Bad-news-a-palooza

So, that thing I was hinting could happen in this post?  Apparently has happened.  My 76-year-old father has been laid off. And, as I feared, Zappa has had to help him pick up the pieces.  She assisted him with his online unemployment application yesterday, and then called me to commiserate.  Unless a miracle happens, no one is likely to give my dad a job.  Which means he’ll have to live off of his social security.  Which means he’ll end up living with my sister.

My sister could reluctantly live with this, except that she’s been feeling shitty ever since the fainting incident that sent her to the doctor, who ran a bunch of tests that all came back normal.  This has been going on for three weeks, and Zappa has been dizzy, weak, and exhausted the whole time.

And, as if that weren’t enough bad news, I came home from work yesterday and was greeted by my husband with the following:   “I didn’t get the London job.  My academic career is over.”

Cue heart breaking.

He is understandably down in the dumps.  It occurred to me last night that his academic career is as important to him as having babies is to me.  It’s something he’s wanted since long before we met and began discussing having a family.  It was his first love, his first passion.  And the thought of it nose-diving shortly after takeoff is as much of a grieving process as dealing with the years of infertility and treatment and waiting and failed IVF.  That’s a lot.

And on top of all of that, his team lost the NBA Finals.

I should have known it was going to be a shitty day.  I woke up yesterday morning from a dream where–literally–everywhere I looked were pregnant bellies and babies.  And none of them were mine.  I told Dr. N (before coming home to all this bad news) that it was a lot like that in Hubby’s home country.  What makes it almost worse is when I see older women–presumed grandmothers–holding newborns or shopping with their granddaughters at Whole Foods.  Something our hypothetical future children will never have.

What they will have (hopefully for a long, long time) are grandfathers.  And now we need to focus our attention on them.  Hubby and I are now talking as if we will be moving to his home country in a matter of months.  He is in the process of arranging a second interview with the company he interviewed with during his trip.  We’ve been looking at rental properties online.  I’m trying my best to imagine life in a place where I don’t speak the language and where, unlike when we visit, my husband will have a full-time job.  He won’t be my constant companion and translator.

His dad is still in the hospital but starting to feel better.  He’s a third of the way through the radiation treatment.  At this point, the best case scenario is that I’ll be pregnant by the time we move there, and Hubby’s dad will be around long enough to play with his newest grandchild.

Hubby insists this is all just a run of bad luck.  I asked him last night, “At what point does it stop being bad luck and become just our shitty life?”  (Not that our life is so terrible–it’s just that nothing has gone the way we thought it would.)

I still don’t know the answer to that question.