Eden Onpeng

Category: Uncategorized

  • new motherhood. two weeks postpartum.

    new motherhood. two weeks postpartum.

    I guess you can say I’m deep in the weeds. In the thick of it. Deeply hormonal, with a two-week-old newborn next to me. I am sleep-deprived. It’s all happening now and my attempts to form my experience into words result in incoherent ramblings (like this one).

    I still feel like old me but also like new me, ready to be reinvented amid this new transition. Like Gandalf the Grey becoming Gandalf the White. Eden the Childless (Pre-Child? Child-Free? It all feels loaded) to Eden the Mother.

    Physically I feel more alert and mobile now that I’m no longer pregnant. Recovering from a C-section while being newly postpartum and with a lingering cough from a cold really sucked. Every cough felt like knives stabbing my lower abdomen. I’ve lost 15 pounds, and although I weigh about 20 pounds heavier than I did before the pregnancy, I relish not bumping my belly into the stove burner control knobs while cooking.

    But emotionally, I feel turbulent and unmoored. How is it that I feel like myself and yet not myself?

    On one hand, gazing into my baby’s eyes while holding him and feeding him has been magical. I cry thinking about how fast he is already growing. He has outgrown the newborn-sized diapers and clothing, and fits into 3-month-sized clothes as a two-week-old baby. I listen to the sounds he makes. The soft coos. The angry cries. The fussy grunts. His little hands open and close around my finger as he looks up at the ceiling fan.

    I see genetic echoes of my dead sister in the shape and shininess of his eyes and the shape of his cheeks. After all, she and I share 50% of our genes as siblings. It’s uncanny. It feels like my baby sister (circa 2003) is staring back at me with her eyes, but I know it is not her, and only genetic echoes of her reflected in my son, staring back at me.

    It’s like when you are going about your day and you see someone who strongly resembles a long-dead loved one. You know they’re not them, but at the same time, it is uncanny, to see someone with those same or very-similar features moving about the world. I wonder if I resemble a dead loved one to someone else in the world. Maybe we all do.

    On the other hand, I find myself feeling sensitive, paranoid of judgment from other people, about my life decisions, my capabilities as a new mother. I sweat as people watch me placate my baby. The act of changing a diaper in front of others (except my husband) has become a hands-on pop quiz on parenting skills 101.

    This feeling of inadequacy extends beyond motherhood and into the realm of my creative pursuits. My creative bandwidth is limited now, of course. For the most part I do not mind it because I am trying to cherish the time I have with the baby. But I feel a deep sense of shame that I don’t have anything to show for all the work and enthusing I did for my failed projects – two unfinished novels that I no longer have interest in completing. I had written those under different mindsets that now feel foreign and far away to me. If my mind is always changing so much, am I really equipped for long-term projects like a novel? As of right now I don’t have a story to tell except my own, which is ongoing as long as I am alive. I also feel ashamed for feeling bad about this.

    I know I should be resting when he is resting, but my mind is restless and hungry. My brain wants to consume something satisfying and juicy. Reddit feeds me headlines and bot-driven conversations of troubling global news–as a result, I look at my soft, swaddle-wrapped potato and dread the war he would would be called to fight when he comes of age.

    These thoughts are heavy but I have been fortunate to have a husband who has been hands-on in being a new dad and sharing night shifts on feeding-diapering-sleeping our baby. I am grateful and happy to witness and share in his transition into new fatherhood.

    These are my two weeks postpartum thoughts. I don’t have the energy to tie them together with a unifying thesis, but I wanted to share them in case somebody out there can relate to this experience, or somehow find it valuable.

  • Losing Friends as a New Parent – Is It Really Inevitable?

    Becoming a parent is a big life transition, one I’d been dreading for quite a while because of what I’ve heard from other people. You’ll never see your friends again. People drop off the map.

    I did have a friend (let’s call her Cang) who dropped her end of the rope after becoming a parent. We weren’t part of each other’s core friendship groups (she too maintained a group of old friends from middle school) so maybe this was part of why she chose to cut me out. After a couple of planned dates that didn’t work out from her end, I reached out to her via messages, and while she would respond, she ultimately stopped initiating. And eventually, after a few more one-sided exchanges, I stopped initiating, and as a result, we haven’t communicated since December 2023 when I reached out to her to wish her a merry Christmas and a happy birthday. Her son was about three years old.

