How electrical engineering prepared me for motherhood

"You're majoring in math and electrical engineering? What are you going to do with those?" people asked throughout my college career. I would give some vague answer or a "I'm not sure" response. Deep down, all I really wanted to do with my degrees was "raise happy genius children" as I confided to Kevin at the beginning of our email correspondence before we started dating. (Apparently, he didn't mind that much because we started dating soon afterwards.) I often wondered if all my degrees would come to any use.

But the good news is, I have actually found electrical engineering to be quite useful in being a stay-at-home mom. Oh, I can't do things like execute a MATLAB script to do my laundry for me or perform a Fourier transform on Joseph to make him content in the frequency domain (i.e. actually like being in his swing), nor am I any good at fixing electronics (that's not where I specialized), but nevertheless, it has done me some good. Here are some examples:


-Signal processing: Besides being an adorable blob for the first few months, a baby is also an expert signal generator. His tongue, his arms, and eyes are all busy conveying signals. As are his vocal cords. A lot. A way lot. Luckily, with several signal processing courses under my belt, I've been ready to tackle all of the sounds and movements Joseph makes. Those cute high pitched squeals? My internal spectrum analyzer has processed those and determined those are too high to convey actual discomfort. (Really. They are several octaves above actual distress signals.) Those coughing cries? My subconscious has done a short-time Fourier transform and determined those to signal hunger. My success rate? . . . probably the same as any other mom, plus or minus 10%.

-White noise: All the baby books recommended saying "shhhhh" to calm your upset baby. That's what we normally say to people to get them to be quiet. But if you stop to think about it, your baby doesn't know that. You may as well be speaking Sanskrit to your baby to calm him down. What's so special about "shhhh"?

Here's where electrical engineering comes in. You see, sounds like "shhhh" are classified as white noise, like the blizzard that used to show up on TV screens back when cell phones were bricks. It has a flat power spectral density, which means there's nothing really to focus on. Which makes it a calming sound.

(Or you could just believe the "experts" who say that "shhh" sounds like the sounds of the womb, which is why it's soothing. Pshaw. My bet is on the flat power spectral density.)

-Tunneling: So, one required class for the major was Solid State Physics. In this class, we learned about a concept called "tunneling," which according to my textbook is a phenomenon in which a particle can make it across a barrier even though there's zero probability of finding the particle inside the barrier. (Or something like that. Physics people need not bother to correct me.) That is, there is some bizarre way of finding a quantum particle in a spot which classical physics says is impossible.

I've realized that Joseph's pacifier is a quantum object. How did I come to this conclusion? Often when he's falling asleep, he loses his pacifier and cries for us to put it back in. Sometimes we can hunt for several seconds before finding it in some obscure location such as underneath him or way above him. How on earth did it get there? Tunneling. This realization has probably saved my sanity.

-Tackling a problem: Oh, those were the days. The days I'd walk into the testing center after studying for hours and hours and take a look at the test. Look at the first problem. Turn the page to the second. Then the third. Then bite my lip and realize, I have no clue how to do a single problem on this test! Not a one!

But since I took enough of those tests, I came to expect that. I no longer had the panic attacks of freshman year. Rather, I was able to calm down and just approach the problem from whichever angle I could. As my brain turned back on, I would find myself slowly inching my way to the right answer. And luckily, engineering tests always had lots of partial credit.

Well, guess what? There are some days like that. Sometimes your handsome lab partner and husband is there to tackle the problems with you, like Joseph's gargantuan blowout in the temple parking lot or his vomitrocious display the day we were giving our talks. But then there are the days where you're on your own and you have to handle the screaming baby, spit-up, or blowout all on your own. And you don't know where to start. You don't even know if you can move without making the problem worse. That's when you inch your way slowly to the solution, and count on partial credit.

-The real world: In textbooks, things are straightforward. Breadboards work the way they are supposed to. The voltage at one end of the wire is the same as the voltage on the other end. V = IR.  The central limit theorem works. The coefficients you get for your PID controller fall easily from standard equations.

But in labs (and probably even more so in real life), things are not so simple. Sometimes the difference between a functional op-amp and a broken op-amp is if you blow on it. Sometimes random numbers aren't random enough. Sometimes you have to completely change your coefficients for the PID controller by a factor of 10. Real life is a lot more complicated than textbooks suggest.

And the same thing goes for babies, believe it or not. Oh, I did what I could to prepare. I watched this video about how babies cry. (Incidentally, did you know that recognizing babies' cries used to be one of 374 Young Women's requirements to get the reward?) I read all the papers the hospital gave me. I read several baby books including Baby Whisperer and took the quiz to see what kind of baby Joseph was.

And guess what? Even though all that information helped, Joseph was still his own person. Each time I took the Baby Whisperer quiz, Joseph fit into a different category. Sometimes his cries didn't fit the cries described in videos or books, which led me to play a lot of guessing games. Real life is complicated.

-Setting the problem aside: Even for problems that were just on paper rather than hands-on, I still found myself struggling a lot. I would find myself wrapped up in the details of a derivation and get wound around the axle so much that I couldn't think. What was the best thing to do? Just walk away from the problem for a minute.When I came back, I would find that it either fixed itself or I figured out another way to solve it. Likewise, when I just had no clue how to soothe Joseph and was at my wits' end, I would just set him down and walk away until I was ready to try again. Lo and behold, half the time that was what he wanted anyway.

-Enjoying the journey: In both school and parenthood, I've found the daily grind is a lot better endured with a sense of humor. After all, it is kind of funny when you're working on a project way past your normal bedtime or when your baby refuses to sleep and you have to keep going back and forth to console him. Or at least they can be funny if you let them be funny.

And then there are the things that are actually funny. (Maybe they're only funny to me. Oh well.)

I heard Kevin say, "Joseph, sometimes you make it hard to sleep" and I had to come investigate. It's blurry because I was laughing.

Talking about tunneling reminded me of this video from when Joseph was 6 weeks old. We are such helpful parents.

He is so talented.

At any rate, electrical engineering is incredibly useful for future mothers. In its own way.