Aching for Ava

Sometimes I am startled out of my bubble. This morning, I couldn't sleep for some reason and found myself scrolling through Facebook at 5:30 in the morning. A photo drew me in unexpectedly, and I was caught in the world of Ava, a little girl fighting against leukemia. The pictures of the little girl's wide open smiles and her mother Esther's words of raw pain wrenched me in deeper and deeper until I found myself in a puddle of my own tears. I am reminded, as I wallow in my own issues sometimes, that there are others living through such unbearable pain. I know what a wreck I would be if such misfortune were to befall our family. The random thought of my children facing death even at the end of a full life fills me with sorrow at times, and to think that this family has been facing the spectre of death so abruptly, so mercilessly.

I'm a stranger to them. I'm miles away. Our only tenuous connections - we are fellow Koreans, both parents. But it's enough to fill my ears with the mother's pain. I hear her. And the weight of her loneliness is palpable. I wish I could do something for them. Offer to babysit their other children or cook some meals for them. Hold their hands. Give them a hug. Just sit with them. Let them know that we feel a sliver of their pain.

After reading Esther's posts, I heard my own children wake up. They staggered up the stairs, rubbing their eyes, T holding his ever reliable companion Beary, while S dragged herself up complaining that she was tired. Instead of responding with my usual impatience, I found myself giving them hugs and helping S get dressed, encouraging her with a promise of an M&M after breakfast. As S ate her breakfast of milk, toast, and prosciutto, I braided her hair. I carefully parted her hair to the side in the front and down the middle in the back. Then I tied one side before dividing the strands into three equal ropes. As my fingers wove in and out through my daughter's healthy, shiny hair, I thought of Esther who can no longer touch Eva's hair. As I worked on the other side, I thought of my daughter who will go to school and show off her little braids, jump a little extra higher to see them bounce, and who will want to loosen her braids to admire the curls before bed.

Parenting is not for the faint of heart. I am reminded again and again. We become parents and we enter the realm of possibilities, vulnerabilities, unspeakable joys and chronic fear.  Even though my own parenthood has been shielded from any meaningful challenges, I am anxious every day that something could happen to my children, that they could be taken away, by a misstep in the parking lot, a moment of carelessness, or an injection of a cruel unknown. And I see parents like Esther who face that real possibility. I ache for their big hearts and the love we all have for our children. Our dependence on them and our need for their permanence. Our desperate need to protect them at all costs and our inability to do so at times. We are at the mercy of chance, of the indifferent unknown. We can only hope to linger in a state of grace.

One of Those Moments

I was having one of those moments the other evening. One of those moments when disappointments of life suddenly swell up like edema, filling up the empty crevices of my mind, welling up to a point that they block all that my eyes would otherwise see.

I don't even remember what set it off. Maybe a careless word from Jeff, or perhaps a tantrum from my vocal four-year old. A trifling that should have done noticed, brushed off. Instead, it takes over, like a drop of betadine contaminating a pool of clear water.

I remember taking myself to my bedroom, under the covers, even though it wasn't yet dark out, and blocking my eyes against the feelings of hopelessness. These feelings always hover in the wings these days, with the curtain widely parted, ready to take center stage.

In these moments, I see only failures, disappointments, neglect. I remember the people in my life who have moved on without me, let me fall by the wayside. Those who are now too busy, or can't be bothered. No one seems reliable. No friend true. No effort meaningful. I feel alone in this world, and no one notices.

I have fewer of these moments these days, but they still return. They don't let me forget that my life now feels different, that my relationship with the world has changed. I'm no longer the person I used to be. I'm now needier, more suspicious, more prone to hurt. So many words and silences feel like small rejections, and I find myself bracing for them. I can tell that my social persona is different, that I misread cues and don't play my social role as I used to.

The other day, when we were camping, I was walking behind my son, who was walking alongside our friend's dog. He was strolling at the same pace as the scampering pup, who spent most of his time sniffing this and that. After a few paces, my son turned to me and said, "Mom, he likes me!" Even though I saw no signs of affinity from the dog, I nodded and smiled back.

I couldn't help but wonder if our relationships amount to that. A strolling at the same pace, a confusion between simultaneity and attraction.

Noticing my absence, Jeff comes to find me. Wrapping me in a bear hug, he asks what is wrong. Suddenly, my tears come and I find myself stammering to articulate where I am. "What is the point," I find myself repeating. What is the point of all this? What is the point of friendships that dissipate? What is the point of making efforts that go unappreciated? What is the point of working toward goals that fail? And what is the point of family if they abandon you?

He hugs me harder, as he always does in these moments. No stranger to betrayal himself, he listens and nods along. After a pause, he tells me what works for him. Our children. Our little beings who place all their trust in us, and believe us when we say we will keep them safe. Our children who cry when they miss us and are consoled by our touch. They take away the cynicism, he tells me. They help me have faith in people.

It is a thought that jolts me. Since I became a parent almost seven years ago, I have thought a lot about how I could help my children, what I could do for them. But I've thought very little about what they do for me, how they help me.

When I have one of these moments, they come to me with solemn looks on their faces and plant little wet kisses on my cheek. They sit on my lap and wrap their arms around me. They tell me they love me. And I know that there, right there, is one true thing in my life.

Motherhood

I'm reading Motherless Daughters, a book by Hope Edelman about women who lost their mothers, many at young ages. Edelman lost her own mother to cancer when she was 17, when her mother was 42. The book is about how women, children suffer, grieve, and struggle to find a way to continue living after losing their mothers.

I'm reading the book on my computer in the middle of a local Starbucks. It's packed in here. At times I find myself ducking behind the computer because I feel the tears coming.

I can't stop thinking about my own children as I read. It is one of my greatest fears, that something may happen to me or Jeff or both of us, and our children will have to suffer the pain of such a loss. I can picture their little faces, mixed with confusion, fear, shock. How could they understand such a devastation? Who will comfort them? It makes me feel panicked just to think about it. And I think about how it would be better for all of us to go together than to put our kids through such misery.

Jeff and I are practical. We have our paperwork squared away. We have amazing friends who have agreed to step in if anything should have. We consider them family, and their children love ours. We know our backup plan couldn't be any better, but I also know that if anything should happen, our children would be thrown off their tracks forever, psychologically and emotionally.

I think of these women who suffered such devastations in their lives, and I think about how sheltered and privileged my life has been. No serious tragedies, no horrible misfortunes. Not even a broken bone. My own family intact. Healthy, beautiful children. The thought makes me want to cross my fingers.

The book also makes me think about the role of motherhood. Until now, I had focused mainly on keeping my children healthy, clean, fed, rested, and educated. But Edelman writes about what she misses about her own mother:

Even now, her absence remains a terrible hole. No home to return to for a holiday celebration. No one to tell me what I was like as a child, or to reassure or comfort me as a mother. 

I paused over her line about not having someone who knew her as a child. We are witnesses to our children's lives, witnesses with the best seats in the house. We hold in ourselves an archive of their lives, the most pivotal moments as well as the mundane, from their first breath until our last.

I replay in my mind the moment my son was born over six years ago. My obstetrician pulled him out and plopped him right on my belly, his umbilical cord still in tact, his body still slimy. He took a second to shake off the shock and then started screaming, maybe at the indignity of it all. I started bawling because I couldn't believe this little person was real, that he had come into my life.

I think about the privilege of being a mother. This exceptional place that we hold in the hearts and lives of these little people who grow up to run this world. My four-year old daughter loves to say, "Mommy is all mine, all mine." She most frequently says it to Jeff. Sometimes, she tells him not to touch me, or to wait his turn before touching me, because I'm all hers. And I love being her magical, special person, not because I did anything in particular, but simply because I am her mother.

That thought makes me want to be a better mother. To give them more hugs. To console them better when they cry. To listen more attentively. To articulate more clearly to them what they mean to me. And to build a reserve of my love in their hearts, just in case.

It also makes me want to document our lives better. So that I'm not the sole curator of our archives. So that their future self-understanding, their future well-being will be less dependent on me.

I know it's not enough. It will not ward off the pain if some tragedy should befall our family. But I know of no other way to protect my children.

For me, becoming a parent has changed my attitude toward survival. Before, when I was alone, I never particularly cared about it. Not in some morbid way, but I figured I'd had a good enough life and when it's time to go, it's time to go. Now, I can't afford not to survive. My children need me. I have to stick around. I would guess many of those mothers who left their children behind felt the same way.

Time Of My Own

Growing up as an immigrant kid, I watched my parents struggle a lot. They worked painfully long, labor-intensive hours, often more than 14 hours a day with no real breaks, six days a week. They could never catch up on their sleep and had no time to spare. I remember their exhaustion stretching out like a rope of molten glass, drooping from its own weight, threatening to crack with the passage of time.

As a teenager, I tried as much as I could to help. I cooked dinner, washed the laundry, cleaned the house, helped out at their store. And I was hyper-aware that I should never impose on their time. I remember one time I returned to law school after a visit home. I accidentally left something behind at my parents', perhaps a watch. When I mentioned it to my roommate, she casually suggested that I just call my parents and ask them to send it. I thought her suggestion absurd. No, that's not possible, I said to her.

But more than with regard to time, I knew I should never impose on them emotionally. We weren't an emotionally open family to begin with. But the idea of bringing my personal issues into the household, where my parents' stress already stretched out the seams of our family fabric precariously, was unthinkable. When their frustration and unhappiness started to swell and they started unfurling their anger at each other, we just quietened our breaths and sagged against the cold, desolate walls.

I learned to be accommodating. To figure out a way to help quietly. To identify the areas of need so that I could find a way to fill them. I took it upon myself to play that role. I had to help us. I was the only one who could do something. There was no one else.

To do what, exactly? I'm not even sure I understood. To reduce the level of unhappiness in our family? To minimize my parents' stress? To free them from the unrelenting demands of survival? To create a sense of order when we felt none? To find some sense of security, some assurance that we will all be okay? Maybe all of the above. I'm not sure.

All I knew was that the situation felt desperate.  I had to do something. I had to find a way to help us, to get us out of the morass. So I stepped onto that hamster wheel and ran as quickly as I could.

After years of living like this, it didn't even occur to me to think about what I needed or wanted. In that context, all of my problems seemed so trivial in comparison. I couldn't even call them problems. They were nothing, insignificant bothers that didn't even merit mention. What are the worries of teenage girls? Weight, boys, popularity? None of them mattered, I told myself. Nothing mattered more than our survival, our survival as a family.

