There are few things sweeter than the breakfast menus I devoured during this year’s vacation, and some of my blog posts are among them. “I am thankful for…” “I feel blessed by…” “I am privileged to…” I can understand that some of my contributions were too sweet to your taste.
So let me confess: I frequently paint a rosy picture of situations when writing my blogs. For example when I wrote about my mom getting diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer, I mentioned in the last sentence that I was a “happy kid”, and I even thought about naming this blog post after the eponymous song from the incredible band Nada Surf. In the real world, however, I can be quite unhappy, and I do sometimes shout at trees or kick against empty cardboard boxes. (Ironically, I saved the ‘happy kid’ title for a later blog post on the many rejections I faced in my academic life thus far and on how happy I was that I could learn from them…)
Something I am always honest about is my gratitude towards the numerous factors (all being beyond my control) which have been essential for where I am in life today. Think about my gratitude towards my parents encouraging me to study pharmacy, a university professor advising me to select a specific Master’s program (and not the one I was becoming more and more interested in), my PhD supervisor deciding to hire me, my postdoc supervisor welcoming me in his group, the institute leaders in Groningen putting me forward as suitable candidate for my current position, and my partner supporting me for more than thirteen years now.
Regarding the latter, I know too many examples of academic ambitions destroying relationships and friendships or even tearing families apart. My partner, fortunately, has always been supportive of my desired career steps, even when this meant that I would be moving to a different country for an unknown period of time.
Admittedly, the years we lived apart were not always great, and the COVID-19 crisis which started nine months after my move to Geneva, made things quite a bit more unpleasant. In particular for my partner. Because whenever I was feeling unhappy, I could always comfort myself with the thought of the academic dream I was chasing, while this dream was not hers and did not offer her comfort whatsoever.
Among the many things I put her through was complicating our desire to become parents. To illustrate, I tried scheduling my visits to the Netherlands during her most fertile periods for almost two years, and I was typically not there to give a hug upon realizing that fertilization had not been realized. Witnessing the tears falling of her cheeks from behind a telephone screen was truly heartbreaking, although this became even harder when witnessing them from up close after moving back to the Netherlands last February.
So, we were clearly not among those people achieving fertilization at the first try, and we hoped that we were also not among those people who cannot achieve this at all (in spite of wanting it badly). To assess the latter, we decided to seek medical support a couple of months ago, for example to test whether I was fertile in the first place given my mumps infection at the age of nineteen (despite being vaccinated as a kid). But suddenly, amidst this testing phase, fertilization was realized, and we hope to welcome a little happy kid into our arms in the beginning of January, 2023.
At last, the recent events are distracting me from the realization that I put my partner through a lot in the past thirteen years. I am, however, committed to make up for this which may possibly involve some very sweet words of gratitude in future blog posts.
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