Baby: August 2005 Archives

Dearest Faith and Anne,

the sun sets on another day, and it is oddly painful to know that we share the same golden sunset, but apart. I’m listening to Tanya Chua’s “I’ll Remember You” on whatever juice I have left on the iPod. I use to reminisce over this song while I was in the US.

Everyone tells me how great it is that we made it through the long distance relationship, but I never felt distant even back then. Being with you, however long or brief a time has filled my days and nights with enough laughter and happy memories to sustain me till we meet again, be it weeks or years.

Thank you for making my life so, for lack of a better word, melodious.

Dearest Faith and Anne,

it is the nights I miss you both the most.

It might have been stupid of me to have forgotten to bring my mobile phone, but somehow the inavailability of instant communication has made clearer to me the things I take for granted daily.

It has been a long time since I’ve had an entire night of uninterrupted sleep, but I know that my place is with the both of you.

My girls. The girls of my life. God has really blessed me with a life of protecting, caring, loving and being loved.

I miss you all. The YF comm especially. I’m reminding myself to cherish serving God alongside such beautiful people, each and every one.

I don’t know if I have the heart to leave Singapore anymore.

You know the familiar, almost clichéd account: baby is born. Father holds the child up to the light like Simba in “The Lion King”. And in that magical moment, the swinging married bachelor or the career-minded egomaniac comes to the sudden realisation that he is now the father of a child?

I didn’t have that. Somehow the nine months leading of pregnancy leading up to her birth made fatherhood a gradual, rather than sudden, process. Even after her birth Faith and I were sort of detatched, unsure why the super-strong maternal / paternal feelings that were supposed to now exist in us weren’t really there. Anne was a baby to be fed and put to bed. A baby that kept us awake at night.

This may sound cruel, but I’ll confess that there have been nights that were particularly difficult, to the point I felt a little trapped by the immensity of bringing her up; that I’d never know freedom again.

I had a taste of freedom today. Anne was taken away from me.

It tasted bitter.

There are two reasons why women make better child-minders than men.

Boobs. Either you got them or you don’t. If you’re the non-lactating parent like I am (but your baby feeds on breastmilk), parenting is a synchronised dance of keeping the baby fed, making sure you’ve enough bottled breastmilk to last the day till your lactating partner returns, and organising all sorts of attention-grabbing time-burning activities in between.

The lactator has the distinct advantage here. When in doubt, instant milk. No questions like “is the baby hungry enough to finish an entire bottle?” No having to wait for the refrigerated ammo to thaw while juggling rattles, storybooks and chainsaws hoping to live through the five minutes of aural hell.

Of course I’m over-simplifying things. The lactator has to deal with nasty electrical pumps, freezing cooler boxes and white-hot sterilised milk bottles.

There are times when I wonder about estrogen jabs; whether transforming myself into a lactator will simplify things. Then I think about teething.

Testicles shrink to the size of raisins, and I realise I don’t need estrogen to scream like a little girl.