When I was a child, I cried a lot. I vaguely remember wailing and corporal punishments that ended in me kicking and screaming on the floor.

This, it seems, would be in line with psychologist Caroline Goldman’s take that violence and conflict are inevitable in the parent-child relationship. At least three or four people have texted me this NYTimes article, Did American-Style ‘Gentle Parenting’ Spoil French Children? since it was published a few weeks ago. Prominently featured is Goldman, whose views have apparently created a polemic against anything but gentle parenting — including the use of timeouts that are described as psychological abuse.

Immediately, I looked up her interviews and watched this 11-minute clip:

At first, I was put off by her introduction, where she essentially says (loosely translated by me):

“We’ve been telling a beautiful story about parenthood that isn’t realistic, we make them believe that to have a child, is to enter a haven of peace, of tenderness, shared joy, and love… even myself, when I was awaiting the arrival of my first child, I was rather stupefied by the violence in the interrelations of the family, intergenerational… I told myself that there would be so much love, there would be no conflict…except that all parents who raise and love a child, realize that it’s inevitable that there’ll be fights, and violence, at a minimum, invites aggressivity, and we must find methods to regulate this aggression.”

There’s a lot to unpack here, especially re: violence. But first, Goldman is primarily up in arms against what she sees as the deterioration in French parenting, thanks to (as she says in the video interview) self-proclaimed parenting specialists who have propped up the Positive Parenting movement, imported from America, and stripped the philosophy of any punishment.

Hand-wringing over whether or not American influence has spoiled French kids isn’t new; three years ago already (!!) I wrote about Earnest Parenting & French Parenting, which referenced a New Yorker article about how French parents don’t know what they’re doing, either. Goldman is cited in that article, too, already critiquing proponents of the positive parenting movement as influencers trying to hawk books and bemoaning wild kids raised without any boundaries.

As an American living and raising children in France, I have a pretty specific take on this all, and as with anything, two things can be true at once.

At the beginning of this year, when friends were visiting, we went out to dinner at a typical French restaurant in a nearby town. Seated next to us was a group of four: a mother, father, I assume a friend or relative, and a boy who was perhaps eight years old. He was dressed in a dinner jacket, khaki trousers, and sat quietly with a stuffed rabbit and a book while his parents dined and conversed peacefully over a bottle of wine. My friend and I looked at the boy and exchanged smiles, both of us laughing inside at the cliché of a perfectly poised French boy and imagining his interiority. Most French people don’t even bother to take small children out to restaurants — “restaurants are for lovers and friends,” my mother-in-law likes to say, but the crisply tailored, demure boy is obviously not the rule in France, and not the trend psychologists are freaking out over.

Just a few weeks ago, I was waiting in line at my local supermarket, buying candles for Kiko’s fourth birthday cake. In front of me was a sight hard to stomach, a mother who had grabbed a plastic bottle of Coke from the mini-fridge at check-out, flanked by her maybe 10-year-old son and toddler daughter, who was sitting in the shopping cart. As she opened the Coke, she took a sip, offered it to her son, who followed suit, and then — clutch your pearls now!! — the mother poured some of the sugary black liquid into her toddler’s bottle. With a glazed look, the messy pig-tailed girl immediately began chugging the drink.

Obviously, there are multiple factors at play here, like social class and lifestyle, and I have no idea how these kids would behave at a restaurant, but all of this is to say that generalization always misses the fact that individual experiences exist.

And yet, it seems that most parents want, need, a “road map” that psychologists like Goldman provide:

But her appeal rests largely on the decisive nature of her advice. She likes to give parents a “road map” that lists possible scenarios and the best responses. “If I’m going to see a cardiologist, I don’t want them to just say, ‘Well, do whatever you want.’ Can I go on a run or shouldn’t I? What time? How long? At what speed?” She also puts the parents’ needs first at times. Plopping your child in front of the television for an hour and a half a day isn’t so bad, she writes, if it allows tired parents to recoup. “Everyone is allowed to want some peace and quiet for part of the evening.”

It seems bizarre to me that people are so baffled over how to respond to their children or how to handle them. But I think the crux of the issue, obviously, lies in control, or the idea that children are extensions of ourselves that must be molded into humans. And adults are constantly trying to model behavior for children, it seems, or at least position themselves as authority figures.

Just this past weekend, I was in Normandie with my family and a few members of my husband’s extended family, who interacted eagerly with Kiko and Elio. While I was grateful for the shared responsibility of caregiving, it was interesting to be around other people ‘parenting’ my children, and to observe just how much adults impose their own views and ideas on kids, as the authority figures in question. A few offhand remarks include that the baby brother was still a “savage animal”, while Kiko, the four-year-old, had reached humanhood, with manners and speech (this opinion is in opposition to philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau or modern psychologists like Dolto who believed in the personhood of young babies), or that a baby was always “wrong” and the mama was always “right”.

Later, I pulled Kiko aside and told her that sometimes mothers are wrong and babies are right. She just nodded at me with a knowing smile. A good child, she’s never given me cause to yell or hit her (it’s illegal in France!). And, I find the idea of yelling at your child demeaning — I think I read in a book once that it’s essentially lowering yourself to their level — and I’ve seen French parents scream at their children, “IT’S NOT YOU WHO DECIDES, IT IS ME” at ski resorts. That mother was in dire need of a time-out herself. When Kiko throws the odd fit or tantrum, and isn’t responding to my offers of explanation or a hug, I do firmly carry her into her room and tell her that she can freak out loudly there, by herself, without disrupting anyone else. When this happens, in usually less than a minute, she’ll calm down or call desperately for me for a hug, and that moment of connection, she can calm down enough to regulate her nervous system, or whatever.

I’m sure my mother-in-law, whom the kids are with now, would have a different method — her “gros yeux” or big eyes is pretty terrifying — but as she always tells me, while citing her own mother, “two authorities never works!” When we spend time together, however, I never really see a problem (other than differents in standards of oral hygiene). Maybe this is because I don’t really see myself as an authority figure but just a guide for Kiko, to help her self-regulate enough to make her own decisions and to teach her about things like the importance of eating vegetables before dessert, or that, sometimes, adults are wrong!

The biggest conflicts I’ve encountered since becoming a parent are the ones with my own parents and their relationship with my kid — which makes me think back to Goldman’s statement of the violence that inevitably arises in intergenerational relationships. Maybe it’s when we never question how our parents raised us, with authority, and repeat what they did to us to our own children, that we manufacture discontent and conflict when we try to impose our will on humans that have come into this world with their own desires and thoughts. Or even if we do question it, we as parents are once more reprimanded by our own parents, rendered helpless, dumb children once again.

But maybe children aren’t so dumb and helpless as we think. And maybe the world isn’t as cruel or as unfair as we say it is. To be a parent necessarily forces one to impose a point of view on what life and reality are, and I think a lot of people teach a child that life is an unjust struggle full of made-up rules one must follow, where compromises must be made. It makes sense then that a child would scream and fight in response.

I know some people would recoil at the idea of educating a child that life is a living lucid dream, where we can get everything that we imagine, and that the result would be, at the very least, a spoiled kid who doesn’t think about others. But I don’t think that’s true. From my memory of reading Rousseau’s Emile in college, he concluded that humans are naturally full of healthy self-love and compassion for others. After all, if you were free to do what you wanted — and let’s face it the core issue between parents and children is all about control (this isn’t to say boundaries aren’t in place but I could go on writing forever and I feel like I’ve already been rambling now for a while) — and if you weren’t told that life was going to be cruel and unjust, you’d have no reason to kick and scream, n’est-ce-pas?

“See…I feel that Taiwan is like a lost child. Who has strayed far, far away from its home, so far that it can’t even remember who it is anymore. We must help it remember.”

This took me by surprise, since the speaker was presumably once a child themselves who forsook their own country for socialism and baguettes of the bread variety.

“But don’t kids have the right to grow up, to take on their own names, to decide and create their own values, lead their own lives?”

An awkward pause ensued. The speaker smiled without a response, laughed to ease any awkwardness, and then our conversation moved on to less controversial grounds.

Yesterday, I returned from Taipei after a brutal 15-hour flight with my three, almost four, year-old in tow. Eva Airlines food couldn’t be saved even with the cute, pink plastic Hello Kitty cutlery, and as I carried Kiko while dragging a suitcase, I managed to barf into a barf bag while waiting to go through customs. This physical act felt symbolic, a visceral reaction to a very emotionally fraught trip. On my last trip three years ago, I wrote about intergenerational trauma, not seeing my father, seeing my stepmother, the sameness of Taiwan, and this vague feeling of accomplished fulfillment of filial obligation by bringing Kiko to the motherland.

But much has changed in three years. I no longer have a stepmother, and I’m no longer sure that I should have any filial obligation to bring Kiko to the motherland. Taiwan itself felt different, too. Last time I wrote about its enduring sameness; while there were still the cheap plastic stools and paper fishing games I played as a little girl (which Kiko did play this time), this time even the stinky tofu smelled… less stinky. Maybe places seem to change because we do, or at least, our perceptions and what we pay attention to have changed. Or maybe it’s also the influence of the company; while on the last trip I’d taken Clem, his parents, and our only kid, this time I schlepped Kiko halfway across the world by myself to meet my sister, her partner, and my mother, while leaving Clem at home to prep for the next Jacques Fromage festival and baby E with his paternal grandparents.

There was one big lunch with my mother’s once immediate family, three of her sisters, and their husbands attended, where there was an eager awkwardness of being in the presence of people you’ve known your entire lives but see only rarely. A few jokes were cracked, moments of complicity, photos were taken, and they cooed over Kiko’s cuteness, but once the dessert soup was served from the lunch set menu, our time was up. They went back to their lives, and we to ours, as tourists more or less, living in my own now deceased Wai Po’s apartment. Every day we went out to eat, seeking the best beef noodle soup or oyster omelet or snow ice, the best night markets for shoes or gifts, and it exhausted me. When talking to a friend currently in Japan, the consensus was that Asia’s unbridled consumption in big cities is unmatched; I think the amount of plastic waste I produced in ten days was more than I do here in France in two months. Convenience is a key tenet of Taiwanese culture, as proven through their transport system, health care system, 7-Eleven system, and wide availability of cheap eats and consumer goods.

But what exactly Taiwanese culture is is a whole mess of a question I won’t get into, other than the fact that my mother, daughter of a general in Chiang-Kai Shek’s army, is part of the dwindling population that thinks Taiwan is the real, Nationalist Party, Republic of China. My mother was not born in China, didn’t set foot there until she was well past middle age, and yet hates the idea of Taiwanese identity. This blind loyalty to a country she’s never been to tracks with her own filial piety; she loves and respects her parents no matter what. I don’t know how, exactly, she was raised, but I can imagine it was with some violence, as hitting children was normal to her.

Our very different views on how to raise a child have become a point of contention for us, and our relationship has become tense. At the end of this last trip, an argument erupted because my mother needlessly scolded my child with the phrase, 誰養妳, who raised you? The implication was obviously that whoever had done the job had done it poorly. I didn’t take the comment well and promptly left my own Wai Po’s apartment for a hotel with Kiko. There, everything was fresh, clean, stripped of any memories or old photos, equipped with a Toto toilet that opened and warmed itself for you. It was in those final 36 hours, dragging my tired feet and emotional hangover all over Taipei without any real purpose or connection other than to consume something, that I began to really question the meaning and weight the motherland should or could have. After all, if our mothers left in search of something better, what are we meant to find back there if not the disappointment and hurt they tried to leave behind?

As the sun sets just before 5 pm, we now eat dinner at 5:30 pm. Kiko has lamented the fact that due to this early dining time, she doesn’t have the requisite 4:30 pm snack of a goûter. I try to comfort her that while all of her friends are starving, waiting around for an 8 pm dinner, she’s already eating miso salmon, This is an absurdly early hour to eat for the French, but for me, it is a necessity because if we eat dinner early, Kiko is washed up and in bed by 7:30 pm, an hour later than her baby brother.

And then the rest of my day can begin. For a solid three hours, I’ll write, read and furiously do all the things I want to do until I put myself to bed and hope that the baby doesn’t wake me up at 3 in the morning. It’s been an exhausting time but weirdly: motherhood has made me feel more ambitious than I ever have before.

I used to think that my options in life, for the future, dwindled as time went on. I would say that I was a pretty ambitious young person, surrounded by equally if not more so ambitious people who attended elite schools. But when I think about myself ten years ago, living in Colorado working at a toxic startup that literally made me cry nearly on a daily basis, and what I imagined for myself in the future, everything is fuzzy. There were too many what-ifs and doubts and restricting beliefs. I felt like I was at the mercy of fate or luck or circumstance. Now, as a mother who’s literally birthed life into this world, I feel more in control of what happens next than ever.

Maybe it’s something to do with the fact that the Year of the Snake is coming to a close. A year symbolic of shedding old skins, letting go, and transformations. I feel that more than ever. Time has become more precious than ever and I’ve become dead set on not wasting minutes or attention on anything that isn’t aligned with the things I want to create and the kind of life I want to lead, which includes giving up certain types of work, friendships, and idle time scrolling, watching brain rot.

I’ve decided to embrace my art monster without having to make the mutually exclusive decision of being a good, selfless person/parent or an artist who achieves one’s dreams (non merci, Claire Dederer). I think I’m writing this more for myself since this isn’t really anything to do parenthood or discovering a person. Or, it has everything to do with it: Kiko is basically her own person now, and there’s only a few short years until Baby E is, too. I can see how she takes everything in and adds it to her (at times frighteningly accurate and reliable) memory bank, how she observes me.

The observer of the person who emerged has now become the person observed. And when I think about that, I am pressed with an extreme urgency to be the person that I want to be — someone who lives their ideals of creativity and optimism, who dwells in possibility and rests in faith that anything is possible.

