Securities and Exchange
posted by Sybil Vane
I've reached the point in this (second consecutive) summer of upheaval where I'm starting to feel unhealthy. Not been sleeping very well for a month; I drop off fine usually but wake up a million times. The packing has me mired in stirred up dust and fleas, probably, so I'm sneezey and my eyes itch. I've been drinking more beers/wine than what is my standard routine, smoking more cigarettes. And not sleeping. Plus, eating down the pantry is anti-healthful. I'm scared to buy any produce because of an overdetermined sense of the move being imminent. Pasta, quinoa, black beans, beer beer, rice, can of soup, beer, rinse, repeat. my god, we wouldn't want to have to move with this *vanilla*! Better use it up! More peanut butter cookies; in my weakened state I tend to bake only half the dough and just straight up eat the rest. Further, like all good hells, the eating down the pantry hell is all the worse because it is a hell of your unique making. I, for example, have a grocery store weakness for two-for-one specials, for boxes of rice/herb combos, for cans of refried beans, for on-sale granola bars, and for oversized bins of risotto. This is my processed carbs hell, for now.
I cleaned out the last bits of stuff in my office yesterday. Something I love about myself is the way I invest in a place and develop a relationship with it, but yesterday that investment, only a year long, felt like more than I had room to indulge. I felt exhausted and sad in my empty first office. I walked down the hall to drop off my key and three of the offices I passed, colleagues, have my kid's artwork taped on the doors.
I don't feel like I've written much about this job over the last year and now I don't know how much I trust myself because I feel weepy effusive. It would be, I imagine, for me, much easier to leave this job if it were a traditionally "really good" job. I know, y'all, its a tenure track job, it's a really good job. Just like the one I am going to, which is a 4/4 with tons of comp and a new institutional structure, is also a good job. I do know. But y'all know what I mean: the kind of job that my grad program trained me to think of as aspirational. R1, 2/2, minimal comp teaching. That scenario presents a clear dichotomy: privileging family togetherness over career ambitiousness, without entirely sacrificing the latter.
Instead the situation is this: my job, my first job, was a 4/4 with constant comp responsibilities and a spartan upper-level rotation that had me in my speciality only once every 3 or 4 semesters. I had weighty service responsibilities, very little funds for conference/research travel, and a very small salary. My colleagues have pursued relationships with my daughter and played with her feverish self while I taught. They hang her art in their office. They have hosted my family for bbq's and riverside crab eating. My chair, when I called her in June to say I was leaving, spent 20 seconds being sort of shocked and then 20 minutes assuring me that I was making the right decision and she was so proud of and happy for me. She also began scheduling meetings with me 2 months into the job to discuss things like my 3rd yr review file, how to think about the committees involved, how to game my committee responsibilities. Maybe most importantly, I am thinking, is that my colleagues here have worked so hard from the day I arrived to convey that I was the best fit for the job, that I was an asset to the department, that I made the school better. The did this because they are decent and because they meant it all, but also, I expect, because they knew how much it meant for a first year assistant professor - any first year assistant professor but especially one struggling with some single mothering and an absent partner - to be reminded of herself as a competent professional with an identifiable career trajectory. That is, at any rate, the effect it had on me. I feel, as I'm sure is clear by now, very sad about leaving these people and this job.
I was skimming archives and noticed that here, last summer, pre-move, I observed how sad people seemed for us when I told them I got a job, but Mr. V hadn't yet and we were shifting to a commuter marriage. This year, with this move, people seem so happy for us. It's much easier to react in an unambiguous way (especially to a woman) to positive family news than to positive career news. Even my colleagues are thrilled for us. And mostly I absorb that and it guides how I feel about the move: incredibly happy for us. But it's more complicated. Always is.
I cleaned out the last bits of stuff in my office yesterday. Something I love about myself is the way I invest in a place and develop a relationship with it, but yesterday that investment, only a year long, felt like more than I had room to indulge. I felt exhausted and sad in my empty first office. I walked down the hall to drop off my key and three of the offices I passed, colleagues, have my kid's artwork taped on the doors.
I don't feel like I've written much about this job over the last year and now I don't know how much I trust myself because I feel weepy effusive. It would be, I imagine, for me, much easier to leave this job if it were a traditionally "really good" job. I know, y'all, its a tenure track job, it's a really good job. Just like the one I am going to, which is a 4/4 with tons of comp and a new institutional structure, is also a good job. I do know. But y'all know what I mean: the kind of job that my grad program trained me to think of as aspirational. R1, 2/2, minimal comp teaching. That scenario presents a clear dichotomy: privileging family togetherness over career ambitiousness, without entirely sacrificing the latter.
Instead the situation is this: my job, my first job, was a 4/4 with constant comp responsibilities and a spartan upper-level rotation that had me in my speciality only once every 3 or 4 semesters. I had weighty service responsibilities, very little funds for conference/research travel, and a very small salary. My colleagues have pursued relationships with my daughter and played with her feverish self while I taught. They hang her art in their office. They have hosted my family for bbq's and riverside crab eating. My chair, when I called her in June to say I was leaving, spent 20 seconds being sort of shocked and then 20 minutes assuring me that I was making the right decision and she was so proud of and happy for me. She also began scheduling meetings with me 2 months into the job to discuss things like my 3rd yr review file, how to think about the committees involved, how to game my committee responsibilities. Maybe most importantly, I am thinking, is that my colleagues here have worked so hard from the day I arrived to convey that I was the best fit for the job, that I was an asset to the department, that I made the school better. The did this because they are decent and because they meant it all, but also, I expect, because they knew how much it meant for a first year assistant professor - any first year assistant professor but especially one struggling with some single mothering and an absent partner - to be reminded of herself as a competent professional with an identifiable career trajectory. That is, at any rate, the effect it had on me. I feel, as I'm sure is clear by now, very sad about leaving these people and this job.
I was skimming archives and noticed that here, last summer, pre-move, I observed how sad people seemed for us when I told them I got a job, but Mr. V hadn't yet and we were shifting to a commuter marriage. This year, with this move, people seem so happy for us. It's much easier to react in an unambiguous way (especially to a woman) to positive family news than to positive career news. Even my colleagues are thrilled for us. And mostly I absorb that and it guides how I feel about the move: incredibly happy for us. But it's more complicated. Always is.
Labels: academia, family values, women and work
Posted at 6:11 AM
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