Rituals and Sabbaths for Large Family Life

We all have family rituals, whether we realise that is what they are or not. In a larger family these rituals start to take on a life of their own, becoming a sort of adhesive that binds the family together. They might take a little bit of effort to set up, but if the fit is right, I reckon they become the things kids grow up and remember as part of themselves, helping them feel they belong. They communicate a sense of collective belonging that is one of the key ingredients to intrinsic wellbeing. Our household of six has a number of rituals for daily life, weekly rhythm, and marking special occasions and holidays. In the nationwide lockdown currently in place in New Zealand, holiday rituals and sabbath-rest-days have taken on an even greater importance as a way of marking time and fostering a sense of security in all the weirdness and anxiety.

Family ritual as spiritual discipline

Why use the world “ritual” rather than routine?Well, for me it connotes a sort of spiritual discipline aspect to the activity, where the value is in the repetition built up over time, not the amazing quality or planning or special oomph of just one event. The discipline is continuing to show up and trusting that the showing up will be enough to make connection and growth happen. Like meditation or a commitment to others forms of spiritual practice, family rituals are a commitment of the mind that takes some discipline to undertake. Rituals are a stable, embodied, repeated action, where something is done in a certain way to represent a deeper meaning.

So what kind of rituals am I talking about here? And how does this relate to large families? Some examples of rituals we use include the following:

• The morning greeting, where each child is greeted separately and directly before any instructions are issued.
• The after school check-in, where each child is welcomed and greeted, briefly asking about their day.
• The family meal, which begins with setting the table, saying grace when the cook is seated, and staying at the table until everyone is finished – then associated chores!
• Reading together before bed, although this changes over time depending on the age of the children. Currently, it is the middle two and we are listening to a Harry Potter audio book.
• Saturday pancakes & chores, where Mum gets up and cooks pancakes with whoever is up, and people come and take a stack as they emerge from their bedrooms. After pancakes, each person has an age-appropriate family chore (emptying bins, cleaning the bathroom) and a chore to do with their own belongings (changing sheets, tidying rooms).
• Sunday church & deli lunch, which was put in place after going out for a meal became too expensive on a weekly basis. We choose something from the supermarket deli on the way home from church.
• Weekend games (board or sport), which is Dad and kids and can include both competitive and collaborative games. Current favourites are Pandemic (board game) and Gutterboard (outdoor game).
• Christmas Eve vegetarian feast, which is a Polish tradition we adapted, and includes waiting until the first star appears before opening a present.
• Good Friday homemade hot cross buns, a tradition adapted from my family (we didn’t make them thought).
• Easter Sunday egg dying and egg hunt, which involves dying plain boiled eggs for breakfast, and an indoor or outdoor hunt for Easter eggs – then sharing them all out equally afterwards.
• Various birthday traditions, including cake, choosing a meal, presents in bed, and singing happy birthday in as many languages as we can.

None of these rituals are high energy, and none are in themselves ‘necessary’, but they all say something about what we value. They also communicate to each child that they are part of those values, and that they themselves are also valued as part of the family. The commitment to repeating these rituals communicates reliability and care for the family as a unit. If it were not for these rituals, it is possible in a larger family (especially with an academic mother) that a child might be overlooked for a period of time, and of course feel neglected and even start to withdraw or act out.

Dyed eggs for Easter breakfast

Sabbaths as spiritual discipline

One ritual I find hard to practice the Sabbath. Now we don’t really practice Sabbath in the Jewish sense, but we do try to hold on to the weekends as special somehow, as times where the family can expect me, as the earner, to be present in home life and not working. Saturday is the day we care for our house and prepare ourselves for the week, including getting washing done, cleaning chores, meal planning and shopping for food or other provisions.  By setting aside time for this and participating in it weekly, the message is that these task are important and are not the job of one person. I therefore consider this a sort of feminist spiritual practice! It also communicates that each member of the family is important and contributes something. This is important to communicate so the children do not foster their self-worth only on academic work or other achievement oriented values. Even chores done imperfectly are a blessing and contribution to the family – it is the ‘turning up’ that counts.

Sundays are days of community and self-care. We usually go to church as a family, and we then go pick up lunch from the supermarket deli on the way home. (We used to go out for lunch when we only had two kids, but now that is unaffordable!). My daughter and I are regularly rostered on to the band, and my husband to the creche. Church can be pretty boring, but by continuing to show up, we communicate that we value this community and what it stands for (in our church, that includes social justice and environmental sustainability). Relationships are built through this ritual of showing up. When my husband had a stroke earlier this year, members of the church community rolled into action with support for us — babysitting, food, help with chores, check-in phone calls and more. The kids knew these people coming into our home and had reliable adults with whom to process what was happening, when I had to be at the hospital. Sunday evenings, I go to my weekly yoga class, and the kids are responsible for cooking dinner. This is framed as a contribution of care because it is dad’s ‘day off’ (he cooks much of the week) and mum’s self-care time. Some years, I might have early morning Monday lectures, which demand a Sunday afternoon work time. Or occasionally I might be working on something with an imminent due date that cannot be put off. I try to at least put it off until the afternoon when everyone is doing their own thing so it doesn’t impinge on family time.

Even harder is taking a Sabbath rest during a public or religious holiday. Work is very important to me, and I think about it all the time. If left to myself, I absolutely would work every weekend and public holidays too. So I am grateful to my children for providing a structure to my life that forces me to take a break and rejuvenate my mind. The cognitive dissonance of home labour, community time and rest certainly increases my desire to work come Monday or the next work day. And I believe that the balance truly creates an efficiency that draws on the balance and focus cultivated through Sabbath-like practices. It is a spiritual practice in that it provides this rejuvenation and because it relies on a certain discipline of ritualised behaviour that builds habits of rest over time. Occasionally, I develop a little niggling concern that I’m missing out somehow by not working on the weekend regularly like my other academic colleagues. Sometimes I suspect that my kids don’t actually even care or seem to notice if I am working or not. But I think this reiterates again that this is a spiritual discipline, put in place to ritualise wellbeing and balance.

Chores and maintenance are an essential part of our ‘Sabbath’ rest days

Rituals, Sabbaths and Larger Families

Finally, what does this have to do with large families, and why is this still important during times of pandemic and lockdown where I am continually present at home anyway? To answer the first, I think as our children develop their own interests and personalities, and the differences between them become more acute over time, there is a danger that little family factions will develop or that certain forms of interaction become hardened over time. For example, I’m pretty sure my teen would stay in her room 90% of the time rather than 70% if we didn’t have these things in place. She might roll her eyes that she has to stay at the table with us until everyone has finished eating, but being present with us even a little bit longer makes less real the belief that ‘nobody understands me’ and ‘I am alone in this world’ that is common at this age. I’m pretty sure my husband and I would just take turns with the baby and let the others run a bit wild since technically they can care for themselves. This would encourage the belief that ‘middle children don’t matter’ and ‘the baby is more special than me’ that often inadvertently develops in busy families. I don’t think we can necessarily prevent these beliefs from forming and developing, but we can make sure there are regular times where every individual is acknowledged because everyone is present and needed.

Family rituals also work to connect the family together and create a sense of ‘us’ that translates into a sense of belonging. In my father’s large family, traditions such as singing certain songs or telling certain bad jokes create a sense of belonging, even if it is punctuated with groans. In our everyday rituals, a minimum engagement with the family is communicated, and a flexible rigidity puts in place the kind of boundedness that helps a healthy attachment relationship and community grow. The stability of knowing rituals –  pancakes come on Saturday and everyone must be present at the table for mealtimes – communicates that ‘our family is important’, and likewise, ‘I am important’.