With that being said, because I’m in the middle of gestating two fairly big writing projects, I’ll be taking a short break from updating this substack — but will be reachable by email for long exchanges!

Thank you for reading.

xx

But before I could pester her with my usual millennial mom questions (“what did you do with your hands today! what made you laught today! what was for lunch?”), as we climbed onto the bike, Kiko spoke.

Maman, tu as des yeux comme ça — [Mama, your eyes are like this —] and then she proceeded to pull her right eye back in the racist slanty-eyed gesture. Shocked, I immediately asked her who taught her that. Sensitive to my abrupt shift in mood, Kiko yelled non and personne, shutting down.

This wasn’t the first time I’d encountered the slanty-eye gesture to my face. A few years ago, I was at a party in Paris, during one of the first loosened restrictions post-COVID, talking to strangers who were all trying to get drunk in a circle. A thin blonde woman, with an air of faux embarassement, was talking about how disappointing Raya was, and how she dreamt of moving to New York. The American dream.

You can have my passport, I offered. This was before I’d gotten my long-term stay visa. We can trade.

Oui, mais, the blonde woman named Melanie or Valerie or something said, before she pulled back her eye into a cartoonish slit. I think I just stared at her, astonished that this bourgeois Frenchie just did that at a cocktail party. She laughed awkwardly after, and then the conversation pushed along with the help of long sips of wine. The hostess delicately tried to broach the subject with me later — “that was…quite offensive, wasn’t it?”

I shrugged. Whatever. I’m not one to dwell on racist encounters because I think the more one thinks about those things, the more one will come up against it in life. I brushed it off to ignorance, her age (nearly 40?), whatever. But to see my own daughter learn these kind of gestures at school was genuinely a bit disturbing. A bit later Kiko admitted that it was a friend at school who told her my eyes looked like the slanty-eyed gesture.

At the core, pulling one’s eyes back with the idea that this makes one look “chinese” is genuinely ignorant — my eyes are not slit shaped. I have single eyelids, and technically don’t even have the epicanthic fold commonly found in Asian faces. But the French are the most categorical nation I know and what is racism other than a steadfast determinism to shove people into categories and erase their humanity, nuances, or shades of differentiation?

The thought must go: If Kiko’s mom looks Asian, her eyes must be like this, pull-them-back, HAHA, so funny!

In French, there isn’t even a term for single or double eyelids. There’s just the blanket term “bridé” to describe Asian eyes (of which there are a multitude), which loosely translates to pulled back, as in the piece of a harness used to pull back a horse. How would you say double eyelid eyes, or Western eyes, I once asked a French person. Umm, just normal eyes, I guess, was the response.

It’s not the first time I heard Kiko make a comment learned about race, either. The other day she was talking about a school aide, a black woman. Avec la tête noir, Kiko added as a gratuitous descriptor. That too, shocked me. Does papa have a tête blanche? I asked. She nodded yes.

Systemic racism is embedded in language, or at least the idea that there is a norm, majority group and then the Others. But this exists in many languages. In Mandarin, for example, a white or non-Asian person is called a foreigner, regardless of the country the speakers are located. I tried to tell Kiko that the gesture was not accurate, by doing it on myself — do my eyes look like this? She half-nodded, maybe because she’s a toddler or maybe because the influence of school and friends is frighteningly more potent than I could imagine. Maybe I can imagine; maybe I felt that way too as a kid. Desperate to fit in. I shook my head and tried to fight the urge for me to tell her to ask her friend at school if her father had a giant, French nose. I wonder if I could pinch my dainty nose and deform it into knobby flesh, if I would do it as a joke.

She’s only three and there’s so much more of schooling to go (really reconsidering homeschooling after reading this substack post)… but unfortunately, Macron has made that option very difficult, in the name of assimilation. And assimilate I have here — I’ve learned French, speak as softly as I can in public (in contrast to other, awfully loud and cliché Americans I see on the streets of Paris), and am aware of / have adopted as much as possible of French culture. I’ve come up against far less racism here than in the States. When I asked Kiko what color mama’s head was, she said white. I held in a laugh. My daughter also thinks that I’m white (for now).

I wonder how different it would be raising kids in the States in today’s climate… friends/readers with kids over there, I’m curious to know what the kids are learning in school.

September 1st, 2025 marked the beginning of “la rentrée” — translated as “the return”, it’s the common usage term that describes when children begin school post les grand vacances. But it’s not just the kids, it’s the adults: businesses that shuttered for long vacations, the offices and streets of Paris that were deserted for sandy beaches in the south during August start to pick back up. Everyone returns to the grind. Nobody has seemed to consider the fact that for little kids going to school for the first time, it doesn’t make sense for it to be called a “return”.

Kiko is now in the ‘petit section’ of maternelle, which began the week before we held a festival with 2,500 people at the house. On the first day, only one parent could accompany the nervous 3-year-old inside to school past the green prison gates that are locked unless a personnel of the school is present. Kiko chose Clem, so I, along with all the other fathers, waited outside like the men on the Titanic who watched their wives and children go down on the lifeboats, worrying: would they be okay?

After what seemed like a lifetime, I called Clem. What’s happening? I asked. I don’t know, he replied. I heard crying and screaming in the background. What am I supposed to do? He asked me. Leave! I said. When he came out, he looked more dejected than I’d ever seen him. I feel like I abandoned her. He hung his head.

I laughed at him, but then the next day I took her to school on my own. I was allowed once more to go inside since she was crying (and not the only child to do so) before even going past the prison gate. The scene inside was worse: screaming, crying everywhere, little hands grabbing desperately at their parents’ clothing, begging them to stay or to go home. I immediately left the second Kiko was distracted by her teacher. Luckily, Kiko has since adapted nicely to school (or so the teachers say), and the gift of time unbounded by the demands and whims of a toddler has been priceless.

The house is so quiet without Kiko, my mom remarked (my mother is here again, bookmarking the ends of a trip to Ireland as a Typical Asian Tourist with an iPad camera with a visit to see her grandchildren), one morning after Kiko was dropped off.

II.

Even if the days are quiet (at least between the hours of 8.30am-4.30pm), lately the nights have been loud. Baby E is somehow already nearly five months old but requires an amount of attention Kiko never did: he prefers to be carried rather than sat alone and needs at least thirty minutes of vigorous rocking, swaying, and shushing to fall asleep. My forearms have bulked even more from a constant football carry of fifteen pounds of fat and muscle, and some nights the agitation in his digestive tract keeps me up for hours. Last Tuesday was particularly hellish, the kind of hell where you keep wanting to fall asleep but a tiny demon you’re blood bound to screams at you to wake up.

Luckily, the following Wednesday, as is often the case in France, there was no school and thus no rush to wake up a sleeping toddler and try to get them to eat, brush their teeth, get dressed and ready for the day. Along with the other parents who decided to drag their kids to Paris that day, my mother, Clem, Kiko and myself with baby E strapped to my chest, rode the train into the city to eat lunch.

As a seasoned buffet eater, I had the idea to go check out a newly opened restaurant, Envie de la Banquet, a French all-you-can-eat restaurant with stylish art deco design and stained glass windows, to celebrate the September birthdays. Unfortunately, the experience was what can only be described as extremely French. The seating arrangement was so narrow that the average American wouldn’t have squeezed between the fancy chaises to make their way to the buffet. There was a leather-bound menu that detailed the provenance of all the cheeses and dead animals transformed into patés and terrines. Despite the all-you-can-eat concept, there were still three clearly defined categories of food: the entrées, plats, and desserts. And there was a strict rule for taking the hot mains — only one tiny, baby-sized portion at a time!

But don’t worry, you can taste them all, the waiter reassured us. You just had to queue up over and over again and feel the shame for being a gluttinous pig. Kiko was bored even at the buffet halfway through, causing pandemonium, stomping around shoeless, and I nearly knocked over an elderly woman with Elio strapped to me. After the intense ordeal of trying to get food for an hour and half, we headed back home to the forest completely drained, I was reminded of why Parisians don’t bring kids to restaurants.

III.

Look! He’s crawling! I shouted at Clem the other day as baby E scooted forward on the floor by a couple of centimeters. He didn’t look up from his phone. This wasn’t the first milestone in which the reaction was a mild “oh, cool” — hopefully, he won’t suffer from second child syndrome. All the firsts that are coming around a second time seem a bit mundane. Whereas time slowed down with the first baby, and I fastidiously tracked Kiko’s development, now it feels like I’m just trying to get through the day. This is my life now: mom of two going to school meetings!

The other day I went to the first big back-to-school meeting, where parents were forced to sit on tiny benches and chairs their children use and were lectured at by the educators. First, as a group, we were reminded of the rules: No being late, no sharp objects in backpacks, and to clearly mark our children’s clothing. Then we were divvied up into classrooms and the teachers ran us through their intense day of wrangling small people to do simple tasks as a collective: take off their shoes, put on slippers, hang up their backpacks, go to the bathroom, draw scribbles, learn new words, etc. We were also reprimanded with unease that children shouldn’t have too much screen time, an admonishing some parents listened to with their phones glued to their hands.

This is really school, the teacher reminded us, though they are little, by the end of the year they’ll get the hang of it. It’s the important first step of living as a group, towards socialization!

Right now, I’m reading Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch (which I can’t recommend enough), and there’s an entire section in there which reminds me why I’m skeptical about school and education.

“School can nurture creativity in children, but they can also destroy it, and all too often do. Ideally, schools preserve and regenerate learning and the arts, to give chidlren the tools with which they may create the future. At worst, they produce uniform, media-minded grownups to feed the marketplace with workers, managers, and with consumers…”

Will my child grow up to be a mid-level manager?! For the moment, Kiko’s way of being still maintains a sense of purity; she likes to wear mismatched socks and shoes to school. I say nothing, but my mom laughs and asks her if the teachers or other kids have remarked her ‘eccentricity’. I note that it’s only by asking her if others notice that this is weird behavior that she learns it is weird behavior… after all, why not?

The subconsious learning of what is and what is not socially acceptable comes from all angles. As Nachmanovitch also writes:

We need to recognize that every bit of our culture is school; we are presented moment to moment with affirmations of some realities and denials of others. Education, business, media, politics and above all the family, the very institutions that might be the instruments for expanding human expressiveness, collude to induce conformism, to keep things going on a humdrum level. But so do our everyday habits of doing or seeing. Reality as we know it becomes conditioned by the tacit assumptions we come to take for granted after innumerable subtle learning experiences in daily life.

IV.

i’d write more, but Kiko was put out by Clem being stern with her when she impishly didn’t put her dirty clothes in the laundry basket and is now, for once, calling “mama! i want youuuuu!” from her room.

fin.

Since I had to leave for the wedding venue early, Clem was in charge of the two kids. While getting ready in our Airbnb, I fretted over the daunting task of public speaking without crying or shaking as Clem slept on the bed, next to Kiko who was being lobotomized by Finding Nemo and baby E who was also sleeping. I wanted Clem to pack the bags for the wedding, and to take responsibility. Still, I placed a change of clothes for baby, the burp cloths, and diapers directly next to his bag.

“Pack the bag! Okay? It’s your responsibility!”
Half asleep, he muttered back to me, yes, yes I’ve got it under control. I fed baby E one last time, then headed off on the early shuttle to the farm, crossing my fingers and hoping for the best. An hour and a half later, while I was doing a sound check, I saw that Clem had called me. I called him back immediately, but no answer. I called again five times and sent him frantic texts: ça va?!?

As my beautiful friend in her wedding gown flittered around and came to ask how I was feeling, I lied through my teeth. Great, I said! Inside my head, I was envisioning worst-case scenarios: Clem had hit his head and passed out, leaving the baby and toddler crying, or worse, he’d dropped the baby in a desperate scramble to transport the two children on his own and now was en route to the hospital.

As the guests filed in, I saw another college friend. Desperate, I asked if she’d seen Clem. Yeah, she replied, they’re all here. He looks a bit frazzled. Everything is fine… except —

What?! I was impatient to know. She had an inscrutable smile on her face that could have meant anything.

He forgot the baby’s clothes, she laughed. I laughed too, somewhat relieved and then only later did I become slightly annoyed when baby E spat up all over the new dress I’d gotten specifically for this occasion and there was no burp cloth to be found.

While minor, this was another prime example of how my husband has nearly no capacity to take on the mental load of parenthood.

I first heard of this term a few months ago, when an older divorcée neighbor of ours was over for a coffee. The subject of “la charge mentale” came up, the French equivalent of the mental load. Beware of it, she warned my husband with a somewhat menacing glare on her face, as women often carry the load alone. What is this invisible burden that is carried by so many? As defined by Sciences Po:

the mental load in sociology is mostly considered in its practical part as the “management of domestic life”, and carries many names: “mental labour”, “emotion work”, “thought work”, “invisible work” …

the mental load is defined as a discrete category of family work, which entails the planning, scheduling, and remembering of domestic chores and events. If couples often experience an unequal distribution of the mental load before the arrival of the first child, this event often increases the mental load: when couples have their first child, parents often adopt different roles, and men and women often recreate mother and fatherhood as differentiated social experiences. Such differentiated experience entails that mothers and fathers do not experience the same amount of mental workload, which is found to be a source of tension[.]

An even easier way to understand the mental load is how the lack of carrying it manifests as real-life inconveniences to straight-up disasters. One particularly memorable incident is when Clem forgot Kiko’s food (when she was 11 months old) right before we embarked on a 12.5-hour flight to California, and she scream-cried for two hours straight. It’s hard not to get annoyed when I think about how I’m the only one to think about what could go wrong, or the only one to anticipate the needs of the family and children (water, snacks, extra clothes, games, doctor appointments) or to put in the work of emotional labor (thank you cards, remembering important dates).

