the rose bush
the rose bush
I've always loved to craft and create.
To most families, the dining room is used primarily for the purpose of dinner. For our family, our dining room served many purposes. It was our schoolwork room, the room where my mom worked on the bills and balanced her checkbook, the room where our cats would escape for a quick nap, the room where we kept fancy things like china and dishware only used for special occasions, and of course, it was the room we sat in for our holiday meals when we had family or friends over. It had beautiful french doors that opened up to the deck my dad built with a few nails, a hammer, and his bare hands. I spent my summers on that deck playing tag and getting splinters, and then when the leaves would fall and the air would chill I'd spend my winters jumping off the rails into giant snow mounds refusing to come in when the sun set.
I remember one particular day in the dining room, though. It was bright. Of course the dining room was always bright, but on this day it seemed to be brighter than every other room in the house. The sun's rays were beaming through the windows and the french doors created a kaleidoscope of light that flickered on the walls and ceilings, soaking the room with warmth and love and creativity. My mom had replaced the school books with brightly colored construction paper that shimmered in the light as we pondered what craft we would make. She sat next to me and helped me cut out all kinds of shapes, big and small: blue squares, yellow circles, red rectangles, and a bunch of smaller pieces of various colors to connect them all together. We had decided to make a clown to hang on my bedroom door. I was seven.
As I grew older and my crafting supplies grew larger, my mom assigned to me a cabinet in our living room. I was told this was where I could keep all of my crafting materials. I quickly interpreted that as a clear proclamation: my crafts were special and deserved their own place of honor to be protected and guarded. Now looking back it's clear she just wanted them tidy and out of sight. But oh how I treasured this cabinet and filled it with all of my beloved paper, coloring books, glue, string, popsicle sticks, markers, stamps, stencils, paints, and really odd things that inspired me like a shoe string or a funny looking piece of trash I'd planned to fancy into something useful. Some days I'd open those wooden cabinet doors below the tv as I'd sit cross-legged, eager to begin a new creation. I'd look adoringly at all of my materials, organized by size, then type, then color. I'd spend hours examining hundreds of crayon colors and I'd carefully rearrange them in order until they displayed perfectly, fading from one color to the next so gradually you couldn't tell when the green crayons became blue crayons, and the blue crayons became purple. If anyone picked up a crayon and returned it to a different spot in the order, I responded with a quiet scold as I returned the stray crayon to its rightful place. I'd separate buttons from paper clips and rubber bands from sequins. Everything had a place and a purpose, and all was right in the world. But then some days I'd open those same wooden cabinet doors and immediately throw my hands up to try and save my coloring books from falling, my colored pencils from spilling onto the floor, and my rubber stamps from toppling out and bouncing under the sofa only to be lost forever. I'd sigh and scan the cabinet for the item I was looking for, grab it, then quickly try to shove everything back in the cabinets fast enough to close the doors before it all spilled out again, often times leaving me to exit the scene without a trace of foul play.
I loved to craft. I still do. But of all the canvases I've painted, pictures I've colored, and wood I've burned...I've never been good at free-hand drawing. So when Carolyn told me she was going to have me draw something, I felt a weight in my stomach and immediately wished I had called out of the session that day.
This was the day I learned about the rose bush. This was also the day I learned just how much grief I had carried inside of me, unknowingly, for the entirety of my life.
Carolyn had asked me a series of questions just moments earlier. They weren't hard questions, but they were impossible for me to answer. They were questions like, "what do you think about when you think of your biological family, not just your mother, but your entire family? Have you thought about what they might look like? Or if you might have biological siblings? How do you think it will feel if you see them?"
Each question was met with a quiet, "I don't know," or "I'm not sure." It felt like she was asking me to smell the color nine. How could I possibly answer those questions? It wasn't for a lack of trying. I tried to think about each one and dig deep for something I could offer as a sign of hard-earned effort, but my mind continuously went blank. The moment she asked a question, I heard it, but then immediately it evaporated as if never existing.
"I...I really don't know," I said finally with heavy defeat.
Repression isn't uncommon when it comes to painful and traumatizing experiences. Our brains and bodies are wired to protect us, and that's a good thing. Just like that hallway with the many, many doors I had envisioned, those repressed feelings were stored beyond the threshold of those doors, out of sight and out of reach. It felt like I was sitting on a beach and I could see an island not far from where I was, but it was too far away to tell if the island had conifer trees or palm trees, or if it even had trees at all. I couldn't tell if there was smoke coming off the island or if it was just a purple haze in the evening sky. I could see clearly there was an island, but I couldn't tell you anything about it. And I had no way to reach it. That's what it felt like to me. I had an awareness of a feeling, of a thought, but I could not identify it, let alone feel it. I subconsciously refused to let myself feel it.
