The Hard, Easy, and Unexpected

Things that have surprised me about parenting, writing, and Vietnam over the last couple weeks...

In my last post, I wrote about how writing my book has been “HARD.” I thought I should elaborate on what exactly is hard though, since it’s not at all what I expected.

It’s typical of me to not have any idea what I’m getting myself into. Like with parenting, I of course got the memo that it would be hard, but it too has been hard (and fun!) in ways I hadn’t expected.

For example, I thought shifting my priorities would be hard, but it has been effortless. I thought slowing down to match Teo’s pace would be hard, but it has been unexpectedly delightful taking the scenic route.

Instead, it’s been waaaay harder than I expected to see Teo get hurt, to restrain myself from looking at pictures of him all day long while he’s at daycare, and to deal with anything logistical stuff like packing and planning for trips.

Primarily, with both parenting and writing a book, it’s HARD not being able to drink more than one cup of coffee per day. If I had one wish (assuming world peace and all that has been solved for…), it would be to have the freedom to drink as as many cups as I’d like to (or even better, to have a body that could sustain itself on caffeine alone so I never had to grocery shop or cook again).

Writing: Hard | Easy | Unexpected

Easy: Escaping Writer’s Block

I imagined that the hardest part of writing a book would be gathering motivation and momentum. But thankfully, it has been easy for me to feel motivated to write every day, to think of things to write about, and to avoid other activities and distractions.

Hopefully this lasts!

Hard: Keeping Everything Straight

The feeling I get writing is how I used to feel trying to clear my dad’s clutter.

There’s something really satisfying about getting things (in his case newspapers and junk from the alley; in this case words in a sentence and ideas in my head) in their right place. Except with the scale of this endeavour, it is like trying to find the perfect home for everything my dad has ever hoarded.

There are essentially three challenges in this:

1. putting feelings and experiences into words(made harder by the fact that I lean towards writing about “hard”feelings and experiences, stuff like betrayal, shame, insecurities, and desire)

2. figuring out where to put these words for maximum impact (this part, though hard, I actually really enjoy)

3. remembering where you put them (of course you can search within a document, but even with that function, for some reason I still find this part hard)

Unexpected: The Joy of Going Down Rabbit Holes

Last week, I went down an unexpected rabbit hole about….rabbits!

I combined a bunch of random life experiences, many of which I’d long forgotten, that at least loosely related to rabbits. Weaved together with some research, I ended up with an essay that made me feel like all these disparate events were suddenly connected. It felt as though the story was meant to be written in this precise way.

This week it was moths. MOTHS! If you told me a year ago that I’d spend a week researching and writing about moths while in Vietnam, I would have told you that you didn’t know the first thing about me. But I loved it!!

It started with one line that stood out to me in an essay I was writing about my time as a telemarketer:

The prairie girl in me looks back with fondness at the small glimpse I got into a farmer’s life.

That made me think to dive into my grandpa’s life on a dairy farm in British Columbia, which took me on a journey that very unexpectedly brought me all the way back, by way of pesticides and caterpillars, to my hometown Winnipeg. As with the rabbit essay, it felt like the connections were all there just waiting for me to see them.

It’s been so fun just letting my mind loose like this, and trusting that if I look at something that intrigues me hard enough, for long enough, from enough angles, it will start to take a different shape.

Vietnam: : Hard | Easy | Unexpected

Hard: Burning Culture

Uggggh. I really try to not get worked up about the small fires that people start all over the city to burn trash, leaves, and (apparently) auspicious ancestral offerings. But it’s hard not to shake my head when the air quality is already iffy (thankfully much better where we are in Da Nang, on the coast, than in Hanoi or HCMC).

For example, here are two of the four fires I saw within a ten minute walk of our house on Sunday.

I understand there is a cultural (and even religious) component that I don’t fully appreciate, but as Uri said, that’s also what makes it worse. You can ban people from burning plastic, but it’s hard to stop people from honouring their ancestors.

Easy: Extending Our Stay

Between the cost of living, convenience, perfect weather, beaches, and Teo’s amazing daycare, it really was a no brainer to stay here through mid-May (after which…Seoul—>Vancouver—>Winnipeg—>NYC—>…….?!)

Unexpected: Cost of Goods

As expected, food, childcare transportation, and accommodations are roughly 1/6th the cost of anything comparable in NYC. But what defies expectations? The cost of clothing!!! It’s the SAME PRICE (for the type of stuff I buy anyway which is cheap t-shirts for myself, and comfy pajamas for Teo) even though Made in Vietnam is on all the labels on the clothes I buy in New York!

To be fair, this is probably more a sad reflection of just how low we’ve pushed prices on fast fashion down in North America.

But to make matters worse, the clothes here kinda suck. The materials, the prints, the fit. PJs for 18 month-2 year olds old would actually fit a 4ft tall kid with the physique of a skeleton and are warm enough to get you through a Winnipeg winter with a broken furnace.

I guess it’s kind of like how the best coffee & cocoa beans are shipped out of places like Colombia and Kenya.

I have more hards/easys/unexpecteds to share about parenting, writing, and Vietnam, so let me know if this was at all interesting and I’ll do a part 2!