All You Can Ever Know

by Nicole Chung

  The lawyer had never expected any of the parents to request a change in the agreement. She could try to contact the adoptive parents, she told the birth mother, or forward a letter if they were still living at the same address. But the decision to allow contact was entirely theirs. Birth parents had no legal rights once an adoption was finalized. Even if all parties had agreed to a more open adoption arrangement at the time of placement—with, say, the exchange of regular letters, photos, and phone calls—the birth parents would have had to rely on verbal promises. The adoptive family had the right to cut off contact, at any time, with or without an explanation.

  Kathy did send a letter explaining the birth mother’s request. It was difficult to imagine the girl’s adoptive parents viewing it as anything other than an attempted breach of their closed-adoption agreement. She couldn’t imagine they would be pleased. She remembered how adamant they had been, throughout the adoption proceedings, about limiting any communication between the two families. They hadn’t been able to hide their apprehension about the girl’s birth family, hadn’t even wanted to know her original parents’ names. To them, the stability of the placement, the child’s security and well-being, required the drawing of a hard, bright line between her family of origin and their own.

  Weeks passed without any reply, and the wait did not surprise her. When Kathy finally received a response from the adoptive parents, it did not come as a surprise, either. Their report was so general it might have been about any child. Anyone.

  She’s doing well. She’s healthy. She’s an excellent student.

  Kathy was welcome to share these updates with their daughter’s birth mother, they said. They weren’t comfortable sending any pictures.

  Please, they added, tell her we don’t want to be in contact.

  Did you ever wonder how I ended up with you and Mom as my parents, and not someone else?”

  My father and I were watching SportsCenter or Baseball Tonight, sharing a pizza he had brought home after his closing shift at the restaurant he managed when I was in high school. I’m not sure what made me ask that evening—maybe I was just feeling philosophical. Like many people who know there is nothing for them in their hometown, I’d had one foot out the door all through high school. I might have been imagining those other, potentially more thrilling lives I could have led, now that the one I’d felt stuck in for so long was about to change course. “I mean, it’s so random, don’t you think?” I pressed him. “I could’ve been adopted by anyone.”

  My father has always been a joker, and it’s a challenge for him to respond seriously, even to the most earnest questions. But this time, his answer was swift and sure, delivered with the ring of gospel truth. “God wanted us to have you,” he said. “Too many things had to happen for us to adopt you. It never would have happened unless God planned it.”

  He recounted the familiar story of how Liz had learned about me, how she’d shared my story with my parents. Such was my parents’ gratitude that they asked her and her husband to be my godparents; they met me just once, on the day they stood next to my parents in our town’s only Catholic church and pledged to pray for me and help raise me in the Faith. I had always found it strange that I had this eternal connection to them, forged by chance and confirmed in the sacrament of baptism; that Liz, this messenger figure in family folklore, a person I could not even remember meeting, was in our lives just long enough to introduce my parents to me.

  As Dad redirected his eyes to the parade of baseball highlights, I thought again of my godmother, the baptism captured in faded photos in a royal-blue album, and all the twists and turns that had led to my adoption. I’d been raised to believe in miracles, the handiwork of a loving and involved deity. My family’s devout Catholic faith had often functioned as a kind of substitute for the Korean heritage I had lost, and I was very much under its sway: from Nativity plays and Lenten soup suppers to the holy cards stuffed in my Bible and the tiny cross my mother traced on my forehead before I went to school, there was rhythm and ritual in my Catholic upbringing, a sense of purpose and interconnectedness. I had long found comfort in it.

  This wasn’t the first time one of my parents had presented my adoption as a thing divinely ordered, almost biblical, though we all knew I hadn’t been found in a watertight basket, plucked from the reeds. Now, when I considered all the factors, both known and unknown, that led to my adoption, I could no longer believe that anyone had planned it. I had always been told that my birth parents wished they had been able to keep me. If that were true, why didn’t God care what they wanted?

  Today I can understand why the idea of a providential adoption appealed to my parents. I’ve heard such sentiments echoed by adoptive parents over the years. Declarations like “We were meant to be” and “We were made for each other!” are not limited to romantic pairings; the words also ring true to many adoptive parents, religious or not, who cannot imagine their lives without their children. How many parents can? And who can question the rightness of a blessing sent from God?

  If adopting a certain child is fated, ordained, it is easier to gloss over real loss and inequity, to justify the separation of a parent and a child. In my parents’ case, I am sure that trusting in God’s will for our family lent additional meaning to their long, sometimes painful wait to become parents.

  But I think they also wanted to believe the Lord sent me to them because it was not always easy to know how to raise me. Even if we did not often talk about it, they knew that I struggled with not looking like them, that I had never quite felt I belonged in this place where I’d been planted. It must have been comforting, when they felt challenged or even lost, to believe that our family had been constructed by an all-knowing God, that it was predestined and so could not fail, no matter what.

  I must have taken the box down again that day in high school because, after years of ignoring it where it gathered dust on the shelf, it had occurred to me that some of the words on those old, creased sheets of paper inside might make more sense than they had when I was a little girl.

