Dear Chancellor Reed - Or the slow death of the CSU

Dear Chancellor Reed,

I am writing to explain my very reluctant decision to begin seeking employment elsewhere, outside of the CSU.  I have been a faculty member at CSU East Bay for 12 years.  I have loved my job, I love teaching students, am extremely well respected by my colleagues and adored by my students. I was in fact voted Outstanding Professor in my department by the undergraduate students last year, and I have students who come back after graduation and ask to sit in on my classes or to get copies of the podcasts I make of my lectures.  I make a difference in the lives of students every day. 

But I can no longer afford to work at the CSU.  I certainly did not get into education because I wished to be wealthy (I would have stayed an accounting major if money was my primary concern).  However, I simply cannot afford to support my family on my income.  I made $55,000 last year, with teaching summer.  That amounts to less than $4,000 a month take home pay.  I am a widowed mom of two children.  My husband was also a CSU faculty member and died leaving me with his retirement and a small life insurance.  5 years later, that money is gone.  My house, which was a reasonable mortgage for the Bay Area, was $3,000 a month.  Though I did the best I could to keep it going, I lost my house this summer and am now sharing a house with a friend.  (I realize that $55,000 may sound like an adequate salary to some – however in the Bay Area, everything is so much more expensive from gasoline to housing, that either I would have to commute the 3 hours a day from the Central Valley to the Bay Area, and lose that time with my kids, or the cost of living is so prohibitive that I cannot afford a place of my own).   My children draw social security from my late husband.  That is money I should be able to put away so that maybe I might be able to afford to send my kids to college.  However, I had been unable to do so until I let my house go – not through being extravagant, but simply paying for groceries, heat, gas and maintenance for the car, clothing, insurance, child care and other basic necessities.

I work hard and I love my job.  But I was hired too late into the CSU.  I suspect in contract negotiations, when you look at the average CSU faculty salary, you only see the average.  That average reflects the people who have worked at the CSU for decades, during a period with consistent yearly step increases, merit pay increases, and cost of living increases that have some older faculty making $100,000 a year.  But any of us hired into the system in the last 12-15 years are stuck – especially given rumors that in contract negotiations that you have stated that we should expect a pay cut rather than an increase in the next few years.  There is no hope of ever drawing a living wage.  We are highly trained, hard working professionals who cannot afford basics like heat (one faculty member in our department did not heat their house last winter – it was a trade-off between their child playing baseball, and the cost of running their furnace).

I have started applying to the community college system in California.  They are hiring instructors in my field at a considerably higher salary that I make now (for example, current job advertisement for Diablo Valley College lists as their hiring salary a scale that goes from $55,000 to $83,000 depending on education and experience.  As I have a Ph.D. from U. C. Berkeley and have been teaching college level for 12 years, I estimate I would likely be hired at $70,000 – a good $15,000 a year more than I made last year).  This is far more than the current job advertised in my department at CSU East Bay will pay.  What does that tell you that a new job hire at a community college would make far more than a new hire at the CSU?  There is something very wrong here.  In fact, during a recent job interview, when a candidate asked what an ideal candidate for the position would look like, one of the current faculty members joked that they would have an independently wealthy spouse. 

I would really do anything to stay.  I love my job and I do not want to leave.  But I do not know how to make the money work.  I did not get into education to become wealthy, but neither did I imagine I would be treated so poorly: being disrespected by the upper administration as a lazy, greedy faculty member in public.  In contract negotiations simply being dismissed as unimportant and told there simply is no money while at the same time watching administrators continue to get more.  I did not imagine that ‘attracting and keeping good people’ for upper administration was a higher priority than keeping the people in the classroom who are doing the actual job of this university system – educating students.  I am not the only faculty member who has reached their breaking point of needing to walk away.  How will the CSU stay as a strong educational system if you lose all of the energetic, enthusiastic, young instructors?  We cannot afford this job.

