By far, the hardest part of parenting for me so far has not been the sleep deprivation, or even the overstimulation, or the endless routines of meals and laundry and cleaning up. It’s been discipline.… More
Rethinking my political journey
I’ve been wanting to process and write about this topic for a long time, but I had pushed it off because 1) the only time I have to blog is usually after 9 pm when the kids are in bed and 2) my brain is musty from full-time childcare, and it’s even mustier at night when all I want to do is snack and read fiction.
But now with the shocking murder of Charlie Kirk, and the conversations that have swarmed out like ants from a smoking ant hill, I feel like this is the time to seriously, carefully rethink my political journey, especially as a parent raising young children in this divisive and politically violent age. I’ve been feeling twinges of conviction from time to time, but I have yet to sit down and parse through them on my knees before God. So here’s that time.
I remember my first encounter with Charlie Kirk.
It was some time in 2017 or 2018, I don’t remember exactly. I was attending a bipartisan political convention, partly for work as a journalist, and partly out of personal curiosity. At the time I had been only just developing my own political conscience, and marking “TBD” on many key issues on which the Bible isn’t clear. One of the panels I sat in on was a debate between Charlie Kirk and a young progressive whose name I cannot remember. The conference room was packed, and from the noises in the crowd, I guessed that the audience– most of them young white men– were majority Charlie Kirk fans.
That debate seared an impression on me because it left a bitter distaste in my mouth. The debate itself was civil, but it was the spirit of the audience that bothered me. I felt like I was watching a pro-wrestling match, with two ridiculously-costumed performers on stage pretend-punching each other for the sake of entertaining pubescent males. The audience jeered, hooted, laughed, and clapped as though watching a slapstick show. At one point Charlie jumped to his feet to point his finger and yell at the founder of The Young Turks, a leftwing news and commentary group, and the audience went nuts.
I remember glancing around at the expressions on these young people’s faces, and the looks of tittering delight, scorn, and thrill made my stomach squish with uneasiness. I thought of that one famous line from Gladiator, when Maximus roars at the bloodthirsty Roman crowd, “Are you not entertained?!”
This is not it, I remember thinking. This is base. This kind of political theater appeals to the basest, animal-like instincts of human nature.
But also… I, too, was entertained. You cannot help but be entertained when two articulate guys verbally spar each other on stage. You cannot help but feel a collective thrill when people around you are howling and stomping in response to a snarky “gotcha!” moment.
And I think that’s what disturbed me the most. How easily I, then an apolitical, open-minded journalist, could also get swept into the current of political fervor. None of us are immune. I am not immune.
Now it’s 2025. I am no longer apolitical. I am not politically active, but I am most certainly politically jaded. The danger with forming a political consciousness is that I’ve solidified where I land on certain issues, and the stronger I feel about it, the stronger I feel about opinions of people with whom I disagree. What used to be curiosity turned into polite disagreement and then stiffened into vehement disagreement. I could not listen to people talk about an issue I felt passionately about without viscerally feeling a rush of negative emotions, which like gush of red dye colored my image of that person.
I didn’t used to be like this. What happened?
One thing I’m really thankful to my parents is that they never raised me in a political environment. My parents didn’t have Fox News and Rush Limbaugh constantly blaring in the house like some did, and I didn’t even know what political party my parents identified with until the 2016 election. They focused on raising me in God’s Word; emphasized that we are exiles belonging to a heavenly kingdom, not an earthly one; and taught me values and virtues without sticking them onto a political ideology. Growing up in public schools in Singapore and Northern Virginia, I was exposed to diverse cultures and viewpoints, and actually enjoyed getting to know people who were different, but also had the confidence to speak my own views, which helped me identify and correct mistakes in my delivery and tone.
And then the 2016 election happened. That was a landmark election in so many ways, and for me, it was the moment when I observed with shock how many Christians so enthusiastically support Donald Trump. And then when the shock finally faded, disgust replaced it. How did the values that we preach fit in with that man?
