The old that is strong does not wither

Ten years ago this month, the #1 song on the Billboard Charts was "Promiscuous" by Nelly Furtado featuring Timbaland.

It was really my first time back at Raphael. Although M had brought me over occasionally for retreats and events during the couple years before that and I had chaperoned WYD in 2005, summer 2006 was the beginning of the return.

I was annoyed that an obsequious Korean nun had conned me into directing elementary summer Bible camp. I was internally conflicted and angry. Earlier that year, during Holy Week of 2006, my mother had been diagnosed with colon cancer. It was a scary and stressful time for my family. My sister had just graduated from high school. I was transitioning degree programs from a more academic theology degree to the more pastoral MDiv. But I really didn't know what I was doing with my life.

As Fr. Mark delighted in reminding me, I hated myself but hated others more. So much angst and hardness. And frustration. So much frustration.

It was still the era before I knew the truth. TAMF. And I wouldn't know for sure for another 4-5 years.

It recently dawned on me that all this was ten years ago this month. Being the responsible person that I am (a little self-aggrandizement here haha), I threw myself into Bible camp planning and directing wholeheartedly, or at least tried to. I was trying my best, but at the same time, I was really bitter about it. I didn't know any of the staff very well except for my sister. Thankfully, they were all better people than me. The camp went very well, by the grace of God.

Fr. Mark was also gone that summer, in Korea, and had me do the Gospel reflection in place of the homily during the English Sunday masses since the visiting priest did not speak English. I want to say they were mostly awful reflections. I distinctly remember one Sunday I barely got to mass on time, stamps from the Vegas club the night before still on my hand with my reflection notes scribbled on napkins from Caesar's Palace. (It was the weekend of my college Pi reunion, which was held in Las Vegas. Now, those were some FUN times!)

In my postpartum depression stupor earlier this summer, I had lamented all that I had lost from my pre-married/pre-parenting life. The things I could do, places I could go, yummies I could eat. But as I reflect on that summer ten years ago, I know there is a lot I don't ever want to be/go through/do again.

I don't know why it took me such a long time to renegotiate my relationship with the Raphael community. It all seems so stupid in retrospect. I missed out on so much because of my stupidity. I acted and behaved like a really horrible and ugly person, and I was still blessed. Imagine all that could have been had I been even fractionally more open hearted? It wasn't really until after Fr. Mark left in 2012 that I started acting like a more lovable person at Raphael.

A couple days ago, I went to the funeral of a longtime Raphael community member. He was just a year younger than me. We had been in youth group together way back in the warehouse days. I was probably closer to his older brother, but we saw each other at the gatherings and major life events of our peers. I was really blessed at his funeral. I was just amazed and comforted at the fact that people from way back, 20 years ago, were drawn to attend and pray and be present at his funeral even though they hadn't otherwise been to Raphael in decades. That is the power of the community and a testament to what a wonderful person he is and his family is. And it is an affirmation of how firm our community is, how deeply we are still connected in some way.

All this to say... I am grateful I came back. I am grateful for the people who welcomed me and who had patience with me as I struggled. I am grateful that I was accepted as I was but encouraged to be all that I could be. I'm still working on it.

I always come back to this email from 2004:

Linda,

I hope you are well.  I hope the times find you in the
peaceful embrace of Hope and Faith.  Isn't it such a
paradoxical time for you?  So much shifting certainty
in an endless short period of time.  Though the
mountains may fall and the hills turn to dust the love
of the Lord will never fail.  I believe in you.  I
believe in you.  Whatever you choose, I believe you
will come out with a greater heart.  Isn't that what
it's all about? I've always wondered what was real.
It is a very difficult question to ask.  Answering it
will require even more of yourself.  So many collorary
factors, so much conflicting alliances.  It is the
process which will define us in the end.

Life Interrupted

I have not written much, blog or journal-wise, in a very long time.

That is the 아줌마 life.

Even as I write this, my second child (yes, now there is a #2) is sleeping rather unpeacefully in her crib. Did you know babies can hiccup in their sleep? I just learned that now as I went to check in on the funny noises I heard from her--but no, she is not awake, just hiccupping in her sleep.

It is mind-boggling to me how much my life has changed in a few short years. I am almost a different person. Almost.

The differences are a result of my finitude as a human being. I am limited. I cannot keep track of professional sports teams and players or watch all their games while tracking poopy diapers and meal compositions and the ever-changing taste preferences of a toddler. I cannot go check out every new restaurant or follow emerging chefs in the Los Angeles area while cooking or preparing or shopping for three meals a day for those under my care. I cannot go wherever I want whenever I want without first finding childcare and coordinating with three families and scheduling around bedtimes. My weekends are taken over by in-laws and grandparents. If I have a moment, I pay bills or catch some sleep or clean that thing I've been meaning to get to for weeks. There is not much reading or binge-watching television shows--or any television shows--or spontaneously going to the cinema anymore. Travel? Ha, the last time I was on a plane was in 2013 before our son was born. Between growing family, job changes, and the house purchase, blocking off time to travel has been impossible, or in the least, too much of a hassle.

