Help! I Think I Was a Horrible Friend in High School. Years Later, I’m Ready to Repent.

This is Prudie Phones a Friend, a feature where Jenée Desmond-Harris calls a few experts for their advice to a letter writer. Submit questions to Prudence here.

I went to high school with someone who was a Korean adoptee. We were in the same close friend group, and we bonded over cooking. We lost touch after high school.

I recently started learning about the international adoption process and, though we have lost contact, I feel inclined to reach out. I think this is mostly for me. I regret my ignorance of her situation at the time, and I wonder if I made anything worse. I’ve almost deleted my submission here because of that, but I can’t help but wonder if reaching out with an empathetic statement (maybe you could provide a script) would be well received. I regret not supporting friends when I was younger, but at the time, I just didn’t know how to. Is there any good to be had now that I’ve become more empathetic?

—Was I a Terrible Friend?

Dear Was I a Terrible Friend,

My first thoughts when reading this letter were: What a thoughtful and kind person, and Oh no. I hope she doesn’t unintentionally upset or annoy her high school friend, who could feel any number of ways about her adoption story and about talking about it.

Since I couldn’t get the friend’s side of the story, I decided to reach out to someone with a bit more insight into adoption and the complex feelings that might surround it. Nicole Chung is a parenting advice columnist for Slate’s Care and Feeding column, but she is also the author of the memoir All You Can Ever Know, in which she grapples with learning the truth about her birth parents (who had recently immigrated from Korea at the time of her birth) and family. She also chronicles her childhood experiences in a predominantly white community, which I imagine may share some similarities with those of your friend.

First, I asked her what she thought you might mean when you wrote, “I recently started learning more about the international adoption process.” She suggested that you might be referring to the Associated Press investigation and the associated Frontline documentary on fraud and abuse in the Korean adoption program. Perhaps you’re wondering if your friend looked into her own adoption and learned that the story wasn’t what she thought it was? Or maybe you’ve just come across other stories shared by adoptees and have a new understanding about the challenges that can accompany this experience.

Either way, my impression was that “reaching out with an empathetic statement” wouldn’t be the best idea. Even though I think you’re coming from a really good place, I was a little worried that you might dump your emotions onto someone unprepared to absorb them. I asked Chung what she thought. Could a random reach-out about adoption be awkward or potentially upsetting to receive?

“I don’t know that I’d be upset,” she said. “But it would be awkward, for sure. It’s not as if they’ve remained close and talk to each other about personal matters all the time. Personally, I wouldn’t want to have to field a (let’s face it, at least partially guilt-motivated) statement—or questions about how I felt/feel about my adoption—from someone I haven’t talked to since high school. Nor would I want to be put in a position of being asked to acknowledge or forgive their past lack of empathy, if that’s really what it was.”

That said, Chung cautioned that she thought you might be assuming a bit too much about having been a terrible friend all those years ago. “I would be surprised if their friend has spent all the years since their last contact thinking about how this one specific person wasn’t there for her in this one specific way,” she said, adding that it makes sense that you didn’t ask about adoption at the time. After all, it’s likely the adults in your life were “reinforcing adoption narratives still strongly skew toward the simple ‘happy ending’ variety. That’s what many kids grow up reading in books or seeing in movies,” she pointed out. Plus, she added, it’s possible you were just following your friend’s lead by not discussing the issue.

In other words, you were just a teenager! You didn’t know what you didn’t know, and there’s really no reason to beat yourself up about it.

It occurred to me that maybe you weren’t as empathetic as you could have been in high school because you didn’t ask your friend about her family, or her feelings of belonging (or lack thereof), and that you could try to avoid repeating that mistake. I thought maybe you could reach out to her, not with a statement about what you now understand, but with a conversation including questions about what life was/is like for her.

Chung was not so sure about this. “Maybe they were a little ignorant about adoption—OK; a lot of people are!” she said. “But even if they’d been an expert, many adoptees of all ages—however we feel about our adoptions—don’t want to get questions about it all the time, from strangers or close friends.” Very fair!

For now, she advised, “Start with sincere and meaningful reconnection” with your friend, assuming you both want that. The adoption content shouldn’t be part of the initial catching up.

Along with a comforting reminder that none of us can redo parts of our childhood with the knowledge we have as adults, Chung wanted me to let you know that there’s a lot you can do with your new understanding that adoption is more complicated than you thought. “There’s nothing to stop them from trying to read and learn more, think critically about it, and have conversations with others they actually know and are genuinely close to,” she said. “Whether they reconnect with this former friend or not, they have found new empathy for what she may (or may not!) have felt and experienced—and they don’t need their friend to hear about that or say ‘Wow, thank you for the empathy’ for it to be real.”

My ex-wife and I were married for 14 years, and together for 20. We divorced amicably in 2019 but always held the intention that we’d stay friends. And we have! We work in the same office, have coffee once or twice a week, house-sit each other’s pets from time to time, etc. We’re both dating again, and both of our new partners have expressed some discomfort over our continued friendship…