reflections on my decision to enter grad school

So, if you have a PhD and work in academia (the college and university system), or know lots of PhDs and academics (people who work in said systems), you have likely seen far too many articles about the state of the job market, and quite a few blog posts about the pain and frustration of applying for jobs in academia. But if you’re not a part of those two categories, here’s the short version: there aren’t enough jobs out there for people who earn PhDs in the humanities and social sciences and it really, really sucks to spend 5, 7, or 10 years earning a degree only to be unable to find a job in your narrow field at the end. Now, I know a lot of my friends are saying, “No shit. It hasn’t exactly been a cake walk outside of ‘academia’ or whatever the hell since 2008, either.”

I could go into how it’s different. The years of earning nothing or next to it make a difference. It’s not a treat to come out of school at 30 or 32 or 35 without any savings or retirement accounts, only to discover that you have to start over, that you can’t get the jobs you thought you had trained to get.

But, here’s the question: Do I regret going to grad school? I don’t. I am an historian, and that is much more than my profession. I approach every second of my life as an historian, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything. I can answer the big questions: the why and how of the American Revolution, the movements of people, politics, and stuff that produced the Industrial Revolutions, and I can talk for a long time to anyone who will listen (or just to myself) about why all Americans think they’re descended, intellectually if not genetically, from the Puritans. I think I can still probably tell you more about the history of celebrity in North America than anyone else out there. I can also have fun with the everyday stuff. When I sit on my front porch steps and see kids riding their bikes in the middle of my road, I think about the strands of time, change, and culture that made that happen. I can see the strands almost, pulling us all together through some pretty crazy stories and shifts of time.

Should my undergraduate professors have discouraged me from applying to grad school, because it turns out that I was one of those people who would eventually quit looking for a job in academia? First, of all, how could they have known? And second of all, it would not have worked anyway. My undergraduate thesis was really very good. I look at it now and think, “That was a high quality piece of undergraduate work,” and, lord knows, I know how to judge that now. My hours spent writing that thing in the Natick Public Library remain some of the most vivid, happiest hours and weeks of my educational life and I wanted to keep doing that, and to do it in more depth. They were right to think I could make it in graduate school. How could they have known what would happen to me personally and to the economy to push me away from academia?

What else would I have done? It would be nice to have more financial security right now, but I had a lot of fun in grad school. I loved my classes. I loved my research. Much of the time, I loved writing my dissertation. If I ever finish and publish the novel I’m working on, I will know that I could not have done it if I weren’t an historian. The real people I learned and read about, the true stories of the past, they are part of my narrative of humanity. They permeate every page I write, just as much as they influence how I see the world. I can’t imagine my life without the people I met in the archival documents anymore than I can imagine my life without the people I’ve met in the flesh.

I understand that some of my colleagues and friends feel trapped. I certainly feel that way at times, too (a lot…). It’s hard. It’s scary. I get that I’m different, because I only did a full search once, and because I actually decided internally, well before I could admit it to myself or out loud, that actually, I don’t want a tenure-track job, or to be obligated to keep writing and researching in American history. I think that, much like what I’ve experienced before, a lot of us are grieving the loss of some very significant life dreams. It’s going to  be different for all of us, and I’m not really up for judging how anyone comes to term with how much the job market sucks.

I had a family, and a husband who found a job that suited him in a field with even fewer options than mine, even if it was in a place that made me miserable (sorry, Oxford friends, but it is true). I don’t know how things would have worked out if that hadn’t been true. Maybe I would have been motivated to keep trying to like academia, to keep searching for a job, to get myself interested again. It’s impossible to know, so it’s pointless to regret.

But, still, I’m scared I won’t ever get anything published and that I’ll end up having to settle for a job I’ll like even less. I’m scared I’ll be bored. But I got to spend seven years thinking, reading, talking, and writing, and making some really smart friends. The last four years, outside of my family life, have been hard and boring. But graduate school, whatever happens next, that was lucky.

with the heaviest of hearts

We only spent 11 months in Ohio. It was a difficult year, my first year of full-time teaching. It was also a wonderful year, because we had the most fabulous people surrounding us. I didn’t realize then how lucky we were, to find such kindred spirits over so short a time. I know now that it is extraordinary to find a community so welcoming of strangers, and transient ones, at that. Professionally and personally, I now realize that that year in Ohio was a gift.

Among the friends we made were T. and K., who were building their fabulously up-to-date Brady Bunchesque family. They brought three older children into their relationship, had one daughter together, and were pregnant with their collective fifth. They were easy to talk to, active in the community, and on the correct side of all political issues (in my opinion). Their daughter, R., became one of Samuel’s favorite friends, and he cried over missing her for months after we moved. We’ve kept in touch via Facebook since we left Ohio, liking each other’s family posts. I also look to K. to keep me from being lazy in my politics.

