Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

I disappeared several months ago, it would seem. The stress of living apart for most of the spring term got to be too much on myself and my family, and I stopped writing, at least publicly. So what have I done these last few months?

Hide it in a hiding place where no one ever goes
Put it in the pantry with your cupcakes.

I started writing privately, my partner and I took a series of steps that felt logical at the time, but have had deep repercussions on our relationship now, we both became a little lonelier, I finished my term in University F, Epsilon is supremely happy to have me living at home with him.

It's a little secret, just the Robinson's affair
Most of all you hide it from the kids.

One of the problem with four year olds is that they are very good at reading their parents. They have little else to do. So when one or both of us start acting strangely, he notices. Not that we believe in hiding anything from our child, that feels too much like lying. Just pointing out that it is not as easy to do as our parents possibly made it seem. Perhaps it becomes easier when the child is older, and less of his life revolves around our facial expressions.

Look around you, all you see are sympathetic eyes

Moving back to His Town, my partner and I have both realized how isolated we are. Living apart for extended periods has always had a toll on our relationship. It is hard to recalibrate with each other, especially when one or both of us are suffering from a bout of depression induced by the associated stresses.

It is not that we do not have friends. We have friends scattered across three continents. Some of them even respond to e-mails. Most of them, we manage to keep in touch with.  I know at one point, I had developed a community at this blog.  And then the D word got in the way, and I fell silent. I have no idea how much of that community I still have. If you have followed me for a while and are still reading this, let me know. I am curious.

I still find the community building aspect of blogs mystifying. A blog is a very intense view on one or two aspects of a writer's life, more personal, sometimes, than the casual reader has any right to know; personal enough that many posts that have generated encouraging comments from readers, when sent to certain friends, dumbfound with the intense nature of the communication. Perhaps I need better friends. Perhaps, like Aadam Aziz, in Midnight's Children, it is easier to deal with a person piecemeal, through a round hole cut in a white sheet.

Whatever the case may be, I think I need to stop writing without an audience. So I return to this forum. What will be different? The visual format is, for a start. At least at first, the next few entries will be a bit raw. A lot has happened these past few months that needs airing. Some of it academic. Some of it not. Nothing salacious. I will still attempt to keep this from being a diary. In the short term, there will be more poetry. I may eventually introduce a few pieces of prose fiction, though with a clear warning. I suspect this space will become less about academia, and more about gender and emmigration, but that is pure speculation at this point.

Not hearin' it

A friend from Grad School City got in touch with us. He started out in the same field as me, and left with a terminal masters. He now works in industry, and has lived in the same metro area for the past 6 years. He has been one of those lucky people who have managed to live within a few hundred miles of his parents his entire life. Far enough to establish some boundaries, but close enough to visit frequently.

He has decided he wants to leave his industry job, and find another industry job. He has a candidate employers in mind. However, this employer is nearly an order of magnitude further from his current community than he has ever been. This distance is making him hesitate in his decision.

Under any normal human circumstances, I would be very sympathetic to his distress. But right now, all I can think is

1. At least you have some control over when you leave your job, with some certainty of being hired in the same field.
2. Picking the one job you would like to transfer is not considered an act of sheer bravado by your colleagues, because we all know how tight the market it this year.
3. Poor you, leaving friends and family behind. Your wife will probably find a job in your new city, and you don't have to expatriate yourself to keep your family employed.

In short, I don't want to hear it. Needless to say, we didn't raise any of the points with our friend. It gives me pause to think though: when did I become so bitter?

All the same, I could just as easily leave what I am doing here to follow a similar industry path as he has. It's not like the option is closed off to me. But I am CHOOSING not to. At some point, I really need to consider why I'm making that choice.

From the other side of the fence

"Collin came home yesterday, and I think I spent an hour talking to him about dog food and grocery store aisles. I open my mouth and these words come out, and I don't know who it is that is talking," Selene told me as Collin buckled their twins into the car after a play date with Epsilon. "I envy your travelling around for the summer. I wish I could put on my backpack again and hitch hike around Europe."

My protestations of rootlessness and loss of friends all seemed empty in the face of Selene's frustration at being bound to one place for so many years. In spite of the fact that we'll be making a significant move in June to start new positions in September, the fact of the matter is, three conferences relatively close to each other, with a week's down time between each means that our family will have a chance to travel significantly, with a sort of subsidy. The number of stamps in Epsilon's passport embarrasses me when talking to my friends, who, for one reason or another cannot travel so much.

