STI: Exploring stork options

March 22, 2009

Exploring stork options

By Colin Goh 

 

Planting pollutants in the air and the food chain. Helping to destroy the world's financial system and still claiming performance bonuses. Marketing high-risk financial products to the less educated. Setting up a global archipelago of clandestine torture sites. Accepting the funds of charitable foundations in a Ponzi scheme. In a world rife with irresponsible behaviour, am I now about to contribute my own little act of incaution?

 

I'm guessing that the current state of the planet makes it uniquely unsuited for the introduction of a new, innocent and wholly defenceless human being, but that's just what the Wife and I are about to do, in a few short months hence.

 

Our new situation came as a total surprise. Though by no means averse to the notion of having children, we weren't making any concerted efforts towards that eventuality. In fact, quite the reverse.

 

This was partly due to selfishness, of course. We've been trying very hard over the past few years to get our nascent artistic careers off the ground. And with very little money in New York, one of the world's most expensive cities, this meant enduring long periods under conditions that are somewhat less than conducive to rearing kids.

 

I think all parents have it rough, but I daresay it's not helped by having to live in sporadically heated, former industrial spaces in shabby neighbourhoods, alongside vermin, stray pit bulls and drug dealers. We certainly didn't feel any peer pressure from the hardscrabble arthouse crowd with whom we were rubbing shoulders, who seemed to wrinkle their noses at the very idea of breeding. With so many starving orphans in the world, they'd tell us, we need to be less like Bristol Palin and more like Angelina Jolie - stop adding and start adopting.

 

Of course, we used to say to ourselves, if we were in Singapore, all this would be different. Why, just look at most of our friends back home, churning it out like buns at BreadTalk, But then, Singapore was also partly to blame for our dragging our feet. This happened one day, after the Wife chanced on meeting a Singapore minister in New York, whose first words of greeting were not 'hello' or 'how are you', but 'So do you have children?', followed by 'Why not?'. He may just have been doing his national duty, but the Wife was so put off by this deficiency of grace, I swear we've been avoiding having kids partly out of spite.

 

But I guess as we made a little progress, our resolve slackened and certain biological imperatives made their ambush. And we learnt of it in, of all places, a store selling kitchen countertops.

 

The Wife had picked up a large slab of granite to inspect it when the Chinese saleswoman suddenly blurted out: 'Careful! You're pregnant!'

 

'No, I'm not,' replied the Wife, a little taken aback.

 

'Then you must have just given birth,' said the saleswoman, looking puzzled.

 

'No,' mewed the Wife, turning to look at me. 'Do I look that fat?' (I stayed quiet - every man knows never to answer that question.)

 

But within the next week, the saleswoman's supposition was vindicated by some test strips and a visit to the obstetrician. To this day, we have no idea how she knew. Did she have some hormonal radar or pregnancy-detecting ESP?

 

And so here we are - about to deliver a stranger into a strange land; one with no grandparents around to play backup, or affordable maids, and an education system that produces extreme highs but also tremendous lows, facing a volatile economy, an uncertain future and the flimsiest of finances.

 

Generation gaps are inevitable - kids always grow up in a different environment from their parents, no matter how much parents want to believe otherwise.

 

But our little one will experience a life wildly divergent from our own. It scares me to think she will never completely speak like us, nor will she ever really understand our jokes. Last night, a horrific thought jolted me from my bed: What if she (shudder!) doesn't like durian like we do? What on earth will our little alien be like?

 

And what are the 'right' things to do? Our little unthinking act has suddenly thrust a lot of thinking on us. In Singapore, much of the path ahead would have been traversed by family and friends. Over here, we have to make everything up ourselves, an especially daunting task now, when everything we thought we knew has been called into question.

 

For the moment, the one thing we know we have to do is: Buy a kitchen countertop from that prescient saleswoman.