Potty-talk and Other Regressions

I stood across the lawn from them, squinting in the sun. I was four, which means he would have been two. I only know this because I remember the house that we lived in then. We moved so often that I’ve learned to tell time by the house that we occupied at any given moment. Those houses stand like markers, points of identification around which three or four year clusters of particular experiences, people and places gather in my mind. Barksdale AFB, Louisiana. I watched as my grandmother squatted beside my brother, a faded yellow margarine tub in her hand, and began coaxing him to pee with a rhythmically hissing, “shee, shee, shee.” Potty training the Korean way. As he began to urinate, preening with a kind of princely privilege and pride, I yelled, “ewwwwwww!” My grandmother didn’t look in my direction, but her retort, “YA!” came cracking across the yard like a swat on my retreating rear. I turned my head to stick out my tongue at them before running away.

My relationship with my grandmother wasn’t complicated. I won’t elaborate now on all my conjectures about her projections of self-hate, but with me she was almost always harsh and dismissive. Without a second thought, she sent me back into the night to search for the extra pair of underwear I’d dropped along the way when I returned from my first sleepover, terrified and crying. I was five. She frequently wiped her thumb across my cheeks, voicing her displeasure at the unfortunate emergence of my freckles. For years I wore them, ugly and ashamed. My skin screamed as she scrubbed too hard at bathtime. “Owwww! You’re hurting me!” I once exclaimed. “YA!” she said, “gamanhi anj-a!”* Sit still. Cut it out. And she commenced the scrubbing with increased vigor. It was clear from the time that she came to live with us that she saw me as an inconvenience to and an intruder on her time with my brother. Sometimes I was permitted to sit up with them at night while M*A*S*H or the The Jeffersons flickered soundlessly in the background. Most times, though, theirs was a private club of two that I observed from afar, my face pressed up against the screen of their indifference.

*Last Thanksgiving, as we sat around the table for the first time without my mother, we listened to my son jabbering away. Somewhere along the way, he’d adopted the name “Aunt Da-da” for my sister, Rebecca. None of us know why that’s the name he’s settled on, but we reflected on the fact that it had an uncanny resemblance to my brother’s childhood name for me. When we were young, my brother called me “ya-ya” for the first five or six years of his life. Again, we never really understood why. But as we sat there, my sister remarked: “You know what? Tim probably called you that because grandma called you ‘Ya!’ so often.” It was one of those moments when life’s little mysteries suddenly give way right before one’s eyes and become glaringly obvious. How had we never considered that before? We cracked up as we realized that for all of those years, my brother had more or less thought my name was “hey you!”

For a long time, I thought of my grandmother with bitterness and then, eventually, with little more feeling than I might have for a passing acquaintance. The last time we were all together, we were visiting my parents in Korea. My grandmother was planning to move back to LA to live with my uncle, so my mother asked the three of us to perform a small traditional bowing ceremony (Sebae) for my grandmother. It included, as does every other occasion in Korea, presenting her with money in white envelopes. Out of respect for my mother, I obliged. As we concluded and made our way out of her room, my grandmother summoned my brother back in, and when he emerged, he smugly held all of our money in his hands. He relented, of course, when he came up against our seething wall of sisterhood and redistributed the money appropriately. We weren’t really angry, though. We were simply playing our roles; by then, we’d accepted the order of things.

Last month, we all met in California at my maternal uncle’s house to celebrate my dad’s 60th birthday. In Korean culture, turning sixty is a significant milestone, and it’s usually observed with a kind of ceremonial importance. While we were there, however, my uncle wanted us to go visit my grandmother who is now in her eighties and who, he told us, probably only has a year or two left. As we drove to the assisted living center, he reminded us, again, of the story we were supposed to relay if she asked where my mother was. Because of my grandmother’s declining health and dementia, my uncle and my mother decided that they wouldn’t tell my grandmother when my mother finally did pass away. Yup. Already feeling some anxiety about this charade, I was a bit on edge when my uncle began talking about my grandmother’s deteriorated state. Because she had fallen several times recently, they agreed that she would no longer attempt to walk around and would, instead, only use a wheelchair. Switching back and forth between Korean and English, we moved from one awkward conversation to the next until, somehow, he was explaining things that we already knew about the way one loses muscle tone and control over bodily functions when wheel-chair bound. I sort of tuned out for a minute, and then I heard him say, “so…doo-doo and shee-shee, sometimes just fall out.” Just like that. And I couldn’t help it, I was four years old all over again. The laughter erupted out of me and I couldn’t stop it. The strain of the week, the hundreds of little white lies, the secrets and the absolute absurdities about our lives that my mother’s illness and death had exposed just burst out of me—rudely, unexpectedly and uncontrollably. My uncle looked at me in the rearview mirror, bewildered, and my sister looked at me, eyebrows raised, with the look I’m usually shooting her: “WTF? Get it together!” Finally, I bit my cheek and managed to get myself under control, though my body trembled for several minutes more with laughter that begged not to be contained.