Recently, they welcomed a sixth girl into their family, another K. But this morning I woke up to the news that baby K died unexpectedly yesterday morning, at 16 days old. I just have no words for the shock and pain of this news, and I know that’s absolutely nothing compared to what they’re feeling. I am so unfathomably sad for all of them, devastated that any of them have to feel this pain, that their other girls, especially the little ones, have to know how cruel life can be.

I drove Samuel to school in the rain today, feeling numbness, tinged with a familiar tingling sensation in my chest and arms. It’s grief, or the remnants of it, making it so even the most familiar of objects, a steering wheel, seemed to sting my hands. Obviously I was focused on driving the car safely, but I was also trying to think of something, anything I could do or say to help. There’s not much I can do, I know, beyond think of them, and say that I am.

They are a beautiful family, and the only comfort I can find is the certainty that their friends and family in that little Ohio town will rally around them. I hope they keep coming around, keep offering food and hugs for now, and love and support forever. Because at times like this, and when I’m struggling, I always remember the best thing anyone said to us six years ago: It never gets better, it just gets easier.

Whoever reads this, please don’t tell me you’re sorry or offer me words of wisdom. Please just think of them, and wish them comfort, peace, and eventually, joy again.

Reflections on 6 years past

Today is January 3rd, Natan’s day. Only it never really has been his day. I know nothing about him, other than that like my other boys, he was on his way to being a big baby, but unlike them, never had a chance to grow. He kicked ultrasound wands and had my toes and my nose. That’s all there is, was for me to know of him.

I am not a particularly sentimental person. I don’t do much to commemorate anything–birthdays or anniversaries. Samuel, of course, cares alot about his birthday, and since he’s here to know about it, we do stuff. Natan is not, so we don’t.

It doesn’t mean I don’t think about him or wonder or mourn. I do. But I have two little ones here with me today. Samuel is sick with a cold and is resting on the couch. Jonah seems a little out of sorts too.

Six years ago, I worried I would never have any of this. No snuggly sick cold days at home with little ones. No healthy days out and about. Today is the anniversary of the worst day of my life. But except for the calendar date, today is a mundane day.

Despite all that we lost and all the distance I have to go still in healing, it has only gotten better since then. I don’t really know how to commemorate that. So I’ll just hang out at home with my boys, snuggling and being thankful for today and how different it is.

pride of place

Two weeks ago we hosted Samuel’s 5th birthday party at our house. I was so nervous about it. Every other birthday party we had gone to since moving to Memphis must have cost $1,000, between the locations, food and activities. We could not afford to even consider competing with that, and I kept telling myself that even if we could, we shouldn’t. Samuel was fine with having the party at his house after we told him we couldn’t afford his first idea, the zoo. He was excited, really. That party went well. I was a little nervous people wouldn’t come based upon where we live, which is a perfectly nice neighborhood, but still a few economic rungs below the houses near the preschool.

Let me put it this way: with just Josh working full time, and given the insane cost of our health insurance, we are barely earning a middle class income. I am not deluded. College professors at the start of their career don’t make much, especially given their education. I earned more at 22 years old working for a start up in Boston. If money had been a priority for me, I would not have gotten PhD.
Yet when I am surrounded by the wealthy parents at the preschool, I struggle with embarrassment. I love our neighborhood, and I am proud we bought an old house in an old neighborhood. But we can’t afford as much as they can. I am not just talking about the clothes and the cars and the boots and the makeup and the hair coloring and the houses and the personal trainers and the yoga classes and the vacations….Ok, I will stop that. More seriously, I feel badly about not being able to afford the music lessons, sports, dance classes, and other various activities the other parents can for their kids.

I shouldn’t feel this way. Samuel and Jonah will have so many opportunities that so many other children in the world will never experience. But they could have so much more, if only I had made different choices. I feel guilty that I am still trying to figure out what to do, still trying to figure out my own dreams when I want to be giving them every opportunity to discover theirs. I worry that they’re going to be limited by my own failures.

At the same time, I want to give myself a break, to tell myself I am doing enough. We are in this place because at every turn over the past six years, I put family first. We moved to Memphis to provide a good Jewish education and community for the boys. I am behind where I always thought I would be by now financially and professionally but given the market and opportunities we faced I don’t know how, short of sacrificing even more time with Samuel or deciding not to have Jonah at all, it could be different. So I should feel good, about our choices, and content that we are finally settled.

Reason tells me this, now could someone please tell my confidence?

Six years gone

In secular time, I woke up six years ago yesterday at home, in our apartment, excited that we had stayed in Michigan for winter break. I had just started writing my dissertation and it felt like bonus time. I felt so on top of things– what grad student gets back to serious work on December 26th? By that afternoon I was in the hospital.

