# 20 Birthday as a Mom

Mid-Thirty Reflection

I just turned 35 years old last month! I thought it would be a chill birthday, but it gave me an unexpected chance for reflection. Before I share my thoughts, here’s a watercolor painting I created for my auntie <3

Childhood Birthdays

Growing up in Taiwan, kids celebrated their birthday by sharing a large bucket of candies at school. The candy would come in a bright red copper bucket with a cartoon figure like a pirate with two big front teeth on the outside. They are manufactured by a brand called 乖乖,( Guai Guai, a word we use to compliment kids who are docile, behave well, and listen to their parents). The birthday kid would announce it’s theirbirthday and pass the bucket around the classroom so other kids could grab one or two candies to share the joy of the birthday kid.

The candies are soft but chewy (like the texture of sour patch), with a coat of crunchy sugar particles on the outside. Sometimes, I would put the whole candy with its package into my mouth to suck out all the sugars, leaving the plastic full of my drool. The plastic wraps would become sticky and gross ( like the boogies kids wiped under the school desk before they dried out haha), but I loved it.

After passing around the bucket, everyone would be jealous, watching the birthday kid get the rest and the largest share of the candies, but they knew it would eventually be their turn to bring their bucket of Guai Guai to school.

The Guai Guai bucket

However, if you were like me, with a birthday in the summer, it meant you would miss out on this celebration. (Remember: it’s pre-Facebook days. You can’t just put your birthday on the internet and guilt-trip your friends for forgetting about it). Instead of bringing a high-profile Guai Guai bucket to the school, I would have a low-key celebration with my family and some cousins. 

My mom would buy a birthday cake from the pastry store across from my elementary school and cook me pork feet noodles. It’s a dish that symbolizes longevity. When you eat the noodles, you are not supposed to bite off the noodles from your chopsticks because that means you might cut off years from your life.  I always cursed when I almost choked and had to break the noodles with my teeth, thinking I might die five years earlier.

Although it’s a bit sad that I could only celebrate my birthday with my family, I felt relieved at the same time because I didn’t like being the center of attention. I would feel embarrassed that people have to “waste their time” to celebrate my birthday.

A birthday meal my mom cooked for me (and our nephew’s beanie babies). The delicious stew pork feet and longevity noodles are in separate bowls to the right of the picture.

Birthdays in America

About five years ago, I met my American husband, Pauli, who’s from a small town in Connecticut. Pauli has a biiiiig but close extended family, bigger and closer than my already very big Taiwanese extended family. To give you an idea of how big the family is, our daughter Mimi is the 17th baby from the great-grandkids’ generation. Pretty wild, right?

The first time I visited Pauli’s family was summer 2019. We had been dating for less than a year. In my head I wasn’t part of the family yet, still an outsider. We had a casual twenty-people gathering at the family lake house porch where Pauli grew up. We were hanging out with Pauli’s cousins when his mom walked out and surprised me with a birthday cake. I was shocked and felt undeserving- wait, me? A random Asian girl who they barely knew?

Since then, every summer when we returned to Connecticut, my mother-in-law has always hosted a birthday gathering party for me (Thank you, Nancy!). My favorite part of the party is always having kids blow my candles out and snuggling with them to watch cartoons on the sofa later (I guess it's no surprise I’ve found parenting so fun).

I’m still getting used to the part where I need to open gifts. In Taiwan, it’s very rude to peek into the gifts when receiving it, so my Taiwanese side still felt a bit embarrassed when I unwrap gifts in front of others. Meanwhile, my American side knew it was awkward not to open the gifts immediately,  so it kept telling my Taiwanese side to chill and just be grateful. 

I would send my mom my birthday pictures over Facebook. She would always say she finally didn’t have to worry about me because she knew I was being taken care of by a very loving family.

My first birthday at the lake

Birthdays as a Mom

Last year, when I celebrated my 34th birthday at the lake, I was in my first trimester. It was too early for me to show a bump or feel any kicks from the baby (not until almost the 5th month!). Even though morning sickness sucked, they became comforting proof that I did have a baby growing in my belly.

