There are many precious “first” moments in parenthood. Even though this is my second child, every “firsts” still feels as novel and precious and magical as my firstborn’s. And for me, the most precious “first” is that moment when the baby looks you in the eye for the first time and cracks her first smile.
Woori gave me her first smile when she was about 10 weeks old. It was such a surprising gift for me, because Tov didn’t smile until he turned four months.
But there she was, looking up at me, her round eyes folding like origami into crescent moons, her cheeks rounding, her toothless mouth curving into a soft laughter. I had been busy in my mind, as I always am, but when she smiled, every other thought flew out of my brain to allow space to wonder at this most beautiful, uniquely human expression: the genuine smile.
Babies look so serious most of the time. They yawn so seriously. They stare so seriously. They burp so seriously. And occasionally they look at you with an expression of disgust or confusion, like, where the heck am I? Who the heck are you?
But that’s what makes their first smile so astonishing and amazing. It’s the first sign that they recognize a human face. That they know how to peer into human eyes, your reflection glinting in their pupils, and meet you, soul to soul. Instinctively, guilelessly, they sense someone made in the same image as they, and they greet you with a smile of recognition, of delight. I think it might be the same sort of smile Adam gave Eve when God first brought her to him: What! Hello there! You’re like me! But not me. Who are you? I can’t wait to get to know you.
There is so much beauty and power in the life of a human being. Scripture says all creation— the sun and moon, the shining stars, the hills and seas, the wild animals and small creatures and flying birds— all worship and give praise to the glory of God.
But no creation reveal as much glory of God as the one and only being created in His image: Humankind.
You don’t have to be a parent to know this truth deeply. You don’t need to be a Christian to love humanity and see its goodness— in fact, some non-Christians do it better than professing Christians like me. But for me, because I can get so irritable and cranky and cynical, I need to experience being a parent of a newborn to remind myself of that truth, to witness that first smile, presented like a gift personally and only for me, and gasp. To gaze into this little human being’s eyes, so clear and innocent, and see God’s original creation, God’s own image. To tear up, because it’s just so dang beautiful there is no words to describe it except to weep helplessly at the magnificence of human life.
I write this the day after Election Day. I woke up to the official confirmation of Trump as our next president, but I went to bed already knowing he won. I thought I had been pretty apathetic about politics and the election, but I suppose I still have a lot of emotions buried inside me, easily triggered from memories of 2016 and 2020, from all the toxic news and social media content, the online and real-life comments I’ve read and heard for the past eight years.
So this morning, with images of Trump lifting his fist in triumph, those emotions frothed out.
“WTF is wrong with our country?” I texted my friends.
And by this I mean WTF is wrong with those people? And that one sentence exposes all the stereotypes, the tropes, the contempt and disgust and rage I have for people who think differently from me. They are flattened to images— images of my neighbors who hung “Get Back America!” flags on their balconies and front yard, neighbors who drove obnoxious, mega-loud pick-up trucks that fluttered humongous USA and Trump 2024 flags as they roared down the streets in a cloud of diesel fumes.
I was frustrated and exasperated and enraged, in part because I had no control at all. We were given two terrible candidates, neither of whom intrigued or excited me. I didn’t vote for either of them. My personal conscience didn’t allow me. And so, in that helplessness and lack of control, I felt nihilistic.
America will reap what she sow, I thought. Let her crash and burn for all she deserves. In that moment, I wanted people to hurt, to be disappointed, to despair, all so I can satisfy some weird, short-lived self-righteousness and masochism. I actually wanted to revel in the destruction of humanity.
And then it was time to feed Woori again, and as I nestled her on my lap, she gazed up at me and gave me a big, happy smile, even letting out a little squeal, so excited was she to meet eyes with me.
I smiled back. I laughed. She smiled even more and cooed back. She doesn’t speak words but we were communicating, on the most basic level, a most basic human expression: Hello! I see you.
Ah yes. I see you, image-bearer of God. I see you. And I see them. Thanks for the reminder. Thanks for opening my eyes again.
It is a well-known fact among working parents of young kids that weekends are now your work days. Your kids are not in daycare or school. In fact, your children have this innate ability to sense when it’s the weekend, because once Saturday morning rolls in, they somehow instinctively wake up before the sun even peeks out.
