1 [S1 E1] Carrie

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/1


Haley: You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is Season One, Episode One: Carrie. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Today we'll be talking to Carrie, a fellow adoptee who will be sharing her reunion journey with us. You'll hear her allude to how she flooded an entire family with postcards in an attempt to find her birth mother. We'll wrap up with some recommended resources for adoptees in reunion.

Well, I'm so pleased to welcome Carrie to the show. She's a fellow adoptee and I'm really excited to hear your story today, Carrie. You've got lots of interesting perspectives to share with us, so welcome.

Carrie: Thank you, Haley.

Haley: So I'd love for you to start with maybe telling us about when you were born and your relinquishment story. Anything that you know about that would be awesome.

Carrie: I was born in 1970 in Vancouver, BC, and was adopted by Americans who were living there working abroad. Although they were all blood family, I have two older brothers that were both blood children of my parents. They were having trouble conceiving and particularly a girl child, my mom wanted a little baby girl. And this was in the era of closed adoption still, and so they went to the Catholic Adoption Agency in Vancouver and put in for a little white baby and were matched with me, actually before my mother would have carried to term. Her final, like sixth or eighth miscarriage, very tragic start for them. So I came into a family that had all kinds of stuff, but were really excited to welcome a little girl. And I might have been what you would've called a poster child adoptee my whole life growing up. I was one of those kids where they said, "being adopted is special" and "being adopted, it means you were chosen", and I bought that. I really bought into it and felt really proud about being chosen and special, and sort-of sang the praises for adoption my whole life up until just about reunion, which happened with my birth father in 2008.

And in between there's a long story, but I just, I guess I just wanted to start off my story by saying adoption has always been just background noise, I never really felt overly compelled to search or felt uncomfortable not knowing. I always felt really kind-of grateful just for the chance to be here, and sort-of had this weird sense in the back of my mind that I could have not been here. It might have been a choice to have been terminated. So, not to make it political, but it just had always colored my view.

I was just gonna say I'm 45, almost 46 now, and I hinted that my relationship with my adoptee status started to get a lot less simple when reunion happened. And you know, you hear a lot about the reunion rollercoaster if you have at all considered searching and reuniting. It's one of the first things you'll read about if you search. And thank goodness there is stuff online because I'd heard about it, but I will say nonetheless unprepared because I thought I was so okay with being adopted. ‘What issues could I possibly have? I don't feel angry. What?’ And adult me wasn't angry, but it turns out the infant me was pretty– had a lot of stuff to say.

So in between, I guess I will just fast forward my story a little. I left Canada with my US family when I was six, grew up in California and sort-of lost touch with my Canadian identity and self and history and schooling, but didn't seem to mind. My family were– my parents were transplants from Chicago into California, so none of us really fit and no one really cares there.

And then my father died in 2000– sorry, 1994. And at that time I started really thinking about if I was ever gonna reunite. You know, 'life is uncertain, you never know', and 'maybe I should do it sooner than later'. And then as luck would have it, in 1996 the laws in BC changed and I was able to gain access to my original birth certificate, which at that time I had never had, I just had an identity card with a case number that linked to my actual birth certificate. So I was unlike a lot of people in the States. I was never issued a false one, I was just never given access to my real one. Which is interesting because I know that whole issue is very upsetting and concerning to a lot of people who get issued fake ones.

So in ‘96 when I was able to get hold of that, my birth mother's name and hometown were listed. But my birth father's information was left blank because they were not married. And with the magic of the internet, I was able to track down four women, in all of Canada, who had her full name, or at least first and last name, and then maybe 40 women with the first initial and same last name. And then anybody in the small town where she was from in Newfoundland who had the same last name, which apparently was all of her relatives. And looking back, I really was trying to word my little postcard inquiry very benignly and not let the cat out of the bag. I knew that because the adoption agency had given my parents two typewritten pages of non-identifying background information, which I know is just like gold and tons more than lots of adoptees get. Whether it's true or false, even to get it is cool, to have some sort of fairytale to spin out about these people who walked away from raising me. Sorry, what was I gonna tell you?

Haley: You're telling me about the postcard and that the information you put on was benign.

