Dana Stallard - Lost and Found Daughter

 

 

My mom found out that she wasn't able to have her own biological children when she married my dad, and so they decided to adopt me and my older sister from Korea when we were babies. I was raised in upstate New York in a small town, and I grew up in a white neighborhood and went to predominantly white schools. I remember going back and forth between really hating the fact that I was forced into this white world and also wanting so badly to blend in that I almost thought that I was white myself. And so, I surrounded myself with white friends, and I dated white guys, one of whom which told me one time that he didn't consider us to be in an interracial relationship, because apparently, he didn't think that skin color was important. 

 

And so, I went away to college. At the end of my junior year there, I met this woman named Cynthia. Cynthia was super confident who she was. She was also born and raised in Brooklyn, which made her even cooler to me from upstate New York. At first, I felt like I just admired her and I wanted to be like her. And pretty quickly I realized that I actually wanted to be with her. And so, we started dating. I told my friends about the relationship, and they were really shocked, and almost to the point of being resistant. They told me things like, “Well, you can't be gay. You've never had a girlfriend before. You can't be gay. You've always dated boys.” And my favorite, which I still get, is “You can't be gay. You don't look gay at all.” [audience laughter]

 

And so, I go home that summer. Its college break, and I want to tell my mom about the relationship. So, I go into her room and she's reading at nighttime, and I take this big breath, and I say all at once, “Mom, I think that I might be gay.” My mom turns to me and she says, in the iciest you can imagine, “What do you mean you think you might be gay?” I backtrack I get nervous. I explained to her I met this woman, “She's named Cynthia. She's really cool. I think I want to be in a relationship with her and see where it goes.” But my mom just basically hears me ranting and thinks that I'm the most selfish person in the world and that I'm trying to ruin her life. 

 

After what seems like hours of my mom yelling at me, telling me that I'm a horrible person, telling me that I'm most likely going to get AIDS, and that I am going to end up looking like a man because of this relationship. [audience laughter] I go to bed that night and I'm trying to fall asleep, but I obviously am really worked up. I hear my mom outside my bedroom door, and she's muttering under her breath, which is what she does when she gets really irritated. And she says just loud enough for me to make out, “You are not my daughter.” 

 

And so, if I look back on my mom's reaction to my coming out and try to make some sense of it, I can see where she's coming from a little bit. Because in high school, my older sister struggled severely with addiction, and she was diagnosed with a slew of mental illnesses, including borderline personality disorder. My mom felt this lack of connection with her and gave up on the relationship at one point. She looked at me to be her golden child, her perfect daughter. And for my mom, the perfect daughter was not going to be gay. 

 

And so, I woke the next morning and I tried to talk to my mom, but she basically ignored me. And if she did have to answer me, she would be passive aggressive and hostile towards me. I decided that I could not live like that, even though it only been a day of my mom reacting to me like that. So, I left home. Before I went, I left this letter from my mom. And I said, “You know, mom, I'm totally wrong about myself. I made the whole thing up. I was confused. I just missed my ex-boyfriend, and I'm really sorry that I upset you.” 

 

When I get home later that night, my mom is so happy that I left that letter for her. She's relieved. She thanks me for writing it and for being honest with myself, and she says, “I knew that you weren't gay after all.” And so, I told her that I broke up with Cynthia, but I actually stayed with her. We kept the relationship a secret for as long as we stayed together, which was a few years after that, through college and graduate school. But as much as I loved her and as much as she loved me back, we were just really struggling. I was fading as a person. I was trying so hard to figure out who I was, but having to keep this huge secret from my family was obviously bringing me down. And their message to me was clearly that being gay was not okay. 

 

So, I found myself sinking deeper and deeper into this depression. And in graduate school, Cynthia and I broke up, and I felt like I just hit rock bottom. I remember being really far away from home, not feeling like I had anyone to talk to about it. I pick up the phone one night, and I call Suicide Hotline. The woman who picks up the phone does not want to talk to me. [audience laughter] She is just trying to get me off the phone with her. She's impatient, and she's dismissive, and clearly lacking some training. [audience laughter] So, I hang up the phone. 

 

The next person that I call is my mom. And at that point, I've lost it. I'm sobbing. I feel like I have nothing else left to lose. And so, as I'm sobbing to my mom on the phone, she can barely make out what I'm trying to say. I tell her to put my dad on the phone. And he gets on the phone, and for the second time, I come out to my family. And my mom says, “You know, of course, Dana, we're going to accept you. We understand that you feel this way about yourself.” 

 

But in the meantime, she completely dismisses everything that I've been through for the last three years, because she says she's never reacted that way the first time. She says she would never say that I wasn't her daughter, and she says that she would never react with such hatred towards me. And so, in my mind, she's basically telling me that the last three years of my life that were filled with this loneliness and depression didn't really exist. 

