I don’t know how many people know that if Alaya had been born a boy, her name would have been Everett Max Yixin Xie, though the Yixin would have been different Chinese characters. I know I have mentioned in previous posts an interest in having a second child; it was even one of the deciding factors for my leaving school in Lappeenranta and taking my current position. I’ve thought that should our future child be a boy, a good name would be Everest instead of Everett. You get it? Everest and (Him)Alaya?
I am beaming at the thought of this. BEAM would have become our new family acronym.
Even when I was choosing my current website name, thebamfamily, I thought about what I would do if we had a second child. Would I need to create a new site? This is the extent to which a second child felt like only a matter of time to me.
I was willing to go through more medical procedures and simulated menopause, if necessary, to bring this child into the world. I was willing to keep my career on the back seat to continue my focus on building our family.
Growing my family has been my number one priority since Bochuan and I started trying to conceive in 2017. That year I co-published a book with Don Snow, and I participated in the “Tea with Distinguished TESOLer’s” as one of the distinguished guests. Imagine: people in my field were willing to pay $50 to have tea with me. I’m not sure I have given a single conference presentation since. All other publications, workshops, and invited speaker events were not opportunities I sought out so much as opportunities I took advantage of when they arose. This distinction is important, as up to that point, I thought—no I was told—that I had to create opportunities, that I needed to be vigilant or I would miss opportunities, that if I wasn’t constantly hustling, I would get left behind, lose my job, become unemployable. Worse yet, I would get lazy. (I've only just this year learned that Laziness Does Not Exist).
Of course, one reason for the break in my focus on my career as an English language teacher came from my plan to change careers, not from deep insight or trust in life. Some of you might remember my plans to become a counseling psychologist. Most of you will know of my plans to become an engineer, though that was mostly to get to Finland. But really, the underlying motivation for many of my actions since 2017 was family. Right now, I do not live to work; I work to support my family.
So, it’s not a small thing when I say that we have decided to just be the BAM family. I have finally decided that my desire to expand my family does not exceed my desire to preserve it. I have chosen the BAM family over the dream of BEAM.
The BAM Family Store
Recently, I had the thought that my family was like a small business Bochuan and I started. When we got married, we opened this family shop. The first year was hard; Bochuan went through a depressive episode. I learned the most important lesson I feel I have ever learned about love. I wrote it in my vows:
Love is a choice. Not just a choice that we make today with these witnesses, but it is a choice we must make every day, even every moment.
Love to me is just the choice to lean toward the other person and their choice to lean towards you. Our shop managed to weather that first year and the second, at the end of which, we decided to try expanding our operations to include a child. The initial plans for a new shop fell through (miscarriage), but I was so excited when our second shop did open successfully (birth of Alaya). However, as with opening our first shop, the stress of so many new responsibilities led Bochuan to suffer Paternal Postpartum Depression. There were times that first year of Alaya’s life that I didn’t know if we’d manage to keep our initial shop (our marriage) operational.
It was only after having Alaya that I first considered that expanding the family business was mostly my dream. Bochuan was my partner, but the shop wasn’t his passion. At the time, I thought it was a cultural thing. I thought it was about the way we socialize little boys (focus on studies, career, success) versus little girls (focus on family, community, putting others before ourselves). I thought that in Finland, where there was greater gender equality, Bochuan might see other roles that men could play. I thought he might see that it was possible to value family and career equally.
Then last year, when Alaya was three years old, I felt that our business was thriving. I thought we had the resources and capacity to expand our operations again, though this was meant to be more like a stall at the mall than a fully independent store. And we invited Miska into our lives. However, the environment for that shop wasn’t a good match, and we ended up using a significant amount of profits from our original store just to try to keep this stall afloat. After some time, we had to accept that we needed to close the shop before we went bankrupt. It’s remarkable how much this closure reminded me of my miscarriage.
It was this final experience of trying to expand our operations that made me think, as this blog post suggests, I shouldn’t continue pursuing my dream to own a chain of stores. Sure, I was only thinking one more shop and that stall in a better-suited mall (a.k.a. a different four-legged creature), but Miska taught me the high cost that investing outward could bring. The greatest cost of rehoming Miska has been the loss that Alaya feels at no longer having a puppy. She misses him and asks regularly if we can go to see him. This is not a problem, but there have been intense, violent tantrums that start with not wanting to brush her teeth and end in the repetition of “I. Want. Miska.” between gasps for breath because she’s crying so hard. Bochuan and I are doing our best to make space for her grief, her anger, her frustration, and her sadness as she processes the change in our family. And, overall, I think things are improving, but now it’s not just Bochuan I need to consider when trying to grow the business.
