Love at the intersection of terror and bliss

Wednesday, April 16th 2025 3:03pm

We have a 10 week old now. She is currently taking a nap in her crib. And where am I? At a coffee shop writing? On the couch typing away? Or curled up in bed for some blissful moments of reflective solitude? No, no, and no.

I am camped out on her floor, sprawled on a quilt handmade in Vietnam from Tía Ceci. This is the first day that Sofia has taken a nap not on me, but on her own. I can’t stand to be as far as the living room away from her. I think I am addicted to our baby, Babe.

She’s been sleeping for a bit, and now she is stirring. I can’t say that I am sad about it. How do you miss someone you are two feet away from? Addicted, I tell you. Positively addicted.

Tuesday, April 22nd 2025 2:29 pm

Here we are again, Sofia’s nap time. Today she is in her DockATot next to me on the couch. Last night she woke up at 3 am and after her feeding told me she was too lonely to sleep in her crib. We spent the rest of the night sleeping on the couch together.

Since I last wrote, another storybook Spring has bloomed in Seoul. The past couple of Fridays we have dedicated to family adventures to see flowers, first cherry blossoms and then azaleas.

My days home with Sofia are waning. One never knows, as a first time mother, how staying home with a baby will strike her. I have loved it. I feel like I really know our little nugget after nearly three months of feedings and tummy time, cookie making and book readings. It’s true, and no surprise, that Sofia Saenal is already bookish. We can read story after story during one of her wake windows and she stares at the pages with rapt attention.

Speaking of, I began reading Salt Houses by Hala Alyan before Sofia was born and I am only halfway through. I am going to try and finish a few pages before she awakes from her slumber.

January 19th, 2026 10:26 am

Did you see what happened to the date there? We’ve gone from having a 10 week old to an 11 and a half month old. Months have passed since I last signed in. There was a summer, a fall, a first Christmas. It is just now, on my 43rd birthday, that I have found time to open up this post that was meant to be finished and published in the midst of cherry blossoms and refreshing spring temps.

It’s okay, though, that I have stepped away from my writing for the past months. I have felt … I have been so fully immersed in motherhood. Not, generally, in a way where I feel that I have been swallowed. For me the experience has been rich and expansive. I suppose not so unlike in many ways living abroad for these past 13 years. Both experiences have taken me simultaneously so deeply outside and inside of myself.

While it is my birthday today, I am in bed on a (preventative) sick day, thinking about Sofia’s upcoming first birthday. In recent weeks, my womb has begun to ache. I return to her newborn pictures again and again. I send them to Dae-Han. “Are you sure you don’t want a second?” I write.

What I am most yearning for is to start all over again with Sofia. To turn back when she was in my belly. To feel her kicking, so much so that I wrote our midwife Julia to ask if such frequent movement is normal at the end of the third trimester. “Is she in distress,” I inquired? No, she was really just training for the Tour de France … or to be the Tour de Force that we know her to be now that she has spent nearly a year with us on this side of life.

I do not think Sofia needs much instruction on how to be a force of a female in this world — she understands boundaries (her own) better than I still do mine, she has such a high physical pain tolerance sometimes I have to wonder if her nerve endings are firing properly, and she knows how to get everyone in a room working for her. Honestly, we’ve started calling her The Mayor.

I daily learn from my daughter about the strength of the feminine. And this weekend I wanted to feel that force inside of myself.

So we took a 36-hour trip to Hong Kong so that I could run the Standard Chartered Half Marathon. This event was really the brain child of my bestie Ceci. Early this fall she wondered if it might be a way to put a weekend together on our calendars. I felt the allure of getting a little bit of sisterhood and a good physical challenge. I knew I wouldn’t be ready to be away from Sofia overnight yet, so Dae-Han, the best partner and dad, agreed to shlep our daughter across another border — her 5th country in less than a year — for a whirlwind weekend.

We were tucked into our hotel, the Dorsett Hong Kong, by 1 am on Friday night. I listened to Sofia sleeping. And started wondering all the things: Will she get sick from too little sleep this weekend? Will she have meltdowns from being overtired? Is this really fair to her? Is a half marathon a good enough reason to ask so much of my family?

Mom Guilt strikes back.

