#diary

Dear XYZ,

I recall a few years ago, I would come across friends and acquaintances with children who would be married to their baby’s schedule. They would turn down invites, or say sorry, that’s past my baby’s bedtime even if it’s (what I would consider at the time) early evening. I would think to myself that they may be spoiling their kids or making them too inflexible by their strict adherence to rigid routines.

Well that was before I had a child myself, and my perspective on it has changed since.

I’ve come to realize that keeping to these routines is, for a large part, an act of self-preservation. There’re a lot of unknowns unknowns while raising a baby. Plus, they can’t communicate exactly what they want or are uncomfortable with by telling you. Their main mode of communication are crying, making non-verbal sounds, and physical gestures. These are by no means as information-rich as they primary mode of adult communication, language.

Often times being a parent involves a lot of guessing, attention, and learning from previous experience. All of this involves time and energy. And when a baby is often waking up in the middle of the night, both are scarce in a baby parent’s life. The routine helps cut down the number of variables that a parent needs to reason through their baby’s behavior. And the routine helps the baby, especially those younger than 3 months, understand daily rhythms because their body aren’t able to properly make out night and day yet. A departure from these imposed schedules could cause their rhythms to go out of tempo, which then results in a disrupted sleep for their parents.

Reduced sleep can have a wide range of detrimental effects for people. Loss of patience, frustration, reduced ability to think and manage emotions, and the list goes on. This could in turn lead to poorer parenting decisions, and possibly cause a bad spiral, riddled with guilt and self-doubt.

So next time your baby parent friend is keeping to a rigid schedule, try to understand that they’re not necessarily doing this for their baby, but for their own sanity.

xoxo,
K

Dear XYZ,

We just sent my mom off at the airport earlier this morning. The last time I was at the airport, I was picking her up. Y hasn’t been born yet, I’m now a dad. Before everything happened, I wasn’t quite sure how she would take being here, coming to live with us. It had been a while since I’ve lived that closely with my mom, so I had some worries about how things might transpire.

I’ve heard before that humans are more loss-averse than we are gain-seeking. Coming back home, I noticed that the house is left with the trails of her presence — a few boxes to be recycled, certain things in the kitchen placed in a manner that only she would do. But more clearly felt is the void that was left in her absence. There is a saying that goes, “Don’t make your presence known. Make your absence felt.” This is how I feel right now.

My mom, by her own account, loves to sew, cook, and look after kids. And the latter shows when she’s interacting with Y. She really enjoys her time with Y. And Y reciprocates, he’s excited to be around grandma. I know that my mom will be there for me when I need her. No one’s perfect, my mom has her own flaws, but she is always trying to be better and I feel like that’s a pretty rare trait nowadays. Especially as someone who’s older, it’s easy to say “I’ve seen it all”, but she’s willing to listen, understand and learn new things. I really hope that I can retain that level of open-mindedness as I grow older.

Walking by the room left empty by her, there’s a sense that something is missing. I don’t want to sound too morbid, but I think I know what her death would feel like now. I would really miss her.

And perhaps this is mixed in with all my emotions of being a new dad — I recall my mom telling me that she felt depressed for a period of time when all of us kids left home. Coincidentally, my siblings and I progressively emptied out of our parents’ house within the span of about a year. Around 20+ years of family commotion reduced to pin-drop silence; I can see why she felt that way much more than before now. Dealing with that empty nest must’ve felt a bit like mini-deaths. A bunch of previously filled rooms, now vacant.

I’m going to try to turn the way I feel at this moment into action by trying my best to include my parents into my life as I grow my own family, before their time here comes to an end.

xoxo,
K

Dear XYZ,

Y just crossed his one month a couple of days ago. There were a couple of things I wanted to jot down because I didn’t come across them during my pre-parent readings (which admittedly I didn’t do a whole lot of).

1. Dry hands

I’m washing things (bottles, clothing, etc) much more frequently as I did before. I observed that my hands are now much drier and my cuticles are cracking more often. Moisturize!

2. Baby smiles

I’m not sure if this is a particularity of Y, but I noticed that Y first smiled in his sleep. More recently, he’s smiling when he’s awake. This is pretty interesting and somewhat surprising to me. It’s not that he isn’t able to smile necessarily but that doing it while conscious is somehow different. It’s super cute when he smiles, but when he does it awake there’s definitely some bonus joy (because secretly I think maybe it’s something I did).

3. Active sleep

When Y sleeps, the early part of his sleep could happen with his eyes half or fully open. It would dart around, kind of like REM sleep but his eyelids would be wide open. Babies have active sleep typically until about 3-5 months.

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Needless to say there are times when Y cries when we are completely clueless why. I guess as young parents you kinda just cycle through the things until you find something that soothes them — bouncing, changing diapers, feeding, burping, etc.

Going back to work officially tomorrow, hoping that the transition will be ok for everyone. This shouldn’t be the big one since my mom will still be around.

I’m still waking up with C during sleep hours when Y wakes up for feeds, which is about 2-3 times a night. Hopefully that can continue without me feeling too tired for work the next morning.

Things are going pretty well overall for now, and I’m thankful.

xoxo,
K

Dear XYZ,

Y was born on 8 August 2026. That makes me a dad, which is something pretty incredible to wrap my head around. In some ways, having a kid is one of the most typical things about life — otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this and you wouldn’t be reading it — but yet every individual birth feels like such a miracle in itself. How is it that a sperm and an egg can come together to create a brand new human being with combined traits from mom and dad?

Y’s birth was relatively successful. There was a short moment where there was a possibility that we may have to do an emergency C-section but fortunately we didn’t have to resort to that. C did an amazing job, she’s a trooper as usual. What’s kind of funny is that we found that Y probably had his hand on his face when mommy was trying to push him out, so the pushing took a bit longer than we thought it would, though again, relatively short.

