The Myth of the Selfish Woman

I've been thinking a lot lately about the paradoxical feelings of motherhood, like selfish vs. sacrificing, and love for others vs. loss of self.  We are all supposed to have stable, monolithic feelings about mothering, and if we dare veer from that one acceptable feeling-- unconditional, self-sacrificing love-- then the world seems to fall apart.

Forget adultery. In this age, it seems the worst thing a woman can do is be Selfish, branded with the scarlet letter S in a world that relies on women seeing their only value in terms of the love they give others. Indeed, the root of "martyr" is of course, mother.

So many women I know feel ashamed to share that they feel anything negative about mothering, as if those negative feelings would somehow counteract or negate the positive they also feel. They are to feel complete and fulfilled by manifesting their destiny as mothers, and when they express doubt or resistance to this notion of motherhood, they're damned.

Can't we feel opposing things equally and simultaneously? Doubt and certainty? Fear and adoration? Anguish and intimacy?  Can we not desire intimacy with our own selves as much as we desire intimacy with those around us?  Why is it so abhorrent to think of mothers as as much internal as they are external in their attentions?

The problem with this approach to mothers is that it actually hurts all women, not to mention the kids and the partners and everybody else around them.  This expectation that women should feel ultimate fulfillment and love by mothering is destructive for mothers and non-mothers alike.  It creates a situation where women who choose to mother are shocked to find they miss themselves and struggle for years to figure out how to find themselves again--all in isolation because of the shame they feel for daring to have any other feelings besides love. It makes women who do not mother-- for whatever reasons, intentional or not-- subject to suspicion.  Rebecca Solnit writes about this in her book, The Mother of All Questions (which of course is, "why did you choose not to have kids?"), for example.  It marks women who want but can't have, or who lost, children as walking embodiments of Tragedy.

The lack of open discussion about the complexity of women's feelings about themselves and about their desires or lack thereof to procreate, and stigmatizing all feelings non-loving around motherhood,  eats away at us.

I see so many of my mother friends suffer from this. Many of our partners add to the shame. And it's easy to see why. The notion that a mother would have complex feelings about motherhood is quite a threat. If mothering isn't totally fulfilling to my partner, will she leave us? Have an affair? Damage the children for life? I have yet to meet a mother who feels her partner can allow the space for negative feelings about mothering. That pressure, too, especially from one's most intimate partner and supporter, amplifies the sense of isolation and shame tenfold.

I feel both fully fulfilled in some profound existential way by the experience of having and raising kids. And I am also feel profoundly claustrophobic because of the inescapability of the daily demands on me, and anxious about the alternative paths I'd also like to be exploring.

It's truly a practice in surrender, and even if there is something appealing about this assault on my desiring ego in a kind of Buddhist way, I don't like it.  I feel both daily explosions of love for my kids and family life, and also daily pangs of resentment about the obligations they put on me. I feel both intense desire to spend more time with my kids and also an intense desire to do a million other things--alone-- that I feel I was put on the planet to do.

It's no surprise to me at all, given the current arrangement of American family life, where there is no village to help me raise my kids, that many women would choose not to have children.  Structurally, it's hard to imagine mothering and also pursuing any other thing fully, except perhaps in sequence (phase two of life = raising kids, phase three = becoming a monk, running for president, starting your own commune, what have you).

These "other loves" as Solnit writes about them, are not compatible with having children.  Her book is all about either/or: women who don't have children devote their loves elsewhere (which is awesome), while women who have children devote their love to their children.  So much for "having it all," right?  I certainly think of myself as devoting myself in many directions, but have been called on multiple occasions,  "selfish", implicitly or explicitly, for doing so.

The ways that married and parenting life curtails self-actualization are a constant source of angst for me.  And yes, perhaps some really brilliant women can self-actualize while mothering.  Every moment with my kids is heavy, full of life, vitality, and profound sense of immediacy and intention.  I also love that, even as I want to focus that way on other things too.  These bonds are both oppressive and fulfilling. Isn't this the paradox of relation?

Perhaps when we accept all the feelings, normalize all the feelings so mothers and non-mothers alike feel no shame or isolation in their myriad devotions, then maybe mothers can find the sacred in the daily grind of life with kids, and see their pursuit of fulfillment as tied to that of non-mothers.

