Haomin, 37

“I want to be the mom who really learns about their child.”

Meet Haomin, a 37-year-old mother of a one-year-old son (and an Australian Shepard named Beau) in the Bay area.

Jenny: I'm going to dive right in. What was your earliest memory of thinking that you wanted to become a mom someday?

Haomin: I have no memory of deciding I want to be a mom someday. I just knew that I wanted to. But the more I talk to friends now, who are mostly in their 30s, I'm realizing that many people actually do have that moment where they really think: What's my life going to be like with kids? What's my life going to be like without kids? And it's a conversation or a debate they have to have with themselves or with their partner. And they arrive at some conclusion based on some pros and cons list that they've thought through. I've never had that. I think growing up, I just always knew. Like here are things that will happen in my life: I will go to college. I will get a job. At some point, I will settle down. I will have a family. I've never questioned it. The only thing I did question about motherhood was when it was going to happen. And I would say that it happened when the pieces of my life came to place where I felt like would be a good environment for a child to come into.

Jenny: Being a friend of yours, I have some more context than a stranger would about this, but I remember even years ago, when you said that for some reason, 35 would be the age where you’d feel ready to have a kid. What was it about that age? 

Haomin: What's so weird is when I think 35 now, I'm like, oh my gosh, that's the age where they consider your pregnancy to be geriatric. So medically speaking, that's on the later end of fertility. I've always heard 35 is where that dip begins to happen, right? And I've listened to so many podcasts where doctors are like, it's not like your body realizes, oh, you're now 35 and your body is significantly different. It's just a baseline for when the number of eggs you have will start declining. And I think because you know me, you know that I feel like I matured slower than everyone else, meaning like I know people who had their 401 set up by the age of 25 and were investing and they knew where they were going to move. And I just didn't know. My focus at that age was always about how I can have fun this weekend and what do I want to eat right now? I didn't think too far into the future. And so, it wasn't really until I moved from the East Coast to the West Coast when I was 27 that I started to grow up, as I was living on my own for the first time.

Haomin: I wasn't surrounded by people who had known me since I was a kid. My family was on the other side of the country, and I had to grow up so much. From the ages of 27 to 30, it felt like I went on this super-charged ride of maturing. By the time I was around 30, I felt like, okay, 35 still feels like a good time to have a kid because I have several years to do my own things before then. I still have a few years to be very free. And the person I was in a relationship with at the time, who I'm still in a relationship with now, we were still figuring each other out. You know what I mean? So, I just felt like five years was a significant enough amount of time for us to figure out what this relationship was, too. 

Jenny: Yeah, that makes sense to me. If you were single now at your current age of 35, do you think that you'd still have that certainty of wanting to be a mom, or do you think that for you, a lot of it is circumstantial, like having the right partner, having the right environment to bring a kid into, etc. Another way to phrase that question is, do you feel like you would want to become a mom even if you had to do it on your own?

Haomin: I can only guess, but I think I would not be so strict on what it means to be a mom. I think I could still want to have a big family because I'm an only child and also because we immigrated to the States when I was so young. I don't have a close relationship with my extended family, so I didn't grow up going to my grandmother's house or hanging out with my cousins over the summer or having siblings to fight with or anything like that. I've always grown up with just my mom, my dad and I, and to this day, we're a very small, tight-knit family and I love that. But as I get older, I look at other people who had bigger families growing up, who have sibling relationships, who have close relationships with their larger extended family, and I really want that.

“And so, I think that if I were 35 and not seriously seeing anyone at the moment, I would probably think about what my extended family could look like. I would also look into my options, and I would be pretty open to what that means, whether it’s freezing my eggs and waiting until a later time. Or rethinking my idea of what it means to “have a family.” I’ve been really lucky to have very close friends throughout my life, who have felt like family.”

Also, I have examples of people who chose not to have kids and they seem to be doing pretty great, you know? They filled their life with other things. Anyway, I guess to your question specifically, I would still want to be a mom. For sure, but depending on how the next few years would shake out, my way of thinking about how to be a mom would change. It would be more fluid to suit what fits my life at that time.

Jenny: Yeah. What about if you were in a stable relationship but you weren't financially stable—like you guys just weren't in a place where you could afford to raise a child, but you really wanted one. 

