Can we fast forward to next Friday?
 
I’ll be straight up and tell you that I’m scared and I want next week to be over with already. In the last few weeks, I don’t think I’ve seen as many doctors, specialists or had as many tests in the last 6 years (maybe ever? Aside from pregnancies?) put together for 3 unrelated health issues I’m dealing with right now. I’m getting probed and poked by lots of needles and other apparatuses and it hasn’t really been all that fun. It’s not even over. It’s like as soon as I turned 40, all sorts of things in my body started crapping out on me. I mean, I’m at an age where you have to do mandatory medical screenings for certain things and other than maybe getting a subscription to AARP in the mail (not yet!!), nothing makes me feel as old as this. Symptoms that might have been waved away by doctors as being “probably nothing” when you’re in your 20s or even 30s, are taken with precaution when you’re 40. And it was almost comical when it went down something like this the other day:
 
Doc: “Oh, you’re not old at all. You’re only 34″.
Me: “Uh, no I’m not. I just turned 42.”
Doc: “Oh! Hmmm, yes…I read the birth year wrong. Oh, well in that case, at 40 we start reading the symptoms a little bit differently. I need to send you in for this procedure to rule out more serious causes”.
Me: “Oh. Right…damn.”

 
I’m a terrible worrier. I always have been and it’s not really something I can change about my personality very easily. I don’t want to be a worrier. Believe me, I am trying. And despite the fact that I try to think otherwise, I also kind of suck at being an optimist. I don’t think I’m a pessimist by any means, but I’ve always been more of a realist. Can I tell you a story though? Someone in our immediate family was recently dealt with a medical blow that was completely unexpected. He’ll be in a hospital in Seattle for the next 3 or so months recovering and learning how to live without the use of his legs. This bit of news probably had a lot to do with the fact that I am finally dealing with some of my health issues. His positive outlook on all this is admirable. I can only hope to be half that positive if I were ever dealt that hand, but I suppose you’ll never really know how you would react to something until it happens to you. Until then, I know nothing. Nothing has happened. Just keep reminding myself that.

I know I don’t talk about my design work very often (ask my family; I think it drives them nuts that I don’t like to talk about the projects I’m working on). I often reference that I’m “busy with deadlines” or “I’m slammed with work”, but have never specifically talked about any of the client projects that keep me busy. The truth is, my freelance work takes up so much of my day – sometimes 15 hours a day if I’m double or triple booked on projects – that it’s the last thing I want to write or talk about, especially if it’s stressful, and often times it is. I’ve managed to keep it fairly separate from my personal life and I guess I decided long ago that I didn’t want my job to be the one thing that defines me. Being that design, however, really is how I spend most of my waking time, I wanted to introduce a new website that we launched recently for one of my oldest clients, Cabengo. In it’s 4th iteration, the site documents 11 years worth of our work.
 

I met my friend and colleague, Hillary a few months after I graduated from grad school in 2000. I had spent the summer working for another start up venture (what is it with me and all these start ups?), but I was also interviewing at big interactive advertising agencies, not as a designer interestingly enough, but for information architect positions. I sometimes think about the path my career would have taken, had I accepted any of those jobs. Maybe I would have worked up to a Creative Director position at one of the big agencies like so many of my friends and peers, but I guess even back then the lure of climbing some corporate ladder for a big job title was never that attractive to me. Instead, I decided to join up with Hillary when she started Cabengo.
 
Back then it was just the 3 of us in the office, a shared space that we rented from an architecture firm, with designy Herman Miller office furniture. It was the first office job that I had in 3 years and the last office job that I would hold to date (this is the place where my coffee addiction began, ironically enough. I could probably count on one hand the number of cups of coffee that I had the entire time I lived in the caffeine capital of the US, the Pacific Northwest, but it took a regular office job to get me addicted to the stuff). Even though the company was new, Hillary had a few high profile jobs lined up from her museum contacts from being an artist in a prior life. As it turns out, joining a small boutique startup would prove to be a good decision because the tech bubble would soon burst and so many of my friends lost their jobs the next year; I was able to employ many of them during a big, year long project that we had done for an early client.
 
