All You Can Ever Know

by Nicole Chung

  Of course, there were risks. My birth parents might not want to talk to me. I might not like what I found. And I still felt it was not my place to make demands of them. It would be terrible to be given up all over again, when I was old enough to understand the rejection.

  Then, too, I knew my decision would surprise many people, including some who had known me for most of my life. I could barely imagine explaining this to my husband. How would I tell my adoptive parents? My friends from college, my friends from home? I’d been so insistent in my declarations about the goodness of adoption and how nothing was “missing” from my life. I’d have to brace for my parents’ reactions; for all the people who might say, I thought you said you didn’t care about meeting your birth family.

  That was my old line from childhood, one of so many I’d faithfully learned, one I’d used to deflect the notice and the nosy questions I had not wanted to answer. Maybe it was also what I had long believed. But people changed their minds—people changed themselves all the time, for all sorts of reasons. And my biggest reason was approximately the size of a plum, twelve weeks now and counting.

  This realization welled up, overflowing in another discovery: I had nothing to prove any longer. Even if I still felt the need to assert my love for my adoptive parents, or defend my family to people who had no idea how it felt or what it meant to be adopted, that did not mean I had to forever deny all interest in the people who’d given me life. It was time to lay down the burden of being “the good adoptee,” the grateful little girl who’d been lost and then found. Who cared what anyone thought of my decision? Who cared about their questions?

  The most important question now, the one I was finally ready to ask, was so urgent I almost felt I could see it, suspended in the air; hear it whispered in my own voice.

  What do you want?

  I wanted to find them.

  All the doubts, the risks, my fear about what people might think or say fell away as I faced this truth. And I knew it was right; there was no need to ask myself again. I felt shaken, but absolutely sure. This hadn’t always been my answer—perhaps even now it wasn’t the best or the smartest one. But it was what I wanted.

  I wanted to write to them.

  I wanted to know everything they were willing to tell me.

  How much had my birth parents struggled when making the decision to place me for adoption? How did they feel about it now? How much might I resemble my sisters? What would it be like to meet them, to hear a voice or look into a face that was like my own?

  I wondered how often my birth family talked about me—if they ever prayed for me, or wished for some way to know that I was all right. Suddenly very little seemed to separate us. And maybe that had always been true, especially if they really had cared about me; if they had known me once. As my thoughts reached out to them, all at once I could envision hundreds of gossamer-thin threads of history and love, curiosity and memory, built up slowly across the time and space between us—a web of connections too delicate to be seen or touched, too strong to be completely severed.

  Part II

  So, you’re looking for a search angel?”

  According to Washington State law, under which I was placed for adoption in 1981, adoption records are now part of the public record. An adopted person can request a copy of the original birth certificate, on which the birth parents’ full names appear, and use the information to find them. Birth parents and other parties to adoption who don’t want their information released by the state can file a contact preference form stating as much. But legislation opening most Washington State adoptions went into effect only in July 2014. At the time I searched, my adoption records had to be accessed and shared with me by a confidential adoption intermediary, and then only after my birth family approved the information exchange. The policy made a kind of sense to me back then, though I now believe that access to basic information about one’s origins, especially crucial medical and social history, is a right no state should limit.

  When I searched, the intermediary represented one more hurdle, and an expensive one at that. Researching the process, I learned that many intermediaries called themselves “search angels,” perhaps because it made their role sound largely altruistic. The term called to mind search-and-rescue volunteers, the patron saint of lost items, or perhaps a religious-leaning matchmaker. I could never bring myself to use it without a slight eye roll.

  “I’ve been a search angel for years. I think of it as my vocation,” the first intermediary I spoke with told me over the phone. “I charge five hundred dollars up front, and five hundred once I get your adoption file for you.”

  “How did you get into this”—I almost said “business,” but despite the mention of her fee, that word didn’t seem quite right—“service?”

  Her story came pouring out: like many single women facing unplanned pregnancy in past decades, she was pressured to let her child be adopted by a couple who could provide “a better life” and allow her to “move on” with hers. She always regretted the decision, and as she told me this, I felt sorrowful and angry on her behalf.

  “When I found my child, she wasn’t ready to see me at first. I kept calling until she agreed to meet,” she said. At this, I began to feel uneasy. Is that what she would do with my birth parents? She proudly told me that she had facilitated five hundred reunions, and I got the distinct feeling she already thought of me as Reunion Number 501.

  “I’m very open to meeting my birth family,” I told her. “But if they don’t want to be in contact, I’ll respect that. I don’t want them pressured in any way.”

  “So what you’re saying is you’re healthy,” she laughed. I felt stung, and rather alarmed. “Good for you!”

  I had a brief vision of this person ringing up my birth parents—or just showing up on their doorstep!—intent on coaxing them into a reunion with the daughter they had not seen in nearly twenty-seven years. She might imply that they owed me a meeting for the sake of my personal healing; never mind their shock, or what they actually wanted. Did my own feelings and wishes matter to her? Or would I be just another tally mark in her book of saved lives?

