All You Can Ever Know

by Nicole Chung

  One morning a week after the birth, I righted her after a feeding in bed and had barely started to pat her back when she spat up all over herself and the bedspread. Dan, who was also awake, leaped up to find some burp cloths and towels. I shook my head at Abigail, who was now screaming. “Thanks for missing my ponytail,” I told her.

  Suddenly my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number. Deciding this was my exit from the current situation, I shifted our daughter into Dan’s arms and accepted the call, ignoring my husband’s incredulous look. Seriously? his eyes seemed to be asking. Now?

  “Nicole?” She spoke the two syllables of my name as if they were her first, hesitant sounds in a foreign language. “This is your mother.”

  For an instant, I was too tired and shocked to feel anything. When an emotion did sweep in, it was irritation—and guilt, because I did not want to talk to her. Hadn’t I asked Jessica to tell her I just gave birth, and wasn’t ready to talk? Jessica probably had, I guessed, and she had just decided to call me anyway.

  But whatever she had done, she was my mother, and I had been the one to go looking for her. Still holding a partially digested milk–encrusted burp cloth in my hand, struggling to hear over the sound of my baby crying, for a few seconds I tried not to think about everything I’d learned. I tried not to feel annoyed that she’d called a week after I had given birth, after I had specifically said that I wanted to call her when I was ready. I opened my mouth to thank her for calling, marshaling the kind of manners that would have earned an approving nod from my grandmother. I’m so sorry, I could say, now just isn’t a good time.

  But she offered me an apology first, cutting off my own. “I’m sorry,” she said, “so sorry to you.”

  Oh, Jesus, I thought. What to say to that? And then a realization: She sounds nothing like me.

  It was true. I’d never sound like her, even decades from now. Her voice sounded oddly heavy; thick, but not with emotion. Cool and calm and direct. Just the few words she had spoken were enough to reveal traces of a heavy accent.

  My mind spun. She was apologizing to me? Did she have me confused with Cindy, the daughter she’d kept and the one she’d raised, the one to whom she’d given bruises where they wouldn’t show and a fear she had never outgrown? Cindy wasn’t sure she ever wanted children, and our mother was the reason. I don’t know if I can ever have kids, she told me after Abby was born, but I’m thrilled to be an aunt to yours.

  Across the room, Dan could not have missed my expression, the sudden—what? Panic?—in my eyes. Who is it? he mouthed while bouncing on the balls of his feet, falling into the gentle dance we’d learned almost before anything else, the one we both did unconsciously when trying to get Abby to settle down. I shook my head—it was too hard to explain with the phone glued to my ear—tossed the burp cloth into the laundry basket, and went downstairs.

  I wanted to interrupt my mother’s string of apologies, but what would I say if I did? I paced from living room to kitchen to dining room and around again, circling the first floor of our house and listening to my mother’s voice—waiting for questions about me, about my life, that never came. I didn’t have to know her in order to register the shame in her voice. It was a voice as unlike mine as any stranger’s, older and harder and still, after thirty years in America, uneasy with the only language I had ever comfortably spoken.

  “I wanted to keep you,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Please don’t worry about it,” I tried to say, when she paused to take a breath. My words felt generous, given what I knew of her, and also deeply inadequate. “You did what you thought was best for me.”

  “No,” she said. “I never wanted to give you away. It was all his idea, your father. He forced me to sign. I didn’t want to.”

  My heart lurched. Whether this was true or not, I knew what kind of parent she had been. She wasn’t the person I had been told about, the one I had always imagined. I wanted to say something in anger, have it out with her like I might have with my own mom.

  But I never wanted to give you away were the words I’d always wanted to hear from her, from my birth father. It was the closest I’d ever come to being told one of them wanted me. She couldn’t know how many times I’d tried to imagine hearing these words from her as a child, as a woman, an expectant mother. Couldn’t know how badly I’d hoped to hear that some part of her regretted giving me away.

  I had always intended to tell her she made the right decision. That it was all right; that I understood why she had done it. Yet that pleasant fiction, that lie about parents who had loved me so much they had to give me away, had never been precisely true. This woman had never felt about me the way I felt about my daughter. To her, I was fairly certain, I had been a complication in an existing tangle of misery; a problem that had to be solved.

  She kept saying that my birth father had forced her hand, and I wondered how he’d managed to impose his will over my fate given that he couldn’t stop her from hitting my sister. What sort of power had they exerted over each other, these two people stuck in their wretched marriage? He stayed with her for years, though she was beating their youngest child. She agreed to the adoption, though she claimed she had never wanted to. This much I could almost believe—in her account, in his letter to me, in the social worker’s notes, the adoption was always his idea. But why didn’t she just agree readily? Why not be grateful he had suggested the adoption; why not sign at once, without protest?

  Maybe she was telling the truth now. Maybe she had wanted me. And what if she hadn’t wanted to place me for adoption, and he had? People were not so simple; people could be and think and want many different things at once. What if terrorizing my sister had seemed, in some twisted way, natural or understandable to her—I’m your mother, you just have to take what I give you—whereas giving me away, losing that same measure of absolute control over me, had not? She might have had not one, but two little girls in her home. I might have grown up feeling just as afraid of her as my sister had. Perhaps some part of her hadn’t wanted me, but hadn’t wanted someone else to have me, either.

