I decided to wade into the probably already calming waters surrounding this one....

 There is an everyone's-new-favorite-WHAT!?! letter about expectations in graduate school circulating through the astronomy community this week, complete with lots of commentary after the fact.

http://www.astrobetter.com/

I've got an opinion about it, like most other people who have read it. Let's be honest, I've got LOTS of opinions about it. And let's be honest, I'm not going to be the most eloquent, and for sure not the most diplomatic. This is a blog, that almost no one reads, so I'm going to write what I write.

1. "However, if you informally canvass the faculty (those people for whose jobs you came here to train), most will tell you that they worked 80-100 hours/week in graduate school.  No one told us to work those hours, but we enjoyed what we were doing enough to want to do so.  We were almost always at the office, including at night and on weekends.  Nowadays, with the internet, it is fine to work from home sometimes, but you still miss out on learning from and forming collaborations with other graduate students when everyone does not work in the same place at the same time.   We realize that students with families will not have 80-100 hours/week to spend at work.  Again, what matters most is productivity.  Any faculty member or mentoring/thesis committee will be more than happy to work with any student to develop strategies to maximize productivity, even in those cases where the student is unable to devote more than 60 hours to their work per week."

How about students with any other interests, too? Who want to have a pet, a hobby, a cause, a passion? A relationship? Let's not make this a women's issue, and let's not forget that there are many men with families who you are also losing (who would probably make much better mentors for having had time to engage with their kids and the complexity of family life instead of being absent) with this mindset.

And how about overachievers coming from dysfunctional families, from alcoholic or other abusive situations that result in their needing external validation like they need oxygen. I'd say you're underestimating the amount of overworking students (who become the lauded professors) who are doing what they are doing because their parents didn't do enough for them as kids. 


2. Second, a related problem is that some students are not reading enough of the literature.  All students should read at least several papers/week.  You do not have to read the entire paper, as sometimes just the abstract, intro, figures, and conclusions will provide you with sufficient information.  Nevertheless, please read.  Knowing what is going on, right now, in your field and other fields is crucial to your development as a scientist.  We would like to see more students engaged in defining their research projects and theses.  We would like to receive more telescope proposals from students and post-docs that do not include faculty members.  To do so, a detailed knowledge of the literature is a must.  

Third, we are pleased with how Science Coffee and Journal Club are going and thank the many students who help make both of those opportunities available to everyone.  We also recognize that we as a faculty need to do a better job at participating.  Yet we have received some student comments about the way in which faculty do participate.  Namely, that some faculty-student interactions have become too intense.  In these cases, it is not the faculty member’s intention to make the student uncomfortable.   The faculty member means to interact with the student as he or she would a peer.  That should be flattering to the student!  Faculty questions (at least in this department) do not arise from a desire to embarrass a student speaker, but from a real scientific interest in the answer.  In such cases, the student should do his or her best to respond and, frankly, to consider the experience good (and relatively gentle) training for any discussion at Caltech or at Tuesday Lunch at the Princetitute.

Ahhh, my home base. Excuse me, I need to go put on my Lucha Libre mask....
First, if you think that reading the literature is crucial to doing well in this field, then you'd better  act like it, and put it on the curriculum. Right there next to the other classes. If it is important to know how to read, you need to teach it. You need to give your own tricks and ways of reading. What questions do you approach a paper with, and don't leave out the sociological ones (Did someone I know write this to b(*&-slap someone else who left him/her off of a previous paper? What is the personal history behind this paper, that the reader knows, and how does that make him/her read it differently?). Don't pretend that a list of three bullets teaches someone how to read a text. Especially not one so culturally enmeshed. Same goes for answering a question, that may be asked because: someone understood the talk but wants to disagree but not in an overt manner, someone who is pissed off, someone who didn't understand the talk (ha, ha, like that is ever acceptable by the community!), someone who is trying to clarify something for the grad students in the audience, or someone who just doesn't want their department to be embarrassed by no one having asked a question after a talk.

