13 minute read
THEHURONEMERY HURON HIGH SCHOOL, 2727 FULLER RD., ANN ARBOR MI 48105 VOL. 7 ISSUE
Falling in love: Soyeon Kim’s journey adopting her son
ALLISON MI EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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Soyeon Kim says it’s just like falling in love. Her dream since what-feels-likeforever, that is. Her dream of adopting a child. “Sometimes you romanticize something for so long you can’t remember when it all started,” Huron art teacher Kim said. “Over the years, the idea just got bigger and bigger.” And bigger. And bigger. Until it was real. “Parenting is the most noble thing I can do while I’m living,” said Kim, who started the adoption process in October of 2018.
After completing their adoption application, Kim and her husband expected to meet their child within six months. But it would be three arduous years until they finally would. The first obstacle arose the day after they submitted their application, when the agency they were planning on working with suddenly closed down, “just disappeared.” It took two more months for Kim and her husband to find a complementary agency: one located 520 miles from home, in Washington, DC. From there, it only got more challenging. In addition to the $50,000 cost, the adoption process entailed mounds of fine-tooth-combed paperwork, 50 one-hour classes, and at least one 500-question exam. Kim even had to write a letter to the biological mother, without knowing who that would be or if the baby had yet been conceived. Every minute detail mattered. In one instance, Kim’s failure to check off one of 200 some boxes immediately eliminated her from matching with a baby. Based on a multiple-choice assessment, Kim’s doctor noted her as “[mildly] stressed,” and one sentence from the sea of paragraphs she wrote was deemed by the agency to be a “problem.” “It was just very discouraging,” Kim said. “I already had to pay a lot of money and had a nursing room all set up. I was already financially, physically and emotionally invested.” But for over two years, Kim had to play the waiting game. “It was pushback, pushback, pushback,” Kim said. “It was heartbreaking. Like, I have to wait longer? Is this ever really going to happen?” Though the sporadic feelings of discouragement would linger for a few days, Kim always kept her chin up and saw a benefit to these delays.
“A little bit more time was given to me to do my stuff,” Kim said. “So, I chose to enjoy every piece of it.”
For Kim, t h i s meant drawing whenever she could. “I’ve never drawn that much, except for college,” said Kim, a graduate of the University of Michigan School of Art and Design. Some days, she drew for three to five hours, while on busy days, for just a few minutes, but Kim kept it consistent. She drew for herself, but also for commissioned artwork, which helped offset adoption costs. In February, 2021, it finally happened. Kim matched with a baby. An eight-month old boy in Korea, with almondshaped eyes and rounded cheeks. Over a virtual meeting, Kim and her husband met with an agency representative. The child’s files were shared, along with “aw”-inducing videos of him “wobbling” in his crib and pictures of his 100-day milestone. “When I saw the photos, I screamed,” Kim said. “It was a moment. It was the moment.” Before Kim and her husband departed for Korea to pick up their son, they had one more very important task: naming their child. With a teeming list of name recommendations from family members in hand, Kim sat down at her easel and started drawing her son, referring to the agency’s pictures. As she sketched his eyebrows, she started trying to match names. Arbor. Leo. Bentley. Austin. Liam.
“Liam,” K i m thought. “That’s perfect.” Shortly afterwards, a customized grey fuzzy blanket, which read, “Let’s Go Liam!” was shipped to the Kim household. Upon arrival in Korea, Kim and her husband had to be tested negative two more times, then were finally able to meet Liam.
