186 Megan Culhane Galbraith
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/186
Haley Radke: [00:00:00] You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is episode 186, Megan. I'm your host, Haley Radke. I'm honored to introduce you to my new friend, Megan Culhane Galbraith today. Megan's brand-new book, The Guild of the Infant Savior, is out in the world, and I begged her to do a Book Club event with us later in June, so stay tuned to the end of the episode to find out details for that.
Today, we talk about the challenges of building a relationship after the first moments of reunion are finally realized. Megan shares how she views the patterns of silencing adoptees from childhood into our adulthood. Did you know there used to be a program at Cornell that used “practice babies” sourced from foundling homes to teach women how to be mothers? Megan describes the impact of researching these barbaric domecon [00:01:00] experiments on us as adoptees, as humans turned into objects, like dolls. 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. I want to give you a content warning for mentions of an eating disorder. Let's listen in.
I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Megan Culhane Galbraith. Welcome, Megan.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Thank you so much, Haley. It's wonderful to have this resource and this space. Thanks for taking the time and for reading my book. I so appreciate it.
Haley Radke: Yes. I promised I could read it in one day, but I slowed down because it was so wonderful, and we are going to talk about that. But first, will you share a little bit of your story with us?
Megan Culhane Galbraith: I would love to. Thanks so much for letting me. I was born in a charity hospital in Hell's Kitchen. I didn't know that until, of course as an adoptee, you start poking into your background. And [00:02:00] I slowly began to unwind my story. I met my birth mother. I was about 29 when I met her, and the impetus for me finding her was probably like many other adoptees. I was pregnant with my first child, and I'd always been curious about who she might be, but I never really was that interested in finding her. But suddenly, when I was pregnant, I just thought to myself, you know, I just had this overwhelming love for this baby that I was carrying, and I thought, without judgment, but how does someone surrender a child? How does this–from a place of empathy–how does this happen? And that really was the beginning of the question of how I went on to find her. And it was back in the early days, before the real internet, so I didn't have –
Haley Radke: Before the [00:03:00] real internet.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: We had one homepage and some chat rooms. [Shared laughter.]
And because I was born in New York City, I thought I had to abide by the New York City laws, which were all closed. All your birth records, any sort of information is closed. And I don't remember how I found out, but someone said to me, Oh, you were adopted in Bridgeport, Connecticut. You should call Catholic Charities there. Because that's the agency that facilitated my adoption. And, so I just made a phone call and found out that, not only could I do a search, it's a two-part search. First, you get your non-identifying information, which can look like the redacted FBI file and the caseworker explains to you the nature of the information, or the non-information, that's there. And then you can go on to think about whether I want to search for my birth mother? And I think all of it was, like, $175 at the time to do this. [00:04:00] I know. I understand they have administrative costs and whatnot but –
Haley Radke: But do they need more money from us? Do they?
Megan Culhane Galbraith: I know. Yeah. And that whole accessing of the information that's your right to have is just…It's painful to think, huh, I'm getting this filtered through multiple, multiple channels. And I was just thinking the other day when I went back to Catholic Charities to ask for more information for different reasons, and she's like, Oh, I have files and files of everybody's stuff in here, and it's gonna take a while. And I'm thinking, Wow, you are a complete stranger and you have access to all these things that people want to know, and what must it be like to sleep at night knowing you're a gatekeeper for this stuff? And for what reason? For what reason? But sorry, I got off on that tangent, but it's an important one. So in my search for her, I did decide. [00:05:00] I got my non-identifying information. It seemed to me in that information that she so wanted to be found because she had updated my paperwork to say her mother had taken DES during her pregnancy. And she was worried that there might be effects on me or my children. So I thought this seems like she might want to be found. So I proceeded to try to find her. And when I called the caseworker, or the caseworker called me, she said, This was the easiest search we've ever done. She goes, I called one place. Her last place of work was at an arts council in Toronto. The person who answered the phone was like, Oh, I know who that is. She's always said she had a daughter out there somewhere. Here's her number in Scotland.
Haley Radke: She had told people that you were out there somewhere?
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Yeah. I was like, well okay, there are two [00:06:00] ways to look at that. One, I was not a secret to her. But also, I was... I felt after meeting her and hearing all of her stories, I was like, ugh, I felt like a cocktail party conversation too.
Haley Radke: Oh. It's like the two truths and a lie, and you're one of the little snippets of info?
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Right, and it's, oh, you've been kind of using me as a point of interest, and maybe that's not how it felt for her. But yeah, I was like, ugh. To me when I heard it back, I was like, oh, I was a little cocktail party talking point: Ooh, that daughter out there. But in any case, she doesn't have any other children. And then we reconnected, we spent a long weekend in New York City. She rented a hotel close by, The Guild of the Infant Savior, which is the title of my book, and also the unwed mothers’ home that she was sent away to. So [00:07:00] she said to me, I want to walk you around the neighborhood. Which was really great because place for me has so much meaning. And once I was there, and once we did walk around the neighborhood, the Guild wasn't there in the way that I was hoping. I was hoping to see this brownstone that stood there, but it was a facade now. It was the Hungarian Consulate, which to me was really interesting because we stood under that flag and she was like, Oh I need to tell you, you're Hungarian. And to me, I was like what weird synchronicity is this, right? I meet my birth mother, we come to New York City, we look for this place, and there's my heritage. How? I don't know. It could have been anything, but over the course of that weekend it was so cute. We did the normal things you might do as mother and daughter. [00:08:00] We went shoe shopping. I was looking for shoes, and I bought a pair of shoes, or she bought me a pair of shoes, like, size nine, and I was like, Hey, you just bought me my first pair of baby shoes!