Public holidays and religious holidays are important here too. The reason they are important is that everyone gets a day off on the same day, which is the perfect opportunity for collective family rituals to develop and be maintained. While technically as an academic with 5 weeks of paid annual leave per year, I could just take a rest day at any time I was not teaching, the fact that we all get holidays at the same time on certain days fosters the sense of togetherness, affiliation, belonging in community that contribute to intrinsic wellbeing at both social and individual levels.

Rituals and Sabbaths in times of collapsed boundaries

In times of collapsed boundaries as workplaces move into the homes, I reckon it is important to keep these rituals in place to provide that same sense of secure boundedness. When we work from home, we often have to enforce false boundaries in order to get work done — for example, putting off the requests of our children for attention in order to pay attention to a screen and incomprehensible tasks that don’t seem very important. Constantly saying ‘no’ and/or ignoring children can really become hard for them to bear, and they will certainly start letting you know in a variety of passive and direct ways! By having a commitment to our usual rituals, we are communicating that our children are important and that they matter, that we will fulfil our commitments to them in the same way that we do with our colleagues. I am all for fostering independence in the children, but I think that really only happens when they are secure that they will get what they need from us.

Two days ago was Easter Sunday. I could have spent the day reading a colleague’s 12,000 word article and preparing for an Easter Monday Zoom meeting scheduled. I did consider it, because I do care about my colleagues, but I also knew that my 6 year old had been counting down the days to Easter and that something special better happen.

In the end, I gave my apologies for the meeting on the grounds that it was a public holiday, and then we made a special Easter in Lockdown happen. We reminded ourselves of the Easter story. We boiled the eggs, then dyed them in food colouring. Each egg was different when peeled. After breakfast we had an Easter egg hunt in the backyard. Then a walk followed, to count the Easter eggs people are colouring and taping to their windows as a Lockdown activity. Then everyone did their own thing until dinner was served at 1pm. We had a tablecloth and napkins, fancy glasses and drinks, roast lamb and vegetables. We took family photos. Then everyone doing their own thing until the next meal: a collaborative starter and dessert meal. The eldest made the dessert. The second made the soup with supervision. The third learned how to make scones. Dad set the table and cleaned up. Baby enthusiastically sampled everything. We finished with listening to an audio book of Harry Potter before bed. While we couldn’t fulfil all the Easter rituals we usually have (we often travel to see family or go to church if we are home), it was enough to show that the day was special, that it was not a work day, that the story of new life and hope is important to our family.

So that’s my thoughts on this. I wonder how much of this is idiosyncratic, how much is how I was brought up, and how much is cultural? I do know that the longer I do this parenting thing, the more I find rituals and Sabbaths provide opportunity to define and shape our family, helping each person to find a place and belong. What rituals do you have in your family life? What challenges do you face in committing to regular rest-times?

 

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My new normal: reducing decisions fatigue with four kids and fulltime work

When I had my first baby, I was struck by how all my assumptions about shared care with my husband were based on an understanding that completely ignored her own thoughts on the matter. We couldn’t do 50/50 like we planned — because (surprise!) babies are grown and nurtured physically in the body of their mother and that actually shapes the initial relationships. Seems obvious now.

What has struck me having my fourth child, however, is actually how much better at shared care we have got – partly through economic necessity (I had only 9 weeks maternity leave at full pay, my husband doesn’t have paid employment, and we have a mortgage). But also, we actually just have more realistic expectations about what a baby needs.

When my youngest was born in December last year, I expected that he would only want to be in bodily contact with me for at least the duration of my short maternity leave. I fully expected to spend those weeks with short breaks from holding the baby in the form of showers, light exercise, and meal times. After that period of maternity leave, we quickly found the value of routine. That is a sentence I never really thought I would write. With my eldest, 13 years ago, the suggestion to have a routine seemed stupid. Why have a routine when you could just respond to your baby’s signals and adapt to what they need? Why force a routine, when you could have a baby that went anywhere with you, slept anywhere, fed anywhere? And indeed, I took her on PhD fieldwork and that worked out OK. But by the time we had four children, with school, work and other activities thrown into the mix, routine is my best friend.

We don’t have to force a routine either. It emerges from what we do. But the bits I deliberately add in are there to actually reduce the amount of decisions and negotiation I have to do each day, to give a start point that can actually be thrown out the window if we want to, but also gave us the next step in our busy day without having to actually think. I read somewhere that Barack Obama wore a ‘uniform’ so he didn’t have to make decisions about what he wore, saving his mental energy for decisions of state importance. I don’t have to make decisions of state importance, but the idea of ‘decision fatigue’ really resonated for me.

After maternity leave finished, I had sabbatical and the kids returned to school after summer break. While finishing off the Handbook of Diverse Economies, I had a loose routine, including a print out of what exercises I would do each day (only 15 minutes) and a work-focus period (9.30am to 2.30pm), where, when baby didn’t need to feed, my husband looked after him while I worked. Our baby got quite used to having Dad for some parts of the day and Mum for others (also at night!). Eventually, the baby could do the school run with my husband and kids and I got 9.30am to 3.30pm to focus and do what deep work I could (I used the extra time in the morning for cleaning and exercising). On Mondays, I sat with my bullet journal and planned out the tasks for the week, and tried to assign them a day so I didn’t have to make decisions in a hazy fog of not enough sleep. After 3.30pm, my husband took the older kids to any activities they might have and I spent time with the baby, then we folded the washing and prepared dinner then into the evening routine. Amazingly, the baby has pretty much just gone along with it all. There is always something interesting to look at, with three older siblings and two cats.

Getting stuff done with four children requires routine — and a sling!

Now our routine is pretty tight. We do a load or two of washing a day. I start work when the kids start school so I can walk them there from a nearby carpark where my husband drops us, and then on to work. I’m back in the office and teaching three classes. I block out teaching prep time for 2 hours before each class and that is all I have.  Baby comes in at 11am for a feed, then I meet everyone at school at 3pm and I am almost always home for the afternoons. Kids have things that have to do each day — music practice, putting away school gear, setting or clearing the table. And a set time for screen time so we don’t have to argue — I mean negotiate — about it.

In our effort to reduce decisions and ‘negotiations’ (which I find stressful, especially if I have been making them all day), we also have a meal plan. On Saturdays, we clean the house (kids have chores) and then I make a meal plan based on our expected vege box from Ooooby. From that we make a shopping list and one of us will take ALL FOUR kids to do the shopping, while the other finishes up cleaning (me) or does renovation related task (hubby). The attraction for the kids is that get to pick their own lunch from the supermarket deli, as well as do their best to convince whichever parent to buy them different cereals or snacks (yeah, nah). The kids also complain less because they know in advance what meals are coming and it’s not a surprise when they get to the table and its “disgusting”.

Even the meal planning got a bit much in terms of decision-making, so now we have a kind of routine for that!

