Yesterday morning OMD woke me up at 4:00 a.m. whining. She takes after me, and doesn't stir out of bed before 10 if she can help it, so I knew something was wrong. D and I both leapt from the bed and rushed to her crate, D checking out the window to see if there were intruders, me opening the door to check on her. Isn't that such a stereotypical division of the sexes? The male on alert for attack, the woman checking on the weak in the tribe?
OMD ran to the door and went outside to poop. When she finished, she trotted in like it was no big deal, hey, I always wake up the folks to poop at four a.m., and crawled back to bed. I stumbled down the hall and crawled in beside D, who groaned that he didn't think he'd be able to get back to sleep. We lay there a few minutes, then started talking.
"I have something to tell you," D muttered.
"What?" I asked, knowing from his tone that something wasn't right.
"I quit my job two weeks ago. I've just been pretending to go to work every day."
And there went the bottom of my world, dropping silently into the vacuum of space.
"You did what?" I screamed, shaking with anger.
"I quit my job. But it's cool, we'll think of something."
But I'm not working! I screamed. I'm not licensed here! You aren't done with your training, you can't even be a general practitioner, you haven't touched internal medicine in three years! We'll have to move! And the baby! We are about to fucking adopt a baby! How could you do that to me? How could you do that to us?
And I got so angry screaming these things at D, that I woke myself up.
See how much more compelling dreams are when people think they are true?
Adoption anxiety, anyone?
D laughed when I told him and petted my head. "If I did quit," he said, "I could be a family doc, so don't worry. I don't want to be, but I could be. We'd be all right," he promised.
OMD really did wake us up at four a.m., though -- I just fell back to sleep and dreamed that awful conversation. The dog, it turns out, has colitis, of course.
Of course.
And I have how many more months of this?
Comments