Category Archives: family

A well-meaning and loving mum-in-law / Suma

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I cannot count the number of horror stories I’ve heard from friends, colleagues, and in my different social media groups about people’s mothers-in-law. The common thing I always hear is that people generally always get better support from their own parents when they have kids versus their in-laws, who can, in some cases, even be oppressive. People have also just assumed this is the case with me, and I’m pretty quick to correct them. The sad thing is — I cannot relate to those sentiments. My in-laws are far more supportive with Kaia than my parents ever have been. When we’re in Melbourne, they’ve babysat for her a number of nights when we’ve gone out to be child-free. My mum-in-law does all our laundry, including Kaia’s. She helps with cleaning her up if she’s there when Kaia’s finished a meal. She pays careful attention (and I wouldn’t be surprised if she even took NOTES) to what we say Kaia likes and doesn’t like. She even thinks about things I don’t think about. During our first year here with Kaia as a baby in 2022, she bought baby/child-safe insect repellant for her since the mozzies can be quite aggressive down here. Back then, I was touched when she would roast and air fry vegetables for Kaia and prepare them almost exactly as I prepared them back home for her in New York; she carefully watched all the Instagram stories I posted about what I was making Kaia as a baby (my massive baby-led weaning feeding project) and did it all for her when we came.

This time on our first day, my mum-in-law baked mini banana muffins for Kaia modeled after the healthy snacks I’d occasionally bake her. She also asked her friend for her recipe for healthy oat-nut cookies that she’d bake her grandchildren, since she knew that Kaia loved having healthy cookies at home made by her mummy. When we arrived on our first day, she casually mentioned she had them in the cupboard and fridge for Kaia over our lunch. And I just felt floored that she’d go to this level of effort. She’d already made us this elaborate and delicious lunch to welcome us back, a low-sugar vanilla birthday cake for Kaia, and now she’s also made TWO additional healthy baked treats?!

I tell Chris this all the time, but I don’t think he or his brother appreciate his mother enough. She really does try so hard in so many ways. His mum has a really high level of empathy, and she’s always trying to do the right thing whether people appreciate it or not. The level of effort she exerts to cater to Kaia’s needs based on what she knows I want and prefer has been really touching; I was nearly moved to tears when she showed me the container of healthy, low-sugar oat cookies she made. They even had little chopped nuts and dried fruit in them. She’s been following all of my social media and trying to replicate what I do for Pookster while we’re staying at her home here in Melbourne. I could only wish my mom would go to even a fraction of the same effort, but instead, she would just insist her way is the best way and that I lack wisdom to know what is best for my own child.

Happy 3rd birthday to my precious little miracle baby

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To my sweet baby Kaia Pookie, aka Pookster, aka Hoji, aka xiao bao,

Happy 3rd birthday, my precious little. It’s crazy to think that exactly three years ago, I thought my uterus and vagina were going to explode when I was in labor with you. But somehow I didn’t die and made it through with flying colors, and out came sweet, affectionate, thoughtful, curious, cheeky, flavor-loving YOU.

Every day you surprise me with what you learn and absorb in this world: your massively increasing vocabulary and syntax in both English and Chinese, your thoughtfulness, your adventure seeking ways, and your love of travel in all forms, whether it’s on the bus, subway, high-speed train, or airplanes; your crazy good memory that remembers faces and names of those you’d seen ages ago, as well as who is whose mummy and who is whose partner.

My sweet Kaia Pookie — I have loved and appreciated far more about life and love since you literally plopped out of my body and into my world. It sounds ridiculous to say this, especially given how many women get pregnant and how many babies are born every single day, but sometimes, I truly feel astounded that I was lucky enough to get pregnant, carry, and birth you. There are so many people in the world who would love to be mummies and daddies and do not get the privilege or pleasure; infertility/sub-fertility are on the rise globally, and not a day goes by when I do not remember that or hear a related story that is affecting a friend or colleague, or someone else tangentially related to someone in my circle. Daddy and I were lucky on our IVF journey. Not everyone else is so lucky who embarks on that tumultuous road. That’s why every day, I know exactly how lucky I am to call you my baby, and for you to call me your mumma.

