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Bereft, Left Alone, and Left (Two Birth Mothers and Daughters)

Behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begins.

MITCH ALBOM, FOR ONE MORE DAY

AS USUAL, MY FRIEND TROY HAD IT RIGHT. Troy is my brother, not by blood or adoption but by choice. I call him Daisy, short for “Daisy Duke,” which stems from an incident a few years ago when his spectacular wife, Julie, was out of town and Troy made a very unfortunate choice of wearing short shorts at my Canada Day picnic. (I can never un-see those fish-belly white legs.)

We met fifteen years ago, picking up our babies at the church nursery. Much to my astonishment, Troy introduced himself as being from Winnipeg and within seconds notified me that he loved the Winnipeg Jets as freakishly as I did. He was adopted, too, and just ten months younger than I (although he would have you believe I am nearing dementia while he is still scampering around in unbridled youth). He was also half Mennonite, he told me, which was golden.

For starters, I didn’t have to explain that I did not drive a buggy and churn my own butter. In five minutes, we understood each other perfectly. You’ve got to understand—most folks around these parts think Winnipeg is in some annex of Alaska. They’ve never heard of it, even though cultured, beautiful Winnipeg is a bigger city than Grand Rapids. And when you tell them where it is, above North Dakota and Minnesota, they carry on as if everyone “up there” lives in heated yurts and mushes their sled team through the drive-through at Kentucky Fried Beaver.

I instantly cherished Troy and Julie for understanding Winnipeg, Mennonites, and what it is to be a Jets fan, a group of certifiable lunatics who, like Winston Churchill, never give up hope that this is the year we will go all the way. I immediately felt as if we belonged together, our two families, them choosing us and us choosing them.

Troy is a social worker who counsels the bereaved in the context of hospice. He’s wise and compassionate and very good at what he does, but one can only hope he wears appropriate pants in the workplace.

Recently, we were at a wedding reception with our spouses, and in between the chicken Kiev and Troy’s ill-advised stab at line dancing, we slipped from our usual stance of giving each other the berries to solemn conversation.

Our topic was adoption and race, a thread the two of us could pick up anytime and feel as if we understood each other. My daughter is Korean; his is part Native American, a status Indian in the eyes of the Canadian government. Julie is black and white, so their three sons are also biracial. We go to a church whose congregants are all of the above plus African and Hispanic.

I asked about a friend of his, a Native American kid named Theo who was aging out of foster care. This led to talking about the great wounds of slavery in the United States and then the Canadian Residential Schools. From the 1880s until well into the 1950s, Canadian government officials and leaders from the Anglican and Catholic churches seized Native children against the wills of their parents and the children themselves, forcing them to attend boarding schools.

Being from Winnipeg, which has the largest Native American population in North America, I was familiar with the tragedy of the residential schools, where Native children, terrified and grieving, were plunged into European-American culture. The children’s hair was cut to look like that of children whose forebears had come from Scotland or England or Germany. Their native tongue was banned, and their traditional names were changed from Nuttah (“My Heart”) and Kitchi (“Brave”) and replaced with names like Alice and Edward.

This forced name change also happened to African American slaves, Koreans under Japanese occupation, and many other people whose cultures were toppled by another culture over the centuries. It happened to my dad and aunt, whose names as children were changed from the Hebrew Abram and Sarah to Adolf and Susie when they made their terrifying trek from Stalin’s USSR to Hitler’s Germany. After coming to Canada in 1947, my dad’s name was quickly changed back to Abram. But my tante Susie never changed her name back to Sarah. “Sarah suffered enough,” she said.

The experience of the residential schools was cruel, especially for the younger children who were separated from their parents. I love First Nations peoples, and I have empathy for their suffering, which, according to Troy, a former social worker to the Cree and Metis, continues through the generations, embedded like bullets in their hearts.

But I also can never forget the suffering of the Mennonites, my own people, who lived through sickening loss and trauma at the hands of Stalin and Hitler, mostly Stalin. My dad’s family lost everything: land, houses, livelihood, possessions, their culture; and like so many Mennonites, they lost their names. My oma lost two baby girls to starvation; one of them, Anna, was my father’s twin. The blood of my two aunts, like millions of others, is on Stalin’s hands.