Haomin: Okay, this might be the wrong answer, but I would just do it anyways. My parents had me when they were still in China, and then when I was five, they immigrated here and started from the bottom. They came to the States and went to grad school here. They were two full-time students who were working side jobs and raising a five-year-old. And I feel like I couldn't have asked for more growing up. They truly set me up for success and gave me all the resources that a kid could want. So because I saw my parents do it, I had this idea in my head of like, you'll figure it out somehow. You will find a way. 

That said, now that I am six months pregnant, I’m constantly thinking to myself, oh my God, this is so expensive. Immediately, I think, thank God I have health insurance. But even still, I pay so much for a premium health insurance every single month and then after every doctor's appointment, you never know how much it's going to cost. You get a random bill a couple months down the road and you don't really know what it’s for. And then also, the birth itself can be complicated, right? 

You watch these movies where in it a woman's like, “my water broke” and then the baby just comes, she goes home and she's happy with her family. But in reality, there are so many things that can happen. You can have a baby who's born prematurely, who has to spend time in the NICU, or you could have complications that lead to needing more surgeries after the birth. And who knows how much that could cost? Still, going back to your question about if I would have a kid even though I wasn’t in the financial position to have one. I think if I still would have done it because I saw my parents do it. 

Jenny: Wow. Yes, because you grew up seeing that it was possible. Now that you are expecting a child, has that changed the way you look at work? 

Haomin: It's such a complicated question, to be honest, because I've had a few friends who decided not to go back to work or aren’t planning to go back to work because they want to expand their family. And before I was pregnant, I felt really…I don't know what the right word is, but I felt a bit disappointed? Being a successful woman and a mom exposes other women to what they could do and seeing them choose not to work anymore made me feel like, oh, this is why there's this discrepancy in pay between men and women. This is why we have to stay in the workforce, so other girls who come after us have an example because I didn't have that when I started off my career. I worked in a company where everyone who was in a position of leadership was an older man. And so, before I was pregnant, I definitely thought, we’ve got to stick in there and do it for the next generation. I still feel this way, but now I have a bit more understanding. I realize that it probably is really hard to do. I don't even have a physical baby in my arms yet, but I have to go to a doctor's appointment every two weeks. And every time you go, you wait at least an hour in the waiting room before you’re even seen. There's always some sort of follow up and there's just so much happening all the time.

Haomin: I can imagine if you now actually have a baby that you're keeping alive and needs you around the clock, it's a lot.

“As a woman, there’s so much physical responsibility on feeding the child. I didn’t even know that women pump, like, five hours a day. That’s a job. You know what I mean? There are so many details I wasn’t exposed to until more recently. ”

You must always feel like you are somewhere else. When you're home, you probably feel like I need to get back to that deadline that I need to do by tomorrow. Or when you're at work, you're probably like, my baby needs this. I can imagine that being very, very hard. Knowing this now, I would say it's changed my mind in general around how I view women who choose not to go back to work. I understand and empathize a lot more because it's really hard to have your priorities split in so many directions. For myself though, I say it's complicated because I've never been motivated to work for money. That's such a crazy luxury. And again, this goes back to my parents. They always made me feel taken care of.

Haomin: I never grew up feeling like I had fend for myself. They never pressured me into choosing a specific career so that I had money or anything like that. They always pushed me to choose a career that I felt connected to, that I was motivated by, where I feel like I could learn. So I don't look at work as this thing I have to do because I have to make money. But I look at it more as...what are the things that I really care about and want to put my time into and make a difference in? And I find that to be really important. I would want my child to have those values as well. Yes, I have to work right now because I have to pay for things. But in the broader picture, I don't look at work as this thing I have to do versus spending time with my child. I look at it as something I really want to do, as something that I care about and hopefully something that allows me to contribute to something bigger than myself. And I want my child to see that, you know?

Jenny: You talk a lot about your parents and specifically your mom. How would you describe her?

Haomin: Oh, my gosh. My mom is like…the five love languages. She is all of them to me. She is constantly giving me words of affirmation, is always thinking of ways to help me out, always taking the time to plan trips for our family so we can spend quality time together. I feel like she has endless energy. She's someone who is close to the age of retiring, and yet, she's still hustling at work and trying to get that next promotion. The other day she was like, I had my review and I got “strong” instead of “very strong” in my evaluation and I’m very upset about it.

