Tattoo

I got my first tattoo last weekend.  It's on the inside of my upper forearm, and it says daughter in Hangul.

There are so many unknowns about my life, especially about my beginning.  I don't know my mother.  I don't know the circumstances behind my conception or my birth or my relinquishment.  I don't know where I was born or who was there or who cared for me after I came into this world.  I don't know whether I was wanted or unwanted, whether I was stolen or given away, whether I was loved or unloved.

I do know, however, that before I was anybody, before my American life was shaped, before my American name was picked out, before I was an orphan or an adoptee, I was a Korean daughter.  And even now, after 28 years in this country have squeezed almost all the Korean out of me, after name changes and life changes and decades spent trying to run from my heritage, I am still and always will be a Korean daughter.  The blood in my veins and the DNA in my cells say so.

Death

Yesterday was my husband's grandmother's funeral.  Everybody cried all day, basically.

My husband comes from a pretty large extended family; his mom is one of six children, all of whom have children of their own, so you can imagine the onslaught of aunts and uncles and cousins who all came together to bury the matriarch of the family.

We were all sitting in this little room before the funeral began, after having just said our final goodbye to the grandmother.  Lots of sniffles, tears, some out-and-out weeping.  I sat there and thought about how these people were mourning the loss of their mother, and how everyone was comforting them and being sensitive about their need to grieve, and how it felt like we were all almost expected to cry about it all day.

Then I thought about how some day my own mother will die, or how she might already have died, and how I might never know about it.  I thought about how people would never think to give me space or room to grieve, or how it would never be acceptable or expected for me to mourn my loss.

Then I thought about my adoptive mother, and her inevitable death.  Would I cry at her funeral?  Would I even go to her funeral?  Would I be invited?

In a way, I've been mourning mothers my entire life.  I mourn the loss of my first mother, and I mourn the loss of the kind of adoptive mother I needed but never got.  Somehow, though, that sadness is not acknowledged or acceptable to people, even though their absences from my life are just as real and as permanent as the physical death of a loved one.

I don't know the mother who gave me life, and the mother who raised me no longer wants me in her life.  I am told to get over it, to move on, to stop being whiny, to stop being so angry.  I am told that bad things happen to everyone, that this doesn't make me special, that this doesn't warrant tears or sadness or bitterness, that I should just make the most out of what happened to me.  Funny, I've never heard those sentiments expressed to anyone whose family member just died.  How is it that my grief is less authentic, less deserving of sadness?

I will never get a do-over with my childhood.  I will never get the chance to be raised by a mother whose DNA I share.  I will never get the chance to grow up in my own culture, among my own people, amidst my own family.  I never had that, and I never will.  I never got to say goodbye.  I never received any condolences or support or understanding.

Yet someone's grandma dies, and I'm expected to bend over backwards to ensure that I am doing everything to help these people grieve their loss.  These people, who had their whole lives to spend with her, who have pictures and memories and tangible evidence that she was a part of their lives and they of hers.

I know I ought to be a more supporting wife, and I think I was.  I was supportive and comforting (as much as I know how to be) and understanding while my husband grieved.  I'm not discounting his sadness at all.  I loved his grandma and know she will be missed by the whole family.

That doesn't mean I can help myself from feeling like it's unfair.  It doesn't make me any less angry about it.  It doesn't make it any easier to have to sit through funerals.

Holt

Today would have been Bertha “Grandma" Holt’s 109th birthday. When asked how she wanted to be remembered, Grandma Holt said “as that lady who loved the Lord.” Her faith was her hallmark. But so was her passion for the needs of children. Her love has changed the lives of children around the world, and today, thousands of adoptees enjoy the legacy of love that Bertha and her husband pioneered. Happy Birthday, Grandma!  - taken from the Holt International Facebook page

I'm sure Grandma Holt was a kind woman.  I'm sure she loved children and loved God and loved helping people.  I can't imagine she was purposely out to cause harm or hurt or problems with "thousands of adoptees."  But she did, and as much as I would like to pretend I'm thankful to her, as so many other fellow adoptees seem to be, I just can't.

I am a Holt baby.  Holt has done nothing for me.  Holt International Children's Services, co-founded by "that lady who loved the Lord," run by people who are far wealthier than they should be, may leave other adoptees with warm thoughts and happy memories, but all it's done for me is let me down.

I guess not everything about that quote is inaccurate.  Misleading, perhaps, but not inaccurate.  Bertha Holt's "passion for the needs of children" and her "love" have changed the lives of children around the world.  But has it been for the better?  That's a bit of a stretch.

What's more, if Holt was really interested in carrying on this legacy that Bertha left, one of caring for the needs of children and changing lives, why are their post-adoption services virtually nonexistent?  Why do they seem to turn their backs on so many of these children that they claim to want to help so much?  Why does it feel like they're a key component in what's keeping me from being able to access my birth records and my Korean family?

I can't help but feel like just another notch in Holt's belt, another dollar in their account.  No one actually cared about my long-term wellbeing or had my ultimate best interest in mind back then, and no one cares about me now.  They buy and sell, turn a profit, manage their business.  Which would be all well and good, except that they're not dealing with goods or services.  They're dealing with human beings.

But to Holt, we are not human beings.  We're expendable goods.  Once they've received what they need from us, we are forgotten.  And when we return to them, requesting information about ourselves that should be our basic human right to know and have, we are treated with contempt, made to feel like inconveniences, cast aside as the lowest of their priorities.

Where is your concern for me now, Holt?  Am I no longer deserving of the "compassion" that was supposedly the impetus that led to me being sent for adoption by you in the first place?

Happy birthday, Grandma Holt.

It's never worked

"During the reunion phase of my adoption, everything spun completely out of control. I was living in Korea and had come completely to the end of my rope. I was on the verge of a breakdown and I needed help. I hadn't talked to my APs in a year, but I had no one else and I was desperate. I called their number. My a-dad answered the phone and I begged and pleaded with him to pick me up at the airport and help me just this one time. He beat around the bush and sounded uncertain and frightened and weak. I waited and listened and then flat out asked him "Are you going to help me or not?" He finally said, "It's never worked." and hung up. They left me to die. Again. But no truer words have been said. That is the entire story of my adoption, straight from my adoptive dad. It's never worked."

Quote from the K.O.R.E.S. page, which you should go to Facebook and like/follow, if you haven't already.

"It's never worked."

Dennis never came out and said that to me at any point, but he demonstrated it to me over and over in the way he treated me, and I don't doubt for a minute that if I found myself in a situation where I had literally no one else to turn to, his response would be very similar, if not identical.

I read that quote this afternoon and thought it was particularly relevant, as today is my adoptive father's birthday.

I hope he's okay.  Truly, I do.  I hope he finds a way to work through all the issues he has that have led him to become the dehumanizing, narrow-minded person that he is.  I don't even mean that in a condescending way, though I realize it may sound that way.

A.S.S. Post follow-up

I posted this on my Tumblr last week, and it garnered a fair amount of activity.  One response, in particular, riled me up, and I wrote a response on Tumblr, but I want to write it here, too, in case there are people who don't feel like scrolling through the loads of blather I generally spew over there.

First, the original response:

Ok. I feel the need to comment on this because I got really offended reading this. BTW I am white and do know several people growing up who were adopted, and children who are in the process of being adopted currently.

First of all, it’s entirely stereotyping and generalizing an entire group of people. Otherwise known as racism. I’m seeing it more and more, but maybe I just grew up really tolerant by parents who taught me that everyone is equal no matter what they look like because we’re all the same on the inside, etc. Anyway, more and more I’m seeing people of non-white races being incredibly racist towards white people. I don’t understand it because I have very rarely seen as much of whites towards nonwhite races. But anyway, back to this post. I found it incredibly ridiculous. Yeah, there are people like this, but a LARGE number of people who do adopt are not like this at all butdoes anyone consider the lives of the children who are living in orphanages who do not get adopted either by Americans or others who can’t have children or have formed a bond with a child through a mission program? 

Does anyone actually know what happens to children who aren’t adopted?My cousin is in the process of adopting a little girl from a country in South America (I won’t say which) and if she isn’t adopted by a certain age, she’ll be kicked out of the orphanage, sold into a sex trade, sold into marriage, sold to a factory or plantation or just left on the street to fend for herself. If his money, and many other people who fund her orphanage just decide to stop, all these children will face the same fate, even as babies. In preparation for her adoption and coming home (she has known them as her “parents” for the last 6 years or so and refer to them as mommy and daddy and it was her choice to make that decision, it was intact her asking and her creating the bond with them that they decided to pursue her adoption) anyway, they have learned her dialect, they have learned to cook her favorite foods, they’ve started celebrating her cultural holidays so that when she comes home, it will still be normal for her. 

