Sitting here in my mother-in-laws apartment in Gwang-ju, Korea thinking back to how I got here is something I do a lot of.
In August, 2012, my wife was dispatched to work for three years in Colombo, Sri Lanka. We packed up our things and flew from Seoul to Colombo. We'd been married a few years and I knew she wanted a child eventually. I've never been very eager to have children. I'll admit it, I don't like babies very much. Everyone says "that'll change when it's your own" and I didn't disagree with them.
Nevertheless, who am I to neglect the woman I love something she thinks is important? Long story short, everyone we knew had a hard time conceiving. It took them months, years, FOREVER to plant that seed. We figured it would be the same way with us so we came up with this plan where my wife would get magically pregnant at just the right time before leaving Sri Lanka.
Well, my man-seed decided to derail this plan and a little over a year into our time in Colombo the 15 cent pregnancy test we picked up at the hospital came up positive. The first thing I asked, and perhaps it wasn't the wisest of questions, was "do you want to keep it?". In hindsight, maybe it wasn't the most sensitive of things to say in that moment, but being the modern man that I am, I felt it was something honest and realistic to ask. The look on my wifes face was enough of an answer so I quickly tried to turn the moment into a celebration. I'm not sure I was entirely successful.
So where did we stand in Colombo? Well her head office back in Seoul didn't have a clue how to handle the situation. Apparently it was the first time a Korean woman had ever gotten pregnant overseas and didn't run back to the homeland. They just didn't have any kind of policy in place for someone wanting to give birth overseas. After what felt like months of back and forth between my wife and her head office, we decided that what they were offering was junk and decided to come back to Korea. Inside Korea, the benefits package her employer offers isn't so bad. She has three months paid maternity leave and up to a year off. We decided that she'd take the year off.
To make that plan the most cost effective, we decided to move back to her hometown, Gwang-ju, to live with her mom and be near family.
On Monday, September 15th, 2014, at 1:46pm my daughter, Lily Mattt, was born in Gwang-ju, Korea after having been Made in Sri Lanka.
