My dear notation,
I'm writing you this first letter just after recovering. What a turbulent, agonizing journey it has been! What terrible physical and mental suffering I endured before finally standing up today!
First, let me congratulate you for leaving your mark within me in this world. Thank you for giving me my first taste of motherhood.
When you first took seed in my body, I didn't sense it even a fraction. I tested and saw that your existence came back negative. Then this doctor, that doctor; this test, that test...a thousand tests, a thousand powerful medicines. Nothing seemed to make my body better. I kept missing something over and over. For a time I couldn't even sit up.
Then on a close friend's advice, I got an ultrasound. I saw your presence in my body. By then you had grown quite large, stirring with tiny movements. Your little heart was beating steadily up and down; the doctor said, look there, your little bird is fluttering inside you. How wonderful! Completely healthy, quite developed for this stage. When the doctor was about to turn off the ultrasound, I said, Ma'am, please show me a little more, let me watch a bit longer.
The doctor laughed and showed you to me for a while longer. I didn't even realize when tears came to my eyes. No one in the world will understand that moment's feeling. I felt like after millions of years, I finally had someone I could call my own, I wasn't alone anymore.
Your report was very good.
Coming out of the room, I sat on the steps in front of the hospital door, looked up at the sky and said to the Creator, Oh God, either give me the strength to overcome this intense attachment, or give me the hard strength to keep this child.
That day I wept helplessly in front of everyone with my head bowed, sobbing. Not because you came unwanted, not at all; you're a living human being, how could I keep you...how could I kill you, in all these thousands of agonizing sorrows!
You know, after so many years, seeing signs of your arrival, how happy I was! How many thousands of imaginings around you, how many millions of dreams were packed into the corneas of my eyes, how you were woven into countless poems, stories, words, choices, narratives—no one knows this but me. You were the biggest, the most beloved dream of my life.
And you actually came! You were moving with little taps, your tiny heart dancing with gentle throbs...I saw it with my own eyes. How amazing, how wondrous, how beautiful!
When I first told your father the news about you, do you know what his first words were?
Will medicine work? Or will an abortion be needed?
Instantly my heart shattered into pieces with some intense, unknown grief. Yet in so many stories about you, your father had an equal share!
I understood that even before you arrived, though I had become your mother, your father remained merely a man, couldn't become your father; wouldn't have been able to anyway.
Your father's capacity to love is terribly limited. Except for his own family members, he never loves anyone else, fundamentally cannot. Like with you, with me—he couldn't love either of us. Yet you carry his pure blood. You didn't even arrive, but you learned about men!
That day I realized you have no one in the world except me. If you were born, you'd have to be born alone, carrying a lonely, isolated, wretched life like mine for your whole existence. When you stumbled and fell, there'd be no one to pull you up, no roof overhead, no ground underfoot—nothing for your entire life, just like your mother. You would inherit my poverty and the spread of my disease called melancholy.
I closed my eyes and thought, I too lived an entire life without a father, but the intense pain, regret and longing I died with every day—yearning for a father's touch of affection, wanting to know what a father's love feels like, the lifelong anguish I died in—let such a wretched life not be yours, let such thirsting desperation never find you. I decided I wouldn't keep you.
Listen, unlucky one, your greatest misfortune—you were born in my womb. I've been a terribly unlucky person my whole life. As a child, Mother used to say that if I touched gold, the gold would turn to ash; any lamp I touched, its light would go out. Mother was telling the truth. That's exactly what I've seen happen all these years.
I didn't want you to have to carry such a wretched life like mine.
My dear child, your mother saved you by killing you.
I always wanted your father's eyes to hold exactly as much tenderness and pull for you as a father should have for his own child. I would watch in amazement as your father would caress you, show you affection, and I would watch spellbound from close by. In that scene I would try to understand that perhaps my father loved me in exactly the same way. I would observe carefully how my child received her father's love—how your father filled you with affection, caresses, tenderness. I just wanted to watch, to understand, exactly how much, in what way, how a father loves and shows affection to his daughter.
No, the day I realized you would be exactly like me, inheriting an absolutely terrible fate, that day I considered destroying you to be true justice toward you.
My dear daughter, my love, by not letting you come, I saved you. I didn't want to show you this world's vile face, this world's selfishness.
In the end I destroyed you. That gently stirring mass of flesh, your little heart dancing and moving with tiny beats—I stopped it forever. What a cruel mother I am! I who never kill even an ant, I easily killed my own child...before you could come into the world. May God never forgive this sin of mine.
My dear little soul,
Come again into my life; yes, you come...into my womb again. But certainly come as the child of such a father who will love you like any of eight or ten fathers would; to whom you are not an unwanted mistake but a deeply desired flower—may your shadow be in his eyes, his face, his heart, may he have intense love for you; a man who will wait day and night in eager anticipation to welcome you.
You should not be only my child, but be a father's child too. Let no unfeeling man be your birth-giver, let some affectionate man be your father...truly be a father. Let there be tears in his eyes too when he hears news of your coming, let lines of joy be spread across his face. The moment I tell him news of your arrival, let him say, should I bring flowers, or sweets, or both? Ha ha ha...!
Before you came, I never wanted to be a mother with such intense longing. But after seeing you, now I have a fierce desire...I will be your mother again, organizing myself a little better and truly showing you the face of the world. I will give you a loving father and a beautiful world as gifts. Until then, bloom as a flower in paradise, my child. Know that at least one person in this world loves you, will hold you in her heart for life.
My beloved child, this is the first and last letter I write to you. The day you are truly born again into this world, once more a child in my womb, from that day I will write to you again. I will take up my pen once more, and fill page after page of my diary with all I have to say!
Every day of your existence I will write letters to you in my diary. The day you truly learn to read, learn to understand feelings, that day I will place this diary in your hands. Perhaps you will read aloud to your father about the extraordinary celebration your mother had around you.
May we have such a day, such a beautiful life, such an ordered world. May your mother be there, your father too, and a home filled with happiness. Your mother loves you, darling; terribly, terribly, terribly—loves you more than anything else in the world.
I know you are not well, and your mother is not well either. Ever since you left, my heart has been hollow and echoing constantly. Such loneliness, such solitude, such a horrible guilt have never worked on me in my entire life. I understand now that if you had stayed, perhaps ninety percent of all my wants, my sorrows, my unfulfilled longings would have vanished.
Nothing feels good anymore. Again and again, whatever I see before my eyes, in everything I see you. Even in sleep your little throbbing heart keeps breaking my slumber over and over. That small, still piece of red flesh that was you has made the weight of all my sorrows a thousand million times heavier.
Child, these days I have no desire to live at all. I find no joy in anything in this world. I feel like lying for a thousand million years beside that red rose bush blooming like a flower in some corner of paradise. What a cruelly tender mother you have made of someone as wayward and absent-minded as me!
I love you, child! I think I love you the most in all the world, more than I love even my own mother. For so many years I haven't been able to love anyone, nor have I loved anyone. I had simply accepted that I would never be able to love again. I was fine that way. But no—this is the first time I feel I'm truly loving someone. My sweet little child! Oh, how much I love you...!
Yours always,
Your mother