Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

All her life, my wife wondered about her birth parents. Who were they? Where were they? Did she share physical characteristics, a voice, a favorite cuisine, or certain habits like biting a lower lip?

Recently, our friends’ health scare led to a new worry about genetic diseases. So my wife registered her name on Adoption.com, as an adoptee seeking her birth parents. Then, she hired a specialist to research hospital records in Columbus, OH. Two months later, she was sitting on a park bench next to the woman who had given her over to an agency some forty years ago. They talked for hours, which answered many questions for my wife. But she got no information about the identity of her birth father.

From an early age, my wife knew she was born to a woman other than her mother. Her adopted parents lovingly raised her and provided a life of comfort. She grew up wanting to please her parents: earning the best grades, participating in sports at a high level, maintaining an upright image throughout her life. She worked to never be rejected again. Being given away as an infant created a gap in her understanding of herself. As an adult, she navigates feelings of abandonment and gratitude. I admire her strength in overcoming periodic waves of insecurity and doubt.

No adoptee’s experience is the same. Today’s poem portrays a meeting with a birth parent — the kind of encounter we seek to gain new information, but, it often does more to help us live, every day, with what we already knew.

On Meeting My Biological Father
by Sarah Audsley

Mostly, I don’t think about him at all
as I go about my day, hanging laundry to dry,
brushing teeth, making tea, & somehow,
he never appears in dreams, & perhaps,
I do feel a bit guilty about the lack
of his presence, how it doesn’t take up
space in my subconscious, & then I need
to remind myself that it happened at all,
that afterward, at a pork hibachi restaurant,
on some street I cannot name, in Korea, a server
frets over the meat, uses scissors to cut up
strips, flipping them as the juices sizzle & slip
down onto the coals in front of us. My father teaches
me to use chopsticks, how to fold the hot pork strips
in lettuce, add sliced green onions,
freshly pressed tofu, radishes.
With this stranger I’ve just met, I sit
on the floor, share this meal. Gestures,
a smile here & there, is what I can say.
I don’t remember the quality of the light
only that he said he didn’t take
my mother to the hospital—it was
because of family debt, a cloud
hanging over him—so she died
& he was left with me—small & 
screeching, with no milk, no bottle,
formula so expensive. What to do?
When did he realize he couldn’t care?
Again, I try to remember what 
it was like in the orphanage,
in a country where I’ve never lived,
in a foreign tongue. He holds 
my hand, strokes the back of it, says,
how good it is to see I am grown,
I even resemble my mother, says he’s 
happy, asks if I’m happy, too.

“On Meeting My Biological Father” by Sarah Audsley from LANDLOCK X © 2023 Sarah Audsley. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Texas Review Press.