Distances and Passing Days

I left New York in 1999. New York was home, as much a home as I ever had. New York is where my family lived, the only family I had. I left behind my parents, brother, and sister, and moved 2500 miles across the country.

I was in my late 20s. Back then, 2500 miles didn't seem like much. Just a 5 hour plane ride, I said. I could fly there and back in one day. As I did one day in September 1999 to interview in San Francisco. For the interview, I took the first flight out of JFK to SFO. That night, I was back in New York. That same night, I decided to move west. It had been my first visit to San Francisco.

If I didn't like it, I could always move back, I thought. Decisions can be un-done.

The decision to move was impulsive. I didn't have as much a reason to move as a reason not to. "Why not?" was my attitude. I was young and single. No responsibilities and no attachments. I was offered a job, and that seemed good enough. All San Francisco offered was a job and two acquaintances. The rest of the city was a stranger.

I didn't think about what that meant until I was asked to provide my emergency contact at my new job. Suddenly, I realized that my closest family member -- in fact, my entire family -- was on the other side of a continent. On the form, I wrote in my father's name and his phone number with its Long Island area code. And then wondered about the three hour time difference. What if I were injured in some horrible accident and they needed his authorization to operate? Would they catch him in the middle of the night? Would he answer the call in his pajamas? Would he be able to find a flight out in an emergency?

Lately, I've been wondering about this decision. Not the decision to live in San Francisco, but the one to move myself 2500 miles away from my family. This decision made on the whim of the day, given not much more thought than choosing a soup or salad for lunch. My cavalier attitude.

We live 2500 miles away from our little guy's grandparents, his cousins, his uncle and two aunts, the only relatives he has in this country on my side of the family. To try to overcome the distance, we skype once or twice a week with my parents. We pop open the skype window, click their login name, and wait for the ring tones. When they respond, there is always an initial flurry of just sound, no images, as they try to find the right icons to click.

"Can you hear us? Why isn't it working? Is it working? Oh, I think I see them. Can you hear us? Is the baby with you?"

Then their faces appear. Two bobbleheads, illuminated by a florescent light behind them. My mom is always in the center, where she sits in front of the computer like a train conductor. She is the one who knows how to operate it. Even though the computer has been occupying a corner of their living room for two years now, my father does not know how to turn it on. Sometimes, when they are not online, I call ahead the traditional way. My father picks up the telephone, and as soon as I say, "Should we talk on the computer?," he responds, "Your mother is starting the computer now." In their household, it is her job to manage the kitchen as well as the computer.

So when they appear on screen, my mother sits on her throne. My dad hovers in the periphery, sometimes to my mother's left, sometimes to her right. As he shifts from one leg to the other, we catch parts of his chin, cheek, mouth, nostrils and at times, even his eyeglasses in the corners of our screen.

"How much he has grown. Look at him now. He looks like a little boy. Already no longer a baby. He's so much taller, and his eyes are so big. So handsome!"

The initial few minutes are always the same. The gushing, the fanfare, the exclamations of surprise at his growth, even though they saw him a week earlier -- and said the exact same thing.

"Over here, over here, look at us. Can you see us?"

They waive their hands, lean in closer, widen their smiles, and make clucking noises for his benefit.

On our end, Jeff and I hover around my 13 inch MacBook on the futon, one of us holding the little guy on our lap. We pick up the baby and try to present him the best we can. I'll often pick him up, let his legs stretch out, and pass his body from top to bottom over the screen, so they could see his full length. I'll also push the computer further out so that the video camera can capture the length of his whole body on screen. After, we'll tilt him over closer to the screen as his head flops forward and his arms flounder as they try to reach out to touch whatever they can.

Usually, at that moment, my dad will exclaim, "Look, he sees us! He sees us. He's reaching out to us. Look at him smiling!"

Then they will have an E.T. moment, where the two ends will try to touch across the screen.

In the way my parents lean forward and gaze at him, I could see how much they want to touch him. And hold him. The way I hold him every day, his little body bundled against mine, and nuzzle my nose against his neck, kiss his cute chubby cheeks, and inhale the sweetness of his baby scent. The only way to experience a baby.

I then vow to plan a trip to visit them -- sometime soon, really soon. But once I start thinking about whether I need to take the playpen, the car seat, the stroller, and the infant tub, I wonder if it would be easier when he's a little older. Then I think about having to take my breast pump on the plane and find a way to pump in that hole of a bathroom or under a blanket in my seat, I start wondering if my parents can't fly out to see us instead. Until I find out my mom's back's been acting up.

That's when the distance I created for myself seems like a burden and not the liberation I used to believe it to be. I'm sure it served some purpose and gave me an escape when I desperately needed it -- and probably still does to some degree from the sense of suffocation that can come from a family that has overtaken you, like overgrown ivy around a building. But nowadays, I seem to have lost memory of that suffocation. Instead, I wonder why I live 2500 miles away from them and what it means to be a family. Are we a family if we live 2500 miles apart but see each other once or twice a year? I guess we are a family by definition, so maybe the better question is what kind of a family are we. What does it mean that we live like this? For whose benefit? Why has it become so normal, so commonplace to live as we do?

Now with the baby and with my parents' aging, the passing days seem precious. I don't want them to miss out on him, and I don't want him to miss out on them. They are on opposite ends of the timeline of my life, and I want those two ends to join and form a cohesive circle, as I think a family should. That my parents should live out the rest of their lives so far away from us seems unacceptable, even cruel. But the thought of moving to the East Coast seems unthinkable. Not with our lives here, with our friends, with our jobs, without East Coast snowstorms and New York cynicism. The roots we have grown here seem too deep to uproot. So Jeff and I talk about the prospect of my parents moving out to California, but it's not so easy to move others to suit your own purposes and notions, especially when the others are set in their ways -- not too dissimilar from the way we are.

So we talk about planning a vacation with them. Maybe a trip to Hawaii. Days filled with sun, the beach, and carefree togetherness. Protected time where they can have their fill of the little guy to last them for the time being.

