“Not Right for Our Needs”

The Modern Love rejection that gave me back my favorite thing I’ve written.

My birthday has always been a hard day for me. Over three decades in this world haven’t taught me the right way to balance celebrating the birth of my existence with grieving my mom. I usually try to spend the day (or the days before or after it) with friends and other loved ones. But the shadow of my missing mother — missing her when I never had the chance of meeting her — always follows me.

In 2024, my husband and I got married at City Hall in NYC on my birthday. I thought the trifecta — my birthday, the anniversary of my mom’s death, and our wedding day — would make the day more palatable. In some ways, it has. In other ways, it hasn’t. The older I get, the more I realize that this grief, this mixed feeling, is something I still need to learn how to live with.

This past birthday has been harder than most, as the essay below will explain. For as long as I can remember, writing has always been the antidote to most emotional pain I have experienced. In the days after my birthday this year, I poured my heart out into writing this essay. It was also the first piece of personal writing I had produced in quite some time. I naively pitched it to The New York Times’ “Modern Love” column. Deep down, I knew it wouldn’t be the right fit. But maybe I was on the writer’s high or something.

Two months after submitting it, I received the rejection, although it was much gentler than most. “Although we don’t find your essay right for our needs, I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to consider it,” the editor wrote me.

So it’s going to live here on my Substack instead. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for being one of the very first subscribers to my newsletter — for believing in my work so much that some of you have put dollars behind it. The following is probably my favorite piece of writing that I’ve birthed to date. And I’m proud that it’s going to live under my own publication and terms.

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Saying “Umma”

Umma was my first word. For twenty-two years, that’s what I called my Korean grandma. My birthmom took her last breath as I took my first.

This past May, my birthday fell exactly a week before Mother’s Day. The proximity is the kind of accident the calendar makes once in a while. And, in the seven days between them, I thought quite a bit about the Korean word for mom, umma.

When I first said it aloud at two or three — or whatever age my cerebral palsy-affected speech allowed the word to roll off my tongue — I didn’t realize the gravity of the word, nor that the person I was calling umma wasn’t, in fact, my mom.

By the time I was aware that other kids spat out their first words casually — in protest, hunger, or boredom — I had already learned that saying umma required me to organize my whole body around it. An open vowel, almost a sigh. Then the lips, pressed and held, asked to make a sound through themselves. Then the release. I had to want to say it.

I had my fair share of speech therapists throughout childhood. They had good intentions — they tried to make me sound like my peers — in hopes I’d be understood, heard. I remember practicing in front of mirrors, watching my own mouth. In my head, I’d say the word crystal clear. But what came out of my mouth would be a shock to both them and me. To add to this disconnect, they wanted me to say “mom” with clean consonants legible to strangers. They were not aware, and I could not have explained it to them, that the word my body was actually organized around was a different word, in a different language, for a different woman.

But in my Korean household, with no “American” teachers or therapists around, I freely said umma instead to a woman who was, by then, already a grandmother three times over. I don’t know what her relationship to my mom was. But I can only imagine what it was like to bury her only daughter-in-law, the woman she entrusted to love and care for her son, a person whom she took in as another daughter. Grief of this magnitude would be something I’d only start to understand much later, when I lost the only umma I had known — all but the structure of the family tree — and to only have the memory of her left.

***

My grandma never corrected me; she always answered to umma. She never said, "I'm not your umma; I’m your halmoni.” She just answered.

Later, I would learn that this is what mothering is: not the noun, but the verb — the willingness to answer to a name that, technically, is not yours.

Yet, she was not a soft woman. She believed in systems and correctness. She kept her hair short and her opinions audible. She scolded me in second grade for missing one word on a spelling test. She was the one who truly knew, against other relatives’ skepticism, that my cerebral palsy merely affected my physicality, not my intellect. As traditional as she was, she was very progressive in her views of disability, even coming from a culture where it was the norm to institutionalize folks like me.

“You need to try twice as hard,” she’d often say to me. She probably meant: the world will not love you the way I do, and you will need to be ready.

Perhaps it was because she had been dismissing misconceptions about herself for sixty, seventy years that it was natural for her to hush over relatives who suggested I should be sheltered, placed in a lesser academic school, and be held to lower standards. Ever since I was a baby, she could see the brilliancy behind my eyes.

To this day, every time I accomplished something noteworthy, be it graduating from an Ivy League school twice, getting a byline in a major publication, or getting *the* job, I think quietly to myself, Umma, look, I did it.

***

Going to school was a whole different ballgame. At home, within our family, my grandma could decide what my mind was capable of. But to my great disappointment as a young student, she couldn't decide whether the classroom desk had room for a wheelchair, whether the teacher would call on me, or whether the teacher would understand me when I spoke. For that, the school assigned me a one-on-one paraprofessional.

