Think/ Hope

Optimism when you keep on losing

I jumped that day when the doorbell rang. 

It was in the fall after we moved back to Korea, when we still lived in Seoul. The kids were all at school (no small miracle in 2021), and I sat at my desk, writing. No one ever rang our doorbell. Being a family of five, we were already past the gathering limits set for the pandemic, so we weren’t allowed to have anyone over. Diane, our downstairs neighbor came up when she had a noise complaint, and occasionally we had food delivery. But all was quiet, and I hadn’t ordered anything. 

It was the superintendent of our building, an older man with a tiny office in the garage who usually only spoke to me when I had–always accidentally–done something wrong. There was a giant bag of toilet paper next to him, maybe thirty-six rolls, and when you do the Toilet Paper Math (“4=12!”), I mean to say he had a veritable mountain beside him.

“Annyeonghaseyo?” I said, unable to keep the questioning tone out of my voice. 

He told me the neighbors would be doing construction, and this gift was an apology for the noise. Ray, who lived in the other apartment on our floor, also had a T.P. mountain parked outside his door. So even if I had questions, I thanked the super and moved it into my apartment. It stayed in the foyer because I was trying to finish my writing before the kids got home and putting that much toilet paper away in our limited space would definitely take some figuring out. 

It was still there when Matt came home from work. I stood at the stove, making dinner, when I heard him come inside and pause.

“So,” he finally said, coming around the corner, “we needed some toilet paper?” 

“Oh that!” I answered. “Funny story!” 

Fortunately, I never got around to finding a place to put it all. My realtor sent a text explaining that the sort of “HOA president” of the building feared it was a bribe, and if there was ever an issue with our collective neighbor, we would have to admit we had accepted the bribe. I left the toilet paper mountain in the super’s office.

It is a funny story, but I’d be hard-pressed to think of a better metaphor for the past few years.

Just weeks after The Great Toilet Paper Tease, I met Matt for lunch at a pizzeria near his work. Restrictions were slowly but steadily loosening. We’d bought plane tickets for our two oldest to come home to Korea for Christmas. A TV behind Matt played BBC News, and the reporter talked about “a new, more contagious variant spreading quickly.” The bite of gooey mozzarella in my mouth turned to tar, and I felt cold all over. Whatever else happened, I knew exactly what this meant for us: our daughters would not be coming home after all. 

I’d returned to Korea knowing it would be hard–knowing we faced an immediate two-week quarantine in a barracks apartment with soldiers escorting my kids outside for “yard time” and monitoring our every move, knowing it was going to be tough to settle and make friends with all the restrictions, knowing we had thousands of miles between us and our older daughters. But I trusted things were getting better, and at Christmas we would be together. Now, the countdown to our reunion had been pushed back to “Who knows?”

By last summer, things were finally improving. In May, I saw my parents after fourteen months. Both older girls came home soon after that, almost a year after our goodbyes, and we had a full month all together. Grace upon grace.

Then I bought tickets to go to Australia, which had just opened up. We were SO excited. For me, it wasn’t just about seeing such an amazing country after a year of barely leaving our neighborhood; it was visiting dear friends I’ve known my whole life. When I was almost sixteen, a year after my eating disorder, I traveled around the country for six weeks. I got to see all the people I had grown up with in Bangladesh, and it felt like a glimpse of heaven: a place where I was known and loved just as I was.

Five days before our scheduled departure, I messaged friends in Sydney and made dinner plans. We were elated, and all the talk about food made me realize I hadn’t requested a vegetarian meal for the flight. I clicked the reservation number… and saw the word “Canceled.” 

What?!?! 

Luckily, the airline assumed responsibility and quickly issued our refund, but by then, ticket prices had shot up so Australia was no longer an option. I already had experienced a canceled dream trip (Krabi, Spring Break 2020), so I threw that itinerary more or less back into place and planned an amazing vacation for a decent price in a matter of hours. 

As we stood in line to board, a friend texted me. She had been stateside for a couple weeks, so I hadn’t talked to her about my recent change of plans.

“Want to head to the pool later today?” she asked.

“Actually, I think/ hope we are headed to Thailand,” I typed back. I was about to get on the plane, but I couldn’t bring myself to actually write the words, “I will be on my way to Thailand.”  Even at that point, it all seemed far too iffy. 