In Jewish time, yesterday was the 13 Tevet, the day Natan was born and died. For some reason the intersection of these days kept me awake two nights ago.

Everything stopped for me between my admission to the hospital and Natan`s death.A.wasted week, really. A week delaying the inevitable, and building false hope.

I have never regained the confidence and contentment I had that morning before. It’s not because Natan didn’t make it. I honestly have accepted the inevitability of that. I have no control over life and death. All things considered, I am incredibly fortunate. I have two sons born at full term,the oldest born less than a year later. That was against the odds.

I don’t struggle much with grief anymore.I accept it. Instead, six years later, I struggle with another loss: I never regained my career momentum or the energy for balancing work with my personal life. I remembered this commitment to Judaism that didn’t fit the professional opportunities we had. Suddenly academia just didn’t work for me. I am still grieving
that, trying to figure out what’s next and how to stop feeling like I have failed. I have my children and that should be enough. But really these past six years in every other way feel like dead, wasted time. I worry I am no closer to a fulfilling career now than I was 6 years ago. Or maybe I am even farther now than ever. 

The other night the intersection of Natan`s yahrtzeit and the anniversary of when I entered the hospital felt like a kind of
gap closing: the gap between false hope and my new life. I accepted the worst part of that long ago. Now on to the next phase.

it didn’t happen to me (some thoughts on responding to Newtown)

This past Wednesday morning I had a long conversation with my friend and rabbi about grief and explaining death to children. We talked about how I didn’t believe there was a reason for Natan’s death beyond the hormonal and anatomical problems with my reproductive system, how I didn’t believe I had to find a meaning behind it. Yet I talked to her about how I did learn a lot about life from the aftermath. I learned that my professors cared a lot about me as a person–one of my advisers came to the funeral, as did a professor with whom Josh had done his preliminary exams. Others visited and sent food.

It was the moment our graduate school friends became my “old friends,” friends with whom I did more than drink, celebrate, and discuss history, but to whom I could turn in hard moments, who would cry with me and just sit with us while I sat on our couch saying goodness only knows what in my grief and sadness. I can’t eat a really good orange without thinking of Andrew H. and his wife, Bobby, and how they sent us a fabulous box of them from Florida, and later cooked us a wonderful meal. Other friends, Matt and Liz, came over many times to play darts and cheer us up. I can’t see an Anne of Green Gables DVD without remembering how my mom and aunt sought one out for me when I had a craving to watch it. Emily came by over and over, and listened to me babble on for months as I learned to crochet and figure out my life afterwards. There are countless plants, flowers, and certain dishes that remind me of things people brought, sent, and said to us in the weeks after–I only listed a very few. So many people responded in so many amazing ways, and then continued to in the months after and well into my pregnancy with Samuel. These are memories from the saddest part of my life, and yet, they don’t make me sad. They make me feel comforted, cared for, and thankful for life, and our lives in particular. They make me happy, and I miss them. They were the moments that let me go on.

When something bad happens in other people’s lives, most of us have the urge to do something. I thought about this on Friday, as news of the school shooting in CT began to circulate on the news channels and on Facebook. I knew, like most people, without being told that the shooter was probably a young white man, reclusive, shy, probably mentally ill. I reacted like most people of my political leanings would–frustrated and angry that this country is so lax about gun control. I wished we had better health care for the mentally ill.

I rolled my eyes when I heard and read pundits and political figures say some version of “Now is not the time for politics.” I responded on Facebook with this status update,

This is the definition of politics: “The activities associated with the governance of a country or area.” Part of governance is keeping our children safe in their everyday lives. Now is precisely the time for politics because clearly we need to work on our governance. Children are victims of violence too often in our society–today’s event, while a rare one, highlights a larger problem.

Lover of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” that I am, I do not understand the other side or sides when it comes to politics. I don’t distrust the government, other people, or society in general. I don’t get why anyone would think they need an arsenal of weapons for self protection. I don’t see why they wouldn’t rather expend their financial and social capital on creating a better society. I believe in governance, and that politics can give us the solutions to social problems.

On that note, as a sort-of scholar, I think about how the national response to this tragedy reflects the arguments I made in my dissertation on celebrity culture. I get why people want to cry for the children and educators murdered on Friday. I understand why some people are obsessing over the images and others want to avoid them. I understand why, in telling our national story about this event, President Obama said we are all grieving, and why he and others have said the 20 children are all our children. In the sense that our media creates a shared imagined community (credit Anderson), we are all grieving and they all are our children. They are now characters in our shared narrative. So is the shooter, and his mother, and brother, and father. But those children are also not our children. They’ve only ever lived on a screen for me, and only ever will live on a screen for me.

