Hello, Dolly! February 1, 2007

When we were in Sorrento, Italy during my second trimester, we browsed in a baby clothing shop. The store was roughly the size of our kitchen. Its proprietor was a short, twinkle-eyed Italian nonna — just the type to make you feel like splurging on exquisite Italian booties and blankets in order to forge a tangible connection to her.

Her English was practically non-existent, but it only required a gesture toward my bump and a raised eyebrow to convey her curiousity about my pregnancy. Mike, who’d been studying Italian, was able to tell her my due date.

“Boy or girl?” We hadn’t had the tell-tale ultrasound yet and shrugged in response. She rummaged around for a scrap of paper and pencil and proceeded to ask each of us for our birthdates, including the time of day. She scratched out ancient calculations in accordance to a formula that had surely been passed down by generations of women in her family, occasionally pausing to look search heavenward for her memory and mumble to herself. I got goosebumps. “Ah!” she said almost to herself, setting her pencil with an authoritative click on the table. “You’re having a girl.”

We were already convinced it was a girl, in part due to hope (girls are easier, aren’t they?) and naive willpower (Dear Lord, it has to be a girl, because I don’t know anything about raising a boy). Nearly six thousand miles from home, Grandma Shopkeeper bestowed a trusted signpost, a sure indicator that matchy-matchy mother and daughter outfits would be in my future.

But then we met Gino.

It was an early dinner by Italian standards, and serendipitious lefts and rights led us to the sound of raucous singing behind a door sized for medieval giants. Inside, it was not promising. Asian tourists filled every chair in the dining room to the left. Seeing us trapped in momentary uncertainty, an Italian Paul Bunyan bellowed a greeting and commandeered us to a table before we could protest. He introduced himself as Gino, and told us in broken English he was the chef. “No menu. I make something you like!” he declared, and then promptly left us to absorb our surroundings.

The raucous singing turned out to be improvised karaoke. An old Italian guitarist was gamely trying to accompany one of the Asian tourists. The tourist, a man in his forties who clearly didn’t speak Italian, comically gestured and hummed a few bars of a song he desperately hoped the guitarist would recognize it. Nodding patiently, the guitarist strummed a few chords and improvised. The scenario of the bashful, reluctant karaoke singer taking the stage, only to belt his or her heart out, would replay itself throughout dinner.

Gino returned to take our drink order. “No, grazie,” I said, pointing at my belly. His Groucho eyebrows shot up, and he asked the inevitable question. We shrugged. He stepped back, tilted his head to the left as if gauging some odds and declared gruffly, “I think… it is a man!”

Admittedly I still occasionally pine for the cute girl clothes and accessories, but I wouldn’t have wanted things to turn out any differently. (Though I must admit while out shopping I once put a pastel floral hat on Atticus and said, “Look at my precious baby girl!”) Besides his fire engine, soccer ball, and other boy accessories, Atticus now has a doll. A few friends had mentioned how much their sons enjoyed caring and feeding their dolls, so I figured, “Why not?” I wasn’t sure how he’d react, but Atticus quickly warmed up to the idea as caretaker. Yesterday morning I noticed the doll wasn’t in its “crib” and discovered Atticus had put it in the doll highchair that came with his kitchen, ostensibly to feed it breakfast. A mother of a girl couldn’t be prouder.

Happy birthday, Baby Gong, wherever you are. January 4, 2007

Today is my birthday, and I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on it since I was roused at 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. Atticus is very clingy and fussy today, though he did brighten up long enough to play peek-a-boo behind the dining room chair. This is a new game he invented last night after dinner. He backs into a corner, pulling a chair in front of him so he can hide. Then he pops out and screeches with joy. Over and over again.

Anyway, I thought for my birthday it’d be fun to record a favorite family story about how I came to be nicknamed “Baby Gong”.

Eight months pregnant with me, my mom shrouded her body in a large winter coat to hide her profile from the flight attendants as she, my dad and my 3-1/2-year-old brother boarded a plane in Hong Kong bound for Vancouver, Canada. Their luggage was jam-packed with things they weren’t sure they’d be able to buy in Vancouver, like a well-seasoned wok. A cleaver. A metal spatula with a a knife-sharp edge, curved to shave down the interior of the wok. And dried, preserved foodstuffs.

They were emigrating to a new life with a preschooler and a baby imminently due. They didn’t speak English and had no job prospects. By comparision, our move from Florida to Oregon was ridiculously easy. Mom says the flight attendants were shocked to see how pregnant she was, but the flight was well underway by the time they discovered her condition. There was no turning back. I imagine her in the window seat, her head tilted against the cold glass and hands resting on her swollen belly, nervous and courageous all at the same time.

I never wondered about the specific details of my birth until I became pregnant. “Is very hurt,” Mom simply explained. “Took long time.” What she didn’t say was that she had gone through labor and delivery without comprehending a word that the nurses and doctors spoke, without the comfort of my dad’s presence.

