still nothing

I wish I could give a more exciting update, but I still don’t have any job offers. I did, however, receive a rejection letter on Friday morning (the “cooking” job). Not a big shocker, nor a huge disappointment. I’m starting to freak out because my options are becoming more and more limited. I leave for a final interview tomorrow at a small, midwestern liberal arts college similiar to my alma mater (Keep your fingers crossed for me, please!. I also just submitted an application for a position overseas, in Hubby’s dad’s current country of residence.

At this point, I’m just feeling resigned and flat. It doesn’t help that I’m in the thick of the PMDD blues (started taking medication again on Thursday, but it’s not working very well yet), and just feel like a distracted piece of crap while trying to prepare for this interview and cope with my phone’s silence.  It also doesn’t help that Hubby’s going through a crisis at work (i.e., is so frustrated that he’s getting closer and closer to walking away and finding something else), and would love for me to get the job in his dad’s current home country. The fact that neither of us really speak the language spoken in this area is not even on his radar, while I start to panic at the thought of having to lecture in a language I haven’t studied in years.

One thing at a time… one thing at a time…. one thing at a time….

timing the transition to parenthood

ubby and I made a second attempt to get to the store to buy milk and cat food last night. We succeeded, much to the cats’ delight. Once again we did not buy a new tv, much to Hubby’s chagrin!

During the drive, hubby mentioned that he’d heard some interesting news through the work grapevine. In the near future, consultants receiving the specialized training he’d just finished were going to be required to sign contracts agreeing to not leave the company for three years post-training. Hubby was in the first batch of consultants to receive this training, and doesn’t yet know whether he will be asked to sign a similar contract.

This is naturally cause for concern for me because we’d previously decided that we’d put off having a family until he left his consulting position, presumably some time in the spring of 2009. Neither of us wants to start a family while he’s still traveling. It’s not fair to me, as the parent who would be trying to work full time while taking care of a new baby by myself most of the week. It’s also not fair to Hubby, and it’s particularly sad to think about him missing all that time with his child. He’s clearly his niece and nephew’s favorite uncle (the “fun” uncle), and it’s inconceivable that he’ll enjoy spending time with his own children less than the time he spends with them. I’m just worried about how we’ll make this work.

From my perspective as a non-tenured academic who wants to have a family, it’s already pushing it to wait until I’m 32. I’m already struggling with waiting, and I don’t know if I could wait until I’m 33. It just seems risky, particularly since I have a handful of friends who have waited until that age and then were unable or experienced great difficulty getting pregnant. I already have Factor V Leiden working against me, after all. My midwife told me not to worry at my last checkup a year ago… but that was before my friends disclosed their fertility-related problems.

So the big question is… what’s the solution? Quitting jobs is not an option. Neither is my being pregnant while I interview later this autumn and winter, as it can complicate matters substantially. Do we try to start a family on our old schedule, regardless of Hubby’s contract issues? Keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best 3 years from now? Both go to my annual midwife appointment and try to figure out what will work best considering my health & our careers?

pre-wedding anxiety dream

As a psychologist, I don’t “buy into” dream analysis. All in all, I think it’s crap, because I subscribe to the theory that dreams are the product of random neuronal firings. Our neurons get active in weird ways while we sleep, and our brains try to make sense of it by building a story around it.

Last night I dreamed that it was the night before the wedding, but I was already dressed. All of my hubby’s Scandinavian relatives were staying in the same house with us. The house was totally surrounded by water, and the cats went swimming in it for koi-like goldfish and what appeared to be deep-fried shrimp. While swooshing around the house in my entire wedding ensemble and trying to get the cats out of the water, I suddenly remembered that I’d neglected to buy Christmas presents for hubby’s younger brother, and that I still had data that needed to be analysed. I plunked myself down a table in order to crunch some numbers on my laptop, when hubby’s big brother came by and said “You’re doing that wrong… you need to analyse the covariance matrix instead of the raw data” [keep in mind, IRL, hubby's big brother is in business management, not statistics!]. He then sat down and proceeded to modify my data file and do my analyses for me. In the meantime, hubby came by and started whining about my eye makeup and veil. It seems that he didn’t want me to wear my veil at all, and that big brother also had some ideas about my eye makeup [NO IDEA where that one came from.... big brother is married, has 2 beautiful kids, and to my knowledge, has never worn eye makeup!]. At this point of the dream, I locked myself into the room where all the Scandinavian aunts and girl cousins were also getting ready. Hubby knocked and banged on the door, pleading with me to come out and get married. Yet, when I opened the door, his brother still had his ideas about my eye makeup…

At this point I forced myself to wake up, thank goodness. Some of the details make me laugh a little bit (the eye makeup, and that I can’t get away from data analysis, even in my sleep). Others are just weird. For example, my hubby is one of the most easy-going guys in the world, and has no preference about whether I wear a veil or not. He just prefers that I don’t wear it over my face when I walk down the aisle. As I’m already pretty clumsy, wearing a layer of netting over my face for a ritual walk seems like a very bad idea. He’s also been a little fussy (or in his words, “fuzzy”) about the processional and recessional marches, but certainly not to the degree that I’d lock myself in a room and not come back out.

I guess it’s all just stress and my brain trying to play tricks on me.