You may never understand why

It's 6 AM and New Year's Eve and if you asked me to tell you how I was feeling right now - I know I wouldn't be able to. I never thought that I would ever be surrounded with so much love in my life and still feel so uncertain about everything to the point where it was harder to sleep at night.

I keep wondering if it's worth me getting upset over this. Wasn't it a loss in the first place? What if you woke up and the thing you thought you had always lost... might not be lost after all? Does that mean that even if you go through all the effort of searching for it - that if it goes lost again...everything is back where it was? And I remain the same?

Somehow, no matter how many times I might try to tell myself that you can't feel loss over something already lost...that I inevitably will. Because initially, isn't it always 'hope' that we feel anyway? 'Hope' that we could find that missing piece to our puzzle...and then when the hope disappears, it isn't necessarily the actual piece that we're missing. I think I'd start to miss the feeling of hope that it was ever there in the first place.

I am a step away from possibly knowing everything...or maybe even having more questions than I know what to do with. How do you differentiate between the questions of a 6-year old and the logical questions of a 23-year old? You can't, I guess. There is probably little difference of importance in my mind between: "Whose nose do I have?" and "Were you economically in hardship when you made that decision 23 years ago?"

Who knows what is going to happen on Friday. I am not even sure if I have an idealistic pan out of how I would want it to go because it hasn't crossed my mind.

But one thing is for sure...please don't ask me how...I have missed you.

A Day To Remember (or perhaps to forget)

There are four pages of a scribbled letter tucked inside my black and white marbled notebook. It was the beginnings of a future blog post for this blog - my annual letter to my birthmother - telling her the struggles and triumphs of my 23rd year of being alive.

For the past week and a half, I, for some reason, kept holding off actually sitting down and typing it out here, not because it was too personal or too gritty...honestly, if you had asked me why I wouldn't have been able to give you a straight answer. Maybe it was because I have been so consumed with the move from Dundalk. (Yes, I have finally LEFT Dumb-dalk for good...and will post pictures of the barren room once I find my camera in one of these boxes that are looming in my room.) Whatever the reason, it just never got done.

And maybe it was a sign that I was meant to read it to her in person...

I don't really know where to begin with the rest of this post. I was trying to think of some clever epithet that might transition into the whole point of the post - but at this point, my brain is too fried with an excess abundance of emotion and utter cluster-fuckery (I just made that word up.) to even be witty or even give a hoot whether I am witty or not.

December 23, 2008 @ around 1 AM will be forever seared in my brain. If and when I have children, and I reflect on this tale to fill bedtime story nights, I will probably still struggle to piece together just exactly what got seared into my brain: a cautionary tale or a Christmas miracle. It is too early yet to decide.

But whatever it will be - what it is right now, at the present, is the exact time that I was trying to get rid of a nasty migraine by sleeping it away... and my 2nd night sleeping on the mattress that is in what will eventually be my bedroom in my Aunt's house. It seems ordinary and simple enough, and started out as any other night ...except that 1 AM will also forever be seared into my brain as the time my mother came into my bedroom to wake me up with the news.

The news that my birthparents have been searching for me and want to meet me.

It is now 11:02 pm of the very same day and I think I must have written the above sentence or said variations of it to myself at least a hundred thousand times. And yet even with saying it a hundred thousand more, I do not think that the sentence's true meaning will ever fully sink itself into my brain and channel signals of acknowledgement to my being.

Even now, there is still detachment from that sentence - as if tomorrow that whole sequence: me sleeping, my mom rushing into my bedroom in her jacket, shaking me awake, her eyes lighting up, and me sleepily opening my eyes to watch her lips move to form the words of that very same sentence....that whole sequence will be nothing but a dream. An afterthought to another dream that I had had.

But a part of me knows that it wasn't. That it was real. But I am not ready to believe that part. All day long I have been trying to figure out how to sum up how I feel and I just can't...it is hard to explain how in one moment - everything has changed with nothing happening. How just words could change my entire world and turn it upside down with no action following.

I am, Blog, scared shitless. Today I have felt happy, annoyed, joyous, angry, resentful, sadness, fear and frustration in succession of each other and even at times, simultaneously.

I have so much to say and yet have no words to say it with.

I have so many questions and yet am not quite sure I want to know the answers.

