Guide for the Guild

The Olympics are airing as I write this, and there’s one ad I particularly detest. It features a slick, fifty-something, white man standing next to an opulent backyard pool overlooking a walled yard backed by palm trees. Over the course of the ad, this apparently successful businessman walks through an equally opulent and pristine house complete with very brief cameos (blink and you miss them) of two young, white girls and an attractive, predictably younger-appearing, white woman. The ad concludes with the man changing with lightning speed from expensive leisure clothing to an equally expensive business suit, walking out of his front door, removing the electric charger from his Cadillac, and stepping inside the car.

This past year a man colleague told me his key to time management in graduate school: “The first thing you need to do is marry a woman.”

Having someone else to ensure basic daily needs is a distinguishing factor between many professional men and women. Yet the domestic demands of cooking, laundry, cleaning, and shopping are absent in Guide for the Guild's call for a list of tasks demanding professional women’s time. This absence reflects at least two issues:

As a single woman well over forty, I’ve entered the final stretch of an interdisciplinary doctoral degree after several years of hard labor. Due to familial and financial obligations, I’ve had to work nearly full time throughout my program. This combination of work and intense study has been costly on many levels—personal, physical, social, and, most of all, spiritual. This is ironic since my degree is in theology and education.

At some point, I noticed that the passions fueling my midlife leap had been depleted. Never-ending professional demands left me ragged. I regretted a lost relationship, my lack of children, the geographical distance from friends and family, and the end of a modest but stable lifestyle as a college instructor. To make matters worse, I was an alien in my own program and new city—a Protestant at a Catholic school; a feminist woman in a field dominated by men; a warm, magnolia-loving Southerner in the frigid land of snow and Puritans. In classes or out running errands, I often felt like I was hearing a strange language. It might have been English, but the dialect was unfamiliar. There was much I didn’t understand. Yanked from my roots, I didn’t know who I was or what I believed in anymore. Even worse, I didn’t know what to say or how to say it, a dire situation for a veteran talker and writer. 

What caught me as I spiraled downward into silence was a big, lovely net knitted together by words, sentences, paragraphs, pages.  The language that I had lost helped me reclaim myself and my spiritual sensibility—in short, I was saved by writing. I kept a daily blog of long-form essays, linking it to my Facebook page where I had at least minimal contact with like-minded folks. They read and commented—not too many of them at first, but just enough to remind me that I was not alone. After my life and studies became too complicated, I abandoned the meaty extracurricular prose and turned my keyboard toward pithy little posts. During the horrendous year of comprehensive exams, these became meditations on flowers, as I forced myself to take daily walk breaks from my studies, during which I photographed whatever was leafing and blooming along the city sidewalks. My growing readership loved the photographs and the vignettes I wrote to accompany them, and I received friendly complaints when I stopped posting them this past year.

Well, the time is almost upon me. My tenure materials are due in early June. The last cancer scare was over the Christmas holidays. My doctors tell me "reduce your stress load." They don't understand my situation.

I was diagnosed with invasive lobular breast cancer in September of 2010. I had a complete mastectomy with the removal of seventeen lymph nodes early that October. Five of those nodes turned out to be cancerous. I was given a diagnosis of Stage III breast cancer. What followed were eight weeks of chemotherapy, then a month and a half of radiation therapy. After a year of recovery, I had a free tram flap replacement of my breast, which involved cutting a segment from my belly fat and muscle and hooking it up to the blood vessels that will keep it alive as my new breast. The second surgery was by far the harder of the two.