I think about the day when our little guy will grow into a man. And I wonder if he will move away from us. That thought makes my heart ache and I start to miss him already.

A Field Trip

Yesterday, we spent the day at the California Academy of Sciences. I had never been there and wouldn't have thought about going if my friend hadn't invited us. I just assumed that my baby was too young for a place like that until my friend mentioned how her three year old loves the aquarium. An aquarium! I love aquariums.

The minute we stepped in, we were in the land of little people. Toddlers and school children with their backpacks ran around us. Mothers with strollers crowded the elevators. It was heavenly. We spent a few hours there staring at fish in florescent orange, hot pink, deep purple, and all other colors of the rainbow. We also hovered over the jellyfish pillar,the pen with the penguins, and the tank with the albino alligator. We watched a diver in a tank answer questions about tropical fish, as air bubbles streamed around him. My friend's three-year old dipped her hand into the touching pool and stroked a starfish. After lunch, she ran around the courtyard as her mother chased her.

Seeing so many little people makes me excited about our little T's upcoming years. I can't wait until he starts running around and touching the starfish. As he experiences the world, I want to go through it with him. In some ways, I feel like I did such a poor job of learning as I was going through school. Sure, I did my share of studying and getting good grades, but I don't know how much I really learned. I know how little I retained. There was a point in my life when I thought about reading junior high school text books just to find out what I forgot. Like most of my great ideas, it never came to fruition. But here is my chance to do it.

I loved the place so much that we went back today and bought an annual membership. The $99 pass makes so much more sense than paying $25 each visit. It's unfortunate that the tickets are so pricey, especially when the place is obviously geared toward children.

Anyway, today, I strapped Little T to my chest in the Baby Bjorn, facing out. We stood a good while in front of the enormous tanks and each time a colorful fish swam by, Little T kicked out his legs in excitement. Could we have a marine biologist in the making? Who know how these early days may shape his interests. I would love to help him figure out his passion, and if it means wearing out our membership, so be it. I just hope he doesn't come to me 22 years later asking me to review his law school application.

Processing

Ever since I had my baby five months ago, my head's been one big muddle. The adorable little guy fills me in a way I didn't know was possible and brings out a degree of love and devotion I didn't know I was capable of having. At the same time, he arrived with a jolt that seemed to knock off balance various delicate pieces of my life that I thought I had put into place over the years.

Since his arrival, I've been trying to unmuddle myself. To work through the various reactions I've been having and try to sort them out. The reactions have ranged from deep feelings of contentment and cloying affection to unshakable anxiety. Some days have been better than others. On some days, like today, I feel like I've emerged from that cloud and have happily moved on. On other days, I'm convinced it's just the hormones. But when, all of a sudden, I find myself emotional and overwhelmed, with my little brain feeling like it's ready to burst from a slew of endlessly trivial demands, I find myself squeezing my hands against my skull, as if to keep it contained. Other times, I feel the urge to bang my head, as if to knock out some of the excess junk that clutters the limited space up above. But then I return to my placid state when all seems perfectly fine, and I wonder what the hell was my problem.

In a nutshell, I don't feel like myself these days. I feel anxious, almost all the time. I often go through the day as if I'm being chased. If it's not feeding, changing, cleaning, singing to, and playing with the baby, then it's the daily ritual of two to three loads of laundry and six or seven cycles of bottle washing, sterilizing, and then preparing for the next round. When there are spare moments, I find myself mopping the floor, cleaning the refrigerator, unloading the dish washer, and cleaning the bathroom. After that, I look for other tasks. I feel as if I'm preparing for a hurricane, urgently bracing for the emergency, fearful that I'll be caught without my windows boarded, my supplies insufficient.

I'm struggling to reach a state of stasis. The problem with trying to sort all this out, however, is that I'm not really sure what is going on. All I know is that I feel uneasy, as if I forgot whether I turned off the stove before leaving for the day. I don't know if it is caused by the heavy responsibility of caring for another human being or the general stress of going through so many changes in life. Or the anxiety of not bringing home a regular paycheck. Or the fear of being doomed to a life of housework. Or hormones. Or maybe a combination of all above. Whatever it is, it is triggering associations that I am not consciously making and sending my instincts into overdrive.

The closest I can compare is the time in my early teens when my dad quit his job and my parents opened a small business together. As I've written about here many times, it caused a great upheaval in our family life in terms of our sense of financial and emotional stability. When my parents started working crazy hours, it became the responsibility of the children to run the household. I became mired in housework, and soon, manically folding the towels into perfect rectangles, meticulously wiping the dust off of the crevices of accordion lampshades, and organizing and re-organizing the cans in the pantry were the only ways I knew how to maintain a sense of control.

The other day, I was talking to a friend about how I feel these days. I told her that I feel as if I've reverted to my teenage days. When I told her about that period in my life, she asked me if I ever processed it.

"Process it?" I responded. "What do you mean?"

"You know, talk about it with someone. Maybe with someone in your family?"

Talk about it... In my family? No, we didn't talk about it. We were Koreans. We didn't talk about emotions, with the possible exception of anger. I wouldn't even know how to ask my parents how they feel. The closest approximation I can come to is asking them how they are. And to such a question, they would respond that they are eating well, or exercising, or spending the day at church.

In our family, we each hurried through the day, on our own. And learned to live with it. Whatever "it" was.

Or so I thought.

Over the years, I thought I had dealt with those events of my childhood. Or at least removed their sting. I learned to worry a little less about my parents, relax a little more, try not so hard to shape a family life that I thought we should have, instead of the one we were living. I thought I had put the intensity of my emotions behind me. But I'm starting to realize that you can never really put a part of your life behind you. Your life is your life, in one continuum. All you can do is shelve it. And maybe over time, the dust piles on, but sooner or later, you need to wipe the dust off and deal with it.

