I am making a few notes here now that I hope to turn into a longer post later. As I scrolled Twitter and read there what some colleagues have been working on, I started to feel my current post-PhD existential crisis take a new and unexpected shape: the shape of wishing I knew a way to stay in academia.

Here are the things that have kept me from pursuing an academic career after graduation:

• watching tenure-track colleagues be miserable
• lack of mobility (it would be very challenging to find a position, even tenure-track, that would be worth uprooting my family for, and I refuse to live apart from my family)
• being a mother (I also refuse to prioritize career over family)
• being chronically ill/variably disabled (I also refuse to prioritize career over health)

Here are the things that today appeal to me about academia:

• pursuing a research agenda that I design

That’s actually about it, and as a freelance academic/independent researcher, I can probably work out a way to do that but today it feels like it’s in conflict with everything else I’ve got going on.

Which is why I’m going to dive into the #motherscholar literature.

More on that later.

If you have access to it, watch The Simpsons, Season 1, episode 3, “Homer’s Odyssey.” This bit happens at around 12:50: Depressed due to losing his job, Homer decides to throw himself off a bridge. He ties a rope around a huge boulder, then ties the other end of the rope to his waist. When he goes to open the gate in the fence around the yard, struggling to carry the boulder, he finds the hinges squeak. He then interrupts his suicide attempt to get a can of oil and oil the gate’s hinges. This cracks me up because in the middle of a devastating act that he is carrying out in a ridiculous way, he stops to take care of this mundane problem.

Is he doing it because he doesn’t want to wake his family with the squeaking? Could be. The rationale is irrelevant. It’s the juxtaposition of the extreme and absurd with the quotidian that makes this moment work for me.

I have a friend who is due to have a baby in January. I offered to write up a bunch of notes for her and realized it would make a pretty good blog post, so here we are.

Make a list ahead of time of ways to help. You won’t want to think about it once the baby’s born. Share the list with people who you think will want to help. (I just put out a call on Facebook asking for who wanted this information.) If someone offers to make a meal train or whatever for you, take them up on it, but you don’t have to wait for an offer. You can do it for yourself.

If you’ve got the money and a place nearby that makes prepared meals, do this for the first couple weeks. It’s amazing.

Stock up on easy snacks. If you’re nursing, you will need to eat all the time. Get a giant straw cup to drink water from. My doulas recommend a giant Bubba Bottle.

Populate your streaming services with queues of everything you’ve been meaning to watch. Again, if you’re nursing, there will be cluster feeding nights when streaming this stuff will save your sanity, and you don’t want to pick which thing to watch in the moment.

Read these books:

• Before baby is born - The Happiest Baby on the Block
• When baby is born - The Wonder Weeks (also has an excellent companion app)

Get the latest edition of Baby Bargains and use it as reference material.

If swaddling seems like a real challenge, try a Miracle Blanket. They don’t work for everybody but if they work for you, they are the best thing ever.

If you’re nursing, get a My Brest Friend pillow. So much better than a Boppy or whatever.

If you have the energy, try to assert your needs to family that wants to hang out with the baby. You might find it a huge relief to have the baby taken away for a while but you might find it really upsetting. Communicate with people about what you’re feeling. I was not good about this. I wish I had been. The first few weeks would have been happier if I had.

Remember that Boppy that isn’t super helpful for breastfeeding? It’s actually a great pillow for keeping your genitals and butt from having to touch real furniture. If you have a vaginal delivery, those parts of you will hurt. Not putting them on real furniture and instead having them propped up with a pillow with a hole in the middle will spare you a lot of crying in pain. Sit on the Boppy.

Learn to use a baby carrier ASAP. YouTube is your friend for this. In fact, YouTube is now your co-parent. Go to it whenever you can’t figure out what instructions are telling you to do. Including for the Miracle Blanket.

Don’t go to YouTube for hand expressing milk advice, though, because it will show you things that are more designed to turn people on than to educate them, and that’s not helpful. (Unless that’s what you’re into, in which case it might be helpful. But I found medical information about this much more helpful.)

Seriously, though, learn to use that carrier because then you will be able to use your hands for things like feeding yourself.

Your baby will hate tummy time. (Learn what tummy time is if you don’t know yet.) If your baby cannot handle it without misery, try rolling up a little receiving blanket and propping it under baby’s armpits. This turned tummy time from hated time to happy time in our house.

