By Cerrissa Kim
W hen I was sixteen, there were two things I knew I wanted to do someday: have children and publish a novel. As I grew up, I realized that writing a book and getting it into the world, well, was no simple feat. It would take study, hard work, perfect timing, a wee bit of my father’s “luck of the Irish” and some of Umma’s mabeop , Korean magic. Getting pregnant, carrying a child to term, giving birth, having a baby? Amazing but also commonplace. Hundreds of thousands of women had babies every day. This would be easy.
T he abbreviated version of my birth story goes like this . . .
Umma felt her first pang of labor, walked a mile to her friend’s house, drank a beer and treaded home. The July sun scorched her arms and the humidity clung to her skin like a moist sweater. Laborers were ending their day, filing from the fields dressed in the usual white clothes of peasants. Halmeoni greeted her when she returned home. She had traveled by bus for many hours from Mokpo to Uijeongbu to be with Umma for my birth. A multi-talented woman who had birthed eleven children herself, Halmeoni was also a farmworker, cook, midwife and mudang, a Korean shaman. Umma labored for a few more hours until I arrived. Halmeoni delivered me on a futon on the floor, then plied Umma with seaweed soup, the Korean food elixir known to promote the production of nourishing breast milk—a baby’s only sustenance in a time and place when formula was nonexistent.
I had heard that women often follow in the footsteps of their mothers when it comes to patterns of pregnancy and birthing. When my husband and I decided to start a family, I was thrilled when I conceived on our first try. Like a moth drawn to light, my joy fluttered around the little person forming inside of me. After eight weeks of pregnancy, stabbing pains in my abdomen forced me to face the fact that something was wrong. I went to the doctor and was told that I was having a miscarriage. The doctor said it was common, that there was no reason for alarm. He said we could try again soon.
“Do not listen to American doctors, they want women to do things too fast. Your body needs to recover,” said Umma, urging me to wait at least six months. I dismissed her advice, tossing it aside like a litterbug throwing garbage out the window of a moving car. Umma didn’t know more than a Stanford-trained obstetrician. I didn’t want her wisdom, I wanted to be pregnant again. Only new life could fill my empty womb with happiness once more.
Two months later I was elated when the strip on my home pregnancy test showed two pink lines. But again, my pleasure turned to sorrow just eight weeks after conception. Five more times over a two-year span, my hope turned to heartbreak after each pregnancy ended in the first trimester.
Finally, one teeny tiny being made it to ten weeks. As a way to protect myself, I referred to the growing person inside of me as a fetus after I lost the first pregnancy. As this pregnancy surpassed the others, I started to reference “my baby.” At fourteen weeks, the swooshing sounds of the imaging machine mixed with the thumping of my baby’s heartbeat. My lemon-sized baby moved around on a fuzzy black and white monitor.
Based on my ripe old age of thirty-five, my pregnancy was considered high risk. My doctor encouraged me to have genetic testing done at seventeen weeks to ensure that the baby was in good health. On the drive from Sonoma County to University of California San Francisco’s premiere prenatal testing site, I swore I felt the first flutter. I imagined a little boy or girl performing water ballet inside my warm amniotic fluid.
My husband and I and jovially answered the questions asked by the perinatal hospital staff. “There are some genetic mutations that result from being related, is there a chance that the two of you might be related?” they asked. My first generation Norwegian husband responded, “Only if a distant Viking relative raided a village where one of my wife’s ancestors lived.” My father’s family had immigrated from Ireland and Scotland, and Umma was from Korea, leaving little chance of our DNA crossing paths.
The next stop involved an ultrasound and amniocentesis. I slipped into a hospital gown and lay down on the table. The ultrasound tech squirted tepid gel on my stomach, and my husband held my hand as she glided the transducer probe across my uterus. We saw the image of our baby on the screen and I squeezed Petter’s hand and smiled. “I’ll be right back,” the tech said, putting down the probe and leaving the room abruptly. Still flat on my back, tears started to roll down the sides of my face. Clearly something was wrong. Minutes that felt like hours later, she returned with a doctor who looked like he was fresh out of medical school.
“I’m sorry,” he stated in a voice dripping with drummed up empathy, “There is no heartbeat. The fetus is no longer viable.” “It’s not a fetus,” I told him. “This is my baby.”
G rief consumed me. Each night my quiet sobs escalated into the kind of wails I had only heard at Korean funerals. I took a leave of absence from work and lay in bed all day staring at a bottle of Stoli and a jar of Tylenol. I knew a large enough combination of the two was lethal. Before Petter arrived home at the end of each day, I’d shower and change into clean sweats.
One of my closest friends stopped by one day. She had struggled with her own fertility demons. Instead of ignoring the sound of the doorbell like I’d been doing for weeks, I opened the door and invited her in. I told her how I was feeling. She understood in that “been there, done that” sort of way. She urged me to see the hypnotherapist who’d helped her through her loss and facilitated her healing process so that she was able to carry her pregnancies to term, filling her world with the love of three little boys.
