All for Alice

Some experiences have the power to focus one’s ambition and intentionality about life. For Steve Jobs it was, famously, a near-death experience. For others it may be a timely encounter with a work of art, a memorable conversation with a role model, an unexpected triumph, or an epic failure.

For me, it was the birth of my first child, Alice Sophia Bateman, just over a week ago. She has strengthened and clarified my purpose, not just in that I’d do anything for her—which I would—but in that she’s moved me to double down on the riskiest, least certain aspects of my career and life.

As testament to the latter outcome, I present to you this—my inaugural blog post entry—whose arrival is, in some ways, an even more momentous event for me than the birth of Alice.

For roughly a decade now, I’ve been setting various forms of ”writing for a general audience” intentions as New Year’s Resolutions, monthly personal goals, weekly to-do tasks, and so on. Yet I’ve never generated a strong enough impetus to push myself into acting on any of them. But here I finally am, pushing against perhaps the strongest inertia I’ve managed to accumulate with regard to any long-desired and correspondingly long-avoided professional endeavor. Fittingly enough, the topic of this post will be the same as its source and inspiration: it will be all about Alice.

In my long-standing avoidance of writing for a general audience, I’ve dealt with the resulting guilt and pent-up need for self-expression by writing the occasional poem instead. I’ve genuinely loved writing these poems and am overall glad they exist. But they’ve also admittedly functioned for me as a kind of “safety behavior”: a “quick fix” anxiety-relief strategy that shields me from having to fully do what I want but am afraid to do. 

Here’s the 1st poem I wrote during my early pregnancy with Alice. Then follows the “slow fix” of explaining it more fully in prose. 

—

Something from Nothing

On flying back together
From a city now at peace
With the villainies it weathered
In its days of “West” and “East”,

I scan my awkward body
For the latest signs of you,
And I relish every soreness,
Every muscle ache that’s new.

Are these among the stories
You will someday hear me tell,
As today your grandpa glories
In his tales of Soviet hell?

But what a silly question
When we haven’t even met; 
Did I read it in the books and blogs 
That clamor in my head?

It’s under all the clamor
Of predictions and advice,
Of the ads for “pregnant glamour”
And the listings-out of vice,

That I am soaked in silent,
Inexorable bliss.
The knowledge of your coming;
The magnitude of this. 

But such intense emotion
Is difficult to bear,
So I channel my devotion
Into “ordinary” cares—

Like trying to get work done,
Or complaining when I fail,
As I bounce from nascent projects
To commitments old and stale…

But this is just more clamor,
Just more dithering about; 
It would take a mighty hammer
To demolish all my doubts:

Ought I to be a scholar?
Am I wasting too much time?
Should I not instead devote myself
To callings more sublime?

Yet, under all that doubting,
I know just what I must do.
I must dip into that longing
Which has always pulled me through:

That longing for the nurturance
Of healthy human souls; 
The chance to lift and liberate,
To arm with self-control;

 The nurturance of potential,
Of the noble and the true.
The nurturance of untarnished youth—
The nurturance of you. 

—

It took Alice’s actual emergence —in all her wrinkly, adorable flesh—for the meaning and power of this poem’s sentiment to fully sink in for me. (In fact, it happened right around the moment I felt her approach; but more on that part of the journey in my next post.)

And what is really so special about Alice? After all, she is pretty boring company, and she drains me of the time and energy I might otherwise devote to more reciprocally rewarding interactions. Have I been taken in by her cuteness, as some evolutionary psychologists might claim, or else fallen prey to popular convention? Neither of these hypotheses explains the depth of what I feel toward Alice, nor why, in committing to her, I find myself committing more eagerly and fully to life itself. 

As Matt and I put it in our Facebook announcement of Alice’s birth:

 “Over the last few years, Gena and I have both experienced, separately and jointly, an unusual surge of coherence. In work and in love, our lives have come together to resemble the vision with which each of us started. But there was still one missing puzzle piece: both of us have, as long as either of us can remember, badly wanted children. …Gena gave birth to our tiny missing puzzle piece this afternoon. We were delighted to meet Alice Sophia Bateman, and we are excited for many of you to meet her soon.”

This “puzzle piece” metaphor is precisely descriptive of Alice’s role in my life. The core themes of my personal and professional endeavors to date have converged upon the nurturance of the struggling, striving, growing person, be it myself, my therapy clients, my students, or my readers. In all my day-to-day decisions about what research or writing projects to prioritize, what therapy clients to take on and how to work with them, what content to cover in my graduate psychology courses, my guiding vision is that of the struggling, striving, growing person, and of the knowledge and ideals that empower and inspire such a person.

