Grandma.

"So," she begins, her lips jerking in the digital strobe of low-bandwidth Skype, "We are going to get pregnant when you visit in June, right?" She glowers at me in mock seriousness, her eyes flickering down and to the right to glance at the image of herself inset there.

I can hear our two-year-old daughter gabbing with my brother-in-law in the kitchen. He's been sick for the past week or two, unaccustomed to the constant daycare siege on his immune system, which began when he moved in a few days after I left for Dominica. His adventures in sinusitis and my mother-in-law's suicidally busy schedule have left my wife on her own with my daughter for at least a week, which wouldn't be so bad if she wasn't taking a blowtorch to the other end of the proverbial candle at work.

She looks so tired. It paints a pretty glaze on her eyes that I wish the choppy video feed would let me see better.

Meanwhile in Dominica, I don't have to cook. I don't have to drive. I live in a tropical paradise. Truthfully, I haven't anything to worry about on this island but my work, for which I write the schedule and I make the priorities. Nothing troubles me otherwise but writing about how the burden I've placed on my own wife's shoulders is related to the burdens men have placed on women's shoulders since everyone's most recent common ancestor was not in diapers. That and learning to properly wield a cutlass.

Hell, last week I danced for six hours straight during Mas Domnik, this island's version of Carnival, literally moving until I exhausted myself and got extremely ill, all in the name of inter-cultural exchange. And believe it, being a béké (that's Kwéyol for "White guy") who can dance has bolstered my rapport enough that I think it will have a measurable effect on the response rate to my surveys. But as I cheeped away behind a lapo cabwit band, I tried to stomp down the guilt with every upbeat step at the same time my wife would be leaving the office for that second shift at home.

For these reasons, I reply to my wife-computer, "I can't believe that after all I'm putting you through, you still want to have children with me or even hang out with me at all."

"God, these hormones!" my wife exclaims in agreement, cursing the glycoproteins and steroids that have transformed her from a child-hating puppy-lover to a breastfeeding, baby-oogling, no-epidural-using badass in the blink of her hypothalamic pituitary gonadal axis. At the "o" in "hormones", her face freezes on the screen in what, frankly, looks like an O-face, which I savor quietly during a lull in our conversation.

Give a lonely Fulbrighter a break, man.

"Seriously though," she says, suddenly sitting in a different position, "Sometime soon?"

I wish I could tell her how desperately I want to see every beautiful permutation of our two faces despite it all. Despite the two years I have of writing after my return. Despite my lack of certainty that this little adventure will give me an edge in any job market, especially that of the itinerant academic, and never mind the two months after my return before I can take a teaching job.

While I tell her, "Someday. I hope sooner than later," I forget that people in some places manage to have children even though they are malnourished and energetically stressed. In that ignorance, I ask myself, why now? Why when things seem darkest for us, while my mother-in-law is working hard investing her time in mid-life certifications, while I am 4,000 miles away and may not have a job when I get back, do we entertain the idea of a baby?

Later, while clicking on abstracts in my peer-reviewed journal RSS feed until all the links turn grey, I come across this article in Proceedings B and misguidedly relate its finds to my personal life, as many scientists do but don't admit. The paper's abstract reads:

There has been a recent increase in interest among evolutionary researchers in the hypothesis that humans evolved as cooperative breeders, using extended family support to help decrease offspring mortality and increase the number of children that can be successfully reared. In this study, data drawn from the 1970 longitudinal British cohort study were analysed to determine whether extended family support encourages fertility in contemporary Britain. The results showed that at age 30, reported frequency that participants saw their own parents (but not in-laws) and the closeness of the bond between the participant and their own parents were associated with an increased likelihood of having a child between ages 30 and 34. Financial help and reported grandparental childcare were not significantly positively associated with births from age 30 to 34. Men's income was positively associated with likelihood of birth, whereas women's income increased likelihood of birth only for working women with at least one child. While it was predicted that grandparental financial and childcare help would increase the likelihood of reproduction by lowering the cost to the parent of having a child, it appears that the mere physical presence of supportive parents rather than their financial or childcare help encouraged reproduction in the 1970 British birth cohort sample.

That bold statement catches my eye. Is that it? That even though my mother-in-law is a busy lady during the school year, her "mere physical presence" encourages us subconsciously toward another child? If so, what is the mechanism? Surely it isn't just the presence of her that spurs us on, but something more. Those extra dishes we don't have to clean tonight. The matching shirt and skirt that I think is too girly but will help clothe my daughter for the next few months. Someone to talk to after Alice is put to bed and grandma gets home from the night shift and neither of us can sleep.  Time. That is the most valuable currency to a parent. And time is what she gives us in the little things that add up and get taken for granted. That wouldn't end up in the metrics derived from the 1970s British cohort study. 

Calm down, Hanowell, the scientist in me warns. You're getting ahead of yourself. Extrapolating beyond the limits ofone study. Using a logistic regression model to predict a new data point without using cross-validation to avoid overly optimistic model fit. You have an n of 3, Hanowell.

Yes, I say to myself, all of that is right. But at another level, I have a data point for every moment from my daughter's birth to now. My qualitative, post hoc, idiographic analysis of those moments yields the conclusion that we'd be lost without grandma, busy as she is.