Excerpted from my upcoming book, A Lonely Fool’s Masterpiece:
“So, I’m telling you, if it doesn’t happen next time, I don’t think I can do this anymore,” my wife said.
If it doesn’t happen next time… I had never allowed that notion to take hold in my mind, because I found it ridiculous. Of course we would have a child. But the idea that we might not succeed was beginning to register. All of a sudden, my wife was putting the barrel of a gun in my mouth and saying, if it doesn’t work this time, I’m going to pull the trigger and blow the brains out on your most fundamental aspiration. Were that to happen, I would have some hard choices to make, choices that I had never seriously studied. Merely pondering those choices made me uneasy, because it felt like a betrayal of Jodi. But what would I do if she categorically refused to try again? What if I just could not handle it? I did not want to consider any of this, but my subconscious had its insidious means.
