Thank you to my friend (you know who you are) who asked me to write this piece. Without your request, it might have been another couple months before this blog got any action! :)
Though I feel I could say so much more about this topic, here is a short piece on some of my feelings about how parenting has affected my views towards my own adoption. . .
Though I’m not an overly sentimental person, at any given moment I can fondly and vividly recall each and every step of my first (and only) pregnancy with our oldest child some seven years ago. I remember exactly how I felt the morning I charted my waking temperature and saw that it had stayed elevated; I sensed immediately that my body was somehow different. Sure enough, six home pregnancy tests in the following weeks confirmed my hopes and suspicions: I was indeed pregnant.
I know that for many adult adoptees, a pregnancy can elicit a broad range of feelings surrounding their own adoption, which makes perfect sense to me. But in all honesty, I personally thought very little about my own adoption or my Korean parents while I was pregnant with my daughter. In fact, the magnitude of the possibility that for the first time in my life I would actually know someone who was literally a part of me and I of them didn’t make its full impact until our daughter was well beyond the infant stage.
It wasn’t until my husband and I traveled to Korea to adopt our son that both my mind and body started to recognize, absorb and truly experience the full spectrum of emotions that I harbored about my own adoption. Being back in the country of my birth, surrounded by people who appeared so familiar and yet so foreign, was an overwhelming and surreal experience. So many times I caught myself staring into the faces of people in random restaurants, on the subways or in the streets of Namdaemun Market wondering, “Could you be my mother or father?” or “Do you know of a sibling that you might have who was sent to America over 30 years ago?” And I couldn’t help but wonder as I wandered the congested but overwhelmingly silent streets of Seoul, “Was there anyone out there looking for me? Did there happen to be even one person in this enormous city who was missing me after all these years?”
We arrived back in the States with our Korean-born son when he was almost nine months; he was just three months older than I was when I came to live with my American parents. It wasn’t until after I became an adoptive parent that I realized how much my own adoption had affected and impacted my life. I came to realize that my seemingly unaffected behavior while pregnant stemmed more from an inability to connect and relate to my own daughter’s beginnings. Intentionally conceiving a child, carrying her for almost nine months, delivering her and having the privilege to parent and raise her was such a dramatically different story from my own history. Yes, I was conceived, carried and delivered, but in what context I may never know. And being raised and parented by the woman who birthed me was not like my daughter’s journey into this world. My daughter has never experienced the gravity of being permanently separated from the woman who nourished and carried her for so many months. Neither my son nor I can say the same about our respective Korean mothers. Meeting my son for the first time in Seoul brought to life the fact that yes, I did have a full six months of life in Korea that not only existed but mattered greatly. It not only mattered then, but it has continued to matter throughout my entire life. . . as it should. And just as importantly, the significance of the nine months spent inside my Korean mother means just as much to me now as does the nine months that I carried my daughter.
I have to admit that I cringe whenever I hear people say that bringing a child into the family through adoption is no different than giving birth. To pretend that my son and daughter came into our family under equal and equitable conditions is not only untruthful, but also does a great disservice to each of them as individuals and to their respective beginnings. And to suggest that our son’s entry into our family was somehow comparable to our daughter’s is laughable at best; at worst it blatantly diminishes and callously devalues the significance of our son’s Korean parents and his relationship with them. I know that many people like to believe that an adopted child’s life begins when he or she is adopted and that their life prior to joining their “forever family” is not equal in measure or consequence. In my experiences as both an adoptee and as an adoptive parent, I can assure you nothing is further from the truth.
Being a parent to a child both by birth and through adoption has given me the opportunity to grant myself permission to question, challenge and fully explore the myriad of feelings, thoughts and emotions that I have about being adopted. Though I am fully aware that my son’s adoption journey will be his and his alone, I see so many similarities in his own search towards identity, autonomy and insatiable need for permanence that I and so many other adoptees I know have experienced at one point throughout our lives. Through honest and critical introspection, through pages and pages of documented research about adoptees and through first-hand experience as an adoptive parent, I have amassed such a clear understanding of the how’s, why’s, and what’s that I felt, thought and experienced as a child and young adult. I realize now that being adopted is a life-long process with many challenges and continuous discoveries about oneself, not a one-time event that can be marked with finite parameters like the day an adoption becomes finalized and the child legally becomes someone else’s.
Some may argue that the real meaning of parental love means treating each of your children exactly the same way at all times. I personally believe that truly loving my children means giving each child whatever he or she needs in order to thrive, to feel safe, to feel empowered and to feel more like themselves. In many cases, my son and daughter may receive the same from me, but often times they do not. Yes, I see each of them as my children whom I love dearly, but first I try to see them in their full totality as individuals; individuals who came from dramatically different beginnings that cannot and should not be forgotten.