It’d been weighing on my mind so much that I did an informal poll amongst my friends; in most heterosexual couples, the women took on the brunt of the work. As a trend, it seemed that men were more reactive to problems in the present, whereas women are proactively thinking about problems that might happen in the future. Even in same-sex couples, the split didn’t seem equal (maybe there’s no correlation, but the ‘bottoms’ seemed to take on the mental load).

But lately, as I’ve been undertaking the lion’s share of childcare as Clem has started intensive festival preparations for this coming September, I’ve been trying to unburden myself with the mental load. To be frank, in my worst moments of getting upset over Clem forgetting something that makes us turn around or lose ten minutes, I feel like the depths of my frustration sink to this dark sentiment that this person is literally wasting my life away.

However, after spending time in America on this last trip, I'm beginning to think that the mental load is a very American concept that has been slowly invading French culture, along with other things like McDonald’s and critical race theory. It’d been over a year since I went to the USA, and last time I was mostly in Brooklyn and Manhattan, on my own for a work trip. This time, with the entire family in tow, we went to my cousin’s suburban house in Rye, New York. Even though I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey, I felt a reverse culture-shock tinged with nostalgia driving by the manicured lawns, white picket fences, and American flags hanging everywhere. I even felt a tinge of pity that my kids will (probably) never know the glory of a yellow school bus, a really good bagel with cream cheese, or a slice of pizza as a regular thing rather than being a “concept” imported from the States. When we first arrived, we were hungry, starving for all that is not available in France — giant iced lattes, food at 4pm, burgers with generous sauces offered without one even asking.

When we ventured inside a Target and Whole Foods, I felt overwhelmed at the infinite amount of crap one can buy with the American dollar. Snacks of my childhood, long-forgotten, resurfaced: Little Debbie’s Oatmeal Cream Pies, Goldfish, Swedish Fish, Oreos. Rows and rows of gloriously marketed junk food in technicolor packaging. The service at restaurants*1 was so obsequious that it made it hard to enjoy a meal. It’s funny how culture is like water to a fish — we’re in it constantly, which makes it hard to see. It’s only when we leave and go back that we can clearly see our own culture. I recently re-read Edward T. Hall’s The Silent Language, where he states:

The idea that people as cultural beings are bound by hidden rules and are not masters of their fates may come as a shock to some — it has always been hard to accept. The one thing that is quite clear, however, is that people are bound as long as they remain ignorant of the nature of the hidden pathways culture provides for them.

Despite the influx of American influence, France remains quite French in comparison to America, and I’m beginning to question how, exactly, I’ll transmit “American” culture to my children, if any. It’s hard to know what it is other than rampant consumerism and a love of money, guns, as I saw upstate, and this convoluted idea of “freedom”. What I do feel is deeply American, however, is this idea that time is money and that one always must be productive to prove one’s worth. (Proof in this may be that it’s 4am, I can’t sleep, am jet-lagged, and am up writing this?)

Perhaps what’s also very American is this idea of convenience: sinks over stoves so that one doesn’t have to carry the pot a few feet, drive-thru coffee shops, central air conditioning. It’s the idea that we can never be inconvenienced, or have to wait. Everything must be optimized. The mental load can only exist in the spirit of optimization. We prepare everything so as not to lose a single minute, to be efficient and to make progress in our lives, to be in advance of the next obstacle or task. It’s basically never living in the present. Clem has the gift of eternally being in the present, but also, he literally doesn’t want to carry any load. He sometimes leaves the house without his wallet. Why?! How?! I asked him? Why do you do that?

I want to be lighter, he said in response. I slapped my forehead. His wallet cannot weigh more than 200 grams.

But maybe he has a point. Maybe being unburdened, physically and most of all, mentally, is best. My baby was naked at my best friend’s wedding, but it was hot and as my friend Steph (and new mother) said to me: “just because you have a child doesn’t mean things have to be so intense, cause it’s not like your child is going to die if you make a small mistake.”

These days (okay, this past one day so far) feel long when I’m the sole caretaker of the children, but these days are numbered. When I gave Kiko a bath tonight, we laughed for nearly an hour as she kept saying to me “It is a question?!” followed by nonsensical things. I have to remind myself that I shouldn’t be optimizing for anything, and that time together with the ones you love isn’t wasted. I think I read somewhere recently that it’s not the bad things that happen to you, it’s how you react or think about them. So the next time somebody (not me), forgets a diaper or a water bottle, I’ll try to be more reactive and present, rather than thinking in conditional future (more disasters to come) or past (how many times it’s happened before). Maybe it’s just okay to waste time with the ones you love. After all, I’m not trying to speed up time any faster to get to my grave.

Strangely, though Kiko is old enough to speak, every time I ask her in the morning if she dreamed last night, she shakes her head no. I’m always disappointed, as one of the most appealing things about being a parent for me was to be able to discuss dreams with a young child. Maybe she just still can’t distinguish the difference between dreams and reality. Like I concluded in this book I wrote about lucid dreaming, there isn’t any difference between dreams and reality. As a counterpoint, a friend once said to me that dreams weren’t continuous. I argued that we didn’t remember well enough to know, and anyway, few of us could remember clearly how we got to this point in our lives, either.

Like I have no idea how I’ve managed to stay alive these past seven weeks (!) since baby number two abruptly popped out of me. It feels like a lifetime ago, and so much has happened since: I finished a big project for Lonely Planet, another novel, my sister came and went, friends have come and gone, we planted the placenta underneath a wisteria, a flock of hens have been murdered and repurchased, and the baby has already gained over 25% of his body weight.

I’ve even slowly started to climb again, on ropes in a gym in the town of Millau (famous for where farmer José Bové destroyed a McDonald’s in 1999) during a visit to Roquefort, and went bouldering outside in Fontainebleau. But while I may look more or less the same before I became pregnant (thanks to gestational diabetes and my keto diet), there’s an undeniably large shift — of my internal organs, which are still settling back into place (not sure if jumping down from boulders is helping that), but also of my entire brain, and subsequently, life.

Kiko is nearly three now, which makes this blog about the same age. It’s a gift to read back on her arrival at the fourth-month mark in her life, when I was simultaneously pre-nostalgic for her babyhood and looking forward to her walking and talking self emerge. Every day is an utter joy to discover this person and to watch her discover the world. And Kiko delights in every discovery. The first time she had a pain au chocolat (previously I only “offered” her croissants), she took a bite, looked back at it in amazement and began to scream “IL Y A DU CHO-CO-LAAAAT!” Two days ago, when we were on a day trip to Lille, she was refusing to get into her car seat. I told her that if she didn’t get into the car seat, then I was going to give her baby brother E, the ice cream we had intended to get for her. In response, she raised her eyebrows cheekily and said “oui, mais ça ne va pas lui plaire” (yes, but he won’t like it).

At the same time, while she never really has terrible temper tantrums, she is in constant need of attention, stimulation, and play. She seems to like her baby brother, although the novelty has also seemed to have worn off. A few hours after giving birth, Clem decided to wake up Kiko and to bring her out; she looked somewhat impressed as she came out of her sleep daze to see that there was a brand new baby in the house, and has been sweet with him, but is mostly focused on having as much fun as she can every day. Objects of her affection and attention: the pool, blocks, magnetic tiles, books, her baby stuffed fox, and endless amounts of ice cream. And as I am, once again, an on-demand, 24/7 milk truck, I am baby-bound whereas Clem is spending more time running around with Kiko.

This was difficult during the first few weeks of my postpartum, in which I successfully didn’t move that much. On sunny days, I had to listen to their screams of delight and splashing in the pool, and if I ran out of water or chicken soup I had to try and scream or text them for help (even walking to the bathroom had me winded for the first week). Other than my insides still feeling a bit loose, I generally feel… well enough now, if not physically exhausted and weak, so perhaps being bedridden was all worth it in the end.

Keeping a newborn alive the second time round has been much easier and less stressful, since I’ve done it before, and there’s a toddler running around to prevent me from googling and doomscrolling for warning signs in his development. Previous anxieties of having a boy have been replaced with curiosity about who this new person is. Still, having read the memoir BoyMom, I have noticed that this baby does feel much more fragile and emotionally sensitive to stress, a fact of his sex, as outlined in the book and which research backs up. It’s hard not to compare babies, but where Kiko slept fairly easily and on her own very quickly, I’ve been co-sleeping with baby E nearly every night. He often needs to be rocked, shushed, or worn to sleep, and is prone to distressing bouts of gas (probably due to the insane amount of milk he consumes, which has led to rapid weight gain). It. Has. Been. Exhausting. Thankfully, my mother has been here for the past month, helping enormously with the Sisyphean tasks of cleaning and cooking for a family. And while I’ll be happy to have some space on my own once she’s gone, I am slightly terrified of the reality that will settle in her absence.

The algorithm of the internet directed me to my most recent parenting read, The Nurture Revolution. It presents a slew of studies that show how crucial the first three years of a child’s life are to avoid having a mental breakdown or developing any of the rampant mood disorders that everyone seems to live with.

Basically: if you don’t invest a lot of undevoted attention to “building your baby’s brain” to become resilient against stress, they’ll end up anxiously scrolling their phone in ten years, trying to figure out how attachment theory can explain their unhappiness. The crying-it-out method, bad. Co-sleeping, good. Neuroscience argues that we should be constantly holding and comforting our babies, co-regulating for them since they don’t know how to themselves. I also learned that I’ve undergone (for the second time?) a big brain transformation, called matrescence, a period of neuroplasticity as significant as adolescence. Apparently, as recompense to forgetting everything else, I am now more sensitive to baby's communication, empathic, able to detect threats, and feel more motivated and rewarded from interactions with baby.

I’m trying to keep this in mind as my days slide into the abyss like quicksand, when I’m constantly with baby, feeding him, holding him, comforting him, staring into his eyes during his wake windows. I have noticed that during particularly gassy moments of distress, the more stressed I get about his crying, the more he cries. The book also advocates for self-care. I cling on to my meditation practice to remain zen, even though sometimes it is extremely frustrating not being able to do whatever I want to do, when I want to.

A huge part of my frustration stems from not being as productive as I once was (hello, past life as a New York workaholic) and especially not in external comparison to my husband, who has his hands full running a business, throwing electronic music festivals with a cheese theme. Part of me also just feels resentful as being reduced to the role of “mom”, even though it is a hugely important one to creating a peaceful, balanced society. I said once that I didn’t want children to be my greatest accomplishment, which remains true, but I also don’t want to fuck them up. I also think there’s a difference between seeing children as an accomplishment, as a reflection of one’s self, and seeing them as people who should be allowed to thrive, doing whatever they want to do.

More friends are visiting at the house now, and one of them here is a professional snowboarder who does flips and gets dropped off at mountain peaks in helicopters. I showed Kiko and my mother a video before their arrival, and as Kiko watched in awe, I asked her if one day she’d like to snowboard.

“No!” My mother interjected immediately, before denouncing the snowboarder as an insane person. “No, you don’t!”

Irritated, I told my mother not to answer for my child. Her well-meaning projection reminded me of my own childhood, where my passion for gymnastics was often dampened by my parents’ apathy and sometimes direct opposition over what they saw as an useless threat to my education and future.

“Si,” Kiko said a few moments later, still watching the video. “I want to do that.”

Before I could daydream about a ski-cation with the family, baby E stirred from his nap, hungry. My chest was already swollen, tight, and uncomfortable. I picked him up - he’s already half his sister’s weight - and began the hard work of holding a baby. It’s been hard not to reach for my phone, to distract myself when nursing him or trying to get him to sleep, but then after all, isn’t what I’m ultimately looking for — love and connection — right in my arms already?

Sorry for the rambling, long and overdue post. Next up: another trip to New York, with baby, toddler, and forgetful husband in tow. Wish me luck!

Nurses tried to call me repeatedly, suggesting I go on insulin… I dodged their calls, evaded their messages, and went on hour-long hikes while I still physically could to avoid spikes on days when I could not resist eating pizza. Eventually, I just adopted a near-keto diet, consisting mostly of eggs, kimchi, pickles, salads, cheese, fish, nuts, yogurts, and meats. I gained almost zero weight since February, yet my stomach continued to swell until I resembled Humpty Dumpty.

As my due date (May 11) approached, the inconveniences of pregnancy got worse: I had to get up to pee nearly every hour at night and on a day out to Paris, my husband had to physically carry me to an Uber because of lightening crotch so severe that I couldn’t physically walk. The shooting pain was debilitating.

What worried me most about the GD diagnosis was whether or not it’d prevent me from my birth plan: spawning a new human in my house in the bath. I fretted, signed up at another hospital, slightly fudged a few glucose tests, and then was relieved when I was still given the green light. Life continued: we started travaux on the bathroom and bedroom, and for most of March I was traveling around Normandy for Lonely Planet. Clem threw his last Jacques Fromage festival in the beginning of April, and as the month petered out and we were still trying to put the house / our lives back in order and catch-up on an ever-growing to-do list.

On that list that I hadn’t crossed off: Attend several hospital appointments that I’d accidentally missed. Pack the hospital bag. Get the room ready for a home birth. Luckily, I didn’t need the hospital, nor the bag. And doubly lucky that blood washes out easily if done fairly quickly.

Most people advised me against having a home birth, citing the risks and vocalizing their concerns. The birthing center I’d been to for Kiko was too far away for me this time, and there were no other similar options, so it was at home or the hospital. While I had a lovely birth experience at CALM — where I first discovered fetal ejection reflex — I had to be transferred to the adjacent hospital afterwards for hemorrhaging and stitches. There, I was confined (against my will) for three days in a small room where nurses would come in and out weighing my newborn, squeezing my nipples and generally stressing me out. I wanted to avoid this at all costs, but more so avoid giving birth in the hospital itself. I’ve never liked hospitals, but I also read Birth Without Violence by Frederick Boyer, and figured that I’d allow my child to enter the world without stress or strangers around.