Saturday — Kids choice
Sunday — roast OR soup (cooks while I’m at yoga)
Monday — using up stuff from vege box
Tuesday — pasta (easy after swimming lessons)
Wednesday — salad (vege box arrives with fresh stuff)
Thursday — using up stuff from vege box
Friday — Soup and homemade bread, scones or muffins

This is a big shift from our previous practice, which, because my husband is an excellent cook, was a bit on the gourmet (time-consuming) side. At any time, we might throw in the plan and do something different, and we probably do this at least once a week. But the reality is, no decisions are necessary. In our fatigue, we can just look at the plan on the fridge, and start working on it. If we need to swap half way to deal with baby needs, no problem, anyone can continue with the plan.  My teen daughter has been inspired to meal prep her own lunches and freeze them as well as prepare chia seed puddings the night before to eat for breakfast, reducing her own decision-fatigue.

So while it is completely crazy and exhausting, through a routine we do manage to get everyone fed, kids to school and a few activities for everyone, me to work, the washing done, and keep baby happy. I only wish we could get a bit more intense exercise and some gardening into the routine. I am also wondering what other words of wisdom people gave me with my eldest which were actually words of wisdom for larger families. Any other tips, anyone?

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Making my own life-work manifesto

Lately I have been feeling very disillusioned with the academic life. I mean, I’ve always intellectually known that our reach is often short, our work ignored and overlooked, and our lifestyles completely overrun by our work. But recently, I have been feeling it more, and feeling more dissatisfied about it. Then a few things happened that pushed me to become clearer about what kind of life I want to lead. Some of these things were positive: reconnecting with an aunt and uncle, achieving some work goals, having a baby, hearing Wangari Maathai and Joanna Macy interviewed for example. Some were negative: fellow blogger Rachel Held-Evans died at age 37, I became disillusioned with the reach of academic work in some recent projects, I worked instead of having full paid maternity leave. Over the last few months I have been considering what I would want to have as my legacy — either at 70 or 90 like Maathai and Macy, or in my 30s like Held-Evans.

1. I want to be a kind, warm, caring, attentive, wise person, who makes people around me feel good about themselves and at the same time, want to be better. Recently I spent some time with people who fit this description, and every time I spoke with them, I felt like fully held and heard, accepted and important without having to do anything. There are other people in my life like this, in my beautiful people collection, but I guess I hadn’t really thought about being like this. Listening to Wangari Maathai and Joanna Macy’s interviews on On Being back to back touched me deeply. Those two woman are what I want to be like when I am old, if I get to be. They are wise, grounded, generous, sharp in the smart sense, gentle, warm. Can I be like this and be an academic? I think so, since Maathai obviously was. But I don’t know if this was their goal or an outcome of focusing on what they needed to do for their other ecological missions.
2. I want to make a difference in the world beyond my interpersonal relationships and my academic work, as a writer. I have been thinking about this a lot while collaborating with others, both about what works and in what ways I want to do things differently. I am most passionate about ecological healing and the human change required for that to happen, and that has been the driving force of my studies since I was about 8 or 9 years old. I did my first speeches at school on turtles (and saving them); erosion (and deforestation); disposable nappies (and their horrific lifespans). Identifying an audience and the best way to do this is important to me, because I seem to have got stuck in a bubble of people who agree with me, and also, I feel quite disillusioned with whether being a writer actually influences anything at all. There are so many words written already, so why write more? And will anyone ever read them? These are questions I am still working out. How do I decide what is important to do for myself, rather than just doing everything other people are doing so I can feel included and therefore important?
3. I want to provide a loving, safe, organised, warm home for myself and my family, as well as meaningful life shaping experiences, leading my kids into independence in their everyday life, their relationships and their spirituality. Here I think of the earning side of my job, which is important for me to provide for my family. I could not be a full time writer in New Zealand, I believe, I need to make a regular income as the earner in our family. Which does mean continuing to take my academic progression seriously. But I also think of the kind of mother I want to be, present, and connected. And my work as an academic often works against that. Even when I am home I am thinking about other things, or doing them. I am distracted so often, and although working and organising our lives is also a way of loving and providing for them, I do prefer just enjoying being connected too. So often we often end up living a kind of mundane existence and not thinking through our short term comfort and its cost on the long term goals of our family. For example, how do we teach children about the planet, life, God, other people? What small life admin steps do we need to put in place to make these goals realities? How do I continue the great rhythms and holding patterns that we have begun? (I’m enjoying the tips from the book Simplicity Parenting at the moment)
4. I want to step up and take care of myself: body, soul, mind, spirit — because without health and wellbeing in myself, I can’t do any of the above well. This includes the cliches of setting healthy boundaries, taking responsibility for my own health even if it means not meeting someone’s immediate needs for a while, and making daily decisions that contribute to the long terms goals of being a healthy person. This actually gets easier for me the older I get, and the more children I have: there is no possible way to meet everyone’s needs before taking care of what I need to do, and there is no way anyone else is going to do it for me! However, I do easily fall into work panic patterns, where I feel so behind than even my 5 minute workouts from Sharny and Julius seem too impossible, let alone a real one hour yoga session.

That’s it. Seems pretty simple. Can I use this manifesto to help me make good decisions over the next few years and into the future? One of the steps has to been to set limits on the amount of voluntary work I do in my job (see here and here), to make space for other voluntary work in the community and for time to make our homelife nurturing for our four children. In the near future I also want to return to a regular centreing prayer/meditation practice like I had in 2017 to help with the feeling of overwhelm. Apparently it actually changes your brain!!

Thanks to Stephen Healy for suggesting I turn these thoughts into a blog post. Now everyone in the world can hold me accountable … !

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The work of "Life Admin"

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I recently read Elizabeth Emen’s 2019 book The Art of Life Admin. Well, perhaps inhaled is a better verb to describe what I did with it. I got it out of the public library on OverDrive and read it while travelling with my four kids and husband during the Easter school holidays. This travel to visit family and friends in our respective North Island hometowns is a feat which requires a considerable amount of what Emens calls life admin. For example, how do I plan and organise to get a family of 6 to and from regional airports and bus stations that have no bookable maxi taxis or car rentals that seat more than 5? Or should we attempt driving, although the cost is considerably higher to take the car across on the ferry? How do you adequately pack enough clothes and baby gear but keep to carry on only for each child, within a weight range than can reasonably lug around themselves and could fit in the back of a 7 seater car, or on their laps? How do you negotiate diets and meal times for a family of six with various allergies in someone else’s house? These are the mundane admin jobs that have been occupying my mind of late.

And this is the point, really. These mundane admin jobs are jobs and they definitely take up mental energy and real time. Becoming a family of six has required a real ‘level up’ in terms of administration, partly because the country seems to be designed for smaller families. I knew this already — I have friends with 4 or 5 kids and I know I avoid family catchups because it’s too much work to think about keeping everyone entertained and fed! Having a family spread over 13 years also requires an insane level of life admin, since at one end I’m keeping track of menstrual supplies and the other end, nappies, with all the activities in between that occupy kids. After reading Emen’s book, I have tried to get through a few bits of life admin, and to recognise life admin as a thing that requires time and energy to do — it cannot just be pushed into the margins to do whenever.

Bullet journalling has been my go to strategy at work, and I have tried to incorporate more life admin into it. I recently created a habit tracker to track my baby’s sleep and feeds over several weeks, because  I could not identify a pattern and was finding it hard to work out whether and when I could hand him over to stay at home dad for sleeps. I also have added daily life admin tasks to my to do list: calling to get quotes for windshield replacement; sorting out a box of baby clothes (or delegating this…); booking in a ropes course for my daughter’s birthday; sitting down with the family budget with my husband; picking blood test results; ordering the washing powder that doesn’t wreck the nappies; listing too-small baby items on trade me… the list is endless, but if I do one or two things a day maybe it will get less overwhelming?