I don't think I even realized that I was effacing myself. I remember how detached I felt from my emotions at times, as if I were watching myself from the outside. I remember never crying. I remember constantly feeling guilty for whatever free time I had, for the smallest luxury, like treating myself to a piece of cake, and comparing myself to my parents who worked nonstop. I remember always fulfilling all of my duties first before I allowed myself to do what I wanted. I remember never asking for anything. Never making demands for myself. Simply biting down on that bullet and doing whatever it was that needed doing.

Ever since I became a mom, I realize that I've reverted to that role. Of putting my head down and doing my part. Meeting everyone else's needs. Trying to make everyone else happy. Doing things for myself only when it didn't upset anyone else's needs or plans.

Of course I've heard all that talk about how motherhood requires balancing one's own needs against others. I heard all that, but it seems impossible to do at times. And selfish.

Despite myself, I've been bulging at the seams, steam leaking out of my ears and my nose. I could feel the frustration building over the day, over the week. The week would pass with me driving the kids to school, then picking them up, then driving them to taekwondo or swim or dance, killing time while they attend class, walking up and down the aisles in Target, Costco, Von's, picking up their toys yet again, preparing their meals, vacuuming their crumbs, bathing them, getting them ready for bed. And a thought would quietly appear, My life has to be more than this. And another thought, I'm getting so old. And I would try to push those thoughts away.

Then a week would hit where the kids get sick, and I would be homebound for days. The three precious hours I had to myself while my little one went to preschool would be taken from me, and those thoughts would keep resurfacing. I have nothing to show for my time. Just scrunched up balls of kleenex, red noses, and mounding anxiety about the minutes, hours, days slipping by. Those days would inevitably end in a blow up. A blow up about how I'm doing nothing with my life.

"Nothing" is a cold word. It slaps you across your cheek and says, Do something! Just do something! Figure it out! It doesn't leave room for excuses, and it does nothing to console the deep sadness I feel about how I spent my 44 years.

Jeff would try to talk to me about hiring a regular babysitter or switching roles and him taking a turn staying with the kids or figuring out what it was that I would rather be doing. And I found it difficult to say out loud that I just wanted time. Time to myself. Time to figure it out. Time to explore.

It just seemed too selfish. We are where we are. We have children, children I desperately wanted. We aren't retired. We need to make a living. It didn't occur to me that I could ask for something like that. It seemed impossible.

But the other day, Jeff asked me why I didn't relax with the kids. Why did I always go running off to this store or that? Why didn't I just sit with them and play?

I responded honestly and said that I just needed to get through the day, to pass it as quickly as I could. I just needed to pass the time.

He looked at me for a long time. Very quietly.

Then he said, "We need to make a change. You can't live your life like that."

He offered me a deal. Take a year. Do whatever you want to do. Just write if you want to. Or take classes. He told me I earned it after taking care of the kids for so long.

I didn't believe him. I know his anxieties about money, our future security. I know his goal-driven personality. How could it possibly work?

But the next day, he quit his job. He's been handling the kids' drop off, the pick ups, taking them to swim and taekwondo after school, planning some of the meals, and doing the grocery runs.

It's been a week. I've been writing, and I signed up for a bunch of classes at the community college.

When I was growing up, my family always needed things from me. Everyone else's needs always trumped mine. Their needs were always more desperate, more urgent. No one ever stopped to ask what I needed.

No one has ever done anything like that for me. Put my need above theirs. Put time back in my hands.

It makes me want to cry.

A Little Reminder

The day before Halloween, my son's class had a day-long Halloween party. The teacher told the kids they could dress up, and the parents were sent an email reminder the night before. When I dropped off my son T at school in his storm trooper outfit, he was greeted by an Iron Man, Elsa, a unicorn fairy, a baseball player, and a host of other luminaries in miniature sizes.

After some effort, I huddled his class together to take some group photos. The little ones were giggling and squealing at each other, the way six-year-olds do. I took a few photos before the kids ran off to chase each other around the playground.

As I turned around to grab my three-year old daughter to make my way out, I noticed one of the girls from his class. She was sitting by herself on the bench, her shoulders hunched, heaving up and down, her hands cupping her face, and her eyes flooded with tears. I knelt down to ask her what was wrong, and she stammered through her sobs that she didn't have a costume. No one else saw her except for another mom standing nearby. We met eyes, and I knew she felt as heart-broken for this little girl as I did.

I grabbed my daughter to get her to her school in time for her party. As I scurried toward the car with my daughter in my arms, I could not get little Diana out of my head. I wondered what her parents were like. I had met a lot of other parents in the class, but not hers. I wondered if they were one of the two parents who didn't have an email address. I also wondered if they worked long hours and whether the family celebrated Halloween.

I had about twenty minutes to get my daughter to her school. As I buckled her in, I ran through the list of stores in the area and realized that CVS would be open. Surely, they sold costumes even if the choices were limited. I did the calculation in my head. If I drove to CVS, that would take five minutes. And if I carried S and didn't let her roam in the store, maybe we could be out of there in five minutes. That gave me ten minutes to drive back to the elementary school, drop off the costume, and then drive my daughter to her school. I was so used to rushing with the kids in the morning that I had to remind myself that being late to preschool was okay.

As I was driving toward CVS, I saw the Halloween store that we had just visited a couple of days ago. I knew they had an array of costumes. At the red light, I called the store to see if they were open. A young lady answered and said the store wouldn't be open for another 20 minutes. I pleaded with her and asked if she could make an exception for me. She got off the phone to talk to her manager and finally came back to say that she would let us in.

I u-turned the car, and parked as close as I could to the store entrance. I grabbed S out of her seat, and said, "Let's go get Diana a costume!"

She was so excited. She said, "Yeah, Mom! We can give it to her and say, 'Diana, this is for you!'" 

We rushed down the aisles looking for the kids' section. We finally found the row of little girl dresses. I grabbed the first poofy dress that looked about her size, plunked down my credit card, and thanked the cashier profusely. Then it was back to school.

I parked again, grabbed S out, and then we sprinted toward the school, the Cinderella dress blowing in my hand. We signed in at the front desk and rushed out to the playground where the kids were still gathered for their costume parade. I found one of the parents from the class and practically threw the dress at her.

"This is for Diana! Gotta go!"

S and I ran back to our car and rushed to her school. We were just ten minutes late.

Later, one of the moms who was volunteering in T's class texted me to say that Diana was thrilled with her costume.

The day after, at our friends' Halloween party, I recounted the events. My friend's dad, who was listening quietly, started nodding along. His eyes softened as he said, "She'll remember that when she's grown up."

When I dismissed his comment with a retort that she's only six-years-old, he said, "No, I know because I was one of those kids. And I remember every time someone did something nice for me."

Maybe she'll remember or maybe she won't. But I'll remember it -- as the day I played the role of the fairy godmother and how magical it felt.

A Lesser Version

I am a bad mother. Even though this is my fifth year in this role, I find myself worsening, not improving. I see it in my son's eyes. A sweet, serious, and sensitive boy. Older than his five years. One who surprises me with how much he understands. He watches me when I lash out, when I scream and lose it over something seemingly trivial. A TV show that wasn't turned off when I requested, a dirty sock in the middle of the kitchen, a meltdown that I can't shut down. Sometimes, his eyes well up, and other times, he just stares at me, eyes wider than usual, with sorrow and profound confusion.

Little things throw me off these days. A sense of stasis is gone. Trivial events feel like crises. A spat between my children feels like doom, a sign that our future that will surely fail. I find myself constantly muttering, "goddammit, dammit." It's as if all my fears are actualizing, even though they are not, at least not all of them. I still have a loving husband, two beautiful children, my home. Nothing terrible has happened, at least not in my immediate world. But I feel as if the world has revealed itself to me in its naked, unadorned form. It's a world where animals prey on each other, where people are left forgotten, a place where nobody really cares. It is a world where families abandon each other, where people fail to live up to each other's expectations.

These days, I feel as if my ideals of family and relationships were solely that -- just ideals. Concoctions. Figments of my imagination.

A friend recently told me that disillusionments can make us stronger once we confront the disillusion because we can then proceed to work with the truth.

For me, the truth -- at least this version of the truth -- feels unworkable. This unwelcome truth feels like a lie, a letdown, a hopelessness.

I don't know how to find my way back to optimism.

Every negative twist or incident -- however trivial --  feels like proof. Proof that life really isn't what it's cracked up to be. Proof that things really go to shit in the end.

In the midst of all this is sorrow. And fear.

I used to think that I had coping skills. Ability to face some of life's adversities. But any that I might have had now eludes me.  I guess abandonment by a person who was a central character in your life can do that. It can make you realize how alone you are in the world. You are in the negative. Minus one. Minus one person who provided a pillar for your existence. Minus one person who connected you to the rest of the world. Minus one person who saw you. But the effect is magnified because it robs you of all the optimism that you had carried previously. Now everything takes on a negative hue, and it is through this light you assess the damage.

Coping means that you have some reason to look toward the future, to propel yourself forward, to want to move future. And with fewer reasons, your coping skills are bound to diminish.

Jeff is the only one I can rely on these days, and when he's out of town, as he is this week, I feel panicked, vulnerable, alone. It takes effort to keep myself together. To make the kids' lunch, to feed them breakfast, to get them off to school, to occupy myself until I have to pick them up, to take them to their activities, to put them to bed, to endure the night.

I would like to find a way to reclaim some of my inner peace. To regain that unquestioned optimism that things work out in the end. To have a solid inner core that can absorb shocks and disappointments. To speak to my children calmly and with control. To not be rattled.

But today, I feel myself damaged. Afraid and unsettled. A lesser version of my ideal self. In this state, all I can do is ask for forgiveness, as inadequate as it is to undo what is already done.

Our House

Our house towers on the corner of a street lined with yew pines, perfectly trimmed hedges, and modest bungalows, just two blocks from Marine Street Beach. Its oak beams soar to the sky and jut out horizontally like branches of a mature redwood in Muir Woods. Its sides are lined with glass, thick enough to withstand an earthquake, angry fists, or carelessly tossed frisbees.  

Some might call it a glass house, an encasing for something precious. It is as exposed as the primate exhibit at the Museum of Natural History, yet as protective as the Popemobile. It’s imposing enough to draw the attention of random passersby, and gracious enough to elicit their praise.   

