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If you’ve been wondering for the past four months about the gender of Rebecca Lim’s first kid, well, you now have the answer. The 37-year-old Mediacorp actress gave birth to a boy, a robust 3.8kg bundle of joy, on Tuesday (Jan 30).
As for the baby’s name, Becks says she and her husband, Matthew Webster, also 37, have yet to decide if they want to reveal it yet. She does say that both his English and Chinese names are inspired by the names of their dads. No need to Google, Matthew’s father is Andrew, and Rebecca’s late dad, Larry.
8days.sg is on the phone with the happy new mum, who is still recuperating in the hospital as of press time. She was in labour for 14 hours and the birthing process was “a little more complicated” than she had expected. But trust the star to find the funny in every situation.
“He took longer to come out, and so towards the end, there was no more epidural. I could feel the pain for the last final push… and the follow-up stitches (laughs),” says Rebecca.
“By then, I had been pushing for almost two hours, because he is a big boy (laughs),” she says. “For some strange reason, before the final push, I got very emotional and I had to stop and cry for a while.”
It was a combination of the “not-knowing” and tiredness that contributed to her breakdown. She had also heard from a lot of friends and nurses that the pushing usually takes less than an hour.
“I just felt very defeated.” she tells us. “I was worried that we had to undergo another method to get this baby out. And it was really on the final push and he came out and the doctor plopped him on my chest. Then everything just went… in slow motion-fast motion kind of way.”
Now if she had to describe the pain of childbirth, how would she do it?
“Let’s just put it this way. Matthew asked me immediately after I gave birth if I wanted a number two. And I said “No way!” (Chuckles),” she laughs. “He chose the wrong time to ask that (laughs). We were experiencing different things. I was experiencing the pain, he was experiencing the joy of seeing his son. We were on different planets.”
She wouldn’t say “no way” now if she’s asked about having a second kid. Instead, her answer is a non-committal “We’ll see how things go”.
While we know Matthew was with her in the delivery room, was he standing next to her or where the doctor was, which is where the, um, action takes place? After all, there are people who feel that husbands shouldn’t see the whole birthing process in case they get scarred for life.
“I had that worry,” says Rebecca. “There was a plan before we went into the delivery suite. I said to him: ‘You just be by my side and don’t look at it. I don’t want you to get traumatised.’ But the baby took such a long time to come out and there was a lot of waiting for me to catch my breath and just recuperate, he ended up walking up and down to look at the progress (laughs).”
“Were you traumatised?” Rebecca asks Matthew, who’s in the room with her.
“Nope!” we hear him say.
“He was very cool throughout actually,” says Rebecca. “He was playing ‘80s music in the background. There was our wedding walk-in song (John Waite’s ‘How Do I Get By Without You’) and Peter Cetera. My doctor was like, ‘I like this, it’s from my era’ (laughs).”
So was the moment she carried her baby for the first time as life changing as people say it is?
“Um… it was life changing in the sense that I would never forget it (laughs). I did not feel the immediate surge of maternal instincts as what everyone says. At that time, I was being stitched up (laughs). I could not concentrate on how beautiful my boy is. I could only focus on the pain from each stitch… (laughs).