Benerkenswert 2024 – The Year of the Dragon Daughter
2024 has been a year of the dragon. The biggest and most beautiful change for me was the birth of our baby daughter L. They say kids change you, and how can they not just considering what an all-consuming new hobby they become. I am deeply in love with this particular one!
L should one day decide herself how much of her life she wants to make public. As I wrestle with that question still for myself, I will keep her life private for now. And yet, becoming a father sparked many quite philosophical questions and considerations I’d like to share. In times where our attention is tested so much by what wants to overwhelm us, I think it is important to remind each other of the places where we find beauty, calm, and happiness. In times where masculinity is often defined in competition to women, I think it is important to reflect on our roles where we come together.
Notes on Parenting
You can’t reason your way into becoming a parent.
Whether to have kids is often seen as a lifestyle choice, these days, at least among couples who like us live in the metropolises of this world. I had conversations with friends about the pros and cons myself. What do you get, what do you have to give up for it. Do you prefer scheming for a promotion from your boss or a self-drawn picture from your daughter? Would you rather master the art of the sales pitch or knotting dinosaur balloons? Is your ideal Sunday spent optimizing your island-hopping travel adventure or building the perfect tree house? I understand even better now why these considerations always felt off. With a child your identity and your values change, so the you who has the child is not the same you who made the decision. People who never wanted kids now love being a mom or dad. Or the other way around.
I think this problem lies at the heart of the psycho-cultural reason why especially the the „urban creatives“ struggle with partnerships and families. (The economic reason is of course that rents are too damn high.) Becoming a partner and especially having a kid means you become less of an independent individual and more of the entity called family. It’s a collective identity that’s impossible to grapple with when these questions are still theoretical. It only makes sense if you feel to be a part of it, and it to be a part of you.
Agnes Callard refers to goals like becoming a parent as “aspirations:” Things you think you might value once you’re there, but you know too little about at the start of your way to know why future-you will like it. I like the idea that we cultivate what we enjoy. Your first opera might be boring, your first surf or game of golf frustrating, you might not like your first meal of a foreign cuisine… and you might in the beginning not know what to do with a toddler. You see others enjoying it and so you get curious to figure out what it might give you. But it takes time to warm up to these things as you have to learn to appreciate them and what to appreciate about them. The reward is that these journeys make you bigger in the sense that there is now more of the world that’s also part of who you are.
Parenthood is similar to these others, but the change is even stronger. Becoming a parent includes making another person part of who you are, to make their needs part of your needs, their happiness part of your happiness. You grow not only as an individual, but in a way that „you“ now includes others. You have to aspire to become bigger in this way, because the individual you have been before has few ways to anticipate what it will mean to be part of this new entity. What was rational or irrational for you as an individual or one person in a partnership might not be rational or irrational any more when your kids and family become a part of you.
It’s hard to keep things fair between parents – and maybe better not to even try
Fairness is often a core value in relationships, and it is hard to foresee how our understanding of it might change. There’s so much to organize and orchestrate, figuring out what you need to buy and what you definitely do not need to buy, learning to change a diaper while your baby tries to learn to turn around, preventing your baby from killing itself while not dying from a lack of sleep yourself, celebrating first burps, wiggles, and rolls while also taking photos and not sharing too many of them. For us, luckily, my own background as a facilitator and Anna’s as a lady boss provides a lot of experience in managing all that – and our love helps to plaster over the inevitable FAFOs and misunderstandings. I think communication is paramount and I wonder how couples did it Back When Men Didn’t Talk. It’s easy to feel that your partner is unfair to you. You are doing so much after all! And they don’t even see it! Yet probably, they do too and you don’t see it either.
What‘s behind this mystery is that the whole equation of fairness shifts. One way social scientists look at relationships is by the exchanges you have. What you want and what you give and what you get and so on. Good relationships from this point of view are those with many, fair exchanges—where what’s good and fair depends on each individual, mind you. It is certainly a simplifying perspective, but also a powerful one, given how central exchanges are to much of our lives. Looking at partnerships and parenting from this angle, I think that love ultimately breaks that logic, though. I understand love not as the pinnacle in exchanging more, but rather as not caring about the exchanges as exchanges. Two people can love each other without giving or getting much. Love then means that you are willing to ignore questions of fairness.
