Pick up as you go

Hi to you all, so I’m feeling much better now as my wife and I had just returned from the doctor. If you have been reading lately, you would see what happened to my wife a few days ago where she had some bleeding. I really thought it was going to be the end of our child, but thank heavens that the baby’s heart rate has improved since then. There are miracles waiting to happen.

On that note, I feel really good that I invited some friends over to have dinner at my house. I had the best time because my best friend from Glasgow came over with some good news. His wife is also pregnant and it just felt great to have someone to talk to these things about. We have really changed since our college days wherein we didn’t care about anything else but ourselves.

Now times have changed and things are really new. So new I’m still starting to get used to them. Even though I know it would be a hard thing to pull off – I even think it would take years.

Work is doing fine, my clients from 2 years ago who went for a marriage counseling are now doing so much better. The husband who has gone to real anger management has improved greatly. His wife tells me that he knows how to handle himself. People do change you know, it just takes a lot of patience and with that usually comes from when you love a person.

On the other hand, I have dealt with a new client who is suffering from domestic violence. The husband is now with the police, but what more worried about is her mental health. We shall see in the next couple of sessions. I hope therapy helps her.

Yesterday we had a short trip to the doctor. My wife had some bleeding after taking a shower and we got alarmed. I’m scared. Really scared, but I do not have control over these things happening now. I think I’m just at the right pace where I am surrendering myself to what can happen, though I know I shouldn’t be thinking about it that way.

I remember the time when my mother had a miscarriage when I was five. We were all excited about the baby, so just imagine how my mother felt when she lost it. She had a slight accident, where she had slipped in the shower – my dad wasn’t around, too. He was at work that day and I called an ambulance and then my dad. I could hear the fear in his voice.

Now I probably have that same amount of fear, but I know there’s still hope. The doctor says the chances of the baby surviving were small, but I’m keeping my act together hoping it would change. I have to be strong for my wife and for the baby she is carrying inside of her.

Meanwhile I keep staring at these father and son photos… It inspires me to test myself, my patience and strength.

Now that my wife’s getting close to giving birth, I can’t help but ask myself some questions. I’ve gone from funny to ridiculous just because I spend too many hours thinking of things — anything related to family, fatherhood and what not

So I remembered some of the things my parents told me. Of course they were lies. One of them was, if I get a cold and if I don’t cough out the phlegm, I’d fly up the ceiling and never come back down. My god, was my mother creative or what?!

Among the few other lies I had been told when I was a kid were: If I get a big cut somewhere then whatever I ate for lunch would come out there. My grandmother was half-Filipino so they had all these superstitions on everything. One of them too was if I made an ugly face, chances are an evil wind will brush through me and my face would get stuck that way, forever. Hell I was so freaked out when I was a kid.

Now that I’m going to have a kid too, I’m getting a bit conscious of what kinds of lies to tell him. Definitely the cut and the food coming out of it is out of the question, I mean that’s pretty graphic for a child to keep in mind, so No.

What about you, what were the lies your folks told you growing up?

I remember the time that my best bud’s wife had just given birth to a healthy baby girl. And I thought it was just amazing seeing the baby. At first, I didn’t know how to react of course, I was his best man if you want me to cut to the chase, so there’s the default happiness although the long hand story says I was shocked out of my system when I had been told that Lloyd was getting married. Marriage is a different thing to me. Knowing the stats of however many couples split up every second.

I’ve loved children since I started practcing in this field, they are the significant proof of purity in this world full of different people who give my character a new dimension sometimes. See, being a counselor doesn’t always make you a nice guy. Many parts of it have to do with knowing what’s right from wrong and more often than not my moral meter is being used by different people. But at the same time, my patience gets tested A lot.

So one day at work, Lloyd comes up to me and tells me we needed to talk. And I thought, hey he must’ve broken up with Anna — I was seeing what I wanted to see, I wasn’t looking at what he really wanted to say. I kept my ear open for the news, and he simply said, “Anna and I are having a baby.”

That was it. I couldn’t function. It felt entirely different all of a sudden. Not like those who come up to me to tell me they’ve finally made it as a couple and what a great thing it was to finally have a child after trying all this time, no. I was dealing with the guy whom I treated like my own brother after all these years, the man who almost reflected every inch of me. And it would be childish to say, but all the plans had shifted to a different phase. I had to find another fool that could take his place at the apartment, I had to get along well with the same fool, too.

The wedding followed in between the pregnancy. It was a small gathering of 30 people. It was one of those weddings that I really liked since it wasn’t your typical garden wedding, but a church wedding, very non-traditional one. Anna’s family was there, I was there and later on 2 of our buddies caught on to the event. I was happy for him, but I knew him best, above all that.

That was 5 years ago. A week ago, my wife told me that she’s 3 weeks pregnant and that I’m going to be a father soon. I know that at one point this was going to happen, but when I told Lloyd the news about it, he sprung out of the seat and told me that it was one of the best things that ever happened to him.

I seem to have been a better person these past couple of days due to this realization. I am doubly a more patient guy, and I take every word I say as carefully as breakable glass. I didn’t know these changes would take place, really. I want to be a good example to my child, that now I couldn’t just eat Goober from the jar without thinking that I have to show my child something he would follow. It stems from the simplest things and it was just something that opened my eye the stretch of the golden gate. This photo was the best father child photo I’ve ever seen, by the way.

I cannot wait until some nine months more.