324 Diana

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/324

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You are listening to Adoptees On the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. On today's episode, we are welcoming Diana to the show to share her story of being adopted from Russia at age two. Diana unpacks how early separation institutional care and adoption shaped her mental health and sense of identity.

This episode has mentions of childhood sexual assault, suicidal ideation, and disordered eating. Please take care when deciding to listen. Before we get started, I wanna personally invite you to sign up for my podcast newsletter, which you can find at adopteeson.com/newsletter. [00:01:00] We wrap up with some recommended resources, and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com. Let's listen in. I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Diana. Welcome, Diana.

Diana: Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Haley Radke: Oh, my pleasure. I can't wait to hear your story, if you don't mind sharing with us.

Diana: Sure. To begin, I'm going to start reading from an exerpt from my adoptive mom. This is basically the announcement of me joining the family July, 1997. What do you know? Christmas in the summertime. You usually hear from us in December, but we just couldn't wait that long to share our news with you. Last year, we told you about the addition to our family, which had four legs, the kitten Princess. Now we have a two-legged [00:02:00] addition to our family. This is all real, by the way, at the beginning of June.

The adoptive parents traveled to Russia to adopt a 2-year-old little girl. Her name is my American name. She has blonde hair and blue eyes, so she's a definite contrast to adoptive sisters, dark hair and eyes. She's a typical 2-year-old in many ways and others. She's very advanced. We always wanted and expected to have a second child, but didn't seem to be able to.

One day the adoptive mom said, wouldn't it be nice if I gave birth to a three or 4-year-old? That way adoptive sister said she'd be closer in age. Then the adoptive dad said it doesn't usually work that way. And anyway, what if it's a boy? I hadn't thought about that possibility. So we investigated adopting a three to 4-year-old girl in the United States.

If you wanna child under the age of five, you may as well be asking for a newborn. One lady told us we'd have a six to eight year wait. [00:03:00] Another asked if we take a slightly handicapped child, then asked. Then when we asked for a definition, they said, needing glasses or missing a limb, it was hard for us to put needing glasses and missing a arm or leg in the same category.

Also, in America, the birth mothers retain more rights than foreign countries. We also did not wanna run the risk of a birth father coming out of the woodwork after a child has been settled into our family. So for all these reasons one year ago, we started inquiring about foreign adoption. For six months, she was made available for Russian families to adopt.

Then foreigners, within a few months from now, US Immigration will have determined that she's a US citizen. Now she's a legal alien, but she's still ours in its permanent, which is all we wanted.

Haley Radke: Oh my God. She really said the quiet part right out loud and just wrote it all down. Who did this letter get sent to?

Diana: All the friends and family. It's [00:04:00] funny, when I first read that, I was completely taken aback. I was barely out of the fog when I first read that letter, but the ick I got from it was just unimaginable. And my therapist, who at the time was an eating disorder therapist, she even read it and was this is way out of pocket here. Like we can try to like work through some of these things, but. All right.

Haley Radke: That is shocking. It's, it's not I have heard of some of these things, like people's photo albums being captioned or like baby announcement or something, but like the full detail, including the birth parent, fears and all that. Wow. That's a treasure you got there. Amazing.

Diana: Thank you. That was just a little part of it. I didn't read the whole thing. [00:05:00]

Haley Radke: Wow. Okay. So you were just two when you made your way to America.

Diana: Right? Yeah, so I was two and a half. But before all that, my paperwork. I'm gonna go by what my official paperwork says.

So I was taken from my apartment where my mom lived and put in a hospital because of the quote, social situation of the home, which I'm thinking is poverty. And then I was in the hospital for pneumonia. And it also said I was like permanently hungry, and then no one ever came back for me. So I was put in the orphanage after that, where I probably got fed and got better in that way, but I still had some consequences from rickets, from being [00:06:00] malnourished.

So they decided to come to Russia with another family. My adoptive parents are Christian, and I think that family was Mormon anyway, so it was I guess adoption tourism is like a term I've been hearing a lot lately, so they adopted me. The other family adopted a little boy and they took us sightseeing for a little bit and then just brought us back.

Haley Radke: Do you mean the adoption tourism thing like they came to Russia to the orphanage, but they weren't necessarily, they didn't necessarily know which child they were going to take home.

Diana: Oh, okay. Maybe I misunderstood the concept.

Haley Radke: Were they already know that you were it, they picked the girl and you looked cute in a picture and that was the. [00:07:00]

Diana: Okay. Maybe. Maybe that's what happened. I'm actually not 100% sure.

Haley Radke: Okay.

Diana: But I'm sure they had pictures or something like that.

Haley Radke: Yeah, I've just, I've heard orphanage stories where families go and then literally select the, the child that is most agreeable to them. Yeah, that's what I understood as like adoption tourism. So it, all of it's problematic. But anyway, carry on. So they did actually go to Russia anyway?

Diana: Yes, they did. Yep. It's just funny because they're the type of people that wouldn't step foot out of their state if they didn't have to. But okay, so after that my adoptive mom was probably on leave, for a couple weeks I was sent to babysitters.

Like I, I feel like I really didn't have a whole lot of time to adjust [00:08:00] because it was, I was pretty much jumping from like place to place a lot of the time. When I was five, I was also a victim of child on child sexual assault, which is like having that at such a young age, it really confused me inside about who I could talk to or who was safe, because she also told me, of course, like you can't tell anyone. It's a secret. So me being five, I was like, oh, I have this big secret. So that kinda winded its way into the under underbelly of my life. But I would say elementary school, I really felt the outta place aspect. Like looking around in my classroom, I just had this feeling like these kids belonged.

They are supposed to be here. They're actually doing the work in class. I'm just being like, pushed along. That's how it [00:09:00] felt anyway. I was terrified of my teachers. I was terrified of anyone bigger or older than me or any type of.

Haley Radke: Just like an authority figure.

Diana: Yeah. Authority figure. And when I hit nine, this thought just popped outta nowhere, but I was really starting to think huh, I should just kill myself.

That sounds like such a good idea. And I don't know where that even came from 'cause I didn't. Like I wasn't really exposed to that kind of thing growing up in a Christian household and pretty much being like, oh, everything is fine. Everything is great. Jesus loves you. So that thought just was in the back of my mind for a while, and then I didn't act on it at all. But when I was 12, I decided, oh, I haven't acted on that thought. I'm like, maybe that was just me being really [00:10:00] childish, like maybe that was just a really childish thing of me to think, because I don't know how that worked, but that's how my brain worked at that point. And then also, of course, growing up, you're gonna have friends that move away.

So those always felt extremely painful, like reliving, being separated and really not having a great way to contact them. I could call them or write them letters, but that was about the extent of it. So that was also like things I had to work through within myself. And when I hit middle school, my, my mental health was just like on a, like decline, like this whole time.

So when I hit middle school, I was really depressed. But that's also something people say oh, you're like a teenager, you'll. That's just how teenagers are. [00:11:00] So I had really good friends for a couple years, and then I started this really bad habit of pretty much destroying my relationships by either becoming jealous or just acting weird or mean just I knew they would abandon me, and it was like a self-fulfilling prophecy of they'll abandon me because of this reason and not because of me, just as how I really am. Like that kind of thing. So there were two other Russian adoptees that I knew of in high school. And they both were able to keep their name.

So whenever I told people that I was also adopted from Russia, they really didn't believe me because of my name, number one. And then they would say I didn't have an accent. And then thirdly, a lot of the [00:12:00] times they would say I looked like my adoptive mom, which also talking about that I did have really blonde hair growing up.

So she would dye her hair like this super light blonde to try to match me and. Also like due to my rickets and stuff like that, I have an extremely short stature. I'm five one and my teeth were really messed up, that kind of thing. So that's why I do believe that paperwork, but my adoptive mom was also super short.

So basically that's all that they saw us being like short and blonde, and that was it. But while the rest of the family, the adoptive family were, I would say very Italian, I know Italians can also look very different, but they had the brown eyes, brown hair, like long and [00:13:00] curly brown hair, so that kind of thing.

Haley Radke: Can I pause you there? It sounds like through childhood and middle school, like there, there was a lot of pain going on for you internally and at the time, did you know where that pain was coming from, or you were just existing in it. And.

Diana: I had an idea about it, but when I tell you I was so deep into the fog that I would have never admitted it on my life.

I would've just been like, oh, that's just my personality. That's just how I am right now. Yeah I probably wouldn't have even accepted it at that time either. If someone were to just be like, oh yeah, this is like, all true. If I was in high school or middle school and I stumbled upon adoptee Facebook [00:14:00] pages, I would've been like the adoptee that was like.

Okay. You guys are crazy. I don't know what's wrong with you, but I'm fine. Even though clear clearly.

Haley Radke: Fair enough. Most of us grew up that way. Like not to speak for all adoptees, but it's like you're told this is normal, this is what should be happening, get over it kind of thing.

The idea that you were trying to convince the other adoptees that no, you indeed too were adopted is also a little bit telling for me. It's something was prompting you.

Diana: I also remember asking a friend, my best friend at the time, if it was a big deal that I was adopted and I think I was asking for her point of view.

Because for me, I was like, this is my deepest darkest secret. This is what I tell people, like who are my [00:15:00] only best friends. Like especially in elementary school, that kind of thing. And she's no, not really. I'm like, oh, okay. I must be making a big deal out of this. Alright, I'm just gonna fast forward.

I went away to college and that. That really opened my eyes to how my mental health was never really addressed, which I know I probably should have spoken up, but really I didn't have the voice to. My anxiety was so bad. Also my depression, but my anxiety was so bad. I could go days without talking to people at college, and I just like moved from spot to spot, like I was like in a board game and I had no other like free will happening or anything. So that's when I dove headfirst into an eating disorder. And [00:16:00] it was the craziest, I think it was like six years of my life I spent, so I lost a good portion of my twenties to the eating disorder and basically what I found was, number one, a sense of community online, because there was a giant eating disorder community that I made some friends on. I was able to stuff down my anxiety with the food and then I would purge it and then, so that would also be like releasing my anxiety and just that whole process was like, I guess a self cure for like my anxiety because it would just numb me out so much, which I've also, I've said this before to a couple people, like I've never been addicted to drugs or alcohol, but the eating disorder [00:17:00] feels like something that would be really close for me to compare it because of all the crazy things.

Like I say, it made me do, but I don't know. I don't feel like I was in myself when I was on that.

Haley Radke: Of course.

Diana: Yeah. Oh, so much stuff, but, so when, I guess it was my sixth year or whatever, I finally drained my bank account that had, that I was using for all the food. It was actually my college tuition account.

So I decided then I would, try to end it, but that obviously didn't work. So I had to admit to everyone like, what happened and like I am not doing well and that there were so many years of just going in and out of treatment centers [00:18:00] and. I just really remember, I don't know what brought this up either.

When I was at a residential treatment facility for the eating disorder, they asked me if I had any like type of trauma in my life and for some reason I told them like, yeah, like being separated from like my mom and like my country and all this stuff is like super traumatizing. And they like cut me off.

We were on the phone, they just cut me off. They were like, oh, okay. Okay. So I guess that wasn't really what they were looking for 'cause I wasn't put on the trauma track for that. So I was like, that was another thing that was like, oh, maybe. I'm still just like making this stuff up in my head. Maybe it's not like actually a real problem.

Haley Radke: And so this would've been just like six or seven years ago?

Diana: Yeah. Yeah.

Haley Radke: [00:19:00] Because, the stats are that we're overrepresented in like residential treatment centers for addictions. I don't know what it is for eating disorders. I know we have a higher incidence, but it's disappointing that they didn't even acknowledge adoption was a trauma even just a few short years ago.

Diana: Yeah. Yeah, that, I don't know. That was just another point on their side of being like, we're the ones that. Write the narrative, for now. So we're gonna decide what's trauma, what's not, and what deserves treatment.

Haley Radke: 'Cause you had, and you're, you had it sounds like a starvation as a young child.

Diana: Right? Yeah. So also I'm glad you pointed that out. When I finally read my records, I talked to my adoptive mom about it and I was like do you think [00:20:00] this like eating disorder could also be from that, like being malnourished or starved or anything? And she's no, you don't. You wouldn't remember that you were a baby.

And I was like. Okay. I don't know what I don't know. I'm like, I like told her it's, I'm like, I eat and I feel like I'm never going to eat again. Is that normal? And she's I don't know what that's from. That's not anything.

Haley Radke: But this will, this is really making me upset because. Yeah, like I, I, 20 years ago went to some sessions about adopting internationally and they literally talked to us then about, or the state of orphanages and the things that children from orphanages may struggle with, and one of them is food, duh. Like this is so obvious. So to have your [00:21:00] trusted adults and experts in your life while you're an adult, tell you no in recent years.

Where we already know all this. This is really, it's frustrating. How do you feel like that too now looking back what are you talking about? None of you got this?

Diana: It's frustrating, but I feel so vindicated by my community, the adoptees and all the research coming out that. Like my whole passion right now is to spread the message of all of this, all the trauma, all the research to people like me who grew up in places like that where it's just in your head, you're a blank slate, like all of those really, not true things about adoption that I don't know if they're still being spread, to hopeful adopters, but it could, [00:22:00] yeah it kills adoptees. I'm just gonna say that so many adoptees end their lives because of, I can't say one thing or another, but probably because they were very alone feeling and no one probably took the time to listen to them and just saw 'em as who for who they are.

Haley Radke: And this, yes, and this higher incidence of eating disorders. And eating disorders are like it's not a good prognosis for, but I don't know, what is it? I don't One of the highest mortality rates of mental health issues.

Diana: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it might be the highest or it's one of the highest.

Haley Radke: Okay. Yes. Highest mortality rate of any mental illness. 10 to 15%. That's from AI when I just Googled it. So please fact check me if you're trying to cite [00:23:00] this. wow. Wow. Okay. Okay. I'm gonna be quiet now, but I just know that I am just like so frustrated for, seven years ago, Diana. These people should have known better.

Diana: Thank you. All right, it was winter, I guess I was still fully in my eating disorder. I had, I was on eating disorder Twitter now, so that's a great, oh, I'm just, I'm not gonna be sarcastic. No one really gets my sarcasm, but, so I had some friends on Twitter there. Okay. And I just happened to watch the movie Lion with Dev Patel because I was just going through his whole, whole list of movies because I love him as an actor and I was like, okay, I'm gonna watch Lion even though this is probably gonna be super triggering for me.

So I watched. I watched the whole thing. I was in awe [00:24:00] because I had never seen an adoptee just be written like that or look like that. And it wasn't even just him, it was also his brother who I was like, I can't remember his name right now, but I'm like, that's me. Like that guy looks exactly like me.

And like the adopters don't know what to do. And I'm just like, whoa. It's like I was like more than one person in this world had that experience. I'm like, there's no way. So I was like on a high from that and I started posting more stuff. I started looking up more adoption things, and I guess I asked people on Twitter, I'm like, do you guys know if there's like an adoption community anywhere and one girl was like, yeah, just Google it or just look it up. I'm sure there's one. And I did, and there was a big community on Twitter that I was [00:25:00] on for a little bit, and I still met like really great people there. And I actually met my therapist there too, so I still have her. She's great.

Haley Radke: Twitter's where I first found my adoptee community.

Diana: Yeah. So the first video that they guided me towards was the Paul Sunderland. Video. I think it was Adoption and Addiction, and that was the first research based video that I ever watched about adoption. And I just had tears streaming down because I was so in awe of someone saying all of this stuff out loud and being believed.

I just never in my life have felt that amazing being spoken about that way so that really inspired me to deep dive into the adoptee community. Also, at that time, I asked for all my paperwork to just look at everything, which was [00:26:00] always a battle. But, so the first round I got, I guess my paperwork from the orphanage and from what the hospital looked like during my time there and the story about how I was abandoned and that kind of thing. There are so many different things that I've heard. So on paper it says one thing, and then my adopters would always say another thing. They would say oh, she was 16, she was this, and this. Like you lived with a great aunt or something. And I'm reading these documents and there's nothing about any of that. So I'm like, I don't really believe you. So I, until I meet my mother or family and they can tell me the facts, I really don't believe the story part, I believe the medical [00:27:00] part just because I can see the ramifications of the rickets and stuff.

Haley Radke: I was just gonna ask, I guess I was just gonna say, I guess there's two possibilities. The staff at the orphanage could have told them, spun some story to them that they were repeating back to you, and that just was, I don't know what they did. Or of course they, they could have made it up to be more palatable to you somehow than the true story. I don't know. And then I guess you don't really know the circumstances of how you really became available for adoption. It sounds like there was the hospitalization and then he went to the orphanage, but were you taken away like a child protective services kind of situation, or [00:28:00] if your biological family just weren't able to care for you and they brought you there, or I guess you don't really know.

Diana: The way it was written, it sounded like someone from some sort of government agency was there and took me to the hospital. I think, but I'm just confused about some of the parts of them claiming they searched for my mother for six months, which I don't believe that at all. They said they went back to her apartment and she just disappeared. I'm like, I don't really know what to believe with any of that.

Haley Radke: Yeah.

Diana: So in my personal life I was really gung ho for all of this. I would tell it was pretty much the first thing I would tell people now, just because I wanted to see their reaction because I had this awakening here and I wanted to see if [00:29:00] people in the real world also knew about this.

So I was greatly disappointed with most of the answers or responses I got. I got things like, oh, that was nice of them to adopt you. Or oh the typical oh, you're not actually Russian. Like that kind of thing.

Haley Radke: So when you say there was an awakening, meaning you, you connected the dots that, oh, adoption did have an impact on my life and this separation, and all those things.

And then people in real life were like, no, that's not a thing. So it's very frustrating. That's very frustrating place to be.

Diana: So I just tried to keep who I knew was safe, my friends, and like people adoptees online that I met close to me so I could still talk about these things with them.[00:30:00]

And then. I met my husband at college and that is a whole new chapter of my life. My wedding was I wanted a lot of it to have Russian, details and traditions, things like that. I wore a kokoshnik it's a headdress type thing. And I was styling it in my adoptive parents' house. And my adoptive mom is oh that's so pretty. Doesn't she look good? And then my adoptive dad just goes yeah. And then he goes back to writing whatever he was writing. And I'm just like, okay. I don't, I didn't know what he was doing at the time, but on my wedding day he gave me this 15 page letter about how I was chosen by God, God made it so they would be my [00:31:00] parents and then he was like explaining the fall of the USSR.

And why I needed to be adopted and there were just a lot of Bible quotes, but this basically gave me one of the biggest mental breakdowns I've ever had. Just I'm really glad my husband and a friend were there to keep me sane. That kind of sealed the deal of I think I'm just gonna be estranged from them. I think I'm just not gonna talk to them after this. So I really wanted my original documents. That was something I've been asking for a while at that point. And their answer was always like, no, you're gonna lose it. Or they would be like, why do you even want this stuff? And it's I was thinking because I'm, I don't plan on seeing you guys ever again.

I just want my stuff so we can be done. And they wanted me to have this elaborate answer like, oh, I'm looking [00:32:00] for my mom. I'm looking for X, Y, and Z. And that really wasn't the truth. At that time. So it took a while for me to get that stuff from them. My husband was mostly in contact and he said, we're gonna have to file a police report if I don't get this stuff. At this point.

Haley Radke: What was it like to have your adoptive father say essentially using God as the reason you were separated and had an orphanage experience and had malnutrition and those kind of things. Like you said, you had a mental breakdown. Can you say what that meant to you?

Diana: I'm not gonna say I was surprised by any of that, but just the fact that he took so much time to write it out and he thought these were great reasons, but [00:33:00] that was his always his go-to is whatever happens is because God wants it to happen that way. He like people like this, like you can't really have a discussion with them because they're single-minded about what they believe. They don't want to even think about how there might be other things going on. It's not because of God. It's just, I don't really know how to explain it either, but it just felt like a slap in the face and that he can't really do any deeper digging.

Haley Radke: Has this impacted your, you grew up in Christianity. Has this impacted, your desire to have any kind of faith life at all?

Diana: Yeah I really don't agree with, I guess the whole of religion or the Abrahamic religions. I'm really into [00:34:00] thinking about my ancestors or even praying to them and being like, please, if you're out there, let me know. I'll learn Russian sentences and be like, please, I'm still here. Please save me. I don't know.

But it's still the estrangement. All of this is a huge freedom. My husband is great. He doesn't pressure me with anything, with getting back with them, and he's not super religious either.

So just being out of the scrutiny, being out of the religion, because growing up, I guess I didn't explain this. I definitely didn't feel like I could be myself around them. I was this tiny person that was just yes, no, school was good and they would be mad at me for not wanting to say anything else other than that. But yeah.

Haley Radke: I'm assuming that [00:35:00] you made a name change. Is that right?

Diana: Yeah, that's correct. I decided to go with, go for it right after my wedding because my adoptive mom found some sort of letter that I had signed my Russian name and she emails my husband saying, how dare she her mom just got knocked up and just left her and blah, blah blah.

And , how dare she, all the normal adoptive mom stuff. So I guess that really lit a fire under me and I was still on the fence, but I was like, no, I'm gonna do it because. I'm not gonna let them dictate anything I do anymore. So I changed my first name and my middle name because Diana, D-I-A-N-A is not inherently Russian like when you look at it.

So I wanted at least to have a name that looked Russian. So that's a, that's [00:36:00] another funny story. They were like, oh, we changed your name. 'cause we didn't want it to be different like Svetlana. And, now that I know what my name is, it's not inherently Russian. But that was one of the biggest pains and also anxiety inducing because the hoops you have to jump through.

I live in Pennsylvania, the rules are different for each state, apparently. So I had to put in two different newspapers I was getting it changed. I had to go to all the counties I lived in the past five years, so that was right after college. So I had to go to four different counties. On a single day off from work that I took off.

Oh man. Just so much stuff and money. And also you don't have someone who can guide you with this stuff because the people at my courthouse, they didn't know what they're doing half the time. I guarantee you, every step I took in this process, [00:37:00] something was wrong and I had to redo it because of they just didn't do it right, file it right. They just didn't find that my name was on a mortgage, so I had to go back and see the judge again. That was fun. So after I got my name changed. You have to go through all the documents you want changed, like your social security card. I pull up there and they're like, oh, you're not a US citizen, question mark.

And I'm like, I have a social security card. How am I not a US citizen? So I had to come back the next day and bring like I, guess I should have brought everything anyway, but I had my citizenship document because thankfully I got all my originals. My final step, no, not my final step.

One of my final steps was getting my Freedom of Information Act, because I was trying to get my alien report from my adoption, [00:38:00] and I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not great with that kind of stuff. So the first time I filled it out, it was wrong, and that's when I heard of an adoptee lawyer slash rights activist who works with slash for adoptees pro bono.

