All You Can Ever Know

by Nicole Chung

  Brenda began to demonstrate various labor positions, inviting us to try them with her, and I followed accordingly. Dan had to rub my back, and all I really had to do was arrange my limbs a certain way and then breathe. It wasn’t so bad. “It’s important for moms to stay as relaxed as possible during contractions, and practice good abdominal breathing. Coaches!” Brenda called—this was how she addressed the partners in our class—“while Mom is breathing and relaxing, you can massage her back or shoulders or feet, help her release some tension. You should also encourage her in a low, soothing voice. Tell her she’s doing a good job.”

  “You’re doing a good job,” Dan said, applying more pressure to my lower back.

  Toward the end of the class, we watched a clip from a birth video, during which I learned that there are camera angles and then there are camera angles. My scientist husband was, of course, entirely unfazed. I didn’t close my eyes, but at several points, I fixed my gaze on a point just slightly down and to the right of the television screen, hoping no one would notice I wasn’t actually looking. Once the video was over, Brenda gave us “homework”: many Kegel exercises for those of us who were pregnant; and, for all the couples, at least ten minutes of relaxation techniques a day (“with good abdominal breathing, remember!”) in our favorite labor positions.

  “There are two very important things I want you to keep in mind in the coming weeks,” she said. “The first is that birth is very difficult work. There’s a reason they call it labor. But while it may be challenging, maybe even the hardest thing you have ever done, I want you to remember that you can do it. Your body already knows what to do.”

  I closed my eyes, held on to these words, and tried to believe in them. No more thinking about bad surprises, labor horror stories, or the fact that I had surprised my own birth parents by arriving early, I vowed. No more obsessing over whether our baby would be born too early, too. Instead I called up a recent golden memory: going for a walk on the beach at sundown during a recent trip to the coast, the weekend after we found out we were having a girl. A wave had smacked into my rounded belly as I waded waist-deep in the surf, and I felt her kick—the hardest she ever had before. When I gasped a second later and then began to laugh, it wasn’t because of the shock or the cold, but because her enormous kick had felt like a joyful greeting. It was her. Dan and I had kept our hands pressed to my stomach for hours after, feeling our child turn tiny somersaults.

  Now she moved all the time, never letting me forget her for a moment. Again, I tried to imagine what she would look like. How much she might resemble me, when no one else ever had before.

  Did every person giving birth feel as anxious as I did about the physical reality of pregnancy, or did my adopted experience heighten my feelings of fear and inadequacy? As eager as I was to become a parent, I had always been frightened by the sheer force and power of birth. I had very little idea what would happen to me—my mind and my heart, as well as my body—when our child made her way into the world. But I wanted to believe that our instructor was right about my body knowing what to do. I wanted to have that kind of faith in myself.

  As Dan and I walked to our car after class, I resisted the urge to make a joke about how terrible my birth art and birth poems were going to be. There was a lot I could have highlighted about the strange newness of natural childbirth class, the fear I still harbored about a pain I could not imagine, the doubts I had about what kind of parent I would be. But I could not deny that I felt less anxious than I had in weeks.

  Maybe my intermediary would find my birth family, maybe she wouldn’t—but this life about to begin was its own expanding universe of promise and possibility. One way or another, my family—the one I had chosen to create—was growing. Our child’s birth might prove empowering for me, not simply terrifying, for all its mystery and all my fear.

  I felt suddenly, deeply grateful for Brenda, for her posters and her workbook, for her brace of birth candles shining through the night. She had helped me view birth as something to be understood and cooperated with, something I could do, however unnatural and unknown my own birth story was. In the weeks to come, I would draw so much knowledge and comfort from her class. I would think about her words, her quiet confidence in us, when labor finally began on a chilly midwinter night.

  Dan and I drove home, talking about baby names and nursery paint colors and the crib we still had to purchase. All the time, Brenda’s promise—my new pregnancy mantra—rolled through my mind. You can do this, I told myself. You can.

  While my thoughts often strayed to my birth family and how Donna’s search might be going, the baby was foremost in my mind as I neared the end of the second trimester. One evening in early November, I assigned myself the pleasant job of folding and putting away freshly laundered onesies and footed pajamas in what was to be her room. The small space had recently undergone a transformation from office to nursery, its walls now a cheerful violet, a white wooden crib in one corner and a changing table in another. As I buttoned snaps and smoothed edges on her tiny outfits, I realized that every stitch of clothing the baby currently owned could fit into a single dresser drawer. For someone who would change our lives, she would take up so little space.

  When my phone rang, I glanced down and saw a 206 area code. Seattle. My knees seemed to disappear for the briefest of moments as I fumbled to accept the call, heart already thundering. I knew it wouldn’t be them, of course. It was Donna. Just Donna, and still, my voice shook a little as I said, “Hello?”

  My intermediary didn’t waste time with pleasantries. Nor did she seem especially interested in drawing out the suspense. “I found your birth family, Nicole! Your file is in my hands right now.”

