So yesterday, I dreamt a won a race.
Now. I don’t usually win races, but you see this one involved galloping about on a giant rocking horse that looks something like the specimen on the right, except HUGE. It involved starting from the back and galloping that wooden horse for all its worth through the neighbourhood hawker centre near my mother’s house, overtaking a mass of IT systems people, the entire large business sales team, and finally my own director of sales, marketing and corporate affairs. It ended when I got bored, and decided to sit down and tuck into some Ipoh Hor Fun.
I think this had a little to do with the obstetrician visit.
We had an ultrasound yesterday. Bear in mind that the last time we had any happy snaps, it was 14 weeks ago so she’s changed a lot since then. After weeks of being told that my tummy is tiny and that I couldn’t possibly only have eight/seven/six weeks to go, I asked my midwife if I was travelling alright, and she said I was pretty much textbook to the point of being “boring”. And then my obstetrician did a bit of sleuthing by ultrasound and lo and behold, our little girl now weighs a healthy 2.3kg and at 34 weeks, has beautiful long legs of a 36-week old.
And would you believe, something primal and stupid tripped inside my head and heart, and suddenly I was ridiculously proud that my daughter was already above average in something. As if either of us had a direct hand in the business of lengthening her femur. “My babe,” I say proudly, “is going to be a babe.”
Has it begun? I hear about mothers groups getting really competitive. And suddenly it’s about height and weight gain, and whose child is crawling first, and whose child still isn’t sleeping through the night, and whose child can perform the Aria. And then it’s brain training classes, and getting into the best gymboree, and which mommy handstitches all her child’s clothes, bakes like a demon, got her flat tummy within a week of the birth sans stretch marks, and looks like a million dollars.
And it sounds silly but hey, I have a competitive streak a mile long. Guys, women are crazy competitive. We’re just not always competitive about the same things that men are, but boy we’re competitive and we’re sneaky competitive, too. We don’t come out with arms swinging. But we count our wins like the best of them and boy, can we fight dirty…
So you’ve been warned. And yeah, my daughter is gonna be leggy. YEAH!
Finding The Happy 
19 May 2011 at 11:02 pm
Can women be crazy competitive? – you think?, really? – ah man, I once managed an admin team of the most manipulative, sneaky competitive controlling cliquey fickle bunch of otherwise nice people. I was absolutely gob-smacked at the difference between their talk about each other when they were together vs separate … but you just said she !!!… the dynamics of that group was so odd and they still had nice things about them when they weren’t competing. Yeah, a bit of sexist labelling I know, but I agree, boys aren’t always fundamentally more competitive, just more simple and boyishly obvious about how and what. Also maybe a bit less sophisticated and more likely to drop it when they get distracted by something else. Still we humans probably need all that stuff to bring out the other great qualities of men and women.
Maybe it’s cool to be proud of our kids – especially if we can do it without the collateral damage of putting down other people’s kids – perhaps the world would be a nicer place if parents were more into finding the good things in their kids, especially as they grow up to be teenagers, rather than the sort of next generational put downs of the bad old days – better to be proud of our kids that being proud of ourselves.