The Whos and the Whats

So I'm still struggling with the idea of grad school and, per my nature, am sitting around thinking and rethinking about it (no, I don't think I'm *overthinking*!) because I still don't feel like I have enough information to really decide if now is the right time or not. Delano doesn't make the best conversation partner for sussing this stuff out, I'm too distracted to really think about it while alone with both kids and too exhausted by the time at least Liam is asleep so Garvin can help me sort it out in my head (he is usually exceptionally good at that, which is one of the top ten reasons I married him. His listening skills, when he puts them to fill use, are downright sexy). So here I am, sitting in the middle seat of the minivan w D while waiting for Liam to get out of class, blogging about it on my blackberry.

I think most of what it boils down to is figuring out if getting the PhD is part of who I am or what I am, and it's feeling like a very borderline issue at the moment.

The who parts are the parts that would essentially destroy me (at least mentally for an extended period of time) if I were to lose them, or in some cases even just lessen their role in my life below a certain threshold. At this point in my life, the most obvious and primary of these is my role as parent. There is a definite minimum threshold of time I must spend with my children to maintain basic sanity (tho I am also very aware that there is a maximum too, but since I'm still nursing there's a time limit of physical comfort away from the nursling, about 6 hours at this point. Pumping doesn't help because for me it's a combined physical/mental/emotional thing once it kicks in I get very single-minded about *needing* to be with my baby). Being married to Garvin falls into this category too, as do my spiritual beliefs, ability to think to a certain depth, and take care of the most basic of my own physical needs (I found the lower limits of that one when I herniated the lumbar discs before getting preg w Liam - being unable to handle my own toileting independently for an extended period of time did BAD things to me mentally). Basically those components, when added to the basic needs of food and shelter, are needed for me to feel like *me* . They are essential to WHO I am.

Other characteristics - gender, sexual orientation, physical dis/abilities, class, race, politics, college graduate - these are fundamental aspects of WHAT I am, but if any one or several, even maybe all, were flipped somehow, I think I would still be essentially the same 'who' (that is, if somehow those changes happened now - I recognize how much many of those attributes have shaped who I have become through their constant presence growing up, just that the loss of any of them would not be devistating to me and lacking a few of them I think I could have developed as much as I am at this point, though it may have taken longer! The physical disabilities have been particularly potent teachers).

So, the question I'm still trying to figure out is: is the PhD a who or a what? One of my undergrad profs pulled me aside toward the end of my education and told me something along the lines of "people think you earn a PhD. They're wrong. You *become* a PhD. It generally takes years of graduate training to teach students to think like a PhD. You already think that way, getting a PhD will primarily be a matter of paperwork for you.". That was back in the spring of 1999. It's now 10 years later and I definately haven't stopped thinking that way - in fact it has just become more intense and pervasive. Back then I had to intentionally turn it on, now it's my default setting - I look at everything around me as data to be analyzed and interpreted, as often waking up needing to jot down a research idea as a writing or photography project one (and I've been writing and taking photographs longer than I can remember - started both before I was out of single digits age-wise, fiction and non-fiction writing, wrote first poem I think when I was 10 but I could be forgetting an earlier one, the first one I remember was about my sister who was born that year). My ability to communicate visually (which encompasses both writing and photography, and other tangental primarily visual arts I partake in) is closer to a who than a what, though I'm not sure if it's a who component because I've never had to test it - writing tools are always readily available (though I get pretty frustrated pretty fast if I have to handwrite things, my handwriting is attrociously bad because my hands cramp up, to the point I have trouble decifering it myself after a few paragraphs, and I can already type faster on my bberry than I can handwrite legibility). Photography-wise, I get grumpy without easy, ready access to a digital camera (I am very spoiled in this aspect, next month marks the 10th anniversary of the purchase of my first digital camera, and the thought of even going back to film, much less hand-drawing, is enough to make me feel slightly queasy right now). I think those aspects of my life, if suddenly made even less accessible, would at least throw me into a deep depression (as anyone who had to put up with the fallout from the hard drive crash in our main computer in October 2007 could probably tell you - I dropped out of a lot of online activities for a while then because I was just too emotionally devistated from the loss of some of the digital photographs on that drive that I hadn't had time to back up yet before the sudden crash - specifically D's church dedication and G & I renewing our vows, both a month before the crash - to the point it set off a major Fibromyalgia flare from the stress and I couldn't deal with any issues outside my household for a few months from the bad health spiral - didn't help that G was also stressed from grad classes he was taking and the developmental points the kids were at and lots of other mental and physical stressers).

