Zhao Panpan felt restless and heavy inside. She scrolled through the contacts on her phone. Five hundred people in her list, yet not one she truly felt she could talk to.
She had never liked bothering friends with her problems. But right now, her chest felt tight, like she couldn’t breathe, like she might faint at any moment.
The feeling was both strange and familiar. It used to come often during the worst days of her depression.
In the end, she had no choice but to call Zhang Yanyan.
“Yanyan… are you free right now?”
By the time Zhang Yanyan rode her electric scooter to the gate of the medical college, Zhao Panpan was crouched beside a flower bed, curled into herself like a little stray dog someone had abandoned.
“Panpan!”
Hearing her name, Zhao Panpan looked up blankly. Zhang Yanyan’s smiling face felt like the brightest North Star in a dark sky, suddenly giving her a sense of direction.
“Come on. I’ll take you to the Fourth Factory food street. Let’s get something good to eat.”
Zhao Panpan smiled and climbed onto the scooter. From behind, she wrapped her arms around Zhang Yanyan’s waist and rested her face against her back. Only then did her breathing slowly start to steady.
“Yanyan… I just saw a couple arguing at the hospital. They failed IVF three times, and the husband wants a divorce.”
Zhang Yanyan sighed.
“If the man were infertile, everyone would tell the woman to stay and live a good life with him. Honestly, she probably wouldn’t even need convincing—she’d start blaming herself, sacrificing everything, trying to prove her devotion. Divorce wouldn’t even cross her mind. But if the woman has even the smallest problem… suddenly divorce becomes very likely. Back in our hometown, a man once sent his wife to sleep with another man just so they could have a child. And people praised him for being generous.”
When it came to having children, fairness rarely existed.
Zhao Panpan added quietly, “Sometimes even if the husband doesn’t throw the wife out and simply takes her to the hospital for treatment, people already call him an incredibly good man.”
The two of them laughed helplessly. Growing up in rural areas, they had heard countless stories like this since childhood.
Still, hearing it directly, seeing it happen in real life, always stirred complicated feelings.
They arrived at the Fourth Factory food street and bought a ridiculous amount of snacks, almost like they were letting themselves indulge without restraint. Then they found a spot by the roadside and sat down.
“Did you talk to the doctor?” Zhang Yanyan asked.
Zhao Panpan nodded.
“Do you think I’m heartless?”
Zhang Yanyan shook her head.
“You and I are pretty much the same. We were both left-behind kids. When a stepmother comes into the house, it’s like suddenly you have a stepfather too. So… I understand how you feel.”
Warmth spread through Zhao Panpan’s chest. In this life, meeting a friend who understood you without needing too many words—that was a kind of luck.
“But after seeing that couple today… I started hesitating.”
“You mean,” Zhang Yanyan said gently, “some people suffer so much just to have a child, even to the point of their marriage falling apart. And here you are, already pregnant, yet planning to end it?”
Zhao Panpan nodded. Zhang Yanyan really understood her.
Zhang Yanyan handed over a giant fried squid skewer.
“I always say this—no matter which path you choose, there will be moments of regret. The only thing you can do is try your best to turn the path you chose into the right one.”
People who choose not to marry can enjoy the freedom of single life.
People who choose not to have children can focus on personal growth.
People who marry support each other and build a life together.
And those who decide to have children do their best to create a loving home and take responsibility as parents.
Life isn’t a simple matter of right or wrong. There’s no perfect road waiting somewhere else, lined with flowers.
“What about you?” Zhao Panpan asked quietly. “After having children… do you regret it?”
She looked at her friend carefully. It was the first time she had truly faced the question of life and children.
Zhang Yanyan smacked her lips thoughtfully.
“Well… children grow on you the more you raise them.”
Seeing the tangled look in Zhao Panpan’s eyes, Zhang Yanyan suddenly laughed.
“My twins were conceived through IVF at the medical college.”
“What?!”
