Feb 6
2010
2010
Posts Tagged ‘Chris Guillebeau’
Today I attended a San Diego Women’s Foundation membership committee meeting. I’ve been a 
member since 2008 and was selected to be a 2008 “class coordinator”, meaning that I am in charge of encouraging people who joined in 2008 to attend events and meetings. This is a unique organization in a sense that we give out a certain amount of money to different worthy organizations, but we do not do any fundraising event. The money comes from membership contribution ($2000 a year). The idea is that there is a limitation of what $2000 individually can do, but if we pull every member’s contribution together, we can collectively do a lot more things that are beneficial to the community. (more…)
Dec 13
2009
2009
The Life of Baby Miroku
It was raining really hard and even stormy on Monday this week, highly unusual for San Diego. I canceled my RCB course as I was feeling some pain in my abdomen. Being 16 
weeks pregnant, I felt that I needed to take it easy. I lied down in bed and waited for my doctor’s office to open at 9:10. But before that time came, my water broke and I went into a premature labor. My husband and I rushed to the Sharp Mary Birch hospital where we had delivered our two previous children over the past few years. Long story short, our baby was born at 10:31. It was a boy. His heart was no longer beating. According to the doctor who took care of me, it was a miscarriage because it was before 20 weeks – but to me, whatever the correct medical term might be, what happened was that we had our baby boy and he passed away.
As I wrote in my previous post, I had experienced a miscarriage before I had my first child. Ever since that experience, I was very private about my pregnancy - I waited as long as I could to start telling people each time I got pregnant. I’d tell people only I was into 5th months when my regular clothes no longer fit. So this time, only a few people knew that I was pregnant with our 3rd baby. I just had my OB check on Thursday last week, everything was going well, and I was finally into my 5th months, so I was going to tell people at work this week – then Monday came, and this happened. I had to tell them that I “was” pregnant, but I lost our baby, and that I needed a few days off from work. I stayed at the hospital on Monday night as I had to go through a D&C operation. I returned home on Tuesday. I went to work on Wednesday and Friday briefly to take care of some things, but other than that, I stayed home mostly, trying to recover physically and going through the grieving process. Today I had a meeting at the school where I work that I could not reschedule, so I went in for a few hours. Most people did not even know that I was pregnant, much less about what happened, and I could have just let it be. If I had kept quiet and carried normal conversations with people during the few hours I was there, they would not have known anything at all. But I felt this strange desire to start telling people. As painful and sad it is to think or talk about this experience and our dead baby, if I don’t talk about him, nobody would know about him. I wanted people and the world to know that our baby boy existed even for a short period of time. So I decided to write about him.
We named him Miroku. After he came out, I had to go to the operation room to have the D&C procedure performed, and while I was gone, my husband told Miroku some bedtime stories and about his two brothers. After I came back, I held him for a very long time. His eyes were shut and we never heard him cry, but we have this memory of him, with his tiny arms wrapped around himself. He was wrapped by a blue baby blanket and had a tiny yellow hat on. We finally said good-bye to Miroku later that evening.
We called my mentor Susie Walton while this was happening – I wanted to talk to her, as I knew she could help us get through this experience. She later called back and left a message on my cell phone. She said that Miroku came to us, so he could experience our love. Obviously, I would have liked it if he had stayed with us longer. If I had known that our time was so limited, would I still have wanted him to come to us? I also reached out to my other mentor Pamela Dunn after I came home on Tuesday. We talked on Wednesday, and she helped me work through some of the regrets I had about what happened. She suggested this beautiful “what if”. What if Miroku’s soul needed to be healed by love, before he had to move onto other place to do whatever he needed to do? He chose us to be his parents and stayed with us for 16 weeks. Now that his soul was healed by our love, he had to say good-bye. When I heard Pam say this, I felt something shift in my heart. Until that moment, I had been so focusing on things I wish I could have done better or differently before this whole thing happened. But if he came to us because he wanted to be loved so his soul could heal, I can say that we did the best we could – after he was born, he was never left alone in the room, he was held by either my husband or myself for the whole time – we told him about his brothers, how much we love him, and how much we’d have loved to take him home. We took some pictures, and I video taped my husband talking to our children while holding Miroku, so that they could someday learn about their younger brother. I hope that Miroku’s soul was filled with love by the time we had to say good bye.
There is no point or conclusion to this post as it’s a grieving process that I am going through – I am trying to take one day at a time. I’ve been crying my eyes out every day and I don’t think it will stop anytime soon. My role model Chris Guillebeau whom I had a pleasure to meet back in September has a favorite quote that he posts occasionally, and I dug through his tweets to find it. I think this somehow fits into this situation so I’ll end this post with that quote;
“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” -Dr Seuss
Oct 24
2009
2009
Meeting With Chris Guillebeau
This year on my birthday, I wrote a list of “birthday resolutions” – a list of things I hope to accomplish this year. One of the items on the list was “Meet with Chris Guillebeau in person”. He is someone I’ve got to know through my coaching training; one of the students mentioned him in a class, and I checked out 
his web-site as he sounded interesting. I immediately liked what he stands for, and what he is trying to achieve through his blog. I started following him by reading his blog regularly, commenting occasionally and connecting with him on Twitter. He has lots of experience even though he is still in his early 30s, and he writes about life, work and travel in his blog “Art of Nonconformity”. I thought it would be so cool if I could meet with him, so I included it in one of the resolutions.
May 14
2009
2009
Pain is Inevitable, but Suffering is Optional
The title is a phrase that I just heard today while listening to Haruki Murakami’s book “What I talk about when I talk about running”. It’s Murakami’s memoir, a book about being professional writer and a (amateur) runner. Chris Guillebeau, who I just got to know of about 2 weeks ago, talked about this book(Chris is a big fan of Murakami) in his report “279 Days to Overnight Success“. I’ve read most of Murakmi’s novels, but didn’t know this one partly because I had not gone back to Japan for a few years. I immediately checked the local library and got the book on CD - my favorite way of “reading” books these days during my commute. It was strange listening to this book translated in English - I tried to imagine how it’s written in Japanese, the original language, while listening to the story.
