How many times do parents watch their children in some accomplishment and simultaneously feel sad and proud?

Simultaneously feel awed at what this little person can do, who you thought you knew 100% but could never have guessed they had the power to do this yet, and at the same time be like "go girl!"

I wonder if parents in bicultural families (or biracial or biethnic or adoptive) are more ready for those feelings because we went into this already knowing that part of our children would be foreign.

Even though I say that my daughters are "japanese and american" in my heart they are what I am, they are american. So when we went to Hawaii this past week and Mia proved that she really is (at age 4) now better than me at Japanese, I felt that simultaneous feeling of pride and estrangement.

I do not regret in any shape or form my marriage or my children. But I guess sometimes weird emotions will well up and I wonder if the best thing to do is just acknowlege them and then move on and forget them.

In Hawaii, I wondered what it would have been like for my daughters to be all American (and shame on me for thinking that at all because they are all american, just as they are all Japanese, those nationalities and identities can coexist together, whichever one needed jumping to the foreground as the situation changes) and to never be able to communicate in a (to me) foreign language so quickly and surely that I can not understand them.

All parents have to let their children be themselves, right? They aren't clones of us, and I can't expect my daughters to like the same things as me, etc. etc. Intellectually I am ready for that. Emotionally I am unprepared for how different they can be when you add the Japanese side into the mix.

Anyway, it doesn't usually matter in the day to day scheme of things, I was just thinking this afternoon as I painted our kitchen cabinets.