Try to remember that this is a temporary time. You are becoming a new version of yourself. You don’t know what this version of yourself will like or care about. You will probably have an identity crisis. Becoming a parent is a lifestage not unlike adolescence, especially if you’re the birthing parent with all the hormones that come with that. (People use the term “matrescence” to refer to becoming a mother. I don’t think there is a similar gender-neutral or non-binary term, and I suppose maybe somebody uses “patrescence” to refer to becoming a father, but I haven’t heard it.) It’s okay if you don’t know who you are right now but I promise you are other things as well as a caregiver. Caregiver is just taking priority right now.

When you feel like you’re doing it all wrong and you’re the worst parent ever, get quiet and check in with your intuition. If you’re like me, it will tell you what to do.

Many thanks to my friend Monica, everybody at Emerald Doulas, and Victoria Facelli for all the things they taught me that contributed to my ability to write this post.

I read Ravynn K. Stringfield’s How I Became a Scholar of Black Girl Fantasy and felt energized. I felt energized specifically by how she found role models who were doing the work she wanted to do, how she came to terms with being able to be a scholar AND a writer of other genres.

I attended her class The Scholar’s Guide to Writing & Publishing Creative Nonfiction and she talked about pursuing questions. She talked about that in her essay, too.

And I thought, what questions motivate me?

I went back to my PhD personal statement. The question motivating me there was broad. It was basically “How do Connected Learning in school libraries?” Meme style.

I drafted it in 2014. I have changed a lot in the last 7 years. Connected Learning has changed a lot in the last 7 years.

And I’m still delighted by people loving things and all the amazing learning that comes from that, but… I don’t know. I don’t feel like I’m interested in that set of questions right now.

I love reading about affinity spaces.

I really loved my dissertation topic.

But now? What now? I wrote my proposal before COVID-19 was well-known.

I defended my dissertation when there seemed to be hope on the horizon: I was freshly fully vaccinated and things were looking up.

I’m despairing about a lot now.

I’m also jazzed about the possibility of taking some time to be a writer.

But a writer of what?

I don’t know.

I’ve been banging my head against WHAT NOW?! as if it’s a puzzle I can solve if I just look at or play with it long enough but I think I’m not there. Doing all the parachute-color-style exercises isn’t what I need right now; it just leads to frustration and exhaustion.

I did a couple Self-Employed PhD sessions with Jennifer Polk back when I was still working on the dissertation. I knew that I could go a lot of possible directions with either traditional or self-employment. I said so. People said “So what’s the problem?” I said “Well I have limited time and energy so I need to pick one to try first.” People said “Well what do you want to do?”

I said:

I WANT TO REST.

I want. To. Rest.

My dissertation has been fully submitted since mid-May. I officially graduated on May 16, I think.

I have been “resting” for 3 months.

But “resting” has meant caring for my son and drumming up client work. It’s meant applying for jobs. It’s meant presenting for both professional and personal endeavors. It’s meant figuring out how to safely get my kid into preschool so I can work. It’s meant agonizing over the fact that while I am incredibly lucky and privileged to be in a position to take time to figure out what’s next, I hate the idea of my husband paying my student loans. Partly because I fear his resentment.

Partly because like… what do I have all these degrees for if all I do is sleep?

Some of what I’ve been doing has been home ownership management. Lots of logistics.

I do not feel rested.

A lot of things happened over the course of my PhD in my family and personal life, in addition to the world being what it has been since 2015. Listing it really bums me out so just trust me that it’s been A LOT and it has taken a toll. And when I look at it all written out, as I did privately for myself last night, I think:

NO WONDER I AM SO TIRED.

So the questions that are driving me, for the foreseeable future, honestly, are:

• What do I HAVE to do to care for myself, my family, and my home?
• What feels good?
• What heals me?
• What energizes me?

Those are all the questions I can handle right now.

I learned a lot from recording my Micro Camp 2021 talk. If you watch it, you’ll notice a pretty big sync problem starting a bit before the 6-minute mark.

Most of the stuff I learned is related to that.

I recorded the video last minute, which I will try not to do in the future. It doesn’t leave time for fixing problems.

I was trying out new recording software, Loom. I don’t know if it was because my computer is old, my wifi was slow during recording, or a combination of the two, but as I understand it, Loom records to the cloud and the lag getting the recording from my computer to their server is probably responsible for the sync error. From now on, I’ll do my recordings locally and back up to the cloud after the recording is done. I don’t think I’ll use Loom with my current computer anymore.

