An Ode to Closing

We closed on a house today. I felt like we should have been breaking out the champagne and sharing teary hugs like they do on HGTV, but instead we walked into an office, signed a hundred documents and handed in a check. We are actually coming in below our budget, though it still feels like a big chunk of money. Pretty much anything above one thousand dollars is theoretical to me anyway. I can feel logical about buying a sandwich for five bucks or a book for fifteen, but dealing in the tens of thousands feels more like a virtual sport.

I’d have to say buying a house ranks somewhere below shopping for a dress and above shopping for groceries. It’s more exhausting than interesting, probably because interior design and atmosphere appeal to me more than structure. I get that layout is important, though I don’t quite get the obsession with granite countertops, stainless-steel appliances, and Jacuzzi tubs. Those are advertised in capital letters and then as an add-on, oh yes, and it has four bedrooms and two baths.

I’m just grateful we found a house that suits us: open, full of natural light, relatively new, plenty of scope for decorating, and in a great community. We won’t actually be moving in yet in order to repaint and recarpet, and I’m starting to assemble those long lists of “to-dos” that homeowners complain about, like “fix the fan” and “install a garage sensor.” So right now it’s more grit than glamour. But hopefully, a few weeks from now, it will be worth it to settle into a place that’s our own.

This process has made me more acutely aware of that: this longing I have to settle down. After seven years of dorm rooms and wearing flip-flops to common showers, and six years of rented apartments, I feel ready to be in one place for a long, long time. The hardest thing about this whole process has been the knowledge that we will likely move again.

Of all the metaphors used to describe heaven, to describe this eternity of existence that seems impossible to grasp, the one of heaven as a place to come home to always struck me most, and it lingers in my mind now. Think of it as my father’s house, Jesus says, and I’m going there to prepare a place for you. After all these pilgrim years, of feeling weary or limited, of desiring more than what we can find, it will be like finally coming home. To a place where someone has longed and waited and thought about our coming. To a place we never have to leave. And the joy and rest of that must be something wonderful.

Journal Excerpt

It is a constant, and I mean truly constant, verbal barrage these days. It’s like a month or two ago she suddenly became a verbal savant, able to remember and repeat any word or sound made in any language after hearing it only once. And now she can string them into phrases. She doesn’t just talk to ask for something or make a timely comment, like a normal person would, but carries on a nonstop commentary the entire day.

At dinner (translated from Chinese): “grandpa sits in chair. Grandma sits in chair. Grandpa, grandma, daddy, mommy sits in chair. Ah-ya sits in chair. Daddy moving eyes. Grandpa moving eyes. Grandpa smiling. Grandma eating rice. Mommy noodles spicy. Ah-ya’s noodles not spicy. Mommy’s water. Ah-ya’s water..” In the car: “big truck. Small truck. Flowers. Wind in trees. White clouds. Hot. Chair hot. More snacks. Bird! Bird flying! Lights..” At home: “Mommy potty. Daddy shower. Daddy hair wet. Grandpa resting..” At the changing table: “Ah-ya diaper. Ah-ya stinky. Ah-ya lifting butt. No more stinky. Clean. Putting on clothes..”

The baby’s also moving all the time these days, so much so it’s distracting and sometimes downright uncomfortable. One’s moving all the time; one’s talking all the time. What can I say?

Body Image

Pregnancy messes on a major scale with an issue pretty much every girl I know has struggled with: body image. It’s bizarre to go from being flat-chested and thin to some burgeoning mother earth goddess. Like those old prehistoric figurines with the grotesquely large breasts and impossible hips. It’s weird to go from thinking about food occasionally to dreaming about it, waking up craving juicy steaks or fresh pancakes or flavors of ice cream you’d never even liked before.

Being pregnant the second time is like being pregnant the first time and the future times all at once. Now when I feel some way, I both think back on how it felt last time, and how it will feel again. There is a certain scope to my perspective that wasn’t there the first time around, when everything was new. Sometimes I feel I see the years stretching before me, with my chest fluctuating through the same three cup sizes and my body over the same thirty pounds, being skinny and stretched and flabby and skinny and stretched again. And while I know it is all passing, it is difficult to accept all this. To not be afraid that my body will never be the way it was again. To not be haunted by old fears from weight struggles in the past.

I really almost never think about aging, but this is probably what it feels like during that other period in your life when you realize your body is changing and it’s out of your control. What will it be like, say one day finding a clump of white hair or sagging breasts? To look down at my hands and find the skin paper-thin and wrinkled, the veins standing out? I feel funny even imagining my body that way. If I traveled forward in time and saw myself as an old person, it would probably scare the living daylights out of me.

But I see a lot of people in oculoplastics clinic at this point. People who are unmistakably aging but struggling to accept it; who want an operation to make their eyes look younger, who are unconsciously asking whether they look okay. Sometimes they ask me outright what I think. I’m supposed to say something neutral and professional, but I want to say, you look wonderful. Natural. Like you should.

