When the moon hangs like it does tonight – a shimmering sliver of copper floating on an indigo sea, the ends of the sickle sharp and fine enough to draw blood – what comes to mind is always a piece of jewellery adorning the night sky, adorning the whole world really, something precious and fine that the heavens gave us to share.
Category: Uncategorized
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kaya toast, konbini, and the kindness of strangers
I’m currently reading The Convenience Store by the Sea by Sonoko Michida and am enjoying it far more than I expected to.
I knew I would like it, because I find Japanese slice-of-life content irresistible, but beyond being just another pleasurable read, the story, though simple, cuts quite deeply into the essence of modern life, particularly the pervasive loneliness of it all. Michida also touches frankly on the imperfect aspects of Japanese culture and society, including the oppressive patriarchy, school bullying, and growing old alone. As the title lays out, the story revolves around a small town konbini, interestingly called ‘Tenderness’. ‘7/11’, ‘Family Mart’ and … ‘Tenderness’? An odd choice of name for a convenience store. Perhaps a victim of translation quirks.
The characters are assembled as a cross-section of society; appropriately so, since a convenience store is where most people in town are likely to, if not congregate, at least pass through regularly. Young; middle aged; old. Married; single; grappling with puppy love. Satisfied with life; disgruntled and pining. Ambitious and hopeful; world-weary and beaten down. All brought together by daily essentials and mouthwatering konbini delicacies like curry dons, strawberry parfaits and egg sandwiches.
(If you’ve been to Japan you’ll probably know that konbini foods are a cuisine unto themselves, and often are of a much higher quality than you’d expect from anything out a fridge or straight off a shelf. I myself fell hopelessly in love with a banana crepe from 7/11 when I was there last summer and still think about it often.)
Reading in Ya Kun this morning over breakfast, I looked up and realised that the scene around me wasn’t all that different from the story playing out in the book. The shop was manned by 4 staff – a man in his 60s, a woman around the same age, and two young men. I wondered if they were a family, but that seemed too unlikely. One of the young guys took my order; he had kind eyes and an overgrown mullet dyed mahogany, bearing an uncanny resemblance to a squirrel. He and the older auntie took most of the orders, while the other young man mutely prepped toast sets. The older uncle was also working on food prep, but was anything but silent. He was constantly barking at the others in a gruff voice, but when I listened properly I realised he was actually being quite nice, like asking if the order-takers needed some help. There was a great warmth and camaraderie in the way they all worked together. I must have looked quite encumbered by the baby carrier because while everyone else had to pick up their food from the counter, the uncle specially brought mine to me, and even appeared again later with napkins. Both he and the auntie seemed very taken with the baby and would periodically send smiles her way. Glancing around, the customers were a mix of business executives, blue collar workers, and students. Some appeared to be regulars and exchanged greetings with the staff as they came and went. Then, a very pretty young woman wafted in. She must have been new to Singapore, because she was unfamiliar with the menu and, well, this is sort of our national breakfast. The uncle wasted no time and barked out a series of menu recommendations at her. Despite clearly not understanding a word of it, she smiled politely in return. Eventually she pointed at something on the menu and the uncle beamed triumphantly.
Convenience stores aren’t so much of a thing here, though I do recall many happy moments from my student days spent huddled at the back of a 7/11 with friends, eating cup noodles and gossiping. Daily essentials are generally more expensive in convenience stores than in supermarkets, so unless absolutely necessary, we get them elsewhere.
Breakfast joints, however, are probably our equivalent to the konbini culture in Japan. On the higher end of the scale, places like Ya Kun, Toast Box, Fun Toast – air-conditioned, reliable, fast, familiar. For something less predictable, there are the coffee shop or hawker centre breakfasts. Regardless of where you land, there’ll almost definitely be sets of kaya toast and coffee or tea being peddled. Singaporeans (myself included) are particular about the variations in taste, portion etc., but honestly, it’s hard to go wrong with something so simple. Even a bad toast set will offer just enough comfort to start the day decently well. At least, that’s what I think. Maybe I lack a more discerning palate, but I make up for it with a disproportionate tendency to romanticise the things I eat and love.