I brought my mom to visit Y at the hospital on the second day. I managed to muster my courage and broached the religion topic which I wrote about previously. While she would’ve preferred a different outcome, she was accepting of our decision. Mom said that she hopes that I don’t have to go through some kind of catastrophic experience to rediscover faith. She mentioned that the testimonies that she hears for rebound Catholics often involve them going through some kind of traumatic event. I think there’s some survival bias here, that many of these returning Catholics have experienced such painful life-changing incidents found solace in faith. The people who led otherwise ordinary lives likely stayed the course. This could explain why those testimonies aren’t heard, or even if they are, they are likely much less salient than the painful ones. This experience has also led me to think about the relationship between life and writing (or perhaps more broadly, art). I’m not sure if I would have the same conversation with my mom had I not put it into writing. In that sense, I have already gained from writing by living more truthfully. Perhaps writing can act as a sort of rehearsal by staging the situation with words first.

Y is absolutely adorable. He makes really epic funny faces and poses. It’s super fun to observe him grow.

As of this writing, Y is on his thirteenth day. In the first two weeks, I think the main concern is getting the baby to regain their birth weight. For those who don’t know (I only found out during pre-natal courses), babies will usually lose some weight after birth and regain it by the second week or so. One of my personal challenges during this phase, as someone who loves to plan, is that Y’s hunger doesn’t really follow a fixed schedule. So things change on a daily basis. Having medical consultative help has been a great source of confidence and reassurance, and so has the occasional questions to Claude for consolidating normative benchmarks and guidelines. Prescriptive science, when applied to medicine and biology, is normative in nature. This means that parents are often trying to fit a shape that is defined by normative distribution. I have some thoughts about this, I think it’s probably the best approach that we know of, but it immediately forces parents to be in a comparative state of mind and to worry about “standards” right after the baby is born — I’m not sure if that’s a good starting mental space for new parents. I might discuss this more in a separate post. Fortunately, we just came back from the medical appointment and Y is now heavier than his birth weight. So in that regard, we’re probably done with this first “quest”.

So far most things have been within the range of expectations — disrupted sleep, less structured time, changing diapers, getting pooped, peed, and puked on. Things have been a lot easier with mom holding the fort in the kitchen, cooking delicious meals for us everyday. It has been immensely helpful to not have to worry about it and know that C’s diet is properly taken care of. I can’t imagine doing this without at least some parental leave. I don’t understand how some working parents are able to survive with little to none of it. Caring for a baby is something that requires time and takes some getting used to. I find myself feeling somewhat tired and thus frustrated at times even when I’m on paternity leave. I can’t imagine people who have to juggle everything all at once in the first few weeks of their baby’s life. I feel like it would be a lot harder to enjoy this time if there are so many other things that require your attention. I’m really lucky to have this time to be with my family.

The last thing I wanted to mention today is that there is a lot of well-meaning advice and pointers that come your way as a parent. I don’t think I know how to properly deal with those yet; I mostly find them somewhat annoying. What I find especially annoying are people telling me all the work that needs to be done and pointing out all of the tasks. I find that kind of… boring and off-putting? Maybe it’s just me being weird haha, but I don’t think it’s super helpful to give such information nowadays in such an information-dense world? I think if the roles are reversed, what I would say instead is to assure the parent(s) that they’ll do a great job and tell them the cool things to look forward to, for instance, the funny little noises that they make and their cute facial expressions.

All in all, glad that things are going well in general. Definitely more to come!

xoxo,
K

Dear XYZ,

I messed up yesterday. Got a bit impatient at C for asking me the same question multiple times over the course of several days. Really wasn’t being very considerate or kind, especially to a pregnant person with all sorts of biological changes that she’s going through. I apologized, but I wanted to reflect further on it because I think any type of real change requires a sort of mental or behavioral circuit breaking.

Habit breaking is difficult because it requires us to change our norm. It’s easy to stick with the status quo because there’s already some kind of grain direction that is our natural state. A simple example of this, especially when I was in my grade-school years, is having to write the date on paper assignments. The new year would come around, but it’ll take me a few weeks, maybe even a month, to correct my muscle memory of writing the previous year.

And so breaking out of a habit, or for that matter, going against the grain for anything, for instance cultural or social norms, require some discomfort or additional energy or attention.

Over the next week or so, I’m going to slow down and turn on a “monitor mode” whenever I have any interactions with X. She deserves better, and our son, who will be born in about a month, deserves that too.

I’ve developed a mantra when I find myself getting into a frustrated state — “slow, chill, center”. To remind myself that I am apart from the immediate emotions I’m feeling, so that I can take a quasi-third-person perspective and consider how I actually want to respond. I think this can also be turned into a breathing exercise, the first two words on the breath in, and the last word on the breath out.

Habits take a while to fix. In my poor memory I recall some fact about 7 weeks for habit forming. I expect to report back on how I’m doing here to you, just so that there’s some account there to keep track of.

This also made me think about the Confucian saying, “修身，齐家，治国，平天下。” The way that I interpret this is that change needs to start within us, and emanate outward. We have to cultivate ourselves to make our families and the wider world better.

Unrelatedly, I also thought about how, ultimately, the people that we impact the most are the ones that are closest to us: family, friends. It’s ironic that, it’s often these people that we end up hurting the most. For all that public success brings you, I’m not sure if any of it can ever equate to the private satisfactions of good relationships that are built over decades. At least for me personally, I think that’s one of the real measures of how someone lives their life.

I’ll do better.

xoxo,
K