About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
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August 24, 2021
Growth
We had a lot of discussions about trusting people and how you decide to trust someone this month. I can’t remember how it started but the conversation continued when JB was reading the graphic novelization of CoCo. They wanted to know why Ernesto yelled “Security!” and what Miguel did wrong for Ernesto to call security to take him away – what was the justification? It was a great teaching example. We talked about when we trust someone: We observe their words and their actions, how they make decisions, whether they believe (as Ernesto clearly did) that the ends justify the means where the means are “sacrificing literally anyone else” and the ends are “so I get what I want when I want it”. We shouldn’t trust people who show us that they are willing to hurt people to get what they want, and a lot of times, people / abusers will hide who they truly are from the rest of us. Miguel didn’t do anything wrong but he made a mistake in trusting someone because he thought they were family, and family doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. We talked about how Ernesto had power over Miguel, who was alone and too little to fight back, and power over Hector who didn’t know that his best friend was a sneaking slimeball, but he chose to hide that part of himself from his fans because he wanted something from them. Very classic abuser!
JB very quickly connected the dots to: “You trusted your dad and you didn’t know he was going to hurt you! And Auntie trusted her husband, who isn’t her husband anymore, because she didn’t think he was going to hurt her!”
Yep.
Yep. People hide the bad parts of themselves from some people, notably the people they aren’t abusing. They hide it from the people who they want something from. So we can be fooled sometimes, it happens. It’s not doing something wrong – it’s a mistake because you don’t have all the information or the experience to know to be more careful around that person but then you’ve got to do something with the information when you do have it.
Responsibility
Nicole and Maggie bestirred my brain cells to thinking about helping JB develop a habit of maintaining their own paper planner. I don’t know if they’re actually the right age developmentally but they do use our family calendars to see what is scheduled so I think it’s just another step from using what’s in front of their faces to developing the skill/habit of writing those things down for themselves. I should have started earlier in the summer, though, more fun things to add than school things probably make this more fun? Oh I don’t know. I started when I started!
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August 23, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 155: Yesterday was such a bad day with JB that the funk has followed me into today. I just want to lay my head down and be left alone for hours. Naturally, I cannot. We have school drop-off, work, more work, Smol to take care of, more MORE work, Smol to settle down for a nap, work, school pick up, JB’s after school lessons that will stand in for some version of aftercare to schedule.
I don’t know if it’s tempting fate but I filled almost in the rest of the school year’s dates on our calendar for JB. Who knows if these dates will stand. But I will want to know them later and what better time to do that then when I’m stressed and looking for administrative mindless scutwork?
I did sort out their tutoring and Spanish scheduling too, so I was able to start booking those out for a few weeks. This gives me a (faux) sense of control over something. Look at me! Planning things!
*****
I finished our two direct aid projects for friends and did tell myself that I’m not allowed to pick up another project for at least 24 hours. Will I be able to do that? WE. SHALL. SEE.
*****
We donated to the Jewish Family & Community Services East Bay to support their refugee resettlement efforts. This situation in Afghanistan hits really close to home. Our family had to escape their homeland after the US withdrew their troops after the fall of Saigon. One uncle who worked with the CIA disappeared forever, leaving behind his wife and three kids. No one has seen or heard from him since 1975. Another uncle was thrown into jail for decades for fighting for the “wrong” side. Most of my family had to flee under cover of night, embarking on a dangerous journey they were lucky to survive.
People deserve a safe place to live and I think we have a moral responsibility to extend that safety (dubious though it may feel when I look around at how citizens of this country have behaved in recent years).
Year 2, Day 156: I am forcing myself to wait at least until tomorrow before starting up another project. I do have plenty of work to do, I just don’t want to do it and I am clearly using these projects to help me feel a tiny bit better about a world that I strongly resent and dislike.
I’m realizing that I’m simmering at a high amount of rage every day. I haven’t been in this emotional space for a long time and I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten until this weekend when JB and I had the worst most terrible-parenting interaction I’ve ever had and it’s finally sunk in that I’m so overtaxed, so filled with anger at the world, that I have lost every reservoir of patience.
I had to meet someone that a loved one has been seeing for a while and it was immediate red flags and I just want to yell nooooo but they won’t listen so there’s no point. Having been their near-daily support for years through similar bad situations, it was so hard to watch what appears to be them walking down the same path again. I’m also furious with some family because GET YOUR SHOT AUGH. The refugee situation in Afghanistan pushes some very personal buttons, as my family including my generation, were refugees after a war. (more…)
August 20, 2021
1. I finally learned the name of one kind of flower I really like but never bothered to look up: gladiolus! They’re striking!
