Mom (4 page)

Milly:
We took a trip to Philadelphia. I remember we went to register at the desk, and there was a question of one room or two rooms for Nate and me.Your father did the registering, and I was kind of curious as to what he would say. He said, “One room,” and sort of looked at you guys.

Jayne:
[
laughs
] So David and I were married in August of 1980, and you were married in March of 1981. You married my father, I married your son, and it was very wonderful in lots of ways. What do you think were the best parts of that? I mean besides knowing that we would always be with you for the holidays.

Milly:
I think your two daughters, Rachel and Dalia. Rachel was the one who made me a
bubbe,
a grandmother, and I’ll never forget that.

Jayne:
There have also been challenges—I had breast cancer when Rachel was born.

Milly:
I’d be in bed with you at night while you were filling the bucket after chemotherapy, and I would empty it. It was maybe the only way I had at the time of expressing my love for you—who wants to empty a bucket of vomit? But I was grateful that I was there and able to do it.

Jayne:
I don’t think I could have gotten through that time without you, Milly. You have taught me so much about what it means to love someone. Over the years, especially when the girls were young, you were the person that I would most turn to when I was trying to think through how to be a mother. I don’t know how many people have that kind of a relationship with their mother-in-law, but that’s the way in which you were always much more than that in my life and in the lives of our kids.

Many years ago, a friend said to me, “Don’t ever go to Milly with complaints about David. No matter what—no matter how much she loves you and you love her—her primary allegiance is always going to be to her son.”

Milly:
That does bring up the biggest issue for us, which is that we really can’t speak openly about things that bother me about your father, or you about David. I think we have somehow established, without really discussing it, that those are places we just don’t go. I find that very hard, because we’re open about so many things. But I think we’ve handled it well. . . .

Jayne:
I guess we have, because we’re still here.

Milly:
When I introduce you, I say, “This is my daughter-in-law,” and then I kind of grin and say, “She’s also my step-daughter . . . but mostly, she’s my friend.” That’s how I’ve always felt.

Susan Lisker:
Our family formed in just a magical way. I had had several miscarriages, and I wasn’t able to carry a child. I used to say I didn’t care if a bird dropped it off on my doorstep, I just wanted to be a mom. And when you came along, Elizabeth, we literally adopted you and closed on your case the next day.

I was very concerned about discrimination with you and then when we adopted Pete—you’re both Korean—and in the beginning there was a lot of it. Now there are so many children that are adopted from other countries—you see that pretty much everywhere you go. But twenty-one years ago it was not as common for Caucasian families to have Asian children, and some very disparaging remarks were made to us. We were at a hot-dog stand once, and a man came up to us and said, “I guess they’ll send anything from China these days.” People would just be very forward with questions. On the grocery line, someone once said to me, “Is your husband Japanese?”

Madelyn, you were a total surprise. We were married twenty years—I was forty years old—and I found out that I was pregnant with you. We kept it to ourselves for a very long time, because we just assumed that I would miscarry as I had done previously, and lo and behold, there you were! By the time Madelyn came along, I was a fairly experienced mom, and one of the first questions a relative said was, “How does it feel now to have one of your own?” I was so taken aback by that—I was still in the hospital, Madelyn was all of six hours old, and my thought was:
I already have two others of my own.What are you asking me?
Maybe it was that post-birth fog or something, but I really couldn’t get what they were asking. In the middle of the night, I was holding Madelyn and it came to me. I said,
Oh my gosh!What kind of dumb question was that?

There were people who commented that Pete and Elizabeth and Madelyn weren’t really siblings because they had different biological parents, and we’d always say, “Of course they’re siblings. When one hugs the other, do they feel love for each other? Of course they do. If one has a fight with the other and pushes them around and they fall down, does it hurt? Yes, it does. Well, it’s the same no matter where they were born—they’re growing up in the same house, they’re being loved by the same parents, and they are as much brother and sisters as anybody else.” So I was always very protective.

A lot of people asked if it felt different to parent an adopted child versus a biological child, but it was your personalities that made the relationship different, not the fact that you were adopted or biological. You’re just three very different people.

Elizabeth Lisker:
I remember when you sat Peter and I on the couch and you said that you had a surprise for us, you and Dad, and that you were going to have a baby. To be perfectly honest with you, I was quite upset, because I liked having the attention. Knowing that the baby was a girl, in my head—I mean, I was in the second grade—I thought I should be the only girl in the family.

Susan:
I remember when Dad and I told you, you cried for three hours the first night and a little bit for the next several nights afterwards. One of the things that you had said to me was that you thought there was no way we could love you as much as we would “a child that grew in my body”—those were the words that you used. Do you remember any of that?