For us, I personally believe it helped a lot in the beginning to give each other a lot of leeway; to be willing to give without getting back, acknowledging that we might not fully understand yet what the other does for us, trusting that if they don’t it’ll be fine anyway. (All between the two of us. The baby doesn’t care about logic of fair exchanges anyway!) Yet if this alone sounds too selfless to you, you are right. The risk of this approach is that it mirrors too much more traditional ideas of fatherhood as a sacrifice, and that you then slide along the slippery slope of seeing yourself as a guardian towards behaving like a patriarch. There is hence a second part to it.
Not keeping a score is important. But so is to build a language about your needs and your ways of giving—and to use it a lot. It‘s what “setting boundaries” and “love languages” in therapy-speak wants to get at, only that general self-help advice is not only often cringeworthy but also necessarily misses a lot of nuances. Between giving what you can and asking for what you need, defaulting to gratefulness instead of keeping score then makes many things a lot easier. It’s more fun for both of you to see your partner’s grocery run as a gift worth thanking them for, rather than simply their duty. Also because it might actually have been yours to do, this time. This way, love allows you to transcend keeping score. “Nice to have if you have it,” you might say. Yet maybe aspiring to overcome fairness like this does not require love as much as it is what love actually is. Love, after all, is actually a verb more than a noun.
What is magical about being a father is to watch a todo list become a real person.
When we left the hospital with L, we were almost surprised we were allowed to do so. She was so small and fragile, we knew so little. All we had was a list of things we had to do to keep her alive. Wake her up every three hours so she doesn’t starve. Make sure her poo is neither too dark nor too light. Keep the room warm and her away from blankets so she doesn’t freeze or suffocate. And always always always support her neck. Luckily, it’s easy to follow the list by just staying in bed. I loved the first two weeks in our nest, where pillows and blankets and days and nights and cuteness and insights melted into each other. And I liked going out from time to time to „hunt“ for some food.
A newborn’s needs during that time are so primordial that it is hard to tell where nature ends and the individual begins. Over time though, especially after experiencing other babies, it became more and more clear that we were not watching some vanilla boot-up of a new human operating system, but a very specific person finding their way into an overwhelming world. The moment she turned around when someone else in the streets spoke German. The way she hugged strangers except the first time she met someone with a beard. The way she loved to watch our hoover like others watch horror movies, with curious fascination but tightly holding onto our hands. It’s kind of magical that each of us learns certain things like walking on our own, by combining some genetic predispositions with laws of nature, time, and a lot of trial and error. Even a baby’s preferences for rolling, crawling, or just chilling seem to eerily reflect their character traits in other areas of their small lives—or to say it differently, it might be what makes “character” in the first place.
Every once in a while, in another moment like those mentioned above, I realize how my thinking switches. Where a minute ago there was a list of chores to do before leaving the house, L reminds me that no, we are already three people living our life together, one of whom just happens to lack certain capabilities for a few years. And also, once in a while, when I meet other people or look into the mirror, I think how that person too found their very own way into their very own life, and how weird it is to judge that way in terms of How Life Is Supposed to Be.
A secret code, not sacred self.
There are still interesting expectations connected to fatherhood, motherhood, parenthood. After L’s birth, I felt a certain sense of maturity growing. Much of that is certainly just the growing additional responsibility I now have. But behind that feeling also lurked some sacred idea of how being a father makes you a Real Man. Glimpses of that flash up when I’m around certain other people, especially from my parents’ generation. It seems to help to bridge the divide between generations. “Well, those Millennials don’t have real jobs, but at least when it comes to children they are real parents”—said no-one ever, but I’m still projecting it. (Flinching of course while thinking of my single, single-mother, polyamorous, or queer friends.)