Motherhood is all at once the most infuriating (oh, your tantrums and strong AF opinions!) and most incredible thing I’ve ever done. But I thank you for giving me the privilege and opportunity to be your mumma – mumma to the cuddliest little globe-trotting tiny human I’ve ever known. I love you to the ends of this earth, my sweet baby. You will always be my baby no matter what — even when you are 5, 15, 50, and 100. As I tell you in Chinese every night before bed; Every day, mama will take care of you, protect you, and love you — always.

The sketch Wall Street pool where Kaia had a makeup swim class

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We were able to get a free swim class from Kaia’s swim school since they were doing a limited time promotion: if families upload an Instagram reel or TikTok video praising the school and our experience with them, then we can get a free class redeemable by the end of December. So on Monday of this week, after I picked Kaia up from school, we took the subway down to Wall Street to the makeup swim class location at a pool I’d never been to. The pool was located at Wall Street Bath and Spa. The directions to get there seemed a bit weird: Look for the Spa 88 sign between a sandwich shop and a dry cleaners. I saw the school sign and walked down a dark staircase with Kaia. We poked our heads into the place and asked if this was where the swim class was. They confirmed we were correct. We then walked down another flight of stairs, through a steamy sea of half naked old men, sipping away at their cocktails and beer and reading newspapers and books. I had to walk through this strange area just to get to the women’s locker room. But once I got there, I discovered it was actually a very fancy spa-like locker room, complete with complex hair styling accessories and even a whole shelf of pool-side sandals that I could borrow while on the pool deck. I was pretty happy about this since I had forgotten my flip-flops.

I thought to myself, what the heck kind of sketchy place is this? It’s supposed to be a Russian bathhouse, but given that about 99 percent of the clientele were all 50s+ old white men who were barely clothed, I wasn’t totally sure this was a child-friendly place. I spoke with the instructors of the class, and they said that they didn’t even feel comfortable walking through the place, so they set up a tent on the pool deck to allow their students to change into their swimwear inside. This whole time, they didn’t even know the locker rooms existed and that you just had to walk through the sea of half naked men! I had to show them that day!

The journey and experience were worth it, though. Kaia basically had a 1:1 private swim lesson given how few kids there were versus the number of teachers. This whole visit to the bath house just made me realize exactly how hidden and discreet a lot of these secrets spots are all over New York City, and that “if you know, you know,” and if you don’t know… well, you may find out given these strange and unexpected opportunities.

Last full day in Paris: beautiful food and floral displays, La Biblioteque Sainte Genevieve, and Place Vendome

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I don’t know how it seems like even the littlest displays of fruit and food are always so gorgeous here. There can simply be a florist shop on a street, and it will look like someone with a keen artistic eye spent a lot of time arranging all the flowers, pots, and accessories so that every object is just so to make the scene look perfect. Today, we ate at a cute little bistro called Le Petit Cler on Rue Cler, and on the same street there were endless little grocers, shops specializing in specific types of meats, seafoods, and other epicurean delights; each simple display looked like it could be photographed for a magazine. But all those foods, whether it was a display of fruit or a very earthy setup of mushrooms in baskets, all were edible and ready to be purchased, cooked with, and eaten.

There was also an architectural wonder I had on my list for a while that I never got around to: The Sainte Geneiveve Library just a block away from the Pantheon. The library is known to be a beautiful place to read and study and houses about two million historic documents that date back to the 9th century. What is crazy about this place is that as a student, you have to book a time slot and an actual assigned seat in the library, showing proof of your student status via a university ID. And any old visitors are not welcome at any time, as you cannot simply walk in. You have to book designated (and very limited) tours at specific hours, and the areas where you are allowed to stand/look are very small.

I didn’t do my research on this beforehand and thought we could just walk in. Alas, my timing was fortuitous because as I poked my head in to ask the security guard if we could enter, a library employee had just come back from her break. Without hesitation, she ushered me in, telling me in French that they usually don’t do this, but she’d make an exception for us given we were tourists from out of town. We got to stand in the same limited standing area overlooking the reading rows. And I looked up and snapped a few photos of the big windows, reading rows, and interior. And I remembered how I first learned about this library: the Boston Public Library, very well respected for its architecture both on the exterior and interior, was modeled after La Biblioteque Sainte Genevieve.