One day, when my children are much older and I have to shove them out of bed to wake them up, I might forget what these weekends are like, so I decided to record a typical Saturday for us with a 2-year-old and a newborn.
5 am: I hear Woori stirring. I climb out of bed shivering. My postpartum night sweats have been cooling down, but I still wake up with my hair and clothes kind of damp, and because we sleep with the windows open, it’s freezing.
I change into a dry T-shirt then stumble to the kitchen to grab my pump and warm up a bottle of refrigerated breastmilk. I bottlefeed Woori while I pump, nodding off to the sounds of her sucking.
5:30 am: I finish pumping. I throw the bottle and pump parts into the kitchen sink. Too sleepy to wash them. I swaddle Woori and place her back into her bassinet. Climb back into bed. She’s a little fussy still but I pass out and eventually, so does she.
6:30 am: Tov’s up! David gets up and turns on the TV for Tov. Saturday mornings, we allow Tov some screen time. He’s currently obsessed with a YouTube channel in which some brilliant guy’s making tens of thousands of bucks by creating videos of trucks and police toy cars driving around and getting into glorious accidents.
“Oh no!” Tov yells at the screen every time a truck crashes.
7 am: David heads downstairs to the gym to work out. Tov gets bored of his show so gallops over to my bed and starts making enough ruckus to awaken both Woori and me.
Welp, time to get up.
7:30 am: I make a matcha latte and try to nurse Woori while Tov literally climbs all over me. He grabs my hand and tries to drag me to his room, but I’m still feeding Woori. He begins whining.
Then he suddenly remembers he has a little sister and grins at her. “Aaaaaay!” He says, rubbing his hand all over her face while she’s trying to feed. Poor Woori. She tolerates a lot from her big brother.
I try to listen to a devotional podcast called The Daily Liturgy (my favorite) while nursing, but with Tov yelling and running all over the place and grabbing at me, I am so distracted that I have to rewind over and over. I also fall asleep while breastfeeding despite all the noises Tov’s making. As soon as the podcast is over, I forget everything except “His steadfast love endures forever.” Or something like that. Amen.
8:30 am: I try to eat breakfast. It almost always includes three soft-boiled eggs. The problem is Tov loves cracking and peeling eggs. As I’m peeling the eggs, he scampers over and asks for an egg to peel, too.
I give him an egg. He screams and cries. He wants a different egg. Fine. I give him another egg. He seems content with that one. He peels it but doesn’t eat it. It rolls on the floor, coating itself with dirt and crumbs.
Usually Tov doesn’t eat breakfast, so we stopped offering it to him unless he asks for something. But today he seems hungry, because he ate most of my eggs.
9 am: I try to give Woori some tummy time. She screams. I try to give her some face time, attempting to get her to smile. She shoots me an expression of pure disgust. Babies are delightful.
9:30 am: David trots up sweaty from his workout. It’s my turn to work out now. This is Mr favorite part about weekends now— I can leave Woori with David and get a full workout, instead of cutting it short because Woori decided to take a 15-minute nap, which is almost every day.
10 am: Welp, never mind. Woori is screaming her head off and David can’t get her to settle down because his man boobs are useless, so I cut my workout short and rush up to nurse her again. I’m kind of resentful that my husband got a 90-minute workout while I got barely 30 minutes.
11:30 am: Shower. Woori is perky and content now so she lies without fussing on her changing pad on the floor while I rinse off and do my morning skincare routine.
12:30 pm: I don’t know where the time has gone. We are dashing about preparing snacks, changing diapers and pull-ups, getting ready to leave.
We have a special treat for Tov today. We are going to Irvine Park Railroad! It’s a kids amusement park that offers train rides and paddle boats. I saw it on Instagram and we knew Tov would love it.
Problem is, Tov doesn’t know that we have a whole wonderful afternoon planned for him. We have to physically wrestle him to get him ready.
While David puts Woori into her car seat, I’m trying to cajole Tov to go down the stairs with me while I struggle with two heavy bags filled with essentials for baby and toddler. He wants me to carry him. I hoist him up on my other shoulder and say a little prayer for protection for my bad back. I have a feeling it’s only a matter of time before I hurt my back again.