But there is a lot of toddler silliness. Much wonder at "where did he learn how to do that?" Screaming demands and sweet "Thank you"s. Precious baby smiles and coos and gurgles. Snuggles and bedtime stories. Children's programming on PBS like the ones I used to watch as a kid, cartoons and puppets learning simple moral-of-the-stories. There is not much me time but plenty of we time. And I am blessed with a wonderful partner and a lot of help from family and friends.

The interior life has been a challenge. At least in my new job (relatively new... I've been there for over a year now), I can easily go to mass for staff at noon every day. It is sometimes the only time I pray. Sunday mass is overtaken by attending to the toddler and trying to patiently teach him how to behave in church. And at the moment I am on maternity leave and so don't have access to daily mass at work. Plus I'm in that Korean postpartum house arrest and so am told not to even go outside. I haven't been to mass in nearly 5 weeks. Once I am allowed out, we'll probably have to go into the dreadful crying room for Sunday masses again, because of infant #2. Sigh. And I will have to give up daily mass so I can pump breastmilk at work once I return to work.

Not that mass is requisite for prayer. It helps me a lot, but it is certainly not the only way to pray. I should challenge myself.

I am reading a book of essays collected for the Year of Mercy. Each essay expounds on one of the spiritual and corporal works of mercy. There is one essay on forgiving injuries willingly that I really liked.

There are brief moments when I get to pay attention to the interior life I guess.

Now I must go do laundry for my son. A small task that I can do with great love... if I remember to do so.

How I Wash Cloth Diapers

Despite what other moms may claim, I find cloth diapering to be laborious. I'm not going to lie. It isn't easy. But I do believe it is totally worth it.

When changing JFJ, we drop the prefold diaper into the diaper pail (which always has a liner in it), wipe the diaper cover, and hang the diaper cover to dry/air out until its next use or wash. Poopy diapers require a little shaking or scraping into the toilet (I just use some toilet paper to "scrape"). If it's a wetter poop, I run the diaper under cold water to get some of the stickier parts off then drop it into the diaper pail. (Please see this previous post for more information on our set-up.)

We own a Samsung front-loading HE washer/dryer set. After some experimentation, this is how I wash JFJ's diapers:
1. I throw the diapers, cloth wipes, diaper pail liner, and diaper covers into the washer all together. First a Quick Wash Cold with Charlie's Soap (and the occasional Booster), with Medium or High Spin at Heavy Soil Level. Takes about 32 minutes.
2. Then a Heavy Duty Wash Hot with Charlie's Soap (and the occasional Booster), with Extra High Spin at Heavy Soil Level. I also add a Pre-Wash cycle, an Extra Rinse, and an Extra Spin. Takes 2 hours and 8 minutes.
3. I pull out the diaper pail liner and the diaper covers to hang dry. The prefolds and cloth wipes I toss into the dryer. I read somewhere not to use the Sanitize setting on HE machines for diapers. But I use our Sanitize setting (Very Dry Dry Level, High Temp) to dry the diapers only. Takes 1 hour 2 minutes.
4. I hang the diapers after the dry cycle. Usually the dryer will do its job, but I like to hang them out in the sun for a bit to make sure they are completely dry before folding and stowing them.

We have 2 dozen diapers for JFJ at 9.5 months. We wash every 2-3 days. If we ever have baby #2, I will most likely buy at least 3 dozen of the Infant size/Size 1 (we use Osocozy prefolds).

Here's a link to the Osocozy Care and Use webpage for some more tips from the maker of our cloth diapers.

And that's it! Easy. Not really.

Notes on Cloth Diapering

JFJ is a proudly cloth-diapered baby. In addition to my concerns for his carbon footprint, JFJ's atopic dermatitis has us doing all sorts of things to keep his skin happy. So far, he's had rashes all over but never a diaper rash in the diaper area. If that's not a testament to the benefits of cloth diapering, I don't know what is.

We were living in an apartment for JFJ's months 0-8 and then busy settling into our house for month 9. We used Dy-Dee Diaper Service for these months and were very satisfied with their prefold diapers, prorap covers, and weekly delivery service. We used the infant size for the first few months and then switched to regular, which was still fitting fine when we stopped just shy of 9 months old. We started with 80 diapers per week then lowered it to 60 when he got a little older and didn't need as many diaper changes. Even 60 was a lot for us though. We could have easily gotten by with 50.