Let’s talk about a few other instances, I had a teacher who adopted a little boy from a South East Asian nation who (most likely) would have died without a surgery that could only have been done through adoption. This surgery was difficult and many adoptive parents overlooked him, because of the surgery and because they couldn’t take in two adoptive children because once they found out his sister was there, they felt bad leaving her. My teacher adopted both the little boy who needed surgery and his sister. His sister, at a very young age, if not adopted, would have been sold to a factory.

There’s so many cases I can say. But all you people who think this post “has the right idea” are probably only considering the parents in this and think that they’re “greedy” personally, I think it’s selfless and caring and necessary. These people who adopt are giving children a better life than the one they probably would have had in their birth country. I won’t get into domestic adoption bc it’s a mess and I know nothing about it but most of the time the people who adopt (at least that I know) learn to celebrate the culture of the child and sometimes have even abandoned their own cultural practices and religion to give this child the best life that they could possibly have.

I really hate this original post and really don’t want to start a fight with anyone but I needed to get that out there because it made me so angry. Maybe the people I know are exceptions because there probably is people out there like that but part of me also feels like the original writer of this is, in a way, playing a victim.

Maybe people reblogging this are adopted as well. If you are adopted, I want to look into what happens in your birth country if you’re not adopted by a certain age, especially if you are female because a majority of the time it is the sex slave trade. Now, tell me that you’d prefer that over the life your adoptive parents have given you.

I guarantee that because of this someone will tell me that I have this ridiculously made up and incredibly stupid “syndrome” because of what I’ve said. Go for it. I do think, that to some extent, this original post is right, but I don’t believe that it is right for the “millions” that it says. I would say a small percentage of adoptive parents who have that huge high horse. MOST adoptive parents are grateful and welcoming and appreciative that they have the chance to parent at all. That is all.

And my response to that.  Excuse the lack of capitalization.  I'm lazier on Tumblr.

this is maybe the worst, THE ABSOLUTE WORST thing i have ever read. ever. i bolded the parts of her post that were particularly disgusting, but you can decide for yourself what you hate most about it. 

written by a 20 year-old white girl who knows people who are adopting (or “saving,” in her opinion) internationally, who thinks that there’s more reverse racism going on than actual racism, who thinks she understands the ins and outs of international adoption enough to feel entitled to write a post about how angry and offended this makes her, who thinks her white-privileged, non-adopted viewpoint gives her the right to tell adoptees how we ought to feel about our adoptive parents and adoption, who has the balls to lecture adoptees about looking into our “birth country” because she thinks that will confirm what she is already telling us: that if we weren’t adopted, we would probably be prostitutes by now, or sold into slavery, or languishing on the streets. 

frankly, i don’t have the energy to respond to all of the disgusting and egregious things she’s written. i just want to point out that her attitude, her white savior, poor international “orphans” attitude, pretty much sums up what’s wrong with the adoption industry today, and actually reinforces the original post that she takes such issue with…which would amuse me, if i wasn’t so busy being furious that she feels justified in writing that shit like she knows better, like WE are the ones who are uneducated about international adoption, like we ought to be considering how appreciative most adoptive parents are that they get to parent at all, LIKE WHITE PEOPLE ARE THE ONES WHO ARE VICTIMS OF RACISM. 

does anyone consider all the poor, orphaned children? she wonders. i’m pretty sure that, if more people actually DID consider all the poor, “orphaned” children, i wouldn’t even be writing this post. the solution is not getting more “americans or others who can’t have children or have formed a bond with a child through a mission program” to buy these children from all these countries. 

the solution involves working, on all levels, to keep these children with their families, because “orphan” is a word that’s used much too liberally in the adoption circle. 

the solution involves creating awareness and empathy and change within these countries, providing monetary and social support to families who, for a multitude of reasons, feel forced into relinquishing these children who end up in orphanages and then eventually in white peoples’ homes. 

the solution involves holding these foreign countries responsible for taking care of their own people, stopping adoption from being a multibillion dollar moneymaking industry, and to cut off the continuous flow of cash to adoption agencies who create and continue to feed into the propaganda that international adoption is the best answer to everyone’s problems.

the solution involves more people understanding just how corrupt and broken and full of lies international adoption is. people just like the girl who posted this response. who, ironically enough, recently also posted this gem on her tumblr, regarding women’s rights: 

“so please stop acting like you have a voice because the only people that should be able to comment on women’s issues are women. Last time I checked, having a penis makes you a man so stop acting like you know what it’s like to have a vagina.” 

let me revamp her quote to make it relevant to this conversation: 

“so please stop acting like you have a voice because the only people that should be able to comment on adoptees’ issues are adoptees. last time i checked, knowing people who adopt internationally does not make you knowledgeable on international adoption so stop acting like you know what it’s like to be an adoptee.” 

there, that’s better. 

i’m not even going to get into the reverse racism or the “nonwhites” being more racist toward whites. because, fuck that so hard.

i think that’s all i can stomach writing about right now. just. i don’t even know. white girl writes a post in support of international adoption and lectures us all about how we should think/feel about our own adoptions and white saviors. that pretty much sums up this bullshit.

For the record, the original brilliant post can be found here.  

Adopter Savior Syndrome

If you are a White adoptive parent who has engaged in the transnational adoption process in order to adopt an ethnic baby, you may suffer from a severe case of A.S.S.
Symptoms of Adopter Savior Syndrome include:

• White Jesus told you to adopt. 

• You believe you saved an orphan. 

• You feel paranoid about reverse racism. 

• You have served as an expert on Adoptee issues. 

• You experience shock when adult Adoptees notice race. 

• You feel entitled to the Adoptee's love, affection, and gratitude.

• You feel confused when people of color accuse you of being racist. 

• You have delusions of grandeur that you are the best parents for the Adoptee.

• You hallucinate consent when touching your adopted child in vulnerable moments. 

• You feel threatened when the Adoptee asks questions about their family and culture of origin.

You may be particularly susceptible to A.S.S. if you are White and exhibit one or more of the following risk factors.

• You are married. 

• You are colorblind. 

• You believe in White Jesus. 

• You believe that people are people.* 

• You fantasize about intimate relationships with people of color. 

• You are desperate for love because of daddy issues and mean girls. 

• Critical thinking scares you because you were taught to be positive. 

• You seek to own that which you desire, including children that already have families. 

• You envy communities of color and poor communities for their authentic and exotic culture. 

• You love ethnic food, hip hop music, and oriental decorations BUT people of color scare you.

*People are defined as White, able, hetero, gender-conforming, and middle to upper-class.

If left untreated in White adoptive parents, Adopter Savior Syndrome may lead to the perpetration of abuse and neglect against the adopted person of color, in addition to collusion with a system of global White supremacy that is destroying us all.

Someone has finally pinpointed, to a tee, this disgusting disorder that seems to have infiltrated childless parents.  Read the whole post here.  Bravo.

Happy Birthday, Amy

Today is my American birthday, I guess you could say.  Today is the day I ceased to be Hyun Sook and was instead introduced as Amy Kathleen.

There's a lot of sadness rolling around in my heart today, as I imagine Carleen and Dennis remembering this day, 28 years ago.  I wonder how vividly they can still picture all the preparation they did for my arrival, waiting at O'Hare for me, and I wonder whether that makes them sad, to think about all the hope and the excitement they had for this new little baby of theirs, and how, in the course of 28 years, it all went horribly wrong for everybody.

I'm not angry at them today, about what they did or didn't do, about how they handled or didn't handle the responsibilities of being an adoptive parent, about the way they acted or didn't act toward me.  Today I'm just sad for them.

I'm sad that they're unable to step outside their comfort or their pride or see beyond their dogma, and that, because of their inability to be decent, loving human beings, they have a broken family.

I'm sad that things weren't able to be rectified between us, that it had to come to the end that it did, and that this is the way things have to be for everyone.

I'm sad that, on a day like today, they must certainly be feeling the pain of what could have been and the loss of what used to be when they stood in that airport and waited for their new Korean baby.  I'm sure they think about all the ways they wanted their life to go, and today is just another reminder of how differently things turned out for them.

They prepared their house for a baby, but they weren't preparing for me.  They waited at the airport for their new daughter, but they weren't waiting for me.  They wanted to raise a child, but they didn't want to raise me.  I was never who I was supposed to be.  I was never white.  I was never theirs.  That must be so sad for them to realize.  It's sad for me, too.


