Yeoh Siew Hoon had one of those surreal Sundays where life begins anew.
New life
You know the feeling when you wake up and you know it’s going to be one of those perfect days? Well, it happened to me on Sunday.
The first thing I did after I woke up at 11am (there’s nothing better to start the day than a good lie-in) was to head off to the Raffles Hospital to welcome a day-old baby into the world. Her name is Juliet and yes, like all newborn babies, she is … tiny.
Okay, she is also cute, adorable and beautiful. Her parents are my best friends, ok?
What I always find amusing about a newborn is how everyone instantly starts looking for signs of parentage. “Her lips are just like mummy’s.” “She’s got daddy’s nose.” “Definitely daddy’s hair.” “Look at the toes. Like grandma’s.”
No one ever says “But she doesn’t look like either of you”.
I mean, how can anyone tell? Everything’s too exquisitely tiny and wrinkly to be discernibly recognizable as distinctly inherited features.
So what I try to see, in such circumstances, is the big picture. The miracle of life. The bond between mother and baby. The gift of love. The “your life will never be the same again” moment of truth for the parents.
The baby though isn’t having such thoughts. All she wants to do is to be held, and all she does is cry a lot. I don’t blame her. Who wants to be out in the big bad world when you’ve just spent nine months in the safest, warmest place ever?
I must say though that hospitals have come a long way since I was born in the General Hospital in Penang. The Raffles Hospital is like the Raffles Hotel – it has a concierge service, its room service menu is extensive and varied and it has piped-in music, for god’s sake.
Right after this rather joyous start to my Sunday, I popped into a friend’s house to see her new litter of puppies, the result of an accidental “collision” between a snowy white Japanese Spitz named Sugar and a brown-black beagle called Bingo. (I can just see the headlines here.)
New life
The puppies, five of them – there were six, but the first didn’t make it out alive – are two weeks old and ever so tiny. They can hardly see, and they can barely walk. So all they do is sleep or wriggle around in the general direction of their mummy’s teats to feed. And my, how hungry they are.
Bingo just sits there and lets herself be fed off, looking rather bored by it all.
Sugar meanwhile is in a caged pen outside. He’s had his pleasure and there ends his responsibility. It’s a dog’s life, as they say.
As I sat and watched the five puppies – they definitely look more like mummy than daddy – I felt a surreal feeling coming over me. Just two hours ago, I had watched a baby girl bond with her mother. Now I was watching five puppies bond with their mother.
The preciousness of new lives.
That night, I watched Nigerian musician Femi Kuti and his band, The Positive Force, perform at the Esplanade. It was the closing of the Mosaic Music Festival.
Femi, the son of the famous Fela Anikulapo Kuti who pioneered “afrobeat” and known for his “dance music with a conscience”, sang of children dying, corrupt politicians and AIDS, which killed his father.
Mostly, he sang about saving children.
Yes, the preciousness of new lives.