The problem with the idea of such a consecration is that even watching your child being born is too worldly an event to be a passage into a new form of being. You don’t stop being yourself. Quite the opposite, the lack of time and sleep makes it even more likely your old self awakens time and again to deal with the stress in proven old ways. Over time, I realized that any big sudden transformation was less about my psychology and more about the relationships I had with others, about social identities and social roles. There are the new moments of instant connection in public. When an elevator doesn’t work and you exchange looks with another couple with stroller testing the escalator instead. When your own or another baby has a cutesy mini-meltdown in public and needs a boob. Once we met a dad who was waiting for a bus with his triplets. In the past I probably wouldn’t have even noticed him, now it was like meeting some kind of war hero (of postmodern social media wars, let’s say). I know this level of connection through other roles, being an expat, a musician, a photographer. No connection like seeing someone else schlep their bass down concrete stairs to catch a crowded train just in time. But the parent role is somewhat deeper as you now will never not be a parent. I wonder what other webs of connection are hidden around me. Being the only two women in a meeting of wannabe-alpha men? Being a member of a migrant minority? Having disabilities, being obese, being an olympic athlete, having the best ass in town, driving a Porsche?
A gift of undeserved trust
An important experience I shared with friends in my generation was that we had to find our own paths. Our parents, given how fast the world was changing, did not only often struggle to support us on that search, they might even accidentally have gotten in the way. In the last months, it sometimes dawned on me that I am now on the opposite side of this experience. L is their own person, and yet she is shaped by the world we create around her, however quixotic it might be. The universe has thus gifted us an incredible amount of unconditional power. Parents can leave deep dark marks on the psyche of their children. There are social limits to that power, sure. Parents who do too many of the bad things can lose their child to foster care. Parents who do too few of the good things might lose their children to their own independence—and might one day find out that their not-so-little ones prefer spending time with a shrink to spending time with them directly. Despite these limits it’s important to find a stance towards that power.
One way to look at it comes from Spiderman, of all people: To acknowledge the responsibility that comes with it. That too can be daunting. Freud still haunts us with the idea that parents can instill dark desires in their innocent children’s subconsciousness. Modern psychoanalysts like Gabor Maté warn us that parents’ various big and small faults carve trauma deep into their children’s bodies. Following most developmental psychologists, I think such ideas take normal acts of parenting, and thus yourself, too important. When it comes to our children’s character, our influence mostly ends at our decision where to live. “You don’t pick the kind of person your child will be,” I hear these pragmatists say. “Nature would never have allowed one generation to have that much power over the next one.”
Hence, I think the best approach is to focus less on ourselves and more on our child. While the universe gifts us an incredible amount of power, it gifted our children an incredible amount of unconditional trust. It feels special in a time in which every interaction seems to have to prove its worth right away, when we often have to prove how interesting or smart or sexy we are just to share a dinner, sometimes even with friends. I think our children’s trust deserves to be earned. The best reason to want to have a good relationship with your children, then, to want care for their needs and help them be free and happy is that you want to live a good relationship while you have it, you want to enjoy their happiness moment by moment and day by day.
Power, responsibility, and trust carry a lot of gravitas. Yet, seeing them not as an obligation to be paid in the future, as something to be considered as part of your legacy, but as the strengths of a relationship that you already live day to day, they feel anything but heavy. When I’m lying on the blanket next to L, she sometimes complains when I don’t entertain her enough, sometimes I silently complain that I’m bored. And yet it is because of the trust and responsibility that we do it, that we will do it for hundreds of hours more. It’s through those hours that we deserve what we already have, even if we are just bored and present with each other.
The masculine urge to do nothing
At our birthing class, Anna and I and the other couples were asked to do a kind of circle training to test various poses for the two of us to relieve some of the labor pain. Our job as the partner—all men, in that specific situation—was to support the becoming mother. “Talk to her,” our doula facilitating the workshop told us. I felt like Brad Pitt’s hyperactive character in Burn After Reading, „breathe, push, breathe, push, with my breath, three more, you! got! this!“ Confused by that feeling it dawned on me that the exercise was but a foredoomed attempt to bring structure into a time and place where nature will chaotically break free.
