It’s been almost four months since I’ve had Woori.
Many people, after reading my essay for Christianity Today on transitioning from a working mother to a stay-at-home mother, have asked me how I’m doing now that I’ve crossed that transition.
I reply, “Don’t know. Ask me in a few more months.”
It’s a hard question to answer because honestly, I’m rarely thinking about how I feel. I’m just clucking about like a crazy hen, pecking at this, chasing chicks, fluttering and puttering and scuttling. My eyes only see what’s right before me in the dirt, at hen-height. The day passes by so fast I can barely tell a Wednesday from a Saturday. I could have sworn I just folded a pile of laundry, and behold, here’s a mountain of laundry waiting to be folded again!
So I haven’t really had the chance to sit down and process my thoughts and feelings, but it really isn’t just about lack of time, either.
I’ve gotten dumb. I’ve gotten really, really dumb. When I expelled all my postpartum blood, I seem to also have flushed out most of my IQ. I forget friends’ names. I forget to respond to texts. I forget where I placed an item right after I’ve placed it. I lose my phone all the time. I can’t finish a thought. Words don’t come to me as I’m speaking, so my sentences are jumbled and chopped. When David wants to talk to me about news and politics, I have absolutely no mental or emotional capacity to respond other than to mutter, “Oh yeah?”
So yeah. How do I feel about being a stay-at-home mother? Maybe the most accurate description is: Dumb AF.
But it’s also confusing. Because in those moments when I am more aware of my thoughts and feelings, they don’t make coherent sense.
At times, as I hold Woori and feel her warm little head resting on my shoulder, or kiss Tov as he giggles with such wild joy, I feel such deep contentment, like my life is perfect the way it is. And then other times, I’m deeply discontent, and the smallest thing annoys me— the permanent clutter, the hands constantly grabbing at me, the noises, the very breathing of my husband. (Is it too much to ask our spouses to stop breathing for just half an hour?)
At times, I’m simply so filled with gratitude for the blessings God has given me that tears spring to my eyes, and I want to leap and sing like Maria in Sound of Music. Other times, I’m in inexplicable rage mode, wanting to kick walls, throw things, scream.
At times, I love the familiar, comforting drudgery of motherhood— feel relieved, even, that I don’t have to go back to work. Other times, I feel pinches of panic and anxiety— is this it? Am I stuck in this merry-go-round of domestic hell? Dropping kids off, picking them up, cooking and cleaning, wiping butts and wringing your explodes mustard-colored poop off onesies? What if I never make something of myself? Am I ever going to write a book?
At times, I tear up seeing how big Tov is now, and how quickly Woori is growing, and whisper to them, “Oh, stop growing so fast,” and I wish I can freeze time and capture them tiny forever in a snow globe. Other times, I’m impatient for the next stage, impatient for them to be more independent and self-sufficient, so I don’t have to help dress them or bathe them and I can have my life back again.
That’s the paradox of parenthood: I feel the extremes of both ends on the emotional spectrum, often within the same day. I’m standing pulled and stretched in that tension of contradictory feelings, which spike and dip wildly like a monsoon season. And from what I’m hearing from other parents, everything I’m feeling is normal. Laughing with joy one minute and then internally screaming with frustration the next? Quite normal. Wait till your kids are teenagers, they say.
So. At four months postpartum, how do I feel? Like a mother, I suppose.
I lied. I don’t get everything done. It takes two days for me to fold laundry. I have a package by the front door that’s been sitting there unopened for six days, and counting. I need to review a 5,000-word article my editor sent me, but I keep forgetting because I have no time during the day and by nighttime, all my brain has room for are murder novels and cookies.
Also my toddler is in school most days of the week, so for a good chunk of the day, it’s really just me and a 3-month-old.
But really. If you saw my IG stories of me baking bread and making pizza from scratch, it might seem like I’m a productive mother of two, an Asian Ballerina Farm, except way less attractive and graceful.
I watch YouTube while I work out. It’s good background noise for me. I work out as much as I can when Woori naps in the bassinet, which can range from 10 to 45 minutes, though most days it’s about 25 minutes. Because as a new mother I used to search for YouTube videos on what baby products to buy, YouTube’s algorithm now targets me with all these mommy influencers, and pretty much all of them seem to have at least several videos with similar titles as this blog post: “My productive morning with 5 kids.” “Making a week’s meals from scratch with 4 kids.” “How I get everything done with three kids 3 and under!” “Getting things done as a busy homeschooling mom of 7 kids!” Somehow they are all super fertile and love homeschooling.
