family

The Unexpected Primary Caretaker

/ Liz / Leave a comment

This piece originally appeared on The Salt Collective, a now-defunct online magazine about culture, faith, and politics.

“I just love being with Spencer all the time,” she said as she crawled up the play structure, on the heels of the child in question.

I was at a neighborhood playground with a new mom-friend, our toddlers happily ignoring each other.  We had met at a preschool open house the weekend before.  Our sons were less than 3 months apart, we lived mere blocks from each other, she had an engineering degree from the prestigious university down the street, and she was a full-time parent.  Excited to find another high-achieving mom who spent a lot of time taking care of her kid, I got her number immediately.  I had so many questions for her:  I wanted to know how she made the decision not to work.  I wanted to know if she still had professional ambitions and, if so, how she was keeping them at bay while she raised her child.  I wanted to know if the same drive and intellectual curiosity that had gotten her that degree ever made it frustrating to read the same Elephant and Piggie book eight times in a row.  I wanted to ask her all the questions I’d been wrestling with for the last 21 months, questions that neither my working-mom friends nor my stay-at-home friends could answer.

Five days later, we were having our first playdate, and I was quickly learning that we might have less in common than I thought.

“I can’t imagine having another kid for at least three and a half more years,” she continued. “We’re just having so much fun.”

I looked at her as she animatedly chatted with her son.  Then I looked down at mine, furiously turning the steering wheel of the plastic car he was sitting in, and sighed.  I was in my eleventh hour of the day with him, and there were still two more to go before bedtime.

So much for a friend in a similar situation, I thought.  I could not relate to anything she was saying.

***

Until I had a child myself, I knew virtually no stay-at-home parents.  Both of my parents worked, as did all the parents of my childhood friends.  When they had children, the high-achieving folks with whom I went to high school, college, and grad school all took as much parental leave as they could before returning to the full-time jobs their educations had earned them.  I did not expect to be any different.

But when my husband and I started talking about having kids, I found myself considering a different path.  I was trying to start a second career (really a fourth and fifth career, but who’s counting these days), building a caseload of career consulting clients and starting to write in earnest.  It wasn’t the best time professionally to have a child, but my circumstances did offer the possibility of caring for a baby by day and working by night.  Not to mention that our nearest relatives were 2,000 miles away and I was not, at that point, making enough to justify the cost of child care — which, in the San Francisco Bay Area, rivals the coronary-inducing cost of housing.

On top of the practical concerns, I was curious about what it was like to be a primary caretaker.  When I was three, I told my parents that I wanted to do every job in the world for 10 days — doctor, McDonald’s cashier, mother — and that statement had proved surprisingly prescient.  Even after working in three different fields and dipping my toes into two more, I wanted to know what it was like to be a full-time parent, at least for a little while.  And frankly, it sounded refreshing to go from juggling too many things for, oh, my entire life to having only one focus every day.  So I decided that I would be the primary caretaker, and after taking a month or two off, I would start writing again and seeing a few clients in the evening and on weekends.  No big deal.  I didn’t know anyone else who had this kind of arrangement, but it seemed like it could work for me.

Not surprisingly, things turned out to be far more complicated in reality.  The first year was a blur of naps, feeds, and diaper changes — one in which I ended up getting very little work done at all.  After the one-year mark, though, my energy started to return.  I started writing again.  I started speaking again.  I got a job teaching about race and sexuality.  One of the pieces I wrote helped spawn an organization into which I was excited to pour my limited time and energy.  The little mental space I’d been able to clear out after a year of parenting was quickly filled — and then some — by work.

The remarkable thing about this transition is how much better I felt after I resumed working.  To no one’s surprise but mine, I loved working again.  I was energized in a way I hadn’t been in more than a year, and not just because I was sleeping more; I was buzzed from checking things off my to-do list and making things happen.  I was less bored when my son and I went to the playground for the second time that day or read There Is a Bird on Your Head! nine times in succession, because I had other ideas percolating in the back of my mind and other things to look forward to.  Paradoxically, I was a better parent now that I had other things going on in my life; I was more satisfied overall, and when I was with my kid, I was more present and more intentional.

