seven years
Once you become a parent, you start hearing the euphemism “it goes by so quickly” all - the - time. I’ve never really known what to say as a response, other than nod in agreement with a polite smile. I’ve heard it so many times that now I catch myself saying it to others, some weird vague parental colloquialism we’ve adopted as a way to express something we’re all experiencing, that can’t quite be put to words.
When I first became a mom, one of the things that shocked me the most was how much I started thinking about death. There were thoughts of death in my anxious ideation - insane elaborate scenarios my reptilian brain would scheme up about how my blobby beautiful baby might get hurt, injured, or worse now that she was out of my safe warm body and so many things could potentially harm her that I had never concerned myself with before. The sight of a rogue blueberry on the floor of our kitchen could incite panicky thoughts of what could’ve happened if she had been able to snag it off the ground while crawling around our terracotta-tiled kitchen floor and put it in her mouth before she had been introduced to solid food. A plastic eyeball our family dog had victoriously mauled off his favorite chew toy, another extreme choking hazard I’d snatch up off the ground in between heart palpitations and self-directed chastising for not having noticed it sooner.
But the more difficult, physically taxing thoughts around death had nothing to do with anxiety and all the what-ifs life can throw at you. It was more the sinking realization that with death, the unavoidable moment of final separation would come between mother and child and the body of a new mother is acutely aware of the pain of physical separation. The first night home from the hospital, my husband (and new dad) held our babygirl in her nursery, feeding her bottles of formula the hospital instructed us to give her to keep up her weight as I waited for my milk to come in. One wall of separation away, I laid in our bedroom, depleted and hurting in places and in ways I never could’ve imagined, feeling empty in a way that I hadn’t formerly thought possible. My insides felt like they had been carved out, like someone had taken a melon baller to my insides and scooped out the very flesh that had slowly formed my new identity as a mom over the past nine months. Every cell in my hollow womb seemed to want to piece itself back together with the baby that was just there before and the forceful magnetic pull towards a reunification that could never be was utterly heart-breaking. I laid there for god knows how long, holding my empty body, arms wrapped around my stomach, weeping with a sense of true despair that I think one can only equate to the miracle of how profound a mother’s love is for their child. This first act of separation and the emotions that came with it helped me to understand that the truest forms of love are the bravest.
It’s been seven years since that fitful night. My then formula-drinking, wide-eyed baby is now a ninety-eighth percentile in height giant angel of a child. She loves reading as much as I did when I was her age. She can get lost for hours doing large Lego sets while listening to audiobooks of Diary of a Wimpy Kid on her vintage RCA boombox. She’s still at the precious age when she’ll dress up in her Mei costume from My Neighbor Totoro, straw hat and all, just because she’s watching the movie. Charcuterie boards, over-medium fried eggs with buttered toast, and ice cream are her favorite foods. She still says ‘tings’ instead of things and ‘birfday’ instead of birthday. She likes to teach me Katseye dances and still wants me to read her stories when she’s in the bathtub. Recently, she’s started to ask me questions about Shakespeare after reading a graphic novel of Romeo and Juliet she found on her Kindle. She doesn’t understand the tragic ending of Romeo and Juliet, the concept of taking your own life because of a broken heart fundamentally does not compute in her seven-year old mind. The innocence of that somehow fills me with gratitude and grief at the same time. Gratitude because it hasn’t happened yet, grief because I know one day it will. I hope I’m still here to hold her hand through it.
There’s more than one word in the Korean language to describe love. My favorite is the word 정 (jeong). It’s used to describe a bond and connection that grows stronger the more time you spend with someone or something. 정 (jeong) gives respect to the passage of time and all of life’s messy and beautiful moments that lead to the creation of a strong bond. It honors the patina a relationship can take on and explains why the absence of a person, a pet, an object, that you had in your life for years, is so painful to experience.
When your child is born, you hold them in your arms for the first time and you think there’s no way you could ever love someone this much ever again. But through the phenomenon of 정 (jeong), one giggle and tearful tantrum at a time, you realize your love can deepen and grow. Somehow, the time that passes between you and your forever baby, pushes your love past what you felt at first cradling and it evolves into something more tender, more soft, more beautiful. You realize how almost every good parenting decision ready's your child to separate from you further, each independent step they take moves them towards their own life outside of you. And yet, bravely, you sturdy yourself to the inevitability of one day saying your last goodbye and allow the meaningful bond of time to continue.