  I clutched the phone tightly so I wouldn’t drop it, lowering myself into the rocking chair. I knew that many of the personal details about my birth parents couldn’t be shared until they had consented to further contact. Still, Donna must be able to share some information, or she wouldn’t have called. “What can you tell me?”

  She seized on the question as though she had been waiting years, not minutes, to share the news. “Not a lot, unfortunately, but what’s here is very interesting! Did you know that you have sisters?”

  I’d long known that I had sisters, though I had never known the precise number, or their names or ages. I tried to imagine them, again, and was unable to picture a single woman who had my eyes, or my smile, or my laugh. But they were out there, somewhere—sisters who might have been my childhood playmates, sisters who might want to meet me.

  Donna told me that two sisters, a half sister and a full one, had been living at home at the time I was born. Then she added, with devastating casualness, “The social worker wrote she got the impression that your parents might have wanted a boy, not another girl.”

  I don’t remember what I said in response. I do remember I suddenly felt like crying. Even though it was speculation, even though I had no way of knowing if it was true.

  Donna said she had found a statement of divorce from 1987; my birth parents now lived in separate states. I would have been six years old at the time they divorced. How old would my sisters have been? What must that have been like for them—to lose a sister to adoption, and then watch their parents split up?

  I had always imagined writing to my birth parents, talking with them, even meeting them, at the same time—never had I imagined a reunion with just one or the other. But perhaps it was not shocking, after all, that their marriage had ended. My adoption must have been enormously stressful, in addition to whatever factors had led to it; many marriages fell apart under less strain.

  Citing my file, Donna confirmed other things I already knew: I was born more than two months early and spent weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit; my birth parents had been given the doctors’ grim prognoses. It was a relief, in a way, to hear the old information repeated, echoes of the history I’d always known. A respite from surprises, before another shock.

  “The so
cial worker thought your birth parents might be worried about what people in their community might think if they brought home a sick baby,” she said. “They also didn’t want to have to explain why you didn’t come home at all. They thought it would be easier if they told everyone, including your sisters, that you had died at birth.”

  Her voice ran ahead, but I no longer wanted to try to keep up. I couldn’t seem to speak, to interrupt or shout at her to stop like I wanted to—I was frozen, staring blankly at the crib and the onesies and the purple-hued quilt my mother-in-law had sewn for the baby. This was worse than hearing about my birth parents’ divorce, worse than wondering if they would have preferred a boy to “another girl.” Had I been easier to give up because I hadn’t been healthy? Had they really spent the years since the adoption denying my existence to everyone—even my own sisters? If so, what kind of people did that make them?

  Had they ever wanted me at all?

  I don’t know how long it was before I realized Donna was still talking. I heard her asking me if I was “thrilled” to be this close to finding my birth parents. She thought this was good news, I realized; she had been waiting for weeks to retrieve my file and now she was able to reveal all the poignant details. Was I going to write to them? she wanted to know. What was the next step?

  Years earlier, when a friend asked if I idealized my birth parents, if I envisioned them as paragons whose absence from my life made them only too easy to imagine and to love, I had scoffed at the question. Of course I know they aren’t perfect! But deep down, I knew that I had cast them as courageous people who made a difficult decision out of love, as many birth parents do. Every snippet of information, every crumb for which I had begged, every tale I’d been told at my mother’s knee bolstered this vision of my biological parents as strong, selfless people who had sacrificed the chance to know and raise me so I could have a better life. It was the story I’d had to believe in, the one I’d treasured because it meant I had been loved.

  On the other end of the line, Donna’s voice finally, mercifully slowed. I knew I had to say something, tell her what I wanted to do, but I had no idea. I felt drained of excitement, of curiosity, even of questions. If I opened my eyes to find my birth parents standing right in front of me, I wouldn’t have known what to say. Who knew what I’d find in pursuit of the truth? Would my child, my husband, thank me for bringing these new relatives into our lives? I had been so sure about my decision to look for them—so sure that I was doing the right thing, for my baby and for myself. What was worse, to know nothing? Or to learn things that broke my heart?

  I didn’t have to write to them. I could just leave them alone. I could be content, leave everything as it was, and maybe—with my new family, with Dan and this baby I loved so much—maybe that would be enough.

  Into the silence, Donna spoke again. “There’s just one more thing you might like to know . . .” I heard paper rustling in the background. “There’s a name here in the file. I guess your parents chose it for you before you were adopted.”

  I felt my heart, which had sunk, begin to thump hard again. A name? One they’d given me? “What was it?”

  “Susan.”

  Susan. Such a pretty, old-fashioned name. I spun through recollections of all the Susans I had ever known: My beloved second-grade teacher. An old friend of the family. A girl who had lived in my dorm in college. I almost laughed: I didn’t look like a Susan.

  I’d always assumed my birth parents hadn’t bothered to give me a name. I’d been in their lives for a few days only, maybe a few hours. If I were giving up the right to raise my child—if I knew I might never see her again—would I still want to give her a name? Would it help, somehow, to remember her by that name, even if I knew she wasn’t going to keep it?