But I'll tell you, and I don't know what your experience is, but on the train ride home, I realized, oh my God, I had only thought up to the point where I was having the reunion. I didn't think, oh gosh, now I have to have a relationship. And so it progressed on from there and that's a lot about what the book is about. It's the idea of finding yourself, finding myself through the lens of someone else's memory. Which memory is a coping mechanism, you know, especially traumatic memory. And I realized more than anything that a lot of her stories are sometimes just that, they're [00:09:00] stories that were made up, understandably, to create a narrative that eliminated or alleviated some of, probably, the grief and the shame that she had. And I think that's not an un- ; I think that's definitely a normal reaction, a normal human reaction. But for adoptees, when all we want is the truth, right? A truth. Just tell me what happened. You just can never get it because of these layers of shame, because of layers of grief, because memory is a fog. I can't remember the writer who says that, but it's like holding fog in your hand. How do you stitch together your narrative from a ghost?
Haley Radke: I have goosebumps. That is such a wonderful description of it. [00:10:00] I've heard from different adoptees, like they find it so frustrating and infuriating, as if their first mother is making up lies on purpose to conceal things from them. And indeed, some are, maybe hiding the father's identity or things like that. But I think some of that is true, like they're also just saying things to protect themselves, and often they don't necessarily know that some of it's made up. What do you think about that?
Megan Culhane Galbraith: I mean I think that's true. I think it's so true. Like Joan Didion says, the often-quoted line: "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." And for me as an adoptee and having met my birth mother, like these are the stories she's telling herself because she has to ... She had to live with a deeply traumatic thing that happened to her, even as she might discount that herself, even as she might say things [00:11:00] like grief and shame are useless emotions. I'm a Gen X-er. She's a Baby Boomer. I feel like they, that generation, just didn't have the support network that I have now. They didn't have therapy. They didn't have anybody telling them how to manage their emotions. I think that they're just told, especially as birth mothers, they're just told: Just get on with your life. The past is the past. The baby's in a better place. Just get on with your life. And the more I talked to her, the more I heard her stories, the more I could hear the nun saying this to her, because she had been sent away earlier to a convent school in Limerick, Ireland. So I can hear the nun saying these shaming things to her. I can hear the caseworker saying these. I can hear her mother's voice saying this. And all I can do is empathize. She's saying these things to me, and they're very hurtful. Some of the things she said are very hurtful. But also, she doesn't [00:12:00] understand how hurtful it is because she just doesn't know how to be a mom. When I met her, I was very excited at first, but, as I got to know her, I was like, oh, she's really just kind of like a bossy big sister who gives you advice when you don't ask for it. She just doesn't know how to comfort because she had not been comforted either. So I feel writing about her, I wanted that to be a fully three-dimensional rendering of a woman who had suffered also. I can't blame or shame her because all I can hear is the blame and the shame that was leveled onto her. And for that I deeply empathize with her. But also, just because you've had that trauma it doesn't mean you can be an [censored].
Haley Radke: There's that. There's [00:13:00] that. [Shared laughter] It's like this real delicate balancing act that a lot of us are doing, having this empathy and understanding. We are reading books like yours and Anne Fessler’s Girls Who Went Away, and reading the histories and things that actually happened. And the doctors would say, too, Don't ever tell a man about this or they're not gonna wanna marry you. Keep it a secret. That's exactly what they were told, which is horrific. It's a horrific violence to have to cover up something so deeply personal as a pregnancy and a child.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Absolutely.
Haley Radke: And yet, can you be a person in my life who I have a relationship with? And maybe I'm not looking for a mom, but what am I looking for?
Megan Culhane Galbraith: I know.
Haley Radke: That's a balance.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: It's a real balance. I remember something so hurtful that she said to me much later on, and it was after... I write a lot about sex and desire, right? Because I think intimacy is something that I really deeply want to explore because, when you're a child in foster care, when you're an adoptee, the idea of intimacy… I was in foster care for close to six months. So like I say in the book, even my mom was like: You probably weren't picked up that much. And as I dug into that, I started thinking about intimacy and writing about it. And I remember my birth mother saying, Well, if you keep writing these things, no guy's ever gonna wanna date you again. And I thought to myself, Ugh, wow, where does that come from? And yet there it is, a kernel in my brain that when I spiral, that comes back. So being an adoptee is always there in the back of my brain. It's always there, like [00:15:00] someone isn't going to love you for who you actually are, for expressing a valid emotion. And that is the [censored] of adoption, that I wish I could take out my brain, put it under the faucet, clean it off, and put it back in my head, like all of that is gone. I don't know how you feel about that.
Haley Radke: Of waiting for the miracle to cure me of my self-hatred and insecurities? Yeah. Totally.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Yeah.