To enter, you walk up four cement steps book-ended with miniature pumpkins, past the red-hued garden rose, toward the imposing glass wall, and push past the heavy wood-framed glass door now decorated with gooey spooky ghosts, purple and orange pumpkins, bats, goblins, and tombstones, all pasted haphazardly and reliably asymmetrically, all at eye-level with your crotch.  As the door swings, it jams abruptly, jarred by a small green translucent superball left forgotten at the perfect spot to trip an unsuspecting guest, and you are forced to sidestep the tiny green specks that appear to sprout out of the wood floor. 

When you walk in, you are intrigued to see in the center of the living room a cylinder staircase the size of a trunk of a giant sequoia, rising from floor to ceiling, not unlike the winding spiral of the Guggenheim Museum.  

To the right, you see a pair of brown velvet chairs, angled just so as to invite intimate conversation without kissing knees. They flank a stand of flowering orchids, as if beckoning a queen or at least a special guest to grace its seats for a photo op. Instead of a royal romp, it currently hosts a reclining Darth Vader draped in a flowing black cape with his arm, mid-air, brandishing a florescent red lightsaber. With him, a Minnie Mouse plastic tote bag overflowing with Duplo Legos on a field of spit balls yet to be soaked in spit. 

You follow the trail of crusted dribbles of milk and streaks of mud, past a grove of Fisher-Price Little People, each figure seated on a chair in a perfect circle, as if gathered for an annual summit, to the plush rug in the center of the grand room. There, you find a toddler’s table, surrounded by three chairs in primary colors, two standing, one fallen. The table is more covered than not, by a singing Cinderella there, a dancing Belle here, a leaping Luke Skywalker, and an exploding droid ship. A crust of Crayola Air-dry clay adds unexpected texture to the table's surface, and drying glitter glue, unexpected dazzle. 

Under the table lies an unruly collection of construction paper, like a pile of raked leaves, some tossed after one or two mis-spelled words, others filled with a chaos of colors, all works in progress. All are invariably wrinkled or grease-stained, and many discolored with age and torn at the edges, as if they have been tossed from here to there, never to find a permanent home, yet too precious to be discarded.    

Like fallen foliage, plastic plates and teacups, half-torn workbooks and board books, crayons and markers, tiaras and hair-clips, pieces of corn flakes, and missing puzzle pieces clutter the rug. Along the wall sits a child’s kitchenette fitted with a refrigerator, a microwave oven, a stovetop, all of its doors ajar and exposing a coffee maker, a blender jammed with waffles and sausage, and baskets filled with enough plastic food to last you a winter. 

Around the room, princesses lie about, like damsels in distress, waiting to be rescued by either a prince or a fickle toddler. A plush Snow White left behind on the rocking horse, an Elsa doll with her tiara fitted askew on top of the toddler piano, a red-headed fair mermaid wedged behind the drum set. While heroes are aplenty, they have all been corralled by the five-year old for the great battle brewing in his bedroom. 

The discriminating eyes might spot the row of cookbooks and novels tucked behind glass cabinets in the far corner, secured with child-proof latches, and the delicate hand blown glass ornaments perched behind the display of Lego Star Wars vehicles on the uppermost shelf. Portraits line the walls, all evenly spaced, one of a wedding, many of the children at various ages. Here and there, post-its of various sizes, colors, and orientation, scribbled with indecipherable messages, speckle the wall.

***

Sometimes, on days when the chaos feels insurmountable, I think about the 900 square foot one-bedroom apartment I used to lease just a block away from the San Francisco Bay in my late 20s. There, my row of orchids lined symmetrically along my window sill, my column of New Yorkers perched on my night table, and my collection of literature sat undisturbed until I reached for one. My floors stayed clean, my counters free of clutter, my refrigerator never over-stuffed. I miss my chaise lounge where I spent many evenings, uninterrupted, with nothing other than a book and a cup of tea.   

But I am reminded that it is in my current house where I hear the crunch, crunch of my daughter as she nibbles on her Persian cucumbers, where I wash the dirt out of the crevices of little toes at the end of the day, where my children, my husband, and I rest and sleep to ready ourselves for another morning. It is in this house where my two year-old learns to say please and thank you and to make bubbles with her hands before running them under the water.  

It was in this house where my then four-year-old son scrutinized his sister for a long time as she sat on the potty before straightening up to ask, “Mom, why is her butt in the front?” This same child startled us months later by asking why everyone has to die . . . because he doesn’t want to die. As he cried, we held him and comforted him the best we could. 

In this house, we don’t pray, but we hug. Yet, despite the imperfect balance between chaos and order in this house, I cling to some undefined faith that here, we’ve found a haven from the harshness that nature can be, while abundantly reaping its fruit. 

Our Little Princess

The other day, we started our morning battling. I dropped the first gauntlet by reaching for an apple red ruffled top with a pair of blue jeans. This caused my two year old daughter to scream, "I don't want to wear pants. I wear a SKIRT!" She stomped over to the closet with her little feet sticking out of the holes in the blue sleepsack and reached for a hanger. "I wear Hello Kitty SKIRT!"

The "Hello Kitty SKIRT" is a full fledged tutu. The waist is banded with a glittery silver belt stamped all around with Hello Kitty's face. The skirt flares out with a swath of light pink, then bright fuchsia, and juts out shamelessly, creating a halo two feet wide around my daughter's pale, thin, naked thighs.

"Well, okay," I said, "but you have to wear some leggings, ok?"

As she saw me grab a pair of black leggings, she screamed out, "NO, I don't WANNA wear PANTS!"

"Don't worry. You can still wear the tutu, but with leggings, ok?"

To demonstrate, I helped her out of her sleepsack and pajamas, changed her diaper, slipped on the ruffled top and then pulled the tutu up to her waist before reaching for the leggings.

"NO! NO! NO PANTS!" she screamed when she was where my hand was headed.

"It's too cold today. You have to wear something under. You aren't even wearing tights."

By this point, her face was covered with snot and tears and she was convulsing.

This wasn't the first of its kind. The battles started a few weeks ago when she watched Cinderella for the first time during our Friday movie night. To teach our son some lessons on compromising, we told him that his sister would choose the movie that night. We had never watched a "girlie" movie before and our choices were limited to a set of Disney DVDs that my husband and son had impulsively purchased during a Costco trip.

She hadn't really sat through a whole movie before, not feature length anyway. She usually watches for about 20 minutes and then scuttled around from one toy to the next, like a butterfly dancing from flower to flower. Not this time. She sat in the crook of Jeff's arm, from the opening scene to the credits, eyes popped open, jaw dropped, completely mesmerized.

The next morning, after I dropped off my son at preschool, we passed a random stranger. Seeing S dressed in her poofy tutu, the lady flashed S a big smile and said, "Hello, little Princess." After the lady passed, S turned to me and said, "Mama, she said I'm a Princess!" That evening, S came up to me as I stood at the kitchen sink and proclaimed, "I am a Princess now."

I never worried about having a princess for a daughter. When my friends read articles and blog posts about the pitfalls of exposing your daughters to princess-dom and proclaimed their boycott of all things princess-related, I didn't pay much attention. Surely, they are over-reacting, I thought. We felt safe knowing that our daughter has an older brother, who had to date not been exposed to any girlie movies or toys. Our house was filled with legos and train tracks, and we had no more room for more toys. Besides, what were the odds of having a princess daughter?

When growing up, I had no delusions of royalty. I was the chubby kid with the bowl hair-cut.  I was the ugly one in the family. No one told me, but it was obvious by the way my sister got all the attention for being cute. I didn't like to wear skirts because I had thick calves. I didn't even dare dream of being a cheerleader, although one girl in my seventh grade class who was chubbier than me still made the team. (But she knew how to summersault.)  I never made the cut for being a princess in my own life, so how could I have even imagined that I would have a princess daughter? And if I were to have a princess daughter, didn't it mean that I would have to become the wicked witch?

When my daughter's verbal dam burst and she started proclaiming her need for a tutu, I hesitated for a second. I do know a couple of women in real life who are still waiting for their prince charmings to show up and whisk them away. Often, I look at them and think, "Girl, you got so much more going for you than any man could ever do." But when I think about it, these women aren't really waiting around. Not really. They have their lives and careers in order. They have their social lives. They got it together, except that they are waiting for that icing on the cake. What's so bad about that?

I then thought about what my son's preschool teacher told me. She told me that they have some serious problems when the kids want to play act "Frozen" because none of the girls want to play the role of Anna, the younger sister who is the princess and the love interest. All the girls want to play Elsa, the queen with the power. Sometimes, they have to tap one of the boys to play Anna (well, I guess it beats playing the role of Sven). Maybe all these years, all the wanna-be princesses didn't really wanna be princesses after all. Maybe they chose to identify as princesses because all the queens in the old Disney films were wicked and wore ugly dresses.

I also thought about my reaction to Cinderella. How I found her beautiful, how I loved the way all the good creatures around her loved her and came together as a community to help her in her times of need. I felt aggrieved for the injustice she suffered and empathized with her longing for a better life. And when she finally received what was her due -- a return to the kind of life that should have been hers to begin with -- I interpreted the movie to be about social justice. How could I begrudge my daughter for embracing her?

Maybe that is what all these little girls want when they proclaim their desire to be a princess. They want to be the star in their own movie. The good one. The beautiful one. The triumphant one. Isn't that what we all want?

Later that day, I ordered six more tutus for my daughter. One for each day of the week.

Let her have her moments, I say. She can twirl as she wants. And wave her wand. And be as beautiful as she wants to be.

Yes, there are pitfalls in these films. One I may not show my daughter again is The Little Mermaid, which I found to be pretty disturbing. And the role of the pixie in Peter Pan was sexism embodied. But maybe having healthy role models in real life will count for something. And maybe I can strive to be that role model, instead of playing the role of the wicked witch.  

Second-Guessing

These days, my impatience seem to have reached a new level. It takes very little for me to get frustrated with whatever I am doing, too quick to fall into despair. Today, I was trying to teach my four year old how to spell some rhyming words. I first tried to make it fun. "Hey, do you want to learn how to spell Bat Man?", pointing to his Bat Man shirt. "Yeah!" was his enthusiastic response. So we did BAT MAN, then CAT, then SAT. Then he lost interest. "What other words can you think of that rhyme with BAT and CAT and SAT?" "I don't know" was his response. After a bit of cajoling and dropping some obvious hints, I found myself threatening. "Ok, then, no Lego Movie if we don't do this." Then it soon frittered to, "Fine, let's just finish this." We hurried through the next few words and then I found myself saying, "Go do whatever you want."