I was surprised this past April, when near the end of Bochuan and Alaya’s trip to China, Bochuan said he could see himself having another child. I was excited in May to have that back on the table, but we learned a lot from rehoming Miska in September. The relapse in Bochuan’s depressive symptoms in the weeks prior to rehoming the puppy made very clear that he and I could only manage so much. What if we had a second child, and we couldn’t manage?
Of course, there is more support for human children than animal ones, but we wouldn’t be able to return a baby to the breeder should having two children prove too much. More importantly, new parenthood would be exhausting if the child’s health and behavior was within the range of what might be called “normal.” But what if this child were in some way differently abled or neurodivergent, requiring a level of care Bochuan and I had no experience with? Would we still be able to take care of ourselves, be there for Alaya, and meet the needs of another child? Of course, no one knows.
But more importantly, the expansion of our family business is really my dream. We both want it to work, but Bochuan mostly wants it to work because I want it to work.
And I’ve seen what Bochuan is like when he’s passionate about something intrinsically. At the beginning of October, we went to a library event in another city that was focused on celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival. On the way there, Bochuan stopped at every tree, bush, and flower to identify it (something he’s learning to do for his degree in horticulture, which he is learning in Finnish). He practiced with flashcards the Finnish and Latin names of the different species any spare moment he had. Even as I write this, he’s busy creating new flashcards, drawing photos of leaves and other distinguishing features of each tree by hand. This was his passion; this was taking him to his dream. Expanding the family? This would take time away from what he really wanted to be doing.
In an online article entitled “The Secret to a Good Relationship? Discomfort” Susan Piver writes, “I’ve come to think that the most deeply loving gesture I can make within my relationship is to… cease and desist from threatening my husband with consequences should he fail to be the person I need him to be rather than the person he is. This is the noble experiment of love.”
Could I let go of who I needed Bochuan to be and embrace who he was? This was the real question. It was never really about whether or not we should have another child. It became clear that the options were either to find someone else to make a family with (No, thanks) or cherish the family I have now. Just as it is. Just Bochuan, Alaya, and Maxi.
So, I have chosen to give up on opening more stores. I have chosen to focus on the quality of relationships I have now, customer satisfaction (are we all thriving?), and being financially sound (fiscally, physically, and mentally).
In 2017, I feel I put down my work-related ambition. Ironically, I now have a full-time, permanent position that doesn’t require me to get a PhD I don’t want. In other words, it was while my career-related ambitions were in the back seat that I managed to achieve job security.
Now, in 2023, I’m putting down my family-related ambition. I was afraid to do this before because I had thought—no I had been told—that I needed to be ambitious. I was generally afraid of what it would mean if I stopped striving. Would I still be attractive if I didn’t have any particular goal I was trying to achieve? Wasn’t that akin to losing oneself, to letting oneself go? Weren’t we supposed to hold onto this imagined sense of self for dear life?
I feel like not having an ambition could be grounds for losing US citizenship. I have been asked so many times since starting my new position if I am still going to school. We live in the kind of society that now expects people to work full-time, go to school at least part-time, raise children, while also dealing with any potential health problems, like chronic pain. This is the new normal. But should it be?
Toni Morrision once said, “At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.”
Somehow this quote says to me, “At some point in life, being becomes enough. You don’t need to strive, to achieve, or do anything in particular. Your existence is enough.”
Enough. I’m going to try living like I’ve already arrived at my destination, like this were all I needed, like now was enough. I’m going to try out a life that is not striving for anything in particular, that’s not going somewhere else, that’s just here. A life where I neither live to work, nor work to support my family, nor wrap-up my identity in achievement. A life where I just show up, open to whatever happens next.
Sebene Selassie, one of my favorite meditation teachers and authors, wrote a post she entitled “Trust Life - Let Joy Be.” It has become my mantra since reading it. Trust that life will provide even without all the hustling. Savor the joy that comes up in small and big ways throughout my days.
Trust Life. Let Joy Be.
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