This Is an iPhone Note
Jannell McConnell Parsons
Keywords: parenting
Categories: Parenting and Possibility in Impossible Times; Academic Pressures (or Critiques of Neoliberal Horseshit Productivity Expectations, as suggested by Amy Vidali)
This is an iPhone note. A note about how I wrote my most of my diss prospectus in March and April. After we went on lockdown. While I was eight and then nine months pregnant. How I defended it on Zoom while waiting for a call from the midwives for test results that would possibly mean going in immediately after to be induced. I passed my phone off to my husband so I could be “undistracted” during that meeting. Then she was born, a week later, on her exact due date. She did not get Covid. None of us did. Not then, not yet. Now she is 15 months old. I am not writing the diss. Not really. I have read, some. I have taken notes, some. I have seen very few people in person. I have slept very little. There has been no daycare like we planned. There have barely been any babysitters, for that matter. There was almost no one else watching her, ever, for almost the first year other than me and my full-time, mortgage-paying, working-from-home husband. Just me, her, sometimes Zoom meetings, sometimes teaching, sometimes reading and writing while she slept on me, while I gathered strength to pass her off to a finally vaccinated cohort aunt, maybe. But there has been no sustained space to think. To escape the monotony and exhaustion of taking care of a newborn, then a one-year-old, day after day after day after day. To escape the crushing anxiety about avoiding Covid, about keeping her safe, that has followed us since the harrowing, uncertain, terrifying months leading up to her birth. I became a new mom two months into a fucking global pandemic. The diss is not only not really being written, it couldn’t be the original project I proposed, I think, if I wanted it to be. Everything has changed. But here is what I *have* written. I have written lesson plans. They have mattered. I have started co-writing a pedagogy paper passion project that’s been on the back burner with my department bestie for the better part of, well, 15 months plus. It matters. I have meal planned. That has mattered. I have written endless iPhone notes all titled “processing.” That has mattered. I am writing this, now, while I drink a Negroni and watch Suicide Squad with my husband and said bestie and while I watch my daughter sleep on the monitor next to me. And that is enough for now.
Bio
Jannell McConnell Parsons is an English PhD candidate living and working in Lexington, Kentucky with her husband, now two-year-old daughter, perfect pup, and chaotic cat. She researches and writes on white womanhood and critical whiteness studies as well as on first-year pedagogies and course-based undergraduate research experiences