I want to be able to say that to myself, ten years and who knows how many kids later. You look good. Wonderful. Just like you should. I think about the struggles I went through in my teens and early twenties and want to tell my younger self, you look beautiful. Some guy is going to really want you. Here is how to take care of your body for the right reasons and in a joyful way. Here is how not to isolate your struggles, or believe you can completely control how you appear.

I think about E, a chubby-thighed toddler who loves rubbing her round belly and running around naked, but who one day will be a girl and woman in a world where appearance means so much, and I think about what I want to say to her. I look at the natural delight she takes in the way her body moves and works and feels and wish she didn’t have to lose any of that.

So that’s what this body image thing feels like. There are days when I try to eat healthy, and others when I deliciously enjoy being the pregnant person eating a second helping of ice cream. I’m making it to a gym, for how good it feels to sweat, not really for any change it makes in how I look. And I watch my body change and swell and I know it won’t go right back to where it was. I think about my younger self, my future self, my daughter. And I think to myself, possibly, maybe, all this change is okay.

Journal Excerpt

I lifted a watermelon today and realized it didn’t seem as heavy as they usually do. I must be getting buffer, I tell myself, what with carrying around a 20-some pound thing all day. She looks small for her age, but it’s all an illusion. High density. Unfortunately all this pregnancy weight is obscuring any visible change.

One of the things I like doing nowadays is just watching her. It’s interesting and makes me think I should just stop and observe more things in my life. Even though she speaks mostly in Chinese, she can give the English words for everything she says if asked. She is scared of shadows, thunderstorms, headless Lego men, and the troll doll’s buttcrack, but doesn’t mind bugs or lizards. She likes directing general activity, documenting what everyone is doing (“grandma potty”) and telling everyone where to sit. She unfortunately likes to watch intently while I try to poop which makes it impossible for me to actually do so. She has a good sense of order but no sense of proportion, repeatedly attempting to put things where they obviously can’t fit. She can count from one to ten but always leaves out four and six. She appears genuinely distressed whenever someone else is crying. She actually likes to share with other kids, especially food, though sometimes she wants it back after they’ve already eaten it.

She treats me like a human jukebox. I suppose it’s only been two weeks since this started happening, but it feels like much longer. She’ll demand I sing different songs, sometimes one repeatedly, or a new one as soon as I’m one line into the old one. Current favorites are “The Hokey-Pokey” (“hokey song”), “You Are My Sunshine” (“baby song”), “You’ve Got The Bare Necessities” (“Mowgli song”), “Father’s Hunting In The Forest..” (“Mowgli song- the other one”), “April Shower” (“Bambi-small-deer song”), “This Is The Way We Wash Our Hands” (“bath song”), “Leaving On A Jet Plane” (“airplane song”), and this does not include all the Chinese songs and rhymes that my mom has taught her and then I’ve had to learn.

She’ll typically have one song she wants while I’m holding her before bedtime, and a steady stream when we’re in the car. And really all day long. I’ve tried airing new tunes because I get so tired of the same ones, but really, what song does anyone want to sing twenty times in a row? (a short one, but then she just asks for more repetitions)

Human Nature

She refused to take a nap today. Which is like the feeling you get when you walk into clinic, find out you’re the only doctor there, are overbooked on the hour, and the residents are gone so you have to take ER calls and consults. And half the technicians called out sick. I can’t even recall the last time this happened—long enough ago to lull me into a false sense of security.

She goes into this sleep deprivation-induced cycle of hyperactivity and fussiness, the most annoying form of which is the frantic now-I-want-it-now-I-don’t. Like she kept asking for the guitar—so I lug it out, start playing, then she starts rolling on the floor screaming “no guitar!” like I did it specifically to torture her, so I put it away, then she cries for it again like it’s the only thing she wants. Ditto for wanting to watch a movie, color, eat this or that.

Clearly she has no idea what she wants, and even less idea what she needs, which is to sleep. It’s hard to believe someone could be so obviously mixed up about this until you see it in action, and it makes me wonder if we appear this ridiculous to God. Very often I get mixed up about what I want or need. I think I want to work, then when I do I want to stay at home. I crave ice cream but feel yucky after eating it. I escape for hours into fictional worlds only to emerge more tired and less able to focus on my real life.

That’s the thing about two year-olds. If you want a completely unfiltered look at human nature, live with one. She is rarely able to think outside of her own needs, wants whatever someone else has, can’t foresee delayed consequences, is completely controlled by her moods. I have many more sophisticated filters, like an overanalytical mind, awareness of societal constraints and others’ opinions, a modicum of self-control, but in the end, my baseline nature is pretty much the same. If I go very long without hanging out with God, without asking him to help me out, all of that eventually comes through.

Of course she also lives with unadulterated joy and delight. Every time she sees this stained-glass angel sticking up out of a flower pot we have, she kisses it. She dances her own, flailing, bopping brand of moves with complete lack of inhibition, anytime she hears a beat. She asks to be tickled and then giggles hilariously at the top of her lungs when we do. She adores babies and tree bark and wants to hug the clouds. When she eats something she likes she goes MMMM YUM continuously. She makes me remember to look at things, to enjoy the simple, to linger with people, and that makes it pretty much worth it.

