As I was picking up my keys and garage door opener from the usual spot where I usually put them (a corner of the piano), my eyes fell on that photo of my dad I talked about, and I wondered:
Did he ever feel doubt as he went off to work? Or something like low-level dread? A lot of times these days I doubt myself - not so much "am I good enough" though that's always a feature, but more of a "does what I am doing even matter?"
And there are the many other dreads - what is the future of higher-ed? Will I still have a job up to retirement? What if we get a new university president who thinks a hard pivot to mostly-online teaching is a good thing, and requires all of us to do most or all of our teaching that way? What if there's another downturn and more budget cuts?
I know my dad took early retirement from one job and turned around and got another good one, but that seems less likely these days with shrinking departments, and also, I know I'm not as good as he was; I haven't done as much, I have no administrative experience (or desire to be an administrator).
I often wonder - my dad was what is sometimes termed Silent Generation - if they were made of sterner stuff than I. If being born at the tag-end of the Depression, being a kid during WWII, having lived through cousins and the like going off to Korea and younger friends going off to Vietnam (I was once told my dad was deferred by the draft board because of his major and research interests; they thought someone who wanted to study uranium was better off still in school, though now I wonder if that was incorrect because he would have already been 30 in 1965, and unlikely to be drafted) and being a young-married during the Cuban Missile Crisis and all that. Or if different training from parents of a much earlier generation did it - were people of my parents' generation tougher, or did they just, like Applejack, "cry on the inside"?
(I think I saw my dad cry twice in my life; once was at the death of one of his parents)
But I don't know. I guess his generation was also the one that produced the Beatniks, so I don't even know.
But yeah, a lot of the time I head out the door these days, and my mind is already clicking through the too-long list of what I have to do (not just work stuff but stuff like "gotta pick up milk on the way home today" which I have to do) that I don't always feel a lot of *joy* on heading off to work, even though on some level I do enjoy what I do (except for the grading, except for all the paperwork stuff).
(And yes, it's entirely possible that my dad having my mom - who could attend to the stuff like "gotta pick up milk" because she mostly did not work outside the home - may have made a difference. I am fundamentally covering the things two people did when I was a kid growing up. Granted, I don't have kids myself [cripes, how do single parents DO it?], but the fact that working full time, plus duties at church, plus housework, plus marketing and cooking, plus yardwork for roughly 3/4 of the year, all fall on me, is perhaps partly why I am a bit more stressed and yes, maybe next summer I hire a yard crew, I don't know.
It's also possible that how higher ed is done has changed - that there's less support for faculty than there once was, and we do more stuff ourselves without help, and that could be part of my distress)
I sometimes think of my old high-school French teacher, how I would sometimes see him walking to campus (he and his wife lived in faculty housing there, just a couple blocks from the prep school) and how he'd whistle and swing his briefcase. And I often wonder now - was that a factor of gratitude for what he had then as opposed to his past (child in WWII-torn Europe) or was it merely a personality difference? I have never been the kind of person who could do that - too anxious, too wrapped-up in what I need to get done, too worried about the various things going on in the world and in my world.
And I admit, I wonder: what is the secret of getting to the point where you can whistle and swing your figurative briefcase as you walk in to work? And it that something I could attain?
Or was that just a cover for the darkness? And I just wear my heart on my sleeve more? (I have had people tell me this fall that I look either worried or tired. Well, yes, I am. I mean, I know it's generally considered impolite to tell a woman she looks tired, but I am, this fall.)
One thing I will never be able to ask my dad - not that I ever would have been comfortable asking while he was alive, we were not that sort of family - was if he ever felt the sort of creeping dread I do some days, where the best you can do is slap on a happy face and do your work and try not to wonder too much if you're getting through to anyone. Or maybe having kids mitigated that, in that you felt like you were having a beneficial effect on the future by trying to raise your kids right?
****
And as I was writing this, someone who had made an appointment (apparently they didn't know this was my "open" office hours, despite my having them on the door and on my syllabi) came in and fundamentally told me "I can't learn the way you teach" and now I feel even more terrible.
I know you can't reach everybody, but....yeah. I need to feel like I have at least one "win" once in a while.
My advice to the student was to drop and to try a similar class in a different department.
I will note that they didn't do about 1/3 of the outside-class assigned work, so, yeah....
but I still feel bad about it.
Maybe my problem is I take this stuff personally? And my dad and others of his generation didn't? I think my dad would have shrugged and reminded the guy that he skipped a lot of the out-of-class work, and that now (halfway through the semester, or a bit more than halfway) is the first time he came in for help/advice?
But I don't know if I've been socialized to take stuff like that personally, or if it's just an in-born part of my personality (I spent much of my childhood being told I was "too sensitive" and I "took things too personally," so I think it might be the latter) but, yeah. Whatever.
Part of the problem for me, I think, is a lot of days it feels like work is ALL I have (no kids, no spouse, not even that many close-by friends, and they are busy) and when work isn't going well, nothing feels like it's going well.
***
Thought: maybe the thing I have to work on more is feeling more like I have a life outside of work. I mean, I do, but work looms so large and has been made so important (both in terms of the time it requires, and the fact that it's the "most meaningful" seeming thing I do, and the fact that I worry about losing that paycheck/health insurance coverage) that it does seem like the only thing in my life some days.
(And I suspect this is something that has happened to a lot of people, especially with the "creep" of work so that you are getting e-mails at home at all hours about work, and being asked to come in on days you normally wouldn't, and the quiet undercurrent of "well, if you don't like it, you can be replaced, you know")
I don't want to be one of those people who dies a couple months after retirement because they can't fathom a life without work and it makes them sick.
But I don't quite know how to do it, not when it's something I spend 50-60 hours a week on. By comparison, I spend maybe 7 hours a week on piano, and 2 1/2 working out (on a good week) and maybe 50 hours sleeping, maybe less.... and none of those things consume my attention on off-hours the way work does. I suspect part of the reason I spend so much time on weekends driving off to Sherman and other places and spending money I shouldn't spend is that is one way of shutting up my brain from thinking about work...
Maybe I do keep seeing the counselor on my own dime after the grief-counseling sessions run out, and one thing we try to work on - if it's even possible - is getting me to divorce from work better when I go home, and worry less about "gotta get stuff done, gotta get stuff done"
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