Last year, I took a hiatus from making traditional savory Chinese New Year cakes. I had made taro cake year after year, and in recent years, started experimenting with the turnip cake since it’s a bit lighter and adds more variety. Last year, I was just too tired, with Kaia being a newborn, my own postpartum recovery, plus my insane pumping schedule. This year at this time, I’m pumping just once a day before bed, and I have a lot more “balance,” so I figured it would be a good time to start making these laborious cakes again. We went to Chinatown to pick up ingredients earlier this week, and I finished making these cakes on Friday afternoon. When I finished steaming them, I felt so accomplished, like I had done my grandma’s memory good, and I would also be exposing our daughter to our family traditions, to bits of her culture. No, she doesn’t get the full Lunar New Year experience as she would if my family actually were together and actually celebrated it, since they don’t and have not since my grandma passed away when I was 9. Plus, with my mom and aunt as Jehovah’s Witnesses, they’re not supposed to “believe in” Lunar New Year anymore. She did try both cakes and seemed to enjoy both, but seemed to initially prefer the turnip version. Watching her eat these foods of my childhood really made me happy. I hope she embraces these, plus other Lunar New Year foods, as much as I do today. Maybe, just maybe when she’s a little older, she can even help make them with me as a family activity around Lunar New Year.

It’s been about a week being back in New York now, and Kaia still has not slept in her crib for more than 1.5-2 hours at a time. Her morning naps during the weekdays have been on top of our nanny’s chest and stomach; her afternoon naps have been in a stroller. At night, she’s been sleeping on top of our bed. And while everyone loves to be judgmental about this, we need to sleep, too, because we have work, so it’s not like we can just spend all night soothing her in her crib.

We let her “cry it out” over the weekend for a record 1-hour, and it resulted in… absolutely nothing. All she did was stand at the edge of the crib and cry endlessly, the fattest tears you could possibly imagine streaming down her face and all over her sleep sack/onesie.

I spoke with a Cleo “sleep expert” about this issue this afternoon, and she said that the first thing we needed to address was getting her reacquainted and liking her crib again. We need to make her realize that her bedroom and crib are a safe space, so we need to start putting her in it, just a few minutes at a time, when she’s clean, fed and full, and happy, and not needing to sleep yet. We could play peek-a-boo with her in it; sing songs; make faces, and just do it for a few minutes, to five, to ten, to fifteen, until she was fully comfortable being awake in the crib. Once she is happy being in the crib while awake, she will realize that it could be a safe place to fall asleep in.

“She needs to build trust with the crib first,” the sleep expert said.

Okay, well… we’ll try that. Baby steps, right?

Our nanny is very opinionated. Initially, I found it a little off putting, especially since she gave zero hint of this during her initial interview or during her trial, but gradually I got used to it. I myself am pretty opinionated, so when she gives me her strong opinions, I’m more than happy to give mine right back to her and counter her if I disagree. Sometimes, she likes to go on small rants about politics, about how Republicans are ruining the country, how “white people” can’t stand black people and people of color. I generally just let her say what she wants if I am there. She’s also made it clear she doesn’t approve of gay marriage for religious reasons (“it’s not what God intended”), but I just let it go because I’m not in a place of insanity to think for a second that I could change her mind. Also, it doesn’t affect how she takes care of Kaia every day, so she can believe or not believe in what she wants.

When I shared the story of the gay couple having twins from yesterday, she immediately had a disapproving look on her face.

“So that’s what they’re going to do? Just pay everyone else to do all the work for them?” she spat out.

Wow, I thought to myself. That seemed so cynical and negative. I wasn’t quite expecting THAT response. For one thing, they’re biologically incapable of having their own children as a gay couple without some outside assistance. Plus, if they can pay to ensure the children are biologically theirs and get breast milk, then why not?

But then I realized that in general, our nanny is resentful of people who are “rich” who generally do not worry about money. She’s repeatedly made disparaging comments about “rich people” and how they throw money around like they don’t care. And I guess this couple, in her eyes, is doing something similar. I didn’t really say much to her about this because again, it doesn’t affect our day to day working relationship, but I don’t think this couple is quite in that same bucket. They want to have children, they want the children to be biologically theirs, and they are paying to ensure they get what they want. I’m not sure what the problem here is?

Since we knew we’d be stopping over for a few days in SoCal, I told my cousin who lives in Long Beach that we’d be here and suggested we catch up over a meal. So he, his wife, and his two kids met up with the three of us at a Vietnamese restaurant in Garden Grove for lunch yesterday. It was enjoyable to see them, and I always enjoy chatting with his wife. Sometimes, it wasn’t always clear what else there was to talk about, but somehow, we made it work.