I didn’t watch the video to make sure it worked. I was tired of my own voice (this almost never happens!). If I’d watched it, I’d have noticed the sync problem right away and could have re-recorded with different software. I’ll watch right away next time.

I thought I had submitted the video correctly. I had not. I don’t know if I didn’t click a button, if I closed a window too soon, or what. Next time I’ll watch carefully for confirmation.

I don’t have any very good video editing software on my computer so if I wanted to fix the sync error without re-recording, I couldn’t have. I’ll investigate different recording options before I make another video.

Also, as soon as I can, I’ll get a new laptop because a six-year-old low-end Acer isn’t going to cut it for creating much besides words.

What have you learned recently?

Because fantasy is the genre I read the most and YA is the market segment I read the most, I’ve already read a lot of the books on these lists.

If I come to a book I’ve already read, I will ask myself if I want to re-read it. If the answer is yes, boom, I’ll re-read away.

If the answer is maybe but not right now, I’ll keep moving down the list and ask myself again later.

If the answer is no, I’ll write a quick blog post about what I remember about the book and how I felt when I read it and move on to the next.

Another thing: a lot of these books are in series. If the book is the first book in a series and I enjoy it, I’ll do a check-in with myself to see if I want to take a detour from the list and read more of the series. If I do, I will.

If the book is a later book in a series, I will attempt to read the books that come before it. I like to read books in (publication) order, even if I don’t have to. If I decide not to finish the first book in the series, then I will move on with the list and try the listed book on its own later.

These plans are intended to prevent me getting bored and giving up on the project and to make sure I try as many new-to-me books as possible.

And some stuff I already knew but needed the reminder sewing napkins gave me.

1. If you want things to be the same size, cut them at the same time. Corollary: This is easier if you have a rotary cutter and cutting mat.

I made 4 napkins. Three of them are slightly different sizes and one is much smaller than the rest. This is fine. But my next project is a pillow, and I’d really like the two pieces of fabric I need to be nearly identical in size.

I knew this already because as I watched my mom sew garments I would see her cut both sleeves at once. The way you do this is fold the fabric in half with the side you don’t want to show in the finished item out. You pin or draw your pattern on, and then cut around it.

The easiest way to do this is with a rotary cutter, which has a round blade and a handle and you can essentially trace the pattern with it and it will cut through multiple layers of fabric. I don’t have one right now but I’m probably going to bump the one on my wishlist up in priority. But I think for only doing two layers, my fabric shears will do just fine.

(Do not use fabric shears to cut anything else ever.)

You need a mat to put under the project if you’re using a rotary cutter so it doesn’t cut into the surface you’re using to hold your fabric as you cut.

2. I really need help to sew a straight seam.

At first I thought I needed to practice this but my friend Casey gave me some magnetic seam guides for my birthday. I had forgotten those existed. These are little magnetic bits of metal you attach to a piece of the sewing machine called the throat plate. The throat plate is the thing the fabric scoots across as you’re sewing. Keep the fabric right up against the seam guide and you don’t have to remember where it should be. Which was my problem, I couldn’t remember how much fabric I wanted to the right of the seam.

3. If your pressing doesn’t get the fabric flat enough, you can help it with your fingers.

Most of this project involved sewing through three layers of fabric. The fabric was folded under itself to hide the edge because people can see both sides of a napkin (as opposed to a garment, where people can’t see the edge unless you pull the garment up or take it off). Sewing the edge of the fabric so it’s folded and doesn’t have a raw edge is called hemming the fabric.

On the corners, though, I had two sides’ worth of folds to sew through, so I was sewing through six layers and I hadn’t been able to press it with my iron fully flat.

But guess what? I have fingers! And I could just barely put a little pressure on the fabric to get it flat enough, so that’s what I did.

4. Sewing is super satisfying.

I crocheted myself a cardigan last fall and it took months. I could probably sew a cardigan in an afternoon. It’s really nice to see the results of your work so quickly.

What have you learned lately?

I’ve written before about how matrescence is like kintsugi: having a baby shatters you and the living you do after you have the baby puts you back together with shiny gold holding you together. But I haven’t articulated how putting yourself together is a long process.

Meg at Sew Liberated writes today about the twelve year project of making a skirt that she started when she was a new mom and only finished recently. Her oldest is 12.

Part of the kintsugi of matrescence is finding the pieces. I misplaced a lot of mine in the time after my son was born. He’ll be 5 in October. I’m gathering the pieces but a lot of them are still in a pile waiting to be stuck to the me that’s here now.