A second-time pregnancy feels old hat to the exterior world, even though it usually always feels very different from the first. Meetings with my midwife felt brief and straightforward, whereas the first-time round I was given workshops on laboring, shown diagrams, and even underwent an exercise where I drew how I imagined my future child in the womb. My hand was held tightly, whereas this time everything seemed far more casual. I was lucky to have a very good first birthing experience, but as my Braxton-Hicks contractions continued in intensity as April went on, a small knot of worry formed in the back of my head: should I be preparing more? Am I ready for a home birth?

By mid-April, I groaned every time I got up. I couldn’t be sure when lightning crotch would strike again. I was too tired to do much, and many people around me thought that the baby would come early. On the last day of April, I had a manic burst of energy.

Clem, I said through clenched teeth that morning. We still need to test the birth pool (that had just been delivered a few days ago).

His response, as he typed into his computer without looking at me: Right now?

Yes! This baby can come any minute!

I spent the rest of the day cleaning our bathroom superficially — planning on a deeper clean later, and then outside picking up cut grass to throw to the chickens, before getting a few emails and other work done. By eleven pm, I was spent and slightly irritated at the lack of progress on the to-do list. Just like most days. Thirty minutes later, in bed, I had a series of intense contractions. I tried to communicate physically with my unborn child. Uh… baby… can you please just wait a couple of days? At least until my sister arrives?

In response, I felt undue pressure on my bladder and a little foot kick me in the ribs. I immediately went to the bathroom and saw some pink, bloody discharge. I woke up Clem and told him to re-inflate the birthing pool and to call the midwife. Ok, keep me updated, she said by phone close to midnight. Thirty minutes later, as the birthing pool was filling up with water, my son popped out into his father’s arms.

At the risk of sounding like a total asshole, or at least someone that’d get mocked on social media for being ridiculously out of touch; I don’t think labor or childbirth is particularly painful. Pain signals something is wrong, and in this case, that shouldn’t be the case, and so pain feels like a misnomer for the sheer intensity of what is happening in your body during contractions: the muscles of your uterus contracting, then relaxing. And then your cervix dilates — one’s body is literally opening up. At the extreme end of intensity, it’s like the crux of a climb or the end of a marathon (not that I’d know but to go with another metaphor) when your muscles are absolutely spent but still operating at 110%. The contradiction of the contractions is that none of this is actually voluntary, the labor is something that seemingly is happening out of your control. For many and for obvious reasons, this can be terrifying. My first midwife taught me that women can either enter two cycles of hormone release: oxytocin and endorphines, if one remains relaxed during labor, or, if one panics and resists the feeling, adrenaline, which can make labor worse or prolonged. One just has to give in, which is what I did as the contractions intensified. Take control, body, I thought, and then rode the waves. And out he came in two contractions. Anyway, all of this to say is that I hope that for any one who may give birth and is looking for non-horror stories, here is one! My second birth was fast, furious, and I am relieved it’s all over…

Or is it?! The most painful part about childbirth, for me, is the aftermath. I feel like my body has been hit by a truck, even though this time I ‘only’ had a second-degree tear. Every part of my body is sore, it hurts to walk, my milk has come in as of yesterday and now three body parts are swollen and inflamed, and worst of it all: I am bedridden. I said I’d try my best to do the Chinese post-partum of 30 days, but here on day four I’m already losing my mind and itching to move about and do things.

One thing I have been thinking about a lot lately is having a boy, and all of the influences biological sex and gendered societal expectations play into raising one, especially since I recently read BoyMom by Ruth Whippman. So far, the biggest difference I’ve noticed is that when checking the baby’s diaper, I saw a brown blob. Assumed it was poop. Opened up the diaper and realized it was just his ballsack.

Thanks for reading, as always! If you’re a boy mom or have both a girl and boy, please let me know if you’ve noticed any differences.

More soon!

Barely recovered from having caught the flu and having fasted the night before, I arrived at a laboratoire in Avon exhausted, before a needle was violently jabbed in my arm to draw an alarming amount of blood. Then, I had to drink an abominable fluorescent yellow liquid that contained 75 grams of sugar (!! [though two Cokes contain slightly more]). For the next two hours, I was confined to a tiny waiting room with a book, and then had blood drawn an hour afterward and then again at the two-hour mark.

If you know me, I’ve never even tasted Coca-Cola before. I am a salty person by nature, and felt even saltier when the results came back indicating that I indeed had gestational diabetes. Immediately, I was skeptical and found research online indicating the fallibility of the test and how a diagnosis may not even be helpful. Being sick can increase glucose levels, too. My midwife said nothing about the results, but when I went to the hospital at Fontainebleau for a mandatory inscription (I am planning a home birth but need to register at the hospital in case of transfer), the midwife there gave me the diagnosis, gave me a prescription for a blood glucose monitor, and mandated that I spend a day at the hospital for testing and workshops.

“You’ll be kept for eight to sixteen hours,” she told me. “Come having fasted, and all food will be provided.”

I can’t wait, I replied dryly in French. On the day I arrived with my kindle, journal and a book, after once again getting blood drawn and peeing in a cup, I was then shoved into a room with eight armchairs. In total we were seven; four pregnant women at various stages in pregnancy, lumped with three slightly more aged persons with type II diabetes. We were all instructed to test our blood levels with our monitors and then a nurse took our numbers before breakfast was served: two sad packets of dry, hard toast, two individually wrapped butter pats, a yogurt, and a piece of fruit, all to be washed down with a coffee or tea via instant powder packets. Inexplicably, there was a clear Duralex bowl with a spoon on my plastic platter. I asked for hot water in the paper cup I’d also received to get a strange glance before I realized that the glass bowl on my tray was already filled with hot water. Because I’m not French and did not grow up taking my tea or coffee in a bowl, I didn’t even perceive the water in there. I begrudgingly ate half the toast and the yogurt, even though normally I prefer something far more savory like eggs with chili oil in the mornings.

Cultural differences became more apparent throughout the day. After we broke our fast, a dietician came to talk to the group. We formed a circle of chairs like in group therapy and went through the food pyramid, receiving advice on what was and was not permitted when one had diabetes. Certain vegetables, like carrots, beets, and peas, were ill-advised, as were some fruits. Snacking between meals was verboten, as were sugary drinks and artificial sweeteners, much to the chagrin of an older man with bug-eyes. As we broached the milk, yogurt, and cheese group, the dietician asked the group, “who here is capable of eating their yogurt without any added sugar or jam?”

Everyone replied at once, so the dietician made us answer, one by one. When it came to my turn, I said that I didn’t normally eat yogurt.

“What? What do you eat for dairy, then?” The woman looked at me, shocked.

“Uh… tofu, I guess?”

Her shock turned into horror. “But, you know that tofu, all soy products are forbidden for pregnant women! The soy impacts the hormones!”

I was too shocked to counter her claim — like tell that to the millions of women in China who eat soy products during pregnancy. I was then advised to drink some brand of mineral water with added calcium, and then the conversation moved on. Another pregnant woman then raised the question of her vape.

“Since it’s flavored… I was wondering, is there sugar in there?”

“No,” the dietician shook her head. “No sugar, you’re fine.”

Tofu, forbidden. Vaping, sure. The absurdity of the day continued. Two hours painfully passed and then lunch was eventually served half-past noon. The group moved to the cafeteria-style dining tables, and we were randomly given a meal of either fish, meat, or a vegetarian omelette because the French hate tofu. My stomach was grumbling and I was given the meat platter; a salad of green lettuce with mustard dressing, a mysterious brown ball of ground animal flesh served with boiled potatoes, and ironically, the off-limit vegetables of carrots and peas. Another plain yogurt was there as dessert this time.

To my surprise, every single person finished their plate, leaving it completely clean. Like my husband, I guess everyone in France is educated to finish their given plate of food regardless if they like it or not. I tried to subtly throw the rest of my food out in the garbage without the others noticing afterward.

Halfway through the meal, the bugged-eye man complained that if his food wasn’t sweetened, he “barely tasted anything.”

“You can always add some hot sauce!” I said to him. His eyes bulged even more.

“Oh no, above all, anything but that,” he replied, before adding, “Though I’ve heard there are peppers that aren’t spicy!”

I sighed, regretting that I hadn’t bought my own hot sauce. I forgot that the French hate spice, too. After more pricking of the fingers and lunch, a psychologist came to talk to the group. I began zoning out the moment she said that depression was a chemical imbalance in the brain, an oft-repeated sentence that actually has no real scientific backing. We were then given instructions on how to give ourselves insulin shots, if necessary. Two hours after lunch I was called in to see the doctor, who said that my blood results were fine. I just had to monitor my blood sugar levels daily with my monitoring device — which sends my results automatically to the team of nurses at the hospital — until I give birth.

I tried to question the validity of the diagnosis — “I had the flu!” I protested, but she just shook her head at me. It’s very French never to question authority and I can only assume, for figures in positions of authority, to never question themselves. I went back home fairly annoyed I’d wasted a day, but also with a reinforced feeling that I am living in a culture that is not at all my own.

This brings me to the idea of raising a “third culture kid",” or a child “raised in one or several cultures that are not the same as that of your parents, or the rest of your family.” Technically, I am a third culture kid myself, since both of my parents immigrated to the US from Taiwan. But what does it mean to raise a kid in a culture that isn’t your own, while attempting to impart not one, but two other cultures? And a “mixed-race” kid at that?

If you’re raising a third-culture or mixed-race kid, I’d love to hear your thoughts. More on that next time… for now, I have to go and prick my finger to test a drop of blood.

Welcome to 2025, exit the year of the Dragon, and enter the year of the Snake. Throughout the long drudgery of January, I’ve also managed to pop into Paris a few times to get lunch with friends (thank you to the in-laws who are kind enough and willing to take Kiko for days at a time), though those dates always seem short and rushed in the capital city socialization kind of way. And despite having lived in France for now over five (!!!) years, my closest, ride-or-die best friends that I’ve known for nearly two decades still live oceans or time zones away. Despite the distance, they remain a constant in my life: a thriving WhatsApp chat, FaceTime sessions, email or lettering writing, and the occasional visit. And yet, these friends aren’t physically part of my daily life at all: their lives continue to turn in another country, on another rhythm. I’ve sent this New Yorker essay, The Trouble with Friends by Weike Wang to a few people and each one resonated with this line: “If I don’t have kids, I will lose more friends.”

I am starting to wonder if the inverse is true: if I keep having kids, will I lose more friends?

I’m reminded of a moment in the past when my father, whom I’m currently not on speaking terms with, asked me to talk to him “as a friend”. This level of desperation sparked disgust in me; here was an adult man, so desperate to shirk his responsibilities as a father, that he was begging his own children to see him without the expectations of someone who has it together. Now I feel something more like sympathy: he probably didn’t have many friends himself at all.

Friendship remains an extremely important element in my life; I can’t imagine not having my friends to speak to, write to, and look forward to seeing. And while they aren’t prioritized in the same way my child is prioritized in my life — at this stage, the child is still literally dependent on me to live and learn how to live autonomously — I am ready to welcome friends into my home as an adopted child if the circumstances demanded it. However, circumstances likely will not demand this extreme. My friends have their separate lives and will continue to go on living, but there is still something irreplaceable about purely connecting with another being. Unlike Wang’s take, I don’t think adult friendships are about give-and-take, but true friendships are about a pure appreciation of the other person, basking in them without asking anything of them. It’s to admire someone and to cheer them on, just because you enjoy their company, values, and have shared ideas of what matters and what is funny in life.

Funnily enough, renowned author and speaker Gabor Maté is famous for warning parents that a child attaching the utmost importance to friendships is dangerous, as captured in his book Hold on To Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers. I overall agree with his idea that:

“Humans never outgrow their need to connect with others, nor should they, but mature, truly individual people are not controlled by these needs. Becoming such a separate being takes the whole of a childhood, which in our times stretches to at least the end of the teenage years and perhaps beyond. We need to release a child from preoccupation with attachment so he can pursue the natural agenda of independent maturation. The secret to doing so is to make sure that the child does not need to work to get his needs met for contact and closeness, to find his bearings, to orient.

Children need to have their attachment needs satiated; only then can a shift of energy occur toward individuation, the process of becoming a truly individual person. Only then is the child freed to venture forward, to grow emotionally. Attachment hunger is very much like physical hunger. The need for food never goes away, just as the child's need for attachment never ends. As parents we free the child from the pursuit of physical nurturance. We assume responsibility for feeding the child as well as providing a sense of security about the provision. No matter how much food a child has at the moment, if there is no sense of confidence in the supply, getting food will continue to be the top priority.”

Peer-oriented children, in his view, fall prey to the seductions of drugs and alcohol:

“Also bearing witness to the unbearable nature of the vulnerability experienced by peer-oriented kids is the preponderance of vulnerability-quelling drugs. Peer-oriented kids will do anything to avoid the human feelings of aloneness, suffering, and pain, and to escape feeling hurt, exposed, alarmed, insecure, inadequate, or self-conscious. The older and more peer-oriented the kids, the more drugs seem to be an inherent part of their lifestyle.

Peer orientation creates an appetite for anything that would reduce vulnerability. Drugs are emotional painkillers. And, in another way, they help young people escape from the benumbed state imposed by their defensive emotional detachment. With the shutdown of emotions come boredom and alienation. Drugs provide an artificial stimulation to the emotionally jaded. They heighten sensation and provide a false sense of engagement without incurring the risks of genuine openness. In fact, the same drug can play seemingly opposite functions in an individual.