I'm sorry I couldn't be the daughter you wanted me to be.  I'm sorry that I didn't turn out the way you wanted me to.  I'm sorry I was never yours.  I'm sorry I'm Korean.  I'm sorry I'm me.

Aimless

I'm gonna be honest with you guys: I don't quite know where to take this blog.

I don't know if I'm stuck on some sort of plateau that I just can't see yet, or if I've crawled back into my default hole of repression and denial, or if the magnitude of bullshit I dragged myself through over the last year really did work its magic and I really am as mentally and emotionally content as I feel most of the time.  Who knows.  Maybe it's some fun combination of all of the above.  In any case, I'm fresh out.

I don't have anything to say about the adoption industry that dozens of bloggers aren't already saying or haven't already said, all of whom are better at the whole blogging thing than I am.

I don't have anything to say about my personal adoption story that I haven't already written about, rewritten about, fleshed out and bitched about, analyzed, cried over, or shared on this blog.

I don't have any news on my family search, because right now I'm still too frightened to really get the ball rolling there.

That leaves us...nowhere.

*crickets*

Sometimes I try to write posts for this blog just because I'm afraid that if I don't, I'll end up inadvertently repressing everything again, and then I'll interrupt the healing process that I think is an ongoing, lifelong thing.  That is to say, I think I feel okay sometimes, but I know I'm probably not.

Then again, is anybody?  We could all probably benefit from a good, long session or two on our local shrink's couch, am I right?

Almost every study published on adoption and adoptees will preach some version of, "Healing is a lifelong process."  Does that mean if I don't feel like I'm healing, then I must be harming?  Or, to put it another way, if I'm not continuously teaching myself to cope and combat all the tendencies that are innate in me because of my adoption, then am I teaching myself to do the opposite; that is, give in and allow those tendencies to run my life?  If I'm not confronting and working through things, am I repressing?  Have I gotten so good at ignoring and bottling up anything that hurts that I don't even realize when I'm doing it anymore, and instead of true, sincere happiness, I've actually just tricked myself by burying all my true feelings again?

Because I honestly feel okay these days.  It's been a few months since the last email I sent to Dennis and Carleen, and I haven't, for a moment, regretted my decision to walk away from them.  I feel like I know myself better than I ever have before, and because of that, I'm able to define and pinpoint why I feel or act or react the way I do to certain things.  Self-awareness, I think they call that, which is something I always thought I had, but turns out I never really understood until this last year.

I guess I don't know the answers to any of my questions, and maybe I'll never know.  I don't really expect anyone else to know, either.  I'm just throwing them out into the void that is the internet, because I don't have much else to say.

A Different Kind of Anger

These days, I no longer harbor all that anger and bitterness I used to have towards my adopters.  But I'm still angry, deep down.  Not the kind of anger that interferes with my general happiness or contentment, or the kind of anger that requires long, angsty blog posts or letters to them that never get sent.  Just general anger about all the things I missed as a child that I will never have a chance to experience.

I'm angry about all the things that were out of my control, that are out of all adoptees' control.  That I never got to grow up with a family that was actually my family.  That I had to deal with racism and identity and abandonment and so much repressed grief and sadness.  That those things affected me so much, in so many ways when I was younger, and that they continue to affect me in irreversible ways, even today.

What I'm most angry about, though, is how all those things might shape the way I end up parenting, if I get to at all.  How some of the issues I have might be so deeply seeded that they'll infiltrate the way I treat my child(ren), whether I want them to or not.

Am I even capable of the kind of affection necessary to be a good, loving parent?  I don't even know what that kind of affection looks like.  Am I going to end up overcompensating with something because I want my children's lives to be so starkly different from mine, and in the process do exactly what I'm working so hard not to do: screw them up?  Will I unconsciously place on them the burden of being the only known genetically related human beings in my life, and in doing so cause them to resent me forever?

The questions are endless.  I am petrified, almost to the point of not wanting to bring a life into this world just because I don't want to be a horrible mother.

I am angry because I am petrified.

I am also angry that, if I ever do get around to procreating, I will have to one day explain to my children why it is they only have one set of grandparents.

What even is the answer to that question, worded kid-appropriately?  "Sorry, son, but your missing set of grandparents were more concerned with themselves and their self-image than with being parents.  Sorry, daughter, but the other set of grandparents are no longer part of our lives because they were too proud and too righteous to even want to try to be decent, understanding human beings.  It's okay to be angry.  I'm angry, too."

“We have all heard the maxim “If you do not love yourself, you will be unable to love anyone else.” It sounds good. Yet more often than not we feel some degree of confusion when we hear this statement. The confusion arises because most people who think they are not lovable have this perception because at some point in their lives they were socialized to see themselves as unlovable by forces outside their control. We are not born knowing how to love anyone, either ourselves or somebody else. However, we are born able to respond to care. As we grow we can give and receive attention, affection, and joy. Whether we learn how to love ourselves and others will depend on the presence of a loving environment.”

 — Bell Hooks, All About Love

On Being Different

My first memory of my awareness of my racial difference was when I was really little, probably four or five.  Growing up as a pretend white girl, I took the obligatory ballet/tap/jazz dance class.  I remember how scary it was to walk into that class all by myself (the mothers had to wait outside and look in through the glass, but Carleen used to drop me off and run errands instead of staying with the other moms).  One of the first things anyone said to me was, "Your eyes look weird."

THEY DO?  I hadn't had anyone tell me that before, ever.  I turned around and looked into the wall of mirrors, but I didn't see anything wrong with them.  How were they different from the eyes of every other little girl in the studio?  My five year-old brain was baffled.  Did everyone see something about me that I didn't see?  Was I weird?  I didn't feel weird.

On the way home, I remember telling Carleen about the interaction.  I asked her if my eyes looked weird.  "Of course not," she replied, because what else are you gonna say to a kid who asks you a question like that, I guess.  "You look just like everybody else."

I'm sure she didn't mean it in a mean or vengeful way, but in retrospect, that was maybe the worst thing she could've said to me.

Because I was different.

I wish I could remember when it was, exactly, that I realized that.  I was willfully ignorant of all the things, physical and otherwise, that made me stick out like a neon sign in a dark street.

I wonder how my self-image would've been different, had Carleen taken that opportunity, and the many opportunities that followed, to talk to me about those differences.  If they had been acknowledged instead of glossed over.  If I had been taught to be proud of them instead of ashamed of them.  If I had understood from a young age why those differences existed.  I wonder what that would've done for me, the adopted child, the Korean in a predominantly white community, the human being with no sense of self or direction or belonging.

I grew up only hearing messages that told me it wasn't okay to be who I was or look the way I looked.  Not necessarily messages said out loud, but that doesn't mean I didn't hear them.  Because in ignoring who I really was, in never addressing my eyes or my yellow skin or my thick black hair, they were really teaching me to dislike all those things that made me different, all those things that made me me.

Legacy of an Adopted Child

Once there were two women who never knew each other..

One you do not remember, the other you call mother.

Two different lives, shaped to make Your one…

One became your guiding star, the other became your sun.

The first gave you life and the second taught you to live it.

The first gave you a need for love, and the second was there to give it.

One gave you a nationality, the other gave you a name.

One gave you a seed of talent, the other gave you an aim.

One gave you emotions, the other calmed your fears.

One saw your first sweet smile, the other dried your tears.

One gave you up … that’s all she could do.

The other prayed for a child and God led her straight to you.

And now you ask me, through your fears, 

the age old question unanswered throughout the years…

Heredity or environment .. Which are you the product of..

Neither, my darling .. neither..

just two different kinds of love.

-anonymous

I wrote a little about this on my tumblr already, but I can't get it out of my mind.

Your mother loved you so much, she gave you up.  Two different kinds of love: the kind of love that sends you away, and the kind of love that saves you.  This is exactly the kind of language that needs to be eradicated once and for all when dealing with adoptees.  What does this say to us?  Your mother loved you, yet she could rid her life of you permanently.  What kind of love is that?  And what does that teach us about love?  That it's conditional.  That we're disposable, even when we're loved.  That the kind of love she had for you is different than the kind of love your adoptive mother has for you, because she chose not to provide for you the way your adoptive mother does.  What's more, God was the one who separated you from your first mother, by answering the prayers of your adoptive mother.  

Horrible.  I hope this poem dies or has already died.  The problem is, even if the poem didn't exist, the mentality would still be there amongst a lot of APs.  It's such a harmful message, but one that I was told over and over growing up, and that I know a lot of other adoptees were, as well.  If our first mothers loved us, how could they get rid of us?  And if our adoptive parents love us, what's to stop them from getting rid of us, too?  Thus begins the adoptees' struggles to either continuously please our APs in order to keep from being given up or sent away (in any sense of the word), or to push them away to see how much they'll put up with before ridding their lives of us, much in the same way our first mothers did. 

