Things have been quiet on Breaking ABD for the past few months. The same has not been true for our apartment. Five months ago today, my wife and I welcomed a happy and healthy baby girl into our family. She is, in part, responsible for this extended blogging hiatus, but also more joy than I can begin to describe.

A combination of maternity leave and vacation time allowed my wife to stay at home for the first couple months, but since January I’ve been our daughter’s primary caregiver. This obviously hasn’t been conducive to making rapid progress on the dissertation, even though it’s been immensely rewarding in its own ways. Professionally, the first quarter of this year has been awkward. As rejections have trickled in, it’s become increasingly apparent that this year’s job application cycle will be unsuccessful for me, although a couple nibbles here and there have brought modest encouragement. This has removed the stress of needing to finish the dissertation imminently. It has, however, introduced the alternative stress of not having a guaranteed source of funding for next year.

I currently have write-up fellowship applications pending, and I’m relatively confident about a positive outcome. Nevertheless, the unsettled state of next year’s finances has shaped both our material decisions and my mental state. Paying for consistent childcare would have allowed me to keep going full-steam ahead on dissertation-writing, but without the prospect of a job offer to require working as quickly as possible and to ensure a source of income next year, this hasn’t seemed like the best course of action. In the best case scenario, we’ll have extra funds in reserve to help cover these and other expenses starting in the summer.

The worst case scenario, of course, is that the write-up applications fall flat too. To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what I’ll do if that happens. The short version is that it wouldn’t necessarily end my trek toward the PhD, but it could.

Psychologically, these last few months have been a bit strange. Both professionally and personally, these have been some of the best times of my life: caring for my daughter, seeing the dissertation near completion (it’s well over halfway done now), and teaching my own classes. On the other hand, there’s no way to know if this year will be a step toward a well-polished dissertation and a successful career or a clumsy stumble on the way out of academia. I’ve been fortunate not to encounter serious writer’s block, and, while I’m more aware than ever of the particular challenges and potential weaknesses of my project, I’m not sick of it. On the other hand, with caring for my daughter being my top priority, there have been many times where my brain is ready to write but my body is otherwise occupied. I’d be lying if I said this stress hadn’t taken a toll. The flip side, is that the time I have to write tends to be more productive and is strangely cathartic. More importantly, while the dissertation will wait for me to write it, my daughter is growing up with or without me, and I want to catch every second of it that I can.

Despite the time crunch, I do plan to get back to blogging more regularly, although perhaps not as frequently as I expected when I started, now over three years ago. A professor in my department once described blogging and Twitter as a kind of instant gratification that can distract from the deeper sort of intellectual engagement that academic life offers and demands. I get that, and I recognize that the buzz from “likes” on Facebook and Twitter is a cheap kind of thrill. But that’s also why I plan to see this blog through to the end. It is, itself, an intellectual project that, while very different from the dissertation, is coterminous with it. Yes, the blog has fewer footnotes, but it’s also given me space to recognize colleagues, influences, and day-to-day happenings that are far more fundamental to my life than the dissertation. You can decide for yourself if that makes it a less serious form of writing.

My wife and I have decided not to publicly post pictures of our daughter online, although of course we don’t judge those who do, and we’re very happy to send pictures privately. Instead, with this post you get a picture of an empty baby swing. This is my daughter’s version of the blog: her vantage point on my writing process. This was a gift from a friend, who used to coordinate the Making History Work program in my department. Our apartment is filled with such gifts. MHW is up and running again, and today there’s an event on writing for public audiences – exactly the sort of event that encouraged me to keep going in the early days of this blog. I figured, then, that this was as good a time as any both to get back to blogging and to reflect on how so many people – both big and small – have shaped the dissertation in ways that won’t make it into the text or even footnotes but will always be on my mind.