Alcohol and marijuana, for example, can numb or, on the other hand, free the brain and mind from social inhibitions. Other drugs are stimulants — cocaine, amphetamines, and ecstasy; the very name of the latter speaks volumes about exactly what is missing in the psychic life of our emotionally incapacitated young people. The psychological function served by these drugs is often overlooked by well-meaning adults who perceive the problem to be coming from outside the individual, through peer pressure and youth culture mores. It is not just a matter of getting our children to say no. The problem lies much deeper.

Sadly, many children make it to adulthood but remain emotionally incapacitated beings that remain dependent on external dopamine hits to feel something. When friends keep going out, partying, traveling and drinking without any responsibilities or cares, it’s hard to keep up when you have a small toddler attached to you. It’s another reason why making friends in adulthood is difficult, and while I wouldn’t throw away my close friendships with people who live thousands of miles away for anything, I do think it’s important to cultivate local friendships. I’ve made a few good friends in France, but most of the ones I like end up drifting away, either literally by moving or figuratively. I think about the poem Saudades by Fernando Pessoa, a lament over friendships held in our youth, about being lost in time. Here’s a stanza in translation:

I always thought that friendships would continue forever. Today I’m

no longer sure. Before long everyone goes to his own corner, either

because of destiny, or some misunderstanding, follows his own life,

perhaps we continue to meet ... who knows.

I do retain hope for making new friends in my area, and have been told that once Kiko starts school (a milestone happening this fall, as in France schooling is obligatory from age three), “we’ll make other parent friends.” The parents of her friends, in short, will become our friends. I wonder how true that’ll be, or how deep a friendship of convenience can be. More than anything, I want a friendship in which two people are motivated with goals and ambition for themselves, not just for their children. Not that I’m unconcerned with my own child’s success, but I believe to be fully capable of steering a kid to a happy, stable self, one has to be that themselves first.

“You’re not stunned by the screen time?” They wrote me after my nonplussed response.

I must admit: while I was previously shocked that a nurse in France tried to distract my 9-month-old with a screen while she was getting a shot, now the 2.5 year old Kiko watches TV shows on occasion and has even seen a movie from start to finish. I only let her watch things in Mandarin or English, which makes me feel slightly better about dumping her in front of a screen to allow me precious time to do things without interruptions. But her demand for “watch a movie” or “regarde un filllll” has spilled over to areas of her life chaperoned by her grandparents (probably at the nounou’s house, too). One of the shows she’s obsessed with is Simon, a French cartoon series about a rabbit named Simon who goes on mini 5 to 10-minute adventures. As a parent who is desperate for moments where my child isn’t demanding to be picked up or carried (though I must be honest, Kiko favors her dad 90% of the time so I definitely have the longer end of the stick), I have caved in.

But recently, out of nowhere — just like the full phrases Kiko has now acquired in her language capabilities — she apparently has developed a fear of the dark. We’re in Normandie for the holiday season, with Clem’s extended family, and a relative described to me a scene in which the lights went off upstairs. Terrified, Kiko grabbed at her legs and declared “le noir! j’ai peur!”) The dark! I’m afraid!

I was confused. Kiko had never expressed fear of the dark before, and instantly my mind jumped to one of the Simon episodes she watched: an episode all about his fear of the dark. This made me think of a really old Medium post I wrote about children’s television, circa 2017:

Children’s television is generally a terrifying concept — it usually acts as the default babysitter, reliable yet filled with uncontrollable messaging and stuffed with seductive commercials to turn kids screaming, temper-tantrum throwing advocates of buying another unnecessary plastic set or something as illogical as purple ketchup (confession: that was me, twenty years ago).

To a young eye, there’s nothing more appealing than bright, technicolor, animated characters with squeaky voices and large pupils. And there’s nothing more unappealing than adult television — to them, it’s nothing but more of the same, boring adult activities of people walking in a world they don’t really have much involvement with yet.

For me, children’s television is particularly troubling because of the messages that are spread. When recommended to watch the beloved Pixar’s Film Inside Out by a good friend who is a year older than me, I left the theater deeply troubled by the underlying message that is diametrically opposed to a core tenet of mindfulness or Buddhism: we are controlled by our emotions.

The bad taste in my mouth hasn’t left since, and I remain skeptical of television because it teaches children fundamental beliefs about how the world works. Not too long ago I was with my cousin, his wife and their kids and while scanning through Netflix, My Little Pony flickered on the screen and my cousin’s daughter, who is about five years old, perked up immediately. We streamlined through and let her watch another episode of some seemingly innocuous British cartoon before sending her off to bed.

We then got suckered into the premiere episode of The Young Pope — a stunningly shot television show starring Jude Law who plays a narcissistic, tyrannical American Pope. Like a Vatican of Cards, it was a train wreck that was hard to look away from, and as soon as the episode ended I felt that addictive wanting for more.

Which reminded me of my young cousin and her attraction to My Little Pony. Her mother confided in me that she refused to let her watch that show as it was full of mean girl tropes, high school bullying themes and emphasis on appearances — but all the girls in her daughter’s class talked about it. Her father interjected that yes, while true, the show ultimately tried to teach moral lessons, to teach young girls to do the right thing. And then it dawned on me that television for adults does the same exact thing: when we watch shows that depict a world as flawed as most of them are (it would be naive to believe that Washington is above being as corrupt as the show House of Cards portrays it), we are reinforcing our own beliefs about how the world is.

I wonder about the origins of the fear of the dark — there are evolutionary reasons, sure, but we all begin our lives in the darkness of the womb. But maybe part of growing up and becoming socialized is to learn the same fears and worries that have bogged down humans for centuries. There’s a lot of talk here about educating a child to “enter into society” successfully, but I still personally am against the idea.

It’s been a long time since my last update here, about three months, and in that time I’ve been once again generating another fetus with my blood, sweat, and tears. Everything about this pregnancy is harder than the first time around: the nausea, the exhaustion, and the hormones have made my emotions a wreck. Most of all, it feels like I’ve been walking through my life in a daze.

It’s been nearly six years now that I’ve been living in France, my life here — I’m sitting in the living room amongst Clem’s clan. Kiko is in the arms of her grandmother, who reads Barbar in French to her despite being an English teacher. I always feel like I’m losing the culture battle: they proudly feed her a “soup au lait”, a culinary crime of hot milk with vermicelli noodles, butter, and salt. She’s fed jam for breakfast, and madeleines for her goûter. I’ve been dissuaded from sending her to bilingual primary school despite my strong belief that she should be raised with at least two languages in complete fluency, without an accent. There’s a huge advantage, I think, to being able to traverse languages and cultures comfortably, or at least to possess two different identities at once. So much of identity politics today feels very superficial, at least in the way it’s coded to say “I am X, therefore I am not Y.” Y usually means something generally “bad”, like the historical majority or dominant powers.

I wonder if this is how my own parents felt. I have the feeling that they just gave up on transmitting their own culture to my sister and I — survival was enough for them, no matter how joyless it was. Either way, I’ve been feeling very lonely these days, feeling the weight of having a family, a toddler, more than ever. On one day trip to Paris during my annual Friendgiving trip with New York / climber friends, Clem, Kiko and I left early after lunch, defeated and utterly exhausted, while the others remained in Paris for the evening.

I’ve felt a sense of bitterness that is unbecoming lately. Maybe it’s pregnancy hormones. Halfway through the 4.5-hour drive to this old Normandie house, I got upset about something trivial and my loneliness came out in tears on the highway. I felt far from my disassociated family, oceans and hours of plane ride away. Clem tried to comfort me in my distress, saying that I had my own family, I had him, Kiko, and now the coming baby. This only made me feel worse: the very thing I had once disdained, the hegemony of the nuclear family, is the only thing I have. It’s not enough, I replied, which Clem took offense to. Now the year is coming to a close. I need to reflect on this past year, but it feels harder to keep my distant friendships, and like I’m isolating more and more into this family I’ve created. The reality of another child, more responsibility, is coming through loud and clear through the physical movement independent of my own will in my stomach already. The more roots I put down, the more that I feel I’m floating.

I was eager to reunite with Kiko as she had been in Normandie with her grandparents while my house descended into chaos (she ran towards me gleefully at Gare de Lyon) and yet was anxious about the six-hour and forty-minute ride from Paris to Barcelona. Traveling in a confined space that’s hurtling at high speeds with a toddler can be tough: if they start screaming there’s no way to take them outside to calm them down. And though potty training has gone surprisingly well — she essentially decided of her own will one day that she wants to use the toilet and has since — I had no idea if she’d be okay with going in a public transportation toilet over the plastic potty she was used to.

As a precaution, her grandparents put a diaper on her. Even more wisely, her grandmother (who was once an English teacher) had kindly packed me a giant green vintage canvas bag (imprinted with mass murderer Mao Zedong’s face) with snacks (cherry tomatoes, plums, bits of cake), three books, a bib, fork, knife, her teddy bear, and seven mini-plastic figurines of various animals and cars.

I was looking forward to seeing my mother and sister, because a few days before the festival, Iris called me and I heard her wailing across the world, nine hours earlier. I could barely make out the words — she’s dead, she sobbed. My mind immediately jumped to one of her dogs, as she has a penchant for adopting elderly creatures on the last legs of their life. But then the message became clear:  my er ayi (second maternal aunt out of a line of seven) was found dead in the bathroom of her retirement home.

It was hard to believe that my aunt, a formerly intimidating businesswoman turned into a jolly, don’t give a fuck grandma, who once laughed her way out of a ticket in Half Moon Bay for turning onto a one-way street, who owned the Shanghai apartment I once squatted in, who owned the empty apartment Iris and I landed in after our long road trip from New Jersey to San Francisco, who had taken my sister and mother under her wings once they’d moved out to California, was now gone. ‘As soon as he kicks the bucket,’ she used to say to my mother about her husband, ‘you’ll come live with me’. 

To everyone’s surprise, she left before he did. Everyone was in shock, myself included. Grief hits first like a tidal wave that gradually lessens to laps that have eroded something indiscernible. The festival came and went — a magical, draining, exhilarating and flattening experience. And then I was off.

After Clem helped me get on the train with the suitcase, stroller, and massive Communist baby bag, I was set to ride the train with Kiko. It went surprisingly well and didn’t drag on as I thought it might. Ironically, I think if I had been alone on that train ride, I might’ve been more bored and distracted; giving in to looking at nonsense on my phone. But being with a toddler forces one to be intensely present with her. She played, looked out the window, ate, drank, and relieved herself. She had no accidents, successfully went to the bathroom two times, and we visited the food cart three times. The last was just before the cart was set to close. The line had been steady all day, people loitered there demurely with their wine glasses and madeleines. 

J”EN PEUX PLUS, the lady, damp with sweat behind the counter growled at me. TEN MORE MINUTES, I CLOSE. I ordered Kiko another juice, olives and gressini for myself, since our lunch consisted of a sad burger split between us, and I wished the madame a good day with a sympathetic look.

J’EN PEUX PLUS (I can’t deal anymore) she repeated back at me, looking at me dead in the eyes. Then she handed me a chocolate for Kiko, who was staring at her with her mouth open. 

Fast forward a few days later to the food carriage on a train from Madrid to Seville, and the difference between Spanish and French culture could be summed up by the food carts: in Spain, I had to squeeze in the cart, which was packed with Spaniards rowdily drinking beer and having a party at 11am — the bartender was nice, patient with me and my broken Spanish. Kiko has been catered to on this trip, the first day my mother and sister gave her a shower like handmaidens, both enamored of her natural joyful state and cuteness. 

Mom seems like she’s in a better mood, my sister mentioned to me during a quiet moment. The days after erayis death my mom had cried so much that her entire face had bloated to fill the FaceTime screen to an extent I’d never seen before. Her social lifeline, her sister, is now gone, and apparently she’d mentioned already ideas of moving back to Taiwan. When my mother isn’t in the midst of grief, however, she is usually sassy. When my Bai cousins came to visit recently — including a cousin son of erayi — his daughter and wife told me how much they appreciated my mother’s rudeness. 

Your mom is hilarious, she just says what everyone is thinking but doesn’t say out loud. College-aged E, erayis only granddaughter on the extended Bai family tree, delighted in the memory of my mother snarking at eryifu (her husband). My mother, in fact, can be quite rude. 

Over time, family configurations constantly change, like trees -branches snap, fall, die, new sprouts pop up. My own ‘nuclear family’ now is really just three - my mother, my sister, myself, and Kiko the new sprout. I haven’t seen my dad since before Kiko was born, and now apparently he’s divorcing his new wife… he’s a difficult character to say the least, and one has to question what kind of person would remain married to him for nearly thirty years. 

I haven’t spent extended time with my mother in a long time, and certainly not as a mother myself. But it’s been a series of very difficult reminders of my own childhood. “That little boy is looking at you!” My mom chided Kiko and side-eyed a boy in Barcelona, on the night Kiko refused to walk and to be carried — she had prostrated herself on the ground.

WHO CARES, I yelled back. I remember in that moment all the times she’d made the same insidious remark to me when I had temper tantrums as a child, and realized that must be the origins of how I came to care so much about what other people think of me. Sometimes I think that my mother doesn’t see Kiko as a person, but rather an accessory to herself — her cute granddaughter that should kiss and adore her, even when my mom patronizingly asks her if she’s peed herself. We were at a cafe in Madrid when I lost it after my mom asked Kiko if she peed her pants again. It’s demeaning, I repeated, and then my mother walked off in a huff. 

She doesn’t understand, my sister chided me brusquely afterwards. You need to be patient and explain things to her like she’s a child. Check your triggers and your reaction.

