How to Marry and Have Four Newborns at 60
And why this matters…even if you’re only 25.
Every passenger within earshot was going to hate us. How else would they feel seated near our four newborns for a 15-hour flight? Although it has been over three years, I recall every detail.
We had helpers of course, but they would never be able to isolate the surrounding passengers from our quad of infant noisemakers. Each passenger had paid thousands of dollars for their sliver of business class comfort and, for this flight, they weren’t going to get it.
I imagined the long cold stares we would get as each of our children repeatedly cried, unconcerned about the embarrassment they were inflicting on their new parents.
But it didn’t matter. A Chinese woman in her late 40’s and an American man of almost 60 were finally living their dream. As unlikely as this story is, two incredibly different lives from two continents had joined to bring Hannah, Rachel, Aaron and David into the world and fly them from China to their new home in the U.S.
How did two people, separated by the Pacific Ocean, find each other? Believe it or not, through an executive headhunting firm. No, I didn’t employ a search firm to find a wife but rather to hire a manager for our office in China.
Wei (my wife) was a perfect fit and throughout the nine years she worked for us, there was never a flirt or hint of anything romantic between us. That was more my doing than hers.
After all, she wasn’t Jewish (and I wanted to have a Jewish family), she was an employee, she lived in China and was married. What’s more, it was around the time I hired Wei that I met the woman I would marry. Yet one more reason why I wasn’t even considering a relationship with Wei.
But, as life is rarely predictable and sometimes horribly unfair, this seemingly impossible-to-marry single, who married for the first time at 47, saw his marriage end in divorce after only seven years.
I was shattered. The part of my life I most wanted was now over.
After finally starting a race that almost everyone else I knew was running, I found myself behind the starting line again. That realization was cruel and unrelenting. It took me weeks before I could tell anyone, other than my closest friends and family, that I was getting a divorce. I was too ashamed and sad to admit it openly.
If I was late in the game getting married at 47, how much later was I in hoping to be married again and start a family in my mid-50’s? That starting line was looking old and faded.
But it’s funny, things can happen when one is running out of time. As options narrow, choices that once seemed crazy can seem perfectly reasonable. And so, as someone who was traveling to China for business seven to eight times a year, I asked myself “Why not date in China?”
How, though? I wasn’t going to travel to another country and just start asking women out. Granted, some guys do. But, in case it wasn’t already painfully obvious, I was never one of those guys.
Who would help me start my search for a wife in China? It was Wei.
Seeing What’s Right in Front of You
Despite her recent divorce, I had regarded her as unavailable for so long that I just didn’t “see” her during my search for the right woman. And when she started helping me meet other women, she understandably assumed I wasn’t considering her.
It was only after months of meeting other women in different parts of China, usually after Wei had traveled to, yes, meet and pre-qualify them, that I finally noticed her. It was the way she put her heart into this search that finally opened my eyes. She sincerely wanted me to meet a good woman. As I’ve told Wei many times, “I felt you before I saw you”. As attractive and elegant as she is, she’s the first woman whose goodness captured me before her beauty. If you’re a woman, ask a man how rarely that happens.
After over ten years of employing her, I told Wei that of all the women I had met in China, the one I most wanted to be with was her. She was stunned — both for the reason I expected and for one I hadn’t: she had committed to marry another man.
I felt even worse when she added that she had been interested in me for years. But, like a professional poker player, she’d had no “tells”. She never betrayed her feelings even slightly. Still, I felt like someone who realized, only after ignoring repeated airport flight announcements, that his flight had left.
What kind of woman would hope to share her life with the man she was trying so hard to help meet someone else? A truly remarkable woman with an incredibly good heart would. A woman unlike any I’ve ever known.
To this day I sometimes feel sad about having put her in that position, now knowing how she felt about me.
While she wanted to be with me, she felt obligated to her fiancé’ even though her friends and family didn’t like him. It was also Wei’s fear of never having a child which drove her to that relationship so quickly. And not long after, against my many protests, she married him.
But Wei’s marriage was troubled from the beginning. Though married, they lived in different cities, seeing each other and communicating with one another rarely. The last straw was when Wei learned her husband was communicating with other women via a Chinese chat service.
She separated from him and virtually all contact between them ended. It was after this separation and her plans for a divorce that we started talking about our future together.
We would face several challenges. One was how Wei would escape a marriage her husband wanted to keep for the sake of “face” (a Chinese form of honor or pride). Given that a divorce in China can be appealed and the extreme acts some in China will take to save face, Wei’s escape ultimately involved her hiding from her husband for almost two years.
Another challenge was how we could quickly have the two or three children we wanted (yes, we have four . . . remember that part about life being unpredictable?). As Wei was still living in China, we chose to have our children in Asia.
And as she was too old to have them naturally, we used surrogates. The laws surrounding this type of childbirth forced us to operate in multiple countries.
A friend helped us find two surrogates — in Thailand of all places. And the embryos were implanted in Cambodia (don’t ask about the room where I gave my sperm sample. The awful porn DVD they were playing was, to put it mildly, not helpful).
As their due dates approached, the surrogates traveled to China where our children were born. You’re probably thinking, “Wasn’t there an easier way to do this?” Maybe, but I don’t regret our choice because the result was four happy, healthy children.
The Moral of the Story
The moral of this story? Actually, there are three.
The first is that fear can destroy one’s life and it had seriously compromised mine. It was fear that kept me from confronting my dad over the very poor relationship we had. It was the fear of appearing foolish that prevented me from expressing the emotions I often wanted to convey to others. And more recently it was my fear of approaching Wei when I first saw the opportunity, which nearly prevented us from enjoying the beautiful life we now have together.
The second moral is to be honest with oneself about what’s important in life. For too long I told myself (and others) that marrying and starting a family was the most important thing, yet I constantly put other activities ahead of that goal. I fooled myself for years. A goal is important only if it is seriously pursued. Words without action are just poetry.
The final moral? Don’t wait for life to turn out exactly as you imagine because it probably won’t. By the time I was 30, I expected to have married and started a family with an American Jewish woman. Over the years, I missed so many opportunities because they didn’t match the image I had for my life. And yet, by the age of 60, I had married a non-Jewish woman from China, who converted to Judaism and had four children with me, all delivered within six weeks. That was hardly the life I had planned, but it is a beautiful life. And that is the point. For too many years, the “perfect life” I thought would make me happy prevented me from living the life that ultimately did make me happy.
Fortunately, this story, while barely told, has a very happy ending.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to stop for a while. Our kids are going to sleep soon, and I want to make sure I get to kiss them goodnight.