So I decided to find a way to deal with it, instead of waiting for it to pass. I called a therapist and started talking to her about my feelings of anxiety. And decided to write about it. Before I called the therapist, I felt pretty damn inadequate. Why were other women able to transition into motherhood on their own, and not me? Why couldn't I just be overfilled with joy like others and not be so mired in this state of stress, especially when everything in my life is so great? Really, what is my problem??

I don't know the answer. But once I find out, I'll let you know.

On Not Blogging

I haven't blogged in a whole month. Yeah, February was a short month, but today is already March 4th. Seven whole minutes into it, as a matter of fact. It's the longest I've gone without posting since I started this blog. Suddenly, the thought of not keeping up with my blog fills me with fear that I'm letting go of something that has come to mean a lot to me.

But then, I've been juggling a lot the past few months. It's kind of ironic because the last couple of months, I've been feeling as if I've been getting a little more in control of all the changes and various responsibilities I'm now handling. But because I feel as if things are more settled and I am in control, I should let less slide. I have to prioritize, though -- and somehow, the little things I do for me shift down to the bottom. That means the baby is at the top of the list. His feedings, his baths, his singing time and strolls, his playtime, his cuddle time, the bottle washing, the laundry. After that, the house work, the dishes, the garbage. Oh, did I forget that I have a husband? And what about that part time job thing I'm trying to fit in? On top of that, I've been trying to maintain a separate blog just for our little guy, so that he can read it when he's older and has questions about how he was when he was little. Not that I've been very good about posting there either, but a little better than I've been here.

The problem is that at the end of the day, when I sit in front of my computer to try to write, I find myself giving into the sweet lull of sleep. Have I ever mentioned that I'm a sleep horse? I love to sleep. Almost as much as eating. I would sleep 12 hours a night if I could, but then I would end up spending half of my life sleeping and that seems so wasteful. But for a mother of a little guy, I get a lot of sleep. Eight hours a night, in fact. If only I slept one hour less a night and used that hour to write instead. Then, I would have the most fabulous and well-maintained blog.

So on this one very unusual night when I find myself not being able to sleep, it seems like a good occasion to try to get back into this blogging thing. This has been a busy day -- with a hearing this morning in one of my cases. The last few weeks -- the whole month actually -- have been busy in fact, with various filings for work and play dates on top of the usual. Oh, and a road trip down to San Diego to visit the in-laws. And turning 39. And I would like to keep track of all the thoughts I've been having about what it means to be a family, how having my own makes me think so much about my own family growing up and reflect more about the difficult times we had growing up -- and to see them in a new light. There is so much I want to remember/memorialize -- for me and the baby. But of course, I'm starting to feel sleepy again.

It would be nice to have the time to live and then to document all the living that we're doing. But I've always been terrible at taking photographs. I would rather just enjoy the moment than detach myself from it with a camera. One of these days, I hope to figure out a way to do both.

Climbing Out

About two weeks ago, our little guy started sleeping 12 hours a night. Jeff and I feel like we hit the jackpot in having the most agreeable baby. Since the first day, he's been the healthiest eater and a very sound sleeper. When awake, he smiles and giggles constantly, and when we put him down in the crib for a nap, he falls asleep without too much fuss four out of five times so long as we put him down before he gets overly tired. Even though we had worried about him getting dependent on the pacifier when we first started giving it to him, he started spitting it out several weeks ago. I don't think it gets much easier.

Despite this, I've found this transition to motherhood challenging. Surprisingly, the physical aspect has been the easiest. Sure, we had our sleepless nights the first few weeks, but once Jeff and I started splitting our nights into two shifts about 3 weeks in, we managed to get about six hours of solid sleep each night (we surprised almost all of our friends by how well-rested we looked). And it took me a while to realize that the baby is actually mobile -- that I could take him place with me, like the grocery store and the coffee shop -- instead of treating him like a fragile piece of glass I have to keep protected. And then I've had my breastfeeding challenges, which made me break down in tears and feel incompetent in the most fundamental way, but slowly over time, I decided that I could live with it.

The more difficult aspect about becoming a mother has been emotional and psychological. They were driven more by concerns about me than the baby. I've been surprised by how much having a child of my own brought out so much of the anxieties I've had about my family growing up. And how that process made me notice the mental and physical barriers I had built over the years to keep my anxieties under control. I think just the process of being exposed to my anxieties again left me feeling incredibly vulnerable and psychologically exhausted.

Somehow, today, I feel like I'm on the other side of those anxieties. As if they are under control again. Maybe it's because the hormones are finally settling back down (let's hope!). Or maybe it's because I spent the day working while Jeff watched the baby, and I had a little time to step back and appreciate all that we have. Or maybe because I decided that I needed more community involvement and signed up for a volunteer position with the Golden Gate Mom's Group. Or maybe because I've had four months to process all this, and I'm feeling more in step with my day to day routine. Or maybe it's because I've been going to sleep at 8pm for the past few nights.

Whatever it is, I feel like I'm climbing out. And ready to start planning for our second baby!

On Not Trying for Perfection

I've been having difficulty writing my posts these days. It's hard to find the time to sit down and write some coherent thoughts. And when you've spent the day singing nursery rhymes and making googly faces, it's difficult to switch gears. When I sit down to write, I find my mind becoming vacant. I've tried to write in the past few days, and I write out a sentence or two and then peeter off. I've been thinking about this, and I am starting to wonder if it is partly because I find it difficult to write honestly without playing into some stereotyped role of motherhood.

As a new mom, I've had a lot of complicated and confused thoughts about the changes we've been experiencing since our little guy's arrival. I absolutely adore our little guy and feel so grateful that he's here with us. But with the bliss comes a host of changes, some of which I anticipated and others that I didn't -- and I find myself reacting to some of them with a lot of intense emotions and anxiety that seem to bubble up from a well I hadn't drawn from in years.

Writing about all of those, however, doesn't seem so easy. When I start writing about any of these topics, I feel compelled to start out with disclaimers about how much I love our little baby. Perhaps to fend off any criticism that I'm complaining, especially when we had been waiting for our little guy with such anticipation. Instead of writing, I've been mulling over these issues in my head, which tends to create a never-ending spiral of aimless thoughts that lead to loose associations that lead to more aimless thoughts. When I try to talk about it, I feel a little guilty, as if I'm failing to measure up. And I scrutinize the listener to try to measure whether she understands.