My sister is right, though it’s far easier said than done. When one doesn’t have the best childhood experience — being raised in an environment of nonstop conflict — it’s too easy to slide back into that tense state, and to see the mistakes that were made play out in real time with one’s own child. But it’s also easiest to blame others instead of taking responsibility for how one reacts in the present instead of, too, reverting to the past.

Last night, back in France I overheard my mother yelling at Kiko. Kiko was upstairs screaming, as toddlers tend to do once they’ve discovered this ability, arrete, or something. In response, my mother screamed back: Don’t yell at waipo!

In response to that, I myself screamed at my mother, don’t yell at her! Which, of course, is the bad response, given that my parenting philosophy is that a child screams because it doesn’t know any better — and screaming at anyone, let alone a child, is unacceptable and childlike behavior in it of itself. I felt bad and apologized later to my mother for reacting so negatively. Being a parent, I’ve learned, is not only about becoming a better person for your kid, but it’s also about becoming a better child to one own’s parent.

To do so, I’ve been spending more time in the forest, climbing in Fontainebleau. One day last week, I bravely (or stupidly) ventured out with Kiko on my own: I drove twenty minutes south and then over the dangerously bumpy, tree-root-infested entrance to the closest parking near Rocher des Souris and unloaded the car. With my backpack, Kiko’s backpack stuffed with toys she’d insisted on bringing, snacks, and water, both stuffed into my crash pad, I tried to get her to follow me down the path into the crag. As potty-training has gotten significantly better (she’s successfully evacuated #1 and #2 into her potty… though she has already begun to pretend to need to “caca” to get the pocky stick treat I give her for sitting there), she was without a diaper, too. Somewhat miraculously, she didn’t have an accident and was a darling at the crag — watching the other strong climbers crush and applauding “bravo” every time there was a send. The only downside was that by 3pm she was exhausted, in want of milk, her father, and I had neither of those things to give her. I left on my own, as the group stayed on until 8pm, with an increasingly hysterical toddler who didn’t want to be carried (the crash pad kept hitting her) and didn’t want to walk. In the summer heat, it took me an exhausting twenty-five minutes to get her back to the car — most of the time farmer carrying her at a slight jog as she screamed for her baba. If I weren’t a woman I’d think someone might think I was kidnapping her.

Since it’s August, nobody in France is working, and so the assistance maternelle Kiko usually goes to is on vacation, which means that we take care of her all day, all week, all on our own. Even in the dwindling summer, the days are still long here — the sun sets at half-past nine. And though most people with 9-5 jobs are in the south with their out-of-the-office set, Clem is prepping to throw an electro-fromage music festival at our house and I’m writing/working as usual. Today was my turn to take Kiko so that Clem could get some work done, and while it was fun — she’s an increasingly cheeky and hilarious child — it was exhausting, demanding, and the moment she falls asleep I just want to sleep, too.

But I also want to write, and so here I am. I can’t complain about our lifestyle, however, especially in contrast with the corporate start-up life I left back in New York: 100% I would rather be living in the forest, pursuing a life of creation, writing, making climbing films with friends, and various entrepreneurial endeavors with complete freedom, albeit without the security of a stable job or a 401k. As a result of being so off-the-grid, I also think I’m way more lax about how “on track” Kiko is in learning her ABCs and how to count, and more about prioritizing free, unscheduled playtime for her.

And yet, as she gets older I can’t help but speculate and imagine: what will she do as she gets older, what will she become?

It’s a natural tendency to ask a child what they want to be when they “grow up”. In other eras, many people were born into their careers; last names were born of professions, like Carpenter and Smith, and it’s still fairly common for people to go “into the family business”. Or, like myself, some are born in America to immigrant families with a dream to climb the social ladder, to make it, and to make it big. Some parents try to project their unachieved dreams onto their spawn, others are demanding, others are negligent, and some just want their kids to be happy, but either way, they all fuck you up, mom and dad.

I question the American tendency to overschedule our kids, to push them to achieve, to go to practice when the kid doesn’t want to — but then, if we didn’t do this, would we have any child prodigies?

Prodigies have been on my mind for a while now. This New Yorker piece from 2018, “How to Raise a Prodigy” is a fascinating read, and seems to reinforce the idea that: “on the whole and with the expected exceptions, exactly the kind of hover parenting that we rightly deplore does seem to be essential to the kind of hyperachievement that we admire.”

In the end, though, being a child prodigy is essentially meaningless in determining whether one goes on to have a happy and fulfilled adulthood, and helping children realize that their own sense of accomplishment, or '“private sense of mastery” is more important than external achievements. The New Yorker piece ends with this somewhat disheartening insight:

“Teaching kids to become something other than what they were born to be is probably impossible; teaching them to behave in ways that seem unnatural to them at the start is actually not that hard. As satirists have pointed out for millennia, civilized behavior is artificial and ridiculous: it means pretending to be glad to see people you aren’t glad to see, praising parties you wished you hadn’t gone to, thanking friends for presents you wish you hadn’t received. Training kids to feign a passion is the art of parenting. The passions they really have belong only to them.”

Between teaching my child to adhere to societal norms and trying to create a prodigy, I have to be honest: I’m opting for the latter. In fact, my former child prodigy friend conveniently recently recommended a book, The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance, written by Josh Waitzkin, a child chess prodigy turned Tai Chi Chuan World Champion in adulthood.

It’s a fascinating and engaging read, and to me, the most impressive part of Josh Waitzkin’s life is that he turned his mental combat prowess in chess into a full-body experience; he mastered both the physical and mental (my closest readers will know that this dual mastery is an obsession of mine) in martial arts. One of the most interesting passages is one where he talks about the two basic ways of taming a wild horse:

“One is to tie it up and freak it out. Shake paper bags, rattle cans, drive it crazy until it submits to any noise. Make it endure the humiliation of being controlled by a rope and pole. Once it is partially submissive, you tack the horse, get on top, spur it, show it who’s boss—the horse fights, bucks, twists, turns, runs, but there is no escape. Finally the beast drops to its knees and submits to being domesticated. The horse goes through pain, rage, frustration, exhaustion, to near death . . . then it finally yields. This is the method some like to call shock and awe…

Then there is the way of horse whisperers. My mother explains, “When the horse is very young, a goal, we gentle it. The horse is always handled. You pet it, feed it, groom it, stroke it, it gets used to you, likes you. You get on it and there is no fight, nothing to fight.” You synchronize desires, speak the same language. You don’t break the horse’s spirit. My mom goes on: “If you walk straight toward a horse, it will look at you and probably run away. You don’t have to oppose the horse in that way. Approach indirectly, without confrontation. Even an adult horse can be gentled. Handle him nicely, make your intention the horse’s intention.

They have established a bond that neither wants to disrupt. And most critically, in this relationship between man and beast, the horse has not been whitewashed. When trained, he will bring his unique character to the table. The gorgeous, vibrant spirit is still flowing in an animal that used to run the plains.”

This made me think that there are two ways to make prodigies, or if not prodigies, then two makes to get children to do what you want — you either make them submit to your will by intimidation and power dynamics, or you truly connect with them so that they’re driven to do what you also naturally do (or want).

To do the latter, and to go along with the metaphor, the parent has to do the thing they want their kid to do. And the purest sense of prodigy, exceptional skill through the mastery of self, can endure into adulthood. What I want for Kiko the most, though, is to achieve complete mastery of her own self, whatever that looks like for her. As a result, here I am, still trying to achieve it myself, climbing, sitting, and dreaming.

It’s also now been two years + nine days of changing shit & piss-filled diapers, and while I am over it, Kiko is not.

I’d promised myself in a previous post that my next update would be about potty training… which I have so far, failed at. I bought 5-star rated books on the subject from Amazon, and a dear friend who knows of my plight kindly brought me other potty-themed books from London. While the American I Pooped in the Potty Today book is very straightforward, and more or less clear (the kid is given snacks on their potty and is given chocolate if he poops successfully in the toilet)…the British “loo” book, Miss Dotty’s Potty School, seems to have been written by a mad English person who’s just taken a huff of nitrous. Visually, a lot is going on, there are a hundred characters and different types of poo, and lots of varying font sizes and formatting. Kids probably need consistency when potty training, and for Kiko I don’t think it helped to add British English potty-themed words to the mix, along with caca, pipi, 大便 and poop. Also, I am not even sure what “pongy” means.

The last time I tried to pull out this book, Kiko started violently hitting the pages and said “non non non” repeatedly.

Her lack of propreté (in French, a child is simply described as “propre” or clean, once potty-trained) is embarrassing. When she was just born, I was set on trying out elimination communication, a method that completely shirks diapers from the get-go, harking back to old times before diapers were invented and open-crotch pants for kids that are popular in China. I gave that up quickly because it was far easier to ignore her signals and simply let her pee into a pamper’s diaper that wicked all moisture away. When she was about eight months old, I remember getting lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Paris near where she was born, in the 12th, and the woman who ran the shop telling me that her own kid stopped using diapers at 1-year-old.

“I was changing her diaper,” she told me, her eyes wide in remembrance of her expaseration, “and then I was like — ‘this is ridiculous! You’re old enough!’ and then I took away the diapers.”

I have tried. General online Google wisdom told me that a child is ready when she can communicate that she has to poop or pee (check) and can go for hours without wetting themselves (check). So, I’ve attempted a few stop-starts of the 3-day-method, which failed because I checked my email for a minute (or two), and at that exact moment of my diverted attention, Kiko would poop or pee in a corner. Perhaps I reacted too strongly — more upset at my own lack of will / attention than at my child, and would carry her in a frenzy to the toilet — because now, Kiko doesn’t even tell me when she has to caca or pipi, and doesn’t tell me when she has. She cries if I put her on the toilet, and refuses to wear underwear, instead demanding for her couche (diaper).

Another kid I know, just two weeks younger than her, is now “propre”. How’d you do it? I asked the mother. He ran around nude for a week, outside, and they followed him around. It was a mess, she told me. But Kiko doesn’t like to stay on the toilet, I said. Even when I see the cues of her having to pee, she fusses when I put her on there, demands to be removed, and pees herself a few minutes later. We put a screen in front of him, the mother said. To get him to sit still.

Given that I sometimes have forcefully taken my husband’s phone out of his hands while he is sitting on the toilet, this is not a habit or reward method I want to pursue. I know that I just need to grin and bear it through three full days (minimum), but life keeps getting in the way — trips, meetings, her days at the nounou… if anyone has any advice or any other methods, please let me know to help my shitty parenting.

Other than the failed potty-training front, life with Kiko is getting more and more fun. I can’t believe two years have flown by. I remember holding her, as a four-month-old when she was just starting to smile and watching toddlers in awe, still unbelieving that she’d ever be so big or babble so much while being impatient for that same day. I remember when I didn’t want her to call me mommy, and now, though she calls me “maman”, I would be lying if I didn’t say I love the special bond we have when she calls me the one that birthed her.

Life with Kiko has transformed drastically. We packed up our apartment in the Marais and moved to the forest, and while a large chunk of my social life depends on luring my climbing friends to come visit, I’m slowly starting to make friends in the area. Her language skills are developing, full sentences (albeit mostly in French) are appearing seemingly out of nowhere, and today she demonstrated a concept of time (“non, maintenant!”) when we denied her having a snack.

Best of all, lovely new neighbors have arrived, with two girls that are a bit older than K (five and three years old, respectively), and the three of them get along wonderfully. Luckily, because the land we live on is so large and next to the forest, they get to run and play around, at times unsupervised — a disappearing phenomenon. The father needed to borrow our chainsaw the other day, and so he came over with his girls. They ended up running around the house, engaged in several pursuits: systematically removing every color of Play-Doh and stacking the cup containers, taking turns on the swing while demanding to be pushed higher, finding chips and cookies on counters and asking for them to be opened, and playing hide-and-go-seek in the newly delivered “cheese break” stand that now lives in our backyard, courtesy CNIEL:

At one point, the two youngest ones disappeared, and I heard a bunch of knocking nosies, and giggling. I opened the back door to the CNIEL stand, a wooden closet for cheese storage, and found the two toddlers lying down on the bottom shelf, each of them on their bellies, propped up on their elbows, with a bowl of chips in between them. They looked at me and grinned deviously, bits of chips falling out of their mouths.

But this post isn’t about my own father — who I do think a lot about lately, even though we haven’t seen each other in nearly two years, since I’m writing about him. In honor of Father’s Day, this post is about Kiko’s father, who is, if I permit myself to say, a very good father.

Whereas it’s normal, if not expected, to see a woman coo over a baby and comfortably babble and play pretend and dolls with small children, it’s rarer to see a man so readily take on the role of being a father, in ways that don’t involve stereotypes like teaching a son how to throw a ball, work a grill or swing a hammer. A prime example of this awkwardness to fatherhood is found in this recent essay by Jon Baskin, “On the Crisis of Men”, published in The Point Mag:

As a father, however, I find myself looking at other men—at other fathers—all the time, and not at all as competition. Often they look back, just as quizzically, at me. I think we are trying to figure out how we should look, how we should act, how we should deal with the perennial awkwardness of being a father in public.

In this essay, Baskin describes a bafflingly torturous experience of attending a religious singing class called “Shabbat for Tots”, reflects on Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autobiographical novel, My Struggle, and struggles with the pressure “to become children, or someone’s fantasy of a child: that is, harmless, asexual, insensible to any non-family-friendly desire.”

I find this idea fascinating because it reflects the paradoxical Madonna-whore complex women are faced with, except the man in question is imposing these limits on himself: in his mind, he cannot be silly or take on a child-like curiosity and openness without losing his manhood. And then he goes on to question what manhood even means in modernity. I have to say that I sympathize with men. For as difficult as it is for women to be constantly questioned about the status of their womb and to have their value as a woman so closely tied to being a mother, with modern technology to reproduce, what do we need men for? Especially when most women today tend to make more money and are more educated than men?

