Category Archives: Conflict

Mourning for a version of a person that is gone

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I was at lunch yesterday with my friend, telling her about the situation with my aunt. I told my friend that when I was little, I was obsessed with my aunt. Ultimately, my aunt is the reason that I love baking because she was the person who spent quality time in the kitchen with me. She’s the person who always proactively asked me about what I was learning in school, what I was interested in, and actually wanted to know me for me. Although my aunt is genuinely a good person and always had been, I know part of her love and interest for me was because she looked at me as the daughter she never had. She had three sons when each time, she really wanted a daughter. So I got all the cute hand sewn dresses and hand knit clothes she intended for her own. I got showered with endless girly gifts and jewelry that she would have loved for her own daughter. But once I got older, and once she came back from being away in Boston for a number of years, she was almost a different person. She officially converted to being a Jehovah’s Witness. Her main concern was the congregation and her “brothers and sisters.” And since at that time, I was a pre-teen/teen, I was changing a lot, too. At that point, I was finally seeing with greater clarity all the dysfunction in my family with eyes wide open. I also realized that at this point, she rarely wanted to acknowledge anything that was ever wrong. I could never have a deep conversation with her. Maybe it was always the case that this was impossible, but when I was in elementary school, that never would have even entered my mind given I was so young and immature. But it always made me sad that we could never have a real conversation together. It was impossible and still is impossible for us to have any meaningfully deep conversation about anything. I don’t know if she is incapable of it or if she just actively avoids it. I guess I will never know; it will always remain a mystery to me.

I told my friend all this. She paused for a while and then looked up at me and said, “Wow. Do you think that some of this frustration is because you never really allowed yourself to mourn the version of her you loved that is gone?”

I didn’t know what to say to this. I suppose I never looked at it this way. It makes sense my friend would hear it this way since she’s a deeply feeling and empathetic person. I guess my friend is partly right: my aunt and I will never have that sweet, simple relationship we had when I was a toddler, kindergartener, or elementary school-age child, where it was easy and always just about baking, having fun shopping and doing playground outings, or enjoying treats together. But as I mentioned here earlier, I am not sure she was ever capable of having a deeper, meaningful relationship with me. So this second part is not a “loss” per se, but more something I wished we could have had that we just never did and never will have.

It reminded me of what my therapist said to me when I was pregnant and due to give birth any day. She told me that I should give myself the time, permission, and grace to mourn the relationship with my mom and dad I wish I could have had, but never got to have and never will have. It’s the same with my aunt: I do wish we had a different, better, and deeper relationship than what we have now. But this will never be. And we just have to work with what we have because c’est la vie.

The “family dinner” saga continues

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And, it did not end with my request to not have M come over. This is what she replied with:

“Sorry, I forgot about that. Can I come with my sister (not actual sister because in the Jehovah’s Witness cultish world, every person in the congregation is a sibling) because I am staying at her house?”

This desire to invite other people to all her meals will never, ever die, even when it’s to my house. Even when the house is owned by someone else, she still wants this random extra person to come. I don’t care that this person is housing my aunt in her place; I asked for my aunt to come over to my house for dinner. Why does this have to be so hard?!

I let the text sit for a day because I was having an irritating day at work, and I really didn’t want my pissy work temperament to transfer over to my aunt. Then, I did what most seemingly logical circa-2026 people do: I told ChatGPT Pro my situation and asked it to come up with a measured, firm, direct response that wasn’t passive aggressive or mad. And this is what it came up with, which I sent:

“Hi (Auntie) – I’m really looking forward to having you over on Sunday. I planned this dinner as a family-only gathering, so I’m not able to include additional guests this time. I hope you understand, and I’d still really love for you to come.”

A day later, she sent me a text saying that she is old, needs someone with her, and since I am coming to San Francisco at the end of the month, she will see me then.

To be honest, I was expecting this. She just needs to have a JW crutch with her at all times. She’s very capable of navigating the subway at her age. It would be an early dinner, and there would still be plenty of light out by the time she left here. So, as a last ditch effort, I told her that I would pay for her Uber ride to and from my house.

