An Army Brat, a California dream, motherhood, and the journey of learning that home is something we make.
I spent a good part of my childhood wanting something that probably sounded terribly ordinary to everyone else. I wanted to stay.
I wasn’t asking for a dramatic oak tree with my initials carved into it or a childhood bedroom preserved exactly as I left it. I just wanted to know what it felt like to belong to one place long enough for it to become boring.
The same grocery store, the same route to school, friends who knew the younger version of me because they had actually been there, a place where I didn’t have to explain where I came from and how I got there.
I Was Good at Being the New Girl
I was born in Seoul, South Korea, on a U.S. military base, and grew up as an Army brat. Moving was simply part of the architecture of our family life. New homes. New schools. New cities. Sometimes new countries. Again and again, every 2-4 years, from kindergarten through high school.
When you grow up that way, you become good at certain things without realizing they are skills. You learn how to walk into a room where nobody knows your name. You learn how to listen before speaking. You learn that people can eat differently, celebrate differently, dress differently, believe differently, and still be wonderfully good people.
Oh, and you learn how to pack. Very, very well. And somewhere between cardboard boxes and always being the new student, you also learn that the word home is more complicated than an address.
Home, I have learned, is made of surprisingly small things. So is a life.
For most of my childhood, I simply dreamed of California.
California Became a Promise
California was a place where I wanted to plant myself. Maybe everyone has a place like that when they are young? A location that becomes shorthand for the life they imagine they will have someday. Well, for me, it was California. And eventually, I got there.
I went to college and met the man who is now my husband. In one of those coincidences that feels less accidental the older I get, he understood something about my childhood because his own upbringing had also involved moving around attending international schools.
There is a particular kind of comfort in meeting someone who doesn’t require the footnotes. We spent our wonderfully young years in Southern California. Those years now live in that golden part of my memory where adulthood had begun, but life had not yet accumulated quite so many permission slips. We were building a life without fully realizing we were building one.
Then came marriage. Children. Responsibilities. Schedules. The beautiful, relentless logistics of family life.
Then I Became the One Making Home
Six years ago, when our daughter was entering first grade and our son ready for (T)kindergarten, we moved up north to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Yup, another move. Except this time, I was the parent who made the choice to move the family. When you are the child, adults decide where home will be. When you become the adult, you suddenly realize that you are one of the people responsible for creating it. Not just the house.
The feeling.
The dinner table.
The traditions your children will remember.
The place they return to after a difficult school day.
The refrigerator with far too many papers attached to it.
The little rituals that seem insignificant until, many years later, they become somebody’s childhood.
I think about that often. Perhaps because I moved so much growing up, I’ve always been fascinated by the ways we make a place ours.
Pictures throughout rooms. 🖼
A meal made the way your mother made it🍝
A stack of books in a corner.📚
A favorite neighborhood restaurant.🏘
A song played loudly on repeat.🔊🎶
A child practicing an instrument in another room.🎷🎶
Furnitures scratched from actual living.🛋
Home is rarely one big thing.♥️
It is usually a hundred tiny things repeated with love.🧩
Motherhood Introduced Me to Multiple Versions of Myself
My life has changed quite a bit over the years. I have changed quite a bit. I hope I always will. Motherhood alone has introduced me to at least ten different versions of myself, several of whom were operating on very little sleep.
There was the young woman trying to figure out adulthood.🏦
The designer.📐
The wife.👩🏻
The new mother.👩🍼
The mother of toddlers.👧🏻👦🏻
The school mom.📓🎒
The volunteer.🙋🏻♀️
The family scheduler.📆
The driver.🚗
The finder of missing water bottles.🔍
And somewhere underneath all of those identities, one part of me has remained remarkably stubborn.
The creative part.
She has never completely gone away. Sometimes she became very quiet. Sometimes life gave her only twenty minutes. Sometimes creativity looked like professional work, and sometimes it looked like rearranging a room because something about it had been bothering me for three months. Sometimes it became photography…
Design.👨🏻🎨
Writing.📝
Cooking.🍳
Making something for my children.✂️🧶
Finding beauty in an ordinary afternoon.🌻🐛
Sharing something online…👨🏻💻
The Creative Part of Me Never Left
I studied fine art and worked in graphic design and digital media, so for a long time creativity was connected to what I did.
Motherhood changed that relationship. Creativity became less of a job description and more of a thread running through my life. And somewhere along the way, a little piece of me found a home on the internet. Some of you reading this may have known me there for years. You may have found me through Instagram, through something I shared about our family, something I made, somewhere we visited, or simply one small moment from our everyday life. Social media is funny that way.
People can know what coffee you ordered on Saturday and still not really know your story. So I wanted to make a little more room. A room with longer conversations. That is what this blog is.
A Place for All the Parts of Life That Don’t Fit in a Caption
I want to write about the things that have always interested me, even when they appear to have absolutely nothing in common.
Home.🏠
Design.🖼
Art.🎨
Beauty.🌹
Books.📚
Food.🍔
Things worth buying and things very much not worth buying.🛍
California.☀️
The Bay Area.🌁
Korean American family life.👨🏻👩🏻👧🏻👦🏻
Places to take children.🛶⛺
Things children teach us without realizing it.❤️
Creativity.👨🏻🎨
Culture.⛩️
Motherhood.🤰🏻
Growing older without becoming less curious.💡
And the ongoing experiment of creating a meaningful life in the middle of ordinary responsibilities. You will find practical things here because I am a practical person. If I spend money on something, I want to know whether it works. If I take my family somewhere, I want to know where to park.
A review can still contain a story. A home can be practical and soulful. A conversation about lipstick can somehow become a conversation about daughters growing up. A restaurant can remind you of another country. A museum visit can change the way a child sees something. A book can follow you home. And sometimes an ordinary Tuesday contains enough meaning to write a thousand words about it. That is the kind of place I hope to make here. Not a perfect life displayed behind glass. A lived-in one.
Maybe Belonging Is Something We Build
I am still figuring out exactly where I belong in the world. The little girl who moved from place to place once imagined that adulthood would eventually provide a permanent answer. Instead, adulthood taught me that belonging is often something we participate in creating.
You make dinner. 🥘
You show up at your child’s school.🚌
You learn your neighbor’s names.🙋🏻
You plant something.🪴
You paint something.🎨
You invite someone in.🤝🏻
You keep trying.🕰
You notice what is beautiful. And slowly, almost without realizing it, a collection of ordinary days begins to resemble a life. So perhaps this xoxoCaliMom blog is another version of that. A place I am making. A place for creativity that never quite left me. A place to collect the things I am learning, loving, questioning, testing, reading, making, and discovering.
If you have followed me for years, thank you for finding your way here. And if we have never met before, hello, it’s so nice to meet you. I’m glad you came.