  I worked my way down the list. There was the man who told me he pitied people like me with our “prehistoric” closed adoptions, and the woman who said I had no business writing to my birth family unless I was ready to fly out and meet them immediately: “Think of how it would make them feel if you sent a letter and didn’t even want to see them!” There was a social worker and fellow adoptee who seemed compassionate and understanding, but after our first conversation I never heard from her again. I desperately wanted to hire someone who would listen, understand the unique circumstances of my placement, and see us all as individuals with our own feelings and histories to be respected. Did an intermediary exist who wouldn’t view my birth parents or me as a cause?

  Weeks into my search for an intermediary, I began to wish it were possible, and legal, for me to acquire my birth parents’ contact information and reach out to them myself. It would be terrifying, I knew, and perhaps they would have a harder time refusing me than an intermediary if they wanted to cut off contact, but at least I trusted myself. I did not trust any of the strangers with whom I’d spoken.

  Finally I received a call back from an intermediary named Donna, for whom I’d left a message weeks earlier. She told me she was relatively new to search-angel work. We chatted for an hour. Donna was taken aback, as many other intermediaries had been, because I was not writing to specifically ask for a meeting right away. But she did agree that, in principle, it was better not to press or demand; when the time came, we would proceed slowly and carefully with my birth parents.

  In the blessed nonqueasy, high-energy days of my second trimester, I sent Donna a deposit and a notarized form authorizing her to petition the court for my sealed adoption file. She told me it would be several weeks before we heard anything. “I’ll call you as soon as I have it in my hands,” she promised.
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br />   Dan had been surprised again when I told him about my decision to search for my birth parents while pregnant, and this worried me. If he could not understand the choice I had made, I felt sure no one else would. But his surprise soon made way for happiness and questions about the search and the intermediary’s role and how I felt about the prospect of finding my parents—and my sisters.

  “You know, I always picture your sisters as older versions of you,” he said. “No matter what, it would be so amazing if you could meet them!”

  For weeks, while I waited for Donna to complete the bureaucratic slog and secure my adoption file, Dan had been the only person in my life who knew all about my search, as well as the reasons for it. I didn’t want well-meaning friends checking up on my progress, asking whether I’d found or heard from my birth family. I especially did not want my parents’ words of—hurt? caution? fear?—rattling in my brain as I waited. So my own search for truth included this early lie of omission: I did not tell them I was looking for my birth family because I wanted to find them and perhaps be in contact. Instead I said that I had hired an intermediary to request an updated medical history on my behalf, and let my parents believe this was all I wanted.

  They were still surprised; I was pregnant, after all, and I had a lot going on, didn’t I? I expected more questions, perhaps an open objection to my plan. When they told me on the phone, “Okay, let us know what you find out,” I wondered if their expressions matched the calmness of their words.

  I tried not to recall the cautionary tales they’d told me about adoptees who should have been more wary of their birth families, or the way my mother had once said, You’re our daughter, no one else’s! in a joke attempt that struck me, even at the time, as strange and a little desperate. I couldn’t have said why their possessiveness bothered me, but in retrospect I can see that it both slammed the door on my birth mother’s one attempt at contact and made me feel rather like an object to be hoarded—cherished, certainly, but still a kind of commodity, not a person with a will and history of her own.

  To my relief, my parents accepted my medical excuse for searching and left it at that—and so, for the time being, did I. Looking back I don’t see how they could possibly have objected, given that I was pregnant with their grandchild and citing the most practical reason to search. And it was so easy for us not to talk about it, both because my birth parents had long been an awkward if not quite off-limits subject between us, and because all my own parents really wanted to talk about during my pregnancy was the pregnancy itself. How was I feeling? Had we gotten a crib yet? What we were going to name the baby? I answered these questions cheerfully, eager to keep their focus on their grandchild—and so this excitement dominated our every conversation, keeping them happy and distracting us all from questions about my other family.

  Now that I was well beyond my first trimester and capable of doing more than plowing through my work day, eating fruit popsicles and saltines with unsalted tops, and falling asleep to Murder, She Wrote reruns on the couch at eight p.m., I knew it was time to shift to information-gathering mode—but anxiety about labor and delivery held me back.

  While Dan checked out and read nine different pregnancy guides from the library, I created a baby registry, renewed my first aid/CPR certification, and obsessed over whether I was eating enough protein. It was not until we signed up for a birthing information session at our nearest hospital that I finally squared up to the disturbing fact that I had very little idea what labor involved, yet was—unfairly!—the one expected to go through it. And not just go through it, but make a “birth plan” and direct the entire operation. I had a general idea of the size of my cervix and the size of a newborn’s head, so I was particularly keen to find out how women in the throes of labor and childbirth coped with pain. (Thus far, the most painful experience of my life had been the couple of days following my tonsillectomy in third grade.) But instead of explaining what we could expect during labor or offering suggestions on how to manage it, the hospital staff merely went over the check-in process, recited how many babies were delivered at the hospital last year, and gave us a tour of the hospital’s state-of-the-art birthing suite—adding that we would be confined to the bed during labor, and therefore unable to walk around the birthing suite.