In the evening, after a last stop at the Paris Christmas markets, we walked through Place Vendome on our way back to the hotel for the night. Paris is one of those global cities that really takes Christmas seriously: all the department store facades were decked out in holiday cheer, and the plaza of Place Vendome and the shops that lined it were the definition of Christmas’s “merry and bright.” The lights twinkled all along the plaza, and it even had this beautiful children’s carousel with endless surrounding yellow and white twinkling lights, wreaths, and glittering Christmas trees.

While walking through the plaza, I actually thought about my mom and how even before she became a Jehovah’s Witness, she never enjoyed Christmas. She used to find the entire holiday a chore, from buying and wrapping gifts to making food to even having a Christmas tree with lights on in the living room. She used to insist that if she were sitting or lying down in the living room that the Christmas tree lights had to be turned off. She would complain and say, “They hurt my eyes! Shut them off!” So when she started studying to become a JW, it was an easy argument for her to completely nix any Christmas tree and lights. And while walking through Place Vendome, I just felt a little sad for her. Had she experienced so much trauma and hate in her life that she couldn’t find it in her heart to embrace this one “merry and bright” season of the year, especially since she knew her kids loved it so much?

But that’s why we learn from the past and try to create better experiences for our future. It’s why I’m so happy that I can create new family traditions for the own family I’ve chosen and formed and move away from all that inherited negativity of the past.

The Vietnam (American) War from the eyes of a Vietnamese person

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In my adulthood, I’ve tried to find more books to read that would educate me about China and Vietnam, my father and mother lands, that are written from the perspective of people who are actually Chinese and Vietnamese. It’s been a pretty big mix of movies, documentaries, fiction, non-fiction, and perhaps one of my favorite book genres — historical fiction. It’s been easier to find books on Chinese culture and the Cultural Revolution. It’s been more of a challenge to find books that are written on Vietnam’s rich history (especially the French colonial period and the Vietnam War) that are NOT told from an American or European perspective, but rather that of a native Vietnamese person. Then I finally stumbled across a book recommendation in my Modern Asian Moms (MAMs) group called The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai. From the first page, I knew it would be an easy read, a real page turner of a book. And oddly enough, it was just published in 2020, so it’s a relatively recent book. Some people criticize the book and say the language is too simple since the book was written in English, which is the author’s second language after Vietnamese (someone on Good Reads actually complained that he had to look up words in a dictionary only a handful of times as a person who knows English as a second language… because apparently, that should be the barometer of “complex language”).

When I say the book was an “easy” read, I meant that it took no time to get into the story. It’s actually a really hard book to read when you think of all the brutal portrayals of hardship, death, rape, hunger, and exposure to Agent Orange and its effects on not just the people it physically touched, but future generations; one baby born in the book (this was a time pre ultrasounds) was born without any arms or legs; she had a forehead that was three times the size of her body, and she died within seconds of being born. But it made me realize even more how flawed the western portrayal of the Vietnam War was, as it was nowhere as simplistic as it was taught to me in school. There were people in the North who were recruited to the Southern Army and vice versa. There were many people who were pro French and actually reaped plenty of benefits of French colonialism. And there was a mass re-education camp that was like a prison after the war, which pretty much everyone on the Southern Army was forced into. The land reform of the 1950s created immediate violence and destruction across all of Vietnam; people who were wealthy were stripped of everything they owned and many were executed publicly and brutally.

I thought about what my mom said about growing up poor and the contradictions of the stories she shared. Her dad, my paternal grandma, died when she was only 6, from choking on his own mucus. But he was a highly educated man who was fluent and literate in both Vietnamese and Chinese. She said in her younger days, her dad was a respected “high official” in government. What that meant for her family once the war started, I’ll never know because my mom doesn’t like to talk about it. I don’t even think she’d like to know I’m reading books on Vietnam or the war at all. She seems to want to wipe all that out of her memory, which is not unlike many others who lived through that difficult period in Vietnamese history.

There are two protagonists we shift point of view from in the book: the grandma in the 1950s and her granddaughter in the 1970s. The grandma says, “Do you understand why I’ve decided to tell you about our family? If our stories survive, we will not die, even when are bodies are no longer here on earth.”