After two and a half years, Hillary and I decided that it would be best if we move into a freelance relationship. We gave up the fancy office and started working from home. She had just given birth to her first child and I was sort of thinking about having babies too. It was during this time when I lost a steady paycheck and my health insurance, that I decided, well…why not? I might not have had any financial security, but I had the time and flexibility to start a family. This is when my freelance career started. I never looked back.
 
I think in a time when job longevity is not as common as in generations past and most people expect you to bop around from job to job every couple of years or so, long-time collaborations are maybe harder to find. But just as I keep saying about so many things in my life lately, “Has it really been 11 years?” (maybe that is just what old people say), sometimes I do marvel that we’ve been able to work together for so many years on so many projects. I’ve juggled many other clients and projects alongside my work with Cabengo during my 9 year freelance career, but none that have endured this long. During those years we’ve had 4 babies between us, first-time home purchases, marriages, illnesses and 40th birthday celebrations. We also share what might perhaps be the most unique bond of all – we were both stranded together during a business trip in Venezuela trying to get back home during 9/11 .
 
I think many of you can agree that it’s not the job that makes a job enjoyable; it’s who you work with. When you find a colleague that you mesh with so well, where you share similar aesthetic sensibilities and you can finish each other’s sentences, or sometimes not even need to say anything at all, it is a rare find and one worth holding onto.

This post is part of an effort organized by Ez from Creature Comforts encouraging bloggers to open up today and write something about themselves that they might not normally share with their readers (head over to her site to see a list of participating blogs). It probably won’t come as any surprise that I wholeheartedly support more of this openness and it harks back to that post earlier this week about shutting out some of this internet chatter because it’s become so unrealistic to measure ourselves against everything and everyone out there. I remember talking once with a very talented designer whose work I really admired. You know, the kind of person who seemed like creative ideas just came easily and quickly to her, only to discover when she confided in me that she was really insecure and had debilitating anxiety before design projects. Man, I could totally relate to that. But I think back to that conversation often because it reminds me that there’s always more to any carefully crafted veneer than we think we might see.

So the thing that I want to share with you today is that sometimes I have doubts about whether or not I’m being a good mom. It’s not that I think I’m a bad mom by any means, but as the girls get older and their needs get more complex, I worry that I’m not capable of handling any sort of emotional crises, should they arise. I feel like I knew how to take care of babies; their needs were a little more basic, but with girls who will soon be entering into adolescence, then preteen, then teenage years and beyond, the responsibility of raising them to be confident little ladies while acting as their centered, supportive anchor seems overwhelming right now. Sometimes I feel like it’s just an illusion to think that I can raise them right when I battle all kinds of demons like insecurity and bouts of depression myself. To dispense any sort of advice on potential problems with their peers, with school, with relationships, or with their self esteem seems incongruous when I am still trying to figure all of this out myself. I know that we don’t have to have all the answers, that it’s impossible to have all the answers. I know that as a family unit we need to figure things out as life plays along. I just don’t want to look back and feel like I failed as a parent or to feel like I’m living some sort of contradiction where I can’t follow any of the advice myself that sometimes comes out of my mouth.

 
This never felt more true than last week when an issue arose with one of the girls. I felt like I was in over my head, that it wasn’t something I had any answers for. I felt like I wasn’t doing enough and that I hadn’t paid enough attention. In the end I think things will be ok, but I did find myself in a little panic wondering how I’d be able to handle anything big. It made me think back to when I was a kid and how my mother might have felt when she was faced with certain issues that were going on with me, all the while battling her own demons and life problems. As a kid, I wasn’t really aware of what was going on with her until much later because she was always just “mom” and not necessarily a “person”, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the duality of some of these shared childhood experiences, but from a mother’s point of view now that I’m on the other side. How would I emotionally handle, for example, if it was my daughter who was diagnosed with scoliosis and had to wear an uncomfortable, ugly plastic brace for all of her teenage years and deal with doctor appointments all the way in the Bronx to get x-rayed every month for 5+ years? I know how I felt going through that as a kid. I was angry and insecure and anxiety ridden, but I never really thought about how hard that must have been on my mother as well, and I am deathly afraid that since it is hereditary I will need to relive this all over again from the other side. My mom later told me that she cried a lot during those years, but at the time I never knew. In my eyes, she was just being my mom.
 