Second, the framing of some faculty questions arise from individuals who do not know how or may not be capable of speaking with respect or have the awareness that they have power in that room and in that building. And when faculty spar with each other verbally, or with a postdoc, how often do they explain to students why this is acceptable but not for the student to do? What it takes to be given license to spar? If you, as a senior member of the community, have ever sat in a room where a faculty member was sarcastic, or inappropriately aggressive (read: any question that gets gossiped about after the event) towards a junior member, and not spoken up, not asked the faculty member to rephrase the question more neutrally, you're part of the problem. In this culture of advisor-as-scientific-parent and student-as-scientific-child, it is the equivalent of sitting around while a father or mother verbally oversteps their bounds with a child. Once you start excusing your colleagues (intended or innocent) jabs as "you just need to learn to toughen up", you're in abusive family territory. Abusive. Because kids don't have the power in the family. And you are protecting a colleague's feelings over that of a powerless individual's. You have a higher salary, a tenured job and the power to affect that student's career - it is not a room full of peers when there are faculty and students together, regardless of the ideal of intellectual academic discourse.

Third, in the "department as academic family" scenario, that last statement is like saying "you should be happy that we only make fun of you meanly in this family, in the other ones they use a belt and a broken bottle." 

3. Fourth, in their evaluations for the APC, some students alluded to research or advisor problems that other students were having and that “no one else knew about.”  If you have a problem of any kind, or know someone who does, please come and talk with me or another faculty member.  Encourage the other student to do so.  Use your mentoring/thesis committees with or without your advisor present.  It makes no sense for someone to be struggling and not seek help.  These problems can be solved, but only after they are uncovered.  

If there was a departmental map available of all the actual relationships (marriage, friendship, affairs, secret supporters) among the faculty, a student might feel more comfortable complaining about a problematic "faculty-parent" instead of fearing that any complaint will be subverted in favor of the inttra-faculty relationships. And to go complain to an obudsman in hopes of impartiality? Like that's not going to get you kicked out of the "family." Or heaven forbid you are thinking of leaving academic but not sure - stating such might get you already listed as someone not worthy enough to have known from an early age that this was a calling. Or hell forbid you are depressed. If I don't know I'm going to talk with a person who has dealt with depression themselves or from a close friend/family member, and understands its power, no way I'm going to speak up when I'm not in a position of power. Thank goodness for some brave faculty who will use their power to speak up.

4. Fifth, while we welcome the thoughtful, honest, and insightful comments that we generally receive from students in their department evaluations, a few students are somewhat rude.  In those cases, it is hard to draw sympathy for your problem.  In your career, providing constructive criticism to your department and colleagues is important and should be valued.  Being negative and disrespectful will generally not fix the problems and will make colleagues less likely to work with you.

Again, parent .vs. child - it is the parent's job to model behavior desired. The parent has the power. As does the faculty advisor. Just because some forums like a journal club are supposed to be about peers and equals, there is almost no variable in which graduate students have equal power or say - job stability, salary, expectations. And there are many instances of faculty who do not want either constructive or other kinds of criticism. If your faculty are not modelling it, don't expect the grad students to step up.

5. Tenth, your evaluations of our program identified some concerns, including a lack of computer support, inadequate representation of women and minorities among the faculty and colloquium speakers, and poor attendance by faculty at various department talks and functions.  We are working on all three.  Professor E has developed a plan for better student support of student computing.  The faculty hiring committee is developing a detailed plan to make sure that the best women and minority candidates are encouraged to apply and carefully considered for the job.  The colloquium organizers have been made aware of your concerns.  All faculty are being strongly encouraged to participate more in the intellectual atmosphere of the department.  Do not ease up on reminding us of these points.

