Separated @ Birth: A True Love Story of Twin Sisters Reunited (6 page)

I am happy I went to design school. I got to meet a lot of people from all over the world, and it was from there that I found Samantha. It was my destiny. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been in London, so I wouldn’t have met Kelsang, so he wouldn’t have known to show me KevJumba’s video, and I might have lived the rest of my life never knowing Samantha existed.

we. are. family. get up, everybody, and sing!

When I was a kid, I always wanted my parents to get another child. I wanted a younger sibling, someone to take care of, despite the fact that I loved the attention and glory of being the one and only baby girl. And let’s be honest, Asian babies are cute. Naturally, as a baby and little girl, I got a lot of attention, not only from my family, but from friends of the family and strangers as well. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy it. Still, a sister would be cool. I was always envious of the girls who could wear their big sister’s clothes to school and then get into a fight with them about it at recess. I certainly wasn’t going to wear my brothers’ cut-off shirts and smelly sneakers. They didn’t even fit!

I really wanted a little sister, so I could paint her nails and do her hair. I wanted someone to look up to me, and I wanted to give her all my wise knowledge. Being a little girl myself, I’m pretty sure I didn’t have much knowledge, except for how to tie my dance shoes properly and how many times in a row I should brush my hair to make it shiny, something I
learned on the many sleepovers I attended, where my friends and I watched the movie
Now and Then
.

Of course, if I were going to get a little sister, my parents would have to “buy” her, too. At times during my childhood, I joked to my parents that they had “bought” me, although I never resented that I was “at cost” to them, and I was never angry that they wanted me because I was a girl. In fact, I actually didn’t find out that they specifically wanted a girl until I was much older. But, if they hadn’t wanted a girl, I wouldn’t be here today, so how could I be mad at them for that? I never felt like I was a purchase. But, I guess in some sense, joking is a passive-aggressive form of confrontation. Sometimes you need to laugh at a situation and call it out for what it really is. But the truth is that my parents wanted another child to love for the rest of their lives, and that was that.

I don’t think I ever imagined having a twin. I mean, as I got older, I wanted to find someone who looked like me. Yes, a lot of Asians look alike. There, I said it. But I had yet to find someone in the world who I thought looked just like me. I’m incredibly short and have a really strange profile, freckles, boobs, and a butt. These aren’t the typical Korean attributes. Not that my brothers have a striking resemblance to my parents, either, but I never even had the option to look like someone. How would I know what to expect? What wrinkles am I going to get? At what age will I start to get fat? Will I have spider veins? I had no model on which to base my theoretical “aging” scenario.

As a kid, I remember thinking about my reflection. When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t see a small Asian girl. I saw a small white girl. I aspired to have the blue eyes and blond hair like seemingly everyone else in Verona, New
Jersey. Yet I wasn’t disappointed when I looked in the mirror. I guess my image of beauty came from my family. When I imagined myself being beautiful, it was looking like my parents and my brothers. But my reflection brought me back to reality. I never imagined being able to stand across from someone, look directly into her eyes, and see myself.

I have always known that I was adopted. It is like knowing that the grass is green and the sky is blue. Some parents choose a particular time or an “appropriate” age to tell their children that they are adopted. But, for me, there really wasn’t a chance that I wasn’t adopted—my parents are a different race. It was never a problem for me, because it wasn’t presented as such. My mom was my mom, my dad was my dad, and my brothers were my brothers.

Adoption was always part of the Futerman family plan. My parents discussed it early on in their relationship. The idea appealed to both of them. They say it wasn’t for any altruistic reason. They weren’t looking to help a “poor orphan” somewhere. They just wanted to have one or two biological children and adopt one or two more. Little did they know, they would end up with bratty me—and maybe a French “plus one.”

And so the plan went. They already had two biological sons, my brothers, Matthew and Andrew, when they started the process to adopt a third child. Apparently my mom had been putting Andrew’s baby clothes into storage boxes when the feeling hit her that she wasn’t done. Either that or she was manifesting the beginning of her mild hoarding syndrome—not legit, just diagnosed by a couple of perceptive individuals, myself included. My parents began with a domestic adoption agency, Catholic Charities, but they were told the wait could be eight to ten years, and they didn’t want
to wait that long. Their sons were both under the age of six, and they wanted their next child to be relatively close in age to them. As this was going on, Matt made a new friend at preschool, an adopted Korean girl. My parents liked the idea of adopting a child from Korea and asked the girl’s parents how they had gone about it.