That was also when I started listening to The Ben Shapiro Show for an article I was working on. His was the first political podcast I’d ever listened to, and what started as reporting research turned into a daily habit. He released content daily, so there was barely a day in which I didn’t have Ben Shapiro’s glib tongue waggling his free-flowing thoughts and opinions in my ear. I was first drawn to him because he originally came out as a Never Trumper, and he was an Orthodox Jew who shared my belief in a God and respect for the Bible, and I found his views interesting. He was also entertaining…but I was foolishly oblivious to why he was so entertaining, because I listened to him while distracted with other things such as grocery-shopping and washing dishes, and because I had naively trusted him simply because he seemed to hold fast to his convictions as a conservative who refused to kowtow to the Trump mania.
I don’t know when it started…but the more I listened to him, the more I absorbed his tone and attitude. A lot of his content was mocking the left. I learned terms such as “liberal tears” from him, and without even being conscious of it, began to see people in categories of left and right. There was little nuance in Ben Shapiro’s portrayal of the left– he handpicked the more radical and extreme views of the left, and trumpeted them often with contempt and derisive humor. He’s a very intelligent, eloquent man, but I wonder how good it is for him to sit in front of a mic daily for an hour with nothing but headlines on a sheet of paper as a launchpad to spew off his instinctive reactions. I know that’s how he works because I visited him in his studio for an interview, and even then, I remember feeling concerned: Where is the time and space to sit with a thought and work through them with humility, empathy, and wisdom? How many of us can speak with nuance when we look at a headline designed by clickbait-hungry editors to enrage and alarm? We would get into trouble if we all ejaculated our first thoughts without a second and third draft, yet political commentators gain fame and funds for doing that for a living.
At some point, I deleted Ben Shapiro from the Apple Podcast app after realizing that my on-the-ground reporting on immigration didn’t line up with his offhand remarks on the show, but by then, the damage had been done. My curiosity had hardened into emotional triggers and mental rebuttals. I couldn’t listen to people’s opinions without an immediate checklist of “why you’re wrongs” unfurling in my mind.
Meanwhile, vicious political disagreements also entered my workplace, particularly during 2020. I also made the absolutely stupid decision to lurk on Twitter whenever I had a spare moment. My disappointment in Christians deepened. I hated how politics became so intertwined with the Christian witness, how much muck politically active Christians raked into the gospel until their testimony was fruitless and powerless. The Bible is offensive enough, but often, Christian clothes and painted it with so much political ideology and cultural niche that it became a clown, a slogan, a monster. What offended people wasn’t what the Bible said but how Christians used it to justify their ideology.
But here’s where I need to owe up to personal responsibility. My anger and distaste about this phenomenon of Christian nationalism is, I think, right, but I also allowed a lot of self-righteousness and cynicism to rule over it. Plus, I had already ingrained the habit of categorizing human beings into political labels after at least two years of listening to political podcasts and even more years of being addicted to Twitter. What that meant was I was getting constantly triggered, but did not know how to release those negative emotions. So my spirit kept getting chafed, and chafed, and chafed, until its flesh was raw and pulpy, sensitive and twitchy to the lightest touch. It got to the point where I refused to talk current news with my own husband, because my immediate responses were aggressive and argumentative, even though he and I are aligned on a lot of values. I need a detox, I told David. I don’t want to talk about politics anymore. I need to heal.
I thought by avoiding politics, my spirit would heal. But that is not the case. I can’t just leave a gaping wound open to the winds and dust of the environment, because the environment will never ever be kind to untreated sores. I need something more proactive, something more surgical. I knew this subconsciously, but what with all the mental load of parenthood, and my aforementioned musty brain, and my own blend of cynicism and apathy, I pushed it to the side as something I’ll deal with when I feel like it. So my posture with politics have mainly been outward avoidance while internally seething.
Well. I don’t think I can push it off any longer.
When I first heard that Charlie Kirk was shot, God have mercy on me, my immediate thought was, “Oh God, I can’t stand that guy. He’s a horrible person.”
The first image I had of him was his tweets, clips of his most controversial videos, and that debate I attended years ago. I didn’t see his face, his humanity, but his viewpoints and rhetoric about race, women, and immigration. I forgot that he’s a beloved father to a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old– that he’s a beloved husband, son, brother, friend. He’s Charlie, he’s Dada, he’s honey, not a commercialized “The Charlie Kirk Show.”