Bad idea to write this up at night, because guess what I’m dying to eat now? Time to go rifle through the fridge for a snack. Goodnight!
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packing, pacing
One of the things I’ve learnt since becoming a mother is that leaving the house with a baby is a muscle that must be built and exercised. The first time we took the bubs somewhere other than the doctor was to church, which should have been fairly straightforward. Aircon-ed car to aircon-ed hall to aircon-ed car and back, nothing too demanding – or so you would think. I spent the night before running through the schedule in my head – what time’s the feed? When to pump? Working backwards, when to feed? Do we need a swaddle? Socks? Pram? Carrier? Maybe we should just feed formula. Okay so we need the formula. And bottle(s). And warm water in a flask. Sanitizer? Wipes? Diapers? Changing pad? Change of clothes? On Sunday morning itself I spent a good hour and a half packing and preparing, until I was sweaty and exhausted. Needless to say I wasn’t the most absorbent of minds during the service itself, a problem that was only exacerbated by the baby rebelling against the pram and persistently threatening to fuss.
2.5 months on, I’ve definitely gotten better. My going-out muscle (maybe hers, too?) has had training enough for me to feel comfortable taking her out for an hour or two with minimum headache or fuss (of course, this ties in with the establishment of a more predictable schedule for feeds).
And so it is that for the past few mornings, around 10 I strap her into the carrier and trot off for breakfast and a bit of a stroll. Singapore has horrible weather and my baby has horrible skin (the ubiquitous monster that is eczema), so as far as possible I try to float from one aircon-ed space to the next. It’s a nice timing because she gets a cuddly carrier nap, and I get to have breakfast and be reminded that there is a society beyond the four walls of my apartment.
As I gradually shook off the anxieties of going out with a baby in tow, I’ve been able to experience some of its joys. Having her in the carrier is very nice and makes me feel like a koala or kangaroo, although my slightly harried pelvis does protest a bit (see previous post). With the carrier on, I’m also obliged to move at a glacial pace that is surely foreign to most able-bodied adults living in cosmopolitan cities. I go the ‘long way around’ to get to lifts, or to stay in the shade and shelter. Moving this way through brisk crowds, I feel like a boulder in a stream disrupting the flow, or a creaky old spaceship caught in a meteor shower. ‘Ambling,’ my husband called it, then quickly corrected himself, ‘more like wading, actually.’ A slightly laboured trek through imaginary thigh-high waters.
It’s not an unpleasant experience. Slowing down means I pay more attention to the world around me, instead of experiencing it in fast-forward mode like I usually do. People staring vacantly into space, or, more commonly, vacantly at their phones. Yves Saint Laurent espadrilles on the young office lady standing in front of me on the MRT. Colours and designs on manicured nails. Older couples sipping coffees across the table from each other, immersed in a comfortable silence (or boredom). Young couples, brimming with passion and excitement, hands all over each other. The skinny branches of a tree, brilliantly green, sparkling in the sun and rustled by a sudden breeze.
It’s been 32 years of milling about this tiny city, and yet there still are fresh things to see and discover. It just takes a slower pace, with or without a baby strapped to the chest.
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hell hath no fury like a pelvis torn
Two weeks ago I experienced one of the more humbling moments of my life thus far.
Against my better instinct (and breaking a promise I’d made to myself while pregnant to never run again), I embarked on an evening jog. I’d been seduced by a gloriously cool evening breeze and the magnificence of sunlight dappling the river.
It wasn’t difficult per se. My muscles were surprisingly compliant and only put up the feeblest of protests. I managed a 2km loop in 15 minutes; just slightly brisker than a brisk walk and a shadow of the pace I used to keep. By the end I was barely panting and genuinely felt quite good and alive.