Carrie: Right, well, because the information I had about her– gosh, just thinking about it just overwhelms me with feelings of all the different people I created from that information and how it's still not even close to the person I met when I met my father. But the person that I understood her to be was a school teacher in Vancouver, or she was living in Vancouver and she was a school teacher, so I thought she'd been a school teacher there. But she hadn't. So when I wrote that I was looking for a school teacher from Vancouver, I thought it sounded like I could have been her student, and it just made everyone in her family really suspicious. And she wrote me, although none of the addresses I'd had for her were correct, because she had been unlisted her whole life. She wrote me a really cold letter that basically was about three sentences, and I have it sort-of memorized. It said “Dear Carrie, I understand you've been trying to reach me. My private life is my own,” double underlined. “If you would like to contact me, you can do so at this address.” And she signed her first and last name.

So I thought, well, it wasn't an outright dismissal, the door was still open. And I sent this really crazy, heartfelt letter and I happened to be planning a trip up to Newfoundland and maybe I could see her. And, by some happy coincidence, that letter got returned to me, so she never got that. And I did try again later, and then she never got back to me. So that was heart-wrenching on lots of accounts, but one of them was my own mom who raised me, who was my adoptive mother, but I just call 'my mom' cuz she's the one I experienced as mom. Sharon would've just been so pleased to meet the woman that gave me birth, and check in, and have a cup of tea and talk about how good Sharon had done raising me, and how great I am. That's all she really wanted to do, as a mom. And the rejection of me from my birth mother was as much a slap to my mom, and to see her, I don't know, it was really hard to see that pain reflected back and forth between us. And I was really impressed that she wanted in. Like, she was careful not to assume that I would include her. She asked if she could meet her if I ever did, and I said, “Sure!” And that was a big deal for her. My mom was pretty closed with her emotions. I always remembered that and felt like she was really in my corner, which was huge when that continued to sting over time.

And then I just stuffed that down cuz that's just, I would have to say, it's kind-of a horror story? And the chances are so small that it would happen to someone searching,I don't know for sure the numbers, but it's like 3-5% are rejected as the secondary thing in reunion. At least, rejecting any contact at all happens really rarely. Most people get at least something. And I guess I did get something, but not near what I would like. I would have to say that's hugely unresolved for me.

Haley: I can imagine how hurtful that was. Just three sentences.

Carrie: And looking at it with a lot more compassion, and having done a lot of reading and searching the ladies over at the First Mother's Forum, I posted a letter there asking, “What would one of you ladies say to a mother who refuses contact?” And they were super wonderful and wrote a wonderful response, so that was nice to get that validation like, ‘dude, that sucks and we wouldn't have done that to you’. Yeah, I don't mean it as a scare story, but it would've been nice. I just don't know why it didn't occur to me that that would be the option. I certainly didn't think we would necessarily be super chummy, it'd be kind-of awesome if the Hallmark thing happened, but I just didn't think there would be such a small option. And I get it, that she was sort-of leapt on outta the blue and felt very cornered. I don't know, I guess the door isn't fully closed for me, I haven't given up on that. Always keeping that wound just a little bit open.

But so then I got the other weird 3-5% lottery, which is the percentage of birth fathers that come looking, and since she wouldn't really have contact with me, and I did ask if she would tell me anything more about my past, which was maybe not a very direct way of asking for information about him. Lo and behold 12 years afterwards, in 2008, my birth father– actually what happened was I got an email from the adoption agency social worker who said “We believe that we have a match. In 96, you entered your name to be contacted if any of your birth family, aside from your mother, wanted to find you. Say, brother or an aunt, or an uncle or grandparent, would you be interested in being contacted?” And since it had been so long, they wanted a courtesy follow-up and just not share last names or contact information, go indirect.

And I wrote back immediately and we facilitated a couple times back and forth through the mediator, getting letters through, but then right away went to email contacts. And then I think within a month, three weeks or a month, I drove up to meet my birth father, and for the first time in my life, got to meet another human who belongs to the same genetic tribe, like an actual blood family member. And since I am not a mother myself, I'd never had that before. And I highly recommend it if anyone ever gets the chance. It is terrifying, and will fundamentally change your view of yourself when you get actual knowledge from where you're from, but it's like the butterfly from the cocoon. You gotta be something different if you're gonna change and grow. And I grew immediately. Immediately. You know how like the Grinch, his heart grows three sizes at the end? I have this really visceral image of myself, that adoption had cut me off from my roots in a way that strangled me and collapsed one of my lungs, and when I met my birth father, it was like a lung I didn't know was collapsed, suddenly inflated with air and life. And it was both exhilarating and wonderful. And almost like pins and needles, painful to realize what was missing. It's such an intense cocktail of crazy emotions, good and bad at the same time, it is hard to wrap your heart and head around them. And they happened so fast. We gave each other a big hug and we both were on the verge of tears. And I sat down on the couch and crossed my legs and said, “So. Where the hell have you been?”