She still declined.

Now, we know what this was really about.

As Kaia said when she was an early toddler learning to speak, “ALL DONE!”

A family dinner that cannot ever just be a family dinner

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It doesn’t seem to matter who it is in my family, but everyone does something that truly, deeply drives me crazy. It reminds me of that Leo Tolstoy quote that you always see when it comes to families that was the first line of Anna Karenina: “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Dysfunction stems from a unique mix of human flaws, generational patterns, and unhealed wounds.

My aunt, my dad’s older brother’s wife, is currently in town, and she asked if we could get together while she was in New York. Of course I said yes, and several weeks ago, I asked her to come over for dinner this Sunday. She confirmed, and that was that. Well, that was not over, because out of nowhere today, she asks if instead of dinner at my place this Sunday that I go down to Manhattan Chinatown to meet her for dim sum with Chris and Kaia. I told her that wouldn’t be possible because of Kaia’s pre-scheduled extra-curricular activities. She then texts to see if Saturday dim sum would work; I replied back and said we already made plans.

I was getting more and more irritated with each response given we had already confirmed dinner at my place weeks in advance, and suddenly, she just wanted to change it. I know why she wants to change it: my aunt has this really frustrating habit of constantly inviting her random Jehovah’s Witnesses friends to almost all of our family dinners. It doesn’t matter if it’s just her son and family and me or all of the cousins and my parents, but she feels this urgent need to invite at least one to FOUR non-family people to any family meal. They are not part of our family, and they are people I will see once and completely forget about. Why does she constantly do this all the time? Even when I have explicitly asked her in the past when meeting for lunch in New York if it could just be us, lo and behold, she shows up with her New Jersey based friend I cannot stand called M, or one or two other random people I will have nothing to talk about with. M is a terrible person; she is a free loader. She makes sweeping, racist generalizations about groups of people she knows little to nothing about. And perhaps worst of all, M once explicitly said that “something was not right in the head” with Ed just years before he died. I truly wanted to punch her face in. And even after I confronted my aunt about how inappropriate and hurtful those comments were, she brushed me off, saying that M didn’t mean it that way and that I shouldn’t take it too seriously. My aunt has a true penchant for always ignoring serious issues and living a seemingly shallow life with no deep conversations ever possible. I told her I didn’t want M coming to any of our meals again. But of course, she ignored me and invited her anyway once against my wishes. We barely talked at that meal; I was PISSED. Part of the reason I wanted her to come over for dinner is to thwart any possibility of some random person showing up at my house because of her incessant “outside” invites.

So lo and behold, my aunt finally agrees over text to come for dinner at 5pm this Sunday. But the story’s not over because she has to text back: “Can I bring M with me, she wants to see Kaia.”

It’s like she’s deaf or suffering from amnesia that I strongly dislike this person. I simply responded back, “No, she is not invited. I have told you that I dislike her.” And I left it at that.

In the end, if she chooses not to come because of this, I truly don’t care. I’ve tried to be amenable and the “middle man” in too many of my family situations, and this is not a battle that I really feel strongly about. The level of delusion here is just beyond ridiculous. I do not want disrespectful, ignorant people in my house, and I am entitled to invite only who I want to my own house.

Conversations about death with a 4-year-old

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In the last couple months, Kaia has been asking questions that dance around death, but are not quite about death. It usually comes up in the context of bees or animals dying. She sees bugs get squashed all the time and knows that means they are dead. She sees her teachers stepping on lantern flies and their guts spraying everywhere. She has also noticed road kill a few times. In the last week or so, she’s asked about where my gonggong/popo/yeye/nainai (grandparents) are and why we cannot see them, or why she hasn’t met them. Then the anniversary of Ed’s passing came this past Wednesday, she started asking me more pressing questions about him, indicating that she’s really thinking through all this quite thoughtfully for her age.

“Why did he have to die?” she asked me.