The problem was that – quite unfortunately – from start till end, I was uncontrollably wetting myself. 15 minutes straight. A full quarter of an hour. Every time my feet hit the gravel a little bit of wee was shaken out of me; think tabasco being agitated out of its bottle. By the time I realised that the growing warmth and damp in my shorts was not, in fact, sweat, it was too late (the route was a loop, remember). In for a penny, in for a pound. On I plodded, aghast and amused and ashamed. A sweet mercy was that my shorts were black and the knowledge of my predicament was confined to just me.
Clearly, my pelvic floor was (is) still reeling from having carried, then ejected, a small human being. Undaunted by the bout of humiliation I tried a jog again two days after. This time, I came prepared in period undies, which are basically adult diapers. As I heaved down the path I had to laugh at how far I’d come from my Lululemon days.
And so the adventures of pregnancy and birth continue. No one day has been the same as the one before it and I’m constantly charting new ground, but for every low moment there is a joy to counter it and for now that is enough to keep me going, even in wee-wet shorts.
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8 friends and a funeral
A couple of months ago I was added into a Telegram chat containing everyone in my 8-person group of college pals, minus YM.
‘Hey. Have you seen YM’s story?’
I darted into Instagram and flicked through his stories, a nearly identical series of content from a gig in Taiwan. Nothing out of the ordinary, until I reached the last page, plain white text on black announcing the death of his mother. He continued that he would be flying home that night, followed by details of the wake.
My heart plummeted. Our parents were of similar age and while not young, they certainly weren’t expected to be knocking at death’s door. The Telegram chat buzzed with collective fretting: was it illness? An accident? Had anybody heard anything before this? No one knew. We quickly made plans to gather at the wake the next night.
We were an odd sight, a hodgepodge of characters spanning worn tees and flip flops to office formal. I was also 8 months pregnant and massive. In Chinese custom, it tends to be taboo to attend a funeral while pregnant, as it’s believed that the negative energy (a simplification) will bring misfortune to mother and baby. I didn’t buy into the superstition, and felt it was more important to show up for moral and emotional support. Still, I was an aberration, to say the least.
As a group, we’d celebrated with each other at weddings, births and other happy occasions, but a funeral – this was a first. As we squeezed our plastic chairs around a rickety table piled with small snacks and packet drinks, the awkwardness was palpable. We were used to boisterous, alcohol-fuelled gatherings full of lightness and laughter. Here, we were compelled to be morose and sombre, speaking in hushed tones. After 15 minutes or so, YM finally made it round to our table, smiling and thanking everyone for coming. I was confused; no red-rimmed eyes, no sniffles or the sickly pallor that comes with a sleepless night. He seemed perfectly fine, buoyant even. He still sported the grey contacts, earrings and nail polish that had come to define what we not-so-secretly labelled his mid life crisis. He told us matter-of-factly that his mother had succumbed to stage 4 liver cancer, which she’d been diagnosed with a mere 4 months ago. The faces around the table all wore the same expression: how did we not know? YM had been running all over the world for months, pursuing a career in talent management; we hadn’t once sensed that his personal life might have taken a troubled turn, and he never let slip. He hadn’t been in the country when she passed and wasn’t at her deathbed. He told us all this without so much as a tear in his eye, though I’d known him for long enough to know that this flippant demeanour was sometimes a mask for more uncomfortable feelings.
As we filed past the coffin to pay our respects, I was struck by how suddenly life can deal you a bad card. I looked at the kindly face in the photo frame and wondered if she’d worried about the two sons she was leaving behind. She would never see them marry, never hold a grandchild in her arms. Never take another holiday or relish another good meal. I remarked this sentiment in brief to one of my friends. As we stood sadly by, another relative of YM’s swooped over to offer us more packet drinks.
We reconvened at our little plastic table. Gradually, the conversation spun off into less solemn topics: how’s work? When are you leaving for that trip to Japan? Did you see so-and-so’s post about her new boyfriend? Before long we’d rebounded into the usual savage jokes and raging gossip, though we did try our best not to laugh too loudly.
