All You Can Ever Know

by Nicole Chung

  The midwife’s questions started out easy enough: When was my birthday? Was this my first pregnancy? How far along did I think I was? I answered quickly; I knew the sooner we completed the forms, the sooner we could listen to the heartbeat.

  But when she asked me how many brothers and sisters I had, I hesitated. I didn’t know how to answer. This was a simple question, wasn’t it? The obvious reply—and true in its way—would be “zero.” I had been raised an only child. My entire biological family was contained, right here, within my own body.

  Yet ever since I was a little girl, I’d been told my birth parents likely had other children. The lawyer had mentioned a sister, and the limited birth family social history I’d received a couple of years earlier had confirmed that my birth parents did have other daughters when I was born. I still did not know their exact ages, their names, or anything more about them, but that had not stopped me from trying to imagine them—sisters who would have known me, grown up with me, if not for my adoption.

  The midwife was still waiting patiently, and now, beneath my indecision, I was aware of another kind of fear. “I’m adopted,” I said. It sounded like an apology, even to my ears. I felt even worse.

  She asked if I knew how old my mother—sorry, your birth mother—was when I was born. I shook my head. How about the birth itself? Did I have any record of how it went? I told her about my premature arrival, the two and a half months I spent in the hospital. When I said, a little panic crowding my words together, that I didn’t know about any pregnancy complications or illnesses that ran in the family, didn’t even know what had caused my mother’s early labor, the midwife looked up from her clipboard with a gentle smile. When it came to pregnancy, she said, some things could be hereditary. Knowing how it went for my mother might help us guess how things would go for me. But if I didn’t have that information, that was fine; we’d just make do without it.

  Her voice was calm, confident—a voice anyone would find reassuring in the throes of labor. Still, I felt uneasy as I watched her skim, then skip the rest of the questions.

  Everything I knew of my life began on the day I was adopted. It was as if I had simply sprung into being as the five-pound, chubby-cheeked two-month-old my parents picked up at the hospital. I’d always found it difficult to imagine my birth mother pregnant with me, difficult to grasp that my existence had been entirely dependent on a woman I would never know. In all the years I had spent thinking about my birth family, my thoughts had rarely turned to unknown facts about my mother’s pregnancy. I was young and healthy; I hadn’t yet begun to worry about aging, illness, genetics catching up with me. When I pictured my birth mother, I did not picture her pregnant. I pictured her holding me and saying goodbye.

  Now that I was pregnant, those mysterious months my birth mother had spent carrying me suddenly seemed far more important. What had pregnancy been like for her? Why had she gone into labor so early? What if the same thing happened to me?

  Dan and I had moved to North Carolina in 2005 just days after our second anniversary; he was a doctoral student, I was the breadwinner, and we were first-time homeowners. Like my own parents, we had married very young. Well-meaning questions and criticism, even the knowledge that we were severely alarming some of our relatives, only hardened our resolve.

  For me at least, the concept of family had always been determined and defined by the actions of others. By the time I reached adulthood, I had been geographically and financially independent from my own parents for four years, and possessed an only child’s overgrown sense of confidence in my choices combined with an adoptee’s innate belief that family was something you made—something you built through sheer force of will. As a young woman, I wasn’t afraid of getting married, nor was I afraid of remaining single; what I feared was the threat of passivity—being powerless, like I had been as a baby, to determine my own future.

  We probably should have been more afraid to bet on our young marriage, but we were too young to have built up a real fear of commitment or change; too trusting and sure of each other to doubt that we’d make it. We have been married for fourteen years. When we talk about it now, we are quick to laugh and admit that it could have been a disaster. It’s funny only because it worked out; because we have been together, and lucky, for so long.