“Well, Jiujiu got very, very sick, so sick that he just couldn’t live anymore,” I explained, in the lightest way possible. Then, I immediately dreaded that she might worry that if she catches a cold that she would then die. And… oh dear, that’s exactly where it went.

“Does that mean that if I get sick that I could die, too?” Kaia asked me with wide, worried eyes. Great. I am clearly terrible at this.

“No, baby, not at all!” I quickly tried to reassure her. “You see, we all get a little sick sometimes. Sometimes, we get a cold or a flu or a stuffy nose. But our bodies are strong, and we fight it off and we get better. Jiujiu’s situation was a lot, lot different than this. His body was sick for a very long time, and then his body couldn’t work anymore.”

She gave me her side-eyed head tilt again. Then, she buried her head and cried, “I don’t want to die!”

“Pookie, there’s no reason for you to worry about dying,” I held her close when I said this. “You are super strong and healthy, and you are going to grow up and hopefully have a long, healthy life. You have so much to do in this great life you have! Eventually, we will all die, but hopefully, that will be when we are very, very old, very far from now.”

Kaia paused. Then she looked up at me again with eyes of terror. “I don’t want mommy to die! I don’t want you to die, mama!” At this point, there were fat tears rolling down her face. It felt like I was getting worse as this was progressing.

“Oh, Pookster,” I said to her. “Mama is quite strong and healthy now. I tell you this every day, don’t I, that every day, Daddy and Mama take care of you, protect you, and love you. And so, hopefully, I will live for a very, very long time. So there’s no need to worry about mama dying now or anytime soon. I live to take care of you and protect you and love you, and you give me a reason to live and love. Do you understand? I love you.”

After a long pause, she seemed to be satisfied by this response. Phew. She snuggled closer to me and said she loved me. Then, she asked if we could build her little plane tomorrow. I said yes.

I always have to remind myself when having conversations with her that kids of her age take everything very literally. Her mind and body are growing by leaps and bounds. And the conversations will keep getting deeper and more complex. And I just need to stay ahead of it and be careful with every word I share with her. The last thing I want her to do is worry every day or night that Chris or I will die, or that she will die, or that she will be alone. She is definitely a feeling child, my feeling baby.

My right side’s baby tooth: any day now

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So it appears the last time I wrote about my loose baby tooth on my right side was September 2024. That was almost two years ago, and somehow I have managed to keep it in place this whole time… Somehow. While on our Caribbean trip, I could feel the tooth getting looser and looser. I’m sure I ate a few things on my right side while abroad that loosened it even more. There was even a point when I thought I heard a tiny little crack. There’s really no more bone underneath keeping it in place anymore; it’s just hanging onto a bed of my gums.

In the two weeks we’ve been back from our summer trip, it’s gotten more and more uncomfortable to eat. Even when I am de-pitting a cherry in my mouth, it’s uncomfortable. When I gargle water in my mouth, the baby tooth rattles. And even sometimes when I spit water out, I can feel the force of the water almost pushing at the baby tooth. Oftentimes when I am eating or brushing my teeth, I will need to push the baby tooth back into “its place,” otherwise it’s really uncomfortable and weird for me. Even though I’ve looked at my mouth closed from the outside, sometimes it feels like it wants to stick out of my cheek to tell the world, “Oh hey! Look at me! I’m 40 years old and a teeny weeny baby tooth is about to fall out of my MOUTH!”

Well, at least I can say now that I’ve made it to age FORTY AND A HALF with both baby teeth still in tact. And my left baby tooth — well, it’s quite solid and not even remotely loose. So I might even get to keep it until the day I die, which makes me thrilled!

A cancer diagnosis

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Chris, Kaia, and I were originally planning to meet two friends, a couple, this Saturday for lunch. But as the date was approaching, one of the friends seemed a bit non-committal when it came to picking a place. She was evading suggestions and not really saying she wanted or didn’t want anything. It was confusing because her tone wasn’t normally like this over text, so I could tell something was wrong that she didn’t want to share. Finally two days ago, she admitted to me that her head wasn’t in a great place because she just had a biopsy on a breast the other day that could mean she had breast cancer. So I suggested that we meet to catch up in person today, as maybe a 1:1 conversation would be easier for her to stomach than a group outing. And she agreed.