I’ve been thinking too about my short-lived, but very intense bout with an eating disorder I had when I was 18. I think for me it was a rather atypical case of anorexia as it had less to do with body dysmorphic disorder and everything to do with feeling like I was in control of something when life seemed out of control the summer I graduated from high school. From an outsider it may have seemed that I had everything going for me at that point in my life and I had attained pretty much every goal that I had set as a high school senior. But when school ended and I was faced with the daunting prospect of starting over at a new prestigious art school, I was lost and scared and all of those achievements felt empty when there were still issues I hadn’t dealt with. I was scared of failure before I even started. I needed something new to focus on. Unfortunately it channeled itself into a very unhealthy manifestation, but the challenge of seeing how far I could go without anyone noticing became far too tempting to stop. But of course my mom did eventually notice. I think back now to how desperate she must have felt, how alone and scared and in over her head. How could you not think that you failed as a parent on some level when you first realize that your kid is starving herself? I don’t think you can. My mom thinks that it was God who saved me, from all her prayers, but I don’t really believe that. It was the moment when she handed me the phone to talk to a doctor, who told me that I was at a dangerous weight (I had dropped to 89 pounds at that point. I am 5’6″ for reference) and that if I didn’t start eating I would have to be committed. It was again that threat of losing control that scared me back into eating and realizing for the first time the severity of what I was doing and that I was not only ruining my life, but also my mother’s. I gained back the 20 pounds that I lost that summer in 3 weeks.

I may experience moments of desperation like these with my daughters – or I may not. It remains to be seen. Sometimes I feel like my life with them has really just started, that we have a long road ahead that doesn’t just stop when they move out of the house. Although some days I may not feel it, I have to trust that I’ll know what to do when the time comes. I also hope that I have the courage like my mother to let go of my kids like she did when I left home freshman year. She hated those years I traveled around the country in a car and hung out with what she probably thought was the “wrong crowd” and was out of touch for months not knowing where or what I was doing. But she didn’t stop me, and while it was exasperating during those years when I thought she just “doesn’t understand”, I hope she understands now that those were the years that really did save me.
 
I’m thinking about all of this now, particularly that really hard summer because it has so much to do with preserving and keeping up that perfect veneer. I couldn’t sustain that in high school. I tried and I cracked, so I certainly make no attempts to depict any sort of perfect life now. While sharing your life so openly is not comfortable for everyone, I applaud all the bloggers who are participating in Things I’m Afraid To Tell You today. I think we could use a little more realness. Let me end by saying one more thing I’m afraid to tell you. It isn’t easy pressing that publish button on posts like these. I wouldn’t publish something that I wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing by any means, but it still isn’t easy. As much as I don’t want to admit it to myself, I still care what other people think. Probably more than I should.

Do you ever think about the house you grew up in? Maybe some of you go back, to visit your parents who still live there. This is the house I grew up in, in a fairly suburban-like neighborhood in Queens, from the time my parents bought the house in 1979 when I was 9 years old (for $85,000, I still remember!) till I moved away to Manhattan for art school in late 1988. My parents moved out of this house around 1995.

We recently had dinner near the old neighborhood a few weeks ago so on a whim I decided to take a little detour and drive by the house, partly to show the girls where I had lived and partly because I hadn’t seen the house in about 14 or so years. We are rarely ever in the neighborhood. The house looks like this today:
 

I was surprised to see that aside from the skylights, the house from the outside hasn’t really changed at all. The scripty house numbers are still attached to the siding in front of the house too, which I found rather amusing.
 
