timing the transition to parenthood

ubby and I made a second attempt to get to the store to buy milk and cat food last night. We succeeded, much to the cats’ delight. Once again we did not buy a new tv, much to Hubby’s chagrin!

During the drive, hubby mentioned that he’d heard some interesting news through the work grapevine. In the near future, consultants receiving the specialized training he’d just finished were going to be required to sign contracts agreeing to not leave the company for three years post-training. Hubby was in the first batch of consultants to receive this training, and doesn’t yet know whether he will be asked to sign a similar contract.

This is naturally cause for concern for me because we’d previously decided that we’d put off having a family until he left his consulting position, presumably some time in the spring of 2009. Neither of us wants to start a family while he’s still traveling. It’s not fair to me, as the parent who would be trying to work full time while taking care of a new baby by myself most of the week. It’s also not fair to Hubby, and it’s particularly sad to think about him missing all that time with his child. He’s clearly his niece and nephew’s favorite uncle (the “fun” uncle), and it’s inconceivable that he’ll enjoy spending time with his own children less than the time he spends with them. I’m just worried about how we’ll make this work.

From my perspective as a non-tenured academic who wants to have a family, it’s already pushing it to wait until I’m 32. I’m already struggling with waiting, and I don’t know if I could wait until I’m 33. It just seems risky, particularly since I have a handful of friends who have waited until that age and then were unable or experienced great difficulty getting pregnant. I already have Factor V Leiden working against me, after all. My midwife told me not to worry at my last checkup a year ago… but that was before my friends disclosed their fertility-related problems.

So the big question is… what’s the solution? Quitting jobs is not an option. Neither is my being pregnant while I interview later this autumn and winter, as it can complicate matters substantially. Do we try to start a family on our old schedule, regardless of Hubby’s contract issues? Keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best 3 years from now? Both go to my annual midwife appointment and try to figure out what will work best considering my health & our careers?

…and now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

At some previous point, I stated that the intent of this blog was to chronicle my experiences as an academic with ADD. For some reason, it seems that everything I’ve written recently has been about our wedding, not academic life!

From one perspective, academia is a life-encompassing choice. When I decided to embrace the identity of academic, I knew I wasn’t just choosing a career. Deciding to become an academic also means that one’s career is inevitably connected to one’s life and vice versa. As a developmental scientist, I view marriage as just one of those life transitions that inevitably impacts the rest of life. Getting & being married definitely impacts my work & my identity as an academic as a whole. I don’t necessarily see a clear division between my work and this aspect of my life. Naturally, it could just be my tangential ADD-type thinking that has led me to this conclusion.

From another perspective, me writing about our wedding is just fluff, and nobody really cares anyway. Get to the good stuff, Addled!

Regardless of your perspective, please let me state for the record… the wedding stuff is almost entirely over. Aside from stating now that our professional pictures have been formatted on DVD, which Hubby’s mom will send to us via snailmail tomorrow. Beyond posting a link to these pictures, I anticipate just one more entry reflecting on the whole experience following our stateside reception, which will occur in two weeks. That’s it!

Without further ado, here is the planned entry about academic life & ADD.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an announcement requesting diaries from this year’s batch of academic job seekers. I hyperfocused for a few enjoyable hours while preparing my submission. Naturally it’s about my looming job search, starting with my experiences the last time I was on the market (pre-diagnosis), continuing on to my anticipated assets & constraints this time around. As this is clearly relevant to my blog, I’d post it here now, except that could lead to plagiarism concerns. I will link to this submission if they choose to publish it (under a pseudonym, of course), or will post it here myself if rejected.

