A 40-week Project: IX

Unbelievably I have already entered the last week of the 10-month stretch of pregnancy. In another 7 days, both the baby and I will reach at the supposed due date, although my doctor said that my body hadn't given any biological sigh of labor yet, and some more exercises from now on will be desperately needed. 

Every single day after year 2015 began has been spent dealing with many emotional and sentimental uncertainties. The route of my thoughts about the current state of pregnancy and any upcoming changes usually takes a thousand turns in a labyrinth of negative and positive imagination and ends up nowhere eventually when my eyelids shut for the end of the day. 

The baby's first parcels arrived at the house in December 2014.

I spent most of January after the academic term rearranging spaces in the house in preparation for the new member. Embarrassingly it was probably the first proper large-scale clean-up after we moved in. The scheduled arrival of the new member made my mind firm and clear as to what to dispose and what to keep, while usually I tend to keep whatever as long as I can. Creating a new and empty space is never an easy task for me, as it involves many forms of decision and many layers of recollection of life in the past. 

Nothing would stay forever; everything has its expiry date - some known and some not - in one's life. 

There have been new routines added to our everyday life, too, owing to some new purchases in the house. For instance, our new all-in-one oven has made bread-making a domestic fun. So far, we have tried several flavours, including taro, milk, cheese, and raisin. I was also finally enabled to embrace baking again after so many years after England. And the first attempt was a lemon syrup cake. 

Home bakery: cheese bread

Home bakery: raisin bread

I also made some efforts to create some Taiwanese sweets in order to consume left-over red beans that I used to cure pregnancy-induced edema. I cooked the red beans into thick sweet soup or red bean paste and rolled plenty of roundish balls made of sweet potatoes and taro. Surprisingly, K also enjoyed it as a new entry on the home breakfast menu. 

Taiwanese sweets: sweet potato and taro balls in red bean soup

2015 is the first year that we are going to welcome the first family member. To notify the change, I created woodcut prints for our new year's greeting cards: 3 sheep in Yorkshire Dale. It took several visits to a local handcraft shop to decide materials and several attempts to finalise the design. In the end, only friends close to me understood how the drawing worked and what it suggested. It is fine, too, as these days I do not usually want /enjoy much attention. More often than ever these days, I realised that I myself would be driven out of my own life gradually when the new life grows, develops and takes over the centre stage of family life. Living in a country like Japan is more so like this for women: they are said to be pampered because they are seldom pressured into career, but these angels at home (I borrow the Victorian idea of housewives here) are in fact forgotten and ignored as their domestic roles silence them. (It is one of the typical topics that I ponder upon these days. How exhausting and insignificant sometimes!)

I have to admit that there have been many joyful things going on. However, my nature is very vulnerable to possible negative aspects of this life change especially in relation to issues such as gender and social inequality. I always wonder how I could have simply ignored these observations on social injustice and merely focus on the happiness that is said to overcome everything else, as I was always advised by veteran mothers. If I really try not to see and not to think too much, doesn't that mean that I am failing to fulfil my job as a scholar and a social being? In that way, I am also failing and abandoning the self that I have tried to built up over the past years of hard work and research. Yet, I am totally and consciously scared of the possibility that the entangled negative thought as such would eventually poison the child to come. Is it better for him to be thoughtful and miserable? Or, is it in the end more blessed if one stays innocent and blissful?

Fortunately, my child, you have a wonderful and calm dad, whom you should follow as an example in the way he loves the family, he devotes to his work, and he exercises his wisdom. Although it might sound entirely wrong to say so, maybe to a certain extent you are lucky to be born into an advantageous sex of man in this world.