Friday night I lit Hanukkah candles with my children, sang Happy Birthday to my son, and took my children to “Zoo Lights” and enjoyed myself immensely. Of course I had to do that. I can’t sit on the couch for a week straight and cry for the children who died on Friday, nor should I. I can’t take their parents food or sit in their living rooms listening to their stories. I’m not going to write a message on their public obituary pages. I cannot grieve, and should not, grieve for them, in the manner prescribed by my faith for families of the dead. I can pray for peace, and did. I can ask God why, but not in the same tone and with the same intensity that their parents, friends, and extended families will. This didn’t happen to me. It happened to them. They aren’t part of my friends, or family. Only a couple of them shared my faith.

Yet they’re all part of my nation, my country, my polity. Thus my response has to be political. If I really care about those children at all, I have to do something politically–be an activist, write letters, vote, speak out. I have seen some people on Facebook honestly admit they don’t care about these children and their families. I can’t relate to that, but honestly, the world is big. Paraphrasing Emerson, not all the poor are my poor. We cannot tackle all the world’s problems, or even all the nation’s problems. I decide what is a problem I can and should tackle, who are my poor, so to speak, and together you and I decide which are the ones we as a nation can tackle. Are we serious about this one or not? Is the urge to make this the moment we act big enough? We have to start there, and then we can begin talking about the how.

the time is near

I met with one of our rabbis this morning to discuss ways to talk about death with Samuel, by which I meant specifically Natan’s death. I should probably be ashamed to admit that he doesn’t yet know about him, but I haven’t felt able or ready to tell him. As much as I think about Natan, he doesn’t come up very much in everyday conversation. I don’t have any photos displayed in the house. His box sits on an accessible shelf, but we don’t open it very often. The only reminders we have out on display of him are subtle, most openly the extra candles we light on Friday nights. Last Friday, Samuel asked why we light extra candles since they only light two at his school. I told him that I light one candle for all my children. He didn’t do the math yet, but he will, very soon I’m sure. 

I had always thought we’d tell him before now. We just haven’t. First, it felt like he was too young. Then I was pregnant with Jonah and that didn’t feel right. What we would have done had Jonah not made it, I don’t know. I have lots of anxieties about telling him. First, I struggle with talking about Natan when I’m not prepared for the conversation. I don’t bring him up in everyday conversation. I don’t tell everyone who asks that I have three children. Despite the public nature of this blog, in real time and place, I’m very protective of my experiences with him. I still get very teary talking about him, and anxious. I’m anxious for different reasons around different people. Some people have a tendency to say stupid and hurtful things, and I don’t like to give them the chance. I don’t like to make people uncomfortable. Yet I feel like my experience can be useful, so I’m open about my blog. None of that is why I haven’t told Samuel, however. I just haven’t felt certain about how to approach it with him.

About a year and a half ago, I began to think about how to tell Samuel. Then Josh’s great-grandpa died and Samuel began struggling with how to understand death. One evening as I was putting him to bed, and Josh was out somewhere, he said to me, “Mommy, I hate God and Jesus.” Obviously that threw me, I asked him why. He told me that one of his teachers had told him that his great grandpa died because Jesus needed him in heaven more than we did on earth, that his great grandpa’s work must’ve been done on earth. The teacher told him Jesus was God’s son, hence God getting blamed too. After I finished silently cursing that teacher in my mind, I told him that that wasn’t true, that Mel died because he was very sick, and that because he was very very old, his body wasn’t strong enough anymore to fight the sickness. He then got sidetracked, asking why his teacher lied so I had to explain that she didn’t lie, she just believes differently than we believe. I could go on quite awhile for how that has played out in the past year.

Since then, Samuel has asked a lot about God and death. He knows that sometimes young people die, too, because they get too sick or hurt to fight it. I’m thinking about how I’m going to approach this conversation when it inevitably happens. Since Natan’s yahrzeit (6 years!) is 13 Tevet, December 26th, we’ll be lighting the candle soon, we might do it then, but we won’t be home. 

I don’t have concrete answers to all the inevitable questions. Why did Natan die? He died because he was born very early, and even though the doctors tried very hard to save him, they couldn’t. Where is he now? I don’t know exactly, but I do know at least a big part of him lives on in our heart and memory, like great grandpa. The rabbi helped me a lot with that one. I’m okay with the uncertainty of most of my answers. When Natan died, and for months afterward as you can tell from my blog, I was very sure his soul went somewhere, that he lived on somewhere. I don’t know that anymore. All of that I feel confident tackling. 

I just have one fear. Will Samuel say he hates God again? I’m not afraid of him saying it, but I am afraid of him meaning it and continuing to mean it. Will he stay angry? I want to tell him, it’s okay to be mad at God. I was very mad too at times. The rabbi and I talked about how I can use analogy. Sometimes he’s very angry at me and Josh, but doesn’t he always keep loving us? And then we’ll play out that conversation and see how it goes. We’ll see.