And by some wonderful fate, I must have mumbled, or maybe he didn't wanna hear that. He misunderstood me to say, “How the hell have you been?” And we just had a normal start to the conversation, as normal as could be. And I spent the next three days tuning in and out while he tried to give me as much family background information as he could, which was amazing and wonderful. But all I could do was stare at his hands and the nail beds of his fingers and see how they were exactly the same shape as mine, but bigger. And I've always been a really– My mom that raised me was like 98 pounds when she got married. She could model 18th century clothing, and she did. She just had this tiny little waist and wrists the size of little chicken wings, and when I was six years old, I tried on her wedding dress and it couldn't button up the sleeves cuz I'm what you might describe as ‘sturdy’ or just, you know, a little more athletic. And my dad that raised me always hoped I would be a linebacker and get a scholarship to Notre Dame in football. Cuz I was always pretty tough, chasing my big brothers around. Lo and behold, I meet my birth father and instead of the man of English descent that the Catholic Adoption Agency told me about in great detail, non-identifying detail, he was in fact a Métis, a Labrador Métis man. So he's a First Nations population member. Descended from English-Scottish people on one side and Inuit-Innu people of Labrador on the other. Which is a pretty big oversight, to tell just the one side. But it was 1970 and I get it. I can see that a white baby is easier to place than a mixed-race baby, and that's still true today.

It's just so complicated to get that information. I can see those physical characteristics in myself when I look in the mirror now and it makes– I have videos of triple-great uncles portaging canoes up the Churchill River in Labrador to their hunting grounds. They have some cool old videos from the 20’s, movies that have been transcribed to video, you can find them on YouTube. If you look up 'The Lure of the Labrador', and if you see those people working hard, like I suddenly look at my bones and my hands and I go, ‘Okay, I get it. I get what my body was designed to do and where I'm descended from.’ And getting that information is amazing. It's amazing in a lot of ways. But I will also say that there was a really Peter Pan sort of quality where, when you don't know, that you can forever be inventing someone really cool to be your parent. And the hard truth of reunion is that you get to actual people and not to idealized people, and so I'm sure I've got habits that irritate him and he's got his human habits that irritated me. And it was hard to mesh all those things, the gratitude to getting to meet and then realizing, 'oh, this is the actual person now', the loss of the fairytale other people. 'This is what he is bringing and this is what he is bringing to the table. I'm not gonna get to wish him to be any other way, now, this is really what I'm working with.' It's interesting, because I feel like adoption has– I mean, reunion has been really wonderful, but I was surprised at the slight sadness of getting an actual specific person. Like, that's one of the few comforts you have if you grow up without knowing your background. Because, like, my mother could have been Joni Mitchell. Could have been, it could have been a lot of cool people, you know? And then you find out they're regular people.

Haley: I believe when I was younger I was imagining, of course, that I was some sort of princess. And, yeah, that was not the case for me either.