Not to say that life was perfect.  For all the energy and meaning it gave me, having more things to do meant more stress and less sleep.  There were moments, like when my son initiated a fifth lap around the block, when I wished I could be using that time to write instead.  He was constantly changing, and whenever one of these changes took place — in his nap schedule, in his activity level, in the sudden advent of tantrums — my work life had to be reorganized in turn.  And the boundaries between work and childrearing were hazy at best; I went from chasing him through the house in the morning to writing emails during his naps to chasing him around the block in the afternoon to grading papers when he went down for the night.  My weekdays were sometimes 18 hours long, and my weekends — time when I would ideally be resting more and spending more time with my family — were often no different.  When working only evenings and weekends started to feel unsustainable, I had to decide if and when to start child care; then I had to decide how much, weighing how much I could justify on my variable income against how desperate I was for relief.  Two mornings of daycare a week soon became three, which soon became four.  The balance between work and childrearing was, and still is, constantly being reassessed and renegotiated.

***

I’ve looked for other parents — mothers especially — who can relate to these struggles, whose experiences I can learn from.  But they’ve been hard to find.  Nearly all the mothers I know who also love work returned to their full-time jobs after a few months of maternity leave.  They have offices to go to, set work hours, regular interaction with adult coworkers.  Their situations aren’t perfect either — they have to deal with leaving their kids with caretakers before they feel ready to, in many cases; guilt for not spending more time with their children; sadness that they miss milestones; the sense that their kids are growing up too quickly.  They have their own set of parenting baggage, one that’s entirely different from mine.

Meanwhile, most of the mothers I meet during the week have chosen not to work.  They do not have the same professional angst that I have, the stress of pent-up ambition, a constant longing for more time and space to work.  They wrestle with isolation and boredom, and if they have any qualms about not working, it’s guilt for not getting more out of their education.  But, as my new mom-friend illustrated, that guilt is usually dwarfed by the satisfaction they get out of being with their children all day.

I can’t relate to that either.  Make no mistake:  I love my son more than life itself, and he’s filled my life with more love and unbridled joy than I ever thought possible.  But being with him 24/7 is not my dream.  I am not creative when it comes to finding things for us to do.  I do not enjoy scouring mom groups for fun outings or Pinterest for new crafts and projects; I do not get excited about finding new storytimes or playgrounds to visit.  His toddler tantrums are more exhausting than anything I’ve ever experienced, including anything that happened in his first year.  I love that he wants to hold my hand and spend time with me, and I love that I get to spend hours of every day within tickling distance of him.  But I also love the work I do and the meaning and purpose it gives me.

So I find myself in an unusual situation:  I’m a parent who loves to work but spends much of her time childrearing, without a traditional job, an office, or consistent work hours.  I’m a mother who does not feel like time is going too fast or that her child is growing up too quickly because I get more than enough time with him.  I feel like mothers like me are out there, especially in the economy we live in, where freelancing and gigging are (for better and for worse) on the rise.  But so far, these parents have been hard to find.

I understand that I’m lucky to have this set of problems.  Having flexible work hours is a gift.  Having the option of not working full-time is a gift.  Feeling like you have too much time with your child is a gift, because it means that you’ve gotten enough, and plenty of parents would kill for that.  I am lucky.

But I also wish I had a few parents in my life who are in the same boat, who fit in neither with traditional working parents nor the stay-at-home crowd.  Who’ve had to constantly negotiate and re-negotiate the lines between work and childrearing.  Who know what it’s like to have the unusual wish that they had a little less time with their kid and a little more time to work.

***

A few weeks later, my new mom-friend and I were texting each other, trying to schedule our second playdate.