2. Sometimes it feels like the robot vacuum taking a million passes on our high traffic floors is a judgment but then I’m just glad it’s there to pick up all that dirt.
Challenges this week: The world?
The ongoing situation in Afghanistan.
The nasty attitude this country has about refugees and our moral responsibility to be the country they pretend we already are.
The ongoing uncertainty with the Delta variant.
The ongoing uncertainty of having a child in school, in person.
The various nonsense and absurdities of my clientele at work.
Finding a healthy way to manage and minimize how much the incoming stressors affect my personal well being.
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August 17, 2021
Nicole and Maggie got me thinking about why it is that I keep running down my academic history. They referred to them as achievements, actually, but when I started writing, I caught myself saying they weren’t achievements. It’s a long-running habit, I now realize. But why?
As an Asian and an immigrant’s kid, I was expected to work my butt off and be academically competitive. We had to do better than our parents so we could support ourselves, and then support them in their old age. That was the script, no questions asked. I did well enough until middle school. Going into high school, school got tougher. When I compared myself to most of my high school friends and peers, I didn’t even come close to their level of smarts and I always felt that difference even though no one treated each other differently over academics. While there were certainly small groups that were academically cutthroat, they were the exception, not the rule. That wasn’t my friends or our wider circles. They no more commented on my academics than I did to my friends who weren’t in the Honors track. It was simply not an issue. We didn’t have any nerd v jock dichotomy in our circles, either. Everyone was a bit of some combination of interests. We were honors students and athletes. We overlapped in band, orchestra, choir, sports (competitive and not), student government, yearbook and volunteerism. One of my best friends was in a completely different academic track and I view her accomplishments with respect. But not mine.
The same goes for college: we went to anywhere from community colleges to state colleges to Ivies. No one had any opinion on anyone else’s alma mater, aside from the (mostly joking) USC / UCLA rivalry. But the fact that I didn’t apply to a selective college, that I was not willing to put myself out there for the expected rejections, and that I mostly approached the process like a hermit crab trying to just keep in my shell to protect myself? I think I’m still ashamed of that. I’m still ashamed that I wasn’t willing to even try applying to a “better” school. So I put myself down. I diminish the very hard work that I put into college once I got there. I diminish the fact that I was able to graduate in four years from a good school where graduating in five years wasn’t uncommon. I diminish the fact that I managed that even while working double time at one job and holding two additional jobs. (more…)
August 16, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 148: Each Monday seems to take the preceding Monday as a challenge of one-upsmanship.
I was juggling time zones, time critical problems with our systems, onboarding new people, hiring new people, my regular work, and dealing with the school board trying to get the information we need to make the least-worst decision for JB’s upcoming school year. PiC had to take the bulk of parenting today as I was in deep for hours and only emerged to shovel several bites of food down around lunchtime and get back to work. I’m also juggling the ongoing tracking and orders for our latest Lakota family and organizing contributions for a former PF blogger who was recently diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia. Oh and I still need to wrap up the last part of JB’s teacher appreciation gifts before our 5 pm meeting with the superintendent, and our 6 pm call with the school.
My urge to stress shop at JetPens is rising.
My urge to stress eat cheesecake is definitely rising.
We didn’t wrap up the night until well after 9, and it felt like it’d been a week in a day.
Year 2, Day 149: We had our dry run walk to the school today with the whole family in the morning to see how early we have to leave. We can make it in ten minutes handily which is good because I’ve got a bum ankle from yesterday and now a bum shoulder today.
Half the day was school prep. We had the meeting with the teacher, we had to cut filters for JB’s masks, we had to organize their to-go area by the door so that they won’t waste all morning running around trying to figure out what they need. I wrote a list to be posted on the wall and made them a backpack tag with the same list so they can check their belongings when they leave the house and check again before they leave school. All day I was stressed but I realized midday that I’d gone to Ice Mode. I desperately wanted to break down and cry but I literally could not show any emotion. Except some anger. Which I repressed. Of course.
