The only way to it is through it

My brother inspired me tonight. He has a blog he is working on that I just checked up on for the first time in awhile, and now here I am. I started this blog 2+ years ago this fall, but have only written a meager 2+ entries...but oh, where the world has taken me.

I am in the midst of final examinations in my program at Yale, in my first semester of a two year graduate degree that I (still!) think costs far too much money. It's been a stressful, hard semester - more so than I would like to admit. I re-learned things about myself as a student (horrible procrastinator) that I really would have rather forgotten, and I have found I am a very different student as an adult than I was as an undergrad. I think I should have expected that, and should have been prepared for it, but it caught me by surprise.

You can't do grad school like you did undergrad - it's harder, and more personal, and a bigger judgment on who you are and what you're made of. I feel deeply flawed today for not being done with this anthro paper from hell, which was due at 5pm. I had a little bit of beer for the first time in...I don't remember the last time I had a drink of any kind, actually...maybe since Thanksgiving? Drinking alcohol of any kind absolutely destroys my productivity, so I rarely do it at graduate school. As in, almost never. I did tonight, however, and it got me all off track. Now I'm sitting here in my dumb, overpriced Yale sweatshirt, eyes mostly closed with exhaustion, paper not done and simply awful, really, but cheeks warm from the beer, and soul a little lighter from the conversation.

Life is full of trade offs, I think. Sometimes you trade a good, heartfelt conversation with your roommates (about heartbreak, of all things) for a 25 page anthropology paper. Sometimes you know you should double-down and crank it out, but you just don't (or can't) care. I'm not sure if that makes me a bad person - I know it makes me a horribly lazy one. But I just think - this 25 page paper will not define me. No one but the professor and the teaching fellows will ever read it (25 pages is a stupid length to assign, for what its worth - I'll write up to 15 'cause you can publish it as an article, but 25? What a trivial length. Why not just assign us a book to write?) so I am still here. Staring at freaking Microsoft Word, wishing it would self populate with the details surrounding incorporation of women into community forestry in Southern Asia. But it doesn't, so I don't beat myself up over it. I just sit here, I do my best, and I write.

My motto falls somewhere along those lines, these days..."just do your best, in the time you have...and then move on". It's really all you can do. I think I learned this last spring when I was frantically trying to reestablish who I was before the Yale deadline, and had to resign myself to doing my best within the real time constraints of the situation at hand. I think its realistic, though. You never get the perfect amount of time, you'll never be able to finish all of your assignments, you'll never stay in complete touch with all of your friends. But if you can do your best, with the time you have...you should at least be able to sleep soundly at night.

My First Blog

While procrastinating on work today I spent some time catching up on Feministing, one of my all time favorite Feminist blogs, and one which I have been reading for almost two years now, as I realized with a shock about a week or two ago. Feministing blogger Ann (a fellow DC resident - Hey-yeah!) had given props to another Feminist blog, Feminist Finance, which she recently discovered, and which I promptly read, enjoyed, and bookmarked under my blogs tab (where all good procrastinators go to die, or, at least, to find some interesting food for thought to power them through the long part of the afternoon).

While on the topic of Feminist Finance, the post I particularly enjoyed (on 'Marrying Debt') can be found here.

Finding a new blog I liked made me think a bit about my first one, and how I became interested in blogs altogether.

I know there's a healthy proportion of our population that don't do anything with (read, write, comment on, or discuss) blogs, but I think they have a lot of value. Although I was interested in blogging as an idea and a venue for writing (and for practicing writing), I probably wouldn't have ever become a blogger (albeit one who is thus far inconsistent, and as far as one can tell, unread!) or reader of blogs if it wasn't for the Washington Post and Bad Feminist.

Two years or so ago I read a Washington Post article on some vaguely feminist issue, and saw that the sidebar included a list of blogs that had recently commented on the piece. I don't think they have this functionality anymore (that, or I just haven't read the WaPo recently enough), because they probably realized they were driving some seriously valuable traffic away from their site. But the blog's name was "Bad Feminist," and the blogger was awesome.

Bad Feminist took some seriously, awesomely antiquated 1950's and earlier imagery and used it to spice up her blog posts, and posted about personal issues, in her own voice, in a direct and engaging way that inspired me. At a time when I felt a bit adrift in my own feminism, and relatively unsupported as an as-yet-unconnected (read: newly arrived) feminist in DC, Bad Feminist made me feel like I was not the only one wrestling with many of these ideas, or ascribed to the values that are to me what feminism is all about.

It is ironic, then, for me to recall that Bad Feminist was some level of Yale student, as I will soon be, and saddening that she eventually closed up shop, and stopped blogging. I keep her on my blogroll as a kind of tribute, and also for the other blogs she exposed me to.

