sleeplessness

Two years ago, J and I faced a difficult decision. He had recently finished and defended his dissertation. I was in the process of finishing mine. He was on the job market. I applied for a single postdoc. We planned to move together wherever he got a job. But the gods of timing weren’t with us. I got offered my postdoc a couple months before he expected to hear anything about his prospects. And so we had to make each of our decisions piecemeal. The market was tanking and it seemed unwise to pass up a single opportunity. I feared being homeless, and so we ended up divided by 800 miles.

Fast forward to the present. J has a terrific tenure-track job at a college he adores and I’m finishing my postdoc at the end of this semester. Once again, we planned for me to move to his town and take up whatever work I could find. (I fantasized about opening a pottery studio or knitting “full-time”; I dreamed about starting a school or becoming a midwife). After all, the market is still lousy. But I applied to two dozen or so jobs just in case one of them happened to want to give us two jobs in the same place. An unlikely prospect these days. I also happily accepted a nomination for a fancy fellowship at one of any number of fancy schools, knowing that there was no way that I’d end up with it. You know where this is headed, right?

J calls it a Mexican stand-off. I think that might be racist, but I’m not sure.

As of today we have one tenure-track job (his), one on-campus interview for a tenure-track job (mine), one offer of a one-year sabbatical replacement job (mine at J’s college), and one fancy two-year fellowship that precludes all of the other options (mine). I suppose this is point at which I make myself into an object of scorn. We have, it seems, an embarrassment of underpaid academic riches. But only one of them puts us in the same place at the same time. Crudely speaking, that one is my least-best option. We are, in all its glory, the two-body problem.

And so it begins.

I have to learn compromise. I have to learn to think as a two instead of as a one. I have to sort what’s best for us from what’s best for me. Without J in the mix, I’d take the fellowship without question. But with J and my rapid-aging body, I have to think in new ways about our future. Am I the only one that finds this difficult to do?

We aren’t going to continue our commuter marriage. We are going to reside in the same house (a goal that any number of people have told me is “unrealistic” for two academics today). So I toss and turn at night imagining myself at one of several bucolic New England SLACs for the next two years, at the kind of place I stopped dreaming about in graduate school because the prospects were so dim. But then I stop myself with the reminder that I committed to something else altogether, that my academic work has never been the most important thing in my life. It may be the thing I spend the most time worrying about, but it’s not the thing that gives me the greatest pleasure. I mean, the teaching does, but the writing is often so painful that it makes me sick. And there are a million other things that I love and can love.

I feel like this is one of those key moments in life. Like it’s a test of sorts. But I also feel like any decision we make is going to feel only sort of right. The next few weeks will reveal more and I’m hoping that all of the crass details will add up to some compelling sum, that we’ll be able to mathematically calculate our decision, that we’ll develop some kind of proof for ourselves. That we’ll know what to do. And that we’ll do it.