Pictures of You, Part One

A Christmas to Remember

Originally written on Medium on Jan 6, 2017

Tucked into the box full of presents from my parents was a standard white envelope with my name scrawled across the front in my father’s hand. I slipped it from inside and the weight, the thickness piqued my curiosity… what had he sent? I wondered as my fingertips slid over the six letters of my name.

I flipped the envelope over to find it unsealed and filled with photos… of her. My heart stopped, trapped behind the breath I’d inhaled and held as the heat of fat tears gathered and fell from my eyes.

Pictures of her.

In my hand were memories, parts of my history that I didn’t recognize, with faces I knew — my father, my granny — and her.

“I look just like her,” I whispered in the silence surrounding my family at the sight of the steady stream of tears and small noises. I turned the picture of her at the table I’d grown up at, in my granny’s house, to my husband. “I look just like her,” I repeated.

I’d sat in that chair against that wall. That expression has peeked back at me from many a mirror and selfie. All these years I’d thought I wasn’t Korean enough, different than my siblings who are undeniably Asian. All these years, I was wrong.

I look just like her.

There aren’t any dates on these pictures, but I must’ve been maybe two? That would’ve made this her 19th birthday. I hadn’t known she had celebrated any birthdays in Tennessee. I vaguely remember Christmases out there, but Easter? No, no Easter. Was she pregnant again in those table pictures with either of my brothers? I didn’t remember Granny’s house without a porch (granted I was around 1 year old in that family picture).

I had pictures. Granny had made sure of that after I became an adult. So I’d seen the wedding dress and my father’s pink shirt. So seventies. But the rest?These pictures were a stranger’s recollection, not mine, though clearly I had been present in their creation.

We looked happy, the three of us. Sure, we were young, all of us, and maybe they still loved each other then. Maybe she’d been happier then. This must’ve been the brief period of time when everyone agreed that I was so wholly loved. Before everything fell apart.

The last picture floored me. Not so much because of our continued shared appearance, despite her lack of glasses and smaller frame. She was older there, somewhere I didn’t recognize. Korea? America? No clue.

I’d stare at her blurry features for what felt like forever, and when I flipped the photo over, I stopped breathing.

“I don’t understand,” I’d whispered. I looked up at my husband again, that face that wasn’t sure how to help me as I fell apart. I handed it to him, because then the words would be real, then he could explain.

She’d left when I was four after a whirlwind of nastiness that I remember simply in two memories: a birthday party where I got a tall, plastic poodle bank and a fight loud enough to wake me up and scare me enough to burn the angry voices into my head.

And later, much later, when I’d get up the courage to ask, I was told that she’d left us behind, that my father had told her she could have anything else, but she couldn’t take us. That she’d left for someone else and she didn’t come to visit. She’d left us for a different life.

I spent my whole life wondering how I could possibly be worthy of anything, if the woman who brought me into the world couldn’t be interested enough to stay in my life.

Mothers are meant to love, and mine clearly did not.

That was the story, as I knew it, sprinkled with a chapter where she sent us baby toys while we were in Germany (and she was just an hour away). She didn’t visit, and she couldn’t remember how old we were. It sparked an ember of deep, bottom-of-my-heart-fed anger that exploded when I was ten and she expressed an interest in meeting me.

I had no interest in meeting with her again after that disaster at the park in El Paso, Texas, until I got sick in my mid-30s. But even then, it was strictly for medical information. She wasn’t my mother. She sure as hell wasn’t going to be a grandmother to my children. She left me, dammit, and I wasn’t about to reward her, when she clearly didn’t care about me.

Except now, holding that picture in my trembling hands, the whole story was starting to unravel. You don’t ask for pictures or updates on children you don’t care about. You don’t sign ‘Love, Mommy’.

The whole story I’d been fed my whole life, had it all been a lie?

Part 2