We’ve been friends for 15 years, and we went from seeing each other in school all day, everyday, to just a couple of times a year as our lives spiralled out in different directions, our schedules groaning under the weight of other relationships and responsibilities. Although the circumstances of this gathering were grim, I couldn’t help but feel a certain gladness from seeing us all in one place, full attendance. It took an untimely passing to summon us all at short notice; for a couple of hours that night we were not girlfriends, boyfriends, wives, husbands, fathers or mothers, but a bunch of freewheeling 17-year-olds again, rubbing shoulders around a table and giggling about one inane thing or the other.
In a world where lives can intersect so fleetingly, I’m proud of us for sticking by for so long, and hopefully for many more years to come.
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the wind blows across the years and rustles the leaves in the trees
At 3:45am last night I stumbled out of bed and headed, bleary-eyed, to the storeroom to gather the logistics for a dead-of-the-night pump session. I tapped the switch for the overhead light in the storeroom and it immediately blew with a loud pop, sending the whole house into a power trip. 20 minutes later, J had tried all manner of tinkling with the circuit breakers to no avail, so we dialled an electrician, lit some candles and sat together in the living room to wait for rescue.
Mercifully, it was a cool night, and the sound of the trees rustling in the dead of the night was like a massage for the soul. The light breeze gradually picked up until gale force winds were howling like banshees through slits in the windows, the trees crunching noisily in tandem. As the electrician tottered on a ladder to fix the circuit breaker, the winds turned into a rainstorm that would continue lashing till the morning.
Just before the rain came, I stood at the window while the wind whipped through my hair and stung my eyes. The air was so cool and the neighbourhood so deserted; I was transported to the memory of walking along pre-dawn suburban streets to my coffee kiosk job in London, waking at 4:30am to be out the door at 4:45am and in the kiosk by 5am to get the coffee machine warmed up. In winter, this was tantamount to torture, and I would shiver violently as I tucked my chin as far as I could into my snood and willed my legs to keep moving as fast as possible. The shop had no heater and I would continue wearing my puff jacket late into the morning, bones rattling within. I look back on this time in my life with great joy and amusement. The job and the people I met while at it were some of the best parts about living abroad.
Soon the electrician’s magic took effect, the lights (and importantly, the air-con) came on again inside, and I popped right back to bed comforted by a wonderful memory of winter mornings that, ironically, was as warm and fuzzy as a hug.
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intersections
To pass the time in my one month of post-birth confinement, I’m rewatching Sex and the City. I have a love-hate (but mostly love) relationship with the series; I think the script is TV gold, and I love how the characters consistently inhabit particular cliches yet travel through such familiar and relatable paths of orbit. I do, however, deeply detest almost all of Carrie’s truly awful life decisions, mostly concerning men. What makes it worse is how much I see of myself in her. It’s like looking at myself in the mirror of a public toilet in the MRT, under unforgiving white florescence – most unflattering.
Anyway I’ve reached the point in season 2 where Miranda meets Steve. My heart swelled when he appeared, a bartender making very smooth moves on Miranda as she sat alone after Carrie had unceremoniously ditched her because ‘Big wanted to cook me dinner’ (Truly awful. Truly.) Having watched the series twice through (this being my third rewatch) and the movies at least twice each, watching Steve meet Miranda was a little bit magical because I know what’s in store for them – a baby, then marriage, then the doldrums of marriage, then a redeeming reconciliation. A whole life together, really. It made me feel like a clairvoyant who knows what’s coming for two people who believe they are engaged in just another unassuming, flirtatious encounter.
That got me thinking about the magic of first encounters. Looking back, you come to see how certain people who slid so unassumingly into your life eventually wove themselves so thickly into the fabric of your existence that they are now inextricable from your sense of self. And yet, when you laid eyes on them for the first time it was nothing more than an innocent ‘hello’, a name you didn’t dwell upon, a face you thought you might soon forget.
The first time I met M, I was 19, a week into my first real job as a part-time dog handler in a doggy daycare, and I was miserable. The dogs were adorable, but the work was gruelling, and amongst other things involved plucking fresh ticks off the dogs with a tweezer, inciting full resistance from my lifelong fear of bugs and creepy crawlies. 3 days in I’d contemplated quitting, but stuck at it partly due to an intense fear of the (well-deserved) judgment I would incur, and partly because I’d convinced myself that you gotta give the job at least a week before deciding that this hell was not yours to be incinerated in.
