Year Four and still more!

I’m continuing to document my journey through graduate school (click here for year 3, year 2, or year 1 if you missed them), and this past year was an unusual one!

Yes, that’s right, I’ve made it through four years of graduate school and I’ve still got more to go. At the beginning of the pandemic, I admit I didn’t mind the initial switch to all online classes so much. It added more flexibility to scheduling, and let’s be honest here--sometimes I just really appreciated not having to put on real pants or leave my house. At the end of this year though, I am looking forward to slowly getting accustomed to leaving my house again and seeing people as more than little boxes on Zoom.

For a year that often felt like a black hole, a lot happened. 

I spent last summer taking an intensive Hungarian course, reading a million books for my PhD qualifying exams in the fall, and moving into our new house. I entered the fall feeling a bit drained.

I took my qualifying exams (known as “quals”) at the beginning of September. This looked like being locked away in an office for four hours two days in a row responding to questions about themes and perspectives in German literature, and then two weeks later responding to oral questions about those written responses for two hours.

Basically the exams are supposed to help you become familiar with the “canon” of German literature (works you should definitely know in the field) and help you figure out what you are interested in for your own research. 

After completing this feat, I collapsed in a wasted stupor for hours (or was it days? Or weeks?! I can’t actually remember at this point). I was teaching two sections of third semester German and also taking three courses (more Hungarian, East German literature, and Heimat/concepts of German home), so I suppose if the stupor lasted weeks I managed to arise for certain activities. 

The exam hangover eventually wore off and it felt like a huge burden had been lifted. I suddenly wasn’t desperately attempting to cram as much knowledge in my head as possible in every spare moment. I finally could watch a movie without simultaneously reading literary commentaries.

Dallin and I took a belated honeymoon trip (+ our dog Ahsoka) to North Carolina in October to see the Smoky Mountains and celebrate. It was stunningly beautiful and we ate incredibly good food and almost crippled Ahsoka with a very steep hike and saw many cute pumpkins. When we came home, I bought 30 pumpkins (Dallin claims it was 50+)  for our house and treasured each one.

We cancelled trips to visit family in November because of corona, which was really disappointing, but the 6 pies we ate as consolation prizes almost made up for it. I ran a virtual half marathon on Thanksgiving around Bloomington, which helped me make room for all that pie.

We stayed in Bloomington for Christmas too, and my parents were able to come to spend time with us and my brother’s family as well. Dallin got a cold while they were here and we panicked thinking it was COVID because apparently all that social-distancing we’ve been doing has prevented us from getting germs of any kind. Both of us stayed COVID-free the whole year.

I got sad and restless in January, missing the sun and traveling and structure (IU extended their winter break, so the semester didn’t resume until the end of January). My virtual classes from the fall were the final ones I needed to take for my program, so once the semester actually started, I was just teaching one section of second semester German (still virtually) and writing my dissertation prospectus. 

What’s a prospectus, you might ask? A prospectus is basically the game plan for your dissertation. It includes things like your research topic, what questions you’re interested in, what other scholars have suggested about your topic, what materials you plan on using, and an outline for your dissertation (which will usually end up being around 200 pages). For my dissertation, I am looking at how characters respond to suffering in contemporary German literature and film (post 1945), which I think offers a model for how we all respond to the suffering we witness in our everyday lives--it’s kind of like a grammar of suffering.

I successfully defended my prospectus in the middle of April and now have the coveted letters of ABD (all but dissertation), which means I’ve done everything for my PhD except actually write my dissertation. For many fields in the humanities, it can take anywhere from 1-3 years to write this, and often longer… research takes time and is hard work and there are always new things coming out and ideas to consider.

Oh and let’s not forget that we also found out I was pregnant in February! Which was wonderfully exciting and surreal. Maybe it’s weird, but I hadn’t given that much concrete thought to becoming a mother. It always seemed so far away. Well, actually, I had nightmares during my undergraduate years about becoming a single mom and having to drop out of school (which maybe contributed to my vaginismus…). 

And oh yeah, vaginismus--a diagnosis I got in February 2020, meaning my vagina physically rejected anything I tried to put in it. Which explained why I could never figure out how other women ever put those damn tampons in their bodies. Because to me, it looked like there were no holes big enough for that. Vaginismus is often a response to sexual trauma, but it can also occur for women raised in religiously conservative cultures (Deborah Feldman’s memoir Unorthodox / the Netflix’s miniseries of her story portrays one extreme example of such). 

I mean, I’m pregnant now so obviously I worked through it, but that was another really stressful part about last summer--feeling like my body was broken and I had too much going on to fix it. Reading blogs from other people who had vaginismus told me that it could take anywhere from mere months to several years to retrain your vaginal muscles. I had no idea how hard it would be to get pregnant fertility-wise, but I knew that at some point I would want to get pregnant and needed the mechanics to work.--it ended up taking about six or seven months for me.

Back to February of this year, I bought a pregnancy test without telling Dallin, but we’d been trying for a baby that month, so this was our first chance in seeing if it worked. 

However, when I ran out of the bathroom waving a pee stick in Dallin’s face as he sat concentrating on something else, he was still stunned at the positive symbol. We sat in happy surprise, minds spinning, and it took all my self control not to tell every single person I’ve ever talked to that we were having a baby. We did play tennis the next day and I shouted things about being his “pregnant wife” so that at least strangers on the neighboring court and those walking by would know. I’m really happy to have Dallin as a partner in life and a partner in raising a child.

2020 and 2021 feels a bit like one long day. I took important exams, finished my coursework, and wrote a prospectus. I ran a lot of miles. I taught students who resiliently showed up to Zoom classes. I mostly stopped wearing makeup and still dyed my hair a few times. Dallin and I celebrated our first anniversary and we’re really excited that year 5 will bring us a little pumpkin.