We sat with my grandmother for about an hour in the courtyard, surrounded by pale pink stucco walls and other residents (all Korean) shuffling aimlessly around. Despite the warnings, I was still a little surprised to find her so vacant, to watch as our presence dawned on her more than once. It felt like a scene out a movie. It definitely didn’t feel like real life. One resident sat in the sun where she’d been wheeled. She was complaining loudly about the sun being too bright. Her eyelids drooped so deeply that we wondered how she could see anything at all, but my brother got up and moved her to a shadier spot. “Hey!” she yelled, “who was that? There’s a man around here just coming and going!” We all giggled a little under our breath and my grandmother, looking confused, joined in. My sister explained what had happened, and my grandmother began yelling at the woman, “that’s not a strange man; that’s my grandson!” “EH?!” yelled the woman, “WHAT?!” And my grandmother, probably forgetting already what had happened, yelled back, “EH?! WHAT?!” Back and forth they went, the call and response of dementia, until one or the other forgot their part and they lapsed into silence.

In the time that followed, my sister and I watched, mostly in silence, as my grandmother lovingly caressed my brother’s face and exclaimed over and over how strange it was that he was so grown up and marveled at how handsome he’d become. I was unprepared for the flood of sadness and tenderness that washed away the laughter in me and nearly made me weep. I was sad for my grandmother, for all that she’s lost to the progression of time and, in the face of so much regression, for all that she doesn’t know she’s lost. I was sad for my mother, who would never be old and for her grandchildren, who would never know her, soft, in old age. And I was sad for myself, not old at all, but suddenly, the oldest in this line of women. 

However, I was also grateful for the opportunity to go back. We don’t get the chance very often to return to those moments in life that shape us, to rewrite our narratives. There we were, children again. My brother and my grandmother were wrapped up in their intimacy, and I sat across from them in the courtyard. This time, though, I wasn’t angry or jealous or hurt. I thought of my son, who is the same age, now, as my brother was when we stood in the yard all those years ago. Time flies so quickly and we are promised so little. It’s up to us to find those small splashes of love and beauty where we can, to discover those moments that originate in us or around us and rock us gently or wildly to our core. And when we can’t, perhaps we can trace the ripples that began elsewhere back to their sources. Maybe I couldn’t love my grandmother, but I can love the woman who has loved my brother with such tenderness. And that is enough.

Another Day, Another Death

It has been a really brutal winter for those of us stuck in this seemingly endless polar vortex that led to an absurd amount of snow days, freakishly frigid temperatures and entire city shutdowns. At the beginning of the week, however, we had actual spring-like weather. I wore a skirt. And flats. Then Wednesday, bitter about its middle-of-the-week status, brought a thirty-degree temperature drop and more snow. But for those two days, I felt more alive than I have in months. Everyone else seemed to be feeling the same way. When I pulled up at one of our most popular toddler parks, it was buzzing with parents and kids hyped up on sunshine. I seriously thought (hoped?) that we might all break out in song and dance, flashmob style, to Pharrell Williams’ “Happy.” I’m sad to report that nothing of the sort materialized, but I danced a little in the parking lot until my son—only two but already embarrassed by my shenanigans—told me to cut it out.

For me, at almost 33 years old, the transition from the hard freeze of winter to the soft warmth of spring is a welcome but expected shift; I survived the winter because I knew that it would eventually end (we’re not quite beyond the wall, yet). I hadn’t considered, however, what my son thought about the perpetual state of cold.  When I stopped to think about it, I realized that last spring was half his lifetime ago. The days when we frolicked half-clothed from sunrise to sundown, when shoes were optional and new grass tickled our bare legs, when milk-drunk was still a thing—those days are nothing more than some hazy baby heyday to him. I first realized this as we got out of the car and he stopped in his tracks to stare at a group of college-aged boys across the grass. Engaged in all manner of muscular feats, they were, wait for it…shirtless. It’s no secret to those of you who know us, that my son is a never nude. He requires head-to-toe clothing nearly all of the time. So seeing a group of half-clothed guys was akin to, I dunno, a unicorn sighting or something else of equally mythic proportions. “Mommy!” he exclaimed as he stood there squinting in his sunglasses, “those big boys are naked! I see his’s [sic] belly buttons!” I explained, of course, that they weren’t naked, merely shirtless.  “Huh…” he responded, part-assenting, part-incredulous and part-awakening to this new “nudist” movement before him. As we walked over to the playground he kept glancing backwards, as if to make sure that those guys were still there in all their lean, vaguely threatening, bare belly-buttoned glory.