Truth is, I have mixed emotions when I think about this house. I remember good times for sure, but there are enough bad memories associated with the years that our family lived there that it’s hard to look at it with anything but conflicting feelings. The house scared me too. I was completely freaked out, for example, by the textured geometric metallic wallpaper that lined the hallway to the bedrooms (this was the 80s after all). When the light hit the wall at certain angles, a big, evil jack-o-lantern grin stared back at me if I looked over at the wall from the living room. I tried to avoid walking past that part of the hallway at all times, choosing to go through the kitchen instead to get to my bedroom. The basement and attic scared me too, and at times I thought there were spirits lurking in some of those rooms. Ok, so most of this was deeply influenced by the Amityville Horror, a movie that terrified me and still does to this day (really, I feel scarred for life from watching that film as a kid, particularly since I have seen the actual house in person), but at times the house really did put me at unease.

Aside from having an active teenage imagination, I think that all 4 of us were ready to be done with the house by the time my parents sold it in the late 90s. It was a relief to be rid of it, really, and I have to say that I am very happy not to have to go back as an adult and revisit some of those bad memories. It’s strange enough to be back living in your hometown, the city that you grew up in. You walk amongst ghosts and reminders of your past all the time, but I’m grateful that when we go visit my parents in the suburbs for the weekend, it’s not the house that I grew up in. Different house. Different neighborhood. No history. A blank slate.
 
Still, this house has a place in our past and I’d like to think of all the fond memories instead. Stuff like days spent rollerskating up and down the driveway and around in the basement with my cousin, blasting Journey, MJ and Diana Ross on the radio while my brother rode his Big Wheel (you can see us holding hands on skates at the end of the driveway in the first photo). Playing kick the can in the street with all the neighborhood kids on the block. The little backyard garden plot where my dad once planted a bunch of Wax Begonias to spell out “love”. Watching MTV for the first time. Painting and sewing through all hours of the night in the basement, putting my portfolio together for art school applications. Raking Fall leaves. The young 6 foot tree in front of our house where I found my brother sitting on a branch one day as I came home from school, only to realize an hour and a half later that he was actually stuck up in the tree but was too embarrassed to tell me when he failed to come inside (that little tree is huge now, by the way). Beyond these little snippets of memories, the house is significant to our family because it housed all of our extended family members at one time or another as they immigrated to NY from Korea. My mom was the first in her family to come and she paved the way for 3 of her siblings, my grandmother and my dad’s sister to come to US. They all lived with us for awhile until they were able to find their footing and get a home of their own.

The girls weren’t really that impressed with the house when we drove by. Maybe they’re too young to fully appreciate it or understand. I remember about 13 years ago knocking on the door of the childhood house where Mark’s mom grew up in Hawaii. We were all there – his mom, Mark, his sister and I, and she really wanted to go back and show us where she grew up as this was the first time we were all in Hawaii together. The people who lived in the house were home and they were nice enough to indulge us and invite us in. It was real cool to experience that with her, to walk through the house 30+ years later and see her revisit some of her earliest childhood memories. I don’t have any desire to go back inside my childhood house again, but I think I’d like to drive by with the girls again when they get older. When we got home that evening from dinner, Mark and I wondered how they would remember this apartment. Maybe they’ll come back to this block 30 years from now, stand in front of the doorway and say, “I lived here way back when…”. Hopefully, their memories will be fond.

I’m going to be 42 in a week, you know. 42 (!!) Forty two. Forty + twooooooo. Basically your average middle aged mom.

 
And I laugh even when I write that because various friends and I have been debating on what middle aged actually is. What is that? 50? 45? 40? Are WE middle aged? What? But as a joke I’ve started calling myself “Middle Aged Mom” but more with this image of a super hero called Middle Aged Mom in mind, a character that is not really me. The joke, obviously, is that I may very well be a middle aged mom right now.
 
