These days, I wear my dark, silky hair in long, light-brown waves streaked with soft, amber highlights. I have dark, almond shaped eyes and clear, soft skin that takes on the color of milk tea when I’m tan.
I’m about 5’4, and like most women who live in LA, I work hard to keep myself in shape. Thanks mostly to daily jogging and yoga, I’m proud to say that I wear the same size jeans (2) as I did before my older son Danny was born.
However, becoming a mom did change my body in a different way that my husband certainly appreciates.
When I first met Steve, we were both students at Santa Monica Community College. Like me, Steve is a second-generation Korean American and a Christian. He’s the sweetest man I’ve ever met and handsome to boot. I fell for him right away. We dated for about six months before he proposed, and we got married right after we graduated from SMCC.
After graduation, Steve transferred to UCLA to get his bachelor’s in engineering, but I got pregnant soon after we got married. This was actually what I’d been hoping for: I’d always wanted to be a mom, so much so that it almost felt like this child was my destiny. I planned excitedly for his arrival as my belly grew, my breasts growing larger as well, swelling from a modest 32B to a fully loaded 34D that looked even larger on my petite Korean frame.
At first, I was embarrassed of my large breasts, and I tried hiding them with pregnancy dresses and loose-fitting clothing. But Steve seemed to love my big tits, frequently joking that he didn’t realize babies came with a free boob job. I told Steve that my boobs wouldn’t belong to him once the baby was born, but that actually turned out not to be the case, because neither Danny nor his brother would breastfeed. We tried with each of them, but eventually, we just resigned ourselves to using the bottle. This might be part of the reason why my boobs never returned to their former size. More than ten years later, I still wear a 34D bra, and Steve still can’t stop congratulating himself for landing a wife whose tits got bigger after the wedding instead of her waist.
But I can’t stall any longer before I tell you about my older son, Danny. My sweet, beautiful, incredible Danny.
Danny is the on autism spectrum. The first few years of his life, he was practically nonverbal. Those early years, before he was diagnosed, were the worst of my life. I did everything, tried everything, to get my son to open up, and nothing worked. I never knew I could feel like such a failure. I wasn’t even 21-years-old when Danny was born, and I felt completely in over my head.
Things seemed hopeless, but when Danny was finally diagnosed, I felt a renewed sense of purpose. I knew what was going on, and I was going to try everything in power not to let it rob Danny of the life I wanted for him.
We tried so many things. and then one day, Danny picked up a Rubik’s Cube in the waiting room at his doctor’s office. It was almost magical watching him with it–I still get chills when I think about it.