In some cases, it's a class thing. In others it's a job thing. Travelling is one of the perks that keeps me in this line of work. Taking my mother abroad to stay at a fancy conference hotel (and watch Epsilon) where 20 years ago she would take me is a cherished pleasure. Each year, my flight to a different tourist city for a conference, is one more than I could make in a different line of work.

I hear the envy for this lifestyle in Selene's voice. I share her periodic feelings of restlessness and sense of being tied down by family. As the kids wave goodbye to each other, I know she mirrors my sadness in knowing that their remaining play dates are numbered. We both say our goodbyes, longing for the parts of the other's life that we don't have.

I am trying to convince myself that it is not just that the grass is greener on the other side. I am trying to remember why I chose this career.

Friends with kids: A fresh start

This is the third and last in my series about the discussions my partner and I have had about the continuous process of making friends and moving while having a child. In the last two installments, I discussed how people with children have featured more prominently in our friend pool, how our schedules sometimes exclude socializing with young, night shifted professionals, how energy levels and candidate pools have effected who we socialize with and when. In September, we get to start over again in our new homes. Here I've listed a few plans to battle loneliness in the upcoming years.

As usual, comments, advice and stories from fellow educated tumbleweeds are welcome.

One of the mistakes we made in our current location is that we didn't activly befriend permanent people in my department who have children of the same age or slightly older than us. We mostly socialized with other post docs in the same position as us. The longer a person has lived in an area, the more likely they are to have a larger network of friends with children we can tap into. My partner has made friends with several such people at University E. We hope to encourage them to help us meet people.

These last few years, I have spent a lot of time trying to find other parents that may also be socially interesting to me. I have specifically shied away from socializing with intersting academics in a setting where I am a parent. This is my shortcoming, and as much as I may wish it away, it will not disappear by September. My partner, fortunately, does not have this fault. We hope to invite many people from his department over to our house for a weekend brunch or some quiet evening activity. As I look back, there are many people in my department who may have understood and/or enjoyed spending time with Epsilon, if we had taken the chance and expended the effort. Now may not be the time to start making this social gamble, but September almost certainly is.

As I will be living several hours away from my partner and Epsilon, near University F, my problem of making friends will be different. It will be easier in some ways. Without Epsilon around, I will not have a domain of my life while I am near my colleagues where I feel embarrassed to interact with them. I enjoy the part of academic life that involves going out for drinks and dinner after a seminar. I look forward to taking full advantage of these occaisions. I need to make sure that I aggressively insert myself into the social life of the department.

In this discussion, I should note that there are multiple reasons why I am not thrilled with the physical location of University F. Without Epsilon to aid in my intergration into society outside of the university, I will probably be isolated outside of work.  My only other socialization will be when I come home near University E. Past experience has taught me that not having any part of my life outside an academic setting makes me very grumpy. This is a problem I will have to tackle.

Friends with kids: Lessons we've learned

I feel like making friends as an early career academic is like trying to set down roots as a very educated tumble weed. This is part two of my thoughts on making friends while having a child, an unsolved 2 body problem, and a career that asks me to move across and between countries every few years. Comments and experiences from other educated tumbleweeds are very welcome.

Last time I tried to describe how the people we felt comfortable associating with had changed drastically pre and post Epsilon. Before his birth, we hung out with other graduate students, post docs and young professionals. We didn't see much of our neighbors. We met people by playing sports or participating in religious/cultural activities, and built friendships by inviting people over for dinner or games or drinks.

Now we choose housing by which neighborhoods have lots of children, and hang out with our neighbors as toddlers and preschoolers play in a lawn. We meet parents at parks and religious/cultural activities, and arrange play dates. Our favorite time to have people over is breakfast or lunch. Philosophical discussions over dinner mostly concern why the engine on the plastic train is not running.

We've muddled through these last few years for better or for worse. But we get a fresh start come September, and my partner and I have been trying to take lessions from the last 2.5 years.

The first notable point is that we have less time and energy to devote to making friends than we did before. In fact, our energy levels have dropped to the point where it is hard to try something new, or try again after something didn't work. We've settled into a pattern where we try to do something fun every weekend, to cut the boredom of having the same three conversations with Epsilon every Saturday and Sunday. That has helped, but it hasn't fixed our loneliness. This is something to change next year.