Haley Radke: Yes, there are definitely some, unexpected to me, sexy parts in your book. I was like, Oh, okay. So yeah, I could see some...a mother figure having thoughts about those things. Look, I'm such a prude. I'm embarrassed even just talking about this. Okay. Whew. Not blushing. No, I wanted to ask you that. [00:16:00]
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Not bad. I do. In my first essay there's one line in there that I talk about a deep sexual fantasy. And in the context of that essay, I can't tell you how many times from a craft perspective I took that line out, put it back in. Does this need to be here? Is this just gratuitous? It was probably 20 times, and it was terrifying to read it. It was terrifying to write it, and then in readings it's terrifying to read it. But when I read it, I feel so powerful, and I feel like there's this rage in terms of desire with women. Like we cannot... It's this Madonna/whore complex. We need to be the Madonna, but men can't love what they can't have, right? I can't remember how, what this is, how it is. But I want to be a fully realized, fully sexualized being in the world, and part of that is speaking into that. So it's scary, but I think it's necessary. [00:17:00] And that's why I didn't shy away from a lot of the stuff about desire in the book because I think, especially as an adoptee, it's just so necessary. I hope people find it useful. Useful is maybe not the word, but I hope people also resonate with it in that way.
Haley Radke: Yeah, and find it empowering.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: I hope so.
Haley Radke: Yeah. I wanted to go back to reunion, and I know your reunion lasted 25 years, and then what happened?
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Well, as I was publishing the book, I got word on Mother's Day that this manuscript was accepted for publication, [00:18:00] and I thought, again, what synchronicity. How amazing. And immediately called my birth mother and told her about it, and she'd known I'd been writing a book for years. And she was really happy and sent me a nice card about it. And then in writing a book, my book uses images, also, so the beginning of each essay is fronted by a photo from my dollhouse, which is my visual art project. And at the end, because I restage my baby pictures in the dollhouse, at the end of each essay is a little archival photo from my baby book. And there were three images that she had given me from what she called our family album that I wanted to use, and part of book publication is getting permissions from people to use these things. And when I wrote to her to [00:19:00] ask for those permissions to use those three pieces, one of which was a photo of our reunion. She wrote me a certified letter in pseudo legalese saying: I'm not going to give you permission unless you let me revise and edit that manuscript basically to my specifications. And I went into this spiral for about a month of like, Oh my God, is she trying to squash this? What's going on? There was such an abrupt change in tone, and she also asked for anonymity. And previously I hadn't identified her by anything but her first name throughout the book, and I thought to myself this is ironic. After I came out of this really horrible, I wouldn't call it depression, but this horrible spiral of what is happening here? After I came out of that, I [00:20:00] thought to myself, I stood back and I said how ironic. It was hard enough for me to find her, and I'm her daughter and she's requesting anonymity thinking other people are going to be able to find her because of our relationship? You know, Haley, I have a completely different name. When I was born, my name was Gabriella Herman. I exist in two different places with two different names. There's no way anybody could... So the irony of that is certainly not lost on me.
And so I had to go back into the manuscript and decide on what name, what pseudonym, to give her, which became an art project in itself, and I treated it the way I treated doing the photographs that she wouldn't let me use. I got curious about how to do it from a creative standpoint, and what I did was I took the baby frame that's [00:21:00] referenced in the gifts that I got from my adoptive mother and from my grandparents. So I took this, I sound like such a snob, this Tiffany baby frame that was given to me by my grandparents, and inside of that I put a white piece of flannel that I'd frayed at the edges and to me looked like a baby blanket. But it conveyed that sort of erasure. It conveyed that blankness. It conveyed that editing out. And in a way, in a sad and tragic way, it actually strengthened the narrative because to feel like I was some sort of danger or it was going to be dangerous to have her identity revealed was just so… Instead of being proud of me for this accomplishment, here she was writing herself out of my life. And I haven't heard from her in almost a year. I'll send her a birthday card, I will send her a Mother's Day card, but I haven't heard from [00:22:00] her. And I feel like it's not mine to mend this relationship after that. I want the relationship, but I have to do it on my terms now.
Haley Radke: I'm so sorry. Under the photos that you described, so each one that's got this picture frame with the flannel, it says: "Permission not granted."
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Yeah.
Haley Radke: And I found that so, I don't know if poignant is the right word, but I felt it in my gut. And you know, Megan, you're not the first one of my friends that are authors who have poured their heart and soul in sharing this beautiful story of reconnection, and then that's cost them that relationship.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Yeah.
Haley Radke: My heart just hurts. At what cost for sharing our own truth? [00:23:00]
Megan Culhane Galbraith: I know. I know. I don't understand what people are scared about. And I think the silencing of adoptees... There's an unconscious... I didn't realize till I was an adult, after years of therapy about attachment disorder and whatnot, that so much of my childhood… I remember talking to one of my teachers at Bennington when I was writing. I was writing, I think it was, “Sin Will Find You Out,” one of the essays in the book, and she was like, What were you feeling then? What were you feeling as a child? How did you feel? How did you feel? And I thought to myself, Oh, my God, Joan, I was numb. I don't think I was feeling anything. And she said: That numbness is a feeling. And it just exploded my brain, and I started to think why was I feeling like that? Why was I so numb? And much of it is [00:24:00] because when as a young child expressing a feeling, it felt dangerous. Like, oh God, if you state what you need, what if they send you back? Just be the perfect child. Not that I was perfect at all. I got into trouble. I did bad things. But the whole overriding idea of being the perfect child so you don't get sent back is something that I think was the big unacknowledged danger of my childhood. And therefore I was very insular. I kept my thoughts to myself. I used to hide in my closet and write music. That's how much of a weird nerd I was. I lost myself in books. I remember my mom once, she was like, Don't you wanna go outside instead of reading on the couch all day? I was like, No, I'm fine. I would go outside, though, when I did and ride my horse or make dioramas out in the yard for [00:25:00] the ants, and just generally play by myself. But yeah, I realize now as an adult, of course, the word for that is self-abandonment, and I think that's the most dangerous thing of all. And once I had the words, this is what writing has given me, it's like it's given me the words to understand my feelings. And self-abandonment, when that came up, I was like, Oh my God, I've been doing this for such a long time. And another thread, I think, in that book is about time itself, and I suddenly felt Ugh. Oh my God, I've wasted so much time self-abandoning, and I want to reclaim that. I've worked really hard to not do that but it's daily work, as you know, daily, daily work.