We do use disposables when we go out, however. I know hard core cloth diapering parents carry wetbags and use cloth diapers exclusively. We opt to use disposables when we go out. Even so, we have only had to get one large box of each size so far (usually 200+ diapers in each box). We had received two boxes of size 2, in fact, from our baby shower, and only went through one box before JFJ grew out of that size. His growth has tapered off a bit so I anticipate possibly having to buy another box of size 3 before he grows out of that size. The current box of size 3 diposables we are using right now is the first and only we've had to buy so far since we got the others as gifts!

We also have used disposable wipes while we were using the diaper service. I bought some cloth wipes when we started using our own cloth diapers. We currently use a combination of the disposables and the cloth. Our use of wipes has decreased signficantly as JFJ has gotten older since he poops much less often than in early infancy (although the quantity with each poopy diaper is another matter).

At 9 months, I bought JFJ two dozen OsoCozy Better Fit Prefolds made of unbleached cotton (lined with red) from Diapers.com. I wash a load every 2 days, and so far this has worked out nicely. We are still using three medium size Prorap covers we had bought from Dy-Dee and two Thirsties Duo Wrap Snaps size 2 that we had received from our baby shower (we've gone through size xs and s in the proraps as well as size 1 of Thirsties). We got to keep the diaper pail from Dy-Dee, and we use reusable Planet Wise Diaper Pail Liners (rotating two liners).

There are ample resources on the internet about cloth diapering. I've taken advice and instructions from a variety of Pinterest pins, Amazon reviews, and friends with experience.

To remember for baby #2...

1. Cloth diapers (and wipes) need to be treated to achieve absorbency before use. Especially cloth diapers made of natural materials (like cotton and bamboo) need to be prewashed many times. I read somewhere online to prewash three times. It turned out that our unbleached cotton OsoCozy Better Fit Prefolds didn't really absorb until wash 5 or 6. We went through an unpleasant couple days (nights especially) of leaky diapers before they started absorbing well. Once properly treated, however, the diapers absorb very well and are supposed to absorb even better with more washes.
2. Better Fits, although smaller, are no less absorbent than Regular Prefolds as far as I can tell. Dy-Dee's were regular prefolds so we folded the diaper horizontally before making the angel trifold. This made the diaper really bulky. I think we'll go for Better Fits when we have to buy Infant sized cloth diapers for baby #2 and stick to Toddler sized Better Fits for JFJ if he needs them that far.
3. Leg gussets are a must. We had a lot of poop leak onto the diaper cover, to be honest, but very rarely beyond the gussets. (Diaper blasts and projectile poo spreading up the back are a wholly different matter, which of course also happens with disposables.) OxiClean for baby works wonders in getting stains out of those diaper covers, thankfully!

I will post separately the details about washing our cloth diapers shortly.

Wisdom for Early Ahjummahdom 3: I Am Beloved

Lesson 3 is "Don't spend time with people who don't treat you well."

I explained this rather crudely to a little brother/dong-seng in his early 20s once as "when you're in your 30s, you don't give a shit about what other people think of your choices anymore... you just do what you gotta do." What I meant by this was not that we should make bad choices that draw negative opinions from others. The context of our conversation was his doing things he doesn't want to do and hanging out with people with whom he'd rather not just because he didn't want his friends to think badly of him. Who cares?? You gotta do what you gotta do. And if friends think badly of you when you do what you gotta do, then maybe they're not really good friends.

I am Beloved. Whether or not friends think so or regardless of how others treat us, we are Beloved. By God. So why spend time with people who contradict this fact? Time is precious and limited. We've only got so much of it. Better to surround ourselves with people who affirm the truth of our identity than ones who lie to us.

I'm not going to go into the Beloved bit because someone else does this so much better than I can: Henri Nouwen. I strongly recommend reading Life of the Beloved. 

Between my marriage, raising kids, my family, my job, and my various hobbies, I barely get enough sleep or time to eat. I don't have a lot of time to waste on sorting out mixed messages and falsehoods and licking wounds. So I prefer not avoid people who give me mixed messages and falsehoods and wounds in the first place. It's hard enough to find as much time as I'd like to spend with people who treat me well for heaven's sakes! Nobody's perfect and relationships aren't always smooth sailing, but the ones in which I can live as the Beloved and I can treat the other as the Beloved are the ones to keep.

Wisdom for Early Ahjummahdom 2: My Body is a Temple of the Holy Spirit

Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy that person; for the temple of God which you are, is holy. (1 Corinthians 3:16-17) 

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? (1 Corinthians 6:19)

Back in youth group days, our counselors would use verses such as these to scare us into not smoking or taking drugs or getting tattoos. Whether or not such actions to our body is sinful is a topic for another time perhaps. The matter at hand is one's body... and its inevitable deterioriation and--dare I say it--death.

