Where I end and begin still belongs to me

I wake up already conscious of my body: how my hips feel, where I detect pain, the way my pregnant belly pulls on my back. As I take inventory and contemplate how to get myself upright, GR springs out of bed to greet LT, who is standing just inside the closed door of his nursery, knocking politely but firmly on the wood like a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman to let us know he's awake.

LT chatters through the hour until daycare drop-off, saying familiar phrases to narrate his life as he goes about his morning routine (get dressed; eat a banana; help mommy brew a cup of coffee). We sit on the couch to observe the new day out the big picture-window and get into a heated argument about whether the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening, or (as LT insists) the other way around. I manage to win the argument -- not by virtue of him trusting my Supreme Mama Wisdom, but only after I remind him that he already knows that "sets" means "goes down" because he sets his toys down on a the floor, and sets his fork down when he's finished eating, and so the sun sets down at the end of the day, too. 

He ponders this, then lifts his arms up above his head and declares, "Sun rises in morning, mama, waaaaay up in da sky! It's light outside!" Me, congratulatory: "You got it, buddy!"

As we make the short drive to daycare, LT monitors the street light and admonishes me to stop if the light turns red. He still refers to his daycare as his "new school" even though he enrolled there in June. 

Back home, I settle into my work desk and begin answering emails, conscious of the morning's quiet. We recently switched rooms around in preparation for the new baby's arrival, and my office is no longer right above GR's, so I'm no longer pestered or lulled by the run-of-the-mill sounds of his working day floating into mine through the air vent. 

Around noon I put my work day on pause to drive to one of my OB appointments, which are being scheduled with increasing frequency (biweekly for now; weekly come mid-November). During a period of life often characterized by euphemisms and coddling, I enjoy my appointments with Dr. B, who is hawkish and blunt and mostly allergic to small talk. (She surprises me this week by asking after our Halloween plans as we listen to the baby's heartbeat with the doppler.) I ask her if there's anything to be done about the pelvic pain that's begun haunting me daily and worsens significantly if I walk more than a block. After conducting a quick exam to rule out a couple identifiable culprits, she tells me: Not really. Except labor.

The rest of the work day is a churn of Word documents and client calls. Eventually I hear the front door clatter, and LT comes charging into my office, yelling "MAMA!" He rushes to tell me things that may or may not be true about his day: He had a snack and it was noodles and his tummy feels full! He saw a big fire truck! It had a loud siren! He and Mateo went down the slide! They took turns!

GR easily entices LT back outside and they set off into the cooling fall afternoon in search of a playground while I hang back at home, fearful of angering my pelvis. I knock out a couple mild domestic chores while listening to a podcast discussing the history of the bleep! sound used to censor swear words on the radio and TV.

I make dinner, first for LT (who eats rapidly, methodically) and then for myself and GR (to be placed into the stasis of a Keep Warm oven until after LT's bedtime). GR and I finally get the chance to chat, swap work stories, share interesting things we've read, while managing interruptions by LT, who is desperate to contribute to the conversation with observations about how many strawberries remain on his plate or the fact that a mail truck has driven by outside.

As his bedtime rituals approach, LT plays with loopy imagination while I watch from the couch and GR plucks random tunes on his guitar. By 7:30, LT is stretched angelically in his toddler bed, arm wrapped around his stuffed panda. GR and I prepare plates and make our way downstairs to eat dinner in front of the glow of an episode of TV (Deep Space Nine, still, or The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt). At the recommendation of the American Pregnancy Association, I use an app on my phone to monitor and count how often the baby shifts, punches, and kicks while I'm splayed on the couch. Not long after, I feel myself fading, and I transition upstairs feeling gravitationally heavy. On my way, I try to remember to express my gratitude to GR, who has been uncomplainingly taking on more and more day-to-day household tasks as I've become more and more preoccupied with the internal disruptions of being the late-stage host to a new person.

Calm like a bomb

The thing about Donald Trump (or, rather, a thing about Trump -- there were and are a lot of things) is that from the earliest days of his campaign and up to the present day, he made no attempt to hide the fact that, in a knee-jerk way, women aren't full-fledged people to him. Nearly everything the man has ever said communicates this idea implicitly if not explicitly. There are people, and there are women. There are hard-working Americans and women. There are lawyers and there are woman lawyers. There are competent professionals, his peers and rivals in business and in politics, serious minds working on serious problems, and also: women.

