Journey of a Thousand of Miles: Transracial Adoption

While riding on a bus in Korea with my friend Mark, he bent his face close to mine and said, “Transracial adoption is a journey of thousands of miles.” Mark was adopted from Korea, he is a father, and he is endearing and wise. It took me about ten minutes to realize that he was talking about “my journey” and not the one my daughter and son were walking. 

Just being a mother is enough to send anyone searching for a thousand answers. Add the dynamic of transracial adoption braided in, with the dynamics adoption brings. But those are things I have plentiful hands-on experience and much book-read knowledge of. Except these things came to me packaged with an emphasis on how I can produce a well-balanced child. But not on how I could become well balanced and how my identity as a mother would grow and change as my children grew into adulthood. 

The more I learned the more I discovered the need to let myself feel vulnerable and admit that sometimes my behaviors in the area of adoptive motherhood were thwarted and of self-interest. And sometimes I just plain didn't know how to move in those areas where the line between being mom to a son and daughter adopted from Korea, and being mom to a daughter who is not adopted, became blurry. 

I thought I’d learned all of this when my kids reached adulthood, and I was willing to listen, and really hear what their peer group of adopted adults had to say about the throng of us who are known as adoptive parents. It's occurred to me we must renew our vows and pay attention, for the times they are a changing—as the song goes. Our children must own the rights to their adoption information and story. This is not a new concept. It’s a line of thinking that has held fast for years. But sometimes parents are slow at catching on, delayed in understanding the harm we bragging adoptive parents unintentionally cause. 

Now I know plenty of parents who claim their young children have given them permission to tell or write their story. I made this mistake when my kids were young. And when they reached adulthood, when the time came to publish my memoir, Pushing up the Sky, we sat nose-to-nose agreeing on which version of the book manuscript to place in the public domain. Some of the things they had given me permission to publish when they were ten, eleven and twelve were no longer up for grabs. We need to remember that children are still children, and they do not yet have the maturity to give up custody of their history and grant us permission to become their voice. Therefore as responsible parents we hold our children’s adoption story in trust. That’s when the real work began, when I had to stop hiding behind my kids and find my own voice, and meet the side of myself that is separate from my children. 

Since my daughters are adults now and live on their own, and my fifteen year-old son died from cancer and joined his ancestors in the spirit world in 1999, I’m alone more often, and I continue to meet myself each day in surprising situations that force me to do more growing up and confront my changing adoptive parent identity. 

Something else I stumbled across on the bus ride through Korea is that some of us (myself included) spend a great deal of time thinking adoptive parent thoughts. Those words—adoptive parent. It has a joyous ring to some of us, though not to everyone. Maybe it's something about the term adoptive parent that keeps some of us stuck. After all, we worked hard to become parents and we want it to sick. Still the word parent is an identifier best describing those who are still parenting children under the age of 18 or 19. Or 20 and 21, for those of us who are late bloomers and slow at letting go. 

Who ARE we when we aren’t busy being an adoptive parent? Parental, fatherly, father like; maternal, motherly, mother like. Thankfully we will always be a father or a mother. But if we will always be viewed within the adoption triad only as adoptive parents, even when our sons and daughters reach adulthood and are living independent lives, will it allow us to stretch, to climb beyond the boundary and further grow as people? Is there a point where we can perhaps graduate to alumni adoptive parent, and move eventually to retired adoptive parent status? If we took a step back would it be easer for our sons and daughters to feel the clout to move into adulthood without feeling a need to fight for the right to grow up? Or maybe growing up is hard to do no matter what. 

I’m plenty old and it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier. Meanwhile, while I’m falling back into an active adoptive parent thinking mode, and momentarily voicing the opinion of others—something else I became aware of in Korea after walking a mile in someone else’s shoes is that all of the adopted adults I know find it difficult to be seen as a charity case. It wore on their spirit while growing up, and it is time we adoptive parents tossed the rescue model. Parenting is a selfish act. We didn’t become parents because we wanted to save an orphan we become parents because we desperately want a child. It’s unhealthy and bad parenting to allow any kid to live with the pressure of believing their parents saved them. 

