We stayed until after closing. That’s the whole story, really — except it isn’t, because getting to a table like that — no kids, no clock, nowhere to be — took the better part of ten years to build.
Saturday was supposed to be a normal weekend. I skipped work for once — an 8am workout instead of my usual routine, then off to a birthday party at the beach: a good friend of my eldest’s, so it was just the two of us who went. Only one kid is almost suspiciously easy compared to three, and it showed: iced coffee actually finished while it was still cold, and a string of small, unhurried conversations with the other mums. One, watching the kids clamber over an inflatable obstacle in the water. Another, walking back to the restaurant with all of them running ahead of us. Life after 40, strength training, boxing, whether a PT is worth the money — nothing that needed finishing, which was sort of the point.
That was the easy part of the day. Saturday evening was the one I’d been quietly looking forward to for weeks: ten years in Singapore, celebrated with my husband, my brother- and sister-in-law, at a place with the most amazing meat. No kids. No interruptions. Just the four of us, past the point where the restaurant wanted to close and started stacking chairs around us, and nobody moved to leave.
Ten years ago, both couples landed here within months of each other — no kids yet, just two pairs of twenty-somethings figuring out a new city. They came from Amsterdam. We came from Kuala Lumpur. For a few years it was board game nights and Newton food court, almost weekly, and a handful of trips together, Japan among them. Then they moved closer to the CBD when their first was born, easier for the feeds. We moved somewhere more central when I was expecting mine. Our first kids arrived nine months apart.
Saturday we did the thing you do at ten years: dug up the old stories, then moved on to the current ones. How the kids are doing — how our second is struggling with the transition to her new school, and how they’re quietly looking at what’s their next school. Japan again, maybe December, maybe January. Work, for all four of us — that strange thing that seems to hit everyone in their late thirties and early forties, where you start asking what’s actually next. Is this it for the next few years? Do you want the promotion, or do you not want it, because a promotion usually just means more work for a “yes” you’re not sure you mean. Wine, good meat, my favourite tiramisu. We didn’t notice the restaurant had emptied out around us until they asked, as kindly as they could, whether we’d mind paying the bill — the kitchen staff were already onto their own after-shift drinks.
Ten years is a strange number to sit with. Long enough that Singapore isn’t a placement anymore, isn’t a posting, isn’t something with an end date attached. Short enough that I still get asked at the school gate where I’m “actually” from — usually by someone who, in the same breath, tells me I’m basically local by now. I don’t think either of us is right. I think ten years just means you’ve been in the in-between long enough to stop waiting for it to resolve.
Sunday brought me back down to earth, the way Sundays do. No hike, no bike ride — the haze put an end to that plan. My husband took the two oldest to gymnastics, leaving me two hours at home with “just the baby.” He asked me afterward how I’d enjoyed it, half-grinning, already knowing the answer. Just the baby is a full-time job these days — he’s newly discovered the art of climbing everything, and two hours turned into two hours of not letting him near a ledge. Couch for climbing: fine. Chair: debatable. Play kitchen: we’ll see. Piano for climbing: absolutely not.
Ten years, three kids, one very determined climber. Still figuring out the rest as I go.
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