The Dissertation

Last Sunday was dissertation day, where bleary-eyed and zombie-like, I sat in front of the computer from after Fajr all the way till midnight editing hubby's dissertation, the long editing session broken temporarily by the study session I attended on campus.

I didn't have much sleep the night before. I had underestimated the length of that paper, which was basically not a 'paper' at all, but a book! Or maybe I was just feeling Sunday-ish.

We changed the tenses, fixed weird prepositions. It took so long that I had to nurse Baby Z in front of the computer. As I sat there rooted in front of the computer, holding a squirming baby in my arms who would smack the keyboard every now and then, and reading strings of sentences out loud in what must have sounded like garbled English (due to 'rushing it), poor baby must have thought his parents had gone cuckoo.

Even H seated himself next to me at one point, and read out loud his father's dissertation, watching me fix technical errors. I ignored him, thinking he would get tired of it at some point, but he remained there, reading, until hubby had to call him away.

That night, even baby Z stayed up, since I was practically stuck there, so I somewhat abandoned his usual routine. I didn't finish editing it that night however. With bloodshot eyes, I went to bed, and as I nursed Baby Z lying down, hubby said to me,

"Tomorrow I'll bring the laptop up here so you can edit it after Fajr."

Great. Thanks!

Suffice it to say, my mind was harangued by this dissertation business for days after, and in fact, days and weeks before that editing day. I felt like I was the one doing the Phd.

But the climax of this dissertation business didn't happen until two days ago. Hubby had just given Baby Z his bath, and no matter how many times he has done it, he couldn't for the life of him remember what to put on Baby Z's eczema-laden body and cheeks. So he'd usually holler to me,

"What do I put on?"

All the way from the kitchen or living room, I would usually holler back,

"Hydrocortisone and then Aquaphor!" or

"Just Cetaphil!" or

"Hydrocortisone on his cheeks, wait a bit and then Cetaphil!" or

"Desitin on his bum!"

That morning, he asked me,

"What do I put on?"

Absentmindedly, I answered, my mind thinking 'Desitin',

"The dissertation."