I have been feverishly (I honestly think I produce a fever from time to time) pursuing a PhD in Literature more than six years. As for the PhD, I currently neither make anything nor believe anything that says I will complete it. I read theory; I write theory; I make lists and put them in MLA format. To be honest, I have been doing all this for so many years that I automatically list in MLA format. Books I love have to be torn apart, analyzed, and reduced to ideas so limited that they make me sad rather than enlightened. Maybe I'm not doing it right, but I am doing all I can. At this moment, however, I am just making and believing.
I am doing neither alone. I woke up late, made hummingbird feeders with my son and husband, listened to Mister Rogers sing "There Are Many Ways to Say 'I Love You'," and cackled as the same son read BC comics to me. Now he is making up a play about "wrastlers." We will come up with something else in a minute. Oh, wait! Now he's thumb wrestling himself. In the left corner is Punch Robber and in the left corner is Thumbie McGee. They are tied at one match win each. daddy's in the kitchen making new potatoes and green beans (those we grew--and by "we" I mean the Daddy-man).
Which pursuit sounds like more fun: the PhD or the making and believing?
Life us supposed to be hard and it is supposed to be fun. The hard part, though, doesn't have to feel like a perpetual, shredding mind cramp, does it?
I am not afraid of hard work. Love is a kind of hard work for which I yearn. Sticking by my people no matter what--that works. Reaching out to people and bringing them into our lives, I want to do that. Adopting a little girl and watching her grow up sassy and bright and undaunted by her older brothers, that's worth pursuing for sure.
Daddy-man stays home for his hard fun. He grows, cooks, cleans, launders, teaches home school, fetches and carries, ad infinitum and into perpetuity. He gets up early and goes to bed late. He builds things--really well. He is truly a Daddy of All Trades. He would say, "and a master if none," but he would be wrong, wrong, wrong. He is a whole, practiced, efficient, bliss-driven human being. I am a Jesus-loving, anxious, over-nurturing, rescuing, staring into space mommy and PhD candidate who just wants to be Mama-lady like mine was but who is afraid of academic failure, or, rather, an academic moonlit flit. And I want to find out who else I am.
I don't think I am going to figure out this by deciding whether hegemony is transformed subversion in Japanese novels and travel literature. I just don't.
I'd rather watch the youngster playing with Lego and smiling like a sunbeam.