I don’t expect anyone to feel sorry for me as I write, “My trip to Australia was canceled, so we had a wonderful vacation in Thailand.” We walked with elephants and fed them bananas out of our hands and snorkeled and ate the best food. It was unequivocally amazing, and we even saved money compared to our original trip.

But I couldn’t stop the ache of the missed opportunity to see my dear friends.

And while we were in Thailand, we received two emails. The first didn’t seem like much at the time; Google warned me as it did periodically that my storage was almost full. I knew there was a lot I could delete, so I set to work right away. And somehow, though I specifically remember thinking, Don’t delete THAT!, I apparently erased the 35,000 words I had written toward the manuscript of my book. 

Then came the second, more significant email. We were being moved from Seoul to the base an hour-and-a-half (in good traffic) away, where we had lived for two years prior to Matt’s retirement from the Navy. Part of me was relieved. Seoul is wonderful, but it’s a hard place to live with young kids who love playing outside, and their school was forty minutes away. But after getting through such a tough year, the friends I’d made meant the world to me, and I was supposed to just up and leave? 

To make matters even more interesting, we had two weeks between when we landed in Korea from our vacation and when we moved. Hellooooo, chaos!!!! It was five weeks later, the day after my birthday, before I was able to work on my manuscript again. I opened Google Docs… and my manuscript was nowhere to be found. I tried everything to recover it and had Lilly and Matt (my resident tech support) search and do all the tricks, but it was well and truly lost forever. Completing a book-length manuscript had been my one goal for the year, and like so much lately, it was just… gone.

I somehow managed to hold it together until that night.

I was scooping some ice cream into a bowl when the scooper slipped and somehow cut my opposite thumb–the stupidest injury ever. (I know. You’re justifiably wondering how this is possible. All I can say is, the corner of that scooper–which we promptly tossed–was very sharp.) Blood welled instantly into the cut as I stared in shock, wondering if I would need a stitch from this moment of pure idiocy. For some reason, that did it. I sat down on my couch with my thumb wrapped in a paper towel, bent over, and wept.  

Wyatt came and put his hand on my shoulder. “Mom? Are you okay?” 

I nodded and tried to explain, but everything just came out as a jumbled mess of words.

“Are you crying because it hurts so bad?”

“No, son,” Matt said from the kitchen, “I think she just needs to cry.” 

I cried for all the things that I had thought would happen, that I had dared to get excited about. The plans I had to change. The friends I never got to see and the friends I had to say goodbye to. The work–so much work!–that disappeared with the tap of a finger. Finally, I dried my tears and laughed about how stupid my injury was. 

The next day, I figured out how much I would need to write each day to complete a 60-70,000 word manuscript by the end of the year. And then I started writing. By the end of the first week, I’d hit 10,000 words. Every day, I shut out the world and wrote like a crazy woman while the kids were at school. If I stopped to think, panic set in. My effort seemed moronic because I had no plan for how to publish it. I just knew that, after so much I’d hoped for disappeared, I absolutely had to complete it.

As I typed furiously on my laptop, a random thought kept popping into my head: I really wanted some houseplants. I could afford to buy them, of course, but after the weird roller coaster of the past few years, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. It felt too silly. Besides, I was busy writing. Maybe I’d get some when I finished the manuscript as a reward to myself. 

Then completely out of the blue, I got a message from one of my friends in the area whom I had known when I lived here before. She was moving out of the country soon.“I’ve got a bunch of plants,” she told me. “Would you like them?” 

I don’t know if you can call it answered prayer when you haven’t actually dared to pray it. But I also hadn’t mentioned my wish to anyone. What I do know is that as my friend unloaded her trunk full of house plants, and I carried them up to the sun room on our second floor, I could sense God saying, “I’m here. I see you. I’m doing good things.” 

I finished my manuscript in mid-November, nine weeks after I had re-started. There is still so much I don’t know, like if or when or how I will publish the book. For now, I’m just plugging away at revisions and editing, trying to prepare a book proposal and develop my writing through various publishing opportunities, which means a lot of rejection. I won’t even try to tell you that every problem magically disappeared overnight. 

But I’ve watered those plants and watched them grow and bloom. I've been reminded time and again that God knows everything we’ve cried for and has been there all along. And it’s okay to do more than think/ hope. We can believe.