[family trip]

I.

2001
We, the family, travelled together with other families with one or several adopted members from S.Korea. It was organized by the main Swedish adoption agency, and gave us a huge discount on living and travelling expenses. We stayed at a 5-star hotel in central Seoul. It was June. It was humid. It was almost unbearable.

It was also the first time I met my birth family.

—

Once, but only once, I’ve met a person who told me I should be angry. I should be angry at my birth mom because she gave me up – what kind of horrible person would give up her own child?How could they abandon me? I think that is something almost every adoptee has asked himself or herself. Maybe every day, even.

I can tell whoever is reading this that I have never once been angry at my birth parents. I have never even questioned the choice they made of giving me up. Did they have other options? My biological parents had siblings of their own, my biological aunt was even present at my birth and she could have been that option. Why go so far as to put me up for adoption, knowing they might never see me again? I have nephews now, Korean nephews by my sisters in Korea and I look forward to the eventual day when my bro here in Sweden gets a kid, I’m mentally prepared to become the super-aunt of all times. So of it had been my niece I would’ve fought to death to keep her with me. I can blame some kind of cultural, very Korean way of thinking of their actions at that time. But I cannot understand so I usually leave it at that.

The moment I met my birth mother, she threw herself into my arms crying and wailing. At that moment she was letting out fourteen years of regret and sadness. Regret for giving up her child, for not being able to keep me with her. A secret of fourteen years let out in the daylight for everyone to see and hear, loud and clear. And I almost wish all first meeting with biological family were like mine. Then no-one could doubt the love our biological family felt for us, probably still feel for us.

Let’s make this clear: to us adoptees, our biological family are strangers. To most of us, all we know about them is the short lines typed on the papers sent with us from the adoption agency, using mostly positive but very vague descriptions of their features and personalities. The me fourteen years old me that day was shocked when a 155 cm-tall stranger threw herself into my arms and started crying and clinging to me. Which is actually the saddest part of all. Because my biological mother knew me even though I couldn’t remember her. I had lived inside of her, in her womb for 9 months and she had given birth to me. She remembered me. She probably felt she had known me for those fourteen years. To me, she was a complete stranger.

to be continued…