I'm now starting to understand how much social pressure women have as moms. To be loving. To be devoted. To be motherly. To live up to an image of motherhood that I can't seem to meet.

I'm realizing that being a mom is complicated business. Hormones have taken over my body, and I can't seem to shake them. Then there are all those other issues, running the gamut from life decisions to the mundane. Like whether I'd rather stay at home or work, how to be ok with being a slave to housework, how to stimulate the little guy just enough to help him with his development, but not too much as to overstimulate him and push him over the edge, how to schedule my days so that I don't feel overly disconnected from the world but still manage to get things done around the house, how to find some time for myself and still do all that I need to do for the baby, how not to feel guilty about everything, and a host of other concerns that I can't seem to keep track of in my head.

Just in the last few days, I discovered the general parenting forum on the Golden Gate Mom's Group's website, and I've been pouring over some of the topics. I had browsed other websites before, but they were mostly for topics related to the baby's well-being, like how often should he be pooping, how do you ensure he is napping enough, etc. Those topics are on this website too, but I'm also finding threads of conversations between moms about being women and mothers. And they are a godsend.

Thank goddness for the women who are honest on that site, even if they do it anonymously. When I read that some other mom worries about being selfish because she is thinking about going back to work or that another mom no longer feels like her confident self after having a baby, I want to call her up and ask her to meet up for lunch. To these posts, I write in my comments with effusive words of empathy. I want to give them a hug because we need each other.

Just Showing Off

Can't believe how much our little guy has grown in the past 3+ months!

Looking in the Mirror

I've never been happy with my looks. Throughout most of my life, whenever I looked in the mirror, I scrutinized the person in the mirror with the critical eyes of a disapproving mother-in-law. And through those set of eyes, I saw a flat face, drooping cheeks, froggy eyes, and clumsy lips -- features unbecoming to any potential suitor. As for my body, it was never good enough. Except for one brief stretch in my early teens when I grew faster vertically than horizontally, I always seemed to be 10 pounds overweight. And too big-boned.

Despite my efforts over the years, I never quite managed to live up to my image of myself. You know, that person I thought I could be if only I could lose all the weight I wanted, if I could discipline myself to work out regularly with weights, if I remembered to cleanse and lather my face with face cream every night, if only I learned how to apply make-up properly for once, and if I only worked my jaw muscles regularly enough to develop cheek bones. It wasn't that I needed to be glamorous or sexy or stunning. I just wanted to be a better version of myself.

I've wondered where this comes from, this poor self-image. I can blame the media and the elongated models who flaunt their emaciated frames. But if I took the time to psychoanalyze myself on this topic, I'm sure there were enough incidents in my life to germinate this attitude.

For example, as a child, I grew very quickly. Faster than most other kids. When we lived in Korea, I was always the tallest kid in my class -- where teachers lined us up by height before pairing us off for school trips. My mom remembers me running home in tears, crying that I was again left without a partner. Fast forward to 6th grade. A picture of me, with thick glasses and a pony-tail, slow dancing with a boy who came up to my chest. His arms taut across to my waist, my arms draped over his skinny shoulders, and my back hunched in an effort to make myself shorter. Even to this day, I shrink when I see that photo.

As we were growing up, looks were never emphasized in my family. Perhaps for that reason, we were given bowl hair cuts, so typical of the 70s and so downright unattractive. For a long time, I worried that I looked like a boy and was often mistaken for one. One time, when I was about 6 or so, I remember going to the public bath with my mother (as we did in Korea), and an elderly lady criticized my mother for not sending me to the men's section as I was clearly old enough to bathe on my own.

As I grew older, I couldn't believe that anyone would be attracted to me. When boys flirted with me, I dismissed them. I assumed they weren't really flirting -- perhaps only practicing for the real flirting they would be doing with the pretty girl. Or maybe something was wrong with them for pursuing me -- perhaps they couldn't get anyone else or had poor self-esteem themselves.

Such thoughts used to preoccupy me in my late teens and 20s. And then I entered my 30s, and I slowly shed my self-absorption over my looks. I remember reaching a point where I thought, well, there are plenty of uglier people in the world and they don't seem to let their looks get in the way of their happiness. I still don't dawdle in front of the mirror, but nowadays, I care a little less. Perhaps because I'm happily married and besides, who has the time to worry about looks anyway.

So imagine my surprise that I should be so enamored of my features on my little guy. Every time I look at him, I think, how did a little guy of ours turn out to be so handsome! Of course, Jeff is strikingly handsome, and the little guy looks a lot like Jeff (or at least as Jeff did as a baby). But the funny thing is that he has my eyes and nose, and I find them to be the most adorable little eyes and nose.

These days, I sometimes stand in front of the mirror and look at myself a little differently. I twist my lips, raise my brows, open my mouth, and move my jaws just as I saw my little guy do. And when I look carefully, I see myself and the little guy smiling back at me.

Loving the little guy helps me love myself a little more.

Growing

I'm sitting in the dark, camped out on our extra futon, typing with one hand. My other arm is holding the little guy, conked out with his head rolled over the crook of my left arm. It has been a rough day for him. The developments occurring in his brain seem to seize him especially radically on certain days. Today, for example, his eyes have been popping open unusually wide at even the most mundane objects. We're not sure how these objects and surfaces appear to him, but we see their impact on him. He can't seem to tear his eyes away, and he stares and stares, even as his eyes droop from fatigue and he cries in desperate need of sleep. His current nap is the result of a 40 minute workout of shooshing, rocking, patting, and repeatedly putting him down only to pick him back up when he cries out with an urgent plea for peaceful sleep.

When he has a difficult time falling asleep, I jump on those opportunities to break our self-imposed rule and let him sleep on me. His warm body fills me like nothing else. When he breathes on me, I want to suck it in, knowing that we really are one still.