1 pm: We somehow managed to all pile into the car. Both kids are strapped into their car seats. Tov has snacks. Woori is throwing a fit. She’s tired and hates the car seat.
We start driving east towards Irvine while Woori shrieks and yowls her displeasure. And then Tov starts screaming as well because he spotted David drinking a can of Waterloo sparkling peach drink and he wants it too.
The GPS says it’ll take us 2 hours to reach Irvine Park Railroad. Thankfully, Woori eventually tires herself out and pass out. Tov passes out too. So do I.
2:30 pm: We are getting close to the railroad park, only to discover that every entrance into the park has a half-mile-long line of vehicles waiting to get in. GPS says it’ll take us 40 minutes just to move 0.8 miles. WTF.
Turns out, it’s pumpkin patch season. We chose the worst possible time to come here. We jettison our plan and scramble for Plan B. We decide to turn around and go to Heritage Park in Irvine instead.
3 pm: I find a public library in which I can nurse Woori, while David takes Tov for a romp around the park. Pretty much every single person I see in that park is Asian. If I see a white person, 10/10 they are married to an Asian.
David and Tov find a water play fountain by the lake. Tov gets soaked. He is the only one splashing. The other kids are apparently not allowed to get wet. They eye Tov from their safe dry spot with envy.
We change Tov into dry clothes and look at the clock. 4 pm and more than an hour away from home. What the heck is there to do in Irvine?
4:30 pm: We head to Spectrum Center, a massive outdoor shopping center. Maybe we can get some coffee and a nice dinner? So exciting. Things we could have done at home without the waste of time and gas money.
Spectrum Center is packed as well. Lots of young couples and families. But Tov is the only child insisting on dunking half his body into every fountain in that center. And there are a lot of fountains. They’re beckoning to Tov from every corner. How can he resist? How can he not run screaming “Wawa!!!” to every fountain and dip his forearm into the pool?
When he’s not chasing fountains, he’s insisting on pushing Woori’s stroller, getting upset when we try to steer him away from people, bushes, and poles. When we finally snatch the stroller away from him, he flings himself onto the floor, prostrating like a professional mourner and wails. Fat globes of tears roll down his cheeks.
After 40 minutes of this, we’ve finally had it. Forget dinner! We are returning home!
5:15 pm: But first, coffee. We stop by the Citibank Cafe since David gets a discount with his credit card. He gets a coffee, I get a matcha latte. Tov points at a sugar-crusted almond croissant. He orders, “This!”
I order him a zero-sugar protein strawberry yogurt instead. He polishes it off.
My stomach growls. I realize I haven’t had time for lunch and Tov had eaten most of my breakfast.
We sit down for 5 minutes at the cafe but Tov, high on yogurt, hops and skips and yoddles and climbs all around as though the cafe is his personal play gym. I see a young Asian couple give him the stink eye and then glare at us.
I was you just five years ago, I want to tell that couple. Just you wait.
I grab Tov by the hand and we leave.
It takes us another 20 minutes to make it to the parking lot because Tov kept grabbing for Woori’s stroller and then running off with it as though drunk and drugged.
We speed home in roads that are surprisingly low traffic (prime dinner time), playing obnoxious Cocomelon songs to keep Tov quiet, and make it home by 7.
7 pm: I am ravenous by that point, but Woori is also starving so I run up with her to feed her again, but I also really need to pee, so I set her down on our bed and then rush to the bathroom.
As I leave the bathroom, I hear a BOOM!
Woori had fallen off the bed and when I run over, she’s on the floor with her head bang on the hardwood floor, screaming. I must have put her too close to the edge, and as she was jostling about, she must have slid off the bed covers.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” I yell, scooping her up to check on her.
David sprints over to see what’s going on. “What? What happened?”
Woori is startled but otherwise seems OK. Babies have pretty sturdy heads. My heart, however, takes a good 10 minutes to finally slow down as I rock her and nurse her. Meanwhile, Tov climbs up and down my legs while I feed Woori.
Stomach growls again. I really need to eat something.
7:45 pm: We have leftover eggplant pasta for dinner. I wolf mine down over the kitchen counter while holding Woori with one arm.
We clean up while Tov makes more messes. It’s a never ending cycle.
8:30 pm: Bedtime for the kids. Our favorite time of the day! Cue hallelujah songs.
