As a little girl I dreamed of becoming a painter. This dream was somewhat squashed by my parents at a young age in favor of a more stable, measured life as a physician. I chose to become an OB/GYN, a career that is all consuming, but one that I have come to really love. I often feel like my identity is wrapped up in my skill with forceps and my ability to connect with women in times of stress and illness. While I am grateful for the career I have and the honor I have in taking care of women at their most vulnerable, I often wonder what life may have brought me had I followed my creative dreams. I wonder if I should have been able to determine my own destiny. Follows my dreams a la Princess Ariel and decided to get legs and join the humans.
As a mother now myself, I find that I have fallen into these default habits that would have made young Michelle Tham cringe. Maika is in a princess phase, a whoa-I-must-wear-a-crown phase. It's wonderful and charming and delightfully ridiculous. My first instinct, though, was to fight it. I feared pink bubble gum lipstick, an adolescence of poor choices...Barbies. Pink Mustangs. Frosted Hair. No, no... I must steer her away from this life. Visions of Team Abnigation from those horrid Divergent Movies danced through my addled brain. Yes, gray, she will wear sensible gray leggings from Costco and drab sweaters from Lands End. And then I heard myself in my crazy head and realized that I was in fact doing some serious (s)mothering.
I have been blessed with an amazing daughter. She is fiestly, strong willed, heartbreakingly kind. My job is to help her become her best self. The Maika she was meant to be. Her "personhood" is already so strong. She has an imagination that rivals any Hollywood film and an enjoyment of life that takes my breath away sometimes. How fortunate am I to get to be her mom. This is her story, not a way for me to make up for mine.
I am lucky to have a life that is steady and a family that is stable enough for me to actually take a moment and reflect about the type of parent I aspire to be. I think my own parents didn't have that luxury and they were often just trying to get through the day and navigate a new country and competing cultural customs.
It's easy to let our own childhoods dictate the types of decisions we make daily without really thinking about what is truly best. It's easy to try to force our kids into these preformed identity moulds that burden us from our own disappointed youth.
So, after a trip to CVS, armed with every permutation of pink hair clip and ponytail holder, I welcome Maika's pink phase.
I welcome whatever may come next! She will be who she is, I just have to get her there safely with lots of love. If I can be the kind of cool candid Patricia Clarkson type mom from Easy A, all the better. Maika gets to find her legs if she wants them....
Xo,
M