Our little baby has been growing incredibly quickly. He is now over 14 pounds, almost double his lowest weight of 7 pounds and 2 ounces about five days after his birth. When we put him down on Tiny Love Gymini playmat, he latches onto the limbs of the orange giraffe and sky-blue monkey with such determination, and we boast as if he has scaled the highest of towers. He smiles and coos at us, and we know he has the best disposition. When our friends Paul and Hugo visited over the weekend, he took it upon himself to babble and engage our guests, and we knew that we have one gracious host. He's already a little person.

What an incredible year this has been. He will be three months old this Saturday, and I still can't believe he's here with us.

The Threat of Domesticity

When I was 14, my parents bought a hamburger stand after my dad quit his company job. That was when my mom, who had always stayed home and made us after-school snacks, started working full-time for the first time in my life. They started leaving at 5:30 in the morning and returning after 10pm, six days a week. That left us three kids to run the household.

I don't remember how much housework we had done before my mom started working. I remember helping her with the laundry at times and assisting in the kitchen. And learning how to make a dish here or there. But I can't recall if we even had regular chores until then.

Once she started working, I remember the three of us sitting in front of the TV a lot and fighting over the remote control. While resenting that my brother always wanted to watch horror films, even as we sat next to him on the couch with our hands cupped over our eyes. And endlessly eating burritos and eggrolls stashed in the freezer in wholesale size boxes that my parents had brought home from the burger shop.

Those days are now a blur, but my memory then skips to a time when we started doing the groceries. And the laundry. And the dishes. And cooking dinner. And endlessly fighting over who should do what.

We fought daily. Over the same set of gripes day after next. It's your turn to do the dishes. I did them last night. It's your turn to do the laundry. Why am I always doing them? You have to make the dinner tonight. You said you would!

In my teenage world, having to do something out of turn was a grave injustice. I shouldn't always have to be the one to do the dishes. Why is it always up to me to figure out what to make for dinner? Why can't you fold your own laundry for once?

We had no sense of order. We were living in the realm of the Lord of the Flies, and I was sure it was my place to impose order. And justice.

I developed a habit of ranting freely. Whenever the situation seemed to call for it. The three of us fought with all that was within us. With the fervor and intensity of divorcing couples. There was no sense of boundary of what would be deemed proper behavior. Within our four walls, we screamed at each other and cried regularly. We nursed our headaches afterwards.

Looking back, it's now clear that we were fighting over more than just having to wash one more dirty dish or carry a bag of groceries from King Kullen two blocks down the street. It was a time of change and anxiety for our whole family. We had lost our sense of security that had come with my dad's company job, and we didn't know how to cope with the emotional stress of feeling like we had been spit out into the world to fend for ourselves.

Years later, my mom rued that she and my dad had not imposed a sense of order when they both started working. We were so busy, she said. We shouldn't have left the three of you alone like that.

With no adult to guide us, we never really developed the skills to manage ourselves or each other. And couldn't seem to find a way to cope, except with the passing of time and by drifting away from each other.

One year, when I was home from college, my aunt came to visit from Korea. She happened to come when our family was in the middle of moving from our rental apartment to the first home we had ever owned. She watched me and my sister organize all the furniture, tear down all the boxes, and sort through all that needed to be put away in cupboards and drawers. Later, she told my mom that I was ready to run my own household. That I would be quite the catch. That any bachelor would be lucky to have me in his home.

I remember feeling my face stinging from that comment. It was the same shame I felt when I went to stay with a friend at her aunt's house during one Thanksgiving during college, and as we were helping with the dinner, the aunt observed that I managed myself in the kitchen like someone who had a lot of experience.

Oh, I just helped my parents out here and there, I remember responding.

I felt that I had become overly domesticated. Domestic skills were nothing to be proud of. In my world, they were associated with resentment and bitterness. Something acquired despite myself. I didn't want them to be the dominant markers of my teenage years, even as I gloated when my parents thanked me for helping them.

When I first started living alone, I shunted domesticity to the side. I took my laundry to the laundry service. I had two pots and one frying pan, but took months to acquire cooking utensils. I loved eating out. I'm too busy to cook, I loved to say. Too many other important things going on.

Over the years, I've learned to become more balanced by cooking occasionally and doing my own laundry. And breaking out the vacuum and the mop on a regular basis.

Now that Jeff and I have our baby, though, domesticity once again threatens to dominate our lives. Our days are now filled with laundry, bottles washing, grocery shopping, and cooking. Sometimes I find myself reverting to my teenage self, a complaint on the tip of my tongue over having to wash an extra bottle or yet again doing the laundry. In a preemptive move, I prepared a chart -- with many a revisions -- specifying exactly who is responsible for what and presented it to Jeff after sending it to him on Google Docs.

Do you want to be in charge of clearing the Diaper Genie? I propose to Jeff. Then I'll be in charge of unloading the dish-washer.

He looks at me patiently and asks, Can't we just work together?

It takes me a few minutes to remember. Oh, right. We're grown up now.

I'm grateful to him for the reminder.

Classes on Glass Blowing

For those in the Bay Area looking for a cool gift idea, consider this! As I've posted before, Jeff is a glass blower and he has made some beautiful pieces like this over the years. Anyone can make something worthy of ooh's and aah's -- so long as you keep at it and develop the skills. If you've ever seen a glass blowing demo, you know how cool the process is. Every glass blower I've met is intensely into the art -- and there is a wonderful community of glass blowers in the Bay Area. You can give the class as a gift -- or better yet, take the class yourself to make a gift!

Cranium Challenged

Jeff and I are big headed people. Not quite bobbleheads but not entirely out of range. My head looks deceptively larger than Jeff's, and Jeff loves to tease me about it with malicious glee. But when we first started dating, we measured our heads with a tape ruler, and we both know that Jeff's is larger by two inches. Mine's only flatter while Jeff's is long.

