“Before we went, Sara, in particular of the two, seemed a little unsettled here. Once we had gone over to Korea, and they met the birth mother, a lot of those issues disappeared.” • South Korea currently accepts adoption applications from heterosexual couples under the age of 45 who have been married for at least three years with no more than one previous divorce per couple. .
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Like many 25-year-old women, Sara Lawson* rolls her eyes at the memory of her bratty teenage phase and admits that her parents were right about a lot of things. While this may sound like a typical reflection, Sara faced some very different challenges because of her unique background.
“I was three when I came over with my sister - my biological sister - she’s a year younger. We were born in Seoul… my parents are both Caucasian,” explains Sara.
She and her sister Melissa* first met their adoptive parents, Hank and Diana Lawson*, when the couple flew from London, Ont., to Seoul, South Korea in October 1986. The Lawsons had already sent pictures of themselves, their house, their cat and their extended family to the girls, all in an effort to have things appear familiar to them when they arrived at their new home.
The couple also learned about the girls’ eating and sleeping habits, which would prove useful in the coming months. Diana recalls one of her new daughters saying that she looked like Diana, and her sister looked like Hank.
After an initial meeting at the girls’ foster home, there was another visit at the Lawsons’ hotel in Seoul. The Lawsons remember feeling afraid to bring the girls out in public in a country where they didn’t speak the language. “We just stayed in the hotel. The girls ended up playing in the sink and got all wet,” Diana laughs.
“They had great fun, though,” adds Hank.
The next time they would meet with the girls was the following day at the airport when they would all fly back to Canada to begin their new life as a family.
It wasn’t long before Diana felt her first anxious feelings of becoming a parent. At the airport, Sara began to cry when their luggage was inspected by the Korean security. A bilingual bystander explained to Diana that Sara was upset because her doll was disappearing through the X-ray machine.
“My heart started racing just about then and it probably raced for about three weeks after that,” says Diana of her adjustment to sudden motherhood.
The Lawsons had been married for 15 years before choosing to adopt children. After spending time volunteering in Africa and during their other travels, they had seen so many needy children, and they knew adoption was the right choice for them.
Once back in Canada, their jet-lagged daughters talked almost non-stop for the first few days. At night, the Lawsons put a mattress on the floor, Korean-style, to comfort the girls in their new surroundings. Diana says she lost seven pounds of nervous energy during her first week as a mother. There were lots of other changes to come as Sara and Melissa were introduced to new food, new activities, new surroundings, new weather and a new language.
But they didn’t seem to be bothered by the language barrier, says Hank. They began speaking more English and completely lost their Korean language skills after two months.
“We were actually advised early on not to have them exposed to Korean people for a while, and the reason being they might have the impression that they would be taken back to Korea,” says Diana, noting that the girls were old enough to understand they had moved to a new country. “I don’t know if that (advice) was right or wrong, but we did go along with it.”
Hank remembers how things that were formerly easy, became much more complicated. “It was very hard for the first while, even taking them out for a walk. They were frightened of the simplest things, like a pine cone,” he says. “It was three or four weeks before we could take them for a walk around the block and it took an hour.”
Fear of new things is a normal reaction, says Cathy Murphy, director of adoption services at Children’s Bridge, a licensed adoption agency in Ottawa. Fear of the unknown – even a harmless pine cone – is a reaction to an unfamiliar situation. “We see kids reacting like that to new situations. They’re on high alert all the time because so much has happened in the last six months, they’re hyper vigilant to what’s going on around them; they’re waiting for the other shoe to drop,” says Murphy.
But after six months, Sara and Melissa were caught up to their Canadian-born peers in all development areas, says Hank.
While he and Diana were always open with their daughters about their adoption, they only provided information when the girls asked for it, in order to avoid overloading them with information. Diana recalls one long car ride when the girls suddenly wanted more details. “A little voice came from the backseat asking, ‘Why did you adopt us?’ and ‘Where did we really come from?’ It was like, ‘Okay, now’s the time to start talking’.”
Today, Sara doesn’t remember being told about being adopted. She just grew up knowing. And this is the best way to inform children about their adoption, advises Murphy. She says most children can understand the concept of adoption by the time they’re between six and eight years old. “Just like it’s important to keep open communication as you would around drugs or alcohol, it’s really important around adoption too.”
In the eighties, transracial families in London, Ont. weren’t common. While the Lawsons don’t believe that people were intentionally rude, Diana recalls one bothersome incident. “We were just being our family, and some woman said ‘You’re just like their real mother.’ And I said ‘I am their real mother.’ I wipe their bums, I’m their mother! And the kids were little and all I could think was ‘Gosh, I hope you kids didn’t pick up on what was just said because that was none of her business!’”
Other misconstrued sentiments that people often voiced were, “That’s a really nice thing you’ve done for them!” or “How noble of you!”
“We didn’t do them a great big favour, we just created our family. It’s not like we’ve done them a great favour to bring them here, and it’s not like we’re expecting them to be forever grateful to us for having brought them to Canada,” says Hank.
“We did it because we wanted this family, and not that we were being noble,” adds Diana.
