“We are naturally drawn to the people we want to spend time with, and we alienate those who stress us out or hurt us. That instinct is even more primal than blood.”

We’re often told that the strongest relationship is the familial bond. Unlike other relationships, which we forge by choice, family is forged by blood — and as such, the tie is primal, permanent, and unconditional. Think about it. The late nights parents put in, the ever-rising tuition and entertainment costs, all of the time and energy and resources poured into a child without any guarantee of return. And yet we still do it. Parenthood, as we’re told, is the greatest sacrificial act.

That’s why social convention dictates that we reciprocate in kind: that whatever transgressions are committed, we will always find a way to forgive and love each other, because that is just what family does.

We slap this rule around as if it were one of the ten commandments. But what if the parents didn’t hold up their end of the bargain? We do have parents who physically abuse their children — beating them, starving them, working them like servants. Do we expect those children to respect and love their parents regardless? Not only did the parents fail to hold up their end of the bargain, they actively wounded the children, and those wounds, even when they heal, leave scars that follow them for life. Is it really heretical for such a child to say I don’t care about my parents, or even go so far as to say, I wish they had never existed?

You might say those are just a few bad apples. Most parents do work hard to provide for their kids, and even go out of their way just to give them the best. But while the majority of parents don’t physically abuse them, that’s not to say most kids grow up without any scars or traumas. An occasional tantrum here, a snide remark there, a quiet manipulation somewhere else — these can be just as sharp as knives, despite leaving no visible wounds. Do we still expect children whose hearts have been quietly cut up over the years to love and respect their parents the way our culture dictates?

This is the question I’ve been wrestling with all my life.

There’s no doubt that my parents fulfilled their obligations. They provided for me, raised me to adulthood, and funded my education so I’d be ready for society. And there’s no doubt they wanted the best for me — especially my mother. She’d check my homework after work every day, and she’d dedicate the weekend to study with me, all because she wanted to make sure I excelled. But she was also the woman who beat me for getting 95/100 instead of full marks, who boasted to relatives that my four consecutive years at the top of my class proved she was the best “animal trainer”, and who told me, when my father finally divorced her, that she didn’t want me — that I’d be a liability holding him back from forming another family.

I was ten.

I remembered crying myself to sleep at night, planning my escape. That’s why I asked to study in the States, and why, when I returned, I moved out the moment I could afford it. To be honest, I had no desire to see my parents — there wasn’t much to talk about. But social convention dictated that families meet up every now and then, and so I complied.

Over time, I thought we had buried the hatchet. The conversations were civil. All exchanges stayed on the surface, and we didn’t interfere with each other’s lives.

The interaction was … bearable.

Then my baby girl arrived.

They started making demands. They wanted access. They forced their way in even after I said my husband and I needed space. Every time I put up a shield, a voice in my mind would ask if I was being too defensive.

After all, they’re family, right?

But as the question lingered in the back of my mind, memories of their recent transgressions — the fact that they kept calling even after I told them the baby and I needed sleep, or that they guilt-tripped me into the hundred-day feast, then refused to hold it at lunch, even after I explained that dinner would wreck her sleep schedule — all of these started to pour in.

Eventually the thoughts took over. As I was watching my baby sleep, the rumination kept turning in the background. And before I knew it, there were tears sliding down my cheek.

As the first tear fell, it dawned on me: I had never seen them as family. In fact, I had always seen them as an enemy — the greatest adversary in my life, and now the biggest threat to my daughter.

No wonder every engagement felt like an invasion.

I know this deviates from the cultural norm. But the conclusion is unavoidable. Family, like any other relationship, requires genuine love and mutual respect to build a bond. We are naturally drawn to the people we want to spend time with, and we alienate those who stress us out or hurt us. That instinct is even more primal than blood.

So it’s simple — the cultural norm has oversimplified what family actually is.

Blood is just the start of a family, not the proof of one.

It’s too late though. My parents and I have spent thirty-plus years building a relationship on the wrong assumption — that the familial bond is as primal and unconditional as advertised. That relationship can’t be rebuilt now, and their assumptions are unlikely to change.

