The Love I Almost Said No To

Contemplations:

What reminds you of your limitless capacity to love?

For a full suggested practice of the Brahmaviharas, go to the bottom of this essay.

When I was in my early 20s, one of my best friends told me she wanted to be a mother because she wanted to experience all the different types of love you can experience as a human.

There’s love you receive from a parent, a partner, a friend, and then one you get from a kiddo. (There are many more kinds of love, but that conversation cracked something open for me.)

The desire for motherhood has been a long journey for me. I was adamantly against kids in my 20s, and I know now that I was subconsciously protecting myself because I didn’t feel supported in my first marriage. Why would I want a child if I was already married to one?

When I met Jess, I was a bit astounded by her love for children. It seemed that so much of her life was defined by it — being a nanny, making theatre for young audiences, all the things she learned about herself through the kids she taught in her classroom.

It all seemed so foreign to me.

At the time, my life could not have been so drastically different. I was suffocating from the horrible grind culture of big media, toiling away working 16-hour days making content for Shark Week, trying to swim away from the corporate sharks circling me and my team.

The closest relationship I had with kids was with my sweet nephews, who I loved but didn’t see often because of distance and circumstance. And even as much as I loved visiting them, they were so deeply embedded in a white suburban culture that I had spent most of my adult life unlearning.

If this is the road to kids, I thought, then I’d rather pave my own path.

And that, I have certainly done.

I started asking myself “why” in every part of my life, which often left an open space for me to listen to what my heart really wanted. This slowing down, this looking deeply within, went hand-in-hand with my mindfulness practice, which not only gave me a structure to explore the world with compassion but healed wounds and patterns that I didn’t know needed healing.

In more ways than one, that meant prioritizing myself, my practice, my needs in a world where they often were overlooked, both intentionally and not. For me, the freedom and liberation I sought so desperately seemed to be tied to the idea that it could only be achieved if I were not bound by the weight of a child.

Of course, like many things, I am a typical Millennial. If I take stock of my friends and community now, I have more friends without kids than with them. So much of my generation has delayed starting a family — if at all — compared to previous generations due to shifting cultural values, priorities, and economic pressures. We are part of a declining trend in the nuclear family, which I don’t think is a bad thing, just different.

Since I moved upstate, Jess and I have had many discussions about what family could look like and mean to us. She has been clear since our second date that she always wanted to be a mother. Me, not so much.

It has been a journey of asking myself why. I have been plagued with many questions:

• Why do I even want to have kids?

• How much does a biological child mean to me?

• Can I raise a child who will have a different lived experience of the world than me?

• Am I capable of being a good mother?

• Are these irrational fears or did I really just not want kids?

I have asked these questions — both specific to my experience as a Queer Asian woman and universal to anyone considering parenthood — many, many times, feeling how they show up in my body. And I have found that the answers, the insights to these questions have gently shifted through the years, breath by breath.

This past weekend Jess and I began embarking on our journey of bringing in foster kiddos into our home. They are two sweet boys who are only staying with us for the weekend, but during their short stay with us, I have felt a spaciousness in my heart that I have never felt before.

In Buddhism, one of the core teachings is on the Brahmaviharas, which are often referred to as the Four Immeasurables. They are what is considered to be four heart practices — to remind you that no matter what you may think, your heart is actually limitless. And by practicing these four different teachings (lovingkindness, mudita, compassion, and equanimity), you will find yourself with an ever-expanding heart.

The Brahmaviharas have been a bedrock teaching for me for the last five years, as both my personal and collective worlds have seen much upheaval, heartbreak, and grief. Even though I know and have experienced how these practices are inseparable and that they work together in tandem like the Avengers, I often thought of them as individual pathways towards liberation — until this weekend.

The experience of caring for these two kids in our home was both heartbreaking and joyful, playful and testing, grounding and uprooting. This weekend I realized the practices I had studied for years were no longer abstract. They were alive, breathing, playing magna tiles, having impromptu dance parties, and waking me up at 2 a.m. scared from nightmares. For me, these teachings have never been more present than being a caregiver: wishing the best for this human, finding joy in their joy, feeling the grief of their circumstance, and seeing the embodiment of resilience in them that evokes such a wide opening of my heart that the most beautiful language will never grasp.

It is a fluttering tenderness, a reminder that no matter how old we are, we are still just kids who need to be loved. It is a pouring into, a kind of love that reminds us, no matter how exhausted we are, that our hearts are indeed boundless.

I suppose this is what my friend meant all those years ago: that there is a kind of love only caregiving reveals, one that expands the edges of your heart until you can no longer find where it begins or ends.

As Jess and I embark on exploring family on our own terms, I am so grateful that I got to touch a bit of that this weekend.

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Contemplations:

What reminds you of your limitless capacity to love?

My invitation to you is to practice rotating through the Four Brahmaviharas this week by meeting the moment. I learned a version of this practice through the amazing Tamara Cress, who I met through the amazing Lotus Institute, that I have adapted below for the Four Brahmaviharas. Set a random timer each day and let the alarm invite you into one of these practices. Label it “Lovingkindness says…” and see how you can respond in that very moment. Rotate through the Four Immeasurables as you go. Let me know how it goes:

• Lovingkindness says… In this moment, tap into how can you turn the wish of “May you be happy and free” into that moment?

• Mudita says… In this moment, how can you practice finding joy in another person’s joy?

• Compassion says… In this moment, how can I alleviate suffering for others or myself?

• Equanimity says… In this moment, how can I stay grounded and rooted enough to have clarity of mind?

A quick note to my readers:

Just want to say hello and thank you to all my new subscribers. As always, I hope my writing is of service to you and sparks something that helps you connect more deeply to yourself and the world.

Though I strive to send out a newsletter twice a month, I’m letting my heart and body guide me in deciding when and what to share. That may means less frequent posts or more time between posts — like between these last two posts. As I continue to practice self-care through an anti-capitalist lens, I’m working hard not to fall into the trappings of any algorithm that says I am only worthy of connection or attention based on how much I produce.

Thank you for understanding that this is a space where I’m practicing unlearning and refusing to ascribe to those oppressive patterns. Trust that I’ll be in your inbox when the moment arises.

Be well and take good care,
Kim