I don't have all the answers.  APs frequently message me to ask me advice about how to raise their kids.  I don't know, but I can say that you probably should've thought that through before you decided to adopt in the first place.  

One of the things I do know is that a lot of APs think they're being realistic, when they actually still have their rose-colored glasses on.  Because it's easy to acknowledge the issues that you're not facing.  Not so easy to recognize when your life is an example of one of those issues.  

For instance, my sister (if I can call her that anymore, which I don't think I can, but that's for a different post) adopted her daughter from Korea.  She's got a stack of books addressing adoption and international adoption and adoption issues and problems and parenting and whatnot.  But what she refuses to acknowledge or believe is the Korean social justice piece of her own personal puzzle.  She adopted her daughter from Korea and is in the process of adopting her second child from there (as far as I know, though, as we all are aware, it's taking longer and longer to steal kids from Korea these days).  We have talked about the issues surrounding Korean adoption, the corruption, the falsified documents, the injustices, the problems with the agencies and the government.  Her response is always, "Yes, but."  

Yes, but...her daughter's mother actually was a young, unmarried girl who didn't want her baby.  Really?  Because I bet I can find you dozens of cases where that same exact information was on the adoption papers that came over and that turned out not to be the case.  Not her daughter, though.  She refuses to see that part of it, because she needs to believe that her daughter is one of the legitimate, truthful cases, that she was taking a baby who truly wasn't wanted.  

Yes, but...someone needs to help all those children who are already orphans, so she might as well just get another one, because she's already set the wheel in motion.  She's not contributing to the problem, because she's taking an orphaned child and giving it a home.  Someone has to.  It might as well be her lily-white, American-privileged self.  She's not stealing a child who already has a family.  She's helping Korea get rid of their unwanted children.  

Yes, but...she understands what it means to parent a transracially adopted child, because she's read all the books.  She's going to do everything right, because she saw how I was parented and she doesn't want her kid turning out like me.  She knows what she's doing.  Her daughter will be fine, because there will be communication and talking.  The fact that she's raising her in a rural town in Wisconsin where the kids are all white and sheltered and raised by incidental racists won't be an issue, because she knows how to deal with that.  Not that she's ever encountered a nanosecond of racism or marginalism or bigotry in her life.  But reading about it is apparently enough to make someone competent to deal with that.

Yes, but.

If you know about fraud and lies from adoption agencies, if you read about corruption in international adoption, if you hear about the social injustices of a country, yet you still choose to adopt from that agency or that country, you are contributing to the problem.  

If you willfully believe that your child's adoption papers are correct because it's easier than confronting the fact that he or she may have a mother or a father or siblings or both or all somewhere who are looking for and missing their own flesh and blood, you are contributing to the problem.   

If you adopt because you need a child and you feel like God told you to save an orphan, you are contributing to the problem. 

If you think international adoption is the way to go because you think the chances will be more difficult for your child to find any original family or vice versa, or because [insert country here] babies are all the rage these days, or because you think you're saving poor orphans from destitution/death, you are contributing to the problem.

APs, it's difficult to hold the microscope up to your own lives, but if you really are interested in serving your adopted children in the best way possible, it's imperative that you examine every aspect of your parenting.  Don't make adult adoptees do it for you.  If you ever find yourself reading something about adoption and thinking to yourself, "That can't be me," take a second look.  If you seek out adoptee blogs to read and learn, then do just that, but don't pick and choose what you wish to listen to or believe, and don't assume we are writing in order to help or educate you.  I don't write this blog for APs, believe it or not, and as much as I wish each adopted child a better life and a better set of APs than I had, I can't be the one to make that happen.  

Thank you, and goodnight.  

Happy Anniversary

I think I've mentioned this before, but my adopters' wedding anniversary is December 15th, which also happens to be the anniversary of the day I terminated my pregnancy.  December 15th, 2003, to be exact, which means that this year it will have been ten years ago.

I almost never think about that day in December.  Even when I was going through my lowest time this past year, dredging up all the things I'd repressed and all the events in my life and the pain from the past that I'd tried to forget about, that one never came up.  I kept waiting for it to, but it was always noticeably absent.  I think the reason is because I honestly never repressed any feelings about it, because I never regretted doing it.

I wonder if my mother thinks about things like that.  I don't know how readily accessible abortion was back in the early '80s in Korea, but I wonder if she ever contemplated terminating, and I wonder if, after I was gone, she wished she had.

I think about all the blogs I read that are written by first mothers who were forced, for one reason or another, to relinquish their babies.  All the anguish and the regret and the loss they suffer through.  I think about all the stories I hear of first mothers who fall deep into depression, or who commit suicide, because the weight of having given away their child becomes too much for them.  Then I wonder how their lives would have been different, had they aborted instead.

That, I think, sounds a lot more gruesome than I mean for it to.  I don't mean that I wish every mother who'd given her baby up for adoption had, instead, aborted.  But I do wonder, if abortion was affordable and accessible to all women everywhere, how would that have changed the face of adoption, both domestically and internationally?  "Choose adoption, not abortion."  Really?  Unwanted pregnancy?  Carry your child to term, bond with it in utero, go through the pain of childbirth, and then give your baby away to some stranger.  How does that seem less scarring, less traumatic, than an early term abortion?

These are just thoughts I have rolling around in my brain.  Feel free to disagree with them.  I just saw this, and it made me think.

Just something to think about.  

This is not an actual letter

Dear Mother (if I can even call you that),

I'm still alive, in case you were wondering.  You sent me away, and then Holt sent me even farther away.  I grew up in the whitest, most pious family in the history of whiteness, and then one day they decided I wasn't good enough for them, and that was that.  So now I have no one.  I don't have you, because you never came looking for me, and I don't have them, because they didn't really, either.  

Sometimes I look in the mirror and I wonder if your eyes have the same odd shape mine do.  Sometimes when I pick up my violin, or when I place my fingers on a piano key, I wonder how it is I was so compelled to play music when I was little.  Was that from you?  Was that from my father?  Do you ever think of me?  Do you wonder where I am, what I'm doing?  Does anyone else know about me?  Do I have brothers or sisters, half brothers or half sisters?  

Maybe you thought you were doing the right thing.  Maybe you're dead.  Maybe you don't even know I exist, because someone told you I had died after childbirth.  Maybe I was stolen.  I hope some day I get to meet you, and that you'll tell me what happened.  For now, I like to believe that you weren't aware of what you were doing, or that you were lied to.  I don't want to think that someone who created me and carried me inside her for ninth months and then went through the pain of delivery could willfully give me away.  Did you get to look at me, hold me, before I was gone?  Did you spend any time with me before we were separated?

I used to hate kimchi.  I'm really sorry.  I love it now.  I'm this strange amalgamation of Korean and American, and it's confusing, and it sucks.  I love nachos and I love macaroni and cheese, but I also love bibimbap and kimbap and mandu.  I don't speak a lick of Korean, aside from "Hello" and "Thank you."  I married a white man.  All my friends are white, too.  Koreans, real Koreans, make me uncomfortable.  They're a painful mirror that shows me what my life could have been.  I have a dog.  Would you have let me get a dog when I was little?  My adopters never did.  But we don't need to talk about them.

I miss you, even though I've never met you.  I think about you on a pretty regular basis, but it's okay if you don't think of me as often.  I hope you have a family now, and that you had more babies that you were able to keep and raise as your own.

Kind of.  I mean, I kind of hope that, but I also kind of hope that you're miserable somewhere, that you never had more children.  I kind of hope that I was your only shot at having a family, and that now you realize that when you threw me away, you threw away your family.  Unless you didn't actually throw me away.  Then, forget what I just said.  Then, I hope you're happy.  

If we meet some day, I want you to brush my hair.  I want you to tell me the story of my birth every day until I can recite it with you.  I want you to tell me about your mother, and about your grandmother, and about your great-grandmother.  I want to go shopping with me and sit with me while I get fitted for a hanbok.  

I'm sorry this letter is all over the place.  To be honest, my feelings for you are all over the place, as well, so I guess it's fitting.  Sometimes I hope you rot in hell, but other times, the only thing in the world I want is you.  

If I could have anything in the world, it would be the ability to spy on you.  To find you, and to watch you.  That sounds creepy, but it really isn't, I don't think.  I just want to be a part of your life without having to risk being rejected by you or having to deal with a language barrier or feeling awkward around you.  Just being in close proximity to my own flesh and blood might be enough, since it's something I've never, ever had.  Just being able to see your face, maybe brush by you and touch your arm, hear your voice, maybe that would be enough for me.  I've wondered my whole life what you look like, who you are.  Yet, when I imagine meeting you, the thought is so intensely frightening.  