Then the boss walked in with M by his side, and perhaps it was my fatigue but there was almost a glow about him, and he was so handsome it made me giddy. I was sweating, bare-faced, hair pulled back into a ponytail – in other words, I looked like a moist egg. I also had in my hand a pair of tweezers with which I was extracting ticks. That’s how we met, and that’s how I continued to show up to work each day (some months in, I hit a new low when I took my post-work shower and felt an unusual bump behind my armpit. It was a tick.). I admired him, tall, dark, handsome, athletic, friendly, sweet. I also believed he would never be interested in someone like me, a friendly if sheltered nerd with pimples and minimal fashion sense. I thought for sure he’d go for the pretty receptionist who modelled part-time. But in the end, it was me, and it would be us for the next 5 years, across oceans, through Uni and army and everything in between. Letters and late nights, long drives and picnics in secret spots and backpacking across Europe, me being a bitch and him being an ass and mounting friction that eventually sanded us down till we couldn’t hold on to each other anymore.
The first time I met H, I don’t remember it, and I would bet good money that he doesn’t, either. I was 19 (and yes, dating M), and we’d both bagged scholarships to study overseas. In classic government style, this did not merely involve a straightforward ‘take the money and go’ approach. The year’s cohort of scholars had been rounded up for some sort of orientation programme that included 3d2n roughing it out at OBS, a variety of tea sessions (some of which, perplexingly, did not offer any form of tea at all), and culminated in a scholarship presentation ceremony where all of us fresh faces put on our best blogshop dresses and Bugis Street blazers and staged a toe-curling song-and-skit act, the tune and lyrics of which is, regrettably, lodged like Excalibur into the rock layers of my psyche. I have a vague memory of maybe having a short conversation with H then, but he was off to the US and I to the UK and there was nothing much to exchange but polite pleasantries.
Fast forward a couple of years and we’d all been gathered back from the ends of the earth to do our postgraduate diplomas together in a godforsaken corner of the island. Initially filled with doom and dread about being wrenched from my happy life in London, I’d quickly found solace in the other art school graduates in my cohort, who were fun, fabulous, and effervescent, a great joy to be around. One afternoon we were crossing an overhead bridge together to get lunch, and a boy walking in the opposite direction waved at us, then locked eyes with me and said hello again, this time specifically. He looked familiar; I said hello. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked one of my friends as soon as he was out of earshot. ‘That’s H! He went to Boston.’ Charming and handsome, I’d once again written him off as another popular-type who wouldn’t be bothered with me. I was no longer as nerdy or as sheltered, and my pimples had cleared up, but I was still pretty rough on the edges and far from the prettiest in the bunch. Yet, our paths kept crossing, and the size of the groups we hung out with kept dwindling till it became just us. Even then, I’d tried not to entertain the possibility that he could have been into me, until one night, as we sat on the SOTA steps chatting after dinner and drinks, he popped the question, ‘Do you want to go on a date?’. I said yes and shortly after hopped alone into a cab and my heart thundered in my chest the whole way home and continued its boisterous beat as I lay in bed, fully awake and aflutter.
I say I see myself in Carrie, but even more than that I see H in Big. Wonderful to date but frustrating to love, emotionally opaque, greedy for the best of both the worlds of the single and the attached. We had a fun few months together and I still think of him sometimes, but always with the conclusion that we would never have been able to build anything lasting together.