In other news, the job market madness has now started in earnest. There are now officially 18 jobs for which I will apply between now and December 1. I expect that number to climb substantially during the next two months. The jobs are primarily in psychology departments, at universities and colleges of varying sizes, and are located from coast to coast. There’s a good mix, and hubby and I are pretty excited about some of them. But please let me reiterate yet again… to have so many ads posted so early is quite unusual. Usually the postings don’t begin to pop up like weeds until after Labor Day (maybe this is another effect of global warming?). I’m not complaining about the early start, because later postings make it harder on applicants to get their full packets to the search committees on time. It’s always better to be early than to be late… and as I know I have to worry about at least one letter writer being late with her materials, I’d better get my apps in as early as I can.

True to form, I’d intended to start revising my materials directly after returning home from the wedding. This hasn’t happened yet. I have revised outlines on my hard drive at work, deadlines set with colleagues who are also working on their materials, but am still procrastinating. Why can’t I hyperfocus on this important task instead of on cheap J. Crew dresses on eBay?

Last but not least, I’ve already restricted my profiles on sites like Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook to friends only. Just as a reminder, my blog will become much more anonymous the night before I mail that first job application in approximately another month. All personal pictures & the remaining identifying details will be removed. Although I don’t list my blog on my vita, I don’t want to run the risk that somebody on a search committee will find it accidentally or on purpose. I can’t anticipate how search committee members might react to learning that I’ve struggled with depression & am being actively treated for ADD. I can’t think that it would help my prospects. It’s always just better to be proactive and cautious.

pre-wedding anxiety dream

As a psychologist, I don’t “buy into” dream analysis. All in all, I think it’s crap, because I subscribe to the theory that dreams are the product of random neuronal firings. Our neurons get active in weird ways while we sleep, and our brains try to make sense of it by building a story around it.

Last night I dreamed that it was the night before the wedding, but I was already dressed. All of my hubby’s Scandinavian relatives were staying in the same house with us. The house was totally surrounded by water, and the cats went swimming in it for koi-like goldfish and what appeared to be deep-fried shrimp. While swooshing around the house in my entire wedding ensemble and trying to get the cats out of the water, I suddenly remembered that I’d neglected to buy Christmas presents for hubby’s younger brother, and that I still had data that needed to be analysed. I plunked myself down a table in order to crunch some numbers on my laptop, when hubby’s big brother came by and said “You’re doing that wrong… you need to analyse the covariance matrix instead of the raw data” [keep in mind, IRL, hubby's big brother is in business management, not statistics!]. He then sat down and proceeded to modify my data file and do my analyses for me. In the meantime, hubby came by and started whining about my eye makeup and veil. It seems that he didn’t want me to wear my veil at all, and that big brother also had some ideas about my eye makeup [NO IDEA where that one came from.... big brother is married, has 2 beautiful kids, and to my knowledge, has never worn eye makeup!]. At this point of the dream, I locked myself into the room where all the Scandinavian aunts and girl cousins were also getting ready. Hubby knocked and banged on the door, pleading with me to come out and get married. Yet, when I opened the door, his brother still had his ideas about my eye makeup…

At this point I forced myself to wake up, thank goodness. Some of the details make me laugh a little bit (the eye makeup, and that I can’t get away from data analysis, even in my sleep). Others are just weird. For example, my hubby is one of the most easy-going guys in the world, and has no preference about whether I wear a veil or not. He just prefers that I don’t wear it over my face when I walk down the aisle. As I’m already pretty clumsy, wearing a layer of netting over my face for a ritual walk seems like a very bad idea. He’s also been a little fussy (or in his words, “fuzzy”) about the processional and recessional marches, but certainly not to the degree that I’d lock myself in a room and not come back out.

I guess it’s all just stress and my brain trying to play tricks on me.

a little too much ritalin turns me into one of “those” brides…

Yesterday was the last day I will try the extended-release ritalin. The dose is too low to work yet I still get really anxious. Not just a little jittery anxious, but full-on OCD-like anxious that just doesn’t occur when I take instantaneous-release ritalin. I was not only unable to make a decision about how to deal with some data, but I also obsessed about the wedding for the entire day. Being unable to divert my attention from attempting perfection in work and the wedding was the overall theme of the day.