  No one could be a bad parent in all the ways it was possible to be bad. It was one thing to hit a child, and another to be willing to give one away like an old sofa or a coat you had outgrown. The first, to me, seemed far worse than the second. But in a sense, it didn’t really matter what she had wanted at the time. If she had wanted to keep me, for whatever reason—if she hesitated to sign the adoption papers and felt my absence more deeply than did my birth father—that didn’t necessarily make her the better, more devoted parent.

  Anger, hot and fierce and tinged with something new, some heretofore foreign maternal instinct, spiked in my chest. I wanted to lash out, remind her of how she’d treated the daughter she hadn’t given up. That’s what you should be sorry for, I wanted to tell her, fighting past her momentarily disarming words. That’s what you should regret. I thought about breaking into her litany of apologies, the accusations directed at her ex-husband, and telling her everything I knew. I know she used to hide, lock herself in the bathroom, run away from home just to get away from you. I know you told her my “death” was her fault, because she upset you on the day I was born. I know the truth, and so does Cindy. Have you ever apologized to her?

  My birth mother asked, her voice a little plaintive, if I had ever thought about moving back to the west coast. Or, if I did not move back, could I visit sometime?

  Again, I did not know what to say. I could no longer imagine meeting her, and I didn’t want to tell her that. For some reason, I kept thinking of what Jessica had told me in one of her emails: Mom has had a really hard life. She eventually shared that our mother’s own father had been abusive, especially when he’d been drinking. Out of seven siblings, she was the only one who seemed to have inherited, by example or by genetics, her father’s hot temper and harsh ways. Both Jessica and Cindy told me that when she was not upset, she was a different person; she could be funny and
charming. But when she was angry, she never had control.

  What was the point of railing against my birth mother after all these years? Would she even understand the source of my anger on behalf of my sister, or would it just be one more thing she blamed on Cindy? I was years too late to help anyone. I was not even part of this family. My fury and anguish meant nothing.

  “I really have to go,” I said. Upstairs, my daughter was crying, and while I knew she was fine with Dan, I wanted to be with her; to press my nose into her soft, wispy baby curls and tell her I loved her again. It would be many months before she would be able to understand the words, but I hoped she already knew. “I promise, I don’t blame you for the adoption. I don’t think it was your fault.”

  It was true. I didn’t blame her. I finally understood what my birth parents did not: my adoption was hard, and complicated, but it was not a tragedy. It was not my fault, and it wasn’t theirs, either. It was the easiest way to solve just one of too many problems.

  And apart from this, I could not offer my birth mother a single thing—I could not commit to a relationship, or the visit she had asked me for. I couldn’t give her peace. I couldn’t even offer her forgiveness, because it wasn’t mine to give. Her real wrongdoings, acknowledged or not, had so little to do with me.

  “If you cannot visit soon, will you call sometime?” she asked.

  I tried to imagine it. Picking up the phone and dialing, hoping to hear her voice, longing for it instead of dreading it. If I had ever been hers—and if she had been the parent I imagined her to be—her voice could have been one of comfort, the voice I grew up hearing in my darkest or most joyful moments. I would have called her when I discovered I was pregnant. I would have called minutes after Abby was born. I had a loving family, and they had been there for these and so many other milestones in my life, moments of sadness and moments of triumph. For all her flaws and all of mine, I wondered if any part of my birth mother still grieved for all the things she had missed, things it was too late for us to share.

  “I don’t know when I’ll call.” It was the only answer I could give her. It was also the truth. There was nothing else to say, I realized—not even a question of hers I could answer, because she hadn’t asked me anything about myself. “Thank you for calling. Goodbye.”

  She was quiet. I had to check my phone to make sure the call had ended. I dropped the phone on the couch and went to find my husband and daughter. As I told Dan about the strange conversation, it occurred to me that my birth mother had never said goodbye. In the end, she’d simply disappeared.

  All my life, I’d had no biological relatives at all—none that I knew, anyway—and now I had a baby, another set of parents I couldn’t understand, and a sister who wrote to me daily. My birth father had written to me, too: the email he sent the day I went into labor. Weeks went by in a postpartum haze, day bleeding into night and back into day, and still I had not responded to him.

  In his letter, my birth father told me he knew, even before I was born so early, that my birth mother wouldn’t take good care of me. He also said that the adoption was his suggestion.

  She said she didn’t want another baby, so I said, why not give the baby to someone who wants her?

  I noticed he never said that he wanted me.

  I wanted to write back to him, but for what felt like one long, continuous day, all Dan and I could do was meet Abigail’s needs and take care of ourselves. This is nighttime, I remember telling our daughter, standing at the living room window and showing her how dark and quiet it was outside. This is when we sleep. Overwhelmed by caring for a newborn, I asked Cindy to let our father know that I would write back as soon as I could set aside the time for a proper response. He didn’t have my phone number yet, and I don’t think I offered it, still recovering from my birth mother’s call.