Back then there was no such thing as birthing suites; post-partum patients shared a room. My mom ordered a set of infant photos. When they were delivered, she eagerly sorted through them, then frowned. These weren’t photos of her child. There was a mix-up. She had been given photos of Baby Gong, and Mrs. Gong had my baby photos. Tong… Gong… Chinese girls born on the same day. It’s easy to see how the mistake was made. Still, my mom became a bit paranoid that the babies had been switched.

Growing up and on into adulthood, whenever I made a silly mistake, my parents would shake their heads and say, “Baby Gong.” Fortunately, there’s a twin-like resemblance between me and my brother, otherwise I think my mom’s paranoid tendencies might win out even after all these years. My dad must have been sure I was a Tong, though. He passed on the metal spatula to me.

Happy birthday, Baby Gong. I hope you didn’t grow up being called “Baby Tong” whenever you goofed up.

I don’t remember exactly when I started keeping a diary. January 4, 2007

It was probably in the sixth grade, a ripe age for childhood angst and a year defined by the new girl, Tami, whose blonde hair, illegal-at-private-school mascara and exotic wooden wedge shoes made her instantly popular. She strutted while the rest of us in our regulation, below-the-knee skirts merely shuffled. She wore a bra. Her demeanor exuded a certain jadedness that I wouldn’t encounter again until adulthood, when I started working with divorced women on the make. She was so bewitching that boys thought her braces were sexy.

The select few who passed muster with Tami ditched their old friends and became her entourage. (Think Heathers or its modern sister, Mean Girls.) Together, they made The List. And as the product of strict immigrant parents, it’s not surprising that I topped the list. My grades set the curve. My face was defined by the most affordable, “unbreakable” frames my parents could find. (As a bonus, they were orange). Of course I was awkward at sports. Of course, I played the piano. My braces were nowhere near being sexy. And no, I wasn’t anywhere close to wearing a bra. (Though when I was ready for one, I endlessly teased my brother by saying, “Mom is going to buy me something that she’s never, ever, EVER going to buy you.” But I digress.)

So, yes, the sixth grade gave me countless reasons to not only keep a diary, but also consider it my closest friend. But it also could have also been my constant re-reading of Harriet the Spy that influenced my journal keeping. Perhaps I learned a lesson from the refuge Harriet found in her secret notebook. There’s also the time I came home from school to find my mom had cleaned and redecorated my room in a way that I actually liked. Among the little gifts on top of the new bedspread were a pink bottle of Johnsons & Johnsons lotion and a Strawberry Shortcake diary, complete with lock. It was around the time my mom had quit the family restaurant business because she hardly saw me and my brother. At the time I was puzzled by her actions, but now that I have my own child, I recognize how much love was behind her gesture.

While it’s impossible to pinpoint the year it all started (sixth grade? Seventh? Surely by eighth), I do know for a fact that I kept a diary religiously through high school, less frequently in college and had pretty much given it up completely around the time I started my career as an advertising copywriter. Shortly after getting married, I did put together a beautiful scrapbook of our honeymoon in Italy, but that was it. Years later came pregnancy, an neon invitation to document every bout of nausea and flutter in the tummy. But despite my best intentions (including selecting the perfect font, finding the least-cheesy clip art stork for the page layout, and picking out gender-neutral paper for my crafty journal project), I never wrote down a thing. Probably because, even though my innie was becoming an outie, my husband and I still found it impossible to believe we were going to have a baby.

And now that the baby is a toddler. A mischievous, curious, loving imp. And I still haven’t journaled a thing. Not his first laugh, first step, first kiss, first anything. Okay, I do have a Word file of mostly terse comments like “First tooth (Rebecca noticed)“. The longest comment is “Rolled over from back to tummy – put you to bed and five minutes later you were crying. Came in to check on you and you’re on your tummy. Shock and surprise!” So, I’m not a totally unsentimental mom when it comes to documenting cherished milestones. And recently I gave myself a reassuring pat on the back when I realized that I indeed had been consistently chronicling precious details to friends and family via email (not to mention the hundreds of photos taken, some of which are posted on Flickr).

And here I am now, blogging. Because I don’t want any more moments to slip away. It’s already hard to remember when he crawled everywhere, when he first waved bye-bye, when he weighed a feather. This will be where I jot down the harmonious and dissonant moments of motherhood. When I come across resources worth sharing, you’ll find them here. And I’ll include the occasional recipe and random thoughts on current events and pop culture, just because I can. Friends and family, I hope this helps us keep in touch. Welcome to my song.

P.S. In case you were wondering how I survived the sixth grade, Tami came to school sick and threw up her breakfast all over herself and the carpet, which wasn’t cool. She didn’t come back the following year. And I eventually blossomed, got contacts and got a life that distracted me enough to get a “B”.