174 [Estrangement Series] Justin Part 1
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Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/174
Haley Radke: [00:00:00] You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is episode 174, Justin. I'm your host, Haley Radke. I am honored to be able to bring you Justin's story in two parts. Make sure you're subscribed or following the podcast to make sure you catch part two next week.
Justin was labeled difficult to adopt because he was biracial. He tells us he never had an interest in finding his biological family until he attended a very interesting week-long therapeutic workshop. Before we start, I want to give you a trigger warning. During Justin's story, we are going to mention death by suicide and also discuss suicide attempts by a child. So if you know those will be harmful for you to listen to, I want you to honor that nudge your body's giving you to push pause and come back when you're feeling safe and have [00:01:00] supports in place to listen with or find another episode that will be a better fit for you. Stick around till the end because I want to let you know about some important activism work you can participate in today that will make a huge difference for your fellow adoptees.
Let's listen in.
I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Justin. Welcome, Justin.
Justin: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Haley Radke: Would you start out and share a bit of your story with us, please?
Justin: I was adopted at about a month old into a family. I have an older sister who is two and a half years older than I am and she's a biological child of my parents. The story my parents always told about my adoption, it wasn't about inability to conceive or anything like that, and it wasn't religious. But it was just my mom always said, "We always wanted to adopt," and that always [00:02:00] stuck in my craw as not a very satisfying answer for me. And it was something that I pursued on and off talking to my mom to get more clarity on that. And recently, in the past few years, I did get a little bit more clarity on that. I think that literally is the reason why they adopted, that they wanted to adopt, but it was more of a maybe it's a good- thing-for-the-world moral sort of thing. I don't have any confirmation that's really true, but the thing that makes me feel it is that they chose to adopt from the group of difficult-to-adopt children. So that included disabled children, and that included siblings adopted together, and then that also included biracial or Black children. So that was the group that I was in. And I think initially they decided against adopting a disabled child because the plan [00:03:00] was to live overseas and travel to third-world countries, and with the medical issues, they might not be able to do it. And then I know that they were offered a group of siblings and they did turn down that, and then they eventually adopted me. I know that they had some issues, not I think so much with their family, but with adopting outside of their race. I know that at least one person inside the adoption agency or the adoption process said something about whether it was–not ethical– but whether it was a good idea to adopt outside their race. So I always was brought up knowing that I was biracial, knowing I was adopted, but also being made to feel good or positive about that. I always had a positive feeling about my Black self. And my parents, more specifically my mother, made an effort to make me feel positive about that. [00:04:00] The downside was that as a child I didn't really live in the US very much. While there was a lot of ethnic and cultural and social–there's a lot of diversity–there weren't a lot of mirrors so I didn't grow up with a lot of African American people in my life. So then, as a result, I didn't really come to dealing with those issues until I went to college, the issues of race and identity. Because in living overseas, I was a foreigner, so even though my parents and I obviously looked very different and were of a different race it was like you're whatever, you're all weird. And we got to be all categorized together. So it was less of an issue until later.
Haley Radke: So did they end up going to developing countries, like multiple different countries?
Justin: Yeah. My parents were both professors. They both got their PhDs, and one of the first countries that we lived in was [00:05:00] Zambia, in Southern Africa. This is in the mid-'70s. So not a developed place by any means. Then we were in Thailand, and then I ended up in high school in Malaysia, which was much more developed. But I think that they were right that those places really wouldn't have supported having someone with high physical needs or something like that. And there was a lot of moving back to the US in between these countries, so there were touches of home, as well. But as far as interest in adoption or curiosity about my own adoption, I didn't really have an interest in terms of my figuring out who my biological family was. Really, I don't know. It just wasn't something that came up a lot. When I was 16 years old, my mom had gone back to the States [00:06:00] because her mother was sick, and she got some non-identifying information from my birth mother. I guess there was an update, and she'd sent this information to the adoption agency. There wasn't a lot there in the medical information because she was actually adopted too, so she didn't have…
Haley Radke: Your first mother was also adopted?
Justin: Yeah, she was adopted as well. She didn't have a lot there, and there was nothing from my birth father in there. I actually still have those documents; I was looking at them recently. But I remember from the time two things standing out from it: One thing is that she wrote on it is that during her pregnancy she smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, and she wrote next to it, "Sorry." And fortunately, thankfully, I didn't have any health issues associated with that, so that's fortunate. The other thing that she wrote was that she was obese, and I [00:07:00] bring that up–it's something that sort of shames me to say–but I think that was part of... I don't know if things would've been different if she hadn't written that, but it certainly was part of my not being interested in meeting her. Because growing up I'd been a little bit of a chubby kid. It was made a big deal of in my family. And when I go back and I look at photos of that time and what I actually looked like, I'm surprised now that it was such a big deal because I don't look like it was that big of a problem.
