Revival

I haven’t written in almost 3 years. I got lost in the routine of small children and was flooded by so much anger over Trump’s presidency that it was hard to find the emotional reserve to put words down in any constructive way.

And then, COVID-19. I look at the tag line of this blog and almost vomit. To be worried about making organic baby food...if only I had such woes now.

Marriage, death of a parent, betrayal by a parent, birth of a child, birth of a second child, political chaos... these are supposed to be the defining moments of my life, formative to my character and the shape of my personal narrative. I was woefully unprepared for a catastrophic health crisis to be the focal point of my adult life. 

There is an abundance of information, misinformation, tweets and Facebook group threads. I devour everything to seek out some hope that maybe we are learning our lesson. That the next state will heed what China told Italy, what Italy told the US, what Washington told New York, what we are telling everyone else. But the human mind wants so badly to not believe the worst, to try to deny the inevitable because it is too much to bear.

I am delivering babies. I am consoling patients, woefully unprepared to be surgeon and therapist. My partners and I are scrubbing our bodies and putting our clothes in plastic bags, showering and gargling before we touch our families. My colleagues are wearing masks around their babies and sleeping in garages or laundry rooms. We are calling our siblings to ask if they will raise our children in the event that we die.

Some figures report up to 15% of those ill with COVID-19 are hospital workers right now. Reports from China tell the tale of some 40,000 healthcare workers with not a single COVID positive case amongst them. They wore full hazmat suits their entire shift, some of them wearing adult diapers to save their PPE and so they would not risk any contamination with donning and doffing their gear after a bathroom break.

And meanwhile here in the US, my phone blows up with fellow OBGYNs across the country who are shamed for wearing a mask during patient care and vaginal deliveries. I am sourcing masks from my family who find coveted n95s in hardware stores and believe it or not from my father’s friends in Asia. Physicians are being fired for speaking up about lack of gear. We will risk our lives, we know what the cost would be if we were not at the bedside, but we are not martyrs. We cannot strike like the sanitary workers in Pittsburg for our lack of protection. We cannot quit our jobs and take a leave of absence. We have families and we are humans who deserve all the armor we can afford while walking into this war.

I write this as catharsis for me and as a commentary on our nation’s lack of a coordinated effort to manage this chaos. We are not the fifty United States of America. We are islands. We are fifty school children running like scattered ping pong balls fearing a school shooter with no teacher, no principal to tell us how to survive the massacre. We need a DOH and CDC who can objectively process scientific data and make reasonable recommendations that are befitting of the supposed richest country in the world. On March 11, the US had just over a thousand cases and that perhaps was our tipping point. We could have shut the country down then but no one wanted schools closed, no one wanted the stock market to fall, college kids wanted their Spring Break in Fort Lauderdale. I applaud the NBA and organized sports for shutting down. But everything we did was too late. No one told anyone what that would mean for us as a country with cases bouncing from one state to the next.We are currently on a worse trajectory than any other industrialized nation and the worst of this disease is yet to come. 

Tomorrow

My daughter starts kindergarten tomorrow. My newsfeed and Instagram are flooded with wistful photos of kids starting school. New beginnings. Fresh starts. Cute signs in ironic hipster fonts proclaiming their new grade.
I'll do it too. It's fun to show off the product of your loins!
September feels like a reset. Hold down that button and restart, erase too much summer indulgence, shake out your stir crazy two week hiatus from childcare, make a plan to get back to your running routine.You'll promise to pack your kiddos healthy lunches, buy a cool new bento box to house your organic,  portable creations.
The back to school fervor and new stuff helps to sort of muffle the dull ache of  holy crap, my baby is growing up. All the work to potty train, book and bath bedtime routine, put on your own shoes, on the CORRECT feet, pulllleaaase eat breakfast, feels so much like minutiae in comparison to this GIANT new step.
As I tiptoe out of my son's room (he's just three, I have some time left with that one!) to sneak downstairs and OZark Netflix myself with the hubs, I feel a string pulling me into my daughter's room. I squat at her bedside, breathe in her sleepy warmth and hold my breath just for a moment. It's really good. I am so very lucky to have helped raise this slumbering creature.
Parenthood is all at once a test of my patience, a fit of laughter, a tender hug, a really unexpected question from the backseat, an uncomfortable bathroom conversation, fighting over the last Dory bandaid.... a first day of school.
It's crazy good and crazy hard and the best part of my life. I feel so very fortunate to be able to do it. 

