Dear Zhan,
It has been so long since I wrote you a letter. I miss you, even though you’ve just gone off today for work. I wish that you could take a month off work, not because I think we’d be more productive at home necessarily, but so I could feel this time was not taken from us, that it was different somehow. We’ve never both been off work at the same time. Imagine that, that most people who are married never have the luxury of being away from work at the same time.
It’s ironic that maybe we wouldn’t be able to go far with that freedom. I guess that’s part of what I miss, being able to go anywhere I like, anytime I like. I guess I didn’t realise how fundamental to life that was. How sometimes that is the point of life. I don’t really know what we would do with the time or where we can explore. I guess I just want the company. I don’t want to feel like this time passed us by, one at home, one working, as if nothing was really different or happening in our lives.
I know, of course, that you are working because of the practicality of it. Because you too need something to do, to occupy you, to have ambitions about, goals and responsibilities. You need ownership and structure and a future, too. I’m being selfish about being at home by myself and alone for so many hours. It adds to the dismal feeling sometimes.
I can’t believe this will be our fifth wedding anniversary. Our first big milestone anniversary. So short and yet so long. You always said it felt so long because we’ve travelled so much. But I think to me, it feels long because we’ve been through so much. I wish we’d had an easy, quick ride to our future and family. I do. I wanted better for you, I wanted ease and comfort for you. I love you so much. You make me a better person, a more balanced, more tolerant, less judgemental, more complete person. You complete the holes and deficiencies that God, background and manner left behind.
I can’t believe that we will spend our fifth anniversary with me bald, having cancer and chemotherapy. Sometimes I look at the medicine that say take on Day 2 and Day 3 after your chemotherapy and I think oh, it’s for me, I’m having chemotherapy. I’m having chemotherapy at 33. We are spending our fifth wedding anniversary at 33. It’s part of the same journey. I wish it would feel like less of a journey and more of a destination. Like, we’ve arrived. We have our financial freedom and our beautiful family and our horizon-less future. Sure, we have our emotional squabbles and our in-law drama and our worries about playschool and night bedwetting, but we’re not tattered and torn in health and hope. And we’re not torn in hope and expectation that we’ll have a 50th wedding anniversary. I wish we could celebrate feeling more whole and more healthy.
But this is life right. It is the journey, whether you just want the destination or not. Whether you want to be somewhere that isn’t here. And we have to believe in wake up calls, we have to believe that life was stale and unsustainable and that’s why we needed this. Or God needed this for us. You have to believe that he has a plan. And you have to celebrate being here and choosing to be happy. You have to choose to put aside the world and know that what we have together, the two of us, is enough. That our life together will go on, that it will be more beautiful, more successful, more compassionate and more loving because of what we know, what we have experienced and have learnt.
One thing that makes me so proud, is how you’ve handled it all, and there has been a lot to digest and to manage. It has not been an easy time and I have been little help in getting through most of it. I am amazed that you have been able to handle the house sale and the liaising with the banks, tax bureau, the doctors and getting by at home with my parents day to day involvement. I am especially amazed because often, I felt before that I was handling everything, managing the accounts, the spending, the social engagements, the finances and the bills and now it is all you. Because I can’t go anywhere.
I really do feel that you are taking care of me, that you are literally carrying me and that you have settled in a big way, our finances and leverage, with the house sale. That is really a relief for me and for both of us and hopefully it will help us to pare down our obligations and accomplish the goals we do have. I think if we had managed it earlier, we both, definitely I would have been much less stressed and I am very happy that we have at least partly settled it now. I couldn’t have done it and it couldn’t have happened without you.
It also makes me so happy that you are involved with the doctors in the US and the process of having a child. I think for a long time, I felt like it was something I was pushing forward and carrying on my own. I know that you were there and supportive, but there were just hours that I felt alone doing it, whether it was at the doctors, in traffic, facing medicines, feeling scared or helpless or desperate. I think we handle stress in very different ways and it lessens my thinking about it, if I know that you are thinking and acting upon it too.
It makes me so happy because it gives me confidence that because of this work and knowledge that you put in, you will love this child. That you will be a good daddy, a strong, reliable and dependable daddy. It gives me incredible comfort that you will know this process better than I do. It gives me a great calm to know that you will know this child, better than I do and the security to feel that if need be, you will be with this child and fight for this child, for longer than I can.
I want to be resolute, determined enough to research the surrogacy options, but sometimes I feel like I’ve just run out of emotional strength to keep researching on that front. Part of it maybe is because I feel like after all my trying so hard, it brought us here, and rightly or wrongly, I feel discouraged and that reading about surrogacy brings back so many thoughts for me on where I am or how I rationalise what is happening to me as a woman. The other thing is that in some way I feel like God’s answer to wanting a child was so uncontrollably cruel, so final, so irreversible, that trying or pushing is what got me here, that I don’t know whether I’m meant to keep pushing.
I wanted a child and what I got was cancer, losing my hair, my health, my enjoyment in food, my independent, my self-determination, my work, maybe my career, my breast, my ability to have children, to carry a pregnancy, to adopt, or to have a life and longevity to live and spend together. Am I meant to give up? Or just give up on my own pregnancies. Or give up on trying everything under the sun. I’m like a terrified child, of what else will happen to me if I try more. It’s so painful to keep going back there, even in research. I’ve researched so much over the last few years, feeling hopeful, feeling foolish, I feel like a tank running on empty.
Maybe I should feel like every attempt brought us closer, rather than left us empty handed, but it also reminds me of where I am now, and the price I paid, sometimes I feel, for nothing. Not knowing where the tipping point was, I wonder if each doctor was the tipping point and when they said if you don’t want to try again, I understand because you have tried a lot already, I could have, should have just said no. I would have said no to the risks, instead of just listening to them place emphasis on outcomes, if I had asked more about risks, been more risk-adverse. I have to keep telling myself it won’t be for nothing, it will be for something. I hope so, I just shudder to think with how the last few years have been for me, how much it could get worse. This process has made me more risk adverse and frightened to push on, but who wouldn’t be? When the worse gets worst and the worst that you imagine happens, does it get worse? When it does, how do you have faith? I put so much faith in trying and that something would work, sometimes I’m scared to do more.
We have to go forward. I have to find the courage over fear, meaning over grief, living over existing. We have to be at peace with our future. We have to believe that God is… I couldn’t have and I can’t do it without you. Thank you for your patience and comfort. Thank you for being my strength and for loving me. You have been the greatest gift in my life. I am thankful every day that we met and that we loved each other. I don’t know what I would do without you.
Love,
Me.
