30 September 2018
Somerville, Massachusetts — You are 10 months old
Dearest Quinn,
I had been whiling away some time at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, looking at an exhibit. I came across a weathered leather journal from the 1950s filled with black and white photos of a cute baby girl. Accompanying these faded photos was a mother’s neat and painstaking logging of her child’s week-by-week achievements. Somehow the mother’s handwriting— something about it— touched me. Her love shone through each meticulous stroke and precious detail, survived all these decades, and touched the heart of this Singaporean being a mother to you in America. And the idea to keep a notebook of handwritten letters ignited my mind and wouldn’t leave. I want to leave you something.
Today I hardly spent any time with you and missed you in that special way mums do. Ten months ago such a feeling was foreign to me. I returned home and though it was late, was relieved to find you still awake. I held your warm body to mine. You laughed when I told you to hush.
It’s strange writing to you, for in essence, I’m writing to a much older you, who is able to read, have opinions of her own, and feel deeply. Maybe you’ll be in your twenties? Married? Having children of your own? Our relationship will be great, tepid, or fraught. You’ll have a profession, friends, goals, vices, secrets. There are so many things I want to tell you, but you’re too young to understand. I don’t aspire to be the best parent, and I may more often than not teach you the wrong things. So, in advance: “you’re welcome,” “I’m sorry,” and “please understand.”
But for now, you’re the babiest. Your hair is growing, save a few bald patches at the back. You have a curious habit of hoarding food in your cheeks like a squirrel. You’ve also lately been making loud, high-pitched screeches, like a bird of prey— discovering your voice. My beautiful darling. My first-born. Everything with you is new.
Love, Mum
14 October 2019
Cambridge, Massachusetts — You are 23 months old
Dearest Quinn,
The first day of daycare wasn’t hard for you, but for me. At the Montessori’s open house the day before, I watched as you were invited by one of the teachers to sit on a tiny chair and eat at a tiny table opposite another kid perched on an equally tiny chair. Seeing you sit there, at a table with peers, on the cusp of being a social being, I thought to myself, “This is the moment she leaves me.” Seeing my face, the teacher said, “I can see your heart breaking.”
Before you began daycare, I understood every warble, every babble you articulated. Now, I sometimes can’t match your language and we get frustrated with each other; you, because I am not understanding you; me, because you’re growing up and what, ‘leaving me?’ What does that even mean? Now you sing songs about your friends: Eleanor, Charlie, and Harper. You grasp concepts I never taught you.
I once read somewhere that parenting is missing your kid as they grow up, even though they are right there. That we inscribe our children’s maturing bodies with nostalgia. The mark of a successful development of identity is being able to exercise your own autonomy, which is what every parent wants for their children. And yet, this primal, maternal part of me— the one that nursed you at my breast for the first time on a hospital bed smeared with blood and vernix, the one that lay naked beside you as you nursed in the dark of night— I want you always, too, small and precious. Will you ever be able to understand this complex feeling, greedy and resigned?
Love, Mum
25 November 2019
Somerville, Massachusetts — You are 2 years old
Dearest Quinn,
It’s your second birthday! The past few nights, when trying to teach you what a ‘birthday’ means, I’d ask you to put your hands on my stomach and say, “Two years ago, you were in here, and then Mama brought you out.” These encounters always happened in the dark, when I’m singing you to sleep. The white noise machine’s soft roar, the room pitch black, us cuddled together under a blanket… Our eyes adjusting to the dark. Your body right now, so perfect in its smallness, settled next to me, grasping, petting blankets, flinging tiny arms asking for “more singing,” protesting “Mama” or sadly whispering, “ya” when I say it’s time for bed.
Love, Mum
23 March 2020
Somerville, Massachusetts — You are 2 years, 4 months old
Dearest Quinn,
We are going through very strange times. The mysterious virus I mentioned in the previous entry is spreading quickly. So many countries are under ‘lockdown.’ Borders are closing. People are dying. Everyone is staying home. In Somerville, in-restaurant dining is banned. Schools have closed. Playgrounds are cordoned off with bright yellow tape. Even as I write this, I am aware of how my language is mimicking the conventions of a bad dystopian novel.
We are trying to adjust to ‘the new normal’ of being shut-in at home. Your dad and I work from home and try to keep to our regular routines. A nanny, on the rare days when we can get one, takes care of you while we work. You tell us you miss your friends at school. We take aimless walks with you in the stroller around the neighborhood since everything is closed.
You like ‘correcting’ my language. For some reason, you sometimes say “my” instead of “I”. For example, “My got it!” and when I correct you, “No, it’s I got it,” you huff and say, “No, my got it!”
Love, Mum
26th March 2020
Somerville, Massachusetts - You are 2 years, 4 months old
Dearest Quinn,
It looks like things will not return to ‘normal.’
Love, Mum
12th May 2020
Siglap, Singapore (Temporary Home) - You are 2 years, 6 months old
Dearest Quinn,
What a month— a tumultous, confusing month. A month ago, perhaps just several days after I wrote the previous entry, I woke up one weekend morning. Your father looked up from his phone and said “We need to leave America. Tomorrow.”
What devastating words. In attempts to contain the Covid-19 virus, governments all around the world have banned non-essential travel. Flights were being cancelled at an alarming rate; we worried that if we stuck with our original plan to return to Singapore in end-May, we wouldn’t be able to get a flight back. We originally got a flight that was leaving a few days later, explained our sudden departure to your teachers, nannies, and friends etc. But our flights got cancelled, again and again. A week of uncertainty followed, where, all packed, no childcare, we didn’t know whether we would be leaving in a few hours’ time, or stuck in Boston for several more months. Finally, we got onto a plane with Obi in a pet carrier, and took the long, desperate flight to Singapore. “Say bye-bye to the house,” I pointed to the blue-shingled apartment you have known your whole life as the Uber pulled away from Medford Street in the darkened dead of morning. “Bye!” you shouted.
