Wooyoung wished he had picked something more practical to study in college. Had he chosen education, he would be able to sit in a desk and all of his homework would have been busy work. Easy and able to finish at decent times of the day. Had he chosen biology, he would be able to go on magnificent excursions somewhere fascinating in order to do work. Had he chosen psychology, he could have made some real differences in people’s lives and would be able to do a lot for many. Had he chosen business, he would be able to get a good job and make a lot of money through his own company or corporation. But no, he had chosen art to, hopefully someday, provide for himself. 

Provide for himself, Yeosang, and their upcoming baby they had originally planned for in a few years, not in their junior year of college. 

Which seemed all too soon already. They were young. Wooyoung and Yeosang married right out of high school, their wedding having taken place a month after graduation. Some would call them both crazy for getting married so soon, and maybe they were, but what did they care? Neither had ever felt something so right as marrying the other, unable to find anyone who was just like the other. It was all too perfect and everything still was perfect. But now, there was a bump in the road, literally, and they had to deal with this as well as going through their senior year taking care of a newborn baby and trying to graduate while also finding a stable job to provide for themselves longterm. 

It was something they had to deal with. Yeosang had been overjoyed with the news and only saw finances as a foreseeable issue, but Wooyoung saw further than that. His specific major wasn’t going to do much for their baby or even himself. 

He was an art major and his specific area was painting. That meant long hours in the studio painting and spending many hours standing or sitting upright with toxic chemicals sitting around him. While oil paint was safe to use while pregnant, Wooyoung’s anxiety of accidentally ingesting it and then harming his baby was quite powerful at the worst times. He was taking two different painting classes this semester and to his luck, they both used oil paints. His third art class was sculpture and he had fewer qualms about that class than his painting ones. He couldn’t get poisoned from water-based clay. Maybe the glaze, but he didn’t even need that most of the time. 

His fears of his art degree not earning him enough to help pay for a child was constantly at the forefront of his mind and it always ate at him to some extent. Art degrees weren’t very useful when it came to raising and paying for children. And you can’t do a lot of art when you have a baby to hold and chase after once they start crawling and walking around. Wooyoung’s major was difficult to fit a domestic lifestyle into. 

At least Yeosang was studying business, but there was still the fact that neither of them had well-paying jobs yet. Yeosang worked as much as he could at the information desk of their college campus and directed students where they needed to go whether that be to classes, visiting to seek counselors, or needing to schedule with academic advisors. Yeosang was basically a full-time employee with his added classes, most online so he can work and do assignments in his own time. If he wanted to, he could graduate a year early and start looking for work in an office or start his own company. But many times, he had voiced how he wanted to graduate the same year as Wooyoung. 

Wooyoung, unfortunately, didn’t have that option. There was no cramming art classes and the only online art classes there were online were all photography. And again, to his luck, he had taken every single photography class he needed and he regretted that at this time. He wanted to save his harder class for the end so he could learn technique and structure beforehand and not try to learn it all in the later stages of the creative process. He wanted to expand his skill first and get it to a point where he could paint with his hands behind his back before attempting harder levels of expertise. 

So there he was in the painting studio on campus, trying to paint a fourteen by sixteen-inch painting in one night after putting it off for two weeks. He had already done his figure painting midterm since it was done in class and was later in the day as opposed to early in the morning. He still had his sculpting midterm to do as well, but that was much easier than painting. He could do that one in an hour or two and it wasn’t due until the day after tomorrow. He had time to finish up the smaller details. 

This one was due the next morning though and it was now on hour four of painting without break and trying not to rush his work. It was impossible when he had waited for so long and had a deadline sneaking up on him. 

It wasn’t his fault though. It was all the baby. He was twenty-five weeks along and his morning sickness had not let up once he finished his first trimester. In fact, it got worse, especially in the last three weeks. He was often stuck in the bathroom throwing his guts up into the toilet and lying curled up on the couch or his bed as he went through the motions of nausea. 

He had just started to feel better and in a plea to extend the deadline with his professor, a crotchety old man who voiced his desire to retire and paint for the remainder of his life having been mentioned one too many times,  he had failed and his assignment was due along with everyone else’s. In hindsight, Wooyoung should have spoken up earlier, but his hesitance to speak to his teacher was less important than his well being. He just had to deal. 

This was his still life midterm after all. A very important assignment that needed to be attended to, and the critique portion of the assignment needed to be done with everyone else’s as part of their grade. Wooyoung wasn’t sure how he was going to survive someone criticizing his work when his emotions and mood were all over the place, but he would have to see. He had twelve hours until then and he would maybe take another five if he was lucky. 

Maybe seven with the amount of bathroom breaks he was taking because of this kid. His son did not tend to sit still for very long as well and every time Wooyoung found comfort, his baby always fought against that and made it hard to sit still for very long. Wooyoung was getting frustrated enough that he wanted to cry but he wasn’t going to do that with a handful of other students painting in the studio with him. He was going to it up and get the right color for these god damn books. 

He had been staring at this stack of books with grapes, apples, and a single vase for too long and he was getting sick of looking at them. He was also looking at an incomplete painting so he had no choice but to continue staring at what was in front of him. The background was hard to get to the exact color too because is that blu