Category: Family Life

Our boys go to bed at eight. I work in the room across the hall, so I hear everything that happens after that, and most of what happens after that is nothing.

At about eight thirty on a Friday, my oldest appeared. Not crying, not sick, not thirsty. Awake because he was curious, and curious enough to walk out of a room he is not supposed to walk out of. He is a rule-follower by construction, and he had done the math and decided this was worth the risk.

“What day is tomorrow?”

I told him it was Saturday and gave him the look that means go back to bed.

He didn’t move. “What are we going to do tomorrow?”

That’s a child who needs routine, and it took me years to hear that question correctly.

The Question Under the Question

Because that second question was not the question either.

With this kid, “what are we doing tomorrow” is frequently a mask. Underneath it is something specific — can we watch TV tomorrow, can we go to the kids cafe tomorrow, can we go swimming tomorrow. He rarely leads with the thing he wants. He leads with the schedule, and lets you find the thing.

And that Friday I knew what was underneath it, because I’d promised it a week earlier. We were going swimming.

He wasn’t asking me to make a plan. He was auditing one. He had a commitment on file from seven days ago and he had come out of bed, against the rules, at eight thirty at night, to confirm it was still on the books.

So I told him: yes, swimming, but we’re leaving before nine in the morning, because by noon the sun makes it miserable.

He went straight to bed.

That’s the whole thing. Not comfort. Not “don’t worry about it, buddy.” A departure time and a reason. He took the reason with him and was asleep in minutes.

What I Say When I Don’t Have One

Some nights I genuinely don’t know what tomorrow is. That’s the job and it’s the country.

I tell him the truth. There’s no plan yet. We can talk about what we might do.

If it’s a weekday it’s easy, because the answer is school and school is not negotiable. If it’s a Saturday with nothing on it, I turn it around and ask him what he’d like to do — which, for a kid wired like this, is not a dodge. Handing him the pen is the best possible answer. He’d rather build the plan than be handed a vague one.

There is one exception to all of this. Occasionally the younger ones hear the negotiation happening and file out of their room to join it, and a private consultation becomes a delegation. That gets no debate at all.

Go to bed. No compromise.

The Kids Cafe

Now the part I’d rather not write.

I promised the boys the kids cafe in town. It didn’t happen. Ministry does not schedule itself — an urgent call, a sudden need, and the afternoon I had committed simply stopped being mine.

The boys were furious. They were right to be. I made a promise and I didn’t keep it, and there’s no version of that which is good modeling. I did the apology and the explanation properly, the way I’d expect an adult to do it with me, and the promise got postponed rather than canceled. That helps. It doesn’t undo it.

What Number 1 does with a disappointment like that is worth watching. He doesn’t argue and he doesn’t melt down. He goes into his room and works on it privately, trying to get himself level before anyone sees the process. I follow him in and talk him smooth, because a boy his age should not have to do that part alone.

And then he keeps it. Not resentfully — he’ll mention it weeks later, lightly, reminding me of my own record. He isn’t scoring me. He’s just the one in this house who keeps the file.

His brother Number 2 keeps track of the terms of a deal. Number 1 keeps track of whether you did what you said you’d do. Both of them are auditors. They audit different documents.

What He Does With a Plan He Trusts

Give this boy a plan he believes in and he stops being a child in the operation and starts being staff.

He converts. He’ll be in his brothers’ room relaying it — do this, pack that, brush your teeth, we have to sleep early because we’re leaving in the morning — which is, word for word, an echo of what my wife and I just told him. He isn’t inventing authority. He’s repeating ours, which is a completely different skill and a much more useful one.

The practical effect is that a plan turns two adults against four boys into three of us against three of them. We give the order, Number 1 carries it, and Numbers 2 through 4 follow their brother far more readily than they follow me.

Then there’s the part that gives the whole temperament away. On the day, in the van, everybody asks the same question — how much longer, when are we getting there.

Answer it once and Number 1 is done. He has it. He does not ask again.

For the other three it’s a repetition game, and the asking is the point. That’s the clearest demonstration I’ve got that a child who needs routine isn’t seeking reassurance. He’s seeking information, and once he has it he files it and moves on. His brothers are seeking contact. Same sentence out of four mouths, two entirely different requests.

