The alumni newsletter just came in! Great.

I just finished filling out an online survey for a Prestigious Graduate School Fellowship I once received, back when I was in Astronomy (about 1500 years ago). It dropped me right smack down in the middle of all the mixed (okay, mostly bad, actually) emotions I had every time I got my yearly "What kind of cancer have you cured this year?" call from the head of a different Pretigious Graduate School Fellowship program. Let's say that I started off my university life as a pretty prestigious kind of student. I studies physics and math and astronomy and I did really well in homeworks and exams. I did research projects and went to conferences and even taught some lectures as an undergrad. I got into all the grad schools I applied for, and I didn't set the bar low. 

And at the end of 9 years in astronomy grad school, I quit. Dejected, depressed, no publications to my name, very little belief in myself. Single. Childless. (Although, I was going to be married soon, which was one of the very few points of light in my days back then). But every year since I'd spent a year at Cambridge, I'd get a call to see what glorious accomplishments I'd racked up. My fellow Fellows had gotten early tenure and professorships, some at Harvard or Princeton. They had research groups and I had a cat with kidney failure that I treated with subcutaneous fluids each day, I small house my mom had been smart enough to encourage me to buy in super-cheap Tucson, and a surprising hidden talent as a swing dance teacher.  These yearly calls made me feel so low, so unaccomplished. 

And let's face it, the alumni updates from, well pretty much anywhere I had attended, were depressing. So, in honor of not having started crying filling out this online survey just now while marking "extremely poor" on a number of aspect of my grad experience, I've decided to put up my own alumni update. 

Or rather, two of them. Because, in the intervening years I've learned that everyone has their pain and failures, even the early tenure at Harvard folks, and that some are just better at masking it, or have it in more private aspects of their life.

Almuni update that makes me feel good about myself

 

"A" received both an NSF Graduate Fellowship and a Churchill Scholarship after graduating with a 4.0 GPA in Astronomy and Physics. She went on to get master's degrees in astronomy from both Cambridge University and the University of Arizona. While completing a PhD in science education, she was asked to talk about her research on the culture of communication in academia at locations as varied as IBM and Harvard, and internationally. She and her husband, daughter and beloved dog currently live in Zurich, Switzerland, where she works part time in academia and concentrates the rest of her time on raising her daughter in Lithuanian (her parent's first language), English and Swiss German. They have been enjoying traveling across Europe especially this summer - to Rhodes, Amsterdam, Torino, Istanbul and Stockholm. Also, she has recently decided just to love her 6 foot tall frame as it is and give up on worrying about fashion trends, instead following her creative instincts.

But really, wouldn't we all prefer the kind of alumni update that made the rest of us feel better about ourselves?

Alumni update that should make you feel better about yourself.

"A" did really well in college, on paper,  and managed to come away with a fairly bad grasp of physics. She rode the good GPA wave to a few fellowships, but wound up not publishing anything she felt she had made an intellectual contribution to in her 9 years as an astronomy graduate student. And as for the papers she made no intellectual contribution to, there was one. She spent many days, after her coursework was done, not getting anywhere in her research, and at least half of those not having the heart to even try. She developed a great eye for vintage clothing and jewelry that she managed to sell for a spell on eBay. She felt she slipped farther behind her peers, until she realized she was clinically depressed and quit her program. After picking a research topic in education that she had no topic-specific mentors for,  she defended her dissertation and left Tucson. Her husband got a job in Switzerland where part of the stipulation was that she get a part time, temporary job. The birth of her daughter ended in an unplanned C-section and her daughter woke up 12 times a night for 6 months. "A" was in a hopsital for a month, returned to antidepressants, and used daycare and a babysitter to help her survive the first 1.5 years of her daughter's life, even though she wasn't back to  work. She's been through a lot of counseling in the last 8 years. Recently, she had a miscarriage, so to try to make the best of not being pregnant or getting pregnant again for a while, she convinced her family to go on too many trips across Europe this summer. In between trips, she was often in bed and unable to even use a laptop, due to a ruptured disc in her lower back. And somehow strangely connected to this disc, she can no longer wear jeans or any other slim fitting pants.