I wish I could tell you these things, so that you could reassure me that I have nothing to worry about and that you would never reject me or not want me around or be ashamed of me.  

But these are things we'll never know until we know.  Maybe one day I'll work up the courage to seek you out and perhaps even meet you.  Until then, though, you'll have to settle for these imaginary internet letters, because for now, that's all I can muster.

Love,
Hyun Sook

For Your Information

In case you were wondering, the reason for my paucity of quality (or any, really) blogging has not been because of the naysayers, or the angry APs or happy adoptees who seem to love to send me hate mail or write furious blog posts in an attempt to invalidate whatever I have to say.  No negative comment or anonymous hate email is going to deter me from posting.  But thank you for trying.  Now go away.  Maybe you can go punch someone while he's burying his dog, or steal from someone whose house just burned down.  Find someone with a broken leg and take a baseball bat to the other one.  Just suggestions of things you might like to do, since you seem to reap so much enjoyment in tearing other people down when they're already low.  That must be why you do it, since you can't be dumb enough to think that your caustic comments are going to change the way I feel about my life or my adoption, and I can't think of any other reason anyone would ever leave mean-spirited comments or send nasty emails.  Either you think my thoughts and feelings are wrong and you seek to convince me that the way you feel about my life is more accurate and more correct than the way I feel about my life, or it makes you feel better about yourself to rip people apart anonymously.

Congratulations on being a happy adoptee.  Personally, I think there's a little bit of denial or repression simmering in all adoptees who claim they're 100% satisfied and pleased with their life and their adoption, but far be it from me to attack the way you live or the choices you've made in their lives.  I don't understand why the same courtesy is seldom extended when the tables are reversed.  It speaks to your character (or lack thereof, I suppose), that you so easily and repeatedly spit vitriolic criticisms about my personal life.  Even more so, however, it exposes the open wounds you are so fiercely trying to hide.  Such blatant enmity would not be produced by someone who was truly happy and at peace with his or her own life.  Scream all you want at me and my narrative and my thoughts and feelings about adoption, tell me how I ought to feel about being adopted, abase and ridicule and criticize me, but sooner or later I hope you're able to discover what the true root of all that anger is.  I'm no therapist, but I can almost guarantee that your anger does not stem from some random blog written by some random adoptee who has random things to say about adoption.

While we're on the subject, I find it almost humorous that APs actively seek out adult adoptee blogs and literature, claiming they want to know what it's like to be us and citing their desire to be open-minded and understanding with their own adopted children; yet, often they're the ones who so blithely and maliciously invalidate anything negative we have to say.  They don't want to hear the truth about the identity issues or the low self-esteem or the consequences of the loss of family and heritage and genetics that many adoptees go through.  They don't want to know about the corruption or the theft or the greed involved in the adoption process.  They don't want to admit partial fault for contributing to and being a part of a broken system.  These things are too uncomfortable, too messy, too painful.  There must be something wrong with this particular adoptee that makes her so unhappy, so unable to cope or heal or get over things, so ferociously anti-adoption.  If she were a better person, a stronger person, a smarter person, she would get along with her a-parents.  She would be glad and grateful for having been adopted.  She would be pro-adoption.

I considered, albeit fleetingly, password protecting this blog.  The thing is, though, that I don't actually mind the negativity.  What some stranger in Canada has to say about me after reading a handful of my posts means absolutely nothing to me.  What some random AP writes in response to one of my posts doesn't faze me in the least bit.  It took me a long time to learn how to stop apologizing for the way I felt about my own life, and I'll be damned if I'm going to make some anonymous coward make me feel badly about anything I've said or done.  I owe nobody an explanation or an apology for who I am.

Hmm.  That ended up being a lot longer than I thought it would be, considering I was going to make this a post about the holidays and the new year and generic stuff like that.  What I set out to write about is how I haven't had much to say lately because, for the first time in a very long time, I feel so very much at peace with myself, with my life, with the world.  Looking back, one might think 2012 was a pretty horrible year for me; however, it was just the opposite.  I rid myself of so much negativity: expectations that would never be met, unfair judgments about my life, conditional love and loveless conditions.

The holidays are about family.  I thought that this year might be especially difficult, or that I might slip into a chasm of melancholy that would take months to claw my way back out of, or that any holiday cheer would be overshadowed by regret and homesickness.  But none of that ever happened.  I spent the day with my husband's family: parents, brothers, nieces and nephews, cousins, aunts, uncles, the whole clan.  As I sat in the living room, tucked amongst the warmth of people who actually loved one another, it dawned on me: this is family.  The smiles were genuine, the well wishes, the generosity, the care and concern for each other, it was all there, and no one thought twice about it.  There were no caveats that accompanied the hugs, no judgment thinly veiled by faux sincerity, no condescension or disapproval or guilt trips.  I never once got that feeling in the pit of my stomach, the one I got every time I was surrounded by my own "family," the one that told me I didn't belong there, that I wasn't wanted there.  This is family.  Love you don't have to work for, love you don't have to fear will disappear if you make a mistake.

2012 was the year I learned about family.  It was the year I learned about me.  It was the year I learned what's deserving of my gratefulness and what is not.  It was the year I learned how to cope with the most truculent anger and the most debilitating sadness.  It was the year I learned that those emotions were okay to have, to feel, to show.

2012 was also the first year I was ever proud to be Korean.  It was the first time I'd ever had a conversation with other Korean adoptees about what it meant to be Korean, and what it meant to be American.  It was the first time I ever heard anyone else speak the things I had been feeling my entire life, about my ethnicity, about my adoption, about my identity.

2013 will be the year I write a letter to my first mother, something I've not yet found the courage to do.  It will be the year I carve out time to concentrate on finding my family, and hopefully it will be the year I finally return to my homeland.

I wish all of you an immeasurable amount of peace and true happiness this New Year.  Even if you make no other resolutions, I hope we all use the first holiday of 2013 to resolve to love a little harder, be a little more empathetic, show a little more kindness, treat others with a little more respect.  Happy New Year!

“I’m sure your child will never ever regret not meeting his real mother as long as you love him as your own.”

This is an actual quote from a commenter on a blog written by an AP who wrote about my blog. Here are some other gems, that are directly about me, as a person, as a blogger, as an adoptee:

“By her logic, since I disagree with her, she must be a simplisitc fool buying into the adoption-for-profit theory.”

“There is also some concern that some of her life experiences and inability to cope may be the result of personality factors as well and cannot all be blamed on the adoptive parents.” 

“Unfortunately, it appears this hurt has resulted in this black and white/all or nothing thinking which undoubtedly will affect her ability to heal.”

I want to address all these things, but I just don’t care enough at this point. I could fill pages and pages of my blog if I were to seek out AP blogs (because there are SO MANY of them) and spend my time tearing them and their feelings and their opinions apart. But I don’t, because it seems cruel, petty, and not my place to read someone else’s experiences and then proceed to make assumptions about them and make judgments about who they are.

How dare anyone read my personal, personal, PERSONAL writing and then feel entitled enough to judge my coping, my healing, my emotions, my opinions, my personality flaws. Why bother getting so defensive about my little blog? Why go out of your way to pinpoint me, to read bits and pieces of my life, and then to subsequently invalidate what I have to say?

I hope the “happy adoptees” and the “good” APs are proud of themselves for being better adjusted, more broad-minded, more complex people than I apparently am. Feel free to continue feeling good about yourselves by using my personal experiences with my life and my family to build yourselves up. Congratulations. Your lives are amazing and mine is clearly broken. Thank you for pointing that out to me. It must be nice to be so close to perfection.

I have more to say about this, but I’m just a little disgusted right now and will have to continue this when I’m not in danger of saying something out of line or inappropriate.

“Because adoption isn’t about stealing or coercing a baby from birthparents or denying where an adopted child came from or who they (meaning adopted child and birthparents) “really” are. Adoption is about making forever families for people, like me, who can’t (or don’t want to) have biological children.” -from this guy’s post.

I’ve been getting a whole lot of “press,” if you will, from APs lately. I don’t know why or how they’ve discovered me, but they’re coming out of the woodwork now to read and then subsequently write about or link to my blog, and I don’t know how I feel about it.

The thing is, most of them seem like good people; as in, generally likable, intelligent, kind people. I want to give all of them the benefit of the doubt (this is also in reference to this post). I think they mean well. I want to believe they mean well. But good intentions aren’t enough.