  By the spring of 2007, when Dan and I began talking about starting a family, we were still very young, but felt we’d had enough time to ourselves. He was halfway through his PhD program, and we had enough money to pay our mortgage, travel, save a little, and fill the house we’d bought with carefully selected furniture and two cats. I’d been considering applying to creative writing programs, something I had never quite felt ready to do before, and had joined a local writing group so I’d have deadlines and an excuse to work on the stories saved on my hard drive.

  Then I found I no longer had the energy to write in the evenings or sit through long workshop sessions with the group. The reason for my sour stomach and deep exhaustion should have been obvious, but for days I remained in deep denial. Dan and I had been saying Maybe now would be a good time . . . for only two or three months. We weren’t even trying. We had barely stopped not trying.

  I had just assumed it would take longer.

  One morning a few months after my twenty-sixth birthday, I found my husband rinsing his cereal bowl in the kitchen sink, getting ready to leave for campus. I had been staring at the white stick in my hand for what felt like hours, though it could have been only a few minutes. It had taken some time for the disbelieving fog to lift; for my brain to nudge me into action and my shaky legs to carry me downstairs. When Dan turned around, a question in his eyes, I held up the test.

  “Does this look positive to you?”

  In the birth center, the midwife pulled out a new batch of forms and turned to my husband. Dan was so obviously his parents’ child. A quarter inch shy of six feet—exactly his father’s height—with his mother’s wide smile and dark curly hair, a scientist in a family of teachers and more scientists, he could trace half of his family back to county Cork in Ireland, and had grown up hearing stories about the bakery his Lebanese grandparents had owned. Like most people I knew, Dan couldn’t understand what it felt like to lack any and all knowledge of the people who’d created you; to grow up with a family you loved but could never quite recognize. I envied how his answers came so easily, one after another.

  Finally the midwife set down her clipboard and suggested that we have a listen to the heartbeat. The paper stretching over the exam table rustled as I clambered up. Dan’s hand closed around mine; he smiled, as excited as me. This was the moment we’d been waiting for, the moment that I knew would make the weeks of morning sickness and wrung-out exhaustion worth it. The midwife turned on the fetal ultrasound and ran the wand over the slope of my lower belly. We listened to the low hum of the monitor.

  “I think the baby’s hiding.” She didn’t sound concerned, but I felt a stab of fear. What if there’s no heartbeat? There was so much we couldn’t see, couldn’t control, and I had no idea what to expect. Though I couldn’t know it yet, I would come up against this uncertainty over and over again, even though mine turned out to be an easy, low-risk pregnancy.

  Whirrwhirrwhirrwhirr.

  Quiet, pulsing, the rhythm seemed almost too fast. But it was a rhythm, steady and sure. “Is that—?” I began, just as it disappeared.

  All I wanted was to hear it again.

  I held my breath as the wand moved again over my stomach. Come on, baby. The midwife pushed a little harder and turned up the volume, and the whirr suddenly turned into a loud whumpwhumpwhump.

  “Sounds perfect!” she beamed. “About one hundred and sixty beats a minute. Just what it should be.” Seeing the awed look on my face, she laughed and added, “It’s real, I promise.”

  “It’s working so hard,” Dan said.

  The three of us fell silent, listening to that strong and unmistakable rhythm. It was the single best sound I h
ad ever heard.

  Our growing family was more than a wish or a far-off possibility; it was real, the strong heartbeat a thrilling introduction. Our child was racing toward life. Toward us. The wonder and love I felt was the same known by countless mothers before me. I found that thought comforting, somehow—in this, at least, I was normal. I still had trouble thinking of myself as anyone’s biological anything, but loving this baby would be the easy part. It would come naturally. And when our child was born, I wouldn’t be alone anymore. There would be someone who was connected to me in a way no one else had ever been.

  My eyes settled on the print hanging across the room. A woman, black-haired like me, cradled her pregnant belly, gazing down at it with a tender expression. The painting so strongly depicted that physical link, the original connection between parent and utterly vulnerable child. It had always been such a mystery to me—here I was now, in its thrall, and still I couldn’t comprehend it. I pulled my shirt back down and slid my feet to the floor. “Nine months seems like a long time, but it’s really not,” the midwife told us. “You’ll be meeting this baby before you know it.”

