Independent offspring

Family lore has it that I have always been very independent. As a toddler, I refused to hold anyone’s hand when crossing the street. So my dad had to be creative: he convinced me to hold onto his belt loops instead. Thankfully, I wasn’t an impulsive kid, which is probably why I’m still here to write about it. When I was little more than a year old, my mom would take me to visit her parents ― normally 15 minutes on foot.

But apparently I thought I was much too mature to sit in a stroller; I had to push it, so the walk took over an hour. And I’m told that I would run up to other babies sitting in their strollers and pat them, saying, “Baby!” even when they were actually my elders.

It goes without saying that when it came time to go to college halfway around the world, I ran out the door and didn’t look back. While my freshman year roommate cried every night, missing her mother, I reveled in my newfound freedom. I could stay up until 3 a.m.! I could eat potato chips for dinner! I could wear flannel pajama pants to class! (They looked awesome, by the way.) In fact, in all four years of college, I went home exactly once, after my first year. Of course, I saw my parents about once a year when they visited and we spoke on the phone and emailed regularly, but I never missed home, high school, or Korea.

Now that I am a parent myself, I am amazed at how gracefully my parents were able to let go. I never felt I had to come home and visit (in fact, one year when I was in graduate school, I suggested coming for a visit and my mother’s response was, “Well, now’s not a great time for us, how about next year?”). They never called me; if I wanted to talk, I could call them, but I didn’t have set appointments for phone conversations like many of my friends.

In fact, when my family flew in to attend my graduation, my sister, who was a freshman at the same school, suffered a severe allergic reaction in the middle of the night, and it didn’t even occur to us to call our parents. Instead of asking my parents for a ride, I borrowed my roommate’s car to bring my sister to the emergency room. When we got back home, I gave them a call to tell them what happened, and instructed them not to call us; we’d call them, but first we needed rest. My poor parents paced the local mall (it was unseasonably cold that year) for several hours, wondering what in the world had happened. This is one of my parents’ favorite anecdotes.

Recently, my daughter went into daycare. She’s a sociable, cheerful child who likes other kids, so a part of me thought she would have a hard day and then adapt quickly. The first week was somewhat rough; I would drop her off in the morning and she would scream bloody murder and reach out for me, while I beat a hasty retreat.

At work, I wondered whether she calmed down, whether she was still crying, whether she was eating anything, whether she was acclimating. The daycare provider sent periodic text messages and cell phone pictures to reassure me. The first day, she sent a picture of my toddler sitting on a kid-sized couch, her legs sticking straight out, her little face sullen, her eyes glaring. She wasn’t sad that she was abandoned as I feared, she was just angry that she wasn’t getting what she wanted, which, presumably, was to go home.

Although a friend of mine thought it was inappropriate for the daycare provider to send me that picture, I was glad. It meant my daughter wasn’t crying in a corner, she was staking her territory and announcing her annoyance. I don’t know how to deal with sad, but I sure know how to deal with mad.

When I was preparing for her birth, I thought about all the things I could provide for her ― love, a nurturing environment, that sort of thing. But nobody told me that the most important aspect of parenthood is the art of letting go gracefully. I sure don’t want to be that parent who calls my kid’s college professor to demand that she be given some extra help.

Or that parent who hangs around her preschool classroom for an entire semester to ease her anxiety. Or the one who requires her kid to come home for every vacation. Although it’s the first time in my daughter’s life that I don’t know what is happening at every moment, I’m pretty content; I know she’ll make friends, learn how to interact in a new, unfamiliar environment, and adapt to life.

I’m hoping that if I learn to let go when the stakes are low, that will ensure that I never become like my first college roommate’s mother, who slept over in our room one long weekend, grumbling about all the drinking and partying.

Chi-Young Kim is a literary translator based in Los Angeles. She has translated works by Shin Kyung-sook, Kim Young-ha, and Jo Kyung-ran. Contact her at chiyoung@chiyoungkim.com or via her website, chiyoungkim.com. <The Korea Times/Chi-Young Kim>

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