230 Marcy Axness, Ph.D.
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Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/230
Haley: This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.
(Intro music) You are listening to adoptees on the podcast adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm your host, Haley Radke today. We are excited to welcome Dr. Marcy Axness. This episode is a mix of a history lesson about adoptee activism and the psychological impacts of infant and mother separation. Marcy has her PhD in early human development and brings a unique expertise and lens to the adopted person's experience.
We discuss what it's like if we bring consciousness to our experiences and how we can be always moving towards healing. But also, unfortunately, there will likely always be opportunities for more healing. 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.
Before we get started, I wanted to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on AdopteesOn.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. Let's listen in.
I'm so pleased to welcome to adoptees on Dr. Marcy Axness. Welcome Marcy. Thank you.
Marcy: Great to be with you.
Haley: I have heard so much about you. You're a prolific in the adoption community and have been doing this work for so many years, but I would love it if you would start by sharing a little of your story with us.
Marcy: Wow. My story. Well, I was one of the very first pioneering what they called independent adoptions at the time, what we would call an open adoption. Back in the fifties. So my birth mother, or at the time prospective birth mother, I am pretty clear always about a pregnant mother being only prospective at the most when it comes to adoption.
But she, she had really firmly decided that she was, that she couldn't parent me, although she and my birth father at the time were living as man and wife. They were living this sort of pretend life in Santa Barbara, his hometown. And one day Liz, my birth mom, she went crying to their next door neighbor, Marcy Densmore.
They're all dead now, so I can use their whole names. She said, you know, we're not married and I can't keep this child, and what am I going to do? And Marcy had a dear friend who had suffered some pretty severe reproductive losses and was looking to adopt. She had a friend who had, had recently done a, a private adoption and so, They all put their heads together and Liz moved up to San Francisco to be near my prospective adoptive parents, Bea and Bob, and they went shopping together.
They had lunch at Blums together, all of those kind of fairy tale ish things. And I was born, I spent six days in the newborn nursery for reasons that, like I said, everyone's long since dead, so I really, I never was able to find out why, but after six days, I was taken home to a not really healthy adoptive family, and when I was 21, my adoptive mother Bea died of ovarian cancer.
And not long after that, my adoptive father, they had divorced when I was 11, by the way. Not long after my adopt, my adoptive father took me to lunch and he said something like, aren't, are you interested in meeting your real mother? That, that was the terminology he used, and I really wasn't all that interested.
He seemed almost more interested than I did. But anyway, he couldn't remember her married name. She got married shortly after she relinquished me and then had two other children, a son and a daughter, who I'm still close with to this day. And he just, my, my, my adoptive father who had a mind, like a steel trap, he could not remember her married name, but he did remember that she had some complications with her first delivery and he donated one pint of blood at Irwin Memorial Blood Bank in San Francisco.
He called them up, this is 20 years later, and said, I donated a pint of blood in 1957 or whatever it was, and they had the record and they gave him the name and I was on the phone with her like later that day. And you know, reunions. As many people as there are in the world or adopted people or people who've been separated from their biological family, there are that many reunion stories. Mine is probably somewhat in the typical range. We had this wonderful honeymoon period and we had a blind date at a fern bar in San Francisco, , and then we had our ups and downs. I, you know, I uninvited her to my wedding, which years later in various therapies I kind of came to see, form of recapitulation, like, let me show you how it feels to be invited and then uninvited. I didn't get that at all at the time, but absolutely. I have seen, you know, through the decades how we do these, kind of reenact these patterns and Freud would say that this is our way of remembering anyway, so.
We were estranged for 10 years and then not long after the birth of my second child, Annette Baron, who's name I'm sure is familiar to many of your listeners, she was really, I considered the matrefamilias of the adoption reform movement. She, with Ruben Panner and another one of their colleagues, wrote The Adoption Triangle way back in the, I wanna say, seventies.
Three social workers who sort of had an awakening about. What they were doing and the effects it was having on all, all members of the, of the constellation, which we came to call it constellation instead of triad, cuz it's just ripples out so far. Anyway, Annette said to me at that point, she said, don't continue the, the, the separation.