Yesterday, she got the biopsy results. They confirmed that she did, in fact, have a very early stage of ductal carcinoma, essentially stage zero breast cancer that had started developing in her milk ducts. Her doctor went over potential treatment options as a move-forward plan. She has another biopsy scheduled next week. She was very lucky that this was caught, as she had been avoiding mammograms for the last five years because her first mammogram was a miserable experience. Her doctor urged her to get the mammogram done, and then had the radiology department call her repeatedly to harass her into finally making an appointment. I told her she was very lucky to have such an involved, caring doctor. In my case, I am not sure I have any doctor who would be that insistent and make sure to follow up with me repeatedly… on anything. When it comes to breast cancer or any cancer for that matter, catching it this early is the best news you could possibly have.

My friend recently lost one of her best friends to an aggressive brain cancer. And previous to that, she lost her aunt to lung cancer (this is someone who had never smoked a day in her life). So cancer has unfortunately been top of mind for her in recent years. Now she has to go through treatments herself. She said this has forced her to think about death more, as unpleasant as it is…. and she sees all of this as a sign that she needs to go “full throttle” on all the things she wants to accomplish in life that will make her feel fulfilled before she dies… hopefully in another several decades.

I told her I think it’s really healthy for us to think more often about death. When you think about death, it forces you to come to terms with the fact that you will not live forever. And therefore, life is precious, and you need to focus on what’s truly important and meaningful to you. Stop obsessing over stupid shit. Stop spending time with people who deplete you and take from you but never give. Stop obsessing what “other people” will think. Stop putting off reading that book you’ve “been meaning “to read, or delaying that vacation you’ve been dreaming of taking. Quit your awful, toxic job and find something else where you’ll be treated better and like a real human. I realize all this is easier said than done, but all of this can be accomplished with little baby steps every single day. The baby steps become bigger steps, and then we start letting go of all the crap that doesn’t matter in life.

So, maybe this is life’s way of telling her that she’s meant to do great things, and she still has time. Plus, just get the freaking mammogram every year.

Canadian wildfires’ smoke come down to the Northeast of the US

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While this isn’t the first time we’ve experienced this, for the last two days, our skies have been grey, hazy, and smoky because of the numerous Canadian wildfires that are happening further north of us. The fact that it is causing air pollution here in New York City just shows how widespread and massive the wildfires are. Today, our building sent a mass email notification to let us know they would be shutting off the fans in all public hallways to prevent the wildfire smoke from further entering the building. Many people outside are wearing masks. Those who have respiratory issues have been asked to stay indoors. When I stepped outside today to go pick Kaia up from summer camp, I could immediately smell a burning smell.

All of this makes me sad. It’s a reality of living in a time of climate change. But it makes me even sadder that we have an administration that denies climate change is even a thing. And it’s even more terrifying that many people believe climate change is a hoax. How do you then look at the hazy skyline of New York City that is barely visible right now due to wildfires all the way up in Canada…?!

When a fancy cake store opens along the way home, and someone doesn’t get the cake she wants

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A new location of Lady M Cake Boutique has opened just a block away from where we live, and it’s along our walk back home from the subway. As we anticipated the cake shop opening for a while, Kaia kept asking when they would open so we could go in and have some cake. I told her that when they opened, I would take her and we could get some cake.

Well, the day finally came the week before we left for our Caribbean trip. I did stay true to my word, and we did end up going in. Kaia chose a slice she wanted, and we left with a very expensive slice of cake. Unfortunately, she never ended up having cake that evening because she was already full from dinner, so Chris and I ended up having to eat the cake ourselves. She remembered she never got any cake. So for the last two days when we pass this cake shop, she has raised hell with me and tantrummed like there’s no tomorrow to try to get her way.