We bathe them both. David puts Tov down, while I put Woori down. Tov passes out the moment his head touches the mattress, but Woori wakes and cries a few times and needs me to rock her back to sleep.
9:15 pm: Me time. Me time. ME ME ME ME TIME!
Also the time when I consume the bulk of my calories. When I don’t have to shovel food into my mouth because the baby is crying. When I can sit and enjoy each bite while reading a novel. When no grubby little hands are grabbing for me, demanding attention. When my brain is not aching from overstimulation. When my ears are at rest because it’s all…quiet. Aaaah.
And because this time is so precious, I drag it for as long as possible. Which is why…
1:30 am: Go to bed. I am so exhausted the marrow of my bones are aching.
But this is the real reason why I’m sleep-deprived. I can’t blame the newborn. She’s a wonderful sleeper once she settles into the night. Every day, given the choice between recharging from more sleep or recharging from more quiet time, I choose the latter every single day. Hands down.
And just like that, a Saturday is gone.
What did I used to do on Saturdays before I had kids? Sleep in? Movie nights? Concerts? Dinner out with friends? All that seems like a distant dream a long long time ago from a land far far away.
And yet. Maybe one day I’ll read this post and remember it with fondness.
I would love to follow up my last post with a post about how I’ve become calm and collected, gentle and lowly like Jesus, but no. I have been experiencing major mom rage, and a lot of that has to do with how nursing is going with Woori.
Probably because at this stage of infancy, all I ever do is feed this baby. All day long. No sooner have I finished nursing, bottle-feeding, then pumping, do I have to start the process all over again.
Woori is 5 weeks today. Which means we’ve been stuck in this hell cycle of triple feeding for five weeks. I would go five more weeks if there were signs that she’s improving, that one day I can exclusively breastfeed her without worrying if she got enough, worrying about pumping, worrying about my milk supply.
But then I go to a lactation support group, weigh her after a 45-minute nursing session, and find out she had sucked only 1 ounce.
Forty-five minutes, and we get 1 measly freaking ounce. I guess that’s better than 8 ml (0.27 ounce), which was what she ingested the first time I joined the lactation support group. But still. I want my 45 minutes back!!!
“She’s…at least getting better,” the lactation consultant Mary said pityingly. She asked me how much I’m pumping.
Two to 5 ounces, I said, depending on time of day.
“So it’s not your milk supply,” she said. “How many times do you pump a day?”
Eight, I told her. Almost every feeding session.
“Well, I’m worried about you. That’s not sustainable,” Mary said.
Nope, it is not.
Mary suggested going to an occupational therapist. But for some reason, the thought of going to another appointment with a specialist that might not work, that might be another waste of time, money, and hope, felt overwhelming to me.
“I just worry about you,” Mary repeated. “What you’re doing is not sustainable.”
I fought to blink away tears. Up till then, I’d been pretty stoic about this triple feeding process. I complained some, but it was a routine I did, day by day, without thinking too much about it. But it was wearing me down. And when I came to this lactation support group, I had had hope that Woori was finally nursing much better. So to see that number— 1 ounce— felt crushing. I wanted to throw myself on the floor and weep.
“Let’s try again,” Mary suggested.
So I went back to the nursing pillow, and tried to rub Woori awake, but she was drowsy from all the calories she spent nursing without getting much calories in return. We stripped her down. We turned a fan on her to keep her awake. She squirmed and pushed but I kept her plastered on me.
Thirty-five minutes later, we weighed her again. She had just under another ounce of milk.
Two hours, 2 ounces. A baby at her age needs about 20-24 ounces a day. That’s 20 to 24 hours of nursing I have to do to get her what she needs, if I were to exclusively breastfeed.
Unsustainable, indeed.
Two evenings ago, I lost it.
We had just finished eating dinner, and as always, David wanted to go for a walk. That’s been our daily routine since we met, but since we’ve had Woori, more often than not, David has been going out for a walk with Tov while I stay home with Woori, nursing and pumping.
This evening, I really wanted to go for a walk too. I had been cooped up at home all day. I had not been able to get my regular workouts in that week because Woori’s naps have shortened to barely half an hour, and when she’s up, she wants to be held. And then of course there’s her feeding schedule.
