Superscreamer

I might not have been as happy as my parents about our new situation initially. They nicknamed me Superscreamer. As they tell it, they had to close the windows of their tiny A-frame cottage, even in the stuffy humidity of that September, so that the neighbors wouldn't think they were beating their new baby.

My parents had waited far longer than I had, of course. Looking for the beginning of the story is like turning toward the first pages of a book and finding always more pages in between. We might start with the letters I found as an eighteen-year-old, looking through some old papers. In these carbon copies of correspondence, my parents wrote to a missionary my mother’s family knew in Korea. He had built an orphanage in Korea after finding a little girl in a dump (JS, that was the one!), and the letters to him speak of my parents’ excitement, youth, and hopefulness. Then, later, he writes, “I’m sorry some months have gone by. I could not remember whether you wanted a boy or a girl, how old, and full-blood Korean or mixed?” My parents write back immediately: “We would like a little girl, as young as possible, Korean. We even have a name picked out.” But these letters are dated three years before I was born.

Or we might start the story with my parents’ marriage after a sweet Sixties courtship; they met “cruising the Ave”—driving up and down the long street in their town as high school students did then, parking their cars in the angled spaces under the big, gentle trees to talk and flirt. My mother was with her friends, and my father was with his, and my mother’s friend liked my dad, but my dad liked my mom. They dated for a year and got engaged on the last white Christmas South Jersey saw until thirty years later, the Christmas my sister was married.

They had a pretty fall wedding, and six weeks later, on Thanksgiving day, my mother’s doctor called and told her to check herself into the hospital. Twenty years old and impetuous, she said she would do no such thing on Thanksgiving, and she arrived on Monday. She had a biopsy that suggested cancer and went back into surgery for another biopsy. While the doctor was “in there,” he did a complete hysterectomy. She awoke unable to have children, seven weeks’ married. When I was old enough to be curious but still small enough to be insensitive, I asked her, “Did you cry, Mommy?” “For weeks.” But my mother always told me that she thought the reason she had had cancer was so that she would have me and my sister—not just two daughters, but us particularly. And so I even loved to hear that story; it was the story of how we became a family.