Somehow I got it into my head that it would be a good idea to do welcome bags for all the out-of-town guests. I purchased 40 clear gift bags and a pound of loose tea before I could stop myself. I emailed Jan’s brother about helping me on this project. I ordered cards, stickers and envelopes to hold the teabags I was going to assemble myself. A few hours later I returned to sanity, realizing that doing welcome bags is out of the question when I can’t even decide how to deal with data I’ve been working with for 5+ years, and when I can’t figure out how to get a prepaid Danish simcard for my phone before my arrival. canceled the order for cards, stickers and envelopes. The tea and gift bags had already been shipped by this point. Good thing that both my sister-in-law and I both like rooibos tea, because we’re going to have a lot of it for quite some time! 40 clear plastic gift bags will be harder to use, but use them we shall nonetheless. We’re still going to make a schedule and maps for all the guests, but are going to mail them to their houses next week.

Yet despite this resolution to relax about the wedding and just go with whatever makes the most practical sense, I still found myself at Michael’s, struggling to decide whether to spend $10 or $1 on spools of ribbon to tie around the bundles of birdseed. After 5 minutes of hemming and hawing, I finally was able to shout at myself “IT DOESN’T MATTER. It’s just ribbon, and the guests will only see it for the 2 minutes they have the birdseed bundles in hand.” Naturally, being the thrifty woman I am, I ended up going with 2 spools of periwinkle ribbon (the $1 option). They don’t match anything else, but too bad.

I will be so glad when the wedding is over, and when my medication will become a routine. I will get my brain and my energy back!

On an entirely different topic, I’ve decided to change my blog in three key ways for the future. First, my blog will be “sanitized” instead of making it entirely inaccessible during my academic job search. Over the next two months, I will (at least temporarily) remove all of my potentially-identifying information. If you noticed the new title, then you noticed that I’ve already started in this effort! Second, I’m also going to attempt to make it more about academia, the academic job search, and where appropriate, academia and ADD. This will naturally be easier once the wedding is over. Finally, I’m going to try to use more pictures because it just makes everything a little more fun. See, I’ve already started working toward this goal, too!

busy weekend: meds, cats, suitcases and entertainment

We had a busy but still mostly restful weekend.

I picked up Jan at the airport at 2 a.m. on Friday. He was supposed to land at 11.30 Thursday night, but naturally was delayed flying through O’Hare. As a consequence of not going to bed until 3 am, I slept until 11 in the morning. I woke up with a major headache, presumably from Strattera withdrawal. I took major advil and later, a smaller than normal dose of Strattera. It took a while but it made the headache eventually go away. So I’ll be stepping down, instead of stopping abrubtly…

Later in the afternoon, we took the cats to the vet for a checkup. We thought Scary had ear mites, but it turns out he just has waxy ears. Spooky misbehaved terribly. She hid under the table and roared like an angry little lion when the vet tried to touch her. It took two vets, a vet tech, and a couple of towels to keep her from hurting somebody during her booster shot. Our little Poogy is a little bit overweight (12.5 pounds!) and Scarykins is just right for his size (10.5 pounds). Our new vet thinks Scary is part Siamese, on the basis of the shape of his head and the fact that he’s a chatty little cat.

On Saturday, we hiked out to the South Hills Mall in order to try to return Jan’s work suitcase, which is falling apart after a bare seven weeks of light use. The wheels are already off-track to the point that Jan has trouble dragging it around the airport. The annoying manager at Specialty Luggage claimed the damage was due to airline handling, which is total crap because Jan carries on for all his flights. Jan either wanted a new bag or to trade it in and upgrade to a Tumi, but the manager was only willing to give him 10% off another purchase. As we will never give Roger at Specialty Luggage another commission, we took the suitcase back and thanked him for his time.

Saturday night we went to play the Settlers of Catan with our friends Chris and Emily. We only played to 10 points instead of 13 (all were tired after several glasses of some strong sangria), and Chris won!

