When they first met, the young woman was saying that she turned down a great job to stay home with her son. Cancer Bitch wondered what the job was. When she found out it was tenure-track, she was angry. Why was she so angry with a woman she barely knew? This is the Bitch part of Cancer Bitch. She is judgmental and thinks that no one should turn down a good job as a professor. Is she jealous because no one has ever ever ever offered her a tenure-track job? Is she alienated because she doesn't understand how anyone would want to spend all day with a baby? Is she secretly envious and wistful that she never had her own baby, the lady doth protest too much and all that? Or is it perhaps that she's lost friends when they've become wrapped up in their children and would talk about nothing else, and that she is transferring her anger and hurt from them to this nice young stranger who happens to like being with her own child?
Cancer Bitch just learned more: that the young woman wanted to go back to full-time work after two months, then changed her mind, as the baby turned more and more into a person. Cancer Bitch fears being left alone with a baby, though she babysat for real babies as a teen. What would she do with a baby? How do you hold it and stop it from crying? They are alien, though she knews she was once one herself, unbelievably, and so were most of her friends.
A decade and a half ago she and her friend made up a song. The chorus was: Your baby bores me. But even this is not true. She likes to hear about people's babies. But she prefers to hear about their dogs.