Unfortunately, in this department, the last 9-10 hires were male. Over the period of many years. So really, how much more time did they need to find someone female or minority to hire? And did they really hire the "best" men in these 9-10 positions? And were all the current faculty carefully considered for their "bestness" and only that? Or did some of them get on the faculty for a range of reasons? Gender equity comes when you have as many "less-than-best" females as "less-than-best" males on your faculty. However you want to define "less-than-best" - be it legally, in terms of mentoring, in terms of teaching, in terms of research, in terms of anything...

6. And finally, mostly what I hope is that the writer of the letter doesn't get thrown under the bus for articulating the many arcane, and misguided ideas that I think many science faculty members have about education, management and mentoring. Science faculty are mostly only trained in research - not in anything else that is important to the job, at least not in a methodical way. There is no reason we should think they will be good at mentoring, gender and minority issues, teaching, managing a group, at any level better than beginner.

Your professorship is no more noble than any other job, so don't keep giving up parts of your life, your family life, your marriage, your health as if it were. If you were to die, or quit, the academic machine that keeps asking for pounds of flesh would pretty cold-heartedly replace you, quickly. They'd hold a memorial, or a moment of silence and then get busy forgetting any legacy or heart or time you put into this. Fidelity to the institution is some sort of noble idea, and yet the institution is rarely faithful to its faculty.

Your family and friends, however, would be devastated and feel the loss. Even if you stopped having time to tend to those relationships because you were in an office 80 hours a week.

In control

I'm a control lover. I don't know that I'd go as far as calling myself a control freak (although M might, at times), but I like to plan. Especially for trips. I like the feeling that if I just pack the right things, everything will go well. I am the person you want to have on your Eurail trip, or vacation in Costa Rica or Ghana. I'm the one who brings tiny mosquito nets, and Cipro (for, um, traveller's, um, food related illnesses), and Ibuprofen, and sunburn cream, and sea sickness pills, and extra ziploc baggies for stuff, and a lock for your huge ass backpack. And cards, and a small pair of binoculars, and a camera with a waterproof case for underwater photos, and extra batteries.

And, you get it.

With the arrival of baby A, and her who-knows-what-it-was sleeping problems almost 2 years ago, I turned these skills onto managing her environment. It didn't work, but it gave me something to obsess about, and make myself calmer.

She has now had 3 chest infections in the last few months, complete with horribly constricted airways that make her wheeze and breathe hard. And after bout number 3, I sit here at the computer, with baby Singulair in an unopened box. The pediatrician has suggested it, and said emphatically how it has no side-effects. And I chose it instead of an inhaler with spacer that she'd have to learn to take 5 deep breaths from. Last night, before opening the box, I went....yes, online.

I know. Dumb. But it is one of those basic-good-parenting things, where at least I want to see what side effects are written on the drug's website for this stuff she is supposed to take all winter long once a day. And even the pharmacist said only that it might make her a bit drowsy (so I was thinking, "Score!"). Let's just let the website speak for itself:

"SINGULAIR may cause serious side effects. Behavior and mood-related changes have been reported: agitation including aggressive behavior or hostility, bad or vivid dreams, depression, disorientation (confusion), feeling anxious, hallucinations (seeing or hearing things that are not really there), irritability, restlessness, sleepwalking, suicidal thoughts and actions (including suicide), tremor, and trouble sleeping. Tell your healthcare provider right away if you have, or your child has, any of these symptoms while taking SINGULAIR."

You have got to be kidding me! Aggression and hostility and sleepwalking?! I mean, ok, now I've also gone to the forums and heard from parents whose kids have night terrors from the stuff. But how am I supposed to know if they are from her medication or would have happened anyway? Depression? Ai, ai, ai.

The package sits, still unopened, on my desk. Between this keyboard and the screen. And I'm thinking that the inhaler isn't sounding so bad anymore. I think that for a kid who is already excitable, and who is going through the tantrum stage, while we are also trying to adjust, and already screams in the middle of the night, and who I've suspected might sleepwalk someday based on how she wakes from sleep,....this medication will have to be the only option for me to start her on it.

