Third Culture Kid(s)

It’s 6 am. MM has yet to wake up, C. is sleeping fitfully in his chair, and I’m online. I should be sleeping, and god knows I’ll be nodding off all day because I’m awake now, but I couldn’t resist this quiet time before the cacophony begins, and I can’t think straight, to write a little here.

As I’ve mentioned, I got back from the annual Big Conference in my academic field on Sunday. I’m still trying to process my feelings about the whole thing, because seeing all my old friends, reading through the list of panels that were being presented, and strolling around the book seller’s room before my own panel have all gotten me to thinking about my place in academia and my plans for the future.

The most overwhelming feeling I had coming away from the whole thing was one of inadequacy, tempered with indifference. You’d think the two feelings would be mutually exclusive; it takes caring about something - evening if “caring” is limited to competitiveness - to feel inadequate about it, and to that extent I suppose I do care that my atrophied, post-partum brain can’t seem to wrap itself around all of the interesting and complex discussions going on in the field. I look at all the books for sale - all the new literature that I know almost nothing about - and I feel like things have just passed me by, and that my time in the field is pretty much over.

By the same token, however, I know that my life has simply started down a different path. I don’t know if it’s one where I have much to say, academically, but it’s not the same path I was headed down (hopelessly single, devoted to my studies, aiming for a tenure-track job somewhere) when I began. In many ways, I feel a bit like this conference was my swan-song, and I don’t know if I’ll be doing any more of them in the future.

At the same time, I think I’m more interested in writing my dissertation than I have been in a long time. I came away from the conference, however, with a much stronger sense of not needing to make it some kind of groundbreaking work. As a friend of mine reminded me, it’s an assignment, not a calling; it’s the last hoop I’ll ever have to jump through in graduate school - get through this, and I’m done and you can call me Dr. Third Culture Kid(s). And, at the end of the day, it’s a story that I still want to tell. I’m reluctant to talk about the meat of my dissertation in public - not that it’s a hot and happening topic, per se, but the risk of having my ideas ‘borrowed’ is too great, and it’s a very personal subject for me. In fact, I really don’t think there’s anyone else out there who could tell the story in quite the way I can, since I lived part of it and I have a perspective that few people - and arguably no scholars - can bring to the material.

I even know what I might like to do with a PhD, should I manage to finish my dissertation. I’m pretty sure that work at a research institution is out for me; not only do I not feel like I have much to say beyond the dissertation, but I simply cannot stomach the idea of taking even more of my attention away from my family. As it is, I’m a distracted mother and wife, and the dissertation is a constant source of stress that makes me hard to live with. The research tenure-track is, I’ve heard, pretty much more of the same, and for essentially crap pay. Unless you’re very much invested in what you research - and, beyond the dissertation, I’m not - I don’t know that it’s worth it.

But there are other things - academic translation, non-tenure track teaching, teaching overseas, study abroad/area studies advising - for which a PhD might come in handy. And even if it didn’t, I’d have the satisfaction of having seen it through to the end.

I don’t regret having gone down this different path. Every time C. cracks a smile or - lately - giggles, every time MM starts doing her monkey dance or venting her frustrations with me on her dolls*, every time M. walks in the door and I have my constant companion to talk with - something I never had, and desperately wanted, when I was single - I know I made the right choices for me. But being at the conference was a bit of a bittersweet reminder of what I once was, what I’m not now, and how I’m not sure what I’ll be in the future. I suppose there’s some freedom in that, though; if I don’t know who I am anymore, then maybe I can be anyone I like.

*Seriously - she likes to get her dollhouse dolls and reenact whatever argument we’ve had over the course of the day. A couple of days ago, she set up the crib, put the baby in the crib, and then had the Mommy and the Toddler stand next to the crib. I caught the Mommy telling the Toddler, “Don’t climb up on the crib, OKAY?” Fortunately, every time she said this (several times), she ended it with, “I don’t want you to get hurt.” At least I know she hears me.