Do everything you can to not continue the separation. So one day I picked up the phone and I called her. And we were in touch ever since. I was at her death bed. This was, you know, 10, 5, 8 years ago, something like that. And we had a, a really quite a good relationship than the whole, and there's a whole other story with my birth father, but I will say I met them both in the same week and that is a lot.
Haley: Oh my goodness. Do not recommend. What's the ?
Marcy: You know, it's, You know, I had this big, exciting blind date reunion with my birth mom, and it turns out that within the prior, within that previous year, she had gotten back in touch with him. I mean, it was kind of very coincidental or synchronistic. If you will.
And so she picked up the phone, she said, guess who called me? And you know, so she. had plans. We jumped into her... and, and the reason I was up in the Bay Area actually at that time was I had sprained my ankle very bad. I was hoping to be a professional dancer at the time, but I had sprained my ankle really badly.
I didn't have an automatic transmission car, and so in Los Angeles, if you can't drive your car, you're pretty much dead in the water. So we just decided, hey, you know, my aunt, who was really much more like a mother to me, she said, come on up here for a couple of weeks. And that's why it even happened. I just happened to be in the area anyway.
So Liz came up with this whole plan of, instead of you flying home, let's hop into my VW bug and I will drive, we'll drive back to LA and we'll stop in Santa Barbara and you can meet your birth father. So it was all a, a real whirlwind at a time when I personally was still quite, I guess, asleep, as we say.
Or in the fog, there's various terms that are thrown around. So it was I, I think probably a lot of it washed over and off me. You know, I, I believe I lived a lot of my life, had lived a lot of my life up to that point semi dissociated, truly. But, you know, so that's, that's the basic reunion story. One, one button that I like to put on it now that I'm in my mid sixties, is now my birth mom like I said, died, I wanna say eight years ago.
My birth father died quite a bit before then. I still cannot go to Sacramento and get my original birth certificate and that is just an outrage. So, and yeah, so I'll stop now, and see, see where you wanna take this.
Haley: There are so many things. Thank you for sharing your story and yes, original birth certificate access, we are absolutely support that here. So outrageous is understatement that we can't have that document...
Marcy: and I've been involved in many, many movements. You know, I've written so many letters, you know, with my little adoption expert, whatever, nomenclature. But my own state, which is supposedly one of the most progressive in the country anyway.
Yeah. So, and then the one other thing, I'll just button, you know, a book came out not long ago called, I'm Glad My Mother Died. I think it was, I think the title of something like that by an actress who was writing about her years as a child actor and her like horrible mother. And I will say, That I have a certain amount of gratitude that my adoptive mother died when I was young.
It freed me in so many ways, in ways that I've watched other friends of mine with mothers not necessarily adopt, you know, adoption related, but just narcissistic mothers like my mom was, and they haven't been freed like that. So I'm quite grateful. And, you know, in my dark humor ways, I, I often have said, you know, my parents had the good graces to die when I was young, but they were older when I was adopted too, so, you know what I mean?
Haley: Mm-hmm.
Marcy: So, yeah, there's that.
Haley: Well, I mean, I, I appreciate you saying that because I think so many people feel like their hands are tied and they don't wanna hurt. But you know, I mean, you choose whatever you'd like to do. There's not a prescriptive thing, but you should have a right to have your information and connection to the people you wanna be connected to.
Marcy: Absolutely. But I, I know for myself, I, I was not a late discovery adoptee. My parents told me from the very beginning, I had The Chosen Baby, was it the chosen baby right, in my bookshelf. And, and yet I absolutely picked up so strongly on the vibe that it was not okay to ask about anything related to who I was or where I came from.
And I had all, you know, my mom had had a dear, dear friend Mary Owens, she had this really long waist length hair and she sang, You Are My Sunshine, and she kind of had this mythic place in my child mind. And I kind of, I think I, I definitely had a fantasy that this was really my mother. And I'm sure that this is an experience.