So this is one of those cases in which I can control. But if I couldn't, as I've realized will be the case with any future pregnancies and birth defects, or behavior disorders (let's just say that the NYTimes Motherlode blog has been going all out on posts about all sorts of scary things), those are the situations I start to get nervous. Maybe, if we decide to have another child, we should adopt. How horrible a thought is that, to adopt to avoid birth defects. What if we have a kid who says he/she wants to kill us, at age 5? There was a post on Motherlode about this, too. Granted, the follow-up from the mother calmed me down.

Even though my brain can imagine a kid with all the possible problems all at once, nature probably cannot, and it is only in my upper-middle-class existence that I even have the luxury of pretending that any of life is predictable. That serious illness won't strike, since we can afford medication when A's breathing gets hard or my depression sets in. That it is worth planning for 10 years from now since we can assume we will all be around. That life can't suddenly get turned upside down. I forget sometimes that it already has, two years ago, and that it sucked, it was hard, I hated being in the middle of all of it, but, that in the end, we all survived.

Time to get some predictable work done, in my predictable Thursday, with my predictably sleepy dog.

Pish time on the iPone

A likes my iPhone. Actually, she calls it my "ipone," on which her favorite toddler game right now is Fish School (which she calls "pish!"). We used it in Mallorca and then Milan in the car to help get over tired, cranky times. And on the trams or buses here, to help get over tired, cranky time. Or at a restaurant, to keep her at the table for more than 2 minutes when shes...you guessed it, tired, bored or cranky. That is correct, I use an iPhone as a babysitter for 5, or even 10, minutes!

But as tired and cranky time seems to be getting longer, and more enthusiastically cranky (ok, let's just say tantrum), I went back into child raising literature and found an idea that is working really nicely. In the book, the example was actually about an 8 year old girl and computer time, but it works with our little one, too. The concept that lack of structure is frustrating translates to A asking for "pish" almost anytime she realizes she is bored, and my having to decided on an instance-by-instance basis whether I say yes or no. If I say no, she protests. A lot. Loudly. And I was really sick of having to decide based on some unknown rules, or make some up, constantly. Anyway, the book suggests to schedule in an activity like this, and for us it has coincided very nicely with helping A get ready to leave the house in the mornings. We are trying to give her more structure to help ease tantrums, and now, 5 minutes before Mama or Papa are leaving to take her to school, she gets to play on the iPhone. She has to have her shoes and sweater on, or at least allow them to be put on, and be in her stroller. And after the first 2 days of toddler protest with the taking the iPhone away when the stroller is leaving the apartment with said parent, today she was fine with it. Now she knows there is a time for "pish" and we get a more cooperative little person, ready to leave for school.

All around win.

By the way, the app is called Fish School, from a company called DuckDuckMoose, and so far I love all their apps. Especially the music and sounds - I have yet to want to throw the phone across any large distance after hearing the same song 50 times. Well done, DuckDuckMoose.

Do they even make binkies in my size?

Two things have been going on at our house lately that probably shouldn't mix. We started trying (on my insistence) to wean our daughter of her pacifier, and she is having a "don't touch me, help me, comfort me, push my stroller, carry me, mom" month. The latter I've posted about before, and I'm still working through my resentment and hurt feelings some of the time.

I'm not so far gone that I can't see the benefits of having a daddy's girl. I get a break. I can go lay down with a magazine for 5 minutes because she could care less what I'm doing. But the becoming just a cook and cleaner is tough on the ego (good thing I've started work again) because I've been so focused on successfully navigating motherhood and bonding with her these last 18 months that it is a slap in the face to be physically pushed away by her tiny hands. "Ne, ne ne ne ne!" she shouts in Lithuanian, her one unconscious concession to my influence.

I feel pretty alone in figuring out how to deal with it, in that I don't feel like I have viable, mature models for how to weather this storm. How do I not take it personally? Should I stay in the room, or can I leave to pout a bit and cool off? What does it mean about me? Or is it just about me as a mother versus her father? Is it a phase? What have others gone through?