Turning 40 wasn’t a big deal. Every year after that has been a little bit harder. I can’t quite figure out exactly why, though I suppose some chronic health issues have something to do with it. Suddenly you just don’t feel as physically invincible anymore. Seems like everything that never made a difference before, counts. Stuff that you never cared about because you were young, matters. Sometimes I just can’t believe I’m already here, the 40s. It’s true about youth…all that stuff about feeling like you can conquer the world, mostly because you were cocky enough to believe it because you didn’t really think about the future and the consequences of your actions, and maybe you weren’t jaded about life just yet. At least I wasn’t. You just lived for the moment, whatever moment you found yourself in and nothing else mattered. Not a career, not saving up for retirement, not wondering if you’ll ever afford to remodel your kitchen one day. Nothing except what you were going to do that night with your friends or where you were going to sleep if you were traveling around the country in your car. I was thinking how glad I was to have had a few “irresponsible” years in my late teens and early 20s because right now, at age almost 42, so much of life is about being responsible.
 

So how do you know if you’re going through a mid life crises? I don’t think it’s entirely about running to get tattoos and flashy cars. It might be more subtle than that for most people. I’ve been getting super nostalgic which for me is nothing new, but thinking a lot about the past lately and watching tons of old and new concert videos on Youtube of bands and heroes from my youth who are still around and touring like The Cure, PJ Harvey, the Beastie Boys and especially watching the Pearl Jam 20 movie and thinking, wow…look…they’re all getting old now (except Chris Cornell, who pretty much looks the same), but then quickly coming to the realization that holy shit! That means I am too. Somehow you never think it’s you.
 
But it’s happening folks, it’s happening. Watching your parents grow old and in some instances, struggle with their health and even deteriorate physically is a reminder for us all. But before we get to all that, what a strange age to be right now. What was once considered old really isn’t anymore. What was once considered solidly middle aged is ambiguous. We seem to be constantly pushing the edges of those boundaries as my generation ages, delaying all that old people stuff because really, we’re not old. Am I RIGHT? It’s a bit more confusing these days, everything is blurred. There aren’t really any hard fast rules anymore on what we should or shouldn’t be doing at our age. With a little bit of common sense and some self editing, we can pretty much wear whatever we want regardless of how old we are, keep our hair long (and all my Asian friends out there know what I mean because I bet your mom’s been rocking the Kofro by the time they were in their 30s too), and generally keep doing what we’ve always been doing. But sometimes I do stop and look and think…what am I doing here? Do I look ridiculous? Am I wearing this outfit or these pants or styling my hair this way because I’m afraid of looking old? I’d be lying a little if I said no.
 
So what does it mean to age gracefully? I certainly have no regrets. I may be confused by all this, but I’m not fighting it, I’m not wanting to go back in time. When I think about my youth and the music and the people that are no longer in my life, I can look back fondly and say, damn…those were some of the best years of my life. I can’t deny that I miss those times; the 80s and 90s were the best. But then I look around at what I have now – my kids, my marriage (the relationship which did in fact start way back from my youth), the life we’ve built and the friends that we have and I think, well, this stuff is really good too. I can be all nostalgic about my 20s, but I don’t have to or need to relate to 20 years olds now. It has nothing to do with my life. I’m Middle Aged Mom. Yeah, maybe I need a t-shirt. I’d wear it with (no) irony.

Some days I have to remember that a lot of things in life revolve in cycles. Women deal with cycles with their bodies (man, do we ever). The business is somewhat cyclical through seasons – there are definitely slow months and busy months and after 4 years we can sort of predict now where they fall (but it doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t worry when sales slow down). Freelance work, well, that is sort of the wildcard.