He’s also learned to trade. A missionary friend invites us to dinner at short notice, the evening we had earmarked gets absorbed, and instead of arguing he accepts it and opens negotiations for compensation — a Dairy Queen on the way home. I said in an earlier piece about his brother that one of my sons negotiates around the rule and the other negotiates with it. This is the one who negotiates around it. The plan changed; he isn’t fighting the change; he’s pricing it.

The Year Nobody Could Tell Him Anything

This is the part of his file I’d erase if I could.

When we first arrived in Cambodia and he started at his first school here, everything a Keeper stands on was removed at the same time. He couldn’t do the homework. He couldn’t ask a teacher for help, or tell a friend what he meant, because he didn’t have the language yet. The rules of the room were invisible to him and nobody could explain them in a way he could receive.

He couldn’t do anything, and he couldn’t find out what came next, and he was seven.

It came out through his body. Two separate stress symptoms turned up that he had no control over and couldn’t stop, and they were serious enough that we took him back to Korea for five months to get him help. That is a long time to move a family for one child. It was not a close call.

He’s fine now. I’m not going to write more about it than that, because it’s his history rather than mine, and he’ll be able to read this one day.

I’ll say one thing about it, though, for any parent moving a kid like this across a border. Third culture kids are usually described in terms of what they gain, and they do gain it. But the cost is not distributed evenly among your children. Number 2 hit the exact same wall in the exact same school, shrugged, and went off to do his own thing in a language he didn’t have. Same house, same move, same week. One of them lost five months.

What Actually Changed Him

He’s a different boy now, and I want to be precise about why, because it did not happen on its own.

Two things happened to him. The first was the border season, when the fighting displaced families near us and our church network started running supplies out to the camps. He didn’t hear about that from a pulpit — he went, and he handed things to kids his own age. He came back humbled in the good sense of the word. Something in him settled the question of whether the family’s plans are the most important plans in the world.

The second was the stretch when I had to be in Korea for surgery for months, and my wife ran everything alone. That was hard on him at the start. What ended it was seeing me afterward — the dressing wrapped around my ear, the scar underneath it. Once he had physical evidence of the reason, he accepted the whole thing at once.

And then he grew about two years in a month. More obedient to his mother, who was carrying far too much. Mediating between his brothers without being asked. Trying, visibly, to be an adult in a house that was short one, because somebody had to be.

But here’s the part I’d underline, because it’s where parenting actually shows up. Those changes were not automatic, and no temperament produces them on its own. We explained the story behind each event so he could hold it. We asked him what he thought we should do. We asked him what he thought Jesus would do. And then we let him sit with it and reach his own end of it, rather than handing him a conclusion.

What he worked out was that his disappointment is not always the first thing the family has to solve. His feelings are real and they matter and they are still not automatically the priority in the room.

That’s a hard thing to teach and I don’t think you can teach it with comfort alone. I don’t want to raise boys who are only ever emotionally supplied. Life is not butterflies and rainbows — it’s closer to swords and shields, and a boy who has only ever been soothed is not carrying either one. Our arms are always open, and every one of them knows it. But arms are where you go to recover. They are not where the problem gets solved.

He’s happier since. Genuinely, observably happier. Less flattened by school, by friendships, by homework. We don’t have to handle him gently anymore.

What Nobody Warns You About a Child Who Needs Routine

And that improvement is exactly where the trap is.

He still needs the plan. A child who needs routine at seven is a child who needs routine at nine and at nineteen — it isn’t a phase he grew out of, it’s how he’s built. What changed is that he learned to absorb it when there isn’t one.

Which means he tells me less.

A child who needs routine and has learned to cope quietly looks, from across the room, like a child who no longer needs anything. He does. He’s just stopped filing the report. So the burden moves onto us: he expresses less, so we have to ask more, and we have to ask like adults rather than like a parent checking a box.

I’ve written about a version of this before with his younger brother, the one who never says the true thing in a crowded room. Same silence, opposite cause. Number 3 goes quiet to protect other people. Number 1 went quiet because he grew up. Both of them end up needing someone to come and ask.