  The name wasn’t much to go on. It wasn’t proof of their love for me. It told me nothing about who they were, what they valued, if they had wanted me. But it was enough to nudge me back onto the path I had chosen months ago—the one I still wanted to follow, though I was less certain than ever about what I would find.

  I didn’t think my parents would have named a child they cared nothing about.

  “I’ll work on the letter,” I said. What I didn’t say, but thought: I will be brave. I will see this through.

  As soon as I heard the name my birth parents chose for me, I’d made my choice. Again I thought of my own daughter, not yet born but very much wanted. When the call was over, I left her future room and went in search of my laptop, pulling up one of the many baby-name sites Dan and I had been consulting. Abigail, I already knew, meant “my father’s joy.” Julia meant “youthful.”

  A new search told me that Susan meant “lily.” What had the name meant to my birth parents? Why had they chosen it?

  Someday soon, perhaps, I might know.

  Donna instructed me to write two separate letters, one for each of my birth parents. I shouldn’t include too many details. I shouldn’t mention where I grew up or where I went to school. I shouldn’t sign my last name. I shouldn’t share any “identifying” or personal information until they agreed to be in contact.

  I decided to focus on one reunion at a time. I would write to my birth mother first, hear what she had to say—if she chose to reply—and then write to my birth father.

  Ever since my phone conversation with Donna, my birth parents seemed more complicated, more human. More real. Somewhere out there, my birth mother was living her life; I didn’t know exactly where. Did she live alone? With one of my siblings? Was she in a little city apartment or a sprawling suburban home? Did she still go to work, or was she now, in her sixties, retired?

  Whenever I pictured her, moving through her days with no premonition of my plans, I nearly lost my nerve. I knew she might be perfectly content with the way things were, no longer curious about me. Yet I also knew there was a time when she had been the one to reach out. In the years since she had sent that letter to my adoptive parents, had she stopped thinking of me? My letter to her would change both our lives, just as her choice to give me up had, and there was no way to ask permission; to warn her that the child she’d given away—perhaps, by now, given up on—was only a letter away.

  Donna emailed to ask about the letter, as if I needed reminding. But I would not be rushed. These were the first words my mother would ever read from me, and they had to be right. They had to be perfect.

  Two weeks before Christmas, a month after I’d learned I had once been called Susan, I sat down with my laptop and opened a new file, ignoring the half dozen drafts I had already started. I vowed not to rise until I had finished the letter.

  Dear Mom

  I couldn’t erase that greeting fast enough. It still felt wrong to refer to another woman as Mom, and I shouldn’t claim my birth mother as family when I had no idea how she thought of me. But the opening was a dilemma: I didn’t know her last name, or whether she went by Ms. or Mrs.

  Hello, my name is Nicole. I am your biological daughter—born on May 5, 1981, and placed for adoption in July 1981. You are probably wondering why I’m contacting you now. I know this letter is bound to come as a shock to you. Still, I hope it’s not an unhappy one.

  I now confronted the problem of deciding exactly what to tell her. I had been instructed not to share any personal details. But I had to offer something. If I had a daughter I had never known and had the chance to learn something about her, what would matter most to me?

  I want you to know that I am well, and happy, and have lived a good life. I was raised by parents who loved me very much.

  On the solid ground of my adoptive family’s love, I began to feel more secure in my words. In many ways, I had been lucky. I had been loved. These were all facts I thought my birth mother would care about, facts she deserved to know. But did it sound like I believed she didn’t love me? I typed faster, reaching for reassurances.

  I know that the adoption decision could not have been an easy one for you. I have always respected
you for making what you believed was the best choice for me. I hope it brings you some peace and reassurance to know what a good life I’ve had. I’m writing to you now because I would like to know a little bit more about your family, if you are willing to share.

  The letter marching line by line down the page was no work of art. It was vague, as it had to be, free from the questions I had waited nearly twenty-seven years to ask. I still needed her permission before I could turn to all of those.

  But, I realized, I did have something I wanted to say.

  If I could only say one thing to you, it would just be this: thank you. You made a very difficult decision 27 years ago—you gave up the chance to know and raise me so that I could be cared for by someone else.

  It was wrenching to think about my adoptive parents while writing a letter to my birth mother.

  “Now? Haven’t you got enough going on with the baby?” my mom said, when I finally told her I was going to write to my birth family myself.

  “I’m doing this because I’m having a baby,” I said. That much was true. But in a moment of compassion or cowardice—perhaps both?—I appealed again to my mother’s practical nature; to the woman who had worked in hospitals for years and had always known I was coming down with something before I noticed myself. “I told you I wanted my medical history,” I reminded her. “This is the only way I’ll get it. I never found out why my birth mother had me so early. I don’t know what diseases run in my family. I’m getting older, starting my own family . . . I need this information.”