“I’ve always wondered why the Mennonites suffered such damage yet mostly landed on their feet,” I said to Troy. “But some of the First Nations people continue to bring those past abuses, as terrible as they are, into the present.” The Anglican and Catholic churches and the government of Canada have all offered deeply felt, retroactive apologies to the Natives for the residential schools. Decades have passed, and acknowledgment of their suffering has been issued, forgiveness sought. Why wasn’t that enough?

Troy, who has been through his own profound losses and injustices, remains the most positive, benevolent person I know. His compassion for others shines like the sun. I will never forget his response, said in a patient voice as kind and strong as God’s. He didn’t tell me I was missing a piece of the puzzle. He didn’t tell me that my empathy was not enough, that I was not being politically correct. Troy just told me the truth as he had seen it: “The difference is, I think, that their children were taken away from them against their wills. When someone takes your child away from you and there’s nothing you can do about it, it does something to you. Some people never get over it.”

My mental picture shifted. I saw a mother seizing her daughter, screaming, weeping, and begging the stone-faced government officials not to take her baby away. If there are levels to bereavement, this mother was in the lowest circles of hell itself. And I imagined myself clasping Jonah, Ezra, and Phoebe, screaming, weeping, and begging a stone-faced government official not to take my babies away. Because I knew that was something I would never get over.

When I think of mothers relinquishing their children, two very personal stories come to mind. One is that of my birth mother, Theodora. Here I imagine Dora’s reaction to me finding her, and also how she felt when she was pregnant with me, drawing on the original answers she gave in the adoption paperwork and our conversations and letters over the years.

Theodora could not believe her ears. She replaced the phone in the cradle on her kitchen table. How had she been found, exposed, after all these years? That’s what she demanded to know of the social worker, whose gentle voice had been on the other end of the line. Her own voice had been sharp, maybe even shrill, and she regretted her tone already. It was just that she was so fearful. The fortified wall she had stood watch over for twenty-seven years was falling down around her.

Her heart thudded in her chest. Bang, bang, bang! She slumped in a kitchen chair, feeble against the waves of memory that flooded her. Bill would be home in a little while, and she had to collect herself. The worst thing she could do right now was relive those days long ago when she had been the most terrified and confused, the most alone. She was afraid of utterly breaking right there in her kitchen. But she couldn’t help herself.

She had been older than many of them, in those days. She was twenty-one and a student at a Canadian university. She had flown out of the messy, thorny nest that was her home at the earliest possible moment after high school, winging it to the city. Winnipeg, by very virtue of its being three hours from her hometown, was a sanctuary. Theodora was a sensitive creature—too sensitive, she had often been told. It had given her a pang to leave her dear dad, not to mention her younger siblings, one of whom was only three years old. But there needed to be space between her and her mother. Their relationship seemed to be charged, as if the ions surrounding the two of them were negative. The more distance the better.

Luckily, she was smart, and she knew how to work hard. In the city, she would fend for herself, putting herself through school, supporting herself through odd jobs. She had found some friends, and with the help of roommates, she was able to pay the bills until she could graduate and really become independent. And she had her faith. The Catholic church was her comfort and haven. She went to Mass as often as she could, and at times, her heart filled up with the idea of becoming a nun.

Theodora had not counted on Tom sailing into her life one summer. Why had this happened with Tom and not the other boys she had trifling romances with? Tom, with his dark, flashing eyes, zesty one-liners, and wiry energy, had a kind of chemical effect on her. The ions between them had been decidedly positive, for a short time, anyway, like forked lightning. Zip, zap. Here today and gone tomorrow. Yes, she had been zapped by lighting, and now she felt slightly electrocuted, with burns unseen by the naked eye. Theodora was long past romanticizing it. She could see her younger self clearly—her vulnerability, her naiveté—and how she had succumbed out of loneliness in the big city.