The Supermarket Fifteen Minutes Away

So I take him shopping.

There’s a supermarket about fifteen minutes from us, and I go to that one specifically because there’s a Dairy Queen next door. We sit down there first for five or ten minutes, which is enough to start a conversation but not enough to make it feel like a summit. Then we walk the aisles and pick up what the house needs while it keeps going, and it keeps going in the van on the way home.

Thirty minutes to an hour, depending. Number 1 needs the longest, every time.

Sometimes we agree on the way home that what we talked about is a secret between him and Dad. Each of my older three has one. Number 4 doesn’t yet, because he hasn’t worked out what a secret is, and the day he does I expect to hear all of them.

Some of those conversations put tears in his eyes, which he does not let fall, because he is the big boy and there are standards. Some of them are just laughing in a grocery aisle. And some of them end where all of his conversations want to end — with the two of us planning the next thing.

Of course they do. Give him the plan and he’ll sleep.

What I Want for Him

I don’t need him to be successful. I’d like it, and I’ll help however I can, and there is nothing wrong with being wealthy — there’s a great deal wrong with being wealthy and arrogant, and those two arrive together more often than anyone admits.

What I want is for him to be honorable. Warm and brave. The kind of man who takes the right option over the profitable one when they part ways, and who gets wiser at whatever he ends up doing. Better before successful, if I only get one.

And I think this wiring is going to help him get there, which is the part I couldn’t see when he was seven and I was trying to make him more flexible. The boy who keeps the file, who does the homework, who checks whether the promise still stands — that’s a man whose word is going to be worth something.

He got out of bed on a Friday night, broke a rule he cares about, and walked down the hall to find out whether his father was still good for what he’d said seven days earlier.

He was right to check. That’s on me, not on him.

We went swimming. We left before nine.

The boys were building blocks, which in this house is a competitive sport. If you have a people pleasing child in the house, the next two minutes are the ones you’d have walked straight past, the same as I nearly did. Number 2 was deep in a dinosaur, the way he always is. Number 4 was undoing things. And Number 3 was building a robot, and doing it perfectly well, and he just wasn’t lit up about it.

That was the whole tell. Not a complaint, not a sulk. A boy at the same table as his brothers, working at the same speed, with the excitement turned down about two notches from where it usually sits.

I almost let it go. He’s the easy one, and the easy one is the one you skip when you’re triaging four boys on a Tuesday. That’s the entire problem, and it took me four sons to see it: nothing he does ever makes it to the top of the list.

“Easy” Measures the Wrong Person

Let me be accurate here, because I’ve called him the easy one in these articles and I’m not going to pretend otherwise now.

He is, technically, the easy child. Adaptable, even-keeled, rarely in trouble. By every measure a tired parent actually uses, that’s true.

But every one of those measures is a measure of me. How much noise did I absorb this week. How many arguments did I have to hold. How many times did somebody call me into a room. “Easy” is a description of the invoice, not of the boy.

And what I got wrong — for years — was assuming those two things matched. That easy for us meant easy for him. It looked easy from the doorway. Inside, it wasn’t.

What I Asked Him in the Living Room

Later that day I got him alone. That part wasn’t an accident; with this particular son it never can be, because he will not raise anything in a room with his brothers in it.

I asked him straight: did you not like the robot?

He said he liked it. Then he said he had really wanted to make dinosaurs.

I want to be clear about how small that sentence was. No drama in it, no accusation. Just an answer to a direct question that nobody had thought to ask him.

So I told him what I actually thought — that his robots were good, that I was proud of him, and that it was completely fine for him to build dinosaurs if that’s what he wanted.

And he had an argument ready.

Number 2 wouldn’t have liked it if their themes overlapped.

He’d already run the whole calculation. He’d worked out what his brother had claimed, worked out what it would cost to claim it too, and quietly routed around it — and then built robots for months without mentioning it to anyone. He was five.

That was my job, right there, and I’m glad I got that one. I told him it was okay. That no matter what, it was okay for him to want the same thing his brother wanted. That nobody in this house owns a category.