From the Bad Feminist blogroll I eventually branched out to discover Feministing, F-Words, Broadsheet (for which I have some serious love and respect), Bitch Ph.D., Pandagon, Feministe, and many others, and started to develop an interest in blogging, myself.

That I would continue to discover new blogs by moving from these more well-established bases, and that this process would continue to unfold, has been exciting, as I love the moment when I read a new blog and something clicks. I know not all blogs will hit home with me (of the ones listed above, Feministing, F-Words, and Broadsheet have been nearly daily sources of information and inspiration for me), just as I know not everyone will like my writing, or my little blog project. Some people might think writing about personal experiences, and in the first person, is boring. But I like personal experiences, and I enjoy learning that my own experiences are common to others - it's reassuring, surprising, exciting, and validating.

I just hope that at least a few people will find my blog worth a read, once in awhile, and that I will continue to develop my voice, much as I have watched these other ladies develop theirs.

Protracted Feelings of Loss

Happy Easter to any who may stumble upon my little forays into blogging.

I spent this weekend visiting my first college roommate in New Hampshire, spending a night at her apartment, a night at her parents' (wonderful, cozy, homey) farmhouse, and then returned to my native NJ, to join my mother's side of the family for Easter dinner.

I am not, generally, so much a fan of Easter as I am a fan of family. I am a true, confirmed, comfortable atheist. I have now come through loss and death in the family, and remain atheist, and so feel comfortable that it will stick. I only wish Atheist didn't sound so dark, so hopeless. I find it honest, not untruthful.

To the point, however - today was a different kind of Easter. We, the 20-30 something generation, have birthed two babies this last year, and this was the first holiday that my little second cousin (and her cousin - my third cousin??) were old enough to do more than burp. Which is to say, they wiggled and kicked, and in one case, did so quite vigorously

The afternoon's entertainment are 8 and 5 months, respectively, and it was...weird. There was almost no adult conversation (whatsoever), with the exception of a quick insertion by my uncle about his finding Bear Stearns to be a sleazy company in his professional experience, and even that was aborted when one of the babies did something exciting...like raising a leg. Or burping. Or drooling. Or all three.

I, who don't want a baby, and finally just told my mother that the subject of children was a defining point in Paul's decision to terminate our relationship, was handed a baby by my wonderful cousin-in-law, the proud (ridiculously, sweetly proud) father. I haven't held a baby (before theirs at Thanksgiving and then Christmas) since my less-fearful youth, when I babysat. So not for about...8 years.

My cousin-in-law wanted to help his wife clean up and set up (they were hosting - I have no idea why we let the new parents host), and turned, smiled, held out his child, and deposited her in my arms while I sat at the dinner table.

I'm not sure how to describe what happened next. It moved me. This beautiful (crying) little baby wiggled around and looked up at me, then out the window, then at my father (who was making old-man-gaga-for-a-baby faces - you know the type), and then back at me. And I started to bounce her gently, and smooth her hair while leaning her head on the soft part of my shoulder...and she stopped crying.

I am not an instant convert. A fairly consistent, even, and logical person, I am not someone who will be instantaneously smitten by a sweet-faced child, although I think my cousins' daughter is beautiful. It's what comes after the baby (the toddler, the child, the preteen, the teenager) that I am wary of, and it is the concessions that all of the women I know have made, that make me dread motherhood. I don't want to lose myself in the mix of childbirth, of motherhood. I don't want a husband that goes to work while I stay home, and I don't want the grass is greener resentment I've seen such bifurcation of responsibilities yield. I don't want to live a life that ends up looking like that.

But while I held the baby today I had such a moment - I was really deeply moved. And with a sudden jerk she swung her head back, and then forward, and planted her little mouth firmly on the small amount of breast showing above the line of my shirt. And that moved me too. It wasn't strange, or confusing, or peculiar - I felt as though, were she my child, I would be capable of fluidly, effortlessly feeding her, that I knew the steps without ever having practiced them, without ever having thought about how it's done. I don't know how better to express it - I was moved.

But then came the loss. Paul loved babies, and I had looked forward to the day we would be able to visit my cousins, and he could play with them. I wanted to show him that maybe I wasn't missing some piece of what he thought was important in a woman, that I too can make silly faces at children, can love them, even if I don't want them. I think I had secretly hoped that Paul and I would visit my cousins and their baby, and I would be moved, and I would discover something in myself that was deeper and more primal than my politics, my goals.

And so when I was moved, although it was not towards a desire for motherhood, I reached my head around to show him, to share the moment and the pride of connectedness - and he was not there. Was not there and won't be, and I am alone.

Even now, hours later, in the last moments of Easter, I wish I could reach out to him and share. I miss him.