Birthday

I turn thirty-seven today.

I remember thinking once, if I could stay one age forever, it would be twenty-seven: old enough to know who I am and what I’m doing in life, young enough to be, well, still in my twenties. But my thirties have turned into a better decade than my twenties. I always felt happier married than single, but I know and love Dave more in our tenth year than our first. I’m somewhat less self-absorbed, probably as a consequence of being compelled into daily service. Other than a proliferation of facial nevi and the way nursing four babies has changed my chest, my body doesn’t feel that much older. I definitely couldn’t stay thirty-seven forever—I may have changed eight poopy diapers the other day—but overall I’d say it’s better than twenty-seven.

If anything, this is the year I’ve arrived. Growing up, I always felt like I was looking forward to the next thing to make me happy: passing the next test or step of training, getting married, having kids, owning a house, getting a job. Somewhere during the last six years, I realized I had gotten there: I’d passed the last test I had to take for a while; I was having the kids I wanted to have—but I wasn’t necessarily happier or a better person. That took me on a journey that eventually turned in the last year or two into my falling in love with Jesus in a fresh way.

And now, here I am, having actually arrived—moved for the last time; own our forever-house; more settled in career; finished having kids (and soon to get a pet). I suppose this is typically when a mid-life crisis would hit—I’d feel meaningless without the next thing to strive for, or trapped by my responsibilities—but instead I feel content and glad, in the way that you do when you realize none of this is your due, or even essential for your primary happiness, but extraordinary gifts from a God who loves you.

Maybe it’s more of a mid-life perspective: I’m nearing the point where my life may be half over. It’s clearer than ever that none of this lasts forever: I’m a steward of my children (in ten more years Ellie will move out!), of this house (which will probably be overtaken by the redwoods outside in a century), even of Dave (who will not be married to me in eternity). I think more about what it means to take care of those things for what matters, and to not lose out on being present in the process.

Those are two goals I’d like to set for my thirty-seventh year: one, to establish our lives in this new home and place in a way that reflects what really matters to us. And two, to enjoy it. To enjoy the way Ellie’s whole face lights up and she jumps up and down when she’s excited; the way Eric wraps me in spontaneous hugs and kisses; the way Elijah says “wot?” with big round eyes and sings “a whole new world” at the top of his lungs; the way Esme stumbles out of naps with unreasonable cheerfulness, declaring “I wake up!” (and the way her thighs are still super chubby). The way Dave reaches for my hand in the car. The redwood boughs rustling outside, the cool breezes, friends who bring over board games and yummy noodles, the mountains in the horizon.

I’m guessing this day will pass without much fanfare (and with four school runs). But this was always the best part: looking back, looking forward, thinking about my life, and this year, feeling particularly grateful. 

Longing For Home

What makes a place home? This house is amazing—after a year of extensive remodeling, it has lived up to our hopes and more. I love seeing redwoods through the many windows, the skylights in the cathedral ceilings, the cozy window seat, the concrete countertops and big island, the dark warm wood floors, and I could go on—but it’s not really home-home yet. A friend told me it usually takes eighteen months before a place feels like home.

For most of my life, home was the house I grew up in: the small 80’s ranch with dark wood walls, patterned wallpaper, and worn carpet. I remember intense periods of homesickness during college and medical school: I think what I missed then was a place where I could be myself, be taken care of, know I was unconditionally loved. I missed having someone cook for me, my old memorabilia. After moving back to live nearby for the past six years, I don’t miss that house the same way—I think I see I could never really live there again, and I see that one day, my parents will move on and sell everything and it will be gone.

Our last house, the first one we owned, was never one I fell in love with, but it was home because of the memories we made in it. We had three babies there, and it was the first place I learned how to take care of a house, and what life was like staying at home with the kids.

But now that house is gone too. I suppose there is an unavoidable period of time when one feels displaced with any major move: you’ve left the familiar behind, but the new place is not really home yet. We’ve settled in well here, but something will happen that throws me off: I meet up with a new friend at a coffeehouse but just feel sad missing my old friends, the way they would hug me and the way we could talk. I get lost again going somewhere. I think of something my parents would have loved to see or eat and realize they aren’t here.

I think for me, home is a place where I can be myself, a place where I deeply belong. I like the word “dwell”—it’s not a place where I’ve just made a living, or passed through, but a place where I have abided and lingered in long enough to know the place and people deeply, and to be known myself deeply.

