sur ma vie

I keep in touch with four other girls who were history majors with me at Covenant. Our friendship can be characterized as very open and always concerned with huge topics like our faith, our identity, the problems with U.S. foreign policy, interacting with other cultures, etc. So it is natural that I should write them an email that kind of brings to a head a lot of what I've been thinking about lately. The following is parts of that email, which I reproduce, largely because of its summarial nature to my recent musings:

"I feel like a zombie myself. I finished totally and completely for the semester on Monday. That is when I finished the last of my grading for the undergrad class I T.A.’d for. Now I’m going through the weird process of crashing at the end of an insane semester and re-entering “normal” life. Ending school years has always been difficult for me psychologically. The uncertainty of the summer, though wonderful and, at times, relaxing, frightens me. And, at least on my part, I have a fairly scheduled summer already this summer, so I don’t know why I should feel weird, but I do. When I was on campus Monday, it just felt eerie and surreal. When just a few days earlier it was teeming with a burst of life unique to exam week, it was now silent. I go through this every summer after a school year since high school. It takes me a little while to recover.

"This has been such a strange school year anyway. I can’t believe that I’ve been through a year of grad school. And that my grades are good, which still fills me with stunned surprise after the desperate struggle for decent grades at Covenant.

"In addition to just reeling from all the newness of grad school, I’ve been sorting through a lot about just being at LSU. I’ve been wondering if this is the best program for me. Now that I have some confidence as a grad student and vision for what I can contribute to the discipline of musicology, I’ve been wondering if perhaps being at LSU is holding me back. That I am in classes with performance majors (like taking history classes with sociology majors) and that there are few musicology grad students (thus making impossible much of an academic community in which to thrive) are only the beginning. There aren’t courses that I feel that I should have in order to shape and to develop me as a musicologist, and the local Renaissance musicologist has such a complex personality and nervous energy that I think I would go nuts having her as my dissertation advisor. So when I was in Philly at the end of March for a little conference, I had a chat with some people from University of Pennsylvania and from Princeton, which would be my two top choices. And I considered finishing out LSU with a master’s, and going somewhere else for my PhD. Well, Chris and I talked it through, and thought it would be better for us as a family to stay in New Orleans longer. I’m on a fast track to a PhD. He’s making an investment in the lives of his students that he would like see develop for a bit longer, and we’re committed to our church right now. I also had a chat with head of the musicology dept, who I guess is my advisor. I am really glad I spoke with him. I had been keeping most of this to myself, because I didn’t want to blab to a department that was supporting me and potentially would right me recommendations that I was shopping around. But since the conversation with this professor, I feel much better about being at LSU. I’ve arranged for an independent study with him to help fill some gaps. And he’s become much more accessible in terms of casual conversation…sort of like my new dr. steele. Times over coffee in which I can sort through stuff like, why do we periodize music history the way we do? etc., is an invaluable part of how I function as a student. This prof has even given me a key to his office so that I can have access to his books! And the profs at LSU have been good about helping me connect with other scholars in order to best pursue my interests. So AAALLL that to say is that I’m feeling confirmed and at peace about being at LSU.

"So here I am, developing in distinct ways in my identity as a scholar. I feel like I have definitely made the transition from undergrad to grad. The way I interact with what I read and connections that show themselves to me have definitely matured, and that has been so exciting to watch in myself. I’ve even been able to come up with unique ideas for my term papers. But at the end of this semester, I feel a little lost as a person…namely as a Christian woman, as a wife, and, hopefully some day, as a mother. Certainly, we have talked about these things before, and I have hashed through various aspects of these different “callings,” if you will, but I was reminded of them in a pointed way last weekend, when our pastor, Chris, and I went to an ordination and installation service at another church in our Presbytery in Louisiana. I watched as we introduced ourselves to other people and they to us. I watched as the other women gathered their bazillions of children, so obviously home schooled, around them. Then Sunday morning at our church with our two new families with many small children and all the mothers glad to have each other to share raising covenant children stories and swap home school tips. I was left standing there like the last person chosen for kick ball, painfully aware of how I don’t fit. Are other people glad to have me around? (I know that sounds selfish, and I don’t mean it to…well, I hope you understand what I mean…I guess something like do I fulfill a need in someone else for a particular kind of fellowship?) Now I must say, though, that no one has ever done anything to make me feel left out, in fact, quite often I am included in outings and such. It is just by definition. Already the way Chris and I function is quite different from couples around us. Since we both work equally hard outside the home, it makes sense that we should both work equally hard inside the home, doesn’t it? And he is swapping tips about teaching spelling with the home schooling moms. So I guess my question is, what kind of fellowship am I even looking for? Obviously, I don’t expect or even want other women around me to be scholars just like me. Nor do I expect them to engage with my scholarship. Do I want some kind of validation from my society? Should that even matter? I feel that what I’m doing is more than a job. So what implications does it have for my life? We have asked before how to integrate our faith and life and learning, but from the vantage point of life. Now I am standing over on the learning hill wondering how to integrate my life."