Perspective on My Birthday, by an Adoptee

Thank you to everyone for the birthday well wishes. But the only thought I had after my birthday this year was: I survived. 

While I had put it on my To Do List for the day to be well, to be—as so many folks helpfully suggested—happy, that did not end up happening. 

The thing is, for people who have survived infant/mother or child/mother separation, otherwise known as adoptees, sometimes simple things other folks take for granted can be extremely difficult. Like birthdays. 

Waking up at 1 a.m. on my birthday, which is 2 p.m. in Seoul, a desperate need seized me. I had to eat miyeok-guk, the traditional seaweed soup Korean women eat three to five times a day for a month postpartum and that everyone eats on their birthday to honor and remember their mothers. I frantically tried to figure out how to make that happen, but you can’t find it here in restaurants and I don’t know how to make it. 

I wondered then if my birth mother was eating that soup at that exact moment and thinking of me, a practice mentioned by some of the Korean birth mothers I’ve met in the past year. Was my mom remembering how she gave birth to me 39 years ago? Did the strength of her longing to see me call me out of my sleep from half a world away? 

“Do you think she remembers me?” I asked Jesse, rolling over in the middle of the night.

“I don’t think you go through that, carry a child to term and give them life . . . I don’t think that’s very easy to forget,” he said.

And all day, I fought the grief.

Put it off, refused to sit with it.

The grief of having a mother, of knowing her name and the city she lives in, knowing she loved me enough to carry me for nine months and bring me into this world, knowing circumstances beyond both of our control caused our separation and continue to enforce it. 

Maybe she is thinking of me too, grieving in her own way, and yet we will probably never meet. We both must carry that grief, loss and heartache every day of our lives. 

When I visited my adoption agency in Seoul last year, they confirmed that I was relinquished on the day of my birth. 

No one has ever said to me on my birthday, “I’m so sorry this is the anniversary of the day that you were separated from your mother.” But it is.

The poet Toi Derricotte wrote, “Joy is an act of resistance.”

I respect the sentiment; I admire it. But some days, some weeks, some lifetimes, it is unattainable. 

On the anniversary of the day I was separated from my mother—a yahrzeit as well as a birth—I cannot approach joy. I can only hope to carry my grief with dignity, try to meet my heartache with compassion. 

I cuddle with my cat and try not to snap at people I love (not entirely successfully). I order Korean take-out and feel sad because I still have never tasted miyeok-guk. 

For me, survival is an act of resistance. Not eating, starving, drinking, drugging, cutting or working myself to death is an act of resistance. 

Existence is an act of resistance. 

In a world that commodified me and defined me as an economic product from the very hour of my birth—and likely even before–rest is an act of resistance (h/t Tricia Hersey).

The hours pass mercifully.

I do no harm.

Ahimsa.

———————

Here is my birthday list:

Have a birthday - check.

Live 39 years - check.

Be well. 

That may have to wait for another day.