There’s only one thing left I can do.

Now that I’m a parent myself, I’ll have my own moments of failure — I’m sure of it. But I hope that, by not taking the concept of family for granted, I’ll love and respect my daughter as her own person, rather than as an extension of me, or worse, a trophy or a tool. And I hope she’ll never want to escape this family the way I did — that she sees us as family not because of biology, but because she chooses to.

“The art of leading anyone — at home or at the office — is to turn imperfect help into leverage.”

Although I still have three months left in my maternity leave, I’ve decided to start training my helper now — letting her handle one feeding and one diaper change a day, just to begin.

And contrary to everyone’s expectation, it‘s not just grunt work — there’s math involved.

We were working out how much formula my baby girl needed. A simple calculation: she needs 100ml total, I’ve already pumped 65ml of breast milk, how much formula do we add?

“25ml,” my helper said.

I felt my face go tight, my eyebrows furrowing, and I heard myself say, “What?”

It’s really simple math — the kind I’d expect anyone to handle. Seeing that I was annoyed, she stared at me with a blank expression, and that was when I felt the rush of blood to my head.

“It’s 35ml,” I said, sternly, escalating my voice.

She shifted her gaze to the bottle, still wearing the same blank expression. I rolled my eyes. “Just feed her to this line,” I said, pointing at a marking on the bottle.

For the rest of the day, the helper stayed quiet, and so did I. I still didn’t understand how someone could fail such simple math. How was I going to leave my baby with her when I went back to work?

That night, after dinner, the confinement nanny pulled me aside. She told me my helper was just nervous, and gently suggested both of us try to relax.

It’s said that it takes a village to raise a child. But here’s the thing no one tells you about this village: it’s full of people who come with different skills, work with different methods, and learn at different rates. Worse still, the mother — the supposed CEO of baby care and household — is also new to this. She’s learning on the job too, because there’s no operating manual for any specific baby. Combine that with hormones and sleep deprivation, and you have a perfect recipe for arguments.

So…what to do about it?

As CEO, I could use my authority to issue executive orders and override everyone else’s decisions. That would guarantee compliance — at least when I’m watching. It wouldn’t guarantee anything when I’m not, and it wouldn’t leave room for second opinions, or for anyone else to grow into competence.

Or I could just do everything myself, so no one can mess up or defy me. This would soothe the anxiety of feeling out of control. It would also mean kissing sleep goodbye, because taking care of a newborn is a lot of work.

As I weighed the two options, I was reminded of something that happened earlier in my career — when I made the transition from individual contributor to manager, and got caught in the same dilemma. I expected my team to follow my carefully written protocols and execute the work the way I had. Instead, I found myself repeating instructions, double-checking outputs, and “correcting” their work over and over. I was frustrated. I’m not proud of this, but I let the frustration show — to the point where I was exhausted by my own rage and started wondering if it would just be more efficient to do everything myself.

It wasn’t. It couldn’t be.

I couldn’t possibly own every detail of every product I managed. Talking to developers and designers alone would have eaten half my day; sponsors and customers would have eaten the other half. There would have been no time left to actually think — about strategy, about roadmaps, about where the product was going.

I had to let go. Of the frustration. Of the insistence on “perfection” — or rather, just the way I do things.

But what if the help genuinely isn’t up to standard?

This is the question that keeps the mama bear — and the perfectionist manager — awake at night. And it’s a fair question. Patience without judgment becomes self-deception.

So before condemning anyone as unfit, here’s the diagnostic I run:

1. Is this a must-have, or just a nice-to-have?

Perfectionism is the greatest enemy of efficiency. If it’s a nice-to-have, let it slide. Most of the things I’ve gotten upset about in my life turn out, on reflection, to be nice-to-haves dressed up in must-have clothing.

If it really is a hard requirement, keep going.

2. Is this task new to them? And are they willing to learn?

If both are yes, what they need is time and supervised practice — not annoyance. Annoyance is just a tax on someone who’s already trying. Give them more reps and watch what happens.