Here’s some things I’ve learned so far:

1. Emens is right when she says Admin is sticky. If we start doing it we may continue doing it. But if we make it visible, we may also negotiate it. My husband had never really considered that with each of our other children I had, every 2 to 3 months, sorted all the baby clothes, stored some for future children, gave some away, found the next size up in storage, did the rounds of the other mums to get extra things I needed second hand, gave measurements of foot size and head size to crocheting and knitting relatives, purchased anything else we might need. This time round, I clearly said “this is what needs to be done, and it is not my job”. He has begun it, and done it in his own way and his own sweet time, but not my problem.
2. Which brings me to the next point: delegating requires letting go. Whether it is delegating a task to a partner, a relative, or a child, there is definitely a process of letting it go and letting it get done differently. Occasionally I have panics over this or step in (I recently went through the family budget myself after years of delegating it; I do have to clean the bath once every few months since my kids don’t really prevent the mould build up with their less-is-best cleaning methods…). But for the most part, I am enough of a reluctant organiser to be comfortable with letting things go.
3. Organising doesn’t make you friends or win you appreciation. My kids hate me on Saturday, when I oversee chores, meal planning, food purchasing. They just want me to do it invisibly and not to have to be involved. But they each have to choose a meal that fits with our vege supplies, and those that can write have to help write the shopping list. It’s kinda sweetened by being allowed to choose something for lunch from the supermarket deli but not really. My spouse appreciates this intellectually, but also doesn’t really enjoy having to make decisions about blind colours and insulation qualities, or pay out money for ring resizing or insurance.
4. Which brings me to my next point: life admin actually costs money. I have realised as I have been getting my to do list nailed that it costs more. I realised that sometimes I am putting things off because I don’t actually have enough money: I got my wedding rings resized and my great grandmother’s ring repaired and it cost more than $300. Ouch. I organised quotes for the windscreen and realised we couldn’t afford it right now. I actually think we have saved a lot of money over the years by just avoiding these things….but then, meal planning and so on probably saves us money. And making sure we get better mortgage rates. And applying for state entitlements like Working for Families.
5. The more stretched your budget is, the more life admin required. The amount of energy I put into working out a way to be at home with my baby and still get an income for the rest of the family was alot. The amount of time to get the cheapest deal or to do some household renovation task yourself is huge. The time and energy planning for ‘fun’ activities with no funds is not small. And also, people want more from you. Applying for community services cards or the like involves form filling and bureaucrat chasing admin, for example. Rich people don’t do that.

It’s worth it though. Getting stuff done does make me feel good, and competent and adult. And exhausted. It really does never end. But trying to cultivate some enjoyment in crossing things off my to do list makes up for the energy required to actually think of a to do list. What I want to explore next is the ways that this kind of life admin is involved in everyday environmental activism.

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Academic Maternity Leave : The shame game

It is a milestone week. My baby is now past the six week mark. We saw our wonderful wise midwife for the last time professionally and were transferred into the care of our medical centre. I took my son for his vaccinations, somewhat more anxiously than with my older three: a Facebook friend had called people who vaccinate imbeciles and could not understand how people could be so wilfully blind. Which for some reason hit whatBrene Brown calls my shame triggers.

For Brown, shame emerges when we are confronted with other people’s perceptions of us that differ radically from how we would like to be perceived. Motherhood is a huge shame trigger for many women, and so is work performance. I’ve posted previously about a major work fail that happened when I was distracted with mothering, but my friend’s comment hit a different note.

Perhaps it is because I am a researcher that accusations of being an imbecile over a matter of health research grates so bad. What if I am not as good a researcher as I believe, despite having access to all the published scientific papers and Cochrane reviews, despite having an intimate knowledge of the politics and economics of research funding, despite teaching ethics and knowledge production to science students? I know there is vaccine injury and what the risks are compared to the risks of disease in the work I do and the places I travel with my family. I have witnessed the ongoing struggles of children who had whooping cough as babies and I have lived in places in the world where the infant mortality rate approaches 25%, from almost entirely preventable childhood illnesses. I have heard from parents whose children seemed to begin to display symptoms of autism around the time of vaccination and I’ve heard the stories of autistic folk who cannot understand why people think autism is worse than tetanus or hepatitis. I have heard people ridicule anti-vaxxers and heard people ridicule vaccinating parents. I have seen the internet articles arguing against the efficacy of vaccines and doctors revealing the conspiracy and indeed they have an internal logic that appeals to my anti capitalist tendencies. How do I sort through a wealth of information of varying quality on a matter of deep personal importance without becoming susceptible to shame?

I’ve done my best and decided to vaccinate. But I hovered over my baby for two days through a fever then an upset tummy, cuddled him through all his sleeps while editing a student’s thesis with one hand. My maternity leave draws to an end and I must find a way to continue my work alongside mothering, both if which are neverending sources of both pride and shame. When I forget to do a work thing or do it less than perfect I imagine everyone sees me as totally flaky. When I don’t turn up for a parent thing or social thing or I make a parenting decision different from my peers, I imagine everyone sees me as a hard-assed working mother neglecting her children’s school and social lives.

The reality is, academic maternity leave is not really leave at all and especially not a holiday from ever present work and mothering shame. Brene Brown suggests that we build resistance to shame, however, by recognising the triggers the developing critical awareness and compassion. Fortunately for academics, our job is critical awareness and fortunately for me, a large part of my job is about critical awareness of the social, political and economic systems that shape women’s lives. So here I am again, fourth time round, still analysing and researching myself… perhaps this is why maternity leave can never really be leave.

You can read some of my earlier publications on academia and maternity by using the tags to navigate.

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Blogging by phone

So Boochani wrote his award winning book on WhatsApp. And I have been blogging so irregularly: firstly because I have way too many writing deadlines and even when I have wanted to blog, I worry what people expecting writing from me will think if I am wasting time blogging! But the other reason that writing and blogging both have been delayed is that I am spending most of my time holding my newborn baby, born December 2018. Breastfeeding, rocking, changing, burping, holding quietly while sleeping, sometimes transferring to bassinet and beginning again — these are the daily activities of my arms. This is the first baby I have had while owning a good smartphone, however.

As is usual with all my four kids, I have read a lot while feeding. But this time I have read books on kindle, overdrive and Google play rather than print. I have tried to read student work and do editorial work, but it doesn’t work… firstly the documents don’t have free flow text so they are awful to read, and secondly, editing and commenting is nightmare on this tiny screen. Good for one hand, because it is lightweight, but really editing and writing are two handed jobs for me.

And then of course, when I do have two hands free, I have this little bundle of cuteness wanting to interact with me, only me, who, for the not insignificant reason of giving birth and being source of sustenance, is the most amazing person on the planet to this wee guy. So the conundrum… productive two handedness doesn’t come easily in this stage of life.

How do you look away from those eyes?

But does writing really have to be two-handed typing at speed in a quiet room no distractions? Boochani’s achievements suggest to me that perhaps not. After all, I write plenty of emails by phone, feeding on the couch, surrounded by nappies to fold and children to watch, doing what I can with one hand free. And don’t even remind me how many tweets and Facebook comments I have whipped off in my hours scrolling social media.

