My husband finished his MBA three days before deploying. He took a full load of distance classes every term in addition to his full-time Army job. He was always busy. And he finished the program and deployed, so I was really looking forward to having him home and having him to myself. No more homework, no more projects, no more me sitting alone in the TV room all day Saturday and Sunday while he worked.
He sat me down last night and said that he wants to start a new Master's Degree. Or learn Pashto. Or both. Either way, he warned me, he will be busy again. There go our Saturdays and Sundays.
I admire him for taking his professional development so seriously. But I can't help but feel frustrated that the thing I was supposed to be doing -- raising a baby -- hasn't happened yet and I keep sitting around waiting for my life to start. I could relate to Heidi's recent post about being consumed with the way life should have been instead of what it really is. I don't know what to do with myself besides sit around and wait for baby to show up. That's my only major life goal, and I've been twiddling my thumbs on it for two years now.
Maybe I ought to learn Pashto too.
Posted by Sarah at December 29, 2008 01:53 PM | TrackBackYou really must embrace what IS. You don't have your baby yet. When you do finally have one, you will never have time again. You'll find that you can accomplish more things in an hour than you used to do in a day, and yet still never catch up.
And you'll fantasize about all the wonderful things you could have done with all that time pre-baby.
Absolutely live your life the way it is, even though it's not what you want it to be. I find myself in this battle constantly. When HD goes back to his Dad's house, I want to crawl under the bed and sleep until he comes back. I want everything to stop. Some days are better than others, but what I keep coming back to is that things are pretty damn good, even if it's not ideal.
You're alive now. You're healthy now. You must live NOW. There are no guarantees that you will live tomorrow, that you will ever become pregnant again or that there will ever be another Republican president. If you wait for the perfect set of circumstances before you embrace life, you will never, ever truly live.
I'm not admonishing you, I'm speaking as a friend who struggles with this same thing daily and doesn't want to see you drown in What If's and Maybe's and One Day's.
I promise that on the days I'm able to embrace what I have rather than wallow in what I don't, things get just a little bit better.
Ok, Polyanna is shutting up now. :)
Thinking of you.
Posted by: Sis B at December 29, 2008 02:15 PMI get your point, Sis B, and I hate posts like this because then I always feel like I have to clarify everything: Yes I like my life the way it is (that's part of the problem, that the longer it takes to have a baby, the more I like not having one), yes I am fulfilled on a day-to-day basis with my job and knitting and blogging, etc. But there's something I just can't explain about how I feel these days, that my husband is still working towards goals that will affect our future and I am not. It makes me feel unproductive and stagnant.
And we better freaking have another Republican president.
Posted by: Sarah at December 29, 2008 02:45 PMI'm all for learning Pashto!!! :-) And that'd be a great activity to do together :-).
Posted by: kannie at December 29, 2008 06:15 PMSarah: And we better freaking have another Republican president.
But first, let's work on electing a Republican Congress ...
kannie, I've warned Sarah that Pashto is like Persian, only harder - it's to Persian what German is to English. So it's a logical next step for her husband who's already got Persian under his belt. Compared to Persian, Pashto has
- more sounds with special letters
- grammatical gender (masculine and feminine like French)
- four cases (same number as German, but the case functions are different: no familiar nominative or accusative due to ergativity)
- a more complex verb conjugation system (with different case marking depending on tense!)
I've been looking at this grammar of Pashto. I wonder how much of it is recognizable to Sarah's husband. Both modern Persian and Pashto have come a long way from Avestan, which is fairly close to Sanskrit. Nonetheless if I look hard enough at a few basic vocabulary items from Wikipedia, I can still see the Indo-Europeanness of Pashto: e.g.,
të 'you' (cf. archaic English thou, French tu, Skt tvam)
mâ 'me' (cf. French moi, Skt maa[m])
dwa 'two' (cf. French deux, Skt dva)
After the Groks master Pashto, there's always Ossetic with eight cases ...
If history had been different, we'd be speaking Persian now and studying other Iranian languages in school. French would be as obscure as Kurdish is on our world.
Posted by: Amritas at December 29, 2008 09:14 PMAmritas (& Sarah) - Wow! Didn't realize Mr. Grok already had Persian - how cool!
I was a (mediocre) linguistics major in college, so I'm more than a bit chagrined to admit that, while I know enough to be really enthralled by the mere mention of learning it & recognize the roots you mention, I haven't kept up with it enough to even sound intelligent, as "less academic" priorities have taken over life, LOL.
But wow. I love this blog for SO many reasons! :-)
Posted by: kannie at December 30, 2008 03:20 PMI would definitely be frustrated as well, as my dh is currently mired in his masters I can imagine how irritated I'd be if he came home wanting to work on a second one when the first one has been such a time suck. Particularly on the backside of a deployment? I probably would not have been as kind, come to think of it. And I know very well that frustration of wanting your life as a parent to "start".
I think finding something else to focus on as a goal would be a good thing. Go for the Pashto!
Posted by: dutchgirl at December 30, 2008 05:10 PM