Sincerely,

Widowed Mom

My children's grief

My children and I are extremely close: far closer than we were prior to their dad and my husband dying.  We came to depend more on each other over the last few years because we were all each other had.  I became both mom and dad to my kids – there when they were lonely, there when they were scared, there to provide the butt kicking they needed to get their homework done or their piano practiced.  And there to make all of the screw-ups in parenting that are inevitable.  It was all me.

I think I have a greater insight into my children’s emotional lives as a result than a parent in a two parent household. And I have tremendous sympathy for the normal every day emotional roller coaster that is pre-teen childhood.  That said, I know I will never understand their experience of grief.  Certainly I don’t understand it the way someone who has lost a parent would, and maybe I have even less insight than a stranger would.  Their grief doesn’t look like my grief.  It is so profoundly different that at times I am at a total loss in how to help them deal with it.  Adult grief and childhood grief are not the same.

When he died, it was a profound life changing event.  It shaped everything for me from that day forward – good and bad.  I cried, I talked about it, I found solace in people and activities around me.  It was sharp, it was deep and it went through the pattern I have read in so many books: numbness followed by an even greater feeling of loss and then a long slow battle back to some semblance of normalcy.  I did not see that pattern in my kids. 

When he first died, my kids seemed to continue moving through life okay.  My daughter left the day after her dad died on her scheduled school trip to Washington D.C.  It was her choice to go and she did okay.  My son went back to school a day or two later and he was okay.  They were both affected by it certainly – my son didn’t want to leave to go with his grandparents for a day at a festival – in part because he didn’t want to leave me alone – felt a responsibility for taking care of me.  He was more clingy than he was before, my daughter became less clingy and more independent.  But their lives continued. 

I had expected to see them cry frequently – they didn’t.  I had expected them to want to include memories of their dad in celebrations of anniversaries or holidays – and while they took those suggestions and were ‘good with it’ they didn’t seem to crave it.  I had expected to see the haunted look on their faces that was on mine, but it wasn’t there. I had expected their lives to go on a temporary hold the way that mine did – and theirs didn’t.  It isn’t as though they didn’t cry – it just wasn’t what I had expected.  Their lives seemed to continue in a way that mine couldn’t.  As if in my adult grief experience – life as I had known it ended, and I had to start again.  For them, it looked more like life continued – just with a giant piece missing.  I had read that for children grief was a more drawn out, slower process.  And certainly that is what I have observed in my own kids.  That missing piece will go with them – continue with each new success that they have that they can’t share with their dad, and with each new failure where they can’t run to him for safety and security. 

For me, I will always love him – will miss him on some level, but I also don’t want my life to return to where it was.  I do not crave him returning.  My life is in such a different place than it was 4 years ago, that it would be inconceivable for me to picture him coming back into it.  But for his children, that isn’t the case.  Without that profound break in life that I experienced in grief, their lives are still missing a piece.  I see it when my son is upset practicing piano – he will go find his dad’s photo and stare at it as he cries over the piano piece.  I see it when my daughter is angry at me and yells ‘Dad wouldn’t have made me do that’.  But I really don’t know what their emotional experience is like.  I ask – I bring up their dad and missing him, however, both kids indicate that just makes them feel worse when we talk about it.   

Perhaps it is also the difference between losing a parent and losing a spouse.  My parents are both still living so I don’t know what losing a parent feels like – and of course losing a parent as an adult will be very different than losing one as a child.

I am an outsider in my kid’s grief.  It is a shared event, but our inner lives aren’t shared.

Widowhood

I recently welcomed a friend into the club of women you don’t want to join – widows. She is the second friend of mine who has followed me into the parallel universe of having lost a spouse to death.  One moment you are living your life, and the next you are frozen.  Life keeps going around you, but you are stuck – like a rock in the center of a stream while everyone else keeps moving around you.  There is an odd moment when you look around you – maybe in the grocery store – when you look at everyone else and wonder how they keep going when the world has stopped. It is a strange place to be, time has ceased to mean anything and you are gripped in a paralyzing numbness unable to comprehend things going on around you.