Through the process, I heard the coach in myself admonishing. Don't ruin it. Don't ruin it for him. Don't make this a negative process. Don't make negative associations for him. Help him love learning. Keep this fun.

But the voice that prevailed was the voice of dejection. The voice of giving up. It's the voice that takes over as you are losing the race, even as you resist its power. The one that says, "You suck."

I've been realizing over the past several months that parenting requires a certain amount of faith. The faith in the value of family. The faith that things work out in the end. The faith that all this is worth it. The faith that I can do this.

It's not something I thought of before. These are things that I took for granted -- that I would be a part of a loving family, that I would be a positive influence on my children, that things would work out if I just tried my best.

But strange things happen when you've been estranged by members of your own family. Bit by bit, the things you've always taken for granted no longer seem so obvious. You start to second guess everything that you've ever said, ever done. You scrutinize yourself through different sets of eyes and find yourself less worthy, less likable. You find yourself less powerful, less invincible.

The threat of failure lingers over you. You've already failed. You've screwed up one of the most fundamental relationships in your life. So majorly. Who's to say you're equipped to handle others? You are that person that others -- ones supposedly closest to you -- felt the need to banish. The one who could not be tolerated. The one who had to be thrown away.

It does a number on you, even as you resist thinking along those lines. You wonder about all your past actions. All the effort you undertook in the past to make things work. And how futile they turned out to be. Or damaging. And how all your good intentions fell so short. It makes you second-guess, when you should simply be chugging along, giving it your best.

I'm using this space to remind myself of all that is in my power. All that I can control. To remind myself that I am not all that rotten. I know it, but these days, when I fall short, I have fewer people to reassure me -- and too many reminders to suggest otherwise.

A Passing Moment

I see him out of the corner of my eye as I walk across the playground. The meter maid, stepping back into his little white car. And D says, "Are these two hour spots?" I look at my iPhone to see it's 12:11pm, and I try to remember when I parked my car. Shortly before 10am, surely, because I arrived early to help set up right after buying a blueberry scone for my son at Pannikin. As she keeps swinging her daughter on the swing, D says, "Have we been here more than two hours? I think he's just marking the tires." Before she completes her sentence, I'm already rushing across the playground to grab my keys, back towards my car, out the playground gate, as I yell out to my 3 year old, who's climbing a truck, "I'll be right back! I'm just moving the car."And I yell at D to keep an eye out for him.

As I near my car, I run around it quickly to see if it has any white chalk slashes on the tires. Seeing none, I jump in my car, turn on the ignition, and back up, catching my breath and reminding myself to check the rear. I pull out and inch just three spots over. I put the car in park, step on the parking break, step out of the car, look over to the meter maid to make sure he's not already issuing tickets, and head back toward the playground gate.

I'm just a few steps away from the gate when I see my son through the fence, his eyes darting, tears streaking down his little face, his mouth open in a cry, his arms outstretched, and his little legs scurrying as fast as they could across the playground, across the stretch of the fence, like a caged animal, caught on the wrong side. I hear his cry, panicked, desperate, piercing through the giggles and the laughter of the playground. I rush across the sidewalk, open the gate, and run down the steps, calling his name. His eyes meet mine, and he keeps crying his panic stricken cry, a scream muddled with Mommy, you left me, you left me, Mommy, you left me, as tears stream down his face, his mouth still agape as he gasps for breath. As soon as I'm on the ground, I crouch down and he throws himself into my arms, and I wrap myself around him, assuring him, no, no, Mommy wouldn't leave you. Did you think I was leaving without you? Mommy has never left you anywhere, have I? No, little guy, we're going home together. I just had to move the car, did you hear me? I just didn't want a ticket. Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry.

My words aren't enough to soothe him, as he keeps crying, and I keep holding him as I repeat myself. His little body shudders as he sobs, and I pick him up and carry him across the playground to sit on a bench. There, he quiets, and his little friends come over to hover and soothe him in their 3 year old ways, a little tap on the back here and there, a few slurred "Are you okay," their eyes wide with concern and fear.

A few minutes later, he's already running across the field, throwing a ball, yelling for his turn.

On our way home, I pull in to a frozen yogurt shop and let him load his cup with chocolate frozen yogurt, sprinkles, mini gummy bears, mochi, and some sugary flakey cereal that I can't even name.

More than twelve hours later, I'm still replaying the moment in my head, still desperately sorry. I think that image will be forever etched in my mind, like the time he got his little fingers jammed in the hotel door in Hawaii as I stood just a foot away from him and his fingers swelled up like mini marshmallows.

I think about the burdens of parenthood, the power we have to cause this level of panic, this mini earthquake in their world. To induce a level of anxiety that we ourselves no longer understand. How easily these moments can come, when you are caught in a moment of distraction, when you have momentarily fallen out of focus. It makes me shudder to think of all that could happen -- and not fully relieved of all that hasn't.

I think of him sleeping in his Lightning McQueen bed. Through the door, I can hear him breathing, rolling around now and then. He seems so fragile, so vulnerable, still so little. And I think of all that is in my power to do, how I have to be more careful, more protective of the little person that he is.

It is 3 in the morning, and I'm just sitting here, thinking about these things and waiting for my son to awake, to run into our room, giggling as he usually does, announce that he is awake at the top of his lungs, jump on us with his boney knees and elbows, slither into our comforter between me and Jeff, and relentlessly tap my shoulder as he asks, "Mommy, can you turn so you can look at me?" And when he does, I'll turn as he asks, press my cheek against his, and hold him a little longer and a little tighter than I usually do.

Something Funny

This made me laugh, and I had to share:

The other day, my husband Jeff was helping our 3.5 year old get dressed after a bath. As Jeff started to help T with his shirt, T started farting.

I said, "Uh, oh, do we have an emergency here?"

T said, "No, it's just my body telling Daddy to put my underwear on first."

An Unexpected Sweetness

My dad is a bit shy. And a little awkward. In a crowd, he'll be standing near the periphery with a big grin on his face. And twenty minutes later, he'll still be there, with the same grin. Without even a drink in his hand.

He never drives the car over the speed limit, even when other cars backlog behind him, honking, and they finally pass, revving up their engines and craning their necks to see who the hell drives at 55mph during rush hour.

His weight never fluctuates. For most of his adult life, he weighed exactly 120 pounds, a slight weight even for his 5 feet 4 inches. Now in his 70s, he has the shape of a skinny pre-teen. At mealtimes, he used to lecture us never to eat until we were full. Just stop before you fill up, he advised, because your stomach needs time to register its fullness. He rarely eats dessert, never a bite after he brushes his teeth, and rarely snacks, only relenting when my mother goads him repeatedly.

When we were in elementary school, he was the guy who doled out our extra homework. He filled up pages and pages of composition notebooks with math problems in columns so perfectly straight that you would have thought he used a ruler to guide his handwriting. When writing his checks, he always wrote in perfect block letters that I have since seen from some other engineering types.

During his 50s and 60s, he spent most of his days hunched over a table shaped like an ironing board, surrounded by tubes of chemicals. I never learned the names of chemicals, but I knew they were noxious. He used them to clean the mounds of clothes that arrived by armfuls everyday at their busy dry cleaner. He went over each piece of clothing slowly, meticulously, as if he were studying some engineering problem to be solved. The clothes came out perfectly, but his fastidiousness irritated my mother, who often complained that they could leave the store at a reasonable hour if he simply worked faster.

When he returned home, he holed up in the bedroom to count the day's earnings, dollar by dollar, quarter by quarter. He logged the earnings into a composition notebook, in the column next to the date, along with the number of the day's customers. When he finished, he placed the notebook next to the other two dozen he had maintained for the past 20 somewhat odd years of running the business.

Then when he had free time, he read the New York Times from beginning to end, with the paper spread out in front of him, a dictionary to his right. If we ever needed to know anything factual, like the population count of the people in Indonesia, we would ask him first before consulting the encyclopedia, because he often knew the information on the spot. He would tell us what we needed to know, along with other tidbits, like its status as the most populous Muslim nation.

I never quite know how to interact with him.

He is the guy who established the rules in our household. The one who refused to let us grow out our hair because he said it would interfere with our studying. The one who refused to let us wear makeup. The one I was reluctant to show my report card to when it had anything less than straight As. The one I was afraid to ask for permission when I was asked to go to the senior prom my freshman year.

While growing up, my sister and I huddled around our mom to chat, but never our dad. We told our mom about our daily lives, and he learned about our lives through our mom. And when we needed his permission for something, we always asked our mom, and a day or two later, she would tell us his response. Even these days, when we call, he says a perfunctory hello and hands the phone over to my mom.

For most of my life, I rarely made physical contact with him, except for a stretch when I was in the second grade and decided that we should kiss our parents goodnight before going to bed as I had seen on TV. Even now, whenever I have an occasion to part from my parents, I give my mom a hug. But with my dad, I give him a quick bow of the head and an awkward, half-hearted wave with my hand as I mutter "bye" in English.

We grew up hearing stories of his upbringing, of how he lived in a room in someone else's house as a child so that he could be closer to his school instead of walking miles each day. Of how he moved in with a doctor family in Seoul when he was accepted into a university in the city. We accepted these stories as an explanation for the state of our relationship.

When my son was first born, my dad came out with my mom to help. While my mom hurried around to help with the cooking, the cleaning, and all other tasks that go with running a house, he sat around, unsure of what to do with himself, first clutching my copy of The Aquariums of Pyongyang and then the week after, The Rape of Nanking. But the minute we stepped out with the baby in a stroller, he claimed his spot behind the stroller. You walk, I'll push, he always insisted. No, no, Dad, I would say, it's okay. You guys walk and enjoy the view. He would refuse to release his grip from the stroller, and I would relent. Then we would walk, my mom and me, purposeless for a change, and my dad steady in his role.

During those walks, my mom never failed to remind me how he had never pushed a stroller when we were little, and how he never held a newborn until I popped my son into his arms the day he was born. When we were little, my dad was often abroad, sent to work in places like Europe and Japan. My mom told us of how my sister cried when she first met him because he was away during her birth and for the first months of her life. I didn't understand how long that was until I had my own children and found out how long it takes for infants to develop stranger anxiety.