And then the news came out that he died. It was then that the Lord grabbed ahold of my heart and said, “Stop. Look here. Look at his face, his eyes, his soul. I knitted this guy in his mother’s womb. I stamped him with my image. Do you see me in him?”
Oh, the shame! That bleak, stark, blinding, wretched exposure of my heart! I did not just lose my sense of empathy and humanity to politics; I have lost God’s heart. That’s what is most grievous of all. What did it matter, that I formed all these political convictions out of supposed values of justice, compassion, and righteousness, if I lost God’s heart in seeing what politics addresses in the first place– the working outs of humanity?
So far, social media has reacted to the Charlie Kirk assassination exactly as I anticipated it would. I’ve seen some encouraging responses calling for a national introspection and return to mutual respect and civil discourse, but I’ve also seen responses that disturb and dismay me– from apathy and even cheers from some on the left, to vengeful rage and politicization from some on the right. I see Christians encouraging more political activism, and lionizing Charlie Kirk as a martyr (my former publication even called him “the American Stephen”).
I could call them out– and I suppose in a way I have– but really, it’ll just make me even more cynical, triggered, and upset, because I’ll face my own impotence against a whole society. What weapon can I swing against a formless, invincible social phenomenon?
So I start with what I do have agency over– myself, and my household.
The triggers I have now were formed over years of thoughts that became so habitualized that I think these things without realizing it. That’s what they really are– habits of the mind that I allowed and empowered for way too long. To break this habit, I need to form new habits. Whenever I feel triggered, I can pray, and ask God to protect and guard my heart and mind, instead of letting those triggers infest my soul. I can practice the virtues of silence and charitable thoughts. I can return to my journalistic roots– that open curiosity that attracted me to journalism in the first place, the discipline of objectivity and truth-seeking, the practice of discernment and wisdom.
Forming new habits is hard. It’ll be uncomfortable, but leaning on what felt comfortable has gotten me to this spot. Discomfort is good. Discomfort is refining. Plus, I have no choice. I have to do this, for the sake of my own soul, for the sake of my children, the next generation of thinkers and doers.
Teaching my child to love God
As Tov is now 3, David and I have been discussing more about how to intentionally instill a living faith in our children, and that got me thinking about how I was raised as a Christian.
I grew up as a pastor and missionary’s kid, so my parents were very intentional about developing our faith. We spent about as many hours playing in church as at home. We had family worship time at home, with my father strumming the guitar as we sang Korean hymns from black-leather, zip-up Korean Bibles that included about 500+ classic translated hymns. I engaged in a lot of cat fights with fellow PKs and broke a couple of glasses that way. We were required to sit in the front row while my father preached for two hours, which meant everyone behind me could see my head nodding away, and I knew I’d get a scolding from my father on the way home.
All that intensive training to be a devoted Christian, and by God’s grace, and through my parents’ fervent prayers for us, I am today a committed, Bible-believing Christian. I thank my parents for that, but mostly, I thank God, knowing how much of a child’s faith is out of the parent’s control.
Still, if I have to confess: I don’t always love to pray. I never did, actually. Growing up, I really did not like reading the Bible; I didn’t like going to church; I didn’t like participating in worship; and I especially hated the children’s worship time, absolutely detested those perky Sunday teachers forcing us to stand up and do silly dances and hand motions when I’d rather be tucked in bed reading and sucking on chocolate mints.
I also remember the week-long church retreats in Korea that my parents registered us in. Koreans can be kind of extra, and the prayers there were definitely…dramatic. Korean Christians do a lot of simultaneous prayers, which means everyone prays out loud together. Today I see a lot of value and beauty in that kind of communal prayer setting, but even as a kid with a sensitive BS meter, sometimes all I saw was a bunch of adults competing to one-up each other on passion and zealousness for God. It was mostly a lot of ahjummas with the ubiquitous Korean perm, lifting their arms up, beating their breasts, wailing, hollering, weeping, screaming “Ju-Yeo! Ju-Yeo!” or “Lord! Lord!” in Korean. And I remember watching some littler kids looking around stupefied, and then starting to cry themselves, and nobody paid heed to them, because that was just the kind of response one was supposed to have in the presence of God.
