View from the trees

Some of you may be wondering where I disappeared to, after my last regular email/post in late April. Some of you are new subscribers to the newsletter of weekly pandemic reflections. Some may want to take this opportunity to unsubscribe.

It’s a period of great transition over here. To recap, in May, our family (my spouse Sam, 5.5-year-old son Theo, and I, and our geriatric cat Smitty and dog Greta) moved from the houseboat we had rented for the last 7 years to our first purchased house, just a mile away and still in Sausalito. For the subsequent month, we had various travel planned (family trip to in-laws in Boise, in-person conference for me, bike trips and travel for Sam). The weekends between involved sequala of moving – getting Theo a bigger bed, hanging my grandmother’s paintings, re-organizing. Theo’s sleep became a mess, including waking up 3-8 times a night…for weeks. We’ve seen this pattern before with big changes so we anticipated it, but oof, it was intense. Poor kid is missing our houseboat, getting grief surges when we visit my mother who still lives on the Dock, and anticipating a trip to Cape Cod (where I grew up and where we haven’t visited since the 3 funerals of 2018-2019) and transition to kindergarten in August with much trepidation.

We are doing our best to acknowledge, accommodate, and lessen the impacts of the turbulence. As parents, we’ve been doing our best to validate Theo’s feelings, identify better (morning) and worse (evening) times to talk about upcoming changes, and teach him that sometimes we need to sleep on tough things and revisit them in the morning. Sleep got better once we stopped traveling and had some stability. We’ve tried to roll with what we each need rather than push the “shoulds”. For Theo, instead of telling him not to be nervous we’ve validated and visited the new elementary school playground. For me, I’ve done some hard cardio exercise but less than before in order to prioritize extra sleep and acupuncture and meditation.

To remind ourselves of the subtly of detecting changes in our mental state over time, we’ve been using the analogy of COVID vaccination. Only when we looked backwards to see how much less anxious we were, particularly after Theo was vaccinated, could we tell how much our mental wellbeing had improved. Similarly, since last summer we experienced the extra angst and effort from the constant house hunt, from debating affordability and regions and school districts, from debating whether we can stay in the Bay Area, to when and where to job search (effort I think might have been equivalent to writing 1-2 R01s). Thankfully all of that has fallen away and now we just have the ordinary hardness of parenting in a two-working-parent household in an ongoing pandemic (ha!). And on a micro-level, these last two weeks have felt so much easier than the two months prior.

As my bandwidth for everyday life has increased, my creativity has returned. One night while Sam was putting Theo to bed, instead of trying to catch up on work I borrowed Theo’s watercolors and painted a couple still life. It’s only in the last two weeks – 10 weeks after the move – that I felt like I had ideas or desire to revisit the newsletter. I had motivation to start updating my website for my post-houseboat life with new names and photos, and while I’ll keep tweaking it, it no longer feels like a barrier-to-entry.

One of the ideas I’m toying with is reframing the website as sharing “recipes” for people who are trying to do the kinds of things I’m up to: be an academic researcher/scholar, perhaps while parenting and/or grieving. After all, you only pick up a cookbook if they are offering things where you know where to find ingredients or the cooking method aligns with your stage of life.

I’m not expecting everyone to have my tastes, or approach things the way I do (hence I sent this missive via newsletter this week so you can take yourself off the list if you choose, whereas I normally send via email so you can reply). But for the people that these approaches resonate with, the recipes can give people a new way of assembling thoughts and actions that they can try on themselves and tweak, adapt, and iterate upon for figuring out what works for them. Selfishly, posts give me something to send to mentees when I find myself repeating these recipes of strategy outloud, a place where I can store, revisit, and refine ideas.

So I’m back, more or less. This fall I have a few big grants due, so I may not post as often or as long.

Gratitude

• I created a “Theo playlist” of his favorite songs from his favorite movies and it’s been delightful to watch him dance, and to sing along with him. Shakira’s “Try Everything” is a favorite whose lyrics feel appropriate to academia. These dance parties remind me how much grief and hardship has weighed down our family for the last few years as I watch it lift

• Learning about the field of graphic medicine

• Orange-peach roses from Trader Joe’s

• The evening light in the eucalyptus leaves as we’re putting Theo to bed

• A confluence of timing, goals, and trusted stakeholders means a shelved project may actually come to fruition

• A July that has felt more like 2019 (in good ways) in terms of going to the office and meeting people in 3D

Interesting things on the internet

AKA tabs open in my browser and things people have sent me

• Podcast on returning to work after loss

• Theory as ethics

• How to embed a racial/ethnic equity perspective in research

• Anticipating the transformation of the business of hospice

• Posts from me since April: quarterly rebalancing for productivity, gifts of mentoring; on work-life integration, supportive household rhythms, importance of childcare, finding a place to pause; physical manifestations of grief and stress and grief high tides

• Tandoori Masala spice blend

• Theo finally enjoying Wendy Mac Draw Together online art lessons

Prioritized small goals for next week

Not my whole to do-list, or my true ambitions, but bare minimum goals to accomplish in order of importance

• Wellness: cardio 2x

• First author: 1h on R&R

• Co-I grants: send one grant to PI, spend 1h on the other
  

What about you? How is your July feeling? How are you managing this season of transition?