  I was going to be a mother. Someone would depend on me. Our relationship would last for the rest of my life; though it had yet to begin, I could not imagine it ending. Yet that was exactly what had happened to the bond between me and my first mother: it had been broken. We had both survived it, learned to live apart, and while I knew this—had known it for as long as I could remember—it had never struck me as unnatural until I heard my own child’s heartbeat.

  Dan and I had our lives to ourselves now, but soon that would change. As incredible as it had been to hear the heartbeat, to realize that we would soon be parents to a real baby, for me our first prenatal appointment had opened up a new source of worry and doubt. Yes, I had to give birth, make sure I was prepared for it. But that was only the beginning. What questions would our child have for me about our family? How could I help them understand and feel connected to their history and heritage when to me it was still little more than a fable? So far, I’d been asked just a few pages’ worth of family information, and I hadn’t been able to supply it.

  As we left the birth center, I couldn’t shake the overwhelming feeling that our baby was destined to inherit a half-empty family tree. I wasn’t even a mother yet, and already the best I could offer was far from good enough.

  When I was young, my family’s view of adoption as identity trump card—more powerful than blood, or appearance, or the bigotry I encountered—made it nearly impossible to imagine, let alone talk about, a future reunion with my birth family. I always understood that my parents didn’t want me to search. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say I understood that they didn’t want me to want to search. I was enough for them, and they wanted to be enough for me.

  But they had also pledged not to stand in my way if I ever decided to find my birth family. When I asked them a version of the question I heard from my first-grade classmate—though of course I wouldn’t have dreamed of using his term, real parents—they always said, “You can look for your birth parents someday if you want to. When you’re grown up.” And so I understood that it was not a decision for a child like me to make, but one for a mature and responsible adult.

  We rarely talked about how or why I might search one day; I was left to ponder this on my own, with the occasional and unreliable supplement of television shows and novels. The few adoption stories I read or saw on TV always seemed to end with the adoption of a child, the focus on the loneliness and destitution from which the child had been saved. If it was a dramatic reunion story, it might end when the adoptee and birth parent (usually the birth mother) found each other—or with the adoptee standing on a stranger’s doorstep, bravely smiling through tears as the door swung open to reveal the unsuspecting parent. In the case of several Masterpiece: Mystery! installments I watched with my mother and grandmother, embittered adoptees whose origins had been carefully hidden—sometimes, even from them—came back as adults to murder their original parents.

  Few of these movies or shows or novels ever showed what happened after the tears or the hugs or the accusations, when people had to cope with new knowledge, to move forward—and choose whether to build a relationship from nothing since the moment of rupture. That was always the part that intrigued me, the part I found so difficult to imagine. Even as a child, I understood that the easy, heartwarming happy ending was the kind of adoption story most people wanted to see. If this realization caused me a slight squirm of discomfort (was that not what my own story recalled, as it was often told to me?), I saw the appeal of such simplicity—though I still longed for stories in which the unvoiced questions, the quiet drama of the everyday adopted experience, did not remain so unexplored.

  I remember a few months before I left for college, Mom and I were driving home from an appointment when she told me that the son of a family friend, Jason, had recently reunited with his birth family. I hadn’t even known he was adopted. “He’s not coming home for Christmas,” Mom told me. “He’s decided to spend the holidays with his birth mother and her other kids. His mother is heartbroken.”

  Jason’s adoptive mother apparently believed her son was upset with them, and that was why he wasn’t coming home this year. I tried to picture Jason, whom I’d seen perhaps once or twice. He was older than me by a few years. I felt a twinge of envy that, as a white kid, he could fit in everywhere and pass for his parents’ biological son. And now he had found his birth family, too.