Haley Radke: You look like a normal kid.
Justin: Yeah. But as a result, I had a lot of self-esteem issues and body image issues because I associated that with something wrong with me that wasn't acceptable in my family. My adoptive family is not a super fit, super thin group. It's not like that. It was just something that I was singled out for. [00:08:00] So at that time or around that time I never really thought about meeting her. But one thing that I did want to bring up was that in a lot of the adoption stuff that I've read and heard and listened to, the focus is really on the biological mother, so that even when you're hearing an adopted guy talking, a lot of it is like, "Oh, yeah, finding my mother." And I never really had that. I think growing up I had a good relationship with my adoptive mother, and maybe that was part of it. I think my curiosity was always about my biological father. And I think a part of that, again, was because he was the one who was Black, and I was brought up in a white family. So it was this other part of my identity that I was more curious about than him. But the fantasizing was always related to him. And I actually found out, I think when I was in high school or junior high, that... Do you know who Kareem [00:09:00] Abdul-Jabbar is?
Haley Radke: Yes.
Justin: Okay. So he actually played for the Milwaukee Bucks. I was born in Wisconsin. So he played for the Milwaukee Bucks in the '70s before he went to the Los Angeles Lakers. So I thought, you know, maybe that's my father.
Haley Radke: You don’t know. He could be. Sure.
Justin: Yeah. Yeah, sure.
Haley Radke: Were you tall?
Justin: I wanted to be tall. All of this played into it. But no, he wasn't my father.
Haley Radke: Oh.
Justin: But that was like the extent of my sort of fantasy life for that. So I graduated from high school overseas and then came back to the States for college. And then after college, I was adrift, as I think a lot of us are or were. And I was actually staying with some friends of my parents, who enrolled me or recommended that I get enrolled in this therapeutic workshop that they had done, this week-long therapeutic workshop [00:10:00]. I don't know if it still exists. It was called the Hoffman Process at the time. But the focus of it is really on intensively working with issues that you have with your parents to break free and grow. And both of these friends of my parents had done it, and they encouraged me to do it. As part of the process, before you even go, you have these pages and pages of questionnaires that you have to fill out for each parent. So individually, you have to fill out for each parent and send them in before you go. So I did all of that. I went to the workshop, and got assigned a therapist. Each person is assigned a specific therapist to work with them. It's mostly done in groups, but you'd have a therapist who would walk you through it or track you through it. [00:11:00] And I went on the first day, and the therapist said to me, "We need you to fill out all of this paperwork for your biological parents as well." And I said, "I don't know them." And he said, "Yeah, I know. It doesn't matter. Just do the best you can to fill it out. So just completely out of your imagination, fill out this one." And I don't think that this was unique to me. I think this was what they would do whenever someone was adopted, but I was the only adopted one in this group, and there were maybe about 20 of us who were there. So the actual work of this, or a big part of this work, was you would work on individual issues with each parent at a time. And as part of this work, they gave you this plastic baseball bat and a pillow, and you would be smacking that pillow as you worked out these issues. It sounds funny. There's lots of different therapies, and it was effective. A lot of this was done in a group setting, but I was always there longer, right?
Haley Radke: You had four to deal with instead of two.
Justin: Yeah, I had my two other parents that I had to whack away at, these other [00:12:00] issues. And the funny thing was that they actually wanted me to focus more on my biological parents. The second group was working with my adoptive parents, but the real focus was on my biological parents, which was interesting because I'd never thought of it that way.
Haley Radke: Can I tell you, I am stuck on you having to fill out the paperwork for them. And I'm like, did you picture Kareem in your head? Like, how did you? Honestly, I'm still stuck on that.
Justin: Yeah, and this is the '90s, so it was paperwork, right? It wasn't Adobe Acrobat: click, click, click. It's like going through these things. Yeah, no, I just made up things. I don't know, maybe they're like this, maybe they're like that. I don't think I thought of any specific person. I don't think Kareem was in my head at that point in time. But he might have been.
Haley Radke: Okay, so focusing in on them. What did that do for you?