All these religious rituals of prayer and worship and Bible-reading felt onerous to me. At times it felt performative. Mostly it felt burdensome, like doing worksheets after school or eating broccoli because it’s “good” for me and because my parents said so. I still remember the shame I felt when my father glared at me from the pulpit because I couldn’t keep my eyes open, or the family worship that erupted into tears and bellows as my father boxed our ears because we weren’t paying attention and showing proper devotion to God.
Now as a mother of two still very young children, I feel the impendence of this terrible, tremendous, awesome burden of Deuteronomy 6: 5-9:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
My parents certainly did this for us, quite literally. They truly loved God with all their heart, mind, and strength. My father in particular also had a lot of zealousness, and the severity of an eldest son of an extremely traditional Korean household. He talked about God all the time. He preached to us from the dinner table, during the drive to church, after church, on family vacations, at random times during the day when he was struck with a conviction to teach us something Very Important, and we better sit up and listen with the respect due to him as our father but especially, to God.
We weren’t allowed to watch a lot of movies and shows. (Beauty and the Beast was evil, my mother told us, because it was too close to bestiality. Thankfully they relaxed on this a little as we got older.) We couldn’t listen to secular music, because Satan was a worship leader, and rock and roll is near satanic. We didn’t have much decor at home, because my parents had no time or aesthetic sense to design our house, but we did have a small wooden cross, a giant painting of (white-looking) Jesus and his disciples, and scripture verses in Chinese printed out on A4 paper and taped onto the bathroom wall at eye level from the toilet. When my parents visited our house, my mother commented with dismay at the lack of religious decor in our home, and I internally shuddered, because I now associate religious decor with the hideous, cheesy, ostentatious artifacts of the 90s and early 2000s. (I do appreciate a simple cross though. We have a small wooden cross in our house– gifted by my parents, of course.)
I don’t want to raise my kids exactly like the way my parents raised me and my brother. But they also did a lot of things well. They taught us that God is to be taken seriously. They taught us to take His Word with reverence, to the point where my father would get upset if we placed the Bible on the floor. They drilled into us spiritual disciplines such as going to church, tithing, and reading the Bible, and they themselves lived that out diligently and faithfully in their own lives. I never once doubted the existence of God, because I saw that God is real to my parents. God is not a political symbol, a cultural expression, a proud heritage of our forefathers– He is a real, living being. They placed this faith– love God and love others– first and foremost in their priority of values, and to this day, this value comes before all other common values such as wealth, comfort, popularity, health, ego, success, and vanity– and for that, I’m eternally thankful, because that shaped my own value system to this day.
My parents modeled what it looks like to be a Christian in real time, and as a missionary kid, I also heard a lot of testimonies from people all over the world whose lives were transformed by God, and I heard lots of biographies of missionaries who sacrificed everything to share the gospel. I had so much knowledge. I had so many examples of how to be a real Christian. I was proud of my parents, and I still am.
As I look back, however, I think something was also lacking. I don’t know if it’s lacking because of something deficient in the way my parents raised us, or if it’s because of my own sins and shortcoming. But what was lacking was joy. There were not enough joy and delight in the way my parents taught us faith. I didn’t find God very enjoyable or delightful. In fact, church services were stressful for me because I knew I would fall asleep and then have to face my father’s disappointment, and I absolutely dreaded family worship because I knew it’ll end with, again, my father’s anger and disappointment.
But what could I do about it? I told myself honestly that I simply did not love God enough, didn’t love Him like my father did, but I did not know how to make myself love someone I couldn’t see, hear, or touch, no matter how much my parents tried to discipline this apathy out of me. God felt like a distant cousin’s uncle, yet His presence was heavy and stifling, like a thick blanket over me, making it hard to breathe or move without feeling its fabric hanging over my face.