During these past few months since my mom’s death, I’ve felt similarly shocked and scandalized by all of the things that her passing has laid bare—particularly, my mortality. I can’t take my eyes off of it. I feel like I’m perpetually looking over my shoulder for all the ways that I might die. Quietly growing cancer. Sudden cerebral hemorrhage. Car crash. Plane crash. Train wreck. Heart attack. Victim of random violence. Shark attack. I guess those last two are somewhat redundant, but you get the picture. I’ve always been a worrier, but I’ve never really had this kind of palpable anxiety about my death. Clearly, death has always been on the horizon for me. (Unless, of course, vampires really do “come out of the coffin”; I’ll gladly sign up for that blood drive in exchange for immortality. Zombie apocalypses can suck it, though. No thank you to rotting flesh and brains on the menu for eternity.) However, I never felt that it was imminent in the way that I do now. I understand how people end up as shut-ins, too terrified to open the door to incalculable variables, to unforeseen dangers and to those encounters that sideswipe us, leaving us wounded on the side of the road. Luckily for me, I have this beautiful kid who needs to be walked and watered daily (and sometimes I feed him, too!). So I’m forced to go about the practice of living while I continue to fret about dying. It’s a practice that I’ve found surprisingly invigorating. Seriously, try it. Get some major death anxiety and then go about your daily life. It’s better than BASE jumping.

When we finally made it from the parking lot to the playground, he ran straight to the swings and asked to be lifted up. I rolled my eyes on the inside and said, “wouldn’t you rather go down the slides?” Last year, he hated swinging. He’d sit in the swing for about 45 seconds before asking to get down. And then up again. And then down. It was maddening. He’s always been opinionated and independent, but I wouldn’t call him a risk taker, and there was something too risky about the swing for him. I could tell that he desperately wanted to enjoy it, but he just couldn’t give himself over to it. I’ll admit that some days, lazy, exhausted and/or ambivalent, I wanted him to love swinging so that I could just stand in that hypnotic sway for a few minutes with the other moms. Nope. He wanted to scrape his knees toddling and toppling around on the pavement. He wanted to eat woodchips and sand. So I expected much of the same when he asked to be lifted up into the swing this time. His little fingers gripped the swing as I gave him a few gentle pushes and then, tentatively, he tipped his back slightly, looked up at the sky and exclaimed: “Look, mommy! I see an airplane!” He let out an exhilarated shriek of joy as he told me, “I go fast! I flying!”

That’s what life feels like these days. I’m going fast. I’m flying. I feel the riskiness of life each time I get into the car to drive away from my son’s daycare. I feel it as I sit down at my laptop to write. I feel it each time I open myself up to new people and new places or old people and old places when I’d rather be sitting at home alone. I feel the way that each of those choices suspends me above huge chasms of uncertainty, the way they promise failure and destruction. Fear is healthy. It alerts us to danger and keeps us out of harm’s way. But there’s something compelling about fear, as well. It can lead us to the most breathtaking heights and profound discoveries. It strips away the detritus of complacency, of habitual living, of losing oneself in the drone of the day-to-day. We are more alive than ever when we’re lit up with fear, racing toward or away from something. Adrenaline junkies everywhere can attest to this. Every day is life or death. Our lives hang perpetually in the balance. #YOLO. You know what I mean; you’ve heard all the idioms and clichés before.

That day, we stayed at the swings for a long-ish stretch of time (in toddler minutes, anyway) feeling life anew as the wind rushed through our hair, and we considered the possibility of disaster, weighing all those what ifs: What if the swing doesn’t hold? What if I fly away? What if this life gives way before I’m ready? What if it’s all as painful and disappointing as it sometimes promises to be? Okay, so my son was still just concerned about those shirtless boys and the wispy white trails of airplanes as they zigzagged across the sky. But I was thinking, “well, what if?” Here’s what I know. I’m a little (A LOT) more gray-headed than I was at this time last year. But that just means I’m a little wiser, too, right? My pockets are heavier, lined with those hefty stones of loss and grief that threaten to drown me some days. In other ways, though, I’m lighter than ever; each day I find myself shedding the things that don’t really matter in favor of those things that do matter. And, yes, I’m afraid of so much these days. But I can’t shake this feeling that it’s not the kind of fear that I should run from. Instead, I feel a little more certain every day that it’s the kind of fear that I should lean into. It’s the kind that makes me want to tentatively tip my head back. Because sometimes, if we’re willing to relinquish the safety of the ground and give ourselves over to soaring, fear leads us to the things we most desire, to that exhilaration and joy that we might not have found otherwise. 

