MAY 11, 2019 – In earlier times, I was more intense. Each day I’d crawl into the cage, jump on the wheel, and make it go round and round. I was sure the wheel drove a generator, because a little light bulb inside the cage blinked as soon as the wheel began to turn and got brighter and brighter as I ran faster and faster.
Nowadays I’m far less intense, which allows more time and attention to listen to people tell their stories. Consequently, life has become far more interesting.
Recently, I heard a story that ought to be a screenplay. It went like this . . .
An adoptive mother told about her adult adopted kids, a son and a daughter, and the family’s recent trip to the Korea, birthplace of the kids. Ahead of the journey, a search of the son’s birth parents had been undertaken—successfully. Still teenagers when the son had been born and placed for adoption, the birth parents had gone their separate ways and stayed well apart in a country now of nearly 52 million people. The mother had married, had had three more kids but then gotten divorced. The father had remained single. Nearly three decades had passed.
Arrangements were made for the adoptive family to meet birth mother and birth father. This by itself was unusual. In many instances, searches lead only to dead ends or to places that provide a degree of closure but ironically, of an unsettled or unsettling nature.
These encounters can be very dicey. Language is often a challenge—few adoptees learn Korean; many Koreans do not speak English—and emotions can run all over the place, triggering unexpected reactions on the part of everyone involved. Usually these encounters are orchestrated under the guidance of an adoption social worker, who can arrange logistics, interpreter services, and assist the participants through a potentially fraught process.
In the case I heard about recently, the initial encounter was very positive, and somehow, arrangements had been made to meet the birth mother and the birth father at the same time and in the same place. Thus, the occasion served as a double first-time reunion—birth parents with birth son and his adoptive family and also of the birth parents themselves. All presented themselves very graciously, and as I can imagine, from everyone’s eyes flowed tears replete with joy and happiness but also with a sense of loss, sense of gain, a sense of wonder.
A short time passed. Further contact ensued between adoptive family and the birth parents. More time passed—enough for an unusual story to develop into an extraordinary one.
After three decades of separation, thanks to the search initiated by the adopted son with the support of his adoptive parents, it turns out that in middle age birth mother and birth father have rekindled their romance of yore.
Stay tuned for the screenplay.
© 2019 Eric Nilsson