There are so many people and places to devote one's self to, it needn't always be one's children. We can make kin in so many ways, as feminist writer Donna Haraway would have it. We should also be able to retract into our own selves, turn that love inward, and replenish our reserves on occasion, without thinking we're being selfish by doing so.

When we start to see that all of our pursuits are admirable, not selfish, we know we're getting close. Because it's so easy as a woman to internalize the message that our purpose is to please others-- this message is everywhere.  And I don't want my daughters to receive this message, not the least of all from the life I model for them as their mother and as a woman with many other loves. Any woman who can transcend that message deserves a medal, not the scarlet letter S.

Friends Don't Let Friends Unpause: Curing Your Email Addiction

Oh Boomerang.... I do love you! It's an app. Get it.

You fling those emails away from me, like a shield deflecting arrows, poisonous tranquilizing darts.

You take over my email interface with a big blue "unpause" button, daring me to unplug the dam. You are a dike holding back the flood threatening to inundate my life with non-urgent, vapid, moist emergencies.

I sit at my computer, trained by the incoming emails, to wait more. Wait for another fire to put out, another flame to quell. It's become a sick habit, a twisted pleasure.  I'm on it, I'm busy, I'm responsive.  What for?  And at the cost of what?

Now, when the dam unleashes its fury at 6am, 1pm, and 3pm, I see a small litany of unimportant requests. I deal with them in 5 minutes. I don't waste time waiting for them. I don't intrude upon my family, my fuel, my loves, waiting... waiting... waiting... for all the requests that might make me feel important.



Research shows how much energy it takes to shift attention between one's "deep work" and shallow work.  Research shows how damaging email is to the psyche, to our sense of being overwhelmed by external pressures.  I have succumbed to those pressures, and have seriously wondered how I could possibly survive in my job without my addiction to email.  I respond to emails when I get up at night to pee, I respond to emails in the middle of other meetings, and I respond to emails while my children are trying to get my attention. My stupid smart phone makes this impulse to responsiveness all the more seductive.

Small fires are so fast to put out. Just give me a second, I have to just write this one quick thing.

____________

Here's the genius of Boomerang, for someone like me.  I'm not required to exert any kind of will power.  Turning off my phone's email ability hasn't worked.  Scheduling email times hasn't worked. Telling others that I don't check email except at certain times most definitely doesn't work.  Self-restraint DOES NOT WORK.  The quick-hit of email responsiveness is too addictive. You know what I mean, right?  If I'm not doing anything else, at least I'm performing a virtual persona of productivity.

This is just not acceptable anymore, for reasons I won't go into now.

______________

Suffice to say, Boomerang is your solution if you suffer from something similar.   Every time I have that impulse to check email on my phone: too bad! Every time I want to stop grading papers so I can check email (it's so much more interesting, no?), too bad! Every time I want to avoid my children's requests to see if more urgent requests are transmitting online, too bad!  Every time I want to avoid taking out the trash, too bad! Every time I want to pretend I'm so important in front of somebody who intimidates me, too bad!

I just simply must do something else with myself than open up my fucking phone.  It's brilliant.

Boomerang is also so genius because of the language it uses on the button it highjacks your email interface with-- "Pause"/"Unpause."  When you're in a "Pause" timeframe, Boomerang takes over your email and lets you know!  You can override the pause, and unplug the dam.  If you make the fateful decision to click on "Unpause", then God save your soul.  A little time clock thing will start, and, like a bomb going off, you'll start to see your inbox fill up.  Boomerang makes it hard to open the floodgates, discouraging you to make that decision whimsically.  The psychology of this is perfect for me.  I can't easily unpause on my phone; I have to be on my computer to do so.  The dam is breachable, but it's not easy.  Your interface is always reminding you to "Pause" again.