Giving the pacifier back

My daughter loves her "nuggi" (the Swiss German name for a pacifier).

I don't love it. Sometimes I'm just embarrassed by it - that some other kids her age (and seemingly every last child in Istanbul) gave theirs up months ago. Granted, I feel embarrassed when I'm in that "my parenting is what makes her who she is" state of mind. Sometimes I just know we're getting close to 3 years old and both the pediatrician and dentist say that is the time to be done with it.

We've gone through so many cycles of my pushing to limit it. She doesn't use it anymore, even for naps, at daycare. And now that constitutes much of the work week. At some point when she was around 20 months old, after a long trip, we found ourselves in double-binky territory for sleeping, and I was beside myself with anguish about it. First world problems, indeed. Except that, if she awoke in the middle of the night, and couldn't find both pacifiers, I or M was called in, loudly, to help.

I imagined that by this time, close to 3 years old, she's be over them for naps. For a while, she was falling asleep in her stroller without them. But not for long.

Now the challenges of convincing her to go sit on the potty in the morning, and getting her cooperation to get dressed (generally and issue of mine, but vital when my back is acting up), have gotten greater. They are accompanied by a lot of whining (I'm not saying whose is louder), and me finding myself trying more time-outs for not putting on socks when I've asked. That isn't what I need time-outs for. And in general, I can always use some practice in negotiating and compromise.

So the nuggi is back in our life, no longer removed once she is out of bed (although for a month or two that helped her stay in bed a bit longer and me get that last 5 minutes of sleep I needed to not be a zombie). It stays with her as long as she is making progress on the taking off of the pajama, the diaper, the sitting on the potty, the getting dressed. And in the evening it calls her name, encouraging her to sit still a bit more while I finish brushing her teeth.

I get it, it is bad for her dental something or other. Looking at that last sentence, perhaps I don't get it. It is bad for something. But so is having a morning full of tears and cajoling and general unhappiness.

The pacifier has taken some ground back. For now. And if a second binky tries any campaigning, forget about it. No deal. But one nuggi, I've conceded that ground.

Art week

Sometime during my cousin's visit with us, she mentioned wanting to get back to more art in her life, and we talked about how we wished we did more creative things as kids. And I remembered that A loves painting at daycare, and that I hadn't yet broken out the watercolors I bought her a few months ago. So there we were, the whole family, sitting at the dining room table, painting.

From the fingerprints series. My cousin L, the interior designer, has always said that A has a great sense of color. I agree. Just wait, it gets better.

L and I agree, we're not so enamored of water color painting. It's hard. Not to overlap colors, to get the right thickness or watery-ness of paint, is not easy. And, although I can pencil-sketch the heck out of a portrait, I'm no color expert. Color is my weakness. Luckily, my child is a natural, and has been putting together great color mixes since she started mixing Lego Duplo blocks into towers.

I'm a better copier than "out of thin air" artist, so I started pulling out some art books from our shelves. M found a book of O'Keefe watercolors and we looked at it a few evenings ago with A on the balcony. We talked about the colors with her, and talked about what different paintings could be of.

At that night's painting session (which M was in on, too - we are officially water coloring fools over here in Switzerland, at our house), I mixed a bit of purple up, and check out what my kid produced, yet again, with no input from me. Suddenly, she's filling up the paper, horizontally.

That's my kid's painting. You can tell because it has an interesting combination of colors. If I was going to push this whole point, I'd call this her landscapes period. If I was going to obnoxious about it, I'd call it her "young O'Keefe" stage. 

Art week has been a lot of fun. I hope we do it again soon.

Moths to a streetlight

What a tiring thing, it seems, to be constantly flying towards the light, at 1am, bouncing off it, and then coming back for more. How long do those 5 months per lamp do that for? Is it just an hour per month and then they've gotten out of their system and go snuggle into moth-nests somewhere? A nice, cool leafy plant or tree, maybe.