This is where Facebook has once again brought me comfort, from those who've gone before me and seen it pass as a phase. From R, posting on here, that's she's also felt hurt by it. And the parenting forums also brought some relief, through my tears yesterday (I'm still hoping it was a PMS day, how emotionally raw I felt by evening), assuring me that it is a phase, that it happens to many people, but most importantly for me, letting me know that a lot of people feel hurt by it. Knowing that my experience, as well as my reaction, is common, helps. That this is a tricky thing to navigate, especially for those of us who are still working through self-esteem issues.

And once again I'm convinced to try to fake not feeling hurt, in the hope that the practice will help me take it better, to concentrate more on myself as a person and not just a mom. Maybe it is finally time for me to take that 3 day trip by myself now. As usual, I can swing quite far in either direction, so at some point I even wondered if I should try to get pregnant again if this was a long phase, because then she wouldn't mind me not being as physically available. Yeah, that last one has been set aside, but it was a good exercise in trying to think around the hurt.

But it is important for me to acknowledge the hurt, because that was not something that was done often in my family. And you can't deal with something, or work through something that you don't admit exists.

There are some changes in our house, now. I've asked M to make sure he takes care of himself enough during the day to be able to be her one-and-only in the evenings and to have the energy for it. I have to find some set of things that A and I can do together, just the two of us. Things she does with her mama. After some serious screaming in the middle of the night, which did not result in a poopy diaper, I seem to have come back into vogue in A's world and we had a fun morning together. And given how much I could have used a huge pacifier this weekend, and a bunch of parenting forums that tell of kids growing out of binkies on their own time, I'm thinking that A should keep hers until she's ready to let go of them.

spilled milk and a dead man

The news this morning is that Osama Bin Laden is dead. And I'm finding all the "shit, yeah! Awesome! Celebrate!" postings on Facebook a bit uncomfortable. All the more enthusiastic, it seems, from people who are more Christian. It is strange to see so many people so gleeful about a death. Isn't the gleefulness about people's death what we thought made him so evil in the first place? Relief I could understand better, but I guess it has been a while since most people were anxious about him still being uncaught. I wonder what people think will happen now.

I didn't mean to leave such a hater-post up (about the runner) for so long as my most recent post. It is the first time I've felt I have to write something else so that it doesn't seem like I'm just angry for days. Because I sat on the couch, and ate a whole chocolate rabbit while watching the royal wedding on Friday midday. I thought the hats many women wore were cool. Ok, some were perhaps a bit much, but most of them made me want to have somewhere to wear a hat like that. And we had a good weekend, full of farmer's market strawberries, a totally messed up batch of compote, good (but forgot the baking soda AGAIN) scones, baby A's first sleepover at her babysitter's, and a bedroom shade that works for the first time in over a year.


Oh, and Baby A is now a strawberry bandit. We've been calling her the Elmex Bandit for a few months now, because this child loves tubes of this Swiss toothpaste, for carrying around the house. Smooth, plastic rubber, fun huge cap to put in mouth. And she'll happily take 3 at a time (one long ago empty, others still in use) and cruise her territory. But this weekend we went up to visit a friend who has a share in one of the great gardens on the hill above our apartment. And the teeny berries were starting to ripen. Our friend N's friend showed her how to pick a few and she was off - harvesting like a pro. Baby A is going to know where fruits and vegetables come from. I have finished most of my balcony planting - some cherry tomatoes and zucchini in the big box, along with a peony (because I love these flowers in a visceral way and they had one deep violet flower plant left this weekend for sale), some peas that might take to a cheap trellis, a bunch of herbs (two kinds of parsley, dill, rosemary, chives), and on the floor, within Baby A grazing reach, two kinds of strawberries, basil, arugula, and mint.

