If Facebook was around when Paige was a toddler I think that I might have just died and gone to heaven. I have to admit that it was (and is) lonely being a single parent and a young mother sometimes. Especially so in those early years when all of your friends are getting drunk and doing illicit things late at night while you are stuck at home cleaning up barf and finding random pieces of Goldfish crackers stuck to your ass. I think it would have been nice to have a better social utility than an AOL chat room (*cringe*) or the trusty Yahoo! forum.

Suffice to say, my ears still perk up like a Pavolivian dog when I hear the words, “YOU’VE GOT MAIL!” But nowadays, I am reducing my dependence on computers and trying to live a real life first.

This week Alice from Finslippy asks, “How do you discipline your child?” Asha from Parent Hacks and I chime in our words of wisdom. Well, her words of wisdom and my babbling nonsense.

In a nutshell, I totally won the parenting lottery with Paige. When she was in her toddler years she only had one tantrum. I distinctly remember that it was only one because I recall thinking, “Who is this kid? Is it too late to ask for a refund?” I was terrified that it might happen again.

It never did.

Thank God.

I would totally be lying if I said I wasn’t over the moon about this. The Korean in me wants to say how excited I am really fast and then never mention it again because that would be almost as distasteful as actually mentioning that something awesome happened in the first place. Now that I think about it, the Korean in me says I shouldn’t even be blogging at all … I am a bad Korean.

The only thing that is equal to the excitement that I am feeling right now is the fact that I am completely terrified. I think that I have taken more photos of myself this past week than in the past 7 years in my Shrinking Giyen project. Now I am going to start videotaping myself. Seriously, this is crazy. I am so uncomfortable looking at myself that I actually had to switch the sidebar widget to my main Flickr feed because I don’t really like looking at myself and things seem all the better when my self-portraits are mixed in with other photos (as to somehow disguise the fact that I am taking pictures of myself). It’s neurotic, I know. You can still keep tabs on my daily self-portraits here.

Okay, I am gonna breathe a bit and let myself lean into the fact that I am happy for the first time in a long time. QB made some crack about me “not going Hollywood on him” then advised me to go read Margaret Cho’s “I’m The One That I Want” – which I actually finished over the weekend. I really didn’t know much about Margaret Cho until I read the book. But after reading it I can definitely say that much of it is familiar to me and my life. There are a lot of commonalities about self-esteem issues and personal hardships in there. At the very end, Cho sums up how I am feeling about life right now:

“I believe that when you take those first steps in loving yourself, the universe conspires with your soul to keep that love affair going.”

A few years ago I the cynic in me might have thought that this was metaphysical crap. Now, I’m drinking the koolaid.

PS. Thanks Mir & Aimee for such great advice!