I pity men and boys who grow up with this immense, silent pressure to be masculine in stereotypical ways: to be strong, to never show weakness, and to dominate. But I’m grateful for Clem, Kiko’s dad, who somehow has maintained his child-like innocence and zeal for life while being a man.

If anything, Clem has been better about embracing the fun side of parenthood far more than I have. While I have clown tendencies, Clem is basically a child at heart. And Kiko’s serious baba preference phases are a testament to this, since his idea of fun is building ships and towers out of blocks, blowing up giant balloons, rolling around the dirt with puppies, or cuddling frogs he finds in the natural pool outside. As his mother says, some people forget that the point of having children is to play with them and to have fun. This is certainly something that he excels in.

It’ll be interesting to see how this develops later on, though, as Kiko will need something beyond clown entertainment, like discipline and guidance. And the downside of having a husband with the spirit of the child is that practical things get left by the wayside, like remembering to bring her water bottle, diaper changer, or snacks in crucial moments.

What is also interesting is to see how much of parenthood is informed by our own experiences of our parents as children. Either one inadvertently becomes one’s own parents, or we actively do the opposite of whatever they did. Clem’s own father grew up in an era where ideas of masculinity were much more restrictive, and his father showed up for his family by showing up relentlessly at work, providing for them. Words of love and affection were sparse, and as a result Clem has always envisioned his version of fatherhood as constantly telling and showing his children that he loves them.

Father’s Day has always been a bit fraught for me, but I am endlessly grateful to see my own child have such a loving, kind and playful father. (Happy Father’s Day, Clem, for when you read this!) And unlike Knausgaard, Clem also doesn’t see fatherhood as a sacrifice to his dreams, or his home as a tether that keeps him away from his dreams (though, to be fair, his dream of throwing electronic music x cheese festivals directly literally takes place in his home). This faux-dilemma of “one can either be a good, selfless person/parent OR an artist that achieves one dreams” reminds me of Claire Dederer’s essay, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?”

But maybe, just maybe, everyone has been misreading selfishness. Perhaps selfishness is good, and trying to be a martyr-mother is what kills everyone’s spirit: it kills the creative projects in yourself, and the creative initiative of your own child when we try to control what they eat, do, or say, in accordance with what we think will be good for them in the long-term over what is fun for them in the moment.

Children are often called little monsters, and maybe the terror that they inspire in adults is a reminder of what we used to be: free, happy, and dead-set on doing what we want, other people — especially our parents — be damned.

I was in the kitchen, working, after a long weekend away. Kiko, now at 22 months, would intermittently yell MAMAN MAMAN, run to the kitchen door where she could see me to give me a grin. Aurevoir, she’d say, waving her hand after blowing me a bisous and then gleefully running away, not without throwing me tiny mischievous glances back in my direction. It was painfully cute, and also strange to see this person seemingly test the boundaries of separation. Whereas two years ago, she was in utero, in my utero, a year ago still dependent on my body for her bodily survival, now she’s speaking, running, jumping, teasing. It was as if she were conscious of her previous codependency on me and of her newfound freedom.

Time has been hurtling. April was a whirlwind of the electro-fromage festival, followed by another sojourn in Normandy, and then a very hectic weekend in London visiting friends. Our friends have a 5-year-old and another child who is only three months younger than Kiko, and it was our first weekend hanging out with another couple that is also saddled with kids. Read: the weekend mostly consisted of chaos, muscling strollers up and down the steep tube stairs, strapping fussy babies into car seats, carrying overstuffed bags of equipment for two toddlers to keep food disasters at bay in restaurants, ear-splitting electronic music made for babies, and two screaming tantrums in a row.

I was looking forward to London, on my last trip there for a quasi-baby moon, I loved being able to walk into a Dishoom at 4pm to for a full meal, loved the expansive cultural food options that were open at all hours, loved the frenetic bustle with English flair juxtaposed to Paris’ more unfussed chic. But now, with a toddler in tow, and even though it was lovely to see my friends (the upside of the combined chaos of hanging out as two families with young children is that there is no shame or guilt: we’re all in the same boat up caca-creek together), I’ve come to realize that modern life is just not for toddlers. Everything is dangerous and nothing is convenient. The result is that parents have to wholly take on the burden of personally escorting the children around, or outsource said cost to some poor nanny, who must dutifully cart the kids back and forth from their designated spaces: school, parks, or their rooms.

It was fascinating to watch Kiko interact with the other children, however. Her playmates are also multi-lingual (the elder one speaks four languages), and though the younger one babbled incoherently, from the way Kiko stared at him blankly it seemed to me that he was babbling in a different language from her own. When it came to playing with toys, it was evident that Kiko doesn’t quite understand the concept of sharing, either. As we boarded the train at St. Pancras International, Kiko seemed happy to leave to go back to the forest. Aurevoir! She shouted on repeat, waving and smiling to nobody in particular. We were happy too, to leave behind the stress of a city, which feels more and more like a giant amusement park made for adults: there are just endless things to queue for to stuff your stomachs and senses. Back in the forest, life is calmer, slower. We planted trees last month, have been watching the grass grow, the cherry fruit buds bloom. Kiko has space to run around, and very thankfully, plenty of her French family around, too.

While I am intensely grateful for the help of her grandparents, cousins, and aunts — this past week in Normandie there wasn’t a second that went by where she wasn’t in somebody elses’ arms or being entertained/educated in some way — on the language front, it feels like a losing battle. Though she understands Mandarin and English, 80% of what comes out of her mouth is French now.

When we were at the beach, Kiko stood before the crashing shoreline. Allez, she screamed in a mini-sumo squat, before running into the cold water and breaking into a fit of giggles. Her cousin showed her how to pat sand into a bucket, and as she did so, she added her own onomatopoeia, saying “tap tap tap” for every tap. Adding onomatopoeia to one’s actions, like saying the word “hup” as one picks something up, is a very bizarre French tick that everyone here seems to have. And despite my best attempts to tell her that this added onomatopoeia is unnecessary, she’s picked it “hup.” In response to one of my rallying cries against the cultural idiosyncrasy, the child looked at me and made that farting sound French people make with their mouths to indicate that they have no idea what I’m talking about.

Another noise without much direct meaning she makes: oh la la! It is as cute as it is frustrating, and even though I know she understands me in other languages, because the majority of people around her are French, I can’t help but feel like she assumes that this is the “right” language to exist in. Prior to the week in Normandy, every time she saw a cat she would say “mao” (貓), but now she says le chat! triumphantly, as if she’s decoded something.

School in France is mandatory beginning at age three — which means that in just a year, she’ll be even more socialized into the system here. It’s a bit nerve-wracking for me. Imparting Mandarin onto her is still important to me, because I feel like if the cultural ties are cut with her, they’ll die within myself too. But now even English seems like a battle, since even her father (who speaks English fluently) always resorts to French. He reasons that it’s more “natural”, even though he naturally speaks in English with native English speaks. The foreboding conclusion is that he sees her as French.

While one’s cultural self isn’t entirely dependent on what language one speaks, it is a major influencing factor. Hopefully, future trips abroad to Taiwan and the States will help balance out the French influence here… and as much as it feels like time is ticking by I am trying to remind myself that kids remain very malleable until a certain age.

Until next time: a potty training report! Something I’ve been personally putting off and now that I’ve written it, I’m holding myself to it.

Each trip, about five days long, had me separated from Kiko and immersed back into the climbing world. In another lifetime, I ran the marketing for a now mostly defunct but once popular climbing gym chain, writing blog articles, producing videos, and attending festivals dedicated to the sport. The main throughline of the marketing messaging behind it all: climbing can change your life for the better, make you a better person, and connect you to a community of like-minded individuals in the pursuit of growth.

Part of what I liked about this job was that I really believe in the power of climbing, and I feel lucky now to work with one of my close friends who is a professional climber. This has pulled me straight back into the heart of a very niche and intense world, at the elite level. Climbers, and by climbers I don’t mean someone who goes to the gym a few times a week but the type of person who breathes and lives for the sport (most likely, out of a camper van), operate on a different level. To quote Beth Rodden, who recently wrote a piece for the NYTimes to promote an upcoming memoir of her time pushing the limits of the sport:

Climbers pride themselves on being better than normal people. Not just in the “I climbed a mountain and you didn’t” type of way, but in the fabric of how we approach life. How we eat, where we sleep, the stories we walk away with: It’s all better.

Naturally, many climbers date climbers, marry climbers, and then tend to spawn climbers. Friends on this trip joked about two professional climbers’ potential to procreate the ‘world’s strongest climber’. Since I now live in Fontainebleau, a forest famed for its world-class bouldering, many people assume that my child too, will be a climber.

Kiko is now approaching two years, and I have to admit that I do take a certain pride in her natural athletic ability (she’s done a pull-up on her own, gripping on the edge of our living room side table). Some of my greatest childhood memories are linked to gymnastics and despite the downsides (like the intense pressures on the physical body and mind as well as literal pain), I wouldn’t have taken a minute of it all back. Other friends of mine who did an equally intensive sport, like ballet, agree that having learned to master our bodies at such a young age taught us invaluable lessons on discipline, endurance, and stamina.

Sport, however, is often viewed as extraneous or a side hobby of childhood. Or, it’s demonized. I recently read Keith Gessen’s book Raising Raffi, a book written by a highly educated and somewhat neurotic man who wrote he and his partner “did not want Raffi to be the happiest baby, we wanted him to be the most interesting baby”. Gessen also wanted his baby to do sports, and extensively traces his own relationship with sports and questions the weight he places on imparting its value on his son (nevermind that the text reads as if he had a daughter, the sports question wouldn’t have weighed so heavily at all):

I came to believe that sports, and football especially, had special character-building properties. Physical labor, teamwork, discipline—the martial virtues without the martial vices. Of course, my experience of actual sports teams indicated that this was nonsense. Some of my teammates were wonderful people; some were jerks. I have played sports with plenty of loudmouths and bullies. They didn’t shoot up any schools, but a lot of them went into finance. Still, for me, sports had done so much and been so much. They were a world away from the world of work and status; I enjoyed playing them when I was one of the best people on the field or the ice, and also when I was one of the worst. Of the things from my own life that I felt I could give to Raffi, the one I most wanted to give him was sports.

However, Gessen ends up concluding that “in a certain reading of my life, sports have been a huge waste of time, a missed opportunity, an abrogation of my responsibility to myself and others.” To engage in sport requires an all-in commitment, which can be too competitive, demanding, or just pointless if it doesn’t get a kid a full-ride scholarship to a top-tier school.

I guess it’s pertinent to differentiate between classic team sports like soccer, football, basketball, lacrosse, and other physical disciplines that are more focused on the physical mastery of the self, like karate, climbing, or gymnastics. I remember playing basketball and softball as a kid in New Jersey, but as Kiko is growing up on the edge of a forest in France, these typical American suburban leagues and associations don’t exist. In France, sports are not common in the school landscape, there are no junior varsity or varsity teams. If a kid is particularly gifted in a sport, they’re sent to a specialized high school for students on track to compete on a professional level.

Having Kiko become a professional climber is obviously not my goal, but early and steady physical training, to me, is incredibly important. I used to joke with my friends that I was going to attach weights on my daughter’s ankles, like the martial arts legends of ancient China, so that much later in life she’d be able to run over lakes. I’ve since given up on that (a friend told me this would be dangerous/borderline child abuse), but I still want her to be an athlete in the way I still try to be (thanks to my friend who got me a Beastmaker that’s now installed in my kitchen).

To me, there is a difference between being ‘sporty’ or a gym rat that exercises for purely aesthetic purposes (e.g. losing weight) and being an athlete, that is, someone who is always training and moving through life with keen body awareness. Body intelligence is so underrated.

I often think about this David Foster Wallace essay called 'How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart', which details how his favorite child prodigy tennis player’s memoir’s vapidness gutted him. He concludes that what makes genius athletes so great is their ability to be in the moment, to be so completely focused that they think of nothing at all, and agonizes that his type of genius —as a writer — can only truly 'see, articulate and animate the experience of a gift we are denied'. The artist and athlete and categorically divided, mutual exclusives. In his mind, and perhaps like others, the artist is too analytical, getting lost trying to decipher and express a moment they’re unable to simply exist in the way that a great athlete can. 

I disagree fundamentally with this assessment, and when I think about raising Kiko, I don’t want to group her into either an 'artistic' or 'athletic' kid, but rather help her discover how creativity can be stimulated from body movement and how physical endurance can help mental focus. To be an artist of the highest order of expression, one must utilize both their mind and body to the fullest effect possible.

This all being said, I do still wonder how much is too much. What is the point, anyway, of pushing the limits of human physical ability? At certain points during my travels, I wondered if such a narrow obsession with climbing harder is healthy. I guess it all depends on if one’s having fun. For now, Kiko loves climbing just so that she can slide down a boulder, which is pretty fun (highly recommend if you, dear reader, haven’t done this yourself ever or not in a while).

Some titles I had for posts that I wanted to write but never got to: The Ritualistic Labor of Motherhood (this was for the Lunar New Year, hello year of the Earth Dragon, and intended to describe the labor required to make rituals happen… I just made nian gao and had hot pot and called it a day), Childhood (revisiting an anthro class I took titled ‘Lost Worlds, Secret Spaces: Modernity and the Child’).

Today’s post, however, won’t be so coherent. Some alternative titles I typed into the headline bar for the post I’m writing now: neurotic parenting, non-traditional parenting,

I’ve settled on entering the age of the tantrum since Kiko is now a full person. This realization hit me a few days when Kiko woke up around 8 in the morning. Her dad got up to get her out of her crib and change her diaper. Since we’ve been living without heat or hot water for the past few days (awaiting a re-up on our fuel supply in the forest), he crawled back into the warm bed. She happily hopped around our room, moving her stuffed animals and potty-training toilet around with no apparent logic or reason, chatting to herself in her mysterious language which occasionally contains words.

