Exactly one year ago, I vowed to spend 2020 pursuing and practicing gratitude. At the time, there was so much to look forward to: a new job, a few trips to Disneyland, the wedding of one of my dear friends and all the festivities that come with it. I thought it would be a breeze to find something to be grateful for every day.
But the universe knew better. The universe knew I needed a challenge. Shortly after January 1st, it seemed like something went wrong in big and small ways every day. I was forced to do for a year what I had once considered emotional torture. Before this year, my worst day was a day spent at home. How was I going to find gratitude for a house that seemed to be falling apart, unemployment, sick family members, isolation? Little did I know at the time, focusing on gratitude would not only be possible, it would be the thing that saved me. It’s never all bad just like it’s never all good. Even though it seemed like the world was unraveling around me, there were moments of pure joy and contentment in each day. What will I remember most from the last 365 days? The decadent meals, slowly and lovingly prepared; the giggle of an infant and a toddler; making eye contact with the love of my life when our child does something so cute my heart wants to burst; a leisurely morning with no plans that turns into a water fight; cozy movie nights cuddling under an oversized blanket; spontaneously blasting the music and dancing around the living room; making a mess while baking on Saturday mornings; impromptu FaceTime chats with friends and family at random hours of the day; cheese and bread made from scratch that we would have normally bought at the store; my kids becoming best friends little by little. Maybe deep down in my core, I knew this year would be different and that is why I didn't make a list of goals like I usually do. Because I now know that any resolution I had made would not have been fulfilled. The expectations were low so the chances of failure were also low. But oh, how I failed! This year broke me down into a million raw pieces that I sometimes didn't recognize. I felt like I failed as a mother, as a wife, as a daughter, as a friend, as an employee. Too many evenings, I looked at the clock hoping it was my kids' bedtime. Too many nights, I slept alone in bed because my husband was awake to take care of our infant, and too many nights, I dozed off during our moments together trying to reconnect. Too many dinners, we ate frozen food or take-out because I was too burnt out from cooking every meal. Too many times, I forgot to answer a text or wish my friend a happy birthday because the day slipped away from me. Too many hours wasted being distracted with anxiety, doom scrolling the Internet, expecting to find a glimmer of hope. Too many hours my kids spent watching TV so I can catch up on laundry or use the toilet in peace. And at nights when my babies were dreaming and the house was quiet and I had plenty to do but nothing to do right now, came the Great Exhale. Breathe in deep and count to ten. Exhale. Repeat. Repeat. The pit in my stomach eases. We made it through another day, another week, another month, another ten months. We survived.
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Why Is It Important to Shop BIPOC?While we make our shopping lists and begin making purchases, it's important to remember that marginalization of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) individuals and cultures can still be found in every aspect of society and it was painfully obvious as I was working on this gift guide. I saw cultural appropriation of authentic Indian spices and traditional Japanese tea sets. White people selling Boba Tea Kits. I also saw a gross number of companies whose stories included traveling to Rwanda/India/Guatemala, falling in love with what they found there and bringing that ‘knowledge’ back to America to start their business. That is the very definition of cultural appropriation.
The problem is that if consumers are not actively, intentionally seeking out shops owned and gifts made by BIPOC, they likely won’t find any. I spent hours researching companies to include in this guide and unfortunately, most people do not have that kind of time. A Google search for “leather dopp kit” yielded zero results for BIPOC-owned companies, at least on the first five pages. Virtually no one ventures past the first page of Google results and the #1 result captures over 30% of the clicks. In fact, only 0.78% of Google searchers click on something from the second page. To further compound this issue, major gift guides from Buzzfeed, New York Times, Today.com, Good Housekeeping, etc. are sorely lacking in diversity. Most of their picks were from major brands on Amazon with a few small businesses sprinkled in. But this year, Amazon and Jeff Bezos don’t need any more money--during the pandemic, while small businesses are suffering and shuttering left and right, Amazon doubled its profit from $2.6 billion to $5.3 billion. This holiday season, let’s support small, local and BIPOC businesses. When you purchase from a small business, a real human being smiles and does a happy jig. Before March, my days were full of a buzzing noise of all the places I had to be, things I had to do and people I needed to see. In fact, in March, I had a social commitment every day of every weekend, sometimes even two commitments a day.