After enough time had passed for Carolyn to realize I wouldn't be conjuring a different response, she shifted in her seat. "I'd like to do a drawing exercise," she stated as she rose from her chair to grab some paper from her bookshelf. I immediately began to worry, remembering the countless failed attempts I'd made time and time again like a cat with strange proportions, a house with wrong dimensions, or a person that barely resembled a stick figure. "Sometimes people have trouble accessing certain...thoughts or feelings," Carolyn continued as she picked out a few colored pencils from a tin box. "It can help to draw instead, so we get a better idea of what you might be feeling, even if you can't...verbalize it." She handed me a few sheets of paper and the colored pencils. I held onto them tightly waiting for more instructions hoping this would be an easier assignment than my stomach was leading me to believe. Carolyn sat back down in her chair and held her notebook in her lap as she met my gaze with a soft smile.
"Okay, we're going to draw two pictures. Don't worry about what it looks like, whether it's good or bad. Try to draw what you picture in your mind and you can explain what everything is after," Carolyn instructed. I nodded my head in understanding, tension in my stomach still gripping.
"I'd like you to picture yourself as a rose bush. How big are you? How many roses do you have?" I hesitantly grabbed a green colored pencil as my creativity ignited. I had no choice but to surrender. It's never been difficult for me to imagine scenes, or colors, or textures, or stories. After all, I loved to craft. I loved to create. But for this particular assignment, I felt unenthusiastic as I dragged the pencil around the paper in the shape of, what was indisputably, a dreadful rose bush. It resembled a green puffy cloud more than anything, but I continued on. I swapped out the green for the red and began to color in a few roses and branches intertwined within it. Carolyn continued, "where are you planted? What else is going on around you? Are there trees or other plants nearby? What's the weather like?" I drew for the next few minutes, adding a sun with lines shooting out as rays in the corner of the paper, much like a 2nd grader does when asked to draw a pretty picture. I placed my rose bush near the right of the page just below the horizon, and added a giant brown tree with limbs stretched high and across. I decided I wanted to have a path, so I drew a small walkway that went right by my rose bush and off the left side of the paper, then added a man walking the path holding a watering can. When I finished, I looked at my drawing and laughed out loud. It was so terrible. I was so embarrassed, but Carolyn was already holding out her hand for it so I reluctantly handed it over, realizing there was no feasible way to shove it underneath the sofa cushion by this point.
"Okay," she started as she began to scan my drawing. "So tell me what's going on here. Here's you," Carolyn said as she pointed to the rose bush.
"Yeah," I replied with equal parts affirmation and embarrassment.
"Can you explain the rest to me?" Carolyn asked as she looked up at me. I sighed and began.
"Well, I put myself over here and I wanted to draw a tree. So I drew a really big one so that I could feel both, sun and shade," I explained while pointing at each figure. "And then I created a little pathway so this man could water me on his evening walks and I'd have some company, but not too much company."
"That's wonderful. What a beautiful scene," Carolyn said. "So, you've got this big tree kind of...protecting you. And then you've got this man, is this someone you know?"
I hadn't considered the man's identity so I responded with, "...no, he's just a kind neighbor."
"Great. Okay, so let's set this one aside for a moment and now let's try the second drawing," Carolyn instructed as she sat my picture down on the coffee table next to her chair. Having a slightly bruised ego, I wanted to do better for my second drawing and try to work in more colors and detail. I knew the process now. I knew Carolyn was going to blatantly point at every image in the scene I'd draw, and if it's not horrific enough to bring attention to your pitiful drawing as a whole, she would then point at each pitiful drawing individually, one at a time. I grabbed my colored pencils and considered the color palette I had to work with again: green, red, brown, and purple. I could make three apples, I thought. A green one, a red one, and...a rotten one. And a...a purple flower...I guess.
"This time," Carolyn said, interrupting my thoughts about irrelevant apple colors, "I'd like you to draw yourself as a rose bush, but instead I want you to imagine what it would be like, if and when you meet your biological family. I want you to try drawing that."
Wait, what? Isn't this the same question you asked me earlier, Carolyn? Did you forget already? How can I draw something if I can't even answer your que --
...oh.
While I was murmuring at Carolyn in my head my imagination had once again taken off without permission. I complied and began to draw. The moment my pencil hit the paper I began to draw my rose bush with a few red roses beginning to bloom. It was the same as before, but this time there were three other rose bushes that looked exactly the same, just a little larger. I placed them all around me. After a few strokes on the paper, tears started falling from my eyes to the paper, smudging the greens and the reds until they ran together as one stream down the paper. I wouldn't have been able to articulate it if you had asked me in the moment, but I remember feeling confused. Why am I crying? Why is this so painful? This doesn't make any sense. I kept wiping tears from my eyes so I could see what I was drawing, no longer worried about what Carolyn would think when she saw it. Instead of creating a horizontal path with the neighbor who came by to water me, I drew a circular path that encompassed all four rose bushes. We were together, yet separate from everything else. It fell silent in that little room as I became aware of my chest, feeling like it had been ripped open and shredded into a million pieces, exposed for the entire world to see despite Carolyn being the only other person in the room. My breath had become labored and shallow as the walls began to move in, robbing the room of oxygen. My toes curled inside my shoes and my jaw clenched in utter pain as my feet and heart sank through the carpet. I cried, and I cried, and I cried. Carolyn sat quietly looking over her notes, trying to give me as much personal space as that little room allowed. When I finished drawing, I quickly handed it over to Carolyn so I could grab a tissue.