It’s the stories of our families, of our lives that keep people alive. And though I’ll probably never fully know my mom’s stories of Vietnam, I’ll have sources like this historical fiction book for me to lean on for at least a glimpse of what she experienced.

Family and politics: The nasty gets nastier

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People oftentimes wonder why politics divide families. I think it’s quite simple as to why: politics cannot simply be separated from the rest of life unless you identify with an extremely privileged and wealthy class. You may consider your politics personal, but are they? Your political stances reveal what matter to you as a person and how you see yourself in the midst of a society of people. That is telling of your psychology, your sociology, and ultimately how you treat other people in your life and other people you work with and pass by, and in the world. And in many ways, your political stances reveal your life view and your morals.

So when I think about my paternal grandma’s three living children, as in my dad and his younger sister and brother, while they are all very different personalities, they do have these elements in common:

  1. They always assume they know everything and are the smartest person in the room and want to assume you know far less. They can be pretty condescending and make it seem like you have the intelligence of a rock.
  2. They are all wealthy and are extremely cheap, yet all in their own ways.
  3. They are racist and really look down on Black and Brown people in general. My uncle is likely the most racist since he’s extremely anti-immigrants and has spent part of his career oppressing immigrants coming into this country, something he has truly relished and happily shared awful count-by-count anecdotes of during awkward family dinners.
  4. They are all right-leaning/far-right on the political spectrum.
  5. They all had a far less than ideal relationship with their mother.

My aunt and uncle voted for Trump in 2024. My aunt explicitly told my cousin she voted for him for her financial portfolio. I think she is planning to be buried in her coffin with her millions. I am uncertain whether my dad voted since he’s sat out the last couple elections, but if he did vote, it also would have been for Trump since he used to audibly complain about Kamala Harris as San Francisco district attorney.

When you do enough therapy, read about therapy, and interact with enough people who have done therapy, you find out that the majority of people’s ills can be traced back to one thing: their childhood and upbringing. My aunt and uncle hated their mother so much that they decided that they would hate immigrants and people of *other* color than Asian as much as possible. They grew up poor, barely had enough food to eat, and had to take care of themselves because my grandma and grandpa were always working during the day. They are deathly afraid of losing all their money, so that’s why they barely spend any of it and are all sitting on massive cash piles. So, once you combine the woes of a traumatic childhood with a poor education and even worser media literacy, it’s a disastrous equation when it comes to future politics. They will always want less for others than they have for themselves. They see the world as a zero sum game: if others thrive, that must mean I will starve? If others gain, I will have to lose.

My aunt told me many times, over email and in person, “One day, when you have accrued enough wealth and earn enough income, you will also come to your senses and vote Republican.” She admonished me on this topic many times, and I insisted to her that was unlikely to happen. While it may be easy for me or anyone else to simply vote in my own self interest, I recognize that as a citizen of this country and world that the world and this country do not fucking revolve around me or my family. We cannot simply vote for our own self interests, as we all coexist in one world. We all have to contribute to the world to make it a better, kinder, healthier, cleaner place. We have to care about our neighbors, those around us who are different and have less than we do. Because if we do not, then what kind of world are we bringing our children into – a place where everyone simply fends for themselves and we can no longer trust anyone? Who the hell wants to live in a world like that?

I keep seeing people saying that it’s hard to care about the world when you are living paycheck to paycheck and barely able to afford your rent and mortgage. Do these people think that Trump will make them wealthier? Really?!

When your mother decides she has an opinion on politics

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I hadn’t called my mom in several weeks. The truth is that I really dislike calling her because we never have anything that is truly substantive to say to each other. We check in on things like health, my work, Kaia, and then… that’s it. The conversation rarely lasts more than five minutes. But it’s five minutes of inanity that I always feel either bored or annoyed by.

When I think back to all the conversations I’ve had and enjoyed with friends’ parents who I respect, with former teachers who I keep in touch with, with people who are a generation or so ahead of me, the conversations were always so fun and thought provoking because there was some semblance of an intellectual exchange, a discussion of ideas. On their part, they always treated me like my opinions mattered, like the things I was learning about and sharing with them were fascinating to them. They made it seem like they also had something they could learn — from me. I never felt like I was being spoken down to, as though my thoughts, opinions, or knowledge were lesser than simply because I was younger. But that’s generally how my parents, and especially my mom, make me feel on the majority of conversation topics. And the most ridiculous thing is: my mom is not educated, worldly, well traveled, or well read. If you gave her a copy of a world map and asked her to identify where the continent of Europe was or even where her home country of Vietnam was, she wouldn’t be able to answer the question. Yet somehow, she always insists she knows more about pretty much *everything* than me simply because she is older and “has wisdom.”