So when we were expecting, we were of course anticipating a baby with a large head -- both in terms of width and depth. We worried about it a bit before the due date and prayed that the little guy wouldn't be too ripe. When the doctor decided to induce me nine days early, we were relieved.

When we visited the pediatrician for our one month check-up in early November, the little guy measured at 75th percentile in terms of height and weight. We were happy to learn that he was proportional.

When they measured the head, though, we found out that he was only in the 25th percentile in terms of head circumference. You would think we would have been relieved to have spared our child our lop-sided fate. Instead, our immediate reaction was to worry. Oh, no, how could his head be so small? Is something wrong? Is his brain developing properly?

We've obviously entered the realm of worrying because we can.

The doctor told us all was fine as he looked up to gaze at our heads. He seemed assured that it'll take more than one generation for our clan to join the ranks of the cranium challenged.

Learning to Be a Mother

I've been surprised to find that I've been nagged by a strange sense of anxiety since becoming a mom. Not enough to take away from the doting moments I've been sharing with the little guy, but enough to make me wonder what the hell is going on. Hormones? Definitely. The control freak in me rearing its enormous head in the midst of all the changes? Probably. Some unexamined fear creeping out? Hmmm...

You'd think after all the waiting and anticipating, I should just sit back and enjoy motherhood. That's what I expected. And most of the time, that's how it is. I hold the little guy tight across my chest and soak him in. But at random times throughout the day, the anxiety seeps out. When I find myself unshowered and undressed at 11 in the morning. When the feeding has been going on for over an hour, and I haven't yet crossed off any of the items on my to do list. When I realize that I have just a couple of hours left before it is bedtime again.

I sometimes feel like I should be somewhere else. As if there should be two of me -- one running around as I am used to doing and the other cuddling with the baby. I feel somewhat desperate and unproductive. And almost always, like I'm trying to catch up.

The anxiety was the worst about a month after delivery. When my parents had already left and we were trying to handle our new life on our own. We were starting to settle into a routine that was meant to give us time to get some sleep, to do all the tasks that needed to be done, and also to find some time for each other and ourselves. And discovered in the process that there isn't time to fit them all in.

I generally have a lot of anxiety about time. Probably from watching my parents work away for decades doing meaningless, repetitive labor -- only for the sake of making a living for the family. And because I so fear that such a big chunk of their lives had been wasted, I feel like I have to have something to show for my day -- something concrete that I can point to and assure myself that the day had been productive.

Being a mother is forcing me to let go of my desperate hold on time. I feel like I have to take some lessons in Zen Buddhism -- and learn how to focus on the moment at hand instead of keeping a part of me always speeding ahead. And to be ok with not being able to account for it by the tenth of a billable hour. And letting some things go.

But that would mean giving up my sense of control. Another thing I like to latch onto.

One of these days, I will learn these lessons.

Our Thanksgiving

I should have gone to bed at my usual time the night before. On most nights, I'm tucked in bed by 9pm, following up on the day's emails and news, before I conk out around 10pm for four hours of solid sleep while Jeff takes care of the baby. My shift starts at 2am.

The night before Thanksgiving, however, we watched more episodes from the third season of Lost on Hulu, an indulgence we haven't had since I was on bedrest during pregnancy. It was too easy to click the "Next Video" button as we excoriated Kate for having slept with Sawyer and wondered how they were going to kill off Charlie. And before I knew it, it was already past 11:30pm. But hey, live wild. It was the holidays.

When I took over for my shift, the little guy was just finishing one of his many meals. He then slept until around 3:30 am. When he woke again, I took him into the other room where he ate and then dozed for about 30 minutes. He then woke again unhappy with his state of being and proceeded to toss and turn, apparently trying to deal with his gasses. After a couple of hours of discomfort, it was mealtime again. I finally got him to sleep again at 7am.

I intended to close my eyes for just a few minutes while he slept, but when I woke again, it was already 9:30am.

I rushed into the bedroom and woke up Jeff.

"Jeff, when are your parents coming?"

"I'm not sure. They haven't called back yet."

I grabbed his phone and saw that there was no message.

"I hope they don't show up too early. They wouldn't just show up, right? We'd better get up and get dressed."

"Ok."

"Can you watch the baby for 10 minutes? I really need to poop and then I have to pump."

"Sure. Come here, Mr. T."

I handed the baby off to Jeff and rushed to the bathroom.

It had been a few days since I had done number two and that's never a good thing. Some alien creature had taken over my body since delivery and my system was no longer reliable. My efforts to eat more fiber sometimes failed when we had no time to shop for groceries, so I often resorted to taking plum extract supplements that my mom had sent. But they obviously were not working as I had hoped. I felt packed inside, and I knew I had to go before it got worse. So on this morning, I even took a nasty tasting drink of "Colon Cleanse" that we had in our pantry.

I had been sitting there for good 15 minutes with US Magazine across my lap when Jeff banged on the bathroom door. He popped his head in and said, "They're here!"

"What?"

"My parents are here!"

"Oh god. I haven't even showered. And it's going to take me some time here. And I have to pump."

"Don't worry. Do what you have to do. I'll take care of things out here."

With that, he shut the door.

I sat there, feeling miserable. And for the life of me, I couldn't go. I sat there as I heard the doorbell ring and heard Jeff rush down the hallway and open the door. Then I heard the greetings and his parents coo at the baby. Then their footsteps walked past the shut bathroom door, as I continued to sit there.

After another 5 to 10 minutes, I finally gave up. Feeling worse than I did before I started, I took my shower and got dressed as quickly as I could.

I rushed into the living room to greet Jeff's parents. Then sat uncomfortably for a few minutes as they chatted about their recent cruise to the Hawaiian Islands. I then handed them the photo album I had made for them of our little guy's birth so that they could entertain themselves while I went off and pumped.

I then rejoined our guests for another stretch while Jeff went off to take his shower.

Later, I handed the baby back to Jeff and excused myself as discreetly as I could so that I could try again.

No luck.

I came back out and squirmed some more.