She’s in her 60s working with the same hustle that I had when I was like 21 and just starting out in the workforce, you know. She doesn't come up short in anything. She works incredibly hard, has built so much on her own, and yet, I never look back and think she wasn't there for me. She was at everything for me growing up. And she's there for everything now, even. And I look at her like, man, how do you do all of that? But she's kind of an unreachable model of like, what a mom “should” be.

Yes, she's still my mom and sometimes it annoys me when she calls in the middle of the day to ask if I ate enough fruit, and we will argue about little things. But if I take a step back and really think about who she is as a person, and all that she's done for me, and who she is to the people around her, I'm so grateful that she’s my example of what a mother could be.

Jenny: Do you feel like that appreciation for your mom has become even stronger or more apparent now that you are expecting your own child? Or perhaps it’s just having more perspectives on what it must have been like for her when she was raising you?

Haomin: For sure. I have so many resources right now that she didn’t have when she was expecting me. Recently, she was telling me about how when she was pregnant with me and still living in China, it was during a time where you could only have one child. And there's a lot of things that come with that, like the doctors wouldn't tell you the gender of the baby because people preferred boys and they were afraid that they were going to abort the girls. And so, she wasn't able to know the gender until I was born. Also, when she gave birth, there were no painkillers and she delivered in a room with a bunch of other women and she wasn't allowed to have family members with her.

Haomin: Then beyond that, I think, man, you have this kid who's going to grow up and become an adult and imagine what that must feel like for a mom. To think, what are all the things I should do to make sure that this person is a good person, that they can become independent, that they are driven and smart, but also really care about the people around them. And you go from worrying about if this kid going to be healthy to is this kid going to be a good person? And it just never ends. There are a lot of times, even now, where my mom will call and say, “let me know when you get home” or “you're flying somewhere? let me know when you land safely.” That constant worrying. That’s a lot to carry.

Jenny: Do you feel like your dad helped/helps her carry that?

Haomin: My dad is interesting because he’s so different from who I am and who my mom is. My mom and I are very similar in temperament and personality. I think we communicate in the same way and we show and receive love in the same way. So, it's very easy for me feel like my mom cares because she's showing love in the same way I show love, right? Whereas my dad, he's not the most vocal person. He's not someone who will tell you, "I love you, I'm proud of you." He's more of an “acts of service,” person. He will take care of things. Like whenever I visit home, he would just wash my car without ever me asking him and fill the gas tank. When I was younger, I didn't see that as his way of caring. I just saw him as not showing love in the same way my mom showed love.

I've always felt like my mom took on more of the role and burden of parenting. But I'm learning now that my dad is just different and that doesn't mean he doesn't carry that. I think he does. He just shows up in very different ways. And so now, I'm really trying to be conscious of what my relationship with him looks like—and how it can be just as great as the one I have with my mom even though it looks so different.

Jenny: You know, they say that we look for partners who are kind of like our parents. Do you feel like that's true for your partner?

Haomin: It’s funny because at my wedding earlier this year, when my mom was giving her speech, she said “Jeff is very responsible.” She threw that in there. 

I'm trying to think of a way to present this that doesn't make me sound like I'm incompetent on my own, but I am an only child. And I grew up with parents that were very much involved in every way. And I'm kind of embarrassed to say this, but I didn't know how to do laundry until I went to college. I didn't know how to get gas until way later. You lived with me. You know I did not clean my room. I didn't understand these things. You know what I mean? I wasn’t someone who was prepared to live on my own because I was living with parents who took care of so much for me.

At some point in my life, when I did start living on my own, I became much better about these things. But even now, I just generally have this relationship with my parents where I will call my mom and ask her "how can I tell if a watermelon is ripe?" Or like, "I'm cooking this thing that you make for me. How much salt do you add?" I could call them for anything and they will be there for me.

In that same way, I feel my partner is someone who, when I feel overwhelmed by the decisions I have to make and there are so many different directions it can go, and I'm not quite sure what the right thing to do is, he's the kind of person who can cut through all of that and be like, okay, here's what we're going to do, here's why it's the best option, and then execute on that. So, yes, in that way, I think they're similar.

