The Greatest Love

My life as I know it starts in a small Midwestern town. The main economic driver there is a paper mill perched along the St. Louis River. It puffs white smoke day and night and has employed most of the town at one time or another for generations. The people there are from German, Swedish, or Norwegian immigrants with names like Anderson, Olsen and Wolf. I hear stories from my grandparents when they remember German was spoken as often as English. I grow up surrounded by golden hair and blue eyes, and I think this is what it means to be beautiful.

But my literal life starts as a complete mystery, on the other side of the world where the Nordic gold and blue is replaced by the deep browns and midnight black of Koreans. My story is not uncommon for the time. As an infant I was abandoned in public, and then placed in an orphanage where I would come home to Minnesota at thirteen months weighing twelve pounds. Malnourished and sick, I was carried off the plane and placed in the trembling arms of a nervous new mother who had wanted a baby for seven years.

As a small child, when I thought of Korea and what it might look like, I associated it with primitive thatched roof huts in Africa. Of naked distended bellies and bare feet on hot, crackled dirt floors. I was confident these images were my past because the only exposure I had to foreign lands where there were orphans, was from the commercials on TV for the Christian Children’s Fund where it was advertised that with your help, the cost of a cup of coffee a day could help save a life. I would think about flies buzzing in my eyes because I was too weak to swat them away, just like those poor orphans on TV. I wondered how many cups of coffee it had cost to save my life.

My childhood was a typical and a very good Minnesota-American experience. I grew up with a younger sister (a few months after I came home, my mom became pregnant). My dad worked hard at two jobs so my mom could stay home and my sister and I could go to the only Catholic school in town. I ate Fruit Loops and Apple Jacks for breakfast, meat and potatoes for dinner, and watched cartoons on Saturday mornings in flannel pajamas. We saw our extended family often and my two most favorite people in the whole world were my grandparents.

At age ten, we moved to the Twin Cities. Leaving was considered a bold move, just shy of blasphemy and I always admired my dad for blazing his own trail despite the outcry from town and family. I struggled and triumphed through adolescence in the usual ways of messy and awkward fits, but these years were also laced with many lovely and tender moments, making a long strand of beautiful firsts.

I leave home, work hard to be independent and make my way in the world. In time, I will meet a good man and marry him.

I have always known I wanted to adopt one day. If it were up to me, I would adopt all my children, period. Most couples reach adoption by way of alternative: because they couldn’t have a baby of their own. This is the one thing about being an adoptee that I cannot shake off; as bright as my parents’ love was, I am always standing in a shadow of second choice. If I hadn’t been adopted would I feel the pull to adopt? I don’t know. But because I was, I don’t understand the concept of identity and family based on shared genetics, I only understand identity and family based on love and shared experiences.

My husband is the youngest of five, from the same small Midwestern town. One of his prized possessions are stacks of photo albums going back generations, the dates and people’s names long gone are scribbled underneath faded black and white pictures. He is open to the idea of adoption. Probably. But he strongly wants children of his own. When it is time to start a family of our own, we face challenges. These challenges weigh heavily on me, I feel like a failure. Painfully, I trudge along to eventual success.

When I stare at my newborn daughter for the first time, wrinkly and ashen colored, I look into dark eyes that are shaped like mine. I am overcome by the realization that she is the only person in the entire world who shares a genetic connection. That she is part of me. For a beat, I understand. This understanding is followed by confusion; have I betrayed my belief in what makes a family?

When it is time to grow, I plead my case to adopt once again. I do not wish to put myself through the ordeal to have another baby, and I long to bring home a child because we chose it from the start. I want to give him only bright light to stand in, none of the shadow. My husband agrees.

I am biased and want to adopt from Korea, so we do. The protocol is to fly there and bring him home ourselves. My friends ask me how I feel about going back to my “home country.” Professionals from the adoption agency tell me to prepare myself for an emotional trip, that this could unleash suppressed feelings of loss for my true ethnicity.

When we are there I examine my feelings often, but there is no flood of suppressed feelings rising. I am certainly emotional. This is where my son was born. I feel deep gratitude for the country that has given me my baby. But even sitting in Seoul, eating bowls of soba noodles and being surrounded by faces like mine, Korea does not feel anything like home. My roots will always remain buried somewhere in Germany.

We bring our son home and start the next chapter as a family of four. I wonder how he will feel about being adopted and I hope he will be at peace with it. If he’s not, I will do what I can to help him find it. I notice one day my Nordic husband is the odd man out. He is surrounded by coffee colored heads and dark almond shaped eyes. For the first time in my life, I see my own physicality reflected back in my two children, and I think this is what it means to be beautiful.

I will end by saying there is one other thing about being an adoptee I can’t quite shake off. It is the thought of my Birth Mother out there somewhere, wondering about me. As a mother now myself, it pains me greatly to imagine the heartache and eternal haunting of leaving your child behind to the unknown. In a culture and time when female babies meant little, the act of leaving me in a public space speaks of her good intentions. I have never yearned to seek her out. I never believed it could offer me anything more than what I have.

But as I’ve grown older, I have often wished to find her, though I know it is impossible for me. Still. I wish I could put her weary heart at ease. I wish I could show her the varied and good life I’ve had that now spills over to include my own children. I wish I could let her know somehow that in her last, terrible act of leaving me, she gave me all she could have ever hoped for-- and more.

November is Adoption Month. Minnesota is one of the largest Korean adoptee states in the country. While I most identify with my German family, for those who have a different perspective than mine about their Korean adoption, here are some good resources: The Language of Blood (a thoughtfully written book for any adoptee), The AK Connection (a resource for Adult Korean Adoptees in Minnesota,) and Camp Moo Gung Hwa (A Korean Culture Camp).