He's amazing. Greg Luce, he helped me refile everything so I could get my FOIA, and I got all my, I got all my records. There was nothing in there that was super surprising. My records actually had more about my doctors than it did me, so that was. Whatever. But the final hurdle I guess I had to overcome was getting my citizenship paper updated with my new name. So thankfully, again, Greg helped me out with that. It was $505, which is an [00:39:00] exorbitant amount for a piece of paper, you're updating your name, but it had to be done because. I'm glad I got everything done. I think it was two years ago now, because now with the state of the US it's a mess.

They're reporting that people who are trying to get their Freedom of Information Act FOIA, they're coming back like 80% redacted. You're getting no information anymore, getting your citizenship certificate back in the mail. I think mine took six or seven months, so I had no citizenship paperwork, which was kind of stress inducing but now it's taking even longer. So it's just a mess. And I really feel for the adoptees who really don't have any guidance in any of this. And it's terrifying. And we really do need people like Greg and Adoptees United who can show us the [00:40:00] way, because it's kinda like uncharted territory. We don't have the government on our side adoption agencies. Like all we have is Greg.

Haley Radke: Yeah. And he, he's told me before too, that. There's a lot of immigration lawyers who should know this part of the law, but they don't. So he is definitely a unicorn.

Diana: Yeah, for sure.

Haley Radke: That's pretty amazing.

And then I know we're wrapping up, but you also have taken your passion for adoptees and advocacy and your leading an Adoptees Connect group.

Diana: Yeah, that's correct. Myself and Fai are meeting in Pittsburgh every month. I actually heard their episode on Adoptees Crossing Lines, and they said there's no really, not really any groups in Pittsburgh.

And so I just was able to reach [00:41:00] out and say, hey, if you're still interested, we could maybe start this up. And this month is our one year anniversary of meeting adoptees, and it's just amazing seeing all the different faces and all the different stories. I had no idea that there would be so many baby scoop adoptees coming and sharing their experiences because I don't, I feel like we don't hear from them a whole lot.

I don't know if that's true, but I definitely didn't hear a lot from them. But yeah, it's really meaningful work. If I could just help one adoptee see that they're not alone and that they matter, their voice matters. I just really want them to understand that we're here for them no matter what stage they're in, like in the fog, outta the fog, whatever they wanna be considered.

Haley Radke: How are you doing? Are you in recovery and you have a therapist and how's that going for [00:42:00] you?

Diana: Yeah, I have a great therapist. She is an adoptee. Lina, she's from Columbia, which for me, it was really important to find an intercountry, a adopted person, therapist, just so they could, we could talk about the different immigration and legal issues that we might have. So she's amazing. I've been recovered from my eating disorder. It'll be I think seven years this August. So that's really great for me. I'm on medication. That definitely helps. I should have been on it a long time ago, but here's the Wellbutrin and Lexapro.

Haley Radke: Congratulations Diana, that's a big deal. And that's a lot of hard work.

Diana: Thank you.

Haley Radke: Evidence of very hard, deep work that you've done. Okay, we'll make sure to link [00:43:00] to the Lion movie Paul Sunderland's video Fai's episode of Adoptee's Crossing Lines. And of course Greg and Adoptee Rights Law and Adoptees United, I have something to recommend that's a little bit unusual, so if you allow me a little nerd moment.

One of my favorite academic journals, Adoption and Culture. This is a very pretty, pretty cover put out this special issue. It's volume 13, issue 2 20 25. It just came out Winter 2025, which is basically when we're recording and it's a special issue. The Natal Mother in Adoption and this whole journal is focused on birth first mothers Valerie Jay [00:44:00] Andrews, who is a Canadian birth mother and the executive director of Origins Canada, was a guest editor.

And I have a piece in this with my friend Sullivan Summer. There's an interview it's called, Now is the Time an interview with adoptee and podcaster Haley Radke, where we talk about my new podcast project On Adoption. So I was pretty honored to be asked to participate in this, and the research and other articles in this are really amazing.

Alice Diver has a piece in here. Of course, Valerie Andrews has a couple, I should say Dr. Valerie Andrews. And it's well worth getting. This is a paywall journal, folks, so if you're not an academic nerd, it is spendy, but you can also try and get some, get it through your library [00:45:00] so hopefully folks can read it that way.

Do you wanna tell us anything more about Greg and his organizations, Diana? 'Cause I know you're recommending him today.

Diana: I just wanna drop the Citizenship Clinic he runs, he's doing this free again he's been helping a lot of adoptees and he could definitely use any support that he can get from

anyone who cares about adoptees.

Haley Radke: Yes, I know when we're recording this, I know there's an event coming up and there's a fundraiser going on, so we will link to that info and if there's a future clinics or any of those things coming up, we'll definitely have that available. Thank you so much, Diana, for sharing with us.

Where can we connect with you online?

Diana: Adoptees Connect, PGH, so that's the Pittsburgh region. You can find me [00:46:00] there. You can find me on Instagram and Facebook, and you should be able to find our email if you have any questions.

Haley Radke: Thank you so much for sharing with us. What a pleasure.

I just have a few episodes left up until we celebrate the 10 years of Adoptees On, and it's been so lovely too get to reflect on all these past episodes, and I've talked to adoptees of like many different ages, and especially when I talk to someone who's a little bit younger, I just feel like there's so many more resources and people talking about these things now then when I was that age, and I feel [00:47:00] so deeply grateful that people are going to be able to process all of this stuff sooner than I ever did. It's really great to see the community grow in this way. And it was so nice to hear about Adoptees Connect groups still going on. I know that the official banner of adoptees Connect has shuttered in the past I think maybe it's almost been two years now. But there's still Adoptees Connect groups going on and local support groups that folks can access, and I'm thankful for all the leaders who faithfully figure out where to have the meetings, what we're gonna talk about welcoming in new people.

And that is a great gift to get to meet in person if you're able to I would encourage you to do that. Connect with people in real life. It is so helpful. [00:48:00] Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again soon

323 Lisa Olivera, MFT

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/323

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You are listening to Adoptees On the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. I am so honored to welcome back Lisa Olivera to explore her new book When the Ache Remains. Lisa shares how becoming a mother has brought up new layers of both loss and connection, and we both open up about recent painful relationship ruptures.

Before we get started, I wanna personally invite you to sign up for my podcast newsletter, which you can find at adopteeson.com/newsletter. We wrap up with some recommended resources and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the [00:01:00] website, adopteeson.com. Let's listen in. I'm so pleased to welcome back to Adoptees On Lisa Olivera.

Hi Lisa.

Lisa Olivera, MFT: Hi Haley. I'm so glad to be back. I can barely believe it's been four years since the last time. I don't know how that's possible.

Haley Radke: I know I was looking back 'cause I was like, oh, I gotta give folks the episode number. It's episode 203 and I was like 203. I'm well over past a hundred episodes and I thought this was, I thought it was two years ago.

Truly, and no, it's been four years. Four years. You have a daughter that's a whole four years old. You shared your story on that episode. I'm gonna point people to go back and listen if they're unfamiliar with your story. But for folks who might be new to you, do you mind just sharing a little bit of your adoptee story before we talk about your new work and adoptee things together?

Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah, I'd be happy to. And yeah, [00:02:00] I shared a lot more in the last episode I was on, but I'll share that I was a foundling. I was found just outside of Muir Woods when I was a few hours old and adopted a few days later, and I had been with that family ever since. There was not a lot of talk about adoption growing up.

There was not a lot of conversation or capacity to hold my depth of grief and loss and feelings of not belonging and because that wasn't mirrored to me anywhere. I of course internalized it all as something being wrong with me, which I know is very common for adoptees. I had bouts of very severe depression and suicidality.

I was in and out of hospitals as a teenager. I struggled with that into my early twenties really, and I found my biological [00:03:00] family through ancestry.com in 2015, when I was 27, that gave me contact with my biological sister, brother, my first mother, my biological father. I discovered half siblings who still don't know I exist.

I'm still a secret to my biological father's family, and he lives about 25 minutes away from me. So that continues to be a tender place of my story. I've also had some severance after reunion with some family members, and my experience as a, an adoptee continues to be deeply complex, beautiful, painful, and one of the parts of me that I feel I'm in an ongoing relationship with that continues to deepen and widen and get harder and easier in all of the ways. [00:04:00] I guess that's the quickest, most general overview.

Haley Radke: I remember when I was trying to pick my major and I chose psychology 'cause I was like, I just, I need to understand humans, which LOL I'm trying to understand myself.

What drew you to becoming a therapist?

Lisa Olivera, MFT: Goodness. So many things. One of which was that I didn't realize until later was this sense of wanting to feel useful as a way of feeling like I'm worthy. That took a lot of humble recognition to realize and to unwind from, but there was a sense of. Being of service and being helpful and supporting other people will make me a worthy person.

So there was that thread. Then there was also a thread of really deeply caring [00:05:00] about people feeling the felt sense of being held and seen in my own experiences, having a sense of un-aloneness and accompaniment in pain and from what I've experienced, what has felt like a pretty wide capacity to meet people in the depths of who they are in ways that I felt could make me of service in this particular profession.

I've always been so curious about people. I've always loved connecting with people on a deep layer. I've always held a real sense of importance around wanting to support people in feeling seen and understood and known. Partially because I know the fracture of not having that in all of the places in our life that some people do, and I think my experiences as an adoptee was also a big [00:06:00] part of wanting to go into this work.

When I first started this work, I worked a lot with adoptees and their families. I worked with youth in foster care. I worked in a group home for female foster youth. So I feel like my foundations in this work started from a place of really sitting with the deep pain of feeling a lack of belonging, feeling a lack of safety in what it means to be a family and really wanting to make something of my own pain. I think that was part of what led me to this work.

Haley Radke: Make something of my own pain. That's sounds a lot like what I've been doing. I identify with that so much.

Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah. Yeah.

Haley Radke: Oh yeah. And how many of us are like working to support others in some kind of way, just to feel like useful, and worthy. I think those are the words you used. [00:07:00] I totally identify with that.

Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah. Yeah.

Haley Radke: So you, in addition to being a therapist, you're also a writer. We talked about your first book already enough, the last time you visited us here. And in an interview you did I heard you talk about writing as a child and that the only place you felt you had, to be honest was in your journaling time. Can you share more about that?

Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah. I've always been a writer. I've always had a journal or a diary or a place that holds what I didn't know how to contain in myself.

What I didn't know how to say to another person what I wasn't sure a relationship could actually hold because relationship felt so fragile and scary in some ways for me as a child. And even though I had a sense of stability in my [00:08:00] family, I also had this constant churning of questioning around whether or not that was ever gonna get ripped away from me.

And whether or not that was actually something rooted and solid, I don't know if my nervous system ever knew that. And so writing became this relationship that I felt was rooted and solid for me. It became this holding place, this like nest I could land in with all of my stuff that I wasn't sure anyone else knew how to be with.

And. It also became a place where I could explore and imagine and tell stories and name things that I weren't sure were okay to name out loud. And so this, it became this refuge and this mirror and this place where I could put the stuff that I didn't know how to put anywhere else, that at times felt like it was just gonna seep out and overflow out of me like a [00:09:00] volcano erupting and writing continues to be that for me and a long part of my life was spent keeping my writing private. But I remember being in high school and having a live journal and like sharing my feelings and thoughts on live journal and connecting with people through my writing there. I remember having a blog and sharing in my journalism class I wrote a paper about being adopted and it was in the school newspaper.

And so writing has always been this thread of trying to connect to myself, to the world, to my story, to what it means to be a person. And it just has leaked out of me in these different ways, but it's always been the first place that I feel like I can go to say what I need to say without editing it for anyone else's comfort.

Haley Radke: When you [00:10:00] released your first book into the world, a portion of it is memoir and you share about the adoptee experience and in some of those things that we talked about in our last episode, and it does talk about the complexity of being an adoptee and the grief of that and those kinds of things. Did you get responses from fellow adoptees in feeling seen by those words?

Lisa Olivera, MFT: I've had so many adoptees reach out and share about my writing in that book that was specifically about my experience as an adoptee. I've also had adoptees reach out and share that my writing reaches something in them, even if it's not naming adoption or the experience of being adopted explicitly, because I think a lot of the writing that I do and share is about [00:11:00] themes of trying to belong, trying to feel connected, trying to unwind from deeply held narratives and ideas and felt sense, experiences of who we are and what it means to be here. And I also write a lot about holding the pain and the grief of being human as something that might not ever necessarily go away. And that is certainly deeply rooted to my experience as an adoptee and to I think it was Pam Cordano who explained it as like this Nothing Place.

Like I feel really connected to that and feel that there is this place inside that may not ever get penetrated fully by life that is so deeply protected. And I'm not sure anything will ever actually get past all of those layers of [00:12:00] protection because it's so strong. And yet it feels like my life's work to meet that grief and that fear and to find beauty and connection and aliveness where it is and to practice not hiding in that place as often as I used to.

So I think that even when I'm not writing specifically about my experience of being an adoptee, a lot of the themes that I write and share about are really drawn from that experience. And so I think adoptees can see and sniff that out and feel resonance with it, even if it's not named explicitly. Yeah, that's the felt sense that I get when I connect with other adoptees who have read my writing.

Haley Radke: And what about the general population? To your adoptee [00:13:00] specific writings, did you have feedback around that? What was the tone or do you remember any instances about that?

Lisa Olivera, MFT: There was an experience, which I think is a lifelong experience of people wanting to take my story and take what I've shared and again, turn it into this like before and after story.

Even when I try really hard to not write it that way, I think people are just programmed to want to see it as this simple arc of transformation or this simple storyline where there's a beginning, a middle, and an end, and oh, reunion happened, so it's happily ever after, or you've found acceptance in some ways, so it must mean that there's no more pain.

Like I think people really want to simplify what is complicated and to reduce what is complex. [00:14:00] And I think being an adoptee is a deeply complicated, complex experience that most people do not know how to hold. And so we are often tasked as adoptees to hold other people's simplifications of our story and our experience instead of other people being willing to sit with the nuance, the difficulty, the not so simple before and after experiences that we have, and I find that sometimes I get so used to people not being willing to understand the complexity that I can just like not want to do that labor and just let them hold their perception of what it means to me to be adopted or what it means to me to have found some healing, but also not found some healing.

And I try to find this balance between [00:15:00] sharing my experience openly and also not objectifying myself and sharing more than I think people can actually mirror to me, because that can really amplify a sense of aloneness when I share something. And people are only willing to receive a part of that. And I think adoptees are often tasked with leaving our wholeness to make other people feel comfortable and so I, I really try to find this balance of sharing openly and honestly, and also knowing that sharing too openly might actually feel really painful for me because it will be yet another experience of not being met in the truth of how I hold myself and my experience as an adoptee.

I think that's why connecting with other adoptees is so deeply healing because you don't have to hold that tension with them. They can just it's just there [00:16:00] and you can drop this sense of protection and permissing other people's unwillingness to sit in discomfort and these ways that we can be inadvertently tasked with managing.

Our story so that we don't share more than other people can hold, and then inadvertently reiterate this narrative that our experience is too complex for people.

Haley Radke: I love that you use that word objectifying because that is so it, and especially for yourself, like I can see as a foundling story, the redemption arc, and look at you now, like it's so easy for folks to pick up on that and reduce you to this trope really.

Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah. And [00:17:00] also it can cause people to assume that my story ended at some point or that my experience as adoptee ended instead of recognizing that actually like my experience as adoptee is going to, it's going to be with me the whole entire through line of my life. Like we don't stop being adoptees that's not something that happens.

And people want that to be what happens because they want to not have to sit with the difficulty of it, because that would cause them to reckon with their own inability to really see the humanity of us, which includes things that our collective doesn't quite know how to hold yet.

Haley Radke: Totally. That it's you're, that's totally accurate I think I love how you said that even for folks who are in [00:18:00] a place where they can annul their adoption or make it like it wasn't even for folks who have the happy fairytale reunion and get completely integrated back into a family of origin. Like even for those case, like you're still adopted, you still got separated as an infant or in childhood. There was still a severance. There's a still an overcoming that we gotta work through. I, it's just. This is forever.

Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah.

Haley Radke: So can we pivot and talk a little bit about what motherhood has looked like for you as an adopted person? And we touched on this last time, and you were so new I thought why is this lady having to try and sell her book right now? She should be home with her baby and not having to work. Now you're a few [00:19:00] years out. Motherhood as an adoptee for me, it changed me so much. I know it changes humans anyway, but specifically as an adoptee, do you have thoughts on that now that your little girl is sorry she's getting older.

Lisa Olivera, MFT: I know she's basically an old lady as a 4-year-old compared to what feels like forever ago as a newborn.

But yeah, I'm feeling, I feel like I'm still really living into the answers to that question and I think becoming a mother really uprooted so much of my locked away grief around separation, around not being able to look into the face of someone who looked like me around [00:20:00] just what I imagined my infant self going through as she was handed from stranger to stranger, and not understanding why she wasn't with her mother.

Like I think the wave of intense somatic grief that has been brought to the forefront since becoming a mother continues to unfold for me. And it's so interesting because I feel like when I look at my daughter, it's like our relationship is this place that holds both the grief and the healing that is available.

It's like in this one relationship, I can feel this depth of grief around my own separation and my own loss, and then at the same time, I can feel this gift of closeness, connection and mirroring that I get to have with her [00:21:00] like in the same two bodies. We together are holding what feels like the myriad of experiences of what it looks like to form healthy connection as an adoptee.

And I feel that with her so deeply. And I also have felt in very tangible ways, like some of my own fears of being deeply seen and known, actually coming up with her. And there were points where I remember like being really afraid to look into her eyes because I could just, I even get emotional thinking about it because I could feel like how much love was there and that was really scary to me.

To feel like how much love was possible in that specific biological way and how the amount of love that was possible with her [00:22:00] again, like really amplified what I actually lost. And so it's this sort of dichotomy of I feel like through getting to be her mom, I'm becoming more of myself and connecting to a sense of lineage and rootedness in a way that I didn't even know I didn't have in some sense. And then I'm also having to face and reckon with the things that I didn't know how to feel until this became possible right in front of my eyes, in my arms. And there's such a tenderness and such a beauty in getting to have this sort of opportunity to really meet these relational dynamics with presence and attunement and care, and to let them infuse my own healing so that I can then support her in being who she is in the world without needing her to be someone for my own sense of [00:23:00] okayness, which is often what I felt like I had to be as a child for my parents.

And so there's this, what feels like just this circular spiral of healing and grief and healing and grief and healing and grief. That is interwoven in my experience of being her mom. And I'll also just name that she's the most incredible kid and I feel so deeply lucky to get to love her. And that loving her so much is the greatest gift. And also it mirrors like this wound. It's gonna need lifelong tending.

Haley Radke: I identify with so much of what you shared. I remember the first time that I felt scared of the closeness with my son and I thought, oh my gosh, I gotta go make an appointment with my therapist [00:24:00] because my nature is to push away. Because reject first before you can be rejected.

Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Classic. And of course you can't do that to your baby. So I hear that. I also hear I didn't feel seen growing up. I felt very alone. I really did. I felt very alone growing up and I was just reminiscent. Talking about this with a friend and feeling this idea of like where people are like, oh, I really want my mom never felt that in my life.

And so when my kids need me, I'm like, great. I'm so glad I can be there for you. And I don't relate to that. 'cause I, who I needed was me. And that's who showed up for me was me. And so as a mom to make sure that I'm paying attention to them and showing up for them in a way that I didn't have certainly, and I'm on the next [00:25:00] age level up, Lisa, where I see the launch and I have to work and study myself to be prepared to, with joy, send them off into adulthood. And again, that feeling of le Yeah, your big size. That feeling of leaving me, it's whew. So on the edge I told Lisa off air, but my oldest son just passed me in height. And so even though he is 13, the, it's, the university looks closer than it did when he was four.

Lisa Olivera, MFT: Oh my goodness. Yeah. I really feel the tenderness of slowly trying to re-pattern what's happening with my own child from what happened to me, and slowly letting my nervous system actually try to see and hold it as separate and as different and as actually [00:26:00] happening in a safe container with the person it's supposed to be happening with.

And I have to remind myself of that often. When I feel myself getting triggered or activated by her needs, or by her not having needs, even though I can see she needs something or by her expression or whatever it may be, I have to remind myself so often, like I'm an adult, she's a child. It's 2026, I'm her mother. She has me. I have to literally remind myself the facts of my relationship with her. So that my nervous system can settle into what's actually happening rather than responding from this core wound that I have, because that can get activated so easily and there can be a lot of shame around that getting activated as a parent when I don't want my stuff to leak into how I'm showing up for her.

[00:27:00] But of course it's going to 'cause I'm not a robot and I can't just shut myself off and detach from how my own history and attachment and connection is going to impact her because it will. And so I've been trying to allow that to just be what it is so that I can be with it rather than hide from it, which is sometimes what I want to do.

Haley Radke: It's such a good reminder too. I see Lisa with her therapist hat on here that, no, like genuinely, sometimes all I need to say to myself is I'm an adult and that's enough to be like, just chill me out in the moment. I need to be their nervous system. They can borrow my calm energy, like to regulate, for whatever high need situation is at hand.

But truly just that little pause like I'm an adult. Like that for me is what really helps me.

Lisa Olivera, MFT: So helpful [00:28:00] and creates like just enough room to be able to see what's actually happening in the room.

Haley Radke: Okay. I have so many different things I wanna talk to you about. So you have a brand new book out called When the Ache Remains.

It's a beautiful cover of these like ferns, unfurling. And I'll tell people a little bit more about your book during recommended resources, but you have this beautiful way of holding the both and, looking for joy even when things are hard and holding grief and accepting it in, and not trying to push past it.

You just have a way about you even as a person. It's this just feels like you, this feels all very you. Can you talk to us specifically as adoptees about allowing grief to be okay and present with us? Because I [00:29:00] think it's a big piece of our healing journey is just to allow it to just come alongside.

Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah. I think cultivating a relationship with grief has been the biggest ally for my own sense of healing and like accessing a sense of wholeness, even with this fracture that I think I'll always have, and especially as adoptees, I feel like allowing and really feeling and being with our grief is so subversive.

In a culture that tells us being adopted doesn't matter, and in a culture that tells us that it's beautiful and that it shouldn't feel painful, and that like we got the family we needed, and all these ways that every message around us tells us that grief isn't appropriate to feel because there wasn't a loss.[00:30:00]

And I think being willing to meet the grief that we experience is an acknowledgement of the loss and the loss that stays with us. The loss that changes shape over time. The loss that gets amplified during certain seasons and that gets quiet during others, but there's this loss that we carry that doesn't necessarily go away, and that specifically is what I was writing from when I wrote the title, When The Ache Remains.

Was this place in me that I know is always going to be here. I think I wrote something in the book that says like the only way to get rid of the wound of being an adoptee is to not be adopted. And that's not possible. Like it would have to change, like my whole story would have to be different for that wound to go away completely.

