24th May 2010 , Posted by Dannie

The Back Up Plan

There’s a new Jennifer Lopez movie in town. I haven’t yet decided if I’ve forgiven her yet for her super-duper boring performance during the Season 6 finale of So You Think You Can Dance, but the premise does sound promising.

Girl is getting older, and wants to have kids. But cannot find the right man to share her life with. Visits her gynae, who puts her up for an artificial insemination program. After the procedure, she meets a nice man whom she’s interested in. But of course, as the fates would have it, she becomes pregnant, even though she professes to be seeing no one…

This actually brings to mind a conversation I had with my Head Prefect in Primary School, Linda. Well, we didn’t actually have this conversation in Primary school. We had it about 24 years after our PSLE exams.

Linda is now working in Shanghai, and as far as I know, has not found her One True Love yet. We were having breakfast during one of her rare trips back to Singapore when I mentioned that the wife and I were trying for a baby.

“Yah! I want to have a baby too! Not getting younger, you know!”, Linda exclaimed.

I raised an eloquent eyebrow. “That’s good. But you do realise that for you to have a baby, you need something with a penis, right?”

“Haha… no suitable penis yet lahhh. But I was just asking my gynae what should I do, because the chances of a healthy baby decrease with age. He recommended that he could extract the eggs from me first, while I’m still sort-of young.”

I remember filing this interesting tidbit of info into the murky recesses of my brain, because it had never occurred to me that a gynae could recommend something like this. It does fly in the face of what we all envisage as the ideal wholesome family. As the movie teaser puts it – “Fall in love. Get married. Have a baby.” Then it cheekily adds, “Not necessarily in that order”.

When you think about it, this is actually not very different from shotgun weddings, or re-marriages. I have friends who got into shotgun weddings, and I have other friends who married twice, with a kid from the first marriage. In a way, they are all about having a child before getting married, and from what I see and understand, it’s not really a bad thing as long as there is true love, care and compassion between the couple. And as long as the child is raised with love of both parents, there is really no shame to it.

I can accept this thinking, and I think most people of my generation can accept it too. But I reckon the older generation must be expressing their shock at such a thought. Makes me also wonder what new shenanigans my kids will come up with!