Not taking a photo is the whole point

I just finished reading "Cinderella Ate My Daughter", a book by Peggy Orenstein. Fast read, about the Disney princess culture and its effect on girls. Not the best book I've read, but she makes some interesting points. About how Disney tapped into the developmental stage where kids are worried that their sex (boy or girl) might be fluid, changeable, and try to assure they stay who they are by being as masculine or feminine as possible. For girls, enter the pink princess stage. Orenstein also talks about the Disney live princesses, like Miley Cyrus or Brittney Spears, who all seem to follow the innocent/virginal to skanky/centerfold route.

In the end, the author doesn't do much in the way of suggestions for boosting girls' self-esteem and helping them value themselves separate from their looks. She gives a few suggestions, like telling your daughter she's beautiful when she's covered in dirt and in her soccer uniform, and not talking about looks too much. And not obsessing about your own looks in front of her - although, I'd say even in private, learn to like who you see in the mirror, because kids pick up on everything. They do as we do, not as we say. If you don't feel worthy deep down inside, your kid is going to learn that - they are learning machines, these little humans.

Anyway, the bit from the book that is in my mind this morning is the part where the author talks about virtual identities and presence. And almost as a side note, she mentions how people (herself, she has noticed) have started to delay experiences of the real world, instead thinking how they (she) will blog, tweet or update their status about them. So on the foggy dog walk this morning, I left my phone in my pocket and tried my best to just see the trees, feel the soaked grasses against my fingers, and be there while I was physically there.

It was nice. I don't do that very often. With baby A, I've noticed that I tend to only relax and muse on her photos after she's asleep, and I'm not actively responsible for her well-being. I can look at her, notice things, dwell. But I also do that with situations. For me there is a part of the behavior that I think has to do with the fear of being overwhelmed by being in the moment itself. If I let it take me over, within seconds, I will start to fear its end. If I get too caught up in rapture, the next thought on my mind will be to mourn its impending loss. So it is a safety mechanism for me.

Sure, I'd love to be in the moment. But I'm terrified it will sweep me away.

The bounty of American magazines

I love Utne Reader. And WIRED magazine, and BITCH magazine (big surprise, huh?). And I intend to enjoy every minute of Black & White Photography magazine, American Scholar magazine, and Philosophy Now magazine. And whatever other things I scooped off the rack at the Border's in Tucson last week. It was glorious, to have that much choice. And to imagine myself taking one of these periodicals with me on a tram or to the dining room window seat.

Ahhhh, a little slice of familiar. But also new.

So on my way into town yesterday I has Utne reader with me. I only read a few articles, hoping to save it for a few more trips. And one of them was about a study on increased depression and low-self esteem in kids who see more advertising. You see what you don't have, what appears to make all those glossy happy people so happy, and want it. You find yourself lacking.

And as I sit here checking out how my blonde highlights spray is working, wondering if I should have bought the red flip flops at Target, too, I think "how dumb." It isn't just kids - it is all of us. Okay, it is me. And I didn't really think how dumb.



I looked at all my catalogs. Did you even realized J. Peterman still existed?! I haven't gotten a catalog from them in over 15 years! And they are the worst. Not even photos in that catalog, but watercolor drawings, and stories about each piece. It will help you marry Prince William's brother, it will make you like that Out of Africa Movie, it will make you....a Mistress of Milan.

So I've decided that since I'd rather not need the anti-depressants for more than the essential life conditions, it is out with the catalogs, unsubscribe from all the Gap and Old Navy email lists, and I'm going on a shopping fast. Because according to CB2, even my balcony is hopelessly insufficient for the fun I'd like to have this summer. Think of it as a late lent, and I still get to eat chocolate whenever and meat on Fridays.

I've marked 40 days on my iPhone calendar, and no purchases for home or body decoration in that time. Just to take a break from all that encouragement to want to be more, better, different. I will stop shopping or even browsing.

Right after my trip to IKEA this afternoon. Hey, even dieters "start tomorrow."

