his arteries. Nothing else is said.
The tail of a typhoon, which blew through town a few days earlier, has wiped the sky clear of the grey smudge that usually tinges the Tokyo skyline. Save for a brisk breeze, it is a beautiful autumn day. I hold my wife’s hand, suddenly conscious of the traffic creeping past us on a street without a footpath. I look at the nail on the index finger on my free hand and try to imagine 8.4 millimetres. That’s one-third of a centimetre, so I guess it is about the length of the nail. I could see 8.4 millimetres. 8.4 millimetres, how about that? I feel myself smiling as thoughts of zero bank balances, arthritic knees, and hardening arteries dissipate. My wife flashes me a querying look. What did you do? If I was writing this scene for one of the many predictable and clichéd screenplays which have done nothing beyond eat up space on my computer’s hard disk, I would turn to my wife and say:
I love you. Instead I offer a defensive, What?
Nothing, she answers then smiles as we continue walking.
She knows this is a good moment for both of us, an indelible memory.
Delivery date
We’re gripped with constipation. According to one of my wife’s baby magazines, it’s common for pregnant women to get constipated. But why me? I’m eating Sultana Bran and yogurt with fresh fruit for breakfast and drinking enough coffee to give an elephant a bowel movement. I give in and take a so-called natural laxative, which terrifies me. Rush hour in Tokyo means horrendously crowded trains where you are poked and prodded from all sides, and full station toilets; many without toilet paper. Thankfully, my natural remedy takes effect at convenient times and I feel less bloated.
I can lay the blame on my body’s overreaction to being a product of the affirmative action, equal opportunity, environmentally conscious generation, which spawned a new breed of male, the SNAG: sensitive new age guy. I’m caring too much, I know it. In my father’s generation, once the sperm had hit its mark, pregnancy, delivery and raising the child were women’s work. The men went to work, came home, ate dinner then metered out the heavy handed punishment, a strap across the backside, for bad behaviour…. Just you wait until your father comes home.
I need to find a balance between being a Neanderthal and a wimp. I figure if I start showing signs of sympathetic pregnancy syndrome, which apparently is real, but usually the fodder for pregnancy episodes in sitcoms, that’s caring too much. The first bout of morning sickness and I’m checking in for electric-shock treatment.
The baby is now 14 millimetres long and still an unidentified speck on another monochrome photo, but big enough for the gynaecologist to determine a delivery date, May 28. The big decision now is which gynaecologist is best for us? Our present gyno’s clinic is near the in-laws’ house, about 30 minutes away from us by train, and my idea of a good choice. If there’s a problem, my mother-in-law is nearby to help out. The fact that she has had three children makes her eminently more qualified than me to deal with any complications.
My wife has other ideas. She wants to go to a gynaecologist in a swank mid-city clinic closer to her office, but about 45 minutes by train from where we live. You pay more for a consultation, but they are supposedly better doctors. That is, unless you get that one doctor who has only one appointment on a busy Saturday afternoon. A huge question mark flashes in my wife’s head. The guy has no other appointments because…? The answer her mind conjures up is enough for her to reschedule her appointment with another doctor for another week.
Besides the obvious reasons for choosing the perfect gynaecologist, you have to consider whether he or she is connected to a hospital that allows the father to be present at the birth. It’s still not commonly accepted in Japan for men to be in the same room as their partners when their child is born. For a lot of dads-to-be, it’s cigarettes out in the car park or coffee and old magazines in the waiting room while the little woman does her job. We have to weigh up our options. Is it more important for me or for a good doctor to be in the room with my wife when the baby is born? I know my wife would be a lot more comfortable screaming at me for all the pain she is going through than at an eminent medical practitioner, but beyond being a human punching bag and breathing coach, I couldn’t do much else to bring the little one into this world. That’s if I don’t pass out in the process.
At 14 millimetres, it’s still early days and anything can happen so we hold off telling anyone other than family of the pregnancy. We figure, once we clear three months and my wife starts popping the top button on her jeans, we’ll make things public.
A teacher I work with has different ideas. He is happy to relay any and all news from his gynaecologist to the staffroom, but then again this is his second child so the stages of pregnancy are very familiar to him. An ex-paramedic, he mentions something I hadn’t thought of in these early stages. His wife is thirty-nine years old. My wife is thirty-nine. As his wife is rapidly reaching the big 4-0 mark, they have decided to have an amniocentesis test. He starts naming syndromes and attaching percentages of their likely occurrence in older pregnant women, which concern me enough to take notice.
That night over dinner I raise the issue of an amnio test with my wife. It is a very brief topic of conversation because she has been thinking the same after reading the same risks and percentages in her magazine and it’s not something we want to dwell upon. I most certainly don’t. I’m a worst-case-scenario kind of person in the sense that I always think of the worst possible outcome and work my way backwards. The idea is that if I consider a certain outcome to be the worst thing that can happen to me, then anything above that is a bonus. It’s a pessimistic approach to being optimistic. When it comes to the baby, though, I don’t want to entertain any bad thoughts for a fear it will bring misfortune on us.
Later in bed, I look at my fingernail in the dark. Fourteen millimetres is probably the length of the nail with a glued on extension — not that I’m the kind of guy who wears nail extensions; and, not that there is anything wrong with it if that’s your choice. Japanese baseball pitchers have their nails manicured regularly because healthy nails are important for throwing a full roster of pitches. I shake my wife gently to wake her from her sleep and tell her I don’t think we should have the test. I’ll be happy with whatever fortune comes our way.
I’m swayed by the fact that we didn’t deliberately plan to get pregnant, but we also didn’t take any precautions to avoid it happening. We figured if it was going to happen it would; if not, which looked to be the case, we’d buy an apartment and commit ourselves to a financial burden that didn’t account for kids, which we did. As fate would have it, while we were knitting together a financial package to secure a home loan, there was a little knitting of chromosomes going on inside my wife’s body. Fortunately, there isn’t a history of life threatening genetic defects in our lineages, so there is nothing really to worry about. Although, the stringy comb-over my father wore as a hair style has me checking regularly for any widening of the bald spot on the double crowns I never used to have.
My wife must have been thinking along the same lines because she agrees before I need to elaborate, which is out of character for her.
No: umm.
No: I… ah…
No: Sucking in a thin breath through gritted teeth or tilting her head to the side, no extended nodding.
Just: I agree.
It’s totally against type for my wife, as her DNA has produced in her that Japanese trait that finds it difficult to make a decision quickly. It’s all to do with the Japanese preoccupation with considering others feelings and the general feeling in the air around us. That’s why there are so few bank robberies in Japan even though the banks are flushed with cash and there are no obvious signs