There are influencers whose sole content is to parade their gaggle of children while they can apple butter, plant their own organic herbs, and make loads of money marketing electrolyte supplements on YouTube, all the while homeschooling their kids, breastfeeding their newborns, decorating their house with vintage finds, and sharing a chaste kiss with their husband in the kitchen.
I hate them. I love them. And I watch them and their lives, wondering how they can make sourdough blueberry bagels each week (I’ve tried making those bagels— they take soooo much time!) and homeschool their gazillion kids and create content and put on mascara every day and keep their cool while their toddlers grab at their apron strings whining and demanding (which must happen off-camera, because I’ve never heard a single whine from their children).
I know how social media works. I know that much of these content is performance and entertainment. These types of videos generate clicks and follows and income, because for people like me at least, it’s content that seem inspiring, even if it’s inspirational only as far as sparking the intent to be half as productive. In reality, these content, at least for me, is at best mindless entertainment and at worst a cesspool of jealousy and resentment.
That said, I do bake a lot. I bake because Woori won’t nap for long unless I’m holding her. But I can’t just hold her in a comfy chair; I gotta hold her and jiggle and walk around, further aggravating my degenerative disc disease. So rather than just walk around holding her while staring into space, I wear her in a wrap and bake and aggravate my degenerative disc disease.
I’ve baked sourdough whole wheat bread and Japanese milk bread and peanut butter oatmeal cookies and sourdough cornbread and sourdough Irish soda bread and sourdough pizza and coconut granola and sourdough brownies and sourdough blueberry bagels.
Yes, I bake a freaking lot. Partly because we love to eat those things, and David gets sad if there’s no homebaked cookie for his midday dessert. But mostly because I like feeling productive. I like the satisfaction of holding tangible edibles that I’ve made with my own hands, even if my son won’t eat them because he’s a punk who only eats cancer-laden treats that come out of plastic packages.
I am addicted to feeling productive. It makes me feel good. It makes me feel like I amount to something, like I’m not wasting my life.
But of course, it’s just a feeling. A temporary painkiller pill that prolongs my addiction to feeling productive but ultimately still wondering, in moments of clarity, what I’m really living for, where my time has gone.
I’m a womb Christian and a PK who has had the answer drilled into my brain for decades: I live for the glory of God! I live to know and become more like Christ each day! Because He lives, I can face tomorrow! Spirit lead me where my trust is without borders, let me walk upon the waters, wherever you would call me…so on and so on.
But on the micro level, my heart doesn’t reflect that. In those moments when I start thinking about where my life is and where it’s going, I feel stabs of panic: What am I doing? What have I accomplished?
Not too long ago my former editor called about something, and in that conversation, he asked me, “Where do you see your career going in the next few years?”
And I told him, “Oh, my career is a deep, dark hole right now.” I chuckled as I said this, but the truth of that statement struck anxiety in me. Is this the end of my career?
Before I had Woori, I made a list of things I want to do once I quit working and become a stay-at-home mother. That list is laughable now for its optimism. It included blogging once a week, journaling daily, going to the farmer’s market, going to the museum, doing art, working on a novel.
I haven’t cracked open my journal or sketchbook at all, I’ve still not been to the farmer’s market, nor gone to the museum, nor even started the brainstorming process for a novel. The only thing I did check off the list is baking.
And whenever I think of that list, most of it geared towards productivity and keeping my intellect stimulated and setting pathways to a future career, I feel discouraged.
Jeez, relax, I tell myself. Woori’s only three months old. You’re only three months postpartum! Give yourself a break! But I also know that as Woori gets older and begins crawling, it’s going to be harder for me to do any of those things on my list. Realistically, I won’t be able to get serious about my career until my kids are in school, and even then, that all depends on their extracurricular activities and my own energy. What if my writing gets stale by then? What if I’ve fallen so far off the scene that nobody wants to hire me? What if I sink so deeply into the daily grind of parenting and homemaking that I don’t realize how much time has passed until the kids are out of the house and I’m in retirement age?
Those are the questions that prick at me when I sit and think about my future. Perhaps mothers who are way ahead of me in life stage, who have older kids and have restarted their careers, will think I’m being silly or myopic. But at 37, with two kids 2 and under, and perhaps, hopefully, a third baby one day, the shelf life of my career feels very limited right now.