  On the drive home, feeling foolish and stress-eating a granola bar I had brought along in my purse (pregnancy having taught me, if nothing else, that I should never be without snacks), I could not stop asking myself why I had ever believed I was ready to have children. I can’t do this, I thought, I can’t. I will panic, I will seize up, I will be ripped apart.

  If being adopted had made my longing for biological family especially strong, in my mind it also made me uniquely ill-prepared for childbirth. I’d done my best to suppress my fears, because I did want to have children. I knew it was theoretically possible to carry and birth a child. But I still found it impossible to imagine, and that hardly seemed a good sign. For weeks, too, I had been consumed with the adoption search and just trying not to throw up in public, please. Now I was staring down my second and third trimesters with a disappearing waistline to prove it, and I still didn’t know what the birth would be like. I was already a failure as a mother, and I hadn’t even really begun.

  What I needed now were solid facts, clear instructions. I had always found comfort in the known, in things I could control. But I couldn’t ask the person I most wanted to talk to about all of this: my own mother had never given birth. And as for the one who had—bearing a baby who was too small and fragile, like I had been, was one of my greatest fears in all this. I felt the powerful and utterly foreign desire for someone, anyone, to tell me what to do.

  Dan understood that I would feel better once I had facts and a real plan, as well as some illusion of control over the uncontrollable. He told me he would find “a real birth class.” True to his word, he signed us up for a class with a natural childbirth instructor, starting in October. “She said the class will cover the stages of labor, pain-management techniques, pregnancy exercises, diet, and nutrition.” As he said this, I felt a stir of hope that could also have been heartburn. “And there’s a workbook.”

  When we arrived at the home of our childbirth instructor, Brenda, she was arranging candles in an earthen vessel filled with sand. Brenda’s son, who had shown us into the room, cleared his throat to get his mother’s attention, then retreated with the quick step of a middle-school-aged boy in the same room as a gigantic poster of a uterus. “Welcome,” Brenda said, smiling warmly at us. “Please take a seat. Try and sit with your legs crossed, tailor-style—it strengthens your pelvic floor muscles and opens up your birth canal.”

  I glanced at Dan. I think we had both expected an icebreaker, some getting-to-know-you chitchat, before we began casually throwing around terms like pelvic floor. Even my gynecologist, not the world’s chattiest health-care provider, would typically ask how I was feeling and make some sort of general comment about the weather before pulling out the stirrups. After a quick, wordless conversation, Dan and I chose two seats and watched as Brenda began lighting her candles.

  As a kid in Oregon I’d sometimes visited the pungent health-food store with my mother, but I had never thought of myself as a crunchy person. While Mom was forever extolling the benefits of various herbs and vitamins, going so far as to mail me plastic bottles full of supplements intended to “boost” this or “replenish” that, I preferred to attack unpleasant symptoms with strong prescriptions. “Time to bring out the big guns, Doctor,” I had been known to say. “What kind of drugs can we throw at this cough?” Enduring labor with less pain medication than I might take for a bad headache was not, for me, a particular point of pride. But I was floundering, and I needed solid information; someone who would take me by the hand and say, This is what will happen. You will be okay. And if that person could not be my own mother, perhaps Brenda would do.

  Brenda lit the final candle she had pressed into the sand—a long white
taper in the center, surrounded by smaller votives. “These are my birth candles,” she explained, setting the dish on the hearth. “One of my students just called to tell me that she’s in labor. Whenever I get a labor call, I light the birth candles and keep them burning until I hear that the baby has been born. Would either of you like some red raspberry leaf tea? It helps tone and strengthen your uterus.”

  I politely declined. “Maybe just some water, thanks,” said Dan.

  Additional couples began to arrive. After we introduced ourselves, Brenda handed out the promised workbooks and Dan opened at once to the first page. What to expect in early-stage labor. “See the pictures of the cervix, beginning to dilate and become effaced?” she asked, as if we could miss them.

  One of the other students asked Brenda about her own births. “With my first child, first-stage labor lasted about twelve hours, and that felt right to me,” she said. “With my second, it went so quickly that I had almost no time between contractions. I didn’t get to finish my birth art.”

  Dan dutifully scribbled notes as Brenda talked about early labor, and I was suddenly reminded of the one and only class we’d ever taken together, months before we started dating—a philosophy course taught by a professor who managed to be sarcastic and deathly dull at the same time. After a couple of weeks, I skipped most lectures out of pure disgust, while Dan, a biomedical engineering major who didn’t even need the class, went to every lecture except for one on a particularly gorgeous spring afternoon when I convinced him to play hooky and sit out on the quad with me. I did keep up with the reading, and I think in the end we both got A’s, but Dan probably learned a lot more than I did. The problem, of course, was that now he could neither prepare for nor give birth for me, and I doubted that any amount of grudging independent reading or last-minute cramming would help me once labor started.