Carrie: I don't know that I– Well, I certainly didn't know that reunion was about to happen to me. And because it happened in a year where I first lost my only pregnancy in March, and then lost my mom that raised me in August, I was in pretty rough shape when my birth father found me in November, all in the same year. But it also was rash to just jump into it. And I studied as much as I could along the way as it was happening, I didn't know it was about to happen. But I don't regret it. I was definitely in the mindset that life is short and you don't know what's gonna happen. And you read so many stories of people that search and search and search and don't get the chance. I almost felt obligated, not only to myself, but to other adoptees. Like, ‘Just take advantage of the chance. Who cares if you don't like what you find at the end, but who would walk away from the chance to know?’ So, it got me propelled up into my car. My birth father is a hunt and peck typist, and so having an email relationship– neither one of us much like talking on the phone, so email was where it was at, and I just couldn't get enough information. And he was very generous and said, “Well, I can answer some of these questions, but if you want the whole story, why don't you come up and visit?” And so I did, and we do maintain contact and I would say the relationship is pretty good now. I had an intense period in the beginning. Got really overwhelmed and I backed out of contact for two years and then he gave me plenty of space. I didn't feel neglected by the space. I was still pretty hot and mad for quite a while, and then when I simmered down enough, I tried again. And ironically, it was one of the genetic gifts he gave me that brought us back together, which is, weirdly, I picked up a love of playing hockey before I met him, when I was living up in Alaska. And for a kid from California descended from no one– well, raised by people, none of whom played hockey or watched hockey, really. And certainly my mother didn't approve of me playing. Yeah, she was not thrilled. She told me quite late in my career. But in the beginning she was sweet and didn't. She kept her mouth shut. But I loved it. And it turns out that Alan played hockey from the time he was very young, and was still quite good. I met him, he was 63 or 64 when we first met, and we had played I guess once already together, or twice. And then when I broke it off for two years, in that time as I was cooling down, I realized that in certain sports and dance, you can communicate through movement in a way without using words. And since we were having trouble using words, I would at least try this other avenue to get back together, and I didn't need it to be anything more than playing hockey. And thankfully he was just ready and waiting for me to cool down, and was able to pick right back up.

And I will say he's been really super generous and in fact, I don't think he'd be upset if I shared this news, but you're familiar with Ann Fessler’s book, The Girls Who Went Away? Well, I don't know if you know, but Ann Fessler put out the call a couple years ago to find any birth fathers that might be interested in being interviewed for her research on their side of the story. And things came up and her research got delayed, but she just got back in touch with with my birth father and he's interested in speaking with her. I’m just really tickled because they're a small percentage, those birth fathers that get found. And to me it's just, I think he's doing it because it matters to me, and that says a lot. He’s doing the best he can with what he has, too. I'm grateful for that in a lot of ways. Okay, so that's my long, arching story of how I got to be me. And it's funny because I, again, up until reunion didn't really– when I was quite young, I was very into being adopted and how it made me special. But it just became something I quite took for granted. And even my brothers really forgot I was adopted. But I will say, I was thinking about this on the way home tonight, there was always a sense– they never used it against me, but people share characteristics in blood groups of family, and there are shared characteristics of people who just live together, for sure. But there were times when I was just different from my family and they would just remark on it like, “You're your own kid. Where did you come from?” kind of thing. And as much as you feel loved, it is very weird to perpetually and at the root feel like not quite ‘in’. And again, it was not malicious. My brothers, I don't think probably ever told me, “They don't love you cuz you're adopted.” They knew I was loved and they loved me too. It was never like that. But there's always just that sense. And my mom was really a tiny kinda girly woman and I'm a hockey-playing granddaughter of trappers and mushers and was a dog musher myself. Like I'm just cut from different cloth. And we overlap and got each other, but yeah, it's weird. And there's hard things in every family. And adoption is a blessing in a lot of ways. I don't mean to be the ungrateful adoptee, but I was so surprised cuz I was always such a cheerleader for adoption. It felt doubly hard to be upended by the reunion process cuz I felt sort-of betrayed by the whole institution. I felt like I'd really only considered the upside. And then you have to, when you meet the people that walked away from you, you have to really confront that part of your history, that you weren't always chosen.

There was actually a part, a little tiny, maybe a couple weeks only, but there was a portion where you weren't chosen. And relinquishment, you would– I know some people have all of the vocabulary and adoption-land is tricky and fraught with shades of fine meaning, but there's no other way to get adopted unless someone lets you go so, waiting to think about that till you're 38 is probably not ideal, and maybe that was part of what really hit me on the head so hard about it. But yeah, I think it was important to do and I'm grateful I had the chance to do it and that I came out the other end, with most everything intact and still moving forward and happy.

Haley: So it sounds like you've done a lot of reading and research, and that those things have helped you do some healing. Have you done any counseling or therapy to go through some of those issues as well?

Carrie: It's interesting. I've only just recently started going to see a lovely woman here who has some knowledge about adoption issues, and then I brought her a book that Laura Dennis recently put out a couple years ago about adoption therapy, from the perspective of adoptees and clinicians and therapists. I read it and loved it and handed it right off to her, and she's been wonderful. The only other time I tried to talk to someone about it, I guess I didn't really even bring it up, it was dealing with alcoholism in my family when I was in my 20s and just rattled off I was adopted as part of the background history. But I don't remember it being brought up at all. I did a lot of reading at the reunion phase and found a lot of online sites too. Two of my really favorite online folks, besides yourself, to connect with: one is Rebecca Hawkes, who on and off keeps a blog, another adoptee. And is it Lost Sisters?