Haley Radke: Absolutely. And [00:26:00] another important part of your book that you weave through this is the social history, historical context, and you uncovered something for me that I had no idea about. Can you talk about the “practice babies”? Sorry, this is not a visual medium, but I just need the mind-blown emoji with also a volcano on top.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Yeah, the little fire icon. I know. I want to write about these babies more. I'm just so glad that they're getting some time for us to talk about them.
Haley Radke: Sorry, I'm going to interrupt, and it sounds like I'm taking us off, but when you are discovering for yourself that you have this self-abandonment and then you find some scientific evidence of what was done with this group that you're going to tell us [00:27:00] about, I think that's so interlinked.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: I'm so glad you see that. So I'll go back. There was a program that began in 1919 at Cornell, and it was the first ever scientific degree program for women in the country. Women could get a degree in domestic economics. They basically were learning how to be mothers, learning to run a household, learning how to be wives. They took something called a marriage course. All of this looking back, you're just like, oh my God, what? But it was extremely popular. The leading feminists of the time came to campus to laud this program. One of the things, of course, in running a household at the time was if you're going to be a wife, “of course” you're going to be a mother, therefore you need to learn how to practice that motherhood. [00:28:00] And what better way to practice that motherhood than using practice babies? And in this case, these were real live orphans and foundlings that they sourced from area foundling hospitals, area orphanages. In some cases, these were babies whose mothers wanted them back. I found one case of a mother who kept writing and wanting her baby back, wanting to see this baby.
Anyway, so yes, from 1919 up until I want to say the late '60s this program operated and used practice babies, and what they did was they would get them from the foundling homes. These babies would be raised in a practice apartment on Cornell's campus that looked like a "home”, and the babies would live there, and about six different practice mothers would do everything on a very strict schedule, like picking the baby [00:29:00] up. I found one of the schedules for them during the day, and it's just barbaric. It's 7:00 a.m. wake up, 7:15 urination, 7:45 bowel movement, 7:whatever, bottle. And just the strict schedule on which they were raised is just bizarre. And then the idea that they could be put down for a nap and wake up in the arms of another mother. Where did? What? I just want to jump forward in time and give all of these babies a huge hug because they were… So they were raised, they usually spent like six months to upwards of two years in these homes, and then they were adopted. And parents at the time who were looking for an adopted child thought this is, these babies are super children. They're being raised by scientific [00:30:00] principles. We're gonna get one of these babies 'cause it's gonna be perfect. Surely science will make this baby perfect. And the thing that is missing in all of this, of course, is love. Where is love in this equation? And how is a baby raised in these ways by scientific principles in the arms of six different mothers? Where is the love? Where's the comfort? And there's no way to teach love as a science. There's no scientific principle for love. It exists. It exists.
Haley Radke: You have in your dollhouse art installation, all of these things. You're replicating photographs from that with, I'm sorry, the creepiest AF dolls you could [00:31:00] possibly summon up. And so there's the photo from the archives of this real baby, but then there's also the recreations that you've made, which is so brilliant. And I'm reading this and I'm thinking: This is fake, right? Like, Megan is making this up. This is some kind of essay thought-experiment thing. I don't understand. And it's no, this actually happened.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Yeah.
Haley Radke: And once I figured it out–I'm sorry, I'm a little bit slow sometimes, because it was just too horrible to believe that this is a true thing–I just felt sick. I felt like I ate gluten. A celiac. Celiac problems. And I just couldn't believe it. And we're not talking about thousands of babies or anything. This is like a 100-something, you said?
Megan Culhane Galbraith: It was hundreds. It was about 120 that I could find at Cornell, for instance, but these programs existed all over the country.
Haley Radke: Oh my God.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Cornell's was just the [00:32:00] first one, but these programs existed all over the country. My friend Gabrielle Glaser, who wrote American Baby, found the same program in other states. But I think Cornell was the pioneer of doing this.
Haley Radke: I think for me, this unraveling of that which I had not heard of before and then looking at it from the adoptee experience and finding it pretty linked was really painful. So as an adoptee discovering this and researching this, what personally was the impact for you?