Crying it out

When we first got the Pupper from the Human Society, we signed her (and, more importantly, us) for an 8 week training class. The head trainer was amazing, equally patient with dogs and their humans. The other trainers helping him liked dogs, but often got short with us humans. And really, the class was meant to train the humans to carry out commanding correctly. This class was a no yelling, no punishment class. All positive reinforcement. The basic principle was very simple and applied to every command:

1. Say (or hand motion) the command;

2. If the dog does nothing, you do nothing;

3. If the dog does what you wanted (perhaps coming by a gentle pull of the leash toward you those first few times), say "Yes!" all excited and happy as soon as the command has been executed and give a cookie.

A few years later, at a dog park in Tucson, the I saw the power of positive reinforcement used for a horrible purpose. A "trainer" was working with a man and his dog just outside the fence of the dog park, having the man yank the dog's choke chain harder and harder each time the dog misunderstood a command to heel while walking. Harder, harder, until I was close to an anxiety attack for the poor animal and the beautiful German Shepherd was cowering and whimpering. It was grotesque. And the "trainer" seemed to be having fun, calling out "yank! yes! yes! harder! good! good job!"

It was the first time I'd had the nerve to say something to someone else about their behavior and I managed some wavering "if you don't want to hurt your dog while training, the Human Society has great classes. This isn't training, this is abuse" the former directed at owner, the latter at "trainer." Of course the "trainer" got pretty upset with me, and I don't know if I got through to the owner. I was shaking, heart pounding.

Only later did I realize the irony of the situation - the dog had learned nothing through punishment and pain. The real results came from the positive reinforcement. The trainer was getting the owner to be more and more violent with his dog by applying the same principles our dog class teacher had - praise and encouragement. You can bet that owner would have walked away had the "trainer" said something like "you idiot, can't you even hold your dog right?" I wish I had realized that at the time.

Just as before, the dark side of positive reinforcement hit me this morning as I was reading a moms' forum about using the Cry It Out method, applied to kids who just kept crying and getting sick with despair. I've mentioned before the one incident where Baby A smacked her mouth on the crib and started bleeding which convinced me that Cry It Out just wasn't going to work for us - it went past my limit. I'd rather have a kid that wakes up more often than a bloody kid. And just like with that dog, I don't think Cry It Out works on all kids, and that it is harmful to keep using it no-matter-what. That can just land certain parents and kids in a traumatic place.

But these books, be they about Crying It Out or other parenting techniques that encourage us parents to do things that make our kids cry, bleed, throw up, get so upset...they are doing the same damn thing. Using positive reinforcement on us the readers, the parents ("Keep at it! Nothing comes easily! It's okay for kids to cry! You're a better parent for doing this!") to get us to do things to our kids that may not be where we wanted to be. That put our relationship with our kids in conflict. That encourage us to stop listening to them, in lieu of listening to some author who does not live in our house with our child.

I know, sometimes we have to say "No" and kids will cry. A lot. But I'm realizing that I want to be a whole lot more skeptical about books and blogs and "experts" who prey on my desire to be a good parent to encourage me to do things that make me uncomfortable.

That dude outside

Am I normal? Is what I do, want, think, believe normal? Some of us spend time comparing ourselves to others to see if we are “normal” in whatever way concerns us. In work, in child-rearing, in dressing, in talking, you name it. We think that others know what normal is, or just are normal and we might not be. But here is the thing that really surprised me about normal when I read about it for my dissertation – it is constructed by everyone around us, including us. We have such a hard time finding “normal” because it is constantly being defined and redefined around us and by us.

A friend of mine was visiting us last week and recalled when I’d first met her (we were both still pregnant) and told her I was looking for a counselor locally who could deal with postpartum depression because I thought I was at higher risk for it. She said something about the exchange like “you just acted so matter-of-fact about it and I thought, wow, she’s this totally normal woman and just brought up counseling like it was nothing strange. I can do that, too.” It reminded me of something I think is related to academic culture – a person can redefine normal by acting as if what they are doing is normal.