And indeed, nature broke free, there in the labor room. There is a crass contrast between the clinical surroundings and the fact that you (i.e., you women) are engaged in the most ancient and primordial of acts. Medicine can eventually control it with epidurals and scalpels, but otherwise all there is to do is to let go and let the bodies do their thing, to play the secret program that has been hidden in the reptilian parts of our fancy 21st century brains until that day.
It’s not the program of us men, though. Our minds tell us to support, help, act in some way, yet there’s little our bodies can do in that moment except for just being there, standing, holding, and even that seems to be directed mostly at the layers and layers of civilization we have dressed around female bodies in the form of selves as woman, partner, wife, mother. I was happy for having been there and Anna was too, and yet I felt humbled by the strength, endurance, and courage that I saw in my own wife yet that seemed to resonated more strongly with our midwife and our doula. And so the most courageous thing I came up with was to accept that this moment like probably many moments to come is about serving others and not thinking about me.
Every time I had walked in the streets in the days after that, and even now from time to time, I think of that moment when I see a woman with her child. There was a day she too showed that strength, endurance, and courage. And then I think of all the mothers of every person around, who also did it. Women created every person on earth, pressed almost all of them through their thin crevices in billions of these magical majestic animalic moments, screaming in pain and out of love for their soon-to-be born child.
Children in Taiwan
Giving birth to a dragon
L was born in Taiwan and many existences and learnings were about that outside world.
The Taiwanese health care system is amazing and among the best in the world. We generally trust it. And yet cultures are different and there is always only so much you know you don’t know. Episiotomies are widely more common here than elsewhere, for example, and we wanted to go without them—unless necessary, of course. But where is the line? From the outside, Taiwanese also seem to be more pragmatic about birth. C-sections are very common, often performed at the due date or sometimes even a few days earlier. And if you can decide when to get your child, then why not pick the date revealed by divination, some couples think. Then there’s language of course. Many doctors do speak English given a stint at a US university, but many others do not. As much as we are able to lean on Anna’s Mandarin skills during usual times, we didn’t want to press that while she’s pressing out our baby.
The idea of giving birth to our first child at what seems from Europe to be the other end of the world was already quite intimidating. But there was one more challenge: 2024 was a dragon year. Years in Taiwan follow the Chinese zodiac. The year in which children are born are said to be authoritative for their character and path in life. Rabbits are gentle and polite, horses energetic, monkeys curious, etc. People are said to be better or worse matches depending on their zodiac sign. The dragon—“mysterious and adventurous”—is the only mythical creature and thus the king of the crowd. Many Taiwanese and Chinese strive to have their children born in dragon years.This is visible in birth statistics, and usually has the effect that clinics are more occupied. Ironically it also means that dragon children face much more competition during their early careers and are actually on average less successful. Another such effect was that in the past, lives of some dragon babies already started more adventurous than usual, as their mothers had to give birth in the hallway because all labor rooms were occupied. It’s one thing to give birth to your child far away from home, without family support, in a country where medical emergencies were not part of your language class. You then don’t want to do that in the hallway of a hospital.
With all this on our minds, we looked for someone who could help us to navigate the Taiwanese medical system. In Germany, midwives play a bridging role between seeing birth as a medical intervention and as the natural wonder it is. They visit you before and after birth, usually at home, to make sure baby and mother are doing well. In Taiwan, the (often male) doctors are usually the only people you see before birth. They have a tight schedule in which to assure you that they understand your baby’s condition up to the smallest significant detail. Questions about maternal wellbeing are not necessarily at the center of their job description though. Luckily then, there are doulas. Wikipedia describes doulas clinically as “non-medical professionals who provide guidance through significant events like child birth” (Wikipedia). They actually feel more like wise elders who walk with women and their partners through what’s for many the most significant experience of womanhood, though. Ours was Angela Chang. She’s the type of strong woman who, were she Italian, you could easily imagine under a huge oak tree in the mediterranean light among dozens of grandchildren. Being a Canadian in Taiwan instead, she directed us towards our birth clinic that offered a more Western-style natural birth process, “gentle” as they say here, not necessarily aware of the irony. She organized a birth class where her warm presence allowed us to lean into our couples-crush with our now-friends with dragon daughters of their own. And on the Day of the Dragon, she rolled up her sleeves when entering the labor room to make sure that we got as close to the birth we wanted as was possible that day.