This past month, we stayed with my parents in New York for a couple of weeks. My 18 months old daughter had met my parents a few times before, but this was the first time she was old enough to interact with them in more substantive ways than just crying or smiling at them.

The visit started out as expected, with my mom cooking up a storm and fussing over the kids and my dad just smiling from the periphery as our kids roamed around their house and reached for everything within grasp. Even though there were four adults and just two kids, we at times felt outnumbered. When my mom scurried into the kitchen to prepare this or that dish or cut the fruit, I always rushed in behind her to help, which left Jeff to play defense with two kids in a house with exposed stairs, doors that jam little fingers, and glass objects waiting to fall on their heads.

The first day, my dad, in his effort to help, scooped up my daughter before I even had a chance to explain how shy she is, how she hates being picked up by anyone other than me and Jeff, how her petite figure belies her ability to scream. Miraculously, she did not scream. Or reach out to come to me. Or bury her face in her hands to pretend that she didn't see my dad. Instead, she just sat there, nestled in my dad's arms, looking as natural as an owl on a branch. She stared back at our baffled faces with a look as if to say, "What? What are you looking at?"

The strangeness continued when my mother picked her up. Whimpering, my daughter reached out not for me, but for my dad. Once ensconced in his arms, she stopped whining.

As the week continued, our daughter surprised us even more. During meal times, she repeatedly blew kisses at my dad -- and only my dad -- and waved her tiny hand at him as she whispered "Hi, Buji" in her abbreviated version of Harabuji, Korean for grandfather. My mom would interrupt my dad in the middle of his slurping and say,"She's waving! Wave back! Blow her a kiss!" In the minivan, she often tipped forward as far as her seatbelt would allow to look for him and giggle as soon as their eyes met. Whenever my dad wasn't in the room, she looked around, whispering, "Buji, Buji." Then when he appeared, her eyes lit up, and the flurry of kisses and waves resumed. She soon discovered his hiding spot, behind the desk in my old bedroom. As he sat there reading the New York Times, she ran in and crouched down to tip her head to meet his face. Once in position, she dispensed more kisses and hellos, and ran back in every few minutes until he finally gave up and came out carrying her in his arms.

My baffled mother asked her daily, "What about me? I'm the one who feeds you. Aren't you going to come to me?"

In my Facebook posts, I refer to my daughter as my angel. She seems like an angel now more than ever. She's tiny, weighing no more than 20 pounds, with a vocabulary of 50 or so words. She loves to say "neigh-neigh,""moo-moo," and "no, no!" She eats everything in birdlike nibbles, except for bratwurst or salami, which she devours like a starving hyena. This little being somehow arrived with a secret knowledge of our needs, our shortcomings, and the magical power to free us from the way we thought we were supposed to be. It is a sweetness and a generosity I had not anticipated -- and a filling of sorts, a filling we had all been craving but had not known until now.

Filler

I don't have any insights this week. And apparently haven't had any for the past several weeks. But I would love to share some words streaming out of my 3.5 year old these days (which I've already posted on Facebook). Maybe you'll get some giggles out of these:

An exchange as we were walking along the ocean in Hawaii last week.

T: "I'm going to walk on the sand."

Jeff: "T, stay on the path."

T: "But I AM on the path!" (As he steps off the paved path and into the foot trodden "path" on the grass.)

Jeff: "Don't be a lawyer on me. Stay on the path. You know what I mean."

T: "I'm NOT a lawyer, Dad, I'm NOT a lawyer!"

Me: "T, do you know what a lawyer is?"

T: "No."

Me: "Then how do you know you're not a lawyer?"

T: "Because I'm just a regular guy."

***

In New York, as we're leaving a restaurant, T says, "Mom, can I have my snack now?"

Me: "T, what did Mommy say when you asked me earlier?"

T: "You said let's talk about it later. (Pause.) So, Mom, let's talk about it."

***

As his babysitter starts to put sunscreen on him, T says: "I don't need that. I'm Korean!"

***

And a little snippet from the life of my 19 months old angel:

Lately, my daughter has been giggling when I say "I love you" to her. Last night, when I said "I love you," she put her fingers together and tapped them a couple of times to sign "more" and then she whispered "more." When I complied and said "I love you" again, she giggled and rolled over to go to sleep.

My Favorite Time

Near the end of the day, after I've stacked all the crusty dishes in the dishwasher, washed the highchair tray for the eighth time that day, picked up smeared beets and clumped shredded cheese and sticky rice off of the high chair and floor, scrubbed the bottles and tiny spoons with the brush, and left all the leftovers on the table for Jeff to handle, I pick up my little girl. Even though I had just given her a bath less than an hour earlier, little gobs of rice and cheese are tangled in her wisps of hair. She smells of sweet potato and milk and cheese. I cart her over to the sink and rinse off what I can, even though she protests by pulling her hand back before all the soap has been washed out. I stretch her little limbs to meet the faucet once again and shrink back when she threatens to grab its mouth and splash us both. As I carry her down the hall to change her yet again, she giggles and coos and talks to me in her secret language.

We make our way upstairs, with her still cradled in my arms and a milk bottle in my hand. I bounce up the stairs with a little extra jolt to squeeze in her last fun for the day, as I exclaim, "Bouncy, bouncy, bounce!" She giggles with each jolt, squeezing her eyes and scrunching her nose. Upstairs, I click on one reading lamp, just enough to help me make my way across the room, where I bundle her in two layers of wearable blankets, and with the push of a button, I make raindrops magically fall without rain. As I zip her up, her hands rise to her eyes and she rubs and rubs as if suddenly lured by the spell of sleep.

I pick her up once more and we move back across the room to sit on the glider. There, I nestle her in my lap with her back stretched across my left arm. With my other hand, I pick up the bottle and hold it up for her. Her mouth reaches for it eagerly, even though we had just eaten minutes earlier, and she fills up for the night. Her head rests on the hollow of my neck, and she slumps with a sudden heaviness, as if giving in, no longer fighting. I rock ever so gently, gently enough to help her find her rhythm of sleep.

There, while she drinks, I hold her. I pull her in a little closer and press my cheek against her forehead. I feel her warmth, her softness, the tickle of her hair. I breathe in the familiar, comforting scent of her skin. I listen to her breathe. I kiss her all over her face and pull up her tiny hand to plant some more kisses there.

When she is done, she pushes the bottle away. She rubs her eyes some more, and I keep rocking her. She rolls herself over and pulls up her head to look at me. She puts her delicate finger on my nose to say "nose." Then she folds herself into a little ball on my lap and shifts around to find a comfortable spot. I pick her up once more and ferry her across the room. I swing her slowly as I walk, whispering, "It's sleepy time." I lean over to kiss her a few more times, to smell her, to breathe in her breath, before I lean over to lay her in her crib. I run my hand down her hair and her cheeks as I say good night. With her eyes barely open, she kicks a couple of times in the air, then rolls over onto her stomach, turns her head to face the wall, and positions herself for sleep.

I linger a bit. Standing over her crib, I watch her shift and settle down. I see her back rise and fall. I fidget a bit with the curtain and then the stuffed animals sitting by the side. Then I watch some more. Then, reluctantly, I tip toe away and leave her in the care of the night.  

Another Day

When we awoke, it was a day like any other. Little T ran into our room, screaming, "I'm awake! Mommy, Daddy, I'm awake. It's morning time!" In spurts from her crib, Little S cried "mamamamamama, mamamamama," until Jeff crawled out of bed and picked her up. When I managed to drag myself out from under the cover, T wrapped himself around my arm and screamed, "Mommy, I want to be with you, I want to be with you!" as he smothered me with open mouthed kisses.

I pried myself loose and ran downstairs to grab some milk for S and headed back up. After the milk, the change of diaper, the pee-pee on the potty, the undressing of pajamas and then the dressing into the day's outfit, after a discussion on whether it was a school day or a swim class day, we all scurried downstairs. After Jeff burned the frozen waffles and made another for T, after S nibbled on prunes and kiwi to make her business a little less unpleasant, I took my shower. Then I ran into the garage to unload the laundry dried the night before and to load yet another load in our never-ending cycle of laundry. When I turned with my basket in hand, I noticed a stack of plastic bins leaning, threatening to crush us, and I called Jeff into the garage to rearrange the plastic bins to remove the one with the broken lid on the bottom and set them straight. After the rearranging, we made plans to go out for lunch. Then, Jeff hurried out to take T to his morning swim class while I cleaned the smeared fruit off of S's face.

When Jeff and T returned, I loaded the kids into the car to go to playgroup. At E's house, we nibbled on snacks, chatted with other moms and cooed at other babies, rubbed smeared paint off of T and S as they expressed their artistic inclinations at the craft table. After the hour passed in what seemed like minutes, I hurried out with the kids to try to make it home in time to meet Jeff as we had planned. In the car, I checked my phone and noticed his email, canceling our lunch, explaining that he needed to take Sherlock to the vet for a follow up exam, that it wasn't looking good.

I drove around with the kids strapped in their carseats, little S fast asleep, T prattling on as he always does. We headed for the McDonalds drive thru, where I could feed T his lunch without disrupting little S's nap. After debating the disadvantages of the cheeseburger versus the chicken mcnuggets, we settled on the cheeseburger, which he promptly decided not to eat after poking five holes through the buns because he found the cheese not to his liking, although he ate the apple slices and drank the milk. I drove us back home and finally, impatient, and unable to entertain T any longer, I awoke S from her nap and herded us inside. After some playing with legos and magna tiles and tea sets, T fell asleep after I bribed him with an after-nap movie.

Three hours later, Jeff still wasn't home, and I left him a voicemail and a text, wondering what the hell was taking so long. S and I flipped through fourteen different board books, pointing at dog, dog, ruff, ruff, kitty, kitty, meow, meow, and duck, duck, quack, quack. I refilled the ball popper again and again as she giggled and bounced up and down in delight. We walked around the living room and then through the kitchen, and then through the living room again, with her soft tiny hand wrapped around my index finger. I wedged myself between her and the garbage drawer where she likes to practice her newly discovered hobby of throwing tissues away, after daintily dabbing away at her little mouth, me hoping she would never discover the crushing pain of closing doors.

