November is a stressful month for Korean high school seniors. They have to take the college entrance exam. This all-day-test somewhat determines their fates. I say somewhat because I'm sure that there are a lot of kids out there who get bad grades on the test and turn out fine, maybe they start their own businesses or figure out that trade school they went to is good enough to get them a job somewhere and they can start making money while their colleagues are in college.
I had a few of my own tests. First was my Kumdo 1 dan test. I messed up one part of that test, but managed to pass. That test was overshadowed by something else though.
The Kumdo test was on a Saturday. The Thursday before the test my wife told me something. Back in August we found out that we were pregnant. The week of the Kumdo test, my wife had one of her check ups with an ultrasound, and the combined screening/blood test. They found that there was a high possibility that our kid might have downs syndrome.
The week after that we went back to the hospital for an amniocentesis, after that we spent the next three weeks worrying about the results.
In that time I looked on the internet for information about down syndrome. I saw some pictures of kids with down syndrome. In doing so I came to realize that having a kid with down syndrome isn't bad at all. I got myself ready to smack the shit out of anybody who would call my kid a retard. Lastly I read a bunch of cool stuff on the internet about things that people with down syndrome have done.
There were still times when the anxiety of waiting got to me though. Just that feeling in the stomach of, "What the hell am I going to do?" But there were other comforting things. A student in our school has some kind of problem like that. I don't know what her problem is but, nonetheless she is a lovely young lady who likes to stick her tongue out at me and call me a pig in Korean as she giggles. A daughter like that would be pretty awesome to have.
We got the test results back and they were negative for downs syndrome. It seems our baby will be perfectly healthy. My wife called me with the news as I left for lunch today. I couldn't tell if her tone of voice on the phone was happy distraught. It turned out that she was happy. I was relieved as well. I don't know if I was relieved that it was good news or relieved that it was news at all and that I could stop worrying. But then I realized that we were having a baby, this was probably just the first of many other worries. I was also more optimistic about the prospects of having a kid.
There were still times when the anxiety of waiting got to me though. Just that feeling in the stomach of, "What the hell am I going to do?" But there were other comforting things. A student in our school has some kind of problem like that. I don't know what her problem is but, nonetheless she is a lovely young lady who likes to stick her tongue out at me and call me a pig in Korean as she giggles. A daughter like that would be pretty awesome to have.
We got the test results back and they were negative for downs syndrome. It seems our baby will be perfectly healthy. My wife called me with the news as I left for lunch today. I couldn't tell if her tone of voice on the phone was happy distraught. It turned out that she was happy. I was relieved as well. I don't know if I was relieved that it was good news or relieved that it was news at all and that I could stop worrying. But then I realized that we were having a baby, this was probably just the first of many other worries. I was also more optimistic about the prospects of having a kid.