Around 1pm, I decided that I had to do something. Jeff's brother and his girlfriend were also coming around 2pm, and I couldn't keep excusing myself. Then I remembered we had coffee. The caffeinated kind. Coffee always worked for me. But I haven't had it for two years ever since we started trying to have a baby. Now that I was breastfeeding, it was still not an option. But I was desperate. I had to sacrifice one round of breastmilk to do this for myself.

So while Jeff prepared the roast and our guests munched on cheese and crackers, I downed one cup of coffee like a tequila shot. Then another. I waited 10 minutes and then excused myself again.

This time, after additional effort, it worked. With great relief, I did a mercy flush. And heard the now all too familiar sound of the toilet clogging.

Fuck.

I tried to unclog the damn thing with the new heavy duty plunger that we had just bought last week. It hadn't worked the week before and it wasn't working now.

About 15 minutes later, I heard Jeff knock on the door.

"Are you ok in there?"

"I clogged up the toilet." I felt on the verge of tears.

Pause...

"Here, let me try it."

"No, no. Stay with your parents. I'll just call the plumber. I hope they're working today..."

I closed the lid and ran into the bedroom to look up the number for Plumberman. Then got voicemail.

"Hi, this is Shinyung. You were here last week. Our toilet is clogged again, and we need someone to unclog it right away. We have guests at our house, and we only have one bathroom. Can you please, please call me back as soon as you can?"

With that, I waited with the phone in my hand. And turned to Baby T, "Things are not going so well today..."

The phone rang less than 15 minutes later.

"Hi, this is Larry from Plumberman. I can be there in about half an hour. Does that work."

"Oh, bless you."

When I went out to the living room to tell Jeff the good news, he was on the phone, telling his brother to make sure to stop by a gas station on their way up if they had to go.

Shortly after our other guests arrived, Larry the Plumberman showed up. He was done in less than two minutes. He charged us his usual $60, even though it was a holiday. Jeff gave the guy a $20 tip.

After, we had a lovely meal. Our little guy's first Thanksgiving with his grandparents, his uncle and his girlfriend and their three pugs.

Little does he know that The Plumberman saved the day.

Now...

It's 5:30 in the morning, and I am listening to the grunts, sighs, wails, and snorts coming out of his little body. I had just picked him up to pat his back to make sure I had burped him properly. After re-swaddling him. And adjusting the folds across his neck to make sure that they weren't brushing too closely to his mouth. Earlier, when he wasn't breathing as heavily, I had leaned in to listen to his breaths, to make sure he was breathing. And took an extra minute to stare at him, as I have done over and over again during the past six and a half weeks.

The little guy -- all 11.5 pounds of him -- fills up our whole house. When we are in the same room, all of our being is directed toward him. When we are elsewhere, his every crackle and sneeze are transmitted through the baby monitor. His noise takes up all of our consciousness and alertness. We crane our necks, stop in our tracks, and still all else to listen to what comes out of him. Does it sound unusual? Is his breathing labored? Is that a cute little snore coming out of the little guy? Doesn't he grumble remarkably like a gremlin?

Sometimes, I still don't believe it. That he's here with us. Two years after we started trying to conceive. After two miscarriages. After fretting that it was taking so long. And then fearing that it may never be.

Now, he is here. With each breath, he announces he is here. And reminds us how he depends on us.

Time now seems to fly by in warp speed, taking with it pieces of him, how he was yesterday, the day before. And presents new discoveries with each day.

All I can do is hold him and be grateful.

California Lawyer Article

California Lawyer magazine asked me to write an article for them a few months ago, and here is what I wrote. Not much different than what I've written often in this blog, but I thought I might as well post it. Here is the link.

On Mothering

My parents stayed with us for three weeks to help us take care of our newborn.

When I first asked her to help us out with our baby, my mom responded, "I think American babies are different than Korean babies."

"What do you mean?"

"American people take their babies outside right away. You would never do that with a Korean baby. American babies must be built stronger. I don't think I would know how to take care of an American baby."

I didn't get into a discussion about whether our baby would be an "American baby" under her definition, but I tried to convince her that all babies are the same, even though I lacked the basis to make such an assertion. When my persuasive skills failed, we agreed that she would help with only the cleaning and the cooking.

On Wednesday, the day before I was scheduled to be induced, my parents arrived from New York with enough food to last us through a nuclear attack. When they unloaded their suitcase, it spilled out with cellophane packets of dried-out seaweed, an assortment of dried fish, varieties of ground rice powder, sesame seeds, and other ingredients for postpartum concoctions.

After unpacking, my mother marched into my kitchen and surveyed the cupboards, refrigerator, freezer, and pantry.

"Where is the sesame oil? What about the soy sauce? You don't have ground red pepper? Oh, these? These aren't the right kind. Where did you buy these? We'll have to get some more. How old are these black sesame seeds? Get me a basket. A big one..."

After she cleared the counter, re-arranged the pots and pans, and browsed through the refrigerator, she grabbed the Swiffer and put the vacuum in my dad's hands. By the next evening, the floors had been vacuumed and mopped, the refrigerator cleaned, the ceilings cleaned of cobwebs, the laundry done, all furniture dusted, the floor mats dried in the sun, my plants thoroughly watered, and our yellow lab Sherlock's fur balls exorcised from all corners of the house.

Early Friday morning, shortly after we called them from the hospital to announce the baby's arrival, my parents rushed over in a cab. After oohing and aahing over the baby and inquiring about my breakfast, they left the hospital in a cab. About five hours later, they returned, again in a cab, but this time bearing a pot of pine nut porridge.

"I thought you told me the food was good at the hospital!" said my mother. "How come you ate only a bagel for breakfast? You can't breastfeed on a bagel."

The next morning, they returned with a new pot of abalone porridge, more pine nut porridge, and two types of seaweed salad.

"I wanted to bring seaweed soup, but I wasn't sure how to transport it..."

When we returned home from the hospital, we were greeted with balloons and a big pot of seaweed soup.