My mom is a Vietnamese American woman, born into a family as the youngest of ten children who was never wanted because she was the youngest and a girl. Because she was a girl, she was seen as worthless. Her mom (her dad died when she was 6) refused to pay for an education for her. She experienced the terrors and pains of the American (Vietnam War), married into a Chinese American family where the matriarch oppressed her and made her feel ashamed for being Vietnamese, and then experienced endless racism, sexism, and classism at her office job, which gave no opportunity for growth, for 26 years. So, while I do not agree with my mom’s internalized sexism and racism, I see where it all stems from. She has experienced so much hatred and oppression from White people who are “above” her on this so-called race ladder that she eagerly delights in putting down anyone “below her” on said ladder who is Black or Brown.

After talking about a bunch of nothing on Tuesday when I called her, she asked me, point blank, if I voted for Trump. “Why would I vote for an incompetent, racist convicted felon?” I responded.

“Why would you vote for that idiot Black lady and not Trump?” she retorted back. My mom doesn’t vote and has never cast a single vote in her entire time being American. And frankly, given how little she knows, it may actually be better she does not vote.

“You know, she’s not an idiot. And why do you have to be so racist and call her an ‘idiot Black lady’?” I said back, as calmly as I could.

“Why can’t I call the Black lady an ‘idiot Black lady?” my mom cackled back. “She’s an idiot Black. She’s stupid. She does no good! She has no face now. NO FACE! What is she going to do now? Nothing! Trump won because he’s better than her! Who wants a Black running this country?”

I have oftentimes thought about the things I would say to my parents if I truly, truly wanted to cut off all contact with them and go nuclear. And in this context, what I would have loved to have said, but refrained from and simply told her that this conversation was done and hung up, was this:

“At least ‘that Black lady’ never drove any of her (step)children to suicide like you did. You are really the one with no face.”

I may not have said it, but I mean every word of that statement.

No Stupid Questions Podcast: When do you become an adult?

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In the last year or so, I’ve gotten into the No Stupid Questions podcast, which is a spinoff of the very popular Freakonomics books series. Research psychologist Angela Lee Duckworth and tech and sports executive Mike Maughan ask a lot of questions, some that can, at a glance, appear to be “stupid,” and so they ask each other these questions and delve into them. Many of the questions are suggested by their listeners.

The latest one I listened to that made me think was on “When do you become an adult?” and how it’s been fairly arbitrary that 18 has been the designated “adult” age. Why shouldn’t people ages 16 and above be able to vote? Why can you legally drive at age 16, vote at age 18, but then you cannot drink alcohol until age 21 in the U.S.? They go through all these questions and the historical reasons behind them in this episode.

One of the things that really made think was what Duckworth called the “life history theory,” which says that these things that you think are just fixed, or are on some cellular clock, they are actually profoundly influenced by experience. There’s an evolutionary reason behind it: if you sense that you are in some chaotic, uncertain, and/or dangerous environment, you had better get to adulthood fast. “Get to adulthood, reproduce, and get the hell out of there! You don’t have a lot of time!” Duckworth says. Life history theory says: what if you have the sense that you are in a stable, rich environment where you will live years and years? Then you have an incentive to forestall puberty and whatever line you want to give yourself for adult roles. This theory says you can procrastinate on adulthood if you live in a secure world because then, you have time to learn from your parents, get more educated from your peers and develop skills.