My parents were told about Spence-Chapin Adoption Services, and they took the recommendation. At the agency, the intake person explained the adoption procedures, paperwork, and parental age requirements so clearly that my mother was scared that she and my father might not qualify. Next came the discussion regarding fees and expenses. Now my parents were not only scared but shocked. The costs were very high, between New York agency fees, Korea agency fees, foster care fees, airfare for the baby, and airfare and fees for the baby’s escort. At the time, babies were “escorted” to the parents’ home country. Few, if any, parents actually picked up their child in the country of birth. My parents weren’t poor, but they weren’t rich, either, and they wondered if they could really afford it. There were also the eighteen years of costs to raise me, and college tuition . . . but, hey, I think it was a safe business investment. My parents did, too. They took a second mortgage on their home in Verona, to pay the expenses.

Spence-Chapin was extremely thorough. The social workers not only talked to our family pediatrician, but they investigated our neighborhood to be sure that a Korean child would not have trouble living there. There was a family meeting at the agency with my parents, Matt, and Andrew. My parents also attended one or two group meetings with other potential adoptive parents, which, they said, felt like group analysis. All of this, of course, was to prepare them for how
the arrival of a Korean baby would change, and add to, their family dynamics.

My parents filled out mountains of paperwork. Because they already had two sons, it was mentioned that they could request a daughter, and although there was no promise, every possible effort would be made to see this happen. It was also mentioned that considering their ages—my dad was in his early forties, my mom was in her late thirties—Korea would not approve another adoption later down the road. So, my parents’ initial plan of “one or two biological children and one or two adopted” turned into “one adopted.” They requested a daughter and began the wait.

Less than a year after starting to work with Spence-Chapin, my father received a phone call that their baby had been born. He ecstatically located my mother to tell her it was a girl. Although I had been born in November 1987, my parents first heard about my birth in January 1988.

To announce my arrival, my father sent bouquets of pink flowers to both my grandmothers with a card that read, “It’s a girl!” My maternal grandmother was working in a small children’s clothing store at the time, and the owner of that shop sent my parents the entire girls’ display from the window. My paternal grandmother, meanwhile, bought every pink item of clothing she could find.

Then came the scary news. The social worker called my parents to say that the Korean agency had reported that I had a serious birth defect, so serious, in fact, that my parents could refuse me and take the next baby available. My parents were thinking . . . eleven fingers and twelve toes . . . no face . . . half panda. To be certain my parents understood what they were getting into, the agency in Korea sent them three pictures of me, one where I was being held by my foster
mother, and two where my arm with the “serious birth defect” was circled and highlighted with arrows. My mother has since been told that this strawberry patch was once considered a sign of bad luck in Korea, but we are not sure if it meant bad luck for the child or the parents, or if this is even the truth. A medical report was forwarded to our pediatrician, and the “serious” defect was nothing more than a raised strawberry patch birthmark, known as a hemangioma, on my left arm. Our doctor assured my parents it would be gone before my second birthday.

My parents did not delay with the adoption. In my mother’s heart and mind, I was her baby, even if the hemangioma had been problematic. My foster mother wrote my mom and dad a letter in Korean, which the social worker translated and read to them over the phone. It said that I was her first foster child, and that she never put me down, but always carried and cuddled me. She warned them that I had my days and nights confused, and although I would fall asleep eventually, I preferred to be held on her shoulder to do so. How unbelievable to have been loved so much by my first caretaker.

My parents had a wait of more than two months to finally meet me, so they had time to prepare my nursery, set up my crib, and baby-proof the house. Mom also received her special gift from Dad—whenever a baby arrives in my family, my dad buys Mom a piece of jewelry to commemorate the event. For Matt’s birth in 1982, Mom got a diamond band ring. For Andrew, born in 1985, Dad gave her a diamond necklace. When I was born, she got a gold bangle bracelet with bits of jade and emerald, the green gems chosen to represent Korea.