Our society doesn’t handle death well.  In other cultures, death is more visible, it is an inevitable part of life.  Widowed women or men dress in particular clothing, can be seen wailing in public and it is accepted. But in our society, we hardly see it.  We don’t see the impact on families, and especially when it happens to someone young, we seem completely ill prepared to deal with it.  When I was first widowed, one of the most striking things to me was how reluctant I became to tell anyone.  It was almost as though in my mind there was a stigma attached with saying ‘I am widowed’.  Women at the park with their kids would easily mention they were divorced.  There was no surprise. However, if I mentioned I was widowed, shocked silence would be followed by awkward apologies.  We simply don’t know what to do around the death of someone’s spouse when they die young.  I suspect it is different among older women since it is so much more common. I generally avoided ever mentioning it.  I think most people around me to this day believe I am divorced with an absentee ex-husband who doesn’t visit the kids because I don’t know how to say I am widowed.  Four years later and I still don’t know how to say those words easily.

Though I avoided telling those around me, it didn’t mean I didn’t feel a lot of irrational anger towards those who were still happily living their lives.  I remember the one morning I was driving behind someone who lives in my neighborhood with a license plate that reads glfwdw (golf widow).  I had seen that license plate many times before, but after Gene died that license plate made me irrationally and overwhelmingly angry.  She was still married.  Her husband simply played golf on the weekend.  How dare she refer to herself as a widow?  At the end of the day, she still slept wrapped in someone’s arms.  Absolutely irrational.  I sat out one day at a birthday party for a friend’s child where the women were talking about their marital problems.  One was describing how irritating she found it when her husband unexpectedly came home during the day for lunch as it was so disruptive to her schedule.  The other woman agreed and said it was so disruptive when her husband worked from home.  And I had to choke down the urge to tell them to stop whining and start appreciating each day they had with their loved one. 

Though I struggled with fitting myself into the world around me, I still I found myself not wanting to be defined by my widowhood.  It was almost as if I believed by mentioning my status, I had a giant letter W on my forehead.  It became as big a part of my identity as being a mom or being a college professor.  And perhaps that as much as anything kept me from admitting my situation in social settings.  I got creative in how I described my late husband – would refer to him as my children’s dad (as if we had never been married).  I even once or twice called my late husband my ‘ex-husband’ even though that denied who he was to me and denied myself the status of having been in a committed, caring, loving marriage.  Why is it so hard to say my ‘late husband’?  I give many personal examples in class, and this becomes the trickiest situation for describing my marital status.  I have really shied away from students knowing my life story even as I use personal examples in class.  I cannot tell you why I find that to be the case – why would I feel there is a bigger stigma attached to being widowed than to being divorced?  Do other widows feel that way?

Making excuses

In the last couple of weeks, I have found myself listening to women who are making excuses for their partners: apologizing for their behavior – explaining away their bad deeds.  And the odd thing is these are not un-liberated women – women married to dominant, overbearing men.  Instead these are liberated, strong, feminist women.  And yet, they are still making excuses for their male partners.  In one case, the partner in question had said something insulting to me.  I had hoped/expected an apology from him – but this did not happen.  Instead I received two e-mail apologies from his significant other, explaining that he must have been tired when he said what he said, that he must not have realized it was offensive, that he was kind hearted and would never knowingly offend someone, so he must have said it by mistake (and yes, she had heard what he had said).  But never did I receive an apology from him.  This didn’t bother me nearly as much as receiving apologies from her.  What is that? If he is being a jerk, so what?  Let him be a jerk. Why is his significant other apologizing for him??? This is a woman who is a die-hard feminist.  Why do strong, feminist women still defend the actions of men?

