My parents had informed their families that they wanted the day of my arrival to be private, i.e., no grandparents or other relatives, just the two of them and my brothers. After a suitable time of bonding with me at home in Verona, they would then invite small groups of the family to visit. As is typical with my family, nobody listened or complied because that plan sounded really boring. My paternal grandmother, my father’s brother, and my maternal grandparents all “happened to be at JFK airport” that day. It wasn’t all bad. There were little coin-operated TVs attached to chairs in the waiting area, and my grandfather would plunk in quarters so my brothers, now six and two, could have something to keep them busy.
Nine other adoptive families were also waiting for this flight. Suddenly a plane was spotted out the window of the terminal, slowly taxiing in their direction, and just as suddenly stopping. My brothers jumped from their TVs and glued their faces to the window. Let’s be honest, they were thrilled to see an airplane so close—they didn’t jump out of their seats in anticipation of my arrival.
All nine families watched and waited. Most of the passengers had already deplaned at another gate, so only the nine Korean babies and one medical student, the escort, remained on board. One escort taking care of nine babies all the way from Seoul . . . a fourteen-hour flight! I would have hated being on that plane. Oops, I was.
There was a social worker from Spence-Chapin waiting with the families, who explained that only one family member could go aboard to collect the baby. My father jumped to attention. He was the first in line to board the plane, but the last to come off. He had to go from baby to baby, searching for the wrist bracelet that said “Futerman,” so it had taken him a while to find me in the far back, bundled in a yellow knitted ensemble complete with matching booties with appliquéd butterflies, handmade for me by my foster mother.
When my father finally emerged, he was beaming so proudly that in photos his broad smile could be seen even under his massively oversized Super Mario mustache. He held me facing forward so that everyone in the family could see me. Grand entrance, indeed.
Mom said I wasn’t alone in being fashionably dressed—all the babies wore adorable little outfits and looked extremely cared for and loved. When Dad and I reached her, I looked right into her eyes with the biggest, most beautiful smile she had ever seen, and all of her fears from the night before disappeared. I looked so confident and self-assured, as if I recognized the whole family and immediately knew that they were mine. I’m still amazed how in a matter of seconds, I took complete control of the family, and I was only four months old. I was theirs, and they were mine, and everything couldn’t have been better.
My mother got to hold me for a brief moment before the grandmothers descended on me, and I was passed around from grandma to grandma to grandpa to uncle. The pictures we have from that day are awesome reminders of the monumental event.
Everything at JFK did not go completely smoothly. As my mother relaxed into comfortable mom-under-control mode with her (now!) three well-behaved kids, my brother Andrew took on the power challenge. He had gotten it into his head that the families could pick the baby they wanted from the airplane. I was as bald as Daddy Warbucks, but Andrew had seen some of the other parents come off the plane with babies sporting really cool hairstyles, and he wanted one of those. He had a special liking for one with a tiny Mohawk. My mother was mortified, having been trying to impress the social worker with how “perfect” her family was. But now she was carrying Andrew like a football tucked under her arm out of the airport while he screamed, “I didn’t want that one, I wanted the one with the Mohawk!” It was my day, but Andrew was trying to steal the attention. His middle-child syndrome had begun.
From JFK, the family went back to my maternal grandparents’ house, where lunch and a baby shower were held in my honor. My mom said that the days that followed were busy, crazy, and wonderful, the love she felt for me growing boundlessly. It wasn’t always easy. There were days when she was overwhelmed with the needs of three children. Laundry quadrupled in the basement. My brothers, while loving me immediately and taking great pride in playing with me, also acted out. Matt had never been easy when a new baby came. Several weeks after Andrew had been born, he wanted to know, “When does that kid go back?” So, Matt acting out for attention when I came home was not a surprise. Andrew also had his moments. His best came when my father was going on a business trip. Mom told him Dad would be going to the airport soon. Andrew looked at her with total horror and asked: “He’s not getting another kid, is he?”
