She Makes My Heart Swell with Pride

I write fondly about my daughter Sophia, 6. That is not just motherly love. She deserves the appreciation, and her sharpness needs to be told.

She is product of a very complicated pregnancy. I was not even sure I would be able to deliver her as a viable baby. She was born one month before her due date. Induced delivery and NICU saved her.

Every day I would go to visit her in NICU and wait for the day when she would reach the needed two kilograms weight and be able to drink milk from the bottle on her own.

One day during that uncertain time, I was standing outside the hospital under a coral tree. I was very emotional. I remember thinking: they say, good things happen to people who do good. I had studied very hard, collecting difficult degrees. I had committed much of life to build a meaningful career.

I had hypothyroidism from birth. To that a cockroach allergy in an apartment made me sick. The body became inflamed, hostile for fertility.

In my mid-30s, now my baby is in the NICU. I wondered: what was the benefit of working so hard? She might have a suboptimal brain now.

Then a voice inside me told me: just take her home, give her love, and see what happens.

Soon, we brought her home. I stayed like a shadow beside her. Wisdom dripped from my mouth as I spoke, and she soaked it up like a sponge absorbing water.

In her life, she has given me abundant reasons to be happy, through her memory, intelligence, kindness. Today something very beautiful happened.

We were planning to visit a botanical garden the following day, and I was telling her about the history of the arboretum.

It has a beautiful old camellia forest near Los Angeles. I had read that many of the camellia trees belonged to Japanese gardeners. When World War II broke out, many Japanese people were jailed, and the camellia plants they had, were rescued and given a place in the arboretum.

As another war seems to loom in the world, those camellias felt like a meaningful story to share.

After I finished, she said, "You know, Mommy, this story reminds me of the movie 'Sophie and the Rising Sun'."

Now, she has never seen that movie. I had watched it about ten years ago, when I used to watch some Netflix films occasionally.

In the movie, a California-dwelling Japanese farmer Mr. Oto travels to New York hoping to buy apple plants for a planned orchard. Bad company swindled his money, and he ends up in South Carolina. A kind old woman gives him shelter.

A relationship develops between him and a young village woman named Sophie.

It was a forbidden love. As anti-Japanese sentiment rises after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he was captured and taken away.

The final scene is very emotional. The camera moves across a refugee camp, full of displaced people. He was one of them. His dream of having a garden never truly died, as he was tending to a tray of saplings.

But war has taken away the life he hoped to build. The movie shows how war can crush the simple dreams of ordinary people.

And today, my little daughter, who is in kindergarten and is just recovering from a cold, remembered that story through my camellia tale. That's the brain I once worried about so much. Unconditional love and conscious parenting took care of my worry.

She would say, 'That's ad astra, per aspera, mommy. To the stars, through difficulties, as the Latin said.

I hope you loved the story.

Remember, power of love is transformative.