I feel a very unusual sensation — if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude.

-Benjamin Disraeli

When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around.

-Willie Nelson

According to some of my Facebook friends, November is an unofficial month of gratitude, where each day a participating person is supposed to name the blessings in his or her life.  I’ve been hunting around on the Internet for the origin of this and can’t find it, so if anyone can point me to the source or a link that explains it, please do!

On a related note, last night at the monthly parenting group I attend by Betsy Brown Braun, we talked about the upcoming holiday season and how to find less materialistic ways to give to our families and make the season more meaningful.  Betsy had a number of suggestions, including making one of the kids’ presents a gift certificate to give to a charity of their choice or to Heifer International or World Visions.  Other charities like Mazon or Feeding America or organizations like the local Meals on Wheels are good choices, but those that allow kids to help other kids can foster empathy and make the giving feel more personal.  The point of it all, when it came to our kids and the holidays, was to take the excessive focus off the material goods and sensory comforts that give us pleasure for fleeting moments as we consume them.  Because, Betsy told us, gratitude is enhanced by verbal expressions of thanks, as when she encouraged us to have our kids lead up to Thanksgiving by naming what they appreciate in their own lives.  And gratitude is enhanced by doing things for other people in need.

With that in mind, I’m trying to find my gratitude this year.  Don’t get me wrong.  There’s nothing wrong in my life that a few more hours of sleep each night and getting my 250-page manuscript out of my office won’t solve.  I’ve had an eventful, productive year.  None of my loved ones is deathly ill.  We know where our next meal is coming from, and we can make our mortgage payments.  I’m just tired, overworked, and sick of first- and second-draft writerly limbo.  I’m wrung out from caring too much about the recent presidential election and wish I had more help with my non-writerly responsibilities.  But I can’t help feeling like I’m missing the forest for the trees (I wish there was a non-cliched way to say that).  There have been times in my life, even in the recent years I was in mourning for my father, when I have felt buoyed by hope and gratitude at the holidays — if only the black comedic gratitude of knowing that my far-from-fun natal family has provided me with years of writing material.  So far, this is not one of those kinds of holiday seasons.

Having finished the first draft of my book, “The Rag and Bone Man,” this summer at VCCA was an incredible achievement.  Most of my frustration lies in now not having the unfettered time to finesse it well enough to send out to anyone else to read.  I won’t sport with your intelligence to enumerate the reasons I don’t have time to write.  But two of them are running and screaming with laughter through the house right now, since their school in on a series of “minimum days” for what seems like eternity during November.

So, with one week to go until Thanksgiving (and then the onslaught of Hanukah, Christmas, and New Years, with family visits and school vacations and the never-ending parade of office and school and family celebrations), I am trying to brace myself with a strong dose of authentic gratitude.  It’s always bittersweet because this is also the season, 12 years ago, when my father died.  His death, after decades of living in poverty with schizophrenia, was also what propelled me to write “The Rag and Bone Man.”  This morning before school the kids and I filled out a gift form for Meals on Wheels, and I plan to take Betsy up on some of her suggestions for family charity.  (I’d like to make it more of a family habit throughout the year, not just at the holidays.)

And as for the teeth-gnashing over the second draft of the manuscript?  Having just now written about the frustration, I already feel a little less ungrateful.

Last week a 14-year-old Pakistani girl named Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by the Taliban.  Her crimes, labeled “activism” by the monsters who tried to kill her and her female classmates, appears to be attending school and encouraging other girls to become educated.

This week, in my home state of Wisconsin, a man shot an entire beauty salon full of people in order to kill his estranged wife.  There was a similar salon shooting tragedy in Orlando, Florida, earlier this month, and another mass-fatality, domestic violence-related shooting last year in Seal Beach, California.

These incidents are related.  No, the Taliban didn’t shoot these American ex-wives and all their co-workers.  But the same mentality that declares schooling girls to be not only useless but a dangerous blasphemy is related to a culture where women are unsafe in their marriages and if they choose to end their marriage.  The same desire to control the minds and bodies of women and girls, coupled with the easy availability of guns all over the world, allows retaliation with high body counts when females step out of line.  It’s a slippery slope, I know, to talk about the safety and rights of women and girls, when I was the one who opted out of all but one college class in anything remotely “feminist” (a single women’s history class, which is the only reason I know the names of all the seminal texts — The Yellow Wallpaper, The Second Sex, etc — that I have yet to read).