I am writing this on my phone, with my thumb, right now. It is not fast and it is not my preference, and it will no doubt be ridden with errors. But if I think of you, dear reader, as a Facebook friend or member if my circle of Twitterati, perhaps it doesn’t matter. The important thing will be to keep writing, even if the medium is smart phone. Because there is one thing I have learned in parenting four kids while working, and that is take every opportunity to do what you need or want to do, whether it is exercise, shower or write. If you wait for the ideal conditions it will never happen!

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Three Words 2018: Less, Dwell, Write

More not less: birthmat writing and dwelling in worry was not what I envisioned this year!

In the last few years I have been choosing some focus words for each year, rather than a New Year’s Resolution. In 2018, after reflecting on the words and things I learned in 2017, I decided on the word ‘less’, ‘dwell’ and ‘write’. Of all the years I’ve been doing this, it feels like this year was the biggest fail — it seemed like I managed to do the opposite of each these!

Firstly, ‘less’. The idea here was to think carefully about my committments for work and home and life and to do less, better. Instead, I somehow managed to visit and make films in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Australia, Italy, Ireland and China, read and edit some 60 odd chapters for the Handbook of Diverse Economies, resubmit my book manuscript after editor’s comments, continue to actively supervise 8 PhD students while on the panels for another 2, attend 3 conferences while organising and chairing an upcoming one in Christchurch, begin major renovations on our home (still underway), assist two PhD students to submit, take the family to Australia for an entire school term (and budget for that from my travel allowances), run and do fieldwork for my first funded research project as Principal Investigator, settle my son into his first year at school, oh, and yes, get pregnant with my fourth (!) child — born mid December after a month of false starts or practice labour. I also added in doing some personal training, seeing a counsellor, participating in a trial on maternal mental health and nutrition, and a more regular meditation or centreing prayer practice — you know, just to cope. Add to that the usual things of committees, teaching loads, board memberships, article writing and reviewing (more about that later), co-ordinating and pastoral care for postgraduate students in my department, attending school events for my older two children, singing in a church band, a large garden, writing off our car, a few trips to the North Island to see family members, some sick.

I don’t think this qualifies as doing less. Or perhaps, the only thing I was doing less of was meeting friends and meeting deadlines.

Secondly, ‘dwell’. The idea behind this was to really live in the moment and appreciate what was going on around me, to focus and dwell in the thing I was doing rather than getting worried about the future or ruminating over past mistakes or hurts. Instead, particularly after I found I was pregnant (while travelling in Bhutan!), and subsequently the inadequate maternity leave at my institution, I have been worrying and scheming about the future. As well as analysing and ruminating on how I got myself into this sort of situation. I haven’t been home enough with my kids to dwell easily with them or just sit and appreciate their presence, and while I have been practicing meditation and centreing prayer (a kind of dwelling in silence), it is of course only for some 20 minutes a day. Eventually, I managed to organise finances for the next year that gives me some 9 weeks of paid maternity leave plus being able to work from home on sabbatical for the first semester of the year (phew). Although I’m still worried about coping with a new baby, at least we won’t get our house repossessed by the bank, and my husband can take care of the other children and the baby as much as possible while I continue editing the handbook. On the plus side, once baby Casimir arrived I was able to sit and dwell on newborn cuddles for the last few weeks of the year while everyone looked after us.

Thirdly, ‘write’. To be fair, there is some writing going on, but most of my time this year has been based on reading other people’s writing and giving feedback. This includes editing duties and supervisory duties as well as marking. On the plus side, I somehow managed to get my book back in to the editor (a few mini 2-day writing retreats in Kaikoura helped there, as well as half my time in Italy was focused on this in the wonderful monastery at Bolsena), and to co-author a few pieces with wonderful people. One of these pieces I managed to rewrite from scratch (some 4000 words) in a single day! Yet, in the end, a sense of failure here too because this was really supposed to be my main focus this year, in particular writing for the forthcoming Handbook of Diverse Economies.

Ironically, one of the things I did near the end of the year was to run a workshop at my daughter’s alternative school on time management and bullet journalling. I don’t know how I would have got through the year without bullet journalling, but still, it is very ironic that my own goals for doing less, dwelling in the moment, and writing more have not really been achieved this year! A lot of other stuff has, however. The question now is, if you fail your three words, do you repeat them next year? Or does it indicate a misfit with the realities of life?

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The Invisible Gender of Deep Work

A book review of Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, 2016, London: Little Brown.

It’s no secret that many of us find it difficult to find space to do the deep thinking that we need to push forward our work — our paid work, but also our self-work, or the work we want to do to for a personal project. Cal Newport, like many others, connects this with our constant connectivity and the dearth of focused quiet time we might clear in our lives each day. Indeed, many of my readers will be accessing this blog post via Facebook or Twitter (around 80% of you do so), and you may have clicked on this link while standing in a queue, waiting for an event to start, or even while distractedly listening to your kids tell you about a random dream they had last night. Some of you may have clicked on this because you got to a tricky bit in your academic writing work and decided to ‘have a break’ by scrolling through your feed.

Well, this is the kind of behaviour Newport is arguing pathologically reduces our ability to focus. And he is not alone. Indeed, there isn’t a week that goes by when my Facebook or Twitter feeds do not show a research article explaining the impact of social media on our ability to focus. My favourite news site, The Conversation, shows up 4 pages of articles when you search for Social Media,  many of them on social media addiction, the social consequences for teens, and the effects of increasing distractedness. But it is not just social media that is distracting, Newport lists a whole area of work he describes as ‘shallow work’:

Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

It is not hard to see that this entails almost all administrative tasks and indeed, most care-work too. He contrasts this with deep work:

Deep work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

For those of us who are academics, this sounds like heaven — imagine distraction free time to work on our writing and research — or even for teaching preparation. Newport’s basic argument is that we should intentionally make time for Deep Work and contain the amount of time Shallow Work takes up in our professional lives.

Firstly, I will say that on principle I agree with Newport completely. I find the 50+ emails I get each day completely overwhelming and distracting and both anger and anxiety producing. It is easy to whip off a quick email or cc someone into something FYI, but each of those emails appears equally in line with super important emails, and must be dealt with somehow. If I answered every email I got every day, I would never get anything else done. I agree that we need to shift our ‘hub’ outside of our inbox, and more intentionally structure our days around the work we need to do to produce value.

This is all good and obvious advice, and has been floating around academic circles in a variety of ways for years: my number one favourite article on organising the academic life is The Awesomest Seven Year Post Doc: Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the tenure track academic life;  The Thesis Whisperer has a whole category for ‘Getting Things Done’ that keeps us up to date with planning and organisational strategies including time blocking for deep work; Alison Miller’s Finish your dissertation: How to Overcome Psychological Barriers, Get Results, and Move on With Your Life set me up with most of these concepts during my doctoral study years (completed while having two children and a full time job). Indeed, I even learned some of this in a session on study skills in my last year of high school, and from subscribing to ‘The Fly Lady’ in the early 2000s in an effort to get my housework under control. (I wonder if you have noticed what I have done here? Did you notice all these women thinking and writing about this issue?).

And this brings me to the niggling annoyance with reading Newport’s book. On the one hand, I want to give it to every graduate student I supervise and say ‘HERE. THIS. DO THIS.’ But on the other hand, it is distressing to see that Newport’s book is a particularly masculinist take on productivity (see also this review post on Thesis Whisperer). I think I’d feel better if the book was called ‘Deep work for men’ and just left it at that, and we all used my other sources which are more applicable to both men and women. What exactly do I mean by ‘masculinist’?  I mean, a view of reality that is primarily based in the male experience but presented as universal — and to this we could no doubt add ‘white’ and ‘middle class’.

