Caveat: One person’s opinion – will not work for all.

Helping your wife to bring your child into this world involves more than one day. It is much more than building tree houses five years too early, anxious pacing of corridors or clumsy attempts at home videos in the delivery ward.

Pregnancy is a magical and priceless journey. If it is your first, you will never ever experience that same depth of joy and thrill, I reckon. Even if you are a confirmed atheist – there will be moments during this journey when you catch glimpses of The Light.

That marvellous journey ought to start, at the very latest, when she first breaks the good news.

Be there, for her morning sickness, her crazy craving for strange food during even crazier hours of the day or night. Hold her hands during the pre-natal classes. Be gentle and loving, kind and…

My dad is a country boy, despite a closet full of suits and a house in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama. This notion first presented itself when I ate supper at a kindergarten chum’s house and made a puzzling discovery: Her family ate beans from tin cans.

Until then I thought beans came from jars. After all, jars of beans, tomatoes, peppers, beets, and bread-and-butter pickle lined shelves in our playroom. Jars of muscadine grape, peach, pear, and blackberry jam glowed like jewels next to the Pachinko machine. Boxes of empty Mason jars—awaiting next season’s harvest—towered on the upright piano.

I rushed home to report the news. “Most people eat processed vegetables,” Mom said, confirming this new fact of life. “They also eat  fruit in tin cans. Aren’t you children lucky that your father is a wonderful gardener?”

Lucky? I didn’t think so. While all the other kids played kickball on…

In August of last year, I gave a paper to the University of Melbourne’s Office of Research Ethics and Integrity research seminars, Tuesdays with OREI, on ‘Hyper-Anxiety about Research Integrity among library staff and RHD students’ that ended up doing two different things. So this is the third of a five part blog series, about who is anxious, why it’s unhelpful, and what we can do instead. 

You can read the whole series by clicking on the category ‘Hyper-Anxiety & Academic Honesty’.

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In the first two posts, I suggested that ‘hyper-anxiety’ about research ethics and integrity is excessive and a ‘double-anxiety’, or a shame about not being totally confident. Rather than seeing academic honesty as a negotiated and complex series of judgment calls that can and should be discussed openly, a punitive culture shuts down sharing and mutual support.

In this post I suggest that it’s not just RHD…