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Well, I had a very recent epiphany. I thought to myself, how many times was I put up in front of parents, let's say, who were like "Here's a baby," when I was in that foster home? How many times was I [00:33:00] presented to someone who either said no? And to me, I was like, oh my God. In terms of choice…Like, let's talk about dating. Flipping the equation and I need to choose someone instead of constantly feeling like I need to charm someone into picking me. Like that distinction? It blew my brain open because I thought, oh my God, I... I think working with dolls–dolls are the perfect medium for this because a doll does not have agency. A doll is an object, and those Domecon babies were objects. And I think many times when we're little babies being presented for adoption, we are objects for someone to say no to. Oh, I don't like –. Oh, she's too skinny. Oh, [00:34:00] he's too fat. Oh, I don't know, he's got brown hair. Objects. And so, like, how did I feel? I felt at the time more for those babies, thinking to myself. But where I felt it in my body was probably like you. I felt it deep in my gut, a deep sadness for those babies. And that whole project started actually as a show in an art gallery that I had. It didn't start with the words. And then as I began thinking more about it, I began writing more about the babies, and then I realized how connected it was to my own experience across time, and how little has changed. Those principles were barbaric but that's still going on in a different way, and I just feel for... I felt so hard for those [00:35:00] babies.
Haley Radke: I don't even know what else to say about it. It's so upsetting. It's just so upsetting.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: I want to write more about them. The other thing I haven't said, actually, is all those babies that came into that program were renamed. This is a part of the erasure of adoption, so they were renamed. They got new first names, and they all took the last name Domecon. So there was Dicky Domecon and Grace Domecon and Edna Mae Domecon, right? And then when they were adopted, of course, they get new names with their adoptive families, and all the identifying records were destroyed. So there are some people out there who never knew they were in this program. They never knew. Like, how was that ever, how was any of that ever explained to them? Was it ever explained to them? So I feel like [00:36:00] many times as adoptees, and I want to hear what you think. Before we can identify what our grief is or where it comes from, we're just walking around with this unidentified backpack full of rocks with this grief and shame that is not ours to carry. But we don't know it's our backpack of rocks. We don't know how to put it down because nobody's ever told us it doesn't belong to us. So I feel like talking about it more openly and getting in there–I'm just one of those weirdos that I will get in there and explore and explore and scratch and find things and it'll send me off into different questions. And I feel like that's the part of the research that I love. It's the part of research about myself that I love. That's why I love being in therapy because all I want to do is find out more about myself so I can be a better person for myself, but for [00:37:00] also my friends and my family and people I might be in a romantic relationship with, right? I think as adoptees, we're–I'm not gonna say broken–but I never felt fully whole until much later in my adult life because I never knew my heritage. How could you feel whole if you don't know where you come from? And I think part of this book is a reclamation of that, all of that, and in a way it's telling my own story. It's creating my own narrative for who I am.
Haley Radke: I want to ask you about the section that you write fully in third person about yourself. So, this is when you're writing in the third person and you're calling [00:38:00] yourself “the false self” and you're telling your whole story, but it's all from the third person. And I found it very challenging because I wanted to hear it from you. I wonder about your decision to do that because we so often do completely escape from our person because we can't accept ourselves. And I'm wondering if you can share about, how can I say this? Telling your full story in a very small amount of time in the third person and characterizing yourself as false self moving to true self.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Yeah. So “false self” and “true self” are very psychological principles, and that particular essay was something that came very late in the writing of this book. A friend of mine had read it and she said, I need to know... the one thing you're not answering here is what happened to your marriage. And [00:39:00] so that essay was a tale about what happened, and the reason it is written in such a way is because it's written in the form of a fairy tale, which is a form I like to play with, also, because in fairy tales, the female characters have no agency, and I wanted to turn that trope on its head and give myself agency. But as I started writing it from the “I” perspective, it sounded whiny, it sounded blamey, it sounded victimy, and I couldn't figure out how to... Because it was none of that, right? It was just me transforming into my true self. And, I think, I left a marriage that was on the outs. There was no shame, there was no cheating, there was no abuse. I left a beautiful person, but it was [00:40:00] because I had self-abandoned so much that I was not myself, and so I had to try to explain that in a way. And using the fairy tale, as women, we’re sold this Cinderella fairy tale of what marriage is going to be like, and your prince is going to rescue you. My mom was always like, Marriage is hard work. There's no Cinderella story. So I love her for that, but here I was not being my full self and feeling very, very alone in a marriage that was full of love, right? But not enough. And so that's where that came from, because I needed distance. I needed that distance of the third person to tell that story in a way that someone would understand it, and the reader would understand it. Because to tell it just as from an “I” perspective was... It just didn't work. And I think that's the benefit [00:41:00] of creative nonfiction is you get to play with and experiment with these forms, and I particularly love fairy tales because I love to turn them on their heads like that. So that's where that came from. But it speaks to the self-abandonment. The false self is exactly that. It's the self that abandons and, in the end, becoming your true self is, I think, the biggest, certainly the biggest gift I could give to myself. I'm still learning to be fully alive in my body and in myself, and loving myself fully. I think that's going to be my life's work.
Haley Radke: Unfortunately, that keeps going, right? Having to choose it.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Yeah. You said choose, and I love that word because I just read bell hooks' book on love, and throughout that whole narrative she looks at love in all its forms, not just romantic love, but self-love, friend love, family love, and she talks about choosing love in your life. It's the choice to have people in your life, and I think maybe that goes back to strengthening that. If I get to choose who is in my life, if I get to choose who I love, if I choose to love myself, I can never, I will never be alone. If I'm strong enough in those principles, I can try to self-abandon. I can certainly try to self-sabotage. I love trying to do that to myself. But I have enough, I think, within me that I know how to rescue myself. I can rescue myself instead of looking to someone else to rescue me.
Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. You mentioned earlier [00:43:00] that you love going to therapy which I don't know if that's relatable. That feels ... that feels challenging. Don't get me wrong, lots of us are in therapy, but I don't know if I've ever been like, Wow, I can't wait to get to my appointment.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: No, they're hard. They're hard. They're really hard. I'm lucky to have a therapist who deals with adoption issues. I loved that I could acknowledge my therapist in the acknowledgments of my book. She really helped me see so many things, though, and understand.
Haley Radke: I have a question about that. And gold star for adoptee-competent therapists. So in your book, again going along with the historical, social history–I don't know what all the right things to call these sections are–but you dive into some of the experiments that have become infamous in adoptee land, like Harlow's monkey, [00:44:00] and more about attachment, and you’ve also mentioned here attachment issues. So can you talk a little bit about that, and then what made you decide to head into therapy?
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Oh, wow. I didn't know about attachment. Actually, my therapist told me about Harlow's monkeys. Yeah. She's like, Hey, have you ever heard of this? And in my research then I started down the hole, the research hole of, okay, there's Harlow's monkeys, what other research was taking place with children, for instance? Which again, like monkeys, are little objects to experiment on.
Haley Radke: Oh, the rubber-band pain one on the infants. Getting them to cry. Oh my gosh.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Yes. Yeah. I know. So when did I start therapy? The therapist I have now, [00:45:00] she's amazing. I know what, I know when I started therapy.
In high school and college, I had an eating disorder. I was bulimic, which is not unusual for adoptees. In fact, it's quite usual and I've learned about that. I went to Penn State for college, and I remember going to the dentist. My parents were like, Get your teeth checked. You're still on our insurance. Go get all your teeth checked! And I went to the dentist, and at my first appointment with him, he says, You have 25 major cavities. What's going on? Do you drink a lot of soda? Do you –? And I just remember feeling so ashamed in the chair , thinking, Oh my God, I've just been found out. And he was so gentle and kind, and I finally told him that I throw up. [00:46:00] And he got me into group therapy at Penn State. And so that was my first experience with therapy. And then I moved on to Lehigh, and I got an apartment at Lehigh, my first job, and, don't you know, the woman who ran the group therapy group was my neighbor downstairs, and I run into her in the hall. I'm like, Oh my God. I don't do that anymore, but that was my kind of window into this is an adoption issue. I think eating disorders, at least for me, eating disorders are about wanting to disappear. They're about wanting to be invisible. They're about slowly killing yourself. And until I realized that's what I was doing, because as an adoptee, I just didn't want to be fully seen. I was like, Let me blend into the background. I'll wear black all the time. I'm just here, your friendly ghost friend. And so [00:47:00] that was the beginning of therapy.
And then, fast-forward, the therapist I have now has introduced me to all these... I never realized playing in my dollhouse, I never connected that there was something called play therapy. People play with dolls or use dolls in therapy for various reasons, mostly for survivors of traumatic things. It's like they show the child the doll and say, Show me where he touched you. Show me where she hit you. And so the fact that I'm playing with these dolls now is, now, no surprise. But to come to this organically… I think one of the great beauties of making art is I get to do it, and then I get to step back from it and question why I'm doing it. And playing with those dolls opened me up to a lot of the questions that I answer in the book, because as I was playing, [00:48:00] I stepped back and thought, Huh, why am I playing with this particular dollhouse? Why am I playing with these particular dolls? Why? And I realized all of that was the same vintage. Like the dollhouse that I play with, that I use in my art is all from the '50s, '60s, so it's the same time period that my birth mother had been sent away. And all these things come back to you.
I remember, to go back to place for me, I remember before I went to see my birth mother, before I knew about the Guild of the Infant Savior, before I knew where it was on the East Side, 51st or 52nd Street. I remember skipping high school and going in on the train to New York. I played the violin and I wanted to go see Carnegie Hall. So we were in the neighborhood, the Carnegie Hall neighborhood, and I just never put it together until recently. I remember [00:49:00] having a visceral reaction. I was at a street corner, and I just stopped, and I think I told my friend: I feel like I have been here before. I've been here before. I don't know. I've, but I also have never been here before. And I just asked a friend, Where is Carnegie Hall? And she said, It's four blocks away from where that is, where your birth mother was sent to have you. To me, I just thought, Oh my God, I have been there before. And that blew my mind.
Haley Radke: Our implicit memories but stored away the pre-verbal? It's incredible, incredible.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Yes. I loved that you said “pre-verbal,” because in our last session, that's what my therapist said, too, that “pre-verbal memory,” and I wrote it down. I was like, I need to think about that more. [00:50:00]
Haley Radke: Yeah. You may know I talk to a lot of therapists on this podcast.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Yeah. I want to know; I've gone so far. I would love to be hypnotized so I can get in there. I'd love to be, I'm so curious.
Haley Radke: Serious?
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Yes. I'm so curious.
Haley Radke: That sounds terrifying. If you want to talk about being in control as an adoptee and how many, unfortunately, suffer with eating disorders and those kinds of things, being hypnotized, that sounds terrible.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Yeah. But you know what? What I want to give up now is that control because I know I can't control anything. So how do I figure out what I can change? And the only thing I can change is what's in me and how I react to the world. So therefore, I want to understand me better.
Haley Radke: That's so interesting. No, it's like I will pay the price of losing control in order to unlock the secrets. [00:51:00]
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Yeah. Yeah. It's really scary. I try to unlock secrets in so many ways. I use divination. I read the tarot. I really think hard about my intuition. I really try to listen to my body and what it's telling me. I'm always trying to unlock those secrets. I think secrets are poison, and I want to find them all. I want to root them out, and I want to expose them to the daylight.