When you’re in it though, when you’re down at the bottom of that cycle and you can’t seem to catch any momentum or when things slow down and make you nervous, it’s hard to remember that there’s an upswing at the next turn. But usually there always is. Currently, however, I feel like I’m on that proverbial hamster wheel. Running, running, running to keep money flowing in so that it can flow out as necessary to run the household smoothly without any hiccups, to maintain that middle class status quo we find ourselves in. Running makes you tired, but you can’t stop because then everything will stop. So you keep running.
 
I feel lucky that freelance work has been very steady over the years. While there are still a few moments where I start to feel uneasy if things suddenly lighten up, for the most part I haven’t dealt with any real panic attacks or month-long depressions in a long time like in the early years of freelance whenever there was a dry spell. Those were scary, especially because I was also a new parent. I would say that for the first 5 years I would obsessively run mental calculations in my head every other day trying to figure out how long our money would last if I couldn’t find work for a few months. Knowing our situation down to the penny was comforting. But as I near my 10th year of working for myself, I understand now that freelance is a constant moving cycle too. It’s pretty ridiculous to believe that you’ll never work again even though you may have been lying face down in self defeat on your bed thinking it was truth. If anything 10 years is a convincing track record that there is always something around the corner.
 
But back to that hamster wheel. Sometimes I want to get off. I’m grateful that the work keeps coming (for now) and it keeps the engine going, but sometimes I don’t feel like I’m going anywhere or that the business is going anywhere. We’re just running to maintain orders and deadlines, to pay bills, to pay for dance classes and soccer and summer camp. I think it’s good to stop once in awhile and reassess things because it’s all too easy to just keep going and then when you look back, a whole year has passed. What have you accomplished in a year that was different and new than the year before?
 
Sometimes I think, well, if you could do anything right now, what would it be? I’ve struggled with the question before, but I think I know now. I think I would like a year to just try things out and work on all these ideas I have and see where it could take us. This is a fantasy, so in this fantasy there are no money issues, no pressures to make the numbers every month, no risk of losing freelance contacts when the year is over. When you’re working, there is an expectation and pressure to make clients happy. There is no room for failure. You don’t go into a project expecting to fail. Neither does the client. So you churn out the work and hold your breath at each design review and repeat with the next. I’d like to just work on something without all that pressure to succeed. To be free to fail without affecting someone else’s budget or deadline. To fail so that I can confirm what I’m good at and what I’m not and to discover if there are any surprises. To have the time to create something so bad and ugly and awful and not have it matter. A year to fail. I suppose you could call that a sabbatical, but those don’t exist for most people.
 
I think my nightly ritual of staying up till 2am is an attempt at trying to carve out this time. It doesn’t really work all the time though. The logic is there, but I often just end up working more and if I’m not, I want nothing to do except zone out on the internet because I have no brain capacity left.
 
So, there really is no point to this post or a moral to this story except I can attest that getting 5-6 hours of sleep every night is stupid (don’t try this at home, kids!). Being 40 year old adults with school age children doesn’t automatically mean that you have everything figured out in your life, despite what your 20 year old self once thought. I know we all make our choices. To have children, to not have children; to live in an expensive city, to live in a rural town; to save money or to blow it all on a trip of a lifetime; to keep saying yes to keep everything running while you keep thinking no. Though sometimes it seems hard to imagine, I’d like to think that those choices that got you on the wheel in the first place don’t mean that you’re locked into your current way of life. I’d like to think that there is some way off this hamster wheel…

Does anyone know what kind of berries these purple ones are? Such a pretty color.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what “success” means. I’ve also been thinking a lot about what being content means. I get asked from time to time whether or not I realize all the things that I have achieved so far in my life whenever I lament about all the things I can be doing if I had more time. The answer is yes…and no. Learning how to be content is perhaps an art and a key to happiness, but I also don’t see anything wrong with always wanting to achieve more unless it makes you a miserable person in the process, of course. Maybe there are 2 kinds of people in life (a gross generalization obviously for the purpose of this post). People who are or learn to be content with what they have and people who can rarely settle and are always looking for more. I don’t think either way is the best or right way and perhaps it has more to do with your personality than anything else. Are these behaviors learned or conditioned? Or are we just born this way?
 