At that time, whenever I walked around the house or lay on the sofa, I would visualize the tiny creature inside me.  I was convinced it would be a boy (even though I secretly hoped the baby would be a girl) and desperately wanted to know what our mixed baby would look like. I would take long walks along the road in the woods, talking to the forming life in my body.

This year, we returned to the lake house right before my birthday. Walking in the house brought back so many memories. I even feel the physical sensations and emotions of being pregnant coming back again! (Yes, phantom kicks are real!). 

But this time, a real chubby baby is leaning on the sofa, staring at me, giggling and cooing while drooling all over from trying to eat her hands! I remembered lying on the bed, imagining a baby next to me next year. Now,  when I open my eyes from a nap, I  see her beautiful face right next to me, with features half like mine and half like Pauli’s. It’s a surreal and magical feeling.

I’ve fantasized about how I would celebrate this year's birthday since last summer. I would take a picture of me and Mimi and post it on Instagram with the caption “ 35 and a mom ✌️.” I would look so happy in the picture, with Mimi cooperatively smiling at the camera or, more likely, wiggling and resisting the picture, kicking my face with her tiny puffy foot. I would feel like I accomplished the most important mission in my life. As I wrote in my pregnancy journey reflection, life would finally be fulfilled with my achievement of motherhood.

But the truth is, at 11:53 a.m. on my birthday, when I was lying on the bed playing with Mimi, I was suddenly hit by a wave of fear. My whole body went stiff, and I felt like crying. 

This bodily sensation was not unfamiliar to me. It’s the same fear that struck me the night I turned 30. It’s the fear that I might not have achieved anything in my life, and that I feel like a loser. I thought if I kept doing what I was doing, I could see myself dying with regret. 

The fear I had when I turned 30 was legit because I was not doing anything true to myself. I was working in a cozy tech job that paid so well in Taiwanese standards, but I RESENTED IT SO MUCH. I felt like a hamster running on a doom treadmill that had no end. Every day I walked into the office building before hitting the “up” button on the elevator, I always cursed myself. “ What the fuck am I doing here?” I asked myself over and over again,  every. single. day. 

Finally, realizing I was turning 30 broke me and tore me apart, but it also awakened something in me. That awakening eventually led to me quitting my job to pursue my dream of working in the fitness industry (a false dream, nonetheless), meeting the love of my life Pauli, and later becoming an online creator and digital nomad. The rest is history. ( I will talk more about it in my mimi memoir series. Keep an eye on it!)

But the fear I had this time? I don’t know. I couldn’t seem to find a legitimate reason for it. I couldn’t care for status, fame, or money, so not achieving something “big” - having a big following or not making a million dollars a year- was definitely not the cause. It’s a general sense of frustration, a sense of powerlessness. It’s a wanting to cry as if something wrong was done to me, but also at the same time knowing I’m the person that created the trap I was in so I better shut the F* up” type of frustration.  

It’s a combination of many “stories” I had in my head. It’s a result of endless comparisons of what I don’t have as a person and as a mom. 

I wish I could be as confident and assertive as other confident, don’t-take-other-people’s-shit type of American moms. I wish I were not this soft and almost too sweet Asian mom ( even though people often think of me as aggressive in Taiwan). I was listening to a podcast episode recently of a mixed-race woman who internalized her Asian mother’s shyness as her own and felt like she didn’t belong to American society, and I realized I have a fear that Mimi will grow up thinking the same, too. 

I’ve told myself for a long time the opposite of a “too sweet and passive” mom is someone who is ruthlessly direct and aggressive.  I picture a woman as an Executive in a large company not taking shit from anyone. Part of this is me over-compensating for me wanting to prove that I’m tough and not fitting into the American archetype of a soft Asian female. Once I become that kind of person, Mimi can see me as an example and know she could do anything she wants in the world. 

