Member-only story
His Mother Had to Give Him up for Adoption as a Baby
Now He Is Holding onto Her by Rejecting Himself
I was on a video call with my friend Dan when we decided to talk about a longing that I had noticed in him. Earlier, in a post on Facebook, he had asked his friends if they would honestly reveal what they could see. I had described what I imagined was longing, longing for his mother.
Dan was born in Korea, adopted by new parents who didn’t look, smell, or feel like the ones his infant-self knew, and raised in a completely foreign environment to the one his nervous system was primally accustomed to. As an adult, he has been on a quest to know his roots and to find his biological mother, all of this to nurture his inner-child.
While some social services exist today for single mothers to raise their children in Korea, they are still ostracized and financially disabled by society so severely that giving children up for adoption is an understandable though heartbreaking choice. Dan doesn’t know for sure if his biological mother was single, but he thinks it’s highly likely, and suspects that the pressures on single mothers would have been even greater when he was a baby.
This label “longing” had resonated with Dan on Facebook and still resonated when we spoke on the video call. I supported him in noticing…
