Pictures of You, Part Two
Let the Search Begin
Originally published on Medium, January 17, 2017
If I’m honest, part of me doesn’t want to know. Pictures are great, but that was the past, and the past was done. No sense in digging up the grave I’d tended for the past 30+ years over photos, right?
But another part, a bigger part, of me, had already started unraveling the pieces, because of the number of things that didn’t make sense, leaving me with a need to find her for reasons beyond just medical history.
So that’s where I am now.
Her name is Jung Myong Kum, and she was born in 1957 in South Korea. She was 17 when she had me in 1975, turning 18 after my birth month in February. She’d be 58 now.
The last time I saw her was in El Paso/Fort Bliss, Texas, in 1985, and my father says the last he heard she was in Atlanta. Apparently there’s a big Korean community there?
Her second husband was in the same field as my dad, Air Defense Artillery, with the US Army (hence all the moving near us but not necessarily near us).
Dear Bio Mom,
I never understood, as a child or a mother myself, how anyone who professed unconditional love for a child could just walk away.
That’s what you did.
Were things complicated? As an adult, I understand that part better.
You came to this country at 17 in the mid-70s with no knowledge of our country and minimal understanding of our language. Far from home and surrounded by no one who looked like you, the blissful relationship you had with my father was soon replaced with resentment and loneliness.
When you found a new circle of other Korean wives, you were tempted and eventually gave in to a cycle of extramarital affairs the other women condoned. This caused a larger rift in your marriage, and while I have some of your fights indelibly inked across my memory, the end just… happened.
Dad shipped my 2-year-old brother and 4-year-old me to his mother in Tennessee. Far from wherever you were. Lost and torn away from both parents, my life irrevocably changed. Granny was wonderful, but she wasn’t you.
You sent baby toys when your new husband was stationed in Germany, the same time we were. I was 8. You didn’t visit. There were no phone calls or letters, as if your unreciprocated minimal effort meant you didn’t have to try.
When I was 10, you did reach out, but I was so angry, meeting you all these years later, and that visit, all twenty minutes of it, ended in a flurry of tears and my adamant 10-year-old insistence that I never wanted to see you again.
You, at 27, took me at my word.
In the 37 years that passed since that day, I have run the gamut of emotions at the thought of you. The hardest of these isn’t the anger, but that somehow I still love you. The memory of you, anyway.
Some of the best parts of me came from having your love and affection during my formative years. I believe in myself when the parents who raised me seemingly did not. I have an almost arrogant sense of ‘do you not know who I am?’, when I’m not drowning in the grief of ‘how can anyone love me, if my mother does not?’.
I spent many years lost in that sea, almost giving in to the riptide a half-dozen times during my teenage years, but that ember of you burned bright in me. You loved me once, fiercely and undeniably, and I wasn’t ready to give up without a fight. So, I chose to live.
Do I want to find you? Yes. I want to show you the woman I’ve become despite your abandonment, the life and family you missed out experiencing. But I also want the truth that lay somewhere between his side of this story and yours.
I deserve at least that.
I don’t know if she would want to see me now, but I do want to at least meet her once more before my life (or hers) is over, as morbid as that sounds.
I have so many questions, so many loose threads, and while I don’t believe that closure heals, I think that information helps.
Even if it might cause rifts.
I don’t know if I’m really prepared for that drama, but if I can survive almost 40 years of thinking the absolute worst, I’ll find a way.
Thanks for listening.
If you’re in a position to help me find her, I’d appreciate it greatly. Thank you in advance. If you know people I should talk to in the Atlanta Korean community, that would be greatly appreciated, too.
Very brave!