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?"