How do I describe those two weeks in quarantine in a Singapore hotel? Devoid of privacy, boundaries, routines, and toys, our family dynamic was tested to its limits. We fashioned you toys out of hotel supplies, watched a lot of TV, cried a lot, and tried our best to love each other through the intensity of it all.
Poor baby! So many of your familiar structures and things and people were gone. My heart hurt when during our second week of quarantine in the hotel, you said, “My home is outside,” My heart broke even more when, the next day, you said, “My home is here,” meaning the hotel. And it had no idea what to do when, the day after, you told me, “I’ve lost my home.” The day we were released from quarantine, I told you that we could finally “go outside.” You looked puzzled and said, “I need a jacket.” And it occurred to me that the last time you had been outdoors, it had been snowing. So much change, so much confusion.
Poor darling, the first day out, you went for a walk with your dad. Apparently, unused to the heat and humidity, and upset by all the changes, you had a major meltdown in the supermarket, screaming, “This isn’t my home, this isn’t my home.”
Love, Mum
4th August 2022
Tanah Merah, Singapore - You are 4 years, 6 months old
Dearest Quinn,
The function of this notebook is changing. This fistful of letters used to be the only way I could talk to you for some assurance that one day you would read this and understand me. When you couldn’t talk, round with babyhood. And now? We spend our time together talking in real time. You are learning to read. The things I want to tell you, I tell you directly.
When I reread my past missives to you, part of me hurts. The writing is bad. Some of them are saturated with matter-of-fact banalities, nothing literary there— is this why some people burn their personal correspondences? But why would I want letters to you to be ‘literary’ in any way? Perhaps the things we leave our children are supposed to be as artless and graceless and as complicated as love itself.
On your way home from school, you gather dropped flowers and sticks and stones and present them to me like a bouquet. Each a little gift, each a little tribute. You leave me drawings of people and spindly ponies and unicorns and magic. The flowers hold hands and the house always has a room “for Obi,” and the candy is on a hot-air balloon ride to somewhere.
I wonder if you still think the moon is following you.
Love, Mum
1st January 2024
Tanah Merah, Singapore - You are 6 years, 1 month old
Dearest Quinn,
“A long time ago, longer even than today!” That’s how you once started an anecdote about your fuzzy memories of snow in Boston, and of your father sliding you off the garage roof in your puffy pink winter coat. Well, a long time ago, longer even than today, I once wrote a letter to you about your first day in daycare in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There had been pained, confused thoughts there about you “leaving me” and of my heart “breaking,” though I still don’t know what this leaving entails, or how to articulate it. Before becoming a parent myself, I gave no thought at all to how much the simple, unavoidable fact of me growing up might have saddened my own parents. What a strange, greedy, and complicated thing it is to have a child!
Fast forward five years later and several continents away. Today is the first day of the new year and tomorrow is your first day of primary school. “I’m excited,” you told me. “But also nervous.” Rationally, your first day of primary school shouldn’t change anything. But the ways people speak of you are already beginning to change. “Wow. Primary school. So fast.”; “She used to be so small. Now she’s a school-going girl.”
For a long time I procrastinated ironing on your name tag onto your new school blouses. Perhaps I wanted to preserve the idea of you being a baby for as long as I could. “She’s a young lady now,” said one of your father’s relatives today. Something achy wells up in my chest when I realize I can’t say you’re the babiest anymore. But she is, a part of me protests. This trembly feeling also sits next to pride and awe at the person you’re becoming. Coy, thoughtful, manic, calm. Sensitive, obdurate, gentle. All the things that make you you. Little things you say blindside me: “Were you sad, Mama?”; “My tummyache is bigger than the earth”; “I miss you ever muchly.”
You’re now asleep. Today we spent time with family— your dad’s family and mine. We came home and wiped off the bright pink nail polish on your fingernails. We packed your new school bag and talked about what you may expect tomorrow at your new school. Tomorrow you will put on your new school uniform with its school tie and Bata shoes. You’ll have $4 in your new unicorn wallet to buy food yourself at the school canteen. You’ll take the school bus and perhaps have friends, perhaps not. So many unknowns.
I will do the things I usually do when you aren’t around; read, write, think, eat. One day, years from now, I will reread this letter to you and will remember this day as a day that happened a long time ago, longer even than today. But for the remainder of tonight, I’m going to sit with these complicated feelings for a few hours more. I don’t want anyone to comfort me. These contradictory feelings are evidence of something, though I’m not sure what. It has something to do with you, something to do with me, something to do with the passing of time, and holding your hand until you don’t need it anymore, something to do with this growing ball of feeling in my chest, something about already missing you much more than ever muchly, even though you’re right here. Life together, ah! What a ride.
It’s been so long since your last haircut that the ends of your hair are golden, an untrimmed keepsake from babyhood. You come home sweaty in your gymnastics leotard. You curl up in a ball on the rocking chair I onced nursed you in, reading books with no pictures by yourself. You scream with frustration while practicing piano— still discovering your voice. You love laughing till you cry. “I’m crying!” you helplessly point to your face, laughing. My beautiful darling. My first-born. Everything with you is new.
Love, Mum