A present at 30

Around June this year, I started thinking about turning 30 in a positive way. The twenties no longer felt like a golden era I had to cling on to. I started telling people I was 30 when they asked. Tomorrow, that is what I will be.

I did think, though, that I should do something momentous and cliched to mark the turn of the decade. Perhaps get that tattoo. I thought about trees and roots and words, and then I forgot about tattoos.

But God thought it was time for a body modification too.

I started feeling it in my chest, pms symptoms dragging on a week too long.

On 9th November, I groggily took a pregnancy test first thing in the morning. No spectacles on, teeth unbrushed. Two lines appeared. I took the box out to k, who was already up and trying to submit a paper online. I showed him the box and the test stick.

"What does this mean? So what does it mean? You're pregnant? Don't worry, it may not be accurate."

I would have clobbered him, except I was also unsure that something so cheap could be relied on to tell me the biggest news of our lives. So we shrugged it off and went about our day. In the afternoon I took another test. It was positive too.

Again, we pretended it was false. But we brought home a digital ClearBlue pregnancy test kit, because the more expensive, the more accurate?

It blinked and calculated for a minute, way longer than my cheap tests took.
Finally it decided. "Pregnant."

Humans are strange beings. A printed word is like the News, it just Is. With that word, we finally allowed ourselves to believe and rejoice.

I called my parents. My mum picked up, and I told her to go wake Daddy up. "Why, you're pregnant ah?"She just didn't let me have my moment. Lots of fumbling and phone clicking later, they were both on speakerphone, and I said this big sentence for the first time. "Yes, I'm pregnant."

"Congratulations,"my father said very properly. I wouldn't expect anything less from him.
"Aiya, I knew it,"said my mother.

The next few days were happy ones, telling k's family and my friends, absorbing all the joy that was exploding around us. We went to Choon Kit and we got a gynae appointment at Mt E. I was seven weeks in.

At the gynae's clinic, I was still worried that my test result was a false positive. I did a urine test for the nurse to check, and I was waiting for her response to tell me if I was really pregnant or not. But she glanced at it and tossed it into the dustbin. "First pregnancy?"she asked. That was a relief.

Then finally, we saw it for ourselves on tv. A mass of black, my uterus, which I'd always thought was faulty, and at the top, a blueberry-sized cluster and a tiny blinking dot. Our baby's beating heart. Dr Kek turned the sound on. I felt k melt into my side and lean his cheek on my head. All my worries about him not being in the moment had been unfounded.

I carried that beating heart with us to Tokyo, and I fed that beating heart lots of food. I took rest stops in the middle of our long walks, and went to bed thinking about the beating heart.

Today, our little blueberry is the size of a lemon. The last time we saw it on tv, it was waving its hands about and bouncing. I realized that even while I couldn't see it or take care of it, God was making it grow, and it was busy doing its own thing inside there.

Tomorrow I turn 30, and already I care less about my own birthday than the impending birth of this little one.

Thank You God, for your gift in Your good time. We don't know where we're headed or what You want us to do. But for now at least we know we are to take care of this gift You've given us, and that's more than enough.