The second case is considerably more serious.  In this case, the husband in question is on trial for a serious crime. I don’t know if he is guilty or not.  But all involved admit that though he may not have done anything illegal (again I don’t know if he did or not) he did do something incredibly stupid to wind up in the position he is in.  He is married to a very strong, very liberated feminist.  And she is going down with the ship on this.  He will likely be convicted (again, I do not know whether he is guilty or not – nor does it matter – sometimes our judicial system is not fair as it turns out).  If convicted, his wife’s life and that of their children will likely be very damaged (and frankly with the media attention to this, their lives are already irreparably harmed).  Her job will be in question.  And he has lost his.  When released he will be largely unemployable as his job is incompatible with the crime he is being tried for.  She is standing by him.  And while I do admire her dedication – she is paying for this crime as are her kids.  And frankly, her family is footing the bill for the legal fees (not his).  This is a woman who has fought for feminist ideals – fought for women to have the rights that they do today.  And yet, she is allowing this man to ruin her life.  He is not always treating her well.  He is not showing appreciation for her dedication, and yet she makes excuses for his behavior.  “He is under so much stress – that is why he doesn’t acknowledge Valentine’s Day”.   That’s bullshit!  He should be showering her with affection!  She is still there!  She is defending him and making excuses for him to the world and he can’t buy her a lousy box of chocolates????  “It’s too hard for him to go out in public”… Well then by god he should be MAKING her a card for standing by his sorry ass.

These women, in my opinion, are not oppressed by their men.  They are doing it to themselves.  They are putting themselves in the position of subservience by allowing men to behave badly and covering it up.  I know – I was there.  I was married to someone who behaved badly sometimes. I made excuses for him not showing up to family events.  I made excuses when he would throw a temper tantrum in public.  I would make excuses to both the world and to myself when he would treat me or the kids badly.  Being a strong woman and making excuses for someone else seems wrong.  One friend pointed out that marriage is forming a unit, so when ½ half that unit misbehaves, we have to excuse it to the world because it reflects badly on us.  If that is the case, how come I don’t hear men apologizing for their wives???  We just don’t behave badly? 

I know that I am tired of making excuses for men.  And more importantly, I am blessed to be in a relationship where I am not making excuses for a man.  That doesn’t mean he never screws up, or does anything socially awkward, however, I am blessed now to be able to shrug, and let him make his own excuses.  I don’t have to be responsible for his behavior.  Is that because I have found the holy grail of men who can apologize when he screw up?  Yes, that certainly is part of it.  And perhaps starting a relationship at a more mature age also means I am not as dependent on the partnership to define who I am, so the errors he makes don’t feel like my responsibility or fault.  I would wish for all strong women out there that they can stop making excuses for their partner.  If we are apologizing for their behavior, are we truly accepting them for who they are?

Grief

It is funny the path that grief takes in an individual.  Though there are similar effects in others, our path is unique.  I was thinking about it this morning as I weighed myself and realized that 3 ½ years later, I now had gained back all of the weight I lost after my husband died (over 20 pounds).  That was one of my major physical manifestations of grief.  Looking back now, at the time I thought I was losing weight because I was too miserable to eat, too uninterested in things that would cause pleasure (like food).  But I think that was only part of the story.  The real story behind it seems more similar to what I hear about anorexia.  I was watching that scale every morning - deriving satisfaction in seeing the pounds come off because they represented control.  In a world where things had so severely slipped out of my control, I could watch the pounds come off and know that I was making that happen. 

Soon after my husband died, I started having trouble sleeping.  Initially that difficulty developed as paranoia.  I would hear things in the house, people outside.  I would sleep with the phone under my pillow convinced someone was now going to try to break in.  As the early period of grief subsided, I stopped being paranoid about security (I now occasionally will wake in the morning to find I left the front door unlocked all night).  But those first couple of months, I was scared.  And that fear took the form of fear of a break in.  It was somehow easier to direct the fear towards an unknown stranger than experience what I was really afraid of – that I couldn’t manage alone.  I wasn’t sure I could handle the finances or manage two small children with their demands and a full time career.  I had no idea how I was going to balance it all on my own.  So, instead of expressing fear of failure, I became paralyzed at night with fear that someone was breaking into the house.