I find them in moments when I’m doing something and suddenly feel more me than I have in a very long time. When I stay up late coding. When I watched the Stephen Sondheim 90th birthday concert. When I talk through a research design with colleagues.

Putting yourself together is an ongoing project; we’re each a big Katamari ball of experiences and interests. (How’s that for a dated reference? Have I mentioned I’m 40?) In my case, at least, that ball got blown apart. It’s encouraging to find all its bits are still within reach.

Are you familiar with the poem/book/animated short film WE’RE GOING ON A BEAR HUNT?

I highly recommend it. Kids wander through all types of terrain trying to find a bear. They come across many obstacles: long, wavy grass; thick, oozy mud; and others. The refrain is this:

We can’t go over it, we can’t go over it, oh no, we have to go through it.

Katy Peplin’s recent newsletter about being in the middle and getting discouraged made me think of the bear hunt.

Everything in life is a bear hunt, isn’t it?

But of course, while the kids are in the middle of each obstacle, they’re having fun. The mud goes squelch squorch. The grass goes swishy swashy.

It’s just another variation on the journey being more important than the destination.

What are we rushing toward? Can we find joy in the hard parts?

I promise I’m going to write about what I learned from sewing napkins soon. But first: my personal history with sewing!

I’ve known how to machine sew for a long time (and how to hand sew for even longer). My mom is an accomplished sewist and made a lot of clothes and costumes for my siblings and I as we were growing up. She even made my prom dress. I didn’t sew with her, but I learned a lot of techniques just from being around while she sewed. Mainly how to be a perfectionist about your sewing, which has both benefits and drawbacks. (She never presses seams open or leaves a pinked edge. All her seams are French seams. Gorgeous, but intimidating to a less experienced sewist.)

I didn’t actually use any of what I’d learned from watching her until I took a required tech class as part of my dramatic art major; I chose costuming (this is where W. shakes his fist because in his day you had to do both cost shop AND set but by the time I got there 3 years later, you got to choose). One of the assignments was to design and construct a garment. I made a dress to fit me, lightly inspired by this Drusilla costume from Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

The process involved making a paper pattern on a dressmaker’s dummy (heavily padded in my case), then a muslin, and then finally the real thing. I finished the edges with a zig-zag stitch and pressed the seams open, because that was what I had time for. I wished I’d been up to French seams but it just wasn’t going to happen.

The dress had darts out the wazoo: bust darts at both the sides and bottom of the bodice, back darts, darts at the back of the waist. I made sure it fit me just right and I wouldn’t settle for anything baggy or saggy. (Maybe that’s why I didn’t have time left for French seams.) The director of the costume shop saw it and said I could do haute couture with that level of fitting.

I loved making it. I was very proud of it. I also learned that you really need to include a slit in the skirt if you’re going to make a long sheath dress, or your stride will be limited to teeny tiny steps. (I did not include a slit. In spite of it’s excellent fit, the dress didn’t get a lot of wear because of this.)

I wanted to sew more but I was saving all my money for traveling to *BtVS* fan parties (that’s an account written by a journalist of the first Posting Board Party I went to) so I didn’t grab a machine until my mom noticed one at a yard sale down the street from her. The machine and its cabinet were going for around $70, so I bought them.

I sewed exactly one thing on that machine, a costume for me to wear to go to the movie Troy. (Remember when Legolas and The Hulk were brothers?) It was actually a costume that, if historically accurate, would have been no-sew, but I was afraid a no-sew version would fall off. So I made myself a chiton with some success.

And the next time I used that sewing machine, the needle got stuck in the bobbin. And so I did not use it. I kept moving around with it; I think that machine moved with me five times.

At the North Carolina Maker Faire in, I don’t know, maybe 2014? I sewed a quilt square for a big communal quilt somebody was building there. I loved it. It reminded me that I actually loved sewing, and I wanted to do more. So I promised myself I would.

But I didn’t.

When I finally got the machine out for the first time recently to try again, after great success winding the bobbin and threading the needle, the same thing happened. I tried cleaning and oiling the machine, but that didn’t fix the problem. I decided to give up on that machine, for which I could not find a manual online and which was lacking many features of modern machines, such as numbering on the thread guides to tell you what order to thread it in.

So I asked for a new machine for my birthday, and I got one!

And I decided to use Craftsy’s Sewing 101 class to help me get back into it, since I hadn’t really sewed in 17 years.

Which is how I ended up making those napkins.

And I’ll tell you what I learned from making them soon, I promise!