The few talks I’ve given about my research, I’ve spent the talk sitting down in front of the audience. I chose to do this, first, because it is not what “normally” happens at an academic talk. It is one of those little rules that everyone learns by watching and no one ever has to be told by their advisor “you stand up when you give a science talk.” It happens at journal clubs, conferences and class presentations. Humans are good at picking up on this type of, everyone-else-is-doing-it, norms. When someone breaks this rule, people use humor, ridicule, or gossip to comment on it to others and reinforce that it was a break from what is supposed to happen. “What was X thinking, sitting down during journal club? How rude/strange/flippant/naïve.”

But I think there is a power to flipping the situation around, that only a few people ever use, but can change how the action is perceived. If the person engaged in the “deviant” behavior acts as if it is normal, instead of apologizing or being embarrassed, she can start to shake up the process. Suddenly, if X comes out journal club and says to the group “I sit because I concentrate better that way and I think it makes my journal club presentations better – isn’t that the goal?” maybe the group starts to rethink the point of the standing up “rule.” The real power to redefine (or challenge) the concept of sitting as normal, though, happens if X makes that statement in a tone of voice that is completely unapologetic, maybe even slightly mystified, the way you might defend a normal behavior to someone who doesn’t understand your culture. “Um, of course I picked up that piece of litter, that’s what we DO here.” Duh. If you can hold that line, other people start to waiver a bit.

So I’m saying there is a bit of a game of “who blinks first” going on. If you can hold your line, and act as if what you’ve just done is normal (whether or not you believe it), others start to think about what you’ve done normal. Or at least more normal than before, if you’ve broken some norm of behavior within your group. Whether you are a pregnant woman telling a new acquaintance that you are looking for a therapist and that you’ve been depressed in the past, or a science instructor who announces to the class that you keep having problems working with log-normal plots, if you can say it matter-of-factly and act as if it is okay, it starts to become ok. We are all involved in defining, and redefining normal, in the groups we are part of. This is a powerful role that can help us change all sorts of things around us.

Just to be clear, I’m not advocating doing this with sexually harassing your students, or spitting into someone else’s dinner plate. And there is an extreme example in front of me as I write this. A guy who has been talking to himself – and not apologetically, or embarrassed when someone looks at him – and after speaking with the café manager, seems to be collecting the white pebbles out of the mostly grey gravel in out in front. This guy is not going by many norms shared by those around him, for whatever reason. And at some point, he may get shooed away, or arrested, if his non-normal behavior keeps going. There is a point at which you can act as normal as you want about your behavior but you’re going to get in trouble for it.

Baby jeans

I ordered some baby clothes for the coming fall and winter for Baby A from the Gap and Old Navy. For some reason, of all the places they ship internationally, only Switzerland and Turkey are on the Europe list. I won't ask why, I'll just count myself lucky.

I just wanted some warmer pants and tops and some long leg pajamas. I'm not a bit fan of baby jeans. Although there was a really cute denim overalls. If they are soft, fine. But no baby needs to have its movement restricted by hard fabrics. (Ok, I may need to rethink my philosophy here, because the idea of slowing this kid down is tempting...)

There I was, on the baby girl "pants" page - because god forbid we let babies all dress without reference to their sex - and there were as many jeans for babies as I remember there being for women in the store! Really? Sure, light wash and dark wash, whatever. But flare vs. skinny vs. boot cut? Really? To go with the baby stilettos they sell? C'mon, like your kid doesn't have enough expectations from you to live up to already.

It makes the Saturday Night Live "baby thong" commercial not so funny anymore. It was funny when it was outrageous. But, what is the point of baby skinny jeans if you've got that big diaper bulge? Best get some thongs to go with it.

Yeah, girl/boy differences are all biological and we have nothing to do with teaching them how to act. It makes me want to keep Baby A in yellows and greens and not tell people on the tram if she is a girl or boy.