OPINION
Steve Braunias considers the ups and downs of becoming a father later in life
I said, “So how old were you when your youngest was born?” We met this week at a fairly cheap and definitely cheerful Sri Lankan joint in Sandringham. One of the chefs cooked our meals on a row of gas rings next to our table, and smiled every time I looked at him. We ordered lamb biryani and a thing called a dosa – a kind of long tortilla filled with spicy potato, about the size of a trumpet, so immense that the ends hung off either side of the plate. The wall of the restaurant was covered in an interesting mosaic of pictures of life in Sri Lanka, and the golden lion on the Sri Lankan flag roared from a wall in the kitchen.
He said, “60.” We have been close friends for all of our adult lives, and although we only see each other rarely – he fled Auckland for a better life with his wife and kids up north, where he enjoys morning walks on a cliff above the sea – it takes us no time, not as much as a fraction of a second, to fall back into the same familiar happy pattern of excited chat we’ve always had. I love him. He’s a great friend and a truly good guy.
I said, “Woah.” The biryani was very spicy, and I kept getting up to pour myself ice-cold glasses of water. Maybe I went up more times than necessary. I am an anxious person at the best of times. I seem to prefer the agitated life, always put myself in situations where happiness seldom remains stable, and I find ways to complicate it. I don’t like spicy foods. I don’t like states of agitation. And yet there I was, constantly up and down, drawing from the well.