On My Third Winter In a Foreign Country, I Was Pregnant

I hate winter and thought I would hate being a mother

During the early months of my pregnancy, I knew I had to prepare for winter: the physical and the personal. My first winter in Germany was the worst: coId, strange, careerless. I felt lost. Something I’d never felt for a while: I did not actually feel at peace of leaving a comfortable life for love in a cold country. I contemplated of leaving and coming back to Vietnam or coming back home: Cebu.

The second winter was way better. The third, I was expecting a child.

“Wintering,” as Katherine May wrote, “is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. Perhaps it results from an illness or a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition and have temporarily fallen between two worlds. Some wintering creep upon us more slowly, accompanying the protracted death of a relationship, the gradual ratcheting up of caring responsibilities as our parents age, the drip-drip-drip of lost confidence. Some are appallingly sudden, like discovering one day that your skills are considered obsolete, the…