Emma Jane

I'm

• an associate professor of ergonomics at Granolan College, a midwestern liberal arts school that's no better than it ought to be.
• a former teenaged academic star who, well, hasn't amounted to much, but is still trying to find her way back to intellectual productivity.
• a city kid stuck, for now, in the middle of a lot of soybean fields.
• the only child of the bipolar Annajane, former foster daughter to the formerly alcoholic Ray, and a survivor of sexual and emotional abuse.
• effectively the only grandchild of the gnarled and grumpy Nanna, who lives 500 miles away with my unbearable uncle Ricky and his new wife Marina.
• wife to Beaker, who has cystic fibrosis, which forced us into pretty extreme fertility treatment.
• mother to the exquisite, and still quite small, Tabitha, a.k.a. Tabby, a.k.a. Miss T.

This blog is supposed to be about what happens when I can't keep those identities in separate boxes. I started it while waiting for my tenure decision to be confirmed.

After hitting a sort of narrative peak (and emotional trough) when my poor crazy mother died just as we were starting the third, the final, the most outrageously expensive (and, ultimately, the successful) IVF cycle, it's been pretty peaceful around here—just another strung-out working mother of an infant whining about how many demands are placed upon her.