The Peacemaker Is Paying for the Peace

Here’s what I’ve come to think that behavior actually is, and it isn’t manipulation and it isn’t shyness. It’s the good instinct running without a brake.

He’s the peacemaker. I don’t use that word lightly in a pastor’s house, and I notice I’ve never once used it about the other three. He’s genuinely loving, he genuinely cares, and in a house with four boys those two qualities carry a specific cost: he is constantly pouring himself out for his brothers, and nothing is going back in.

That’s the part a parent has to catch. Giving something up for peace is a good instinct. Giving something up for peace forty times, quietly, with nobody ever noticing that a transaction happened — that’s an account being drawn down with no deposits. It doesn’t look like a problem for years. Then one day it is one.

And I now assume the block thing wasn’t rare. Once you’ve seen the shape of it, you start counting backwards, and there were almost certainly a lot of other afternoons where he gave something up and I registered it as the house being peaceful.

The People Pleasing Child Needs More of You, Not Less

When I wrote about the seven child temperament types I called this one the Harmonizer, said easy kids get overlooked, and moved on to the next type in the list. That was true and it was far too gentle. So I’d put it more strongly now.

The quiet child is very often the deepest child in the house. The most considerate. The one running the most calculations about everyone else before he opens his mouth. That isn’t a child who needs less of you because he’s low maintenance.

A people pleasing child needs more of you, precisely because he is.

He needs the love and the care, and he needs the specific thing that a loud kid gets automatically and he never does — the evidence that somebody noticed. And he needs to know we’ve got his back, which is a different message from “well done.” Well done is about what he produced. Having his back is about what he’s allowed to want.

The System, Such As It Is

I’d love to hand you a chart here. I don’t have one. What I have is four steps that I now run on purpose instead of by luck:

Watch the volume, not the behavior. There’s no misbehavior to catch with this kid, so the signal isn’t what he does — it’s the excitement dropping a couple of notches while everything else looks normal. That flatness is the entire alarm system. It is very quiet and it is very easy to walk past.

Get him alone. Always. He will not say a true thing in front of his brothers, because the true thing might cost one of them something. Same information, different room, completely different answer.

Ask a direct question and then shut up. Not “are you okay” — he’ll say yes, because yes is cheaper. Something specific enough that agreeing to it isn’t an option. Did you not like the robot? And then wait longer than is comfortable.

Give explicit permission, out loud. This is the one I’d underline. He didn’t need encouragement, he needed a ruling — that he’s allowed to want the same thing his brother wants, and that nothing bad happens to anyone if he does. He’d already decided the opposite on his own, and a five-year-old’s private ruling stands until somebody overturns it.

What I Can’t Do

I’m not going to pretend this fixes him, because it doesn’t, and I don’t think it’s supposed to.

I can’t stop him from doing this. It’s his character. He is going to keep handing his portion to whoever is angriest in the room, because that’s who he is, and honestly it’s one of the best things about him — I’ve watched him end a fight by giving away his own snack and then look genuinely relieved about it.

So the goal was never to make him louder or less generous. The goal is that he isn’t doing it alone and unnoticed. He can keep pouring himself out. Somebody just has to be paying attention to the other side of the ledger, and in this house that has to be us, because he is never once going to bring it up.

Back to the Robots

He still builds robots. He’s good at them now, in the way you get good at anything you’ve done for years, and I don’t think he’d give up the lane even if dinosaurs came free tomorrow.

But I’ve stopped telling that as a story about creativity.

A five-year-old looked at a shelf, worked out what was already spoken for, and routed around it without telling anyone. Nobody taught him that. Nobody had to. And if he can do it with blocks at five, he can do it with a friendship at twelve, and a job at twenty-five, and a marriage at thirty — always choosing the lane nobody’s contesting, always costing nobody anything, and never once being any trouble.

That’s the part I’m actually working on. Not making him different. Just making sure that somewhere in this house, at least once a week, somebody sits him down on his own and asks him a question that “yes” is not a good enough answer to.

Every conversation I have with my sons’ teachers ends the same way. It starts with me, it gets about two sentences in, and then it becomes a conversation between my wife and the teacher while I stand there and wait.

She speaks fluent Khmer. I speak fluent English. This is supposed to be an English-medium school.