Later in my grief process I developed another sleep problem, insomnia.  It appeared for me probably three to four months after he was gone – at a point when I felt I was finally getting on my feet and getting some control back over my life.  So, it was odd to me I began waking up every night at 4 in the morning, unable to go back to sleep.  Eventually I gave into the insomnia, would just get up, work for an hour, and then either go back to bed or if that was unsuccessful, I would go sleep on the sofa. 

I went back to work two weeks after my husband died.  Ostensibly it was because my job only gave us two weeks bereavement leave (however, I had been told I could get a doctor’s note and use sick leave if needed) but the reality for me was that I needed to go back to work.  It provided me with an escape from being bereaved.  I could step into my classroom and be the performer I am when lecturing and stop being the widow.  Grief had no place in that space.  I cannot imagine my lectures were any good that term (though I got fantastic evaluations out of sympathy) but it provided an escape for me. 

Though lecturing was easy following his death, other parts of work left me almost paralyzed.  I couldn’t grade papers.  And while commuting at times I was overcome by a wave of panic that didn’t seem to be based on any thought.  It was one of the strangest aspects of the process for me – the physical manifestations of stress were often independent of thought.  I did discover the wonders of a drug called Ativan – an anti-anxiety drug.  One pill and that ball of panic and fear would dissolve and I could grade!  You might assume by that statement that I used it frequently, but I didn’t.  My doctor initially gave me a bottle of 20 pills. I gave several away to a friend dying of pancreatic cancer, and 5 or so remain in my cabinet (expired I am sure).  I hoarded those pills.  Just having them in my cupboard helped me cope with life.  It wasn’t necessary to take them, just knowing I could meant I could sit down and grade my papers and drive to work. 

It has been 3 ½ years since he has been gone.  And my grief process isn’t over.  It has changed, but learning to move on to a new life is a long term process.  For me now, the steps are about distancing myself from my previous life.  Moving forward means letting go of what I had.  While during that first year, I did remember the bad with the good, I was still looking to replace what I had with something similar.  I dated men who were like him.  Now, more often than not, I remember the problems in my previous marriage not the good things.  It is sad to me that I end up focusing on what was wrong other than what was right.  I envy others who can look back and only see the good part.  But perhaps the exchange there is while I was in my marriage I was very happy – I can ignore the bad in the present, but see it strongly in the past.

My process has been very different from others I have seen around me.  I went to a grief group for a couple of years and watched others expressions of grief.  Even after the first couple of months, I was working on moving forward and rebuilding my life.  Others I saw spent far more time missing what they had.  Some of them seemed stuck in their grief.  But most of them only ever reported the happy parts of their lives with their spouse - the ways in which that person was wonderful.  I miss that.  I wish I could in some ways filter out the parts of my marriage that were difficult.  I think it might make life easier for my kids.

Grief is individual.  There is no one road to travel down.  I am a different person than I was before I lost him.  I am proud of surviving.  I am managing.  And that puts a smile on my face most days. 

If you think you KNOW the answer....

If you think you KNOW the answer, maybe you aren’t asking the right question

I stood with my children around last holiday season, in a circle while someone told the assembled group that as they looked around, they just loved us so much and it broke their heart to think they wouldn’t be together with us forever – they wanted us all to be there.  But of course those of us who hadn’t said that Jesus was our savior wouldn’t be.  And they wanted to encourage us to seek their guidance so we could join them.

My quipped response under my breath was “well if they are there, I’m not going”.  Sarcasm aside, the moral, just, righteous, paternalistic, self-righteous, conceited, arrogance of that statement took my breath away.  I know these people to be well intentioned, thoughtful NICE people.  Of course they are nice.  They are trying to save us after all.  My late husband used to quote “Beware the tyranny of niceness”.  I’m not sure I got it until that moment.  Whatever one’s belief system, what gives any one the right to force that down anyone else’s throat? 