It didn’t help that my father was also my pastor, and our family was rather patriarchal and hierarchical, in which my father’s word was the ultimate authority, so it was confusing to me whether my father’s words was God’s Word, or a human father’s words. So much of God was channeled through my parents’ words, actions, and expectations that I couldn’t disentangle the two; it was like trying to hear God through a faulty landline buzzing and hissing with other people’s conversations. I suppose this is a very common issue among second-generation Christians, especially those whose parents are in ministry. There were just too many words, too much knowledge, too much theology, stuck in my mind like an apple core in a gullet, unable to be fully digested and absorbed into the heart.
And so. Now the responsibility of raising our children according to Deuteronomy 6:5-9 falls upon David and me. It’s our turn now, and that means we need to start with Deuteronomyu 6:5: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and all your strength.”
When I really think about it, really sit and dwell on it in the midst of the chaos of early parenthood, I feel stabs of anxiety. I can go to church every Sunday, tithe a good amount, go to small group and discipleship groups, do my devotions, serve others, all that. But love the Lord with everything I have, to the deepest depths of my soul? Oh, dear. How much of my daily life reflects that? And my goal for our children is pretty lofty: I don’t want to them to just be good Christians; I want them to be better Christians than David and I. I want them to love God– truly, desperately, delightedly, joyfully love God, with all their heart and soul and might.
Now, how do I achieve that?
When Tov turned 3, I decided it’s time to be more intentional about setting healthy spiritual habits for our son. Every morning, during breakfast, we now have Bible time. It’s short and relaxed, especially because Tov has a hard time sitting still, and he’s only just begun being able to sit through a picture book.
Here’s how our Bible time looks like: We begin with a short prayer. Currently we are praying for gentle and kind hands, because Tov can be quite rough with his little sister. Then we read a short story out of a children’s Bible. (We started with The Tiny Truths Bible for Little Ones, which is really more on Tov’s level and he loves the cute pictures of angels in there, and now we’re going through The Jesus Storybook Bible, which I love but the artwork is not as engaging for Tov and the narrative is profound but seems a little over Tov’s head.) Then I read a short passage out of my Be Thou My Vision liturgy book, which is definitely way over Tov’s level, but the purpose of it is just to get Tov habituated with the language and posture of liturgy, and it’s really for me, because I’m part of this Bible time, too. Then depending on the story we read in the Bible, I play a song for him so he can get the wiggles out. For example, when we read about Abraham, I played the song “Father Abraham” for Tov, and he turned on the karaoke mic to sing (scream) along and ran to his room to get his guitar so he can have a proper jam session. We end with a brief lesson on an alphabet letter.
All this is maybe 15 minutes, at most. That’s the longest I can hold his attention at a time, and I don’t want to push it in case Bible time becomes more burdensome than enjoyable. Even within that short 15 minutes, it’s controlled chaos: I’m often telling Tov to sit down instead of climbing onto the table, being interrupted by Woori who’s flinging food everywhere, and reminding Tov to eat his breakfast. For now, at least, I was surprised by how easily Tov adopted Bible time into his daily routine, and even asks for it every morning.
Fifteen minutes of Bible time, but then there’s a long stretch of all the other hours when my children are also learning about God through David and me– and that’s the terrifying part. These kids are always watching you, learning from you, including things that you weren’t even aware of, things you don’t want them to learn. Everything is a teaching moment. And I wonder: Is God real and loving and lovable and awesome to them, based on how David and I live our lives? Sometimes I think they’re just too young to even understand the concept of God. But then, I also wonder at what point they will being to understand, and what they’ll absorb and learn until the day I realize that they do understand. It doesn’t matter when they understand. We have to start living our faith out authentically, today.
Two nights ago, we had a teaching moment come by, and it would have passed us if not for the fact that I lost my cool in front of Tov.
Tov had pooped in his little potty in the bathroom, and as he left the room to ask me to wipe him, he pushed the lock inside and then slammed the door shut. So now there his poop sat, steaming in the little pink plastic Baby Bjorn potty, out there in the open air, and I could not get to it. I could smell it from behind the door as I fiddled with the knob.
David was out for a work dinner, so it was up to me to figure out how to open this door. Google told me to straighten a hair pin and poke it into the lock until I hear a click. I did that and I heard no click. I jammed and rammed and jiggled and wiggled the damn hair clip, hearing the metal scratch at metal, while Tov, in a great state of excitement, tried to “help.”