It didn’t feel real. They had pored over pictures, videos, her own pencil sketches of Liam. And suddenly, there he was, ten feet away, jauntily dressed in a denim jumper overlapping a white undershirt. “It felt surreal,” Kim said. And then he voluntarily approached Kim and sat on her lap, beginning to curiously play with her pearl necklace. “We were all so shocked,” Kim said. “The foster mom was really shocked, because he was usually shy, acted invisible to strangers and had frequent tantrums.” After visiting Liam three times over the course of four more weeks, it was time to bring him home. Some worries began to simmer for Kim. “What if I’m a bad parent?” Kim worried. “What if there’s a foreign feeling that lingers too long?” The fact that this was her first child made it even more difficult. “In our hotel, he was opening all the possible doors, pressing all the buttons and bumping into all the furniture,” Kim said. Liam’s amounting bruises from his adventurous behavior caused Kim to panic. “Don’t worry,” another parent told her, alleviating Kim’s worries. “Kids do that all the time.” On the flight to America, Kim still couldn’t believe that the boy in the blue and yellow-striped pants and baby blue shirt sleeping on her husband’s chest was her son. “Is it real?” Kim continuously thought. “Is he really mine?” For the first few weeks back home, Kim described the feeling as babysitting someone else’s child. “I love this boy,” Kim said, “but it still doesn’t feel like he’s my son.” She thought that this uncomfortable feeling arose because Liam was adopted. However, when Kim talked to more parents, she found that even parents who had given birth to their children felt exactly the same. Two weeks later, it started to get better. “It started to get really real,” Kim said. “Getting a child, whether it’s by adoption or birth, is like a blind date, and then you get married, and you’re committed. Of course if you really like the person you go out on a blind date with, you have excitement. But you still don’t see him as your husband immediatley. Meeting Liam was the same.” By the seven-week mark, everything fell into place. “He’s just my child,” Kim said. “And that’s the core of parenting. It’s not so much about our DNA sharing. It’s the relationship we get to build together.” When parents would shed tears as they dropped their children off to daycare, Kim used to watch in confusion. “What’s the big deal?” she would think. However, when it was her turn to drop off Liam, it was very emotional. “Whatever steps he’s going through, I feel like I’m emotionally attached,” Kim said. “And my husband feels the same way. Us going through the process together has made us tighter.” According to Kim, the three of them — Kim, her husband` and Liam — are a team. “It’s really powerful,” Kim said. And best of all, Kim still has time to draw. “Because I drew so fervently for two years, it became second nature for me to draw fast,” Kim said. “I expected I wouldn’t have time, but practice really didn’t fail me.” Kim is so happy with Liam that she is even considering a second child. “The process was very difficult, but it was so worth doing,” said Kim, who uses nine gigabytes a month on pictures of Liam. “He brings so much joy to our family.” Kim’s personal favorite memories of Liam are when he babbles his “alien language” consisting of pouts and “wows,” defensively clings to his cobalt blue toothbrush, or when, as he sleds down the snowy sidewalks, tailed by their Yorkshire Terrier, Cookie, he never fails to wave. “I forget what my life was like without Liam,” Kim said. “It feels like he’s been here forever. And it really is just like falling in love.”
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It’s the relationship we get to build together.”
SOYEON KIM
Ann Burdick, also known as Nurse Ann has worked in the Ann Arbor Public Schools since 2003, and she joined Huron in the fall of 2019. ALLISON MI 1600 students. One nurse. Nurse Ann shares her story.
ALLISON MI EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
“O holy heck.” That was all Huron nurse Ann Burdick could think during a recent district nurse meeting, when they were reviewing updated guidance from the CDC. The muddled fine print of protocol changes and the “moving targets” of how AAPS are to implement them, were headspinners.
“Geez, we’re all having trouble keeping up with this information,” Burdick admitted.
The root challenge? Their everchanging handbook. “In math, two plus two will always equal four,” Burdick said. “But in medicine, it’s an art. It’s not exact. A diagnosis is essentially an educated guess. And COVID is an evolving thing we keep learning more about, so we keep having to adjust.” Burdick describes her routine as working two jobs at once. She’s a regular school nurse, who helps manage students’ chronic health conditions, alleviates headaches, stops bloody noses, provides heating pads to ease period cramps, and bandages scrapes. But she is also Huron’s COVID czar. She handles students with symptoms, travels b a c k and-forth countless t i m e s daily to the Health Support Room, and figures out how Huron can adopt continuously shifting COVID protocols put forth by AAPS. She also faces parents. Confused parents. Frustrated parents. All parents. “Most have been understanding, but people’s frustrations come out at times,” Burdick said. “Parents have been blunt and even yelled at me.” But Burdick’s reaction is filled with understanding. “I’m a parent of four,” Burdick said. “I get it.” She echoes a message Superintendent Jeanice Swift wrote in a weekly update at the start of the school