Half the Boxes Are Still Packed, But Raon Has Already Settled In

We have been in the new apartment for just over a week. Half the moving boxes are still sitting, unopened, in a corner of the living room, but right beside them, Raon was flat on his stomach, feet kicked up in the air, completely lost in a hidden-picture book. Outside the window, a strip of blue sky slips between two apartment towers, with a small, leafy park just below. It looks a lot like the view we left behind, except for one big difference: we moved from Gyeonggi-do into Seoul.

Moving changes more than the address. Raon’s kindergarten bus now picks him up an hour earlier, which means bedtime got pushed up too. His Hanja tutor changed as well. In Korea, many young children get occasional home visits from a Hanja teacher who helps them learn the Chinese characters still used in everyday Korean, and these tutors are usually assigned by district, so a move almost always means a new face at the door. I expected Raon to feel a little thrown by all of it. Instead, he breezed through his first lesson with the new tutor like nothing had changed.

The one place his feelings did show up was saying goodbye to his old tutor. He cried. I had assumed “goodbye” was still an abstract word to him, something he had heard but not really felt. Turns out he understood it well enough to cry over it, which, strangely, made me a little proud. His neighborhood friends are a bigger loss, and one he has not caught up to yet. For now, he seems unbothered, busy settling into a park that looks almost exactly like the one he left, just with new names for the trees. The boxes are only half unpacked. Raon, somehow, is already home.

Parenting Note: Grief does not seem to arrive for kids all at once. It shows up first in small, specific places, a goodbye to a tutor, before it ever gets around to the bigger absences, like a best friend two subway stops away. When Raon is ready to really feel the second one, I am planning to have that conversation over a snack and something sweet to drink, not as a lecture, but as a quiet talk about how goodbyes and new beginnings are just part of how life moves.

The boxes can wait. Raon has already found his peace, one hidden picture at a time. See you in the next Raonlog!