That vision is my raison d’etre; it is the essence of what I want out of my life. Put another way, it’s the picture to which I want the puzzle pieces of my life to add up. It’s what empowers and inspires me toward continued struggle, striving, and growth.

Yet I’ve often found it hard to keep that vision consistently vivid in my mind. For instance, I might focus all my energy on applying for a grant that, if I’m lucky enough to get it, will allow me to run a pilot intervention study that, if it generates meaningful results, will eventually help me develop a treatment strategy that people might (or might not) discover and use some 10-15 years from now. To think about and move towards any such activity, I need to zoom out enough to see how the pieces might eventually connect, including the uncertainties and opportunity costs. But conjuring up so many hypothetical pieces and the different ways they might fit together is itself a highly demanding and often anxiety-inducing task. 

In the work of assembling the puzzle of one’s life, piece-by-piece, the easier approach is to follow an existing blueprint that’s already been written by others, and hope that it is a close enough approximation of the vision one was aiming at. The most plausible such blueprint in my line of work, should I choose to follow it, is to focus on the academic activities that typically lead to tenure. Even if this metric is difficult to achieve, it is fairly easy to understand and use.—And it’s not entirely at odds with my picture of the life I want. 

What is less clear, however, is the shape of the other plausible paths, alternative or complementary, that I might focus on if I weren’t exclusively focused on the standard academic one. Equally unclear is how their potential reach and impact compares. And, if I’m honest with myself, one thing I know with reasonable certainty is that writing for a more general audience, though it will not help me get tenure, will be part of any path that truly satisfies my vision. 

In this way, “doing what gets me tenure” has also functioned as a kind of safety behavior: by giving me the comfortable illusion of a clear, well-drawn path to my desired life, it has kept me orbiting in place instead of truly, thoughtfully growing. 

Or so it did, anyway, until Alice came on the scene. This wriggly little creature who began her growth inside me and is now devoting every reflex, every little grunting noise and semi-voluntary wiggle, every ounce of her living energy to growing farther; and who needs a generous supply of my and Matt’s living energy to help her grow. Never has the meaning of my life—to foster human growth—been more vividly, constantly, delightfully presented to me. And never have I been more willing to do the work and overcome the fear of really living that life.

This has manifested most directly in my decision-making about Alice’s care, both prenatally and postpartum; the sheer number and intensity of “existing blueprint”-style recommendations that have been thrown at me, and my efforts to chart out my own scientifically-informed and Alice-tailored path in the face of them, will be the subject of a later post. For now, I want to reflect on how Alice’s clarifying presence has extended to all the other realms of my life, insofar as they involve my own growth or the growth of those I care about. 

To give but one example: For all the love I already felt toward Matt, our 1 week of parenting together has already further concentrated and intensified the feeling. How did a helpless little pooping, peeing, feeding monster manage to work such marital magic? By showering us with a sudden flood of new particulars to reaffirm and intensify the love we already felt. In just these 7 days, we have seen each other through several tearful bouts of emotional overwhelm ranging from sudden, unexpected ecstasy at her adorable sighing noises, to equally sudden pangs of doubt about whether we’re doing something wrong; we’ve cycled through several failed attempts at a mutually agreeable sleep and feeding schedule, and finally settled on one that seems to be working for all 3 of us (not that we’re holding our breaths!); we’ve had and thoughtfully resolved our 1st parenting “fights”, and somehow emerged as even stronger allies and collaborators at the end of both. 

And the same mechanism has already begun to operate in the rare moments when I’ve had at least one hand free to write or answer emails or otherwise catch up on work. For that, this blog post, written largely while pumping or nursing, is its own best example. 

When seen in this light, I think my complete and unconflicted devotion to Alice—and my willingness to push harder than I’ve ever pushed, in every sense of the term, now that it is for her sake and in her honor—is a more genuinely selfish motivation for parenting a child than any of the “tricked by cuteness” sorts of accounts that get bandied about by evolutionary psychologists (though it certainly doesn’t hurt that Alice is the cutest baby I’ve ever laid eyes on). Of course, I recognize that this motivation is deeply personal to me; not every parent will have devoted her life to the nurturance of human growth, be it in the form of mental health treatment (as in my case) or education (as in Matt’s case). In fact I imagine the particular motivations that make parenting a deeply gratifying and personally worthwhile endeavor will vary widely from parent to parent. This is one reason why I think the choice of whether to have kids should be a strictly and exclusively personal one, and that not having kids should be the assumed default, rather than the other way around (but more on this in a future post). 

With all that said: for those of you who do make the choice to parent—or any choice that’s life-altering and irreversible, for that matter—I wish you the kind of distilled clarity and eagerness of purpose that Alice has bestowed on me, as the constant reward for making her my all.