The one that matters the most is meeting J, now my husband, father of my child. Of the 3 relationships that have shaped my adult life, this has the least romantic of beginnings. We met on Coffee Meets Bagel; I’d been using the app for years by that point and had actually deleted it, disenchanted and increasingly at peace with the desperation that gripped me. It was however my birthday month and I thought to treat myself to a quick look at what was available on the market. J had actually been on my ‘discover’ page instead of the main one, because while he’d liked my profile, he was outside of the age range I’d specified, since I’d been averse to dating anyone younger. We struck up a lazy conversation, sometimes replying days later. As the chat was closing we made plans to meet for dinner the next day, a Saturday. We’d planned to get burgers at Shake Shack and that’s where I was waiting in a cropped top and my too-short denim skirt (‘what a tease!’ J would say) when a cab pulled up and J got out. He had a nice smile and looked disconcertingly youthful, but spoke with a maturity far beyond his years. We ended up getting pasta, then embarked on the first of many long walks to come. Impressively, J had brought a tumbler of homemade soursop kombucha, and whenever we found a nice spot we paused to sit and have some. We walked and talked till 2am, eventually meandering our way to the Marina Bay area. Somewhere along the way we found out we both loved ’13 Going on 30′ and could read lines from the film, which I would later tell people was what sealed the deal for me for a second date. Truth is, it was how warm and at ease he’d made me feel. Helped that he was pretty cute, too.
I’d been on countless CMB dates by then (‘Hundreds!!’ J would say – a gross exaggeration) and hadn’t expected too much from this one. Like so many others, our dinner date could easily have faded into the background, become an anecdote I’d tell my girlfriends over drinks while checking his Instagram to see what he was up to right now. Somehow, we clung to each other, a little half-heartedly at first, then as if our lives depended on it. And now there are no more first dates, no more first encounters, just the magic of forever.
Well, there are still some first encounters. Catching my newborn’s eyes for the first time, her tiny hand grasping my finger. Different, but equally majestic, equally shimmering and wild and momentous.
And just like Carrie, I’ve gone and condensed my life in the past 13 years into a catalogue of relationships with men. Shallow as it may seem, I think we’ve all experienced the exhilaration of meeting, knowing, loving, and then perhaps leaving someone, and only discovering in retrospect the magnitude of their impact on your life.
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little thing
‘How does it feel to be a parent?’
‘Not very different, for now. It feels like a truncated experience because the nanny is doing so much.’
‘Chores and duties aside, do you feel fundamentally changed as a person?’
(thinks) ‘I’m not sure.’
‘Would you take a bullet for her? I know the correct answer is yes, but deep down, how does it actually feel?’
(thinks) ‘I’m not sure yet either. I think yes … but I’m not fully sure.’
I don’t know if I would, either. People describe motherhood as this instant gush of mothering instinct and I-Would-Die-For-You mother’s love at the first sight of the little thing that just exited your body, slimy and wrinkled and pink. While I do love her, and she is undeniably very cute, she still feels foreign. Like she could be anybody’s baby; nothing feels proprietary (yet). Perhaps like all human relationships, this one, too, will take time. Maybe the motherhood experience is different for everyone – but of course it is, I’m just unacquainted with the normal extent of deviation. Is anything normal? Life in the past 12 days have been about timings and schedules and right breast and left breast and how many days has it been since she pooped and which formula brand is better and what’s this funny spot on her little face? I am tempted to flow with my instinct, but have to admit that when it comes to caring for the little thing, I actually have close to none. Mothering doesn’t feels instinctual, or human nature; it feels like a set of skills to be learnt, knowledge to amass, habits to build. When my cluelessness feels overwhelming, I remind myself that she, too, is learning – learning things as basic as how to do a poo. It’s humbling to think that I myself was once so new to life that something that feels so natural now, like dropping a poo, had to be learnt. Likewise, I hope what feels like an insurmountable curriculum now will one day become second nature.
Perhaps my problem is a need to optimize motherhood. I’d been reading Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’, of which my favourite of the anthology is the essay ‘Always be Optimizing’. The essay revolves around the rise of Barre and athleisure in the US, positioned against the evolving face of feminism and, correspondingly, the newly insidious ways that society dictates how women should act, look and be. But the root of the problem, she suggests, is the need to optimize the female experience. And maybe I’m doing the same thing here with motherhood. I do feel the need to do things right, and to get them right quick. I take it as a personal insult that the baby cries in my arms, but is soothed the moment the confinement nanny takes over. I get frustrated easily when the latch falls through. I despair at the way the hours shoot by every day of confinement, making me feel like I’ve done and accomplished nothing except constant breastfeeding and sitting through many, many Youtube videos.