Journal Excerpt

My mom cooked some bitter melon the other day, and since E always wants to eat whatever is going into someone else’s mouth at that moment, we gave some to her. She spit it out and said “no spicy” and kept trying to rub the taste off her tongue until we gave her some milk to wash it out.

Now all I have to do if I don’t want her to eat something is use the magic word. When she was whining for a bottle of salad dressing on the table today I told her it was spicy. She paused for a moment and continued eating without another sound.


The other day we were watching a thunderstorm outside and she said she wanted to “hug rain. Hug rain.” She kept holding out her arms towards the window while I told her if she tried to hug it she would get very, very wet. She was quiet for a moment and then turned and said very seriously, “rain shy.”

Motherhood vs. Career

A friend of mine who recently had a second baby just wrote a post on angst about motherhood versus career, and it made me think about how the same basic conflict plays out for me.

What I dream about in my career is not so much doing basic academics, but being an excellent clinician: someone who operates a lot and well, who thinks of surgical innovations, who is there for her patients, who does a lot of teaching. To do that, really even just to operate a lot and well, you have to be available all the time, both to build up the surgical volume that hones your skills, and to handle all the peri-operative concerns and complications that are inevitable. And you really can’t ever quit entirely. You could probably come back to psychiatry or general medicine after being out of the field for ten years, but it would be hard to operate again after so long.

What I dream about for my family is having a lot of kids, as in more than three. When I see a healthy family with a lot of kids, I feel the same way, perhaps even more strongly, that I do when I hear about some famous surgeon. And I genuinely like being at home with her. I like seeing how happy E is when I’m around, knowing what she’s learning rather than wondering where she picked something up.

What works now is working about three days a week, which I’m hoping will hold true after a second baby comes, but who knows how it will be with a third or perhaps a fourth? Do any of us truly think about this when we choose our career? I don’t regret the past twelve-odd years of training, but it was hard work, with investments from teachers and foundations that paid a lot of money, so I could—have my choice of part-time private practice jobs?

I think every woman faces this at some point in her life. On a basic level, it’s inevitable. You’re raised your whole life to achieve goals, to succeed relative to your peers, to obtain outward results, and being a mom is pretty much the opposite of that. Motherhood is about doing with persistence and unflagging spirit an endless number of terribly mundane things. No one’s grading you on how well you change a diaper. Depressingly enough, not even your kid will remember any of it. It is about the process, not the product.

But I think much of Christ’s life was like that. There were the occasional large lectures and flashier miracles, but much of it was a life of quiet sacrifice, without recognition. Centered on a few relationships rather than the applause of many. Full of solitude and what must have felt to a divine being like unnecessarily mundane tasks. One could argue he gave up a lot more in assuming the humble life than I ever could.

All I know now is, I’m taking it one step at a time. I’m not beholden to the past, to institutions or what anyone else thinks, even to myself. I’m not beholden to anyone except God and what I feel is the thing he has called me to now. That helps a bit now, and I’m hoping will kick in during the doubts and trials that are sure to come in the future.

Pictures

These are possibly the best pictures I have ever taken of her in my life. Getting a good picture of a toddler is a long and arduous process. The key is time and repetition. And maybe a fast shutter speed. Most of my pictures are blurred like the one below. Boy, she loves her watermelon.

Grandparents

She’s been around her grandparents a lot lately. We visited one set last week, and are temporarily living with the other until our house is ready to move in to. Seeing her with her grandparents is like seeing her marinate in a pool of constant attention and love. She just soaks it up like a sponge: all the ooh-ing and ah-ing, eating all her favorite foods like fruit and noodles and pickles, getting to do her favorite things like dancing to music and running around outside. She got into singing karaoke with D’s mom, holding the microphone while wiggling her butt. She spent all of this morning “helping” my mom water the garden.

One of the best things about having a kid is seeing how much delight they give your parents. Growing up I’d feel this real sense of deep happiness if I got to share something good with my parents, like give them a free eye exam or take them to see the Boston Ballet do the Nutcracker, or bring them some food I knew they’d like. This is like that times a hundred. And it only gets better as she gets old enough to know them, to say their names and ask them to hold her hand or read to her, to copy whatever they say or do. If I suggest it, she’ll run over to give them a hug or kiss.

I never had this growing up, but it’s a wonderful and natural thing to see, the way she’s constantly so happy around people who love her, and the way she livens up their lives. And of course it’s all selfish in the end, because having extra sets of hands to watch her is like regaining a bit of our lives and sanity. We don’t feel so bad going out to eat or even taking a weekend trip.

I never would have thought we’d end up back in my hometown, but then I never would have imagined how wonderful it is to be around parents when you have kids of your own. We might not stay here forever, but I’m grateful God has led us here now.