Got a letter from Kim today and I loved the cactus stationery and envelope she used. She’s having a very typical problem right now with Walter. He doesn’t think he wants kids. Is that classic male, or what?

Well, that’ll be a part of my New Year’s resolution. Since quitting smoking certainly can’t be a part of it, it’ll be to lose weight get fit again, and accept that nothing I can do can ever turn my dream of having a child into a reality. It just ain’t meant to be, my husband doesn’t want that, and I have to deal with it, accept it, and move on. I can’t change fate, Tom can’t, a doctor can’t, and God won’t. I have to trust that God had good intentions for denying me a child and that it’s not to torture and punish me. He has to obviously have good reasons to have felt that a child wasn’t worth making me handle. Yes, he could’ve made sure I was able enough to handle it, then gave it to me, but he didn’t. So he’s got to have damn good reasons that’d make perfect sense to me if I knew for sure what they were and had more than just theories about it. No God does this to a woman without a reason, so I have to count on God to know what he’s doing and live with it. That’s all I can do anyway, and something I read got me thinking. I was reading a part in a book where this guy realizes that he turned his back on a gift God gave him and was sorry he didn’t appreciate this gift. Well, is this a gift? Is this, in fact, a gift in disguise? Maybe I’ve been looking at this child-denial thing all wrong. Perhaps it is a gift. A natural built-in birth control system that enables me to live life in the way that no parent could. That allows me to experience and do things that no parent could, or that would be very hard for a parent to do. And perhaps there’s even more to it and it’s much more of a gift than I could ever realize.

Well, gift or curse - it just is. And there’s nothing I can do about it, so I may as well learn to live with it and accept it now, so I don’t have to have another handful of sad years over it. If I just deal with it, my life shouldn’t be so hard. I’ll just concentrate on what I do have, look at the bright side of having no kid, and make a game of it if it’ll help. Something like - see how good I am and lucky at dodging pregnancy every month, without the expense and hassles of birth control. Being denied something as natural as a child should also make me stronger in the end.

Is the dog gone again next door? I don’t remember hearing it bark yesterday or today. A highly unusual case. They wouldn’t take it indoors. Not for this long, anyway, and its prime barking time is early evenings. I didn’t hear it, so I wonder if they’re gonna work around the yard some more. I wish I could say that they’re moving and it’s just over at the new place waiting for them there, but I know better.

My schedule is now on nights, so I can’t be sure, but to my knowledge, the music hasn’t been a big deal.

With my emotional state being so bad, I don’t know if I wrote about our holiday present from my folks. They sent a bunch of treats - cheeses, cakes, cookies, etc.

I still want my cigarettes half the time, but it’s either smoke or crave, and cravings are my trade-off for not smoking. The Nicorette program will be sending me my award certificate.

The rabbit, who never wants to come inside lately, killed one of my cactuses, and I’m sure he’ll kill the others, too.

Of the mice with the markings, no two are alike, so I can tell Shy and Ziggy from their babies. However, Cocoa, who’s solid brown, is gonna blend right in with her babies as soon as they’re her size.