“I’ve got an idea,” he told me, poking his finger in the air, and ran around the house ransacking drawers and cabinets, bringing me a bandaid, a cheese knife, multiple masking tapes, batteries, a wine opener, even a Covid test. He shoved each item into my face, talking up a storm, while I wrestled with the locked door, the fumes of his stool bruising my nostrils. It was just too much sensory overload for me, and I let out a frustrated roar as I violently shook the door knob.
Tov immediately burst into tears. “I don’t like that!” he cried, fat tears running down his red cheeks. He grabbed my face and held it. “Don’t do that! I don’t like that!”
I felt ashamed of my behavior. It wasn’t Tov’s fault. He had shut the door because I had previously told him to do so, as I didn’t want Woori climbing into the toilet and licking his potty.
“Hold you, hold you,” Tov cried, trying to climb onto my lap. I hugged him and apologized. “Omma isn’t angry at you,” I told him. “I’m just frustrated. I don’t know how to fix this. I’m trying, but it’s not working.”
He understood what this means, but he was also puzzled, because every time his toy stopped working or something broke or his Yoto went out of juice, we knew how to “fix” it. What did it mean that his mother couldn’t fix this door?
And then God convicted me: This was a great teachable moment. An opportunity to make faith come alive, in ways that Tov can understand.
“Let’s pray,” I told Tov. “I can’t fix this. But you know who can? God! Can you pray to God?”
Tov bowed his head, put his hands together, and mumbled something with God and Jesus in it and declared, “Amen!”
“Amen,” I echoed. “OK! God is going to fix this!”
OK, God, you heard him, I prayed silently. It’s all up to you now. You’re not going to let a little boy down, will you?
So I continued wiggling with that hair pin in the lock, trying to conjure up that magical “click,” but to no avail. I was losing faith. I mean, did God really care about a stupid locked door? Does Tov even understand what he prayed about, who he prayed to? This lock is probably faulty. Maybe I’ll just wait till David gets home and he’ll either figure it out or we’ll have to break the door. And then I reminded myself that I needed faith, even just for the sake of my child’s faith. Surely God cares about Tov. Surely He’s listened to this prayer, however trivial it is.
“Your omma has less faith than you,” I remarked to Tov. And then I prayed, Come on, God. I may have little faith, but a young boy’s faith is on the line. Please please don’t fail him!
Woori began to whine. It was past her bedtime. I nursed her and put her down. Then David reminded me via text that we may have some tools in the toolbox that’s small enough to fit the lock.
I dragged the toolbox out. I tried with a small screwdriver that fit into the lock, but no matter how much I jabbed, there was no click. I tried another. Nope. Then another. And there it was– that gorgeous sound, click! And the door swung open to a gentle whoosh of poop fumes.
“Oh my God! Tov! Tov!” I exclaimed to my son. He came sprinting over. “What, what omma, what?”
“Look!” I yelled. I almost said I fixed it, and then caught myself– “I– God fixed it! Look!”
Tov opened the door and entered the bathroom with open-mouthed amazement and wonder. We high-fived in glee. Then I went in to clean his poop.
“Who fixed the door?” I asked him later, as we got ready for his bedtime routine.
“God!” he beamed.
Oh, I never felt prouder of our son.
It was a pretty silly, insignificant event. People unlock locked doors all the time. It doesn’t take a genius. But that event transcended into something that fed into the eternal soul of a child who learned that nothing is too small or silly for God’s attention. And that child was me.
That’s it, though. So much of parenting is reminding ourselves that we are daughters and sons of God first, omma and abba second. God commands us to talk to our children about Him when we’re sitting at home or walking on the road or lying down or getting up, because we also–especially so– need to hear it, as guardians of young, impressionable, moldable, wonderfully and fearfully made souls.