    Maybe Cang felt there was a disconnect because I wasn’t a parent and she was, and perhaps there were things that I wouldn’t understand as a non-parent. Maybe she had outgrown the friendship since becoming a parent. This could be true, and I think she might have dropped me because I was always on the peripheral of her friendships–nice to have but not core–and so she could afford to drop me when priorities became tight. I imagine she would prioritize her middle school friends, and I get it.

    Our friendship died slowly, via slow “ghosting,” where I noticed only when I reached out, and later on, when I reviewed the time stamps and realized it had been a long time since I had last reached out to her, that she hadn’t initiated in our last few interactions, and that I now had little to talk about with her. There was no breakup message, she simply stopped watering the friendship and let it wither away. In her garden of friendships, ours was ultimately pruned via thirst.

    I pushed away my hurt and moved on with life even though it haunts me now, as I am about to give birth. I suppose I have the option to reach out to her again now in hopes of reconnecting now that I am also a parent, but the hurt remains and I don’t like the idea of being discarded again as soon as my compatibility wanes.

    Some of the things I cherish most in the world are my close friendships with my ride-or-die homies. These are the homies who showed up for our courthouse wedding, officiated by low-budget Bernie Sanders, who hugged me tightly during the fallout of my first marriage, and who went to my sister’s funeral. Even as my pregnancy progressed and mobility became an issue, I made it a point to host gatherings to bring my closest friends together–a precious thing in today’s fast-moving world and our adult lives. I grew up feeling very lonely, and friendships were like a ray of light in my mostly isolated existence, a lighthouse in the stormy waters of my childhood.

    As I’m on the cusp of giving birth, I dread losing these friendships. I’m afraid parenthood will somehow change me or my priorities to the point where I will drop these friendships, like those stories I’ve heard about people who disappear into parenthood and fall off from their friendships.

    I guess I’m afraid of the Unknown: where my mind will be as a new parent. I’m afraid I will become (due to brain changes, post-partum depression or stress) someone who no longer cares about these friendships, who lets them wither away like Cang did with my friendship. After I’m afraid my new priorities as a mom will cause me to drop everything that made me “me,” like my reading, my writing, and my friendships. Will these things no longer be important to me? Will I change that much as a person?

    I hear so much about new parents who feel like they’ve lost who they were before becoming parents. But I also hear that it gets better with time, as the baby grows and learns to sleep through the night.

    I guess this is something I won’t know until I’ve crossed the bridge. And perhaps these fears are unfounded based on the actual facts. Although I am the first in the group of homies to become a parent, my friends have been so supportive. They’ve filled our home with love. They’re going to be really cool aunties and uncles to Baby Daniel. Perhaps because I have this on my mind, and because it’s so important, I will find some way to maintain these precious friendships with my homies. Our friendships may change, just as they did when we became full-fledged adults with adult responsibilities of jobs, bills, and other duties, but it would mean the world to me if our friendships evolve, rather than wither, as we move through these new life milestones.

  • Reflections Before Giving Birth to My First Child

    My husband and I have been sick this week. First he was sick, and then two days later, I woke up with a swollen, irritated throat that evolved into a runny nose and then ongoing congestion and a lingering wet cough. The worst of it is over as of today. I’m glad I won’t have to give birth while suffering a cold. In between household tasks I have been laying in bed like a beached whale, resting my feet and catching my breath.

    In two days, we will go to the hospital to undergo induction to give birth to our first child and son. At 39 weeks, Baby Daniel will be full term, although being induced feels like prematurely evicting him (although who knows if he’d come early anyway). I feel bad. I imagine he’s nice and warm and comfortable in there. I feel him rolling, kicking, and hiccuping. He has passed all his non-stress tests with flying colors. “Happy baby,” the nurses call him.

    I picture his little hands and feet curling and kicking in the womb. I picture the nutrients being exchanged between us through the umbilical cord, which will be severed upon birth. This is the closest we will ever be linked physically, and after this point, the process of parenthood begins of raising him and slowly letting go as he grows more independent.

    Although my pregnancy has come with health complications and bodily discomforts, Baby Daniel’s impending departure feels bittersweet. Is it weird to say I will miss him, even though he will be right next to me as a newborn?

    This is the end of one stage (pregnancy) and the beginning of another one (new motherhood with a newborn). I am about to cross a bridge for the first time and have no idea how I feel once I’ve crossed it. I hope I will be happy. I hope the baby blues don’t hit me hard.