Running scared

A few weeks ago I went running in the early morning and two men in TRUMP gear were flanking the sidewalk.

I felt my heart rate quicken and I darted past hoping they might not notice a small Chinese woman in liberal athleisurewear passing them.

I was scared.

I did not lift my chin and puff my chest, or draw on my girl boss self. I was a rabbit at the dog races. I have not felt that way in very long time. I had a quick flashback to age nine, moving to a new town and being taunted with "Hey Chopsticks!". I grew up feeling small. So, so small because of my Asian-ness, my slanted eyes and rosewood decorated home. 

I am now an almost forty-something, wife, mother, physician who has seen her fair share of life, trauma and loss. I am not supposed to worry that two older men in my small suburban community might try to assault me for my race. I am the product of two immigrants who came to the United States in hopes of a brighter future for their children. A place where girl babies were cherished and not cast down a grassy hill, where women were equals and there were no quotas on childbearing. 

I felt that that America had been lost last night.

So, like the rest of my peers, I retreated into my Facebook bubble. I felt the weight of this giant oil spill, slicking our skin with its filthy tar. I feared for my mixed race children, for women seeking reproductive choice, my Muslim friends. 

I didn't want to feel small again. What did this mean about the country I lived in?

Wait, yes! This is America. It is just because of our Democratic process and collective right to vote, our ability to exercise free choice that TRUMP happened.  The same America that elected Obama, elected TRUMP. 

We HAVE to listen to this vote. I know minorities, women and non-Christians who voted for the president-elect. They are not all bad people or deplorable. There were Muslim, Ivy League-educated, lesbian, millennial undecided female voters who called into NPR and told Brian Lehrer that they just found Clinton to be disingenuous and didn't know what to do. I would have knocked on doors for Bernie, waited in the pouring rain to hear him speak, hosted randoms in my home to campaign for him. I felt no enthusiasm for Hillary and I am a liberal, minority female. ( I did not vote for TRUMP to be clear). It's too easy to scream, RAPIST, RACIST, SEXIST! And to shrink away like a field mouse and run away to Canada. When I was a nine year old girl, I shrunk and looked down, I should not be doing that now. 

The country needs change. Huge change. We cannot ignore that 58 million Americans were so disillusioned with establishment politics that they elected the most outrageous outsider. 

We need to be honest about how the divide between the richest of rich and those barely making minimum wage is expanding and expanding, forming a chasm that conjures images of a starving Fantine, a real life Les Miserables. This is not hyperbole. This election was about feeling disenfranchised and about an America that we New Yorkers just don't see. 

It's about women (and some men like my husband) who make family choices to stay home and make their kids lunch everyday and want to feel valued for that and don't want liberals yelling at them, belittling that decision. It's about the lovely man who delivers my takeout, afraid he will go to jail because he can't afford to buy the health insurance that he is required to by law. There is no way in hell that he can pay those premiums....even though he works 16-hour days.

I should not have bowed my head that day and run scared. I should have said good morning and smiled, because painting those two men as racist, sexist assholes who victimize the women in their life is just widening this gap. It's playing into the media-driven stereotypes that galvanized TRUMP. Those same stereotypes paint me as a Socialist who wants to put lollipops in the mouths of the homeless and lazy, raise everyone's taxes to 90% and destroy free markets. This is not the time to call TRUMP "learning disabled". How are we any different if we sling petty insults back and forth?

Part of why I left Washington DC was because it felt so very bifurcated to me. Gray suited slabs of humans in stone castles running the country, not noticing the city they lived in had the worst public schools in the nation. It felt very black and white as a city and I could feel the resentment brewing, bubbling in the Metro everyday. 

I am fearful of publishing this blog, because I know this is an unpopular opinion. We don't want to believe we are all at fault. That the divorce wasn't one-sided. Blame, blame, blame and yell and call names. Hillary was a bad choice, TRUMP, a far worse one, but they were born of a broken two party system and a growing discontent among a working class that is simply faltering economically. 