Haley Radke: Yes. No more secrets, no more lies. That should be the adoptee mantra. Okay. This was such a good conversation. I want to do recommended resources, but before we do, is there anything else you want to say to your fellow adoptees?
Megan Culhane Galbraith: I see you. I see you. I hope you see me. I am very grateful for finding, finally late in life, an adoptee community, and once I found some of the resources on your site and other places, [00:52:00] I just thought, Oh my God I don't feel so alone. I think we struggle feeling alone because we think that what we're feeling is just us, and it's so not, and I'm so happy to have this community because of that. So thank you for making this space, for god sakes.
Haley Radke: Community is so powerful. It absolutely is, and who knew? Who knew?
Megan Culhane Galbraith: I know.
Haley Radke: I am so thrilled and honored that I got to read your book. So Megan's book is The Guild of the Infant Savior: An Adopted Child's Memory Book, just the title, even, is so special. You have this whole section where you list off, oh my gosh, all these different names of maternity homes and other places. It's fascinating and so powerful. But isn't it nutty, just the name, The Guild of the Infant Savior? [00:53:00] Talk about the reason for adoption, the savior narrative. Oh my word.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: I know. I know. Oof. And I want to write more about the actual place too because it was a huge, society nonprofit, huge. All the blue bloods got together in the Rainbow Room to raise money for the Guild of the Infant Savior. They got together at whatever the fancy hotels are in New York to raise money, and I just think to myself, Ah, so this is also where the wealthy daughters go to get a baby when they don't wanna ruin their fig, y'all. And also where they go when they get in trouble. Right?
Haley Radke: Yeah. There's so many things that come out of that.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Yeah.
Haley Radke: So this is described as a hybrid work of creative nonfiction, and, as you may have heard us allude to throughout this conversation, Megan has works of visual art that she's created that are a part of it. [00:54:00] She has essays. There's just these little snippets. What would you call those? You've got a few sentences on this, and then you go to the next topic and the next, and it felt like to me like your journal where you have your little epiphany, and you're like, Oh my gosh, I gotta write that down. And you write down your few thoughts, and then you come back to it later, like some special thing that you've saved. So to read your insights like that was so special. I really enjoyed it, truly. I'm not just saying that because I'm looking at you. And also, I love how you wove in all of those pieces of sadly finding out about the domecon babies. Domacon?
Megan Culhane Galbraith: I say dome-econ. [as in domestic economy]
Haley Radke: The domecon babies and the other experiments, some of which you'll probably be familiar with, and some that you might never have heard of. And even though some of the things are really upsetting to find out about, [00:55:00] it's critical as people that want to be in the truth, living in the truth, knowing about adoptee activism and speaking up for other adoptees who maybe haven't found their way yet, if they haven't found their way to community yet, it's important. It's critical for us to know those things. So I love how you have your story wrapped up in this bigger story, the bigger narrative of what's happened before and what's still happening now. So, highly recommend. Top-notch. Two thumbs-up.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Thank you so much. Thanks.
Haley Radke: I only have two thumbs, but –
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Thanks, Haley.
Haley Radke: Is there anything you want to tell us about your book? It's hard for me to describe because I haven't read anything like it. Anything else that you want to hook us in with?
Megan Culhane Galbraith: It's funny people say they haven't read anything like it, which that's a high compliment. I also love when they say it's weird. [00:56:00] It's weird, I love it.
Haley Radke: I was going to say quirky. There are some quirky things, yes. And the photos are just, all of them, there's this visceral reaction. And I was reading on an e-reader, can't wait for my color copy to come, because even in grayscale it packed a punch.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Oh, I'm so glad that's the case. Those pictures needed to be in color, and it's not something that happens easily in publishing, especially with a small press, and they supported me on that, so I'm really happy about that. I think the whole narrative is what I would call fragmented narrative, and it replicates the way we as adoptees get our information, which is not in any linear fashion. I tried to write a linear memoir, and that just did not work. And I think appropriating different forms [00:57:00] like the lyric essay, which is what you were talking about, these disparate thoughts that come in but are all interlinked, the lyric essay, a prose poem, a fairy tale that's turned on its head, all these are things that help me tell my story. And then there are some just straight-on essays in there, and there's research essays like the domecon piece. I'm glad that this book exists in the world. I didn't know that it ever would actually get published, and I really appreciate Ohio State University Press, especially Mad Creek Books, which is their imprint for these kinds of narratives and diverse voices. I think that they do a fantastic job. And I think there needs to be more of a place in the world for these kinds of books that are not traditional linear narratives. And so I'm glad mine's one of them.
Haley Radke: Yay. I'm so glad, too. There's some really stunning writing. What do you want to recommend to us today, Megan? [00:58:00]
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Yeah. So speaking of non-traditional narratives, I want to recommend Palimpsest: Documents from a Korean Adoption by Lisa Wool-Rim Sjöblom. I read this just recently, and I wish I had read it while I was writing this book because it's a graphic narrative, so it's told in comic book style. The thing that interests me so much about adoption is how interwoven our feelings are no matter race, class, color, international adoption, American adoption. We all have similar feelings, and in this narrative I just felt it so deeply in her words and images, that same longing, that same [00:59:00] sadness for not being able to find her paperwork or reclaim her identity. International adoptees have, of course, the added layer of a heritage that, you know, she goes back to Korea and feels so at home there, and yet also othered because she was adopted into a family that wasn't Korean and not in Korea. So there's this whole heritage that I think international adoptees lose also. That's not part of my story, I can only relate to it because it's not my lived narrative, of course. But I highly recommend her book. It's beautifully done, and it's just heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking. I can't wait to listen to her podcast.
