At one of the very first golf tournaments I ever went to I walked around with a wife who doesn’t get to travel very much. She has one school aged child and she was walking around with her two month old. It was early March so it was still very early in the golf season. She told me her husband had seen their baby girl one week out of her two months because he needed to play as many tournaments as he could.
A few weeks later I read an article about an Australian golfer who had returned to US to play golf two weeks after his baby had been born. He had to come back because he needed to make a certain amount of extra money in order to play again the next year. Not sure when he got to go home again.
I know that this pales in comparison to all of our wonderful military men and women who leave their babies for much longer periods. I know this is nothing in comparison to the men who don’t get to meet their babies until they are a year old because they are out fighting a war.
And yet, this is still my life, so it’s something that concerns me. In fact after walking around with that wife I spent a long time trying to decide if this was something I could live with. It was one of the many things about this lifestyle that I wasn’t thrilled about committing myself to. In the end love won out against any of the many arguments I was having with myself.
I am very fortunate that I will be able to travel with my hubs so that he doesn’t have to miss out on everything. However, I won’t be traveling for at least the first two months. I want to make sure the baby gets all the shots before I subject him or her to the germs of airports and planes. Not to mention, the thought of actually traveling with the baby scares me unbelievably!
A little back story on how we got pregnant. I went off the pill in April thinking that it would take at least a few months to get pregnant. I had thought long and hard about what this would do for the golf schedule and figured the timing would be perfect. Well, with many things in life, you can’t plan it. I didn’t have one period after I went off the period. I peed on the stick and when I saw pregnant pop up I was thrilled. And then I thought about it. Then I looked at the golf schedule. Then I had a cry when I realized that the baby would be born right at the beginning of the season.
Our baby is due the week of the first golf tournament. The first tournament is in Hawaii. This is very far away from Virginia Beach. I am lucky that Marc doesn’t want to chance missing the birth so he will be missing this tournament, but that doesn’t come without a certain amount of guilt. I’ve spoken about it before, but in golf if you don’t make a certain amount of money you don’t keep your job for the next year. Asking him to miss tournaments when we can’t even be sure that the baby will come right then is a bit scary to do. After the Hawaii tournament comes the west coast swing. Once again its a bit scary. He’ll have to play them. What if the baby is late and he’s not able to get back in time? What if he misses this most important moment? There’s no way to know.
There’s also the timing of going back to Australia. Normally we go together in the winter. I will be too far along to travel. He’ll be leaving me for 4-5 weeks when I’m 7 months pregnant. Who’s going to clean the litter box for me?! I know, this is a trivial worry but it’s there. I also know I’m also going to miss him like crazy and I’m not sure how this hormonal mess I’ve become is going to handle the distance for that long. But it’s his only time to go home and I would never ask him not to.
Well, this post is getting pretty long and I hope I’m not coming off as whiny. Just some things that have been weighing on my mind lately.