I was two years old when I was formally adopted on March 22, 1990. Four months later, on July 17, I became a U.S. citizen and received my Certificate of Citizenship. Pictures of that day show me at a huge family barbecue in my backyard on the Fourth of July. I am dressed in a fun red, white, and blue outfit. I have a fleeting memory of my mother trying to pose me next to my brothers for photos, although all I wanted to do was climb on the swing set. I wore the same patriotic dress at the swearing-in ceremony thirteen days later. That event even made the front page of the local paper, the Verona–Cedar Grove Times. Mom had sent them a little announcement, expecting it to run in the “Births” column. Instead, a reporter came to the house for an interview with her and a picture of me, dressed in the outfit and waving an American flag. My mom still has several yellowed copies of the paper.
When I was growing up, my mother used to read me stories of adoption. My favorite one was The Mulberry Bird: An Adoption Story by Anne Braff Brodzinsky. I loved hearing about how the single mother bird came to the decision to give her baby boy bird to a family of birds that could better take care of him. I loved the happy ending. I could always sleep well after that.
Some adoptees have a real aha! moment when they realize what it means to be adopted: that they were taken from or given away by their parents and raised by others not in their genetic lineage. Because I didn’t look like my parents, I didn’t need such enlightenment. Adoption was just a part of my life, and my definition, and my vocabulary. I think my parents did it right. It wasn’t an issue or something that I did wrong, it just was.
My mother taught me that my birth parents loved me very much, and that they had given me up because they wanted me to have a better life. I believed it, and I still do now. Whether or not my birth mother’s intentions at the time were bad or good, she gave me up because she couldn’t provide for me. That is love. Yes, she didn’t raise me, but she could have flushed me down a toilet or left me in the trash to die, but instead, she brought me somewhere with the hope that I would have a better life.
Not that I didn’t have my share of awkward moments about my identity. At times, people would stop my parents and say things like, “Oh, your child is Chinese . . .” Most people, especially my schoolmates, just assumed I was Chinese or Japanese. The kids in my school didn’t really know where Korea was. When I told them I was Korean, they said, “Where is that?” and I shrugged and replied, “Near Japan?” To be honest, I didn’t really know myself. But it didn’t matter. They just said, “Oh, okay,” and that was that. They dropped it, so I did, too.
On one of my early birthdays, my mother found me in my bedroom hiding under my covers, quite distraught. “Do you think that woman ever thinks about me?” I asked her.
Mom knew exactly who I was talking about. “You can call her your mother,” she told me.
“You are my mother,” I said.
“Okay, your birth mother,” Mom corrected. “And yes, she does think about you. She just couldn’t keep you.” At the time, my parents believed that my birth mother had been fourteen years old when she gave birth to me, the same age Matt was now. “Look at your brother,” she said. “Is he old enough to be a daddy?”
“No,” I agreed.
“Well, your mother wasn’t old enough to be a mother to you.”
Mom’s explanation satisfied me. I thought about my birth mother from time to time, but
even though I didn’t dwell on her, I worried about her. I wondered if she was safe, had enough to eat, had a place to live, things that I had but wasn’t sure she had. I was Sam Futerman, Korean, yes, but ultimately American.
My parents tried to encourage an interest in Korea, but never forced it upon me. They were exceptional in reading my wants and needs. When I said I wanted to do martial arts, they enrolled me in Tae Kwon Do. Andrew also took lessons, which made it that much more compelling. I never wanted him to be too many levels ahead of me. Every year, the Tae Kwon Do studio would throw a Korean party, where they served Korean food. They also offered Korean language lessons, which I tried for a while, but lost interest. Why would I want to study more after school was over? I liked Tae Kwon Do for the rubber knives and nunchucks, and looking cool in front of my brothers and their friends.
I had a Korean friend, another girl from my class at school. My mother liked that I could share a Korean heritage with at least one other person. She and Dad offered to enroll me in a true Korean school in nearby Fort Lee for weekend studies, but I wasn’t interested. I just stuck with the Tae Kwon Do and the Korean food to satisfy my cultural appetite. I fully accepted that I lived surrounded by Americans in a predominantly white neighborhood. I identified myself as an American, not a Korean, and very few people ever made me feel like I was an outsider.
