So, it's been almost two months since my last post. My personal goal is one a month, but I couldn't make either November or December because I spent 6 weeks of that time solo parenting. Bochuan found a job within the arctic circle for the Christmas season. He worked as a cook in a restaurant for the company Lapland Safaris. He was at the Reikonlinna location in Saariselkä.
To give you a sense of how far North that is, you can check out this photo. The red dot is where he was. Surprisingly, though, over the course of the time we were separated, it was often as cold or colder in Lappeenranta. I think this may be because we live by a large lake,
which creates colder winters and warmer summers. It might also have just been a milder winter in Saariselkä. It’s hard to say. One thing I can say is that the scenery in Saariselkä was spectacular. I know this because toward the end of his contract, Alaya and I also went to Saariselkä to ring in the new year and bring Bochuan home. However, I'll talk more about that trip in the next blog. This blog will focus on the time he was gone and some of the realizations I came to.
When Bochuan first told me about this job, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t get it. He didn’t have experience working in a restaurant, except one class that had some culinary training during his nutrition program. I wasn’t sure I wanted him to get the job. We’d just moved to a new country. We had no family here. I had some friends, but they ranged in age from 18-21. They were great for help with my math and physics homework but were just becoming adults themselves. I didn’t have any parent peers. I didn’t have a go-to babysitter. I didn’t have the language skills to even know where to begin to find one. There was also the issue of the pandemic, which made getting help if Alaya got sick impossible. Being in a new country with a young child where the culture and language were new was hard enough, and did I mention I was back in school studying a subject completely foreign to me and that it wasn’t going so well? Why in the world would I want to add solo parenting to the list of new challenging things I was doing?
I didn’t want to, but Bochuan said, “I’m hoping we can make this work,” when he was ultimately offered the job, and I caved. Either that, or I suited up. An assurance came over me that I could do this. However, I did have one caveat. We got all of our stuff, finally, after exactly 100 days—there’s something beautiful about that number—on November 2nd. And before Bochuan left, I wanted all 27 boxes we had received to be unpacked. This meant that much of November was taken up with unpacking when I wasn’t mommying and studying.
Bochuan then left on November 21st, and the remainder of that month and December was taken up with trying to survive mummying and studying and everything else, but it was good for me. It was really good for me.
I came to many realizations, but I’ll just discuss two major ones here.
The first realization I came to was how quiet it was in my head and how at peace I felt when Bochuan wasn’t around. Now, that might sound a bit ominous, but it doesn’t feel that way to me. What it made me realize was that I had a deep-seated value around fairness. To me, fairness meant that housework should be divided more or less 50-50; parenting more or less 50-50; working / studying more or less 50-50. When Bochuan wasn’t around, my mind wasn’t busy keeping score of who did what and how much. How much time was Bochuan getting to work on his stuff versus how much time I was getting to work on mine? How much time was he spending with Alaya versus how much time I was spending with her? When you add up all the housework that’s been done today, who should do the dishes tonight? All of this subconscious tallying was exhausting.
When Bochuan wasn’t around, all of these questions disappeared too. I knew I’d be doing the dishes and the laundry and the groceries and taking out the trash. I’d also have to pick Alaya up every time she cried and every time she just wanted to be picked up, and I knew I’d need to do even more than that to try to reassure her in the absence of father’s presence.
When I was 18 months old, my mother went to the United States to work and send money back to Jamaica. By the time I moved to the US seven years later, my parents had decided to get a divorce, and I chose to live with my mother. So, for almost all of my childhood, I have been in a single caretaker home, and I came to realize that this was how I approached parenting, and that it was in many ways easier for me to solo parent. Beyond all of those questions above receding, I also didn’t have to come to an agreement about how to parent. I didn’t have to wonder what Bochuan thought about my saying or doing this or that, or particularly, what I was or wasn’t giving Alaya to eat or even what I was eating myself. During this period, I did a meditation challenge around intuitive eating, and I won’t say much about that realization here, but I’d recommend everyone learn more about it. I always thought I had a healthy relationship with food, but I came to realize my relationship to food also needed some work, and a lot of the voices in my head around food were disguised in a Bochuan costume, but he's actually very rarely questioned my food choices.
But the important part of this realization wasn’t, “Bochuan is gone, and I’m now more at peace.” The realization was, “I care a lot about what Bochuan thinks, and I make a lot of assumptions about what he thinks. But has he ever said those things to me? Is one of my inner critics simply wearing a Bochuan façade?” Beyond that, “It’s obvious I care about fairness, but how I do achieve that without becoming mentally obsessive about it?” It was clear to me that it was easier to do 100% of everything myself than to do 50 or 60% of it while keeping a tally on who did what.