The second point is that ideal current friend pool, the intersection between interesting people, interesting professionals, and parents is not as large as it may first appear. Some academics with kids are unfortunately academics who are married to a parent. Conversely, the family events organized by the campus women's group are largely populated by stay at home mother married to academics. Similarly, mothers I meet in other settings are often not devoted to a career. I have nothing against mothers who take time off for their children. It is a choice I could never make. However, since so much of what I love about life is my science, I have a hard time bonding with a person who doesn't understand having a passion for one's career. At a time when my 2 body problem consumes so much of my life, it is hard to make such friends empathize with or even understand the decision to repeatedly tear our family apart.

This is not to say that I have found no meaningful relationships in this intersection. Rather, if I had known the probability distributions of who I may encounter in which setting, it would have saved me a lot of frustration and heartbreak early on.

Third, as lunch is now one of my favorite times to meet people, I should take advantage of the fact that lunch is a convenient time to socialize with people on campus. There was one year when I (and my partner when he was aroud) managed to schedule weekly lunches with a grad student from a different department. We all looked forward to those meetings. She has since moved on, and I haven't found a replacement engagement. That is a mistake I should not wait until September to mend.

Finally, as much as I lament having to leave old friends behind, or have friends move away, I have learned in the past few months how much a few regular (daily/weekly) e-mails or phone calls to people in distant cities can do to revive the embers of friendship, and to make me feel connected to people I may see less than once a year. Before I started this blog, I tried mass e-mails to friends on a roughly monthly basis to no avail. More frequent, specific e-mails to specific people, while a lot more work, has paid off for me in an amazing way.

Friends with kids: the shifting pool

My partner and I have started some planning for our impending emigration. In the process, we've started talking about the different situations we will find ourselves in with regards to making friends. He'll have Epsilon in a department where he knows  peoples, I'll be alone in a new department and commuting to them every weekend. In this series I'll try to collate our thoughts and write them down.

Sometimes making friends in as an academic feels like building a community while being a highly educated tumble weed. I welcome any insights and experiences from my fellow tumbleweed readers.

Epsilon was born a few months after we made a significant move to start my current post doc. We knew no one in this part of the country, and the logistics of seeing old friends is difficult enough that it rarely happens. One of the first things we noticed is that it was very easy to meet people with a kid. By the time Epsilon learned to like dogs, we knew every dog walker on the street. Well before that every neighbor who was of a grandparent's age knew our little family as well. We became friends with those of our immediate neighbors who had children.

At the same time, the people we met outside our neighborhood were very different. At the religious organization I attend periodically, it seemed that giving birth graduated me from the group of "young adults" to the group of "full fledged adults." Instead of hanging out with the young, post college/early career crowd I was used to, I found myself surrounded by older women who wanted to coo over the bundle in my arms. There were also some other young mothers there as well that I organized play dates with. But it was very hard to make friends with young childless people.

The colleagues I socialize with outside of work, as a result, are those who also have small children. I know very little about the lives of other post docs in the department. The people in my group I socialize with while at work, but see very little of outside work, no matter how interesting I may find them socially or scientifically.

Part of the problem is scheduling. Given Epsilon's early bedtime and early mornings, it is hard to go out as a couple with people after 7. Sometimes we manage to invite people over for after dinner drinks or games, but often the noise level involved causes problems with Epsilon. Part of the problem is my discomfort with the mixing of my parental life with my academic life.

The result is that our new friends set would be unrecognizable to either of us from our graduate student days. We had very few friends with children before Epsilon. After Epsilon, that ratio has literally been inverted, at least locally.

Mechanical skills

Grad School Friend brings over the fire truck with the broken pump. Armed with a screwdriver and my smaller fingers, we manipulate the plastic clasps and dismantle the toy piece by piece. A neighbor walks by, sees Epsilon asleep in his car seat and two adults intensely staring at a pile of plastic bits. I wave. He grins back knowingly. I am so glad that all my neighbors have young kids.

Having taken apart the pump, and finished blowing air into each others' faces, we have no idea what is wrong with the pump.We snap everything back together, and pray.  The pump works! Apparently, Grad School Friend had the same result when he took apart his dashboard to fix his power windows.