Let's pause on this idea of pause.  I have read several books on the value of the sabbath, the pause built into our rituals.  I have read at length about how our current work ethos punishes pausers.  Extract labor, extract labor, extract labor-- to think of this in Karl Marx's terms.  The interstitial moments, when nothing is happening, where nothing is taking place, have no value in contemporary life.  My loved ones send me articles cut out about how we need a pause from technology. I find beautiful articles in Buddhism magazines about the detriments of technological distraction.  I "get" why my email addiction is a problem.  But I haven't been able to translate that knowledge into action because, frankly, I'm weak when it comes to discipline and will power. Don't even ask about how much wine I drink, or the egregiousness of excuses I can muster to justify getting an iced mocha on any given day.

For a weak soul like me, Boomerang is some kind of savior.  I'm sure I sound like a proselytizing fiend, and I'm not getting paid to write this.  I genuinely want to share my story with  you, dear reader, of an addiction solved and a soul saved from the torturous drip, drip, drip of the email inbox.

What a genius name!  Can't touch me!



Update: despite no mention in the downloading process (I'm also not very detailed in my reading of fine print. See above, reasons why I need more time afforded by getting off email: because I'm BUSY!), it turns out this app costs money at some point.

I'm currently exploring its beauty, and wondering whether I can manufacture the kind of will power required to do what Boomerang does for me.  I'm also wondering why Google hasn't already created this functionality.... Anyway, sorry if I misled anybody, and get ready for that beautiful blue "Unpause" button to just go away.

I think I'll pay, as my friend Janelle says, because it's like you're getting your money's worth in email vacation!

"Are You Tired? You Look Tired!"; Or, "Why Aren't You Acting Like My Mom?"

If you read any of my posts, you know that I am thinking a lot about how to balance my love of teaching and the slippery slope that love falls into when I lose myself in their demands.  I'm sensitive to their feedback, worry about each of them, and do, in many ways, feel like their mom. And, as I noted in my last "rant" post, I do this willingly, and the payback is that teaching truly fuels me.

However, this past year's wealth of disasters--natural, political, and otherwise--has worn me (and many of you, and many of my students) very thin.  We're all keeping our heads just above (sometimes below) water, just treading, trying to anticipate when we'll have to take a deep breath to survive the next wave.  I can't help but feel obliged to help all my students do the same, and that sense of obligation is what's really going to drown me.

So, I've started taking some self-protection measures.  Dear reader, do not be mistaken that these are signs that I don't continue to absolutely adore my students and teaching.  I just want to be sure I can keep doing this for the long haul.  Ok, here it goes.  Some confessions:

1. Make it a goal to get worse student evaluations.  Did I just hear you gasp?  It's not that I could actually handle it if they were worse.  It would be like a sword in my heart, to be sure!  But it's a trick I play on myself to release myself of some of the minutae of the worries I have about them.  Being a hair less beholden to those evaluations in my approach to daily teaching life is probably healthy, right?

2. Ask for less feedback from students.  Is that another gasp?  I know, I'm totally losing my marbles.  I have always been one of those earnest professors that asks for feedback at every turn and then implements the feedback, and I have benefitted immensely from students participating in shaping the classes with me, and by them appreciating the transparency of my pedagogy.  I will still solicit feedback, not to worry.  But I am overwhelmed by it.  I'm frazzled, I'm losing my bandwidth to process all of the concerns. I feel like saying, "I'm doing the best I can. Give me a break." Sign of burnout? Yes.  I'll get back on the feedback wagon, but I'm just taking a short hiatus while I tread water.  Also, asking for feedback is weird: I'm getting all kinds of requests to do and solve problems that are not within my purview, and I worry I'm setting students up for expecting that I can solve these problems.  I'll fix this issue at some point, but I think I must have conveyed the message somewhere along the line that my teaching will resolve all their existential crises.  Maybe it's because my teaching seems to be causing all of their existential crises....  Oops.

3. Balance all the ways I identify as a teacher with realizing I'm also other things.  I love Rebecca Solnit's chapter in A Paradise Built in Hell, "Dorothy Day's Other Loves." It makes me cry. I have other loves besides this vocation, even though I love it.  I just have to spend some time remembering what those other loves are.  And I need to retreat into those loves-- just a little bit-- to remember how to breathe.