My concerns are based around the following: Newport ignore’s women’s deep work; Newport ignores power relations; and Newport creates a false dichotomy that devalues care-work. I’ll finish with some thoughts on how we can enable deep work on a more collective level.

Newport Ignores Women’s Deep Work

There are only about three examples in the whole book of women doing deep work, which a) perpetuates the stereotype that women are better at shallow work and are not cut out for this kind of work and b) immediately makes me suspicious of who is doing the ‘shallow’ care work that enables these men to focus on their deep work. Who looked after Carl Jung’s family while he was building his house in the woods? I immediately googled ‘was Carl Jung married?’ and look what I found on Wikipedia within five seconds.

Emma Jung (born Emma Rauschenbach, 30 March 1882 – 27 November 1955) was a Swiss Jungian analyst and author. She married Carl Gustav Jung, financing and helping him to make him the prominent psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology that he became, and had five children with him. Enduring his infidelities and mood swings, she was his “intellectual editor” to the end of her life.

This made me very, very sad. I’ve never heard of Emma Jung. I imagine she was at home trying to manage her own intellectual deep work while also looking after the five kids while Carl was off in the woods building his tower and doing his deep work. Lucky Carl. Too bad Emma. Which leads me to my second point:

Newport Ignores Power Relations

Some people are able to do longer stretches of deep work more easily than others. These are normally people who have someone to take care of much of the shallow work in their lives. For example, married men (research shows women in heterosexual relationships still do the majority of domestic organisational work).  Or just men — in academic departments, academic women seem to take on a larger administrative load too. Why is this? Well, for one thing, the hard nose rules Newport recommends are more difficult for women to implement without negative effect. When Newport or the MIT professors he cites turn down an administrative task that contributes to the collective, who takes it up? Who is the coordinator for the graduate students? Who organises the learning and teaching committee? I recently went to a College of Science wide meeting of postgraduate coordinators, and bar one person, ALL of us were women, in a college/faculty where the majority are men.

This is not Newport’s fault — and Newport is obviously not a social scientist so hasn’t been trained to think about power relations. But still, it’s there. Do we choose to do these jobs and therefore just need to ‘try harder’ with prioritising ‘Deep Work’? Maybe, but I’m guessing that it’s because the standards men and women are held to are different. My husband and I often joke that if he turns up to drop the kids off at school and their faces are unwashed and hair unbrushed, people are like: “oh, it’s so great you make time for your kids”. If I was to drop them off like that, people would be more like “Are you drunk?”. The standards imposed on women with regards to so-called shallow work are higher. Newport and others who are white middle class men might have a bit of an advantage when drawing a hard boundary line. People expect male professors to be useless with communication and take it as an example of their intelligence. People expect women to be responsive and caring, and if they come across as useless communicators, well, it’s seen as ditsy or distracted. If they are hard-nosed about boundaries, especially with regards to family life, they can be seen as ‘uncommitted to the job’. Which brings me to my next point.

Newport Creates a False Dichotomy

I fully agree with Newport’s goal to increase and set aside time for Deep Work. But I don’t think it is helpful to do this by calling everything else ‘Shallow Work’. To lump social media in with care-work is really not accurate or helpful. Indeed, as philosopher Sara Ruddick argues, care-work and mothering can produce a particular kind of cognitive style that consists of non-dual and concretely productive thinking. This is the opposite of ‘masculinist’ thinking, which is often dualistic and based on strict boundaries between categories (see Gillian Rose’s work for more about this). I might cheekily suggest that if Newport was doing more regular care-work in and amongst his deep work, he too might be able to develop a less dualistic style of deep thought (I have no idea what his care-load is, but he talks about finishing work at 5.30pm and spending time with his kids which implies he isn’t doing his academic work in and around them and someone else cares for them until 5.30pm).

Perhaps we could talk in the affirmative about enabling deep work, without degrading everything else to shallow work. Indeed, the seeds of this are in Newport’s book, when he describes a number of different philosophies of deep work scheduling: The Monastic Philosophy (total separation from society), The Bimodal Philosophy (separating time periods into deep work retreats and everyday life), The Rhythmic Philosophy (creating a daily or weekly rhythm that allows for deep work to be scheduled), and the Journalistic Philosophy (intentionally taking what time you have in the interstices to do deep work — I would rename this one the ‘Part-time Mother-Worker Philosophy’). Except for the Monastic mode, the others all recognise the fact that deep work is just one part of life, and helps us to think about making space for it in and among the other kinds of important work we do.

Beyond Deep Work for Men

My good friend is finishing her PhD in Chemistry. She has five children, one of whom was born during her PhD. She knows the value of deep work, and structures her time so that when she gets a couple of solid hours free to work, she really focuses and gets the work done. No Facebook, no media sites or news. Very little emailing.

One of my PhD students has two children, and her husband is at home with them a few days a week. On the days that she has to do her work, she is ultra efficient. She completed her proposal and confirmation of candidature a few months into her enrolment, and is moving forward on her PhD at a pace unprecedented in our department.

In the final year of writing my PhD, I had my second child. Once she was around 5 months old, I arranged to have someone pick me up and take me to university at 8am every day. I then had four hours before I had to be home for the next breastfeed. I did as much work on my thesis in those four hours than when I worked fulltime. Perhaps more.

My point? Well, this style of work is a) familiar to mothers with time-scarcity since we have no choice but to focus intensely in the hours we have away from our children and b) relies on the carework of others oftentimes — either others taking up administrative loads we cannot meet due to our stretched schedules, or others taking up carework for a period to free us up.

To make the call for deep work relevant beyond the individual and the man, we need to think about how to enable deep work collectively. My next post will look at a number of collective enabling strategies for deep work.

Acknowledgements: I would like to acknowledge Travis Dombroski for folding all the washing (noncognitively demanding, logistical-style work that does not produce value) while simultaneously entertaining the three kids (distracted, but perhaps not easily replaced) while I wrote this blog post in bed on a public holiday with the door mostly shut. He also did the dishes and hung out the washing, he adds.  I dedicate this post to Cal Newport’s partner.

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The Invisible Gender of "Deep Work"

A book review of Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a  Distracted World, 2016, London: Little Brown.

It’s no secret that many of us find it difficult to find space to do the deep thinking that we need to push forward our work — our paid work, but also our self-work, or the work we want to do to for a personal project. Cal Newport, like many others, connects this with our constant connectivity and the dearth of focused quiet time we might clear in our lives each day. Indeed, many of my readers will be accessing this blog post via Facebook or Twitter (around 80% of you do so), and you may have clicked on this link while standing in a queue, waiting for an event to start, or even while distractedly listening to your kids tell you about a random dream they had last night. Some of you may have clicked on this because you got to a tricky bit in your academic writing work and decided to ‘have a break’ by scrolling through your feed.

Well, this is the kind of behaviour Newport is arguing pathologically reduces our ability to focus. And he is not alone. Indeed, there isn’t a week that goes by when my Facebook or Twitter feeds do not show a research article explaining the impact of social media on our ability to focus. My favourite news site, The Conversation, shows up 4 pages of articles when you search for Social Media,  many of them on social media addiction, the social consequences for teens, and the effects of increasing distractedness. But it is not just social media that is distracting, Newport lists a whole area of work he describes as ‘shallow work’:

Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate.

