In spite of the mental troubles I went through earlier in the month, I came to the realization that October truly was, one of the best months ever, as far as my life is concerned. I have my child, I have my wife, and I have my mother under the same roof throughout the entire month, and I’ve been getting free childcare from my mom while I’ve transitioned back into the rhythm of working virtually.
Additionally, my fridge has literally never been so full so often, as my mom is basically a machine when it comes to insisting that I be eating more Korean food, and I’m more than happy to oblige as much as my appetite can accommodate. It’s actually been kind of humorous the pattern of her complaining about the lack of fridge space when it’s she who’s constantly buying more food to re-cram in there.
But the last weeks have been an enjoyable pattern of me getting to work with piece of mind that my daughter was with her grandma and in the best of hands that aren’t her parents. The two of them bonded pretty immediately, and it makes my heart swell every time I see them together, both of them smiling and enjoying each other’s company. My mom bringing a lot of old world parenting to the forefront, with my child responding just fine, as long as she was being cared for and given attention.
The thing is, I had a harrowing thought in my mind throughout the month that I’m not entirely sure if I’ll ever have the opportunity to spend this much time with my mom again in my life. She’s in good health, and takes pretty good care of her lifestyle, but she is in her 70s now, and we live in a country where basically a plague that preys upon the elderly is still running rampant. I feel like my child kind of revitalized my mom a little bit to where she was capable of babysitting for her throughout the working weeks, but it was clearly taxing by the end of each day, and I can’t assume that this will be able to be the case again in the future if I were ever to have a second, but I also don’t want to imply that grandma’s biggest value is solely in babysitting, because she’s still a mom to me.
Needless to say, the realization that these are the days that should be treasured the most is what helped me pull my head out of my ass, because there’s no guarantee that I’ll ever have time like this ever again in my life. It’s been a truly incredible month for the most part, and I’m happy that I was able to capitalize and memorialize a lot of the times with my actual camera, because it was really important to me that my daughter have lots of photo evidence of her time spent with halmoni on dad’s side. Because she’s been hitting home runs every single day while she’s been here, and as our month winds down to a close, I wanted to write something about it so that I too can look back fondly at this time of my life and remember that in a year where everyone is bemoaning as the worst in history, I had one of the best months ever.