Then, because I unplugged the space heater she keep turning on full blast, she broke down crying inconsolably (to be more specific: inconsolable by me, since these days she often only wants her Baba). It has now been nearly 20 months of discovering personhood, and of Kiko becoming Kiko. She has a very defined desire and will and makes it known.

Having a child makes time speed up, I think, because so much shit in their life happens in a short amount of time: they learn how to hold up their head, see color, grow a set of teeth, crawl, walk, talk, in the same amount of time when us adults are either doing basically the same exact thing every day when we’re not meeting up with our friends for the 2nd time of the year desperately trying to catch up.

Anyway, moving beyond that trite it goes by so fast shit, Kiko does have an unusual set-up: both of her parents work from home (her dad is launching his music career and a series of electro-fromage music festivals in Paris, while I’m helping with the marketing, writing, and doing other various freelance creative jobs), which means that we spend a lot of time with her. Two days a week, she goes to an assistant maternelle about a 5-minute drive from the house, and on those days we cram in meetings and as much work as possible. While luckily, knock-on-wood, Kiko still really loves sleep (average 12 hours a night and 2.5-hour naps in the afternoon), getting work done when she’s around all day at home is getting harder and harder.

The result is getting a lot less sleep than what would be ideal. Last weekend her paternal grandparents graciously hosted her at their home west of Paris, and while I had grand plans of getting work done, I ended up spending my Saturday afternoon like this:

Despite the beautiful weather outside that merited a climbing day, I just sat underneath my jacket reading on my Kindle. Because parenting can be exhausting when a little person is either always demanding your attention or refusing your aid in a very loud, constant, and at times rude manner (one thing Kiko has picked up from her daycare is this tendency to push me from where I’m sitting while yelling BOUGE).

All of this being said, the joy in witnessing her unfiltered reactions to life makes the exhaustion worth it. Last week, we pulled a bag of frozen raspberries out of the freezer (one of her favorite fruits) and put a few on the table before her. Frozen fruit was an unknown concept to her. Still, the raspberry looked familiar enough so she popped one in her mouth, and then immediately, her eyes widened and her mouth puckered into a tiny ‘o’ shape and she inhaled with great exaggeration while cooing OOOOHHHHHHHHH!

Every time Kiko reacts to something, it’s the purest reaction one can have. When we had hotpot for Chinese New Year and pulled from the bubbling fondue pot (meant for cheese)strands of hand-rolled noodles, she nearly screamed with delight. We visited the Salon du Fromage, where she tasted Swiss raspberry yogurt. The next morning she saw it in the refrigerator and immediately pointed at it, seeing nothing else. When I take away the metal stick to poke the fire away from her, she screams and cries as if the world is ending.

Most adults mask or filter their reactions in some way — people are either too cool or concerned over how they’ll look if they ever express such joy, or worse, they don’t allow themselves to indulge in things that truly make them that happy at all.

Having a child is a good reminder that it’s more than okay to scream, laugh, and cry, unbridled. It’s fun, too.

Five weeks flew by, and yet, it was the most amount of time I’d spent with her since… I last lived at home, which is now nearly two decades ago. Her initial entry into our house and world here in the forest must have been disorientating, as she adjusted to the new rhythms of a household in a foreign country halfway around the world and the cold of winter.

Spending time with her only granddaughter, Kiko, obviously took up most of her attention. Kiko, now speaking more than ever (though mostly incomprehensible and hard to discern which language she’s attempting to use), is a joyous ball of positive energy that whirls around, running, climbing, hopping, and constantly demanding to listen to music. Now I understand why some people think having children will solve any marital problems: a child is a blank slate of positive expectation that everything will go right for them. She was the buffer between any residual tensions between my mother and myself, leftover, from having lived together in a household that was in a constant state of unhappy warfare.

Mostly, it was fascinating to watch my mother, in a mixture of Chinese and English, interact with Kiko. Mostly because it was difficult to imagine that she had been that way with me or my sister; thirty-plus years ago, I don’t know if she would have used English to coo at us, or if she would have cooed at all. My mother has always been a stoic, strong person who never lets emotions overtake her and is strongly averse to emotions taking over other people: the one rare occasion in which I, college-aged, sobbed over a breakup to her, she sternly told me to pull myself together.

But during the downtime when Kiko was napping — she, thankfully, is still at the age where she sleeps soundly and for long hours — or during the one day a week she still attended the assistance maternelle, my mother and I had to fill the time together. It was difficult, at first, to bridge the immense space that had grown between us. She found my cooking to be too sour for her tastes (by the end of the month, she had full command of the kitchen, which was duly appreciated by Clem and myself), found the cold too uncomfortable to go outside, and was used to using her devices (iPad, iPhone) to pass the time as she normally lives alone.

As we spent every day together, I took advantage to ask her questions that went beyond what she’d done that day or was going to do. As we walked in Barbizon, after picking up a pain aux raisins from the bakery for Kiko, to pick her up from daycare, I asked her about the brother I nearly had. A roughly outlined fact I grew up with— that my sister and I learned at some point in our lives, perhaps as a joke or menace — was that the only reason I was here on this earth was because my mother’s first pregnancy and child, a son, had died. In my mind, he had been a stillborn, and so I asked her for the first time.

No, she told me, it wasn’t a stillborn. It was a tumor, she replied, looking down at the cobblestones beneath our feet. I was surprised to learn this information. What do you mean, I asked?

What had really happened was that somewhere along her first pregnancy, a tumor had appeared in the womb, alongside her son. The doctors had identified it, and apparently, there was nothing to do — the operation was impossible due to the risk it would pose to the baby — but wait and see. Then, at either the fourth-month or sixth-month mark (this isn’t too clear in my mother’s memory), she had intense pains and began to bleed. My mother went to the hospital, and the tumor pushed out the baby.

I asked her if she had seen him. She nodded. I was shocked and a bit horrified to learn the real turn of events — somehow, more jarring than a stillborn. What did he look like? Small, like a baby, my mother answered, without any discernable shift of emotion. Were you sad? I asked. Of course, she shrugged. She went on to explain that afterward, the doctors in New Jersey wanted to perform a hysterectomy on her. It was crazy, she said, so she went back to Taiwan, the land of national health care, where the doctors removed just the tumor. My father had found a job in Taiwan at the time and accompanied her, but he hated it. Not long after, my old sister was conceived and then born, and then since two children were the minimum norm, I arrived a few years after that.

A miscarriage or stillbirth is a horrible experience to have to live through, and many women like my mother, carry that burden alone. I can’t imagine which one is worse: the lose something before it can be someone or to lose something that already was. But funnily enough, I find that when it comes to the topic of having kids, most childless people are just deathly afraid of the loss that comes with having a child.

I was at a birthday dinner last week in Paris, and sitting across from a new acquaintance my now 18-month-old came up. Do you feel like your life has changed drastically? He inquired. A man in his early forties, he was actively looking to get married and settle down with children, though the hostess later informed me that he had a penchant for dating twenty-year-olds. I considered the question and said no, not really. Because while it has changed, as the responsibility of making sure a small person is fed, clean, and attentively care for is no small task, my values in what I try to spend the most time doing and paying attention to, haven’t. I don’t feel loss or at least, don’t focus on anything that has been lost but only what has been gained.

If my mother had been a different person, a woman who worries instead of one who pragmatically shuts down any disturbing emotion, perhaps she wouldn’t have saved her uterus or gotten pregnant again so quickly. Worrying about the potential loss of something isn’t likely to beget anything good anyway.

If there’s one thing I worry about during this period of my life as a mother, it’s over wasting / the loss of time. This month, I deleted Twitter (ugh, I know it’s sad I spent so much time reading useless clickbait thoughts) and feel much better for getting rid of the distraction.

But then I had a realization: distractions aren’t really distractions at all. They’re just things we’re paying attention to that we don’t want to admit that we’re paying attention to. When framed this way, it’s a lot easier to step back and admit that I don’t want to be paying attention to that sort of stuff.

For the last days of my mother’s time here, I tried to pay attention only to the good things: her precious time with her granddaughter, a trip to the medieval town of Troyes we took together with Kiko’s paternal grandparents. As I said goodbye to her and hugged her at the doors of ORLY, she looked at me meaningfully. Good luck with everything, she told me. I was overcome with a sudden swell of emotion, my mind suddenly jumping thirty years ahead into the future, imagining myself hugging Kiko to bid her goodbye, seeing her off to live a life so far away from my own. I went back to the car and immediately kissed Kiko who was sound asleep in her car seat, savoring her precious little being who is still only aware of the present now and has yet to grasp the concept of permanent loss.

My mom has been here for the past few weeks, and it’s been an adjustment, to say the least, to have to live with her again for such an extended amount of time. I can’t remember the last time I asked her for advice. And I have to scold her to not joke around that she is going to spank Kiko (to demonstrate how different Eastern parenting can be, this popular Taiwanese child psychology doctor’s YouTube channel released a video just three months ago about the pros and cons of corporal punishment).

To say the least — I have been individuated from my fractured and formerly dysfunctional nuclear family for quite some time now. For those from happy/functional families, this podcast is intriguing, notably because the host mentions that many of her Asian clients have a hard time with individuation.

Individuation is essentially developing a unique identity separate from that of any other individual — especially from those who played the most influential role in shaping who you are, i.e., your parents. In the Jungian view, we arrive on earth as pure consciousness in a tiny meat suit, which then becomes conditioned by caregivers, peers, school, and societal norms.

The societal pressure is the most suffocating. For Christmas, we hosted the holiday, and when I suggested inviting a few “orphan” friends, as was normal in my family growing up, I was met with a visceral reaction. In France, I was told, the holiday is reserved for family only. My upbringing of what is considered right and wrong was not aligned with the family I married into, but also, as I have gotten older I no longer wish to bend to societal norms to fit in.

In the end, we hosted a Chinese-style Christmas with a Chinese banquet — 17 dishes in total. My mother and I cooked mapo tofu, brussels sprouts, hot and sour soup, beer-roasted duck, three-cup chicken, hong shao niu rou, tofu pad kra pao, vegetarian sticky rice, chao mi fen, lion’s head meatballs, rice powder steamed pork ribs, scallion pancakes, smashed cucumber salad, stir-fried napa cabbage, wood ear mushroom salad, taro sago soup, and black sesame cookies.

[ As a side note, I now finally appreciate how much work has gone into every single family gathering in my childhood — the sheer amount of organizing, chopping, preparation, sweat, time, shopping, and cleaning. One mode of being a mother means being at once invisible and indispensable. Birth is like a prelude to a lifetime of hidden labor to bring to life that can be enjoyed - poof, one day a person is here, poof, a meal appears, poof, the dishes are washed, poof, the sheets are changed. ]

In the chaos of 21 people at the house, Kiko didn’t do chores but instead spent time bouncing between arms, with everyone cooing over how much she’s grown. And as cliché as it is, it is kind of insane how fast a baby grows.

At 17.5 months, she is also at the dawn of her individuation — increasingly independent and is starting to voice discontent over being handled like a doll. She thrashes her feet while getting her diaper changed, screams if she doesn’t want to get into the car seat, and shows a strong preference for her baba. Her hair has gotten longer, her molars have come in, and where there was once a sprout of a human there is now a very small child. When the discontent is loud, my strategy is to distract and act like a clown, which usually works. I don’t try to control her as much as I misdirect her attention elsewhere.

During my childhood, my behavior was largely controlled by force, shame, rewards, and corporal punishment. I remember being in awe at my peers who would talk back to their parents or make demands, but they were probably not hit with large cooking chopsticks or forced to stand facing a corner for an hour for a minor infraction. In France, it’s illegal to hit your kids, but on a Christmas walk with one of my nieces, she mentioned that she had no choice but to continue playing piano at the behest of her parents. Her mother is from China, with the typical stripes of a tiger mother, but in France, it’s more the system that forces children into set career paths at a fairly young age.

What I do find interesting is the unspoken range of how much parents’ influence still has on my many adult friends today. One friend confided in me that she never makes a decision without consulting her mother for hours, and other people I know plan or live their lives based on their parents’ wishes; be it marrying someone of a certain religion, staying close to a geographic location, or taking over the family business.

Not to say that any of that is inherently bad, but it does pose a troubling question of free will, identity, and nature versus nurture. How can we become who we are if we are expected to become something already, or to follow the same path that’s been well-traveled? How responsible are we supposed to be for the well-being (emotional, financial, physical) of our parents?

The heritage of a family tradition is even often romanticized. If one is born with the last name Boucher, born into a family of butchers with a successful butcher shop, it would seem difficult to pursue anything else but carry on the torch one has been given. I was born with a fairly common last name (as someone joked at Christmas, the one everyone has in China!) and no real defined career path other than one that went up in terms of social mobility. The one other unspoken pressure other than making a shit ton of money being the most important thing in life— and this is perhaps why a lot of people from Asian cultures have a hard time individuating — is that children in Chinese culture (often the first-born male) are expected to take care of their parents in old age.

While there are three generations currently living in my household, it’s far from the Confucian ideal (interestingly enough, one study showed that three-generational families tend to dampen a child’s creativity — perhaps kill in the child’s mind what is possible). My Taiwanese-born mother is visiting from California, uprooted as she could be in a forest in France, trying to remember what it means to take care of a toddler after over three decades. She’s helping as best as she can, but that isn’t the point of her trip. It’s not about striving to become or achieve something in order to please her or myself. It’s just about simply enjoying the magic of watching a child grow, without any expectations at all.