I whispered tearfully to the baby that the nurse put into my arms. He was crying and I knew deep inside that I had no idea of how to comfort him or how to bond with him at that moment. And I felt ashamed because I didn’t. This shame only added to the self-hatred that I already felt for putting him, my family and myself into this untenable position. At sixteen years old, I was faced with a decision that would affect another person for the rest of my life. The memory that I carried with me was of my tears falling on him while I continued to tell him that I loved him and hoped that I had made the right decision. Right or not, it was the decision I had made and there was no turning back from that point. He would not know this moment in time, but I would carry it with me forever. Weeks before that, I had signed on the dotted line surrendering my rights to my son and giving him away to a future that I knew nothing about. There were no assurances that it would all work out, just an unspoken prayer that someone else would love him even more than I did.

As I held him, I tried to imprint onto my consciousness the shape of his face, the color of his eyes, the slope of his nose and the thickness of his dark black hair. I wanted to get as much of him as I could in the few minutes that they allowed me with him. And then with all the love that I held in my heart, I gave him back to the nurse who took him away to his new mother and his new family. I gave up part of myself for the well-being of someone else; someone I would never get to know, someone I would never get to hold, someone I would never know their name or what their life would be like. With this love, I broke my own heart just so another mother’s heart could be fulfilled. Was it a loving action? In my immature way, I could only hope that it was the most loving thing that I had ever been asked to do.

And yet, this all would be so tragic if it wasn’t so ironic or the end of the story.

The story of my birth was told to me but cannot be substantiated. I was born in Inchon, South Korea where my mother gave me up to a policeman who took me to a Catholic orphanage. I only weighed 2 lbs. 3 oz and in South Korea in 1966, they didn’t have incubators, so I say that I am only here today by the grace of God, Similac milk and lots of prayers by a lot of Catholic nuns. For a long time, this was the story I carried and that I told. There really was never any feeling attached to it. It was an easy way to be quite detached from being given up for adoption. There was no empathy involved, just a matter a fact attitude toward it. Growing up, I never really saw my birth mother as a human being who went through great heartache from her choices and only wanted the very best that she could offer under the circumstances. I never thought about her much over the years. She was just a part of my story until I had a frame of reference that was undisputable. It was then and only then that I could understand the depth and weight of the love that I had been given when I had to walk, literally, in her shoes.

So often I have missed out on the gift of love by judging the container that it comes in. It wasn’t until I had to give up my son for adoption that I was able to view my own mother’s actions with the lens of compassion; to fully feel how she must have felt when she gave me over to a policeman not knowing if I would live or die, whether I would have any kind of real chance in the world and praying with the same trembling voice as I had “ I hope I didn’t hurt you”. It wasn’t until I truly felt my own mother’s pain of loving and self-sacrifice was I able to connect with her spiritually. I may never get the chance to find her to reassure her that the actions that she took were the ones that were best for me. I can only hope that somehow this type of love can conquer both time and space which will keep a mother and her child’s heart emotionally bonded together. I hope she can feel the love that I carry for her and a gratitude that is rooted in a love that only a birth mother can know. A type of love that creates ripples going outward that in most cases can never be seen by the person who initiated it.

For me, love is an action based on empathy, compassion, acceptance and grace. Sometimes, love is the only thing that you are left with when facing difficult choices that go against a natural instinct to hold on, which is what my head tells me, but my heart tells me otherwise. Throughout our lives, we are all faced with times that challenge our nature and force us to go back to a place of clarity through loving actions and difficult decisions. Loving actions are pure and true to oneself.

Today, I can be comforted knowing that through the actions of both my mother and myself that both me and my son were graced with the gift of having two mothers that love them. True love that holds no expectation of return. That is truly love beyond measure.