And… well, it’s been pretty miserable for me. She knows I am softer than Chris, which is why she always asks me for these types of treats and not him. And she also lashes out a lot more when I say no.

“I WANT CAKE! YOU WILL BUY ME CAKE!” she screamed twice this week on the sidewalk as I nearly had to drag her along the way home.

I probably need to have a long chat with ChatGPT to see how I can calm a screaming 4-year-old down when she doesn’t get what she wants because my patience is really wearing with all these public outbursts. I’m *that* mother trying to control her child, who apparently thinks she can have whatever she wants when she wants it.

Another day, another layoff

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I’ve been working full time for over 18 years now. And at every single company I’ve ever been at, I’ve seen layoffs happen. At my first company, there was a layoff just four months after I started. Then five months later, layoff round 2 happened, and I got cut. Fast forward 18 years later, and layoffs are pretty much the normal thing that I expect will happen. The question, though, is, whether I will get laid off.

I’ve been at my current company for almost six years now. I’ve seen two rounds of layoffs here before today. The first was unexpected. The second was planned, announced, and very much expected. And then today’s was also expected given my company merged (or really, got acquired) by another company, so of course there were duplicities and restructuring that needed to happen. I guess at this point of my career, I have just become numb to all the madness, the constant change, the constant “reductions in force.” It’s tiring, exhausting, demoralizing. When you work in tech, your job is never, ever “safe.” Job stability is a joke here. The default expectation is that there will be layoffs.

Luckily for me this time, after layoff round 3, I am still employed. My job is safe — at least for the next few months. Who knows what will happen and what decisions will be made? I remember when I got laid off the first time in 2009, even though I had a big feeling I would be impacted, when it finally happened, I felt so sad, angry, and confused all at the same time. I felt a lot of insecurity and uncertainty about my place in life (it also didn’t help that my mom equated employment with self worth, but that’s another stupid story for another day). What I wish I could have told myself then was that — everything always works out in the end. “You will be more than okay.” Leaving a job not on your own terms is never a fun thing. But there’s always something better out there — the time just has to be right.

Mangoes with black spots = sign of ripeness in other countries, but a sign of rot/”bad” in the U.S.

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One thing I noticed while eating the many varieties of mangoes we were lucky to taste across four Caribbean islands on this trip was that many of them are ripe when they have black spots. This is actually a good thing, not a bad thing: it signals to us that they are ready to eat, and we should eat them right away! This was the case for the Julie and mango longues, and especially true for the starch and dodo mangoes. We got told from multiple vendors, as well as our smoothie guy who gifted us the five cutlass mangoes in Port of Spain, that black spots were a positive thing. The funny thing is that I told Chris that this would absolutely not fly in the U.S. You could never have a display of mostly black spotted mangoes in the U.S. and actually get those to sell — no freaking way!

The strange thing, though, is that black spots with mango varieties readily available in the U.S. — so Ataulfo (champagne, our default from March to June) and Kent — actually are not good when they have black spots. For these two mango varieties that come from Mexico, black spots are a sign that they have really gone bad or are about to go bad. I know this after peeling and cutting hundreds and hundreds of mangoes over the years. Sometimes we don’t monitor the mangoes closely enough, and the black spots appear. And once the spots appear, this is truly a sign of rot. Those parts don’t taste good, or they actually smell off. Some of them become mush in the parts where the black spots are.

The American public is quite superficial when it comes to produce. Everyone wants picture-perfect fruit and vegetables, oftentimes at the expense of taste, flavor, and even nutrition. It’s partly why mainstream supermarket tomatoes look super red and plump but often taste like nothing or are mealy in texture inside. So I doubt that even if Trinidad and Tobago could export mango longue or starch mangoes to the U.S. that they would do well from a sales perspective outside of ethnic markets in neighborhoods with a large Caribbean population. That is sad, a real loss for someone like me who wants every single mango variety possible at the tips of her fingers!