Haley: The Lost Daughters.

Carrie: Sorry, Lost Daughters, yeah. They’re my sisters. Which I guess Rebecca's part of. But yeah those sites and all the people on them, you could branch off and find a ton of great adoptee support there, which was just critical for me in 2008, -09 and -10 as I was trying on new moods and expressing my early unfelt anger at my situation.

Haley: Carrie, do you feel like you hit all the different stages of reunion?

Carrie: Can you quickly remind me what, there's the five maybe or something? Do you have a little list there?

Haley: I have a list that's from Origins, Canada and they have: Fantasy, so that was the imagining that we did when we were young. And the First Contact. Then the First Meeting and the Honeymoon stage, which I think we hit all this already. And then the After The Honeymoon, so things kind-of–

Carrie: Down!

Haley: Yes, and you're like, ‘Oh, you're a real person. Okay.’

Carrie: 'Not interested!'

Haley: And then Time Out, which you said that you did. And then Making Adjustments. And lastly, Ongoing Relationship.

Carrie: Yeah, bingo! Oh my gosh. That's exciting. Yes.

Haley: You see, you're still a poster child. Now you're a poster child for the stages of reunion.

Carrie: Oh, that pleases my inner Hermione. It's amazing. I would not have thought myself to be the person to pull out as violently as I did. But I was upended and I needed to digest. And I guess that's my coping pattern anyway. But it was bigger than any time out I've ever had before. I've never– I'm a compliant, easygoing, overachieving adoptee. I definitely wasn't the acting-out type. If you're gonna divide into two basic groups, I was the Hermione type for sure. So I surprised myself with that long time out. That's nice to see those all listed, the time out, especially.

Haley: I didn't get to time out, but I was close. I was close.

Carrie: Fingers above the plug, just twitching.

Haley: Oh yeah.

Carrie: Well, that was big of you, and you must have learned a lot from that, too. Man, it's amazing how relationships really do put you right in the spot to rub up against the things you need to learn.

Haley: Yes. And I think you were talking about before, I don't know, what I was hearing was– what I've experienced is when you're with them, whoever it is, your birth mother, your birth father, anyone that you're related to, but you've lost time with, it's amazing in the moment, and yet all there is, is grief. It's joy and grief all intermingled. And I can't turn off the grief part and just enjoy the moment.

Carrie: Yes. And for me it was like, if you envision the way, say, a beach ball if you held it underwater, and just kept pushing it deeper and deeper, and then finally let it out. That's what happened with my grief, I think. And it just came out like a fountain. And ‘Where was it from? I'm not sad. Why? Why is this so sad? This can't be sad. I'm super lucky. I got to meet him. He tracked me down. He's trying to make it work. Why is this sad?’ And if you get a little more perspective, of course, there's grief there. Why wouldn't there be grief there? But the popular adoption narrative is one of so much joy and fulfillment and the grief being erased, that there's just not a lot of popular space to experience that. And that just makes it harder. And I think it's surprising because I was walking around not feeling sad, but grief. And they're such a different thing and I didn't really realize how different they were, that you could still be really happy about something and still be just overcome with grief.

Do you know Lori Holden, I think is her last name? @LavLuz, I think is her Twitter handle. She's an adoptive mom and she seems to have a very open mind about things and she's really of the mindset it's 'both, and' instead of 'either/or', which is just so freeing. If you can say, “Yes, I'm grateful I was adopted, and I had terrible grief. Yes, I was grateful for the reunion and it's tearing me apart and I'm suddenly someone you might– My sense of myself is never gonna be who I was before.” And that's good and it's important, but, wow, in my case, I wasn't really ready. I was having a hard year already,

So if you have the chance to time it, yeah, prepare yourself. If you don't have the chance to time it and it lands in your lap: prepare yourself. And if you walk away, that's your choice. But boy, there is a lot to get out of it too.

Haley: Looking back on that, the timing of it and everything, I can't imagine your sorrow from your miscarriage and losing your mom, because I haven't experienced either of those things yet. Was this something that was a distraction? I don't know, were you headed in a different direction and this changed things for you? Do you ever think about that?

