Motherhood, A Year Later.

Life always intervenes: on stopping, coming back, and forgiving myself.

A year ago today, my daughter was born at 39 weeks. She was healthy, weighed 8 lbs and 5 oz, and made me a mother. Only a few days in, we could barely remember our life before her. She was new to our family, but it felt like she’d been with us all along.

Some of you messaged me last year to check in. Others encouraged me to start writing again. I was moved and surprised that even though we’ve never met in person, you were still thinking of me, and by extension, my writing. Your kindness reached me during the trenches of postpartum recovery, and it pulled me to come back to write, again and again, despite the push and pull of early motherhood.

Fast forward to today, my daughter is now a healthy, happy 12-month-old, crawling everywhere and pulling herself to stand.

in her happy place-only for a few minutes!

She loves books. The first thing she does each morning is crawl to her favorite one and start flipping through the pages, sometimes upside down.

She loves being outside. Since learning to point with her index finger, she always aims her finger at the balcony door: before, during, and after each meal, asking to go out.

She loves eating meat and fish. Vegetables? Not so much yet.

She also loves to share, raising her small, messy hand with a piece of food towards our mouths, only when she truly loves the food herself. She’s never once shared her unseasoned, hard-boiled broccoli floret. I don’t blame her.

Every day, there’s something new in her. She is constantly changing and growing, and I already hate the fact that I won’t remember all these tiny details years and decades after. All I can do right now is cherish every moment with her, even the long, exhausting days when I wished time would go faster. For example, this week, when she’s ill with a summer virus.

having fun crashing a sensory storytime for preschoolers.

Before my daughter was born, I was determined to write about meeting her for the first time and the early days of motherhood—except that I never had the time or the energy during the first few weeks. I naively thought things would calm down and get into a rhythm after a few months. I now laugh at my naïveté. Things never get into a rhythm. Babies don’t have one. I was waiting for something that would never arrive.

Over the past year, I started many drafts but never finished anything cohesive. I typed bits and pieces on my phone while breastfeeding at 3 am to stay awake. Very bad idea. I recorded voice memos while waiting at red lights on my way to postpartum check-up. Also very bad idea. I knew I didn’t have the time to edit late into the night like before, but I wanted to jot down the intense feelings of being a new mother before they faded into the background. I knew I was on a countdown. I am glad I wrote down at least parts of it.

Personal essays requires pause and retrospection. A baby demands the opposite: she demands that you live in the moment. I couldn’t think past what she needed right then: the diaper that needs to be changed, the crying that needs to be soothed, and the hungry belly that needs to be filled. Everything is now.

I knew I shouldn’t be doing anything other than caring for my daughter and resting and recovering for those first few months. But deep down, I was scared I’d never return to writing at all, that becoming a mother would be the end of it.

I am not only afraid of losing a piece of myself that existed before I became a mother. I also fear the difficulty of returning to anything after a long pause. I’d taken long writing breaks before and pulled myself out, even after two eye surgeries left me unable to look at screens for weeks. That’s when I became keenly aware of how hard it is to come back after any pause. The momentum gets lost. The strong current of everyday life washes over you. There are always more to take care of: toys to pick up, groceries to order, daycare forms to fill out, and food to prepare for my daughter.

Being a mother, working full-time, and trying to find time to write is like a salmon swimming upstream, I use all my strength to fight against an overwhelming current that’s rushing me back down every second.

I want to be clear: I am not doing this alone. My husband handles all the cooking and almost all household chores. My mother and my in-laws took turns to stay with us for months at a time, caring for my daughter around the clock and caring for us. I have more support than most. Even with labor divided up, there’s never quite enough time or energy left for personal pursuits like writing. Among our friends who also have small children, surviving early parenthood is the threshold, it seems. Not thriving.

After months of my evenings divided between trying to sit down to write, cleaning up, and comforting my daughter after wake-ups, I realized that writing had to look very differently now if I wanted to make it work. I’d have to let go of the ideal version of writing: turning on my favorite Spotify playlist, making a cup coffee, clearing my desk, and finally sitting down to write. I could still enjoy all of those things—the Spotify playlist, the coffee, the clean desk (maybe), and writing—just not all at once. Now I just have to write. Anytime and anywhere I get the chance to.

I started typing on my phone in the dark while my daughter drifted off to sleep in my arms, while standing in line, while sitting in the waiting room of my doctor’s office. A sentence here, a sentence there. Some weeks, I did not have the time or mental space to write anything. Some days, I edit a paragraph for two before having to abort the whole thing. And on some rare lucky days, my daughter lets me write paragraphs and paragraphs before she wakes. It’s a constant tug-of-war between resting, planning, cleaning, writing, and everything else it takes to care of a growing baby.

Ammi Keller, one of my favorite writing instructors at Stanford, taught me the most important lesson about writing. If I learned anything at all from her class, it is this:

Life always intervenes. That’s what I’ve learned from being a writer who knows a lot of writers. The difference between the people I know who have a creative writing practice and those that don’t is that the former come back after they get overwhelmed by life and stop writing, they forgive themselves for stopping.

Forgiveness, in general, may be the key to success, when it comes to not just coming back but to accepting the entire process.

So I am going to forgive myself for not having sent out anything until a year later, and celebrate the fact that I am coming back. I'm also forgiving myself for not writing the perfect piece that I wanted to write (who could?) and accepting the good enough instead.

I write about the quiet, complicated, and often contradictory parts of life: identity, home, and, now, motherhood. You can read more of my writing here. If you enjoy what you read, consider subscribing or sharing. Your support keeps this space going and means so much to me.

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