  That we’d made contact just as my own baby arrived put my birth parents at a kind of disadvantage. I knew that I would do anything for my child; that no situation, however desperate or dire, would make me willing to give up the privilege of being her mother. All of this was less because she was mine, and more because she was her own, already: now that we had met, I could not imagine not knowing her.

  In the emotional throes of new motherhood, the hours I spent caring for my baby, puzzling out whatever I felt for my birth parents, whatever they meant to me, seemed such a daunting task. My birth parents could not have been to me what I was to Abigail, I thought. They had left me and they hadn’t even known I would be okay. They had denied the very fact of my life. As a parent, I was incapable of such a thing, and I knew it—now that my daughter was here, I knew my life wouldn’t make any sense without her. Not a day, maybe not even a waking hour, would pass empty of some thought of her.

  In his letter, my birth father told me about his work, his interests, his volunteer work with his church, how he helped more recent immigrants settle here in their new country. He said he was proud of me (for what? I wondered, more curious than skeptical; so far all he knew was that I’d gone to college, gotten married, and had a baby). Like my birth mother, he apologized and begged my forgiveness. He said he had also asked God for forgiveness. Of all the things to regret, I thought, why the choice that had likely saved me? I could not think of my adoption as a sin, and wanted to tell him that it wasn’t necessary; to remind him that Cindy had gone through far worse—but it felt wrong, somehow, to think of inserting myself into the maelstrom of his emotions, whatever they were, or push my way into a family drama that began before and continued long after I disappeared from their lives.

  My birth parents’ memories seemed to be based on what each wished to believe, and I couldn’t quite reconcile their stories. The two of them seemed united in one belief only: what happened all those years ago when I was born was beyond their control; it had simply happened to them, an event ruled by unfeeling fate. Beyond that, they were each convinced the other had no care whatsoever for my well-being, and had simply acted selfishly. They could not both be right; either one of them didn’t know the truth, or one of them was lying. Was I to believe the woman who hurt her daughter, or the man who said I was dead? The woman who’d tried to reach out to me when I was a child, or the man who told me he wept when he saw my picture?

  If they felt so ashamed for giving me up, after all this time—even after I told them there was no need—did that mean I should be ashamed of it as well? I could not see my way to it. I had never been taught to hold on to guilt or shame, especially after a thing had been acknowledged, confessed. From the time I was young, I had assumed the same truth that freed me would also free my birth family—that the rush of air and light sweeping away the secrets would come as a relief to all of us. If I learned one thing in the early days of our reunion, it was that I could not compel another person to feel comforted, to feel whole, to forgive themselves. The peace I’d wanted so badly to give my birth parents, all along, was never in my power to give.

  In one of her letters, Cindy said she felt she understood me because she got the feeling I was “searching for the truth, too.” She was right, though in more honest moments I could admit that I’d have preferred a truth closer to the shiny, sanitized fantasy I’d entertained as a child—the dignified, self-sacrificing immigrant ideal that had been cooked up for me by others. More than once I had even imagined sitting down with my birth parents for a civilized meal and a long, cleansing chat—our interactions would remain mature, light, and friendly; on my side, almost journalistic. At the end of our conversation, I would say goodbye and leave them, finally understanding all I’d ever hoped to understand.

  Of our two parents, I was now far more inclined to trust my birth father—because of my new relationship with Cindy. But that didn’t mean I felt ready to leap into a relationship with him, assuming he would even want one. I didn’t feel comfortable asking for many explanations now. I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to let him into my life. It was different for Cindy. They were family, and had lived through what
my birth father called “those dark days” together. If she wanted the truth, she was his real daughter; perhaps she had a right to demand it.

  The only right I felt I had, now, was to accept what I could not know and retreat. And while I’d been caught up in the Korean soap opera that had become my life, I knew it was also in my power to end it. To step back from my birth family, and let time and distance pull us apart once more. And maybe, I thought, that’s exactly what I ought to do.

  Watching your baby learn how to do something new, you notice all the little movements that go into, say, a roll—from the instant she decides she might just make the effort, to the slow testing of the space around her, to the planting of one leg, the swinging of another, the final bit of strength that allows her to push against the floor and pick her head back up. Yesterday—for the first time—she rolled from her back to her tummy, pushing off from the ground with one foot, swinging her leg up and over, planting it on the floor to stabilize herself, pulling her arms out from under her, lifting her head and chest back up, catching my eye long enough to grin at me with false modesty: What are you staring at? I do this all the time.

  She is getting more and more expressive, always trying out new faces—variations on what I call Abigail’s Look of the Day. I am constantly amazed by how many of these looks seem cribbed from my face. Yesterday she took my face between her hands and said, very seriously, “Mom,” and then broke into a huge grin. She is so pleased with herself when she makes wordlike sounds, though I know she has no idea what she’s saying. But she smiles her biggest and widest for me, and I go to enormous lengths to hear her bright staccato laugh.