But when I reflect deeper on this, I know it is not me. and I realize how silly these thoughts are. I realized that what I was really frustrated with was my lack of ability to commit to creating.  

I’m lucky in that I’ve found things I enjoy- like art and writing. I know I have a lot of potential in doing these things but if I’m being honest, I know I’m not doing what I’m capable of.

I’m still creating but way less than I wanted to be. Pauli said I should give myself more credit since parenting is a demanding task, but I knew the difference between not having energy and using parenting as an excuse, or “resistance” as Steven Pressfield calls it, to not do the thing I claim to want to do (for example, the many times when I opened 20 tabs of baby clothes on Amazon instead of writing my newsletter). 

In Chinese, we have a term called 問心無愧 (Wen Xin Wu Quei), which means that you ask your heart how it truly thinks of how much effort you have made on something, and you find out you have absolutely no guilt or regret because you have done everything you can, doesn’t matter if you succeed or not. I’m definitely not 問心無愧. Instead, I’m not only 問心有愧 ( (Wen Xin Wu Quei, feeling guilty), but 問心崩潰 ( (Wen Xin Beng Quei, felt so guilty that I crumbled apart).

I know a lot of my resistance comes from fear of not being able to create something good- writing that flows well, painting with harmonious colors, or creating a perfectly symmetrical mandala rock.  I would rather spend a week drifting from day to day, thinking I could have used the time to create instead of opening my laptop or picking up my paintbrush. If I don’t create, I never have to risk embarrassing myself. 

I felt worst about the mini-memoir I claimed I wanted to write. The emotion I conjured up in the first issue was so overwhelming that I just gave up on writing it. I was so obsessed with how I could form a coherent narrative, how honest I should be about everything, and most importantly, how my mom would react if she ever read my writing. These questions threatened my narrative of being a good writer and became convenient excuses for giving up. I started to bail on the writing calls in Write of Passage, hit a pause on writing the second essay in my memoir series, and then stopped writing altogether. 

Day by day, the void of creation devoured me, finally leading me to my birthday breakdown. After a long reflection and binge-listening to all the podcast interviews of Steven Pressfield, the writer famous for articulating different forms of resistance in his book War of Art, I knew I didn't have to and couldn’t wait till I figured everything out to keep creating. 

I. Just. Need. To Fucking. Create. 

I’m okay with painting a very ugly rock or writing a memoir essay that feels fragmented and boring. But I’m not ok with letting the resentment of not creating eat me alive. I not only need to accept that shitty creations are necessary steps toward creating something great, but I also need to redefine what great means to me. 

I was so afraid that if I wrote something that would not gain enough attention like Pauli’s Pathless Path, then I would feel like a failure and tell him cynically, “I told you I was never as good as you think I am.” (Wait, so I did care about being “big!?” Hmm…) 

However, when I looked back to the writings I’ve done, the ones that I’m most proud of were not the ones that were widely shared, but the ones that I knew I had to write for myself. I wrote a 12,000-word mini e-book on my marriage reflections. I was confident it would be very popular and potentially lead to potential book deals with publishers. But when I published it, it was like a dead rock thrown into the sea. I had a few downloads, and some people gave me feedback. That’s it. But I never regretted spending so many sleepless nights writing it.  I knew I needed to do it to honor that stage of my life. I knew I had to write it. I knew if I didn’t do it, it would become one of the biggest regrets in my life. 

Writing this mini-memoir means the same for me. It’s an important reminder of how far I've come after all these years of identities clashing and reforming. It will be closure to a chapter of my life and a real opening to a new chapter of motherhood. I. Just. Need. To. Write. It.

I just need to write and to keep creating. No matter how much resistance I feel and how many times I stop, I know I will pick it up again and keep walking on the path I was born to be on - the pathless path of being a creator, of writing, of art, of movement, and a parent to my child. 

(Maybe Pauli should consider using this sentence as a closure to his book haha)

What will happen next? Only time will tell : )

Until next time,

Angie