To get rid of it would be to get rid of my wholeness, which includes that important part of my experience of being alive [00:31:00] and learning to meet the grief of that with my own presence has been a way of reminding myself in my body that like what you experienced was and is real. Whether or not anyone else knows how to mirror or hold that for you, like your experience is real.

It's happened. It's happening. And allowing yourself to meet that grief with openness and with a sense of seeing it as compassion can offer just this anchor in what can feel like this, like dark sea of trying to navigate how to be with our experiences as adoptees in a world that doesn't always know how to throw us those anchors and the grieving process as an ongoing relationship rather than something to complete has been a real sense of like medicine [00:32:00] for me and is let me make my experiences become real when often I was told that they weren't real.

Haley Radke: Can you speak to the power of acknowledging those things to ourselves, like just giving something awareness, like even like naming a feeling or, and how that can impact the rest of our life versus what can seem easier, which is shoving everything down and not thinking about it. And I'm not even talking about oh, let's look through the things. Just like it's there. Just it's right there. And just acknowledging.

Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah. And I wanna name that. I think shoving it down and not wanting to look at it makes a lot of sense sometimes.

And there are plenty of times where my adoptee stuff is in a corner in the [00:33:00] closet underneath a pile of clothes, in a place where nobody is gonna get to it, including me. Like sometimes that's where it is because sometimes it feels like too much if I were to take it out. And so I think that's actually like a really wise strategy at times.

And I think, and I can speak for myself, that I've had the experience of everyone else shoving my experience as adoptee into the corner and saying it doesn't matter. And not wanting to look at it and not wanting it to be real, because to look at it would force them to confront their own feelings around it, their own grief around it, their own anger or sadness. And since they can't do that, they instead want me to pretend like it doesn't exist. And

Haley Radke: Their complicity. Complicity in the system.

Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yes, exactly. And so in that way, I think even the act of acknowledging, it's like saying, no [00:34:00] thank you to the system that continues to do so much harm. Saying no thank you to the people who try to gaslight us out of our experiences being real and deserving of being felt and held and witnessed.

And in that way, I think acknowledging whatever we're feeling is a way of reclaiming our power. It's a way of rooting into our sense of agency, which as an adoptee feels really important because there were so many ways that our voice and choice was not part of what happened to us. And so in that way too, I think it's not only about acknowledging so that we can feel what we're feeling, but also acknowledging as a way of reclaiming that we actually get a say in how we hold our own experiences, which to me is so important in a world that often doesn't want to hear our voices. It's can I hear my [00:35:00] own voice? Can I want to hear my own experience? Can I want to name my own experience? As a way of reclaiming that actually, this is my experience. It doesn't get to be yours just because you want to narrate it differently. I feel a lot of fire around this actually, which I don't often let myself access, so it actually feels good to name that with you.

Haley Radke: I feel like I live around a burning fire where I'm setting things on fire. On purpose. On purpose only for good.

Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah.

Haley Radke: No, I appreciate you saying those things and also acknowledging that like it is safe sometimes to put those things away. Of course. I think that's really helpful.

And because I didn't mean it as a shaming way of for folks who shovel their stuff in their closet, never look at it because it's not always safe for us to do and I think we've, I've [00:36:00] talked about this in other episodes. I don't know how scientific this is, but I feel like when we have the capacity and when we are psychologically safe to do is the time when we see things in a different way and only when those things are true. And so our brain is doing a good job of protecting us and keeping us alive, and that's when we can come into further adoptee consciousness, in my opinion.

Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah.

Haley Radke: If you're comfortable about talking about this, you mentioned that there's been a rupture in your reunion, and I understand it's from different political stances, I'll say to shortcut. Are you comfortable talking about that?

Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah I'll share what I'm comfortable sharing, which is that for a long time I thought that reunion was going to be this like solution or [00:37:00] answer to some of my grief and some of my sense of self and belonging as an adoptee. I thought that it was going to be this and it, I narrated it in a way as this like place where everything got fixed and healed.

And when I had a rupture from my sister who became deeply close to me through our experience of reunion. She was the first person I had ever connected with in my biological family. She was who I got matched with on ancestry.com. We were deeply close. We spent a lot of time together. We talked every day.

So it was a very close relationship and this rupture happened really suddenly and really quickly and without much say or sense of control in what was happening. And I have experienced it over the last two years as [00:38:00] a profound layer of grief that has gotten activated around even the people that we think see and know us, like sometimes they don't.

And sometimes when we think people are able to witness our full humanity, sometimes they can't. And there's such a deep pain in recognizing that sometimes we can put this sort of magical lens on when we talk about reunion, because that's what we want it to be. We want so deeply for it to be this experience of feeling fully seen and met and known for the first time.

And I know that I had this narrative, and so to have someone that I assumed really knew and saw me have this perception of me that felt so deeply off, really brought into question not only what it means to [00:39:00] be close to people, but also it's also caused me to explore like where do I still have walls up that I actually didn't know I had up.

And I think in this rupture with her that I won't go too deep into detail around I've been trying to explore my side and my experience of yeah, like what it has meant to be in connection with her and to have that go away when our connection had become this real anchor in my sense of security as an adoptee, and it has brought to light the need for me to really deepen into my sense of self outside of any relationship and my need to really hold the tenderness of what it means to let people in and what it means to practice trusting people even when we do it imperfectly and what it means [00:40:00] to be really open and honest about some of the hard parts of cultivating a deep relationship with someone and to also practice separating other people choosing to leave.

From this root story that I have of I'm not lovable and everyone's going to leave because that certainly got activated when this happened. This sense of I can't trust people. No one wants me around. I'm not good enough for people to stay. If I make any mistakes, someone's going to leave, which is a real story that I've had to work on for a long time.

This sense of I have to get it right all the time, or they're going to leave. And in my own therapy, that's something I've really been working through is like sometimes people leave, not because you're imperfect, but because they didn't know how to stay with what you were bringing. And sometimes it's not rooted to your sense of self and the story [00:41:00] that you carry about what it means to be attached or what it means for people to leave and.

Yeah, a lot of that has gotten tangled up and then unthreaded over the last two years and continues to be just a really tender place of acknowledging the messiness of reunion and then rupture and then severance and losing contact with people I thought I would have contact with my whole life, and really deeply trying to not let that further this old story of being alone in the world.

Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. I really, I identify with some of that having a friendship disillusion because of someone's assumptions about me and my character after having years and years of deep connection. [00:42:00] And so this feeling of feel like of being so unseen.

This might be a, a theme in my life, but so unseen and unknown and misunderstood after so what I thought was so much deep a connection was so profoundly confusing. And you and I know each other a little bit and I think for readers of your work, folks that are connected to human stuff on a regular basis, reading your thing for work and hearing your interviews and reading your books, and seeing how you show up on Instagram, like certainly that's public facing for people who hear me talk on Adoptees On or on Adoptees Off Script or wherever. All my different podcasts, Adoption Pop, like you get a sense of me and it's do all these strangers know me better than you? [00:43:00] What? I don't know.

It was it was world shifting to me to feel so misunderstood by a close person. I don't know like I like that you talked about coming back to trying to know yourself better and not relying on other people. That's not easy. That's not easy at all.

Lisa Olivera, MFT: No, it's it's like a real, real rooted pain. This sense of feeling misunderstood, especially when it's someone that you thought like really deeply knew you. And if you asked my husband, he would tell you. I have gone back and forth countless times over the last two years, like trying to understand, trying to figure it out, trying to understand how this happened.

Looking at it from every which way, looking at it from every perspective, like just trying to understand. And yeah, there is this reminder that sometimes you can't [00:44:00] understand because it just doesn't really make sense to you. And I have to trust that it makes sense to her for whatever reason that it doesn't make sense to me.

And holding that confusion and that shock in that like it has been life rattling and I feel a little timid talking about it publicly, and I think that's why I am like trying to share about it in a way that feels comfortable and rooted. But there has been a lot of uprooted confusion around the rupture and all of that has adapt, has touched on my adoptee stuff in a big way, in a really big way and has amplified this sense of what I think sometimes as an adoptee, there can be a felt sense of am I real? Do other people see me as real? Do other people see me as like a whole human? I think the fracture, I often refer to it as like this [00:45:00] fracture that I hold, that fracture can sometimes make me feel like I'm not even real in the world. And so when confusion happens, when something happens that disrupts what I thought I knew, it can make me go back to this place of am I missing something? Do I not have something people have? Am I like not fully? Like it's almost like it can sometimes feel like, have I like never come fully alive in my human form because some of these things can activate that sense of what I know about myself and what I know about relationship. And I feel like I'm going on a little bit of a tangent here, but there is this sense of, yeah, not always knowing how to be with the confusion and the feeling misunderstood.

Haley Radke: And when it comes from like a relationship where all you have is love and good intentions for the other person. And I feel like that's a piece of it too. [00:46:00] So it's I just want I love you and I want the best for both of us and together. And I'm from the other side of it, and so the like. I guess my birth mother will choose not to have contact with me, and so I have no power over that.

I have chosen to estrange for my adoptive parents, and so they have no power. So it's like there's always like one party that holds this power that, and so you're on the, it feels like powerless side of this particular situation. So I feel for you, Lisa, I really do.

Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Haley Radke: Your new book is just so lovely. It's like another like balm for the soul. Are you gonna read the audio book?

Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah, i'm recording it next month. Yeah.

Haley Radke: Amazing. Okay. Okay, so we peeling behind the [00:47:00] curtain. We are recording this before your book is out into the world, but folks will be able to grab this and hear your words from your voice then. That sounds awesome. When they're hearing this. I love these, all these different parts. We talked before, like just, I mentioned the unfurling of these like fern leaves. Your words are so hopeful and gentle and the books really, it's helpful in this way of you talk about this, I don't know, I'll call it synthesizing healing as like a, it's a practice, it can be an action, but also this holding compassion for when we're just becoming aware and then having the bravery to look inward and I think you just do that in such a masterful way, just like you did with Already Enough and it's.

To prep for the interview. I had to read it fairly quickly. I tried my very best to [00:48:00] slow down. But it's another one of those books where you can go back and revisit. You have all these very practical exercises for folks to slow down and I just, I let, do you wanna tell us anything more about the book?

I just loved it. I love you, so of course I would. But the subtitle Lessons on Tending to the Unfixable and Finding Beauty Anyway, like how perfectly you is that?

Lisa Olivera, MFT: Thank you. I feel like I wrote this book for myself. I feel like I wrote it trying to imagine. People who needed it sitting next to me when I wrote it and imagining my hand, like reaching out to people who need a hand and offering them things that I have needed in my own experience of tending to my own wounds and my own aches and my own pains that continue to resurface and then get easier and then resurface and get easier.

I feel like this book is almost like a deepening [00:49:00] into Already Enough, like it feels like I wrote Already Enough. And then I like went deep into my own grief and was like, oh, there's a lot more here that I actually have to say about what it means to meet our humanity and what it means to allow our grief and to allow ourselves to accompany our own aches instead of push them away relentlessly.

And I really wanted this book to be something that was accessible and something people could flip to read a page or something people could read all the way through. I really just wanted it to feel like someone being accompanied as they meet the things that they hold in themselves. I feel like I could have dedicated it to adoptees because I think I wrote it a lot of it for my adoptee self, for the part of me that needs to hear that it's okay that some of these things are still really hard and that they might need my own care for a lifetime. [00:50:00] And yeah, it felt really relieving to write it and to let my, to let it be known that I'm not finished and we don't need to be finished with our stuff.

Haley Radke: Yes. That's so it, I know when I talk about we have the healing series and those things, like it feels and then, so then you should be healed. There should be this end point. And I love how you talk about it. It's just for a lifetime here are the things. Sometimes we're curling inward, sometimes we are doing more active things to, work through it's just such a beautiful visualization of what that can look like for through our lives as human. And you're, and I hope folks know about your newsletter too, because you write so much. There's so many things that you can take in of Lisa's perspective on the world and keeping us mindful and grounded and thoughtful.

I think I just, you have so many [00:51:00] lovely things for us to connect with, so thank you. What do you wanna recommend to us today?

Lisa Olivera, MFT: I think I picked The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller. Which is a book about grief, and it's a book that actually helped me a lot in understanding my own grief as an adoptee.

It's a book that frames grief, not just as something that happens in death, but as something that happens in a lot of stages of our life, and it talks a lot about grief as something that needs to be held with other people, which I think is something you do so beautifully with this podcast in a way, and with your community and yeah, his work around being with grief has been a real teacher for me. Yeah. So I'll recommend that.

Haley Radke: Thank you. We will link to that in the show notes and you mentioned Adoptees On in your book and I'm so grateful for that. Thank you.

Lisa Olivera, MFT: Thank you.

Haley Radke: Where can folks connect with you and find your [00:52:00] work online?

Lisa Olivera, MFT: Yeah, my website is lisaolivera.com and that has links to my newsletter and to my Instagram, and those are the main places that I share, so that's a good hub for everything.

Haley Radke: Perfect. Thanks for letting us into your world for a little bit.

Lisa Olivera, MFT: Thank you. It's always such a gift to get to connect with you. Thank you.

Haley Radke: I feel the same.

Oh my goodness. Do you ever just find people that. I don't know Lisa that well, but every time I speak with her I'm just like, oh, I just love you. You're just like a kindred spirit to talk about Anne of Green Gables lingo. I just really learn a lot from her every time she speaks. If you're not following her on Instagram, it's just such a peaceful, I dunno if you can hear [00:53:00] Spencer snoring in the background, but she's so chill and relaxing and she just has this way of speaking so kindly, and I don't know about you, but my internal dialogue is often not kind. And so to have that voice like speak into my life in just like this really kind nourishing way is such a gift. And I think you'll find if you follow her on Instagram you read her books, you listen to her on other shows, you read her newsletter.

Like you will just get this influx of oh, it's just like these nice, warm, fuzzy feelings. And not in a superficial way either. Like in, I keep saying this word, nourishing like a, in a really nourishing way. And [00:54:00] strengthening yeah. Anyway, I'm a big fan of hers. Thank you so much for listening to adoptee voices and I also thank you to guests who are willing to come back and talk with me again.

What a gift to get to share these conversations with you. Thanks for listening, and we will talk again very soon.

322 Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/322

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AO E322 Monique Pangari

Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You are listening to Adoptees On the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. I'm so excited to introduce you to today's guest, Australian Adoptee and somatic psychotherapist, Monique Pangari. Monique shares about her experiences as a teen mom. What led her to search for her origins and how she discovered the man she believed was her father was actually not biologically related to her.

She also reflects on how her lived experience shapes her work, supporting adoptees, including the concept of personal sovereignty. Before we get started, I wanna personally invite you to [00:01:00] sign up for my podcast newsletter, which you can find at adopteeson.com/newsletter. We wrap up with some recommended resources and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com.

Let's listen in.

I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Monique Pangari. Hello, Monique.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Hello, Haley. Such a gift. Such a pleasure to be here talking with you today.

Haley Radke: I am so excited to talk with you. It's a long time in the making. You've had some big life altering things happen. We've had rescheduling happen and we live on the opposite side of the world, but we're here now.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: That's right.

Haley Radke: And I spent the last couple days having your voice in my ears. From other shows that you've been on, and I was like, I'm so delighted to get to meet [00:02:00] you. So I'm excited for everyone to, to hear your story. Do you mind sharing that with us for a start?

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Okay, sure. As you just mentioned, on opposite sides of the world, so I live in Australia and I was adopted. I was born in 1972 here in Queensland and was adopted. Actually I was relinquished at birth and adopted six weeks later. So for those first six weeks I was in the hospital. And the rule at the time, is that babies that were to be adopted were to stay in the hospital for six weeks, whether there was a family available straight away or not for paperwork reasons.

So that's interesting information. It's good to know, you know what, what was happening at that time. And because. I guess we can trace so much back to those first weeks and what happened. That's such an important time. Yeah. So I was adopted into a [00:03:00] family with two older siblings. They were also adopted, so I had two brothers and I was the youngest and in fact I was adopted where in the same place that I live right now. So the hospital I was adopted in is literally a few kilometers away from where I currently live, but I was adopted into a family that moved about six hours north of here. Grew up in central Queensland in my family, and probably at about 18, oh, first off I had my first son at 17, which was probably the instigator.

I can't quite remember how much that was instigating things, but certainly by about 18, 19, 20. I started to get very curious and wanting to know where I came from and so I did reach out and gained some information. I think it was through Jigsaw back then, and [00:04:00] was able to get my original birth certificate, which had my birth mother's name on it.

And then through that process I was able to track down my birth mother. So I was 21 at that time. And I phoned her and she was living in Perth. So for people who don't know, Australia, Perth is on the other side of the country. It's a long way away. And we had a phone conversation that lasted over an hour. She was pleased to hear from me.

And then within about a week, I think she jumped on a plane and flew over to Queensland to meet me. And that was the beginning of the reunion and a whole lot of other things that played out from there. So

Haley Radke: I know your story has a lot of twists and turns.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: It does.

Haley Radke: Can we just pause on having your son at a young age?

How were you able to parent at [00:05:00] 17. A lot of us our story is, we're relinquished because of a teen pregnancy. That's my story. And I'm curious about that.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Interestingly, I did find out that my mother, my biological mother had me at 18 and I had my son at 17. Yeah, I was in a relationship with a man that was four years older than me. I was still at school. He was a police officer. So for my father, it's interesting 'cause I grew up was very strict parents. They were very strict and didn't really allow me to do much as the girl in the family. But I became interested in a guy when I was 16 and he was aboriginal. And he was my first kind of crush, I would say.

And when my father found out about that, obviously he was racist and I didn't know that. This is all [00:06:00] hindsight, going back and looking back and going, oh my God, I didn't know I was living in a family that was racist, but he behaved very horrendously and forbid me to see him again. So then, a month or so later, I, through a friend, I met this guy.

He was a police officer and he I wasn't overly interested in him, but my father gave full permission for me to go wherever I wanted with this guy. And so I did. And so we started hanging out a lot. I was rarely at home. It gave me the sense of freedom that I was wanting at such a young age, and then I eventually fell pregnant and that was a lot of shame for my adoptive parents and yeah I quit school. No, I had already left school actually before I found out I was pregnant and I got a job and I stayed in that job until my, until I was [00:07:00] probably about six, seven months. Yeah. And then I spent some time with the father, a couple of months before the birth.

I returned home to be at home and had my son. That was a traumatic experience in itself in some ways because of the way that I was treated by the hospital nurses who still had that leftover attitude of unmarried, an unmarried teenager having a child. So I've had to work through, yeah some of that.

So I was told a lot at that time. You've ruined your life. What have you done? And yet the decision for me as soon as I found out I was pregnant was I'm keeping this baby. So it just, it wasn't even a question for me. And of course at 17 you don't know what that means, but I was very determined, so I did and my parents became very supportive of helping me look after my son.

And so I was able to stay at home, but over time. It became [00:08:00] obsessive about my child and I felt I was, I felt like my mother was taking over the parenting role and I wanted to get out and to get away, and I knew even I hadn't finished year 12, I knew I needed to get an education so that I could leave.

And so I did a year at TAFE and I ended up getting an OP score of one, which is. Back then they had OP scores at the end of year 12, and this gave me an OP score of one, which was the top that you could get, which meant that I got straight into university to get into the course that I wanted to do, which was a joint degree in education and psychology.

And I picked that because it was 12 hours away from my parents. So I got into uni and off I went. I was 21 at that point. And I had already met my birth mother. My son was four, and I'd done that extra year at tafe. I was starting to get my head wrapped [00:09:00] around university studies and I decided I was gonna do it all by myself.

So off I went as a single mom and I started studying a joint degree by myself because I wanted him to be raised by me. It was, I still look back on that. I feel a bit teary thinking about that woman that made that choice, who was still a child really, in a lot of ways, it's probably the most deadly thing I've ever done in my life, really.

I feel really proud that I had the courage to say, this is my child and I will do this, and I was very grateful for the support that I had been given and I didn't see at the time the legacy of intergenerational trauma and the legacy of adoptive parents who had saviorism as their operational status quo.

And so when I had my son, they almost went into I [00:10:00] became less important to them and my son became very important to them. He was, they just revolved their life around him for many years, and it created a bit of a triangle where I had to really fight for him to see me as his mother.

And that dynamic plays out today. It just played out at Christmas time. Yeah, it's a really tricky triangulation that happened because I had him so young and I really needed their support and help, which I got and I was grateful for, but it came at a great cost. One of the best things about that is that I found out who I am under pressure and I did raise him and I raised him by myself and I got myself through uni and he had a great schooling and yeah, he's a school teacher now and living independently and doing well in his life.

Haley Radke: You did it. Good job, mama.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: I did it.

Haley Radke: You did it.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Thank you. Nobody's asked me that question before. Oh, that was a trip down memory lane.

Haley Radke: [00:11:00] It's one of those things where I have so much respect because I know like it's a crisis situation. And it was temporary.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yes.

Haley Radke: And you did that.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: And it was temporary.

Haley Radke: Oh

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: yeah.

Haley Radke: Good for you.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yeah. It took me 17 to 21 at 20, I guess I went back to school. So yeah, those first couple of years I just needed support and, 'cause I was so young to get things together, but then I did do it and that's it. It's a temporary situation that needs support.

Haley Radke: So another turn in the story is you also had a NPE experience finding out who you thought was your father was not your father, and that led you to have a, I'm gonna say a reunion, quote unquote, experience with a sister, and you had a lengthy relationship with them all to find out [00:12:00] actually we're not related. Can you talk about that?

Because I know you're not the only one that's had that experience and that, when I heard that part of your story, I was like, this is very upsetting. This is one of these. I don't know. I don't even know what to call it. I was gonna say traps in adoption when we don't have all the facts in front of us and this is something that can happen.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yeah, just gonna take a deep breath. I can feel myself shaking a little bit. It doesn't matter how many times you go over these, this history, in your own head or share it with somebody else, it still brings up emotion, and I'm just noticing I'm sitting with that right now. So just wanting to name that.

Yeah. So I met my birth mother, as I said, at 21, and she, before she flew over to meet me, she didn't tell me she was doing this, but she reached out to who she said was my father. And at the [00:13:00] time he had just gone through a divorce. That he'd been in a long-term relationship and it was one year out of his divorce and he had two children.

So unbeknownst to me, he drove up from where I currently lived, Sunshine Coast to where I was living at the time. She flew over and was like, surprise, this is your father. And what was interesting to me is that when I was a teenager. We had, my brothers and I had found the paperwork hiding in mom's closet.

