Out with a whimper. Kind of.

Last hours of call and waters-broken primip is finally in active labor. Francesco is about to get off of work, so I drive with the kids to meet him there. We switch vehicles. I head on my way, am next to the mall in the left turn lane as MW calls and tells me she's started pushing, am I less than a half hour away? Yes. And then...

The transmission on the car goes out. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. Francesco is luckily not too far away yet, and less than 10 minutes passes before he comes and we coordinate pushing the car (with the van...I was headed slightly uphill) into the parking lot.

Needless to say, I missed that birth. The last with this preceptor.

"Are you going to be OK?" asked Francesco...he almost never asks this kind of thing, I guess he usually assumes that I've got it handled or he can't do anything for me anyway or something, but he asked me then, so I must have looked like the shit I felt like. "Can we, I don't know, all get in the van now so you can go help out?" Pointless. Arriving after the birth when there is another student there already.

This was supposed to be my last one, though, and I feel like eversomuch shit. The nearly overwhelming feeling of that competed with the nearly overwhelming thought of how much this is going to cost to fix, and then I just couldn't think about any of it anymore. The kids and I went to the bookstore and Francesco called towing companies. The car is safely transported to the mechanic, now, who assures us that if it is complete transmission replacement that we require, he is now equiped to do it. This is someone we trust to do this monster repair right and cheap, and that is no small thing. It's still money we don't have, which will make an already lean holiday season even leaner.

I have no idea how we're going to do this coming week. Today, Francesco is off so I can take the van and strand him at home with the kids; tomorrow we are both off for Boyness' birthday. The remainder of the week we have wildly diverging schedules in hugely different places, and there is no way to do it with one vehicle. There just isn't. Mass transit? OMG we've never even been on the busses in this state.

At least I'm not on call this week.