The latest in the right to breast feed case

Today there was a small victory after last week’s ruling. Now the Board of Medical Examiners are going to appeal…

Thoughts on work

Most days I am equally excited about the birth of Moon because for the most part it also means an end to the job I have come to dislike. Yes I will go back to work for four to six weeks once my maternity leave is over, but it will be in May/June and I will just be there to close out the academic year. So I won’t be dealing with all the things that make me most crazy.

I’ve given a lot to this school and my job in the last three years and I knew when I made the decision to stay on for a fourth year that it was a “me” year. I was not pregnant at the time, but I planned to stay so we could continue to aggressively ttc and I knew if we stayed on track I’d be eligible for IVF coverage in January. I stayed in a last ditch attempt to get pregnant. Not long after making that decision, I became pregnant and then I felt I had to stay for the sake of consistency and benefits and all that stuff.

As I ‘ve begun to settle into the routine of this year (I speak in academic years…) I’ve remembered the things that make this job so hard: the long hours, the weekends worked, too many demands on my time by too many people, one crisis bumping another, being a supervisor, working really hard and feeling like I’ll still never get it all done…and so I begin to feel down about the job and this also moves me into a semi checked out place where I sometimes confuse late January with our due date and instead think of it as my stop work date.

And then, from time to time, when I step out of my office – even though this means I fall even further behind in my administrative tasks – and sit down to connect with students (yes! students, those creatures I spent my graduate years preparing to work with, and who usually inspire me) I gain a wave on energy, a sense of how to make meaning in my job. And then sometimes when I am walking across campus (or through the grocery store) and I see one of my students, and they wave and smile and I do the same, I get the same warm feeling.

Being that this is my fourth year in my position, there are some students that started their education here the same year I came to work here, and we’ve moved along this path together. While there are so many things I fault this school for and so many things that frustrate me about my job, it’s these students that I will have been with for all four years when we move on in the spring, as well as the others that were here before me or came after I started who’ve inspired me, that I will miss when I move on.

I’ve made peace with the fact that I need a break from higher education and given myself permission to step off the track even though I labored through graduate school to get here…some day I may find myself back in academia, but for now I need a break. A real long break.