But I did have three important learning experiences that shaped my view that education for girls and equality for women (which includes control of their own bodies and health, including access to birth control) are vital and interrelated, and can’t be taken for granted.  The first was the circumstances of my upbringing: my mother was in an abusive marriage to my father until I was six years old, and until my father’s death in 2000, even after he left the United States and moved back to Taiwan, she remained terrified of him.  I remember plenty of physical violence, but what also stands out in my memory is the steady stream of emotional and verbal abuse he hurled at her.  You can blame it on culture or family — my father was from a male-dominated, old-fashioned culture, in a patriarchal family, where other men also beat their wives.  You can blame it on the fact that my mother dropped out of college after only a year or so, at age 20, to get married, and then had a baby (me) in short order, and another one (my brother) when her marriage was falling apart, at age 25.  All of that contributed to the misery and intractable feel of our family situation and the poverty we experienced once my mother was out, sort of, from under the yoke of her abusive marriage.  Like the women who were murdered in all of the recent mass killings, my mother had a restraining order against my father.  But like the deceased women, my mother’s restraining order was a simple piece of paper against an abusive man’s rage — at worst, only as good as the paper they’re printed on.

The second experience came when I was in eighth grade.  My social studies teacher was an enthusiastic, articulate young man named Mr. Fisher.  We studied government and current events and the rest of the prescribed curriculum in 1984 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.  One day during his lecture, Mr. Fisher told us that he didn’t understand why more girls didn’t go on to higher education.  As he recalled from his own childhood, the girls were the ones who were often “better at” school than the boys, and they had great contributions to make if only they would stick with their educations.  Of all the prosaic, throwaway bits of my adolescent school experience, this was a memorable moment — someone outside my family saying that girls should stay in school and go as far as their intellect and resources will allow.

The third experience was when I was in graduate school studying public health at UCLA.  My public health classes were all about math, biological pathways, risk factors, and assessing variables that I never before understood could be quantified.  In one class, a community health class outside my primary discipline of epidemiology, I was shocked to learn that infant mortality is related to lack of education in mothers.  In fact, the babies’ risk of dying decreased with each additional year their mothers had attended school.  It was a thunder clap, but also a moment of, ‘this is so obvious, it’s hard to break it down for anyone whose mindset prevents them from viewing women as an important half of the species rather than simply walking baby incubators.’

Knowing this makes it seem like basic species survival to send girls to school, and allow them to learn for a good, long time!  I’m not sure what to do about the problem of creating boys and men who view women as truly equal human beings.  I count myself lucky and smart to have married one; now I’m working on version 2.0 in raising my son.

It’s the most glorious time of the year in Minnesota, the cusp of autumn, with bright, still-long days, a warm but no longer humid breeze in the air with the green smell of trees and flowers still in bloom.  My family and I are visiting my brother and his family — his wife, toddler, newborn, and dog.  The house is full of chaos, toys, and love, not necessarily in that order.

And being around these half-gnawed-on pieces of toast and tiny bits of fruit, peeled just in time for a child to lose interest and walk away, reminds me of so much that I had already forgotten about what it’s like to have very young children.  My kids are almost seven and ten years old.  It’s been a few years since I’ve spent what feels like a lifetime within one day of wiping counters and spills and cleaning dishes, picking up toys, changing diapers, and trying to get at least one person (preferably two) to sleep for a little while.  I’m not at an age where these tasks feel like ancient history; my kids still make a huge mess.  But now they’re old enough to help clean up.  And they no longer eat like pint-sized Henry VIII’s in catch-all bibs, discarding half the meal onto the floor for the dogs to lap up as they flail about in highchairs.  I forget the visceral sense that raising babies and toddlers is a set of Sisyphean tasks contained in every day.  But then I’m around a baby and a toddler, my niece and nephew, both out of sorts because of colds and the oddity of visiting family members in the house, and it all comes back.

