What Is Fulfilling?

~ Laura

I have exactly ten minutes before I have to package the boys up in mittens and boots, but I had to get down one quick thought.

The notion of homelife and fulfillment came up AGAIN in the blogosphere during the week.

I find it very interesting that so many people who have never watched children at home are such experts on it. I’ve never performed open heart surgery and therefore would never speculate about how much fun it is to pick at someone’s vital organs. But when it comes to raising kids, everybody’s got an opinion.

There were some half hearted attempts to define fulfillment.

The point was made that homelife wasn’t fulfilling, because it puts the individual in a financially risky position. You’re always at the whim of another. Subordination, financially insecure — sounds like adjunct work to me.

I’m sure that part of the problem is that people find fulfillment in different places. Also, a lot has to do with attitude.

Published by Laura

9 thoughts on “What Is Fulfilling?”

  1. I don’t want to defend those who feel the need to second-guess other people’s decisions about lifestyle. But I worry about the “you have to have experienced it to understand it” idea. I know that’s not quite what you said. But still, you could interview open heart surgeons and gain some critical distance on their reponses about job satisfaction without, I think, being an open heart surgeon yourself.
    OK, back to that grading.
    Closing thought: “I’d Rather be Blogging” bumperstickers would probably find a lot of bumpers.

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  2. The problem is that everyone tries to extrapolate their own ideas of personal happiness onto everyone else. It’s funny how people can be all down with “Free To Be You and Me” until they discover that the You isn’t the same as Me. I’m not saying that every position is equally valid (I don’t think that “submitting to your husband” is a feminist position), but not every woman who forgoes monetary recompense in favor of childcare is doing so because she’s a submissive patriarchal drone.

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  4. Yes, thoughtful people can study and make interesting observations of other groups of people. But I wouldn’t walk into a conference of surgeons and announce that they were oppressed. When they tried to show me another position, I wouldn’t tell them that their point of view was worthless, because they had false consciousness.
    Thanks for the Postrel link. I like that person she quoted. I also try to spend as little time doing the errands as possible. I deal out a healthy share to my husband and I leave my house a mess. There’s a lot of dumb errands involved in having a full time job. Because I don’t have to grade papers, I can be really productive when the kid is at school. When I’m at the playground, I am coming up with ideas and scribbling them down as soon as I get in the house. Once an absent minded professor, always an absent minded professor.
    When I wrote this, I was just amused that all the characterizations of motherhood — underpaid, unseen, abusive — could also describe many of the so-called paid jobs that I’ve had. I am in the process of lining myself up to adjunct next fall. Then the slavery really begins.

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  5. Agreed that telling other people they have false consciousness is dangerous, often totally unfounded, business. But this is not because, in the current instance, one does or does not have children. Rather, it’s because one does or does not have the proclivity to judge others on flimsy or no evidence.
    Or so says the empirical social science prof who (finally) got his grades in — (just barely) on time.
    Delighted to hear you’ll be adjuncting. You’ll have good stories and you will Remain Viable, as they say.
    I know: you are viable either way. Cheers, RC

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  6. I’m going to nitpick at you again.
    “Because I don’t have to grade papers, I can be really productive when the kid is at school.”
    You’re putting grading papers in opposition to productivity and thus valorizing a certain definition of productivity (writing, I assume).
    Philosophically, I feel grading papers is one of the most important things we can do as teachers because it’s one-on-one individualized communication with the student.
    Doesn’t mean I love it, though. But it’s important and it is productive work because students do value getting comments.

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  7. You can nitpick. I don’t mind.
    It’s true that grading papers is very important. I just loathe doing it. I have to come up with different tricks to get through it with little tallies and reward systems. I always taught jumbo intro classes with 50+ students. I just mentioned it as an example of one part of paid work that I take no joy in. Not really a major point.
    RC — I just had a meeting with my old advisor to discuss plans to keep me viable for another year until the little one can tolerate more childcare. The problem is that if I adjunct, I can’t publish. I taught a grad class at top school for a year. It paid $2,000 per semester and used up 30 hours per week. No one observed me, so I have nothing to show for my efforts, and they didn’t even bother to invite me to the Christmas party. I have to balance the adjuncting with publishing and going to conferences.

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  8. There are times I do love grading. I love knowing a student worked really hard on a paper and I can see how it came out. I love seeing a really poor paper and knowing I can give the student the advice s/he needs to make it better. I mean, we all enjoy giving comments and feedback on colleagues’ papers? So what’s different about doing the same for student papers?
    I don’t love when the students don’t appreciate the work I do to grade. Sometimes I think it’s a catch-22. I’ve spoken to students (the office assistants who work for our department, tutors I worked with in the past) and they hate getting papers with few to no comments, just a grade. So if we don’t do the work to respond, why should they work hard on writing the paper? They’ll respect the work we do, which will make it feel less burdensome, when we respect the work we do.
    I’ve been thinking a lot about the notion of work and stay-at-home moms. I have a friend who is a SAHM who actively avoided work during her marriage, which eventually fell apart. He was the bad guy, definitely, (cheated sexually and financially) but she contributed a little, I think, in part because of her refusal to work outside the home, which angered him. But now that she is working, and I read her stories about her different jobs, I think that a lot of the problem is that the work she is qualified to do is such unsatisfying work, plus it can be so demeaning (she told once of having to get a doctor’s note to explain an absence–I never ask students to do that, though they always expect me to want one). She almost never feels the level of happiness with a job that I do.
    It’s not that I feel that teaching is in an of itself always a happy, wonderful job, but I do know I feel respected when I go there. My mom has been volunteering in a thrift store lately, and it makes her feel good and respected, even though it’s basically “just” retail. We don’t all feel satisfied by the same work, but we all can feel *respected* even when we’re doing “unsatisfying” work, and we can feel disrespected when we do “satisfying” work.
    Can’t expand further as I have to leave (family stuff–wish we could save and edit comments).

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