One Mother, Two Mothers, No Mother

One mother is the person I was born from. We have the same complexion, shoe size, fingers, nose, and chin. She lost me at age three to a man who promised he would let her visit, but in a year’s time, she would have no idea where I was. After months of chasing down last known guardians, she arrived at the orphanage too late: I had been adopted, and no one had known that my mother was trying to find me all that time.

One mother is the person who claimed me when others believed me to be without a mother. This mother disappeared with a click of the phone, when a truth she couldn’t handle severed our relationship. At the time, I said, Okay, Mom, I will wait to hear from you—that was the last time I said the word “Mom.” To this day, I wonder, If I just didn’t say it, if I didn’t make it known, would I still have a mother?

There is no amount of time that can replace the missing. One mother never replaced the other mother. Adoption isn’t always forever.

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My birth mother persisted and found her daughter when she was twenty-four. She found her daughter, but it was also not her daughter—who she found was a grown woman, a mirror of her youth, who held only essences of a shared life together.

Reconnecting with my birth mother as an adult, I have had to learn a different dance. Umma and I have no real conversations. We have snapshots of moments, literal and figurative; succinct messages. I can speak Korean to anyone except Umma.

She has sent me postcards over the years, and they remain untranslated and unanswered. We haven’t allowed ourselves to care for each other—she will not burden me with her daily worries and curiosities, and I will not burden her with my needs and wants. It feels too late to ask her to be my mom. And she is halfway around the world; her morning is my night. We are always playing catch-up, living in retrograde.

One mother claimed me when others believed me to be without a mother. She disappeared with a click of the phone.

Despite our differing versions of what went on in our home, my adoptive mother and I share a history—that is what family is about, after all. Sometimes I miss the shared remembering. But there were rules—rules that needed abiding, strictly and without compromise.

Only once did I say out loud what was happening to me in my adoptive home, only to be silenced. I was told to lie, and for a time I did, in order to stay in my family. For nineteen years, I rationalized my silence by telling myself, Better to have parents who require silence than to have no parents at all. It seemed that even the silence was eating at my adoptive mother, though: In the last phone call we had, all she talked about was how hard it was to talk with me.

Becoming a mother gave me the power and strength to know that I could not renege on my truth twice. I could no longer comply with the rules of this establishment, deny what had happened, just to claim I was part of that family. I’m an adult, and that kind of childish thinking would also force me to live in retrograde.

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I sometimes ask myself why I think about this so much. I don’t need a mother in the day-to-day. But sometimes there are moments when you just long for a person who is obligated to be in your corner. Even if they answer the phone with rancor, still, they are there for you.

Two mothers, both living, and I haven’t called anyone Mom in over a decade—at least not in my “mother tongue” of English, the language that houses all the words I use to express my innermost thoughts. To say Umma in Korean still gets stuck—I feel no flow, no rhythm, no entitlement.

It feels too late to ask my birth mother to be my mom.

It’s not like I never hear the word Mom. I am a mother myself. Sometimes I hear my kids calling too often, sometimes not enough. I wonder, do mothers ever tire of hearing the word Mom? I don’t think I will. Still, hearing it does not satiate the need to say it aloud, myself, with the hope that someone else will respond.

To me, there is something so optimistic about calling out to a mom. All the ways we say that word with hope for engagement—the fulfillment of a plea, the answer to a question, even a conflict or argument. It is one of the most intimate words a child has, no matter their age. Once, on a podcast episode, I heard about a child who moved from France to New Jersey and struggled with the transition. For a while, she would only say one word: Maman.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, I am just fine. I go about my days, self-contained, filled with giving, receiving, doing, living with my family—loving that I am a grown woman who can go wherever she wants, spend her day doing fulfilling work, and come home to a tranquil existence as someone’s mother. It’s that one percent of the time, at the tipping point of a hard week, a day that was filled with more output than input, that renders me weak and just wishing I had a mom to call, a familiar pressure building in my chest.

Adoption didn’t give me a forever mother. Being in reunion with my birth mother did not make me wholly mothered, either. But I had them both at crucial times in my life. There must have been some value in their mothering of me, because the chemistry of it remains in me somewhere, and I am not completely deprived of it.

What has made me feel less orphan and more pioneer has been the active choice to mother and be mothered in new ways: raising my own family, seeing the kind of men my sons are becoming. Being in the company of chosen friends and sisters and mothers. Some of these friends walking with me through life have now begun to lose their mothers, too—as they lean on me, I lean back, and find strength in the joining of our pillars. As we look past middle age and into old age, together, we are becoming our own mothers.

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