Lunar New Year 2024 came and went and I almost forgot to acknowledge it. It’s probably the least interested I’ve ever been for Lunar New Year. In the past, there were days of cleaning, cleaning out, and organizing leading up to the day, with last minute frantic cleaning in the last hour before the clock struck midnight. This year, I was lucky to have vacuumed my bedroom. It’s a testament to how clean and tidy I maintain my room that I don’t feel compelled to do it all at once. That’s progress.

I did some reflecting back over the year. If you looked for grand changes, transformative magic you would be hard pressed to find them in my life over the past year. The changes have been gradual, micro movements that have created a shift.

Since I’ve moved to the bay area years ago, I had never missed spending Tet with my mother until the pandemic hit. Things changed after that and my trips to my mom for Tet has been sporadic. Of course, my mom is disappointed and she’ll say something about how even the Vietnamese here will go all the way back to Viet Nam for Tet and why I can’t make the short trip (6-8hours) from Oakland to Orange County. But this year, her disappointment was disguised. And I didn’t hear disapproval until she inadvertently didn’t hang up soon enough before I overheard her say to her caregiver, “Oh, she’s not coming home”. What mattered weren’t the actual words but the tone in which the seemingly innocuous words were uttered. She was annoyed, supremely. It was the kind of tone that I would only hear accidentally from her. It was raw and it was authentic. I didn’t expect to hear the honesty of it. That part of her that was bruised, she wasn’t going to show to me. I was pierced to the heart to hear it. I felt like I had disappointed her. It took me a day to recover and to realize that in order to take care of myself, I had to disappoint her. There was no way around it. I knew it would be hard on me to do another trip, hard on me physically and mentally so soon after the last trip but my mom couldn’t truly understand it. She has never understood it.

That’s the hardest part to reconcile with. To take care of oneself, sometimes, you may disappoint your loved ones. That’s a hard truth to accept but alas, to not do it, I disappoint myself and that is one thing, I refuse to do any longer.