I’m highly conflicted. I have no way to assess the risk in numerical terms. We have gotten a lot of last minute information about the mitigation layers. They have said that all classrooms will have a portable air filter, that hand sanitizer will be supplied, the desks aren’t spaced apart but they do still have little barriers up, the doors and windows are supposed to stay open unless it’s raining, everyone is to be masked indoors and outdoors. They will be eating outdoors unless it’s raining. It all sounds like it should be reasonable measures except for the part where they’re going to be indoors with 24 other people for 5-6 hours a day and that’s a lot of people who are seeing a lot of people who are also seeing a lot of people. They have also confirmed that it’s actually always been a legal requirement for them to inform parents of close contacts within classrooms so the principal was being shady as hell acting like they didn’t know what that protocol was. It’s unfortunate but this school is one of the preferred schools in the district for this age and she clearly knows it and acts accordingly. I have been completely unimpressed by her leadership through this pandemic.
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August 13, 2021
1. Almost without fail, going to fetch Smol Acrobat from the crib always lifts my spirits. They look up, flash a gummy grin, and start chuckling. I can’t help but chuckle back.
Challenges this week: Remember when I pondered whether I’d keep up my COVID weekly life posts? Because it seemed like perhaps an end was near? Hahaha … sigh. I remember that.
The computer chip shortage is really doing a number on the used and new car markets. We had intended to avoid them until more of this pandemic and disrupted supply chain thing was over but that’s not practical.
We have to deal with the nonsense of this recall election in CA thanks to some pack of political hyenas. And if it works, we could be stuck with a horrible Republican governor. Yes I needed more stress, thank you.
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August 10, 2021
I was looking at JB and was struck by the sense of how much has changed in the past 18 months. I can’t call this a before/after yet, not with the Delta variant having so recently raged through India and now appearing in California.
With all that’s gone by, I want to record my observations of Jan 2020 to now, a whole year and a half later, before I completely forget what the before times were like.
Current Events
Before: In January, I was obsessively reading all the news about COVID. I don’t think we actually knew that it was coming for us just yet. Though I didn’t truly have the energy to spare, my alarms were all going off about this latest virus and I was starting to hunker down mentally. We were slowly adding to our food stores and I was evaluating our cash holdings. We were impacted by the shutdown in China at work and I suspected it would get worse before it got better.
Now: I had no idea how much worse. I worried but I truly didn’t know how horribly the US response to the virus would be bungled, and for how long, and how politics would dominate the response to a global health crisis. I’m sick to my soul with how broken this country is. We have vaccines now and a good swath of the country is vaccinated but huge groups still aren’t. We have people in our families who still refuse to get vaccinated and I just don’t get it. The Delta variant is coming through and I don’t know how badly that’ll affect the remaining folks who aren’t vaccinated, whether by choice or not.
Before: We had no idea what was going to happen for school. Daycare had shut down and school was mere months away. I was grateful that we didn’t have to deal with it yet in the early months, hopeful that we’d have a reasonable response in time to have some kind of a school year come the fall.
Now: Wrong. And now we are heading into the new school year with some states going out of their way to put kids at risk (Texas, Oklahoma), and us in CA having to be grateful for scraps like “at least we have a universal mask mandate for the moment but that could go away too” and not having any good alternatives if we have vulnerable family who are higher risk. This. Sucks.
Family
Before: We were a 3 human, 2 dog household.
Now: Smol Acrobat burst onto the scene and is growing by leaps and bounds. I’m both glad I know that things will keep changing rapidly and stunned by how quickly it flies by once the hardest parts are behind us. How do we have a small baby that can eat solids and sit up and try to crawl already? Soon after, we lost our sage and wonderful Seamus.
Before: JB was a fresh minted 5 year old that needed ALL THE ATTENTION. Play with me, play with me, read to me, draw this for me because I can’t do it, very much attached to PiC, meh about me. They were loving swim lessons and playdates, and the birthday parties I had no interest in. They still had a lot of little kid features. Their fondest dream was to go to kindergarten.
Now: We have a seasoned 6 year old that can still be quite attention-needy but ALSO can: do chores on their own initiative, draw a whole boatload of cute things, read chapter books, ride a bike, ride a scooter, push a stroller, get the dog to obey simple commands (come, sit, lay down, leave it). They are forming lots of opinions, reflecting tons of things that we say back to us, sometimes in thoughtful ways and sometimes not. They’ve achieved a level of confidence with their art that I love to see, and they’re learning to type, to write more legibly and to compose their own correspondence. The changes in their hands and feet strike me the most. They’ve always been tall by comparison to say, me, but seeing their hands lengthen into real kid hands and lose that little kid chubbiness is really startling. They used to daydream constantly about what it’d be like to have a baby and now that reality is here, they’re thoroughly enamored with their baby sibling. They’re looking forward to first grade; their kindergarten teacher sucked most of the joy out of their first experience of school so we’re hoping for a better teacher this year.