  The older I got, the less my parents and I felt the urge to retread what was, for us, ancient and settled history. But lack of conversation was not, on my part at least, lack of curiosity; while I did not often question aloud the foundational myth I’d been given, I was always alert for any clues that might fill in the gaps between guesses and facts. If my adoption was mentioned, I perked up, listening for a dropped hint, a new revelation.

  And sometimes I also snooped. It was easy: our house wasn’t large; none of us ever had much privacy. There were only so many places where my parents could attempt to store precious items, things of a sensitive nature. I knew that my mother kept her favorite pieces of jewelry, including the antique amethyst-and-garnet ring her aunt had given her, in the bottom compartment of a polished myrtlewood jewelry box. I knew that my father had a signed baseball, a box containing his only tie clip, and the strawberry-patterned dress I’d worn home from the Seattle hospital buried under a layer of socks in the top drawer of his dresser.

  So of course I also knew about the ornately carved wooden box, about the same depth as a shoebox but twice as wide, up on a high shelf in their closet. When I was little, I pretended the box was a treasure chest; more than once I imagined burying it in the backyard and trying to convince the neighbor kids to follow a hand-drawn treasure map leading to it. I searched the box once while I was very young, disappointed to discover that it contained nothing more exciting than a pair of cufflinks my father never wore, my parents’ marriage certificate, a few photos of my mom’s late father and my dad’s late mother, and papers that meant nothing to me.

  When I decided to search it again, the first thing of interest was a slightly faded legal-size envelope buried among the photographs, stamped with a Seattle address. Inside was a bill for five hundred dollars and a business card that read:

  KATHY L. SANDERSON

  ATTORNEY-AT-LAW

  Suddenly I felt like an amat
eur sleuth from one of the mystery series I’d read and loved as a child. But I wasn’t Nancy Drew, girl detective, nor was I snooping into a stranger’s secrets—this clue could lead me to information about my own life. My parents had told me that my adoption was handled by a private attorney, not an agency. Was this her?

  A bill for five hundred dollars somehow seemed both too large and too small if what you were buying was a baby.

  I wrote down the phone number of Kathy L. Sanderson, attorney-at-law, threw everything back into the box, and replaced it on the top shelf. Then I locked myself in the spare room, sat down on our lumpy blue futon, and reached for the phone I had bought in eighth grade with my saved-up allowance money. At the time I’d thought the phone was the height of cool: you could see rainbow wires and gears through the plastic outer shell of the receiver, and the numbers lit up when it rang. I dialed the number for Kathy L. Sanderson—nervously, guiltily, half an ear awake to the sound of one of my parents arriving home.

  After a few rings, a woman answered, her voice cool and professional. “Kathy Sanderson’s office.”

  “Hello.” I sounded like a child, even to myself. “Is this Kath—Ms. Sanderson?”

  “She’s not in right now. May I ask who’s calling?”

  I gave my full name, spelling it out. She asked what the call was regarding. I wasn’t sure whether the truth would serve me well, but it had taken all my nerve just to dial, and I couldn’t think of a lie. “I think she handled my adoption in 1981,” I said. “I wanted to ask her some questions about it.”

  My heart was racing. By now I felt less like a detective, more like a criminal. Should I just hang up? What was I going to say if Kathy Sanderson actually called me back?

  A phrase, one I’d heard in the crime procedurals and court dramatizations I watched with my grandparents, skipped through my mind. Attorney/client privilege. She probably couldn’t tell me anything. My parents had paid her five hundred dollars, and that made her their representative, not mine.

  The woman didn’t laugh or tell me to stop wasting her time. She dutifully took down our home number—another snag. I didn’t have my own phone line; it was an expense my parents never would have considered. What would Mom and Dad think if Kathy called our home number and asked for me? As I hung up, I berated myself for acting so desperately.

  Though I couldn’t resist calling back once more, later that week or maybe the following, to leave another message, Kathy and I would not actually speak until many years later. She was my parents’ faithful advocate to the last: when she did finally take my call, I believe with some reluctance, to answer every question I had, it was only because they had asked her to.

  “Who was the attorney who handled my adoption?” I asked my mother with feigned calm, not long after my secret call to Kathy L. Sanderson’s office.

  “Kathy,” she said, after a pause.

  I noted the absence of a last name. Had she forgotten, or did she not want me to know?

  “How much did you have to pay for my adoption?”

  “It wasn’t as much as it could have been, fortunately.” My parents’ income was a constant source of anxiety in our lives—also why I’d fretted about grades and test scores and financial aid for college since I was in junior high. “You know, you’d have been a steal at twice the price,” Mom added.

  If she was becoming suspicious, at least she was still talking. I asked if she or Dad had heard from the attorney at any point after my adoption. I waited for her to shake her head and say no, they never talked to the lawyer again; no, she had never come back with any more news for them. If they had learned anything more, heard anything more, wouldn’t I already know?

  “We heard from the lawyer once when you were younger,” she said. As she spoke, her voice unusually hesitant, I realized I’d been holding my breath. “Your birth mother asked her to get in touch with us.”

  My birth mother had tried to reach out to us. To me. Of all the things I could have learned, this was the very last I expected. I felt like a puppet, pulled taut by invisible strings. All I could do was waver, wait to react to the next jerk, the next shock.