Justin: The process was helpful [00:13:00], but the actual reason I bring it up is that the end of the whole thing, the culminating event once you finish this thing, was that you were supposed to dramatically find a time to meet with each of your parents, individually, and tell them that you love them. That was the culmination that brought it all together, right? And so I was always–still to a lot of extent am–a big rule follower and a big completionist. You give me a task, and I'm like, "I gotta get it done." So I was like, "I guess I have to find my biological parents," Right? Okay. That's part of the thing. And I think that in a way I was lucky in that because in hearing about other people searching for their biological parents and hearing about the people agonizing about writing the letter and what should I say and should I send it and how can I not seem needy. None of that was really on my mind because I was like, I got this job to do. I gotta finish, I gotta finish these things, so we'll see. [00:14:00] But I also had the benefit–
Haley Radke: I'm sorry. I've never heard anyone tell a story like this. I'm just... If you could see my face. Okay? All right. They convinced you. They convinced you to search.
Justin: No, really, a thing I am still working on is that you don't have to follow all the rules. You can cut some corners here and there. But it was beneficial in that I wasn't super emotionally invested in the outcome of it. I also had the benefit of when my bio mother had sent the medical information, something in there said that she wanted to meet me if I ever wanted to meet her. So there was that. So I get done with this and I'm in the city where I was born, so I contact the Catholic social services, where I was adopted through, and say I'm interested in meeting these people and can you help me? And they said, Yeah, we [00:15:00] have to get permission from both of your parents, though, before we can release any information. So you just sit tight and we'll get back to you. I had the expectation that it was going to take a while. A month later I got a letter from them saying both of them want to come and meet you. So we met. We met, and I was actually really fortunate in a way in that I met both of my biological parents at the same time. They were not married to each other, and they probably hadn't seen each other for 20 years or more. But I was staying with these family friends, and then they came there and we met.
Now, my adoptive parents were still overseas, and I kept them abreast of all of what was going on, and they were supportive in that way. But my parents have always been distant in that they weren't people who were good to go to in an emergency [00:16:00] for helping out with things. And there was a sense that you should be independent and take care of things for yourself. And so I didn't ever really think about asking. I involved them, but it was my thing that I was doing. I was doing my thing.
So the reunion with my bio parents was a good experience, overall. So this was in my mid-20s, yeah, early 20s. With my mother, it was always difficult. From the very start, it was difficult. As I mentioned, she was adopted, too, and hadn't met any of her biological family, so I was the only biological family. And she's a very impulsive person and she's also not very good with boundaries. I always felt afraid of being overwhelmed by her. She's also very effusive and loving, but in a way where you need to back up. And [00:17:00] I think that from the beginning to the end it was always really, really hard for me. But I felt a responsibility to be part of her life. And so she came to my wedding. She met my kids. She met my wife. We had a relationship for 20 years or something like that. And then recently, in the past–who can remember time anymore with the pandemic? I don't know, was it last week or five years ago, right? But in the recent past, I was in communication with her, but just via text because talking with her was just hard. It was just emotional and hard for me and whatever. And that was not enough for her. It wasn't satisfying for her, and she felt very frustrated that I wasn't giving her more. And there was a series of drunk texts on her part, not on my part, [00:18:00] to me that said some inappropriate things, including "Oh, your father had wanted an abortion." I think the thing she said when she apologized was, "Oh, we always hurt the people we love," as though that was an excuse. And anyway, basically it came to a head where I said, "I'm done. Don't contact me. Don't contact my family. I'm done." Which has been a good thing. It has been a good thing for me, and it's also been a good thing for my wife because I'd pushed off on my wife a lot of the responsibility of interacting with her because my wife got something out of the interaction which I didn't get.
So with my birth father, it was always a lot easier. We were a lot more similar. I definitely have some similarities, especially the impulsiveness, with my bio mother, but just personality-wise. His family says [00:19:00] this about hand mannerisms, ways of talking, personality. We were just very similar. And he was always really supportive of me but not invasive. And I even pushed him on some things. You know how we do this testing of people, right? And he was always there. He was always there, and he never pushed away through that. He wasn't adopted, and he was married to someone else and had four other kids. He had a son. He had adopted his stepson. His wife had a child when they got married. Then he had two children with his wife, and then he had another son that was a product of an affair, and that son was someone who I ended up comparing myself to a lot because his mother was also white. My two siblings, my two sisters and my stepbrother are Black. Both their parents are Black. And he grew up away. He always knew who our [00:20:00] father was but there were just issues. His mother took him away, and he grew up separate from his father and didn't really reconnect until he was a teenager. And he looked a lot like me. We looked a lot alike. But he had a lot more difficult life than I did. He grew up in different places around the US. He struggled with drug addiction and other issues growing up. And I actually only physically met him about three times, even though I was in contact with him for a long period of time. But because his life was out of order, there wasn't an even playing ground on which we could meet as equals. I always felt that we weren't at the same places in our lives and it was hard to connect in that way. And unfortunately, the times that I did meet him were sort of crisis events. Not crisis events, but my [00:21:00] wedding was the first time I met him. So like the day before I got married, he came and there were other things going on. Unfortunately, a few years ago he succumbed to his depression and committed suicide, which was obviously a very, very sad thing. I wasn't super close to him so it would be different than that kind of experience, but having someone who you compare your life to and then having that happen, them making that choice or feeling that they have to make that choice.