That was the paperwork from the government to say, we have a child available to be adopted. And my paperwork being a bit newer than my brother's paperwork had more details in it. And in my paperwork it said the mother has brown hair and brown eyes, and she works as a stenographer and the father has blonde hair, blue eyes, and works as a carpenter.[00:14:00]

So when I met this man that my mother said was my father in my early twenties, he did not have blonde hair and blue eyes, and he wasn't a carpenter. And so I met him and got to know him. I got to know his children and his daughter ended up moving close to me. And so we became very close and we would see each other regularly, and I did ask my mother at some point, why is this in the paperwork and this is not who he is. And she just really fobbed it off and didn't really answer that. So in getting to know my sister, she had a 21st birthday. I was then pregnant with my second son, so I was 29. So we had a long time of knowing each other and becoming really close, and she came out one day and said, look, I don't know if you know this, but your mum was dating another man at the time.

And my mom thinks that he [00:15:00] might be the father and or that it's worth, investigating. And I said, do you have a photo of him? And she showed me, and he was blonde hair and blue eyed, and he was a carpenter. And I went, oh, okay, there's more to this story. So I reached out to my birth mother and asked her some DNA evidence if she would, back then we didn't have all the DNA opportunities that we have now.

And it was gonna cost $2,000 to get a DNA test. So I asked her if she would go halves in that. Yeah. So I had a child, I was married, I had a mortgage, and I had a child on the way. It was not $2000 it was not something that we easily had. Anyway, that created a great deal of drama. She was not interested in doing that. It was very unhappy. Anyway, over a period of time, maybe about six months, she finally agreed to do that. And though I went to the doctors. I did the DNA test, waited several weeks. Finally it came back [00:16:00] and the lady at the doctor's surgery, the receptionist just read it out, just handed it to me.

She didn't make an appointment with the doctor. She just handed the results to me. I hopped in my car. I was driving home because doctor surgery was about five minutes from home. Opened it up while I was driving and read it. And freaked out. I got home, I can remember hitting probably the most depressive state.

I dunno if that's the most depressive state, knowing where my life has gone since then, but it was my first incredibly major depressive state. I felt wow, I've just spent 10 years thinking these people are my family. I had met not just my sister and my brother, but a grandmother who I thought was my grandmother and an aunt.

So I'd spent a lot of time getting to know these people and to find out that after 10 years, these people were not actually my family. It just created a huge feeling of who am I and who can I [00:17:00] trust? So it felt like a major betrayal, but I didn't have language for any of that back then. I just had no, no words for it.

And I do remember feeling suicidal and not that I made any attempts at that, but. I remember fantasizing about what I could do or would do, and of course, having a child on the way and having another child, I was never gonna act on that. But I do remember thinking about it and that led to me finding Jigsaw in Brisbane.

And I started going along to a meeting once a month. And I guess I started hearing other people's stories at that time and listening to other adoptees, starting to sharing their stories. I was hearing how they had support many of them, and I felt dreadfully alone. I felt like my husband was well ill-equipped to understand what the hell was going on with me.

My adoptive parents were not interested in any way, shape or form, and I was in my late twenties. I didn't have [00:18:00] friends that had any capacity to understand any of this, and I didn't have any capacity to word what was going on. I didn't have the language, but I know I went into a very dark place for a long time.

And then eventually I decided that I would look for my birth father 'cause I now had his name. And so I did what I did when I went looking for my birth mother, which is I went to the phone books and I looked for his name and I ended up finding my grandmother who was living in Sydney. And I found a couple of people I think, and then I got onto her and we had an hour long conversation over the phone where she filled me in on a lot more things that I, my birth mother had never told me that basically my father was around through the whole pregnancy. He financially supported her. He thought he was the father. She told him he was. That's why I was on, his details, were on my birth, identifying information.

And then when I contacted her at 21, she contacted this man who [00:19:00] she thought was father. And once they. Missed information in there. They got married 12 months after she reached out to him and they reached out to me. They married, and then they contacted him somewhere in there. Didn't tell me any of this.

Somewhere in those 10 years, they contacted him, met up with him, and told him, you are not the father. This other man is the father. So he had also had 10 years of thinking maybe he wasn't the father yet. He, his life was based on 21 years of thinking he was the father for this child he'd never met. So he opened me.

He agreed immediately to a DNA test, welcomed me with open arms and was probably the closest I'd ever felt to feeling a sense of just love and acceptance in my life. I'd never felt that before, and that was the first time I think I felt it and it was. It wasn't even big. He would just do things like introduce me to other [00:20:00] people as his daughter. And it was almost like the simplest thing, but to me it was the hugest thing in the world.

Haley Radke: I remember when my dad, my, for the first time, did that. It is, it's huge.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yeah. And that got me into relationship with my two sisters. I had a sister living 15 minutes from where I lived that I didn't know about.

Because he also had two daughters and another sister that lived down in Northern New South Wales who I later became really close to and we shared a lot of time together.

Haley Radke: Do you maintain any connection to the first family that you thought was your family?

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: No. I, it's, it was very sad and I don't know if other adoptees who've been through this might relate. I have, I think I've read other people's experiences and thought, oh, that's what I did. But they kept trying to reach out to me, which was lovely of them, and I couldn't respond. I just look back now and think, [00:21:00] oh, that was so rude of me. And I kept feeling at the time I should respond. I should respond like they're good people, but I just couldn't.

So I was, now that I know about nervous systems and what happens, I was in collapse. I was in complete collapse. I couldn't bring myself to talk to them, to converse about any of it. I didn't have the words. I didn't have the language. I didn't know how to navigate any of it, and I had really no support. I really didn't have any support.

I don't know if Jigsaw had a counseling service back then, and I don't know why. If they did, why I didn't access it. I do remember trying to see a counselor at some point. It didn't last very long. It didn't. I didn't get into any kind of adoption stuff.

Haley Radke: Classic. Classic.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Are you able to like pinpoint I'm so glad you got connected into Jigsaw.

So this is a Australian organization that helps. Is it [00:22:00] all members of the constellation? Like I know they serve adoptees and first birth parents.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Oh, that's a good question. I know that they're funded specifically for forced adoption.

Haley Radke: Okay.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: That we have another organization here in Queensland called PASQ, which stands for Post-Adoption Support Queensland, and I worked with them for a period of time and they are funded for all areas of the triangle, but Jigsaw I know is specifically just funded for forced adoption.

Haley Radke: Okay.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: And definitely work with relinquishing parents, biological parents, and adoptees. Not, I don't dunno. That's a good question.

Haley Radke: Okay. Okay.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: It's one I need to find out.

Haley Radke: So you connected in with other adoptees at that time when you got connected into Jigsaw, and then when did you start like connecting all the dots for adoptee stuff.

And now, like [00:23:00] for the last several years, you've worked with adoptees as a psychotherapist and so a somatic psychotherapist. And so I know you, you come a long way from those days where you didn't even know anybody to. Can you talk about that path a little bit?

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yeah. Let's just get a timeline. It really helps me to have a timeline.

I'm 54 now. I was in my early thirties when all that DNA stuff was happening, and my youngest son was born at 29. So trying to do the timeline here. So over the last 20 years, yeah, so my thirties then became I was parenting again. I did two master's degrees. At uni, we built a home, we built a life together my husband and I. And I was busy, like really busy. And so this adoption stuff was happening in the background of my life in a way. It wasn't something I talked about, it wasn't something anyone else really knew was going on. [00:24:00] What I did know I would do is if I went to parties or were with friends, I would drink too much and often end up crying, which would alert me.

It alerted me eventually to there's something. There's something here, which I knew all along. There's something here I really need to delve further, even after having all of the reunions and having the information out. I hadn't really been on any kind of healing journey at that point, but through my studies, I guess I started studying and training in, even though I'd done all my academic studies at uni, my master's degrees.

It wasn't really till I started doing my post grad training in expressive therapies, which was over five years, and it was a very deep dive into my own personal world using the modalities that we were learning. And I would say that was the beginning of me starting to wake up to the relationship with my adoptive family, starting to really see what [00:25:00] was happening.

I was also, working, I ended up leaving Education Queensland where I was working for a long time as a behavior management teacher. And went into work outside of the education department in agency work and started working in child protection, and it was when I was working in child protection, I started really looking at my own childhood and recognizing that I had lived through child sexual abuse.

I didn't have a name for it. I didn't know that's what it was until I started working in that field. So I did start to gather that. I had a lot to work on. Had a lot of personal stuff to sort through. And as I came out and shared this with the, with my adoptive family, because I was abused by a cousin in my adoptive family, specifically because I was adopted as he told me, that led to, a lot of family members being very upset.

People didn't believe me. And then my brother came out and said he was also abused by the same cousin. [00:26:00] He basically was drinking himself to death because it was so unacknowledged, unsupported through the family. So not only was adoption, it wasn't okay to go and find family members. It also wasn't okay to start to talk about what actually went on behind closed doors in our family.

And I also started to see that I grew up in a family where there was domestic violence, though. It was not uncommon for mom to turn up at the breakfast table with sunglasses on, for instance. So there was a lot for me to start to process, and I was becoming aware of these things in my thirties.

I would have periods where I would distance myself from my adoptive family, but I never felt that I could ever not have contact with my adoptive family. That felt like too terrifying, but I started to see how unhealthy it was. And then in my late thirties I decided [00:27:00] not decided, but I came out basically to my husband and that relationship ended and I moved away and moved down to Northern Rivers and yeah, started to live quite a different life.

So my forties were very much about finding myself coming out. Recovering from a divorce, which was devastating, like the levels of devastation at the end of that marriage was huge. I lost my best friend and at the same time I was starting to discover like an unlived life, like more of who I was. I was away from my adoptive family now. I was away from a life that I was really conditioned to lead and I was on my own two feet in a way, and I was single parenting my youngest son, my oldest son was old enough now that. He'd gone off to uni and so my forties was again starting to do more self work. I was very, my [00:28:00] forties, I spent a lot of time looking at attachment and adoption on attachment.

And I studied a lot around parent child attachment. I did years of study in that and then I, I did years of study in adult attachment and relationships. I became an adult relationship counselor and trained in emotion-focused therapy for couples and like I started creating my own training programs around attachment.

And yeah, it was a good solid decade of really starting to try to understand adoption. Attachment through an adoption lens. And what I found through all of those years is that nobody was talking about adoption, and I had to pull together the pieces. So I touched into healing portals over those 20 years different ways, mostly through my career.

A lot of understanding was developed, but I wouldn't say I really touched into a deeper healing. Until more recent years and probably what really kicked [00:29:00] that off was joining Flourish, which as you some of your listeners would know, we talked about probably on the show, was a year of coming together with 25 other adoptees online during COVID every week for two hours, and sharing writing prompts really.

It was probably hands down one of the most healing things I've done as an adopted person was finding adoptee community and having a whole year to unravel and to hear other people say, me too. Oh my God, that's my experience was so affirming and mind blowing really, and yeah, and that led to us maintaining a lot of good friendships that we still continue to have.

And has led to me then finding a voice around advocating for adopted people, because up until that point, I [00:30:00] still hadn't found a voice. I still found, every time I spoke about it, I will get into trouble. There's this sense, and even today, if I talk about adoption, I still feel like I'm gonna get into trouble for this, or I need to limit what I say.

It's gonna upset somebody. But I do it anyway because I don't believe in secrecy and wounds fester in the realm of secrecy. And I see other adoptee people, particularly in our Flourish group, that were like 20 years younger than me doing all this deep work. And I'm like, oh, I wish that was available to me 20 years ago.

I'd be further on in my journey, but I feel like I've come a long way just in the last five years, probably since Flourish. But yeah, it's a lifelong journey. And it's not over yet.

Haley Radke: No, not over yet. Can you tell me about the importance of sovereignty [00:31:00] to you? You've got it. Somatic sovereignty is your, one of your websites.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Right. Yes. I have a few websites and yeah, somatic sovereignty, the word came to me. I was playing around with words and it's almost like I've lived into, that word was just like, yes that's what I want. That, for my, for what I'm, for, what my work offers. But I feel like since I claimed that name for my website I've deepened more and more into what does this mean? What does it mean? And I just keep getting the layers just keep shedding for me around, around sovereignty and particularly, I think sovereignty for all women is incredibly important, but particularly for adopted people, because adoption itself is coveted in, or that's not the right word, but is shrouded is, it came out of a sense of saviorism and paternalism [00:32:00] and, saviorism being an act of often goodwill, wanting to support somebody but also get recognition for that. And I think many of us as adoptees could probably not have to look very far to see whether we had, whether we grew up in a family that wanted to save us, particularly in intercountry adoption, there's that can be shrouded in saviorism.

And then paternalism is slightly different, similar but slightly different. Paternalism is that sense of, again, wanting to support, but wanting to support somebody without them having a say. And so adoption is paternalism because as a baby you don't get a say, you don't get a say about whether your name is kept.

You have your whole identity is earased by giving you a new birth certificate. Yeah, the deeper I dive into paternalism and the way [00:33:00] that adoption is structured and created, it's about a whole heap of people saying, we know better and we are going to enact laws, for your benefit without you having a say.

And this has happened in indigenous communities across the world, and it certainly happens in adoption. I guess I've been deep diving into how does that play out then in somebody's life, if that's what you came into, how does that play out? And it certainly played out in my life in terms of the ways that my adoptive parents tried to take over, in a way, parenting my child 'cause they didn't see me as fit and thought they could do a better job in a lot of ways. But then, these outer complexes can turn into inner complexes. And so yeah, I continue today to look at how does paternalism impact me? What, where are the places where sometimes I look to [00:34:00] be, to have somebody guide me and as opposed to listening to my internal world.

And sovereignty to me is the opposite of paternalism. It is the capacity to turn inward. To listen deeply to the body, to your intuition, to your instincts, and to learn to trust them. And adoptees above so many others have been taught not to trust our instincts have been taught not to follow that deep, that inner voice.

And I guess I've always been someone that did do that, at 17 saying, I'm gonna have my child, I don't care what you say. 21 going, I'm moving as far away from this support as I possibly can so I can learn to stand on my own two feet. Those are the sovereign decisions that I don't know where they came from, but I'm so glad I had them.

But that doesn't mean that's continued throughout my life. Like I, I self-sabotage all the time. [00:35:00] Alcohol has been an issue in my life and for many years in my life. And what alcohol has done for me is it keeps me quiet. It keeps me not thinking. When I go through periods of not drinking, it's like I wake up and then I start to see what's really happening.

So there are ways, I know alcohol consumption is a big one for adoptees, but there are other ways that we keep ourselves quiet and silent and not listening to ourselves is one of them. So I guess personally, I'm on a big journey around sovereignty. I'm in my fifties now, so I'm also in my perimenopausal years, which is a time when a woman, my midlife years, it's a time when a woman really comes into her power.

And for the first few years, I think I just really fought this. I didn't want to change. I didn't want my body to change. I didn't wanna put on weight, I didn't wanna have brain fog. I didn't wanna have achy joints and exhaustion. And so I started listening to the medical model and I gave up my [00:36:00] sovereignty in many ways.

And then last year, because of the medical model, I ended up under the knife of the surgeon fighting for my life because a doctor had made a mistake and during a routine test and my lung collapsed. So I came out of that experience. That was the end of June last year, and I really started to go, okay.

It's time to start trusting yourself now. Start trusting your body and to start healing from within. So yeah, I'm living the path of sovereignty, going back in throughout my life and appreciating the places where it's showed up, acknowledging the places where I didn't listen to myself. And there's been many, and moving towards like really true, authentic sense of self.

Which I think is what one of the books that I found in my thirties was Journey of the Adopted Self [00:37:00] by Betty Jean Lifton, and it's old now, but I really love that book and it really started to shape that sense of what that book is on about is really a sense of self and how adoptees really struggled to know a sense of self.

Because of our lack of biological mirror mirroring. Because of our lack of lineage. Something I've, I haven't talked about today is in my, another reunion I had in my thirties was late thirties and again more recently was finding out about my Aboriginal heritage. And so there's a whole cultural lineage that I haven't had growing up that I'm still starting to find.

And because I, the people who, if my family generation that have the stories, many of them have died. So again, I have to come back to sovereignty. I have to come back to those places and trusting those things that happen that tell me my ancestors are close, that tell me that I have Aboriginal lineage because I feel it.

You [00:38:00] certainly feel it. I always have. It's always been with me. But as an adopted person, I question it over and over again because I didn't grow up with it. And it's very easy to hear the voices of people that say you're not black enough, or you didn't grow up with it, so therefore you're not.

And those are the places where I'm not being sovereign, where I'm listening to others' voices. They cloud things. And for adoptees, I think this is our struggle a lot of the time, is to get those other voices out of the way and to really listen and to really trust and really believe the experiences that we have, the truth that we know in our bones.

It doesn't need somebody else to validate it and to start to know it, speak it, and live it. I think, as I go further in my fifties I hope to embody more of who I truly, really am as a sovereign aboriginal woman.

Haley Radke: That's powerful stuff. And I know that you help guide [00:39:00] other people to finding that. And if folks are like vibing with you, they can check that out. I know you've got lots of stuff, lots of opportunities, even if we're far away to learn from you. So let's switch to do our recommended resources if that's okay.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Okay, sure.

Haley Radke: We're recording this just a little bit out from when it's airing, but hot off the press is this new article by Lynn Zubov.

I don't know if you've seen this. Lynn is a first mother and she's been conducting research on adoptees, first mothers and first fathers, and she's just published her results. In the Journal of Social Sciences, the article is called Long-Term Mental Health Effects of Mother [00:40:00] Child Separation Due to Adoption, and I'm gonna link to it. It's open source, so anyone can read this and read the data. And there's some caveats on her study, which let me just flip to the back here. There's some caveats based on how she found her sample and those kind of things. So I'll just flag that for folks. But it's very illuminating, especially about our risks, both adoptees and relinquishing parents, our suicide risks. And yeah. Have you seen this article, Monique?

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yeah, I saw it last week. I think I, I came across it on Facebook and immediately we posted it for people to start to become aware of. But yeah, the statistics are very sobering.

Haley Radke: Yeah. Yeah. So [00:41:00] this is important work and we have to support the people in our community that are doing these kinds of things for us. Like we've talked so many times on the show about who's doing the research on us and we need proof of these things. And so thank you Lynn for that. And of course I will link to the Flourish book that you, you mentioned gathering with the Flourish community for a year and there's a whole book about your experiences and the group that put that together was so kind to donate the proceeds to Adoptees On.

Amazingly and I'm sure we have a, I'm sure we have an episode about it too, that I'll

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yes.

Haley Radke: I'll link for folks.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: I do you remember that.

Haley Radke: Yes.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Yes. What do you wanna recommend to us?

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Those are two fabulous resources. I have a list of things. Can I give three? [00:42:00]

Haley Radke: I guess. Only ' cause I like you so much.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Oh, that feeling's very mutual. Thank you. I would say the book, if you are looking for a book to get started, Adoption Unfiltered is, before we used to have The Primal Wound as the recommended book which is still great, but somewhat outdated a little bit now. And I think Adoption Unfiltered is the new version of the Primal Wound.

And it, and what I love about it so much is that it covers the stories of the triangle, so adoptees, birth parents and adoptive parents. And it just, it's a great all rounder for everybody to read. So that would be a reading recommendation. I also have had great feedback around I have a, an ebook that I created that you can download off my website. It's free, it doesn't cost anything. And it was, I [00:43:00] created this during that time where I was trying to bring together the research on attachment and nervous system work together with adoption. Because I just felt like there's a big missing gap out there that nobody's talking about. And so I created this handbook and it's, you can download that for free off my website, healingadoptiontrauma.com.

And my third recommendation, and this is my big one, is I think the best resource we have is nature. I would say for adoptees spending time in nature for me has been one of the most healing things I can do. Just watching the seasons, interacting with trees, moss leaves, getting a sense that we are actually held by this mother earth and that, whilst I had two mothers, I didn't really receive [00:44:00] any of the nurturing mothering that I would've liked to have received.

When I really am in need in that of that, I'll go to nature and just lie on her. Feel her talk to her. Listen to her. Yeah. That's probably my biggest recommendation.

Haley Radke: We, we never talked about this, but I heard you share about sand trays in another episode.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yes.

Haley Radke: And you have lots of photos of them on your Instagram account. Which we'll also link to in the show notes, but when you were talking in another interview about people putting their hands in the sand. And sometimes they might start to get weepy right away. I, it just, as you were describing it, I was like, oh, I would just love to put my [00:45:00] hands on some sand right now.

And for me I'm like, that's nature connected and anyway. If we had more time, we could talk more about

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yes. That's a whole nother episode.

Haley Radke: You, yes. You got, you have to go to Monique's websites because she's an expert in all kinds of different modalities, and we've talked about so many different styles of therapy on this show over the years, and I love that you're a somatic psychotherapist. So these, all these embodied, healing activities. And I think that really helps us connect because we've had this severance from our mothers.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yes.

Haley Radke: Which I think disconnects our like mind from our body and it's taken me years to build any sort of connection back and so

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Exactly.

Haley Radke: Yeah.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yes. Yeah. I would say the two [00:46:00] most profound modalities that I've studied, and I've studied a lot of different modalities, would be somatic experiencing trauma training. Is a three year trauma training and sand play therapy, which is, there is no three year training, it's just year after year after year after year training in sand play.

It's a depth modality and it's interesting. These two don't get talked about a whole lot in the world of adoption and I'm not overly sure why, but as you just said, healing, the disconnect between mind and body is probably the biggest wound that I feel like I'm still constantly learning to be with, like learning to be with my body, learning to be with the what's happening internally.

It just continues to keep unraveling how deep that can go and there's lots of ways to do that. We can do that through touch and in turn, introspection, turning [00:47:00] in and following and noticing what's happening inside. And we can do that through movement and all sorts of ways. So yeah, the mind body split is particularly for those in adoption wound, and the other one is sand play therapy, and the reason I've been drawn for over 20 years to sand play therapy is that it profoundly reaches into the preverbal trauma. And I don't know, another modality that reaches so deeply into preverbal trauma than sand play therapy. It's. primarily a nonverbal modality, so you don't need to find words.

And as I feel like I've said numerous times, as I look back over my journey in my twenties and my thirties, I didn't have words to say what was going on. And I only found that in my late forties when I came into relationship with other adoptees. And so I have been doing sand play over those years.

It profoundly gives you a picture of what's happening on the [00:48:00] inside. On the outside, it's like having a dream that we have at nighttime in 3D, but it's showing us what our internal world looks like, so it takes our mind out of the way. Access is our limbic system where trauma is held and images appear that are very unexpected, that we don't expect to come.

In the protected space of the sand tray and the sand play therapeutic relationship. And over a series of those images and trays being created, we see a pattern, and I've been through this myself. We see a pattern of healing start to emerge. And I would say for me, that's where my sovereignty really started to kick in. That's where the word sovereignty came. I'm continuously going back to those trays and looking at them and more wisdom just keeps coming through and I continue to do my own trays every week as much as I can to allow my unconscious to speak to me. [00:49:00] Yeah, so that's a little bit about those, but you can read more and find out more on my socials and my website.