Even in the rosy haze of memory, there were no wistful thoughts of sunsets at Grand Beach or strolls through the dunes or what-could-have-beens. She didn’t care enough, nor was she cared for sufficiently to make this about romance. Theirs was not a love story. But of course, she was very drawn to him at first, and he to her.

When Theodora found out she was pregnant with Tom’s child, the ground underneath her felt soft. She was sinking, and there was no one to pull her out. The thought of going back to her family in this condition was ludicrous. No, that door was shut tight.

Tom had abruptly broken up with her before she even had the chance to tell him the news. Theodora’s gut told her he knew she was pregnant, though she could detect nothing other than coldness in his delivery. Tom always kept things close to the vest. But she felt that this man knew she was carrying his child and simply didn’t care.

Theodora was left behind by Tom, who all but sprinted away from her and their child growing inside her. She and her baby were left in his dust. There would be no solicitous attentions from the father, no courtly offers of marriage or even money. More than ever before, she was alone.

What could she do? It was 1967. Catholic girls did not become pregnant out of wedlock. Or if they did, it was muffled like a state secret. She was a girl “in trouble,” a place she had never imagined for herself.

However, Theodora considered it a bit of a saving grace that she was over eighteen and free to steer her own destiny as far as she could. There would be no parents interfering; forcing her to live in a home for unwed mothers; swearing her siblings to secrecy; spinning fictions about her working as a camp counselor, visiting an aunt in Winnipeg, attending boarding school in Saskatchewan, or having a bad case of mononucleosis. She was an adult, and as such, could take the matter somewhat into her own hands.

Yes, everyone would now assume she was promiscuous—she, a prim Catholic girl who had dreamed of the convent! Abortion was illegal, but there were backroom procedures she could avail herself of. But the thought of termination was worse than what she was going through now. Theodora was repulsed by the thought. She had no option but to forfeit this baby for adoption, but oh, how the thought tortured her.

Theodora’s pregnancy was a cloaked affair as much as possible, hidden behind tent dresses and shame. She was tall and thin, and therefore she didn’t show until she was at least six months along. She felt protective of her baby—“illegitimate,” this little one would be called! It was as if society had spoken, and the tiny soul growing in her womb was already judged as corrupted, some kind of lawless extension of her own crimes. But Theodora knew her baby was innocent and pure; he or she deserved to live a life free of such damaging stigmas.

When she went to meet with the adoption workers, she put on a cheerful air. She combed her dark brown hair to a shine and dressed carefully. Theodora had answered their questions to the best of her ability. The questions about her were not hard: She quickly rattled off her parents’ occupations and ethnicity. (Later, when she had been reunited with her baby, she discovered that the social worker had boiled down all of her ethnic information into something likely pleasing to the adoptive couple, listing “German” as her half of the baby’s background.) Yes, she had a positive relationship with her family! The social worker had smiled approvingly. Her family, of course, had no idea that their eldest daughter, three hours away in the city, was pregnant and volunteering information about them to a social worker.

As for Tom, she forced herself to be upbeat. The last thing she wanted to do was to tell them what she really thought about him. What if this information damaged her baby’s chances of being accepted into a decent family? “He’s a wonderful person,” she told the social worker smoothly and recounted what trivia she had managed to collect during their brief time together. She offered the information she had about his parents’ background, though she had never met them. His last name, Gordon, seemed British to her, and so she offered that as his ethnicity. He was employed and a hard worker. Did she mention he was wonderful? Well, he was.

Theodora made one request: that her baby be placed in a Catholic home, or at the very least, a Christian home. She envisioned the flickering life inside her being baptized by a kindly priest who would gently make the sign of the cross on her baby’s forehead with holy water in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. She imagined a little boy in crisp whites or a small girl with a frilly white dress being confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church. She wanted her baby to have the peace and stability she had found in her own faith. That much, at least, she could hope for.

She had quit her job at a Catholic school in the summer when she found out she was pregnant. She found another job in an office, and for six months she diligently did her work each day before coming home to a shabby apartment. She kept working as long as she possibly could.