  “Why is his mom so upset?” I asked, though of course I knew. I believed my mother had no business endorsing what I saw as unreasonable levels of parental sensitivity—she ought to take Jason’s side, or at least try to talk his mother down. I could see why Jason had waited until he was no longer under his parents’ roof to reunite with his biological family. On the heels of this thought came another, more traitorous and vindictive: If his parents can’t handle the thought of him ever knowing his birth family, maybe they shouldn’t have adopted him in the first place.

  “I’m sure Jason’s birth mother would love to have a relationship with him,” Mom said. “But what if that’s not all she wants?”

  She told me she’d heard “lots of stories” about kids who found their birth families and tried getting to know them. And then it had turned out their birth parents were more interested in getting their hands on their adoptive family’s money. She sounded more regretful than judgmental, but I knew we were no longer talking about Jason, or whether his birth mother’s motives were mercenary or pure. This, I understood, was a message for me.

  I wanted to tell her I knew what she was implying, and why. But with the heartless, deadeye aim of a teenager, I also knew I could say something that would upset her more than a direct challenge of the facts. “Jason’s parents shouldn’t make him feel guilty for choosing to spend one holiday with the woman who gave birth to him,” I said. “She’s his mother.”

  Mom’s mouth flattened into a hard line. I could tell she was annoyed now, maybe even hurt, but she absorbed the hit. “I suppose,” she said.

  As we drove on in silence, I almost regretted ending the conversation so defiantly. I wanted to ask if she knew how Jason had found his birth mother, or if she had found him. To me, his adoptive parents’ fears seemed unfounded—how could she possibly lose her son to his birth family? If I ever found mine, I assumed our relationships would resemble pleasant, long-distance friendships. They would never be my refuge, my first call in a crisis. Even if you found your birth family, how could you ever be certain they would stick around? How could you think of them as your real family when they hadn’t been there all along?

  For years I had wondered what my own adoption reunion would look like if it ever came to pass. I still didn’t feel like the adult I knew I would have to be before I considered a search. Yet in a few months I would leave for a college three thousand miles away. Though I was anxious about it—I had long thought of myself as a homebody
, and not a terribly brave one at that—I was eager to move “back east,” as my parents called it, and be on my own. If this was not an acceptable time to consider a search, perhaps that time was drawing near. Would my family support me, as they’d always promised, if that was what I chose? Or would they try to talk me out of it?

  In the days following our first prenatal appointment at the birth center, my mind never strayed far from the court letter with its accompanying list of intermediaries, both stuffed in a folder at the back of our filing cabinet. Though I had long since memorized every line, every fact in the letter from the county adoption office, I found and read it again.

  The timing for a birth family search was no better than it had ever been. I had no idea if it would be possible to find them. Even if I did, what would happen then? How did one go about talking to such close and distant relations? How to restore connections and relationships that were never meant to be broken in the first place?

  I didn’t know if the discoveries would change how I thought about my parents, or the new family Dan and I were just beginning. To upend our hard-won stability by adding any unknown variables might well be foolhardy. Yet ever since the birth center, my mind had been hijacked: What if I did find my birth family? What if I ended up with a richer and more complete story to share with my children, one that would finally unfurl all the branches on my family tree? I could see the faces of my closest relatives. I could know their names. What else might I gain—for me, yes, but also for my future child—if I just stopped being so afraid?

  This had always been a possibility, even if it had seemed farfetched. I had considered it before, made calls, researched what it would involve. My adoptive parents had told me a search was something I could pursue on my own, one day, if I chose to. As a child, of course, that was rather like hearing them say I could become an astronaut or a famous actor or an Olympic athlete—possible, perhaps, but highly improbable. Now I forced myself to acknowledge just how simple it could be: my birth parents weren’t in hiding. Reconnecting would not require a miracle, a private investigator, or a talk show chasing drama for ratings. It would be a matter of pushing some paper around. One letter, one phone call, was all it might take.