Sunday it was a mad dash to get all our work done before the weekend was over. Jan did all his laundry and I pre-cleaned the kitchen in preparation for the cleaners’ visit on Monday. Jan also completed several modules for his job’s required educational certifications, while I wrote shower thank-you notes and ordered wedding-related stuff (guest book frames, the flower girl’s pomander, and my jewelry, pictured elsewhere in my blog). Still need to schedule engagement photos and our dance lessons… our next few Saturdays are going to be quite full!

This morning Jan was back at the airport well before 6 a.m. for his flight to Toronto. We were 5 minutes down the road when Jan realized he’d forgotten his cell phone at home (he’d changed pants at the last minute and had left his phone in the other pair!). So we raced back to the house, left the car with the hazards blinking in the middle of the street, and raced back to the highway. We made record time to the airport. What usually takes me 40+ minutes in rush-hour traffic took him 20 minutes in early morning (light) traffic. I made it back to our house by 6.30, and only then realized that he’d stolen my phone’s stylus! (What a brat!)

On the medication front, I am totally without Strattera today. In fact, I’m totally without ADD meds today, and for the first time I’ve gone without meds since diagnosis, I don’t feel entirely overwhelmed by all the small details of life. This is somewhat interesting to me, as it’s the first time I’ve been off ADD meds while taking Lexapro. My optomistic side makes me think “Hm…. maybe I don’t have ADD… maybe I was just depressed for a long time without feeling sad, and that’s what’s kept me from concentrating at work and from being able to get stuff done at home.” I saw my med doc this morning for 5 minutes in order to get a prescription for Concerta (keep your fingers crossed that it doesn’t make me anxious like Adderall does), but I will plan to talk about this with her at our next scheduled med appointment. I might also have to bring it up with talky-shrink, too.

long weekend and data

I’m back at work today after spending the holiday weekend with my family. We spent Sunday at home and driving to/from the airport to pick up my brother and/or drop off Jan. Most of Monday and Tuesday were spent driving to and from Washington DC, where we interred my grandfather’s ashes at Arlington National Cemetery. In no particular order, here are some reasons why this was not a particularly enjoyable trip….

• It was for a funeral.
• My grandmother can’t walk well enough to make it more than a block or two, but complains about having to be pushed around in a wheelchair (particularly if it’s cold, and her definitions includes all temperatures under 72 degrees Farenheit).
• It was cold, windy and cloudy outside, and yet multiple family members wanted to tour monuments on the national mall. We walked/wheeled for at least 2 miles. Good thing we had a blanket for Grandma!
• 5 of us slept in one hotel room. 3 of these 5 people snore.

…and it just kept going from there. I wish I could say that the funeral was nice, but it seemed trite and impersonal to me (the funeral director and minister even sounded just like ride operators at Cedar Pointe when they explained the procedures to my family). My grandmother appreciated it, which is probably all that matters. It was the exact Arlington funeral service that’s in all the movies, down the the rifle shots. It was very quick — one reading, a couple of songs, shoot the guns, and that was it. We had lunch afterwards with the other family members and friends in attendance.

I had to take 2 days off from work in order to make this trip, and had to leave my family at my house in order to go to work today. My brother’s college class registration time was noon today, so they had to stick around until he’d registered over the internet. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I’ll return to happy kitties inside a locked house this afternoon.

I’ve played catch-up at work all day. It took me over an hour just to get through email this morning, with minimal replies. I spent most of the morning drawing a map to get myself through the rest of the data task I’ve been putting off for over a year. Now that I have a plan, it doesn’t seem quite as daunting. I might even be able to get through it within a couple of days, provided I don’t run into additional glitches along the way.

I was asked to review a manuscript for Developmental Psychology yesterday. I read the paper today, and unfortunately it’s not so great in its current form… but interestingly, it’s related to a paper I already have under review at another journal! This is the first time I’ve had a “Gotcha!” moment (the reassuring sense that I already have already produced better, similiar work).