When I think back to how I was raised as a Christian, I have a lot of gratitude and compassion for my parents. They were both the first Christians in their family. They were first-time parents and first-time Christian parents. They discipled us the way they knew how, which was very traditional, formal, and rigid. But they did it out of genuine love, love for both God and their children. That love set the foundation from which God added brick and mortar, curtain rods and wallpaper. God honored their love and prayers, and sprinkled so much grace over their mistakes. And over the years, my parents grew, too. They are not the same people they were when they were raising toddlers. They too were son and daughter of God first, parents second, and they are continuing to grow and change to this day.
I felt immense peace that night. It’s not that my sense of duty and responsibility to raise my kids in the Lord has in any way diminished. It’s just that I felt a little wind in my sails. Oh, so this is what it’s like: I invite my children into my growth process as a Christian, as a daughter of God. We don’t have to have it all figured out right now. We just need to have our sails up and ready, so that when that gentle wind of the Holy Spirit blows, we take off in the right direction, with our kids aboard us. And putting our sails up can start as simple as a 15-minute Bible time in the morning, with Tov hopping up and down on his seat, while Woori spread banana paste on her hair.
A son made in my image
When Tov was first born, I started imagining.
I imagined how our son will grow up, what his personality will be like, what interests and passions will drive him, who he’ll hang out with. Would he be into sports? Music? Art?
That’s what makes the Korean tradition of doljabi so fun, but also laced with anticipation: What destiny will my 1-year-old pick? As parents of young, not-yet-formed human beings, we have the power to present to our children certain life opportunities, but absolutely no control over which path they will pick, and that’s what makes doljabi a fun, light-hearted way to play-pretend. We lay out only the desirable options for our children’s doljabi, but ultimately, our 1-year-old babies will grab whatever their heart fancies.
I remember for my niece’s doljabi, my sister-in-law refused to include a ball because she didn’t want her daughter to go into sports. I didn’t want to offer sports as an option either, but David would be apoplectic if Tov didn’t like baseball, so I reluctantly allowed him to include a baseball, comforted by the fact that neither of us has athletic talents, so most likely, neither will our children. Our doljabi was not very traditional. Because I would love for Tov to become a journalist like me, I added a reporter’s notebook into his doljabi options, and I also included a globe because I wanted him to be well-traveled and globalized in his worldview.
Tov chose the globe. I rejoiced, even as I knew all this is just a game designed to please the parents’ ambitions for their child, nothing more. Even then, I thought, “I don’t care what Tov chooses to be when he grows up, as long as he’s just like his name– a good person, full of God’s goodness. I will be content with whatever he chooses.”
That was then, when Tov was still very young and malleable. Now that Tov is 3, I realize I might be more ambitious than my professed noble goal for my son. I know it, because I have been fighting some rather strong disappointment that my son– my wonderful, adorable, good son, who is indeed so much like his name– does not seem to be much literary-inclined.
Often with firstborns, there are childhood stories that parents repeat to prove their firstborn is special (these kinds of stories seem to diminish with the younger siblings, interestingly enough). For me, apparently I was about 2 when my parents searched all over the house for me until they finally found me hidden behind a pile of books. I had been “reading” for hours, completely engrossed. There’s another story that apparently prove my unique brightness. According to my parents’ folklore, as a child I had very curious, observant eyes. I would stare at things and people with intensity, as though analyzing them in deep thought, and I remember my parents constantly admonishing me to stop staring at strangers.
Now that I think about this, I don’t think it proves anything about my specialness or intelligence; it sounds like I was a pretty creepy child indeed. But all that to say, my parents told these stories proudly to anyone who would listen, which showed a value they upheld and instilled in me: Intellect.
I too uphold this value. I value minds that think and read and create. I admire people who are well-read, who can quote literary giants, who can discuss Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard and C.S. Lewis. If I’m completely honest, I probably uphold that value higher than any other virtues such as goodness, gentleness, self-control. And that value system is becoming more blatantly obvious as I watch Tov grow from a baby to a boy, as I take him to the library and offer to read him books, but he’d rather just run and climb between the bookshelves. Or when five seconds after I pointed out the letter “A” to Tov, he’s already forgotten what it is. My literary ambitions for my child is even more abundantly clear when I meet other kids similar to his age who love reading, have a strong grasp of language, and can recite entire books front to back. I can’t stand those kids. I hate them, really.