4. Get told I look tired by my students a lot more.  This one is a double-edged sword, and I can't say I set out with it as an explicit goal.  However, since I started taking some of these protective measures, I am spending less energy and time tripping over myself trying to perform my profound love for students.  When I see them, I don't just immediately light up and gush all over them like I used to.  I don't ask them, at every turn, like I used to, how they are and what's going on in their lives and how can I help?  I'm not acting like a customer service agent; I'm just sometimes thinking about other things like whether I have time to write, or what I want to make for dinner, or what to ask my kids about their day when I see them, or what I was doing on 9/11/01, or whether I should call my grandma, or whether "misplaced" is the right word to describe attention to climate change in the context of Harvey and Irma, or... This isn't about distraction, or denial.  I still love my students and get a lot of juice from them in return for this expenditure of brainpower on them.  But I am just slowing down, a la The Slow Professor, which means I'm just not bursting out of my seams all the time to please. I don't think this is tragic or that this is a sign that I am not absolutely in love with my students and profession anymore. On the contrary, I think it's something akin to sustaining this love.

But you're right, when I hear "you look tired, are you tired?", as I do more and more these days, what I'm really hearing is "why aren't you acting like my mother?"  Also, isn't there a rule that you're not supposed to comment on how a person looks?

Or maybe I really am just tired.

4 Tips for Building Self-Care into Your Syllabus

Do you sometimes feel like the demands of your students overwhelm and deplete you?  Do you feel like you're the therapist for an increasingly emotionally-needy millennial student body?

Considering the myriad reasons that those students are righteous in their increasing emotional neediness (student loans, fear of deportation, climate crisis, just to name a few), students need more from us these days than they used to.  Add into the equation whether you are a female faculty, or even more so, a female faculty of color, and the "cultural taxation"-- expectations around your ability to be helpful to students navigating the emotionally-challenging terrain of college, based on your own identity-- of your energy, time, and love, may threaten your own self-care.

This post is an attempt to give you some tools that draw boundaries between you and your students' infinite, black hole of need for you.

1.  Cultivate Peer-Peer Support

The best support for your students is each other, not you.  Build peer-to-peer assignments into your syllabus.  Require that they check with each other before writing you.  I make my final exam an open-book, open-friend, open-everything assignment, so students are encouraged to talk to each other.  I do a lot of group assignments in class and outside of class. I try to create spaces for cross-generational mentorship: senior students are required to talk to my lower-division courses.  We hold world-cafe style chats about advising across these cohorts.  Get creative.  How can you design ways for them to help each other?

2.  Maximize Your Office Hours

This may be controversial, but I don't hold "by appointment" office hours any more.  Forget it! I'll never get anything else done if I pretend I'm available any time to meet.  Students need faculty support all times of the day, so this is a joke.  Also, one-on-one office hours need to be limited.  Students always come into my office, close my door, and unload for an hour.  I have 150 advisees; this just won't cut it.

So, I've decided I do one hour of immediate, live, email office hours per week, for easy, practical questions that may benefit from something like a conversation, but online.  I hold a group office hour every week during which community-building and conversation can occur.  I try to advertise them in terms of themes that I find myself discussing repeatedly with individual students.  Why not hold a "how to apply to grad school" office hour that you advertise, instead of talking to 20 individual students about this over the semester?  Are students worried about DACA?  Hold an office hour about it, where they can talk to each other, and perhaps you bring in a resourceful person on campus.  Is some trauma happening on campus?   Hold your next group office hour about it.  Ask students to make requests about topics, so you can serve more students in an hour than you ever could one-on-one.

I am grateful to the Latino Center for Academic Excellence at HSU for allowing me to hold these sometimes in their center.  As Fernando Paz, our director, states, "change the setting, change the outcome." Holding office hours in spaces outside your office is transformative for students.

Where could you hold office hours that would serve more students?

Finally, I hold one hour of 15-minute appointments that are designed ONLY for the students who simply must speak to you privately, and in person.  These are the default office hour appointments, but they just don't work when you have a huge demand.  One-on-one appointments need to be limited, or else I'll never survive.  I want to encourage students to ask themselves, "do I need to talk to Sarah privately about this, or is this something I could email her about, or perhaps meet with her in a potentially non-private setting?"  If they're asked to think that through, I think you'll find they don't need one-on-one with JUST YOU for every single question and anxiety that pops into their brilliant and lovely heads.

