A Chronic (Heart) Condition
By Meredith Seung Mee Buse
1.
“I’m sorry you’re still sad about something that happened a long time ago,” he says.
I almost crumple to the ground. How can someone I love so much understand me so little?
True, I’ve been less than fully functional for the past few months—or years, depending on when you start counting. And I understand why this frustrates those who depend on me, especially when the reasons for my downturns seem opaque.
The problem is, I can be doing great for weeks—months, even—taking kind care of myself, getting enough sleep, eating meals, exercising, but then BAM, something triggers me.
Some events are anticipated: my A-mom’s birthday, my own (alleged) birthday, the anniversary of the day I arrived in the U.S. as an infant.
But others are unexpected: an article about foster care that shows up on my feed, my 11-year-old’s sadness over not having any Korean family, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Korea affirming what I and my friends have long known—that the whole international adoption scheme was rotten from the start.
Unfortunately, those things sometimes happen one after another or even overlap, and suddenly I’m debilitated. Knocked right off my executive-functioning game.
My adopted identity is more akin to an emotional chronic condition than a one-time injury. A profound ache in my chest—like a phantom limb—that can flare up or quiet down, but will never go away. I get back up only to be struck down again, over and over, like I’m on some sinister adoptee merry-go-round.
I want to explain: It’s not me. It’s not even depression. It’s ambiguous loss, unrealized grief.
I want to scream: It didn’t happen a long time ago. It’s happening now. Every moment. Every day.
I’ve felt grief before—lost a baby in utero, lost my adoptive dad—but here’s the difference between adoption and other loss: You’ll never know, in warp and weft, exactly what you’ve lost, but you will always know you lost it.
And as the years pass, the heartache doesn’t lessen. Doesn’t dull.
Does not give way so easily to forgetting.
As the years pass, you just find new things to miss.
2.
“I really wish you could just make yourself stop loving someone,” she says. My 13-year-old and I walk home hand-in-hand one balmy afternoon.
“Yeah, buddy,” I say, giving her hand a squeeze. “I know what you mean.”
The day before, I sat crying in the bathroom as I prepared to say goodbye—again—to friends who love me and believe in me unconditionally. A found family that accepts and understands me in ways my adoptive family never did.
My chosen sister, who makes miyeok guk for my birthday when I say I’ve never tasted it; my soul sibling, who marvels at how my adoptee story is crazier than his (debatable).
I never disliked goodbyes until I made friends I didn’t want to leave.
But being part of these communities—adoptee communities, BIPOC writer communities—pulls me away from the family I’ve created: my supportive husband and kids, who love me despite my chronic heart condition.
They love me in the depths of depression when my birth mother refuses my letter—twice—and I can’t get out of bed for a week. They hold me when I sob uncontrollably after reading the scene in I Can Make This Promise where we find out the baby was stolen. My intense emotion scares them, but they stay with me and see that we can all come out of it intact.
Cobbling together a family like this means I can never have them all in the same place at the same time. I can only feel the support of my community when I’m away from my immediate family.
And these moments of community are fleeting and all too rare—then I’m procrastinating on packing my bags, staying up obscenely late because I know tomorrow is the day I have to say goodbye, and crying in the bathroom once again.
I long for the birth family I’ve never met, the adoptive family I wish I’d had, and the chosen families who always seem at odds with the family I’ve made.
I am a self divided.
~
Korea is a self divided, too. Jagged boundary slashed across the 38th parallel.
Families separated for decades on different sides of the border, one line and two slender fences rendered, at times, invisible by the fog. As if countries, families, lives—hearts—could be so neatly severed.
I cannot mend the parts of me that have been broken. Instead I dream of running for the exits or making a slow escape. Wake with an aching heart.
~
Try to listen. Try to see. To sing.
To gather. Remember.
Plant seeds.
~
Seek forgiveness in my heart.
Pray to be strong in the broken places.
3.
“When I told her my name and birthdate, the psychic said, ‘No, that’s your other timeline,’” fellow adoptee writer Judi says.
Interesting.
Now, when I miss them—the biological family I know, the first family I don’t, my chosen family scattered around the world—or miss the place I was born, I try to console myself by imagining that in some parallel universe, some alternate timeline, we are together.
Somewhere out there, I am already back in Seoul. Or maybe other timelines exist where I was never forced to leave in the first place.
But it still hurts. Knowing I’ve built an entire life in exile, in a place where I’m destined never to belong. That going home strains my family, my job, and my finances, but not going home strains my spirit.
Maybe the trick is to carry the hurt with both hands. Be brave enough to wrap my arms all the way around it, like a hug.
Hold within my heart the tangled strands of timespace wherein I always have been—and never will be—home.