An offer you can refuse
A nice tradition in Taiwan and China is 坐月子 zuò yuè zǐ, postpartum confinement. It’s a one month period immediately after birth during which mother and child get time to rest, heal, and find strength again. Usually mothers spend that time in bed and have others like a granny take care of them. Nowadays, a whole industry has sprung into life to offer that service for the medium to very big buck. It’s not rare even for Taiwanese American women to fly to Taiwan to give birth and have that time here. Seeing their mothers certainly is one reason, but I’ve heard that the immense US health care costs are actually the prime one. 坐月子 is so common here that when we went for a walk with a newborn, people were chiding me for not caring for my wife well enough so she had to leave her bed early.
When you are all on your own with a newborn there’s little you might want more than have a simple and tested way to get support for a month. Someone to care for you, cook for you, who knows of the needs of a newborn. And yet it didn’t feel right for us to “sit for a month.” Neither fear of well-meaning patronizing behavior nor the hefty price tag were the actual reasons for us to not book a 坐月子, though, but rather the romantic ideals planted deep in our Germanic and Helvetian souls. And thus, we decided to follow the tradition of the Wochenbett, two weeks with just us in bed at home.
And as if to show us what we would miss, the universe gifted us two days of quasi-坐月子 anyway. As all hospital rooms were occupied by other dragon children, we had to get the luxury upgrade for us („us“ as, somewhat surprisingly, I was allowed to stay as well). And so Anna enjoyed the opportunity to have someone to ask if she had a question. I appreciated a two hour „daddy lesson” that in its progressive and pragmatic approach declared me “master of the rear end.” („Mommy takes care of everything that goes into the baby, daddy takes care of everything that comes out of the baby.“) We both fell slowly in love with the Traditional Chinese Medicine inspired food menu… and in the end really loved to be on our own again a few nights later.
Too much love for too few encounters of childhood
Taiwan has one of the lowest birth rates worldwide. It might thus either surprise you or not surprise you at all that both its infrastructure and society are enviable and adorable when it comes to children. Taiwan’s infrastructure proves that engineering in its rationality is anything but cold. We have yet to find a place that we struggled to access with our stroller. Elevators are usually easy to find and in perfect condition, people around them respectful and supportive. Taipei‘s MRT, the system of subways and local trains, was world class already in our minds, but our respect even rose once we realized that there are marked seats also for families and family cabins in the middle of each train, positioned just in front of the elevators. Public changing rooms too are ubiquitous, usually separate rooms with a changing table and a toilet, sometimes even a chair for nursing. They are almost always clean and welcoming, and it’s not rare to find them in the men’s toilet as well. Once the little ones are older, there are small parks in almost every city block, usually with a playground. Various districts also have free parent child play centers.
Taiwanese society is not only tolerant of small children but warm and welcoming. We are definitely enjoying “cute baby” privilege the last months! The old 阿姨 Āyis, aunties, are almost a Taiwanese cliche. You find these old ladies in the parks and streets where they greet every baby with a high pitched 好可愛 hǎo kē’ài, “soooo cute“ while trying to pinch a cheek. The two ladies at our local food coop almost exceeded our own mothers in their displayed excitement when we visited with L the first time after months of pregnancy. Taking a bus after a long hike, an old lady next to me gladly entertained L for half an hour playing peekaboo. Men don’t rank far behind. The old male guard of our complex often scrambles by to open any door for us, just to snatch a smile of the little one.
It’s when we meet younger Taiwanese that we start to understand why despite all this there are still so few children in the streets. 那是狗還是寶寶, “is that a dog or a baby,” they ask, reminding us that many couples have a dog instead of a child for whom they buy an expensive carrier. Life with children is hard outside of our privileged bubble. Vacations are rare, and not only are nannies and rents expensive, but cram schools, too. Childhood ends earlier here than in Europe, and so we wonder how much of the love and consideration is there to help make the most of the encounters with fewer children during fewer years of childhood.