My mind raced as the bus rolled along in Korea, across the motherland of my children, and it continued racing when I reached Colorado and walked the good land where my grandfather’s 94-year-old twin sister still lives, and I could feel something settling inside me. Truth to tell, early in our friendship I made the comment to my friend Mark that I was old enough to be his mother. I’m not of course, and he nailed me on it. Few eight year olds give birth and eight year olds don’t adopt children. Yet being a parent is how I’ve learned recognize myself. My parenthood status stands sacred and cherished above all else. When a needy child who is not my own cries, I want to help and I’ve caught myself saying, “once a parent always a parent.” 

Now I realize there is another way I can enrich my life as a mother, and that is to step out of my parenting mode whenever I’m in the presence of anyone over the age of 18 and meet them women to women, friend to friend, colleague to colleague, instead of parent to child. I can even offer to help; yet I’ll have to ditch the adoptive parental thing of being all-knowing with a take-charge attitude. Because it was the thing that drove me batty on our 14-day trip throughout Korea; all those parents, parenting day after day. They even parented each other, and they parented me, when their kid/teen/adult sons and daughters were off doing kid/teen/adult things. 

And I’m not sure how, but I figured out the best way to become a better mother is to give myself the gift of sometimes not looking at the world through my parenting lenses, and I made this discovery while walking the good Colorado land I call home. 

First published in Adoption Today. © 2007 Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.

Back in those days, in South Korea

The summer of 1998, according to the neighbors in Cho'nan, was the hottest in recent memory. The family we were staying with didn't speak English. Thirty seconds after my fourteen-year old son and I arrived for our week-long visit, the neighbor women began to arrive, all with children in tow. Round-faced women, apron-bound, carried pots of ice-cold shikye sweet rice drink, platters of pindaettok mung bean pancakes garnished with green leaves of chrysanthemum and red pepper slices. 

Low tables were pulled out, one for the children and another for the women. Everybody sat cross-legged, loose-limbed, all but me. I on the other hand, had one knee propped up like an old bent apple tree. 

After we finished eating, over at the kids’ table, I watched my son throwing himself into a game of Mancala. My son was born in Korea. I adopted him when he was a year-old. Although his Korean language skills were limited, undaunted, he taught the group how to play the game. We brought the Mancala game as a gift and immediately it was a huge success. The children, communicating in grunts and shrieks, played for hours.

The afternoon sunlight glimmered from the window and changed from goldenrod to a rosy red sunset while the neighbor women laughed and chatted. I smiled and nodded my head. This was partly to draw attention away from my lack of verbal abilities. After two years of Korean language school I knew how to speak only with nouns and verbs. There were benefits, I'd discovered, of abstaining from speech. It gave me time to draw in the raw powerful language that flowed so freely from these women.

Like the others I was content, embraced in the peace of the moment. I could see into the summer of a year in my own childhood. And if only in mind I was again in my grandma's kitchen, gathered with my deep-eyed Indigenous aunties with their high cheeked faces. 

Around midnight somebody pulled out a Korean-English dictionary, and I was able to grasp that the plan was to wake up in time for an early morning hike, then go to the bathhouse. I’d never been to a Korean bathhouse, and I loved hiking. I drifted off to sleep looking forward to the morning.

Instead I woke up in the middle of the night with a stomachache. By seven a.m. I was worse, and called my son. “Get the Korean dictionary and look up the word for illness, and go get Young Oh's mother. Just say Ohma, and point to the word that means sick.”

I fell asleep and opened my eyes to see many black-haired, high-cheeked women standing over me. It was noon; my skin was grayish.

"You go to doctor," one of the women said in English.

"I'll be better in a little while." I argued. I pushed the skin on my leg, and it dented like it was made out of clay. 

 "Okay, doctor." I agreed.

The neighborhood clinic was new and modern, spotlessly clean with a Korean-style squatter toilet. I sank to my knees and vomited again. The doctor didn't speak English. A woman translated for him: the diagnosis was food poisoning, probably from eating at an American style fast food hamburger chain the day before in Seoul. I hadn't wanted to eat hamburgers, I prefer Korean food but our train got in late and the only place open was an Americanized hamburger chain, so that's what we ate.