Choosing an international school in Cambodia looked, on paper, like the one decision in our move here that wouldn’t require a translator.

What’s Actually on the Menu

There were three real options in front of us, and I want to lay them out plainly, because nobody hands a new missionary family this list.

A local Khmer school. This was genuinely appealing — our boys would relate to Cambodian kids, make Cambodian friends, live where they actually live rather than in a bubble on top of it. We said no on the education. The system here is still being built, and that isn’t a criticism of anybody, it’s a fact about a country’s timeline.

An international school, which is really two options wearing one name. There’s the legitimate international school, and it is very pricey. And there’s the localized international school — affordable, still teaching a real curriculum, still full of Cambodian children. We took the second one. That was the whole point: quality education without removing them from the country they live in.

Homeschooling. Several families we know do it and do it well, and a lot of my own childhood friends were homeschooled. Abeka and BJU Press were what we looked into, and the cost lands about where the school fees do, so it isn’t the cheap option people assume. What stopped us was the same thing that made the local school attractive — homeschooled kids here get far fewer hours with local children, and that’s the currency we’re actually trying to spend.

We pay about a hundred dollars a month per child.

Somebody reading that in the States will think it sounds like nothing. Here is the number that reframes it: a hundred dollars is close to half the average Cambodian family’s monthly income. What surprised me most in this country isn’t the fee. It’s how many families pay it anyway.

The English School Where Nobody Speaks English

An international school in Cambodia is sold to you as English-medium. The reality at ours is that most of the teachers are local, most of them barely speak the language, and the children speak Khmer to each other at every break.

I could have lived with that. Here’s what I couldn’t.

My boys told us they can’t play with their classmates, because their classmates don’t speak English.

Sit with that for a second. The school’s English was good enough to isolate my sons from the children sitting next to them, and not good enough to actually teach them anything. We were paying for the worst possible position — a language that separates without educating.

That was the flag we didn’t see coming.

What My Sons Actually Know

I want to be fair to them before I go further, because none of this is an education problem.

All three of the school-age boys are fine on the basics. Numbers 1 and 2 do multiplication and division without hesitating. Their science is somewhere around middle-school level, and that isn’t the school’s doing — it’s mine. I was a science guy. So we talk. The structure of plants. Human anatomy and physiology. Why gravity does what it does. No textbook has ever been opened for any of it; he asks, I answer, and it turns into a Q&A that runs until somebody’s hungry.

They are not behind. My one and only problem with their education was language.

And then we changed our minds about which language that was.

The Curriculum That Broke My Oldest

Their first school here, in Phnom Penh, was bilingual. Khmer and English curriculum, eight in the morning until five in the afternoon.

The boys still remember that school as a fun place. The teachers were kind. I want that on the record, because what I’m about to say isn’t a complaint about the people there.

It was the wrong curriculum. Two full languages of instruction, in a nine-hour day, for children who had just arrived in the country. Number 1 is the one who couldn’t carry it — he couldn’t do the homework, couldn’t ask a teacher for help, couldn’t tell a friend what he meant, and it eventually came out through his body badly enough that we took him back to Korea for five months.

So was it the wrong call? I’ve thought about this more than I’ve thought about most things, and no. It was the wrong curriculum, and it was one of the cheapest schools available to us at the time — three hundred dollars a month per child, which is nearly a thousand dollars a month across the boys.

That’s the honest version, and it’s the version I’d want another family to hear. We didn’t pick badly out of carelessness. We picked the best thing we could reach, and the thing we could reach was wrong for one of our children.

What an International School in Cambodia Costs a Family Like Ours

A hundred percent of our income is support. No second job, no second stream, nothing underneath it.

That isn’t an accident of our situation — for Korean missionaries, and for missionaries sent from plenty of other countries, a second income is quietly disapproved of. Never in writing. It’s why genuinely working a trade on the field is harder than it should be, and I think the paradigm has to shift, because the question in front of the church now isn’t may I but how should I.