Elizabeth:
I don’t remember, but when you’re growing up and you know that you’re adopted, and you go to school with kids that have biological parents, you just get in the mind-set that children that come from their biological parents are—they’re different, like in the way that their parents treat them, or that they love them more. I had the mind-set that you loved us the most because that’s all you knew, and that having a baby might change that. [
laughs
] It hasn’t changed. I’m still loved exactly the same if not more, I’d like to think.

Susan:
Well, there’s more to love about you as you grow. When you were five years old, you had your birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese. That night, when we were tucking you into bed, you were telling me about what you liked about your day and what you didn’t like about your day. You asked me if I thought your birth mother was thinking about you on your birthday. I remember saying to you that I thought that she would always think about you on your birthday. And you asked me if I thought that she knew you had your birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese. I remember saying that I didn’t think they had Chuck E. Cheese in Korea, but I’m sure she knew that you had a really wonderful birthday.

Do you still think about your birth family?

Elizabeth:
I would like to go visit Korea and see what it’s all about, but I have no interest in meeting my birth mother—I’m perfectly fine with the mother that I have.

Susan:
Madelyn, it’s your turn. You’re growing up in a family where both your brother and sister are adopted. When you were about four years old you were fighting with your brother, and you shouted at him, “I grew in Mommy’s stomach and you didn’t!” I had to stop the fight and say, “But all of you grew in my heart.” You didn’t like that at all, because you thought that you had a definite advantage by having been born of our flesh. So what’s it like to be the only biological child in the family?

Madelyn Lisker:
The biggest thing I’ve noticed is that Liz and Pete have their airplane day—that’s the day when they came to our family. The only day I came to the family was my birthday. I only have one day of the year, and they get two. Otherwise, I think it’s just like nothing anymore.

If I could make a wish, it would be to make the age gap smaller, because I have a friend who’s two years apart from her two brothers and they’re a lot closer. When I was little, I felt like Liz and Pete were always talking and I wasn’t really included in that.

Susan:
At the dinner table, when you were very small, they would be talking about their day. You were about three years old and in preschool, and you’d sit at the edge of your high chair and you’d say, “Today at school . . .” And everybody would just keep talking and ignore you. You’d go a second time:
“Today at school . . .”
And we’d still keep talking and everybody would ignore you. Finally, you would lift up as far as the high chair would let you, and you’d shout out, “TODAY AT SCHOOL, GUYS!!!” Everybody would stop and look at you, and your brother would say to you, “All right, Madelyn, what is it?” And you’d sit there and say, “Now I can’t remember.” That would happen night after night after night.

Elizabeth:
We’re all different people in our own ways—and I’m not just saying that; we are actually
very
different people. Our personalities clash sometimes, but at the end of the day, we’re just a family that loves each other.

Susan:
That’s very true. Elizabeth, I loved you from the moment I saw your picture. And Madelyn, I loved you from the first moment also. I love you both and your brother very much today, too, but for different reasons than in the beginning. I really love who you’re turning out to be: really good people.

Roselyn Payne Epps:
I always knew I’d have a career and children. It’s interesting, you hear a lot of people talk about “Which can I have—one or the other?” Why not both? Coming from a family of African-American people the women have traditionally worked—so it has never been a big mystery about “either-or,” just how you balance it.

I never let my children think anything was more important than they were, but I never let anyone at work think that anything was more important than my job. I never talked about my kids at work . . .

Roselyn Elizabeth Epps:
. . . And you didn’t bring work home.

Roselyn Payne:
Nope, I left my work there.You make adjustments. I can recall when you all were starting school and I was working in a clinic. I was the only pediatrician there, so I had to be there every day. If anything happened at home that would keep me from being there, there may have been fifteen, twenty, forty parents bringing their children for examinations who would be disappointed. So I knew I had an obligation to be at work. But I also knew I had an obligation to my children.

You all were very responsible. For instance, I would tell you, “Tell me in advance when you’re going to have a program. Ask the teacher: ‘When is the recital going to be?’ Don’t tell me on Monday to come to a program on Friday—you’ve been rehearsing and rehearsing and rehearsing for months!” So then I had the opportunity to get someone to substitute for me. It was a partnership between us.

Roselyn Elizabeth:
Well, as far as partnership was concerned, we all had our responsibilities. There were specific chores—there were days everybody was supposed to do dishes. If we were going to entertain, somebody was supposed to sweep, somebody else cleaned the walls, and somebody else pulled the weeds. I was the “A-One Sweeper.” You and Dad were very creative with your names: “Oh, you’re the best wall washer!” “Oh, boy, you really know how to pull weeds!” Only later we realized,
Boy, we were bamboozled into our chores!
But we were sweeping, and we were so happy.