I admit that I sometimes bristle at comments that imply that I should be more grateful with what we have and what we’ve achieved. I pause and consider each time I get called miserable by strangers because of some of the things I’ve written. When I speak honestly about wanting to do more with my life, it isn’t about discontentment or being ungrateful and I don’t understand why it sometimes gets interpreted as such. I am always aware that there are people out there who have less and I am always aware that we are blessed, but this is rarely about that. It’s about channeling this inner struggle to always want to do better and more things in a positive way that keeps me excited about life. Some of us need that, whether you want to call it a distraction or a motivator, but some of us need that fire to keep us going.
 
There are 2 things that my music professor in college told us that has stuck with me through the years. They aren’t earth shattering pieces of advice, but I hear them rattling around in my head from time to time.
1. There will always be people who are better than you (this is in context of being a musician and a composer, not a “better” person).
2. It isn’t always the most talented who succeed, it’s the go-getters who get the opportunities.
 
It’s pretty obvious, really, but I think it was the first time I heard it from a mentor-type person. It stuck with me in the same way as something my mom said to me when I was a little girl. She told me once when I was frustrated about something that I would have to work harder to get where I wanted because I was a girl and because I was a minority (this was in the 80s, mind you).
 
So here we are 20+ years later. I think it’s natural to start contemplating life and career changes once you hit 40. I talk about this with my friends all the time. How much longer can we be freelancers at our careers with all these young go-getters snapping at our heels who can do it so much cheaper and yeah, sometimes better than we can? Even if we can, is this what we really want to be doing when we’re 50 years old? So some of it is the vague beginnings of an exit strategy and some of it is because we might be ready for the next thing in our lives anyway. Like any other person, there have been successes and some disappointments in my life. There are times when I falter and spiral down into the “what if” scenarios and question some decisions I’ve made that have led me to where I am, but we are where we’re supposed to be. It doesn’t mean there isn’t room for bigger things. Personally, I can’t think of living my life any other way.
 
Defining success is a very personal thing for each and every one of us. For some it might be financial, fame, recognition or personal happiness. I’m trying to figure out what success means to me, but I don’t feel like I’ve reached it yet. My plan for my 40s is to raise the girls to be the best young ladies they can be before letting them go out into the world on their own, and to figure out what it is that will truly make me feel successful. It won’t be measured against anyone else’s achievements or criteria but my own. Maybe the business is the start to part of that success but maybe it isn’t. I don’t even know yet. It’s both exciting and daunting, but I know that whatever it is will only come with hard work and the will to make it happen – and if I’m fortunate, maybe a little luck.

us, circa 1996.

It’s pretty funny to have all these old photos of us together when we were much younger. It’s more interesting still to witness how we’re both aging over the years (why do guys in general look ok with the grays that come in? So unfair).
 
Friends, I had a much sobering moment over the weekend when my back started acting up. Though it’s not officially diagnosed, I suspect I have a possible herniated disc brewing back there. I have bouts of sciatica. My childhood scoliosis probably doesn’t help (yes, I wore an awful plastic back brace for 5 years). It’s never really terribly painful, but the pain is annoying and just there. I’ve managed to keep things under control by not lifting anything at all anymore, but it is a bit sobering to see how much this affects the every day details of my life. I’ve also now realized that the decisions I have made in my early 30s have all helped shape the life I live right now where I can manage my back issues from getting worse – the fact that I had children when I did and not later in my late 30s (and no doubt my back issues became exasperated or maybe even caused by carrying, lifting, and pushing around 2 big babies for so many years). The fact that I decided that office life wasn’t for me since it’s physically hard these days to sit in a chair all day (when I am working at home, I lie as flat on my back as I can with my laptop since that puts less pressure on my lower back).
 