Clearly the man knows women are people, in the sense that they are humans. But Trump considers women to be categorically different from men, first and foremost because a woman's primary purpose is to be sexually pleasing to men, and because he also clings to all kinds of classically male-chauvinist beliefs, including the rightness of separate spheres. When these are your operating premises, all kinds of other beliefs spring out like Hydra heads: sexual assault is both inevitable and not really a crime (more of a perk, really); a woman is a failure if she's unattractive, regardless of her other mitigating merits; intelligent or ambitious women are to some degree unnatural and suspect; it's appropriate to hold women and men to different standards. Tellingly, no one needs me to provide links or quotes to back up these statements about Trump, but the proof is there, obviously, in the most egregious sound bites ("Grab 'em by the...", "If Ivanka weren't my daughter...") as well as when he sneered at Hillary's ability to "satisfy America" and when her debate style made her a "nasty woman" and when the former ambassador to Ukraine was "that woman." Word influences deed: Trump had an overwhelmingly [white] male Cabinet and administration, appointed a disproportionately high number of [white] men to federal judgeships, de-prioritized women's healthcare and parity issues to the point of rolling back existing measures. 

All of us know men who harbor similar sentiments to some degree, because everyone to date has grown up steeped in cultural messaging that does little to contradict them. Good men make an ongoing, good-faith effort to recognize and overcome sexist biases. But it lingers. We see it in the men who struggle to acknowledge or care about sexism in any form until they become a father of daughters -- and even then, we see it in the fathers singularly obsessed with their daughters' chastity. We see it in the men who have deep, meaningful platonic friendships with women but also style themselves as The Game-style pickup artists in their romantic lives. We see it in the men who haven't yet thought critically about phrases like "locker room talk" or "boys will be boys" or why there's something about a woman that just doesn't seem presidential.

The thing about Trump, of course, is that his sexism -- like other of his most odious moral failings -- is outrageous and cartoonish in a way that startles. One-upping mere philanderers and deniers of the wage gap, here is a man who has openly referred to women as 10s and bitches.

It's no longer interesting, if it ever was, to grouse about how norm-breaking Trump was and continues to be. (He's shameless! He's Teflon! He got away with 5,000 scandals and insults that would've tanked any other politician!) Yet there's an abiding part of me that also deeply loathes the Chapelle-on-SNL-after-election-night response to Trump's mendacity. (Of course he's succeeding! Don't be naive! America's always been terrible. You're foolish to expect better!)

I don't think harboring a bottomless reservoir of cynicism is a good way to go through life, and I'm willing to admit to being profoundly shaken by Trump's blatant belittling of women and how little it mattered to the people who voted for him. It revealed that I'd been misapprehending the world in a very personal way, that, despite all my feminist education and awareness, I'd managed to underestimate the prejudice and chauvinism that still existed around me and the levels that would be tolerated. 

If all of this is a reflection on the past, wallowing in feelings that were at their most potent in 2016, then today -- the day the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade -- is a good day to invoke the old Faulkner line that "The past is never dead. It's not even past." The almost surreal sense of dismay I felt at Trump's election hasn't abated so much as changed shape as time has gone on and the consequences of his presidency have emerged and gained permanence. Today, specifically, I'm feeling the weight of witnessing things getting worse. The dismay takes the form of losing things, like lives, that don't need to be at risk.

Where I'm going, if I get there at all

About a decade ago, the field of psychology was rocked by what is now known as the replication crisis. (I say "rocked," but if you're not in the habit of tuning in to social-science news, you probably experienced this crisis like the seagulls in Finding Nemo, who floated so far removed from a deep sea explosion that it looked to them like a fart bubble.) 

The crux of the crisis -- which is still ongoing and has expanded to other branches of the social and natural sciences -- was the simple discovery that a whole bunch of studies failed to hold up when other research teams attempted to replicate them.

Take, for example, the social-psychological theory of ego depletion, a.k.a. decision fatigue, a.k.a. the depletion model of self-control. It's basically idea that everyone has a finite reservoir of willpower to be spent over a given period of time. (Imagine you spend all afternoon resisting the doughnuts and cake in the break room. You go home, and your spouse offers you a cookie. You're more likely to give in and take the cookie than if you hadn't already spent all day exercising your will power.) The fact that this theory has its origins in Freud might've been a warning sign -- still, ego depletion sounds plausible, feels intuitively true. Researchers hypothesizing the existence of ego depletion published hundreds of validating studies throughout the '90s and '00s. 