I also have always committed myself to living a life I won't regret later. A big part of this is from spending so much of my childhood with mysterious medical symptoms that were not clearly diagnosed and a mother who tended to catastrophize the symptoms in front of me enough that I did sometimes wonder if it might be something terminal. Since the doctors took years to figure it out (the full puzzle as I now understand it wasn't put together until I was a few years out of college when a physiatrist off-handedly mentioned that I was clearly hypermobile and that the body mechanics involved were triggering myofascial pain, which was likely more of what I was dealing with that Fibromyalgia per se, so we finally worked out that the hypermobility, which I was born with, set me up for fascia and muscle issues, which triggered the Fibromyalgia, which triggered the chronic fatigue, which triggered the immune issues, which doesn't help the ear infection issues, which triggers the audio processing issues - elegant how it all works together, eh?) I came to the decision when I was in my early teens that I wasn't going to waste my limited energy living life in a way that I might regret later, so I've had the thought of "how would I likely feel about this decision on my deathbed?" as a guide much longer than your average never-terminally-ill 30-something (to the point I sometimes get mistaken for a senior citizen online), and it's the first thought I have about any decision that will have obvious ramifications lasting beyond the next moment. Not that I don't sometimes still make bad decisions, but at least they're not made lightly so I forgive myself for them ;) one regret at this point is that I didn't go straight into head school from undergrad, but then G might not have become a teacher and that is so clearly his calling that it lessens the regret I have about not earning my advanced degree already.

So, on my deathbed, will I regret if I never earn a PhD? Due to the lack of ability to conduct some of the research in my head that I think has significant potential to better the lives of many people and lessen suffering, yes. I think I would. However, that still doesn't answer if NOW is the right time to start, as the timing affects my children and they are too young to voice their opinion (and, I definately feel that I WOULD regret not having at least one more child, likely more - I somehow feel like I am "supposed" to have two daughters, to the point that it feels almost like they're missing sometimes because they're not conceived yet). I haven't been able to get clear answers/ideas of how much on-campus time will be involved (I know full-time is 3, 3 credit hour courses plus a 1hr/wk seminar, but there is also a fellowship involved to have tuition covered in full and I don't know anything about that beyond the expectation of 20hrs/wk of work -don't know if the hours are flexible, if telecommuting is possible, etc, which makes it difficult for me to figure out if my health can tolerate it with the added demands of mothering small children, and that gets me right back to the only part that REALLY scares me, that I might drop the ball as a mother by pursuing the degree now). I inquired about going part-time at least to start, to make sure my health can tolerate it beforre jumping to full-time, but the answer I got was that would have to be entirely self-funded and that's just not an option (unless some independantly wealthy person I'm unaware of is reading this and wants to find my degree), on a teacher's salary and with the extra classes G has had to take for licensure, we're still paying on existing student loans and can't take on more, especially ones that don't immediately increase job security or employability (I haven't the foggiest clue as to my chances of earning enough to pay back the loans upon completion, especially being totally unwilling to relocate - which plays large in my lack of interest in tenure track. All I really want us to be affilliated enough to do my research and teach some - I really do love teaching and miss it - I don't really care about much beyond that, and if I can hook up with other researchers at more prestigious universities for that part, I'd likely be quite happy teaching at a community college. Not against the idea of some public speaking gigs either as I rather enjoy public speaking - one of my other anomalies is a total lack of fear of public speaking).

Anyway, I'm still feeling very conflicted about this and have no idea how to sort it all out beyond writing it here so I can examine it more outside my head. If anyone has any advice/input/perspective to share, please comment. Maybe there are other options that just aren't occurring to me because my brain is set on this one path, I'm willing to be re-routed! This post has taken all day and at least 3 sittings to write, so it's a bit disjointed. Hopefully I've caught all the SureType typing prediction oddities.