I know it is shared by many adoptees. We have this whole like fantasy scenario because we're not allowed to ask about just the very pedestrian regular scenario, that is most likely the case.
Haley: Right? Right. All of our celebrity parents in the ghost kingdom. , quick question. So you're named after that neighbor cuz she connected you?
Marcy: Yes.
Haley: Okay. Yes. Okay. I thought so.
Marcy: But I will, I will share with you and your listeners that my birth name, that I claim very proud. Is Catherine. Catherine McDavid. Mm. I'm a I'm a Scott's lass, all through and through.
Haley: Okay. So moving forward in time, you do a lot of education and I think you, you switched gears once you had your children. So can you talk a little bit about that and the expertise that that you have in early childhood and perinatal development, all of those things?
Marcy: Yeah. My adoption work really was just such an organically emerging thing after my second child was born. My daughter, as part of, you know, the day before she was born, I had this spontaneous regression is the, is the way I've come to understand it, that it was just, it was so very visceral and physical and I just found myself lying in bed sobbing and sobbing and saying these words over and over. "Mommy doesn't want me, mommy doesn't want me." And the words didn't come from my brain. They just like came up from my gut and out my mouth and I was, I was surprised to hear them and yet I had read just enough about prenatal psychology at the time to kind of in, in real time go, oh, I bet that's what that is. You know, I didn't spend much time analyzing it. I was too busy, like literally vomiting and just, it was a purge and it just kind of cleared the way for my daughter to just come through such an easy birth.
And going back not long after that, I got back in touch with Annette Baron, whom I had interviewed. I used to work for C B S News in LA and I had interviewed her for a series called Adoptees in Search. And you know, I can still, I literally, these, what, 45 years later, can still hear, her words like from that piece in my head, you know, "Adoptive parents, if their children in adulthood seek to search, need not feel threatened. They're looking for someone who looks like them. They're looking for someone who feels like them genetically, but emotionally their ties will still be with their adoptive parents." I mean, those are lit word for word in its words and, but here's the point here. After we were done and the crew was packing up their equipment, and Annette and I were just chatting. She said to me very like, she got very serious. She said, she gave me her card. She said, look, feel free to call me if you ever need me, if you ever wanna talk. And I at age 21, and this is all the same year I met my birth parents. This is what kind of inspired me to propose that I do this piece.
I was like, What for? I felt like I was, I was the ever gleaming, hyper achieving , good adoptee, like all the time. And I just couldn't imagine what she was talking about, about having any issues or anything. And, and then so what it was almost 15 years later that I called her and when, when I told her who was calling, she didn't even miss a beat. Like she, Annette was always so beautifully unfazed by anything, and she had me, I, I described to her my experience and I, I said, I said, do you think it's possible that adoptees come into the world already wounded in some way already, you know? And she said, well, there's this woman, Nancy Verrier and she's writing about something she calls the primal wound and said it like it was real exotic. And, and I just went, ding, ding, ding. Like, I need that. And at the time, I don't even know if Nancy's book had come out. She had just had an article in the, the Journal of the Association for Pre and Perinatal Psychology and Health. Anyway, I got that and then I ended up in Annette's kitchen soon thereafter over coffee. And she did say to me, we were kind of commiserating over the state of adoption at the time. This is in the early nineties, mind you, she said, you know when you can advertise for children next to the Volvos in the newspaper, you know you've gone wrong as a society and I was getting ready to go to AAC's next conference. I had been to AAC before and she said, no, if you, if you really wanna see the cutting edge of what's happening, get yourself out to Traverse City, Michigan to Jim Ritter's conference on open adoption. And so long story short, I go there, I'm sitting there, I'm listening.
I listen to the adoptee talk about adoption issues. And I had just started my own primal therapy. So there, there you have a dangerous situation, like a bit of a powder keg and I, I just was so, just so full of passion for the topic and it was so immediate for me because I was just really delving into it right then in therapy, that I went up to the organizer, Jim Ritter at the break and I said, I think there's room for another perspective. Would it be possible for me to have five minutes at the microphone? So he gave that to me and that was the beginning. It was like I just got up there and talked about, you know, writhing on the ground, getting back in touch with these, these visceral, I won't even call them emotions, because emotions are fairly a little more advanced in terms of nervous system development and brain develop.
