When our oldest daughter was born in Korea, my husband and I didn’t know that we were going to be adopting her just one year later. In fact, we didn’t know that she existed. Yet.
But three weeks after her birth, we found ourselves traveling through Incheon Airport, on the way to a trip to China and the border of North Korea. We didn’t know her, and she didn’t know us, but I often think about the coincidence that we were physically so close to each other without even realizing it.
Something changed in both of us during that trip to China. We had talked a lot before about adopting, but we hadn’t taken any concrete action toward making it a reality. But soon after we came back home from our trip, we decided that we were ready to take that first step.
I remember it was the end of August. I had gone out with a good friend for her birthday, a friend who had always encouraged us about adopting. She asked me why I didn’t ask my mother if my grandfather in Korea could help us with the adoption process. My mother’s father had been running an orphanage in Korea for over 50 years. If anyone knew where to start, it would be him.
I pushed aside my lingering feelings of nervousness, and made the call to my mother that very night. I’m not sure why I was so worried about bringing the subject up to my mother. Perhaps I thought that she might be like other first generation Korean parents, reluctant to even discuss the possibility of adoption, even though her own father had started an orphanage. Maybe I was still just anxious to move from the safety of “exploring” the idea of adoption to actually asking how to go about it.
So I called my mother. But before I could even bring up the topic, she beat me to it.
“There’s a baby at your grandfather’s orphanage. Do you know anyone who would want to adopt her?”
And that’s when I knew, just knew without a doubt, that this was no coincidence. This was our daughter.
First of all, my mother had not known in any way that I was going to ask her about adoption that very night.
Secondly, there had not been any babies at the orphanage for years. They mostly cared for older children who were not eligible to be adopted overseas.
But this time, there was a baby girl, our daughter HJ, whose birth mother had given her permission to have her daughter adopted internationally. And at the time we found out about her she was just two months old.
Had we waited any longer to ask about adoption, we might not have known about her at all. Had my mother not thought to ask us herself, she might never have realized that we were wanting to adopt. And yet somehow, we were brought together.
Three months later, we were back on a plane to Korea. We got off the airplane at Incheon Airport, but this time we weren’t just passing through. We were on our way to meet our daughter.
Angie Bahng is a freelance editor and writer, born and raised in Chicago, and a mom to two girls. She started blogging in 2012 to connect with other moms and adoptive parents of special needs kids. Her older daughter is adopted from South Korea, and the one she mostly blogs about and affectionately calls her spirited girl. Her younger one is her surprise baby, who currently is giving her older sister a run for her money and turning out to be spirited in her own way as well. You can reach Angie at myspiritedgirl