When I was with my own babies, I did find it meaningful.  But many days were unbearably long — like first-draft theater of the absurd with tiny, schmutzy people who said nothing that made any sense.  I felt like I would never have a thought to myself again, let alone write one down.  I was filled with the basic needs and preferences of other people.  It was overwhelming and often sucked.

One weekend, when my son was a baby and my daughter a toddler, I was invited to a party for a writers’ professional organization.  Eager to get out of my toy-littered, sticky, furry house, I accepted, even though I didn’t know anyone else in the group.  When I arrived, the pleasant hosts led me into their suburban home.  They were the parents of one grown child, and their house was clean — noticeably free of glittery art projects, stuffed animals, and board books.  Instead they had paintings on the wall, a sedate fish tank instead of floppy dog beds, a bookshelf full of reference books and novels.  They were medical writers, like me, and they seemed like a happy couple.  But as I looked around their house, I couldn’t help imagining how boring their life must be.  (And then I got a little irritated with myself, since my inner monologue was starting to sound like that crappy, women-belong-at-home-with-babies 80′s song, “I’ve Never Been to Me” — the one where the singer claims to have been to paradise, but never to herself, because she didn’t have children.)

In the years since I’ve had kids in preschool and diapers, I allowed myself to think that I’ve become something of a pro at aspects of parenting.  That my difficulties at the time were because I was young, inexperienced, sleep-deprived, and hadn’t learned to take the long view of parenting (and writing).  But when I spend time with a family with very young kids, and I try lamely to lend a hand with cleaning or cooking or wrangling, I realize that I’m no better at this small-scale version of “having it all” than I was in the recent past.  And that, even though it would be fun sometimes, I would sort of suck at the baby stages just as much now as I did then.

All this, and I also miss it so.

In January 2011 I had the honor of performing a personal essay I’d written in the Expressing Motherhood show in Los Angeles.  I’m happy to announce that I will be performing again in the upcoming September and October Expressing Motherhood show.  The Expressing Motherhood team has recently launched a blog featuring mothers and creativity, and this is the piece I wrote for them.  Enjoy!

http://expressingmotherhood.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/susan-sheu/

I sort of recall the day my mother tried to tell me about “the facts of life,” or the ones that pertained to the getting a period.  She had sent away for the Modess kit of visual aids and granny maxi pads with an elastic belt that girls were supposed to wear under their gigantic underpants.  On the allotted day, which she must have dreaded, she sat me down on the scratchy, green couch.  I’m sure she was praying that my grandpa wouldn’t walk in mid-speech.  I was 11 years old, and what I mainly remember from “the talk” was that soon I would start bleeding.  My mom giggled while trying to tell me that it was the start of something wonderful.

But the granny pads and bizarre elastic girdle, like a highly ineffectual chastity belt, told another story — one that eluded larger meaning in favor of paper products and talk of “that time of the month.”  I don’t blame my mom for failing to come up with an evolved and comprehensive approach; it was 1980, and she was a 32-year-old single mom with two young kids and not much of a road map other than a mishmash of Redbook and textbooks that she fell asleep reading after her long day at work and in college classes.

The person who actually told me where babies came from was my best friend Amy.  We were both six years old, hanging out on my candy-striped swing set.  She had three older brothers, and there wasn’t much she didn’t know.  I was indignant when she explained baby-making to me.  I might have even called her a liar.  Still, the utterly bizarre mechanics she had described stayed with me, and the story must have been part of the fetid soup of embarrassing period stories, adolescent hormones, and clandestine, 1980s R-rated movies that helped me eventually put the pieces together by the time I was a teenager.

All of this was on my mind last month when Betsy Brown Braun, who facilitates my monthly parenting group, spoke about “the facts of life.”  She said that if by the age of six, a child hadn’t heard some realistic version of “where babies come from” from his parent, he will have heard it from someone else.  This was sobering and implied a whole cascade of trust and truthfulness that could be initiated or evaded as a result.  Prior to hearing this, I had vague notions of talking about X and Y chromosomes or animal babies or a similar wishy-washy conversation with my older child, who is nine years old.  I left class with the sex talk much higher on my parenting agenda.