  My mother continued chopping and stirring and preparing our dinner in the same kitchen I’d known all my life, with its dark brown paneling and the linoleum floor that was always a little sticky. From where I stood, I could see the old electric stove I hated to scrub, the white Formica table where we ate dinner most nights, and the sight of my mother calmly working on our meal after what she had revealed. It was her outward calmness that lit my fury and smoked my questions out. “What did she say? What did she want to know?”

  “Your mother wanted to know how you were,” Mom said. I was shocked—my parents never referred to my birth mother as your mother. “She wanted to know if you were all right. She asked for a picture of you. And . . . she said she wanted to talk to you, maybe see you in person.”

  The words fell like stones into a still pond, sending ripples of surprise and apprehension through the room. But I knew the possibility presented by my birth mother’s curiosity must have been dead on arrival. My parents would have told her no.

  We had never met, so they must have.

  My mother confirmed that they hadn’t been “comfortable” sharing photographs or detailed information. I was shocked by the casualness of her tone, whether or not it was assumed. She spoke as if we talked of my birth parents every day. As if it would mean nothing to me, this revelation that my birth mother had once tried to write to us. No, Mom said, she and Dad never seriously considered meeting her or allowing her to talk with me.

  I could not picture such a conversation—a meeting?—taking place when I was little; the very idea frightened me a little. As a child, I recalled, sometimes I’d had nightmares about my birth parents showing up to take me with them. But whether it was in my best interest or not, now or then, I was upset that I’d never been allowed to decide for myself. Why couldn’t we have talked on the phone, after we heard from my birth mother? Why couldn’t my parents have allowed her—me—that much? I might have heard her voice. I might have heard her tell me, just once, that she had cared about me.

  “We told her that you were happy and healthy,” my mother volunteered. “We said you were doing well in school.”

  I nodded, though I hadn’t been happy in grade school. Now, from a distance of some years, with good friends I loved and valued, I could see even more clearly what a trial elementary school had been. I had been anxious every day; sometimes bullied, though my parents still didn’t know the worst of it. I had been convinced that my biggest flaw, my physical appearance, was offensive and irredeemable. And while I was glad my birth mother didn’t know about any of this—glad my parents hadn’t told her the truth, because she had given me up so I would be happy—sometimes I wondered if I’d have had the courage to tell my Korean parents what I had never told my adoptive parents. I wondered if they might have understood me, or at least understood that pain, better than my white family.

  “Where’s the letter?” I asked. I had to see it. I could not understand why I hadn’t. This was proof that my birth mother had cared. “I want to read it. Now. Was her name on it?”

  Mom sighed. “If she signed her name, honey, I don’t remember what it was. We don’t have the letter anymore.”

  My age always shifts when I talk with my parents about the time my birth mother reached out to us. You were five or six, they’ll say, or maybe seven or eight? The lawyer doesn’t remember the year, either, though when we spoke she did remember meeting my birth mother and communicating her request to my parents.

  There is much I cannot remember about my later conversation with my mother—my exact age; what my mom looked like at the time; if it was during or after her breast cancer scare during my sophomore year of high school, when I consciously tried not to argue with her because I’d faced the terrifying possibility of losing her; if I’d already begun looking ahead and applying to college and living with one
eye always on the door. I don’t remember the meal Mom prepared that night, or whether we all actually sat down together and ate it. But I remember her telling me that my birth mother had spoken of a sister when she met the lawyer again; I might even have sisters, she said, emphasizing the plural. How many? I asked. How old are they? Why were they kept when I wasn’t? I will never forget the way my mother shook her head when I asked why she couldn’t remember more; why she and my father had thrown away the only evidence of my birth mother’s curiosity, her one and only attempt at contact. I remember her suggestion of a shrug, and the fact that while an explanation came later, there was never an apology. I remember how she wouldn’t look directly at me as she said, simply, “It was a long time ago.”

  And though I pushed for more details about the letter itself—Was it typed or handwritten? Signed or anonymous?—neither of my parents would ever be able to remember anything else about it. I still don’t know what I would have done if I’d been told about the attempted contact as a child. But I know I would have felt comforted. Maybe even relieved. Back then, the mystery I wondered about more than anything else was why my first parents had given me up. I knew some of the practical reasons: money, my health—but I did wonder if there were other reasons, too; if something about me had simply failed to move them, command their love or loyalty.

  This is a question that, on one hand, makes little sense—many birth parents make the decision to place their children for adoption before they even give birth, and at any rate, what can a newborn or a small child do, or not do, to offend her parents? Yet when I talk with other adoptees, particularly those who don’t know their birth families, I know I’m not the only one who’s ever wondered: Was it something we did, as babies, as little children? Something we lacked that made us easier, possible, to part with?

  I’ve never met an adoptee who has blamed their birth parents for their decision—we’re more likely to turn inward, looking for fault. Growing up, I know it would have made an enormous difference to know that I was worthy of memory. That they still cared. That the adoption was not my fault. And although I learned of my birth mother’s overture years too late to respond, I did feel better just knowing she had tried. I wasn’t forgotten. Not entirely.