Southwest Moonlight and Making Babies

Fall, 1972. “I want to cancel my appointment,” I told the woman at the front desk. “Instead of birth control counseling I need a pregnancy test.” The doctor at the Clinic rubbed his beard. “If you are pregnant and don’t have any money you’ll have to apply for welfare.” He scribbled an address and phone number on a piece of paper and handed it to me. 

The next morning at the social welfare office, under bad fluorescent lighting, I filled out the forms. The clerk took my paperwork and motioned for me to sit down. “Number thirty-two,” the social worker called out. I was number fifty-six. My shorts were soaked with sweat, and my bare legs stuck to the orange plastic chair. The room was filled with women and crying babies. I thought of my mother at age fifteen, pregnant with me. Finally my number was called. I was led into a windowless office. The social worker lit a cigarette, and smoke poured from her nose like a dragon. 

“Are you giving the baby up for adoption?” She asked. The question unnerved me. She eyeballed me up and down and hissed, “You’ve written down that you are American Indian—if it was going to be a white baby it would be easier to find a family to adopt it.” 

I clenched my jaw to stay calm. Brown haired and green eyed, most strangers didn’t place me as Native American and the father of my child-to-be was a full blood. This was my first glimpse at the way race and culture collided in adoption. I was a nineteen-year-old, unmarried college student, and pregnancy caught me unprepared to become someone’s mother. 

Though we spoke occasionally on the telephone, my relationship with R. was over. It had ended weeks before on a windy night in Nevada, under a climbing moon. The next day I headed home to California. Underneath my embarrassment about repeating the family cycle of unplanned teenage pregnancy, especially when I’d been so determined not to, there were moments when I smiled as the baby swelled within me. But I was certain I was not ready to be a mother. Or was I? Before I made a decision, however, I miscarried. At least I did not have to surrender my child to another. 

Twelve winters later, in 1984, I sat in the lobby of Holt International Adoption Services. The room was decorated in pastel wallpaper, with a nubby textured sofa. This time I was married and on the receiving end of adoption. Within the next twenty-four hours my husband and I were due to become the parents of a one-year-old Korean boy. 

As our son grew up I knew he would wonder about his first mother, his Korean mother. Perhaps it's wishful thinking, but I like to believe his mother is a lot like me, but was forced to make a decision that I did not have to make. 

An excerpt from Pushing up the Sky: A Mother's Story.
Copyright © 2006 Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.

An All-American Korean American 4th of July

An armload of bulgogi covers the grill and a circle of friends surround the barbecue. Everyone has a pair of chopsticks in hand and turn slices of the sizzling beef. A picnic table is laden with platters of pindaettok, mandu, heaping bowls of kimchi, chap chae, and romaine lettuce leaves with red bean sauce for dipping. There is plenty of sliced watermelon of course, and three rice cookers stand ready in a row. There is laughter around the table.

After another helping of dry cuttle fish, after we eat as much food as we can hold, we find a grassy spot under a shade tree, pull out a folk guitar, stretch back on the grass, and sing. The familiar melody has me humming along, while the group sings the lyrics in Korean. Most of the time I forget that my husband, our youngest daughter and I are the only ones who are not Korean. At these gatherings all my friends are Korean American, like two of my children. The afternoon leaves me with a contented feeling, a sense of belonging, like I have when I go to a family reunion. 

However, my friends within the Korean community didn’t feel like family in the beginning, way back in 1987, when my three kids were then 4, 6 and 10. I needed to reach deep with faith, because in giving my kids the opportunity to grow up within an all-Asian group I also had to let go of them a bit in order to allow them to find their place within the Korean community and to learn to identify and express themselves as Korean adoptees, instead of trying to fit into the stereotypical Korean model everyone expected them to be.

I’ve heard adoptive parents say they want the Korean American community to accept their family on the adoptive parents terms and not to absorb their kids. They don’t want them to take over. But I’ve never felt this way. I wanted my children to have the same opportunity to be immersed in the Korean community and discover their identity, as I did growing up mixed-blood Native American within Indian country. The difference is Korean culture was initially unfamiliar to me. We were making new friends and I was allowing them to take my children into a world unknown to me.

I remember my grandmother’s words. “Child,” she said, “We’re Indians, and our culture has been scattered into odds and bits, but American Indian people are determined to keep our life ways alive.” 

I wanted to give my kids what was given to me, to make it possible for them to gather bits and pieces of Korean culture and braid it into our lives, and show them how to hold their heritage high. While my son and my oldest daughter explored the constantly evolving questions of what it means to be Korean American, and my younger daughter who is mixed-blood Indian and Irish, grew increasingly more diverse, and my husband and I sank in roots and worked to build lasting relationships, and to let our new friends know that our interest in doing so was genuine. 

For three decades our Korean community gatherings provided me with some of the deepest sharing I’ve ever known. At the picnic we rest just long enough for our food to settle, and then it is time to play games. There are sack races, three-legged races, a water balloon toss, followed by a scavenger hunt. Everyone plays, the grandmas and grandpas, even babies are encouraged to join in, and there is always someone willing to lend a helping hand.

I find it wildly wonderful that fancy equipment is not needed for our game playing. We have a ball, a blindfold, two gunnysacks and we have each other. Just people enjoying one another, a day of slowing down and relaxing at the park, it’s not always an easy thing to find.

First published in Adoption Today. Reprinted in The Huffington Post, and in a wide variety of publications.

Copyright © 2007 Terra Trevor. All rights reserved.