Out of respect for my kids’ future ability to search the Internet, I’m not going to delve into the conversations in detail.  We spoke with them one by one.  My daughter, the nine-year-old, had to be almost physically restrained to stay in the room while we spoke.  My husband and I sounded like stereotypes of open-minded parents, covering the bases and forcing ourselves not to laugh while she averted her eyes and claimed to know everything already.  My son, the six-year-old, looked horrified when I talked turkey with him.  I took off from his “kissing in movies is so gross” statement to segue into “where babies come from.”  It was like the kindergarten version of the scene in “American Pie” when Eugene Levy talks to his son about sex: cringeworthy, but hey, now that’s out of the way.  (And to my mild credit, I didn’t muck it up so badly.  He’s had a lot of questions since then, most kind of gross and out of left field.)

I don’t know if I did the right thing, or if I did it in the right way.  But as a parent and a writer, I do buy into the whole “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” romantic ideal.  May my fumbling attempt be sufficient.

Last month I learned how to ski in Canada, at the same place where 12 years earlier I learned to snowboard.  In those days, at 30, I suspected I was too old to learn how to do something like ski or snowboard.  Still, I put on my helmet and hoped no one would guess my age.  I hated how hard it was.  Early on, I likened my hard falls to “cement enemas,” but I was committed to learning.  Snowboarding was a welcome change from my graduate school work: it allowed me to be worked over by a snow-covered mountain rather than an academic committee.

A year later my father died, and snowboarding became a “Fight Club” of one that was more solace to me than all of the kind sentiments offered by my friends and acquaintances.

This is a version of something I wrote for a writing class in 2004.  Enjoy.

Fall is here, and my thoughts turn to strengthening my abs.  While many think of spring as a time to seek the elusive six-pack for swimsuit season, a chill in the air reminds me that I’m about to reacquaint myself with my boots and snowboard, the nonexistent six-pack nowhere to be seen under layers of fleece and waterproof Gore-Tex.

I don’t come from an athletic family.  It’s more than a little sadomasochistic that, with my non-jock history, I’m embarking on snowboarding at this late date.  The “sado” part is that I’ve coerced my husband along for the painful, expensive ride.  His family, more cerebral and even more sedentary than mine, has an unofficial motto: “Why stand when you can sit?  Why sit when you can lie down?”  He has taken up the more dignified sport of skiing, and he’s none too happy with pain and the black toenails that tell him that he’s rented the wrong boots.

Our parents disapprove when we tell them the weekends we’ll be away skiing.  Just as when we adopted our first dog several years ago, they act as though we might not be licensed operators of our own lives.  They rattle off stories of broken limbs, fruitless search teams, decomposed bodies, and amputated feet.  After we tell them we’ve already booked our flights, my mother or his father will say, “Oh well, then.  Have a good time.”

Flying from LAX to Reno/Tahoe should be easy enough.  But ever since I’ve had a baby, the schlep with the snowboard, suitcase, stroller, and toddler supplies, has become an almost prohibitive hassle.  Lugging it all reminds me of the discomforts to come: my back leg cramping with the hop-slide movements forward in the lift line; the packed and overpriced cafeteria selling prefab cocoa and greasy chili; and the labor of hobbling off the slopes, parking the board, and removing layers, just to go to  the bathroom.

Last winter my trials began right off the bat, when I drove in a blizzard through Donner Pass at night in a rented minivan with my laughing baby, our babysitter, and her preteen child.  They gritted their teeth as we skidded along the highway despite my slow speed and the chains on the tires.  I put on a show of bravado to reassure them and myself that we would not die in this stupid manner.  Many hours later, past midnight, we arrived at the rented cabin.  The babysitter and I spent the next two hours digging out the driveway and hauling our bags and the sleeping children into the house.

The hoards of Californians rushing the gondola at 8 am are another challenge.  And then, after traveling up the lift with total strangers, I actually have to ride the mountain.  Writing all of this down, it’s hard to believe that I do this voluntarily, when a part of me has more in common with the spouses and friends who spend the day at the lodge, drinking beer and shooting the breeze with anyone who happens to sit on the next bar stool.

What I actually enjoy about snowboarding takes a few runs to experience: the flow and enforced in-the-moment feeling.  If I allow myself to begin thinking about messy and complicated things, say, my doctoral dissertation, I fall.  I have to use my reptilian brain: eyes on the snow and on the boarders and skiers around me; and my mind on the immediate challenge of whether to go over or around the small mogul a few feet in front of me, whether to take the green run or try that blue one that peels off at the bottom of this hill.