In 2016, however, a large-scale effort to analyze the actual validity of this phenomenon found... well, pretty much nothing. Since then, ego depletion has become one of the poster children of the replication crisis, a leading example of well-meaning social scientists finding significance where none has really been shown. This revelation prompted a leading researcher on ego depletion, Michael Inzlicht, to write a sorrowful, soul-searching blog post reflecting on his career. "As someone who has been doing research for nearly twenty years, I now can’t help but wonder if the topics I chose to study are in fact real and robust. Have I been chasing puffs of smoke for all these years?" he lamented. "I’m in a dark place. I feel like the ground is moving from underneath me and I no longer know what is real and what is not." Other titans of popular social-psychological theory (power poses! priming!) are in similar turmoil.

How does this kind of thing happen? It wouldn't be a full-blown crisis if it wasn't complicated. Conscious and unconscious bias, p-hacking, and seemingly innocuous practices in data analysis have all been identified as contributing to the problem.

But the ringleader of the crisis -- the four-star general under whom all the biases and bad practices are marshaled -- is probably simple publishing bias. Researchers are under tremendous pressure to publish, and the incentive structure for publishing heavily favors positive/significant results. There are plenty of studies (called null studies) that don't prove a positive result: they fail to show that the experiment had any significant effect whatsoever. These studies are, well, kind of boring and difficult to publish; researchers are disappointed when they happen. But they're also extremely important. Consider how our perception of the prevalence of skin cancer would be skewed if doctors only ever reported the results of biopsies that came back malignant and we had no idea how many came back benign.

On the plus side, this means there is at least one clear path to reform: incentivize null results! Make them a central part of teaching and textbooks. Devote journals to replication studies and null findings and recruit prominent members of the field to ensure they become prestigious. Help researchers, students, and institutions internalize the message that null isn't dull.

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In medicine, null findings have something of a cousin in the concept of expectant management (a.k.a. watchful waiting, a.k.a. active surveillance). It's the puffed-up medical term for "doing nothing."

In the wild, you've probably encountered expectant management in its lowest-stakes form: going to the clinic for, say, an ear infection, only to hear the doctor say, "It'll probably clear up on its own, but if things haven't improved a week from now, give me a call." Other common contexts include kidney stones ("Let's see if it passes naturally"), cancer treatment ("The surgery is very risky, so let's wait to see if it gets worse before we act"), pregnancy ("You're at full term: we could induce, but let's wait a couple weeks to see if your water breaks on its own"), and infertility ("We're not sure why you're not getting pregnant; we could begin treatment, or you could keep trying").

As you might imagine, patients aren't always thrilled to have expectant management be their treatment plan. If you're seeking medical care, it's probably because you feel like an intervention of some kind is warranted. You want to do something.

Expectant management exists for good reason, though: intervention almost always carries drawbacks or risks, which we often downplay in our eagerness to act. Even a paltry antibiotics prescription, if prescribed unnecessarily, can contribute to the global scourge of antimicrobial resistance. And intervention doesn't even always yield a better or faster result than simply doing nothing.

Plus, most physicians would likely be quick to correct me: expectant management isn't the same as doing nothing, much in the same way that a null result isn't the same as no results. Watchful waiting entails monitoring and actively staying on top of the situation. Finding no significant effect in an experiment is itself a valuable result. 

But here's the thing: both expectant management and null studies ask us to confront the void, to stand by even though intervention is possible, to embrace non-significance rather than going back for a positive result. We shouldn't pretend that inaction is easy, or that researchers have nothing to lose by abandoning the quest for a significant p-value. 

Expectant management is a useful parallel for null studies, I think, because its stakes and frustrations are visceral, where the replication crisis is dry and academic. What they have in common is a mandate to accept absence, to make peace with the nonevent. What expectant management teaches us is that this acceptance is going to be an uphill battle.

The junctions all disappear

When a baby joins your household for the first time, lots of people give you lots of advice. A majority of it is compassionately bestowed, unsolicited, and not necessarily super-duper helpful. Babies are notoriously variable, and advice is often either anecdotal and not very transferable (e.g., "FYI, Pfeffie would only nap while hanging upside down like a bat.") or impracticably vague (e.g., "Try to find time for rest."). There are also a lot of New Parent Truisms -- things that older and more experienced parents will sagely relate as a means of setting your expectations for what parenthood will be like. ("The first few weeks will be a total blur.") People offer help and wisdom as a way of expressing love, and it's gracious to accept those offers, even if the advice ultimately goes unused. Advice-givers are trying to be a supportive force in your life, to show they care.