During the next two weeks, I was mothered as I had never been mothered before.

As soon as I stirred in the morning, my mother knocked on my door.

"Are you ready for your breakfast?"

By 6am, my mom and dad had already had their breakfast. By the time my husband and I woke up, fed the baby, and sauntered out of the bedroom around 8am, we would find my mother in the middle of cooking a second breakfast just for me. She would bring over a steaming pot of soup, a fresh cooked bowl of rice, a whole fish, and various other side dishes.

"I cooked a separate pot of rice just for you. Dad and I'll eat the leftovers. You have to eat everything I cooked for you!"

"But Mom, I can't eat all this food. It's too much."

"You're nursing. You have to eat a lot. In Korea, you eat until you get sick and tired of eating. You eat for your baby. Tonight, remember you have to wake up in the middle of the night and have a snack. You can't go through the whole night without eating something. You can have some of the porridge I made for you."

"Mom, I'm tired of eating. I ate non-stop for 9 months."

"You do it for your baby!"

When I ate, my parents hovered over me. They jumped out of their chairs if I needed to re-fill my glass of water or wanted to check on the baby.

"You eat. You need to recover. I'll get it for you!"

And for the meals we ate together, they brought over my food first.

"You start eating. Don't wait for us. You have to eat when everything is hot. You are a mother now. You have to take care of yourself."

It wasn't the usual order of things, not in our family where Confucian hierarchy was strictly followed, with the father served first and the youngest child served last. And it was unlike the kind of parenting I had seen for the past 25 odd years when I had felt more like a parent at times as we played out the drama of an immigrant family.

When she wasn't cooking or washing the dishes or mopping or dusting or doing the laundry or weeding my garden, my mom held our baby. And I don't know how to explain how it felt to see my mother hold my baby the way she must have held me 38 years ago. To see her gently fold her arms around the child, to smile and coo at him, to wrap him in her love and to bestow all of her best of intentions on his well-being. To see her affection and tenderness spill out at his sight.

She must have forgotten her protestations about "American babies" when she showed me how to bathe him, how to hold him when breastfeeding, how to massage him.

Seeing her with him, I knew that I had been mothered in the best way possible. And that my child would be a part of this history -- of mothering skills passing from one generation to the next.

Catching Up to the Day

Since my parents left about ten days ago, today is the first day I've felt somewhat in control of my day. Instead of the day whipping me around by my ass, I actually felt one step ahead of it. By 4pm, I had already worked out, finished all of the laundry, had all bottles cleaned and sterilized, had vacuumed, had eaten both breakfast and lunch, and had even remembered to drink lots of fluids to help with the lactation and eat lots of fruit to help with a certain other problem. Compare that to Tuesday, when I felt like having a little breakdown for failing to keep myself well hydrated and barely having a chance to finish half a sandwich for lunch while foregoing dinner altogether because I was so tired.

It's a challenge to try to fit in all of the chores while the baby is asleep, and god forbid he awakes before I had finished going through all of the tasks on my list -- which has been the rule, not the exception. The one privilege I started allowing myself is a workout at the gym. I jump in the car and speed up and down the hills of Noe Street like a madwoman to get to the gym to fit in my 30-40 minute workout while Jeff hangs out with the baby.

It is only because Jeff has been a partner in the true sense of the word in taking care of our little Baby T that things have been as manageable as they have been. We've broken up the nights into two shifts, and I have not been sleep deprived since we started that schedule. When I fretted about failing to take good care of myself and negatively impacting my lactation, he ran out and picked up a bunch of groceries for us -- and cooked a healthy dinner for us last night. I don't know how single mothers do it -- they have my deepest respect.

So it should not be a surprise that my blogging has suffered a bit in the past several weeks. I can sit and write for an hour -- or hold my baby in that time -- or sleep. We have grand plans to make life easier for ourselves -- like hiring someone to clean our house. But it will only happen when we have time to look for someone. With each day, however, our new life seems easier. And one of these days, I will be able to post entries with coherent thoughts once again. Until then, dear readers, I beg for your patience...

Two and Half Weeks Later...

It has been about two and a half weeks since our baby's birth, and the world I live in now is very different than the one I inhabited before he showed up. I feel like I'm on the other side. As if I've climbed Mount Everest and can see a vista I didn't even know existed -- and can appreciate a human experience that I only poorly imagined before. I think I would sound trite if I tried to describe all of the changes I have gone through, but I'm sure anyone who has been through this can relate. My relationship to my body, to my sense of self, to my family and others... nothing is the same.

But despite that, having our little guy feels so completely natural. It feels like he has been with us forever. He feels so right when I hold him in my arms. And when I press my nose against his skin, he smells exactly as he should, and I can't get enough of him. When I look at him, I fill with an aching feeling -- a determination that I should -- that I have to -- do right by him. Please let me not fail him.

There are so many moments in the past two and a half weeks that I want to preserve. Like the second when they pulled his writhing grey body out and laid him on my chest -- and how I cried when I saw him. And how he has grown so miraculously fast that he seems like a different person already, and it hasn't even been three weeks. And how much it warms my heart to see Jeff hold our baby and talk to him with the most engaging of conversations, even as he changes the fifth consecutive diaper in less than an hour -- he who always declined to hold other people's babies. And the tireless effort of my mother to mother me after the delivery -- and to see her hold our little baby and to know that she must have held me the same way 38 years ago. And to see my father kiss our child, even though I had never seen him kiss anyone as long as I've known him.

I am filled with emotions, and I can't seem to contain them. Life seems so tender, as if it would bruise so easily. But it is also very soft, and it is in this softness that I have been living in the past two and half weeks. Let us stay here a while...

Our Baby

Here's our baby at 5 days old. (I'll just call him Baby T on the blog so that I don't give away his privacy before he's ready to.)

The last 5 days have been wonderful and tiring and wonderful. I can't seem to stop staring at the little guy. And holding him. I'll write more when I've had more sleep, but I just wanted to post a little update and thank all of you for your happy wishes.