Haley Radke: Yeah. Lisa was on the show. I was telling Megan earlier, she's on Episode 130, so we talk more about her story and her book. And she is such a fabulous artist. The cover of [01:00:00] Palimpsest, she tells us a little bit more about that in her interview, but you can actually order an art print of the cover, and I have it. It's hidden behind my screen here. But it's so beautiful.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: It's so beautiful. It's–if I can describe it, she would describe it better–but it's basically a baby in utero and that fetal position is so vulnerable.
Haley Radke: And it's within the map of Korea. And then the word palimpsest refers to the hidden words behind when they've reused manuscripts and there's text overlaid. And she explains to us that the text on there is other names from her orphanage.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Oh my gosh. We did a similar thing!
Haley Radke: Oh, yeah, Megan.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Wow. Oh my God, we did a similar thing without even knowing it. That's what [01:01:00] I mean. I just love the word palimpsest, and I'm sure she's done this, but in the beginning of her book because words mean so much, right? Palimpsest: a very old text or document in which writing has been removed and covered or replaced by new writing. And that's from the Cambridge Dictionary, and that speaks to me directly to the erasure of adoption, your original birth certificate is somewhere. You got a new one. Mine was dated two years after I was born. I still haven't received my original one. And so that word in and of itself is just a great gift to understand what that means. Oh my God.
Haley Radke: She's brilliant. I know. I know.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: I know. I know.
Haley Radke: Wonderful. We're so glad that your book is in the world, and where can we connect with you online to hear more?
Megan Culhane Galbraith: Oh, I would love if you connect. I [01:02:00] am at megangalbraith (dot) com, and there you can get all my Twitter, Facebook, Instagram handles. You can also sign up for my newsletter if you'd like to do that. I haven't written one yet, but I would love to have you. I would love to have you as a subscriber. One's going out soon.
Haley Radke: We're recording this a little in advance of when it's coming out, but I just sent out a newsletter for the first time in two years.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: That's the beauty of signing up for my newsletter is you know you're not going to get spammed- ... with a lot of stuff. Definitely not.
Haley Radke: No spam.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: But so my newsletter's called The CoLab and I want to, after book promotion stuff, all of the stuff I need to do, I want to start talking to artists and writers because my word for 2021 is “collaborate.” And I just think there's so much that can be gained from other people's [01:03:00] insights, and I'm hoping maybe Lisa will be someone I can talk to and I can share her art. But I want to share, I want to talk about collaboration. I think it's just so important to connect, especially after a year of disconnection.
Haley Radke: Absolutely. So true. I will make sure to link to your website and all your social media handles. And I was looking at the Dollhouse Instagram. I did a deep dive, and when I say you have been consistent through your life, Megan, there was found objects from your childhood that you made tiny little dishes and food, and you mentioned in our interview that you used to make dioramas, and then now moving fast-forward to the Dollhouse as an adult. Wow. Very meta. Look at that. You're very consistent.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: It's so weird. Thank you for [01:04:00] looking.
Haley Radke: What more can I do as an interviewer than to be very creepy and go back years and years on your social media? So you bet. Such a delight to chat with you, Megan. Thank you.
Megan Culhane Galbraith: You too, Haley. Thank you so much.
Haley Radke: I enjoyed our conversation so much that I asked Megan if she would come and do Book Club with the adoptees on Patreon supporters. If you don't know, on Patreon, all of my monthly supporters, we have a monthly Book Club where we get together on a Zoom call and we talk about the book that we have read for the month and we've done memoir and fiction and kind of a wide variety of different picks. But I promise they are all adoptee-authored books. And then if you can't be with us live, we drop the audio recording right into your podcast app so you can catch up. [01:05:00] It has been so fun and Megan agreed. So she's going to be our June pick for the Adoptees Off Script Book Club on Patreon and she'll be joining us for that.
You can find the date and link to the call posted in Patreon and it's also going to be posted in the Patreon Facebook Group. So I am so grateful for those of you who support the show in that way. It is a huge gift for me that the community is supporting the show and paying for the cost of production and all the things that you don't see because the show just drops into your app nicely every week. But it takes a lot of work to get it there. So I have tried to set up Patreon as all the extra bonus content for you as a thank you in order to keep the main show always free for adoptees, especially for adoptees who don't have access to other resources that [01:06:00] some of us do, paying for therapy and such expensive things. So Adoptees On the main feed will always be free as a resource and my monthly patrons, bless you, because you make it possible for Adoptees On to be available like this for other adoptees.
Okay. I've mentioned this a couple times but I just wanted to lead up to our summer goodbye. Next week will be our last episode before I take a summer break and I'll be back with regular episodes in September. So next Friday there will be a brand-new episode and then you'll see me back in September except if you're on Patreon, I'm still there. Through the summer we'll be having weekly Adoptees Off Script episodes and Book Club. That is going to continue. So if you need more Adoptees On in your life, go to adopteeson.com/partner to find the book club and to support the show and keep it going.
Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday
