Tag: newborn

Tov meets Woori

Published on by Sophia LeeLeave a comment

I remember the day of my first date with David.

It was my first official date ever, really, the first time a man had formally asked me if he could take me out for a date, instead of that annoyingly ambiguous “Want to grab a bite to eat?” that could mean so many things.

We were to meet at 6 pm, but I started getting ready at 5 pm. There really was no need– it took 10 minutes to do my very minimal makeup and another 3 to change from sweats to jeans– but it was the anticipation of getting ready for something exciting and slightly nerve-wrecking. I felt like a high school girl getting ready for the dance.

I felt similarly the morning after I gave birth to Woori. She was dozing deeply next to me in her hospital bassinet, and the morning sun was starting to pour golden pools through the window blinds. It had been less than 12 hours since she was born, and I hadn’t had more than 20 minutes of uninterrupted sleep. My head was light, and my heart was fluttering.

David called to tell me he’d be visiting with Tov at 9 am. By then, I hadn’t even yet announced to any of my friends that I had given birth. Only our family knew (and unfortunately, all of David’s business clients), but Tov did not know.

We had been prepping him months before Woori’s birth, of course. I told Tov repeatedly that there’s a baby in my belly. “Where’s the baby?” I’d prompt him, and he’d smile and point at his own belly. He did not get it.

A friend bought Tov a book called “You’re a Big Brother.” I pointed at the pictures in the book. “Look, there’s omma. There’s abba. There’s Tov. And there’s…baby!” He loved that book. We read it over and over again, and I kept pointing to the characters in the book: “Omma…abba…Tov…baby!” And then later I’d ask him, “Where’s Tov?” hoping he’d point at the boy, but he’d always point at the baby in the crib. He thinks he’s still the baby in the family.

As the due date approached, people asked me how Tov feels about becoming a big brother, and I told them he has no idea. “He’s in for the shock of his life,” I joked, but I guess it’s not a joke. He is in for the shock of his young life. Never ever has he not been the center of attention since he was born. He was the baby of the home, the emperor and prince. Guests came and cooed at him, not anyone else. And now, someone was about to take his place.

I wondered how Tov will react to meeting his little sister. I was nervous, but more curious and excited, just like how I felt that evening waiting for David to show up at my apartment gate. Will he show interest in her? Will he completely ignore her? Will he break down into jealousy? Will he be thoroughly confused by the appearance of a stranger who never left?

The minutes ticked down. I ate the hospital’s very bland breakfast and saved the blueberry muffin bottom for Tov (the hospital menu claimed it was homemade blueberry muffin, but it was a package from Otis Spunkmeyer). I watched Woori sleep. I tried not to get annoyed as nurses barged in every 5 minutes.

And then around 9 am, I heard him. He’s a very loud boy. I heard his running footsteps from down the hall. Several minutes later, the door opened, and Tov stomped in with David behind him.

Oh, I missed this boy. It’s only been 17 hours since I last saw him, but a whole world had changed since then. My balloon stomach had deflated. I don’t have to drink decaf coffee anymore. Another Lee-Herrmann was in the birth records. And our family dynamics will never be the same.

“Hi, Tov!” I greeted, and he bounded over to me like a kangaroo with a huge grin. I gave him a big hug and kissed him. I purposely delayed introducing him to the baby; I wanted time for him to adjust to seeing me in a strange new room, to greet him properly and make him feel like he’s the star attention.

“Look what we have for you!” I said, and whipped out a wrapped gift that the women in my discipleship group had bought for Tov. They had thoughtfully written “Especially for Tov” on the wrapper.

“Woooow!” Tov exclaimed, and immediately demanded, “Open, open!”

We opened the gift. It was a digital book about animals. While we tinkered with it, David went over to Woori and bent down to look at her, and that’s when Tov noticed the baby.

“Tov! You want to come meet her? Yeah, that’s your little sister!”

I took off his shoes and lifted him up onto the bed. He crawled towards the bassinet and peered over to gaze at the tiny pink face, whose eyes were closed in peaceful slumber, her head covered in that classic newborn pink-and-blue striped hat.

“See Tov, that’s your little sister. Her name is Woori.”

“Bebe!” Tov cried, pointing. Then he got distracted and pointed at the clock on the wall: “Cuckoo!” And then his interest got drawn to the baby again. “Bebe!”

That first moment was about as anticlimax as expected. He was constantly distracted, either by the clock or the packaged blueberry muffin or the new toy, and most especially, the bassinet, which he insisted on climbing into and lying spread-eagle as though he himself is the baby.

And it was also as sweet and precious as I had hoped for. When he did remember the baby, he was enthralled. He pointed at her eyes. He pointed at her nose. He patted her on the head. He pressed his forehead onto hers. He kissed her forehead, her nose, her cheeks, over and over again, delighting in the act. It was sweeter than my first kiss, more precious than my engagement ring, more satisfying than my first byline.

I wanted to hold this moment with both palms and cradle them into the deepest groove of my heart. I wanted time to pause, and replay slowly, over and over, that moment when my firstborn met my secondborn, and my whole family bunched together in that morning glow like a fresh-picked bouquet, pure and crisp and new.

Even as I was pregnant with Woori, feeling her kicks and seeing her little figure on the ultrasound, I couldn’t imagine loving her as much I as love Tov. People with multiple kids told me your heart grows. Bitterness and anger corrode the heart, but there’s always space in the human heart for more love; in fact, the more love it fills, the bigger and stronger and healthier it gets.

My heart is the biggest and strongest and healthiest it’s ever been.

Lord, you are so good.

God, please help Woori suck

Published on by Sophia LeeLeave a comment

Woori is five days old today. As I write this, she’s sleeping on her tummy on her play mat, while David builds a mini lego set with Tov.

If you visited us right now, our day would seem pretty peaceful and calm. There’s the soft ocean breeze blowing through the open windows. The gentle snores of a blissfully slumbering newborn. A contented toddler and a present father. A woman smelling sweet from breastmilk, sitting at her desk with a coffee mug and chocolate-covered pretzels, click-clacking on her keyboard. Ah, isn’t the newborn days just wonderful?

NOT.

Two hours ago, I was fighting back tears because I was so overwhelmed. Three hours ago, I was slightly freaking out that I was going blind, because it had been four hours since a white film had covered my vision, powdering everything I saw, giving me a headache.

Five hours ago, I was at a lactation support group, watching other mothers nursing and weighing their babies after to measure how much they’ve consumed. “Up 40 grams!” Jennifer, the lactation consultant pronounced, and the women cheered. Another woman’s five-week-old baby had consumed 5 whole ounces– that’s 150 grams, that overachiever.

Meanwhile, it took 30 minutes for me to finally get Woori to stop wrestling and grunting and finally suck on the breast for 20 minutes. “Oh, I can hear her swallowing a lot,” Jennifer remarked encouragingly. We weighed her after, I holding onto my breath with anticipation.

“Oh. 8 grams,” Jennifer said in a dismal voice. “Ah, she tricked me! I thought it would be more than that.”

What the freaking hell, Woori!

Six hours ago, David was yelling at Tov because he was having a roll-on-the-floor-with-snot-smearing-his-shirt kind of meltdown, simply because he did not want to wear pants. Six hours ago, I was holding Woori and watching David fly off his handle, feeling a little gratified, remembering all the times when I had lost patience with Tov, and David’s response was that I didn’t try hard enough to control my temper.

And then 12 hours ago, I was up in the wee morning, light-headed from sleeplessness, having finally finished bottle-feeding Woori 2 ounces of pumped breastmilk and formula after trying for 30 minutes to get her to breastfeed. That took more than an hour, and now I had to dry the pump parts, still wet from the last pumping session, so I can pump again before crawling back to bed.

It’s been anything but peaceful and calm.

We are on a crazy feeding plan for Woori because she refuses to breastfeed. She’s maybe successfully breastfed only three times since she was born, and even then, as the weighing scale today informed me, she barely even put 10 ml of milk inside her. So every three hours, round the clock from morning through night, I have to try to get her to practice breastfeeding, then bottle-feed her, then pump. That takes at least an hour and a half, which means about an hour later, I have to repeat the process all over again. There is no time to rest. The moment I fall asleep, my iphone blares an alarm, reminding me it’s time to feed again, and I wake up bleary-eyed and brain-fogged, a zombie with swollen, aching boobs.

Speaking of boobs. I had never once experienced the kind of engorgement I have this time round. Tov was born premature so he had a hard time latching properly, and he fed very slowly, but with the help of a nipple shield, at least he would still breastfeed.

Not Woori. This girl knows how to latch. There’s no problem with her tongue. She’s a lustily healthy baby. Two lactation consultants and a pediatrician examined her and pronounced her physically capable of breastfeeding. No, little stubborn girl just don’t wanna. When I finally jam a nipple into her mouth, she grunts and twists her head and even worse, sometimes bites down and then twists, which releases a string of obscenities from my mouth. And then she dares complain when milk sprays her in the face.

Unsurprisingly, I’ve been suffering from clogged ducts, hard swollen lumps measuring 2 inches all around the breasts that finally loosened up only after two days of continuous, painful massaging while pumping.

And that brings us to my cloudy vision. This morning, I put on my contact lens, and as we were driving to the lactation support group, my eyes started fogging up. I thought something had gotten into my contact lenses. Everything I saw had white halos. When we got home, the first thing I did was take off my contact lenses, but the cloud did not lift.

“I can’t see,” I told David, as he was wrestling with Tov to get him into the tub to wash off what he’d randomly vomited in the car.

I poured eye drops into my eyes, rubbed, blinked. Still cloudy.

“I still can’t see!” I said, starting to get a little panicky. Meanwhile, the clock was telling me it was time to feed Woori again in 35 minutes, and I still haven’t had lunch, or pumped from the last session. And now I was going blind???

“It’s probably from lack of sleep,” David said, seeming irritatingly unconcerned.

“I’ve never had this happen before,” I said. The more I blinked, the more I closed my eyes, the foggier my vision became. I called the optometrist to get my eyes checked, and they made a 3 pm appointment for me.

I pumped. I forgot to eat lunch. I lied down in bed and closed my eyes for 20 minutes in a restless sleep of anxious dreams. Then my alarm clock went off: Time to feed Woori.

As I tried to unsuccessfully get Woori to breastfeed again, fighting through pain and stickiness and frustration, my vision started clearing. Huh. I guess David was right. My body was telling me I’ve hit an exhaustion point I’ve never reached before.

And even as I write this, Tov has skipped and galloped over to me several times, once again butt-naked, breaking my writing flow. He’s climbed onto my lap, rubbed his naked butt on my pants, and stolen three of my chocolate-covered pretzels. He’s claimed he needs to poo-poo, a clever manipulation to steal my attention for 20 minutes while we pointlessly sit at the potty, his butt and penis completely dry, but he thoroughly entertained while I read and sing to him.

But that’s newborn days for you. There’s chaos, fatigue, frustration, mind-numbing repetitive rituals, boredom. And then there’s precious rare moments of peace, beauty, wonder, thankfulness, sweetness, like the third time Tov ran over to me while I was writing, and then stopped to kneel down beside his little sister and nuzzle his face into hers. Or when Tov is napping, and David comes to lie down next to Woori who’s also sleeping, and gaze at her little wrinkly, piglety face. Or when I’m pumping while holding Woori to my chest, inhaling her natural fragrance, feeling her warmth match mine. Such moments are so fleeting, so glorious, a ray of heaven shining into the pit of hell, blasting all darkness and doom away.

So ask me how I’m feeling, five days in. And I’ll say: tired and thankful, frustrated and content, bored and delighted, a seemingly contradiction of emotions that actually meet and rise into this extraordinary, one-of-a-kind symphony of postpartum. It’s life on earth.

This is a time when no prayer seem trivial or silly. I’m not praying for world peace, or justice, or souls saved. My prayers are brief and simple but earnest, as real and raw as cracked nipples and toddler tantrums and a newborn baby who refuses to suck on the breast.

It’s the prayer David prays every evening during dinner these days: “Oh God, please help Woori suck.”

Married with a newborn, Part II

Published on by Sophia Lee1 Comment

It’s interesting how we form a lot of our “truth.”

We like to think that we form thoughts and opinions based on facts, evidence, logic. Rather, it’s the opposite: We have a thought, and then we look for facts and evidences to reason that thought into “truth.”

I had such a thought one day. I thought, “I have a terrible husband.” And from then on, the evidences all fell swiftly and neatly into a report on why David is a terrible husband.

That is a very dangerous thought, because no spouse is perfect. We’re living with an imperfect human being, sharing so many intimate, unfiltered moments that a person’s every flaw pops out of the surface like pubescent pimples. And when you look at your spouse and decide that he is x or y or z, every incident– past and present and imagined future– reinforce that he is indeed x or y or z. Any evidence that points otherwise is ignored, dismissed, and reasoned away.

My thought– that David is a terrible husband– raked up old conflicts long resolved that date back to our dating days. They came back alive and groaning like a resurrected mummy. And once that thought clutched my mind, it held on with a death grip, killing all the joy and grace in my heart.

Obviously, there are genuinely terrible spouses out there. This is not the case here. David has always supported me and my career. He consistently provides for the family. He has never once raised his voice at me. He does all the cleaning in the house. He is a great father to Tov. He even takes better care of the cat.

But that’s how deceitful our thoughts can be. One morning, I woke up feeling grateful for my husband. I kissed him good morning and blessed him with all my heart. Then by evening, I was tallying up all the ways he had disappointed me. My eye sharpened, and my heart narrowed. All within the span of 12 hours.

What changed? Besides for being physically and mentally drained, I listened to my own thoughts, and only my own. It doesn’t mean that thinking is bad– I’m talking about the kind of self-focused, self-listening, self-advocating, self-accusing, self-reinforcing thoughts that dwell in my mind and heart and spirit, leaving no room for anyone else’s voice but my own. And I know myself. I can be selfish, mean, contradictory, exacting, ruthless, graceless, impatient, toxic– everything that the fruits of the Spirit are not.

That evening, on our usual evening walk, I lingered several steps behind my husband because I was crying, and I didn’t want him to see my tears– not out of consideration for him, but if I’m brutally frank, it was because I was content to just stew in my own thoughts. They were familiar, even comforting. Bringing him into my self-conversation would have added inconvenient and uncomfortable nuances to the picture.

It just so happened that that morning, I had begun reading a book called “Risen Motherhood” by Emily Jensen and Laura Wifler for a book club. I had recently joined this book club with other mothers from my church and just finished reading the first chapter, which ended with the book’s main point: “This book is for every mom who is asking, ‘Does the gospel matter to motherhood?’ Oh friend, the gospel changes everything.”

The gospel changes everything. I thought about that paragraph that evening. I remember thinking, as I walked behind my husband, wiping sour tears from my cheeks, “OK then. How does the gospel change this?”

Preach the gospel to yourself, the book says: “…we hope you’ll be encouraged and that you’ll gain a greater ability to see God in your own life through gospel lenses.”

All right then. Sounds good. Let’s try seeing this situation through gospel lenses. Well, let’s see…I am a sinner. Ha. I know that. I also know for certain that my husband is a sinner. We are all wretched creatures, I know, I know, OK, next.

Jesus died on the cross for my sins. Well, Jesus, thank you, that is wonderful, I am grateful, truly. But now what? How does his death more than 2,000 years ago change what I’m feeling right now?

The world is broken, but God redeems. Again. Wonderful, but what am I supposed to do about that now, as as a new mother and wife, when I can’t stop the tears from falling and it’s freaking embarrassing that I’m crying, when I feel unappreciated, ugly and old, tired as hell, and uncared for? Do I just wait around for God to magically redeem this broken situation? Do I count to three and hope for joy to magically infuse my heart?

This isn’t working. My heart is still as hard as popsicles. How? If the gospel changes everything, how does it change this specific situation in my life?

I should have read on. The second chapter of “Risen Motherhood” is titled, “What is the gospel?” And I have to admit, I rolled my eyes. I grew up in a preacher’s family. As a kid I attended church services three to four times a week. I’ve heard the gospel till I bleed in the ears. I don’t need yet another retelling of what the gospel is. I felt like I was reading a book explaining the alphabet to me.

But as I read that chapter the next day, I realized I had left out something: I have an enemy. He is a real being, and the Bible describes him as “a murderer from the beginning” who has “no truth in him,” “a father of lies.” (John 8:44)

I don’t know how that slipped my mind, but it jolted me. The fact that I have an enemy who’s a liar and a thief became so real to me. Then it clicked: There is someone who’s actively trying to destroy my marriage. There is someone who’s whispering falsehoods in my ear, and then sitting back watching and cackling while I take his lead and continue the work of self-destruction. There is someone who viciously hates me, because I am loved by God whom he hates, because I share the glory of God that he covets. This someone tells me that the gospel is irrelevant and boring; he blasts white noise in my head: blah blah blah, I know it all already.

But do I, really? Is the gospel a continuous reality for me? Why do I always forget? Why do I go through life with the gospel as a blur in the background, like coffeeshop music? Because in my worst moments, in the deepest, darkest caves of my thoughts, if the gospel doesn’t shine there, then is it true?

If the gospel is true, then I need to wake up and protect my marriage. And if the gospel is true, then when I’m hearing the lie that my husband is a terrible spouse, I can remember exactly who planted that lie in my head, and I fight back with victory, because Christ crushed that enemy’s head on the cross. If the gospel is true, then I need to pray– really pray, not just by myself, but with my husband, for my husband, for us.

David and I are both very independent beings. We even do our own laundry– which is fine, but we carry our independence into our spiritual walk too, which is not fine. Other than meal times, we rarely pray together. I guess I think of those picture-perfect Christian influencer couples kneeling and praying while holding hands (somehow they’re always young, blonde, and beautiful), and it feels so inauthentic, cheesy, performative. But since Tov’s birth, I’m feeling the urgent need for us to practice the habit of praying together for the sake of our household, for the sake of keeping the gospel active and true in our life.

Since then, David and I have talked more about our needs and expectations. He suggested doing a devotional together every evening during dinner. We’ve been doing that (not always consistently, because such is life) for about three weeks now. At times we get distracted, especially when Tov is being extra fussy, but that’s OK. There is grace for all of that. This is a season of grace. And thank God, the grace is all His.