But come 6:30 pm, I was still stuck in the chair nursing Woori. I had passed out, so I couldn’t tell if Woori had even been sucking or simply suckling.
David stuck his head into the room. “Are we going?”
I opened my bleary eyes. “I don’t think I can go,” I said. I still needed to pump, and it was getting late, and our walks are usually almost an hour long.
So David got ready to go for a walk with Tov without us.
We were alone at home. Again. Man, I really wanted to go out for a walk.
By then I had maybe been nursing for a good 45 minutes. Surely she’s gotten something out of this, I thought.
But no. As I lifted Woori up and walked around the house, she began sucking on her fingers— cues that she’s hungry.
I groaned— a deep, guttural burst of livid frustration. How. HOW! How is she STILL freaking hungry?! Did my milk ducts dry up? What the heck have we been doing for the past 45 minutes?!
In a whoosh, I felt rage boiling out of me like fresh hot lava. I felt resentment that David got to keep all his routine— a 90-minute workout every morning, walks every afternoons and evenings, hot coffees, work and conversations with adults— while I was chained to this never -ending cycle of feeding a baby who had a piss-poor suction. I could feel the hours we spent trying to nurse flattening my butt into a Swedish pancake, all my hard-earned muscles softening like butter. I felt fat. I felt unproductive. I felt utterly demoralized and discouraged and deflated.
I burst into angry tears. And then, because tears were not enough, I picked up the first thing I saw— a big-ass plastic dump truck filled with blocks that a very kind friend had gifted Tov that day— and hurled it across the room. Red and yellow blocks scattered across the floor. That was still not enough, so I kicked his plastic fire truck across the room, too, and it somersaulted in the air and skidded next to the other giant truck.
I calmed down a little then. Or rather, guilt and shame tampered my rage. I felt bad that Tov’s toys had to bear the brunt of my lack of self-control. I checked on them and was relieved they weren’t broken.
Then I warmed up 4 ounces of pumped breastmilk and bottle-fed Woori. Sure enough, she gulped that thing down as though I haven’t just spent the last three-quarters of an hour trying to feed her. I could have cried again.
At that moment, I remembered what a woman had told me after helping watch Woori for an hour: “She’s so easy! All she does is sleep and eat and poop!”
I knew she meant it as a compliment or something. But when I heard it, I felt triggered and irritated. I thought, Of course she’s easy, after you’ve golfed all day and shopped at a farmer’s market and all you do is hold her for an hour in the evening. Of course she’s easy, when that bottle you’ve fed her was squeezed from someone else’s dairy farm. Of course she’s easy, when you get to hand her off so you can go home and sleep when you like, for however long you’d like.
I knew I wasn’t being fair. But I wasn’t in a mood to feel gracious and rational. I felt like my struggles were belittled. And then, on the flip side, I belittled myself: What are you whining about? Why is this so hard? It’s so easy. Just suck it up.
I dried my tears and gulped down my frustrations and picked up Woori and spoke to her gently. Something will have to change, and we’ll figure it out together.
Later, while I was bathing Woori, I heard David and Tov return from their walk. Tov stomped up the stairs to greet his new truck. “Argh! Oh nooo!” I heard him exclaim to see his dump truck turned upside down and all the blocks skittered across the room. I felt guilty, but also tickled at his dramatic reaction. I heard him gather all his blocks again and put them where they belong into the dump truck.
He pushed that truck into the bathroom where I was bathing Woori, and he greeted cheerfully, “Hi!” He had no idea the tantrum I had thrown just 20 minutes before. I pulled him close and kissed his cheeks, penance for throwing his toys, though he had no idea what I had done. If only all the moments of my mom rage could be as easily remedied as picking up plastic blocks.
An hour later, I was back in my nursing chair with Woori, restarting the process again.
Of course, all this could end if I stopped being stubborn and just gave up on breastfeeding. I’m keeping this cycle going because at the end of the day, I still have the privilege of choice. I told myself I’ll keep on going for as long as I can, and maybe that breaking point is coming.
I hired a personal lactation consultant who lives nearby to come visit me. It’ll be the fourth lactation consultant I’ve seen. She’ll visit me next week, and maybe it’ll help, maybe it won’t.
But I need a new plan. Tov’s toys don’t deserve my mom rage.
Writing for Sophia 