FAFO

This is on the corner of my computer.  In fact I have stickers all over my computer, which doesn't seem to be the culture of the State of Vermont...but meh. I am supremely unbothered. Until the Commissioner strolls up and directs me to start peeling them all off they stay. My Deputy Commissioner sees me a billion times a day and she is also unbothered. Emily tells me it is an "academic" thing. 

These five words ground me during meetings where I am annoyed, but trying to seem neutral. Meetings in which something that I want is being denied by the people I (State of Vermont) am paying. Quick note - If I (or any funder) is paying you two million dollars to exist and we want to implement something that is within the scope of your agreement telling me no is a surefire way to fuck around and find out.  I told a colleague that they ignore me "at their peril".

The position that I hold gives me an interesting space in which to move policy and practice. Many of these things are slow - gentle and persistent pressure applied systemically. Early Childhood people are patient and persistent by nature. Seriously, you wrangle a group of sixteen 4-year-olds for a day, or 8 infants.  Patient and Persistent. 

I thought my career pinnacle was being a tenured professor. While I absolutely loved my students and the process of teaching them to become kind and caring teachers who knew that the child is always at the center of the curriculum, the cost of that job outweighed that joy.  The energy that I had to expend was too much for me. My desire to take care of and support my students was at a steep cost to myself.  Dying in front of them for three years in a row gave them collective PTSD with every cough or every time I needed to be out.  Not a good fucking model of work life balance.

There is life after academia. A much happier life it turns out. One with actual boundaries and a real work life balance. A life in which I can effect a lot of change for child care in a small state that I love and in which I feel "normal". Wisconsin always left me feeling like I was an odd and brightly coloured bird that was misunderstood. I was too blunt, too direct, too Dawn. Too fuck around and find out.

I am back in a place where Dawn-ness is understood - maybe not all the time - but it is also not looked at askew. In Wisconsin I was told by an Associate Dean that I didn't realize how I came across and I stared in amazement. Bitch, I have lived with me for 50+ years. Do you think I have not had intimate knowledge about how I come across?

Then I quit my job.

Fuck Around and Find Out.

Flood

 I am truly trying to write here more.

My brain is wholly quieter now that the constant-ness of a child at home, and a job that was killing me has subsided. 

It's nice. 

I drive to work two days a week and it gives me time to sing to my favorite Sirius stations, or Spotify playlists all while thinking through my day ahead or day behind. I still marvel at the beauty of my home state with early morning mist coming off the intense green of late June.  I marvel at the deep blue of the afternoon sky reflecting onto the trees as I drive by now-quiet streams on small back roads. 

We all watch those streams now. The PTSD of last years flooding remains close to our skin.  I find myself holding a bit of breath when rain is forecast for multiple days. There are no guarantees that your town or city or house will not suffer next.

I was re-reading some of my older writing here and find myself marveling at that person who wrote so well, so witty.  She was fucking brilliant and hysterical. Since this blog started in 2006 it can feel like looking back into distant memories that snap back into crystal clear focus with re-reading.  It brings me back to having a seven year old and feeling the exhaustion of mothering both both ways - into her past and into her future.  As I write today, I can feel that exhaustion but it is far away and fuzzy. I am not sad about that. I have said before and will continue to say that Motherhood was terrible for my mental health. It nearly broke me and despite my fierce I-will-cut-a-bitch-while-you catch-these-fucking-hands protectiveness - it cost me.

My body continues its slowest fucking meander into Menopause ever. 54, ya'll. I am 54 and my body is not particularly ready to give up the fertility ghost. I am at the doorstep waiting to hand it over but the UPS driver never arrives. I got my first period when I was 12. I think I've donated to the cause long enough.  That being said, the symptoms of menopause do not wait at the door. 

While I can abide a lot of symptoms, it's the not sleeping through the night that gets me.  No  sleep = Dawn can easily spiral into a manic episode! I take two sleeping meds, with Ambien on stand by if I have haven't slept in 4 days. 

(As an aside, the lectures I have gotten about my Ativan and Ambien by doctors who are not my psychiatrist. YES, I know they can be addictive. No, I am not abusing them. I got lots of issues but substance abuse isn't one. Well, maybe the ibuprofen liquigels but that is in the past)

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If you've read to here you will think "Did she say June up there in the third paragraph"

Yep. Sorry. Who knows how I got distracted or by what - one of those eternal mysteries that I just live with it seems. Perimenopause has fucked with my memory in ways that I find intolerable. I would find myself forgetting words in lectures that I had given for 11 years. I stand up and walk away from something and immediately forget what I was going to get and why. Mostly it just pisses me off.  I hear that it is not uncommon.

Vermont did flood again in July on the anniversary of the 2023 flood. This followed with a flood two weeks later and then more damage a week or so later. Every time rain is forecast we all, collectively, hold our breath to see if it is just a little or it is going to turn into some destructive force. If you don't believe in climate change come to Vermont. We can show you the effects all across our state. Emily can take you on her field visits assessing damage to historic infrastructure that has simply disappeared. We can't even rebuild yet because the ground is so saturated that it simply collapses inward. Rebuilding a culvert or road to only watch it disappear with the next heavy rain is worse than the initial damage.

Let us not even discuss the amount of farmland being swept away and the yearly loss of crops in the middle of the growing season.  One farmer I know has lost ten acres between the July 2023 and July 2024 floods. 

I didn't intend to make the end of this some kind of climate change flood rant but Vermonters, while hella strong, are tired. The FEMA relief has not yet come through from 2023. The houses they said they would buy out have not been bought out and continue to flood. People have nowhere else to live because there is no housing here (insert my feelings about hedge funds buying the real estate and air bnb profiteers)- so they live in flood damaged homes or apartments with mold and the knowledge that the next flood will also come for them again.

Terrance, Emily and I are fine. We are privileged and fortunate. The inconvenience of not finding a house or land ( that is not on a newly designated flood zone) on which to build is a small discomfort compared to fellow Vermonters.

Spare them a thought.

Take to the Sea

 This time of year finds me contented. The beginning of summer with it's softness and greenness stirs something inside me that holds forth a type of promise that things will be good.

Our family tradition has become meeting in Maine for three weeks and living in the beach house at Moody Beach. My sister comes from Florida, my nephew comes from Detroit, my mother in law from Arizona. My brother and his family come from outside of Boston. It has become, for me, a time outside of time.  

The ocean rolls in and out and I look at it all day perpetually fascinated by the immensity of the sea. It is hard, when confronted by an ancient force, to focus on small problems.  I love the ocean and not in a charming way. It is terrifying and beautiful. There are nights when the tide is so high and so strong that it hits the sea wall and moves the boulders.  All of this reminds you that you, human, are so small and inconsequential that your anxieties are misplaced. 

I walk the beach after those tides and see fish, lobsters and crabs torn apart by the force of the waves. I wade up to my knees, even though the water is ice cold. I walk out on the rocks to the tide pools. I haunt the edge of the tide. I am uniquely at ease.