Haley Radke: Listen, I almost ordered a bag sand after listening to that. To one of those conversations about that. Perfect. Okay. We will let folks do their own digging into hearing more about that from you and where can we do that?

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: As you said, I have a couple of websites and then they're all under slight reconstruction at all times, so just know if there's things missing on there that's because it's under reconstruction. So I have one called healingadoptiontrauma.com. I haven't touched that one for a little while. And then I have another one I created a couple years ago called Somatic Sovereignty. So it's somatic-sovereignty.com. And the one that I've been working on since about December after my operation and coming into recovery, I've taken a sabbatical, had a [00:50:00] year off or it'll be a year coming up in June.

And the last three months of that year has been diving into a new iteration, which is more focusing on sand play somatics. And so my new website is called moniquepangari.com, which is my name.

Haley Radke: Perfect.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Yeah. So you'll see different iterations of me across those three different websites, but that's moniquepangari.com is my latest one.

Haley Radke: Okay. We will link to all of those things and your Instagram in the show notes so folks can find you. Thank you so much, Monique. What a delight to get to talk to you today.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: Thank you so much. I can't tell you what a privilege it's to be on your show, on this podcast that literally saved my life. I would say it was this podcast. That slowly started entering into my consciousness. I couldn't listen to one every day. I couldn't listen to one every week, but I would always keep coming back throughout my thirties and [00:51:00] forties listening to this podcast. I dunno, how long have you been going? Maybe not my thirties, but certainly my forties. Yeah.

Haley Radke: It's 10 years.

Monique Pangari, MEd, SEP: 10 years. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Yes.

Haley Radke: Thank you.

I might repeat myself a little bit, but I'm feeling big feelings during every interview so far this year, and a huge piece of that is looking at my calendar and thinking, oh my goodness, it is coming up on a full 10 years of this podcast, and when I'm recording this, it is the 10th anniversary of coming up with the idea for Adoptees On, and it was March, 2016, I started brainstorming, [00:52:00] what podcasts do I like? What don't I like? How do I make sure I make a really good show that I would wanna listen to? And really, I wanted to hear from fellow adoptees their real true, unvarnished, no sugar coating stories, and that's how it started out. And when I had the idea for the healing series and to talk to therapists who were also adoptees, I don't even know where that idea came from, but I just think, thank goodness that I thought of that, or someone prompted me to start in on that. I don't even know, but I have learned so much from [00:53:00] every therapist that has been on the show. And what's so cool about having Monique on is to think that there are so many adoptee therapists in this world all over the globe, and even if we're just looking at our own little bubble, wherever we are.

There are other people doing the same work We are in all the countries. What a, I don't know. I don't know if I'm getting my point across, but I just felt grateful to know that it's not just, I'm not a therapist, it's not just me out here, podcasting, there's so many adoptee podcasts you can listen to now.

It's not just Monique out there therapizing. There's so many adoptee therapists. We could always use more. We could always [00:54:00] use more, but there's so many more folks who are really knowledgeable in this space. If you think about just. How far we've come in the last 10 years. Oh. I'm so proud of us. Good job adoptee community.

And I know it just keeps expanding. It just will keep expanding. Our voices will continue to get louder and to be heard. Perhaps we will gain that sovereignty that Monique was talking about with us today. Yeah, I'm just feeling super grateful today. I don't know if you know this, but I don't think I've shown this, but in my office where Spencer's snoring right now, I don't know if you can hear him, but I have a whole wall in front of me.

Part of it's covered with audio foam 'cause audio nerd forever. And the top half is full of [00:55:00] cards and photos from listeners who've sent their, good thoughts and kind words to my PO Box and I maxed out last year. And so I started on the wall, oops. To the left of me by my glasses collection.

And anyway, I'm feeling the gratitude, I'm feeling the love. I stayed up late to record this. And so I have, I don't know, those late night feelings and whenever I'm really tired, I just look up and think, oh yeah, that's who I'm doing it for. So if you ever sent me a note, you know it's up on my wall here and I can see it.

I thank you for listening. I, am feeling so grateful. And if you're curious about my other project On Adoption that the wheels are [00:56:00] still going, I'm still working on that. And you can always look for information about that on the On Adoption Instagram, if you sign up for my newsletter adopteeson.com/newsletter.

We have updates coming out there and i'm so proud of all that work that's happening over there. Okay. That's enough rambling. That's enough. Late night rambling. It's probably not late night when you're listening to this. You're probably out doing something productive, like walking your dog or going for a run or doing your dishes.

Good job. You. Thank you so much for listening to adoptee voices. Truly. I feel so grateful that you're here. Let's talk again soon.

321 David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/321

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You are listening to Adoptees On the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today's guest is Dr. David McCarty-Caplan., a researcher, consultant, and a Colombian born adoptee. After becoming a father himself, David began searching for his biological family, leading to a reunion with his mother and siblings in Colombia, an experience that deepened both his personal journey and his professional research.

We talk about his scholarship. Including how families and communities can better support adoptees in developing a stronger sense of belonging. Before we get started, I wanna personally invite you to sign up for my podcast [00:01:00] newsletter, which you can find at adoptees on.com/newsletter. We wrap up with some recommended resources and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com. Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased. To welcome to Adoptees On Dr. David McCarty-Caplan.. Welcome David.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Hi. I am so excited and honored to be a part of this. Thank you so much, Haley.

Haley Radke: I've spent the last week or so listening to interviews you've done and reading your research, and I'm so honored to get to speak to you. I'm very excited too.

So feelings mutual and I would love it if you would start off by sharing a bit of your story with us please.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: I was born in Bogota Colombia, 1981, and I was adopted at three weeks old by a American white Jewish family that at the time was [00:02:00] living in Michigan. I was taken from FANA, which was the orphanage I came from that I know a lot of your guests have actually come from as well.

But yeah, taken from FANA raised in Michigan for a period of time in Ann Arbor and then in Maryland, outside of DC for my young teen years. And yeah, life has been wild with regard to adoption. It's been such an amazing process to figure out how all of this fits in to the stories of our lives. I knew from the moment I was adopted that I was adopted.

It was never a question. I'm like five foot, five and brownish, and my dad is six two and white. So it was visibly very present. But also they shared it with me from a very young age that I was adopted. And that was a big part of my upbringing because when I grew up, there were actually about five or six other families in Ann Arbor that all adopted kids within a few years from my same [00:03:00] orphanage.

And so I had this kind of unique childhood of being raised in a community with a lot of white adoptive families, with Colombian adopted people. And so my early holidays were often spent with these families, and my earliest friends were from this group. And that was a huge thing for me to see other Colombian adoptees.

But oddly looking back on it now as a grownup, we never talked about adoption. It was just the silent elephant in the room always. And that's something I think about a lot. So I had adoptee community, but never really spoke about it. And I think that was a big part of my childhood, getting this reflection from people around me that adoption is something that needs to be kept quiet in some way, and that kind of followed me through my early years, especially in Jewish community, being raised in that community and feeling at times like I wasn't welcomed or I didn't fully belong, even though I really wanted to be part of that [00:04:00] community. And then I was raised up in that space and really fell in love with aspects of Jewish community and culture with regard to social justice and community support and the traditions and histories of it.

And that all informed kind of me getting into work related to social issues. I was a social worker at the beginning of my career in clinical practice working with emotionally disturbed youth and incarcerated populations. And I think that connects to adoption too, because I know so many of us get into helping professions, which is something I get so excited to talk about.

But yeah, I was just super fascinated by culture, identity development, and how systems do or do not support people as they're facing the challenges of very complex human lives. And after that, I ended up going to pursue my master's degree in social work and then went on to the PhD and started doing research.

And all [00:05:00] along the way, I was working in extremely challenging social context, but never adoption specifically up until about five years ago. I have two wonderful kids, Milo and Max, and when they were born, Milo is 12 now. When they were born, that's when I think things for me drastically shifted. Like my whole life turned upside down the moment I held my first child 'cause it was that moment, you have that. I had never had a biological relative and here I was holding my child and it's like a switch went off in my head about what that felt like. And it awoke in me a deep longing and curiosity that I've been, it's like the thread I've been pulling on ever since.

So I, I really feel like my adoption stuff has been coming out these past 12 years 'cause before that, I just told everyone I was fine. I told everyone I didn't need to know where my family was or who they were. [00:06:00] And the more I think about it now I just feel deeply that for me personally, that was a defense mechanism.

I was trying to protect myself against the grief. Now I know that for me personally. Processing that grief is actually my path to healing, and it's actually what's good for me and for my family and my children, for my next generation, for my bio family that I met a few years ago. So now I'm just trying to put all my effort into aligning these things where I came from, the work I do, trying to analyze systems and institutions that should be supportive of adoptive people of color more generally, and where they're needing to kick their game up.

And in so doing, hopefully building communities that really feel like they can be their full, complex, authentic selves without rejection.

Haley Radke: Can I ask you about this idea that you didn't really wanna search, you [00:07:00] didn't really wanna know, and you called it a defense mechanism?

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Did you ever have like thoughts come to the surface during those years about search or wondering?

And just outwardly, you said to people, no, I'm not interested. Or were you just genuinely you thought I'm not interested. You never really had surface things and now looking back you're like, oh, maybe I did have something bubbling under.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Oh, it was definitely both. It depended on the point in life that I was at. The first thing that popped to mind when you mentioned that is a couple years ago, I was looking through some old papers that my, my adoptive mom had for me from like my childhood. And one of the things I found was this like old notebook of things that I wrote when I was in second grade. You know those like big lined papers where you like, we're learning how to write words out and there's like a blank space.

You can feel it, it's

Haley Radke: wait, can I tell you I have a notebook like this? Where a teacher noted, like Haley doesn't leave [00:08:00] enough space between words, and they, the tip is like to put a finger space in between and literally put your finger in between writing. And so then from that point on, I have these giant gaping spaces in my said, I can picture exactly what you're talking about.

I love that.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Yeah. So I can feel it and smell it, but I found this paper and it blew my mind 'cause I was probably seven or eight at the time. And it's, it's just a few lines and at the top of the lines there's a blank space where I was supposed to draw what I was writing about.

And in the drawing you can see. Some grownup figure, putting a crying baby either into or out of a bassinet and another group of grownups crying, right? That's the drawing. I'm not a hundred percent sure who the people are, but then in the lines it says, I was adopted from Colombia. I do not know who my mother is. I don't know if she's alive anymore. And that makes me cry just thinking about it [00:09:00] now. I was eight and that was what I was writing about. And the thing that trips me out the most about it was at the bottom of the page, there's a happy face sticker and a pen written line from my teacher, very well intentioned teacher who I still love to this day.

And what she wrote was, aren't you so lucky for having the family you have now? Like that's the message I got. I have evidence of it, which really is a lot to process. So yes, I think I was consciously trying to figure it out and was acting in ways to please others around me or to present in a way where I didn't have to feel like my sadness or grief was too much.

And then I think it just got to be part of me through so many years that then it became subconscious and I just thought I was fine. But there are telltale signs. Like even before I wanted to find my family, [00:10:00] when I would talk about adoption, I would weep. It would just come outta me and it's, I feel like that's my body telling me to go there. It's unprocessed love, unprocessed grief, and so I've really been trying to embrace the tears too, because I feel like I wasn't listening to them all the time.

Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. And I wanted to ask you about this 'cause I've heard you talk around this idea on a couple of other podcasts.

And I think I'm one of those people who absolutely have stigmatized adoptees for saying they're in the fog or they're not outta the fog yet, or, that language. And now we have the new adoptee consciousness model language we can use as well. But I don't know, like I, I don't know. I'd love for to hear your thoughts on that language.

Like we don't wanna be prescriptive over anyone's story or process. [00:11:00] And I also see yeah, a lot of people don't wanna think about it for a long time, and hopefully they die happy. Lucky you.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Boy, wouldn't that be great?

Haley Radke: So I'd love to hear your thoughts around that.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Oh man. I just remember being earlier in my path and receiving what felt like judgment from another adoptee that I was really trying to open up to, and it hurt.

To be told essentially that I wasn't far enough along yet, and I've said this before, I don't think that person was wrong, cause clearly I'm much farther now than I was before, but it was something about the tone or the language that really stung because I was all nerves out sharing what I was thinking.

So for me, now, I have that experience in my mind all the time when I talk about adoption because I just think it's so important. [00:12:00] We as adoptees that are speaking about adoption, welcome anyone in who's coming from an adoptee experience with a true honoring of where they are in the moment. That could be somewhere totally different than we are.

And what I would rather do is focus on owning my experience and my story as my individual experience and state as clearly as possible. I hope my story or our conversation or my experience, I hope it gets you thinking. I hope it invites you to have conversation with me about where you're coming from. I hope in the vulnerable way, I hope to present myself that it encourages you also to feel safe to share wherever you're at.

And if you don't want to talk but you wanna listen, that's cool. If you want to tell me everything about your life, that's cool. If you want to find your family [00:13:00] someday, let's go there. If you feel like that's not something you need at all. Cool. I just want you to feel like adoptees have your back.

Haley Radke: Yeah. It's a, it's lonely enough. It's lonely enough being adopted, that to pile on. And I totally admit. I've certainly used language like that in the past, and I try to be more open and aware of that damage that does now.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: And I think also the language, that's a key thing too though, to acknowledge when you make a mistake or when the language is limited.

Because so much of the language in this world and other worlds I've worked in is fraught with terms that are inadequate or things that change over time. So again, I think it's okay to use the language we have. And if it's received in a way that is a hurt or an ouch situation, like that's where I hope we have the grace to process with like kindness, that restorative justice piece is something I really am excited about in [00:14:00] building adoptee spaces is like how do we deal with the things that we do that might harm one another or hurt one another? 'cause we really are trying to support and build our community.

Right?

Haley Radke: Oh, definitely. Definitely. And as someone who's doing it publicly from a mic, and I'm not necessarily interacting one-on-one with all the folks that hear me say those things, you wanna hear the evolution of Haley can start at episode one.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Episode one, yeah. You're in that rough place. It's really hard to have have people observe you as you go through this process, as an adoptee. I was thinking about that today. Just how many eyes and ears have been listening to how you have processed things over years. And I just, I don't know. It's just a lot to have on your shoulders and I imagine that there are moments where you wanna take something back or change the way was something was said, but I don't know. I just am. I'm very impressed by [00:15:00] the way you hold space for people.

Haley Radke: Thank you. You know what I think about, I'm glad people can see my evolution over the years, and I remember I had a guest on pretty early on who was a blogger and she talked about how when she first started blogging, she was that like stereotypical happy adoption story stuff on her blog. And that's kinda what she put out in the world. And she said, she was like, I never wanna take that down so people can see the evolution and I've appreciated that. And anyway,

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Oh my gosh. Yeah. That, that's so valuable. I actually did, my first podcast was with an organization I work with and I love called Jewtina and it was a couple years before I decided to look for my family. I was deep in adoption processing in my mind, but I hadn't gotten to the bio family stuff. And that entire podcast is heartfelt and true.

And [00:16:00] also I talk about not wanting to find my family and how that doesn't matter to me. And I look back on it now and I'm like, I'm so glad that exists. I want that to be out there because human development, human change is important to note, especially for communities that have a history of having their stories be so uncomplex. Like we don't get enough depth to our stories, and so it's good to have these touch points over time.

Haley Radke: So can we go to that? You have your first child and something opens up in you, and when did you become aware that you actually wanted to find family? If you could. If it was possible.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: I think it was maybe the third minute that my child was born.

Haley Radke: Really?

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: At least the first thoughts of it. That's when it came to my mind. And then I was scared. I was like essentially scared for the next eight years to actually do the thing, but it was really, it was holding Milo. It was holding my [00:17:00] child and the first thought was, oh my God, I'm a dad.

Oh God, I'm in so much trouble. This is such a big thing. And then it was like this feeling of deep love and I'm like, wow, this is what this feels like. And I'd been thinking, I knew what love felt like, but I didn't until that for me.

Haley Radke: Yeah.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: And then the next thought was, something must have been really wrong for my mom to give me up.

Right.

Haley Radke: Yeah.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: That was the second thought. And the third thought was not mad at her. And then it was like this, the follow up was like. I wish I could ask her. I wish I could ask her what that was like.

Haley Radke: Yeah. Are you able to articulate, I'm sorry I'm poking at painful things here. You just tell me if you're ready to move on. I'm sorry.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Oh, I'm good.

Haley Radke: Okay. Are you able to [00:18:00] articulate. What the fear was in searching, like what does it mean if you're gonna be open to searching?

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Yeah, I know the answer to that because many years later, after my first child was born, I'm in Colombia, I decided to go there. It was my second time there, and on this trip I was deciding to bring my kids to connect to my homeland and to have another touchpoint for myself and my wife. To be there when somewhat unexpectedly. We ended up finding my family, which is bananas.

Haley Radke: That,

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: and so it was, I had no preparation.

Haley Radke: Okay. That's a real skipping over like unexpected.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Yeah. Oh,

Haley Radke: There's much, how did you unexpectedly find your family?

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Okay, so the short version is. I was planning to go to Colombia with my family. I was thinking [00:19:00] maybe I will look for my bio family. And then I got scared and I decided, nope, nevermind. I'm just gonna have it be a family trip for us to connect to the country. And then two weeks before we went, a dear friend of mine at Adoption Mosaic put me in touch with a searcher, an investigator Elena from Healing Puentes who is also connected to Adoption Mosaic and she basically put the word out there into the internet inter sphere to she had some information from me and basically the week before I went to Colombia, she found somebody that may have been a relation to me. I thought it was a cousin. It turns out it was one of my sisters and the day I was flying to Colombia, like I was in the airport getting on the plane to go to Colombia at 1:00 AM from LAX with my family.

And I'm walking onto the plane and I get an email from another one of my sisters saying, who are you? What [00:20:00] is going on? I heard you're looking for us. What's the deal? And so I wrote a quick email back, sent some pictures of the family, just I don't know if you're the person I'm looking for. I think we may be related.

I didn't say I'm coming to Colombia right now 'cause I didn't wanna freak her out. But I sent the email and I'm like hoping. I get off the plane six hours, seven hours, whatever it is, later, and there's four or five emails from my sister saying with like pictures of the family, like I found out I had five siblings the minute I landed in Colombia.

I found out what my mom looked like with pictures when I landed in the country and then the next week of being in Colombia, which was supposed to be just like vacation, turned into me hearing my mother's voice for the first time on a WhatsApp message and doing a DNA test and sending people to do a DNA test for her, and then waiting to see if it's really her, and then getting the confirmation that it was her, and then the next day I saw her [00:21:00] in person.

Like it was so bananas, the emotional upheaval of these days. And to answer your initial question, the night before I was gonna meet my mother, I was terrified. Like I'd just gotten the paperwork that it was her. And I remember saying to my wife the fear is, what if she doesn't want me? What if she doesn't want to talk to me?

What if she didn't want me in the first place? What if she's upset that I'm here? What if I cause her more problems? What if it goes poorly? What if? What if it's scary for me? I was just scared that she wouldn't want the connection that I was hoping to find, and it was almost too much, but I did it and I was wrong. And it was wonderful and heartbreaking. [00:22:00] I'm really proud I did it.

Haley Radke: Thank you for naming those things. And I think of your responsibilities like you're on a family vacation and your kids are there, and you're still having to do real life while your world is shaking, and that's really difficult.

It's that reminder that search, reunion processing, adoption, failing. That all happens while real life is still going. Real life's still going. The people sitting behind you on the plane don't realize. You're like, oh my God, if you can email me back for six hours, like no one else knows. You're going through that. It's heavy.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Yeah, that reunion trip was so much to process and there's an added angle which like most people don't know, which is at the end of the week of being there with my family, I was then on a week long trip with the organization I mentioned that I work with called Jewtina, [00:23:00] which is all about the intersections of Latin and Jewish community and culture.

And part of the crazy part of my story is. I got called up by my dear friend who runs that organization and she was like, hey, we're thinking of doing these international trips and the first place we might wanna go to is Colombia. Are you interested? And I was like, I was literally just thinking about going with my family.

So that sealed the deal that I was gonna go was this additional professional experience. So I'm there with the day I met my mother was actually the day after my family flew home and I joined this group of international Jewish Latinos traveling to Colombia, and that's like real life. I was there. I was actually, I'd led a three hour session on adoption in Colombia with the group.

The day I found out my mom was my mom. I'm sitting on a bus going through Bogota with these 12 [00:24:00] new friends when I like get the text message with the fact that my mom is my mom, like the DNA test. And then I had to teach this class for three hours, just weeping. And everyone there is wait, you're telling me this happened like now?

Like right now? And I'm like. Yeah. Yeah. This happened. This is happening as I am teaching, as yeah. Life. But I had just had my family there, my kids, my, wife were holding me down. The people I was with on this trip were so warm and so loving, and so supportive. They celebrated me.

When I got home from meeting my mom that night, they were literally cheering for me. And it just helps so much when you know you're in the right community spaces to be going through hard stuff.

Haley Radke: Wow. Thank you for including us in the Inner circle to talk about that. Like I am, feel [00:25:00] honored. I also, it made me like excited for you to be the person doing research on adoptees. And I was like, okay. He knows the right questions to ask adoptees. And you wrote this whole white paper, we'll link to it. We'll talk about and recommended resources a little more. About Jewish adoptees who are adoptees of color and their experiences.

And as I was going through it, something I noted that I was like, oh, this is really interesting. I wanna hear you talk more about this 'cause I think this is really critical information, especially for adoptive parents of children of color adoptees who had opportunities to connect to their race or culture, had a higher sense of belonging. Can you talk about that, David?

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Yeah. Yeah. That was one of many, I think, super valuable findings of the study. There [00:26:00] was another piece that also connected with that, which I think is super valuable, which is that also Jewish adoptees of color that know other adoptees of color have a greater sense of belonging.

Haley Radke: Oh, good.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: And so there's this beautiful piece about that. There's something really special. Let me back up and start from like the negative, like the really, the, like the real bad part about my study is I found that 75% of Jewish adoptees have no strong sense of belonging in their Jewish community, even though the Jewish community to a disproportionate degree adopts kids into their community, particularly kids of color. 75% of us don't feel a sense of belonging in those communal spaces, which is just heartbreaking. And that resonates. That's, that was my experience. I felt at times welcomed, but generally just a great sense of unease in the community as an adopted person of color.

But the beautiful piece is then statistically. Being able to [00:27:00] show that the things that change, that likelihood of belonging, increasing belonging, or decreasing belonging. There's some really beautiful things in there. Number one is knowing other adoptees. If you knew more adoptees, particularly adoptees of color, your sense of belonging grows in those spaces.

And then the second piece is, do you have touch points for your cultural heritage? Is the communal space you're in acknowledging your cultural identity? Is it giving you a space to see yourself in those arenas? And that also increases the sense of belonging. And I just love those findings because they just tell me that we a need each other.