Meanwhile the arithmetic moved underneath us. The won was around 1,240 to the dollar in early 2024. It peaked near 1,534 and has since come back to about 1,340. Cambodia effectively prices in dollars, so at the worst of it support raised in won bought close to a fifth less than it had — and on top of that we lost sponsors who were dealing with their own economic pressure. At the bottom, call the total drop about thirty percent. The rate easing has given some of that back. It has not given all of it back.

So the thousand-dollar-a-month tier isn’t a school I’m declining on principle. It’s a door that closed.

The move I’m describing is cost-neutral: a hundred a month per child at the school they’re in, a hundred a month per child at the school they’re going to. What we’re buying with it isn’t cheaper. It’s different.

Why We Chose the Khmer One

The new school teaches in Khmer. English is the second language, not the first.

For a man who writes in English for a living, whose fluency is the most portable thing he owns, this looks like a strange call. Here’s the reasoning.

English can be learned later. It is everywhere, most of the quality material in the world is in it, and a motivated adult can go and get it. I’m not pretending my sons won’t need it — they will. But Khmer is not a language you casually pick up at twenty-five in another country, and right now, in the town where my children actually live, friendship happens in Khmer. All the international schools in the world haven’t changed that. The kids at break are speaking Khmer.

Right now none of my boys can speak Khmer. If I’m honest, none of them really speak English either — not the way I do. They have basic phrases and all the letters, from their time at the school in Phnom Penh. So if they’re going to be surrounded by a language regardless, it may as well be the one that’s actually being spoken around them.

And the load is lighter, which is the part that finally settled it for me. One language of instruction instead of two. Eight to three instead of eight to five, with lunch and two recesses inside it. The thing that broke my oldest wasn’t a foreign language. It was two of them and a nine-hour day.

Number 2 is the one I expect to move fastest. He’s already the boy who makes a friend before he has the words for it, and he’s also the one most visibly frustrated — he complains that his friends can’t understand him. Change the rule set and tell him plainly that the language here is Khmer, and he’ll adapt on the fly. That’s just how he’s built.

The Regret I’m Actually Trying to Prevent

I grew up in Uzbekistan in the nineties, a few years after the Soviet Union came apart, when Russian was still what everybody spoke.

My parents first tried a semi-local school. It went badly and it went badly fast. We came home with foul language we didn’t understand. Bribing a teacher was a normal cost of doing business. Discrimination was the least of what you worried about. There were third graders smoking at recess. My parents pulled us out quickly and put us in the school for missionary kids, where every teacher was American or British — missionaries themselves, who had come out to teach other people’s children. It was the best school available and it was easily the safest, and I know exactly how fortunate I was to sit in it.

I flunked a year there, because my English wasn’t good enough.

That sentence and my son’s story are the same sentence, one generation apart.

Years later, out of Uzbekistan, I kept ending up in work alongside Russian speakers, and every single time I regretted not learning it properly. They’d tell me the same thing: go to Russia for two years, that’s all you’d need. They said it because my pronunciation is nearly local — on the phone, people don’t hear a foreigner. It’s good enough that I can do a Russian accent to make my friends laugh.

And it’s good enough that people answer me the way they’d answer a local: fast, and half-swallowed.

My Russian sounds good. My hearing doesn’t.

I can get around. I can be polite, I can handle a transaction, I can be pleasant at a table. What I have never once been able to do is sit down with a Russian friend and have a conversation with any depth in it. That’s the gap. It doesn’t close on its own and it has not closed in twenty years. My mother still speaks Russian to me on the phone so I don’t lose what’s left of it. She and my father are in Ukraine, still at it — but that’s another story.

So no, I don’t think my parents were wrong. Their local option had bribery and third-grade smokers in it. Mine has a Christian curriculum and teachers I’ve met. Same instinct, different menu.

I just know precisely what it costs to grow up somewhere and leave without the language, because I’m still paying it.

What Actually Decided It Wasn’t the Language

Here’s the part that surprised me about our own decision.

The new school being Christian mattered, but it wasn’t the deciding factor — if it hadn’t been, I’d still have considered the school seriously. What decided it was the tour. The rules, and the fact that they were actually applied. The hours. The curriculum. And above all the staff: how they carried themselves, how they spoke to us, what they seemed to expect of themselves.