"You get a shot with needle," she translated next. 
"No needle," I insisted. I felt in control. I was sick, but didn't feel overly worried; I'd taken Imodium, the diarrhea had stopped.
"Little needle, not big one," she reported. "Not hurt."
"Let me see the needle,” I demanded. Then because I didn’t know how else to phrase it I requested a fresh needle, using the word “fresh” in a way that was meant to be spoken at the green grocer’s to ask for fresh vegetables. 

The doctor brought out a package of unopened, sterilized needles and a new IV bag containing liquid to replace the body fluids I'd lost. He held it up for me to see, the ingredients were listed in English.

"You better fast," the doctor explained.
"Okay," I agreed and held out my arm. The smell of alcohol drifted over me. 

The neighbor women gathered around me,
"We go home, then come back, get you later ."

My son flashed me a worried look.

"I'll be fine," I announced, and then off they all went.

Meanwhile, while I was in the Korean hospital, an air conditioner hummed in the corner. Outside it was 105, not counting the waves of heat from the pavement. Inside the clinic, cool air blasted around me. My head rested on a green quilted pillowcase. A small voice in my mind kept saying, maybe I ought to be worried. But I didn't feel worried. I was amused.

Although my son was seven years past a brain tumor, he still had a shunt because hydrocephalus persisted. Shunts are such tricky things; like the plumbing in a house they can block and back up or malfunction. At first I worried about traveling outside the US in case something should go wrong with his shunt and he would need to be in the hospital. Yet here we were in Korea, and I was in the hospital. But instead of feeling worried I felt confident I was receiving care equal to, and probably better than that of many medical clinics at home in America, so I closed my eyes and went to sleep.

Later that afternoon Young Oh's mother and her neighbor friends came to get me as promised. "We go to museums now," one of the women said. The doctor told her to make sure they gave me plenty of water and Gatorade to drink.

My son pressed his face next to mine, and whispered, "Do we have to go to museums?"

Even though I was feeling a lot better, I explained to the women that I was still much too weak for an afternoon of walking, so we piled together in the car and went home.

The night before I'd slept in the youngest son's bedroom, in a twin bed. Now I was invited to rest in the master bedroom, on the queen sized tol ch'im dae, a stone bed. It had a wood carved head and footboard and instead of a mattress, the sleeping surface was a polished stone slab, expensive looking, beautiful and hard. After about twenty minutes of resting on this bed, I went into the living room and spent the rest of the afternoon relaxing on the floor.

Rather than holding us apart, my sick day actually strengthened bonds. We were able to share stay-at-home time with our host family in a way that probably wouldn't have happened if I were feeling healthy. 

With help from the Korean-English dictionary I asked Young Oh's mother if she liked swimming or camping. At first she said ahn chu an hey yo which is a polite way to say she didn't care for either. But I pressed her further; finally she giggled and said the Korean word that meant she hated swimming and camping.

I pointed to myself and said that I liked both. 
Young Oh's mother fell into the game. "Indoor girl," she said pointing to herself. 
"Outdoor girl," she said pointing to me. 
We laughed. 
My son looked up the Korean word for fisherman and pointed to himself. 

There were moments of real intimacy between us. We had time to rest and shore up. I was fed homey Korean comfort foods, soothing creamed rice dishes, with cucumber kimchi on the side of course. I discovered Mee Hwang delighted in inviting friends over and treating them with her home cooked food. In the neighborhood just the mention of her name made everyone think of her delicious meals.

“Sometimes when I smell rice cooking, and everybody is singing in Korean, I can remember being a baby in Korea,” my son admitted. “It’s not a regular memory I can think about as long as I want. It’s much quicker than that.” 

He was delighted to play big brother to the younger kids. Making paper airplanes and an afternoon of watching Korean cartoons were simple things that still warmed his heart. 

The kids pulled board games out of the closet, and the whole house felt warm with our day together. Or maybe it was the kimchi tchigae simmering on the stove. Whatever, it was awfully nice.

—an excerpt from Pushing up the Sky, a memoir by Terra Trevor

Author's Note

I've traveled to Korea many times since that long ago day, and each time culturally specific memories of growing up American Indian sneak up on me unexpectedly. It doesn't matter that the conversations taking place are in Korean, each time I feel the power of togetherness, it needs no translation.