“Are you free Thursday or Friday?” I asked.

“Possibly Thursday. I have a job interview!” she replied.

I laughed.  My first reaction was cynical:  What happened to the emphatic claim that she loved being with her son all the time?  Did she get an opportunity that she had never considered before, one so perfect that she was willing to disrupt all the fun they were having?  Had she been she trying to convince me?  Had she been trying to convince herself?

Then came a more gracious thought:  Maybe she and I have something in common after all.

I Get the Hype About Grandparents Now

/ Liz / 2 Comments

This piece originally appeared on The Salt Collective, a now-defunct online magazine about culture, faith, and politics.

“Bear, we have to go inside.”

My son pulls at my hand.  His tug is insistent, surprisingly strong for someone who isn’t yet two; when I refuse to comply, he pulls harder, his legs in a textbook tug-of-war stance.  I counter his weight with one hand as multiple Target bags hang from the other.  I do not have the wherewithal to make the walk around the block that we often do after coming home.

Nor do I have the time.  It’s almost 4.30, and we have a date.  After struggling for a few moments, I pull out my ace:

“Yei-Yei and Nai-Nai want to talk to you.”

Suddenly his arm goes slack.  He drops my hand and runs to the front door, patting it insistently as I fumble for my keys.  We enter the house and I fetch my laptop.  As I sign onto Skype, he claps his hands and looks eagerly at the screen.

Seconds later, my parents appear.  “Hellooooo?  Hiiiiiii!” my mom exclaims, waving with both hands.  “Hello, Bear!” says my father.  “Goochee goochee!  Moochee moochee!”  He turns his index fingers into horns and pretends to charge at the screen.  My son squeals with delight.

And so our call begins, just as it does every Tuesday and Friday at this time.  My parents and my son entertain each other as he shows them his new tricks and they make silly faces at him.  I sit on the couch and watch them, quietly marveling at the relationship they’ve formed in just 21 months with 2,000 miles between them.

***

Much of my amazement stems from the contrast between their relationship and the one I had with my grandparents.

Mine lived in Taiwan, halfway around the world, in a time when that distance was far more difficult to traverse.  It was practically impossible for my grandparents to be part of my everyday life; there was no FaceTime, no Skype, no text messages, just long-distance phone calls that, at $2 a minute, were too expensive to make frequently.  (One 30-minute call a week would set you back over $3,000 a year.)  My mother compensated for this however she could.  When I was a baby, she would audio-record me cooing and laughing and mail the tapes to her parents; two weeks later, after the tapes finally arrived, they would tell her how much they loved them and ask for more.  Later, she would make my brother and me write them birthday and New Year cards in Chinese, even though she would have to compose them herself and show us how to write each character, even though it would have been much easier to write them herself.  She did everything she could under the circumstances to bring our lives together.  But for the vast majority of time, their lives did not intersect with mine at all; my grandparents felt almost theoretical to me.

When our lives did intersect, communication was always a problem.  Mandarin was my paternal grandmother’s fourth language and my distant second; things weren’t much better with my mom’s parents, who spoke it exclusively.  Trying to tell them about my life only got more frustrating as I got older and it got more complicated, so I compensated by talking with them less.  Our phone calls were perfectly summarized by Aziz Ansari’s character in Master of None — “Hi!  Good!  Bye!”

When we did get to spend time in person, it always involved a drastic upheaval in our lives. Because it was so time-consuming and expensive to fly from Taiwan to Detroit, where my family lived, my grandparents would visit for a month at a time — first my maternal grandparents, then my father’s mother.  During these months, everything in our home would change:  The language we spoke, as my parents shifted to speaking only Chinese and required my brother and I to do the same.  The food we ate, as one grandmother took over cooking responsibilities and the other brought her own requests.  Our routines, as we spent our weekends at the Gucci counter at Saks Fifth Avenue and our Thursday nights at Old Country Buffet.  (Both of these trips were for the same grandmother.  She contained multitudes.)  Our chain of command, as one grandmother felt the liberty to tell me what to do and the other did the same to my mother.  None of my grandparents spoke English and none of them could drive, so when they were with us, they were additional charges for my parents to care for.  During these months, the focus would be on them, the respected elders and the guests in our home, instead of on me, where I preferred it.  Being the child that I was, I did not appreciate this shift, nor the sense of being displaced in my own home.