Before: I was climbing the walls worrying over how to handle the shift from full time daycare with 12 hours of coverage possible to a school day schedule. The only aftercare we knew about, that was affiliated with the school, was by lottery and oversubscribed many times over.
Now: No aftercare? Eh, fine. We’ve been through the gauntlet with fulltime work and zero childcare. We’ve found many ways to remotely connect and educate JB, and many ways to entertain or let them entertain themselves. As long I continue to work remotely and am physically present, I’m not going to bother fussing with the aftercare lottery.
Before: We had our perfect Seamus overseeing everyone, and goofy Sera who could barely handle her ownself.
Now: Our hearts are sore. Sera is coming along with her training. She can tolerate seeing other dogs sometimes.
Before: PiC was miserable at his job. It had evolved several times over the years and the last evolution transformed the job into a very poor fit. He did the best he could but he was annoyed all the time and second guessing himself constantly.
Now: PiC changed jobs and while he’s still stressed over learning a new job and the workload, he’s in a very different emotional place. I’m really glad for him.
Before: I sometimes felt like I was losing my grip on the reins at work. I probably wasn’t really, but I didn’t feel like I had my arms around my team the way I wanted to for them to be well supported and operating efficiently and effectively.
Now: Being on leave reaffirmed my value at work and reaffirmed that I no longer value my work as a high priority in my life. An odd juxtaposition.
Before: I hadn’t had a haircut in about a year and I was too lazy to get it cut in January when PiC and JB went.
Now: I haven’t had a haircut in 2.5 years and I’m still definitely too tired, busy, and lazy to get it cut. My hair is two feet long. I’m only five feet tall. This is getting awkward. At least I think it’s hit the maximum length it’ll grow. If it kept growing, I’d be in danger of being an imitation Rapunzel.
Before: We’d had a long visit with family and friends, I was socially tapped out and physically extremely fatigued. The physical fatigue had pushed me to despair. Thankfully my mentor gave me that final nudge I needed to seek help with my health through therapy.
Now: Therapy has been transformative for my mental and physical health. It’s not a cure and it’s not banished all pain. It’s simply eased my suffering in wholly unexpected ways. It’s also challenged me to my core.
Household
Before: We used to run the dishwasher if we had hosted a meal with company or maybe once a month to make sure it got used.
Now: We run the dishwasher 2-3 times a week.
Before: We had strict one hour of TV on the weekends only rule.
Now: We joked that the rule went out the window. We sometimes allow half an hour of TV on the weekdays and an hour every weeknight after dinner. They were obsessed with it for a while but we’ve always enforced the rule about balance – there’s no binge watching. 3 episodes of something max, then move on to something else. We made a few mistakes letting the TV time run a little long, and sometimes it was for my survival, physically but JB’s intense obsession has worn off. They love watching still but it’s not the end of the world if we veto it some nights. We were starting to think of how we’ll pull back but I’m sure that some of it will just happen naturally as they start getting back into school and activities.
Money
Before: I was definitely sick of the mental chaos from the rental property. That disruption was probably contributing to my sense of unease. I really hate feeling like I am not making the best possible choices for our family.
Now: I’m still VERY glad we sold the rental. I could not imagine dealing with that mess on top of everything else.
Before: I was stockpiling cash.
Now: I’m making myself let go of part of the stockpile and even finally set up auto-investments to our brokerage. I missed out on a good deal of growth last year because I was worried about the stability of our jobs. My risk assessment at the time was that we had no idea whether either of our companies were financially stable enough to weather the unknown that was ahead of us without layoffs. It was a good surprise that both our companies had done a good enough job of saving and investing that they were able to take the hit of 2020 without cutting headcount. I won’t make our financial plans based on hoping that key people at work aren’t incompetents or fools but so long as the current leadership remains in place, it seems safe to assume that they will probably still make similar kinds of plans going forward.
Before: We were paying for full time daycare for an older child and money felt TIGHT.
Now: We’re getting ready to pay for part time daycare for an infant and as I’m getting ready for that line item, where the heck all our money has been going?? Yes, I do know what we spend on but I still can’t believe how fast it adds up.
:: I’m sure I’m forgetting things. What’s on your before / after?