Are you seious?

I ran to campus on Thursday with the kids (which I try to avoid doing, because it's just a hassle, and I get stares like there's not tomorrow) because I needed to drop off a hard copy of my reading list to one of my professors (really it was just a not-so-subtle hint to remind him I exist, since he hasn't responded in any way to the first copy of my list that I emailed to him before the semester break).

Anyway. I was grumbling to myself about taking the stroller down the 5 flights of steps from the top of the parking garage (Do they have an elevator? Yes. Was it working? No.) when a nice woman struck up a conversation with me. Turns out she's in another department with offices on the same floor as my department offices, and so we were going the same way. I don't really remember how it came up, but at some point she said "There are some students who do what you're doing...family, and school. And maybe neither one gets the attention they deserve, but it seems like you're putting your family first."

What a way to kill a perfectly nice conversation. I mean, I recognize the "you're putting your family first" as a possible attempt to make up for the preceding remark. But in five minutes of walking and talking, can she really judge that I'm doing that?

I always have this overly-defensive reaction to this sort of comment...I want to jump into how developmentally advanced Bee is linguistically and Baby J is physically, how I make them hats and clothes, how I quilt, how I make and can homemade jelly, and dry seal food storage things, how my house is always clean when I go to bed at night because of my obsessive need for order. And not to let my professional side be outdone by all that, how my grades are the same or better than my single and childless counterparts, how I've presented at three graduate student conferences and three professional conferences (one of them twice), how one of my papers has been published (albeit humbly, and mostly thanks to David Wiseman), how I am proceeding through my program ahead of schedule, and how I consistently earn "meets and exceeds departmental expectations" on my teaching observation evaluations (even the semester that they observed me when I had morning sickness so badly that I was sure I was going to fail the evaluation)!

But it's just that: defensive. It's completely self-serving to try to bring any of that up. So I usually just find a way to wrap up the conversation, and mosey on through the rain with my kids, to drop off my papers.