They're like states, states that, that as a baby, we don't yet have the equipment as a newborn and a prenate, we don't yet have the equipment, the parasympathetic, calming branch of our nervous, nervous system, and we're just sort of flooded with these overwhelming states really. Anyway, so I just started writing and there were, at the time, there were magazines, Roots and Wings.
I was big into writing letters to the editor. My proudest moment was a letter to the editor in Time Magazine, which I have perma plaque in some box somewhere, you know, in response to always trying, I mean, I've really had, I've been pretty one note in what I've tried to teach through all these decades is that I'm a pragmatist.
I, I understand the argument that adoption should be abolished and we should have a guardian system. I, and I absolutely can see the merit in those. But I'm also a pragmatist and I just sort of believe adoption's always going to be with us. So if it is, let's do it in the most humane, healing way. And the number one thing is to understand that everyone comes to this experience with deep losses.
And so this whole relationship is built on deep losses and, and most often upon ungrieved losses. And this is where we run into so many problems. You know, when we swallow our grief, tuck away our grief, sweep it under the rug, like nothing good happens. So that's really all I was writing on throughout the nineties and writing about my own healing experiences and such.
And then I did shift gears because once I got into the prenatal piece, Haley, what I recognized is these issues, you know, being carried in a stressed womb, being carried as an ambivalent, you know, by an ambivalent mother. By a mother who possibly contemplated terminating the pregnancy. These are not the sole province of adoptee, of adoptee people.
A lot of people go through this, but within their biological family, and in some ways in kind of flipping the, the framework, I've said in some ways adoptees have a bit of a leg up because at least we know what happened to us. Think about the person who is kept in their biological family, but did go through all of that.
They were conceived through an affair, or they were, yeah. Who knows? I mean, there's so many different scenarios, but then it's like you're in your family and everything's good and you can't put your finger on what's going on and why you feel so out of your skin and all these things. So that's why I shifted gears and, and really started looking more into, sort of looking in a human development lens. And so that's what I got my doctorate in, was early human development with a, with an emphasis on prenatal development. And then I, you know, I wrote my book that came out in 2012, Parenting for Peace, Raising the Next Generation of Peacemakers, which it's based on seven steps in time.
And the first five step, I mean step five is postpartum. So you can see how front loaded it is, and I really believe that that is the way that we're gonna get some traction on a lot of our issues in our societies, really finally recognizing how early these things are in play.
Haley: Hearing some of the information we know about how much, you know, stress soup Uber cooked in to just be graphic about it.
Marcy: Yeah. Stress soup. That's good.
Haley: It can be really disheartening to think about for me because I'm like, well, I mean, is there anything you do? But it's, that's what happened. Right? So I think the more we understand about that, it can just be heavier and heavier on us. What have you seen? In terms of like a positive thing, like we know that you mentioned so that's a positive mm-hmm. . But being aware of that, how can that be helpful for an adopted person?
Marcy: Well, for one big principle that informs so much of my, my work and my life is that consciousness can change everything. And by consciousness I don't mean the state of being awake, I mean the contents of our consciousness.
And this goes for the pregnant mother with a crisis pregnancy too. Most long-term relationship people, if you say, what's the secret to your good relationship, almost always the answer is communication. So I would say this goes for this too. We carry so many selves within our own self, we carry the prenate that we were still and always, we carry, you know, , as I said in one of my talks, it gets real crowded in there so.
But you know, if we look at that in this, if we could kind of see ourselves more in quantum terms, like there's always the opportunity for healing and you know, that's sort of a, a double edged sword. While there's always opportunities for healing, the healing is always happening. It's... how many times I got bit in the butt by thinking, oh, that was the piece.