 

So, I hang up the phone with my parents, and I know that they accept me. But I also know that we can never go back from that point, and that my relationship, at least with my parents at that time, would never be the same. 

 

In the middle of all this, something really crazy also happens to me. I'm away in graduate school, and my birth mother in Korea does a search for me. She wants to reconnect with me and see how I'm doing, see if I'm happy. I remember my mom telling me this news and everybody being really excited for me. My mom, my friends, they're like, “This is so awesome. This never happens. Your birth mother's doing a search for you and not the other way around.” I just feel really numb. Everything's fuzzy when you're in a depressed state. I didn't even understand what was really going on. But I knew that no matter what, this stranger who was my birth mother would never really know me and probably never really accept who I was. 

 

And so, I get the letter in the mail, and I do write back to her. We keep up some correspondence over the next couple of years. But I don't feel that invested in the relationship. I don't think that I'm ever going to be honest with her about who I am. I'm never going to see her. She lives all the way in Korea. So, I graduate from school. I move back home to try to find a job. I get this call from the adoption agency, and they're offering me this trip to go to Korea to travel with other adoptees and learn about my birth culture and learn the language, take classes at the university. I freak out, because I've never traveled anywhere, especially by myself and that's far away. I also have this paralyzing fear that when I go there, I'm going to have to go back in the closet, because it's Korean culture, and it's very homophobic to live there as a gay person. 

 

But I decide that I want to go on this trip. There's something in me that's really curious about my birth country and where I come from. And right about a week before I was about to leave, I get a call from the adoption agency saying, “Hey, guess what? While you're there, your birth mother would like to meet you.” And so, they told her that I was traveling to Korea, and she really wanted to reconnect with me after 23 years of never even seeing each other or meeting or anything. 

 

So, I meet my birth mother the third week into my trip in Korea in the summer of 2009. It's not just my birth mother that I meet. I meet my three birth sisters, two of their spouses, their children, and my birth brother. I'm sitting in this adoption agency, and they all come rushing in. They come pouring towards me. My birth mother runs up to me, and she grabs my arm, and she just starts sobbing, and she says over and over again, “I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry,” in Korean. The translator tells me what she's saying, and she's crying. 

 

And that first day when I met them, they take me out to a Korean department store, they pick out this Korean dress for me and Korean shoes. [audience laughter] They take me in the dressing room, and they actually dress me up as if I were a little child again. [audience laughter] On the car ride on the way to the department store, I'm sitting in the back seat with my birth mother, and I put my hand down in the seat between me, and she puts hers down next to me. I see that we have the exact same hands, and I see how warm they are towards me and how much they embrace me. But I feel deep down like they're not going to accept who I am. 

 

The first question that my oldest birth sister asks me when she meets me is, “Do you have a boyfriend?” At that point, I certainly don't have a boyfriend. I'm actually back together with Cynthia, and I just tell her no and I feel like shut down in a way. So, I really had this beautiful time meeting them, but I left that trip feeling like this sense of being defeated, that no matter what, I just couldn't tell them who I was. And so, I get back home, and Cynthia actually proposes to me shortly after I return, and we end up getting married. It's a really, really happy time in my life, except that there's this chunk missing. I realize that the chunk is that I'm out to everybody in my life, I'm comfortable, I'm confident, but I'm not out to my birth family. I do want a relationship with them, but I'm so scared that I will lose this family that I just met for the first time. But I know that I need to do it for myself. 

 

So, I sit down with Cynthia, and we pick out some wedding photos to send. I decide to write this letter to Hee Kyung, who is my oldest birth sister, because she is able to speak and write some English, and I want her to translate the letter for the rest of my birth family. And so, we sit down. I put these photos in an envelope. I hand write this letter painstakingly. I look up all these words in the Korean Google dictionary, and I put the letter in the mail. And for the third time, it's like I'm coming out to my family again. 

 

A few days pass, I want to just kind of delay what I think is going to be the inevitable rejection of my birth family. I'm really surprised. And just a couple days after I put the letter in the mail, there's an email from Hee Kyung, who's my oldest birth sister, in my inbox. So, I sit down and I kind of brace myself for what's to come. I open the email and she says, “Congratulations on your wedding.” She tells me that the wedding photos are absolutely beautiful, and she's so glad that I found the person that I love. 

 

And then, Hee Kyung tells me that she considers us to be the same. It turns out that my sister, my birth sister in Korea, is also in a relationship with a woman who she wants to spend the rest of her life with. And so, she translates the letter to the rest of my family. And although my birth mother still needs a little bit of time with my news, because she's not completely comfortable with it, my birth sister tells me that we are the same. And for now, I feel like that's all I really need.