It was a Tuesday night in late March when Theodora began having labor pains. She felt panicked. What should she do? Her roommate was at work, and there was no one else to drive her to the hospital. No one had talked about what was going to happen. There was no plan, no breathing classes, not even a pamphlet about what was to happen to her body. She was unprepared especially for the grief that lay ahead and the grief that already scalded her heart. Theodora called a taxicab, figuring it was better than the city bus, and packed a few things in a bag as she waited.

Her daughter was born on a Wednesday after a grueling night of lonely labor. She had finally been taken to a room and strapped to the delivery table with harsh, white lights glaring at her disapprovingly. In the lamp over her head, she could see the reflection of her child being born. It had been as ravaging as the pain of labor to realize she had no voice over her baby’s life to come.

The nurse had actually said yes when Theodora asked if she could hold her baby, just once. She stared down at the little one, all five pounds, three ounces of her.

“Wednesday’s child is full of woe,” she recited softly. “But not you, baby, not you. You will be so happy.” Theodora was the one full of woe, not her baby. The rending was coming, and it would split her open. This she knew. But she was also undeniably filled with pride and a primal love.

“Good-bye, my baby. I love you forever.” The baby’s name was Charlene, although she had no doubt the adoptive parents, whoever they were, would change it. “Blessings on you, whoever you are,” she whispered through her sobs. “Take good care of my baby.”

She left the hospital the day her milk came in, going back home the same way she came, by herself in a cab. She was sore, exhausted, and as anguished as any mother who has had to part with her own flesh and blood. No one at the hospital offered any suggestions about how to deal with the milk that spurted out of her alarmingly or the painful engorgement that followed. When she returned to work the next day, she stuffed her bra full of Saran Wrap to keep from leaking through her starchy work blouse. Somehow, the humiliation didn’t register nearly as much as the mourning. Dora was the one who had left her baby at the hospital, but nonetheless she felt as if she herself had been left behind.

Once, while sitting in her dentist’s office, Dora had read in a magazine that an estimated 1.5 million women gave up their babies in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, only to return home and pretend the births had never happened. Theodora was one of them. And now here she was, twenty-seven years later, sitting in the kitchen of her home, heart pulsing like a wild thing, woozy with disbelief.

She tried to take some deep breaths. Was it really so hard to believe that her baby was looking for her? Hadn’t she always secretly hoped for and yea—known—that this day would come? Wasn’t that why she kept one piece of information at the bottom of every purse she had ever carried in the last twenty-seven years? If she felt the scrap of paper while digging in her purse for lipstick or gum, she would have a flash of memory and pain. Sometimes she fingered the paper like a rosary bead. It had contact information for the Manitoba Post-Adoption Registry, a place where she could register her information and thus her interest in being reunited with Charlene, whose name was not, after all, Charlene anymore. But her baby had beaten her to it.

Tom. Her heart dropped like a stone. She and Bill had moved away from Winnipeg years ago, and she’d never had contact with Tom again. Would she now have to turn the key and open that Pandora’s box?

Every year, on a day in late March, she cried and missed her baby. Was she happy? Healthy? Safe? Was her baby even alive? She would have given her left hand for the tiniest smidgen of information! And she worried. It was possible and even probable that her baby was angry and hurt, that she would resent her for giving her away. But what choice had she had in the matter? What could she have done differently?

Over the years, the not knowing had been the hardest part. Now a door long jammed shut had been pried open. On the other side were answers to her questions. On the other side was her daughter, not a baby anymore.

I’m going to call Phoebe’s birth mother Moon, because that is my favorite Korean name of all. I also love the name Sun, but it doesn’t fit somehow; the picture I have of her is not blindingly bright and sunlit. When I think of the college-aged girl who gave birth to my daughter, she exists in a kind of lustrous light but is also somewhat obscured by darkness and secrecy. And besides, I have always preferred the moon to the sun.

I do know her last name is Kim, although that doesn’t narrow it down. One in every five South Koreans is a Kim—in a population of just over fifty million. Talk about a haystack.