I want...and yet wish it was easier just to walk away...at the exact same time.

And despite all these crazy feelings - the one thing I keep dwelling on is the revelation that they searched for me.

Undecided

I met up with a friend last night that I hadn't seen in a while. I had promised her a long time ago that I would have dinner with her, and see her new apartment but I just had never gotten around to it (partly due to the transportation issues).

So at around 6:40pm I headed out to meet her and a few of her friends at XS on N. Charles Street for dinner.

It was fun finally being able to get to where I wanted to go, and be able to leave the house when I wanted - except when it came time to find a parking spot. I ended up paying $10.00 (yes, 10 whole dollars) to park in a garage over on Cathedral Street and walk the two blocks up Preston to where it met Charles. I conjured up the reasoning that I needed the exercise anyways.

I walked into the familiar sights and sounds of XS. The bustle of the girls and guys dressed in black from head to toe, scrambling down the three flights of long stairs to get to the kitchen in time for the food not to be cold for the patrons. (That part always amazed me.)

I found a seat on the second floor and waited for the others to arrive.

Once they did, I found out that my friend's best friend/roommate was celebrating her early birthday. We ordered, and had pleasant conversation and then decided that we would go back to my friend's apartment where she had baked a cake for the occasion in an attempt to emulate "Ace of Cakes". It was actually an awesome attempt and I am going to have to steal some photos from her later on.

As we dove into the four tiered cake and gathered around her dining room table, the conversation suddenly took a turn towards attending to finding birthparents.

I don't know how we got on it - I think it started out as an arbitrary topic and ended up with the birthday girl telling a story about how she never wanted to ever find her birthfather - that she knew who he was, but that he never gave a damn about her so why should she try to find him? She ended with, "Nothing ever comes good of that - I am totally against the whole search thing, nothing ever comes good so it's not even worth bothering to try."

And it got me thinking - am I, too, against the whole search thing? Is that the subconscious thought in my head that has really stopped me from taking all of the many chances that I have had to go back to Korea and find my birthparents?

I just got another offer last week from a program that helps adoptees take their first journey back home. I could easily take that trip and then head over to the G.O.A'L. office and ask Dae-won to help me find them. Put in the search application.

And even though I kept the email in my inbox, I know that I probably won't take the offer. In fact, I know for a fact that I won't take the offer. And it's starting to bug me as to what my real reasoning behind it is. I keep telling myself that I would never be able to get the time off from work to go on that two week trip like that. I tell myself that I wouldn't want to go alone if I did take that trip - so if I had to go alone, I would skip out.

But jobs come a dime a dozen (if you're not too picky), and I only have one pair of birthparents. Two people that aren't going to be immortal forever and ever. So why am I not rushing?

The answer? I don't know. I think that it is something there that digs a lot deeper into the surface that I am not yet ready to uncover just yet. I thought I had this all figured out - and that I would go back and find them - and we'd live partially a f&cked-up life of twists and turns between my adoptive parents and my birthparents. And I was okay with that. But in recent times, I have found that my answer to that age old question of: "Have you ever thought about looking for your birthparents?" has gone from a "oh yeah, totally. I really want to." to a "Uhhh, I'm not sure, I am kinda taking it easy right now."

It's like asking a person whether they've decided to take the Low Carbs diet or not. And it's killing me that I am still so undecided.

Trying to come to terms...

This boy wants to play, there's no time left today
It's a shame 'cause he has to go home
This boy got to work, got to sweat
just to pay what he gets to get left all alone

Well let's step outside, let's go for a ride just for a while
Oh we won't get caught, well that's what I thought
until we cried

I'm still here
but it hasn't been easy
I'm sure that you had your reasons
I'm scared of all this emotion
For years I've been holding it down
For years I've been holding it down

This girl tries her best every day
but it's all gone to waste cause there's no one around
This girl, she can draw, she can paint, likes to dance,
she can skate - now she don't make a sound
We'll play in the park, till it's too dark for us to see
We'll make our way home, with mud on our clothes,
she won't be pleased...

I'm still here
but it hasn't been easy
I'm sure that you had your reasons
I'm scared of all this emotion
For years I've been holding it down

And I love to forgive and forget
so I'll try to put all this behind us
Just know that my arms are wide open
The older that I get the more that I know
Well it's time to let this go...