As we took yet another turn around the living room, I heard the gate squeak open, and I scooped S up and headed to the front door. There I saw Sherlock lingering around his dog house next to the bowl of dry food still left uneaten, his belly shaven of fur in a large rectangular patch the size of a laptop, and no sight of Jeff. Still carrying S, I walked out the front door, toward the front gate when I saw Jeff come out from behind the garage where he had been throwing something out.

He saw me, came up the three steps into our front yard, and standing with his hand extended to steady the swinging gate, said with an attempted smile, "I took him for a swim," pointing at Sherlock. "How did it go? Did the vet figure out what's wrong?" I asked.

And he looked up once again and looked back down, with his hand still on the gate, as he said, "So, he has cancer. They did all the tests and the ultrasound showed the lumps and they're pretty sure that's what it is. And we can do chemo but it's eight thousand dollars and it may or may not give him another six months and I always thought it made no sense for dogs when there are kids out there who can't get treatment and maybe we just donate that money where it can be used for a kid. They think he has a few weeks left, but they have some steroid treatment they can try..."

And he kept talking as if he were afraid to stop talking, afraid to take a breath, afraid to let the words run out. And as he talked, my ears must have gotten stuck many words ago, right around the beginning when he said the word cancer and a part of my brain must have been trying to process it because I stood very still as the word began to sink in. And I felt myself starting to crumble. It was as if someone had injected me with some narcotic, making my body feel heavy, weighted, overtaken by emotion and tears that just sprang out of nowhere, and I started crying and Jeff said, "You're going to make me cry now."

I reached out and we held each other with S in between us, in front of the gate, both of us leaning in to each other and staring at Sherlock through our tears.

The Paranoia of a Mother

Being a mother makes me paranoid in a way I never expected. Every grandma, car, or dog we pass on the street is a potential enemy, and I keep my fangs ready to attack if necessary. That sweet faced blond college girl texting behind the wheel of her Prius? She's better stop long before the stop sign or I will scream bloody murder until I wake her out of her iPhone stupor. That lanky teenager hunched atop his skateboard careening down the sidewalk? Don't even dare swerve toward my baby in her stroller because I'll kick a rock in front of his wheels before he can say narly. That grandma walking her pitbull? Yeah, you'd better believe I'm going to cross the street because I don't want to have to try to pry that dog's jaws off of my baby's neck.

As if the everyday encounters weren't enough, I go looking for trouble. I scour the papers and read up on every abduction, every murder, every accident involving a child. I could not stop myself from reading every article on Leiby Kletzky, the Newtown massacre, Jaycee Dugard, you name it. I scour the stories of the incidents, the reactions of their family and friends, their funerals.

Every time I read about one of these kids, my teeth clench. I start rubbing my forehead and feel my chest tighten. I cry for them, their parents, their siblings. I jab my husband lying next to me reading some technical manual (if such things can be read) and say, "Can you believe this? Can you imagine something like this happening to us?"

"No, no, I can't" is always my husband's whisper of a response. As I rant on, he asks how I find this stuff -- and why am I always reading such stories?

I'm drawn to them. Somewhat curious, perhaps, and completely horrified. But I want to know. Where were the parents? What did the parents do or not do? And most importantly, what did the predator do? It's not just morbid curiosity. I feel as if we have to prepare. What IF something like this were to happen to us? What IF? And how can we prevent it? Who are these monsters? How do they think? What is their m.o.?

We have to come up with a plan of action. We have to know our enemies.

I imagine how I would react. What would I do if something unthinkable were to happen? If someone were to break into our house, how would I fight back? Would we bonk him with our $2 flashlight? I'm poorly equipped with not even a single martial arts class, barely an hour of self defense lesson. I've had fleeting thoughts about whether I need to equip myself with the proper tools.

We have perfectly rational friends, those with higher degrees, sensible and thoughtful people, without even a splotch of red on their necks -- those who seem like one of us -- arm themselves. "What, you bought a gun? You're willing to kill someone with that thing?" And they always respond, "Well, if I have to..."

One friend who is considering buying a gun has two beautiful daughters. Not yet teens. They are breathtakingly beautiful, sweet, and so, so innocent. Our friend wants a gun to protect her daughters. "What if some asshole tries to hurt one of them? I'm going to take that motherfucker out." She is tiny, our friend. Always with a smile on her face. And she loves babies. All babies. I can't even imagine her with a gun. Or shooting someone. But she would do it, take out that motherfucker, if she had to.

I wonder who is the fool here. Me, or those millions of people with guns in their possession. In the event of a break and entry, or god forbid, some kind of riot or a massive earthquake where law and order breaks down, wouldn't we want to protect ourselves, our children? I think of those images from the LA Riots, when those Korean grocers guarded their stores from their rooftops, brandishing their rifles. And I thought, "Damn right. Defend yourselves and what is rightfully yours." And aren't our children worth protecting more than a bunch of groceries? And if something were to happen, something terrible, would I be able to stand by helplessly? Wouldn't I want something -- anything -- to fight back?

Of course. Of course. What parent wouldn't? I would use it -- I know it in my gut. And I wouldn't be sorry because I would be doing what I had to do to defend my children. Every parent must feel this. And every parent has the same right to defend her child as I do.

So what does that mean? A couple of guns in every household. Teachers armed with guns. Guns in glove compartments. Guns in strollers. Guns at amusement parks, at basketball games, at picnics.

I think about when my children become old enough to play at their friends' houses without me. Do I ask the parents first -- "Do you have guns in your house? How is it secured? Can I come by to make sure it's not in a place where the children can access it?" And walking down the street, I now have to worry about people with guns in addition to texting drivers, reckless kids on skateboards, pitbulls.

I grew up with a lot of fear -- in New York in the 80s. It was pre-Giuliani New York, the days paralyzed by the murder of Kitty Genovese, the smoldering anger of Bernie Goetz, the rape of the Central Park jogger. I never went out at night, and if the sun started to set while we were out, we scurried home, looking over our shoulders. As I grew older, that fear never left me, even when my parents escaped to the placidity of Long Island. I remember coming home from work, in the quiet of the evening, looking all around the vicinity from within the safety of the locked car before I darted out and ran the 20 feet to our front door. When I was in law school, I remember stopping in my tracks and waiting for the men to pass me after making deliberate eye contact with them before I continued, because that's what I learned in a self defense class. Now, even though we live in the sanctuary of La Jolla, where people leave their french doors gaping open and elementary school kids roam the neighborhood on their own, I still look over my shoulders in the evening.

That kind of anxiety still lives in me. And that is my view of the world. A dangerous place where people prey on each other. Where you keep your door locked at all times. Where there is a monster lurking behind every corner.

Our three year old went through a monster phase recently. He was scared to sleep at night because he said there was a monster in his room. He didn't want us to leave, and he wanted to keep his door open. We wanted to allay his fears, so we told him how monsters don't really exist except in books and movies. When that didn't work, we told him that the monster was a cute cuddly monster, like Elmo. When he didn't believe us, we let him sleep with our dog in his room, until we found out that he was allergic to dogs.

He has since outgrown his fear of monsters. But we went through a lot to help him feel secure in this world, to feel less threatened. Because we want him to believe that he lives in that kind of a world, where not everyone is a monster, a potential threat. Where people are kind to each other. We don't want him to grow up with anxiety, with stress, with fears that make him shrivel. We want him to thrive, to be confident. We want him to be the yellow daisy in the middle of our flower garden, not the dandelion growing in the crack of the footpath at the cemetery.

I want our children to grow up in Michael Moore's Canada, not City of God's Rio de Janeiro. Dorothy's Kansas, not the Wild West. And when I think about how we create that kind of a community, I don't picture a lot of guns. I picture a community where people can resolve their differences without weapons. Where the mentally impaired cannot pick up a semi-automatic. Where there is help for people who need it. Where everyone is included, even the socially awkward, the shy nerd, the difficult misfit. Where the social contract hasn't frayed so much at the edges that people feel the need to fend for themselves.

As a parent, I can't stop imagining all the threats around us. But I also imagine utopias, a better community for my children. And maybe the only way to get there is to start imagining it.

Dialogue

Our three (and almost half) year old has been exploding with words these days. From the minute he wakes up at 6am until he goes down at 8:30pm, he is spewing with words (with a mini break for a nap in between). New words, old words, made up words, repeated words, he has them all. In the car, he bombards us with questions from destination A to destination B and has a running commentary on every house, car, person, dog, cloud, and blimp we pass.

The other week, we passed acres and acres of almond groves and grape vines as we drove from our friends' house in South Lake Tahoe to visit some other friends in Montecito. T spotted a field of trees, their branches elegantly arched like outstretched limbs, blooming with wisps of delicate white, feathery flowers.

When he saw them, he exclaimed, "Look, Mommy, those trees look like ballerinas!"

Sugar Plum Fairies, anyone? Such poetry from my little man.

When he talks, Jeff and I do all we can to listen (well, most of the time). We lean toward him, we crane our necks, we bend at our knees. We parrot back his words to show we understand. We answer all of his questions, even after the eighteenth "why", even after he circuits back to the same question he asked three questions earlier. We nod our affirmations or explain why we disagree. We open our faces with surprise or scrunch them with consternation. We do all we can to continue the dialogue.

Sometimes, however, his precious words come out a little muddled. It could be that the word is a tad too big, and all the vowels and consonants get jumbled and squashed in his tiny mouth. Or in their hurry to land in our ears, the words run into each other, one unsuspecting fragile mound of syllables tripped and overrun by a bully on its heels. Or little T forgets to breathe in the middle of his rushed sentence, and all the words abandon their beginnings and endings and leave us stranded in an incoherent blob of sounds. The latest has been T's insistence that his words can sound the way he damn pleases, and if he wants to pronounce "cat" as "chat", that's his prerogative.

What three (and almost half) year old has not had a mispronunciation or two. Or some jumbling or slurring of words. Maybe even a lisp. It comes with the territory. We understand that. But what we did not expect was the explosion that happens after we fail to take in what he has to say. If we misinterpret what he has said, he unexpectedly becomes silent. Then, his little lips start to tremble. Little mounds of tear well up in the corners of his eyes. Then the bawling starts. In between the slobbering and the hyperventilating, he shouts, "You MIZ-understood ME!"