Haley Radke: I'm very sorry.
Justin: It's just sad. It's sad. With my father I had a good relationship. Again, he was at my wedding. He met my kids, and there were interactions and stuff like that. And we had a good relationship, if not super close. It was always there in the background. He was always someone who I could call up if I needed to. Unfortunately, a few years ago he had a stroke. He recovered from the stroke and while he was in the [00:22:00] nursing home–I guess they're supposed to put something on your legs to prevent clots from forming–a clot formed in his leg and went up to his brain and he died even after recovering from the stroke. That was actually before the death of my brother. But I don't regret; I had a lot of time with him and I got a lot out of that experience, but it's certainly something where, now, there's times where I really feel like, yeah, I wish... Because he was someone who was reliable, he was someone who I could turn to. But I'm super fortunate in that one of my sisters lives here, and I'm very close to her, and she's someone who's always super supportive. And I have an uncle who is also very supportive who I'm close to, and the larger family is amazingly supportive. They're the kind of family where they show up. Something happens, everybody's there. There was a surprise birthday party for one of my aunts. I think I was the only one who [00:23:00] didn't go. And lots of people in the extended family show up. So that's like a blessing. That's a blessing for me.
Moving now to the sort of estrangement thing. For me, I think the real rupture with my adoptive parents happened around the birth of my first son. At the time, I made the decision to add my biological father’s name to my name. This was a religious decision. I'm Muslim, and interestingly enough, there is a story in Islam about adoption, about the prophet. He had someone...This is bad. He was his slave, but yeah, okay. But he ended up adopting him because he didn't want to go back to his father even though the prophet said, You can go back to your father. He said, I want to stay with you and he changed his name to the prophet's, the family name of the prophet. And there was [00:24:00] actually a revelation that said: Don't do that. Children, even if they're adopted, they need to keep the names of their family. And so he changed his name back. So you can imagine, as an adopted person, as someone who's found your biological family, how powerful that story is for you. So I made that decision through a lot of thought and trying to broach it in a way that would be good, but it wasn't. All hell broke loose in my adoptive family. My father literally had a nervous breakdown. He told me later that this was just one thing of it, that he felt, like he felt it coming on. I guess he's had episodes like this before. But it certainly seemed to be a spark for it. And, as a result, my sister and my mother closed ranks around him, and it was very much, You're a horrible person. Why are you [00:25:00] doing this? How can you do this? And everything I tried to do to explain it away, to explain why I'm doing it, that it wasn't accepted.
Haley Radke: And I just want to be clear: you added a surname.
Justin: Yeah.
Haley Radke: You weren't like, Oh, I'm completely removing your surname. You added an extra surname.
Justin: Yeah, and my sister had gotten married and changed her name, right? But this is societally acceptable, right? So anyway, my sister was actually also a Muslim and a convert as well. I'd actually come to the religion through her and through her family, and she completely cut me off. She even sent a religious authority to me to explain why I didn't need to do what I wanted to do, which was a horrible conversation for me because it's just this piling on of this thing that seems super important to me, and telling me: Well, you don't need [00:26:00] to do that. You should respect your parents and stuff like that. Things never have really recovered with my sister. We were living in the same city, and she wouldn't see me. We had our child. She didn't come, didn't do anything. Four months later she was actually pregnant, and I went to the hospital with my parents who I'd reconnected with, and she was so pissed at me, and even to this day is pissed that I came to be there when her child was born, when my niece was born. And then, we actually ended up leaving the country, and then by the time we came back to the country, they had left and my sister still lives overseas. So we’d see each other every couple of years but it's never really resolved itself in any way. My parents also made the decision to not come when my child was born, to come and see him. And I remember calling from the hospital after he was born, calling my mom to tell her, and it was [00:27:00] like talking to a stranger. She was just very much, "Oh, I'm very happy for you. That's nice for you." As though it didn't involve her. But my mom has this way–and I'll mention this later–of just putting up this screen of this unemotional face of I'm not going to give you, I'm not going to be vulnerable. You can say whatever you want, but I'm not going to be vulnerable. And it was that same voice that I heard on there. A couple months later they did come up and we did have a conversation about it, but basically in this time–and I'm sure that you can relate and a lot of people can relate to how this felt to me and how it would feel to a lot of people–I was petrified that I was going to be disowned. I really thought that I was going to be completely cut off from my family. And it was a [00:28:00] physical terror. Completely illogical terror. This body terror to it. So the need to reconnect was very, very strong with me. I don't know if you know about this experiment, but I remember in college reading about these monkeys that they tested. Do you know what I'm talking about? About the spiky monkeys?