Or do the same moths keep going, around and around and around the whole night until they just die of exhaustion?

Let's hope it is the former and they're all just getting their daytime frustrations out at the streetlamp elliptical machine before going off to sleep.

A change in the weather

Well, at least I hope it is coming. It has been a cold, cloudy, wet summer here in Zurich, and this coming week is supposed to finally be getting above 70 F. And after all that low-sugar drama last week (which I am still trying to keep up a bit, while M joins in for his own reasons), I realized last night while I was doing dishes that...I was doing dishes. While M gave A her bath. I wasn't on the bed, just trying to recover for 10 minutes enough energy to put her to bed without all my body screaming to go to sleep. That I had enough energy and was just feeling, well, normal.

And again today. I'm not exhausted by the time we try to put her down for a nap, and although I do sleep for an hour, I haven't been feeling like it is all I can do to make it through the day. How long has it been since I've felt this way? Not even noticing the doing of a load of laundry because my back feels ok and I'm not so tired. Or that I decide to get some dishes done because there is some energy left just after I've had A for a while.

It feels good to feel this normal. Life has not been this normal for a while. My body definitely hasn't. And I haven't given myself a break for that. Until now, when I've realized that I just wasn't up to many daily tasks and I was doing my best to do what I could. I don't know if it somewhat due to the sugar I've stopped eating so much of, but it is also because my back is doing better. I'm still trying to not look at my iPhone constantly when I'm on a bus or tram, and to move around more. And my reproductive system seems to finally be calming down a bit from the miscarriage. I didn't realize how long that could take, either.

 I'm the last one up tonight, as the only member of the family to have had a nap (well, ok, the dog always takes the nap and the early bedtime), and I feel awake. I've started a new book (The Foremost Good Fortune) about a woman who moves with her husband and two small kids to China for a year. And has great doubts about it all, and talks very early on in the book about how she has a place she goes to in her head when she gets overwhelmed by her extremely active 4 and 6 year old boys. So she doesn't yell as much. And the world feels like a smaller place to me again as I hear from someone else telling me her struggles with motherhood.

A is continuing to talk more and more, and as she is really getting good at this potty training thing, she has decided to name her poops according to size. There was a Mama, Papa, Baby and puppy poop tonight. And then after dinner she decided we should all go into the living room and dance to the NPR music broadcast by wiggling, spinning, and shaking our heads yelling "No!" as loud as possible.

It is enchanting to see her own ideas and personality coming out. Her imagination, if you let her have it and just go along with it, and her ideas. A few weeks ago, during some meal, I told her to close her eyes to really taste something we were eating. Probably after a trip to a farmer's market, or in Amsterdam. And she took to it. And completely got on board with the idea. She tell us now sometimes to close our eyes. We all sit there, actually tasting cherry tomatoes as sweet as cherries, or a great cucumber or plum.

Oh! Plum season is back and once again I am in love. I've never liked the plums we got in the US. The purple, sour ones. But here, they are magnificent, and the purple ones are only one of 10 varieties you see for a few months each summer.

It is getting cold on the balcony, and dark. Time to think about going to bed. After all, the old lady who seems to be accompanying her cats (or someone else's cats) on a walk down the street is headed to the little plot of grass at the end of the block where the old man who used to let his dog poop on the sidewalk will be waiting for their evening canoodle (as M puts it), is on her way to the rendesvous. Closing time.

The beast within

Turns out that turning on the air conditioner (yet another concession to increasing age and decreasing ability to sleep off a rough night well into the morning) was the way to sleep in Istanbul. It continued to be a gorgeous city, although never that well suited to travel with a toddler in the near 90 F sunny days. Not enough playgrounds nearby. And I think M was more than a bit worried in a big, new city, and wound up trying to constantly establish a 6 ft circumference safety circle around A. Good luck with that in a city where even the mosque guards can be found cooing to a baby, giving him their walkie talkies to chew and slam on the carpets, and later young women take the same baby for a walk always within sight of his parents. The people were so lovely and kind, and loooooooove children. Their own, yours, that one over there, all of them. There was not much personal space for A to inhabit when everyone wanted to pinch her cheeks. She declared in the middle of the trip "I no like Esstanbul," which I'm sure was not referring to all the gelato she ate, the birds she chased or the food she happily gobbled up. M and A and Aunt P had a tour guide show them around for a few days while I was at the conference.