Carolyn looked over my drawing with a gentle sympathetic smile. "Ah," she whispered as she leaned back in her chair. She took a deep breath in then said, "So, this time there's a few rose bushes, huh?"
I nodded in silence, still wiping tears from my eyes.
"It's very interesting you placed them within this path. Before, you drew a horizontal path and this time it's a circle, kind of like it's defining this area and keeping you all together," Carolyn said as she traced the circle of my path with her index finger. My heart began to shatter into even more pieces as I nodded my head in quiet affirmation.
Carolyn turned my drawing towards me and asked, "Nikia, what do you feel when you look at this?"
I took a long look at my drawing and finally it was clear to me. I had opened one of the doors in my hallway and the air that filled it came rushing out. I finally understood the feelings that were pulsing through my veins at relentless speed and into my exposed chest cavity, fracturing my heart over and over again, robbing me of breath.
"It's...." I began before pausing to take a deep inhale, a final attempt to quiet my sobs. "I feel grief," I continued, trying to gain some composure and control. "Grief and...and pain. But, there's also a bit of happiness with all of the rose bushes together, but...it's sad too. I guess it mostly feels like brokenness and great loss. All of that at the same time. I don't know how to explain it. It's just...it's hard. It doesn't really make sense to me," I sputtered.
"Feelings don't have to make sense," Carolyn said as she reached out with another tissue.
____________________________________
What do I think about when I think about my biological family now? I think about whether or not we share things in common. I wonder who I look like more, my mother or my father, or maybe a grandmother or an aunt. I wonder if I have siblings, especially sisters. I've never had a sister. I wonder if I'd like her, or if she'd like me. I think about questions I'd want to ask my mother like why did you give me up? Was it really to give me a better life, or was there another reason? I wonder if she feels the same heartache I feel now, or if she's accepted her decision and now feels at peace. Relieved, even. I wonder if she also has allergies, or anxiety, or poor eyesight. I wonder about diseases that run in the family, a question doctors ask me all the time, but one I can never answer. I think about my father and wonder if he knew, and if he did, if he cared at all. Did I mean anything to him? Or did my very existence cause him to abandon my mother?
I'd spent most of my life trying to create a place and a purpose for all that I did. Just like I'd organize my crayons so perfectly as a child, I'd learned to line up everything I defined myself as in a neat and orderly fashion. I'd understood that music was a shade of blue and a gift from my mom. I'd understood that discipline and hard work was a shade of green, a gift from my dad. Playfulness and fun were both yellow, and that was imparted to me from my oldest brother while wisdom and examination, dark gray, came from my other brother. I was formed by all of these colors. And when they were lined up perfectly, all was right in my world. Everything had a place and a purpose. But the moment I realized that maybe the truth I had relied on for my whole life was only part of the whole truth, that there would be another set of colors to which my identity could be tied, my cabinet exploded, and my crayons spewed everywhere. And where was I to be? Who was I, then?
Opening doors in this journey is not really that fun. I think there is an intrigue and an excitement from the outside related to adoption search stories because they are mysteries and people love to feel suspense. They love to experience surprise. They love to solve puzzles. They anticipate a warm, happy ending. And I'm finding that so far in this process it's mostly just been sadness, pain, and shame, and that this, this heaviness in the trudging before I actually take one step into searching is actually what is normal. I've learned that some Korean adoptees go down this path only to find out horrific truths that might have been better off never discovered. I recently heard a story of an adoptee who found out the truth about her adoption. Her father was abusive to her mother and one day, in anger and retribution, took her to an orphanage without the mother's knowing, leaving the mother to work for months until she could buy her own daughter back. Months later in a rage, he did it again and when her mother collected enough money to buy her back once again, she had already been adopted. There are stories of children being left in supermarket parking lots overnight. Young mothers too guilt-ridden by family shame and forced to give up their babies by their parents for the sake of honor and pride. These are real stories from people who are like me. What if I find out that's what happened to me? What if I find out that is my story? Then who am I to be? Who am I?
There is a part of me that would like to settle for my first drawing. To be content, to feel the warmth of the sun and the coolness provided from the tree. To exchange kindness and thankfulness with a passerby and to wonder what was further down that path as it stretched beyond my sight, but feeling okay with never knowing. And then there's a part of me that wonders about my second drawing. How many rose bushes are there like me? Just one? Or a bunch, big and small, old and young? Are they all grouped together? Am I the only one who isn't a part of that defined circle? I didn't draw anything else other than the rose bushes because I don't know where they are. I don't know if they have sun or if they have shade, if there are mountains or bodies of water nearby. I don't know if it's hot or cold, or if they're surrounded by beautiful wildflowers or birds in the sky. I think about never knowing these things and I feel a lump in my throat and a heaviness in my heart.
I have to know. Ignorance is not a choice I want to choose.
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