After reading naive, blithely optimistic comments that are all pretty similar to this one, I can’t help but think that there is a lot of education that they’re sorely lacking.

Here’s the thing (I’ve said it before, and I’ll continue to say it until I’m blue in the face): Adoption is not about making forever families for childless people. It’s not. It’s just not, and that type of attitude is damaging, even if it doesn’t seem like it. All these APs claim they want to do right by their child, but in admitting that they wanted to adopt for their own selfish reasons, whatever they may be, is already doing their kids a disservice. I could ramble on about that, but instead, I’ll just link to Nancy Verrier.

Adoption is supposed to be about finding families for needy children, but it’s very clear that the entire institution has turned on its heels and is now about supplying the adults who either can’t or don’t want to bear children. Which brings up a different point, about who these so-called “needy children” are, and whether or not they have parents who could or should still be raising them.

APs love to believe that the adopted children they bought were orphaned, homeless, needy. How many different articles or studies or blogs have to be published before they’re able to acknowledge the truth: adoption is about coercion, theft, and corruption.

• The Orphan Manufacturing Chain:The idea that the developing world has millions of healthy infants and toddlers in need of new homes is a myth. In poor countries as in rich ones, healthy babies are rarely abandoned or relinquished—except in China, with its one-child policy. The vast majority of children who need adoption are older, sick, disabled or traumatized. But most Westerners waiting in line are looking for healthy infants or toddlers to take home.
  
  The result is a gap between supply and demand—a gap that can be closed by Western money. In some countries, Western cash has induced locals to buy or kidnap children or defraud or coerce their families into giving them up, strip the children of their identities and transform them into orphans for Western adoption.
  
• The Politics of ‘Orphans’ and the Dirty Tactics of the Adoption Lobby: “There are millions of orphans in the world that need to be saved” fits that bill. It sounds a lot better than “a single mother is encouraged by an adoption agency to send her child overseas for adoption and then when she changes her mind and returns the next day, she is told it is too late” or “the family who does not understand what intercountry adoption really means and thinks their child is leaving to go to school” or “some children adopted into Australia have been trafficked”.
  
• According to Cornell University, about 68% of all child protective cases “do not involve child maltreatment.” The largest percentage of CPS/DSS cases are for “deprivation of necessities” due to poverty. So, if the natural parents were given the incredible incentives and services listed above that are provided to the adoptive parents, wouldn’t it stand to reason that the causes for removing children in the first place would be eliminated? How many less children would enter foster care in the first place? The child protective budget would be reduced from $12 billion to around $4 billion. Granted, tens of thousands of social workers, administrators, lawyers, juvenile court personnel, therapists, and foster parents would be out of business, but we would have safe, healthy, intact families, which are the foundation of any society.
  
• Coerced adoption cases
  
• CPS profits from every child that they can first, terminate Parental rights, and then place the child for adoption. 
  
• We need to begin with how adoption policies and practices relative to adoptee rights morphed from being deemed “sacred” to being deep-sixed to shield private adoption agencies from accountability and liability. In the process, what was “best for the child” became severely tainted by the business of adoption. And a business it is! A multi-billion dollar annual business!

This is just a tip of the iceberg, as far as corruption, falsified adoption papers, forced relinquishment, and questionable adoption tactics go. The personal stories about reunions and family searches I’ve heard and read about that prove adoptees do, indeed, have families out there who wanted them and who love them there far outnumber the ones I’ve heard that involve someone who actually ended up being an honest-to-goodness orphan.

Did you do the best thing for your adopted child? It’s a little late to be asking a question like that. A lot of people would tell you that no, you didn’t, without even having to hear the child’s story or know the natural family’s situation. Because the simple fact of the matter is that being torn away from one’s genetics, one’s family and history and blood, is damaging in an irreparable way. As APs who have already contributed to the severing of those ties, it’s now your job to do what you can to set aside your own agendas (which, even if you think you have, you haven’t, if you still believe you have the *right* to raise someone else’s offspring), eradicate the privilege or the willful ignorance from yourselves, and educate yourselves.

I haven’t even begun to talk about APs who chose international adoption, and I won’t, because then this post will be ten pages longer than it already is.

I think I just need to stop reading AP blogs. They just get me all riled up over nothing, because in the end, people are going to continue to adopt, despite mounting evidence that supporting adoption means supporting broken or corrupt adoption agencies. They’re going to continue parenting their adopted children the way they think is best, even if that means giving their kids the message that their “birth parents” loved them and wanted to give them a better life (which, for the record, is the exact opposite of what you should ever say to an adopted kid), or that they were “chosen” and wanted and special (also a horrible thing to say to an adopted kid).

There are so many resources out there available for APs: articles that prove how corrupt and damaged adoption has become, adoptees speaking out about their experiences, conferences or clinics or lectures about adoption and its subsequent trauma, parenting books, online groups and forums. There is no excuse for naivety or ignorance or rose-colored glasses.

Want to do right by your adopted child? Think about supporting organizations that help mothers and families who want to keep their children. Stop promoting adoption as the correct or loving option. Be an adoptee advocate, not an adoption advocate.

My a-mother weighs maybe 100 lbs soaking wet, just FYI.

Last night I learned that my adoptive father never wanted children, and that the only reason they adopted was because he wouldn’t let my a-mother get pregnant again after their first child, because he didn’t want her to get fat again.  I feel like he should be nominated for Man of the Year; or, at the least, Father of the Year.

For the record, these are the kinds of people who are ideal candidates in the eyes of the adoption agencies, because they’re Christian and affluent and white, but who should NOT be allowed anywhere near children, or people in general, for that matter.

Yay, adoption.

Let me back up a little bit.  

My Aunt Kathy called last night, and I made the mistake of answering the phone.  I figured she was calling to get to the bottom of what was going on between me and the a-parents, but she actually didn't know anything about it and was just calling for some other random reason.  But we ended up talking for an hour.  There were tears, and lots of honesty, and it was actually really interesting to hear about Carleen and Dennis from her perspective. 

As an aside, I'm tired of hearing the following: "I'm sorry that happened to you."  Mostly because those words just remind me that I've heard them from everyone except the people who need to say it to me.  But now it makes so much sense.  He never wanted me, he just wanted a thin wife.  In his eyes, the only thing he's sorry for is being a father, not a bad father.  He needed control over his wife, which he got, and control over his children, which he didn't get.  He adopted me to appease his wife and tolerated me to save face.

The holidays are approaching, and this will be the first Christmas I spend without them (aside from the first Christmas I was alive, of course, which I spent somewhere in Korea).  I'm almost thankful for this new information, though, because I was beginning to feel a little melancholy about not being with them for the holidays.  But not anymore.  

Who is to blame when adoptions go wrong?  Is it the adopters, who have no business going through with adoptions when they aren't prepared to be loving, informed parents?  Is it the adoption agencies, who see only dollar signs and care nothing about where or with whom they're placing these children?  Is it the countries who send their own away because it's easier to reap the monetary rewards than to work to fix the social welfare and family structures?  It's everyone.  No one is faultless.  Korea + Holt + my a-parents = deadly combination.  The death, in this case, is my family.  My Korean family, and my adoptive family.  

Not all negative

At the risk of this blog beginning to turn into one where I just sit around and whine about my a-parents and throw myself constant pity parties, I'm going to make this post non-negative.

Since having posted it on Facebook and written about it in my blog, I've received a lot of support and love from a lot of different people, some surprising.  I'm thankful for all the friends I have in my life, for the adoptees I have "met," for the extended family I gained when I married my husband.  And now, to close, I want to share with you the best message I received in response:

"i'm so happy for you. sounds like a VERY big move in the right direction. you know you'll always have my support. but in this very instance, i'm so proud of you. it is so easy, as humans, to get stuck and comfortable and sit around watching our own lives dissolve at the seams. you are awesome, amy"

I hope that all of you who are reading this right now find the courage to change whatever it is about your life that makes you unhappy.  Surround yourself with people who are good to you, who build you up instead of tear you down, who support and love and understand you.  

Family is not truly family and friends are not real friends if they are not willing to listen to you or be there for you when things are tough.  Love yourself enough to take care of yourself and your emotional and mental well-being, even if that means doing something difficult and painful.  Stick up for yourself even if no one else is willing to go to bat for you.  If you are hurting, you deserve the chance to speak up about it.  Don't let anyone silence you, invalidate you, or ignore your thoughts or your feelings.  No one has the right to tell you how you should or should not feel about anything that has happened to you in your life.  Be an advocate for your own happiness.  