It was clear that my mind was causing me suffering, so how did we address this when Bochuan returned? Because I knew these issues weren’t coming up simply because I’m crazy or obsessive. They were coming up because of the values I had and needs I felt weren’t being met. However, I wasn’t going to address the situation by keeping track of how much each of task each person was doing and trying to assign a weight to each task when they weren’t really comparable. For instance, how much was being up in the middle of the night with Alaya for two hours worth in dishwashing?
This realization led to several questions I'm still working on, and I'll probably address more in future posts.
What did I need? How did I ask for it?
What could I let go of?
How much could I really accomplish in a day?
What were my individual priorities?
What were our priorities as parents? What were our priorities as a couple and as a family?
What values would govern how we prioritized our time?
This brings me to the second realization: Being a mother is my number one priority.
I know. I know. As a society, we expect that our children will be our number one priority, and we say these things sometimes without much thought. But it really sunk in during this time with Alaya. Alaya, was sick on and off pretty much for three of the weeks of the time that Bochuan was gone. She would seem to be getting better, then get sicker again. This meant that I got even less work than I hoped done. And the work I hoped to get done was already pretty basic level. I sometimes wondered if it was possible at all to be the mother of a toddler and a student.
When Alaya was sick, I couldn’t send her to daycare because of the pandemic, and for the same reason, there were also no other care options. If your child is showing upper respiratory systems, your home is essentially off-limits unless you have family / friends willing to take the risk. I did not. So, Alaya’s only possible caregiver during those times was me.
But even when she wasn’t sick, I wasn’t keen to introduce her to a complete stranger to give myself a few hours away. Why? She’d just moved to a new country. She was learning a new language. Her father, one of the few constants in her short life, had suddenly disappeared for a period of time she couldn't comprehend and to a place she didn't know. She’s been going to the same daycare for the past 4 months, and she still doesn’t talk to the people there, even though she’ll speak Finnish to us, and they've reported that she seems to understand what they are saying. So, there may have been other care options for her when she was healthy, but I wasn’t keen to leave her anywhere but the usually scheduled daycare from 8am to 4pm. I wanted to give her as much security as I could, which often meant making school related sacrifices, like putting off a final exam, or not being able to study as much as I wanted to for another. I got a score of 1 out of a possible 5 for the exam, which is now my grade for the class, as your course grade is based entirely on this exam.
And these sacrifices were at first difficult and uncomfortable because I could hear societal voices suggesting that things would be easier if I weren’t still breastfeeding and cosleeping with my two-year-old. I could hear people saying, “You have to cut the cord sometime.” And there was also the usual, and I’ve said this before myself, “Children are resilient.” But one of things I learned in the last six weeks was that some kids are resilient and others are not, and it’s not a given that child will be resilient. Resilience was something that had to be nurtured into a child, and a sense of security was an important place to start. Since Bochuan and I chose to live this life far from our families, outside our cultural and linguistic norms, we’d have to give Alaya some other anchor to hold onto in this wild ocean, and that was us. When Bochuan wasn't there, that meant just me.
So, for the time Bochuan was away, I came up with an acronym that helped me think about my day and my priorities at each point in time. It was MOSS:
Mother
Organize
Study
Self-Care/Socialize.
Being Alaya’s mom was my number one priority. Also, it was important that our home was mostly organized; the trash was taken out regularly; we had food in the house; and Alaya had clean clothes to wear. So, “organize” covered all of those tasks that are an important part of life, and I tried to do as much of it as I could while Alaya was at daycare instead of while I was trying to mother. Studying speaks for itself; it was the time I had to prioritize my school work. Finally, self-care/socializing was an important way for me to reenergize and reconnect with my community, which gave me the energy to start the cycle all over again. Sometimes self-care meant taking a nap instead of studying more, but it was important that I maintained my health. I most feared the possibility of Alaya and I being sick at the same time.
It might seem a little silly or perhaps somewhat underwhelming, but the realization I came to while Bochuan was away was that I had at least two jobs. I wasn't just a full-time student. I was a full-time mother, and this job trumped everything else. School was, if anything, my part-time job. School was my side thing. And I'm not sure if I can become an electrical engineer when school isn't my number one priority. However, I can only do so much, and I remind myself often that I don't need to do my best. I just need to do enough.
One of my very good friends and mentors Stephanie always reminds me, “Dare to Be Adequate!” And I'm working on relaxing into this concept. My lived experience up to this point immediately revolts at the idea, and I just sit with that feeling, that it's not okay to be adequate. And I remind myself that I don't have to have the courage to do something. I can do it even without the courage.
I might fail this program if I don't make it my number one priority, but I continue to encourage myself not to fail because I feel I don't deserve to be here.
**The first photo is the day before Bochuan left for Saariselkä. The remaining photos are from the six weeks Bochuan was gone. The photos at the top are from Lappeenranta. The photos in the last row are from Saariselkä, where Bochuan got to see the Aurora Borealis.
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