One evening, I was trying to read a book with Tov, when as always, he kept grabbing the page from me and interrupting me, fixating on that one page with the picture he likes. “What’s that?” he asked, for the fifteenth time.
“Oh my God, Tov, can I just finish this book!” I cried, losing my patience, yanking the book away and startling the poor little boy, who just wanted to look at the orange ball again and again.
At that moment, so many thoughts were flicking through my head, all poking at perceived flaws in my son: Why can’t Tov just sit through a book? Why does he only want to read this one stupid book? Why doesn’t he like books? Are we letting him watch too many stupid firetruck shows on YouTube? Why hasn’t he learned his letters yet? I’ve been trying to teach him his ABCs for months now! Is it the screen time? My niece could memorize the entire Brown Bear book by his age; why can’t he? God, we need to stop letting him watch shows, it must be rotting his attention span!
Oh, the slash of terror: What if…God forbid, my son never likes to read? What if my son is not very intelligent? What if…Good God!– my son becomes an atrocious writer? And, to my self-dismay, what I felt then was shame. Shame, that my flesh-and-blood might not carry this value that I hold so dear. Shame, at the thought of my son struggling with math and spelling and grammar.
And then, of course, I felt instant shame at my shame. Is this what I’m really all about? I, a professed Christian, called to set apart from the world, has allowed secular standards to infiltrate my value system, and it’s going to impact my parenting and shape my children. But is it not an instinctual, parental desire to create my child to my own likeness?
I wrestled with this thought for months.
I don’t think that wanting my children to love and read books, to have deep critical thinking skills, and to cultivate a rich intellectual mind is a bad thing. I know it’s a worthy and good goal to try to instill these values into my children’s education, which will serve them well in life, and raise them as solid citizens of the world.
It’s also healthy and natural for me to want to share my passions and interests with my own children. Just like David can’t wait to take our children to their first baseball game, I can’t wait to read the Harry Potter books with my children, and also The Good Earth, Jane Eyre, East of Eden, The Brothers Karamazov, and discuss them together.
What I struggle with is how much I want it. How much it’s insidiously tied to my own ego, ambition, and identity. And how disappointed, frustrated, and mad I fear I’ll get if they fail to meet my standards.
People say Tov looks like me, which pleases me, because I think Tov is a very handsome boy— no bias at all. And maybe, if I’m brutally honest, I’d like people to also say Tov is sharp and intelligent because that too reflects well on me. Because those are values I hold high and dear. Because I want Tov to fit my ideals of a worthy person, and create him according to my image, when he has already been wonderfully and fearfully made in the image of God.
As a parent, I have the responsibility to raise my children to be the best person they can be, to stretch their weak points and cultivate their strong points. But it’s also my responsibility– and joy– to get to know and understand who they already are as a person, and delight in how God created them, just as they are. There’s a fine balance between accepting who my child is, and recognizing that they have more potential, and then pushing them lovingly and firmly towards it. It’s this fine balancing act that make my head twirl and my heart clench. Man, parenting requires so much wisdom and discernment. There’s just so many life-altering decisions and judgments that I feel, at this current moment, so ill-equipped to make. Lord, help me.
Tov is still only 3. I have yet to see all the hidden parts of Tov. He has yet to emerge from his chrysalis, yet to fully spread his wings. He might still learn to love books. Or he might not. My brother was raised the same way I was, with the same parents, and he is still not a reader, but he has many other interests and capabilities that I don’t have.
So what can I do?
I still want to do what I can to foster a rich intellectual life for my children. So I plan to take Tov and Woori to the library once a week. I can keep surrounding them with books, keep reading with them, and let them see me read.
And also: I can just relax and enjoy who they are.
That’s easy enough. Tov truly is a wonderful person. He is kind and empathetic and sweet and resilient and curious and fun. He loves his little sister, loves his umma and abba, loves his teachers and friends, loves laughing and rolling and the color pink and fire trucks and Lightning McQueen and listening to music and collecting rocks.
I adore 3-year-old Tov. He makes my heart so full. And I’m so proud to be his umma.
Writing for Sophia 