Adulthood

The wife and I had been discussing the possibility of having a kid for some time, but it's always been some far off fantasy – like what we'll do when we buy that penthouse flat in Manhattan. We kept passing various milestones – my parents were 31 and 32 when I was born, they had their first kid at 30 and 31, etc etc. It was awkward at first. Somehow I'd imagined I'd have had a kid by 35. When I hit 35 I knew I wasn't at all ready. Now that I'm 40 I keep vacillating between it being ok or silly of me to have waited til now. Having a kid can't be that hard. I mean, every single one of my ancestors has bred. And most of those at a younger age than me.

A bit of background... I went straight from undergraduate uni to do a PhD without any real job in the meantime. Looking back, that did delay "adulthood" a bit – hardcore academia is so different from the real world, and being a student in the UK, one can get by without ever dealing with real-life stuff. Sure I was an expert on immigration, living cheaply, finding rental property, etc. But I'd no real idea about how the grown up world worked. It was fun.

After I graduated and got a real job, flat, relationship, etc etc, I still didn't feel grown up. I felt no different after any of those milestones. I once asked my mother when she finally felt like an adult. She said it was only after she'd had a child. So I'm kind of wondering how things will change for me after the wee one is in my life. I am already starting to see changes on how I view things. I've spent the past 9 months in a kind of instinctive look-after-the-wife mode, and now I'm entering the look-after-the-family mode. I can see my perspective shifting, and it's weird being able to notice it. It's actually brought the wife and I closer together. Not that we'd been having issues. It's just you hear stories about people having children to save their marriage. It never occurred to me there might actually be a relationship-enhancing effect of children (or at least pregnancy). We've been very happily involved for almost a dozen years now, and I'm rather surprised to see how some of our remaining rough edges have been smoothed in the process.

With regards to my parents, I now realise that my life is so different from them that there's no point using them as a metric. I'll take their advice, but I'll tempter it with my perspective and see what happens. After all, I find that by now I have a decent sense of how the world works. I know now that few people have any real clue about what they're doing and all of civilisation is held together with ossified strings and glue. Homeownership has done far more than anything else so far in life in making me feel adulter – partly because of all the repairs. Once you see a house taken apart and put back together, there's a lot of is that it? feeling I just never got as a renter.

Anyway, I am both ready and not ready for this. I'm pretty sure I can take what the world is going to throw at me. On the other hand, I know changes are afoot and I wonder if I'd have been better off the way things are now. I guess I'll just have to wait to find out.

How we got here

So for the past several years, the wife and I have been discussing the theoretical child. Not everything, but alot. The point was not to plan out the kid's life, but a whole bunch of what-ifs. The birth, raising, schooling, citizenship – all kinds of things, even whose body parts and traits it would be better off having. If we could answer them and come to an agreement then we knew we were closer to being ready.

We're control freaks. Both of us. Everything needs to be planned out. It's just the way we are. It seems to be working out for us so far.

We didn't talk about it with friends or family. Talking about it would make it too real. We felt that telling people would make it more concrete and force ourselves down that path whether it be a good idea or not. Or the opposite – sometimes discussing your plans means you're less likely to actually do them. We had to be really ready and really be sure we were doing this for the right reasons. So, to cope, it had to be our little secret.

We decided on names literally years ago. One name for a girl and one for a boy. Of course we won't tell anyone until she's born. Somehow we feel if we did it would make it less "us" and ruin the name. We may be control freaks, but we're not always rational.

A couple of years ago we decided on a code name for the kid. The wife did not want to use any of the standards - bean, alien, bump, bambino, etc. She suggested Willow. This was long before we even started trying to conceive. We needed it so we say things like Which room will be Willow's in the new flat? without feeling like we were committing ourselves to breeding. The name is based on an offhand comment my step-cousin-in-law made to the wife at the wedding, making a joke on my surname, Rosenberg.

We bought a flat almost a year ago after searching for a very long time. We'd always "known" that this would be the place where we'd have a baby. That thought went into our evaluation of every place we saw. In the worst case, we'd just end up with extra space if we chose not to breed. It did end up with us having to come up with lots of on-the-spot rationalised avoidance of questions when people'd ask Why do you need 3 bedrooms? or Stoke Newington? Is she pregnant?

We didn't decide for sure to sprog until last year. The wife had a completely irrational pregnancy scare. There were no real signs, and the maths didn't work out. There was no way she could be pregnant – but she got in her head anyway that she was. So, being the rational/irrational creature she is, she sat down and figured out how we'd handle it. She came to the conclusion that we could handle it, and it wasn't such a bad thing after all. A month later we started trying.

It's a year later now, and we're just over two weeks from the due date. Willow could come at any moment. We have, I think, everything we need. It's just not organised enough – it's all in piles on whatever random flat surfaces we can find. Plus our home is still in a state, with curtains needing to be put up and furniture moved to at least the right room. And the bag. We need to pack the bag. And by the bag, I probably mean 2 or 3 the bags with just-in-every-possible-case stuff for all of us. In the meanwhile, all parts of our lives are coming to a mad peak. All we need to do is get past it and ride the waves down into whatever familihood awaits us.

Baby me. Baby and me.

So I dug out an old baby photo of myself. I must have been maybe 8 months old. It was really interesting looking at it in the light of my new baby-aware eyes.

First off, my ears have not changed one single bit. My nose is unrecognisable for the original, but my ears are so similar that even I can tell, and I don't get much chance to look at my ears.

Next, my hairline is the same. At the age in the photo, my hair was just starting to grow, so it was rather thin. Later in life it got much thicker and grew out. But, since my 30s it started retracting and is now thinner. My hairline has moved back, my widows-peaks pronounced, and bit of thinning in the back. Which is rather similar to how it looked in this photo. Weird.

The lines around my eyes and on my forehead have always been there. No change. Well... maybe a line or two, but not much.p

I spent a long while starting at the photo and comparing it to the wee one's 21 week ultrasound photo. The curves of the head and face are the same. The nose looks pretty similar too. I'd originally though the turned-up nose was wife-ish, but now that I look at my old turned-up button proboscis, perhaps it is like mine (tho, I'm not sure I'd wish the beak it became on her). It's really hard to tell, for obvious reasons. I wish I had a profile shot of the wife as a baby, but they're all head-on, so I can't tell which of us this sonogram more resembles.