Update

So, remember yesterday how I sent that email to Dennis and Carleen?  It felt good to finally be able to say those things to them.  I opened up, I was honest, I was vulnerable, and I did it.  I made the choice to work on myself before I did any more favors for them.

I also wrote a Facebook status about it, which was pretty unlike me, because I rarely like to share anything too personal with the general public.  Getting it out in the open was really freeing, though.  I don't want them to be able to continue pretending they have the perfect family.  I will not be a party to the facade that they are and have been great parents, and I don't think I should have to hide their dirty laundry for them.  I didn't go into specifics, just stated that I was done being their child, and that enough was enough.

I'm Facebook friends with a handful of relatives and family friends of theirs, so at some point, word must've gotten back about the post, because this is what I found in my inbox today:

I can't believe that you put this stuff on Facebook. What purpose does that serve you, us or anyone. Oh, I do know one - now more people are praying.

I don't know why I'm so surprised by her response.  I guess because I still wanted to believe there is compassion in them, but obviously I was being too optimistic for my own good.  They are just as cruel and indifferent as I remembered.  When I reach out to them, when I show them how much pain I'm in, when I want them the most--that's always when they let me down.  I'm not sure why I expected this time to be any different.

The thing Carleen felt was most important to say to me after yesterday wasn't about how sorry she was, how she had no idea I felt that way, how she didn't mean to be that kind of a mother, how she wanted to talk, to have me back, to listen to me, to love me.  Nope.  It was about her.  How is MY Facebook serving HER?  Her anger over my Facebook status is more important to acknowledge and talk about than all the words I wrote to her yesterday.

And where is Dennis in all this?  That's an excellent question, isn't it?  Sitting back and letting his wife speak for the both of them, it would appear.  Does he not care enough to get involved in his own daughter's life?  Is he incapable of pulling himself out of his comfort zone, getting his head out of the sand, long enough to acknowledge that anything of consequence is going on in his family?

What I have to say is not important to them.  How I feel is not important to them.  What's important is their needs, their public image, their narrow-minded views.

I know they're sitting at home feeling faultless.  I know they're doing damage control already, since I can only assume there are calls and emails coming in, asking them what happened.  I can hear them blaming me for it all.  I can imagine they're saying things like, "We did our best, but she was just too rebellious, too defiant.  She never listened to us, never obeyed us, never followed our rules.  Her life is a mess because of her own problems, but certainly not because of anything we did as parents.  After all, we parented Nicole, and look how perfectly she turned out.  No, Amy is just a lost cause."

I don't know how it's possible for two people to be so deeply entrenched in their dogma and their subsequent piousness, how they can be so literally unable to remove the blinders and take an honest look at themselves.  I wanted to believe they were better than that, more capable of self-awareness, humble enough to admit fault, selfless enough to be concerned about their daughter before themselves, but it's pretty clear that they're not.

Emails

See?  I'm back already.

I sent what I assume will be my final email ever to Carleen this afternoon.  Just to recap, here is a brief history of everything that happened:

Early September: I invite both Dennis and Carleen to come to Minneapolis for the weekend to have a prolonged session with Suzanne, the purpose being to give them the chance to show interest in hearing my narrative, what it was like for me, growing up as their Korean adopted child.

They both accept, and then on the phone, Carleen mentions that she doesn't understand what the big deal is; after all, this was all God's plan.  I tell her to keep God out of it, please, and she tries to justify herself, and I hang up on her.

Two days later, I receive this email from her:

Thoughts - we are not at "war" here with anything. We understand that if it is part of your therapy to pronounce on us all the wrongs we have done you over the years, then we will be there for that. We are all for you and whatever it takes to start you healing, we are there for that too; or not there if that is what you ultimately choose.  But we will always be here for you. So please let us at least start down that path.

My response to her:

You do understand how passive-aggressive and manipulative your language in this email is, right? "We understand that if it is part of your therapy to pronounce on us all the wrongs we have done you over the years, then we will be there for that." Don't pretend to be the martyr to make me feel guilty for daring to expose these "wrongs" of yours. I told you right away on the phone that I am not out to place blame on anyone, so stop playing the victim, because you will never get any validation from me, nor will you succeed in making me feel bad for anything I've done or said. You act like this is solely my problem and that you're doing me some favor by being involved, when, if you've been doing any reading at all, you should know that this should be OUR problem, as a so-called "family." My healing will happen and is happening with or without you gracing me with your presence, and I don't want to feel like I "owe" you for letting you help me out.

No response.  No nothing.  Until the one that came a few days ago:

Are we ever going to see you? Will we have a Christmas together?

And my response:

When you guys are ready to initiate a conversation, I am ready. It's laughable that you think I would come down for Christmas with the way things were left between us, as if we can just brush things aside and pretend to be a happy family for the holidays. So when you guys want to have an honest dialogue about things, let me know, but for now, with the way things stand, we will not be joining you for Christmas.

And hers:

Yes, we do want to see you. To be able to have productive conversation not infused with a lot of anger, to reach resolution.

And my final email, sent today:

This email is for both you and Dennis. 

I am angry. And if you don't know why, if you can't take a long, honest look at the way I've been treated, as a supposed member of your family, if you can't understand why my dialogue with you might be "infused with anger," then I have no need to have a conversation with you guys. I've already reached a resolution in my own life about you both, and I am done being the one who is forced to apologize for things that were not my fault and crawl back to a "family" that has not demonstrated they are capable of selfless, unconditional love.

If you feel a resolution needs to be met, perhaps you should begin with yourselves. Take a good, hard look at why there was and still seems to be a significant paucity of humility and empathy in yourselves and your parenting. Ask yourself why I was the one treated poorly, while Nicole was the one being praised. And then ask yourself how you would feel if you were struggling and screaming out in pain and obviously hurting, and the response from your parents was to effectively shut you out of the family because of it; and then when you came crawling back, you were still made to feel as though you were at fault, that it was you who forced them to treat you like an unwanted, second-class citizen: never good enough, never wanted enough, never part of the family.

What about my life am I not supposed to be angry about? What about that do you feel needs to be resolved? As far as I'm concerned, your words and your actions have told me what I need to know about you as people and you as parents, and neither of those are things I want in my life, or my future children's lives. Even now, you know what I'm struggling with, you presumably are aware of the issues I have with you, and yet you still force me to initiate a dialogue about it all. Why do I have to be the one who bears the responsibility of putting the family back together? Why is the onus on me to commence conversation? I was the one who had to do it before, who ended up sitting in your family room, begging to be let back into the family, while everyone refused to admit any fault for my being ostracized. It begs the question, if I hadn't pleaded with you, if I hadn't began the discussion, how much longer would you have pretended I didn't exist? When would my life have been acceptable enough for you to allow me re-entry into the family? I know you probably feel like I'm unjustly accusing you of things, and I don't really expect you to own up to any of this, but I'm also not interested in hearing you try to spin it away from your ineffective parenting and make it about me being a bad person or a bad Christian or a bad daughter. I am done feeling like the one who is constantly in the wrong for struggling instead of being perfect, for not being the child you wanted, for not living the life you approve of. You have refused to take responsibility for any wrongdoing in the past, and I am well aware of your penchant for sweeping all the uncomfortable things aside so you don't have to deal with them. So be it. You can disagree with the way I feel or justify your parenting or your actions toward me in whatever way makes you feel better about yourselves, because ultimately, you are the ones who have to live with that.

I had a family in Korea who effectively abandoned me and turned their back on me, and I had a family in America who basically did the same thing in different ways. That is something I am forced to carry with me every day, for the rest of my life. It has affected and will continue to affect me in more ways than you can imagine. I may have pushed you away in the past, but you never came after me, you never showed compassion, you were never on my side. I pray you never have to know how it really feels to be unwanted, to be without family, to be abandoned by everyone who was supposed to love you and be there for you. No one in my life has ever fought to keep me. It's the worst feeling in the world. No one has ever needed me enough to fight to keep me. And it took me a long time, but I'm finally able to not blame myself for being left behind. You can tell me I was a horrible child, reminisce about how disobedient or rebellious I was, talk about all the bad things I did and said, but in the end, you were the parents and it was your job to help me, and if you couldn't figure out how to help me, it was your job to find someone who could, and to keep fighting for me until I was okay. You shouldn't have adopted me if you weren't prepared to do that. You shouldn't have told me you loved me if you weren't prepared to demonstrate that you did. I don't know if it was ignorance or pride that caused you to act and react the way you did, but I will never, for a single moment, believe you did the right thing, and I will never, for a single moment, blame myself for being cast out of the family. It was over ten years ago that it happened, but I will never get over it. I will learn to cope with it, I will learn to work through the hurt, but I will never forget it.