Jenny: You’ve shared that your parents took care of a lot of things for you when you were growing up, and you said that there are things that you didn't know how to do until you were in your 20s. Is that something that you think you're going to be conscious about in raising your own child? Like the balance between taking care of them and doing things for them versus having them figure it out on their own?

Haomin: I really think that I'm either going to be a very loving mom who reads all of the books about how to properly talk to children and the best ways that psychologists say to raise your child to be loving and well-adjusted. I can see myself wanting to be their best friend. But I can also see a world where I'm a helicopter mom because I think maybe there's a feeling of like, we may just have one child, and so this one has to be everything. And I feel this odd pressure to have the sort of relationship that I have with my mom where we’re very close. 

“What I want to be is the mom who really learns about their child and the kind of person that they are and encourage that and try to give them all that I can and guide them to be more independent. ”

Specifically, to answer your question, I definitely want them to be more independent than I was growing up. My partner now has two children and sometimes he’ll be helping one of them with their homework and she’ll be frustrated about something. And he won't just tell them the answer. Instead he'll say, well let's think about that problem. Like, here's how I would approach that problem. He’s very patient and I really like that way of parenting, so I will definitely try to be more like that. Beyond that, I find myself already having these crazy expectations that this kid will need to be athletic and artistic and book smart and street smart. I'll try my best not to be like that, though.

Jenny: So, you currently don't know the sex of the baby. Have you thought about how parenting will be different if you have a son versus a daughter?

Haomin: Well, I know more, obviously, about what it's like to be a woman and a girl, so it’ll have to be different. And I don't mean in the way of, I'm going to treat a son differently than I am going to treat a daughter. I will never be someone who's like, you can't wear that. That's a boy outfit. Or you can't have that haircut. That's a boy haircut. Or even things like telling a girl "you look so pretty!" I want to be very conscious of not putting any expectations on them about what a girl could be or what a boy could be. 

But where I think the differences will come in is I do think a lot about how women are perceived, how men are perceived, and what opportunities are given to men versus what opportunities are given to women. And I think my goal is to really present that as a positive thing.

I mentioned to you earlier that my first job out of college was at this company where everyone in a leadership position was an older white man. And even my boss, who was a female at the time, would ask the guy on our team to present instead of the woman because our client was a man and she thought that they would connect better. I remember taking this Strengths Finder test around that time, and my strengths were like “empathy” or that’s the only one I can remember. 

Haomin: In contrast, the people in leadership positions, their strengths were around public speaking, being confident,  type A personalities, you know? And for the longest time I didn't really appreciate what my strengths were, which are “softer” skills. Now, I’m at an age where I realized those are amazing strengths to have. I'm so happy with how these things make me different and I think I would really want to display that to my child. If I were to have a kid who had different strengths than what was expected of their gender, I would really want to celebrate that.

Jenny: What is it that scares you most about becoming a mother right now?

Haomin: I think what scares me most is I see some people whose identities become fully wrapped up in being a mom. I think that's a choice that some people have made. There's no right or wrong way to be a mom. But it scares me a little bit to become someone who's like, on Saturday, she has soccer practice, and then on Saturday night, he has tennis. And then my whole life revolves around being their assistant.

So that's one piece of it. But I'm equally fearful of becoming someone who isn't that involved. Like I'm pursuing my dreams and what I want to do with my life, and I want to hold on to my independence to the degree where maybe I'm not as available to my kids growing up. And so, I think maybe what I'm most worried about is how to find that balance of being someone who is very present, but also having my own things and my own dreams.

Jenny: Well, I feel like you were modeled that growing up, so hopefully that will kick in for you. Like when I look at your mom, I see a fully formed person who's, very invested in her kid’s life, but also has all these interests and friends and takes trips. She's a very dynamic person.

Haomin: Yeah, that's true. Thanks for saying that.

Jenny: Yeah. I feel like the things that we're afraid of, you know, if you flip the coin of fear, there's also excitement, right? I wonder, what is it that excites you the most, then, about becoming a mother? 

Haomin: What excites me the most is, when I think about my dog Beau, he goes to agility class. He’s been going to this class for a couple of months, and it's the coolest thing. The first class, he was just sitting there. He was just trying to eat cheese. He wasn't sure what he was there to do. But after a couple of classes, he was going through tunnels and doing tricks and jumping over obstacles and you just see him learning and it's very cool to witness that.

