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by Hugh Cook |
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Section 103 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 April 23 Friday.
(diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) The first time I knew I was ready for fatherhood was in the delivery suite. We'd been there rather a long time (I'll spare you the details) and I was starting to feel more than a little ragged, though my role was far and away the easier one. Then the woman on the far side of the curtains, a stranger to whom we were never introduced, was delivered of a child, which was carried into my field of vision to be measured and weighed under bright hospital lights. And, seeing this child being carried through the air, I experienced an emotion to which I am almost a complete stranger: a stab of red-hot jealousy accompanied by a wailing thought, the thought being "Where's our baby?" And that, really, was the moment when I knew that I was well and truly ready. Everyone was surprised by the size of the child the stranger had produced, an exceeding-all-norms baby, almost four kilograms of baby. Wonderful! Stupendous! And so healthy! But our baby? Our baby was still a question mark, even its sex unknown. (By choice, a surprise.) And then our baby was there. Having survived. And in good shape, apparently. The first time I held her in my arms, I was surprised, above all else, by her completeness. I had always imagined babies as being not quite finished, works in progress, but this was a complete child. "And," said Al, a couple of days ago, as I was working on a computer at the office, "how old is your daughter now?" I looked at my watch. "Three days and two minutes," I said. "And how does it feel?" he said. I thought for a moment or two, then answered: "Like a step in the right direction." This is Japan, of course, and the busiest phase of my entire life, so there's not much time for being meditative. I have so many lists of "to-do" notes scattered around the place that I lose track of how many I have. But sometimes I have time to absorb a little of the import of what has happened. At times it feels totally normal, and then, at other times, I get the feeling that the fundamental nature of reality has changed: that the nature of the universe has been revised. Welcome to our planet, kid! Section 103 Entry 0002. Date: 2004 April 28 Wednesday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Got an e-mail from G. saying his son is nine months old and he's still "insanely busy," and I can definitely relate to that. My new universe runs non-stop. Yesterday's really packed schedule, for example, included venturing out into the rice-growing rain (the city's one big mass of concrete but the rain still falls) to do a bunch of birth-of-a-baby paperwork, which was really a big strain, though the people at the local ward office were really friendly and helpful, and my Japanese, written and spoken, was more or less adequate for the tasks I had to deal with. Though a couple of times, I confess, my Japanese just wasn't up to the job of handling an unexpected twist (for example, do I really have to register for a child benefit here, now, today?) and I had to find the words to ask, politely, "Could you please phone this number in Gunma Prefecture where the child's mother is standing by the phone?" (Yes, they phoned. No problem.) One of the quirks of life in Japan is that women with roots in the provinces often go home to their mothers for the birth of a child, so their mothers can help look after them both before and after the birth, and teach them how to deal with the new baby. Which is why I ended up alone at my local ward office here in Yokohama, the city where I reside, filing the paperwork. Today's Wednesday, and I still haven't had time to get any of the baby photos developed. And haven't yet written about my weekend trip up to Gunma Prefecture, where I helped bring my daughter from the hospital to my mother-in-law's house in Gunma. That home-from-the-hospital journey involved a car trip. I got into the back, received Akachan (= "Baby") into my arms, and then the last person got into the car and closed the door. Just as the door was about to slam shut, I realized that the collosal sound would surely jolt my daughter awake, reducing the sweetness of her sleep to an angry red scream. But it didn't. Unperturbed, she slept right through the slamming door - slept "like a baby," as the idiom has it. And then I remembered that babies are said to be able to hear from the seventh month in the womb, so she will have heard all this before: car doors slamming, engines, voices, maybe even the tick-tock of the old click in the silence of the night in the house in Gunma. It's too early to be sure of my daughter's nature, character and potential, but, so far, three good points have become apparent. One is that this child, once asleep, wakes for nothing: there's no need to tiptoe round for fear of waking baby. My image of "baby" is of a small thing red in the face from continual screaming, but this child generally cries only for a diaper change or to be fed. And she can smile, which really surprised me, as I read in some textbook somewhere that babies don't smile at such an early age. That's three points, I think. Another point is that this baby can sleep, on occasions, for a staggering total of five hours at a stretch, which is quite a gift when you're expecting to be woken up once every three hours. Norms for a Japanese child are, or so I have been told (anyone wanting verified figures to quote had better look elsewhere) are: length, 50 centimeters; weight, 3,000 grams; head circumference, 30 centimeters. By contrast, my daughter (born almost two weeks late) was 52 centimeters long, weighed in at a formidable 3,908 grams and has an unusally large head, with a circumference of 36 centimeters. If we have been favored in the genetic lottery, then the rather large head is merely a genetic echo of my own, the excessive size of which caused a certain degree of concern when I was born (ten days late.) It's a little early to know exactly what we have in this child, a child born in the later years of life; we'll know more, one way or another, after a standard health check a month after birth. Meantime, what's obvious is that the child has my own broad forehead, and may end up with my face (that is to say, my mother's face) (only with very dark brown eyes, black hair, and, in place of the excessive ski slope of a standard Anglo nose, a modest Japanese version of the same organ.) My attention was drawn to the bigness of the big toe on each of the child's foot. Until then, I had always thought that my own big toes were big because of years spent in childhood running round without shoes, but now I realize that this bigness is genetic. Absorbed in a baby's world, focused on feeding, bathing and such new delights as dealing with unchi ("poop"), it's easy to lose track of the wider world. When I was up in Gunma, the TV news was reduced to an irrelevant chatter puncutated by percussion. But, coming back from Gunma on the Tobu Line, I was reminded of the larger world when I realized that the trash cans, sealed a few weeks back as a precaution against terrorism, had been entirely removed from the platforms. Which reminded me of something that happened early Friday morning, when my Tobu Line train was pulling away from the platform at Asakusa, in Tokyo. I had my nose in a newspaper, reading about things going bang in Baghdad, and I happened to raise my head, and, glancing out of the window, was startled (a little shocked, even) to see a hefty duffle bag sitting unattended at the side of the platform. Then a few meters on there was another unattended bag, and I realized that people had dumped their luggage on the platform to lay claim to first place in line. (Though why anyone would do that I have no idea, since that platform only serves the Ryōmō express, on which every single seat is reserved.) Back in the 1980s, in the days when the IRA was active, I lived and worked for a while in London, so I know that in troubled times you just don't do that. But here in Japan, though threats have been made against us, and though we are going through the motions, I really think the message has not got across. |
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