If they’re not improving over time, keep going.

3. Have I actually trained them properly? Is the instruction clearly documented?

A surprising amount of “incompetence” turns out, on closer look, to be poor onboarding wearing a costume. Writing things down — actually writing them down — goes a long way.

If the training is solid and the gap is still there, keep going.

4. Is the gap across the board, or just in specific areas?

Almost no one fails at everything. Most people are uneven — strong in some places, weak in others. The work isn’t to find people with no weaknesses. It’s to figure out whether the strengths outweigh the weaknesses, and whether the weaknesses can be mitigated.

Which brings me back to my helper.

She’s hardworking. She cleans well, she cooks well, and she adores my baby girl. Discouraging her over a math problem would be a poor trade for everything else she brings. So my mitigation is small and practical: I made a table. It lists every combination of breast milk and formula she might need, so she doesn’t have to do the math. It cost me an hour. It’s going to give me back months of peace.

This, I think, is what it actually means to channel frustration into problem-solving. Most people aim their anger at the person — attributing the failure to capability, or attitude, or character. The diagnosis may even be correct. But it doesn’t solve anything. It’s easy, instead, to fall into a pit of rants and resentment. And it’s even easier, from inside that pit, to lose trust and quietly take back every burden onto your own shoulders — which only deepens the resentment, because now you’re alone and exhausted.

So, instead of fixating on the person, redirect the anger to the gap — between where they are and where you need them to be. Then help them close it.

This is the art of leadership — at home or at the office. Most people are just uneven. Your job as the “CEO” is to figure out how to build around the weak places without throwing away the strong ones.

Next time you feel the rush of blood to your head, pause. Run your diagnostic on the gap, not the person.

The table on my kitchen counter is a small version of that work.

“Possession demands, love makes room.”

On the day I was discharged from the hospital, I got a call from my mother.

She didn’t call to ask how I was doing. Instead, her first sentence was, “I miss my granddaughter so much, how is she?” I told her I was busy and couldn’t talk, and yet she called again the next day.

So this time, I declined the call and texted her back instead — “We need some time to figure things out. We’ll reach out when things are settled.”

Just as I sent the message and prepared to toss my phone aside, I got her call yet again. I swiped decline. And there it was — her text:

“So you’ve now blocked my call?”

I stared at the screen. All I wanted was space because I had a newborn whose feeding cadence I didn’t yet understand and a body that was still bleeding, and I wanted to focus all my energy on taking care of my baby and recovering. Yet she insisted on her intrusion by flipping my defense of my own boundary into an attack, a defiance to her will.

So I decided to escalate. Not only did I tell them off, I also instructed my husband to quit the family WhatsApp group with them, just in case my mom would want to use him as a back channel.

I could tell my husband was shocked at the intensity of my response. But this wasn’t only about the phone call. A few days earlier, when I was still in the hospital, my parents had brought up hosting a 百日宴 — a hundred-day feast — to celebrate my baby girl. I had already told them I couldn’t be bothered. While I know the feast is a custom in Hong Kong culture, it was the last thing on my mind — I’d rather pour all my energy into actually caring for a newborn, from changing diapers and feeding to learning her developmental milestones. But they pushed anyway, reminding me that I had already skipped the wedding banquet they’d wanted.

The subtext was clear — “You owed me.”

Since they pulled out the big gun, I told my parents that if they really wanted one, they could arrange it — but please make it a lunch instead of a dinner so it doesn’t wreck my baby’s sleep schedule.

A reasonable request, I’d think. But to my dismay, my mom’s response was “Dinner is better.”

That’s it. No justification. No response to what I said. A simple declaration.

But better for whom, really? Not for my baby for sure — so I pushed back.

And that was when my dad chimed in,

“If it’s so troublesome, then let’s just drop it.”

Again, not really a response to my request but just another wave of emotional manipulation. A punishment dressed as a concession. An advance dressed as a retreat.

I’ve been turning these two events over in my head for a week now. I understand my parents are excited about being grandparents, that they want to be close to their granddaughter and to share the joy with their friends. But wanting to be near someone is not the same as loving them.