It's as if we told him that he could never play with Buzz Lightyear ever again. Or that Mickey died. Or that he could no longer sleep in his Lightning McQueen bed. It's as profound an upset as he could experience in his three and half years of existence lived with a belief in Santa, an unquestioned expectation that food would appear whenever he hungered, and the unwavering knowledge that he could get his star as long as he peed and pooped in his potty.

When his tears start to fall, we entreat him to repeat himself. "Help Mommy and Daddy understand what you said. Can you say it again?" We give him our most concerned smile, attempting to convey that fortitude is what is required at the moment, that we are ever so eager to understand. Sometimes, he shouts back with a big "NO!" and continues to cry. But after some cajoling, he repeats himself -- and sometimes (reluctantly) again -- until we understand. "Oh! Is that what you said. Now we understand! What a good thing you repeated yourself. And you know, I don't know if blimps have steering wheels. Do you want to look it up when we go home? What a good question!"

I've been thinking about his need to be heard and to be understood. To not be misunderstood. And I think about my own experience growing up in this country. Where I often felt as if no one understood what I was going through. That words were often inadequate to convey my perspective, my experience. That even if I spoke, not many could really understand because they had a different frame of reference. How I often chose to stay silent because it seemed so pointless. And I wonder how it impacts us. What do we do with this apparently deep seeded need to be understood when no one does? Where do all those upsets and tears go when those we want to make understand cannot?

I would like my children to have their crying fits now, when we can identify the source of their frustration, rather than later when it takes five therapists to untangle the causes. I want them to have the faith to know that we try, that we'll always try to understand, even if we misunderstand each other at times. I want them to keep trying talking to us, even we seem to lack the ability to understand, even if we at times may be too busy to hear. I want to instill that fortitude in them, the fortitude to keep trying, because if we give up on words, we can so easily lose each other. And losing them is not something I -- no parent -- can stand to bear.

On Self Esteem

Self esteem was in short supply when I was growing up.

Not that anyone was out to crush us. We just didn't have an environment where there was such a thing as self esteem, much less a sense of self. I'm not sure if my parents thought of us in those terms -- as individuals with individual sense of selves. To them, we were children -- viewed as a unit, perhaps more or less interchangeable, with roles to play and futures to fulfill. Of course, they knew us as separate people, with distinct personalities, but I don't know if they necessarily thought of us as contained beings ripe enough to possess inner lives worthy of consideration. We were beings in the making, nascent and malleable, billowing with potential and room for improvement. Their job was to help us ripen, prevent bruises and defects, and deliver us for perfection in the hopes that such painstaking preparation would help us weather future storms.

When I was younger, I remember my mother scrutinizing me for potential defects. In middle school, I walked slightly pigeon-toed. My mother walked alongside me, block after block, reminding me to point my toes straight. Over and over again, she made me walk along the divide in sidewalk cement to use as a guide for my misaligned feet. Her reminders were incessant, and I remember feeling harangued. Just leave me alone, I muttered. It does not matter. But to her, it did matter. It was her job as the mother to correct my defect. She focused on the potential of a corrected defect; all I heard were the words that I was somehow defective.

Another defect I had was my right eyelid. When I chewed, my eyelid flinched ever so slightly with my jaws. My aunt noticed it when I was a child, and my mother zoomed in like a moth drawn to the light. She stared and stared while I ate. Try chewing this way, she encouraged. No, try it another way. To no avail. She gave up when she realized that the movement was involuntary. My only choice was to chew less, which I tried to minimize under my mom's watchful eye, or to chew with my head down. Once in my early 30s, my mom called me out of the blue. She wanted to know if I wasn't seeing anyone, couldn't get married because of my eye. I laughed at the time because the idea seemed so absurd. But to this day, I feel self-conscious and flood with shame when someone notices.

When I was younger, I often felt inadequate. I didn't have much going for me. I stood a good foot taller than most kids in my class. I reached puberty early. I had oily skin and hair. And on top of that, I had a mom who had no problem pointing out my defects.

Now that I'm a parent, I can understand some of those concerns. You want your child to fit in, to belong. To not be that child with a blaring "difference" who could be rejected by a society of primitive beings we all have to learn not to be.

I can see how she was coming from a place of fear. But I can also see how we approach the world from radically different points of view. When faced with a "difference," you can teach your child to accept the difference -- in herself first. To love herself. To build within your child an inner reserve of self esteem and confidence so that she can face the world, and in turn, force the world to make room for her. But to do that, you have to accept that difference first, and you may be more inclined to accept that difference if you see that difference as an intrinsic part of your child. Because you believe that the body (and mind) is a holy temple.

Alternatively, instead of accepting the difference or defect, you can reject it. You don't accept it as an intrinsic part of your child, and you do whatever it takes to eradicate it. This rejection may come from a place of shame, but it may also arise out of concern for your child's welfare, out of fear that your child may be spurned. And it is far simpler to "fix" your child than to fix the world. But this approach can also be viewed optimistically, as a sign of tenacity, that anything can be conquered if you try hard enough, if you work on yourself. Maybe if you were raised in a society as rigid and as socially conforming as South Korea was in my mother's youth, you may see no choice but to conform your child. Because that is the best way to maximize the chances of your child's success.

I can't help but wonder if I would have received her efforts to "correct" me with a better attitude if we had been raised in Korea. Back there, blunt criticisms are unleashed without any attempts at nicety, and it is not uncommon to be told openly that you are fat or unattractive. Maybe if we too had been raised with the same standard of socially acceptable communication, we would have developed the same armadillo skin that could have helped us weather the criticisms and seen them as something constructive, as she intended.

But it wasn't just this. I think it was my parents' ambitions for us that, ironically, did greater damage. My parents had three children, but one dream for all of us. They wanted us to become doctors or lawyers, some kind of professional. It was their idea of security, of fulfillment. It was the best they could imagine. Their children would have money, an earning potential that could never be taken away. And we would have the respect of others, a degree to elevate us in the eyes of others.

Their dream, however well intentioned, had little to do with any of us. Although none of us showed any inclination to become a doctor or a lawyer, they failed to see this in their zeal. My parents tended to disregard our individual traits that didn't align with their prospects for us. And when we showed promise in any other field, whether in playing an instrument or showing our creativity otherwise, it mattered little. Of course they humored us by attending the annual holiday concert, but we were quickly made to understand that excelling in those areas held no value. It was as if they took their pruning knives and lopped off those traits they deemed undesirable in the hopes that we would tend in the direction they set out for us.

But I don't know if we ever recovered from their efforts to shape us. We felt the pain of having parts of ourselves shunted. The implicit message we received was that those traits were neither worth having nor knowing, but to us, they felt like they contained the seeds of our inner essence. It felt like a rejection in the deepest sense, as if they were telling us that we were not worth knowing, not at our core. And it felt like a failure -- their failure to see us for who we really were. And to this day, I can't help but wonder if those thwarted parts were the very things that could have helped us define ourselves, helped fulfill our destiny.

Our sense of rejection created a cascade of issues that none of us children ever addressed, or at least not really well. Suppressed of our distinguishing traits, I think we felt interchangeable -- and hollowed. We became fiercely competitive with each other, even though we never acknowledged it. But we expressed it in the way we always compared ourselves to each other, in the way we resented each other. And we lived with the seed of fear that we could never measure up, that we would never reach the standards that others set for us.

It's hard for me to blame my parents. They were no more ambitious for us than most other Korean parents we knew. If anything, my parents were more easy going. They never sat us at the piano for hours with a stick in hand. They never made us practice for hours. They never prohibited other activities at the exclusion of the one they chose. They were moderate, but even so, they followed the prescribed methods of their time and culture. And they believed, with all of the best intentions, that they were creating the best environment to optimize the future of their children.

But no matter the good intention, I see our upbringing through the American lens, where acceptance is touted as the higher road, and self-confidence, the key to one's success. And through this lens, I am sensitive to the scars my siblings and I bear and what I interpret to be markers of low self-esteem. We are quick to anger. We have a tendency to read into comments, to scour another's words and to find offense in them. To take things personally. To get our feelings easily hurt.  All of us are a little needy -- in need of more attention, more affirmation, more affection. And I don't mean to oversimplify things by pinning everything on the parenting we received, but it's hard to argue that there isn't some connection.

I think of the difficult task of parenting. You could have all the best intentions in the world.  You could plan and hope for the best. You can clothe and feed your child, wipe off that snot, break your back washing laundry by hand day and night, run to the doctor in the middle of the night with desperate fear of that abnormally high temperature as your baby cries and screams at the top of her lungs in your ear. You can refrain from eating that bowl of rice you hunger for because your child wants it, and you limit yourself to the scrapes left over from the last meal that your child rejected simply because he wasn't in the mood to eat the rest. And you can worry in a way you've never worried about another human being, not because something horrific has occurred, but simply because you understand the ever-present dangers of this world as well as the frightening vulnerability of your little person. And you are determined to do whatever it takes to protect this child.

You could do all that, year after year. But the world changes on you. And the standards of parenting change. Your now grown children see the world through a different set of eye, a different measure of approval. And your parenting cannot surpass the boundaries of culture or time. No. You do what you believe to be right at the time, but what you believe to be right is a product of your own upbringing, your own culture, the beliefs of your time. You do the best that you can, and pray that your children will one day have the ability to reflect, the maturity to understand, and the inner resources to appreciate. 

From the Land of Dog Eaters

Before the birth of our first child, our yellow lab Sherlock led the privileged life as the sole heir of a DINK couple. My husband fed him specially ordered never frozen raw meat. We often emerged from pet shops with $20 squeak toys that Sherlock shredded within minutes. During the week, a professional dog walker chauffeured him and a few other lucky hounds to Fort Funston, a dramatic cliffside beach on the west coast of San Francisco, where he pranced as happily as a prima ballerina. During our weekend walks in Noe Valley, we only frequented restaurants that could accommodate all of us, which usually limited us to a cozy French bistro with an illegal patio in the back.

After our son was born, all that changed. Suddenly, the crunch, crunch of the turkey neck dangling from Sherlock's jaws made us question the prudence of nurturing his taste for raw meat. We immediately switched to dry nibbles. And while we had previously experienced only joy and fascination in watching him chomp on his toys, we suddenly gawked at the sharpness of his canines and agonized over his instinct for tearing into squeaky little things. While the trips to Fort Funston continued, our family walks no longer included the dog after he tried to push ahead of the stroller one too many time. As for those cozy meals at the bistro, we started opting for dining indoors where our baby could be sheltered from the insidious San Francisco fog.

