Dear Tanner,
On November 7th I said goodbye to you thinking I would see you again in 4 days. It has now been 14 days since I have seen you, hug you, cook for you, talk to you, or snuggle with you. You packed your entire closet of clothes and took your lego and left without even saying goodbye. The confusion and sadness and hurt and shock has been more than unbearable. It is so shocking that there hasn’t even been a word created to express the feeling. Is it loss, heartbreak, shock, sadness, confusion? It’s all of them put together times 1000.
I know you are hurting, I know you are sad, I know deep down inside something good is still in you. I am sorry for your sadness, anger and confusion. You are at an age where everything already seems angry and confused and now add on even more. I can’t even begin to imagine or say I understand what you are going through, but I can only say it must feel like what you’ve done to me. When we are sad and mad and hurt often we want to do the same to others to make ourselves feel better. I hope you are feeling better, but somewhere inside you I have to believe my baby is still there.
I know you may think I divorced your father because I fell in love with Tao. We can sit here and debate this topic for the rest of our lives. I can only tell you the story of why I left your dad and hope one day you will be old enough to understand what it all means.
I met your father when I was 22 years old. I had actually just come out of a long relationship where I actually thought I was going to marry that guy. His name was Aaron Fu. I took a job in San Francisco, CA because he had a job there, he was 1 year older than me and had graduated already. 2 months before I graduated from college, we broke up. To say I was devastated was an understatement. I had planned my life and decided to move across country for this boy and now we were no longer together. Fast forward to July, I started working and then met your Dad. He was so funny, charming, fun, and I loved being around him. He made me laugh and we enjoyed hanging out together. A lot like how you and Maja were in Grade 5.
Your dad and I met in July and from July until December we were inseparable. We loved doing everything together from grocery shopping, to working out, to hanging out to working together, the only times that weren’t great were when we weren’t together.
I was so surprised to meet a boy like your Dad. He was an Asian boy who wasn’t like all the others I had met in my life. Remember Mommy grew up in a town with 0 Asian people except for Po Po Gong Gong, and Uncle Stephen. Then I went to the School of Science and Math where I met lots of Asian kids who loved to study or as you would say were “nerds.” Then I went to Duke where I met more Asian kids like that. Then I meet your dad, he didn’t like to study, he went to college on a Water Polo scholarship, and the kicker he was a surfer from Hawaii. That was it. He smoked cigarettes and drove a black Honda Civic that had a body kit and I thought he was super duper cool.
Your Dad and I went from being best friends to being boyfriend and girlfriend when your Dad left in December to go back to Taiwan to break up with his girlfriend. During this time, I started to talk to an old family friend, much like you and Bella or you and Alcia or you and Estelle. We had dated sometimes on and off since I was 16 and I was now 22. He lived in California (he was a wrestler for Stanford) and then went to medical school in San Diego. His dad was Gong Gong’s best friend. We always tried to date but since I was in North Carolina and he was in California it never worked out. Then finally, he found out I was in Sacramento. He flew up to Berekely for the weekend to visit his brother who was going to UC Berkeley and we decided to have dinner in San Francisco.
We went to dinner and then decided we would start dating again. At this time I did like your dad as a friend, probably one of my best friends but didn’t think we would date.
3 weeks later, this was before cell phones were a thing, your Dad comes back from his trip. I had not seen him or spoken to him in 3 weeks. I tell him about the
Letters from Mommy 