year: “Please be nice to your nurse.” “Being in more than one place at all times is hard,” Burdick said. “And sometimes I look down at my phone, and there are suddenly 40 texts.” One of those texts is likely from another AAPS nurse, marking the start of a web of contact tracing. Say, a Scarlett nurse has a student who has a COVID positive test,who has a sibling at Huron, who is a River Rat athlete, who played in a tournament last week — it quickly gets complicated. Recently, when a COVID-infected family had questions, Burdick called them. It did not matter that it was 9 p.m. on a Friday. “I’m sorry to bother you,” the family member told Burdick. “Listen, no bother,” Burdick responded. “We’re all in this together, and I know that I’d want this information.” Burdick works out of a 11’ by 11’ inner office that has no outside windows. Prominent on the walls are color-coded medical charts, family pictures and inspiring quotes, including one about work ethic by St. Ignatius of Loyola, hand scripted in calligraphy by Burdick’s mother. “To tell you the truth, I’ve been stressing at night and eating too much junk food,” confessed Burdick, who worked 20 hours over her schedule one week. When ambiguous situations arise, Burdick knows where to head: the nurse group chat. For the students of Huron, Burdick has two main pieces of advice. One, get vaccinated. “Focus on the science, which means go to reputable sources and look up information,” Burdick said. “This is not about personal autonomy. I want to do what’s best for my community and what science says is best, which really is to get the vaccine.” Two, take care of one another. “America has been a very individualistic society, but with COVID, we need to be community-minded,” Burdick said. “We have forgotten that we belong to each other. We are our brothers’ keepers. This has to be a team approach for us to get out of the pandemic.” This past year, beyond the team bonds between the nurses, the irreplaceable cherry on top, which has kept Burdick working through the months and “won her heart,” are the relationships she has built with students who deal with chronic health conditions. Two specific students come to Burdick’s mind: one lives with severe seizures and one is diabetic. Their health challenges make them more vulnerable to COVID. “They face much more than COVID or anything I personally have to deal with each and every day,” Burdick said. “And when I witness progress, like their condition being better managed, or them taking more responsibility for their daily care, it’s ‘a win.’ When they or their parents look at me, smile, and say ‘Thank you,’ it’s just like a warm hug in my chest. It’s worth a million dollars. Gosh, it really is. We are all truly connected. And I think that taking care of each other is what we’re meant to do.”
Outside of Burdick’s office we see a whiteboard with this motivation-
al quote. KANTARO INOKI
The dialect of dance: What it all means to Nishita Shah
NADIA TAECKENS STAFF WRITER
With every movement, she finds herself drawn closer to both her culture and those around her. Senior Nishita Shah has been dancing since she was three years old, and it has always helped her connect to her Indian heritage. “Dancing is so important to my culture and my self-expression,” Shah said. “I really do feel like I’m most myself when I’m dancing.” Shah practices several dance styles, but the ones that she is most well-versed in are Bollywood, Garba, Folk and Bhangra. She says that she loves how each step has a different meaning, which weave together to form a story that is clear to both the performers and the audience. “All of those styles show me a different part of my culture,” Shah said. “They help me connect because of their rhythms and the stories that are being told.” One of the ways that Shah has used dance to connect to her cultural community is participating in the annual teaching Gujarati Samaj of Detroit’s Holi Program, which she has been a part of since the fourth grade. For the past six years, she has also taught and choreographed a group for the program. “There’s a lot of different groups that come together, all the way from three year olds to 70 year olds,” Shah said. “Everyone’s dancing, everyone’s having fun, and it’s a great cultural showcase.” Shah has also worked with a variety of studios and dance groups. In 2018, she competed on international TV as a part of the Arya Dance Academy’s Michigan team. “It was a fun competition,” Shah said. “We didn’t win, but it was a great experience.” Today, Shah serves as Co-Captain of Huron’s Indian Student Association (ISA), which teaches students Indian dance. “ISA is a very closeknit group, and we do a lot of different cultural dances to further our understanding and appreciation of Indian culture,” Shah said. ISA holds weekly meetings on Sundays, and Shah emphasizes that anyone can join, no matter the experience level. “We start off really small,” Shah said. “Then we build the skills necessary, because ISA is a growth experience. There is no expectation at all. We’re just all there to have fun and be a community.” Shah says that she thinks everyone should dabble in dance because it gives them an opportunity to explore themselves and their values. “I like to say that [dance] is a language,” Shah said. “Just as you and I speak English to each other, or my parents and I speak Gujarati to each other, dance is a universal language which you can use to communicate with anyone, anywhere.”
Senior Nishita Shah says that dance is part of her lifestyle and has boosted her confidence, while also teaching her
patience and teamwork. COURTESY OF SHAH