Verona, my hometown, is eleven miles from Manhattan. It is a cute little village around two miles wide, with a big park featuring a man-made lake. It also has an amazing corner deli near the middle school, where I would always eat the #7 sub, a delicious sandwich consisting of ham, salami, provolone, tomato, onions, shredded lettuce, oil, and vinegar, with a “mudslide,” fries with cheese and gravy, on the side. But despite this Jersey delicacy, my favorite part about Verona is the abundance of pizza places and nail salons. As you drive down the main drag, Bloomfield Avenue, you will be flanked by Ray’s Pizza, Paradiso Nail Salon, Nail Story Spa, Capri, Verona Pizza, Tiara Nails, Nail Art II, Anthony Franco’s, and Frank Anthony’s, two different pizza parlors—not kidding. Many scenes from HBO’s hit series The Sopranos used Verona as the backdrop. It is an upper-middle-class commuter town, with lots of Hondas and Toyotas, and well-kept houses on quarter-acre yards.
The only house I ever remember living in is the one where my parents still live today. It’s an old three-story, East Coast Tudor with wood floors, dark windows, and lots of creepy creaks and sounds. The dark was scary, as were the hallways and stairwells. I would always picture seeing someone not in my family coming out of the darkness.
For a long time, my brothers and I slept on the floor in my parents’ room, which was the third floor, a gabled attic converted into a master bedroom. To reach it, we had to go up a staircase far narrower than the staircase between the first and second floors. My parents had the bed, and the kids had the floor. I hated when I had to sleep in the spot at the foot of the bed close to the stairway, but by standard sibling sleep rotation, that was where I ended up. When Dad was away on business trips, at least two of us got to sleep in bed next to Mom.
My father traveled internationally for work quite a bit and would be gone for a couple of weeks at a time. Although two weeks might be an exaggeration, it was definitely an eternity. I really didn’t mind when he left, because that meant more room in bed with Mom, and I knew he’d bring me home a cool present. I’d always get a beautiful doll or a dress from overseas.
My father is a certified public accountant. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, but he grew up in Flushing, Queens, where the family moved when his little brother, Robert, was born. The two boys were five years apart. My grandfather Jerry was a printer, and my grandmother Lillian worked as a bookkeeper. They owned a co-op, although they always dreamed about buying a house. My grandfather died of a heart attack when my father was twenty-four.
My mother also grew up in Queens, but in College Point, not Flushing. She was the oldest of Jack and Dorothy Urban’s two children. Her brother, my uncle Daniel, was ten years younger. My grandfather worked many different jobs, his last being a manager/supervisor for a company that made baseboard heating and swimming pools. I never really knew what my grandfather’s occupation was until my parents told me after he passed away. All I knew was that he made me cool wood carvings and taught me how to fire a shotgun in the woods. My grandmother had some part-time jobs, usually at the post office, to make extra money for Christmas. The family lived in the first-floor apartment of a two-family home, which they rented from the couple who owned the house and lived upstairs. My mom was so fond of them, she called them “aunt” and “uncle.” When they died, they stipulated in their will that my grandparents could buy the property at the price they had paid many years earlier.
My parents met at Queens College night school. My mother was earning her graduate degree in English and creative writing with a minor in the legend of King Arthur. My father was majoring in accounting. They met in the same communications class, and then dated for four years. The fact that my father was Jewish and my mother was Catholic did not affect the relationship, nor did the fact that my father had been married before and had a young son named Jeremy.
My father proposed to my mother at a New York Mets game at Shea Stadium, the same place he had taken her on their first date. My mom loved him, so she had learned to enjoy baseball, and this day was a doubleheader. Dad put the engagement ring in a box of Cracker Jacks that he had bought previously and resealed with a hair dryer. During the game, he went to the concession stand and returned with a soda and the “loaded” Cracker Jacks box. My mother didn’t like Cracker Jacks, however. She took the box and put it under her seat, forcing him to insist she open it, pretending he wanted some for himself. The ring was right on top. They were married at Saint Fidelis Church in College Point in 1976, the same year the Bordiers were married in Troyes, France. My parents’ first apartment was in Queens, across the street from a New York City garbage dump. The bedroom was so small, it could just fit the bed. My father worked for Sony Corporation, and when the headquarters moved to New Jersey, my parents moved, too. They bought a tiny Cape in Pompton Lakes, not too far from Verona. Mom worked as a secretary for Mobil Oil Corporation in New York City, so she commuted until Matt was born, when she became a stay-at-home mom. Eventually, they moved to Verona to have a yard big enough for a play set and a house big enough for the children to have their own rooms.
