Yogurt Girl and Scone Girl and me

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Tennessee, paying for my self-serve yogurt and the cashier did that thing where she prolonged the transaction for A WHOLE 4 SECONDS. She paused to verify my phone number for the rewards program. It took four seconds. In that four seconds, the gal in line behind me sighed loudly and, in protest to this four seconds to which she felt entitled to not be waiting in line behind me, plucked a blueberry or a chocolate chip or probably a piece of Cinnamon Toast Crunch (because this yogurt place is crazy like that) and ate it. Without paying for it. Because, forget capitalism, to heyyyy'all with honesty, zap it all to zero because how could you make me wait in line with this Cinnamon Toast Crunch that doesn't even melt for four more seconds of my life when I could have spent it paying for it? Or who knows, if I had that four seconds back, I could possibly have been inventing a way for frozen yogurt to not melt so fast or I could have developed an app for legal line-skipping. Imagine the possibilities!!

***

Yesterday, I was in Ohio for my sister's wedding shower and I was standing at the counter of a cafe paying for my latte and scone. I ordered the chocolate and hazelnut scone because it sounded life-changing.

"Oh! You got the last one!" said the gal waiting behind me in line. She asked the cashier if they were going to make more, because she really seemed desperate for that scone. I suppose a nicer person could have just let her have the scone, but I am spending too much in therapy to not assert what I really want sometimes, even if it's a complex carbohydrate that I don't really need.

Then, the gal behind me said, "Ugh, I really wanted that scone!" and I kid you not, she actually stuck her tongue out at me.

***

Let the record state: I prefer the tongue sticker-outer infinitely more than I do the loud sigher. I will almost always favor the overt rather than the oblique. I prize the courageous one who will say it (or stick it) to my face, versus passive aggressively shoving it in their mouths in protest. The variable here is age, as I would presume the sighing lady was at least ten years my junior. The tongue lady was presumably my age or older. The one who sneaks and the one who sticks out--the range of their ages is not as great as the range of their behaviors.

I am generalizing here, but the above behaviors represent the two regions where I have lived. By showing two incidents where indignation flared while waiting in line to pay for food, I have witnessed the North and South, respectively. In the South, one rarely confronts. One steams in private and then, after composing oneself, one will address the matter if necessary. In the North, people will generally look you in the eye and say what they feel. I am a daughter of the North, largely the folksy Midwest but I borrow the assertiveness of New England, and this makes me a misfit here in the land of the peacekeepers and the watercooler whisperers. And yet, as much as I wanted to stick my tongue out at the yogurt girl, the South has taught me to reign it in, to move along, to deal with it later when I am not feeling so Northern confrontational about it. Bless my little heart.

Confessions of a non-Korean mama

I have so many dear friends expecting babies this year. Come October, I'm expecting a veritable traffic jam of storks in the sky. It's reminding me of the joy of bringing our own little dumplings home. Our first experience in doing so is forever illuminated for me...

January 2008

As we are leaving the hospital with our dumpling, our pastor and his wife from the Korean church call Loverpants. They say they are on their way over to our house. There is no asking and there is no refusing. I mean, my belly has just been on the butcher block and I am having volcanic eruptions of hot hormone lava and we have a new family member that we just met, but no bigs!

Going home from the hospital

Our pastor and his wife meet us at home. They march through the apartment toward the kitchen where they dutifully stock our refrigerator with noodle dishes and potatoes and bread and seaweed soup P.S. GOOD FOR BREASTMILK. And then pastor offers a prayer in Korean and his wife looks askance at me trying to breastfeed.

The following week, the pastor and his wife are back for a second go-round. This time, with friends! And more seaweed soup. Ahjoomah General’s warning: Contents may make breasts explode with ample milk supply. After several hymns and prayers in Korean, all of which may have been pleas to the Almighty to make our next child an heir, the church elders begin to leave. But not before several of the ahjoomahs (Korean elder women) compress my abdomen, exclaiming “Aygoh!” I believed at one time that Aygoh! meant “Hot dog! She’s still a postnatal fatty!” in Korean.