I find this creative office hour schedule strategy helps build community, makes students feel served, and saves me a lot of closed-door, hourly meetings with students who really need a therapist, and to whom I struggle to ask to leave my office.  I'm not trying to be mean or unavailable, but seriously, office hours have become a bottomless pit of time-suckage for me, and I'm desperate to figure out ways to serve students while serving myself.  This really has worked for me.

3.  Support Peer Mentoring

Recognizing how important peer-to-peer mentoring is for effective learning and retention, not to mention saving my own energy and time, I applied for a grant to launch a peer mentoring program.  Consider how you might do this at your institution.

4.  Account for Emotion in the Classroom

Save yourself the extracurricular emotional labor of supporting individual students by carving out space in class time to address heavy stuff.  This is no small ask.  When you know something big is happening with a few students, and you know it's going to involve more office hour meetings, why not put aside some content in favor of collectively working through the big emotional thing? I've learned the hard way too many times that this is a good idea.

What do you do?

Because let's face it, all this stuff is killing us too.  And we have to keep serving our students, keep surviving these traumas ourselves, keep fighting on all the fronts around us, keep feeding our babies, keep laughing and sleeping, keep taking leaps of faith "by virtue of the absurd", and sustaining ourselves to do all that work.

What I'm Reading Now: Emergent Strategy, by Adrienne Maree Brown

I learned about this book through my work on a collaborative CSU/UC network project through the University of California Carbon Neutrality Initiative, called the Transformative Sustainability and Climate Education Knowledge Action Network (KAN).  Our workshops were facilitated by Abigail Reyes, whose approach to facilitation is inspired by emergent strategy principles.   Emergent Strategy just blew my mind.  I have so many ideas about how to use it in my life, research, teaching, collaborations-- all my work.

My "pie in the sky" dream would be to use the facilitation principles and processes outlined in the book as pedagogy.  The entire point of that process is to identify vision and translate it into actions we can do to achieve the vision we want.  Students are always seeking a salve for the doom-and-gloom of the content of climate change, environmental injustice, critical science studies, and the challenges to their positionality that happens in environmental studies classes.  They always want do-able "actions" to address those problems.  Below, I take issue with those impulses, and write about this at much greater length elsewhere, but one way to give students what they seek is to facilitate a vision/change/action workshop for them during class time, or build in transformative student leadership workshops somewhere into the curriculum, or make them a co-curricular opportunity.

Otherwise, for me, the book emphasized the value of:

·      cultivating community and relations (committing ourselves to span an inch wide and a mile deep rather than the other way around).

I am so strapped for time, that relationships with colleagues and anybody in my various communities seems superfluous, not on my to-do list, and so I rush away from social interactions so I can keep working on my task list. I always work from the principle of spreading myself an inch deep and a mile wide, covering a ton of ground, but superficially.  I'm notoriously late everywhere, because I'm always squeezing things in before other things. I'm happy doing half-assed work because I live by the motto "just get that shit done."  So cultivating relationships in ways that don't feel like I'm achieving immediate items on my to-do list has definitely not been a priority to me.  However, Emergent Strategy makes such a convincing argument for the value of relationships, that I am committing myself to letting myself actually enjoy my colleagues, appreciate the languid feeling of just talking to people, and seeing the immeasurable but crucial work of conversation as part of my work.

·      valuing conversation over deliverables

Similar to how important I see the humanities as resisting the corporatization of the university, because it teaches stuff that cannot and shouldn't be monetized in our lives, conversation and relationship-building aren't seen as valuable aspects of "action".  Emergent Strategy argues otherwise, suggesting that the relationships are precisely what keeps a community or group resilient and sustainable for the longer haul.  The language of "action" and "deliverable" and "impact" misses so much important work.  In describing the work of a group called Ruckus, Brown discusses the "action" culture of their direct-action activism as "masculine action culture" and "penetrative"; "Rather than forming long-term partnerships with communities, Ruckus was in and out with mind-blowing, creative actions.  This was in line with a model of action grounded in spectacle" (61).  I spend a lot of time teaching my students that there are so many ways to define "action" that aren't just about marching in the streets, and even that could be argued to be not effective at bringing about "action."  In other words, the idea of "action" needs to be deconstructed, and the value we put on "action" over thought/theory challenged.  This insight from Emergent Strategy really resonated with me because I value the intellectual work of thinking so much, and try to convince my very action-oriented students to spend the time in the world of critique, thought, the mind, conversation, research.  Timothy Morton says something like "don't just do something, sit there!", and he encourages students not to get dirty in soil, but to "rub their noses in their own minds."

