One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane. ~ Nikola Tesla (1857 - 1943), Modern Mechanics and Inventions. July, 1934
I can console myself all I want, but the truth is I haven't made much progress at school. The same classmate who mocked me about my papers now mocked me about not having taken the first research examination yet (I'll console myself again by stating the fact here that that classmate has neither had a paper published, nor taken that first research examination).
So this is what I have to say about school so far: fudge it.
Now let us move on to the more, errr, cheerful part. You know how much R wants a child. He has been longing for one forever, I think he once even mentioned he has wanted one since he was in high school (yes yes I cannot imagine how a male can have such instinct either. Meanwhile, I have been having my periods for twenty years now, but my motherly instinct is pretty much non-existent).
He is the one who will stop eating/talking/reading when a commercial featuring babies come on TV. (I swear I don't dare to check whether he gets misty-eyed watching those commercials. Finding he actually does get misty scares the bejesus out of me). He told me which colleagues were expecting and how long they waited til they finally got pregnant. He said gently "She is still feeding her babies" when I commented that a stray cat who usually begged for food at our door at exactly 5.30 AM each day, lately had been showing up an hour late. He once actually tried to find out where that ugly cat kept the kittens, and lying in bed one night, he told me how beautiful they were.
Ah. But the worse is yet to come.
One early evening, as we arrived home from work, he took me to see those kittens. Yes, barbaric and heartless as I am, I still found them surprisingly beautiful. There were four of them, staring at me with their liquid eyes, and R kept make low hisses that sounded comforting even to me. Then the mother came running and proceeded to groom the kittens and something inside me just, errrrr, stirred. I swear I could feel that R wanted a child so badly he almost adopted the kittens and married that super-fertile cat, I'd say.
Now, like I wrote sometime back, he already told me that he was okay with an option of never having a child, if I opted for that. And I know he said that genuinely. I of course thought hard and long about it, until a friend who delayed having a child for 6 years told me that his wife was expecting. He said, he actually didn't really want a child, but he couldn't force his wife to live his choice. "It is unfair to marry a person, and forever deny her longing for a child. I might as well did not marry her at all in the first place," he told me.
That statement threw me. Of course I had known it for a long time, but to actually heard it said, still threw me. If anything, R is one of the best dad material I have ever come across in my life. How could I deny his need for a child? What reason I have to deprive him of it? I know I can rest assured that if we have a child, he will take good care of it. I know he will even get as far as letting me stay in campus all day whenever I want to, and he will take care of the diapering and the whining all day without complaining.
We have been trying for a child for about four months now.
Bottom line is, this research work and this kitten business is driving me completely insane. What other explanation can there be? This barbaric and heartless woman now tracks her ovulation times carefully. If you do not want any children in life, be warned: never, ever work in research, and never, ever have any contacts with kittens.
Could you please wish me luck for this month? You can wish me luck for a research exam ending with good results, or you can wish me luck for a conception. I am already too insane to know the difference between the two.