This period, when I’m feeling the loss of a home, makes me read Revelation 21 and 22. One pastor at our church here pointed out that the story doesn’t end with the same garden it started with: it ends with a city, a place where we work and live together. I love that the word picture Jesus gives of heaven reminds me of coming home, to my own room. And when I feel lonely, I love that the story ends with, “He will dwell with them,” and in 22:4 with “they will see his face.” And that will be enough. All of this—my husband, each of my kids, this house with the redwoods—all of it is on loan to me, and as much as I love it, will be gone or changed one day. But I have this promise: this longing to belong is not in vain. One day, I will see his face, and I will live in a place that is home in every way, and that is a kind of comfort now.

Weather

So Bay Area weather is essentially all it’s touted to be. But my favorite thing about the weather here isn’t the perennially cloudless, sunny days, or better yet, the transformative lack of humidity and mosquitos—it’s the evenings. Every evening, the weather magically gets cooler and crisper. It makes me want to breathe deep and wander long. It reminds me of that first thrill of fall on the east coast, when months of oppressively muggy, hot days finally give way to a brisk coolness that makes you want to open windows and slip on long sleeves. Nearly every night here is like that. Dave used to go on and on about how he loved as a child to open his bedroom windows and sleep to a cool breeze, and I have to admit there is something to that.

One of the strangest things here is the lack of rain over the summer. It rained and thunderstormed aplenty in Virginia: we got used to radar-tracking storms to see how long thunder claps would keep the kids up from their naps or sleeping at night; a small tornado uprooted one of our trees a few months before we moved; we checked the weather app every day to figure out how to dress, or whether to bring rain jackets to school. Plenty of times, I’d forget to check in the rush to get the kids out the door, then groan when it starts to pour and I’m not wearing my wellies or raincoat. I haven’t checked my weather app once since moving here. Our chalk drawings stay on the sidewalk for months. We leave toys out on the deck. It’s all rather bizarre.

The first novel I’m reading since the move is The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, a strange amalgam of science fiction, Chinese history, theoretical mathematics and astrophysics, philosophical treatise, and epic quest. My favorite part of it (spoiler alert) is considering what life would be like if a planet existed in a stellar system with three suns. Because of the mathematically unpredictable movement of the three suns, at times the planet can be drawn into the orbit of one of the suns (at which time the planet has regular day-night cycles and mild weather), and at other times it cycles irregularly between them (resulting in completely unpredictable cycles where nights can last for weeks, and deadly temperature extremes). The planet can be far from all three suns (extremely cold conditions where it snows water, then dry ice, then the atmosphere sort of congeals), can be exposed to all three together (every living thing erupts into flames and the surface of the entire planet becomes a lake of lava), can be affected by the gravitational pull of all three suns in one line (all things and the atmosphere itself gets sucked up into a vortex and pulled to the closest sun), or can collide with some or all of the suns (splitting the planet in half and forming various rings that later collapse, destroying all life).

The inhabitants have no control over these events or how long various periods last, and the extreme weather often wipes out a civilization with millions of years passing before another develops. Civilizations devote their energies to trying to predict the motions of the suns, before realizing it is impossible and deciding to leave their world altogether.

I don’t understand the mechanics behind why the weather in the bay area is always so mild and dry—why there are rarely ever clouds during the day, or why the evenings are always perfectly cool—but it’s interesting to mull on how completely it is all out of our control. One day I am going to stop remarking on how nice the weather is here; it will just seem normal, much less the fact that, well, I don’t have to worry about suddenly erupting into flames when my planet gets too close to a few suns. But for now, I’m going to sit in the mystery of it all a little bit, that of all places in the entire universe and galaxy, I have landed upon a place where I can open my windows every night to a cool breeze. 

Preschool Parenting Culture

I stick out a lot here because I have four kids, but I was expecting that. Two is the average here. I get a lot of “are they twins?” about the younger ones as apparently it would be odd for us to intentionally have four children, or comments like v“how do you do it?” (still don’t have a great reply for that one).

But I stick out in another way I hadn’t anticipated: people are always surprised when they hear that I keep the younger two at home. I get asked regularly where they go to preschool, and incredulous looks follow when I say that they don’t.

Apparently it is rare for children to remain at home for their earlier years here, probably due to a few factors—both parents having to work to afford living here, or there being more highly-educated people likely to elect focusing on their careers.

But third, and this is the part I’ve been pondering, I get the sense people here place a higher value on early-child development: they have such a high standard that they feel the only way to do it well is to outsource it to the professional experts. There is a lot of talk about education strategies and things like SEL’s (socio-emotional learning), Carol Dweck growth mindsets, optimizing your child’s brain development and exposures by a certain age. Combine that with a resource-rich environment and parents who either naturally want the best for their kids or are the “Stanford-or-bust” types, and you get competitive preschools teaching based on the latest Stanford experiments, preschools touting specific play-oriented environments, and lessons for little ones ranging from the typical (music, multiple languages, sports, ceramics) to the unusual (Legos to teach political skills, metal-working).