Maybe that’s why I watch those mommy influencers. Because they literally make parenthood and homemaking their career. They do all the tedious chores that we all do but can call it content. Changing diapers and making one-pot meals are accomplishments, because they literally make money off it. They have numbers they can track to feel accomplished and successful: 10,000 followers, 100,000 followers, 1 million followers. They know they’ve made it when they score partnerships with big brands, receive mountains of free products.
I don’t ever want to be an influencer, but I’m envious of them, envious of the clarity in their work, trackable by the income they bring, measurable by the business they’ve built. Envious…that they can seemingly do it all.
That’s why I was surprised when some people who saw my IG stories of my baked goods and homecooked meals told me they’re amazed at how much I get done. That was never the image I was trying to convey when I post what I thought were just fun random shots on social media. I cut down on posting those things because I didn’t want to create an illusion of myself, or make people feel the way I do watching YouTube mommy influencers.
The reality is, I often feel unproductive and unaccomplished, and have had to significantly cut down on my standards for what I can get done in a day. Just going to Costco is a big deal. Getting the laundry folded and tucked away in closets is worthy of self-applause.
And as much as I daily marvel at what I have— a good husband, beautiful healthy children, a warm house, and the privilege to buy 15-pound sacks of flour— sometimes, I despair at the fact that such small tasks as doing laundry have become my biggest accomplishment of the day. That my standards have dropped so drastically, but even more honestly and embarrassingly, that nobody cares about that except me. I have faded silently like mist into the shadows of full-time motherhood, and nobody is thinking, “Something’s missing. Where are Sophia Lee’s articles! God I need her writing!”
And therein says a lot about the condition of my heart— why on the macro level, I know what truly matters in life; I trust that God is sovereign and all things work together for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose; I know that I’m called to be faithful and grateful in this season I’m in. And yet in the minutes of my day, I’m disappointed and insecure, and I wonder, “But is that it? What’s next? Surely this is not enough.”
How do I get everything done with two kids 2 and under? I don’t. I’ve seen so many videos with such titles and I still don’t know how they “do it all.”
And I think that’s the point. These videos are created because there’s a demand for it. Because most parents like me are struggling to get even one thing done, and in this modern day, productivity is an idol, a status, a social class, and when we watch these videos of beautiful, well-dressed women maintaining an organic garden, a tastefully decorated home, and an armful of well-behaved children, they become our aspiration. No longer am I proud of getting the laundry done; the bar has been raised, the standard for adequacy set higher.
I remember studying Nehemiah years ago. In chapter 3 of Nehemiah, there’s a long list of names that people typically just skip over. I do, at least. It’s just name after name after name of people who are mentioned once and never again in the Bible.
But still— their names are in the Bible, read (and glazed over) by millions of believers over centuries and centuries. It is a huge freaking deal. And for what? For helping repair a wall. For scavenging rocks and stamping mud bricks and installing bolts and bars by an entrance called the Dung Gate. For doing menial tasks and manual labor, they got their names inscribed for eternity into God’s Word. Why? They were faithful to the task God called them to do, as lowly and humble as it is.
The world has their standards of accomplishment, and God has His. I suppose this is also what Jesus meant when he said, “my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” God’s call for me isn’t to be a bestselling author, or a world-traveling journalist, or a supermommy. His standard for me is simply to be faithful to the task He’s laid in front of me today. And for now, it’s being a wife and a mother of two young kids.
I think back to my career as a journalist, and it’s humbling to remember how the amazing jobs I’ve had simply opened up to me, seemingly by chance. I had never heard of World Magazine until I started working for it. It wasn’t the job I had wanted, but it turned out to be the right one for me, and I had some terrific years there. And after I resigned, not having any jobs lined up, the CEO of Christianity Today called me to offer me a dream job, everything I’ve wished and prayed for. I didn’t go looking for those jobs— they came to me.
That’s a great track record of how God provided for me in those 11 years of my brief but fulfilling career. He’s been so faithful to me. So why wouldn’t He continue to be faithful? If He opened those doors for me, He can do so again five or ten years down the road.
And if my career has really ended for good, that’s OK. It means God has other tasks for me in mind, and they might seem lowly and mundane, invisible and unacknowledged to the eyes of others, but God sees.
He saw Shallum son of Hallohesh and his daughters as they repaired the wall by the Tower of the Ovens. He saw Malchijah the goldsmith, and Pedaiah son of Parosh. Which means He also sees Sophia Lee, wife of David, mother of Tov and Woori, as she tries to finish folding laundry while Tov literally climbs over her and Woori wails and wails on her bouncer, and at the end of the day, He celebrates with her that she somehow survived yet another day.
Writing for Sophia 