An Apology to my 10 year old Daughter

Dear M,
I'm so sorry to drag you out on the weekends when you'd rather be home.

It's just I want you to get outside. We've got so little land left here in the Silicon Valley to appreciate. Those sprawling dusty ranches and blooming orchards that I once took for granted are no longer.

And so, while your peers are glued to their iPhones or Wii, I want you to lift up that beautiful face of yours and marvel at the wildflowers and bobcats and deer that hang out in any of our few open space preserve parks.

I'm sure one day you will thank me.

The Asian Influence in Silicon Valley

Being a Silicon Valley native, I had the pleasure of growing up and working alongside some of the most fascinating, brightest and hard-working people, many of them Asian immigrants.

These immigrants have such rich histories to share. My best friend in high school and her family risked their lives to leave behind their homeland, Vietnam, and travel here to the US by boat.

When I worked in high tech, I witnessed the stinging affects of racism and job discrimination committed against these individuals. People who helped create Silicon Valley too.

Please check out this Silicon Valley Moms post, Asian Americans Immigrants Share Silicon Valley Stories. The Asian American Voices is hosting a free screening in San Francisco of a documentary that tells the histories of 3 Asian Immigrants who live in the Silicon Valley.

Keeping the Faith

...It became impossible, at seventeen, to continue supplicating a divinity that stood by silently as cancer tore through the body of a forty-one-year-old woman who'd never hurt anyone and took her life in sixteen months.

This passage, taken from Hope Edelman's memoir, The Possibility of Everything, moved me. Actually the entire book moved me. (We received the book for the Silicon Valley moms Book Club for the month of March.)

I didn't lose a parent to death. But it sure felt like a death when one day in 1982, my father, the same man who tucked me in at night when I was younger, held me when I cried, worried about me crossing the street all by myself when I was 5, just got up and left.

Gone.

I just wanted to say goodbye were his last parting words to me, spoken over the phone.

We never heard from him again.

I was thirteen at the time and a very self-absorbed one at that. Aside from my world being turned upside down, I began questioning things that before I took for absolutes, like God. And like Ms. Edelman I wondered, how could God, any god, allow something like this to happen? Before all this I believed in Him: you didn't take the lord's name in vain, you obeyed your parents, you never committed any sins and in the end you will be rewarded with eternal life.

But after my father's departure, for the first time I realized that nothing in life--parents, a roof over your head, security--nothing was a given anymore.

My mother later remarried a wonderful man, someone today I refer to as my "real" father and any pity I felt for myself was left, along with my big aqua net hair, back in the late 80s; but still, to this day my faith is shaky. I WANT to believe, trust me, but so many times I find my skepticism intruding on any lingering traces of faith I may have.

How I envy those people who remain steadfast in their commitment to their faith, all throughout their lives. Even when faced with horrific circumstances such as death, these people continue to cling tenaciously to their faith.

I wish I were one of those types of people.

Although today, whenever I find myself wavering in my faith I think back to what my father (the 2nd one) once said to me before the birth of my firstborn, his first grandchild:

Babies. They are miracles. They are what make me believe in God.

It works for me.

This post was inspired by Hope Edelman's the possibility of everything, which I received for the Silicon Valley moms book club selection.