This made me think about two individuals I know. One is a former colleague from my last company who was essentially the biggest child I’d ever known who was my age. Let’s call this person Amber. Amber came from a wealthy, prominent Bay Area family with all the resources and support you could ever ask for. Yet somehow, when she started working at my last company, Amber came across as the most needy and insecure 30-something-year-old adult I’d ever met. She was constantly trying to make friends with everyone and get everyone to like her. It was really confusing to me, and I kept my distance from her. But eventually, I found out that she seemed jealous of the role I played in the office. I was effectively the culture queen in the office and organized happy hours and gatherings, and she did not like it since she wanted that role. She tried to get people to call her the “office mom,” as ridiculous as that sounds. Since Amber was the first and only recruiter in our office, she was the land line to HR in our San Francisco headquarters, and she kept tabs on and falsely reported goings-on and “moods” in the office. I will forever and always remember this stupid incident that happened: She had the balls to report me to HR for not wishing her a public happy birthday message on our team Slack channel. Amber knew I had an office birthday list, and when I happened to forget to ask her when her birthday was, she got upset and actually reported me! On top of that, because I had recently co-organized a happy hour event for a departing employee (who left on awkward terms), she also reported me for being “exclusive” and not inviting her (even though 1) another colleague was helping me organize, who she never reported, and 2) I purposely didn’t invite her because I knew she would be out of town for a work-related conference). Instead of HR looking at this as some senseless, childish, and elementary-school-like behavior and dismissing it, they actually took it seriously (since HR at my last company was full of toxic, drama-instigating individuals who substituted activity for achievement every day). Our “People Partner” (what a joke of a title, by the way, as she couldn’t have been less of a “partner” but an trouble maker who abused her “power”) asked my manager to have a chat with me about it. My manager, who was relatively new at the time, seemed a bit helpless when he confronted me about it. It was clear he thought it was dumb, but he shrugged and said he was simply delivering a message that HR had asked him to share with me. In general, people at the office despised Amber; endless people would say she was childish, bratty, and lacked self esteem (one former employee who was on her way out said to me in disgust, “She is a child! She tried to force me to hang out with her after I left!”), but they were generally afraid of Amber since she was like a pseudo HR-representative in our satellite office.

The second person I think about when I think of this life history theory is a friend of mine who is currently on her second divorce. We met in college and connected over our love of Chinese language and culture, food, and travel. Throughout college, I got to meet and hang out with her parents multiple times. They used to visit at least a couple times a year and were so generous to take me out to many delicious meals together. We talked about all sorts of topics that I’d never dream of discussing with my own parents. They treated me and my opinions with respect. I’d never felt so intellectually stimulated by another person’s parents in my life at that point. I always envied her relationship with her parents, and I had wished my parents could be more like hers. My friend married for the first time in 2011, then got divorced around 2015. The guy was literally a clown, as he was a professional clown artist and apparently a bit of an unstable fraud. She got married a second time in 2017 (to someone who, from any outsider’s view, was the total opposite of her, morally and politically), had a kid with this second guy in 2019, and then filed for divorce last year. Somehow, she has dug herself into a hole where she not only gave up her house that she is still paying bills and mortgage payments on, but she is also paying for a Christian private school that she didn’t want her child to go to. Because medical related decisions need both parents to sign off on them, he rejected my friend’s request to get their child therapy for how to handle the divorce. Their child is struggling and hating the separation, and she’s acting out because she doesn’t understand what is going on. Her ex-husband, who is unemployed, is making no attempt to work again given that he’s essentially living for free off my friend’s hard-earned money. She is so short of money now that her grandparents, who are well off, are paying for her rental payments for her apartment that she escaped to.

I wonder about the two of them, though. Is it possible that both of them were so loved, so supported, so coddled by their parents and grandparents and all the money and resources they had, that they are basically like living examples of people who never felt truly compelled to “grow up”? No one wants their children to feel unsupported or unloved, but according to life history theory, we may need to find ways to instill grit in our children so that they do not feel like they have all the time and endless resources in the world to “grow up” and be independent. No one will really respect you when you are in your mid-30s and crying to mommy when someone won’t wish you a happy birthday. Few people will respect you when your grandparents are paying your rent payments as a nearly 40-year-old.

Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood

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I recently started reading a book called Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Motherhood, written by Lucy Jones. The term “matrescence” still doesn’t seem to be recognized by the dictionary in the year 2024, which is quite sad and pathetic considering time has evolved. Matrescence refers to the state of a person becoming a mother and all that this transition entails. I first heard of the term in a news article my friend linked to me, which I think was in NPR, about matrescence and how it doesn’t get nearly as much research, news coverage, or talk as it should. My friend sent this to me as she was sharing with me how much her body and her mind had changed after giving birth. She said it was hard to describe, but the way she thought about things and saw the world was completely different. She expected it to be different after becoming a mother, but she wasn’t prepared for exactly how different her perspective would be in her postpartum state.