We need to see each other. We need to be in communication with each other. And we need to be building things with each other. And also we need to have communities that value where we came from and the things that we lost, the grief that we've had to absorb. And if there's [00:28:00] an acknowledgement of who we are and where we come from, inevitably in my mind, that's like our grief is being seen, our identities are being seen.

We don't have to hide it and pretend that we're fine. Pretend that. I don't miss my homeland, that I ache when I can't connect to Latinos in the way I want to. If there's some piece that's allowing me to reconnect and pull back those lines of lineage that you've talked about in the past it's so beautiful.

And these are structural things that, not just Jewish communities, all communal spaces, Christian, Jewish, whatever schools organizations, institutions. Like if you can be celebrated and seen in your authentic wholeness. Then you'll feel welcomed and belonging in that space. At least you'll be more likely to.

Haley Radke: Do you think of like little David knowing all these other adoptees from your same orphanage? And like you guys didn't talk about it. Do you think I [00:29:00] get it, do my kids enjoy when I make them watch something and say, tell me what you thought about this adoption theme in it 'cause I'm recording about it for a podcast.

They, no, they don't enjoy that. We have kids around the same age. Oh, there's no, they're not that excited. But so looking back now as a parent, are there things you think that could have been helped, like to facilitate those conversations and friendship where it's just oh man, we just weren't that interested. I dunno.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: I think it's a mixture like kids, I've got kids now and I know there are times when I want to dig in on big questions and they're like meh. Like they're like just not feeling it for whatever reason, and that's okay. I don't think it should be pressured. I think the challenge that I see though, which was my own experience, was when I asked my parents about this many years later, like both with that community that I was raised in for a short period of time, and also the fact that we traveled to many Latin American countries but [00:30:00] never went to Colombia.

It feels weird to me that they made those choices of just, it's like we were close, we were proximal, but not actually in the thing that I needed to address. And with no judgment of my parents 'cause they were doing the best they could. They say that they were waiting for me to tell them that I wanted to dig in on these things.

And that is, I think, a very common experience for a lot of adoptees, particularly my generation. Your generation. And I also think that it's a fundamental disservice to the adoptees to expect the weight of that proactive approach to addressing adoption challenges should come from the child because there's this tension between relationships and authentic expression, and I think a lot of adoptees, myself included, all of the fear I had of talking about adoption and the grief [00:31:00] that I was experiencing, the way the society around me talked about adoption was like, oh, aren't you so grateful? Aren't you so lucky to have been adopted? My parents thought I was a happy go-lucky kid, and in many ways I was, because I think I was afraid to talk about the depth of my experience for fear that it might put into jeopardy my relationship with my parents or anyone else I loved.

And so if you're waiting for a kid to tell you they need to go do these things, but for the child to talk about these things in their mind might mean a risk or loss of the people that they're most terrified of losing. Now that they've already lost a family, they're not gonna tell you all the time that they want to go do these things.

And if they do. Good on those kids. Those are some brave ass kids, right? But it just, I don't think it should be expected to have the weight of that be the child's responsibility. I think the parents should [00:32:00] have touchpoints regularly where they bring it up and they say, take it or leave it. This is what's on my mind.

This is important to me because I care for and love you unconditionally. I wanna make sure you know that I am okay talking about this thing. And if a kid picks it up, great. And if they don't, also great. It's the parents' work to stay in that lane. You know what I mean?

Haley Radke: Oh yeah. And I totally agree, and I think it's one of those things where we get this messaging from our teachers. Good job. Aren't you so lucky in writing on your little assignment. And we get this messaging from our TV movies, and we get it from our parents, our adoptive parents, who by not talking about it. We can get the sense of it's not safe to talk about this.

They don't wanna talk about it. And kids are very perceptive. They're very perceptive. [00:33:00] And that's, those are the messages I got. Yeah.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Yeah. And I think it's even more complex when you add in interracial issues in adoptive families 'cause. There's just added layers to being a person with darker skin tone, and it's harder, the darker your skin is to find places and spaces that are gonna be willing to talk to you about what it's like to be in a society that doesn't acknowledge the hardships that come with racial identity.

And then to, in your own family, have no mirroring no, no models of what that experience looks like, but to know it. To know it your whole life, that there's some something there that is different that is deserving of attention because it's hitting your heart like you can feel it. And I think a lot of white adoptive parents really struggle talking about race and identity in ways that can hold space for the [00:34:00] death of grief and identity challenges that adoptees experience. But I know they can do it 'cause I work with them on it. Like they can do it. They just have to be bold enough to sit in the discomfort of it for a while.

Haley Radke: Can you tell me after all your many in-depth interviews with fellow adoptees who had maybe a similar experience to what you did? How did that change you?

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: It just got me so excited. It's just, I was just so excited. I was looking for these people my whole life. Like my particular study was on Jewish adoptees because that's where I come from. But I just see it as like a big picture thing. I think a lot of adoptee communities are also overlapping with religious communities. And but for me, it was like I used to introduce myself in Jewish spaces as the only Colombian adoptee, Colombian adopted Jew you will ever meet. I used to say that as like a joke when I introduced myself, but I [00:35:00] was scared that it was true. And then I do this study and I found I had over a hundred people participate in this study and I interviewed over 30 of them, and it just felt like each interview I did was like finding, just like finding family. It felt like I've found people who I've been looking for, who may have been looking for me, every one of my interviews said that they'd never been asked about what it's like to be adopted and Jewish. Every single one. And I show up and I get to ask these questions like, what an honor to be able to find these people. Let them know they're not the only one to ask them what it's like. And so for me it just, it's fuel. It just made me wanna do more. So I'm very excited about next steps and building and [00:36:00] reconnecting, and hopefully creating futures for adoptees so that they don't have to feel like they're the only ones ever again.

Haley Radke: I relate to that so much so much. I remember my first interviews where folks had never shared their story before and it was like, oh my God, I feel like I'm like treading on holy ground here. And that feeling of I'm not alone. Like it's such a relief because you just I spent so much of my life feeling crazy. And I don't mean that in an ableist way. Like I genuinely thought there was something wrong with me. Like totally could not connect. And I'll tell you, meeting other adoptees like changed my life. Truly. Yeah,

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Yeah. And now I have these connections and others like just finding adoptee spaces has been everything for me in the past five or so years.

Just having people you can call on your birthday when your birthday [00:37:00] feels, like when you just don't know why you're feeling funky on this day or that day. And like I've got people, I've got people with me that I can reach out to where I don't have to explain myself. And I hope that they can reach out to me and feel like they don't have to explain themselves and we can just vibe and yeah just be in space, in peaceful space with one another. 'Cause I'm gonna need it the rest of my life, so I gotta keep working on building this. Like we, you also are building this and it's just amazing to see what exists now in comparison to when I was a child. And it's just exciting to see where we're going.

Haley Radke: Before we do recommended resources, I have a couple last questions for you. One of which is, did you say that you are working with adoptive parents and how do you do that? I cannot. I can't. Is there hope there if i'm tired. I'm so tired. [00:38:00]

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Yeah. Let me ask a clarifying question. Do you mean like it's too hard to work with the adoptive parents 'cause they don't get it sometimes? Is that kind of the vibe?

Haley Radke: I get a lot of email. I get a lot of dms even though my inbox is closed. Somehow they just keep coming in and it's the majority is like adoptive parents trying to ask for free labor from me to answer their questions, and I'm like, oh yeah, you know what? I have 320 plus episodes you can listen to. Yeah. Do the

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: work.

Haley Radke: I have pointed you to hundreds of books and documentaries and other. Why are you still asking me these questions? So anyway, thank you for doing that, David. Thank you for answering our questions. And is there any hope there? Because not the one's emailing me.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Okay. So there's hope and then there's definitely [00:39:00] places where I'm like, I don't have the energy, nor do I want to be in this conversation. So it's it's honestly, it's finding people that are really willing to dig into the self exploration that is needed. To support their adopted children.

And that's not everyone. It also as like a consultant in these spaces. Yeah, this is labor. So you should pay me for this, and that's important because it honors my time and my expertise, and it shows that you're not expecting things like that, that, that taking aspect of what adoptive parents often can look like or present as is frustrating. So there for me, it's yes, I know stuff about this. I really do believe in your ability to support your kids better. Let's dig in. But often the first place to dig in is actually inward. And [00:40:00] if they're not, honestly, I work in a lot of like anti-racist, like racial equity spaces.

A lot of it is deconstructing white supremacist culture, examining racial biases, examining the like tropes or narratives that they had around adoption before they got into this. And that tells you real quick who's ready to ride with you and who's not really ready. And so there's some testing that goes on in the early conversations to get a sense of is this a place where I'm actually willing to put my time and energy and do they hear me?

And sometimes I get really excited when the answer to that question is yes, because I know my parents have come a long way and they're trying their best and they're working real hard and they make mistakes, but they keep showing up. They keep trying and it's something I love so much about them, and that's what I hope other families will have as well.

That sense that you're gonna mess up. But it's about showing up [00:41:00] again and trying again without ego, without with humility. But it's real hard. It's a lot easier to counsel and support adoptees. That's all beautiful.

Haley Radke: Bless you for doing that hard work on behalf of those of us. Who choose not to.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Hey. And that's understandable. You do. You Haley.

Haley Radke: I am, I am. Okay. Last question. I love this idea that you were talking about and you have expertise in this, like seeing the systems and just the structural part of how systems support currently the structure of adoption. And when you think about that, this is a really big question.

I know we don't have that much time. When you think about that, what are the things that you see upstream that really need to change in order to support family preservation, adoptee rights, whatever you wanna talk about, just in terms of [00:42:00] systems, just give us a broad. High level.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Okay. That's a huge question. It's also like one of my favorite things to talk about, like I come from social work, so it's all about like person and environment systems analysis, like deconstructing systems of oppression. So this is always on my mind, right? The thing that I am working on most these days is looking at existing systems for people that have already been adopted.

And whether or not those systems are creating spaces that allow them to feel fully seen, heard, and valued. So I'm talking about schools, I'm talking about workplaces. I'm talking about community organizations and religious spaces, religious institutions or communities. And so for me, in those places, there are really important conversations that need to be had about policy like what are the rules that govern these spaces, and do they allow people to be their full, [00:43:00] authentic selves? I think it's really important to understand the narratives that influence these spaces, like the kind of unwritten social policies, like the things around aren't you so lucky? Aren't you so grateful?

Like hearing that all the time in school was really weird for me. And in Jewish spaces, like the idea that adoption is a mitzvah or a good deed, or in Christian spaces, that it's a benevolent act like you're doing God's will. Or in other religious spaces where the idea might be like, oh, you were chosen.

You were chosen by God to be taken into this new family. And these are systems of oppression in my mind for an adoptive person because all of those expectations, all the policies that don't allow us to dig in on identity or race, all the narratives that structure adoption, understanding around benevolence or gratitude or god's will silence us from being able to [00:44:00] express the hurt and the grief and the questions that we have being disconnected from our lands of origin, our ancestors, our racial community, our cultural community. So for me, it's like I love analyzing institutions and systems on policy levels, on education levels, on cultural levels, so that we can pull apart all these threads.

So that adoptee voices can feel like they can be safe enough to be shared. And then hopefully that's the first step, as we said, feeling like you can connect to your community, finding other people feeling like you're heard. That leads to greater sense of belonging.

Haley Radke: I love that. Good answer. I am assuming that folks who've heard our discussion do want to hear more of your research because you're just a really fascinating person and I can tell you're just so thoughtful.

And you have access to, people have [00:45:00] open source access to Shades of Belonging, which is your research. And I also watched you give a presentation on it along with a couple of subjects.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Oh, you did oh, that's so great.

Haley Radke: I did.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: That's so great. Thank you.

Haley Radke: We'll, yeah, we'll link to that in the show notes as well for folks because you know there's something through having the researcher walk you through their results and hear from some of the participants. I thought that was really special. So we'll make sure that's available for people. But thank you so much for doing that work. Like good for you. I'm just cheering you on.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Thank you. I think it's super, like that's something I also focus on a lot is I come from academia, but I don't want any research that I do to be disconnected from community or applied practical value.

So I don't want to, I do publish peer reviewed studies of course, yet that's, of course, that's what we're supposed to do. But like more than anything, the thing I loved about that video is it's [00:46:00] conversation about the findings and two of the people that participated in the study were part of the presentation. It's so accessible. It's so real and that's how I hope my research is in the future. I want it to be accessible. I want it to have practical value, and I don't want it to be overly complex or ivory towery, you know?

Haley Radke: Yeah. Yeah. I think you hit the mark. So I hope we see more from you. David, what do you wanna recommend to us?

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: There's so many things. There's so much good stuff happening. Okay. So I am a huge fan of Gabor Mate. I am actually just now rereading his book, The Myth of Normal, which I think is just an outstanding piece of work for a variety of reasons, and I look at that work through the lens of adoption and it's amazing.

It talks so much about relationship versus authenticity. It talks a lot about the connections between childhood trauma and [00:47:00] mental health challenges and physical ailments for those that have struggled with big T or little T. Trauma over time. Talks a lot about parenting and parenthood. I just love that book because I feel like it's deeply felt and helps me so much understand where I come from in a way. So I love that piece. Other resources, your podcast is like, as I said, it changed my life. I think often about episodes that really mean something to me, and I often recommend that there's two episodes that I got a double shout out.

I hope it's not like overdoing it 'cause I'm on the podcast, but like the one about the seven attachment challenges that adoptees face. That was a life changer for me.

Haley Radke: Pam Cordano.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Honestly. Yes. And I'm a just a, I'm a huge fan of Pam Cordano. And then the other one, which I heard more recently was the one about The Nothing Place also with Pam Cordano. And the whole thing about how attachment theory is a theory that does not account for adoptee experience blew my mind. And that's a systems [00:48:00] level issue. If we have therapy that we're all supposed to go to, but the tools that therapy is using to address our needs is actually miscalibrated.

Then we're working with a systems deficit. So yes, those are two huge things. Adoption Mosaic. Another organization I work with is a huge resource. I absolutely adore that organization. I consult for them and I've been like a community member with them for a long time. Astrid Castro is also brilliant. And another adoptee from Colombia. Yeah, there's just a lot of good stuff out there.

Haley Radke: Totally. Thanks for shouting those out. I'm gonna name one more before you tell people where they can find you. You were on an episode of a podcast that I don't know if I've talked about very recently called Labor of Love.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Yes. Oh my gosh. I can't believe I forgot that one. Yes. I love them.

Haley Radke: So their tagline is A podcast for Bipoc adoptees navigating parenthood, and you're, we'll link to your interview with them in the show [00:49:00] notes for folks. It's just, it made me fall in love with David. You just,

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: that's so sweet.

Haley Radke: Your kids are. Lucky to have you. Lucky. They should be grateful.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: They should be. No I mess up far more than the podcast would suggest.

Haley Radke: Oh same here. But we, I'm, I know that listeners will go have, check that out. It's a great podcast. Lots of good resources there. Okay. Where can we connect with you online and follow your work?

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Oh yeah. Okay. I would love if people wanted to visit shadesofbelonging.com. That's an emerging place where I will be putting out future research where my existing research already exists around Jewish adoption. But honestly, I feel like that's expanding.

It's expanding beyond just Jewish community, so just really anyone that's interested in exploring community and adoption, particularly transracial adoption. That's where you can find me shadesofbelonging.com. On Instagram, it's @shadesof belonging and yeah, also I work with Jewtina y Co.. I'm their [00:50:00] Director of Research and Evaluation, so people can find me there.

And I just am really excited to connect with anyone because I believe that our healing must be collective and must come through community. And so I think it's everything that you're doing as far as like how do we connect to each other is such valuable work. So if anyone who's listening to this wants to figure out ways to get involved or participate or just connect to other people thinking about these things, yeah, find me. 'Cause I would be excited to talk to you.

Haley Radke: Amazing. Thank you so much. Thanks for sharing with us today.

David McCarty-Caplan, Ph.D.: Thank you so much, Haley. This really oof. What a day. I'm just buzzing. Thank you.

Haley Radke: If you're listening, when this episode just released, July, 2026 is going to be my 10th anniversary of the show, and I keep reflecting, it's just like one of those years where you're like, think back and all of [00:51:00] the memorable people I've had on the show and just the honor of having these deep conversations and sharing them with y'all.

It's just. It's just been just the honor of my life, truly, and this conversation is going to just be up there with my, some of my favorites. I loved this conversation. I hope you did too. And folks that love adoptees like I do and really want to do research and serve and, get to the bottom of how we can fix things and help our peers and help younger adoptees like. Those are my people. So I feel grateful that I could share this conversation with David and with you, and I'm just feeling especially thankful for all the [00:52:00] guests who've been brave enough to share their stories with us here on Adoptees On.

Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again soon.

320 Erick Wolfmeyer

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/320

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You are listening to Adoptees On the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today's guest is Erick Wolfmeyer, a contemporary quilt artist known for his bold, large scale textile works. Erick shares experiences of being relinquished twice by his mother, their fraught reunion, and the DNA discovery that upended his identity yet again.

Before we get started, I wanna personally invite you to sign up for my podcast newsletter, which you can find at adopteeson.com/newsletter, and we wrap up with recommended resources for you. And as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com. Let's [00:01:00] listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Erick Wolfmeyer. Welcome Erick.

Erick Wolfmeyer: Thank you, Haley. Thanks for having me. I'm so honored to be here.

Haley Radke: I cannot wait to hear your story. And you have an unusual skill, and I'm so excited to hear about it. So please, why don't you share your story with us a little?

Erick Wolfmeyer: I always say my story started probably around the age of three to five. And one thing before I even say anything about my story, I think in the, in our community, we often conflate our search with our story. And while our search is part of our story, our search is certainly not our entire story. There's the semantics of what is my story? When we ask that question, what are we really asking?

And I think really what we're talking about, and I doubt people that don't have our experience are asked this question as often as we are and have to have our elevator [00:02:00] pitch about our whole life story in a nutshell. But we get really practiced I think at telling it. I think, I remember when I was dating in college, I was always feel very compelled to tell them at least something to know so they know like the person sitting in front of you is not the entire story, so I've been telling and refining that story for years. And one thing I've also learned is that telling your story, people are just innately curious, right? And, but telling our story can be certainly puts us in a point of vulnerability and can be very dangerous in a sense that if we don't know our audience, it really opens us up to micro and macroaggressions no matter how well intended the listener is.

And I've just learned over the years to be very protective of my story and know that no one deserves my story. That it is, an honor that I would bestow it on them if [00:03:00] it seems appropriate. And I'm just a lot more careful in how I tell the story and who I tell it to. But I do like to share it because I think it's all part of folks who have not had this experience understanding really what it is and what it isn't.

'Cause as you well know, part of the reason we're here is to fight against the false narrative that exists around this experience called adoption. And can I ask you a favor before I tell you this story? I wanted to start with a quote.

Haley Radke: Certainly.

Erick Wolfmeyer: That I felt like is gonna really set the tone for where I'm coming from. And it is old and dusty. It's from 99 to 55 BC so it's a little old. It's from a man named Lucretius and he, there's a wonderful book by Lucretius called The Nature of Things, and this is a passage from there that I like. "Lastly, in construction, if the carpenter's rule is bent or if the square is warped on which you have your measurement, [00:04:00] or if the level anywhere staggers off even by a jot, all of the structure must be built on crooked lines, the lot ramshackle, tumble down walls leading out or in and all out of whack. Now part of the rickety shack is to fall, and now part of it does collapse and all because it was betrayed by faulty measurements when its foundation was being laid. Likewise, your reasoning concerning things is built to skew if founded on sensations that are off from plum and true."

Haley Radke: I can see how that might relate to what we're gonna discuss.

Erick Wolfmeyer: We'll just let that sink in for a little bit. Some of my earliest memories around this are, I know earlier than age five because the family that raised me, we moved at around a certain age. So I know before the move. After the move, and it was before the move and that was in 73 I think. But anyway, I remember sitting in the bathroom.

The bathroom was the [00:05:00] only house or only room in the house that had a lock on the door. And I would go in the bathroom again. I was anywhere from three to five years old. And I would lock the door and I would sit on the toilet with my pants on. I wasn't actually gonna the bathroom. And I would do ESP with my mother because I don't know if you remember the movie we're slightly different ages it looks like, but there's a movie, a Disney movie called Escape to Witch Mountain, and I've watched it recently and it's actually has a why it makes sense why I would've liked it at that age in terms of, there's a lot of themes that are about separation and whatnot, but, and family connection. But I would sit on the toilet and I would do ESP with my mother, and I would just send her little messages and say, I want you to know that I'm okay. I'm okay. Where are you? And I would just basically, that was the gist of it, as I remembered, is I wanted her to know that I was okay, if she were worrying about me the next big thing I remember related to this was the Series Roots, again, based on our age, discrepency. I'm not sure if you'll know what that is.

It was an American [00:06:00] television series that was, you're shaking your head Yes. Do you remember Roots Well, or you've heard of it?

Haley Radke: Don't remember it. I've heard of it. You've heard of it? I've seen bits of it, yes.

Erick Wolfmeyer: You know what? Yeah. Okay. You know the reference. Yeah. So Roots was a big deal. That was back when you had three stations on tv, and I remember seeing the scenes where the families were separated on the auction block, and of course, I didn't have the understanding to know why that was freaking me out. But I look back and I think, yeah that, that really, that's something that's ooh, that spoke to me like something's not, Ooh, that's not good. That really was shocking. Then fast forward to my freshman year of college, I was going to a small Lutheran school in Chicago, in River Forest, to be specific, Illinois.

And one of my part-time jobs was as a babysitter. And when I was doing the interview, I never forget she was taking dishes outta the dishwasher, clean ones. And I happened to tell her that at the time I said I was adopted, and she just got [00:07:00] this look on her face, like she was almost ready to drop the glass.

And I thought, wow. No one's ever responded that way. Come to find out, she had relinquished her daughter and she was fairly, and this is back in 1985, and so this woman was also somewhat involved in kind of the movement, to help. Kinda move things along, for search and all that. Again, it's was before the internet, so it was so different.

It was so analog and there was even the things you could do were just so painstaking and so iffy in terms of a result. So I noted those three things as precursors to all of this, because up until then, it was just something that was internal and, I dealt with it as we all do growing up, but it wasn't until I met Diane Coates that it all broke open for me.

I had never even heard the term birth mother, which is not really a term that I use now, but I had never even heard that term before I met her. So I was like oh, there's a name for that. Oh, okay. So that really set me on my way. I would've been like 18, 19 years old. [00:08:00] And I ended up transferring schools and ended up finishing up in St. Louis, Missouri. Went to art school. I left my pre seminary program after a year and went to art school instead. Which was a much better fit for me as it turns out. But I then initiated my search in 1989. I was a junior in college. My, it had to be, it was this whole court thing where my parents that raised me had to take, go to the court where my adoption was finalized and the court had to petition the adoption agency to do the search.