During the four months that I had been training for the half, I had not struggled with guilt. Running has been the one thing I have taken back for myself since Sofia was born. (This is by choice — Dae-Han and I would figure it out if I needed more me-time.) Some people understandably inquire if I run with Sofia. No is my emphatic reply. No, because I have needed these delicious miles to reconnect with my brain and my body. On my own. Just for me.

It was not hard to rationalize the twice a week runs, but I was struggling with “Am I just too extra"?” that first night in Hong Kong.

The sisterhood and my husband showed up to show me that Sofia could be just fine — even thrive in some moments — in the midst of more airplane rides, late nights, and meals out.

“She is so proud of her Mama and will look back at this moment through photos and be so inspired by you! She has everything she needs — this is your time to shine!” my friend Lauren wrote me.

“You should be doing this for you because she won’t remember zonking out, but it will help her form core memories of you being active and healthy and being the next role model for her,” my friend (and unpaid running coach) Bec said.

My Hong Kong Baddies Katie, Cec, Britt, and Allison cuddled, laughed with, and delighted in Sofia for 36 hours.

Dae-Han carried a stroller up and down dozens of stairs as we traversed the city on Saturday.

It is the village, friends. It’s always the village. Parenting cannot be done in a silo. Motherhood should never be a solo endeavor.

And so it was that I was able to lean into the moments on Saturday with a little less doubt that I was being too selfish. We ate lunch at Mak’s Noodles, I enjoyed yummy pasta dinner and a birthday toast from the Baddies, and my Garmin gave me a sleep score of 90 as Sofia slept like a piglet nestled in mud.

I awoke at 5:45 am on Sunday feeling fresh. Excited. Adrenalined.

The Hong Kong Baddies chat was already alive with photos from Ceci and Katie who were starting their 10k much earlier than Britt and I were starting the half.

At 6:45 am, Britt and I met in the lobby of our hotel and rode together to the half marathon start.

At 8:10 am we were off and running a course from Kowloon to Mong Kok, through Central and Wanchai ending in Victoria Park. The course ran up highways and through mile long tunnels. The energy was … chef’s kiss.

In my training I had not run more than 11 miles at once, averaging 9:30 minutes per mile. Initially, I had wanted to run a sub-two hour half marathon, but this meant running 9:10 minutes per mile. The week before the race, I began to moderate my expectations. I am competitive — all those years of track — but I wanted to honor my body above all. Let’s go for finishing strong, I decided. Whatever the time was, it was.

As Dae-Han and I laid in bed Saturday night, he asked how I felt about the race. “I think you should go for it. I think you can run sub two.”

I could draw this out, pace it like I did the 13.1 miles — steady, strong. But, nah, let’s cut to the chase. Let’s sprint this story:

When the gun went off, I was feeling the rush. I held back a bit. And then I decided to go for it.

Did I run sub two?

Well…

Almost.

I ran the Standard Chartered Half Marathon in two hours, six seconds. Friends, it feels worth mentioning that this included a pit stop bathroom break at 5k.

I am not hung up on those seven seconds. I ran a great race. I ran better than I thought I could right now. The last 400 I was running at 7-minute mile pace. I felt like a Tour de Force when I crossed that finish line.

As I finish this post, Sofia is asleep in her crib and Dae-Han and I are sipping wine in our bed while I pluck away at the keyboard. I am toasting to the next gen Tour de Forces. May they know their own strength. May they use it for good. May she use it to unite people through love.

End note: When I started this post in April of 2025, I was in perhaps the most vulnerable stage of motherhood. The world suddenly seemed scary in a way that it hadn’t before … or even scarier than my Anxiety had allowed it to be before Sofia. I nightly had dreams of losing her. When we went out for a walk, worries popped into my head that would have to defy the laws of physics to come to fruition.

But turn on the news, if you dare. The reality is this world is not safe for so many children.

Being a mother has made me even more tender than my Highly Sensitive Self was before. The worries may not be as acute as they were in those first weeks, but they come to me every day, as I think they must to every mother, every where.

I do not imagine I will ever be without more worries now that I am a mother. As Hannah says, “Two things can be true at once.” With the terror that I can feel with worries, bliss too fills my body as I cuddle, learn about, learn with, and love this perfect babe.