Yay. Honestly.

mr. delagar heard this morning at dawn (thanks to the wonders of the internet) that he has passed his language qualifiers.

This is good news, of course, even if it did set off the tiniest little panic attack in me.

See, we have a deal, mr. delagar and I.

He's working on his doctorate. Once he gets it, he gets to look for a "real" job, as the kid keeps putting it. (Right now, I guess, he's doing unreal jobs -- teaching adjunct, teaching online, being a TA.) And, when he gets this real job, I'm going to surrender my real job and be the trailing spouse for awhile, doing, I guess, unreal jobs myself.

That's the deal we have had. I swore to it, three years ago, when he started work on the Ph.D.

It seemed like a really fine idea when the doctorate was four or five years away from ever being finished.

Now that it's, what, maybe a year or a year and a half away from being finished, I find myself just the smallest bit nervous.

See, I sort of like being a university professor. I like teaching Chaucer and History of the English language and Vic Lit and even Bible as Lit, so long as I don't have to do it more than once every third or fourth semester. I like advising students. I like having an office with my name on the door. I like it when students come to me saying what should I do, and I like being able to figure out how to fix their problems and I even like serving on committees because I like that moment when I can lean forward over the table and say, damn it, all right, let's do this, and feel the committee's momentum shift because I said it.

And yes, I like earning the giant paycheck in the family.

I grew up in a family where the woman was powerless. I watched her wheedle and cry and get knocked around -- verbally, just verbally, but Christ, that was enough -- because she had no economic power, no power of any kind. I know mr. delagar would not do that. It's why I married him, a big part of why I married him, that he's not that guy. But on the other hand, ai, do I not want to be that woman.

So even though I told mr. delagar I would be extremely happy to take my turn at being the one to work part-time for a while, while he got the full-time academic job, as the actual prospect of the chance of this actually happening approaches?

I'm wishing I had a lot more Xanax.

That's all.