Newborns mean always having to say you're sorry (but not really)

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I thought about starting this post off with the obligatory apology for going so absolutely silent. But I do a lot of apologizing these days and felt like my own blog was the one place where perhaps I would skip that step. With the baby and everything else going on, I've dropped the ball on many things - mostly things other people want me to do for them. Most of my apologies are partially heart felt. After all, I am sorry that I (fill in blank with thing that someone else thought was important but I didn't do here). However, it's not like I've been eating bonbons and sipping pastis so I'm only sorry they're unhappy with me; I'm not sorry that I didn't do what they wanted. So I write a lot of emails that have various of the elements below:

Dear important-person-So-and-So: I am so sorry that I haven't responded to you in several months. I know you thought your (fill in blank here) was incredibly important but over the past few months I have: 1) Had a baby, 2) see #1, 3) went through the tenure process which required putting together my tenure packet and giving a talk while operating on only a couple hours of sleep and nursing a newborn and I only had two hours a day to get stuff done because my baby hates napping, 4) see 1 and 2, 5) tried to keep my research program rolling by writing an assload of grants to funding agencies with apparently negative funding rates (I didn't know negative funding rates were possible either, but there you have it) and finally, you guessed it, see 1), 2) and 4). Much of my work time these days is spent holding a baby with one hand, typing  with the other "obviously, the predictions of the model are well supported by..." while blowing raspberries and saying such erudite things as "roly moly poly foly toly" (she apparently loves rhyming nonsense).  As you might now begin to suspect, my email inbox looks like someone sent it a Howler which did a lot of screaming and then exploded. Terribly sorry. Hugs and Kisses, Professor Chaos.

P.S. please don't respond to this email unless its really important as it will take me another few months to respond. In the meantime seeing your unanswered email in my inbox will cause me great guilt and anxiety which, contrary to all logic, will not actually make me respond more quickly but will only make me not respond to more emails until your email spills on to page 2 of my inbox and I no longer have to look at it (and thus no longer feel guilty).

I once tried to email an important but absentminded professor who apparently had allowed his inbox to fill to its quota and thus bounced back incoming email. I'm beginning to think it was not absent-minded at all but the most brilliant strategy known to man...

Things I've learned while returning to work

Things I've learned while I've been slowly ramping up how much time I spend working versus doing baby-related things:

1) Working at home is still more productive than working at school...if Baby Mayhem agrees to take her naps or her grandmother is visiting. I really thought that going to work would be critical for managing to get work done. But I'm only at school 1-2 days per week and those days often get jam packed with meetings. Even though Baby Mayhem's good days only give me 1-3 hours of time to get work done, that's still more time than I get at school. Of course on the bad days, being home is kinda like  being stuck in a faculty meeting all day - lots of crying, yelling, spitting, and general frustration.

2) You do actually get used to baring your breasts at work (behind locked doors, with the blinds drawn closed, and the lights off). I now regularly pump when I go to school. What's hard is making sure I get time to do it. Since my day is often booked from beginning to end, it's hard to find 30 minutes to deal with the breast pump. It's not like I can schedule a meeting with a student or administrator and pump during it. I have, however, used milking myself as an excuse to get out of a painfully long committee meeting. Let's just say a room full of men have no comeback to that one...

3) I'm less worried about other people's whiny problems. A senior professor fussed at me because I hadn't sent a mundane email that he thought I should have sent. Before Baby Mayhem I would have gone home and worried about whether the incident made that professor think less of me. Now, I just looked at him and thought "pfft. I'm getting 3 hours of sleep at night and still working while on 'maternity leave' and taking care of a newborn. Write your own damn emails."

4) The state of my appearance is generally unchanged. Over the years, I have seen mothers of newborns generally stop investing in their appearance. They stop brushing their hair, putting on makeup, wearing nice clothes, etc. However, I never did those things before I had the baby so there is no discernable change in my appearance. The only real difference is that instead of having white deodorant stains on my shirt, I now have white spit up stains.

5) Sleep deprivation will drive you slowly insane, but your graduate students may not notice. I'll let you decide whether that's because I'm good at hiding my insanity or because my graduate students already thought I was crazy...

and last but not least

6) Not having much opportunity to do science for the past few weeks has bothered me personally much more than I thought it would. Getting little done scientifically doesn't worry me professionally (I worked my butt off before Baby Mayhem arrived to make sure things were going through the pipelines before the lull hit). But personally, I really miss working on my science. However, I take it as a good sign that I still love that aspect of my job and I've chosen the right career for myself!

"Ruining" one's career

A while back, FSP and Drugmonkey had posts about "ruining one's career". These really hit home with me in a deep and personal way and I've been trying to figure out how to blog about it ever since. You see, my name is Professor Chaos and I am an inveterate "career ruiner". I have violated almost every 'rule' out there for how to have a successful career. We've all heard these 'rules'. They range from topics to avoid for your dissertation, to not taking a postdoc or phd position at your ph.d/undergrad institute, to not having a baby before tenure (if you're a woman, this rule doesn't seem to apply to men). The exact details of the 'rules', and how severe the consequences for violating them are, vary from field to field, but for my field I have violated most of them.

Along the way, I've learned a few things about  so-called 'rules for success'. 1) They often assume only one type of success: becoming a high-powered R1 rockstar. However, there are many types of 'success' even in just academia and definitely in science more broadly. The key is deciding what your definition of success is. 2) People seem to confuse correlation with causation. The guidelines are correlated with people who have been R1 successful, they are not causative. Which leads me to: 3) By far, the most important thing is to publish interesting research in good journals. Everything else is window dressing. Window dressing only goes so far if you don't have windows (or even a house).

I won't say that violating the rules didn't have its costs. There isn't a stage in my career where someone hasn't used one of the violated rules to argue that I'm not actually as good as I might seem or to tell me I was ruining my career.  I'm sure there were many people over the years who felt like I was Nero fiddling on the rooftop while my career went down in flames. And I know for a fact that this has cost me various postdoc fellowships and jobs. But each time I violated a rule, it was for personal reasons - preferring to follow my own curiosity over scientific trendiness, balancing an academic couple, etc. In the process, however, I have carved out a career I am very happy with, professionally and personally. I have also come to grips with my own definition of success. I no longer strive to become a rock star. Instead, I've created my own category that I strive to be successful at: Indigo Girl. Like the Indigo Girls, I strive to produce high quality product on my own terms. If that's ruining one's career, well, it works for me. In fact, perhaps I should work a little harder at ruining my career. I'm sure there must be at least one rule I still haven't violated!