Misery misery misery...

Every interaction I have with my family revolves around misery. One sister wants to die, another is nearly destitute because of an abusive relationship. Another fights with her daughter-in-law about the right to see her grandkids. Another has her business robbed. Mom revels in sadness and anguish because her religion demands persecution. I can't help with any of these things, it seems. I wish I knew what I could do to either (a) help them, (b) disengage from them forever, or (c) some third option.

I am glad that my life is wonderful right now, and I have plenty of people -- people that I like, even! -- to share it with. So maybe I don't need my family. Still, it'd be nice every once in a while to be able to talk about something other than problems.

Heartbeat

One hundred fifty-one beats per minute. We have a centimeter-long baby, with a head bulge and an ass bulge and a heartbeat that you can hear by using machines. It's got two chambers. I spent lots of yesterday afternoon smiling until my cheeks hurt.

Week seven, I guess

The parasite is roughly blueberry sized. There's no predicting M's bodily weirdness. Tuesday she spent feeling hung over, and yesterday she nearly cried from the agony of a close encounter with someone's oyster-based lunch.

I canceled my class Thursday -- Marlowe's Jew of Malta -- in order to go with M to the first ultrasound, about which she's understandably nervous, since the last one she got revealed that she'd lost half her blood volume and was "About to Die" (a phrase that must be pronounced in the voice of the narrator from the old arcade game Gauntlet -- "Red Warrior needs food. Badly!")

Somehow we're still going to run the half-marathon together. She's been cleared for that, but told not to overheat, so now she's apologizing that she'll slow me down and saying I should run ahead at my own pace. As if I'd pass up the opportunity to run 13.1 miles with my 8-weeks-pregnant wife.

Apparently we're well on the way to becoming those people. I am having a hard time thinking of anything but the pregnancy. It's edging out my book projects, my classes, my anger at Arsenal's willingness to pee away points at every turn in late season league play, my grief over the loss of a beloved university president. I apologize in advance for the fatherhood brain that is likely to make me utterly insufferable forever.

And here we go again

The dog's food bowl almost made M puke today. A few days ago she was lamenting her backne and her breast sensitivity. Recently she asked me to bring her an orange and a pickle. She is become, in other words, a hilarious caricature of someone about six weeks pregnant. So I gently suggested that she take a pregnancy test, even though she very recently had both a negative blood test and a period. You know, to be sure. So she got a positive result on the pee stick, of course, and we went for a run to ignore it, then she got another positive result on another pee stick.

Last time, this made my knees go wobbly and prevented me from thinking straight. This time, I just said, "Huh. Looks like you're pregnant." I think the difference has something to do with the last positive pee stick being followed by M almost dying nine days later, but maybe it's also an indication that my attitude toward fatherhood has changed for the mundane. We'll find out soon whether it's another ectopic pregnancy and then maybe I'll start getting scared or excited again.

In other news, I had a great conference last week. I chaired a seminar attended by both my PhD advisor and my current PhD student, which was quite touching. I found out my tenure is approved, finally. And I've been awarded a distinguished professorship that, among other things, will make having a bairn easier to do.

In the negative column, though, the current round of my state's barbarism -- unwilling to tax corporations, perfectly happy to destroy the state infrastructure -- means that my university may be cutting French, Philosophy, Theater, and Dance. Soon we'll have to start calling it a "university" instead of a university.