During my second year, just after my father died, snowboarding became my own “Fight Club” of one.  My dad and I had not been close; his severe mental illness had been the unwelcome third parent in my upbringing.  After a week at his funeral in Taiwan, mourning him and the happy relationship we would never have, I returned to school in and the relentless, incongruous sun of January in Los Angeles.

Soon after I went snowboarding, hoping that, for one weekend, external pain and icy solace could displace sorrow.  At the top of each black diamond run I dared, I saw the expanse of frosted, ancient fir trees and the deep, pure lake below, surrounded by mountains.

There’s no place on earth like this, I thought.

I glided down, falling-leaf style, the mark of a beginner.  In my mind, there was no past and no future, only riding down the mountain.

I read an article on “mindful eating” the other day in the New York Times.  It’s about applying the principles of mindfulness and meditation, being in the moment while eating.

I couldn’t figure out whether to laugh or cry, since I practice the exact opposite of mindful eating.  This practice of mine is not for any weird LA anorexic/dietetic reason; it hardly feels like a choice at all.  My children’s school is five miles away, through one of the densest parts of Los Angeles.  Between the school commute and after school activities, household errands, and traveling back and forth across one small swath of my area code for personal and work errands (the gym, a writing class), I drive hours each day.  I actually drove less when I worked 35 miles away from home, since my kids pretty much stayed in one place (home or preschool) during those years.

This was not how my life in Los Angeles began.  I moved here in 1994, several months after the Northridge earthquake.  Traffic was not the epic force of nature that I’d been led to expect, perhaps because there had been a significant exodus after the earthquake.  But the biggest reason my husband and I didn’t have any sense of traffic was because we lived about a mile from our jobs and graduate programs at UCLA.

Many days we’d drive anyway, laughing ruefully about how much we were becoming like the Steve Martin character in “LA Story,” who drives next door to his friend’s house.  Sometimes my husband would be home early, shop at Trader Joe’s, and whip up an overly complicated meal by the time I arrived home from work.  When acquaintances would tell us how horrible their commutes were, how hard it was to juggle work, school pickup, karate practice, and some sad semblance of a family life, we would try to muster some sympathy.  But we had no idea.  In one corner of our minds, we were often thinking that the poor whining jerk should just move somewhere more practical, or stop trying to have it all.

Oh, how the young and cocky have fallen.

My husband now drives 50 to 60 miles away to his two job sites (in different counties), and I zigzag around a tiny corner of Los Angeles doing the daily Rubic’s cube of our family life and my writing, such as it is.  There’s a ball of hair on the floor of my car, and I realize that I now have a nervous tic of pulling out my own hair as I sit in interminable traffic.  Yes, it’s come to that: I now exhibit caged animal behavior in my own car, as if this life isn’t a product of our own choices.  (I hope that by outing myself this way, I will redirect my nervous energy back into swearing-as-an-art-form instead of plucking myself.)

I know that if we went “full Unibomber” (i.e., lived “off the grid” — which is to say anywhere other than Los Angeles, New York, or a handful of other cities), as we sometimes threaten to do, that life would be simpler.  When I visit family members in quieter parts of America, I am in awe that in one afternoon, a person can do several errands, make dinner, and still read part of a book.

But after all these years in Los Angeles, and the friends we have here, and how accustomed we are to the relative diversity and the precarious beauty of it all, it would be very hard to leave.  I have come to view Los Angeles as a huge, beautiful but garish tattoo that I got when I was young.  I sometimes regret it, but I have it, and that’s that.

And as I rounded the corner too fast, one piece of four-day-old pizza hanging out of my mouth, the other piece between my legs on crumpled aluminum foil, the Don Henley song “Sunset Grill” came on the air, and I listened to the words as I inhaled the food:

Let’s go down to the Sunset Grill

Watch the working girls go by

Watch the basket people walk around and mumble

Gaze out at the auburn sky

Maybe we’ll leave come springtime

Meanwhile, have another beer

What would we do without all these jerks anyway?