You can apologize for not talking to me about my adoption, you can apologize for not giving me the chance to grieve over the loss of my real mother, you can apologize for overlooking all the racial and genetic differences between us and pretending they didn't exist, and you can even apologize for turning your back on me for the better part of a decade when I needed you the most, but the simple fact is that, although it would be nice to hear an apology from you both, it can't change anything. You've done it before, and I don't trust you not to do it again, and I'm not willing to risk being hurt by you another time. My heart can't handle any more rejection. I'm never going to be the person you want me to be, and I'm never going to live my life the way you think I should be living it. The difference is that now I'm old enough to understand that there's nothing wrong with being who I am, and I shouldn't have to apologize to anyone for having struggled through a difficult time in my life or for being the person I am or was because of those struggles.

So no, I guess we can't see each other, because I am angry, and I have every right to be. I'm not interested in putting aside that anger to make things easier for you to deal with, and you have no right to ask me not to be angry, or to tell me you will only speak to me if I can leave the anger behind. I'm dealing with things now that should have been dealt with years ago. I'm grieving for a loss that was never acknowledged by either of you. I'm learning how to cope with abandonment from two sets of parents. I'm finally learning about the person I want to be, outside the parameters of family expectations and pressure from manipulative parents who offered love with contingencies instead of unconditionally. I'm working through all the feelings of rejection and pain that I was unable to vocalize for so many years. I'm finally able to stop feeling grateful for my adoption, to stop feeling like I owe you for "saving" me. I have trust issues, abandonment issues, identity issues, control issues...the list goes on.

I'm proud of who I have become in spite of and because of my struggles. It hurts my heart to know that you are too proud to ever apologize without being prompted or forced to do so, and it hurts my heart that for so long I let myself think you were justified in the way you parented me. I'm sorry that you were never able to be the kind of parents I needed, and that I was never able to be the kind of daughter you wanted. I'm done fighting for a place in the family, and I shouldn't have to. I'm going to let you be the family you were supposed to be, that I'm sure, many times, you wished you were. You have Nicole. She's yours by blood, by genetics, by biology. I'm yours only by a piece of paper. You've cut ties with me before, so I can only imagine that it won't be too difficult for you to do again.

The End.

As an aside, you will notice the obvious lack of communication from Dennis.  The last email I got from him was about cars.  True story.  Good ol' head-in-the-sand Dennis.  

I hate that I had to say all those things via email, but I did not trust myself enough to walk into their house and not be manipulated into feeling bad about myself or apologizing for whatever it is they think I've done to them.  I probably should have proof-read and revised before I sent it, but I wanted to get it all out and send it before I backed out.  

Is it bad that I want to pierce them straight through the heart and twist the knife until they hurt the way they've hurt me?  Is it wrong of me to feel nothing but disdain and disgust for the people who gave me a roof over my head and food on my plate every day for 18 years?  The answer to both of those questions is probably yes, but I can't help it.  

I have nothing left to say.

NaBloPoMo Fail

Welp.  I made it about halfway through the month of November and NaBloPoMo (which is, by the way, National Blog Posting Month, in case I never explained that).  But things have kind of blown up and gotten chaotic and now the internet is now a last priority.  The husband got a job offer in Madison, Wisconsin yesterday and will be starting in a little over one week, which means we have less than one week to pack up and move.  To say that I'm stressed out would be a bit of an understatement.  But I'm also really excited.

So I missed yesterday's entry, and I anticipate missing a bunch more through the rest of the month.  As it is, writing this post has already taken up enough of my time, so until the chaos subsides, you may not see a lot of me.

I'll be back, though.  I always come back.

Somewhere Between

I had what can only be described as a major breakdown last night.  It was pretty horrific, given that it happened in public, but only now, looking back, am I mortified about how many people were probably witness to my sobbing; while it was happening, I couldn't have cared less who was walking by.  

The husband and I went to see the film Somewhere Between last night, about four Chinese adopted girls.  Synopsis (from the film's website):

Four baby girls are born in China to families who are unable to keep them, largely because of China’s “One Child Policy.” Instead of being raised by their biological parents, the baby girls are raised in orphanages, and then eventually adopted by American families to be whisked halfway around the world to the United States. There, they grow up with Sesame Street, hip-hop, and Twitter. They describe themselves as “bananas”: white on the inside and yellow on the outside. All is well, until they hit their teen years, when their pasts pull at them, and they begin to wonder, “Who am I?” 

All four know they were probably “given up” because they were girls (they are understandably uncomfortable with the word “abandoned”), and grapple with issues of race, gender, and identity more acutely than most their age. 

Documentaries have been made before about international adoption, but they have always been from the point of view of the adoptive, Caucasian parents, or the adult adoptee. Young women’s voices are rarely heard—especially young women of color. SOMEWHERE BETWEEN lets four teenaged girls—Fang, Haley, Ann, and Jenna—tell their own stories, letting the film unfold from their points of view and shedding light on their deepest thoughts: about their families, their feelings of being “other,” and their powerful connections to a past that most of them cannot recall. 

The film captures nearly three years in the lives of these four dynamic young women. The emotional journey took the film crew across America where they documented the girls in their hometowns, facing racism and struggling with stereotypes. Their journeys were also documented as they traveled to Europe to meet other transracial adoptees and back to China, where they witnessed China’s gender gap resulting from its One Child Policy. 

The film also witnesses their emotional coming-of-age. As the girls discover who they are, viewers—no matter their color, gender, or culture—will find themselves exploring their own sense of identity and their feelings about family and belonging. Through their experiences, we will also see our still-prevalent cultural disconnects around stereotyping and race. 

As SOMEWHERE BETWEEN plunges the viewer into the ordinary and extraordinary days of these four girls lives, we, too, are forced to pause and consider who we are—both as individuals and as a nation of immigrants.

I shed lots of tears throughout different parts of the movie, as I watched these four teenage girls speak candidly about their adoption and share parts of their lives with their adoptive families that I was never able to share with mine.  I wept with the one girl who cried while talking about her fear of abandonment and her subsequent need to feel perfect in order to avoid being rejected again.  I cried as the film captured one of the girls finding and meeting her original family, and sobbed when I saw how much she looked like her sisters and how much her first father loved her.

Then, when the movie was over, I checked my phone and found a message of support from an unlikely source: my cousin.  And I lost it.  I made a bee-line out of the theater and just as I walked through the doors, I broke down.  Sobbing, wailing, hysterical.  Loud.

Apparently I haven't been dealing with things very well.  I haven't shed a tear for quite some time now, and the absence of any noticeable sadness made me think (erroneously, obviously) that I had dealt with the hurt and moved on.  I don't know if that will ever be the case, though.

Adoption is traumatic, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.  "You can run from adoption, but it will run faster" -a quote from Somewhere Between.  This movie triggered in me a lot of things I hadn't ever had the courage to feel, because admitting you're hurt means being vulnerable and displaying the chink in your armor, something I hate doing.  But it's kind of hard to pretend you're strong and inscrutable when you're bawling like a child, so for a brief moment in time, I allowed myself to be defenseless and exposed, and this is the revelation that came from my vulnerability:

No one wants me.  No one wants me enough to fight to keep me.  No one.

My mother in Korea, under pressure of social stigma or financial inability to provide or family judgment or whatever reason, did not have the courage to stand up to those forces fighting against her, and instead abandoned me at the hospital.

My a-mother in America chose not to fight for me, when my a-father was freezing me out and refusing to acknowledge my existence for close to seven years of my life.

Even now, when they know what's going on and they've presumably read the books I asked them to read about adoption, no one seems interested in changing the way things are or righting what has been wrong.

No one needs me.  I'm the only one in any of these circumstances who is left without a family.  My a-parents have family, in my older sister, who is theirs biologically, and in their own brothers and sisters.  My Korean family has each other, whomever they may be.  It makes sense, then, that I'm the one being abandoned and then, as a result, that I'm the one who is constantly begging to be let back in.

I don't know where to go from here.  I don't know that there's anything that could possibly fix what's already been broken.  Even if I was to find my first mother and she was to welcome me back into her family with open, apologetic arms, I don't think that would cure the pain of not knowing her my entire life or not being important enough to her to keep me.  Even if my a-parents admit their faults and apologize and promise to be different, that doesn't undo the memory of what it was like to not be good enough to be in their family for the better part of a decade.  It doesn't repair the damage of 28 years of trying and failing to be the person they wanted me to be.

And most of all, above all the abandonment and the subsequent hurt, is the lack of trust I have in anyone anymore.  They've done it before, which makes them capable of doing it again.