    On the surface, life has been peaceful. Joe and I were blessed to receive so much love and support from friends and chosen family at our baby shower. The silver lining of the estrangement from my parents has been peace and the ability to grieve my sister and process my childhood trauma in therapy.  

    I think of my mother, and her dark mood swings and constant meltdowns surrounding the times of her pregnancies and births of my little brother and sister. My father told me as a child that she’d tried to kill herself when she was pregnant with me. I think of how I used to resent my baby sister (13 years my junior) because of how angry and abusive my mother became toward me during her pregnancy. I believe my sister was a surprise baby, which could have contributed to my mother’s extra unhappiness. “I wish I’d aborted you,” my mother would say when trying to nurse her to sleep.

    Baby Daniel has been shy in ultrasounds all pregnancy—his hands are always in front of his face or he is turned away. We’ve been unable to get a clear 3D shot of him, so his face, beyond the basic outline, is mostly a mystery. I wonder how it will feel like to hold him in my arms, and to behold his little face—part me, and part Joe. Will he be a big baby or a regular-sized baby? A colicky baby or a chill baby? So much of Baby Daniel is unknown and abstract to me right now, aside from when we poke at each other through my tummy. I guess I won’t have a lot of answers until we are holding Baby Daniel in our arms and marveling at his sleeping form, how fragile, precious, and tiny he is, in our big, wide world.

  • Not a Cat

    The cat clawed at the door. But there was no door, and the cat was not a cat, only a memory of a sweet cat that once was.

  • We Would Be Sand Dollar Rich: a memoir

    Work was far from my thoughts as I wandered along the sand on a Wednesday morning, a week after my sister had killed herself. Waves curled and flattened against the shore as I ambled forth, my eyes cast downward in search of calcium-rich remains of mollusks. This morning, the beach—not the city named after the beach, but the actual beach—was deliciously lonely, with only one or two people out on the southern shore, and a few people fishing on the pier.

    Then I saw it—a round disc, face-down in the wet sand. I picked it up and groaned with disappointment.

    The front center of the sand dollar was broken like a sinkhole, exposing its hollow heart to the world, as dark, watery sand gushed out.

    So close to perfection. And yet…

    I wanted something whole.

    I dropped it back to the ground and continued down the shoreline, between the water and row of tidy rental properties. At some point I found another sand dollar with the five-point grooved star intact on its front center. And then I found more sand dollars, broken and whole ones alike. I kept the whole ones in my linen blazer pocket for safekeeping.

    Where were all the people on this sunny Wednesday morning? The kids were probably at school. The adults were at work, or pretending to be. And with the signs telling visitors to KEEP OUT OF THE WATER due to sewage contamination, others were avoiding this beach.

    As for me, I was here to say goodbye to my sister.

    Victoria died in her dorm room at college after taking a toxic substance. It wasn’t even a fun drug so I couldn’t say that at least she died having fun, or doing what she loved. It wasn’t fentanyl mixed into cocaine. There was only one reason to take it.

    I later learned she had spent lots of time scouring forums for information on how to do it. Did it matter if it was the pain that began her journey to find the end, or the pain that led her to finish it?

    I researched online to learn what my sister might have felt during her last moments.

    As it took effect, she might have felt short of breath, panting for air but without relief. Perhaps she started to vomit in her body’s effort to reject the substance, or developed a throbbing headache. Then the dizziness and lightheadedness set in. At some point she lost consciousness. Her organs began to fail, and finally, her brain, starved of oxygen, died. By the time they found her, her blood had turned chocolate-brown and her skin and nail beds had turned blue due to the oxygen deprivation.

    Did her life flash before her eyes during her last moments, before she sank into oblivion?

    She was two months away from graduating with a bachelor’s degree in microbiology.

    My sister was quiet and kept a very light online footprint. But in the wake of her sudden death, people came forth to remember her: her fiance and his family, our family and its broken dynamics, our extended family, our friends, and her club mates at school. There are probably others whom I will never know, people who cared about her.

    The funeral was open casket. I looked at my dear, sweet sister, and realized: this is no longer her. Victoria, wherever she was, was no longer here, in this gloomy funeral home filled with grief, love, pain, and religious people who used her death to criticize today’s young people for suffering under “modern values” of freedom and independence, and to talk about sin, heaven, and hell. I found none of the sermons comforting.

    For several nights after the funeral, I had trouble falling asleep, because I kept envisioning her casket face: face gray, powdery, and flattened; her closed eyes and lips stretched out; eyes sunken in their sockets; and lips too swollen.