My family of origin, my, mother and father had the option to be declined to be identified. This is in Missouri. This was in Missouri in 1989. So my mother agreed to be identified and the man named as my father declined to be identified. Okay, fine. So my mother and I talked on the phone, this is around like spring break in March, and we agreed not to exchange any photos, any recent photos before we met.

And so I flew up to Montreal. She was, oh, by the way, she was living in [00:09:00] Montreal and I had an 18-year-old brother, half maternal brother Scott. And so we agreed to meet in Montreal. I flew up there over my spring break and one of the things I remember just recently was my brother told me that when I came through sort of the doors in the airport, my airport moment, and he, she leaned over to him and said, there he is.

She had never seen a picture of me as an adult. And I found that really fascinating that she just knew right away. Suffice it to say as many do. It didn't go as planned. I was supposed to be there about nine days and I was only there about four before she, my mother took the liberty of reading the diary that I was keeping while I was there.

So I took a shower one day. My brother Scott was like at school or something, he was gone. So my mother and I were only the only ones at her apartment and she read the notes I was keeping. And when I got outta the shower, she just ambushed [00:10:00] me and come to find out she had already called the airport and had my ticket changed and the whole shebang.

So I had made a backup plan through my employer at the time. He had a friend in Montreal as it turned out. And so I had already made an escape plan. We were always at the ready, right? We always have our plan B. And so I had within moments after the confrontation that my mother and I had, I was being scooped up by this person I didn't even know.

But that was a friend of my employer and I spent the night at their house. I went to the airport the next day, prepared to buy my own one-way ticket home. And come to find out she'd already made the plans for me to, who, how you change a ticket, I, whatever. So I flew home. So the next several years were pretty rocky and weird and off and on and back and forth and whatever.

My mother that raised me intervened at one point, and it was just a whole thing. It was just rough. But it, the next sort of chapter was my mother came to visit me, and by [00:11:00] that time I was living in Rapid City, South Dakota. I had finished college and et cetera, and she came to visit me, stayed with me actually for a month. Big mistake. And all I remember about that visit, the main takeaway is that she got on the plane in this, it was a summer of 93, 92, something like that. And I didn't hear from her for 27 years. So.

Haley Radke: Are you comfortable saying what. What were you sharing in your private thoughts in your journal that was so upsetting to her?

Erick Wolfmeyer: Oh I mean my mother is the queen of self sabotage. She actually has no contact with me or my brother who, whom she raised, or he would tell me he raised her. So it's not surprising looking back that I almost think she was looking for a reason to just burn it all down. I think my mother might have, an undiagnosed mental, but who knows?

For obviously being a relinquishing mother is not the easiest thing in the world for sure. I don't know 'cause it [00:12:00] wasn't my experience, but I know that she had her own challenges long before that ever happened. She lost her father at a very young age and it thrust her and her mother into poverty and I'm really getting way ahead of myself. One thing that I would say is my mother, I found out only fairly recently that my mother, had planned to relinquish me from the get-go. She was a go-go dancer in St. Louis. She danced with me until she was seven months pregnant, believe it or not. So I'm always wondering what kind of music I was hearing, like in utero.

Haley Radke: Do you have the moves now?

Erick Wolfmeyer: Oh, I used to. I'm too old now. I used to love to dance. Yeah, it was a big thing. She's also was a chorus line dancer, so she, the high kicks, all that fun stuff. So I was born and then immediately relinquished. She didn't even know my gender. But here's the trick. I'd always thought that I was relinquished because of my cleft lip and palate. But actually, weirdly. That's really what kept me in her life for longer than I would've been otherwise, most likely. Because I had that complication. She had to sign paperwork and she had to be In loco parentis [00:13:00] or whatever they say.

She couldn't really entirely relinquish her responsibilities 'cause I needed this immediate care. So the first day of my life, I had a repair on my lip. My palate stayed open for a full year, and it wasn't until my family that raised me, got me that they took care of that. So it's funny to watch my name and my parents change in the medical records that I have.

She relinquished me initially, although she had to stay in touch. Then she went to Chicago for a month because she said she would, people on the street would ask her like about the baby, and it was just too much. After a month, she came back. I don't know anything about that first month in my life. I have no idea who or how many caretakers I may have had, but I was a failure to thrive baby. I was actually starving because they couldn't figure out how to feed me with the open palate, which for those of you who don't know, that just means that my upper, like the soft palate was just open to my sinuses and everything. So you can imagine it's really tricky to feed a baby like that. So it was failure to thrive and she actually took me back. So my mother took me [00:14:00] back at a month old and she and my grandmother raised me or took care of me. My mother would take it, my mother would dance at night and my grandmother would take in ironing.

This is back in the day when people ironed things or pay. So you can imagine they were very poor, but they managed to take care of me for the next six months, and then they just ran out of resources and my mother relinquished me for a second time. And that February 2nd, actually, of 1968 is the day that I was transferred to the family that raised me.

And the nutshell on that is I had a great life. I love my parents. They're wonderful. They're still married after 65 plus years. They're 87 years old. You know I mean they're great. There's really nothing to tell on that. It's all good. Very Leave it to Beaver, so wonderful. Just idyllic childhood.

But fast forward to where I picked up, where I left off. So then my mother came back into my life unexpectedly in around 2015 and promised me that everything was better now and we're gonna be good. And so I was willing to give her a second, third, [00:15:00] fourth chance, whatever it was by that point.

And that time culminated with a visit around July 4th to Southern California where she now lives and has lived for several years, as well as my maternal brother. He lives there too. And everything seemed great. I did mention to her, oh, by the way, I, IDNA tested and what I failed to mention was when I was in Montreal in 89, even though my named father had declined to be identified, she told me she identified a man and he happened to be living in St. Louis, right? In the same city I was living in. So I went back to the adoption agency and said, Hey, I actually know who he is. I could go see him, but I don't wanna do that. So will you please just contact him and let him know that I know who he is? So they did all that.

He was very reluctant when I met him. He said don't be so sure I'm your father. And I thought that was a really horrible thing to say at the time, but we never, ever developed a relationship whatsoever. So anyway, fast forward to 2015. I told my mother like, oh, by the way, I did a DNA test.

'Cause I gotten a call outta the blue on a [00:16:00] hot July day from my would be first cousin. This man who was named to my father, his niece called me and said, Hey, I'm Jennifer. Would you mind DNA testing? I'm actually trying to find my father. And I said Jennifer, how do you even know about me?

After things went south with the man named to my father, I wrote a letter to his parents, my wouldbe grandparents. And I thought maybe they're just these nice little old people in rocking chairs and they're just gonna be so happy to find out about a grandson they, didn't know about.

Actually the opposite was true. They called a big family meeting and were very upset, and they tried to get this man's siblings to turn on him and tell 'em what was going on and who was this person? I just wrote them an introduction letter. I didn't ask for anything, but apparently the quote was shared with me was, we're not supporting any bastard children.

So that letter was very important because without it, I actually would never, ever know the truth of my story. So it goes to show that every little thing we do in life really does matter. It's that whole butterfly flapping wing thing. [00:17:00] So Jennifer had heard about that letter. It was such a big deal in their family, and based on that letter, which apparently she still had in her hands, she was able to find me and asked me to DNA test.

I said, sure. I'm thinking nothing more than it would just prove this guy who was so reluctant that he was my father. As you can imagine, it turned out that he was not my father. The DNA test revealed completely different person. Jennifer was not my first cousin, but she was so lovely and actually is extremely knowledgeable about how the all this stuff works. And she helped me find the truth and dig through all, the GED match, the ancestry.com, it's wade through, all that sort of stuff. And my father was actually well known enough that I could read about him online and that was really a blessing because he had actually died 11 years prior to this.

And I had, I have a paternal brother who had died four years prior to him. And so I never got to meet them, but my father was well known enough that I read an article in Forbes Magazine about him [00:18:00] and because, that's what, how you do. And I learned that I had sisters that I didn't know about. And so within just a few minutes I was able to find them via social media.

But Jennifer, who stayed in my life, this would be first cousin who helped me reveal all this truth through the DNA test. She very wisely said, don't contact them. Let me contact them and then we'll get them to DNA test and then we'll know for sure that all this is like true. And so she contacted my sister Christian, and she took her about six months, but she did eventually DNA test.

And we are siblings and I love her dearly. And I just talked to her this morning, so that's really great. I, so I, after this was around 2015, 2016, I went to Texas to meet all of my paternal siblings that we know of. The flip the other side of the story with my mother at this time, when I told her that I, the last communication I had with her was via text, which we, we were texting back and forth.

That was normal during that final year. And I said, hey my [00:19:00] DNA test results came back and there was some surprises and she sent some very kind of angry response. And I basically I've never heard from her ever again and we don't have any contact. I am in contact with my maternal brother, Scott, he and Christian.

I'm very clo Christian. My is my paternal sister. Scott is my maternal brother, and we are, I feel very close to them and I maintain regular contact, regular relationship with them. So that's as nut-shelly as I can get I think about it. And there's, I wanna mention my father. You can read it on my website, who my father was.

He's not someone that, most people that he wouldn't recognize, people wouldn't recognize his name. But he was a really big, huge deal in the music industry and was, has been called like one of the best r and b songwriters you've never heard of. His friends were like Mick Fleetwood. He lived next door to Jack Nicholson at one point.

Actually, Mick Fleetwood asked him to be in Fleetwood Mac and my father turned him down 'cause that's just the kind of guy he was. It's just stuff like that. It was like [00:20:00] kind of mind blowing actually to read about him. I can watch videos on YouTube of Tina Turner singing my father's songs and he wrote songs for Bonnie Rait that I was literally listening to on a seat on a cassette tape that I still have in 1989, having no idea that I was hearing my father's songs he wrote for Eric Clapton. I just recently got to hear two new songs on my father's 'cause Eric Clapton rereleased, his album Journeyman, and there are two new songs on there. And both of them were written by my father.

So that was a cool thing about having this big character for a father, that he was well known enough that I could read articles about him online and learn about him that way. My, my single goal that's still left my box to check is I wanna see a video of him 'cause I've never seen him alive or moving.

I've heard him sing. I have his, you can listen to his music on YouTube. He has albums of his own where he's singing, but I've never heard him talk or, seen him walk or move. My sister Christian tells me all the time, oh, you [00:21:00] look just like dad. You look, of course I don't have to tell you this, but there's just nothing that's more music to my ears than to hear that, she can see a thing that I can't see, but I know that it's there. And just to have that mirrored back to me is really such a gift. Such a gift.

Haley Radke: Yeah.

Erick Wolfmeyer: Yeah.

Haley Radke: I'm sorry you never got the chance to meet him.

Erick Wolfmeyer: Yeah, I am too.

But I think I accept what is, and I do feel like he, I don't know that he ever knew about me in his life, in his living years, but I do believe he knows about me now, and I do believe that he communicates with me in various ways, not surprisingly through music. There just have been too many little things that have happened along the way that are hard to ignore that I really feel like it's his little nod of saying, yeah I'm in another place now.

I'm in a better place. And like he looks back in his life and it's free of all of the. All the craziness. He lived like the big hard rock [00:22:00] and roll lifestyle, and he died at age 57. I'm 58 years old, so I've already outlived him by a year. But I do think he's in a loving place and he sends love to me and my siblings and yeah I do feel, so what else?

That was really nut-shelly, really nut-shelly. But I don't know what else to say. It was just one of those funny, wow like there isn't there, this sort of, this thing where, you know almost like a fairytale thing where, you know the relinquished child discovers that, oh my gosh, my, my father was like, a multimillionaire and he was, semi-famous, all this sort of stuff, but, and.

Okay. Yeah I had that sort of fairytale story, but it really didn't mean a whole lot in the sense that he was already passed away. But what it, what meant the most to me when I found out who my father was actually, and knowing how close I came to, never, ever knowing that, and to know that the only reason I know it to this day is because of a letter that I wrote with an open heart [00:23:00] to these would be grandparents that were not my grandparents.

Isn't that bizarre? That's how I know, that's how I know this. And people ask me like why do you think your mother lied to you? I said I don't know that she lied to me. I just don't know that she knew because my birth certificate, my original, my OBC original birth certificate, there's no father listed and I don't know the circumstances of my conception. Obviously, other than that, my parents are both Scorpios and I always think, oh they just had a really great night on around their birthdays, and my father was, he was not even 18 at that point. This would've been November of 1966. My mother was like 20. She was gonna be having her 23rd birthday, I think.

He, at the time, around that time, he was on tour with Little Richard and my father actually learned to play guitar from Jimi Hendrix. I know it sounds like I'm making all this stuff up, but it's true. You're laughing. But he did. This was Jimmy his, he was Jimmy James and he was touring with Little Richard, and my father was too.

My father was [00:24:00] very tall and was often mistaken for being much older than he was. And so he got sent home off the tour because he was actually underage. I don't know how my parents' paths crossed, but my mother also traveled with her dancing. She told me that she would travel throughout the south in various clubs and do shows like dinner and a show kind of thing back in the day when that was a thing.

And so maybe they crossed paths when she was traveling. Maybe they crossed paths when my father might have been in St. Louis. But it doesn't really matter 'cause I'm here, we're here and we're here to talk about, moving forward in life.

Haley Radke: It's so nice that you have pieces of documentation.

Erick Wolfmeyer: It's a privilege. Yeah.

Haley Radke: And a lot of us find graves and then are trying to piece together things with folks who knew our parents in real life somehow. So that's cool. But of course it still is all secondhand knowledge that you're getting access to.

Erick Wolfmeyer: It is. Yeah. My siblings could tell me some things. I did recently meet, so [00:25:00] Roy Orbison moved from Nashville to Malibu to write with my father, and I did recently meet Alex Orbison, Roy's son. He's delightful. He was my late brother's best friend and happened to be in concert where I live in Iowa City and so my sister knows Alex and lots of other folks, and she help me arrange to meet him. 'cause I wanted, I have a handmade bracelet that was belonged to my brother, that my sister gave me. And I have two of my father's rings, which I meant to wear today. Oh, I forgot. Anyway, so I wanted to show Alex that bracelet, and I just wanted to make a full circle connection with him that, because I know my brother died so young when, and so my brother was in a band with Alex, and so Alex was really lovely.

And so to hear him talk about my father and, so there's lots of people that knew him. But yeah, it's all, it is all secondhand. But again, I wanna acknowledge like I have so many privileges, but keep in mind too, I'm 58 years old and I, like I said earlier, I've been working on this since I was about three years old. 55 years.

Haley Radke: Yes.

Erick Wolfmeyer: And I don't know, I think [00:26:00] you know this, but one of the things I like to tell people is I'm so old school that I literally was workshopping. The Primal Wound with Nancy Verrier in 1992 in Oakland, California. So a year before it was published in 1993. I was in a small group, workshopping it with her. That's how old school I am. I was like, honey, I've been around the block. I've been doing this for a while. I've been doing this for a while.

Haley Radke: So one of the things I really appreciate is you talk about how you had this idyllic upbringing with your family that raised you, and yet I have, I wrote this quote down from an interview you gave in 2010. "I have a shattered sense of identity. Quilts are like trying to put together pieces of my life into something that makes sense. " Can you talk about that?

Erick Wolfmeyer: Yeah, so in 1998 I made my first quilt for a guy who's actually getting married this summer and he invited me to his wedding and I was so thrilled. And it's a day after my birthday, which is funny too. [00:27:00] But he's really the reason that I started quilting. 'cause he was a baby and I made a quilt for him. And then it turned into this whole thing. My art education kicked into high gear and it just became a thing. So I, it has taken me around the world and my quilts have shown all over the country.

I just found out on Saturday that two of my quilts just sold in a show that I'm in Michigan right now. So it has become a whole advocation. I have a day job, by the way. I'm a paratransit bus drivers, so I drive a bus for people with disabilities, mostly mobility issues or cognitive developmental issues.

And I actually love, love, love that work. But I have three days off cause I work four 10 hour days. And so I try to spend as much time when I'm not doing podcast interviews. I try, I, I spend as much time as I can in my studio, which is in a church making quilts. And I've made, I would say I quit counting at a hundred.

I don't know how many I've made, but they've mostly sold which has been a blessing. And, yeah it's become a whole spiritual practice for me, and it's been, I think, the primary [00:28:00] gift and tool in my life for finding healing and wholeness and integration. Because it is literally the perfect metaphor.

It does root back to my early self where, I primarily as a child would spend my days alone in my bedroom building with blocks, be it like Lincoln Logs or Legos or whatever. And that's really still what I do to this day, is I go to my studio, I'm by myself, I turn on music, and I just piece quilts that are just like giant puzzles and I make my own designs.

I don't use patterns, and I stay really true to the traditions of quilting. Oh and if you look at my website, you'll see a giant quilt of my mother. It was that last visit I talked about seeing her around July 4th in 2016. The quilts called Corona, California 2016. And there are a variety of reasons why a titled it that, but I think one of the primary ones is, before the internet, especially when we're doing our searches, just having an address or a city or anything tangible as to a, [00:29:00] where is so critical. So I did this gigantic portrait, quilt of her, it's 12 feet by 16 feet and it's made up of over 27,000 pieces each hand selected by me. There was no sort of computer, generated pixelation, but it's essentially using the concept of pixelation.

But I hand selected each piece to make this portrait. And it's a, from a snapshot that I took the last time that I saw her, she's in her pool at her home in California. That was like, the grand people have called it, I can't think of the term they've used. It'll pop in my head in a second. But tour de force or whatever, it's just such a grand expression of how quilting has interfaced with this re-stitching back together of my whole self.

Because, as people have had this experience of a relinquishment and identity reassignment, we're always living in two realities. And as Paul Sunderland says, it's the impossible job description that we have to live into and up to this assigned identity that we've [00:30:00] been given.

And that's a big job and it's exhausting. And I find that the creativity is a place to, for my soul to rest and to celebrate. And it has brought me so much joy and connecting me to so many people. And there's are other interesting parallels too. All my quilts are hand quilted, I make the tops what but then they're sent off to Amish women that hand quilt them for me.

And that's actually rare. Most people are machine quilting these days. And every stitch is done by hand by a woman that I will never meet because that's how their culture works. They don't want any credit. And I worked through brokers to get the quilts to them and back from them.

And I always find that kind of fascinating. Oh, that's interesting, isn't it? That I wouldn't even have this work complete if it weren't for these anonymous relationships with these women, in a far off distance that I'll never meet or see. I'm like what does that sound like? So yeah, I think that what we're always doing. Is trying to [00:31:00] make our outsides match our insides. So if our insides are calm and integrated, then hopefully our lives will reflect that. And if our insides are not, our outsides might reflect that as well. And I think that's where what we call self-sabotaging behavior comes from is that we're really, as counterintuitive as it might seem, we're really just trying to make our insides and outsides match.

So yeah, the quilting has been just an enormous part of my life. I hope to do it until I die. I showed in France in 2018 and I'm been invited back in 2028, so I'm hoping just to go every 10 years. Why not? So anyway, yeah, that's a huge part of my life. And if people want to look at my work, my name is my. Given name for my adopted family is Erick Wolfmeyer. It's a name I go by. And of course I never really liked it as a kid 'cause it's hard to say and it's hard to spell and ugh. But it's been a wonderful [00:32:00] name to have in the age of searchability. 'cause it's very unusual. I think in fact, I think I was the only Erick Wolfmeyer on Instagram when I was on social media. That's pretty remarkable. So yeah, you can just search me and you'll find my stuff.

Haley Radke: You, you have to go look at these quilts. You have to. They're incredible.

Erick Wolfmeyer: Thank you.

Haley Radke: I know you've talked about quilting with quilting people. So I'm going to, mostly leave that there.

Erick Wolfmeyer: Yeah, because there are interviews that you can find on YouTube and all that sort of fun stuff. I just did one with Wisconsin Public Radio. That's was good practice for this interview. And it's online and YouTube, all that fun stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

Haley Radke: Amazing. I have one question I cannot get outta my head, so I'm gonna say it out loud and it's not gonna add anything to this interview except for my interest.

Erick Wolfmeyer: I don't know, you might be surprised.

Haley Radke: Do you have a story of a mishap I just think about working with fabric and I'm a spiller. I took 15 minutes yesterday to try and get grease stains outta my, one of my son's favorite sweatshirts. And [00:33:00] I just think about, having your coffee by this, on this. Incredible.

Erick Wolfmeyer: Okay. You've brought up several things here, so you should know that I almost never am further away than five feet from a Tide pen.

Haley Radke: Okay.

Erick Wolfmeyer: I love my tide pens. They just fall out of pockets. They're everywhere. Tide pens, love those 'cause I can't stand having a little drip. I will tell you last year, one of my personal goals was to spill on myself less.

'Cause I'm old and I'm thinking it's not a good look to be spilling on myself. So I am doing much better. And it's really all about intention and consciousness and slowing down. So it is possible, but I've never really, I've never really had a mishap in that I've had things like one of the quilts I recently finished, I got about three quarters of the way done with it and I realized there was some kind of seam allowance differences and the whole thing was getting askew and weird.

And I was like, oh, that's gonna bug me forever. And I literally [00:34:00] deconstructed the whole thing after being about three quarters of the way done with it and then reconstructed it. But the truth is, I don't even have any memory of that. All I have now is a beautiful finished quilt that I like and so it doesn't really matter.

But no, I don't really have any spillkus, or gezoink memories or? No, we're good. We're good. I'm glad you asked though.

Haley Radke: Okay.

Erick Wolfmeyer: I hope that can be reassuring to you.

Haley Radke: It is.

Erick Wolfmeyer: It's a goal.

Haley Radke: I'm so glad you don't have a,

Erick Wolfmeyer: It's within reach for you, Haley.

Haley Radke: I have a, I have a terrible story about accidentally dropping one can of root beer and it sprayed over my entire living room in a 360. I don't know if you knew this, but if a pop can drops and spins, explodes, it spins,

Erick Wolfmeyer: It spins.

Haley Radke: So you get the full.

Erick Wolfmeyer: Wow.

Haley Radke: Anyway, I'm glad you don't know about that. Okay, let's switch gears. Yeah. I wanna talk about language with you because before we got on in some of our contacts, you're like, listen, I don't say adoptee. I don't talk about adoption.

Erick Wolfmeyer: Right.

Haley Radke: I don't say birth mother.

Erick Wolfmeyer: Nope.

Haley Radke: Tell me [00:35:00] about language for you.

Erick Wolfmeyer: Okay, let's just go down some of them. The why's. So birth parent, to me, it's too like matricentric. It's only focusing on the mother. So I like, I'm not into that. Also, why is it that our population, why are we the only ones really that have to talk about birth parents? I have parents. Period. I don't say biological parents. It sounds like a, all I think of are petri dishes. I think of like science experiments and labs and like bubbling liquids.