For me the system comes second. A teacher’s character and attitude is the thing I want for my sons, and honestly for every kid in that building — and finding good teachers is like finding a needle in a haystack. It’s also, not coincidentally, why the teachers there handle both English and Khmer better than I expected. Most of them have long relationships with foreign missionaries. That’s a green flag you can’t fake.

If a new missionary family arrived in Battambang tomorrow and asked me how to pick an international school in Cambodia, I’d point them at this one. As long as it keeps its expectations where they are.

What I’m Actually Hoping For

I’m not doing this so my sons will be impressive.

What I want is for them to grow up healthy, make real friends, and eventually find partners who know the love of Christ inside the relationship rather than as a label on it. To be salt and light where they happen to be standing. That’s the whole ambition, and for missionary kids it is not a small one.

The gift I’m actually trying to hand them is smaller and harder to name. There’s a shell around every person that stops them stepping out of the comfortable thing, and cracking it open is the most useful thing that ever happened to me. If my boys learn to open up, to take the risk, to be the good influence in the room instead of the quiet one at the edge of it, I have nothing else to ask for.

A language is just the tool that makes it possible. You cannot be salt and light to people you can’t talk to.

Hopefully it works. I’m aware that’s the operative word in every paragraph of this, and I’d rather say it than pretend otherwise. What I can control is being a good father to them and, increasingly, a good partner in Christ — because they have a calling of their own, all four of them, and how a person takes that up is the only part that’s really theirs.

And if I’ve decided to see my sons as partners, then I don’t get to disrespect them later, when they’re grown and making calls I wouldn’t have made.

Back to That Classroom Doorway

So we’ll move them, and for a while it will be hard, and Number 1 will want to know the plan before he can sleep.

And somewhere down the line I’m going to be standing in a school corridor in Battambang while my son talks to his teacher in Khmer, at full speed, and I’m going to catch about one word in five.

I’ve been on that side of it my whole life. I know exactly how it feels.

I’m looking forward to it.

The egg recipes are the easy part of my kitchen. Kids are forgiving — give them something yellow and warm and they’re in. My wife has been a different project entirely, and after ten years of marriage, I think I’ve finally cracked a homemade tomato soup recipe that actually won her over — paired with a batch of baguettes made at midnight, which turned out to be just as important.

She’s picky in her own way — sometimes as picky as our four boys, honestly, just about different things. Feeding the kids is a numbers game: enough repetition, enough consistency, and they fall in line. Feeding my wife has never worked like that. It’s been slower, and it’s taught me more about actually cooking than any of the systems I’ve built for the boys.

A Marriage of Two Very Different Kitchens

My wife grew up in a dormitory. She never had to cook — not once, not out of laziness, just circumstance. I grew up the opposite way, cooking my first (bad) fried rice at 11 years old and never really stopping. My actual cooking skills, though, didn’t grow exponentially until after we got married. She was the challenge that made me better. Living with someone whose standards were completely different from mine forced me to actually learn instead of just repeat what I already knew.

Pasta was the first fight. I grew up eating pasta in Vienna, Austria, so al dente isn’t a preference for me — it’s the only standard I know, the texture pasta is supposed to have. My wife grew up in Korea, where a lot of local restaurant pasta is cooked soft, closer to the “oven spaghetti” pizza places give out with a pizza order than anything close to al dente. That was her standard, and it wasn’t going to become mine, and it wasn’t going to become hers either just because I said so, or because I happened to think my version was more correct.

So I make her pasta soft, the way she actually likes it. My own midnight pasta, when I’m cooking just for me, is still al dente, texture intact, exactly how I learned it as a kid. Same kitchen, two standards, and I’ve made peace with running both — one for her, one for me, and neither of us has to pretend the other is wrong.

New Means Terror

Pasta texture was a negotiation. New food entirely is a different problem. My wife isn’t a fan of new — in her head, and I think it runs in her family, new basically registers as terror and abomination before it’s ever registered as food. I’ve made this family try a lot of new things over the years. I win some of those and lose most of them, and I’ve made peace with that ratio too.

