Last night I couldn't sleep. So this is what I thought about.

There are a few little known facts about me that my close friends know. Like how I used to live in a trailer park growing up, and how once I drank bleach thinking it was lemonade, and how my family lived in Germany at one point, and how I came to join the LDS church, and how I once dressed up as a Crayon to visit my older brother’s 4th grade class—things like that. I believe in sharing honest experiences, which is one of the reasons I want to write books, only none of my stories have endings yet, so I keep waiting.

One thing that some people know about me is that just after I turned ten, my mother left home, and I haven’t spoken to her or seen her since. She’s from Korea, and she went back to Korea, and I assume she’s still there. It’s a long story, and a short story, and a mysterious story, but no matter how much time passes, my perspective on that event continues to change, and it’s something that has affected me deeply throughout my life.

In some ways, the older I get, the more distant I am from that turning point in my upbringing and its effects; and in other ways, the older I get, the more I understand and empathize with the situation. There’s that song, “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” which, most of the time, I think is a really silly name for a song, and other times, I feel like humming to myself.

There’s this Bob Dylan song that I heard for the first time over the summer, and I would weep every time I heard it because it struck that chord that I don’t often play anymore, which is the memory or the longing for this mother of mine.

Well, if you're travelin' in the north country fair,
Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline,
Remember me to one who lives there.
She once was a true love of mine.

Well, if you go when the snowflakes storm,
When the rivers freeze and summer ends,
Please see if she's wearing a coat so warm,
To keep her from the howlin' winds.

Please see for me if her hair hangs long,
If it rolls and flows all down her breast.
Please see for me if her hair hangs long,
That's the way I remember her best.

I'm a-wonderin' if she remembers me at all.
Many times I've often prayed
In the darkness of my night,
In the brightness of my day.

So if you're travelin' in the north country fair,
Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline,
Remember me to one who lives there.
She once was a true love of mine.

I don’t often think of myself as having a very close relationship with her, as I don’t even remember very much about her and her character—the sound of her voice even—because I was very young, but at the same time, I believe that daughters and mothers have a special connection that isn’t easily dissolved no matter how much time or circumstance my intervene. I do believe that families are eternal and there are spiritual connections formed between familial relationships that aren’t broken by this mortal experience. I still have dreams where I meet her again, and I wonder what sort of conversation we’ll have in the life to come if I don’t run into her again on this plane of existence.

I know Sam and I will be together forever in this way because the relationships we form in this life, especially family relationships, create these holy, sanctioned bonds that leave permanent marks on your soul. As hard as we humans try to forget things, we can’t really cut out the pieces of ourselves that are imprints of our influence on and experiences with each other. Like, as much as I may try to erase memories of past boyfriends, etc., the fact is, I learned something from my experiences with them, and kudos to them for teaching me and helping me along in my self discovery.

A few years ago I went on a trip to Mexico with a small group of BYU students. I was learning Spanish, and we stayed with Mexican families (holla to Hazel and the whole clan), and as part of the trip, we went to visit an orphanage as a “service project.”

I’m wary of some kinds of service projects, mostly the ones where I’m not sure how it’s actually giving service, or where I’m not sure if what I’m doing will have any sort of lasting effect on the people I’m supposed to be serving. We were asked to buy toys and gifts to give to the children, so we stopped at a dollar store, or a peso store, and bought all sorts of cheap toys. I bought a few little satin purses for the girls.

When we got to the orphanage, we were first taken up to a room full of cribs and babies. The girls in my group went wild, picking up the babies and playing with them, and I felt very awkward. I don’t think I’m a very coo-ey or naturally cuddly kind of person, so at first I just didn’t know what to do. But someone handed me a tired-looking baby boy who was maybe six months old, and he just held on to me. He really liked me, and I was shocked because I wasn’t doing anything to entertain him, and I’ve convinced myself over the years that children don’t like me. But he just clung to me with his fists and hung on and seemed to really enjoy just being held, so I stuck with him as long as I could and started feeling very strange, like I wanted to promise him that I’d never leave him and I’d take care of him, but I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t make that promise, at least not to this little boy, and eventually I gave him back and we were all escorted to the other side of the orphanage to visit the older kids.

Everyone pulled out their toys and the room just exploded with commotion. It was like a gym with no carpet and just children everywhere. Most of them were really excited about the toys, but I started looking around at the orphanage workers, and they didn’t look very happy. I realized, maybe we were just making a mess—children were getting out of control, they were fighting over all these cheap trinkets, and what they really needed wasn’t toys or material goods, it was family, and we couldn’t give that to them. We were providing a temporary high, a quick fix, a drag on the cigarette or something. Maybe that’s a cynical way to view it, but I started losing it, fast. I didn’t want to be in that room.

I caught a little girl’s eyes. She was sitting in another girl’s lap and looked so forlorn and depressed. She didn’t want to play with any toys. I handed her a purse, and she looked at me with this empty expression that said, “That’s not what I want and it’s not what I need. What I need, you can’t give me.”

I had to get out of there, so I got up, and I walked towards the door. No one seemed to notice me leaving in the commotion, except my advisor, who looked at me as I passed him and said something like, “Don’t you feel so lucky,” to which I responded with this burning feeling, because at that moment, I felt like an orphan. I felt like I could empathize with these children because I knew what it felt like for a parent to choose to leave you behind. I don’t think it’s the luckiest of feelings.

I went back to the baby room where one orphanage worker was trying to take care of like 20 babies. Yeah, I thought, we were a big help at the orphanage, our group was. Making a mess and then leaving. Maybe it wasn’t like that, but that’s how I saw it. I started talking with this woman in what Spanish I knew, asking if I could help her, and how old the children were. She gave me a spoon and a jar and had me feed a pair of twins, and I started feeling better. I know people need to eat to survive, but I don’t know if people need cheap toys to survive.

The rest of the Mexico trip was fine—actually, it was really great. I mean, I got sick and threw up for the first time in ten years and had to do some really awful lab tests when I got back to the States. But it was a wonderful trip in so many ways. Still, of all the experiences we had there, the orphanage comes to my mind the most, and not because I felt warm and fuzzy about it, but because I felt so disturbed by the familiarity of broken family relationships. More people experience it than I wish did. Not to say there’s no mercy or no recovery. There is. I believe in an infinite Atonement that heals even the most impossible wounds. It gives new chances and sunrises and all of those new beginnings, you could say, that make life progress the way it does.

So here’s to family, and here’s to mothers. And fathers and brothers and sisters and husbands and wives and children. Geez, I’m starting to sound like a John Maher song.