On top of all that, we were such wildly different people.  Generation gaps can already be hard to cross for grandparents and grandchildren who live in the same country, even the same city; when you add radically different cultures and histories into the mix, they can feel insurmountable.  One of my grandmothers came of age during the Chinese Civil War, when her family decided it was safer for her to get married and flee the country than to stay and attend college.  She got the last seat on the last flight out of Manchuria before the Communists took power.  She raised four children practically alone as her husband, an army general, spent months at his post.  Their entire neighborhood had only a single television.  Meanwhile, my other grandmother was the daughter of a businessman’s second wife at a time when the Japanese occupied Taiwan and polygamy was still common practice.  She spent her childhood watching her mother jockey for attention and resources — “for love,” my father says — with two other wives who had children to fend for.  This was her world until she was 18, when she entered an arranged marriage.  She would bear four children and bury her husband by the time she was 34, the age I am currently.

Me?  I grew up in the suburbs of the most powerful country in the world, in a house with as many televisions as people.  My mother outworked and outearned my father, almost all of my classmates were white, and my biggest frustrations were casual racism and the fact that my parents ordered so many toppings on our weekly trips to Pizza Hut.  My grandparents and I had virtually no experiences in common.  Even if communication weren’t so hard for us, I am not entirely sure what we would have discussed.

So when my friends would talk rapturously about their grandparents — these mythical creatures who would bake cookies with them, fill their Christmas stockings, take them on trips to Florida — I simply could not relate.  I cared about mine, of course, but if I were honest, they felt either nonexistent or intrusive, depending on the time of year.  I spent much of my time with them waiting for them to leave so my life could return to normal.  In hindsight, I recognize this as selfish; perhaps things would have been different if I had been 25 instead of 7, if I had more compassion and understanding of cultural differences and appreciation for our strange circumstances.  But I was a child, and I was not yet capable of such things.

***

Needless to say, my parents and my son do not have nearly the same hurdles that my grandparents and I had.  They have so much less distance between them — linguistically, geographically, culturally.  My parents speak fluent English.  While they live in another state, we’re able to fly to each other multiple times a year.  At this point, my parents have lived in the US twice as long as they lived in Taiwan; they have iPhones and Instagram, and they love In-n-Out burgers and getting samples at Costco.  They will understand my son’s life in a way that my grandparents could not understand mine.  Their presence in his life will never feel unusual.  And thanks to the glories of the internet, they get to see our normal, everyday life — reading books, pushing cars, crawling on furniture — for a few hours every week.  These are luxuries that my grandparents could not even fathom.

And I finally understand why my friends talked about their grandparents with such awe and wonder.  My parents (and my in-laws, I might add) are incredible grandparents.  They think everything my son does is amazing.  They buy him everything my husband and I won’t buy him and feed him everything we won’t feed him.  My dad once saw a commercial in the early ‘90s, not long after his own son was born, in which a grandfather took his grandson to McDonald’s for a milkshake.  He held onto that image for 25 years, and now he takes my son to get milkshakes almost every day that they’re together.  Every day!  And my nutrition-professor mother doesn’t even mind — she encourages it, in fact — because she sees how happy it makes both of them.  For them, grandparenting is the victory lap of parenting — they get to enjoy all the best parts and then return their grandson to us for discipline and diaper changes and midnight feedings.  They get to be the good ones, the fun ones, all the time.  This is awesome for grandparent and grandchild alike.

