February 23, 2011
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The Waiting Game
There are many life changing events which happen so quickly, you have no time to prepare for them. Events such as this week’s devastating earthquake in Christchurch which has taken so many lives, or the spate of revolution around the world which took Ben Ali and Mubarak by surprise, and which Gaddafi is trying desperately to quash.
And then there are more personal events which you do have time to prepare for, such as the birth of a child. With Joanne now so heavily pregnant, she’s waddling around like a fat goose, the wait for Lyndon to be born is slightly frustrating. When we were merely dating, Wednesday evenings were our time together during the week – we would regularly go out to dinner either close to her office, or at the food court on the 2nd floor of Taipei Main Station, where we found a nice Malaysian place, and also a Tibetan place.
Last week, with the realization that those Wednesdays would soon be finishing, we headed to Café India for what we thought would quite possibly be our last Wednesday evening date night together as a twosome. And also, perhaps, thinking that the spicy food would be enough to entice the little one from his comfort zone.
Not a chance.
With the due date being last weekend Sunday, I thought that perhaps he was waiting for me to play football, but an injury and cancelled game may well have caught him off guard. His father liked to annoy his parents as a child, and this could well be an incident of turnabout is fair play. And what better way to introduce yourself to the world than by interrupting your old man’s football game? However the postponement of that put paid to his little plans.
So what next? Lyndon’s grandparents are flying in for the weekend, heading back to Blighty on the way back from Down Under. Now if that had been me, I would make sure that I was not going to come out until the day they left. Probably the time they were half way to the airport – that would be the ideal time. I can imagine it now:
“Sorry guys – can’t take you to the airport. Got to turn around and zoom in to hospital. Looks like you have to take a taxi. I’ll just drop you here, in the middle of nowhere.”
Yea. Perfect.
But perhaps the little one will not be quite as much of a tosser as his old man, especially when you take in to account that half his genes come from the much nicer side of the family that is Joanne. And with this in mind, and the olds’ arrival in less than 36 hours, perhaps he will show the kind of attitude for which his mother is famous – a caring, considerate one. Perhaps just as we are about to leave the airport, he will announce to the world that he is ready, so that we spend the evening in the hospital, waiting for the first wails of the new-born son.
But the waiting just means that we can not make plans for anything more than a few hours in advance. With no rain expected this weekend, it is merely hope that drives me towards playing football, or going biking. Will we make our regular Saturday trek to Carrefour for shopping? Will we even be able to have dinner together this evening? Everything that we were used to before now has to have a “maybe” or “let’s wait and see” tag attached to it, because despite him not even arriving yet, our whole worlds already revolve around Lyndon.
And I don’t expect that to change over the coming 20 years!