I should say clearly: I never tried to make her eat what I eat. I genuinely love trying local food — since we’ve lived in Southeast Asia, I’ve had alligator, fried frogs, fried crickets, deep-fried scorpions, flower soup, all real Khmer and Southeast Asian dishes I sought out on purpose because I love the challenge of a new cuisine. That’s just who I am at a dinner table. Put something unfamiliar in front of me and I want to know what it tastes like. None of that was ever a project I put on her, though. I never once tried to drag her to the exotic end of the menu with me. She had her own list of things she was willing to try, at her own pace, and tomato soup, of all things, ended up on it.

The Homemade Tomato Soup Recipe That Broke Through

She had her doubts about the tomato soup before she’d even tasted it. She didn’t want to try it, plain and simple — no real reason beyond it being unfamiliar, which for her has always been reason enough on its own. I didn’t push hard. I just kept making it for myself and the boys often enough that it stopped being a strange, foreign thing sitting on the table and started being just another Tuesday option, something she could try on her own timeline instead of mine.

But now, whenever we get good tomatoes, she’s the one asking for the soup — and specifically asking for it with homemade baguettes on the side. That combination has become one of our household’s real favorites, hers included, which for a woman who treats “new” as a threat is no small thing.

Here’s exactly how I make both.

The Tomato Soup

Boil four large tomatoes whole. While that’s going, mince garlic and onion — four onions to match the four tomatoes, which sounds like a lot and is a lot, but it’s what gives the soup its depth — and stir-fry them in an oiled pot. In a separate pan, make a roux with about 60g of butter and 1/2 cup of flour, then mix that into the pot with the garlic and onion.

Once the tomatoes are cooked through, pull them out, peel them, and add them to the pot, mashing them in as best you can. Keep about two cups of the tomato stock aside as you do this. Add that stock back into the pot along with an equal amount of cream, and let it come to a boil.

Once it’s boiling, take a hand mixer directly to the pot and grind down the tomato, garlic, and onion right there until it’s smooth. Let it simmer down from there — this is where the soup develops its deep, sweet flavor from the tomato and all that onion working together. Season it once it’s done, and that’s the soup.

One thing I’ve learned: it’s better the next day, reheated. Every soup and stew is. I can’t fully explain why. Just trust me on it.

The Baguettes

This one’s simpler than it sounds, and honestly more about ratio and feel than precise baking-science measurement. I usually work with 300g of flour per tray, so at a 3:2 ratio that’s 300g flour to 200g water. Mix those in a bowl and let it rest for 20 minutes before adding 1 teaspoon of salt and about half a teaspoon of yeast, then mix it well.

Let it rest for a first proof of one hour, then fold it several times and let it rest for a second hour. After that, pull it out, cut it into three equal pieces, and place them in a baguette tray for a final 20-minute rest. While that last rest is happening, preheat the oven to 185°C (365°F).

Score each piece diagonally before it goes in, then bake for 20 minutes. That gives you three small baguettes — exactly right alongside a pot of the soup above.

I do this one at night, after everyone’s asleep — a small kitchen ritual that belongs entirely to me, in a house that otherwise runs on four boys’ schedules all day long. A baguette’s actual shape and crust are more specifically defined than people realize — French law even regulates what can legally be called one — and getting the timing and oven temperature right takes real attention. Doing it at midnight isn’t about the romance of it. It’s that nobody’s calling me away from the dough at exactly the moment it matters.

Still Working On It

Ten years in, I don’t think “winning her over” is ever really finished — it’s more like a slow accumulation of small yeses, the same way most of what actually works in our marriage has been. The tomato soup was one yes. The baguettes were what made it a habit instead of a one-time thing. I don’t know what the next one will be. But I’ve learned not to stop offering.

I think that’s the real difference between cooking for the boys and cooking for her. With the kids, the system is the point — build the routine once, and it runs itself, meal after meal, without much thinking required. With my wife, there’s no version of that. Every new dish is its own negotiation, and I don’t think that ever fully changes, even after a decade. I used to find that frustrating. Now I think it’s just what it looks like to actually know someone — you don’t get to automate a person the way you automate a Tuesday dinner, and I wouldn’t actually want to. The soup being better the second day isn’t the only thing in our kitchen that takes patience to get right.