    She must have been so blue when they found her.

    The last times my sister and I hung out were last summer, right after I had stopped talking to my parents. I had realized my parents would never change, and that the same abuses would be covered up again, just like they were two decades ago. I couldn’t trust my parents to not repeat the old patterns with their grandchildren.

    To celebrate my sister’s twenty-first birthday, my husband and I took her out to a local brewery along the beach. We ate tacos and drank beers. “You can drink legally now,” I joked.

    Little did I know, she had been drinking heavily for years, possibly self-medicating for the pain she must have carried.

    Victoria didn’t talk much when we hung out. We would make little playful sounds, like “meow,” to fill in the silence. With all the stuff I had gone through with my parents, I still held out hope that maybe I had borne the brunt of the abuse, that maybe they had mellowed out with age, and were less cruel with her than they had been with me. They had me when they were much younger. They were just figuring it out. They beat my sister less, but beating is not the only form of abuse.

    But I had learned to play along. In order to function in the family, I had swallowed my hurts and denied the sexual, physical, emotional, and psychological abuse our parents had wrought upon me—because otherwise my rage and pain would bubble over with each meal, each visit.

    I buried my memories and pretended my parents were just stern Asian tiger parents who had meant well but didn’t know how to love. I pretended that only the kind and non-abusive ones existed.

    In essence, I had two sets of parents in my mind: the abusive ones, and the safe, non-abusive ones from whom I yearned for approval. I could not reconcile the two. But even then, bitterness would simmer over at times. To preserve the peace within the family, especially while both my grandmother and siblings were living there, I kept shoving those feelings down. Because they were my parents, and it was safer to treat them as the parents I wished they were.

    I went through the motions of being family to my parents: Christmases, birthdays, parent holidays, weekend visits, etc. I hugged my mom who had made the entire household walk on eggshells with her violent rages, who had made me drink from her lactating breasts at the age of thirteen. I shook hands with my dad who had groped and slapped my ass all the way until I was sixteen or seventeen. I tried not to think about that. I would smile and make small talk with my sister who sat in the corner on her phone, who did not enjoy hugs, and who was probably suffering her own version of hell in that family but remained quiet because she did not trust me enough because I had played my role too well—

    What if, by being too scared to rock the boat, and by playing along for so long, I had normalized the dysfunction in my family? What if, by pretending everything was normal…I had made my sister feel alone in her pain?

    In pretending to accept what was broken, I had become part of the very dysfunction that bound the family together. All Victoria could see was what I was pretending to be—a loyal daughter, a peacekeeper, someone who could live with it. She didn’t know I was suffocating too.

    And now, in death, she felt nothing. But what did nothing feel like, when there was no more of you to feel or perceive anything? My brain went in circles trying to comprehend the concept of nothingness. Deep down I also hoped there was some sort of an afterlife, where an echo of her essence hung around, hopefully at peace. And maybe one day I would see her again. Or maybe we would both rest in oblivion while existing in the little trail of mementos we left from our lives, and in the memories of the people who loved us.

    I made it to the end of the beach, where the strip of sand narrowed until it disappeared beneath some rocks and water. Here, the waves rushed forward erratically. I jumped atop a large rock, narrowly missing a wave as it slammed against the face of a rock wall.

    During the last few weeks of my sister’s life, she had written that “my mom kept talking shit about my sister…Trying to pit me against her…Says that my sister should have no reason to hangout with me if she doesn’t hangout with my parents…My mom also told me to not introduce you to my sis lol.” I wondered what my mom had said about me to her over the years.

    It must have been hard for my sister to meet with me that last summer at the beach. Our sisterhood and friendship was a secret. We both knew my mom would be unhappy with her hanging out with me on her own. We were supposed to hang out again but she canceled, saying something had come up. We made other plans, but none of them worked out.

    A bird competed with me for shells, but it was looking for a quick meal rather than a keepsake. I found a few empty ones and stashed them into my straw bag.

    I had reached the end. It was time to return now.

    On my way back along the shore, I found more whole sand dollars and thought back again to that last summer with my sister at the beach, how we had combed the beach for shells and sand dollars but had found nothing intact and only broken pieces.

    I thought of her and her sun hat, her quiet smile, and all the things we knew but didn’t say to each other. My linen pockets were full and sand dollars stacked atop my hands like wide coins. If she were here, we would be sand dollar rich.