You're Too Good to be True

You're too good to be true, I can't take my eyes off you. You'd be like heaven to touch. I wanna hold you so much .... I never thought I'd be singing this to anyone but my wife, but the tune does ring in my head when I look upon my newborn son, Daniel, born 16 Aug 05, 7.50pm, under the safe hands of Dr Tan Hak Koon. It has been a most memorable four days since R was admitted to SGH on Mon, 15 Aug with a 4cm dilation.

It's one of the "true" truisms that you'd never understand parenthood till you become one. Amidst the euphoria of bringing a child to this world, fears and doubts also abound -- in a heady mixture of sleeplessness. While I want to hold Daniel and promise him the world, I also know that he would disappoint one day; that he'd make some really bad decisions, and say some really hurtful things to pain his parents -- hopefully unintentionally. Yet, I know he will also bring tremendous joy in those moments when you realise you had given him the right values and beliefs to ground him firmly in the fear of the Lord. Trepiditious joy, that's what it is.

I think he looks a lot like R, with her nose and searching solemn eyes, which is perhaps why I find it so easy to form a strong sense of attachment. Within the first few seconds after he was sucked out of his mother's womb by a mighty vacuum, his eyes were wide open, searching for understanding of this strange, noisy, and cold world that he had come into. He looked at me. I held his tiny hands. Holding him was my JC school-mate (now a doctor), and he congratulated me. His eyes; they just gaze as if they knew that this would be the man who could either make his life a joy or a living hell.

We have been praying a lot. Nothing reminds us of our own mortality and fragility like a baby. Our utter dependence on God is often masked by our little achievements in life (oh, look, I can do this, or that), but a baby just lies on his bed, crying, hapless except perhaps for the air he breathes. Actually, we're all like that too. I wonder if Daniel in his deepest delusions think that he is perfectly capable of taking care of himself, just we do of ourselves.

The thoughts, they keep coming. I turn to R and we remind one another of what a wonderful friend told us from the UK -- we're 2+1, not 3. R is still my wife, and I am still her husband. We're one. This baby, given by God, is our joint love, pain, joy, and responsibility. And the best way we can provide for him is to have a strong marriage firmly under God's loving hand. Yes, in a strange way, in the midst of all the jubilations, I draw quiet strength from the fact that R is (in the words of Elder Michael Lee) "freehold" but our baby is only "leasehold" ... but oh, what a wonderful leasehold it is going to be!