Mama PhD

I’m writing this on Inauguration Day. Although I missed hearing the speech live, I did catch a stream of it a little later on, and I was struck by how, in a relatively short speech, the President managed to remind us of the needs of those who have too often been left out of “we, the people” — women who do not earn equal pay, homosexuals who do not enjoy equal rights, immigrants who are not afforded equal protection. It was a liberal speech in the best sense of the word, a speech open to possibility and progress, and while I could, as always, wish it had gone farther, I was glad I had a chance to read and hear it.

I had been feeling achy and draggy for longer than I could remember. I had a chronic headache, too. I thought of these as flu-like symptoms, but not the flu, because I don't get the flu. I almost never even get a cold. I have what I sometimes refer to as "autoimmune surplus syndrome, or ASS": my system gobbles up every virus or germ that comes its way, and when it has nothing left to feast on, it turns on itself, like the Ouroboros, the serpent that eats its own tail. I worry about being devoured from within, but not about what is flying around in the air. I figured that feeling lousy was the price I had to pay for overloading myself with work, classes, and active vacations at my age.

In Economics we talk about maximizing “utility” subject to a given constraint. For example, a shopper wants to choose the best combination of groceries that can be purchased given their present budget. I thought of this recently, as I recalled a class I fell into in my last days of college. Realizing that tuition had been paid that allowed me to take up to eighteen credits my last semester, and also assuming that I would never again have access to courses in Theology or Philosophy, I decided to take as many of those classes as I could before graduating.

Well, I successfully dropped off my son Nick for his first day of college. If you’ve been following my column (and his), you will know that my son was a “high school burnout” who took some time off before college. Discovering that he was bored silly with the minimum wage working world, Nick conceded to apply to a local state school. He moved into a dorm last Sunday and started classes at 8:00 am on Monday (which happens when you register late.)

As a kid, I remember being fascinated by the idea that all my cells regularly die and get replaced over an interval of several years, that at age 10 my body was all different from the body I was born with: what did this mean about who I was? We know even more about cell turnover now - I just looked up human cell longevity, and studies using modern cell dating techniques show that the cells in our body average about seven years of age (except for most brain cells, which survive our whole lives with stable wirings, perhaps answering my question of my identity also being stable, I guess).

It’s the first day of my new semester, and as always I am scrambling just a bit. Two syllabi done, one almost so. And I put my daughter on the plane this morning to return for her last semester of college. While college is cyclical for me, it’s linear for her, which is tough for me to grasp after all these years. Looking over her commencement weekend schedule during the break, she commented, “There’s always been more school. It’s weird to think there won’t be.”

Last Friday, Ben called me at work. I answered with some trepidation, because 1) he knows not to call me during supervision hours unless it is an emergency, and 2) he never calls, only texts.

When I first tried to teach my daughter division, I taught her to ask how many objects she could allocate evenly among a given number of piles of that object. For example, if you wanted to make six piles of marbles, how many marbles would end up in each pile if you began with twenty four marbles? I found myself thinking of this recently, as I remembered frequent carpools for teenage excursions, often heading towards the Southern part of my home state, Connecticut. I would meet up with friends to allocate those of us without cars among a set number of cars driven by friends.