Day 48

Today, I am grateful for ...

I've decided to change my posting style. I'm going to pick one big thing every day for which I'm grateful, and then look at exactly why I'm grateful for it.

I am grateful for my birth mother. For most of my life, I spent my time wondering who she was, wondering why she gave me up, wondering why she didn't want me to know her or her to know me, wondering, wondering, wondering. I loved her without knowing who she really was and is. My parents always talked about her with respect and gratitude - if it weren't for her and her decisions, they never would have gotten me. So I never grew up resentful or angry with her. I was resentful at the situation and not knowing about her more than anything - but never her or her choices.

Tonight, I went through my adoption papers. My mom keeps them all in this weathered, green folder in her room. The edges are frayed and it doesn't close quite right because there are too many papers inside. My mom literally kept everything related to my adoption. And she has always shown me them and gone through them with me since I was little. The last time I looked at them, I was eighteen and had made the decision to try and find my birth mother (so far, no success). Reading through them all this time, though, I felt like I had never seen the papers before in my life. All of it felt new and foreign. It was the most surreal experience I've had.

As I told all of this to my mom and to Stephen, they both said the same thing: maybe I was just ready to know all of the information this time. And, as Stephen pointed out, maybe the last time I read it, I only looked at what I wanted to see or wanted to know. This time, I wanted to know it all. My birth mother was 23 (making me older than she was when she had me), a high school graduate, unmarried, and the oldest of four children. She was introverted and quiet. She was 5'2" (why I'm 5'1") and 105 lbs. She kept me for seventeen days before giving me up for adoption. I was born at 16:30 on June 10 after they induced her, eight weeks premature, in a small clinic. I weighed 2.8 lbs. The worker who took me at the agency in Korea named me after my birth mother's surname. Chae means "Noteworthy" and Won means "The Best." My umma ("mom" in Korean, which is what I used to call my foster mother) took care of me for seven months and had two children of her own. She nursed me back to health so that I could be adopted by my family.

And now I'm here. Because of so many decisions, so many chances of fate. I am grateful for my birth mother for not terminating her pregnancy, for trying to keep me, for giving me up to have a better life. I am thankful for my Umma for taking care of such a weak, sickly baby (I also had pneumonia) and taking care of me like she would her own child. I am thankful for my parents wanting to adopt and adopting me. And I am thankful for the fact that I am no longer angry about my adoption. I am no longer empty or obsessed with what I do not know; I am now focused on what I have and am thankful for every single chance that brought me to where I am today.