It never bothered me before that my grandparents and I barely had a relationship; I did not know what I was missing.  But now, when I see my son build a tower of blocks and look to my laptop screen for applause — applause that my parents are all too happy to provide — I see what could have been.  I wish now that my grandparents had been a part of my daily life.  I wish that I had the experience of enjoying my time with them, of being excited to see them and sad for them to leave.  I wish I had a set of cheerleaders who thought everything I did was spectacular and reminded me of that all the time.  And I wish I could have really known them.  My grandparents were survivors — of war, of immigration, of poverty, of patriarchy.  They were strong and strong-willed, traits that I can trace directly from their DNA to mine.  I wish I could have appreciated that while they were alive instead of only in retrospect.

I can see my mother going through a similar process.  She and my father are deeply and appropriately proud of the life they’ve built for themselves in the US, but her one big regret is that this life made it next to impossible for her children and her parents — four of the people she loved most in the world — to know each other.  I see her recognize this loss more profoundly the longer she knows my son, as she experiences a relationship that her parents did not get with her children.  Every moment that she has with him, whether trivial or profound or both, is a reminder of what her parents did not have.  They were victims of bad timing: They had grandchildren in the 50-year window after moving across the globe became common but before technology made long-distance communication easy and cheap.

***

One thing from our relationship simultaneously comforts and saddens me:  I know, and I knew then, that my grandparents loved me deeply.  If I ever said that something my grandmother cooked was good, she would make it every day until I could barely stomach it.  The first time I visited Taiwan, I had taro ice cream for the first time and liked it; every morning after that, she walked to the corner store in her neighborhood to see if any had been delivered and bought out the entire stock if it had.  On the same trip, my grandfather set up a place for me to write and games for us to play — ones that did not require us to talk, ones that he always let me win.  Years after he died, I came into possession of piles of stamps he had collected for me while he was alive in case I ever developed an interest.  In hindsight, these glimpses into their fondness for me are heartbreaking; we had so many barriers between us, and yet this tenderness still squeezed through.  I can only imagine what else my grandparents would have done, what else we could have experienced, if we had even one less obstacle to contend with.

In the absence of almost all of these obstacles, I can only imagine the kind of relationship my parents and my son could have.  I watch him laugh at the laptop screen as my mother balances a small bear on my father’s head.  I can’t help but think about how incredibly lucky they are — and how lucky I am to be able to witness this.

Becoming a Mom Transformed My Relationship with Mine

/ Liz / 1 Comment

This piece originally appeared on The Salt Collective, a now-defunct online magazine about culture, faith, and politics.

Every now and then, when I’m on the phone with my mom, I’ll mention something that I’m not looking forward to doing. Going to the DMV, perhaps, or needing to initiate a conversation that has the potential to be unpleasant.

My mother will respond: “Well, you just have to do it.”

“MOM,” I’ll say, rolling my eyes heavenward, immediately reverting to the 16-year-old version of myself. Obviously I have every intention of finding a dentist, I’ll say in a huff; I’m simply commenting that I’m not looking forward to it. I do not need to be reminded or convinced that it needs to be done.

“Okay,” she’ll say, in a way that I can’t quite read. Has she heard me? Does she really think that I’m considering not taking my car to the dealership for a safety recall? I don’t want to tell her that a more helpful response would be “Oh, that stinks” or “I don’t like doing that either.” She’s my Asian mom, after all, and I’m not sure how she would receive that kind of direction from anyone, let alone her child.

In hindsight, I think I subconsciously expected these conversations to increase after I had a baby. The world of new parenthood, I was told, was full of doing things that are tedious and unpleasant but need to be done anyway. I imagined that when I talked with my mom, three time zones away, about how I was doing, I would be hearing a lot more “Well, you just have to do its” and doing a lot more eye-rolling.

That I have yet to hear this refrain once, nine months in, is testament to how much has changed between us.