The hypnotist was a combination of therapist, natural healer and visionary. She sent me to an acupuncturist who treated me with needles and herbs, encouraged me to get massages and had me make a vision board. “She’s wacky,” my husband said. But I was desperate. During one of our first sessions, I sat in her comfy chair and pushed it into a reclining position. She placed a small sack filled with lavender over my eyes and guided me through hypnosis into an altered state of consciousness. I was reminded of the weightlessness and quiet of a scuba dive, and what it felt like to be lost in meditation. Her voice guided me someplace new, somewhere I’d never been before.
“When did you start feeling the need to protect your mother?” the hypnotherapist asked. By this time she knew a lot about my life, including the challenges I’d faced being a mixed Korean in an all-white community. I’d told her about my Umma, a strong-willed and competent woman, yet someone that I’d always felt a need to protect. I thought it stemmed from the time when I was four years old and two bank tellers humiliated my mom by laughing when she couldn’t complete a form because she couldn’t read. I’ve always believed I learned to read at an early age so that I could make sure she never suffered like that again.
“I’m in utero, five months in utero. I hear my mom crying. She’s crying so hard that her whole body is shaking. She’s really, really sad. I don’t know why she’s sad. I want to help her. I want to stop Umma from being sad,” I said.
When I emerged from the session, my face was wet, tear stains running down my face.
“How did your parents meet?” asked the hypnotherapist.
“My mom said she was working at a snack bar at the army post in Uijeongbu and that my dad asked her out when he stopped by to get something to eat. She said they fell in love and got married. That’s all I know.”
“I think there’s more to the story,” she said. “Are you willing to ask your mother about what was happening in her life when she was five months pregnant with you?”
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
I left the session and went straight to my parents’ house. Umma was home by herself, preparing dinner.
“You look like you have been crying. What is wrong with you?” she asked, straightforward, without compassion, her usual way. She turned her attention back to chopping vegetables. I told her about my hypnosis session. She looked up at me, her eyes filled with shock.
“You were really five months old in my stomach, that is the feeling you had?” said Umma. I nodded.
“Aigoo! You must be like my mother. Like a mudang. How else would you know that I was sad then? I will tell you something now. Something I did not want to tell you because your father is a good man and I did not want you to think bad things about him.”
She told me that when she got pregnant, she wasn’t married. When she found out she was going to have a baby, my father told her that he’d provide for me. He said that he’d send her money every month, but at twenty-one, he was too young to marry her and start a family. When she was five months pregnant, she stood at the gate of the army base and watched as the green truck filled with soldiers left for Incheon Airport. My father was sitting in the back of the open bed, sandwiched amongst his peers, solemnly gesturing farewell as she screamed and cried “so long,” cradling the small bump that contained me with one hand, and frantically waving goodbye with the other.
“I was not very upset for long though, so I do not know why you remembered at five months about this,” said Umma. “Your father, he came back for us. We live in America now. You have a good husband, a nice house, a great job. Stop thinking about the past.”
She told me so much but also so little in that short conversation. It wasn’t until my father’s passing ten years later that I’d learn the whole story. How she’d been his paid girlfriend. That he’d fallen in love with her, that he’d left but came back when I was four months old. While he was gone, he’d sent letters and money but after awhile, nothing made it to her because someone in the postal service was pocketing the cash and throwing out the letters. She thought he’d abandoned us. She didn’t know if she could keep me. Every day he was gone was filled with hardship and heartache.
My father had to re-enlist and commit to a tour of duty in Vietnam in order to get back to Korea to retrieve us. The military wasn’t happy about American soldiers bringing home foreign women, but he brought home his bride and I became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He risked his life to make sure we weren’t left behind. I understand now why neither of them liked the play Miss Saigon. It was too close to their story to serve as entertainment.
M y moment of hypnotic exposé led to Umma’s eventual release of a ribbon of secrets and shame she had wrapped tightly inside of herself for too many years. I wonder if holding onto such humiliation has contributed to the assortment of illnesses she suffers from now—ones that no doctor can find a root cause for.
Six months after starting my work with the hypnotherapist, I became pregnant again and slowly grew heavy with child. This time I was gravid, full-term. I was delighted with every aspect of carrying a baby within me. It was all I had hoped for and more. I believe now that my journey to becoming a mother wasn’t an easy one because I carried trauma within my cells.
My losses helped me explore and release my own hidden sorrows. Maybe they even helped me tap into the abilities of my mudang ancestors. I like to imagine that all of the babies I lost had a key. That during their short time with me, each one of them unlocked a door that allowed me to explore areas of my life I would never have known without them. It is through both pain and joy that I have grown the most and how I will continue to learn life’s lessons.
Cerrissa Kim was born in Uijeongbu, South Korea to a Korean mother and an American soldier father. She is an alumni of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, a member of the Women’s Fiction Writers Association, and is in revisions for her first novel. Cerrissa lives in Sonoma County with a husband who hails from Norway, two sons and a cadre of rescue animals. She in the process of learning to make kimchi from her umma, who is also teaching her the secrets of her mudang (shaman) ancestors, and of Korean cooking.