The thing that’s really killing me, though, is not the crying, or the sore nipples, or the night feeds. It’s the sheer monotony of confinement. Each day blends seamlessly into the next (thanks to the night feeds) and it feels like a groundhog day situation where I do the same things, eat the same foods, and spend the hours between feeling hot and sweaty because of the sheer amount of heat piled up in my system.
There are moments of reprieve, and tenderness. Today I looked at her suckling and thought about how she will never be two weeks old again. This is it, the here and now. She’s growing by about 200g each week, mad! Then there’s the little singsong sounds she makes while nursing, or the way she sporadically breaks into a small smile. Moments like this make me feel a little better.
Well, I suppose there’s no alternative now but to dive head in. Wish me all the best!
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death by flatpack
The contents of a $600 IKEA order are strewn around the house, waiting for a corner or a shelf in which to settle and belong. J and I (more him than me, I was basically part of the furniture) spent the last hour putting together a gargantuan wooden shelf that was worryingly wobbly, till we realised we’d forgotten to put the cross bars in at the back. The entire structure still feels disturbingly lightweight, but I take comfort that if it does indeed fall forward the storeroom where it resides is so narrow that it will likely hit the opposite wall before crushing any skulls. I think.
As I was doing the bare minimum and yet thinking about how arduous flatpack assembly is, J mused, with a big, sincere grin, about ‘how fun this was’. What a gem this man is.
We’ve gone from ‘stay in there bb girl’ to ‘time to come out bb girl!!’ because the obgyn has been issuing increasingly stern warnings about the baby being rather on the large side, and if she continues to grow happily inside the womb instead of coming out and starting the show, it might be difficult to come out at all. ‘Poor girl,’ sighed my sister. ‘Not even out of the womb and already being fat shamed’.
Off to google natural ways to induce labour.
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taking stock
I am writing to you today from none other than one of Singapore’s best hotels, the Ritz! My heavy, whale-like body is comfortably nestled in a very softly padded desk chair, and behind my screen the nearly floor-to-ceiling windows frame a view of the Kallang basin, earlier bathed in a sweet late afternoon glow, but quickly becoming shrouded in ominous cloud cover as the evening swims into place. I can see both Golden Miles, the grey mound of the National Stadium, trees and parks and buildings stretching vertically upwards and horizontally into the horizon.
I am quite overwhelmed with the beauty of things and feel very calm, which is much-needed respite from a couple of weeks of mounting anxiety. Let’s take stock:
- In 2 days, I’ll be 38 weeks pregnant. Which does also mean that I am technically full term, and this staycation is therefore a fairly hefty risk. If I go into labour at the Ritz, will they sponsor a yearly stay for our little family, or slap me with a hefty cleaning bill for the room?
- I am almost more bump than body now, which is both mesmerising and terrifying. It’s hard not to wonder how the not-so-little life brewing in there is going to make her unceremonious exit through (what feels like) a sliver of a doorway. Everyone laughs and says the door will open as much as it needs to; I mean, of course I know that, but that doesn’t make it sound any less painful or mortifying.
- As she turns somersaults in my belly it feels like all my organs are being nudged into disarray. I spend half my day needing to pee and hunting for a loo.
- A girl! A little girl. I lie awake at night oscillating between wonder and fear. I’m not sure I’ve fully grasped the entirety of what it means to be me, much less what it would mean to be mother to a fragile, delicate and tiny other that my body is, miraculously, spinning into existence right now.
- A girl! Not-so-secretly, I hoped for a boy. The world, I think, is a safer, more secure place for a boy. Sure, they can be monkeys with boundless energy and pubescent sweat and a predilection to gaming and a tendency towards brusqueness and emotional unavailability. But it’s easier to protect them from people who mean them harm. They’re safer walking the streets at night. It brings me some measure of dread to think that from the day my little girl is independent, I will forever wonder if she’s okay as my head hits the pillow at night. As my mother has chimed for many years, I do, indeed, now know how she feels and has always felt.