But after reading a thing or two about samchilil, I know why they are squeezing me. Samchilil, which means 21 days, is the Korean practice of letting a woman who has just given birth to rest. Doesn't that sound amazing? If mama rests then she will regain strength and be able to take care of those around her. But my impression is that it is a fear-based rest. The postnatal mama is resting to avoid her bones going soft and all of her teeth falling out. True fear. The mother is to stay indoors, drink miyuk-kuk (seaweed soup), avoid cold (even drinking an iced beverage), and sometimes she even wears a girdle. Not kidding, players, an honest-to-goodness girdle. Hence why the ahjoomahs are squeezing the place where a baby used to be. Aygoh!

Exit: Team Ahjoomah, stage left.

Irritated and exhausted, I walk to the kitchen to see the spoils of the meals on wheels. I open the refrigerator and there it is: the familiar pots and pans, the kimchee and the burnt rice. The potluck ministry had come to love on me today.

I’m told no matter the denomination, it’s the same scene at any Korean-American church. The potluck is the thing. I’ll never be able to consume the topographic mounds of rice that my church sisters manage to wolf down, but I always enjoy it. Is there really no such thing as a free lunch? Have I paid for my meal ticket through every awkward encounter at K-church? Perhaps. But I’ve never been asked to contribute to the potluck. For the most part, I’ve been a taker. For me, this is God’s grace come to life in a silver pot. We’ve done nothing to deserve it and done everything wrong to be denied it, but He lavishes it on us like a smiling Korean ahjoomah whose delight derives entirely on its acceptance.

Our first time at church as a famiLee

The Korean church loved me through my twenties. The ahjoomahs loved me in a way that I found peculiar, in ways that I never would have chosen to be loved. But there’s no menu at a buffet. Only a bounty of the interesting and colorful, the flavorful, sweet, sour, and spicy.

4 pairs of Converse high-tops

We bought four pairs. You came into the world with four pairs of Converse hightop shoes. Daddy bought unisex colors: two sets of aqua (unisex? debatable) and two sets of black, because we didn't know if you were a boy or girl. But we were prepared with hightops, sizes 3, 5, 7, 9.

We didn't know how this would work, you joining us, no other family member for 1000 miles, Mama in grad school, Daddy working 3 jobs. When the nurses handed you to me, I couldn't tell if it was just the anesthesia making me shiver or if the great and profound weight of this new life in my care was making me quake. I was holding 8 lb. 1 oz. of beautiful you but the pull of gravity at that moment was much greater. Like a Mac truck had backed into my hospital bed and dropped a heap-ton of work and sleeplessness into my lap. Somehow--and I can't explain it because I think you have to experience it firsthand--a feeling washed over me that you were the only one thing in my life that I couldn't get out of, and yet we were going to be ok, you and I and Daddy, and that we were going to be so, so happy together.

I mean, for starters, at least we had shoes.

The first time I saw your Daddy walking up the hill of Schultz lawn, he was wearing Converse. They were red Chucks, the only appropriate choice for the man who captured my young heart.

Whenever we would go to visit your grandparents in Ann Arbor, we would visit Sam's to buy ourselves a new pair of Cons.

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It's terribly naive to think that we should make this bulk investment in Converse for a girl who would not walk for another 13 months, but I suppose the shoes symbolize our naivete and our induction of you into our Converse club.

***

You put the last pair on today, the bookends on this shoe collection, and you complained that they were pinching your toes. It felt unfair, that you had outgrown these shoes that had once seemed so impossibly big without our even noticing it.

This, too, is a symbol of the invisible ache that your own growth causes the people who love you most in this world, and also of the wonderful shoes you have yet to fill that you do not yet own, in sizes we cannot yet fathom.