A mother's worries

The other day, a friend of mine looked up the latest photos online for Winston (picasaweb.google.com/michaelzlin) and wrote me the following message:

“Winston is so unbelievably cute! Seriously, and I've seen many cute babies. And is he always in such a good mood? You still look a little stressed though. Usually mothers with such happy and thriving babies have a glow about them, which says something along the line of "I am content and settling down". None of that in you yet from what I can see.”

And I wrote back, “Indeed you are right that I am not content at all, and in fact, rather stressed out. I don’t think I can take credit for Winston’s being happy, but I do take credit for figuring out (in many cases although I still failed in a few) very quickly what’s bothering him, so that things can be fixed quickly instead of having him suffer for long, which could make him perpetually cranky. For instance, often I would wake up in the middle of the night (because he wimpered a little bit but did not wake up) and then started thinking about what could be bothering him, so that I could do some experiments to figure out. Those sleepless nights were in a way self-inflicted.

My dedication to him is certainly no less than how I was dedicated to my first startup company, when I also would stay up at night figuring out how to keep the team together till we could see some hope of financing, etc. When others were sound asleep, I would be thinking, and frequently those thoughts did turn to productive actions, but of course many did not. So everything did come at a cost.”

I took Winston to a children’s play place in the nearby shopping mall. He’s perhaps the only kid there that could not walk around easily on his own – everyone else was running around. First, he was so scared that he would start crying immediately after I put him down somewhere. He was completely overwhelmed by the frenzy going on around him, with kids laughing, tumbling and running as well as music blasting. But after a while, he felt better and more comfortable and he was then playing as well, and even laughing his head off when he was in the jumping house. I was so happy that he adjusted quickly to the new environment.

It occurred to me that many years ago when I told a friend that I did not want to have kids because I did not want to give the kid the sense of responsibility to live the kind of life I wanted for myself – a terrible burden to bear but frequently the case with Asian families. Now I realize that it is very hard for a mother to not wish for her son everything that she would have loved herself growing up. Now that still is a heavy burden to bear, especially for an only child.

Poor Winston...