Our office will be closed from January 31st to February 2nd due to Lunar New Year holidays. Please note that we will be back in the office on Thursday, the 3rd of February. We apologize for any inconvenience and thank you for your understanding."
was the auto-reply I received as soon as I hit "send" on the email to my birth mom. I sent the email on a Friday afternoon, and they wouldn't be back in the office for about a week. My tendency is usually to first find the silver lining so I immediately thought, "well I did my part and I feel good about putting the ball in her court, so now I don't have to think about it for a while." Ha ha. In fact it was all I could really think about, and I found myself sharing what I wrote with several friends, because if I wasn't getting her response yet, at least I was getting A response. With each day that passed someone else would ask me if I'd received a reply yet and I broke it down every time: "well the agency won't even be back in the office until Thursday, then they have to catch up on being out for a week, so then the time it takes for them to translate, and then however long it takes for my birth mom to reply, and then it will have to be translated back. So...probably not for a month or so." Really, I said this so that I could prepare myself for how long it could take, but even so, every morning I found myself tracking the time difference- "if it's 6am here that means it's 8pm there so obviously not getting a response today." But then in the evening hours I'd say, "okay it's 7pm here so 9am there so they are in the office and I could potentially get an email tonight!"
I was talking to a friend about it and she looked at me and said, "and yet you're so calm." I laughed and said, "well my chocolate consumption has increased, my average bedtime has gone to 1am, and I told my husband I need a punching bag, so..." I employed any means I could to distract myself, while at the same time fixating on the tangible stressors of the situation. I had no control over if/when I would hear from her, but I could worry about things like, I have a lot of food allergies and if I go to Korea will they be able to accommodate them, or will I even be able to communicate to them that I have serious allergies? I spent several months learning about Korea and its culture several years ago, and I don't know if it still holds true but at the time it seemed they held strongly to one beauty standard. In the US, you can walk into a room full of women who all look drastically different and still believe each one to be beautiful. Not so in Korea; in my findings it seemed, they all aspired to basically look the same.
*Disclaimer - I am fully aware of how ignorant I am in making such a statement, but it was what I gathered from various videos and conversations I'd had at the time.*
From a gal who spent her entire life trying to fit in with the crowd and be accepted, I began to worry that I would not fit their standard and not feel accepted again. I don't know how to explain this well, but for several years after my adoption, I vehemently rejected the idea of ever visiting Korea. We have a home video of my 5th birthday, and after all the guests have gone home there's footage of me riding a tricycle (with my dolls and stuffed animals in the backseat) on the sidewalk. In the video my brother asks me, "are you going to Korea?!" and immediately I brake, markedly turn the tricycle around, and pedal back towards home as fast as my little legs can go. In 3rd grade my class was given the writing prompt of, "if you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?" I wrote about how I would get in an airplane, fly *right* past Korea, visit my sister in college (which was 2 hours away from where we lived), then visit my brother in college (which was halfway across the US). Not only did that flight path not make any sense, but I clearly went out of my way to convey how much I did not want to visit that country.
Somewhere in my mind I felt that being placed for adoption meant that I was rejected by Korea, and I would do everything I could to reject Korea back. With the now real possibility of going back in the somewhat foreseeable future, those fears of rejection were stirring again. While I no longer needed to make it a point to say that I won't go back, I could feel the self-preservation tactics activated, and I began to subconsciously voice the reasons [mentally] that I might be rejected by Korea once again.
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