My surgery is Tuesday afternoon. This afternoon, as I was driving out to pick up books to read while I'm convalescing, I realized something that caught me off guard for a moment: I was happy about the upcoming surgery. Yes, nervous, incredibly - anything that involves a high likelihood of general anesthesia should be treated with the respect and caution such drugs deserve. But happy. Relieved. Calm. It was going to happen, and I was glad of it - glad and grateful that I live in a country, during a time, that lets me decide the future of my own fertility.

The decision to not have children was made a long time ago, long before most of you knew me. Andrew may or may not remember, but Matthew does; one of my cross-country phone calls led him to mention that he remembers me talking about planning this someday surgery … twelve years ago. (…and to subsequently say "It's about damn time you got around to it.")

Let's see if we can't knock out the two most important topics at once here. No point in beating around the bush, really:

1) I am, at last, on vacation.
2) I'm not pregnant.

I am scheduled to catch a flight out of Atlanta tomorrow … uh, okay, in about fifteen hours. (Perhaps I should go sleep.) I'm winging out West for close to a week of enforced peace, quiet, cooking, and shopping. I'll have my cell phone on me, but I'll likely not be allowed near any of the computers in the house where I'm staying.

You want me to get back to #2, don't you?

Hush. I'll get there.

What an exciting week! Any more excitement and I think I'd have to be flushed and gasping, just to keep appearances up. I have a reputation to uphold, after all.

I realize that it's cheeky of me to rant and ramp about the parenting choices of other people when spouse and I do not have children ourselves, but there are some decisions that just strike me as incredibly wrong, even from a childless person's standpoint.

Between rainstorms, spouse and I sneaked off to see Matrix: Reloaded tonight (although the only actual 'sneaking' content involved was in not telling the cats we were leaving). Now, I understand this whole cultural-phenomenon thing, and know firsthand from watching my friends with children that parents' lives don't just stop permanently after childbirth, but doesn't there come a point where a parent has to ask the most dreaded question of all:

I fear the days you stand outside my door,
too timid to ring, too determined to leave. Your
presence comes and goes, waning and waxing with the moon's
movements, from new to crescent to full. A tune

composed of someone else's notes, you are
as familiar as my dreams and fears and as far
removed from my life as I could have made you.
Was I wrong to sacrifice you to the hesitant altar

of selfishness, ambition, greed? It is easier to think
of planned vacations and toys than to sink
emotions, time, love—myself—into the bringing of life,

Last night I dreamed of a child; a very young child. I knew it was a dream, even as I went through the motions of action in the dream. Knowing this while in the dream made it all no less discomfiting as I proceeded through it.

In the dream, I awakened with the child in my arms. She—I knew it was a she even without looking—was a newborn, eyes tightly shut. In my dream-sleep I had been mulling over names, repeating combinations and trying to find one that fit.The child never moved. She slept soundly, unaware of the fuss being made over her, only her clenched fist and face showing above the white blanket she was draped in.

"Victoria Alexandra," I said to the woman sitting beside my bed. "Call her Alexa until she grows into the name."

The woman beside me—whom I believe was intended to serve as my mother in the dream—snorted. "Are you trying to name a queen, with a name like that?"

Sometimes decisions come to you quickly, in waves of intuition that you know are correct and require no reconsideration. Sometimes they take years of occasionally-returning thoughts before a final realization is made. Sometimes they languish for years, waiting for an impetus, a catalyst.

One such catalyst came for me today.

Jeff doesn't always like it that I write a journal for an audience. I do try to respect his privacy, but I don't always manage it to the level that he would like. It's all too easy sometimes to forget that things that are important to me are important to him too—but may not be things that he wants to share with the world.One of the things we've talked about that falls into a gray area is our discussion about whether or not to have children. I know that I have much more strong feelings on the subject than Jeff does or ever will—partly because I'm the female in this relationship, and thus a lot of the burden would fall on me.

After a long and exhausting day of having all three nephews over at the house, I told my mother what Jeff and I have been quietly discussing for some time: the fact that unless something strange happens, that we won't be having children.

She says she's not disappointed. I hope that she's telling me the truth; it's hard to tell. But I know that she's not surprised. She mentioned that some of my relatives have started asking her when Jeff and I planned to start having children, and that her response has been that she's never been too sure that we planned on having any at all.

I'm going to warn you now. Some of you are going to finish reading this entry and scream TMI. ("Too much information!" for the abbreviationally-challenged.) If you keep reading past this point, it's all your fault if you're offended. It's my stinkin' journal, for goodness' sake.

I'm thinking of going back on the pill. I've been off for ten months now—and yes, it does take me a while to come to decisions like this, hush! I'm still not totally sure I'll do anything about it; perhaps I'm waiting for things to get so annoying that I feel I have to get back on the pills NOW or it's all going to drive me crazy.My prescription lapsed in January. For those of you who remember, I was finishing up at my helljob at the credit union in January. I didn't have enough time to curl up in a ball and cry, much less get to a doctor.

A snippet of lyric from the song currently playing:

it possesses me controls me it makes me run and it makes me kill