It is not hard to see that this entails almost all administrative tasks and indeed, most care-work too. He contrasts this with deep work:

Deep work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

For those of us who are academics, this sounds like heaven — imagine distraction free time to work on our writing and research — or even for teaching preparation. Newport’s basic argument is that we should intentionally make time for Deep Work and contain the amount of time Shallow Work takes up in our professional lives.

Firstly, I will say that on principle I agree with Newport completely. I find the 50+ emails I get each day completely overwhelming and distracting and both anger and anxiety producing. It is easy to whip off a quick email or cc someone into something FYI, but each of those emails appears equally in line with super important emails, and must be dealt with somehow. If I answered every email I got every day, I would never get anything else done. I agree that we need to shift our ‘hub’ outside of our inbox, and more intentionally structure our days around the work we need to do to produce value.

This is all good and obvious advice, and has been floating around academic circles in a variety of ways for years: my number one favourite article on organising the academic life is The Awesomest Seven Year Post Doc: Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the tenure track academic life;  The Thesis Whisperer has a whole category for ‘Getting Things Done’ that keeps us up to date with planning and organisational strategies including time blocking for deep work; Alison Miller’s Finish your dissertation: How to Overcome Psychological Barriers, Get Results, and Move on With Your Life set me up with most of these concepts during my doctoral study years (completed while having two children and a full time job). Indeed, I even learned some of this in a session on study skills in my last year of high school, and from subscribing to ‘The Fly Lady’ in the early 2000s in an effort to get my housework under control. (I wonder if you have noticed what I have done here? Did you notice all these women thinking and writing about this issue?).

And this brings me to the niggling annoyance with reading Newport’s book. On the one hand, I want to give it to every graduate student I supervise and say ‘HERE. THIS. DO THIS.’ But on the other hand, it is distressing to see that Newport’s book is a particularly masculinist take on productivity. I think I’d feel better if the book was called ‘Deep work for men’ and just left it at that, and we all used my other sources which are more applicable to both men and women. What exactly do I mean by ‘masculinist’?  I mean, a view of reality that is primarily based in the male experience but presented as universal — and to this we could no doubt add ‘white’ and ‘middle class’.

My concerns are based around the following: Newport ignore’s women’s deep work; Newport ignores power relations; and Newport creates a false dichotomy that devalues care-work. I’ll finish with some thoughts on how we can enable deep work on a more collective level.

Newport Ignores Women’s Deep Work

There are only about three examples in the whole book of women doing deep work, which a) perpetuates the stereotype that women are better at shallow work and are not cut out for this kind of work and b) immediately makes me suspicious of who is doing the ‘shallow’ care work that enables these men to focus on their deep work. Who looked after Carl Jung’s family while he was building his house in the woods? I immediately googled ‘was Carl Jung married?’ and look what I found on Wikipedia within five seconds.

Emma Jung (born Emma Rauschenbach, 30 March 1882 – 27 November 1955) was a Swiss Jungian analyst and author. She married Carl Gustav Jung, financing and helping him to make him the prominent psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology that he became, and had five children with him. Enduring his infidelities and mood swings, she was his “intellectual editor” to the end of her life.

This made me very, very sad. I’ve never heard of Emma Jung. I imagine she was at home trying to manage her own intellectual deep work while also looking after the five kids while Carl was off in the woods building his tower and doing his deep work. Lucky Carl. Too bad Emma. Which leads me to my second point:

Newport Ignores Power Relations

Some people are able to do longer stretches of deep work more easily than others. These are normally people who have someone to take care of much of the shallow work in their lives. For example, married men (research shows women in heterosexual relationships still do the majority of domestic organisational work).  Or just men — in academic departments, academic women seem to take on a larger administrative load too. Why is this? Well, for one thing, the hard nose rules Newport recommends are more difficult for women to implement without negative effect. When Newport or the MIT professors he cites turn down an administrative task that contributes to the collective, who takes it up? Who is the coordinator for the graduate students? Who organises the learning and teaching committee? I recently went to a College of Science wide meeting of postgraduate coordinators, and bar one person, ALL of us were women, in a college/faculty where the majority are men.

This is not Newport’s fault — and Newport is obviously not a social scientist so hasn’t been trained to think about power relations. But still, it’s there. Do we choose to do these jobs and therefore just need to ‘try harder’ with prioritising ‘Deep Work’? Maybe, but I’m guessing that it’s because the standards men and women are held to are different. My husband and I often joke that if he turns up to drop the kids off at school and their faces are unwashed and hair unbrushed, people are like: “oh, it’s so great you make time for your kids”. If I was to drop them off like that, people would be more like “Are you drunk?”. The standards imposed on women with regards to so-called shallow work are higher. Newport and others who are white middle class men might have a bit of an advantage when drawing a hard boundary line. People expect male professors to be useless with communication and take it as an example of their intelligence. People expect women to be responsive and caring, and if they come across as useless communicators, well, it’s seen as ditsy or distracted. If they are hard-nosed about boundaries, especially with regards to family life, they can be seen as ‘uncommitted to the job’. Which brings me to my next point.

Newport Creates a False Dichotomy

I fully agree with Newport’s goal to increase and set aside time for Deep Work. But I don’t think it is helpful to do this by calling everything else ‘Shallow Work’. To lump social media in with care-work is really not accurate or helpful. Indeed, as philosopher Sara Ruddick argues, care-work and mothering can produce a particular kind of cognitive style that consists of non-dual and concretely productive thinking. This is the opposite of ‘masculinist’ thinking, which is often dualistic and based on strict boundaries between categories (see Gillian Rose’s work for more about this). I might cheekily suggest that if Newport was doing more regular care-work in and amongst his deep work, he too might be able to develop a less dualistic style of deep thought (I have no idea what his care-load is, but he talks about finishing work at 5.30pm and spending time with his kids which implies he isn’t doing his academic work in and around them and someone else cares for them until 5.30pm).

Perhaps we could talk in the affirmative about enabling deep work, without degrading everything else to shallow work. Indeed, the seeds of this are in Newport’s book, when he describes a number of different philosophies of deep work scheduling: The Monastic Philosophy (total separation from society), The Bimodal Philosophy (separating time periods into deep work retreats and everyday life), The Rhythmic Philosophy (creating a daily or weekly rhythm that allows for deep work to be scheduled), and the Journalistic Philosophy (intentionally taking what time you have in the interstices to do deep work — I would rename this one the ‘Part-time Mother-Worker Philosophy’). Except for the Monastic mode, the others all recognise the fact that deep work is just one part of life, and helps us to think about making space for it in and among the other kinds of important work we do.

Beyond Deep Work for Men

My good friend is finishing her PhD in Chemistry. She has five children, one of whom was born during her PhD. She knows the value of deep work, and structures her time so that when she gets a couple of solid hours free to work, she really focuses and gets the work done. No Facebook, no media sites or news. Very little emailing.

One of my PhD students has two children, and her husband is at home with them a few days a week. On the days that she has to do her work, she is ultra efficient. She completed her proposal and confirmation of candidature a few months into her enrolment, and is moving forward on her PhD at a pace unprecedented in our department.

In the final year of writing my PhD, I had my second child. Once she was around 5 months old, I arranged to have someone pick me up and take me to university at 8am every day. I then had four hours before I had to be home for the next breastfeed. I did as much work on my thesis in those four hours than when I worked fulltime. Perhaps more.