We need to really look at this and ask why. We can't write off 58 million humans coexisting among us as Nazis with psychiatric disorders who want to deport us. 

It's far more complex than that. I am not running scared.  This is a wake up call. We are in a powder keg of emotion. I have to make choices now that are for my children's future. I want to help protect their rights in a cooperative way. This is not reality television, this is just reality. 

Impermanence

When I tell you I just stayed up way past my bedtime writing a heartfelt piece about the anniversary of my mom's death (8/16/16) only to have my app shutdown abruptly and erase the whole thing...I can only laugh. 

Impermanence. There you have it. That is the lesson of loss. Everything we have is just barely slipping through our fingers all the time. I had never heard of a sand mandala prior to meeting my husband. And I'll be darned if every life lesson I have had in recent years all comes down to a dang sand mandala. 

It's all fleeting. Appreciate this moment in front of you and create beautiful things /relationships/memories when you can. I could labor over the loss of those words I took time pouring over in the last hour, desperately trying to recreate them. Or I could move on, learn a lesson from my loss and create something new. 

We miss you Margaret Tham. Your silence over the last two years has been surely tough to handle. I have felt robbed by and at peace with your malignancy, enraged and blunted by your untimely loss all at the same time. I have yearned for a few more minutes, one more phone call, one last question, a small piece of advice. Searched for you when I found a dish you would have loved to eat, a dance you would have wanted to learn. But all I have is a legend, a memory that kindly polishes up the good times and slowly blurs the edges of squabbles and harsh words. I remember a great woman. 

A woman who would give me permission to find joy again despite the awful thing that happened to her. Permission to create something intricate, special and complicated with my own life...knowing all the while that it too will be delicately brushed away, its individual colors indiscernible with time one day despite how beautiful and rich it may have been. 

Raising men and women

In the echoes of my daughter coughing at 1am, I can hear her sneaking in the front door from a night at the movies, an hour later than she said she would be. In the hazy streetlight peeking through my sleeping almost two-year son's window, I see a barely arousable teenager luxuriating in a lazy Sunday morning. It hits me that being pregnant and anticipating these warm cherubic babies was not exactly the point. Although this is an incredibly adorable time sprinkled here and there with the frustrations of sleep arrangements, demands for specific stuffed friends and toilet habits, this is not really the meat of what reproduction is all about.

We are raising men and women.  The hands into which we leave our earth, the users, preservers or consumers of what fruitful years are left without leaking ozones and dripping glaciers. It's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day slog of pickup, dropoff, drooling, spilled soup and wearing enough layers. My two little doe-eyed sponges are soaking it all in. It's my responsibility to be an active, graceful participant in their social and emotional development. The how and whys of learning the days of the week and using a fork matter but maybe not as much. I will blink and my children will be grown, with fierce opinions and curious minds and I am laying the groundwork now for their moral compass.

Of late I have been reflecting about our brief cameo in the expanse of time. We need to make it good. We need to raise good humans that will promote others to be the same. I don't want a nation of gimme-gimme mini Drumpfs. How are we here? How did the beckoning eyes of our Statue of Liberty become so ignored? Are we a nation of hateful, hairspray-ed, gun-wielding, racist, uneducated fools who shun diversity?NO. NO. There is a chance.

 It starts here, in this moment when maybe you huff at the cashier for fumbling with your change. When you drive past your garbage man, your mailman, your local crossing guard and don't give a warm nod of acknowledgement, that we are all doing this. THIS. Being human and that at our core we are chemically, genetically the same. Separated maybe just by the good fortune of being born to a family with rich real estate roots, or the bad fortune of being born at a time when your country is ravaged by war. What good comes of teaching our children to hate our neighbors and turn our backs on refugees? I imagine most mothers show their toddlers how to share on the playground, to take turns on the swings, to call for help when a child is lost. As adults it isn't that different, the same rules apply. Shove shove and me first and stealing all the sand in the sandbox looks bad at any age. 

In this moment. Now. For parents and uncles and honorary aunties of young kiddos. Let's teach them that we are a global society, flesh and bone inhabiting one earth. All with hopes and dreams for our warm sleeping babies. All with an incredible opportunity to shape human interaction. This culture of hate and anger isn't sustainable and I don't want my children growing up in a world that doesn't even abide by the basic rules of the playground. 