Haley Radke: Yeah, it's Harlow's monkey.
Justin: Right, and that image of me, because it's been years of me going back and grabbing that spiky monkey, and it was that same kind of thing because it was like, it was death, right? It's survival or it's death if you get abandoned. It's like that. But anyway, we had a conversation with my parents and the agreement, I guess, that we came to or what they were willing to do is they basically said: The person that you were before this is dead. We [00:29:00] don't recognize you, the person you are now connected to that person that you were before. We're divorced. And so the way that we're going to move forward is afresh. So we're not going to talk about anything from that past, but we'll start over and we'll build from this. So it was basically–and this was my parents' kind of way of dealing with things–but it was basically like, We're done. We're not going to talk about that anymore. Let's move forward. And those were the terms on which we restarted a relationship of sorts. And it was basically what I went along with for 15 years of "Okay, I'm not gonna bring these things up. I'm not gonna bring any of these things up."
Haley Radke: Meaning you couldn't talk about your reunion at all.
Justin: It wasn't that. They didn't have an issue with my reunion. But I certainly didn't feel comfortable talking to them about it because anything negative that I would say–I have plenty of negative things to say about [00:30:00] my biological mother–but it felt like I don't want to share that with you because you're not being vulnerable with me. It wasn't so much that. It was just specifically in terms of the name and in terms of what happened at that thing, that they didn't want to talk about any of that.
Haley Radke: It's the name. All of it's the name.
Justin: Yeah. And it's interesting about my father because I learned this later on that people had said some things to him when they were adopting about "Oh, you're not going to have a son to carry on your name." And in the past 10 years my father has really gotten into genealogy. And I don't know. I think it's a proxy for something else. Right?
Haley Radke: It has to be because we've said it was like you're just adding a name. Like you're not even erasing the original name. I mean, they erased your original name. So, okay, basically, there's this falling [00:31:00] out over the name, and then they come back to you and they're like, "Okay, we'll start fresh." And then you said you went along with that for about 15 years.
Justin: Yeah. And then, this is where you enter the story.
Haley Radke: Okay. I don't usually do cliffhanger stories. Just so you know, if this is the first episode you're listening to, we don't usually do that. So in Part 2, next Friday, you can hear the rest of Justin's story. We'll wrap up and share recommended resources with you as usual. Today, I want to highlight something for you if you are American, if you live in the United States.
I'm Canadian, so I can't participate, but I can give some space to this. So if you remember Episode 147 of the podcast, Anissa shared her [00:32:00] story of why she was deported from the United States, a country she was brought to via adoption. The organization that she works with is called Adoptees for Justice, and they have been working tirelessly to have a bill passed in the United States that would grant all adoptees citizenship, full stop.
And there's an opportunity during 2021 for a new bill. Y'all forgive me if I make mistakes with this, because again, I'm Canadian, but the action that you can take is, you can go to adopteesforjustice.com/supportletter. And there's a really easy form for you to fill out. You fill out your name, your contact info, and what state you're in, and they will email your representatives for you [00:33:00] to show support for a bill that will protect all adoptees from being deported and, instead, grant full citizenship.
So I really hope that you take the time to do that. I'm going to link this in the show notes, but again, it's adopteesforjustice.com/supportletter. You can follow them for more details and updates. They are looking to get 18,000 people to sign this support letter and send out these emails to your representatives in order to make a huge impact and have other politicians and legislators be able to support this bill. So we're asking for your help.
I'm asking for your help. The adoptees like Anissa who have been deported are asking for your help, and it's a really quick, fast way you can support them. So please do that [00:34:00] today. And I hope to keep you up to date with some other ways you can get active in helping adoptee rights in various ways. This is a really important one, citizenship, adopteesforjustice.com/supportletter. And if you're like, Wait what are you talking about? Make sure you go back and listen to Anissa's episode and it will blow your mind that this is happening. All right. Thanks so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday, where we'll be back with Part 2 of Justin's story.