- I’ve always prided myself as someone who performs well under pressure; allow me the small boast that while my course mates used to chip away at their final essays for months, I’d churn everything out in a week and still manage to do pretty well. Minor affirmations like that have likely left me too complacent, because the same can’t be said about our preparation for the baby. In the coming week, we still have deliveries coming (big IKEA shelf for the plethora of baby bits and bops), a faulty toilet shower door to get fixed, and a washing machine to exchange. Well, the washing machine isn’t really our fault, but all in all our procrastination over the past 8 months has really caught up with us and tasks like these are annoyingly nipping away at our ankles. Swollen ankles, in my case.
All the anxieties. Now, to take stock of the blessings, of which there have been many:
- It has been a healthy pregnancy, which we know better than to assume is the status quo. In the myriad of tests and scans and probes and checks we’ve undertaken, there has almost never been cause for worry, and for that I truly thank God. Early on there was a minor issue with restricted blood flow in one of the arteries leading to the womb, but everyone rallied with us in prayer and at the next scan the issue had miraculously righted itself. I’ve been able to stay on my feet since day 1, keeping up with prenatal workouts, and have generally been free of the usual aches and heartburn. The only malaise that has doggedly followed me throughout has been waves of pregnancy sickness, but that I can live with and there’s medication for that.
- That I am able to get pregnant at all is a sweet miracle and a great gift from God. This I know, despite my initial feelings of dread and discomfort that, thankfully, melted away eventually. When I first did the pregnancy test(s) – 2 at a pop, I was in such disbelief – I was so overwhelmed I lay on a beanbag and sobbed for an hour. What would happen to me, my life, the dreams I had? Living abroad, writing professionally, going to cooking school, doing … I don’t know, things. But perhaps this is one of the biggest and best things I can do with my life, and certainly my marriage. All around us, friends struggle with fertility issues, and we can only bear prayerful witness to the horrible pain and disappointment that years of trying for a child can bring. In fact, so many we know have problems conceiving that we ourselves grew complacent in our use of contraception, et voila. It was difficult and uncomfortable to break the news to some of these friends that we were pregnant. They were all full of genuine joy and congratulations for us, but I can only imagine what a punch it must have been to the gut. And so, we were and are blessed, and I never want to take that for granted again.
- We have been the beneficiaries of immense support. When friends with kids found out we were pregnant, the generosity flowed like a torrent. Cataloguing the other day what we have for the baby, and from whom, I was bowled over by how much had been given to us and consequently, how much we’d managed to save. People have been even more unselfish with their words of advice and encouragement, building us a steady bulwark against the waves of uncertainty that crashed against us. My parents, in particular, cooked elaborate, healthy dinners for us, drove them over, and also offered us lifts all over the island. So many people have a baby with so much less. My heart is full.
Perhaps it’s also worth mentioning the funny way I found out I was pregnant. During a class, my 14 year old student raised her hand and motioned me over. ‘Ms H, are you pregnant?’ she sheepishly asked. Now, we hadn’t not been trying to conceive, but we certainly hadn’t been actively trying. In fact, I’d been trying to avoid ‘fertile days’ (but a combination of irregular periods and a bad head for numbers probably meant this was more self-sabotaging than anything else). My first thought was, yikes, I know this isn’t the most flattering (Uniqlo smock of a) dress, but is it really that bad? No I wasn’t, I replied. Her brows furrowed in thought. ‘… Are you sure?’ Wow, I was really going to have to burn this dress (it went straight in the Salvation Army pile that night). She might as well have ended with ‘… so sayeth THE LORD’ because I was, I just had no idea. A few days later as I rummaged through my recent memory for when my last period was, her question wafted through my head, prompting a very skeptical purchase of a pregnancy test kit, and, well – the rest is history.
That’s all for now. The next time I write, it will likely be with a sleeping (I hope) baby in the next room. What a thought!
Medium Delirium 