A Typical Day With Some Questions

I am writing this on Thursday morning instead of Wednesday night because when I went home last night I was exhausted. I intended to stay up late to do some work for classes but I kept hearing voices telling me that I should get some sleep. I’ve been through enough sleep deprivation to know my own sleep cycle. I got four-and-a-half hours of sleep the night before last so I figured I better get some sleep last night and hopefully I can get by on less sleep tonight.

Nothing out of the ordinary happened yesterday. Well, I did have an interesting conversation with one student who missed the mid-term last week. One of my colleagues told me she wouldn’t let the student retake the mid-term if she missed it. But since the student was sick and since I myself have fallen upon the grace of professors, I decided to give her a break. Of course she will still have to prepare for the test and I am not the funnest person to take a test with (I like to ask difficult questions in case you forgot).

Yesterday was my free-talking only day. Of course it isn’t just free-talking because it also involves teaching the class at City Hall. This is always interesting, perhaps because of the maturity of the staff taking that class. Last night, the topic was about adoption. This is something I’ve been thinking about more since re-connecting with one of my cousins. I was surprised to hear people talk about the importance of bloodline in Korea. I thought that if Koreans adopted Koreans they wouldn’t be disrupting the bloodline but apparently that is not the case. One person wondered how difficult it would be to discipline children who are not one’s own children. It seemed to me she was referring to adopting children when they are ten years or older when they are adopted.

This conversation reminded me of three people: the first two are my cousins who were born in Korea, one of which I’ve been corresponding with lately (I love the look in peoples’ eyes when I tell them I have a Korean cousin). This has been interesting to talk to her about her home country. It seems ironic that I am in her home country and I am looking forward to telling her many more things when I go home in a month-and-a-half as well as hearing her own story. The third person is Janelle Matthews, a girl who disappeared about 33 years ago. I never knew her personally but I did know her family. I remember seeing the “Missing” posters when I first started going to Sunny View Church of the Nazarene in Greeley, Colorado. Eventually the family had a farewell service. They never found Janelle and it seemed possible that she might not be alive. Whether or not this was true, it was a way for the family to bring closure to this experience.

I think of adoption as a just cause and I still think it is. But I have more questions about the whole process. It seems like a good thing. As one of the staffpersons last night said, everybody should have a family. With globalization being what it is today, it makes one wonder if other countries will or have had people who adopt people from richer countries. What would it be like for a Korean family to adopt an American, where the American goes to live with the Korean family in Korea. How would that affect the person’s psyche? What might the differences be between adopting a toddler and a teenager?