grief + the peace of wild things

grief + the peace of wild things

__________________________

"I'm sure this is triggering me because of my birth mother, but I don't really know how," I admitted at my last therapy session with Carolyn.  

"Yes, I think that's probably true," Carolyn confirmed.  Part of me was disappointed she did not refute my suggestion.  My selfish nature was hoping she would give me an exit ramp, a detour, so I could prove to her that I wasn't the one struggling.  Instead, Carolyn did what I was paying her to do.  The nerve.

She continued on.  "Have you sat down and thought about how you feel since this all happened?" she asked with kind concern.

I sat there for a moment to consider the truthful answer to that question.

"Not really," I began.  "I'm not sure what else there is to do at this point.  And...I think I feel fine.  I've just been trying to focus on my own family, my kids..." my voice trailed off.

"Well..." Carolyn began.  "It may be worth spending some time on this.  I know you like to write and that's helped you process your feelings in the past.  Maybe you should sit down and try to write about it."

I shifted my gaze downward.  "Yeah, maybe so." I responded.

__________________________

Here I am, almost a year later.  It's been four years since my last bit of writing on this matter and I admittedly haven't had a session with Carolyn since Thanksgiving week of last year.  

It's difficult to know how to move forward when so much is out of my control.  I thought for a while that perhaps this journey was at its end, but in the last four years I've discovered that the grief, however much ignored, is still there.  I've just been too busy and distracted to take the time to notice it.  

Sometimes it is a quiet lapping of water in a deep ravine below, miles away and out of sight.  Sometimes it moves with a rushing force and suddenly overwhelms me, sweeping my feet out from under me.  I lose my footing.  I lose my grounding.  It pulls me under.  And sometimes...lately so it seems, it is conveniently camouflaged, just barely there whispering in the shadows and the fog, amidst the frustrations and the heartaches that are seemingly irrelevant, but are actually all...too...relevant.  At least that's what I think Carolyn was trying to tell me at our last session. 

Grief has a funny way of popping up like a weed.  Like any other trauma, it can mutate and reproduce, mask and hide, glare and blind.  I don't think I can really keep using the excuses of "motherhood" and "chaos" and "juggling" as a means to avoid this all.  The truth is that the grief still resides in me, I've just become well-practiced at hiding and ignoring it.  But slowly it has been seeping through the cracks between the errands and the dinners, just before the checking of school work and right after baths.  It's been pooling while my head swivels from side-to-side, watching the mailman drive by, watching my children run in the backyard, watching the hours and the days, the months, and even years pass by.  While I sweep the floors after lunch the grief spills, forming a small, sticky mess drop-by-drop.  And while I laugh with our children in the hot, hot sun and as I yawn while crawling into the arms of my husband after a long day, the mess only gets wider and bigger.  I've become quite used to cleaning up the crumbs my children make every day.  But I'm not quite sure how to begin to clean up the rest.  How do I clean up the grief?

______________________________________

I am so sorry I did not keep you.

These are the words I keep returning to from my birth mother's letter she wrote to me in 2020.  I know there is a lot to unpack here, but the tightness in my chest tells me I can't do it on my own.  I do know, however, that being a mother of multiple children now, this simple sentence, a plainly stated apology shatters my heart even more than when I first read it.  It's difficult not being able to analyze word choices and infer intent or meaning from phrasing considering our language barriers.  All of our communications have been translated and thus intent, nuance, and everything in between has been lost while it travels from her continent to mine and vice versa.  Did not or...could not? is all I think about.  In our language, that is a colossal distinction: an inability vs. a decision.  And when it comes to your child, that means everything...doesn't it?  

I know that you wanted to see my photos.  I do not have many pictures.  I am so sorry.

I must have thousands of photos of my children.  I, like many others I'm sure, have to figure out how to make space on my phone every few months to account for this.  I spend hours transferring them to hard drives and order prints to carefully place into photo albums.  My children love to flip through and recount everything from our family beach trips to that-one-time-Griffin-made-this-funny-face.  It's common and acceptable to say that we live in an age of excess.  But maybe it's more accurate to say that Americans, especially, live in an age of excess.  I received two photos from my birth mother.  One from when she was younger, perhaps in her twenties and one more current.  Years ago Carolyn asked me, at a minimum, what I was hoping to achieve or find by starting a search for my birth mother.  After some time contemplating, I responded with the following: I just wanted to see what she looked like and I wanted to know about family diseases and health risks so I could better protect my future children.  I received both.  

As I stare at the photos now though...I still feel very little.  I stare at a stranger and make physical comparisons.  I have her eyes and cheeks.  But I do not have her mouth.  In both frames, she looks serious and a bit melancholy.  That seems familiar to me.  This time, however, I carefully looked over the photo of her handwriting.  I didn't pay much attention to this when I first received it.  After all, it's in Korean hangul, of which I can read none.  But there was a tidiness and organization to her characters that I noticed this time.  I wondered if she had drafted her letter once in pencil, then rewritten in pen afterwards...like I did.  Her characters seemed to have been written with deliberate intent, a specific amount of pressure as the pen pushed into the paper.  Little to no hesitation.  I'm not entirely sure why, but this brought me comfort.  Were we alike in this way?  How else were we similar?  

I've spent the last few days revisiting my old writings from this journey trying to see it all through a different lens.  I keep trying to see what Carolyn sees.  I admittedly feel like a student who's been given an assignment I don't quite understand.  I'm leafing through pages of a textbook trying to look for clues or inspiration, something to help point me in the direction of: how do I not let this grief spill all over my kitchen floor?

______________________________________

Two nights ago, I logged into my old email account and found the thread of exchanges between myself and the social worker in Korea.  Our last few exchanges had been regarding a request for information about my foster mother.  I asked if there was any way to contact her, but the only information they had was an old address.  After asking about other directories or other avenues I could explore to find her, I was told, "I am sorry to say that there is no other way to find her under the circumstances."  That was June 22, 2022.

On August 28, 2026 at 11:48pm I wrote an email.  

"Dear In-beom, I was wondering if you were still able to contact my birth mother.  Please let me know, thank you!"

I sat watching the cursor blink for a while, contemplating whether or not I actually wanted to send the email.  What if my birth mother has died?  What if she still doesn't want to communicate with me?  What if this is too much to go through again?  What if this is my last chance?  What if - 

Sent.  Laptop shut.  Lights out.

Korea is at least 14 hours ahead of us here, so they received my email on a Saturday.  I haven't received a response yet, but then again, it's been four years.  

I don't really know what my expectations are.  It'd be even easier to claim that I don't have any, but I know Carolyn would dispute that and correct me by saying it's impossible not to have expectations.  But even so, I can't seem to grasp them.  

And so I'll wait.  In the meantime, I heard news today that Wendell Berry passed at the age of 92.  My brother gifted me a book of his poetry last year and I have since enjoyed reading it.  

Here is, "The Peace of Wild Things."

"When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light.  For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."