My point? Well, this style of work is a) familiar to mothers with time-scarcity since we have no choice but to focus intensely in the hours we have away from our children and b) relies on the carework of others oftentimes — either others taking up administrative loads we cannot meet due to our stretched schedules, or others taking up carework for a period to free us up.

To make the call for deep work relevant beyond the individual and the man, we need to think about how to enable deep work collectively. My next post will look at a number of collective enabling strategies for deep work.

Acknowledgements: I would like to acknowledge Travis Dombroski for folding all the washing (noncognitively demanding, logistical-style work that does not produce value) while simultaneously entertaining the three kids (distracted, but perhaps not easily replaced) while I wrote this blog post in bed on a public holiday with the door mostly shut. He also did the dishes and hung out the washing, he adds.  I dedicate this post to Cal Newport’s partner.

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*Important* Come on along to The Black Rider

My daughter emailed me from school with *important* *urgent* in the subject line, asking me to book her tickets to see The BlackRider: The Casting of The Magic Bullets. She had told me about this play earlier in the week and had been surprised that although I knew nothing about the play, I did know all the songs from the album The Black Rider by Tom Waits. I admit, it’s always weird when  your mum knows your music, but I must admit, I was equally surprised to learn my eleven-year-old daughter was into Tom Waits, in particular, the noir album The Black Rider. 

All can be explained, however, since the play itself features the clarinet in the musical score, and my daughter and her friend had been trying to develop a clarinet/piano duet of ‘Just the right bullets’ in their self-directed music class at their alternative school, where, as her friend quipped, “everyone’s so weird that weird is normal”. (I concur. I visited the other day at lunchtime and saw a boy strolling sedately in a top hat and a girl dressed in a unicorn t-shirt galloping around the quad. No one batted an eyelid.) I wasn’t so sure that a play featuring the music of The Black Rider was going to be suitable for eleven-year-olds just out of primary school, but my daughter’s friend had been at all the rehearsals, and tonight’s performance was especially for school-age young adults. 

So, newly united in our fascination with Tom Wait’s music, we joined her friend at The Free Theatre for the NZ adaptation of The Black Rider, directed by Peter Falkenberg and featuring noir country singer and troubadour Delaney Davidson. From the first few moments of interaction, the cast were incredible: those on the door were already in character, faces painted white and black, moving jerkily like puppets. The stage was eerily lit and sloped impossibly towards the audience, punctuated with poles that mimicked the trees of a German forest — but also handily provided something to hold on to for the cast as they acted on this unusual surface. As the music began, and Delaney Davidson launched into the opening ‘song’ of ‘The Lucky Day Overture’, my face broke into the hugest grin of enjoyment that stayed firmly fixed as the cast went straight on to the title song ‘The Black Rider’. On the one hand, I am transported back in time to my teenage self, cross-legged on the floor of the hippy neighbour’s house, as I explore their tape collection while the duly baby-sat kids slept soundly. Before smart phones and ipads, when all you had to do when you baby sat was go through the music collection of your employers, and do your homework of course. That is where and when I discovered The Black Rider, and I remember the fascination and enjoyment with which I heard something that was nothing like anything I had listened to before, or since (except, perhaps, for some similarly wacky songs in Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy album).

But the grin was not just in place because of nostalgia — the pieces were just so brilliantly performed, with Pegleg/Davidson’s crazed face matched only by the craziness of the lyrics, the set, the sound, and the puppet-like movements of the entire cast around him, and of course the ‘magic’ of the tiny curtained cubicle from which and entire cast emerges and disappears. The plot is summarised in its entirety in this piece, with Pegleg – the devil – manipulating the desires and characters of the cast for his own evil and pointless amusement. The play is based on a German folk tale, with a wonderful piece of opera in the middle performed by Emma Johnston as Kätchen, apparently based on an opera based on the same folk tale, and an even more powerful performance by Aaron Hapuku as Wilhelm in an adaptation of a scene, where he breaks into Te Reo Māori in his deepest distress. 

The grin leaves my face, of course, in these and other places, because the themes of the play are the crushing and impossible expectations of others and the power of addiction. I can see why this *is* an appropriate play for teenagers, because those themes are timeless. In attentive silence, we are serenaded by Pegleg, in an achingly beautiful reindition of ‘November’ (is it just me, or does it feel like Davidson/Pegleg looks into your soul as he sings this?). We hear the desires of the parents Bertram (George Parker) and Anne (Greta Bond) as they argue about whether their daughter should marry a pen-pushing clerk or Robert-the-hunting-boy (delightfully played by Marian McCurdy, in a form of over-the-top manliness that perhaps only a female actor could portray, reminding us of the fact these behaviours indiciated ‘manliness’ are learned). We see Kätchen and Wilhelm fly around the stage as they sing of their love. We see Wilhelm give in to the pressures of hunting-style ‘manliness’ and seek to prove himself. At this lowest moment of self-esteem, we see Pegleg enter with his sly offer of magic bullets. We see Wilhelm revel in his new powers, and the depths of despair when the bullets are finished. We see him beg and plead in deepest shame and humilation as he asks for that 7th bullet, the one which will belong to Pegleg. We see, in the end, the devastation wrought by that bullet.

 At some point, I forget when, Bertram makes an appearance down in the audience — a kindly father figure played by George Parker, and moralises a bit with the teens. I don’t know if this is part of the normal performance, but it breaks the tension, and provides some space for reflection — he says, ‘you might think you can handle marijuana, but then it leads to heroin and you can’t get out’, among other things, bringing forth the theme of addiction for an audience that might not perhaps immediately make those connections unless they have been unlucky enough to have witnessed them already.

Then the cast return to their puppet-like movements, and Pegleg sings them off stage with his insanely scary open mouthed grin (I’m pretty sure Davidson must be in pain by the end of the performance). 

And then, surprisingly, Pegleg/Davidson stands up straight and says in an ordinary unscary kiwi voice ‘Well that was nice wasn’t it, to hear all those old songs again?’. For some reason this jarring leaving of character is also comforting: the devil we imagine tempting us is sometimes just an illusion, the bargains we make can be broken, the puppet master is no master, but a monstrous mask, a puff of smoke, a fly in the ointment of healing. I think of all the times a person looms large, or an expectation looms overwhelmingly — and how often this is our own fears and self-doubt. 

What I am left with is the thought that addiction begins not with the offering of the magic bullet, no. Addiction begins when we are overwhelmed with fear and doubt, when we cannot accept ourselves as loved or fundamentally enough. When these needs are not met, when we do not know our own state as beloved, as ok, as good enough, well, it is then that magic bullets become attractive to block out all the cruel voices. 

Kindly, the cast and crew stayed on afterwards to talk to the audience, especially the drama kids and musos like mine. I found that a bit difficult — I wanted to think on what I had experienced and savour the play without meeting the actors. I never know what is appropriate to say after that kind of powerful performance — perhaps Delaney Davidson’s kiwi-understatement of ‘well that was nice wasn’t it?’ might not seem so appropriate to a group of actors and musicians who have just poured their incredible talents and energy into a couple of hours of tight performance. What could I possibly say without revealing my absolute ignorance of the craft, the play, the theatre? But for the young people, this was appreciated. They could talk clarinet and Tom Waits, top hats and fedoras, horror and noir with a bunch of people who, I suspect, were once affected in the same way by elders in their craft. 

So folks, there is one more night of the show — will you come along for a ‘gay old time’??

The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets presented by The Free Theatre has returned for the Christchurch Arts Festival. Tickets available on Eventfinda. Friday 1st September is the last show.

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