Doljanchi; July 14 2019

At long last, my blog post about my child’s first birthday! Life finally allows me the time to celebrate a year of parenthood in text format.

My kid had an unconventional conception. My various disabilities had me convinced that I’d never have children – I didn’t want to pass on the genes that made my life miserable on the daily. My partner, however, is pretty able-bodied: much better eggs. The thing is, she also has an intense phobia of pregnancy and pretty significant emetophobia. (If you don’t know what that is, it’s the fear of vomiting/being sick. Not a good fear to have when you might experience morning sickness.)

Well, I have a perfectly good uterus, and she has the eggs. So we hit up a fertility clinic and did in-vitro fertilization, combining the two. I knew the exact day I became pregnant – the morning of October 30th, our doctor implanted the would-be-baby in me. I went to a Halloween party that night and proudly declared that I couldn’t drink. I was ‘pregnant until proven otherwise’.

Cut to June 26th, 2018. My baby was born, and she’s freaking fantastic.

Our sperm donor was Korean, so she’s biracial. We spent a lot of time going over potential donors, focusing mostly on their health and whether or not they’d want any involvement with us or our kid. We chose the healthiest person possible who didn’t want anything to do with us – a lot less complicated, that way. It was actually a tie between them and someone else, and the swing vote went to the fact that the donor did Jiu-Jitsu and we thought, “Cool, if fighting prowess is genetic we’ll have a black belt baby.”

My partner and I, though? Very white. We have no idea how important her Korean heritage is going to be to her, when she grows up. So, we researched!

The first birthday is a Big Deal with several traditions attached, and we wanted to hit the main points of ‘em all. It’s called the doljanchi, and usually the kid wears a hanbok (traditional Korean dress, it’s extremely pretty), has a rainbow rice cake, and does this ceremony called a doljabi. The doljabi involves several unfamiliar items that represent different paths she can take in life – career paths, a skein of yarn symbolizing long life, money for fortune, etc.

We ordered her a hanbok internationally right after her 100 Days Ceremony (another big deal celebration in Korean culture, in which she wore a hanbok we rented from the United States). Her doljanchi hanbok is hers to keep, which was important to me, personally. I really wanted her to be able to just... have it, forever. We also ordered the rainbow rice cake from a Korean bakery in Toronto, and took a train to pick it up. The party itself was thrown at a local hotel with my partner’s immediate family in attendance. She also tried seaweed soup, which is traditionally had on birthdays, and that kid was all about it.

I filmed her doljabi – she wound up picking up an enormous paintbrush and a computer mouse. Foretelling her future as a graphic artist, perhaps? That’s our guess.

I have no idea how significant these things will be to her later in life, but they’re fun to research and carry out. She got a lot of bilingual books from her parents, too, while we try to learn Korean while she learns to speak.

There’s no right way to parent, obviously, but I think our best bet at parenting a biracial child is to give her as many experiences from both of her cultures as possible. Let her decide which ones matter to her.

Now it’s story time!

Foliage in my way fell in clumps at my feet, but I didn’t want to do too much damage to the forest if I could help it. Netteri wasn’t a fan of wanton destruction. The patron goddess of flora and fauna was not my goddess, but I was disinclined to piss her off all the same.

“I don’t know, Zaccheus. Maybe you should just worship someone else,” Seyhra despaired. She had an intimate view into my brain and knew what I was thinking.

“I’m not a disciple of Netteri. Not that it wouldn’t be an honour,” I tacked on, since she was listening.

“But then you would know how to worship.”

That was the thing about the goddess Seyhra. Neither of us knew what she was actually the goddess of.