Working on my new leaf

I was putzy to a friend.  She’s an establishing scholar – on the academic track, doing good research, teaching – and she’s smart and will be a success, I think.  Her research and mine historically have overlapped some; our perspectives are different, but there’s enough similarity that I’ve sometimes felt competitive/insecure about the work she’s doing.  The thing is, she’s the better scholar in many ways – she takes the time need to do the work, her fundamental skills – understanding of complex theory, language abilities, etc. – are superior to mine.  I have my own strengths – I can apply theory to everyday life relatively easily – but I have yet to try and grasp theory in any meaningful way.  I cobble together bits and pieces that I read and hope that something sticks, I work in fits and starts (of necessity, anymore!), and I’m far too emotionally invested in the stuff I work on to make a good scholar.  There’s got to be some distance there, you know?

I recently let some of my insecurities get the better of me, and corresponded at her in a particularly putzy way.  Nothing serious – I mean, generally speaking I’m mostly of the fly-in-the-face variety of annoying, rather than outright troublesome or malevolent.  But I’ve been feeling crappy about it ever since, even post-apology.  I can’t help but think that maybe our relationship has come full circle, and that maybe we’re just heading off on very different paths.  I’d hate for that to happen, because I enjoy her company and her conversation when we get together, but I feel like I’m falling behind and just can’t keep up anymore.

Not sure how that constitutes turning over a new leaf…except to say that I’m trying to make my peace with this and turn more fully to the person I have to become, not the one I used to be or have been trying to be for so long.  You know, I went through this once before: when we left Hong Kong, we also left the ‘circle’ – the group of people who knew Hong Kong intimately, who were part of it (even as expats), who could lay claim to it.  It’s a common thing among TCKs – the sense of mourning over the loss of something in which you could once claim belonging – and one that people who still belong/never belonged just never quite get.  This is very much the same kind of feeling…and I have to figure out a way to work through it and make a new identity for myself that folds these things in, even as it accepts that I’ll never have full membership in any of them.

(Thinking about it like this, it occurs to me that one of the things that spurred my putzy comments to her on some pictures she posted was that *first* TCK issue, since she’s been in HK and doing the rounds there.  It was like I felt the need to pee all over her pictures in order to try to claim my own ownership of the place – in that sense, she was just kind of an innocent bystander who got caught in the crossfire between my now-and-then selves.  Hm.  L. is right – this blogging thing is cheaper than therapy and works as well.)

Never Mind…

Okay, so, that whole password thing?  Never mind.  I decided that I want to try and use this blog a bit differently than I can if I’m password-protecting every other entry, so I went ahead and deleted the protected posts.  Hope you enjoyed them, if you had a password!

And now on to other things.

I watched Jason Sperber‘s Today show segment this afternoon with real admiration.  For years I’ve been struggling – and I mean internal knock-down, drag-out fights – with my identity; am I a ‘mom’?  Am I an ‘academic’?  At times it’s seemed like I was both and neither all at once, and not in a good way.  More in the sense that I’ve constantly felt like I’m falling short on both ends of the spectrum: not committed enough to the ideals of perfect parenting (Complete! With! Baked! Cookies!) on the one hand, and clearly not committed enough to a life of academic rigor, based on my paltry research output over the last five years or so.

But Jason’s observation that it’s not about these clear-cut roles – stay-at-home-parent vs. working parent – but about versatility and making the right decisions for you and your family really hit home.  I think I’ve been trying too hard, and for too long, to fit myself into an idea of what it means to be a ‘mom’ and an ‘academic’ that bears little resemblance to me and my own situation.

Let’s face it: I’ll never, ever be a mom who lives solely for the sake of her children, no matter how much I love the little pissers.  And I’ll never be an academic in the university-employed sense of the word.  The first is just something I’ve never been – hell, when I used to go to the hoikuen (public daycare) in Tottori to spread the international love, I could only take so many 4 year-old reenactments of Crayon Shinchan before I beat a hasty retreat to the shokuinshitsu (staff room) for tea and conversation.  I used to think it was because they were other people’s kids…turns out, not so much.

But if I’m being honest, then I should admit that the same is true of the latter identity.  I have a hard time handling the inevitable ego-pummeling that comes with serious academia.  I’m terrible at networking and making connections with people whose research corresponds to mine.  I get nervous in front of a classroom of almost-adults, and the thought of actually passing judgment on them makes me break out in a sweat.

Even so, I am a parent and I am making progress towards finishing my PhD.  The question, then, isn’t one of living up to expectations and ideas of what a ‘mom’ or ‘academic’ is, but rather one of deciding what kind of parent and what kind of scholar I want to be.  I want to be a parent whose kids know their mom loves them without reservation.  I want to help guide them as they make their way through their own lives.  I want our home to feel like a safe place for them – one that’s cosy, loving, and stable.

I want to be a scholar whose work makes a contribution, however small.  I want to teach ordinary people to think of things from a different perspective.  I want to foster communication between people who seem to have nothing in common and little to say to one another.  I think I may have a book in me, if my committee (should I get to the defense stage) thinks the dissertation would translate well to a book project, and I may even still have a paper or two left.  But I’m increasing thinking that I’d like to turn my attention more fully to translation.  There’s a lot of scholarly work in Japanese that should be translated into English – too few people have too tight a lock on information right now, mainly by virtue of language ability.  I’d love to make a difference there, and to bring to light some texts that deserve a wider readership.

I guess this is a mini-manifesto of sorts, but it makes me feel a little better just writing it out.  I’m not there yet, but I feel like I’m heading down the right path for once.