Carrie: In some ways it was lovely because it felt like a new– I got a chance to meet my family. I didn't have to do the tricky juggling of worrying about, ‘even though my mom says she was into it, is she feeling threatened?’

And I'm sure we could have worked through it, but in a lot of ways it did simplify things. It also compounded the grief because I really wanted my mom, she would've loved to meet him. She wanted that chance to meet her, and she could have just, if my birth mother had written me back his name. I was so raw already. I think in some ways it propelled me to getting right to the raw emotions right away. I wasn't in a place to fake this reunion. I was not in a place. I was gonna do it to get real with somebody. And if you didn't have it in them, that was fine. But I needed to go and say my truth.

I just didn't realize how hard that would be and how I should have ideally had a little more emotional reserve to fall back on, ideally. In some ways also it's like, ‘Well, everything comes in threes, and I'm already beat down, let’s just get right to the very basics of who I am and build up from there.’

Haley: Thank you so much for sharing all that. That is a lot of big information. It's a big story. So Carrie, I'd love to hear if you have any recommended resources for our listeners. And I have two books actually I'd love to share with you and if you're okay with that. I'll go first. You mentioned Lost Daughters earlier. These are two books from one of the Lost Daughters, Deanna Shrodes, who I know that you're familiar with. And she wrote her memoir Worthy to Be Found, and part two is Restored. And she shares about finding her birth mother, their reunion relationships, their ups and downs, and then just the great grief from her birth mother withholding her birth father's name from her. And I just really love Deanna's heart, and she has a wonderful blog called Adoptee Restoration and her great heart is for adoptees to be restored. Her story is really powerful and I feel so badly that she's still searching for her dad and her mom had that information and she wouldn't give it to her. They're really both really well written books and I really recommend them.

Carrie: I have not read them, although I have spent tons of hours over on Deanna's blog and couldn't agree more. It's such a wonderful voice and heart and empathetic ear. My couple that I would recommend are reunion-specific, and the author is Evelyn Robinson and she's an Australian woman and I found her books on Amazon.

And I believe the one that I read, the reunion one is not in my hand, but it was Adoption Reunion: Ecstasy or Agony? It's a little subtitle. And it really resonated with me as I was just struggling just past the honeymoon phase and not being an American, the perspective was really refreshing. Because it doesn't seem like there's a lot of room in the States for there to be anything but the Hallmark happy narrative, and her book, just the title gave me room to have my reunion be any way that it was, and it could be both. And she has some other books as well that I'd recommend checking out.

Haley: Okay, good. And I can, I'll put a link to it in our show notes so that people can find it. So if our listeners wanna connect with you, Carrie, where can they find you online?

Carrie: My business is to make hats, warm woolen hats that I learned to make when I was living up in Alaska. And, come to find out all my women ancestors were making warm wooly clothing going way back in Labrador, so that's fun to find out.

But my initials are CCM, and then hats, H-A-T-S. So @ccmhats is my handle at Twitter and my Etsy shop for my hats. And I think my Facebook page probably has that and Google and YouTube and wherever else. That was generally what I tried to pick. Oh, actually my Twitter handle isn't that because someone in Germany had that. So my Twitter handle is @CCMFeltHats.

Haley: Okay, I will put a link to that up as well, and I can attest that Carrie's hats are so beautiful. I love your tweets about how you make them, and they're so colorful. And whenever you post a picture of your– I don't know what you call it, your shop, your workshop.

Carrie: The studio.

Haley: The studio, thank you. The hats on the wall, it’s just beautiful.

Carrie: Thank you. And I do love connecting with other adoptees and other people connected with adoption. It's just really added a whole lot to my life to meet people like yourself and the Lost Daughters online and have a community that I never had growing up. So thank you for the chance to get to talk.

Haley: Thank you. Well, I appreciate you being so vulnerable and authentic with us. It's rare to be able to hear someone's story in this depth. So thank you very much.

Carrie: Thank you for asking.

Haley: Didn't Carrie have some beautiful metaphors? If you have some more questions for her or would just like to thank her for sharing with us, you can connect with her on Twitter @CCMFeltHats. To share your story or to ask us a question, visit our website Adopteeson.com. You can send us an email or you can record a short voicemail that we could feature on an upcoming show.

You can also find us on Twitter or Instagram @adopteeson. Today, would you share our show with your adoptee network? We would be thrilled to have your support. Thanks for listening, let's talk again soon.