A paraprofessional is a staff member school admins hire to assist a student with a disability, like me. They’re typically paid less than the teachers. And they are not, in any official sense, your family nor supposed to make decisions about your life. They sit beside you, follow you from class to class and to the bathroom and cafeteria, and provide you, in my case, physical support in completing coursework. Be it picking up the pencil I dropped for the fifth time in a period, transcribing my chicken scratch into something legible, or grabbing my textbooks from the locker.

From sixth through eighth grade, that person was Sharron. Sharron decided early on that I belonged in the room, participating at full capacity. When teachers turned away from me, she turned them back directly at me. When school admins suggested easier classes, a less demanding track, she said “no” on my behalf, sometimes in front of me, sometimes in meetings I wasn’t included in. She wasn’t hired to argue with administrators, to advocate for me. She did so anyway. She did it in the same manner a mother argues for her own children.

Throughout high school, I had Domenica. She was a different kind of fierce — she knew which teachers would accommodate me and which ones would not. And she organized her advocacy for me accordingly, often without anyone asking her to (she also knew I wouldn’t settle for anything less). She was feisty in all the best ways possible. She’d attend meetings that no parent of mine came to. She corrected the language in the documents that inadequately described me. When I gave her the initial list of colleges I wanted to apply to, she dared me to dream bigger. And, oh boy, I’m so glad she did.

Neither Sharron nor Domenica had been hired to do this. Their job descriptions included phrases like “assistive support” and “daily living tasks.” They went above and beyond that, ten times over. And their care and love for me didn’t end when the dismissal bell rang. They took me in as one of their own, inviting me to family functions and taking me on cultural experiences I’d otherwise have missed. In a sense, they took the baton from my grandma and ran as far as they could with it, with me under their wings. The three of them didn’t really know one another. They had no occasion to. But between them, in different rooms and different decades, they shaped me into the woman I am today.

***

My grandma was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer shortly after I graduated from Barnard — and when I was mere weeks into Columbia Journalism School. By then, I had been calling her umma for over two decades — in English sentences, in Korean ones, in the Konglish register as my mother tongue faded. Even after my dad remarried, I had, in my heart, reserved umma just for my grandma. Whenever it was just the two of us, I’d call her that freely. The word absorbed her. In her last weeks of life when she could not remember my name in the last weeks, I sat with her and whispered, Umma. It’s me. Umma.

I don’t know if I was reminding her or reminding myself.

She died in January of 2018. The months that followed had no precedent; I didn’t know what to do with that kind of grief. But I kept my head down and finished my second Columbia degree, because I knew that’s what she would’ve expected me to do. When I walked across the stage to receive my master’s diploma (it was a ten-month-long program), all I could feel was her absence. Just a year prior, she was there, at Radio City, watching me get my Barnard degree. I fully expected, hoped, she’d be there for this milestone, too.

***

What I didn't expect was how grief would slowly illuminate the others. I began to notice other women had been quietly filling the same hole my grandma had been pouring into with her love for years. None of them had ever asked to be called umma. None of them ever would have. They were employees of school districts, professionals filling out timesheets. But the word, the word my mouth had been trained to produce so carefully, the word I had said for twenty-two years to a woman who was not, technically, owed it, had been migrating without my permission. It had been distributing itself. It had been finding people.

This is the part I find difficult to say without sounding like I am tidying it up. My grandma was singular. No one replaced her, or ever could. The emptiness in my heart is the size she was, and it’ll remain that way.

But I had, over the years of my education and the years afterward, been calling other women some version of umma in my head, in the way I leaned toward them, in the way I trusted the room when they were in it. I had not noticed because the sound was internal. I was raised by a woman who answered to a name that wasn’t, strictly, hers. It should not have surprised me that the same thing happened to me: others calling me mom or umma, be it my late younger cousin or my (half) baby sister. I slowly recognized that I, as motherless as I was in the technical sense, have innately inherited motherly instincts from those very three women. I have learned to provide shelter and love to those in times of need. No questions asked, nothing expected in return.

I think this is what mothering has become. We no longer assume the work belongs to one person. We don’t assume it is biological, chosen, or even named. It sometimes accumulates in the aide who decides, on her own time, that you belong in the room, the woman who shows up to the meeting that no parent of yours came to, the staff member who corrects the language in the document before the higher-ups sign it. They mother in the verb tense. They do not require the noun.

This realization would have dryly amused my grandmother. Twice as hard, she would have said, and meant it about everything. But she was also, I think, the original instance of this lesson. She had spent years showing me what it looks like when a woman accepts a name she is not owed and meets the child who gave it to her anyway.

This year, in the seven days between my birthday and Mother’s Day, I’ve said it out loud, to no one in particular. Umma. The word still costs me what it has always cost me — the lips, the breath, the wanting. I want the word to land on someone, but sometimes there isn’t anyone that it can land on.