The former is about the self. It’s about how it feels to be in their presence, how much you enjoy them, how much you’d miss them if they weren’t there.

True love is different. True love is about wanting the best for the other person. It’s about respect and tolerance. There’s no room for manipulation, no scorekeeping, no leverage. If you truly love someone, you can want to be with them and still let them go. You can prefer one thing and accept another because it’s better for them. You don’t register their boundaries as a wound.

It’s easy to conflate the two, especially in families. Social norms dictate that families must love each other, and from the parent’s standpoint — how else could you justify the massive investment of time, energy, and money if it weren’t for love? But that’s where it gets slippery. Both possession and love can produce devotion, and from the outside, they can look identical. The difference is that one is love-shaped but self-centered at its core, while the other is oriented toward the other person.

So here’s one litmus test — how hard do you have to fight to be heard when you say no? Because boundaries inside a relationship aren’t a betrayal of love. They’re a condition of it.

It’s been complete silence from my parents ever since. It may be another form of punishment, maybe not. Either way, that’s okay. Because what’s important is for me to remember the lesson I’ve learned here.

One day, my baby girl is going to grow up and have a life of her own. She will have her friends, her family, her career. I’m sure I will have less and less of her over time.

That ache will be my test. I will want to keep her close, to keep her mine, and I’ll want to call it love. But I hope I can tell the difference. I hope I can want her near me and still let her go, and that I can hear not right now without making her pay for it.

“Just because no harm is intended doesn’t mean no harm is done.”

In my last doctor visit before the c-section, I asked the doctor to describe the c-section and the recovery to me, just so I can mentally prepare for what may come.

It begins with anaesthesia. I’m asked to curl up — still pregnant with the baby inside my belly — such that they can slide a needle between the vertebrae of my spine. Then they’d cut me open. Since my baby is at the 90th percentile in size, I am going to have a bigger cut than the average mom — about 9cm long, to be exact. And they’re going to reach inside my uterus and fetch my baby, clean her up, and pass her to me while I’m awake and still bleeding.

Seeing the color drained from my face, the doctor reassured me that the epidural is really strong and I’d have pain meds after the effect wears off. It’s just that an anesthesia this strong and a cut this deep is going to have a lingering effect on my body. I will basically be confined to my bed in the first 24 hours, where I couldn’t eat, couldn’t drink, and couldn’t pee because I’d be too weak to do anything. Yet, after 24 hours, it is mandatory for me to get up, regardless of how uncomfortable it is, and get out of bed to prevent the formation of blood clots — which can kill me.

This whole thing just sounds like a series of torture.

So I made a decision. I texted my parents and asked them not to come within the first 48 hours, because the doctor said I’d be too weak for any engagement.

To my dismay, my dad pushed back and insisted on coming to visit right after the surgery.

*”But I’m really excited to meet my granddaughter. We won’t disturb you.”*

I couldn’t believe what I just read. Since when does someone’s excitement override another person’s recovery? Since when does a grandfather’s joy take precedence over the body of the woman who just made him a grandfather?

I immediately vented to my husband and best friend, but the responses I received were… underwhelming.

“Maybe they’re just too excited. Grandparent is a new identity after all.”

Neither of them said it out loud — but they were basically asking me to let it slide because my dad didn’t mean any harm.

I sat with that for a while. And then I texted back:

“This is not a negotiation.”

I understand there’s this norm to be gracious about transgressions if the intent is pure. I mean, it sounds perfectly reasonable to say, “Yeah, she’s evil, so let’s punish her.“ But it sounds kind of weird to say, “Yeah, she messed up, but she didn’t mean to. Let’s hold her accountable anyway.“

The first sentence sounds like justice. The second sentence sounds like cruelty.

And I think this is where the trap is set. Because once we accept that “no malice = no consequence,” we’ve handed every transgressor a permanent escape hatch. Almost no one believes their own intent is bad. The mother who reads her daughter’s diary and texts because “I was just worried about her.“ The friend who shares your news before you’re ready because “I was just so happy for you.“ If purity of intent is what determines whether a boundary is real, then in practice, no boundary is real. Everyone’s intent is innocent in their own telling.