I was feeling overwhelmed and stretched thin, but I had no idea what to do about it. I have an impossible time declining invitations because I feel an immense sense of loyalty to my friends and family. Not only do I enjoy spending time with others as an extrovert, but I feel a huge amount of guilt at the thought of letting people down. On some level, I believe that if I don’t show up for my friends’ events, they won’t want to attend mine or be my friend anymore and I cherish my friendships too much to let that happen. For that reason, I was a “yes mom” for as many brunches, parties, play dates, dinners and birthdays as was physically possible (and sometimes even more than was truly physically possible). I didn’t realize how stressful it was and what a toll it all took on my mental and emotional well-being until it was all stripped away. My nonstop days of going to the park, to the zoo, to the library, to get coffee, to go shopping, to grab lunch with one friend and dinner with another were replaced with lots and lots of nothingness at home. The days got slow and quiet. One day melted into another until six months had passed by. For many people who practice intuitive eating, joyful movement and gentle nutrition are the intuitive eating principles that we have the most difficult time with.
At least for me, exercise has been a sore spot for most of my life. I swam competitively starting at age seven until I was 17 and most of my weekends were spent at swim meets. In high school, I was on the swim and water polo team which meant I was in the water or at the gym from 5:30 am until 7:30 am and again from 2 pm until 5 pm. If we had a game, I didn't get home until 8 pm. I was exhausted and ravenous all the time--I couldn't physically eat enough calories in a day to sustain myself and my teachers forbade me from eating during class. The week before homecoming, I lost so much weight, my strapless dress wouldn't stay on. And I still vividly remember the guilt I felt (from my parents and teammates) when I chose to call in sick from one game during a tournament so I could attend my close friend's birthday party. In senior year of high school, I quit the team because my body and my mind had simply had enough. And since then, I've had a complicated relationship with exercise. For most of college, I didn't "exercise" much at all unless it was a Zumba or Hip Hop Class and walking around the Santa Cruz Mountains for class. After college, I continued to brew in diet culture, using exercise as a form of punishment and means for weight loss. That lasted until I got pregnant with my son and didn't have the energy to move in the first trimester. Fast forward a couple of years, I discovered intuitive eating and the anti-diet, Health at Every Size movement in September 2018. I was able to quickly and easy adapt almost all of the principles immediately, except for the joyful movement bit. Because I had been forced for so long to exercise to the point of exhaustion and use exercise as tool for weight loss, even the slightest sore muscle from working out triggered me. My muscles had PTSD. And that took almost two years to heal. I still feel uneasy when I feel tight glutes or thighs from slightly overexerting myself, even if it is from moving happily. But what has helped me the most with this intuitive eating principle is redefining what exercise and movement mean to me in addition to defining my health and fitness goals that have nothing to do with weight loss. I'm done with the days of running on a treadmill or forcing myself to do push-ups and sit-ups for the sole purpose of burning calories. There are many non-weight loss benefits to exercise, but the one that resonates with me the most is being able to play with my kids for as long as possible, be strong enough to continue to pick them up and have enough endurance to run around with them. With those goals in mind, these are my expressions of joyful movement, the types of physical activities that truly make me happy and don't feel like exercise at all: As an extrovert who feels tortured being at home, the last couple of weeks have been almost unbearable emotionally and mentally. The things that normally fill my cup--being around my friends and family, going out to events or other activities with people and having a fulfilling, productive day at work--have all been taken away. When birthday parties, weddings and music festivals are cancelled, how can we find happiness? It's so hard to focus on the good when all that seems to be left right now is fear, anxiety, sickness and death. These are the things that are making me feel even a little happy right now in the midst of all the terribleness going on in the world.
Lessons I learned from labor and delivery the second time around: Women are warriors. Our intuition is magic. If we can learn to listen and trust ourselves, incredible things can happen. People say that every pregnancy, labor and delivery is different and I wasn’t sure I believed them until I experienced it myself. With my first, I only had nausea and food aversions from weeks 7 to 9, an easy, breezy pregnancy overall and a long 30-hour labor that started spontaneously at 39 weeks and 3 days. With my second, I had nausea until 15 weeks, was in so much pain with symphysis pubis dysfunction (a common condition in subsequent pregnancies) that I had to go to a prenatal chiropractor twice a week starting at 20 weeks and physical therapy, and I made it to 40 weeks and 5 days gestation with no baby. On Wednesday, December 4 at 9:30 a.m. (at 40 weeks and 5 days pregnant), I went to my weekly check up with my midwife. When my nurse took my blood pressure, like she does at every appointment, she discovered that it was high (146/102) and it wouldn’t go down even after rest. My nurse pointed out that my belly was very low, that the high blood pressure meant that my body was reaching the end of being able to carry the baby and that I would probably be delivering today. After that, I saw my midwife and we decided that she would do a cervical exam and, if I was dilated at all, she would perform a membrane sweep. When she did the cervical exam, she discovered I was already 3 cm dilated so she did the sweep to help move things along. At that point, it was 10:30 a.m. She said that cramping and bleeding is normal and, if my body and baby are ready, that labor would start within 48 hours. She also wanted me to go to the labor and delivery ward at the hospital to monitor my blood pressure in case I needed to be induced for preeclampsia. I left the office, called my husband to come home from work and headed home to finish packing my hospital bag. Today was finally the day! My first of three miscarriages was in January 2017 after an unexpected positive pregnancy test. We hadn't been trying to get pregnant but we also hadn't been preventing since coming home from our honeymoon in October 2016. I didn't even think or know I was ready to have a baby until the positive test was staring back at me. And in that short week, between finding out that I might be a mom to miscarrying, my life had already changed--I had already dreamed a lifetime of dreams and hoped a lifetime of hopes, all of which came crashing down.