A lot happens to a person when they become a mother, both mentally and physically, yet somehow, we’re all expected to just “bounce back” in every sense of the word after giving birth. Children do not give birth to themselves; mothers give birth to them, and that’s a very wild and intense ride, and for some women, can even be traumatic. To this day, the 25 hours I spent in labor from beginning to end was the most intense 25 hours of my entire freaking life; I doubt anything will ever top that – physically, mentally, emotionally. IT WAS BEYOND INTENSE. It is said that it takes somewhere between two to four years for a woman to feel like “herself” again after giving birth. Unfortunately, in the U.S., you’re meant to go back to work the next week, in six weeks, and if you’re “lucky” like me, in the next 16-20 weeks. So who cares if you are “yourself” again!

A lot has resonated with me as I am going through this book, but what I wasn’t expecting was this excerpt near the beginning:

“During pregnancy, cells are exchanged between the mother and fetus in the placenta. When the baby is born, some of those cells remain intact in the mother’s body. For decades. Perhaps forever. The phenomenon is called microchimerism. The exchange creates what the leading geneticist Dr. Diana Bianchi calls “a permanent connection which contributes to the survival of both individuals.

“Cells have been found in subsequent siblings, too. If you have a younger brother or sister, they may have your cells.”

I figured that something would likely be left behind from my baby after giving birth, especially given the role the placenta plays and how that also needs to be birthed out of you, but I didn’t realize that my baby’s cells could stay in me potentially forever. Nor did I ever think that any subsequent siblings would have their older siblings’ cells in them. But that then made me stop and think: Wow. That means that I physically have some of Ed’s cells in me. He actually is a part of me, and in more ways than I had previously thought or known. I always knew that a part of Kaia would be in me, and I’d obviously be in her, but Ed’s in me? But it gave me this sense of joy and warmth, as strange as it sounds. He may no longer be living, but he physically is still living on in me, through cells that I got from him through our mother.

I think it goes without saying that I am definitely enjoying this book.

“Take good care of Kaia”

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I can’t remember how long it was after Ed died, but I remember being in a room just with my mom in San Francisco, and she murmured about him and finally admitted some level of regret or remorse about how she treated him when he was alive. I remember her voice quieted down, and she said, “I didn’t take good enough care of him. I should have. I didn’t take good enough care of him. I should have taken better care of him.” And she left it at that. I was pretty silent. And she was, too, after she said, that. And moments later, she changed the topic. I didn’t say much in response because… what was I supposed to say? There would have been nothing I could have said to make her feel better. Plus, to be frank, I agreed with her: No, she and my dad did not take good enough care of their son. They did not treat him well. That’s a very succinct summary of how their relationship was.

On the day before and the day we left San Francisco last month, I remember my mom taking a lighter tone and voice with me and saying repeatedly, “Take good care of Kaia.” She also said, “She’s all you have. Take very, very good care of Kaia. Don’t forget.” And while I know she was trying to be loving and caring when she said this to me, something about it just felt eerie, as though her message to me was echoing what she had said just years ago about not taking “good enough care” of her own son. It wasn’t what she said; it was her tone and how it felt like the same message she told herself about Ed. But instead here, she was directing it to me about my own daughter, her granddaughter, and warning me that if I didn’t take “good enough care” of my own daughter, that my own daughter would fall into a depression and want or attempt to end her own life.

That felt jarring to me. Kaia is turning three this December. She’s my sweet baby, even if she’s no longer really a baby anymore. She will always be my baby. I’m trying my very best to keep her safe, healthy, and happy. I want nothing more than to be her safe space for life. I want that as her mother, but I also want it because Ed and I never had that with our parents, and I want to do everything in my power to do good by Ed’s memory and give Kaia the love and support he never had. I am trying my very best. The thought of Kaia Pookie falling into a depression is enough to kill me. But we can control only what we can control, and I’m not going to obsess or worry about what is not present.