Also, I think with Beau and dogs in general, they just have this way of slowing you down and making you really appreciate the moment you’re in right now. 

I go to the SPCA every weekend, and yesterday, I was walking this dog and it was really hot out. We happened to walk by this tree and he just laid down suddenly. He just did a complete belly flop and was enjoying the shade. Normally, I would have been like, no, we have go. But I was also really hot, so we just sat there for ten minutes. I patted his belly and enjoyed the breeze under the tree with him and it was a lovely break.

Haomin: That’s what I'm also excited about when it comes to having a kid. Watching them learn and grow and develop a sense of humor and make jokes with them and experience everything again through them. Like think about back-to-school shopping and playing games and having water balloon fights. All the things you did as a kid, you now get to do it with your own kid. That's really exciting for me. And then the second part of that, I hear about and I can imagine this being true, is so much can happen in your day, but when you go home and you see your kid, it just feels like a reset, like re-ranking the things that matter.

Jenny: My second to last question is what do you think it means to be a good mother?

“People are so different, and sometimes you’re going to have someone who needs you to give them 24-hour attention, and then you’re going to have someone who really wants to be independent and wants you to give them more space. So I would say that being a good mother is learning who your child is and being there for them in the way that they need you to be there for them.”

Jenny: My last question is, what would you tell someone (ahem, your best friend) who is on the fence about whether or not they want to be a parent? 

Haomin: I would ask a series of questions to understand why. Because I think there's a big difference between “I don't want to have kids” versus “I don't want to have kids right now” versus “I don't want to have kids until X, Y, Z.”

I think the most important thing is to try as hard as possible to take out all of the expectations that you feel about this topic in general, because I think there are a ton of pressures we get externally and put on ourselves. I would really want that person to get to the root of their uncertainty. Is it fear-based? Is it because they’re worried that the life that they want to live can't exist if they have children?

And maybe try to see if you could experience that to some degree through spending time with a close friend who has kids. Then, spend time with a friend who doesn't have kids. I would say that exposure is important because when you only see one way of living, it can make you feel like that’s your only option. Because I think for me, growing up in the suburbs of Maryland, there was a very specific model of what a family could look like. You got married. You had kids, and on the weekends, they would do their extracurricular activities and that was it. I think that's why a part of me was afraid that once I became a parent, I would just be a minivan driver. 

Haomin: Since then, I have met so many other different types of families, like my very close friend, her husband is one of eight children, and his parents were traveling missionaries. That’s very different from how I grew up and his parents were able to live a very different life than the one I pictured as the norm, even though they had kids. 

So maybe my best advice would be to keep asking yourself why? And really try to find the root of why you do or don't want to have children, and while you’re thinking about this, try to expose yourself to different types of lives. Because there isn't just one way of life. 

Jenny: After hearing you talk, I do have one more question. If you were to give a message your future self, let’s say ten years down the line. What would you say to her? What do you hope she’s like? Who is this woman who now has a ten-year-old kid?

Haomin: Okay. In ten years, my dream is that my kid and I have one activity that we do together, and that's our way of bonding. Maybe it’s that we play tennis together and that's our thing. And they are a well-adjusted, happy kid who has good friends and is a kindhearted person. And I really hope to be in a place in my life where I am doing something with animal rescue. I'm really hoping at that point I will no longer be working at a job where I feel like “OK, this is fine but it’s just work,” but truly doing something that I care about and can make a difference in. 

When I think even more granularly about a day in the life of my future self, I wake up and I take my dog and all my foster dogs, of which there will be many, and hopefully I’ll have a llama and a goat and a cow and, I just have all these animals that live at my house with me. 

Haomin: My dream is that they're all rescued. Maybe they're all animals that have some sort of disability and didn't have a place to go. I'm going to take them all in and they'll live with me and I'll take care of them. So every day, I wake up and feed all of the animals. And then my kid and husband and I will go play tennis together, and then we'll have some lunch. And then in the afternoon, I’ll go work at an organization that I've built that contributes to different areas of animal rescue. That would be an awesome ten years from now. Oh, my parents live somewhere close enough that they could easily come over.

*This interview took place December 2022 and has been condensed and edited for clarity.