Xo,

M

I almost failed Organic Chemistry (read I almost got a B+) and now I am a doctor

From an early age, I was heavily praised for being bright and precocious. I was generally obedient and craved deeply my parents love and affection, which perhaps too often went hand-in-hand with a good report card. I recognize they were doing their best, as we all are, just trying to do the right thing day in and day out while putting a roof over our heads and food on the table. 

I strove for perfection, vigorously treading water to please my parents and to maintain an aura of success and competence. I learned very little about failure until I reached college and this article ( Campus Suicide and the Pressure of Perfection http://nyti.ms/1VIuROq) in the NY Times struck a cord with me today. 

Societal and academic pressure has been around for ages and I think the majority of what is said here is already well know. Parental pressure can be debilitating, and one billion Asian teens can tell you that story over and over. The Tiger Helicopter mom is our bread and butter. I was pressured into memorizing my multiplication tables in the dark with three grains of rice while all other children had a proper childhood with cable television and on-brand fruit roll ups and frolicked in the woods carrying Barbie dolls. Or so I thought.

I had a somewhat delusional vision of everyone else's all-American, stress-free homes. Everyone else's life was my fantasy. I dreamed up that faux-reality even without the aid of a perfect Insta-filtered world of swans and bikinis floating in aquatic backyards. I mean, have you seen some of these adolescent Insta accounts?! hashtags with #bae? Goddammit everything is #on fleek. I barely know if the vocab is even in the English language. Merriam Webster be damned! I really do enjoy Facebook and Instagram. I can catch up on old friends and their babies, sneakily investigate a new friend's husband's name that I forgot and I am a member of some Mom groups that tell me what day to recycle my milk cartons. But I feel Insta-pressure from other postpartum moms who look like Greek goddesses in their bikinis after 4 kids, and I am a grown up! How on earth are my kids supposed to grow up in this era of Photoshopped-life and not feel that need to keep up? 

I guess the answer lies with me and my husband. We can be human reminders that perhaps a picture is worth a thousand words, but those words may just be a good work of fiction. I'll start the trend. Lets post real life. The good and the bad. No filter, failures welcome.

Xo,

m 

Hoodies, no makeup, no filter. 

#deliveryroom selfies ?!@!&

A disturbing item came up in my googlenews feed this morning. A Venezuela-based medical student had posted a selfie with a woman giving birth in the background. Along with some crude remarks about female anatomy, there was a brash and disgusting disregard for perhaps the most vulnerable moment in a woman's life. The article detailed that this is actually not a rarity and that many health care professionals use the delivery room hashtag to post similarly offensive Instagrams. As an obstetrician who routinely leaves my husband and two small children in order to spend sometimes over 24 hours supporting women during their labor, I found myself more than a little miffed. I make that difficult choice to not be with my family, to ensure safe passage of a new life into this world and to care for women during a moment that is literally life-threatening. How dare someone make light of that? How dare a medical professional disgrace what I consider to be my life's work? 

I usually use this blog to talk about parenting moments and avoid the shop-talk of my career. I never want to be preachy about the birth experience because it is such a personal choice, so many polarizing opinions about epidurals, elective cesareans, skin-to-skin, boppies, birthing balls, breastfeeding and feminism. A universal truth, though....It is NOT a public social media moment.

I battle daily against public misperceptions about what happens on the labor floor. Patients fear that we make rash decisions about their deliveries based on office hours, money, imaginary cocktail parties. That fear has lead many to become distrustful of obstetricians, vilifying us as crude manipulators of a natural process.

My husband, who is perhaps my greatest  cheerleader, knows what I go through in order to help women have a safe and nurturing birth experience. It is not easy to be married to me. I make these sacrifices in my personal life because I know what can go wrong during childbirth, and I am fortunate enough to have the skills and experience to make a difference in those moments. 

How far we have come as a civilized society, gay marriage and transgender equality shout out in the headlines, but how Neanderthal our views on childbirth and maternity leave. I am so lucky to have women who trust me to care for them during what can be a scary and foreign moment. I am so sorry that there are members of the medical community with such poor judgement.