***

My mother is not a person you would describe as touchy-feely. It makes sense, given her history: She’s from a culture that has little tolerance for indulging one’s emotions — or even articulating them, really. Her own mother fled mainland China when the Communists took over — she was pregnant with her first child — and raised four kids mostly on her own while her husband, an army general, was away at his post. My mother came to this country as a young graduate student and worked her way up to full professor and chair of her department while raising two children, co-authoring over 100 publications, and co-founding a company on the side. One does not accomplish all of this if they’re easily sidelined by their feelings in the face of struggle. And she was not: Growing up, the one time I saw her cry was the morning she learned that her father had died after heart surgery in Taipei. We were in a hotel room in New York City; she was seated at the desk with her head in her hands, and I was lying in bed, peering at her over the comforter, uncertain how to give her privacy when our whole family occupied a single room. A few hours later, all four of us were riding the elevator to the top of the World Trade Center, our sightseeing plans unchanged. My mom was noticeably quiet and I’m sure she took in nothing of what we saw that day, but the fact remains that the greatest loss of her life to date didn’t stop her from taking her family to do what we had traveled to New York to do. Clearly, this is not a woman driven by her feelings; her feelings are in a suitcase in the trunk somewhere, to be released only on her terms, should they ever see the light of day. The phrase I most often use to describe her is ruthlessly practical, which might be the polar opposite of touchy-feely, and I’m only half-joking when I say it.

Don’t get me wrong: My mom is not a robot. She’s warm, kind, and generous, someone who smiles and laughs readily and often, who will always put out too much food when you visit. But not surprisingly, my mother and I have never had a relationship marked by long heart-to-heart conversations over steaming mugs of tea. Our relationship has always been good — she’s always wanted to know about my goings-on, and I’ve almost always been happy to share them with her; we’ve had countless long conversations about everything from colleges and majors to politics and celebrity gossip. Though we haven’t lived in the same time zone for over a decade, we’re consistently in touch through phone calls and emails and texts. But historically, if a boy broke my heart or some serious friend drama went down, she wasn’t the first person I would call. Or the second, or the third. It’s not just because she told me when I was eight that I wasn’t allowed to date until I was in college, though that certainly didn’t help; we just didn’t operate at that level. For those needs, I went to my girlfriends, who more than sufficed.

When my feelings did come up in conversation, I sometimes got the sense that she didn’t know what to do with them. I remember walking through the Diag one evening as a senior in college, telling her how much I loathed working on the thesis I had elected to do and how I wasn’t sure if I wanted to invest so much of my final year into it. “Just do it,” my mother replied, with more than a hint of exasperation in her voice. When she was a senior in college, she was preparing to move across the Pacific, to a country she had never seen, to get a PhD in a language she barely spoke. She did not have time for the angsty hand-wringing of her privileged second-generation daughter.

We had another iteration of that conversation years later, near the end of my graduate school career, when I told her that I didn’t like being a therapist and planned to leave the field after the graduation. “What are you going to do?” she asked, her voice marked by not sarcasm or shame but confusion. She and my father hadn’t had the option of disliking their fields of study; not only had they been assigned those fields based on their college entrance exam scores, but they were also immigrants in a country where they had no safety nets. They had to make their jobs work, emotions be damned.  Entertaining feelings about their professions was a privilege they did not have. I, on the other hand — I had the luxury of these feelings, thanks to their hard work, and I had them in spades. I could practically see a DOES NOT COMPUTE screen flashing in my mother’s brain as it tried to make sense of my words.

***

So when it came time for me to have a baby, these were the kinds of responses I was expecting. I knew my mom would be a fantastic grandmother — she loves babies, babies love her, and she had been dying to join all of her friends in the grandparent ranks — but I was less sure how she would be with me.