In an attempt to make myself feel better, I wrote the following list of reasons why I didn't want a baby yet (based on preconceived notions of what I thought motherhood would be like). I was scared that becoming a parent meant leaving everything I loved about my pre-baby days behind. Since our first baby joined us, I’ve discovered that it's a lot easier--and way more fun--than I had expected to introduce him to the activities we enjoyed together before he came along or having grandparents babysit him for us to go out and do things that he can’t do yet. Before I share my misconceptions of motherhood (and my present-day rebuttals to pre-baby me), I want to preface the list to say that I am completely aware of my privilege and I know that many of these things would not be possible if I did not live close to family and did not have their support and a very hands-on partner in my husband. On the other hand, I'm a firm believer that we can design the exact life we want for ourselves through commitment, hard work and planning. Yay I'm officially 30! Two years ago, I wrote an extremely ambitious list of 30 things I wanted to do before 30 and was able to do cross off 15 items in those two years. Not too shabby.
I'm a firm believer in the law of attraction (and focus and hard work) so I make a lot of lists. Writing down exactly what I want to achieve helps me clear my head and focus on my goals. Below is my list of 40 things I want to do before 40. Feel free to use it as inspiration for your own goals. Taking time to reflect and plan ahead is extremely important to me. It's not so much about nostalgia but of learning from my past self and deciding how to intentionally move forward in my life.
For me, journaling has been a crucial part of my life for 18 years. It's my therapy and has helped me deal with and overcome a lot of trauma. It's also where I allow myself to dream and tell the universe exactly what I want out of my life. By goal-setting every year, I make sure I express what I want to achieve, what I want my life to look like, even if I fall short sometimes. Today I turn 30 and over the course of the past several weeks, I've been reading my journals from my twenties to reflect on this decade, see how I've grown, which (if any) of those goals I still want to pursue and plan for the decade ahead. While I was reading my journals, I found an entry from seven years ago, when I was about to turn 23, entitled "For Christina on her 30th Birthday." I had totally forgotten about it but sentimental 23-year-old me had the foresight to know that 30-year-old me would find this to be so special. Here's the letter I wrote to myself for my 30th birthday: After telling my birth story to a dozen women and being met with awe and disbelief, I’ve come to realize how unusual my natural childbirth experience truly was. And I know how easily and quickly my labor and delivery could have turned into the one I had been dreading. A quick recap of how it all went down: On the morning of Valentine’s Day, I felt a contraction which caused what I thought was my water to start breaking (no one ever figured out when it actually broke because the amniotic sac was still intact at 6 cm dilated). Throughout the day, I had irregular contractions associated with early labor. I went to lunch with my friend, got my nails done (my manicurist asked me how far along I was and I didn't want to tell her that I was already in labor haha), finished packing my hospital bag and spent the remainder of the evening resting at home all while timing my contractions. Steve went to Trader Joe’s to buy salad, cheese, crackers and snacks on his way home from work. Some of that ended up being our romantic Valentine’s dinner since my contractions were getting too strong for me to feel like I could enjoy our dinner reservations.
Around 1:30 am on February 15, my contractions were 3-5 minutes apart and lasted for one minute. At 3 am, we left home and headed to Kaiser Sunset. My husband called our doula who joined us at the hospital. My midwife's shift at the hospital started at 9 am so I was put in the care of the OBs and nurses on duty until then. After exams, they determined that I was 2 centimeters dilated and 75% effaced and said that it could still "be days" before I deliver. They were concerned because our baby’s heart rate was dropping with each contraction. They admitted me, hooked me up to an IV of fluids to see if dehydration was causing it, put me on continuous fetal monitoring and told me that if things hadn’t progressed in a few hours, they would have to induce me. The dreaded word: induction! They offered me medication to deal with the contraction pain and I rejected it. By 5 am, I was in my delivery room, laboring in whichever way felt comfortable. I used a peanut ball, walked around, ate some snacks. Every fifteen to thirty minutes, someone came in to check how I was doing and offered to administer pain medication. “We have something that could take your pain away,” they said. I turned them down every time, but I could see how tempting it would be and how someone could feel pressured to accept. |