On March 21, 1988, my parents, accompanied by my
two brothers, drove to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to await my arrival. It is so strange to think that only two weeks prior, six time zones away, a French couple was picking up a little Korean girl at Paris’s international airport—a baby born the same day as me.

Throughout the adoption process, my mother’s motives were transparent—she wanted her third baby, end of story. She hadn’t worried about taking care of a third one, as she already had a supremely supportive, loving family. What my mother didn’t tell me until very recently was that the night before I arrived in New Jersey, she had a major panic attack. Suddenly, she felt guilty that she had subconsciously been “stacking the deck” to ensure herself a daughter. She also feared that bringing me to New Jersey was selfish and not the best choice for me, that she wasn’t as capable of taking care of three young children, that our town would not accept me, that I would have no friends. Overcome with anxiety, she fell to pieces, crying uncontrollably in the shower. She managed to pull herself together for the trip to the airport on very little sleep.

My parents had informed their families that they wanted the day of my arrival to be private, i.e., no grandparents or other relatives, just the two of them and my brothers. After a suitable time of bonding with me at home in Verona, they would then invite small groups of the family to visit. As is typical with my family, nobody listened or complied because that plan sounded really boring. My paternal grandmother, my father’s brother, and my maternal grandparents all “happened to be at JFK airport” that day. It wasn’t all bad. There were little coin-operated TVs attached to chairs in the waiting area, and my grandfather would plunk in quarters so
my brothers, now six and two, could have something to keep them busy.

Nine other adoptive families were also waiting for this flight. Suddenly a plane was spotted out the window of the terminal, slowly taxiing in their direction, and just as suddenly stopping. My brothers jumped from their TVs and glued their faces to the window. Let’s be honest, they were thrilled to see an airplane so close—they didn’t jump out of their seats in anticipation of my arrival.

All nine families watched and waited. Most of the passengers had already deplaned at another gate, so only the nine Korean babies and one medical student, the escort, remained on board. One escort taking care of nine babies all the way from Seoul . . . a fourteen-hour flight! I would have hated being on that plane. Oops, I was.

There was a social worker from Spence-Chapin waiting with the families, who explained that only one family member could go aboard to collect the baby. My father jumped to attention. He was the first in line to board the plane, but the last to come off. He had to go from baby to baby, searching for the wrist bracelet that said “Futerman,” so it had taken him a while to find me in the far back, bundled in a yellow knitted ensemble complete with matching booties with appliquéd butterflies, handmade for me by my foster mother.

When my father finally emerged, he was beaming so proudly that in photos his broad smile could be seen even under his massively oversized Super Mario mustache. He held me facing forward so that everyone in the family could see me. Grand entrance, indeed.

Mom said I wasn’t alone in being fashionably dressed—all the babies wore adorable little outfits and looked extremely
cared for and loved. When Dad and I reached her, I looked right into her eyes with the biggest, most beautiful smile she had ever seen, and all of her fears from the night before disappeared. I looked so confident and self-assured, as if I recognized the whole family and immediately knew that they were mine. I’m still amazed how in a matter of seconds, I took complete control of the family, and I was only four months old. I was theirs, and they were mine, and everything couldn’t have been better.

My mother got to hold me for a brief moment before the grandmothers descended on me, and I was passed around from grandma to grandma to grandpa to uncle. The pictures we have from that day are awesome reminders of the monumental event.

Everything at JFK did not go completely smoothly. As my mother relaxed into comfortable mom-under-control mode with her (now!) three well-behaved kids, my brother Andrew took on the power challenge. He had gotten it into his head that the families could pick the baby they wanted from the airplane. I was as bald as Daddy Warbucks, but Andrew had seen some of the other parents come off the plane with babies sporting really cool hairstyles, and he wanted one of those. He had a special liking for one with a tiny Mohawk. My mother was mortified, having been trying to impress the social worker with how “perfect” her family was. But now she was carrying Andrew like a football tucked under her arm out of the airport while he screamed, “I didn’t want that one, I wanted the one with the Mohawk!” It was my day, but Andrew was trying to steal the attention. His middle-child syndrome had begun.