She and my father came to visit for a month after the baby was born; she was a ruthlessly practical godsend. She did not ask for permission to help or suggestions for how she could be useful — she just went to work, cooking multiple meals a day for my husband and me, finding a mop and cleaning our kitchen floor, sparing us the energy of having to ask for anything or provide instructions. (It was one of the few occasions in my life when my family’s relative lack of boundaries was a gift.) When those tasks were done, she held and cooed at her grandson, which made her the happiest I’d ever seen her. I was so overwhelmed with gratitude for her presence and everything she did that the mere thought of her leaving would bring me to tears — a rarity, as I am my mother’s daughter. Our farewell at the airport was the soggy mess of Lifetime movies. This was unusual, to say the least, but I wasn’t sure if something had shifted in our relationship or if this was all simply the result of the hormones coursing through my veins.

On one of our first phone calls after she left, I told her that the baby had started spontaneously shrieking at night. “It might be gas, but I can’t be sure,” I said, listing off all the ways I could try to alleviate a problem whose cause was anyone’s guess. I knew that a “Well, that’s just the way it is” response was possible, but this issue was taking up a significant amount of my headspace, and she was perhaps the only person in the world who cared about my son’s bowels as much as my husband and I did. I braced myself for the kind of unintentionally unsupportive answer I had come to expect.

But instead, on the other end of the line, I heard a sigh. “It’s frustrating,” she said. “You don’t know why he’s doing this, and you can only use trial and error to see if anything helps.”

I literally stopped in my tracks. A validating and empathetic response? Who was this? What happened to my mother, queen of the don’t-think-don’t-feel-just-do school of thought?

And that response proved not to be a fluke; almost every time I’ve told her about something parenting-related that’s been challenging or frustrating, she hasn’t rushed to offer solutions or indirectly told me just to deal with it. She’s listened, she’s sympathized, she’s shared similar stories from her experience. After decades of talking about everything but our feelings (and fumbling with them when they occasionally surfaced), she’s handling mine with aplomb, in ways that my old clinical psychology professors would approve.

I’m not entirely sure what caused the change. Maybe it’s because after 32 years of wildly different experiences, we finally have one in common. As engaged as she’s been in my life up to this point, she hasn’t been able to fully relate to being the only Asian kid in class or high school dances or feeling ambivalent about research. The transcendence and exhaustion of motherhood, though — that she knows intimately.

Maybe it’s because she’s learned how to be a better listener. Her friends, all grandparents themselves, advised her to approach this new phase of life not as an expert but as a helpful support. Perhaps she took their wisdom to heart.

Maybe it’s because I’m giving her more of a chance to support me. Not unlike the woman who raised me, I tend to keep a lid on things that trip me up, but now that my life is a neverending stream of new experiences and second-guessing, I don’t have much else to talk about. Perhaps she’s seeing these opportunities and rising to the occasion.

Maybe it’s because we both love this little person so profoundly, in a way that few others do, and that shared love has allowed us to connect on the deeper level that eluded us before. I suppose it makes sense that our love for this child would bring us together in a way that, say, my dissertation or our shared fascination with the royal family could not.

Maybe it’s because having a grandchild has changed her. A few months after he was born, I got an email from her that ended with this: “I found my productivity is low lately. Then I just realized that I spent so much time looking at the baby’s pictures and videos. This little guy really captures our hearts.” Maybe this baby isn’t just the kryptonite to her workaholism, previously undaunted for decades; maybe he’s also allowed her to access her feelings in ways that she didn’t or couldn’t before.

Maybe it’s because having a baby changed me, so that I have a far deeper understanding and appreciation for the work of mothering a child, and I want to talk about it with the one person I think might understand it too.

Whatever the reason, this change in our relationship has been the biggest surprise of parenthood so far. I wasn’t thrown by the depth or intensity of my love for my son, nor the depth or intensity of my sleep deprivation; though I couldn’t know exactly what those things would feel like in advance, I had been given ample warning. But little did I know that the greatest surprise of motherhood would not lie in my newest relationship. It would be in my oldest.