Zhao Panpan’s eyes widened. Zhang Yanyan had never told anyone this before. Everyone assumed it was genetics—after all, twins had appeared in her grandfather’s generation.
“I met Old Li when I was eighteen,” Zhang Yanyan said with a bitter smile. “Our relationship has always been good. Of course we wanted children.”
But the fight over having children had turned into the biggest war she had ever had with her husband and mother-in-law. At one point, they were on the verge of divorce. Even now, with the kids already a year old, things had only just begun to ease.
“Women who give birth often say they lose all their dignity in the delivery room,” Zhang Yanyan said calmly. “But for me, it started way earlier. From the moment I began trying to get pregnant, it felt like I had lost my right to be treated as a person.”
Zhao Panpan listened to her light tone, but her heart ached. That period of humiliation must have been something Zhang Yanyan never liked talking about.
“Transvaginal ultrasounds, hysteroscopy, hormone injections to stimulate eggs, egg retrieval, embryo transfer… every step made me feel like nothing more than a reproductive tool.”
After the egg retrieval, all the women stayed in the same ward. They wore hospital gowns and walked slowly around the corridor as doctors and nurses instructed, trying to prevent fluid buildup in the abdomen that could affect embryo implantation.
Some women had urinary bags attached, holding them in one hand while walking back and forth in the hallway.
That time had been incredibly hard for Zhang Yanyan. But she was lucky. Everything went smoothly, and both embryos survived the transfer.
During her pregnancy, she felt like a container. At which week the placenta developed, what she should eat. When the baby’s bones formed, what nutrients were needed. She followed every rule strictly.
Sometimes she would drink milk one second and vomit it out the next through her mouth and nose. She would rinse her mouth, then go right back to the kitchen to boil another bowl and force herself to drink it again.
“Some of the hormone injections hurt terribly,” she said. “They go near your belly button. I’d be in so much pain I couldn’t even straighten my back. But the next day… I still had to go back for another shot.”
She looked at Zhao Panpan.
“So when the babies were finally born, the only thing I felt was relief. Like I had completed a mission. Honestly, when I first saw those tiny, wrinkled babies… I couldn’t say I loved them deeply yet. I just accepted them because I had become their mother.”
She laughed softly.
“Maybe I’m selfish too. Everyone says breast milk is best. But I was in too much pain—my pelvis had separated, and I had a C-section wound. Every time they sucked, it felt like the pain got worse. So I chose formula feeding and gave myself time to recover.”
Zhao Panpan reached over and hugged her tightly. Zhang Yanyan had never shared these things with their friends before. She admired the strength it must have taken to swallow all those emotions alone.
“It’s all in the past now,” Zhao Panpan whispered.
Zhang Yanyan patted her shoulder and smiled.
“Yeah. It’s all behind me. When they first rolled over, when they smiled at me for the first time, when they crawled, when they took their first steps… it felt like life itself was blooming.”
For a woman, hearing a child call “Mama” in that soft baby voice was almost impossible to resist.
Those tiny hands and feet reaching out, the wobbly little body stumbling into their mother’s arms… in moments like that, she felt like she could give her life for them.
“When a little life trusts you completely and depends on you,” Zhang Yanyan said softly, “and when you face moments in parenting that remind you of the ways you weren’t treated well in your own childhood… it feels like meeting your younger self again. Only this time, you finally have the power to give the right answer. It’s like healing the past… like saving the little child you once were.”
She looked at Zhao Panpan.
“Panpan, we were abandoned children. So if you can… please don’t abandon your child. Right now, that little one is just like the you from back then—the you who didn’t want to be abandoned.”
Zhang Yanyan’s words exploded in Zhao Panpan’s heart.
The truth she had been avoiding, the confusion she couldn’t explain—suddenly it all became clear.
No wonder she kept feeling lost and empty, even while insisting she would terminate the pregnancy.
Yes. She had been abandoned once.
So she knew exactly what it felt like.
And now, her child was standing at the same crossroads she once faced.