I don't say first parents. It seems like, there's a hierarchy. I don't say natural. I don't say original. I don't say real. I say parents because to say anything less is to soften the impact and the trauma and to make it okay for everybody. Everybody else. Because you know what, let's back up here.

And one thing I wanna make sure that I say is hold onto your hats. Adoption is not about parenting. Adoption is [00:36:00] about solving adult problems. Now, I'm not so naive to believe that, of course there are times when kids do need a different situation for safety reasons, for whatever. We're not gonna go into that because that's not my job, but that is one of my, the things that, one of the things I premise all my thoughts about this is adoption I've discovered is not about parenting, it's about shame management. And then a story I'll tell you of that is my sister that I was raised with, my adoptive sister, if you will she found her family of origin, both paternal and maternal, talked to some of her paternal brothers, found out that her mother, not her mother, but their mother was still living.

And they were like, oh no, we can't we have to keep this under. Her father had died, but her siblings are still living. And the brother basically is now controlling my sister to say, I'm not gonna let you meet anybody. Because even though now our father and our mother, like their mother, but not my sister's [00:37:00] mother are gone, they're still shame managing their 'cause. He doesn't wanna besmirched the memory of his father because my sister, my adopted sister was the product of an affair that this man had, and they don't want that to be come to light. So here is my grown sister who's 60 years old, being infantalized by another, adult sibling, as if somehow it's okay for them to have access to this, but she can't because they're shame managing.

So that's an example of what I mean when I say adoption is not about parenting. And so for so many people who don't have this experience. Our stories and even our lives seem to be so intricately linked with the quality of our parenting because as if somehow we have any responsibility for that.

But, there's such a link between the, there are all these sort of false binaries, good parent, bad parent, the failed mother who didn't keep her child. And then the Madonna-ized woman who [00:38:00] then in her grief of her infertility, takes on someone else's child and raises them and all the benevolence and all the awards and the accolades and all this.

And that narrative is so much part of the false narrative, but it doesn't serve our needs and it creates all these false loyalty battles that just really need not exist. And I'm just, after all these years, I'm really a realist and I've realized that in order I, so I'm not really a part of the adoptee activism, movement, whatever other than in my own way.

And I try to use my platform that I have with the quilting world to speak out when I can and just speak my truth. But part of it is because I, and by the way, I told you this off the air, but I love and adore and respect the work you do in your show. And it's amazing and it's wonderful. I found that when I was on social media and other things that it just wasn't, I would just get really frustrated because I feel like, to be truth, totally truthful, Haley, that until we stop using the word adoptee and adoption, [00:39:00] I don't know how much further we're gonna get.

And so I really looked at the trans community and how far they've come with a very uphill battle and learning the term cisgender. And I remember there was a time, I had no idea what that meant. Looked it up. Oh, okay. So I'm cis male. Okay, cool. Ah, that's good to know. So I, if I had, first of all, I try to only use little precursor type boards as sparingly as possible.

Qualifiers I try to use as sparingly as possible, but I do like cis parent and allo parent because it really takes out any of the judgment or the value around better, worse, whatever. And what more importantly it does is it, in order to define ourselves, we have to define ourselves within the entire community of human beings.

Because so often our language and our, all of the things that we do have in common, we [00:40:00] start to silo off. And so then there are the cis parented folks with all their cis parented privilege that they don't even realize they have, but they're swimming in it all the time. And then we are over here in the corner going sharing our little stories. But I really feel like in order for the cis parented folks to really understand who we are and our experience and how traumatic and painful and difficult it is, and what we're always navigating day after day, they have to understand themselves in relationship to us.

And that we started our lives just like they did. It's just that there was this gigantic interruption. And again, I go back to, I was just reading, I was just listening to Paul Sunderland's video today. I'm like, oh my gosh, please everybody listen to his stuff over and over again. 'cause that was a major turning point for me when I heard his work.

Haley Radke: Can you say what allo parent is.

Erick Wolfmeyer: So allo just means other, it's, I think it's a Greek term. It just simply means other. So I have my cis parents, which are my original parents or parents of origin. Family of origin. So terms I do use, I use cis parent or I [00:41:00] use family of origin. You've heard me say many times today, the family that raised me.

It's not that I never say the word adoption or adoptee, but I next to never, ever refer to myself as an adoptee. So I find the term adoptee to be infantalizing. It keeps us perpetually in and defined by that state and that thing that happened. And even Sunderland says it's the word adoption is it's this weird word that really doesn't even describe what happened.

And it's a whitewash term to me. It's not that much different than when you go on these forums and they ask you to check your, are you white, are you Latino? Are you whatever? I am not white. I'm not a color. I'm of Northern European descent, but I'm not white. And I feel like. The analogy I would make is if it were a piece of furniture that had been varnished or painted, and that I continually identify myself with the varnish in the paint, but disregard the actual piece of furniture that's underneath of all that.

And so for me I go to therapy again. I have so much privilege. I'm [00:42:00] able to go to therapy every week pretty much if I want to. And I have a wonderful therapist that I've trained. She would admit that I have trained all my therapists and I have the privilege of having made a friendship.

When I did workshop that book with Nancy Verrier in 92 in Oakland, I met a guy named Randall and we became like the best of friends. He was also gay. He still, he is also gay. And we were just like blood brothers for about 20 years. And for whatever reason, I don't know, our friendship is like evaporated and I don't ever hear from him again.

And I've tried to reach out and I get nothing, and it's really super strange and hurtful. But I do accept that. It was what it was and it really saved me when you talk about people finding your show and telling you that it saved them 'cause they felt really isolated and they felt really crazy. He was that person for me that had all broke open, like knowing Randall and going, 'cause he was also I guess I forgot to say he was, had also had the relinquishment and adoption experience.

But yeah, so I feel privileged in [00:43:00] that. I had a really great family that raised me. I feel privileged in having had Randall in my life for 20 years to share this journey with. So I come to this having had a lot of bolsters and a lot of supports. But it is very hard and I've definitely had my dark moments.

Haley Radke: Can I ask you, Erick, how do you identify yourself? Without saying adoptee your adoption.

Erick Wolfmeyer: I know it's, it is tricky, isn't it? Because the fact of the matter is, there isn't one word that sums it up. So I enjoy seeing the quizzical look on people's faces because, adoption or adoptee is a word of convenience, but convenient for whom it's not convenient for me 'cause it doesn't tell my story. And if it does, tell the story. For example I said earlier when you asked me to tell my story, the reason I've become so skittish about it is because for me, all I have to do is say the word adoption. I call it the a-bomb. And suddenly I could see people's eyes glass over, and in their mind, they already have decided, they just click into the [00:44:00] cultural narrative that they've been told about it, then suddenly everything I say gets skewed through that. I just say I was, family separated and re-identified or given an assumed identity. It's not unlike the witness protection program, and when you really stop and think about what we went through. Just so you know, I was a baby scoop, classic baby scoop, conceived in 66, born in 67, relinquished and reassigned in 68 and closed adoption.

I wasn't able to know anything other than that, that I was from St. Louis. I wasn't raised in St. Louis, but I, we were two hours north of there on the Mississippi River. So a total shutdown lockdown. And then from age 18 on, I was, from that time that I met that woman who I babysat for, I was like, pedal to the metal baby.

I am not resting until I am satisfied. And you know what satisfaction looks like? It looks like you're, 50 something and you are tired and you say, I'm so happy for everything I've learned [00:45:00] up to this point, but I'm just gonna have to stop searching at some point. I'm tired. I'm tired.

And you just come to peace with the fact that there will always be more that I don't know than that I do and I'm, I have to be okay with that. Just make the most of what is right in front of me and the life that I have with my husband, with my dear friends, with my family, all of my family. So yeah, I feel like I, I literally have eight pages of notes that I realize, oh, I guess I basically have the outline of a book here.

People always tell me, oh, you should write a book. Which maybe when I'm retired in a, two years or whatever, I will start on that project. But right now with my full-time job and the quilts, it's and, life. It's more than enough just to do all that. But yeah, I'm answering your question in like too many words, but does that, so I don't really have a word.

I don't have a word. [00:46:00] I think of us collectively as a diaspora. We are a diverse group of people that have had a similar experiences. I'm not, not monolithic, we know, but I think that we are our own kind of diaspora of sorts. So that would make us diasporites. So I guess I'm a diasporit, but I like to confuse people because when we use the word adoption immediately they think they know what that means, even if in most cases they haven't had that experience.

And what they have had is an experience of cis parented privilege with all the privileges of relatedness. Because relatedness is what's really at the root of all this. It's a little bit like when I talk about quilts, everyone thinks they know what quilts are, right? Oh yeah, my grandma made quilts, or, oh, I have a on my bed, all this.

But then you stop and you ask people tell me what the three parts of a quilt are. And they're like, what? It's the top, it's the batting and it's the backing. And then it's all put together with the binding. So it reminds me a little bit of that, not that it's a quiz, not that I really care that people [00:47:00] need to, they don't need to know that I don't care.

But I'm just as an analogy, that. People think they know what this experience is, even if they haven't had it. And people are all too often unwilling to allow us to have our experience with it when it is our experience, and they're so eager to tell us what it should or shouldn't be. And we have to be so fierce and so strong to hold it together.

It's like a being again, a co constant headwind. A constant headwind. And we know that we show up so much more in, all the places, addiction, suicide, mental illness, all these sort of struggles that we are overrepresented there. And sadly, and what I find so shocking is how underrepresented we are.

Haley, I keep waiting for you to go on National Public Radio. I keep waiting for you to go on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. These are all American references, of course, I think. I listen to a lot of news and talk radio in, the background of my day and I [00:48:00] next to never hear a thing about us.

Since I got the invitation for this interview, I was tracking what do I hear on the radio. I've heard so many stories about researching like spider monkeys or researching the most. And that's fine. I'm not anti-science, I'm not anti-intellectual, but there are the most, obscure things that people are researching and talking about.

I heard a woman talking about like how people suffer when they are disconnected from their family stories. It was an hour long hidden brain on NPR. Not once did she mention anything about our diaspora. Talk about separated from your family story. But we weren't even mentioned. I'm like, what? So why is it we're overrepresented in these things I mentioned prior, but we're so grossly underrepresented in the public dialogue.

I think it's because, the public has been, and we have been sold a bill of goods that, adoption is this, wonderful rainbow and sunshine and everything's good. What? There's [00:49:00] nothing more to talk about. Bye. See ya. And it's just not that way.

Haley Radke: And you wouldn't consult with a baby or a child. And if we are perpetually infantalized.

Erick Wolfmeyer: Thank you.

Haley Radke: Like where's the, there's nowhere to call. No one to call for an interview. No one, because they're children.

Erick Wolfmeyer: Yeah. And they're all fine now 'cause they've been adopted and they got happy. Lived happily ever after. There's nothing to talk about. And so I'm just shocked and I cannot listen to one more person come on fresh air with Terry Gross and talk about. How traumatic it was to lose their father, that they live with all their, it's not that I don't have sympathy, but I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, why? So this is why the work you do is so important and it's so nascent and it's so groundbreaking, and it's just like you are literally building the foundation that I hope we can get to it start spilling out into the cis parenthood world of people. Like where we, it can become part of the common communal dialogue.

And it's not just you and me sitting here on a mic, with our 4,000 to 8,000 listeners, which by the way, [00:50:00] wonderful, but you know what I mean? I really want you to be interviewed by someone that outside of our diaspora.

So it's great. We're talking to ourselves, we've been talking to ourselves and among ourselves for probably 40 to 50 years. And I'm just like, we've got to get out there. And that's where I go back to the whole thing about, I just refuse to use the term the language of oppression. And one thing that we are most sort of. Typically in our diaspora is we are, and I learned this recently in my therapy, this, my therapist will shoot terms back at me. I'm like, oh my gosh. And they just, some of 'em just really stick and recognize how overly accommodating I am. For example, I don't go to therapy 'cause my life's a mess.

My life is totally great. I go to therapy to maintain and manage and just deal with the little stuff 'cause guess what? It's not always that little 'cause, even the little stuff, it all taps back into something much bigger. And I tell my therapist too, that imagine a giant reservoir. I'm just coming to you every week, like splat, scooping out [00:51:00] a few buckets and throwing 'em over the edge.

'Cause I have a lifetime of stuff that I never got to process with anyone that was willing to listen, with curiosity and with understanding and willingness to learn. And it's a safe space to do that. And so I go and I talk about the little things because it helps me, just the life as it comes up and it helps me see.

Oh, so one thing I learned recently is how overly accommodating I am. For example, recently I had someone on my bus, she was in a hurry to get to her appointment. In a hurry. In a hurry. Stress. What is over accommodating me do. I made a very stupid decision.

I had seen a bus in front of me in this loop at the hospital, pull through this super tight squeeze. There was a big water truck on one side and like a marble post on another side. He pulled through there within inches of clearance and I thought I drove a school bus for a much bigger, bus for 15 years.

I can do this. It turns out I couldn't do it, and I got hung up on the pole. The water truck eventually [00:52:00] left. They had to come and get a tow truck and pull the bus off the pole. But you know what? It all boiled down to over accommodating. Because I was more concerned about that woman getting to her appointment and managing her stress for her than I was to sit here and say, no, we're gonna have to sit in some discomfort collectively until this situation clears.

So that's why I'm telling you that's what the it, the rubber hits the road in all the little things, those little micro decisions we make every day is that our adoptive consciousness, our adoptive self, it can't help. But because that's what we Sunderland said today I listened to, he says, we have no pre trauma personality, that we are just constantly responding to the world through this trauma brain.

And that's the other thing I wanna make sure I say today. This is my call out. My call out is my challenge to the language we use to think about it very carefully about what it's doing and how it's holding us back, and that we're in. Nah. Anyway. But the other thing is like I cannot believe for the life of [00:53:00] me that there is not a DSM diagnosis.

Like developmental PTSD, I think he refers to it as, or whatever, can you imagine Haley, a world where someone who's had our experience can go to a therapist and the therapist knows what to do and the therapist has gone to workshops and they're like, oh, I know how to deal with this. Just like I know how to deal with sexual abuse or this or that or whatever.

But literally, no matter who you go to see as a therapist, you're pretty much starting from scratch. And like I said, I've been working on this for years, so I train and teach all of my therapists because when I train and they always say, you don't really know something until you can teach it. So I've been teaching my therapist for years, and by teaching it, I've also learned more about myself.

So it's a whole process, but it's also exhausting. Like I'm paying them, like they gotta be paying me. But they're lovely people. I don't, I'm thankful for them but I think about people who aren't able to do that. Yeah I'm an oddball in that regard. I'm just really, I am my mother and my father's child.

That's one I forgot to say earlier is that when I learned about [00:54:00] my father, the thing that it did for me is it made my life make sense from the inside out. I imagine my, with my eyes closed, I imagine that I could see inside this cavernous shape of my body, like I'm inside of a cave and my body, with all the organs and everything gone, it's like the walls of a cave, right?

And someone clicks the light on and suddenly all the walls have the story of my life written on them. And that is how I felt when I found out about who my father is. I'm like. Oh, okay. The man that told Fleetwood Mac, no, thank you. That's my father. And it's oh, why is it that I spend hours upon hours with this passion I have?

Where, what does, where does this burning, creative passion come from? Why always thought my mother liked to sew. She made her all her own clothes. But that didn't quite. It didn't quite cut it for me, but when I found out how big of a personality and a big of a force he was, I was like, oh, okay. [00:55:00] Okay. I got it now. Yeah. Yeah. This makes sense.

Haley Radke: Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing part of your story with us. Erick, and talking through those things. I think that's, you've given us a lot to think about as a community, especially in terms of language and how we're positioning ourselves.

Erick Wolfmeyer: Yes.

Haley Radke: With that, I wanna recommend that folks check out your quilting work, and in particular, I'm gonna point them to now you told us about the one of your mother. Face of a stranger.

Erick Wolfmeyer: Oh yeah. Thanks.

Haley Radke: Oh my God,

Erick Wolfmeyer: I forgot about that one.

Haley Radke: It's a self portrait.

Erick Wolfmeyer: Yeah.

Haley Radke: And yet you called it face of a stranger.

Erick Wolfmeyer: And recently, it's gonna be in a show in a, like next year at, it's a, it's owned by a museum, I was in a show, in a museum. They purchased it. And actually it was one of my highest selling quilts ever, which was shocking. 'cause when I made that quilt, Haley, I'll tell you, I made it. And I thought, oh my gosh.

Who would ever want this? This is so [00:56:00] stupid. Why did I do this? What a waste of time. And it has become one of the most popular pieces I have. And like I so said, it sold for like over $10,000. So it hangs in this museum. It's in a show. And what I, what it dawned me the other day is that, oh when most people walk by and see that. It is the face of a stranger to them. But you understand why I title, you know why I gave it that title as well? There's a whole other, right? Yeah. Thank you for, I totally forgot about that.

Haley Radke: I to me it's a nod to us, and.

Erick Wolfmeyer: Yes, it is. It is.

Haley Radke: I thank you. I looked through, as you said, you've done many interviews and so I looked through many read many, listened to many to prepare for our conversation, and you always talk about that part of you, and I appreciate that because you're bringing to light what it's like to be separated from your [00:57:00] parents of origin, so thank you for being one of those people that does bring it to the public.

I also wanted to highlight for folks, I don't know if I've ever mentioned Jeff Forney on the show before. He's fellow adoptee. I'm gonna use that language because that's what I have in my,

Erick Wolfmeyer: that's totally great.

Haley Radke: My toolkit.

Erick Wolfmeyer: That's great.

Haley Radke: And he takes portraits of adoptees and he's done your portrait and you share a little piece here and there's multiple photos on here of you and I was so excited to get to see them before we talked today. And I'm gonna link to that in the show notes for folks. So

Erick Wolfmeyer: Great.

Haley Radke: It can be a little trip down memory lane for you too.

Erick Wolfmeyer: It can 'cause I didn't even know it was out there, so I was happy to be reminded of that. It was a fun day.

Haley Radke: It's out there.

Erick Wolfmeyer: It's a fun day.

Haley Radke: It's out there fun. What do you would recommend to us today, Erick?

Erick Wolfmeyer: I wanna recommend the work of a man named John O'Donohue, the late John O'Donohue. I always, he's always my go-to for the sort of moments of the deepest, profound [00:58:00] when you just need that pick me up. And I really believe there's a, I don't know anything about his background off the top of my head, but there's a deep sense of belonging and beauty and longing and desire and his language is so beautiful and I wanna recommend the book called To Bless the Space Between Us or really anything by John O'Donohue is marvelous, really marvelous.

So he's a great author. And like I said, I the last books I read about the, this adoption experience were Primal Wound and Journey To The Adopted Self by Betty Jean Lifton. So you can imagine, I'm like, it's been a while since I've really dove, so I just went on my own journey. I'm grateful to all the help along the way. And then, like I said, I stumbled on Paul Sunderland several years ago, but it's really just been me and my power animal, like powering through all of this. So yeah.

Haley Radke: All the identity pieces.

Erick Wolfmeyer: Trying to put it all back together.

Haley Radke: Yes. Yes.

Erick Wolfmeyer: Into one. Into one.

Haley Radke: Figuratively [00:59:00] and literally.

Erick Wolfmeyer: Literally.

Haley Radke: And, okay. We are gonna link to your website, which is https://ewolfmeyerquilts.com/. You also have a blog there, and as you said, your off social, lucky you. But I'm sure there's a way for folks to connect with you through your work, and do you announce when you have showings and things on your website?

Erick Wolfmeyer: Yeah, if you look at my exhibits page, I will often put things that are upcoming. It'll just, it won't always have the date, but it'll have the year, it'll have the location. So if a person really wants to know, they can Google it or whatever, but yeah. Yeah.

Haley Radke: There may be an Erick Wolfmeyer quilt near you, and you don't even know it, but now you will.

Erick Wolfmeyer: Yeah. Exactly.

Haley Radke: Thank you so much, Erick. What a pleasure to get to talk with you today.

Erick Wolfmeyer: Oh, you too. I'm honored. I'm honored. Thank you, Haley, and thank you again for the work that you do.

Haley Radke: My pleasure.

I'm always in awe after I talk with [01:00:00] artists, the way creative folks see and interpret the world. Helps me understand things in a different way.

I love art, but I am such an amateur. So I remember several times going into our local art gallery and feeling like, oh my goodness, I love this, but I don't know why and I don't know who the artist is, and I don't have it all together to understand the nuance and the symbolism, but I think art is for everyone and just the enjoyment of it is okay too.

I watched a couple of tours of Erick's work that are available on YouTube, and I was straight back to that stunned feeling, even though I haven't gotten to be in the room with them. These pieces that we're talking about are, some of them are massive and folks walking nearby them or sitting and enjoying [01:01:00] them, and it's oh my goodness.

To be in the same room as this quilt is so it must be so incredible. And we didn't get into this, but Erick doesn't keep this huge stash of quilting fabric. He uses what he has, and from what I read, I'm guessing he has less than most hobby quilters keep in stock, but the intricacy of assembling thousands of pieces of fabric, and we didn't really describe this, but the self portrait and then also the portrait of his mother, which to date I, as far as I could tell on his website, these are the only ones that he's done portraits of people and it is like a mosaic. And in that all of the colors would match up with a photograph except that there're, in, in blocks [01:02:00] and to figure out the colors for that. I'm sorry, it, I cannot describe this on audio, how impressive this is. And I know there's computer programs I'm thinking of Lego.

Okay. That you can be like, here's a photo, make me a Lego kit that I can assemble so it has similar colors and it will give you something like that. And Erick doesn't do that. He does it all by hand and. Oh my gosh. It's just incredible. And when he applied to be on the show, he wrote he hinted at, in his submission of all the healing that has come through these hours and hours of quilting.

And I love when you find something that works really well for you. And Erick and I didn't go into this, but 'cause I didn't wanna bring it up, I'm like this is not the same. But for me this is my [01:03:00] similar thing. It's just I just love puzzles so much. And I started doing them really regularly just in the last few years.

And it's like one of my favorite things that I do. I just love sitting down and working on them. But I only like puzzles where I can look at a piece. And know exactly where it's gonna fit. So I don't like big forests where it's like this tree, this, piece with a piece of tree with a couple leaves on it could be anywhere in like half of the, I don't like that.

I like to know exactly where something's gonna go. That's what's relaxing for me. And not to put too fine a point on it, but, I'm going with this as adopted people or the diaspora as Erick is calling us to know [01:04:00] where a piece fits into our life is so impactful. And I think that's where my obsession comes from and thus my fascination with Erick's quilts.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed our conversation. Please do go have a look at his work and tell me if you've ever seen it in person. 'Cause I'm jealous. And I would love to see it in person. Thank you so much for listening and for valuing adoptee voices, and let's talk again soon.