A Lineage of Love

Sometime last year, I read a piece in the The New York Times about the relationship between a child’s resilience in the face of difficulty and his/her sense of an “intergenerational self.” Reading that piece, I contemplated the lack of an intergenerational narrative in my own childhood. My maternal grandmother is the only grandparent I’ve ever really known, and for much of our lives, distance, language and culture have posed nearly impassable barriers in our relationship. Both of my father’s parents and my mother’s father died before I was born, and neither of my parents talked openly about their lives before one another very often. In fact, when I stopped to tally all the stories I have from their collective childhoods, I realized that I could count them on my fingers and toes. I channeled my six-year-old self, tongue in cheek, brow furrowed, thinking, “wait, is that right? That can’t possibly be right!” But it is.

I think in our case, that lack of a cohesive and intergenerational narrative was exacerbated by the demands of military life. We moved so frequently that it was difficult to establish any kind of reliable tradition. Ironically, the only thing that stayed the same…was that nothing stayed the same. For most of my childhood, we were a unit of four (a unit of five after my sister came along) and that was it; we began and ended with one another. As a kid, I couldn’t name what I felt, but I remember being angry at times that we didn’t have that narrative and familial structure to anchor us to something. I longed for a place where we belonged, where we could return—a place that we both recognized and would be recognized by, in turn. It was nostalgia at its most literal, that longing or ache for a return home, but it was also the simultaneous recognition of, as Boym puts it in The Future of Nostalgia, “the impossibility of homecoming.” After all, how does one return to something that never existed?

It wasn’t until my mother’s recent illness and death that I really began to contemplate how many gaps filled our family tree—whole histories lost, limbs lopped off by our tradition of reticence. In those last months with my mother, I scrambled to discover some of that history before she took it with her. But as I sat there poised with my pen and paper in hand, I felt how much the radiation had dulled her once razor-sharp mind; I knew that it was already too late. We went through the motions together, anyway, grasping at all the threads and attempting to tie the ties that bound us to each other and to all that which had come before us.

As I’ve tried to make sense of our last months together, I’ve been overcome with a new nostalgia for those six weeks that she spent with us after my son was born. He was a 33-weeker, healthy but small. He spent nearly a month in the Special Care Nursery, and I was exhausted from the worry and work of living in two places. My mother swooped in as she always did, an amalgamation of old wives tales, “better” ways of doing things, tough love, and unsuspecting tidal waves of tenderness that nearly drowned me with their suddenness. She cleaned, put my not-yet-ready-for-baby house in order, and cooked. For weeks after I gave birth, she insisted that I eat the traditional Korean seaweed soup, miyeok guk, prepared for post-partum mothers. After about a week and a half, I begged her to let me eat anything else. She finally relented, but only if I agreed to drink a bowl of the soup first. I watched her make and remake that soup with a kind of ritual care. It was more than soup. It was her offering of peace and love. It was her way of welcoming me to the table of motherhood. So I drank it, dutifully.

As I ate, she would sit next to me in that little dining room of the apartment that we lived in then, made bigger, somehow, by the sunlight streaming in through the two enormous windows, and she would talk, sometimes for more than an hour. I remember being deliriously sleep-deprived, wanting nothing more some days than to tell her to be quiet so that I could lie down, but something made me hold my tongue. Maybe it was that well-worn guilt and obligation that she’d cultivated in me. Or perhaps it was the recognition, however nascent at the moment, that she rarely spoke so freely and that she was offering me something I would later value. So even though my body ached and my brain could barely keep up, I listened. And later, we would gaze at my son through his warm incubator, marveling at his feistiness, tracing its lineage in the small blue veins on his stomach back to the little umbilical stump where my blood and her blood had so recently coursed through him.  When I think of that time now—the warmth of that sun-kissed space that we inhabited together, the love we felt for him knitting new bonds between us—it feels so much like that return home that I’d longed for as a child.