My bedroom was my fortress. That didn’t mean I still didn’t sleep with either the TV or the light on. I used to have nightmares about wolves and rabid guinea pigs, and the light helped. I think the guinea pig thing was guilt, because I went through about four guinea pigs in one year. Our house was a menagerie—fish, dogs, birds, rodents—but I was never great with animals. My parakeets and hamsters didn’t end up well, which always made me feel really bad. I would lose interest in about a month and forget to feed them. Luckily, my mom would do it for me. My room had a bluish-purple wall-to-wall carpet and a beautiful cherry bedroom set that I had found by going to every furniture store in existence.
My parents were great about letting my room be my space, and I loved perfecting it. My brothers were slobs, and their rooms reflected it, but my room was my sanctuary, my place to let it out if I was upset because someone was mean to me at school, or when I was older, because I didn’t get a part that I had auditioned for. I would go upstairs, close the door, and cry by myself. I was constantly rearranging my bed and dressers to find the perfect fit and energy. I was always making improvements, so much so that I thought I would be an interior designer.
Growing up, I was a “mommy’s girl,” always wanting to be held in her arms. From there, I could look up into her beautiful blue eyes. I also loved her pale Irish skin and her ever-changing shades of reddish-blond hair. I remember my dad would dye it for her in the kitchen sink. He would dye his own hair—his mustache and his eyebrows—in the guest bathroom off of the dining room, but for whatever reason, Mom’s hair was don
e in the kitchen.
My mother was my hero. While she was the nurturer, I knew if she said “no” on something, I could convince my dad to take my side. He was the man of the house, and then it was two against one. My dad taught me how to have thick skin and a sense of humor at the same time. He wasn’t home a lot, but my brothers and I never resented that. It made it a treat and more exciting when he was. We would see his headlights in the driveway at the end of the day, and we would run to hide. My hiding places were never great. Sometimes, I would crouch in plain view and cover my face. Not smart, but I was under pressure. Dad always went along with it and made me feel like gold. Then, he would pick me up by my feet and dangle me in midair. When he kissed me, his mustache would scratch my face.
My brothers have always been my protectors and my support. We grew up with lots and lots of screaming, wrestling, and putting each other in headlocks, but all in good fun. They never made me feel like I didn’t belong. Most of the time, we all forget that I didn’t come from my mother, too. Granted, I didn’t have the experience of living with my birth mother, so I don’t know how a connection like that would differ. But I did come from my mother. I came from her heart, her hopes, and her wishes. A lot of babies are “mistakes” or “surprises,” but my parents had to sacrifice a lot to get me.
My brothers taught me how to survive in school, how to win video games, and how to play every kind of sport. If their friends weren’t available, they could force me into learning how to be “Player B” on Duck Hunt or Donkey Kong, or teach me how to play H-O-R-S-E or stickball. I was like their pet. But I wanted them to think I was cool, so I learned what they wanted me to. If I didn’t want to play with them, they would come into my room to get me. My mother told me to just ignore them and they would go away. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.
Matt and Andrew have very different temperaments. Matt is quiet and introverted. While Andrew and I were running around the house playing, Matt was locked away in his room doing his own thing. He wasn’t an attention seeker, although I think he sometimes resented that Andrew and I demanded so much attention and got it. Matt wanted to be recognized for his accomplishments without marketing them. He is very artistic. He used to make amazing cartoons and doodles. I looked up to him and wanted him to be proud of me.
Separated @ Birth: A True Love Story of Twin Sisters Reunited Page 7