May 19, 2020
The Mother of Reckoning
One of my mothers, I thought, could be dead.
If all adoptees felt not only safe, but empowered in their families and their communities, I would feel better—but not lucky.
Will my intestines turn the sacred bread into holy shit, or does the miracle not extend that far into the digestive process?
I wanted her language, her understanding of Honduras, a family like hers. I wanted things she could never give me.
Adoption didn’t give me a forever mother. Being in reunion with my birth mother did not make me wholly mothered, either.
This folder contained memories I did not have, information about a family I did not know.
Adoption is one of those forks in the road where many of us try to glimpse through the trees to the other path, the other world.
I never would have come to Korean if not for my adoption. The language pulled me back to it, despite the decades, cultures, and continents between us.
“I hated when attention was brought to my adoptee status. I was American, and that was all I wanted to be.”
We wanted our son to know his first mother. Was it the right choice?
I worried that my nephew considered it too late for reconnection.
“In moments like this, natural childbirth seems like magic to me.”
“I have an insatiable appetite for photographs of people who look like me.”
“I’d wanted nothing more than to be a Korean person, to speak fluently, to adapt culturally.”
“I was born four years before Governor Rockefeller legalized abortion.”
“Telling our stories often means pushing past the easy platitudes.”