When my mother passed away, I felt momentarily frantic. What would I have to offer my son in terms of some historical trajectory—ours, mine, his? When my partner and I selected his donor, we took some measures to ensure that he could fill in some of those intergenerational gaps when the time was right. But I began to think of all the ways that I had failed to keep track of the day-to-day. I didn’t keep a baby book. I recorded things haphazardly here and there. I saw the same old cycle of silence situating itself in the gaps. So I began a new project. Each night I take a few minutes after he’s in bed, and I write something about the day. Sometimes, it’s just a sentence or a picture depicting the things he’s said or done. Other times, it’s a longer reflection on the memories or stories he’s called up in me. I make sure to include other threads, too: anecdotes about the people who pass through his life and the people who are a constant presence; observations about the ways in which he fits into his world; notes about the things he loves. Maybe I can’t provide him with some “oscillating” narrative about where we came from and how we endured, as that article discussed, but I can weave together these present threads for him, warp and weft, into a lineage of love. For so many of us and for so many different reasons, this is our story. We don’t know who came before us. Or maybe we do know, but would rather forget. We are resilient in the face of difficulty not because we see the long line of history trailing behind us, but because we’ve learned to craft our own stories from the moments around us, gathering together those strands of love, endurance and connection and wrapping ourselves up in them. 

Lost and Found

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a lost and found box for life? You could occasionally peruse its contents to locate “things” you’d lost along the way: “Oh, look! It’s my self-esteem! I can’t remember the last time I saw that” or “Hey! Look at those life goals! I’d completely forgotten they existed!” Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. While we might find a pair of sunglasses or a phone in a state similar to that in which we lost them, it’s unlikely that we ever find these other intangible things—if we find them, that is—in quite the same condition.

Around here, 2013 has been a year of profound loss as I said goodbye to my mother, and it’s been extraordinarily difficult, over the past few weeks, to see beyond that heartache. The thought of entering a new year without my mother is unfathomable. I can’t help but think of all the things that she’ll miss. I keep expecting her to call. I keep picking up my phone to text her the latest pictures of Bennett’s antics. Most days, I’m still waiting for the weight of my mother’s absence to sink in, the loss suspended somewhere just out of grasp. Other days, however, it knocks me over and takes my breath away.

But it has also been a year of equally profound discovery, and I would be remiss if I didn’t let myself acknowledge those things that, in my mother’s absence, have sprung up quietly, dissipated suddenly or simply ceased to matter. In some ways, I’ve grown up occupying the negative space around my mother. I’ve spent time trying to shape myself around her, in relation to her, against her. My choices, though they’ve been mine, have always found her at their center in some way, wondering if she’d be angry or pleased, disappointed or proud. Like any tiger mom with *real* skills, she always claimed that the pressure I felt to “perform” or “succeed” was somehow a thing of my own creation, and sometimes, I actually bought into that.  Sometimes, she actually bought into to that. Despair and loss, however, have a way of bringing us face to face with those things hidden in the otherwise unfathomable depths of ourselves. During those last few months together, she began the process of making space for me. It was an uncomfortable and disconcerting experience for someone so used to being constrained by the shape of another person’s desires and demands. Gone were the caveats and qualifications. Gone were the insurmountable mountains of her expectations. And eventually, of course, she was gone altogether.

Losing my mother has felt very much like a void that no amount of time can fill. But lately, finding no resistance in that space that she once occupied, I’ve begun to discover the potential for a kind of fullness or wholeness. What have I kept back? What have I denied or written off for fear that it wouldn’t be enough…that I wouldn’t be enough? This is what she offered me in those last months. After a lifetime of “buts” and “if onlys,” she said simply: “you are enough.” My mother can’t be replaced, and I’ll never stop missing her. But the funny thing about absence is that it always, inevitably, makes room for something new. She understood that as she chipped away at the hard lines of herself. She’s given me space to grow into myself more fully, to see around those things—be they hers, or mine—that took up so much room.

People say that “time heals all wounds.” I’ve begun to think, however, about the way that it is time, itself, that wounds us with its relentlessness. So many of us spend our time looking back, planning for the things to come and trying to keep up with the everyday. There’s never time enough, money enough or peace enough to assess the damage incurred daily. Certainly, there’s even less time to reflect on the ways in which things wear on us year after year. We patch ourselves up, push things aside and power through…at least I have. And suddenly we find that we’ve lost whole parts of ourselves, whole histories, whole lifetimes of desires. No, what’s lost can’t always be found, but as I enter 2014, I’m fortunate enough to have found some time. The hard work will be accepting it without guilt or shame, without pressure to perform in some way, without buzzwords like “idleness” or “privilege” compelling me to fill my time endlessly and frantically. Instead, I’ll try to spend some time breathing into that space of being “enough.” Perhaps I’ll rifle through that box of old selves, discarding things that no longer fit, exploring things that might be worth trying on. Whatever it is, after a long season of loss, of losing, and of feeling lost, I welcome this season of discovery, of finding and of being found.