I finally hit my stride at said academic gathering. My poster was moderately attended, I chatted with a handful of attendees, at coffee breaks and lunches, I hung out with the Brazilians. It was okay. I had time to think about my own research and where to take it from here, and went a few steps forward during the meeting, listening to the various English-as-a-second-language speakers' presentations. Know what? In a meeting like that, where even the native English speakers are working hard to keep up with the galloping change in accents that roam the span of each session, more text on slides is a good thing. As is reading directly from a slide. I'm a convert of the extreme context specificity of the "little text; no direct reading" rule.

Once I got home, work is again slow, and so I feel the same. And in an ill-advised google search of Candida Diet (something I might at some point need to consider, due to a combination of the d&c after the miscarriage and probably the cortisone shots), I am once again reminded of why "we don't do google searches on medical problems", children. Ugh. Look it up - you can eat beef, eggs, macadamia nuts, and peppermint tea. Oh, and eventually work your way up to yogurt. It is depressing, but not as creepy as all the folks discussing it on the forums (children, if you didn't obey, and actually did the google search, for the love of Pete at least don't read the forums...). They are busy writing things about the Candida Die-Off in which the candida is described as being angry at you, who are not offering sugar on its altar of gut and other parts destruction and attacks you. And you feel like crap.

So guess who tried a mini-version of no caffeine (coffee beans and tea leaves are moldy, apparently), sugar or carbs today? Someone with a death wish who really should have known better, but thankfully had daycare for both child and dog at midday. And then drank black tea finally. And then had a pizza and ibuprofen for dinner in hopes that the sudden flu symptoms (huge headache, aches, nausea, and I kid you not, even leg pain from my back) would go away. They did. I'm chalking it up to either caffeine/sugar withdrawl, or the ability of ibuprofen to handle flu symptoms. And pretending I didn't read anything about angry microbes.

In either case, I will most likely be offering white bread and jam and coffee to "the beast" tomorrow for breakfast. M replied to my texts about how horrible this felt by telling me to "feed my Trill." Nerd.

A ridiculously romantic city

There is this shamefully full moon hanging over this ancient city of Istanbul, where it feels like the last 1000 years of history got put through a blender and dropped onto the streets. I've chosen well this time, and not cheaply, and we have a balcony view of the Bosphorus, the Blue Mosque, and the Hagia Sophian from up on our crowded ancient hill across the water. The seagulls have a different accent here, and the cas are everywhere but quiet. The women are fully covered in black robes and scarves, or stuffed into knockoff designer clothing that is skin tight and teetering on platform stilettos, or something in between and not either of those. The male waiters at restaurants coo at A, and smile and pat her belly after she's happily eaten most of what we've randomly chosenfromthe buffet. Fathers and 12 year old brothers hold newborns in the passport control line at the airport. We live right next to a hammam that is the landmark taxis know best around our neighborhood of modern stores and ancient homes with secondhand clothing shops run out of a spiral staircase. People are warm, friendly, which makes up for the fact that they don't understand as much English as I've gotten spoiled on in Zurich. I know I'm being misunderstood and vice versa, but it doesn't make me feel disconnected like it might in a cold place. The good will of people carries me pretty far. I'm up at 3am, taking a break from a bed full of husband and warm, snuggle-my-head-in-your-neck toddler. I can't sleep well here. I didn't sleep well in Amsterdam, either. It is taking an awfully long time to realize I can't travel like I used to as a single woman. Or single teenager. I'm at a conference, but it is hard to be able to fully participate, even at my half-conference level, when I have others with me. I don't know how to do this. Also I look up some more at our ridiculously romantic view, and listen to the crazy talking seagulls, and hope this gets me tired enough to sleep.