So let’s get one thing straight: just because no harm is intended doesn’t mean no harm is done. This is why the law punishes not just the malicious, but also the careless. Manslaughter and murder both get you into prison. So do premeditated harm and negligence. The only difference is in the severity of the punishment — obviously a person who hurts with malice is punished more harshly than a person who hurts by accident. But the accident still demands a response. The body is still dead. The family still grieves. The world still has to do something about what happened, even if that something is gentler than it would have been for a deliberate act.

This makes perfect sense. Behavior is what has real-world impact. Intent is something we project onto behavior, based on what we know about the person and the situation. What we actually live inside of is the interaction — the words said, the boundary crossed, the body affected. That means it’s imperative to send clear signals when we feel our boundaries violated or disrespected in any way. This signal comes in many names — consequences, reactions, punishment, but at the end of the day, it is a piece of information for the transgressors as it tells them where the line is. Without it, they have no way of knowing — they’ll assume, reasonably, that what they did was acceptable. So intent should only act as a modifier on the severity of the response. It should not be an eraser that absolves the impact entirely — even though that’s the version most of us have been quietly trained to accept.

You’re probably thinking that it’s cold of me to apply the principle of law to my day-to-day interactions with people, especially my family. But I’d argue the opposite: we need to stop mistaking consequences for cruelty. The real cruelty is letting someone keep crossing a line they don’t know exists, and then resenting them for it years later. Holding the line in the moment is, in fact, an act of kindness. It gives others a chance to know you, to adjust, to do better. Letting it slide isn’t grace, it’s just deferred resentment.

And it is with that resolve that I sent out that text — “This is not a negotiation.” Because some boundaries need to be reiterated in a way that even the purest intent cannot erase.

The fear never leaves. We just learn how to walk with it.

Two more days until my scheduled c-section.

And unlike my friends and family, I’m terrified instead of excited.

Perhaps I’m a pessimist by nature. While other moms-to-be are browsing adorable starfish outfits and imagining their baby in them, the only thing in my mind is a list of questions. What if she has some developmental disease? What if she gets sick after she’s out? How is she going to change my husband’s and my life? Do I still have a life after she’s out?

There’s just so much unknown — and it only compounds from Day 1.

I still remember the anxiety that plagued my mind every time I sat in the clinic, waiting to be tested. And there are a lot of tests for pregnant women. The blood test, the preeclampsia test, the non-invasive prenatal test, the glucose challenge test, the group B Strep test, and so on. Just like with any other test I’ve had in my life, I wanted to ace it. The problem is — these aren’t tests you can study for. I can’t memorize a book and watch my preeclampsia risk drop from high to low. And my dad is diabetic, so the odds aren’t exactly in my favor either.

But one by one, despite my smoker past and my diabetic genes, I “aced” them. The anxiety never cleared, though. When it was quiet at night, I’d wonder if she was still alive and well, until I felt a kick or a hiccup. Then the line of questioning would start again the next day.

Fast forward to now. Two more days until I meet her. You’d think the anxiety should be lowering, since the uncertainty is almost over. It’s not. It’s getting worse — because now it’s time to face the unknowns that even the comprehensive screening tests couldn’t cover. I won’t know if she has a developmental disease until much later. And even if she arrives healthy, what’s she going to catch as she grows? What if it’s deadly? What if it’s not deadly but it changes her life?

And then it dawns on me. This line of questioning is never going to stop. Adulthood won’t end it — it’ll just change the questions. Can she take care of herself, mentally and financially? Will there even be jobs in twenty years, the way people are talking about AI?

So yeah, I’m terrified.

But — however paralyzing and tormenting it is, I am aware that I have no choice but to make peace with this fear. And if I think about it, this is not a newfound anxiety unique to pregnancy. This anxiousness over uncertainty is just a reflection of our inability to control our lives, and it permeates every aspect of it. The friend who did everything right in their career and still got laid off. The couple who loved each other and still ended the marriage. The person who took every supplement, ran every morning, and still got the diagnosis. You can create the best conditions, pour your heart and soul into something, and still not get the outcome you wanted — because the result depends on far too many factors that, for the sake of simplicity, we call “luck.”