And besides, all our friends are here.

This week I am starting a class and working on a deadline.  So far in 2012 I’ve been meeting all my deadlines, but I don’t want to gloat lest I start missing them!  Instead of a new post, I am re-posting the following entry from June 3, 2011.  Thank you for reading, friends.

A New Yorker article by Rachel Aviv (“God Knows Where I Am”) came out in the last week that has affected me deeply.

It’s an account of a woman who was diagnosed with bipolar and schizoaffective disorder. Part of the nature of her illness was that she didn’t accept the diagnosis. She didn’t take her prescribed medications unless she was in an institution where she was compelled to. She had committed a number of petty crimes and bizarre behaviors that landed her in jail and a mental institution. But she was described as otherwise likable and often lucid.

I would have found the article fascinating (and depressing) even if I didn’t have a personal interest in this subject. It’s a circular situation, a true conundrum, when an illness manifests as a refusal to accept that you are ill. These were the types of questions that kept me from really understanding my college courses in philosophy, hanging just at the edge of my reasoning abilities. But the real reason that this is such a difficult topic is that my father’s story was similar.

My father was out of touch with reality for most of my memory. He only went to a psychiatrist once, forced by a court order during my parents’ divorce. On that brief visit, he received a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. His symptoms included delusions of grandeur, auditory hallucinations, and paranoia. He had these symptoms for the rest of his life and never took medication or (to my knowledge) ever saw a physician.

My father’s story did not play out as tragically as the mentally ill woman from the New Yorker article. He lived a marginal existence in Chicago for over 20 years and then rejoined his family in Taiwan for the last few years of his life. But the fact that he refused treatment made dealing with him a constant exercise in frustration, and in effect, his illness steered our family history during my brother’s and my childhood and young adulthood.

The article brings up difficult legal and ethical questions about how to treat the mentally ill. During my father’s lifetime, I was not willing or able to take drastic measures to curtail his freedom. Because he was able to hold down a series of jobs, he maintained financial independence. He died ten years ago, around the age of 60. And since he’s been gone for a while, I’m able to see the trajectory of his life and try to put it into some kind of narrative framework to understand, past tense. But I have no idea what I would do if he was still a force to be reckoned with in my life.

Much has been written about The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, the book by Yale Law School professor Amy Chua.  If you are not a parent, or are not Asian, perhaps you have not heard of it, except possibly from your friends with kids.  They probably either hate the book and wish ill to its author or who grudgingly acknowledge that American kids could use some of her tough parenting style.

I don’t wish ill to Amy Chua.  I wish her anti anxiety drugs.  And I wish that she had waited to publish this book until her children were adults.

There are no Tiger Mom stories from my childhood.  My father was Chinese, and my mother was Caucasian.  In fact, my mother was (and is) exactly what Amy Chua would picture when she describes the soft-hearted, conflict-avoiding Western parent who avoids setting standards too high and praises “mediocrity” when it comes to her children.

My mother did all sorts of ineffectual things that Amy Chua would cite as evidence of the decline in achievements in second-generation Asian children.  She told my brother and me that “we could be anything” and that we were beautiful and brilliant.  She was riding the tide of pre-ERA Amendment feminism.  In every loving, starry-eyed pep talk were vapors of Helen Reddy lyrics mixed with Mr. Rogers-style parenting.

In fact, we were decent-looking, surly, and of modest talents compared to many of our peers.  It sometimes felt nurturing to have a mother who was affectionate and believed in us.  Both of us have earned graduate degrees and work in skilled jobs.  But I sometimes suspect that part of the reason we have become professionals is that we finally believed the hype about Asian kids being inherently smarter, and we regressed to the mean of our model minority-hood by graduating from respected colleges.  (I’m mostly kidding.)

My father, an immigrant from China via Taiwan, was in the tiger parent mold.  He was a civil engineer and attended one of the top universities in Taiwan.  But since my parents were divorced and he lived in another state, he could only drill us in math, science, and swimming one Sunday a month.  Although he was paranoid schizophrenic, I am convinced that most of his academic fervor and frustration with his children had more to do with our utter foreignness (the shrugs, the adolescent hostility, the lack of single-minded focus on achievement) – than with his mental illness.

