My Daughter
My daughter. Don’t let her demure demeanor deceive you. She’s wild.
My daughter turned one a few weeks ago. Most parents are shocked by how quickly the first year of a child’s life passes. This was not the case for me. This past year felt like the longest year of my life.
In a blog post just a couple weeks before she was born, I wrote about how worried I was that she’d turn out to be more wild than her easygoing brother who never gave us much trouble when it came to his sleep, eating, potty training, or anything else that our fellow parents struggled with. All my fears came true.
I love her, no doubt. But she is wild.
Whatever the messiest, most dangerous item is in the house, she’ll want her hands on it. Even better, on top of it, like the kitchen counter because it’s filled with sharp knives, hot drinks—the fun stuff!
She’ll be happily playing on the ground with an age-appropriate toy. I’ll turn away for a nanosecond to pee and when I return, she’ll have opened the refrigerator and toppled the stack of glass Tupperware. I feel like a football player doing practice drills non-stop. I take a water break, and there she goes! Right to the medicine cabinet.
She also still doesn’t sleep through the night. She’s hypersensitive to just about everything—stimuli that never bothered her brother when he was a baby. She’ll hear a neighbor’s dog bark and wake up in the middle of the night. A tooth will be coming in and she’ll shriek for hours.
I’m continually sleep derived and exhausted. Each day, I look at her and say, “Girl, you owe me so hard. You better provide a cushy life for me when I’m old and gray.” My husband hears me from across the room. He shakes his head and mutters, “I thought we weren't going to pass on those burdensome Korean expectations you yourself hated growing up.”
As it often goes, however, what makes her difficult is exactly what I love about her. She’s curious, exploratory, and relational. She always wants to be with us, doesn’t like it when she’s not (and makes it known!); she’s got a voice and she’s not afraid to use it. She expresses her needs, likes, and dislikes so clearly. She’s feisty and moves through the world like a boss. On multiple occasions, she has stolen snacks from other babies with a smirk on her face—snacks they were happily in the midst of eating.
Of course, her wildness, my exhaustion, and this pandemic didn’t keep me from throwing an exquisite birthday party for her. I…I mean she…she deserved it!
The one-year birthday is a big deal within the Korean tradition. Unfortunately, due to current circumstances, we weren’t able to gather as many people as we would have liked but that didn’t stop us from getting all dolled up and having the customary festivities.
My family. We all dressed up in the traditional Korean hanboks. Aren’t they gorgeous?
A standard within most Korean one year old birthday parties is an age-old ceremony called the Doljanchi. In this ceremony, you lay out several items that symbolize various life paths. The one the baby chooses represents her destiny. Nowadays, people do this ceremony just for fun instead of as a serious fortune-telling rite. The items we laid out for her were (from left to right): A paintbrush (represents life as an artist/writer), money (you can guess what that represents!), a Bible (represents a call to ministry, just like her grandpa and mama), a hammer (okay so, it was supposed to be a gavel but we didn’t have one so we used a hammer instead), a stethoscope (represents a career within medicine), a bowl of rice (represents overall prosperity), and finally, yarn (represents a long life). You’ll notice there aren’t any items that represent any kind of misfortune. Life is hard enough, we want to set them up for success!
My daughter, the foodie that she is, chose the bowl of rice. Funnily enough, I chose the rice cake at my own one year birthday party.
My kids, along with their cousin, with my parents.
The whole family, with my brother and his wife on the top.
My kids!
And here we are. We made it, we survived her first year.
Thanks for indulging me by letting me show you these fun photos. Now, back to the complaining.
Before I became a stay-at-home mom, I kinda didn’t believe it when my SAHM friends told me they had no time to themselves. I left my job in the hopes that I’d have more time to write, exercise, read, etc.
I have less time to myself than I’ve ever had before and whenever there is a rare spare moment, I just want to sleep. Long gone are my solo 5 a.m. writing times. Oh, and that book I was working on? On hold yet again.
And if mothering a wild one wasn’t enough, the pandemic put me over the edge.
I’ve had to let go of—over and over again—my former standards for productivity and expectations of what I thought this year off would look like.
Recently, I heard a podcast episode with a bestselling author who shared that this pandemic has also made him feel so much less productive because he’s not able to do the kinds of projects and traveling he’s used to doing. He shared that he always feels like he should be doing more because he compares himself to his pre-pandemic self. Note: this author doesn’t even have young children.
Not only was it a relief to hear somebody say that, the fact that it was a prominent author who doesn’t have the extra load of young children, made me feel so much more at ease. I’m not doing something wrong, I realized. We’re all feeling this way.
I was continually berating myself and just needed to receive a big fat permission slip from somebody to tell me that whatever I was doing or not doing, was perfectly fine, and exactly where I need to be right now.
When I shared with a good friend my disappointment over not being able to work on my book in the way I thought I’d be doing, she responded, “Don’t you see? Your daughter is your book!” Mind you, this wise friend doesn’t even have children.
A lightbulb went off. My daughter is my book. My daughter is the fruit of my labor right now. In the same way I’d be losing sleep and pouring all of my energy into writing a book, I’m giving all of that to her. She is my art. She is the one I dreamed of, longed for, imagined, and then brought into being.
It occurred to me that, until this point, I didn’t think she was worthy of the same kind of attention I’d pour into a book or another work of art.
I looked at my daughter with a different lens after this aha moment.
In my most recent email to you all, I shared that I was in a bit of a cocoon and that was the reason for my inconsistent blog posts. Well, now you know the nature of my cocoon—my daughter.
I was embarrassed to share this because there’s something about parenthood that seems so much less…less valuable and productive than other kinds of work in our society, particularly the money-making kind of work. When we bring this assumption to light, though, and examine it, we can point out the faultiness of this thinking!
Raising children is just as valuable, meaningful, and productive. And what might be the most important thing for me to remember, is that it’s just for a season. There is an end to this phase. Not that we ever stop being parents, but the physically laborious part of parenting truly is temporary! Funnily enough, I had to remind myself of this years ago when I just had one child. That’s life though, right? We keep learning the same lessons.
Do you need permission to “just” be a parent? Or to take it easy during this pandemic even if you don’t have kids? And to possibly realize that this pandemic may be a gift in disguise as it’s forcing the entire, fast-paced world, to cocoon?
If you need a permission slip in the same way I needed one, I’m here to give it to you. Take it easy, take it slow. You don’t need to be productive to be valuable. Your value is infinite, intrinsic, and inherent since the moment you were born without ever having contributed anything to the world. The point of your life isn’t to produce. The point of your life is to receive your life as an extraordinary gift to experience more joy. More on that in the next blog post. Wanna make sure you receive that post? Be sure to subscribe at the bottom of the website.