This certainly doesn’t sit well with us. Humans have been trying to engineer certainty since the dawn of time. We may have started with reading entrails, but over time, the methods got better — oracles became science, prayer became medicine, hoping became optimization. We’ve gotten to a point where we can terraform earth, manipulate weather, and to a certain extent, put a stop to death. It almost seems like we can control anything we want as long as we put our mind to it — that there’s no such thing as vague and elusive as “luck” anymore.

But that’s not true, even though we really want it to be. There is a hard limit to the extent of our control. For example, we can’t control how the environment changes — earthquakes still happen, viruses still mutate, droughts still come. We can’t control how the people around us behave — if we could, there would be no bullies whatsoever. We can’t even control how our own body changes over time — we still age, and our functions still decline, despite our wishes and our technology.

It’s about time we accept this. Just because we wish to guarantee the best outcome for ourselves doesn’t mean we can — there’s just so much that is beyond our control.

Ugh, I know this is very hard to stomach. And this is why we have a lot of “anaesthesia“ along the way. For starters, we have religions to tell us “God has a plan” or “the universe has a plan.” You’re an atheist? No problem — hear it from philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, who encourages us to embrace adversity because it helps us grow. Too heavy? Perhaps you can turn to pop culture, just like how Kelly Clarkson puts it — “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” There are countless forms of “anaesthesia”, all created to help us sit with the fear of having no control.

Of course, if they don’t resonate, you can always buy different types of products and services that “claim” to put the odds in your favor. It doesn’t matter if the science is shaky — it’s not the science we’re after, it’s the consolation, the act of doing something to mitigate against the odds. This is what the multi-billion-dollar industries such as supplements and fortune telling are about, isn’t it?

I understand the need and the urge to seek comfort, to suppress or resolve our fear. But the problem is, each one of these consolations smuggles control back in through the side door. If everything happens for a reason, then “someone” is choosing the reasons, and assuming that “someone” is benevolent, the comfort is that this is just a temporary setback in a larger plan. If adversity makes you stronger, then the bad thing wasn’t really bad, it was just a lesson, and lessons are tolerable in a way that pointless suffering isn’t because eventually you will be able to wrestle control back once you’ve gained strength.

But in reality, none of this is quite true. Bad things can just happen with no particular purpose. You get sick because you catch a virus out of nowhere. You don’t get a decent salary increment despite your hard work because of a lack of budget. Your loved one leaves because they have a change of heart. To tell us there’s a plan or a lesson behind all of it seems to flip the logic the other way around. First of all, we aren’t the center of the universe - things don’t happen for us, they just do. And secondly, our growth isn’t why we suffered — it’s just what we managed to salvage from a bad outcome.

So going back to the pregnancy. Yes, I’m terrified, but I also know there’s nothing I can do except to sit with this fear. And instead of letting it paralyze me, I’ve decided that a better angle is to use this fear and this realization to keep me cautious and humble. I don’t know what viruses she’s going to catch, but I will try my best to pass on my immunity to her through breastfeeding and hope that offers her enough protection. I don’t know if she’s going to live a good and stable life, but I will do my best to offer her the resources to develop her skills. She may not choose to walk the easiest path, but I can share with her my experiences and let her make her own judgment — perhaps build her a safety net to fall back on, if that’s permissible.

So the lesson isn’t really to make the fear go away. It’s to make use of the fear to prepare and to mitigate, without going paranoid and trying to cover all the bases — because you simply can’t. Don’t let the fear paralyze you or drive you into a frenzy. But don’t try to numb yourself either, or lie to yourself about how powerless we can sometimes be.

Two more days. I’m still terrified. But I’m also packing a bag, I’ve prepared her bed, and I’ve read more about newborn care than I probably needed to. The fear didn’t go anywhere. It just got useful.