All of these things I know. But over the weekend while Mark was gone I sort of had a freak out moment when I realized I was so dependent on him to do all those little things I need to avoid to keep my back in check. I can’t lift anything more than 10 pounds or stand longer than an hour straight without feeling it in my back and legs the rest of the day. This is why he does all the grocery shopping. This is why I can’t work in the kitchen baking cookies or lift heavy pots of water. This is why I can’t take out the garbage or carry packages to the post office. So many little things that I can’t do.
 
I look at my mom and see how in many ways I am becoming her. When I realize that she was only 6 or 7 years older than me when she had the first of her 2 back surgeries it makes me feel really old in a way that I have never felt before. Watching your parents age is like watching a play unfold – everything is written on the wall. You see how some of their life choices are catching up with them now, or you see how some of the choices they made 20 years ago, like quitting smoking (my dad) or switching careers from a less physically demanding job (nursing) to a desk job (real estate), have made a difference for the better. The things that we do when we are younger really do affect our lives later on. You can’t see this or care about it when you’re in your 20s (we thought we were invincible back then, didn’t we?), but man, when you turn 40, suddenly all those issues are right there in your face.
 
Still, there are no regrets, but I feel like we are at a critical age where the things we are doing now will affect the rest of our lives. Our parents are a daily reminder of that, though I think we are better equipped with knowledge than they were about so many things. We can’t be in control over everything, but we are in control of some things. Make smart choices. Make everyday count.

Nah, it’s not really that short. It’s just pulled back, but sometimes I wonder if I should cut it short like this and then I remember how much maintenance it took all the times I had short hair, and I’ve had short hair probably half my life. I usually end up only getting a haircut twice a year. Making haircut appointments are about as painful as making dental appointments in the same way that both get pushed aside when I’m too busy, but I’m going to try and be better about that, particularly since I found a new stylist thanks to Anna (basically I’m just going to do whatever Anna tells me to do).

The haircut actually looks like this:

About 10 years ago when I was still writing my Asian American webzine, we had a whole issue devoted to hair. I wrote an article titled “A Lifetime of Hair Angst” that kind of went viral in the way that things went viral 10 years ago (meaning not like today with blogs, twitter and facebook, so maybe 50 people read it instead of 5000). The article was about my life-long struggles with finding the right haircut for my thick Asian hair, and it also talked at great length the perceived differences in the way men treated me depending on if I had short or long hair (so the piece wasn’t all fluff). I think in all of my years I may have had almost every kind of hairstyle and length you could think of, from a 2 inch pixie cut to hair down to my butt, big 80s perms and a mop of hair inspired by Robert Smith and the Reid Brothers from the Jesus and Mary Chain. I used to chop off my hair every 18 months whenever I’d get too comfortable hiding behind my hair as sort of a lesson in letting it go, but I dunno…since I’ve had kids it’s just been stuck in a rut because pony tail hair is easy hair right?

So what do you do when you’ve reached a certain uh, “mature” age and you’re trying not to have mom hair (’cause god forbid I actually look like a mom, haha!)? Tell me when you find the answer, ok? Especially since my hair has now gone wavy post pregnancy instead of straight and I now have freckles. Aging sure is weird.

Totally frivolous post today and sorry to bore the guys who read the blog – you know, all 5 of you – but boots! I’m never that girl anymore who finds that deal or flea market steal, mostly because I don’t have the leisure time to browse anymore (wish I did!), but the family and I were visiting our friends who sell at the Hester Street Market in the Lower East Side the other week and I spotted these boots for sale at a booth selling vintage clothing. And hey! Size 7, just my size. That hardly ever happens to me anymore. From what I could tell, they had never been worn and now I have a new pair of $400 Swedish Hasbeens for nearly 85% off.

Also, do you wear Oxfords? Specifically gray wingtip ones? I don’t usually, but I picked these up on final clearance for really cheap. I don’t know…the verdict is still out…it feels a little 80s throwback here…too preppy for me…maybe the argyle socks don’t help…