The rest of what I know about her is actually somewhat parallel to Dora’s story: Moon was the same age, twenty-one, and living apart from her family in another city. She had a brief relationship with the birth father (I’m calling him Jin), and he proved to be a disappointment to her. Their romance ended before there was any discussion of what would happen to the baby they created together. Moon’s social worker filled in some of the details—that Moon’s mother had turned up on her doorstep one day and that she had been present during Phoebe’s birth. She said Moon had been very emotional on the phone and when she had relinquished Phoebe.

Recently, Phoebe and I talked about her birth mother and grandmother after seeing the moving documentary The Drop Box, about a Korean pastor’s “baby box” for unwanted babies in Seoul. The film underscored the gigantic stigma for birth mothers and how the vast majority don’t go through the proper channels (i.e., a social worker and a hospital delivery), for fear of their secret coming to light.

“Your Korean mama did the right thing by taking wonderful care of you when you were in her tummy,” I said. “She gave birth to you in a hospital because it was the best thing for you, even though she was probably afraid of getting into trouble. She loved you very much and was so brave. And your birth grandma was also brave and very, very loving to her daughter and you. Most people in her situation would have turned their backs on their daughter, but she was there for your birth mother and for you.”

Phoebe nodded stoically, processing it all. I could tell she was listening with her whole self, uncharacteristically still and somber. I felt as if I was bestowing a great gift to her heart, and I was filled with gratitude for the valor and love of Moon and her mother.

From the details I do know and what I know about Korea and giving birth to a baby out of wedlock there, I am going to imagine Moon’s story playing out in a place far away from here, a place I love, a motherland I carried her child and mine away from in an orange fabric baby carrier.

Moon could not believe her ears. She ended the call on her mobile with the press of her finger. What was going on with her daughter? That’s what she demanded to know of the patient voice on the other end, her social worker, the woman whom she had called for an update on her baby. Moon’s own voice had been tremulous, maybe even out of control, and she regretted her tone already. It was just that she was so scared. Her baby was three months old, and adoptive parents in the United States had been matched to her. Within several months, they would travel to Korea and claim her as their own.

She slouched on her bed, overcome with thoughts and emotions. Her roommate would be home in a little while, and she had to collect herself. If she wanted to stop crying, the worst thing she could do was relive the last year, thinking of a boy who had failed her and a tiny infant of splendor and grace, wrapped like mandu in a hospital blanket. She was afraid of breaking right there in her bedroom. But she couldn’t help herself, and the memories flashed before her as if on a filmstrip.

She was twenty-one, working at a mart in Cheonan, just ten kilometers from her home in Asan City. The train ride was short but beautiful, with bright green ginseng fields flanking the train tracks. Still, Moon had achieved some independence from her family, even if they were close by. They may as well have been a million miles away when she had found out she was pregnant with Jin’s baby.

Moon had not counted on Jin. He had sailed into her life on a summer’s day at the Geonbae, the name of the convenience store she worked at that spring and summer. He was the newest employee at the mart, and there had been a mild buzz of excitement among the girls when this newcomer arrived, smiling and donning the ridiculously cheery smock bearing a picture of an empty glass. Geonbae means “Cheers!”, “Good health!”, or literally “dry glass.”

How had she let things go so far with Jin when all it resulted in was an insignificant relationship? Jin, with his dark, glinting eyes, dry one-liners, and crackling energy, had blown into her life like a storm. Here today and gone tomorrow. And now she was left behind, abandoned in the rubble of his casual intentions.

When Moon found out she was pregnant with Jin’s child, it felt like one of those dreams when you are falling in slow motion, flailing, unstoppable, and all too real.

She could never go to her family with this news. That was an understatement. She had heard about other girls who had done the unpardonable: allowing themselves to become pregnant outside of marriage, outside of the patriarchal blood line, and they had paid for it. Some were forced by their families to get abortions, which were illegal yet rampant. Some were ostracized for life, even if they gave up their babies for adoption. Keeping her baby was hardly an option. Such an act would bring blistering shame upon her parents and grandparents. Moon would be branded as immoral, a failure, and a criminal, and her baby would be equally shunned. She would have a terrible time getting any kind of work, and depending on her landlord’s stance, eviction was a real possibility. Moon and her baby could both end up on the streets, or as karaoke “hostesses.” She shivered. Moon was caught like a mouse in a trap.

