Hosu Kim, "A Flickering Motherhood Korean Birthmothers' Internet Community" (Page 4 of 5)
IV. The Distributed Unconscious of Performing Mothers
The virtual mothering of Korean birthmothers is embedded in the
trauma of adoption. The "repetitive, involuntary, obsessive" accounts of
dreams, incorporation, and fantasies of reunion are characteristic of
what Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith have described as the convoluted
relationship between trauma and memory.[16]
The unconscious
topography of birthmothers suggests the birthmothers' entangled
relationship with loss—loss of the baby, as well as the ideal of
motherhood—and thus constitutes a complex, contradictory
subjectivity.
Cathy Caruth argues that the traumatic event is an experience that
the subject witnesses but cannot easily remember, if at all. Central to
this conception of trauma is its unknown, emergent nature: "trauma
repeats itself and demands a belated experience."[17]
In this
instance, the women's unspeakable losses haunt them through various
processes, including incorporation, reunion fantasies, and dreams, as in
the following account:
ID: 정환맘
Date: 2001.11.11 23:54
How are you all doing? Today, I bought a rainbow rice cake [which a
baby is supposed to eat on the 100th day of its life]. As I ate it in
order to celebrate, instead of my baby, tears came
along.
Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok argue that incorporation occurs when
there is "no other choice but to perpetuate a clandestine pleasure by
transforming it, after it has been lost, into an intrapsychic
secret":
Everything will be swallowed along with the trauma that
led to the loss. Swallowed and preserved. Inexpressible mourning erects
a secret tomb inside the subject . . . the loss is buried alive in the
crypt as a full-fledged person.[18]
By swallowing a rainbow rice cake, the birthmother "buries" her
living baby in her body, effectively turning herself into a "crypt."
This act of incorporation brings two incompatible lost love objects—the
baby and the ideal of traditional motherhood—into coexistence within her
body. Anne Anlin Cheng further focuses on the consequences of
"swallowing" on the development of a melancholic subjectivity. She
emphasizes that the melancholic subject's ambivalence continues after
swallowing the object that inspires not just love, but also profound
resentment. This resentment leads to "the multiple layers of denial and
exclusion that the melancholic must exercise in order to maintain this
elaborate structure of loss but-not-the-loss."[19]
Numerous women on The Sad Love Stories site manage to survive this
life-death crisis by entertaining the fantasy of return and reunion with
the baby. As Cheng suggests, the birthmothers' losses sometimes are
disguised as fictions of possession. In other words, the fantasy relies
on a fictionalized narrative of adoption where the baby is studying
"abroad at a little bit younger age compared to others" or "traveling
right now." Both accounts illustrate the denial of loss by suggesting an
inevitable "homecoming" and reunion between mother and child.
The most prevalent fantasy of reunion defers the birthmothers'
motherhood until later in her life. Now, the story goes, they are too
young, too poor, too unmarried to raise their child:
I am becoming a mother whom my baby will not feel ashamed
of. So I should not drink. Until the time we meet again, I will live
earnestly. I am going to study hard and enter college.
This young, unmarried, uneducated woman expresses a determination to
live up to ideal of womanhood and motherhood. The vast majority of posts
that express such hope for a future reunion suggest that the
birthmothers' subjectivity is built on "this elaborate structure of loss
but-not-the-loss" through the deferral—rather than renunciation—of their
motherhood.
The chronicling of the birthmother's dreams further testify to the
trauma and ambivalence surrounding her child's adoption. Caruth
described the traumatic moment as "an unexpected or overwhelming violent
event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return
later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive
phenomena."[20]
Adoption as experienced by many of these
women—itself a series of violent events: the ostracization precipitated
by a socially unaccepted pregnancy, the separation from the baby at
birth, a second separation at adoption—is never fully experienced, and
thus returns in the form of dreams. Consider:
ID: 혀니
Date: 2002.05.18 23:31
I saw you in my dream not long ago. You are really sick. I woke up
and couldn't go back to sleep thinking what if my baby is really
sick.
ID: 보이지 않는 사랑
Date: 2005.06.10 06:13
I was holding my Haemin and feeling so happy in my dream a few days
ago, you know my baby called me "UMMA" there . . . I wish I stayed in my
dream . . . I woke up. I saw myself trying to fall asleep once more to
stay with my baby, which made me really sad.
Though both dreams repeat the women's traumas by inflicting a sense
of guilt and anguish, they constitute the very conditions for the
birthmothers' survival by transforming them into virtual but also
good—i.e., caring, worrying, attentive—mothers.
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