During the elementary school years, there were some bad days for Sara and Melissa. They often suffered cruel taunts for being the only Asian children in their school.
“It was the same kids; they’d call us ‘flat face.’ It just brought me to tears! I’d go home and I’d just be crying. They were just bullies and it kept going,” says Sara. “It happened a bit in high school too. I was so upset. But I don’t think I was ever like ‘Why am I Asian?’ I was more like, ’This sucks!’”
This kind of treatment isn’t uncommon, according to the 1994 study, Intercountry Adoption in Canada, that stated that 80 per cent of foreign-born adoptees experienced racial discrimination while growing up. The study concluded that while the majority of adoptees were well-adjusted, ethnic and racial identity was the major area of concern for adoptees in a transracial family. The study also found that this concern didn’t interfere with an adoptee’s ability to function well in the general population.
During Sara’s childhood, the Lawsons noticed she seemed slightly unsettled. “She used to have these moments where we used to find her crying and saying, ‘I miss my birth mother.’ But I’m not sure she actually remembered her,” says Diana.
The Lawsons belonged to an informal group, organized through CanAdopt, that offered social activities with other Korean adoptees. Through this network in 1994, the Lawsons heard about a heritage trip to Korea for North American adoptees.
When they asked their daughters if they wanted to search for a parent, the girls said they wanted to find their birth mother.The Korean adoption agency arranged the meeting. In advance, the Lawsons made some decisions, including when to walk away. “We said right up until the time we hopped in the taxi that if the girls showed any kind of anxiety about it, one of us would stay back at the hotel (with them),” says Diana.
And so it was eight years after the adoption that the Lawson family met the girls’ birth mother. “She was very quiet; a very, quiet woman. I was just sitting there, beside her, holding her hand,” recalls Sara.
“She was able to say to them, ‘I wasn’t able to care for you, I didn’t have vitamins for you, I didn’t have the proper food for you,’ so I think that was good for them to hear. It wasn’t ‘I didn’t love you anymore,’ or ‘I wanted to make my own life some other way,’” says Diana.
Sara says she doesn’t recall much else about the meeting with her birth mother. “It means more to me now because I’m much older and I’d probably have more questions.” During the meeting, Sara says she was almost speechless but she and her sister did learn a lot.
They were told that their birth parents divorced and their birth mother couldn’t support them. Years later, she remarried and had two children, about nine years younger than Sara and Melissa. The birth mother also claimed that she was at the airport the day the girls left with the Lawsons.
“Our impression was when they said goodbye (at the reunion), the girls were happy to leave it at that,” says Diana.
Adoption reunion, or meeting biological parents, is an important part of answering basic questions about a person’s origin, explains Christine Gatzke, a clinical psychotherapist and certified post-adoption reunion and foster care counselor based in Saskatchewan. She believes that every person needs to answer four basic questions: Who am I? Where do I come from? What am I doing? What direction am I going in? In the case of an adopted person, reunion is needed in order to answer those questions.
While adoption reunion can help to resolve some identity issues, it can result in adoption breakdown, also referred to as pullback. Adoption breakdown means the adoptee detaches herself from the adoptive family while fostering stronger ties to the birth family.
The Lawsons say they didn’t have conflicting emotions about the adoption reunion. “We were really glad we went and we had no regrets about meeting the birth mother. It was right for the girls, and right for the birth mother,” says Hank.
“And right for us too,” adds Diana.
And after they came home, things changed. “Before we went, Sara, in particular of the two, seemed a little unsettled here. Once we had gone over to Korea, and they met the birth mother, a lot of those issues disappeared,” says Hank.
Diana says Sara never mentioned again that she missed her birth mother and Hank thinks it was also a positive thing for the birth mother.
“It was a closing stage in her life, for her to be able to see that Sara and Melissa were okay,” he says.
The Lawsons still live in the comfortable two-storey house on the quiet, tree-lined street where Sara and Melissa grew up.
Looking back, Diana concedes that as parents they didn’t always know that everything would work out, especially during Sara’s phase as a typically rebellious teenager. But they’re happy with their decision to adopt and they acknowledge that, as parents, they’ll never stop worrying about the girls.
Sara lives in London and works in health care and Melissa is in college. The sisters remain close to each other and close to their parents.
The Lawsons look back on their experience as all proud parents do. “They’re our kids, we worry about them,” admits Hank.
His hope for his daughters is that they end up in happy and stable marriages, following the example that he and Diana have set through the years.
“Sara has said to us before that’s what she wants in her relationship too,” says Diana, adding that both she and Hank have always tried to instill in them the importance of being good people, being good to society and being good to each other.
Neither daughter has contacted their birth mother since the meeting 14 years ago, but Sara does think about her. “I meant to write her. I just want to update her, and I’d really like to get pictures of my half brother and half sister,” she says.
She also thinks about going back to Korea again so she can experience the history and culture she says she didn’t appreciate as a young child.
But there’s no doubt about what Sara did learn to appreciate growing up here. “My parents are great, they really are,” she says. “I think adoptive parents are a little more special. They’re taking in a total stranger; they haven’t brought up or given birth to the child, and any medical problems the kid comes with, they’re going to take it on. I just think there’s an extra-special something there.