Just over seven years ago, as I prepared to start graduate school, I sat with my mother on the floor of an empty new apartment, assembling Ikea furniture at midnight. This summer she came to visit me in England, where I just finished my first year as a full-time faculty member.
Things have certainly changed for both of us. Her visit felt particularly lucky as she had only barely recovered from a recent bout with pneumonia. She spent mornings with a travel oxygen machine while I called ahead to museums to make sure they had rentable wheelchairs to allow us an easier visit. She remains as indomitable as ever, though. As for me, seven years later, I have both a Ph.D. and a job—also a result of no small amount of luck.
My living situation has improved decidedly since graduate school, but there are moments that remind me of the many less-than-glamorous apartments I rented during months of dissertation research. I still own those Ikea bookshelves I assembled long ago with my mother. They’ve survived the trans-Atlantic move, but only just. I’ve allowed myself to acquire more books to fill them, now that I am certain I won’t need to ship them across an ocean in the near future.
I’ve spent this summer on a fellowship in London, away from my British campus in Southampton, renting an apartment that, oddly enough, was even less luxurious than the one I had inhabited in graduate school. The oven door wouldn’t open all the way when I moved in because it bumped into the washing machine. The bathroom door wouldn’t shut so if you wanted privacy, you had to close the kitchen door, instead. The building lost electricity and hot water for two days. Our neighbors played raucous, bass-heavy music, and the smell of smoke wafted into the windows when the monthlong London summer necessitated propping them open. I managed to resist yelling at the neighbors to get off my lawn.
Just like in graduate school, I’m still living paycheck-to-paycheck, as evidenced by my poor rental options. I earn more, but life has grown more expensive. I’ve started making payments on my student loans from my undergraduate degree; the monthly reminder email that the payment is due makes me cringe each time I receive it. A small part of me also revels in feeling like an adult as I arrange overseas money transfers. But that feeling quickly passes by the time I’ve sent in a payment on my credit-card debt, which still looms large after the expenses accrued from my last year in graduate school and my move overseas.
In graduate school I had very little money, but more time—unstructured time, anyway—in which to spend it. Now I have less time and more money, but not that much.
I remain keenly aware that there are historians who write faster and better than I do. The summer months quickly became a precious commodity, indeed. When I was in graduate school, the beginning of the school semester barely registered on my radar. Each day I still woke up, went for a jog, and read and wrote some things. The summer-to-fall transition didn’t really alter my routine except for the days when I had to go to the campus to TA. Once I was on dissertation fellowships, I had even fewer obligations; a seminar or two each week, where I showed up for the mere joy of not thinking about my dissertation and the job market. I wish I had realized what a luxury that was to so thoroughly ignore the change in seasons.
This summer, however, the start of the fall semester began to intrude into every hour: reminder emails from the bookshop to submit book orders; from the library to digitize readings; from students about meetings; from colleagues about staff development and more meetings; emails, emails, emails. I send them, too.
Summer, I remind myself sternly, is an indulgence. It is my time to do research unrestricted, to delve into the sources for my second book project. Of course, “unrestricted” means something different outside of graduate school. As a full-time faculty member, my unrestricted time for research is not really unrestricted. Besides my actual research, I have to use that time to revise a chapter from my first book, begin to organize a conference for the coming year, finish a revise-and-resubmit on a peer-reviewed article, check the proofs for a chapter I’ve written in an edited volume, and draft, write, and edit another chapter I shouldn’t have agreed to produce.
And then my boyfriend, a fellow academic and the clear optimist in our relationship, reminds me that summer as an employed academic is a treat. My mother’s presence, which forced me to move about England at a much slower speed than what I was used to, clarified how much time I really had. I went to a conference where I got to see the people who supported me when I was on the job market, and who have become close, important friends. Other friends came to England, where we took them to our new favo(u)rite places to eat. We sampled, and formed strong opinions, about the best places from which to procure fish and chips. We woke up when we wanted to. We took short train rides to beautiful beaches only an hour away. We booked a brief, cheap vacation to Spain, where I ate the best paella of my entire life. We resolutely put up “away” messages on our emails, and spent several days not responding to “urgent” queries.
I remain keenly aware of how lucky I was to have gotten a permanent position—and one only a few hours from my boyfriend’s teaching position, at that.
If life is more difficult now, it is because I have an actual academic job, rather than an apprenticeship. I have obligations that are now tied to the specific rhythms of the year, rather than one responsibility to write a giant, first attempt at history before graduating. I have an M.A. student, whose thesis is due in a month, and I feel compelled to read his work as carefully, critically, and generously as my adviser read mine. I have undergraduates whom I also care about, whose reappearances in my courses symbolize a new, delightful sort of pattern. I have syllabi to write, but I can also allow myself to feel slightly smug when I consider that the semester doesn’t start for another few weeks here, meaning that I still have a bit of a time cushion. These responsibilities are good things.
And so at the end of my mother’s visit, I feel heartache at her departure, as well as a sense of relief that I can get back to work. I feel grateful to my younger sister, who is living at home and has assumed more than her fair share of my mom’s postsurgery care. I feel torn between the United States and England, but also as though I’ve made a home for myself here. I feel, in the main, like an entirely different person than the ambulant, freewheeling, time-rich graduate student I was seven years ago.