Moon would not try to find Jin. She had broken up with him before she even realized she was pregnant. Things had not turned out the way she wanted them to. He had not turned out to be the person she hoped he would be. But she was glad things had ended before she knew. What if he or his family had forced her to have an abortion because her baby was of his family’s seed? She was relieved that Jin was gone, long gone.

Moon’s pregnancy was concealed behind oversized hoodies and disgrace. She was tall for a Korean, five feet seven inches, and didn’t begin to show noticeably until her last trimester. When she couldn’t hide it any longer, she endured the biting remarks and cold stares of the customers, especially the gossipy old ajummas who would come into the mart with their bad perms and rubber shoes. Yes, it was a disgrace to be pregnant out of wedlock, but she was proud of her baby and treasured the feeling of the baby kicking her at night when she wanted to sleep, flipping itself over, head over heels.

One night in her seventh month of pregnancy, she answered a knock at her apartment door and was stunned to find her eomeoni standing there with bulging bags of groceries. Moon had managed to avoid coming home via one excuse or another, despite her mother’s growing suspicions that something was wrong. Well, something was wrong, and now her mother could see with her own eyes what that was. Moon’s mother hustled inside as if she were being followed by the police. She dropped the groceries on the floor and began to scream and wail. “Mian haeyo! Mian haeyo! [I’m sorry! So sorry!]” Moon cried. She dropped her head and looked at her swollen ankles. This was humiliating, but Moon knew Eomeoni; she would rant and rave, and then the storm would pass into calm, into action. Aboeji need never find out. Moon began to put the groceries away while Eomeoni continued to howl. She was no longer alone in this.

It was a Wednesday night in late December when Moon began having labor pains. She felt so afraid, even though Eomeoni had rushed to her side within the hour after her call, making who knew what excuse to Aboeji and her siblings. The kind social worker had talked to her during her pregnancy about what was happening to her body, what delivery would be like, but of course she wouldn’t really know all the details until she went through it.

Her daughter was born on a Thursday at the very end of 2004 while a horrific tsunami swept through Indonesia, thousands of miles to the south. After Moon’s own struggle and pain, there was new life, a life over which Moon had no voice at all. Even as she triumphantly pushed her out and became a mother, Moon felt a terrible sadness and dread. Yielding her tiny girl would be like a death.

The social worker had come to visit her the next day in the hospital and asked Moon if she would like to name her baby, knowing that her American parents would change it anyway. “No,” she had said softly, stroking her daughter’s velvety cheeks and temple. “You name her.” So the social worker had named her baby Eun Jung, which meant “grace.”

The social worker, Sunny, had been very patient with Moon throughout the process. Moon knew this. As Moon was filling out the paperwork for the adoption, she had left the “Religion” field blank. The social worker had gently prodded her.

“Are you Buddhist? Are you Confucian? Are you Christian?”

Moon had not conceded to this pressure. She refused to declare herself as a believer in anything. “Nothing,” she had told the social worker, perceiving that this was the wrong answer though Sunny just nodded. “I believe in nothing.” She watched as the social worker made the Hangul strokes for the word “none.” Eobs-eum.

Because Moon had no beliefs in God, her response was completely true. But now she had given birth to grace, and even as she handed her baby over to the nurse for the last time, she felt a measure of favor and mercy. Where so many others had taken another road, even the path of a mother-child suicide, Moon had risked much and had given life to a daughter who would always be a part of her. And Moon would be a part of her daughter too.

It still felt like her heart was being torn from her body. It still felt like too much, too hard to bear. Hot tears spilled down her cheeks, as the nurse turned her back and walked out the door with Eun Jung. The social worker had tried to coach her in working through the grief that lay ahead and the grief she already felt. But could anything really prepare a mother to part with her child? Moon didn’t think so—not at all.