Dear my imaginary beloved readers,

It’s been a long time since I started writing on this blog, 3 months to be exact. I felt like the person who’s typing to you at this moment is a much more completed version than the previous one.

I am me but I am not me
I am one but I am not one

Throughout the 7 years of this blog post I have been the following:

– The “travel addict” who dreams of being a diver instructor going places for the rest of life.
– The girl that looks at life with awe in every aspect
– The passionate lover who’s so in love that her life revolves around that fact
– The aching soul that writes about her pain as if she knows nothing but pains.

On one hand, I’m still all of the mentioned above, I still love passionately, I still enjoy going places, I still look at life with awe every single day, and my soul went through all the pains. But, I am also very different in all the aspects, my soul is no longer aching, we know what pains look like, we’ve been through it, but we are no longer in pain. I love, but no longer let love revolve around just one love. I look at life with awe, but I’d say with much in-depth analysis (sort of like higher resolution in a monitor). I go to places, but no longer just to go places, I go to a place with a purpose.

If you know me well enough, and maybe by reading my notes here, you will often see me telling you that the person who’s writing whatever is happening in her head is very different from the person who’s interacting with the world. I often say that it’s a split personality. Mai-at-work, The one who’s working, and socializing with the world is a grownup who can resolve all her work effectively, in short – an adult. Mai-at-home, the child, who’s negatively dependent on her mother, her lover, her father, and to my own surprise her sister as well.

In this blog, you sometimes will see this child appear, someone who’s crying for the moon. Someone who thinks that she has a boyfriend now and she feels proud and secure. She only felt secure when she’s with someone, just like a child needed to hold her parent’s hand, she cannot feel safe unless there’s someone around her. You can see that in the child panel, I marked “mother” and “lover” in red because I can clearly see that through all of the relationships that I had been through, my lover is either the opposite of my mother or the exact copy of my mother. That means he’s either passive-aggressively attacked me, or he cannot decide anything at all.

Today, on a fine full moon night, I can proudly say that that era has come to an end. The era of my shadow self, the child who’s so insecure, so afraid has grown up and become a full-grown adult.

I’m not going into details about the actual moments that it has happened, but I can tell you that now I am so free to talk to my mother. She’s no longer fearful to me, in fact, she’s so childish and so immature that I feel so bad for her. I wish that I can help her to see light, but this kind of light can only be from within.

From this day onward,
I am a different person
I am me, but I am also not me

I am trying to find the right word to describe how it felt to you, I think the right word is ” Wholeness”. I feel that finally, I can just be one person, the one that’s typing these words into my semi-public blog post is exactly the one who’s operating daily in her life.

One of the most important things in my mind is I think now I can be a mother. Well, anyone can be a mother, sure, that’s just basic instinct. But a good mentally healthy mother is a very rare find.

I wrote about bé Minh a lot of times in this note, some said it was the right decision, but mostly said what would have been different if she’s here with me today. Today, I can tell you with all my heart that it was the right decision. At that time, I could be a good mother, I and my daughter could easily have a happy life in Hoi An just the two of us.

She will inherit my infectious laughter, she will know how to think, all of her choice will be her conscious choice, she will have the cutest accent mix between my Saigonese and the Hoianese accent, she will speak perfect English like her mother tounge but she will also inherit my pain, my insecurities, my fear. Her lense of life will always be tilted, distorted while she's looking at the world through her mother's lense (me)  

And I definitely don’t want that for my child, living in this world is already hard enough let alone carrying generational sufferings. I would not let that happen to my child. Thus, I think it was the right decision after all.

When I say I think I can be a mother now doesn’t mean that my basic instincts kick in and I want to be a mother so badly that I need to find a husband soon, to fulfill my destiny – being a mother – like in our language ” thiên chức”, well, I called it “Thú chức” if we don’t really know what we are doing like most of us, I included.

What I mean is, I know now, that having a child is going to be a viable option, at least I know that if I have a child, she will not inherit my sufferings and my fear. Actually, even better, I can show her how to overcome fear and how to enjoy the suffering. I know now that if I have a partner, and if we both feel like we would like to take the journey of creating another human, I can say yes without any hesitation.

What do you think? Do you agree with me that it’s a viable option now?

I will continue this blog tmr, it has been a long long day, and my brain CPU felt like it was on fire.