That said, my favorite piece of advice came from my mother-in-law, who on more than one occasion admitted that she couldn't really remember anything at all from when her children were toddler-age or younger, and so had no recommendations to give. Her "advice," such that it was, was simple: Take photos and write stuff down. The things that seem so vivid to you now, so obvious or striking or common, that you're sure you'll remember? You won't.

It's great advice because it actually applies to everyone, even if it's maybe extra applicable to parents of small children whose quirks change constantly. And like the best advice, it's actionable, and in theory seems easy to implement, but is in reality weirdly difficult to practice -- because habitually writing mundane stuff down is boring, and your present moment in time always feels stable and memorable and not worth mentioning. Things rarely feel like they're changing all that much, until they have.

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Predictions of Varying Certainty for 2021:
 - GR and I will get vaccinated by the end of June (and not earlier than May). 'Til then, our lives during the first half of the year will feel like a very gradual reopening, as other, more at-risk family members and friends get vaccinated before us, community transmission levels go down, and our circle slowly widens.
 - I will undertake between five and ten small home improvement projects (e.g., repainting a room or exterior door, replacing light switches or house numbers or light fixtures, etc.)
 - LT's first word will be one of the following: dada, mama, duck, or up.
 - GR and I will spend at least two nights away from LT, leaving him in the capable hands of an aunt/uncle or grandma/grandpa.
 - I'll go on one of Chicago's architecture tours. (Never been! Hear they're great!)
 - I won't return to work in an office, and will instead continue to work from home full time. I will, as always, love this setup.

How Prescient I Actually Was:
 - I kind of nailed it! Both GR and I snagged shots relatively early and so were fully vaxxed by the first week of May. Although our going-about-town habits are still far from what they were pre-pandemic, even with the roller coasters of Delta and Omicron, we spent the year visiting more freely with family and friends and dabbling in normalcy.
 - Technically a failure, because "between five and ten" was an undercount. I painted the front door, replaced the house numbers, installed a new storm door, replaced the exterior light fixture, reupholstered the dining room chair cushions, replaced the ceiling fans and light switches in all the bedrooms, hung a new curtain rod in the living room, painted my desk, retrofitted a new base to an end table, repaired some molding, painted the basement ceiling, and replaced two can light fittings. This list omits some smaller/more fiddly projects.
 - I think "dada" was his first word? I've always been flabbergasted when I ask parents what their kids' first words were and they respond with uncertainty: How could you not note or remember something so consequential?! Now, I get it. Kids do lots of babbling before they actually land on proper words, and it's hard to track when a sound/referent relationship has actually clicked. Which is why, even though "dada" was probably LT's first word, "ba-lalalalala" (for banana) is the one that leaps to mind.
 - Success! All together, we've spent about a week's worth of nights away from LT, who seems perfectly happy to get us out of his hair for a few days at a time.
 - Also a success! As part of a Chicago-based staycation, GR and I joined some friends for a river boat architecture tour. It was, in fact, great.
 - Yep. My company actually declined to renew the lease on its office space in January last year and still hasn't found a new one. It's unclear whether or not they're really looking.

 

Predictions of Varying Certainty for 2022:
 - Screw it, I'm just going to say it this time: I'll get pregnant again. (If I don't, rest assured the whole Not Getting Pregnant thing will have loomed large over the entire year, as it's already loomed over the latter half of 2021. I realize this parenthetical is hedging and therefore against the spirit of a predictions list, but there's a superstitious part of me that feels like I need to cross my fingers here.)
 - In spite of our planned vacation to Florida at the probable height of the Omicron surge in mid-January, my family will avoid getting COVID (that we know of).
 - I'll go to a concert -- probably of the rock variety, but a symphony/classical music counts.
 - I'll get involved in my community in some way (e.g., volunteering; joining a village board or parents group; attending council meetings).
 - Neither GR nor I will have any major changes to our careers or working situations, save for GR resuming some work-related travel later in the year.
 - I'll repaint at least one room in the house, even though I have already painted literally every room in this house, because I'm otherwise running low on projects and can't help myself.