both of her language-intensive professions: linguist and lawyer, and my father wrote a sports column for his high school newspaper and considered being a journalist, but decided instead to go to law school. My sister and I were raised in a culture of reading but also writing; for example, we both maintained written correspondence with a number of out-of-town friends and relatives. In school I always enjoyed writing and I excelled at it. When I was in second grade my favorite language arts homework assignment was on Tuesday nights: we had to use all of our vocabulary words for the week in a story. My best story was perhaps "The Boy who Loved Cabbage." In high school, I especially enjoyed the challenge of writing an essay on a topic I hadn’t done the reading for. I wrote poetry, or what I thought poetry was supposed to sound like. In college, I continued to write for academic purposes, but my senior project, translated short stories from French to English, was what really turned me on to creative writing. This was not work to me; it was fun. That project, and also the influence the literature courses I took my junior and senior years prompted me to write more poetry, prose, and combinations of the two. After college, I worked as paralegal for a year and discovered that I did not want to be lawyer; off hours, I wrote. The following year, I continued to write but I also had a part-time teaching position at a private Quaker school. I thought I had found my calling (and perhaps I did) so I put aside my existential angst, and my pen and paper along with it, and went on to graduate school and then on to public school teaching jobs.

But now I have put teaching and the classroom aside to become a student of writing. I am taking classes and writing workshops and I am making more time to read. I have started a blog where I self-publish more polished pieces a few times a month and to maintain an on-line portfolio. At times the work feels frivolous, decadent, self-indulgent and even slothful. But I tell myself that going back to the grind of K-12 public school teaching is not an option right now, and that in order for me to do this writing thing seriously, I need to treat it like a job. And in order to be a better writer, I simply must read and write as much as possible.
Ultimately I suppose that my goal is to make a living (or a part-time living) as a writer. For practical reasons, I am also taking classes in editing. I may apply to MFA programs after a year or so, or I may try to get some freelance editing gigs and write creatively on the side. Or perhaps in the end, I will decide the writing life is not for me and I will go back to teaching. None of this is too relevant at the moment. Right now I want to focus on the process and craft of writing, to work and study and to become a better writer.

I am happy to report that since making this decision, my one-third-life crisis has abated and I no longer feel like that lost cartoon-movie orphan. So far, I feel fulfilled, energized, and fortunate to have the space and support in my life to do this. I am thrilled to be a student again, this time with enough maturity to appreciate the experience. Even so, the doubts and the insecurities can nag at me. I am uneasy as I take stock of my thirty-something aged peers, most of whom are comfortably established in their careers. A piece in a writing workshop does not connect or elicit the response I was hoping for, and I am crushed and want to scratch the whole project. I torment myself by glancing at the bios of the writers featured in the publications I read, and end up feeling discouraged and overwhelmed. They got started being serious students of writing during college while I was busy drinking cheap beer. They occupy chairs at colleges and universities, and have won awards and been fellows. They have serious head shots! I will never be where they are. I bet they don’t have three children, I whine; people who win Pulitzer Prizes don’t have children or don’t really spend time with them if they do. Then I pause and attempt to quash that bitterness and envy. They probably DO have children. And I have three wonderful children who give me so much. I have teaching, which I am good at and feel passionate about. Becoming a writer is important to me, but I have a life, identity, and existence beyond it. I remind myself that when I was writing at twenty-one, I had angst and a voice, but not the focus or wisdom to channel it. I tell myself that I am taking this time to be a student of writing and if it does not work out, so be it. In the meantime, I owe it to myself to be serious and work hard at it. I do not want to regret never having tried.

And so when the questions start to badger me again tomorrow or the next day: What have you done? What have you accomplished? I will answer that today wrote and read for as many hours as I could in addition to washing and folding three loads of laundry; mediating a conflict over Legos between two active boys; preparing dinner that didn’t only involve pressing the defrost button on the microwave; and making sure my toddler got outside, took a nap, ate, and had six diaper changes. And I will tell myself: that is quite enough.