Start taking care of your body now, not later, because your body is basically gradually breaking down as you age whether you realize it or not. This is Lesson 2.

What does this have to do with the Holy Spirit? It doesn't... because humans are not the Holy Spirit. We are spiritual but also corporal, and we are not God.

The temple is a physical building. All physical buildings require maintenance and upkeep. The more regularly you maintain, the longer it will last and the easier it is to keep it well-maintained. Aside from the holiness factor, which makes our bodies sacred and therefore demanding respect and dignity on an abstract level, our physical bodies also demand good treatment on a concrete level.

Bearing in mind one's temporality, one's limitedness in body, is humbling, if not humiliating. I think this is important spiritually as well because it reminds me that I am not God. The omnipotence one sometimes feels as a youth is deceptive. While I don't want to curb human abilities too much--we are like God, after all, and made in God's image--ultimately we are not God.

So, for practical and prayerful purposes, one should exercise, eat healthfully, and be conscientious of potential diseases and conditions that can be harmful to our limited but infinitely dignified bodies. And of course gratitude for having a body and the life with it is also in order.

Wisdom for Early Ahjummahdom 1: Be A Good Steward

Money money money money... MONEY!

I try not to be obsessed about money, but I'm not going to lie... I worry about financial stability often. The fact of the matter is that money comes and goes. I can only do my best with what I've got (the theme here? haha). Being the oldest child of "failed immigrant" parents, as I like to (now) affectionately describe it, I don't have a whole lot. But I'm grateful because I definitely have what I need and more, if I'm honest with myself and not too greedy.

Stewardship... the notion appears in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures all over the place, from God's injunction to Man in Genesis to Jesus' parable about the dishonest steward in the gospels. While saving for retirement sounds like a self-serving practice that has nothing to do with spirituality or God, saving and spending prudently and paying off debts and all such responsible handling of finances fall under good stewardship imho. How one handles finances reflects one's values and even attitudes toward God, community, and others. How much we spend on what demonstrates what is most valuable to us, and our debt-paying and generosity with money inevitably impacts our relationships with others. Yes, I opine that personal finances is never just a personal thing because it ultimately affects the collective. Therefore personal finances bleeds into communal economics (so leave some of your harvest for the widows and the orphans aiite?) and one's spiritual life.

Stewardship, according to the Merriam Webster Dictionary 11th Edition, is "the conducting, supervising or managing of something; esp. the careful and responsible management of something entrusted into one's care." I submit that finances are something entrusted into one's care. Many people will disagree with me on this, and in fact, most of us do not live with this attitude towards money (I often find myself falling into this even). Is it "MY money" or "money given to me to use for my and my family's well-being"? Especially after a long and wretched day on the job, I like to think of my earnings as "my money" to be honest. But no, I am merely the manager.

If it's not my money, then I should a) be grateful for having it in the first place, and b) use it wisely and for its intended purpose. Here, I submit that the intended purpose of personal financial resources is the health, well-being, and enjoyment of myself, my family, and the community. Really, isn't all purpose for the fullness of our BEING?

Saving for retirement now, then, becomes about setting aside some of one's resources to live one's fullness of being as much as possible when one is old and unable to earn as one is able now. One might naively think, "Well, I should just trust God will provide for me later as God provides for me now." Yes, God provides and will provide too... but what if God is providing for your later NOW? It's like that story about the stranded man who refuses help during a flood.

A man is stuck at his home during a flood. A neighbor comes by to take him to higher ground, but the man refuses the neighbor's help, saying God will come save him. The waters are rising so the man goes up to his roof. A rescue boat comes along to take him to safety, but he tells them to go along, for God will save him. Then his house becomes completely submerged. The man is stranded on a broken piece of debris. A helicopter flies overhead and throws him a line, his last chance of rescue. But the man refuses, insisting that God will save him. Finally, the man drowns in the flood. When he faces God, he asks why God didn't come to save him. God says, "I sent your neighbor, a rescue boat, and even a helicopter, but you refused to be saved!"

I am reminded of the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30, Luke 19:12-27). I often interpret this parable to mean non-monetary things with which God entrusts us, but why not take it a little literally and apply it to money? I'm not saying God will give you a return on all your investments. But we ought to be faithful even in our financial matters and be responsible, not lazy.

So save wisely for retirement, spend only on what really is needed and truly is valuable, be generous but not foolish, and pay back one's debts for the good of society. And be grateful to God for what one has. All this is important for faith-filled living.

Besides, money is not even real. Hahahahahahaha