Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

I'm guessing that a lot of people eventually runs up against one of those days when it occurs to them that they may have made a huge mistake. And no, I don't mean that in the sense of the child itself, who, from the sonograms I've seen is at least very adept at standing on its head, but rather whether we're ready to have a kid. It brings to mind that old complaint that people need a license to drive a car but nothing in the world to bring a baby.

I'm guessing that good old C.S. Lewis kind of already hit the nail on the head when it comes to my own particular troubles with future child rearing, which is, selfishness. How in the world am I going to put myself aside and focus on another living entity that is going to require so much of me? I've no earthly clue. I've always said that I wish I was born in another century but perhaps, for good measure, I should have made myself rich as well. That way, I could continue to maintain my current policy of, I love kids as long as they are behaving, and I don't have to wake up with them in the middle of the night. It's a pretty good policy. The only real major drawback is that it's way too selfish for having a kid. Sigh.

And quite frankly, I'm the sort of person who is highly dependent on copious amounts of free time in order to maintain certain aspects of my life. I mean, I only manage to write after S has gone to bed because I wake up a little later. However, in the last couple of months I've started giving up an hour of sleep to make sure that I get some fiction writing done as well. And I'm well aware of the myriad of jokes that accompany the arrival of a child about losing sleep. So, I guess the question is, what goes out the window? (And we're just going to right off the bat eliminate the idea that the baby is the thing that goes out the window).

I should probably sit down at a desk right now and map out my current schedule and figure out where the slack is and try and determine how I can squeeze all of the things I "want" to be doing into the space that I'll have left in between fits of crying babies. And sometimes when I'm expressing my discomfort about our impending situation, unlike S, who cries, I tend to drop some f-bombs and get a little mad at the world. And I don't suppose that's the sort of thing that you do in front of children, so it's just one more thing that goes out the window, and I suppose that I'll just have to assume that these things are going to pay off. That it's going to make me a better and more patient person, and that our own little offspring will feel very loved and cared for. And then, one day, grow up to be an adult who slightly resents us and somehow perceives the attendant bitterness that arose with all the things that I had to give up, and I'll turn off my hearing aid and smile at a blank white wall, imagining a statue that I saw by the artist Michelangelo, a Pieta, in which he is one of the men holding the body of Christ.

Fiction (Cont).
The current sky is an almost ethereal blue. The large apartment buildings across the street are showing the first shadows of sundown. She’s not certain if she is sitting Indian style or not. She’s not sure if the term is still in use or if it carries some negative racial connotation. The abstract nature of the suicide thing occurred in a state that could probably be called day dreaming, which includes all of the attendant haziness and general drunken feeling that one has in a daydream, which makes the details hard to relate with anything approaching accuracy. As a child, she had always assumed that the term referred to Native Americans, but now she thought that it probably meant Indians. She considered shootings to be the least tragic, or at least something not as emotively effective. She wondered if it should have been affective. An analog clock on the wall behind her kept time strictly. She was playing the if then game based upon his return.

Rebecca had met with the little Indian man that Joan had recommended as often as possible. He had a large desk constructed of some dark wood and inlaid with a gold colored metal alloy. The desk had a fish bowl, mostly full, with blue pebbles that rose about two sevenths of the way up into the total bowl space. A small castle is nestled on top of the pebbles on the left side of the bowl. At its apex, the castle reaches a height that is slightly smaller than the fish itself. A sign next to the fish, which appears to be an angelfish, reads, “Say hi to Jaws.” The fish is striped in yellow and black, and occasionally presses its face against the glass like an amused toddler. A statue of an elephant sits at a right angle to the tank. She knows it is some sort of Hindi god, the lowercase “g” here is hers.

The bizarre suicide thing had not just involved weights and strings but a run in with something that may or may not have been Big Ben, Rebecca herself, only having seen the clock on post cards. The death itself perhaps just occurring with a clock’s loud chiming in the background, providing the relevant knell. She did not believe in reincarnation, of that she was sure. In some religions, the Christian one most prominently, and that being the one with which she was most familiar, suicide was considered a venal sin. Her guru was short, and actually from some indeterminate country. He spoke English with the slight pauses and apparent amiability of most people she had met from India. He was Nepali.

Her skin color is generally off white, but she’s currently something more akin to red, due to the strain of not thinking. She has a red blotch on her neck that is shaped somewhat like the People’s Republic of Congo. She guesses that most of the people on the street below are lovers as lonely people sometimes do.