Let’s take this to its logical conclusion – let’s assume that the only way to get into heaven is by saying “Jesus is my savior”.  Then Ghandi isn’t there?  What about individuals who for thousands of years had never heard of Jesus?  Are they similarly condemned?  Is saying Jesus is my savior necessary and sufficient?  Or is it only necessary?  Does it right all wrongs done to proclaim it?  If you can get to heaven without it (ie, perhaps Ghandi will get a pass) then how much sin does it undo?  What are the proportions?  Normal every day sins like being inconsiderate of other people’s belief systems?  Does that get waved if you have proclaimed Jesus as your savior?  I assume it can’t get you to heaven if you have committed a murder, but who knows? 

I wonder sometimes if this family who made the statement would understand that I consider these moral, righteous people to be a bad influence on my kids.  That in fact, their dogmatism and failure to consider any other view point, their belief they have the only RIGHT path, could start one down the path of evil.  After all, it certainly is the epitome of conceit.  And I believe that even in the Bible, conceit is not looked on kindly. 

This family can or course argue that the Bible says that one has to proclaim Jesus in order to be saved.  But remember the Bible also tells us that if we beat a slave with a stick, and he dies immediately, we will be punished, but if he lives a few days, then shouldn’t be, since the slave is property. 

Okay, so maybe I have over-reacted.  Certainly I have managed now for a year to 1) not see the people concerned, and 2) apparently to hold on to a pretty serious level of irritation over this.  So, I guess it is time to let it go.  We are coming up on another holiday season where I will again find myself saying prayer before dinner with the same family.  Time for me to accept them for who they are and hope that just maybe, in time they may learn to appreciate others as they are.  After all, what would Jesus do?

Did I Just Lie to My Daughter?

Earlier this evening, my 11 year old and I continued a conversation about why she wasn’t thrilled with my boyfriend.  This stemmed from a moment the night before when I had said he was coming over, and eye rolling and muttered teenage sarcasm in the form of ‘that’s just great’ occurred.  This was the first time I had seen any hesitation or opinion that wasn’t positive from her about him.  Pressing her today eventually she stated that she was afraid I was replacing her dad, or worse, erasing his memory. 

I of course strongly reassured her that I was doing nothing of the sort – her and her brother’s dad couldn’t be replaced, and his memory wouldn’t be erased.  But later I started to wonder, was that entirely true?  Was it really the case that as I rebuilt my life in a new direction from what it was while married was I slowly erasing the memory of him from my life, and as a consequence from theirs as well?  As I looked around the house, at the replacement of wedding photos with more recent ones of the kids, the removal of the furniture and objects that he had bought that weren’t really my taste, it started to feel less honest.  Earlier this week, I had to replace the washing machine he has bought long before we met each other.  And there was this feeling of empowerment, of me standing on my own able to buy an appliance – one that I chose.  I was making a decision by myself and it felt great.  And the consequence of that is one more object of his that was gone. 

I had married someone who was pretty domineering and who had a lot of faults.  And in recent months, I must confess that I think more about the problems than I do about the good things that happened in our marriage.  As part of my own road of self discovery, I have been thinking about the problems in my marriage – the bad behavior I tolerated at cost to myself and the kids and have been thinking about what I want differently for the rest of my life. I loved him and was convinced I was happy in my marriage.  But I had made a lot of compromises – and maybe that is the case in all relationships – I don’t know.  I only know the compromises that I had made. 

Where is the line between changing your life and erasing your past?  Can I move forward – remapping my own life without leaving my children’s father behind?  Is recognizing you want something different now equivalent to replacing the old?  My daughter feels it is.  She feels like the fact that I have chosen to be with someone now so very different from her father is evidence that he is being replaced. 

I have no answers – I don’t know what to say to her nor do I know how to live independently without reducing the influence he has in our lives. 

I guess this is part of the processes of learning to live on our own.