I've got to let it go, I've got to let it go
I've got to let it go, I've got to let it go

I'm still here,
but it hasn't been easy
I'm sure that you had your reasons
I'm scared of all this emotion
For years I've been holding it down

And I'd love to forgive and forget
So I tried to put all this behind us
Just know that my arms are wide open
The older I get the more that I know...

And I'd love to forgive and forget
So I tried to put all this behind us
Just know that my arms are wide open
The older I get the more that I know
Well it's time to let this go


-"This Boy" by James Morrison

Tonight is THE night....

Ugh, I have a speech to give in Speech class tonight. It's the second one that I have done so far (this class is the accelerated class and is going sooo fast!) and I am not looking forward to it.

1. Because I just came up with the topic two minutes ago on my lunch break.

2. Because I also have a quiz on Ch. 10 in the same class tonight.

3. Because it's the last topic that I wanted to do a speech on but the only thing that could come to my mind.

The topic of the speech was "If I could go back in time for a day where, when would I go? Who would I see? Why? What would I take with me and what would I take back?"

Where would I go? I kept sitting there trying to think of some lame topic that would hopefully take me two minutes to come up with - but it seemed like the lame topics were taking me longer.

My mind kept dwindling back to the same thought and I guess that it was my heart, really, telling me what my topic should be: So... if I could go back in time for a day... I would go back to 1985 in Seoul, South Korea, somewhere in those farmlands, and find my birthparents right before I was born.

I would want to show them that I turned out okay. I would want to tell them that I think about them every day and that I wish that things had turned out differently that both them and my adoptive parents could be in my life.

I would want them to know that I graduated high school, that I have a good job, that I want to be in the medical field. I would want my mother to know that I don't hate her for the letter that she sent to America a few months after I left. I want her to know that I forgive them and that if anything, I thank them for not giving up on me, and letting me live so that I could have the life I have lived so far.

Gosh, I just know I am going to burst into tears in class tonight. Exactly what I didn't want to do.

When the memories come...

I was 3 months old when I came off the plane in BWI Airport from Korea into the arms of my mother and father. For so long, I was told to be happy that I didn't own any devastating infancy memories of abandonment or abuse. But the fact of the matter is, I don't own any memories at all. Well, that's not completely true.

They say that a newborn's first years are the most understated and underrated years of life. There are parenting books that say just because they are newborns or babies doesn't mean that what you do as a parent or caretaker won't mean anything and it doesn't mean that babies won't have memories, too. I wasn't sure how much of this I believed until my memories started rushing in. And in the strangest and most memorable times.

It wasn't until my sophomore year of high school that I got my first "memory" of the Homeland and of my birthparents. I was really sick and to this day, it was never really diagnosed fully what I had experienced (although after going to six different medical specialists I had six different diagnoses: IBD, some rare form of IBD, small intestine inflammation, etc.). Regardless, I was in the worst pain that I had ever been in in my life. By the middle of 10th grade, I had to be removed from school and placed in a hospital. At my time of arrival, I weighed in at 75 lbs. because my body couldn't hold any of the food that I put in it and I was constantly nauseated by my own stomach acid. They placed me on IVs and then stuck me in a hospital bed. During my stay, my close Korean friend came to visit me, and sat down at my bedside. I remember just being completely out of it as he tried to talk to me. But then, all of a sudden, I felt his hand touch my cheek, and I heard the soft sound of his voice as he began to sing "San Toki".

But even though the small conscious part of me recognized that it was him who was singing, for some reason, I heard a woman's instead. A softer voice, and then the touch of a cooler, softer hand, and I closed my eyes and just clung to this feeling. It was this warm feeling that rushed over me, as if the warmth were someone trying to guide me into memory, as if to say "You've been here before. You know it this place."

A week later, I was completely healthy and returned home. I told my friend all about it, and was so excited and yet overwhelmed by how much this one instance had stuck with me, and had left me with this bittersweet happiness.

He said, "Eun-jung ee, don't you know? That was your hangukae uhma singing to you. You can remember now."

From then on, memories of her seep through me. And I think about her and him on a regular basis. What do they look like? Are they proud of me? Do they know I am not angry at them? Do they know that I am not sad at how things turned out? Do they know that I want to be a part of their lives? Do they want to be a part of mine?