·      expanding our notion of  what counts as “action,” based on Brown’s nonlinear and iterative view of social change

Extending this broader argument about what counts as "action," Brown suggests that the messiness of nonlinear movement and iterative, incremental shifts is OK; that's 'emergent strategy.'  I love this.  This relieves us from feeling we have to save the world in one day.

·      shifting toward resilience as a priority over “problem-solving,” in both pedagogy and curriculum development

As an environmental studies person, I'm always hearing that environmental studies is all about problem-solving.  Students in this major think they're getting trained to problem-solve.  We have classes on problem-solving.  Michael Maniates' "Teaching for Turbulence," which I read with my students every semester, tells us that environmental studies is the 'problem-solving' field.  Problem-Solving is one of the Environmental Studies Program Student Learning Outcomes.  It's everywhere.  Yet, I have so many issues with this.  As my dear friend and colleague, Janet Fiskio, says, "I want my students to create problems, not solve them."  And Ted Toadvine's fabulous "Six Myths of Interdisciplinarity" examines the assumptions behind "problem-solving" (whose problem is it? Who benefits and who pays to solve it?  What about competing notions of solutions, definitions of the problem, etc?).  Also, sometimes environmental studies should be about other stuff.   Emergent Strategy is a beautiful antidote to the myopic "problem-solving" definition of environmental studies.

·      increasing appreciation for the theory of the fractal for understanding how change happens and for grasping the power we each all hold

This gives value to all our little steps and small work.  Brown's argument is that "small is all," which suggests that the MOST we can do is the small stuff we can do.  This is hugely relieving and empowering to me.

·      emphasizing the importance of self-care for ourselves and our students

·      shifting curriculum toward affective resilience and emergent strategy as opposed to just content or “marketable skills”

·      paying attention to what we want to grow, rather than all the things that are wrong (in life, pedagogy, how we spend our time and attention, in committees and other collaborations, etc)

This one is really mind-blowing for me, since I'm so keep to criticize and whine about everything.  I will make this a mantra of mine, so I can be buoyed and uplifted, not anchored, dragged down, by the things I spend my time thinking about.  Or at least I'll try to resist whining more than I do now.  For example, rather than sitting around biting our nails about climate change, we should be asking "what is compelling about surviving climate change? What do we need to imagine as we prepare for it? How do we prepare the children in our lives to be visionary, and to love nature even when the changes are frightening and incomprehensible? How do we cultivate the muscle of radical imagination needed to dream together beyond fear?" (58-9).

And also, she says "sometimes we put up the critiques to excuse ourselves from getting involved, to protect our hearts from getting broken if it doesn't work out" (112).  Ouch. I think that's why I intellectualize my grief.  Ouch.

·      doing work that fuels us.

I'm so driven by all the "shoulds" in my life.  I always say things like "I need to pick my kid up".  Should is shit, though, and I WANT to pick my kid up.  I want to do things in life that I desire.  There's no time to waste. Mary Oliver beautifully put it, "what will you do with your one wild and precious life?"; so Brown writes, "As an individual, get really good at being intentional with where you put your energy, letting go as quickly as you can of things that aren't part of your visionary life's work. They you can give your all, from a well-resourced place, when the storm comes, or for those last crucial miles" (72).  Brown says that saying "no" to things that don't fuel us allows us to open up to more "yes's" that do. I love thinking of no as a kind of yes.

I could go on and on, but I'll wrap up here by thanking a group of colleagues for reading this book with me-- Janelle Adsit, Christina Accomando, Janet Winston, and Renee Byrd.