Even though this cousin is my cousin (my dad’s younger sister’s only son), I can count the number of times I saw him growing up on one hand, and two of those times were for funerals. Although he was born and raised in Alameda, just across the Bay Bridge, his mother, who is my aunt, hated our side of the family and hated her mother, my grandma, even more. And since our grandma lived with us, she rarely came to visit. This cousin and I didn’t really start communicating much until after I graduated from college, but especially after his dad died in 2012 and my brother died in 2013. It was like our shared grief, plus the constant family conflicts, kind of drove us together. In both of our sets of eyes, the other is the only seemingly “normal” cousin on this side of the family.

Today, he is fully estranged from his mother; he doesn’t even call her mom or mother; he just refers to her by her first name. She has never met his two children, who are her only grandchildren. He suggested I cut my parents off back when my brother died, but I couldn’t really do it, nor did I really want to, even with all the constant pain they still bring me. But we relate to each other so much as we both experienced the same intergenerational family trauma and are living examples of children who experienced childhood trauma within their families, who are actively trying to break the cycle of dysfunction. With him, I rarely have to explain my parents’ emotional immaturity; he gets it because he experienced the same with his mother. It’s sad, but my infrequent relationship with him is a sort of solace to me.

Today was Christmas day, our second Christmas as a family of three, our first Christmas back in Australia after three years; Chris’s 41st birthday; Chris’s second birthday as a daddy. And of the wider family, it was the second Christmas without Chris’s Nana, his paternal grandma. Three years ago when we were last here, Nana was still here. And that trip in December 2019, Chris had an eerie feeling that that would be the last time he’d see Nana. Sadly, he was right. Nana had a tradition every Christmas Eve of gathering all the grandchildren at the cemetery where Appa (grandpa) is buried to honor him, then hosting everyone for a meal at her house. Now that she’s gone, the cousins are trying to continue the tradition of visiting Appa and now also Nana at the cemetery on Christmas Eve. We missed it because we had to feed Kaia dinner at the time they gathered. So instead, Chris, Ben, Kaia, and I went to the cemetery to visit Nana for the first time this morning before heading to a relative’s house for Christmas day festivities.

In past visits, the cemetery visits were happy gatherings of the cousins altogether with Nana, honoring Appa’s life. This visit, though, was sad: it was the first time the three of us (plus Kaia) were seeing Nana’s grave. The inscription looked fresh, shiny, and new. I laid down my Santa headband, which she loved, along with Kaia’s Christmas hair clip on her grave, and took a photo of her and Appa’s epitaph. We took a few photos. We stood there for a while looking at the grave site and just didn’t say anything.

Staring at her grave, I thought of all the years we came to visit and how much I admired Nana for how strong and independent she was. To think that she lived independently, out of her own will, after her husband died for 20 years, until age 90, before moving into an aged care facility was just mind boggling to me. I thought about how she appreciated all the little things in life and always expressed gratitude for the tiniest things; if all we did was just visit her, she always said how happy it made her and how grateful she was. I also thought about how I wished my own parents could have a fraction of her happiness and the tiniest smidgen of her gratitude, as well. In an ideal world, yes, I would spend more time with my parents. We’d actually do activities together and eat meals together where I wouldn’t constantly hear them criticizing me and my life choices, where they weren’t constantly criticizing my in-laws, my cousins, my aunt and uncle, my friends. They wouldn’t pick fights with me during the limited times we have together, they wouldn’t call me a bitch. They wouldn’t do all the toxic things that drive me away and then afterwards, wonder why I don’t want to rush to book my next trip to see them; or even worse, wonder why I wouldn’t want to spend a month with them and work remotely. Even though my parents are a generation behind Nana, I always thought: why can’t my own parents be a little more like her? I suppose Nana didn’t have much intergenerational trauma to pass on.

She’s passed on now, which is so sad because I always thought given Nana’s strong mind (she literally remembered the most minute details of her life and recalled them with stunning accuracy) and relatively good health that she’d live until she was 100. She lived a long, happy, full, good life. No one would debate that. But per passing is a further reminder of how the time we spend on this earth is finite. And given it is finite, we should spend time with people we love who love AND treat us well. Who wants to spend time with people who make them feel bad about themselves or make their lives miserable? The moments we spend with the ones we love — at the end of the day, that’s all that really matters, as Nana always said. All the things we love and accumulate in our homes will eventually become rubbish that will be tossed or donated, as the things we cherish won’t be cherished by those who outlive us in the same way. Nana did love things a lot; she loved a LOT of things, resulting in a lot of donating and rubbish collecting after she passed. It felt so sad to hear about that as the siblings were sorting through all her things to distribute to family members and/or donate.

At the end of our lives, we won’t be wishing we worked more hours or earned more money. We won’t regret that work trip we didn’t take or working over a holiday period to meet some stupid deadline dictated by a corporation that looks at us just as another number. We’ll have wished we had spent more time with our family and closest friends.