Since The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was published, some of my friends have asked me whether I’m a “tiger mother.”  My answer has sometimes been yes, but more often no.

When I’ve said yes, it’s been a day when I feel keenly aware that, like so many parents my own age I feel like I’ve got to be parenting “correctly,” which, now that they’re not babies anymore, slides easily into “preparing them for the future.”  My kids are learning Mandarin, piano, Hebrew, and each play a sport.

On a day when I deny being a “tiger mother,” I comfort myself with the fact that Mandarin is taught by a young woman far kinder and more patient than I am.  My daughter has school homework, and our family has decided that sleep and homework come before any extras.  My kids’ other activities are close to home.  Their sports – one day a week of barely competitive soccer for my son, three days of swim practice for my daughter – are because I just can’t bear to take them to the park anymore for their exercise.

It’s the curse/blessing of my public health education that I’m obsessed with preventative medicine through healthy eating and exercise.  And I’d like to think that I’m giving them something that they need, or at least that they will appreciate later.  My social son loves mixing it up with the other kids while he runs drills and plays short soccer games.  My cerebral daughter loves the mastery of swimming on a competitive team and needs a structured physical activity to get her out of her own head.

But there’s no way I can be a tiger mom.  For one thing, I was born in the year of the chicken.  And I’m only “hapa,” with the added disadvantage of a relaxed, White mother.  I lack the hunger to succeed and the anxiety about failure that plague the striving model minority parent.  Sometimes I call myself the Stoner Tiger Mother.  Most of all I strive to strike a balance between full-frontal parenting (Tiger Mom style) and allowing my kids to turn out to be the individuals they were born to be (hippy-dippy style).  Does that sound wishy-washy?   It is.  But it feels more honest and true to my agnostic nature than firebrand fanaticism than any parenting advice (or “self-effacing memoir”) I’ve read.

Last summer, I posted Swimmies, about my kids’ swimming despite the fact that I hate doing it myself.  Nothing earth-shattering has changed between then and now.  But on a recent trip with my family, I was trying to keep up the exercise routine (Run. Get sore/injured. Repeat.) when I discovered that I hate swimming slightly less than I used to.  It all started with my husband taking our two children down to the pool before lunch.  He’s known as “the fun one” in our family.  Most of our family vacations will find him enduring hours of Marco Polo in the hotel pool while I remain at the side of the pool, in a swim suit but dry, fussing over towels and sandwiches.

Here at home, one of the features I like about the gym I go to is that it has a pool.  But I wouldn’t dream of swimming in it.  Chlorine turns my hair brittle and Raggedy-Ann-awful, takes forever, and then there are those awful associations of my father standing over me, shouting to go faster. Still, it’s nice to know I could cross-train and save my creaky, rickety ankles and knees a few years longer.

I’ll cut to the chase and just say that I did end up swimming.  On two days of our trip I swam for about an hour.  It wasn’t the hurts-so-good punishment of running, so I assumed that I hadn’t “really” worked out, especially since I was swimming a leisurely breaststroke.  (My freestyle, the stroke formerly known as the crawl, has always kind of sucked.  I just can’t get serious about lifting the non-breathing-side elbow out of the water.)  But I suspected that I was getting a decent amount of exercise, since I was ravenously hungry both of my swim days.  When I returned home I looked up the estimates for calories burned for running vs. swimming.  I expected that my leaden-treaded 10-minute mile would cream swimming — but it didn’t.  It was exactly the same.

My kids were thrilled that I was swimming, even if I still wasn’t as fun as my husband.  The fact that I was in the water somehow counted as “play.”  They are both water safe, which freed me up to praise their pencil dives and cannon balls between laps.  Swimming laps was surprisingly “mental.”  While running the same track or treadmill over and over again can feel like a hamster wheel, swimming back and forth was closer to meditative.  Maybe it was due to novelty, but my mind traveled in a way that felt less like disco-driven punishment (my running mixes feature mostly songs at least 100 to 150 beats per minute) than like aerobic tai-chi.  And there was something about being immersed that was calming, even as I felt myself flush with exertion at every break.

I’m home now and wondering if checking out the pool at the gym, maybe once a week, would help me with that meditation habit I’m trying to develop.