"I don't know. We're juggling science, technology, politics, and social relationships, and well, I... we'll just have to see."

Ah, as do we all, man, as do we all.

I just received notification that my grant application hasn’t been funded. I am getting used to rejection, and I somewhat expected it. It isn’t the rejection that is upsetting me so much as the reasons why. The reviewers were pretty positive; there were a few minor issues with the proposed research, but they thought that I had come up with a good collaborative project that would establish me as a leader in the field. They praised my PI, they praised the fact that I had reached out to other members of our university, they praised the potential impact of the research. Blah blah blah. The major concern they had was that, although I was very productive in my previous research career I had not, as of yet, published a paper as a post-doc, and that my non-productivity might be a warning flag as to the feasibility of my actually completing the proposed research.

Unproductive? Let me ask you this… where, on my CV, can I put that I got pregnant and gave birth… twice?

The powers that be in the scientific community have recently incorporated a ‘time-out’ waiver into the climb up the faculty ladder, so that women who have had children will not get penalized for a seeming ‘lack of productivity’.

This is good. Except… that means you have to wait until you actually have secured a faculty position to have children. Only… most every female I know doesn’t want to wait that long… and they don’t. They start having children as a postdoc, as I did. So where is my ‘time-out’?

Maybe the lesson here is that I made the wrong choice. I shouldn’t have tried to do it all. I should have stopped working for a while. I didn’t, thinking that it would be the wiser move to keep going, even if at a crawl instead of at a run. Only, now everyone else is approaching the finish line while I am still at the starting gate. Can I ever catch up?

My paper finally got accepted. It was the fourth journal and the third revision... but it is done. It just goes to show... perseverance pays.

Friday I faxed in the proofs. Any day now it will show up on pubmed. It is my eleventh paper, third as first author, and first as corresponding author. It is the first one that I really did write... I've written others but after handing my draft in to my PI and making all the 'suggested' changes it was barely recognizable as my own. Not so with this paper. In fact, I'd been working on it for so long that I'd forgotten what I'd written. After reading it again for the proofs, I thought "Damn, I wrote a good paper!".

It is a bit disturbing that two years worth of work got condensed into 6 pages and three figures.

And then my two year old got her hands on the first page of my proof... and drew all over it. It looks not at all unlike those aforementioned first drafts, only she was an even more harsh critic, leaving little to recognize on the page. Now, when I read it, I really smile... because the blue scribbles make me think of something even better then work. I think I'll frame it.

I have a graduate student working with me these 12 weeks. It is an unusual situation; she is actually only volunteering here while visiting her husband, a fellow in one of the clinical departments. They are from India, and he moved to the States one week after they were married; she has come out to visit but needs to go back for one more year of her graduate studies.

Things are going well. She has good hands, which means that she gets good clean results. She is meticulous, which means she moves slowly. Sometimes a little too slowly… but, she is volunteering her time with me after all, so I can’t complain. Occasionally, I wish I could just do the work myself; but I know when she is gone I will wish I had her back.

We have one little problem, however. It is a communication issue. For the first few weeks I thought perhaps I wasn’t communicating effectively; but that has never been a weakness of mine. However, I made an effort to slow down, and wrote as I spoke so she could see and hear my instructions… and then have them written for her reference. I made a point of telling her why we need to do a certain experiment, what I was hoping the result will be, and the detailed protocol on how to do it. Even so, I found that there was still an issue. It was quite frustrating.

Yesterday, however, I realized what the problem was.

She thinks I’m an idiot.

She is constantly questioning me… but not in a positive, inquisitive, manner. She is second guessing me, my motives, and my methods.

And she smiles so politely as she does it.

It is quite irritating, really.

Well, there is nothing to be done about it. I know I am not an idiot. My resume speaks to that. I’ll just have to keep on explaining myself… maybe eventually the results will prove that I do know what I’m talking about. Of course, this being science, there is a greater likelihood that the experiments won’t work.

I’ll just have to look at it as one of those challenges; I’m sure, if I continue to teach, I’ll always have that student who thinks they are smarter and better. And some of them will be… but that doesn’t mean they don’t have more to learn.