October 2011
Need 1
So…
I am a father again. After the arrival of our second daughter, Molly, Laura said she needed some breathing space. And how could I argue? The first child might suck up eighty percent of the oxygen in a room, but a second takes the rest and leaves you gasping.
So we busied ourselves with our two sweet girls. If there were one of each – a girl and a boy – we might have stopped there. I used to say that we definitely would have stopped there, but now I’m not so sure.
Regardless, in time Laura was ready to give it a go again. I’d been ready a good while longer, but I get to leave the kids with her and escape to work every day, so it’s an easier thought for me to play with. So anyway, stuff happened.
…and now we have our third. A little girl: Lucy Esmeralda. 7 lbs 14oz and fighting healthy.
‘Healthy’ with newborns can involve, of course, vomiting, as I was reminded of last night. Laura had been feeding Lucy in bed when I came into the bedroom from my shower.
“Good luck!” she said as she bounded down stairs for hers.
It was a joy to just lay there and watch Lucy. Three and a half weeks old now, one and a half pounds heavier, and content to rest there on her side before her peering daddy.
I did most of the talking.
She gurgled a bit.
Then she fussed some.
And then she unleashed a milky hell upon my bed sheets.
Sure I had to strip the bed later on, but that’s ok. It was due a change anyway. What got me was when it started chugging out her nose and she ceased to be merely puke-upset and became increasingly and legitimately distressed. Lucy didn’t seem to be able to get in any air to clear the passages.
Laura heard my feet hit the floor, even with the shower blasting. I maintain that I did not (literally)(technically) run down the stairs with Lucy in my arms, but I was trying to ‘calmly yell’ for her attention, and I was there pretty darn quick.
There’s a weird rubber thingy in our house that for all the world looks like a miniature turkey-baster. Thank God Laura knew exactly where it was, because no sooner were we back upstairs than Laura had it shoved up Lucy’s nose, sucking out the goop.
Lucy’s fine.
Laura’s fine.
I’m recovering.
In all honesty, Lucy probably would have been fine if Laura had’ve gone to the shops or something, instead of a shower, and I’d been left to fend for myself. But it was so good to have her there for me. I love her, and can barely imagine what I’d be without her.
Need 2
I have a lot of friends here in America. Dozens. Hundreds. Anxious for a number? How does 381 Facebook friends sound?
I’ve been teaching for seven years, with an average of one hundred and thirty-five new faces every year. That makes about 945 kids who have passed through Room 402 at Kenmore West High School under my tutelage. Add in Study Halls, coaching, etc., and I’ve worked with close-on fifteen hundred students here so far.
There’s also the hundred and fifty faculty I’ve worked with.
Beyond school there’s Laura’s extended family, rugby friends and a hoard of good running friends. Neighbours, passers-by, the girl at the coffeeshop who thinks my Aussie accent is fake.
Heck – sometime it feels like I know half the bloody country…
But I have one best mate. Only one who’s been there since I was seventeen, which was twenty-one long years ago. There’s hardly a thing about me worth telling that he doesn’t already know.
There is, I believe, a mates ‘code language’ that hovers out beyond the edges of literal meaning. I can hold up two fingers in a ‘v’ to him and there’s no one else in the world who gets the reference and the dozens of years and stories wrapped up in it. To us Yass = black coffee, a Nick Cave t-shirt and The Rolling Stones; Cherry trees = ‘all the girls we ever met before we were twenty’. There’s a hundred of these profound and yet wildly meaningless little things that make up true mateship.
And the bond is stronger because we’re both expatriates. He’s in Texas and I’m up here in New York and we’re both strangers in strange lands. The Proverbs nail it when they remind us that ‘there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother’.
As we both negotiate our American lives, it’s the common stuff of common mateship that is important, but I also believe that one of the reasons we’re remained tight is that we need each other as anchors, to ground us, as sounding boards, as perverse expressions of normality.
Need (y?)
Do I need my mate? Yes. Do I need my wife? Yes. Do I need my daughters? Yes. I need.
I am human. I need.
Kookaburra