It wasn't only our activities that changed. The creature that I had previously described as a bright but petulant teenager suddenly became no more than a ball of fur. When he furiously shook his head to relieve his itchy ears, which he did several times a day despite his daily eardrop treatment, a cloud of fur emanated like the brewing of a great dust storm and a flurry of haze rose around his 63 pound frame. The puff of fur lingered in the air and then descended on everything around us, including the baby's blanket, the uncapped milk bottle, the dropped pacifier. Some strands of fur dug into the warp of the rug or became entangled in the fringes, and the rest drifted around until they formed stubborn dust bunnies in far reaches under our bed.  

Usually, between the 6am and the 8am feeding, I would start my daily ritual of rolling the lint remover over as many toys as I could manage. Then, I would pull out the vacuum to suck up the fur and dander. While I futilely rammed the blunt edges of the suction into corners to try to reach tiny crevices, I thought of my doctor friend's comment when I fretted about having a pet with an infant in the house. "Who would want a dog with all that dander near a baby!" In those moments, I visualized dander drifting into my baby's mouth, into his nostrils.

When my mom visited, she too focused on Sherlock, or more specifically, Sherlock's fur. "You know, he's such a good dog, but why couldn't Jeff have gotten a dog that doesn't shed? That's his only bad trait." I assume she was referring to the dog.

After a cousin visited from Korea, she went back reciting a couple of criticisms of my housekeeping skills, one of which was that the baby's toys were covered with fur. I'm sure many of my relatives whom I haven't seen in over a decade have intimate knowledge of Sherlock's fur.

It wasn't just the fur. Before Jeff and I merged our households, Sherlock was Jeff's sole companion and had the run of his house. He curled up wherever he liked. He slept on Jeff's bed. Most importantly, he licked whatever he liked. He spent the greater part of his day licking the kitchen floor, lest he miss that one morsel, that one calorie hidden in the crack of the tile. He continued that practice when he moved in with me. Once the kids arrived, however, I tried to modify that behavior.

My friends envied what they saw as a cuddly Roomba. "You don't even have to clean up after your kid eats!" they said. "You're so lucky." I saw it differently. I saw a (relatively) clean floor being smeared with dog spit. And my pristine baby crawl and roll in that film of dog spit, spreading his hands in that spit. And my baby's dog spit covered hands being sucked by my baby's mouth. I vividly remember one of my second grade classmates sharing his ice cream cone with a random dog on the street. It ranks high enough on my gross list that I've remembered it all these years. And here was my baby sucking dog spit off of his hands.

Trying to prevent Sherlock from licking the floor is like trying to shoo a swarm of ants away from a rotting apple. I would send him away from one corner of the kitchen only to have him start at the other. Sometimes, I would scold him with a stern "no!" and send him to his pad. There, he would hunker down, cross his front paws, and droop his head as if to feign resignation. But his doe eyes would stare at me with the intensity of the New York Vigilante. The minute he saw me exit the room, he would spring off of his pad, dart across the room, and start licking the floor nearest the high chair. And the minute he heard my footsteps again, he would quickly skulk back to his pad. I would catch a glimpse of his sashaying tail and hind legs fleeing the scene of the crime.

In addition to the no-licking, I imposed another rule. No doggie on the rug. Since our rug took up most of the living room floor, that was a little unfair to Sherlock, I will admit. But I saw it as my maternal duty to protect my child's space -- space he needed to roam, to learn to crawl, to learn to walk. And to have his toys strewn about as he pleased without having the dog step on or shed all over them.

All these rules did not go over well. Sherlock and I battled constantly, territorially and psychologically. As dogs often do, he pushed the boundaries. At times, he would brush the rug with the tips of his paws, then wait a second or two, then inch forward more and more until the entire length of his front paws fully settled there. Other times, he would lick the floor only when shielded by Jeff, assuming that surely, the alpha male would stand up for his best friend. Otherwise, he would sprawl on the floor and pretend to lick his front paws, and by the time I noticed, he would be surrounded by a halo of dog spit.

Many years ago, I took a tour of Ano Nuevo, a state park about 50 miles south of San Francisco, where elephant seals beach themselves for the winter to give birth. While we watched a colony of seals sprawled all over the beach, the tour guide pointed to one nursing two pups. Since they give birth to only one pup at a time, the guide said that the elephant seal must also be nursing another's. "Bad mom," he said. "She doesn't have enough milk to feed both."

That image stayed with me. Not that I ever nursed Sherlock. The closest was when he licked my baby's spit-up off of the floor, which in turn made me want to puke. But the idea of diverting your resources to another living creature when you should be reserving them for your own offspring raised enough quandaries to unsettle a new, overzealous mom. And something about becoming a mom makes you think in primal terms. Maybe because we spend so much time bearing our chests and cleaning up poop (although not usually at the same time). Granted, our resources were not strictly limited. I knew that intellectually. But emotionally, I was living in a cave, shielding my baby from creatures of the wild and foraging for berries -- all while sleeping suboptimally and trying to get my own basic needs met.

The thing is, I never wanted to be that kind of person. You know, the kind of person who treats a dog like a dog. Rather, I wanted to treat Sherlock like one of us. Because I'm affable. Generous. Compassionate. Easy-going. All those good adjectives that go with being an animal lover here in America. And in America, you can't be affable, generous, compassionate, or easy-going if you're not an animal lover. It's true. Think about it. Have you ever seen a protagonist who hates animals? Who kicks them for fun?

Maybe I'm particularly sensitive to this image because I come from a land where they eat dogs. Sure, they tried to deny it during the '88 Olympics and claimed that it was a thing of the past, but we Koreans know it's not true. Some Koreans still eat dog meat, and you can see those restaurants when you visit South Korea. Not that I ever wanted to frequent such a place, although I cried when my cousin wouldn't take me when I was six.

Once, when I was in high school, I saw my dad kick a cat. It was incomprehensible. Sure, it was during one of the worst stretches in our lives when he was working 15 hour days. And he was going through a bout of depression and frustration. And sure, he was carrying a huge carton filled with buttermilk and the cat was in his way. But the kick was intentional. And I knew, as surely as I knew anything, that he wouldn't have done that had he grown up in America. Because my dad's not a bad guy. Not a mean bone in his body. But he's old school. With old world values. And the thing that differentiated me from him was that I grew up here. And I wanted none of those old world ways about me.

So when Jeff moved in with the dog, a part of me was secretly relieved. Now I too could be a dog owner. One of those people who frisked their dogs and jogged with them. And our children could grow up with a dog in the family. They could be the type of people who love dogs. And wouldn't that be the sure marker of true Americans?

But this dream was short lived. I hadn't realized that when you become a mom, you no longer have the luxury of putting your self image first or even the image of your family. You become a slave to your instinct, and everything is about your child's eating, cleanliness, and sleeping. Before kids, Jeff and I constantly bragged about Sherlock's superior intelligence. And I was fascinated by this creature who knew how to shake hands, roll over and play dead, and rang a bell to be let outside. After kids, however, all those warm and fuzzy feelings toward the dog vaporized, and I only saw him as a source of threat to my kid's safety, hygiene, and territory. I felt like a substandard mom who had allowed an intruder to invade her nest and take residence.

All that Sherlock did seemed like acts of intrusion. When my baby held a piece of cantaloupe in his hands, Sherlock tried to sniff it. When Jeff played with the baby, Sherlock tried to wedge himself in the middle so that he could get his butt scratched. When the baby napped, Sherlock barked non-stop. And when I was in the middle of bathing my little one, he would start ringing the bell to be let out to use the potty. In those moments, I cursed him out, but under my breath so that Jeff couldn't hear.

Perhaps to appease my guilt, I often sought affirmation from fellow moms. Because I found out soon enough that my reaction to Sherlock was common among all dog owners after they became parents, even those who had treated their dogs like their first babies. When I heard other moms complain about their own dogs, I took in every word. And brought them home to Jeff. Because the few times I argued with Jeff were about how I treated Sherlock. And how I insisted that we all wash hands every time we touched Sherlock. When I relayed these stories, I made sure he knew they weren't Koreans like me, because I didn't want to hear him to say, "Well, sure, they don't like dogs. They're Korean," even though I knew he said it in jest.

All my dog-owner friends said things start to change when your children grow old enough to play with the dog. That's when the dog starts to redeem himself in your eyes. Because he can now contribute, instead of just making making demands. He can play fetch and tug of war with your kids. He can make your kids happy.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, we found out that our now toddler son has asthma. And he is allergic to dogs. Allergic. So bad that he had to be admitted to the hospital overnight. Smack in the middle of the redemption phase. How's that for a twist in the story? For the past couple of weeks, not knowing what else to do, we've been keeping Sherlock outside full time (albeit in a nice, sheltered doggie house in prime San Diego weather). Jeff takes him for regular walks and plays with him. But for now, Sherlock's officially ostracized.

I no longer have to spend so much energy trying to contain the dog and his uncontainable dander and his licking tongue and his wily ways. I now have belated justification for my obsessive compulsive vacuuming and insistance that we all wash hands fifty times a day. Yet, I don't feel relieved. Instead, I feel a little sad. Maybe it's the guilt creeping in or a little sense of regret. Or ruefulness that my children cannot grow up with a dog, as I had secretly hoped. But it also seems wrong that any creature's twilight years should be spent alone, away from his family.

Not all is lost, however. Jeff's parents called this week and asked if Sherlock could move in with them. He could be good for Jeff's ailing mother who responds better to the dog than anyone else. And Sherlock's need to be a part of a pack coincides with my in-laws' need for companionship and perhaps something to love. He is good at that - being the object of someone's love.

It's not what we expected. We expected Sherlock to have more time to play with our kids. And to grow old with us. And for him to teach our kids some lessons along the way. I didn't expect such a sudden separation, at least not before I had a chance to make more room in our household for a dog again. And not before I had found my way out of playing the role of the evil stepmother. But life doesn't follow your plans. It also doesn't live up to the scenarios you entertained in your childhood. And time often runs out before you know it.

Our children won't grow up with a family dog. And I will never be as American as I hoped to be. But my son will be able to breathe. And Sherlock will have all the love he wants without some peevish lady chasing him with a vacuum. Maybe that's not such a bad tradeoff.