10,005 dependents

Hello internets!

So yesterday was Mother's Day... (I called mine, did you call yours??).  Hope all you mom's out there had a great day.  My hope is also that all the moms who read this are actively participating in the unstated collective goal of releasing fewer jerky people out into the world.  Someday, I hope to "join the cause."  In the meantime... we're all counting on you, moms... keep fighting the good fight. :)

After spending a rather exhausting (but fun!) weekend of whitewater rafting and car camping in the rain, we pulled ourselves together long enough to take the in-laws out for a fine celebratory Mother's Day dinner.  Upon dropping them off, j's dad took me into the family greenhouse to go "shopping" for some additional plants for my nascent garden.  I came home with 4 buckets of herbs (basil, rosemary, mint and parsley) as well as smaller pots for transplant full of: Cherokee tomato (2), eggplant, Malabar spinach, sage, and 2 types of cilantro. These little plants rode home with me, in a tray, in the front seat.

I had to try very hard not to do this into my pad thai last night

As soon as we got into the car, j turned to me and said "I am not doing any household work when we get home.  I can't even watch Game of Thrones.  Let's go to bed."  To which I had to respond... "Except feeding the dog.  That has to happen."

And then we looked at the plants in my lap.  And then we looked at each other. And j said:

"So MANY living things dependent on us!"

And that's my realization for the weekend.  While j and I are not yet mothers, we have recently had an exponential increase in the number of living-things-dependent-on-us. In addition, while this change has been exciting and welcome, we're also apparently at our current limit.  Both of us were exactly on the same page in that one moment of looking a tray of garden transplants.  We have reached our current threshold of household dependency.

Newest living-thing-dependent-on-us... in a rare state of serenity

We spent part of the car ride home listing the living-things-dependent-on-us and it looked something like this:

3 cats.
5 houseplants.
10,000 bees.
1 foster dog with separation anxiety.
1 vegetable garden.
1 flower garden.
1 herb garden.
for k: j
for j: k

Of course the garden can also be broken out into:
20 bean plants
2 ground cherry plants
6 tomato plants
16 carrots
16 beets
5 kale plants
16 chard plants
1 eggplant
1 Malabar spinach
6 cucumber plants
1 basil plant
1 parsley
1 sage
2 cilantros
1 rosemary
1 mint
At least 50 flowering plants

On the home front, we have acquired the majority of this (10,000 bees, three gardens and a dog) in the past 12 weeks.  As I mentioned in my last post, the bees have become a bit of a worry... in that I don't know if they are going to survive. Last Thursday, I inspected and found a brand new queen roaming around the comb. This was extraordinarily good news and I was quite happy about it.  And then it rained all weekend and has been in the high 50s/low 60s for two days.  This is worrisome because the new queen only has a small window of time to go out of the hive and mate with drones.  Once she does, she will never need to leave the hive again.  I am worried that she was unable to do this due to weather limitations (bees will not fly out of the hive in the rain OR when it is less than 55 degrees out).  Thus, I continue to be concerned that my beehive may be dying... and I was a failure to these initial 10,000 living-things-dependent-on-me.  If I do not see eggs when I next open the hive, I will need to order a new queen off the internet. 

Queen bee... same type as the one in my hive... Mine needs to "get busy"...

Back to our car ride: After some silence, j turned and said, "And 400 undergraduates."  More silence followed, and I knew what she meant.

Of course, these undergraduates don't depend ENTIRELY on her... but they sure do lean on her a lot and I can definitely see the toll it takes.  In fact, this semester j has discovered that being a professor would be a whole lot more productive if there weren't so many students!  This sounds silly, of course, to those who are not entirely familiar with the standard undergraduate institution these days.  After all, what does a professor do if not "interact with students"?  And the answer is: More than you think.  Between grant writing and lesson writing and spearheading the construction of a new "design studio," j is more than occupied each and every moment of her waking day... and then there is the actual teaching.  However, due to others on sabbatical this semester, j has also become the main "go-to" faculty person for advising undergraduates in the department.  And let's be honest, even if she wasn't the only one around, the students vastly prefer coming to her to talk.  As one of very few women faculty in her mostly male faculty AND male student department, she has inadvertently become the "mom" figure.

How j's students apparently see her

Here at home, we find this new role endlessly surprising and amusing.  Let's just say that between the two of us, we would both imagine that I would be the one most stereotyped as "mom-like"... and while I would not say j is "dad-like," she does spend a lot less time thinking about and processing emotional information than I do.  Of course, most of her students do not know me and are not comparing me to her, but rather her to all the other available faculty.  Suddenly, processing young adult male emotions is now a significant part of her job.  They drop into her office whether she has posted office hours or not.  When bottom lips start to quiver, she has to ask them to close the door because she knows they are about to announce something emotional.  Any time her door is open, they quietly lean on the door jam until she looks up from her computer and asks what they need.  They stop her in the halls. They form a sitting down line in the hallway whenever she DOES hold office hours, 4 times a week.

Reenactment - Not j's actual students...

All this activity has now been boiled down to a single statement: "Dr. j, I have NEEDS."  Whenever she comes home and I ask how the day went, I can tell when I need to launch into a slump to the side and a whiny rendition of this statement... to get a smile and lighten the mood.  Truth is... 400 young people can have a lot of needs. 

So, that's where we are this Mother's Day.  Not yet mothers, waiting on a bee to become a mother while also mothering other mothers' children. Some Mother's Day in the future, we'll be part of the group being celebrated... but for now, this is truly enough.