It’s easy to ask, how can I possibly be doing all that by myself at home? Maybe some people are wondering, why would I want to? Why not go do what I trained for twelve years to do, or go get some self-care, and leave that to the experts?

I am in no way judging kids who do go to preschool (we’ll probably find one for the three year-old next year) or lessons, but part of adjusting to being here has been processing this sort of tension. It’s made me realize that I do personally believe in and desire to teach them myself, in large part because the most important things—world view, values, priorities, principles—are taught implicitly, as they are lived out, and I want my kids to see that from me. Maybe I’m just too sanguine and laid-back to worry overmuch about what they are missing, though in that case it’s good to be challenged about what and how I teach them at home.

And that’s the bottom line about living here: there are so many things that are good, but I’m constantly having to decide when there’s too much of a good thing, or whether that good thing in fact aligns with the gospel and our purpose. Without that lens, it’s so easy to get sucked into a certain way of feeling and operating, because the culture here is so strong: its values are like a riptide that can pull you under unawares. We thought a lot of that through before making this move, but it’s interesting to see how it plays out in ways we do or don’t expect.

California

Well, we have moved to California, nearly two months ago, and I think I’m ready to write about it. To the two people who still check this blog.

This was not a shotgun move. It was several years in the making, and made intentionally for mission and community, which I’m realizing is very strange in Silicon Valley. People come here for tech, for Stanford, or for the academic success of their kids. Where we live, houses cost anywhere from two to ten million dollars: it’s this strange oxymoron, seeing dated, small houses that would go for 100K anywhere else in the country, but that cost millions because of the dirt they sit on.

This place is full of contradictions like that. Inclusivity, awareness, and diversity, for example, are huge values, but while people are diverse in terms of ethnicity or lifestyle, there isn’t much diversity socio-politically or economically.

That’s led to a sense of personal dissonance, because while I fit in perfectly on the surface—I’m a highly-educated, slim, casually-dressed Asian female, which every other woman seems to be here—I’m actually really different inwardly. I have way more kids than anyone else here probably thinks is responsible (or affordable), and I primarily parent them myself rather than outsourcing for the sake of career or self-care. Our kids go to a choice school that they pretty much accidentally (providentially) got in to, not because I had orchestrated or worried about it. Similarly, we live in a covetable house, but due to an act of grace, not by merit or striving. Our kids do have some enrichment skills like language or music, but because I try to teach them myself at home, not because they were enrolled in a ton of extracurriculars from a young age. I secretly compost and recycle not for the good of the earth, but because our regular trash can is sized for a midget. I have ties to an Ivy League, but I’m an under-achiever in my career. I value kindness and inclusivity, but I believe in absolute truth.

When we first moved here, there was just so much to thrill the heart, and I was just soaking all that in, rightfully so—our kids are around other kids that look like them! The weather is disgustingly perfect, all the time! There are (almost) no mosquitos! The food—the food! The parks and playgrounds and zoos and museums and things to do with the kids! Perhaps I will never get over seeing an orange tree outside the window, opening the windows to a fresh cool breeze at night, or seeing blue mountains in the distance. I’m still amazed by the 100-book checkout limit at the library, the way our kids have taken to biking everywhere, and how any retail store in the universe appears to be within ten minutes of our house.

But eventually things about the culture started to soak in. Part of me feels lonely, and I’m not even sure what for—I don’t think Virginia was a place we could have stayed forever, or that I really belonged in either—perhaps what I miss are people who unconditionally love and support us; people I felt I could completely be myself around. And I know that only comes with time. Part of me is trying to make myself relevant to the culture here, while figuring out how to be intentional about who I still am. A few days ago, after realizing I was getting a bit swept away by school stuff, we finally got back on some spiritual and marriage routines we had lost with the move, and that was good.

So there are a few unique things about this time period: it’s going to be lonely. It takes a while for a place to feel like home (someone told me eighteen months) and that’s okay. The loneliness hits me at random times, like when I think of something a friend back in Virginia would have liked to know about, or when I get lost again going somewhere. And this is also a formative time: we have a new chance to define ourselves, to set the right foundation, and part of that is intentionally not getting swept away by various pressures, is being willing to wait and discern before making decisions about our commitments.

And a lot of it is drawing closer to God, as to an anchor in changing seas or a resting place in lonely times. This move throws into clearer relief that we all long for home, a place where we belong, where we are unconditionally loved and inexpressibly understood, and yet we could search forever on earth and not really find that place. As St. Augustine wrote, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you”—one could add, “until it finds its home in you.”