You know, whatever breakthrough I had in therapy that day, oh, now I'm fixed. Now I'm good. All right, I'm good. And I actually, it exists in print in some places, kind of when I was in that, like, ugh, I finally discovered the golden key and now I'm good. My mantra now is "always healing, never healed", which can sound disheartening.
I've never healed. And yes, sometimes it is a pain in the ass. I'm not gonna lie. Sometimes it's like I actually just started up a new round of therapy. I mean, here I am at 66 years old. I've been doing therapy for 45 years. All different kinds, modalities, whatever. And honestly, there are times it's like, oh, going back and dealing with this stuff is like the last thing I wanna do.
And yet, you know, if it hasn't sort of healed me, well then what has it done for me? It has illuminated the minefield, whereby I'm no longer sort of stumbling around and oh my God, I just stepped on a mine and why did I have such a huge emotional response to this little trivial thing that happened just now?
It's like I know where those are and I can recognize them really quickly. It doesn't mean that I don't sometimes get triggered. It's way, way less. I didn't even like that term by the way. Triggered. It's so violent but...
Haley: Activated That's....
Marcy: Activated There you go. Just this last week I had a really intense session with my new therapist and it had to do with shame. And, you know, shame. I mean, since Brenee Brown came out and sort of took shame out of the closet and made a big thing about it, a lot of people talk about it, including me. And yet here I am, 45 years into therapy and just sort of like a very, very intensive state, like overwhelming state experience of shame, didn't come up for me to deal with until now. That's crazy. And so to your question, how can we look at it in a positive way rather than disheartening way? I really believe that awareness and consciousness, putting the light of consciousness on something right there is just your, your leaps and bounds ahead.
Like I said to my therapist recently, how many times I've wished I could be one of those Ignorance Is Bliss people. Have you had that? You know,
Haley: Oh yes.
Marcy: You like, Ugh, I wish I could just be so blissfully ignorant, and walk through, you know, and just live happily through the fog. But then we get into karma and who you are as a person.
I'm a good Aquarius. That's just not me. And so I could kind of play around at wishing it were me, but it isn't. And you know, when you shine the light of consciousness and awareness on anything that's, that's immediately gonna bring some healing movement. I think one of the things we like to be looking for, not just as adopted people, but as human beings, is to avoid stasis, just this calcification in one place. We're kind of like sharks. We need to keep moving.
Haley: Well, one of the things that I have seen over time, I, I mean I'm newer in community if we're comparing our stories , but I've been podcasting for six years, sort of in adoption land for maybe a decade and I see this thing where people sort of discover everything about the primal wound and you know, some of what we've touched on today, and then they get stuck. It's, and, and I think some folks can, you know, be accused of like living in this victimhood mentality.
Marcy: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Haley: And I wonder if you can speak to that a little bit because I mean, I think there is a absolutely a time for like, oh my gosh, this is what happened to me and you're becoming aware.
And of course you'll have that time period of maybe being stuck, feeling stuck and staying in that, but how do we help those folks move into the next state? Or should we, should we just let them be in there? If that's, I just don't think it's productive. But anyway, you go.
Marcy: I, I wrote an article about this um, again, way back in the nineties when I was writing so much about adoption and speaking and at conferences and such. And when Nancy's book first came out, yeah, there was a bit of controversy around it, and one of my close colleagues wrote a critique of it, and so then I wrote kind of an, an answer to that. The title of my article was In Defense of the Primal Wound, and it circulated as that for a while, and then once Nancy and I became friends, she did say to me at one point, I don't feel like I, I need to be defended.
So I changed the title, it's now In Appreciation of the Primal Wound, and I'm pretty sure it's on my website. You think I would know, but I don't for sure. Pretty sure it is, but you can certainly Google it. It's all over in, In Appreciation of the Primal Wound, but I did address this issue; is the primal wound...? Well, the way I set it up in the article. As I recall, I started with a, a, a quick little snapshot from my now ex-husband's life, which is he, he was having this terrible, terrible pain behind his ankle, in his ankle or his foot, and he didn't know what it was, and it was really holding him back. And finally he went to the doctor and it had a name.
I don't remember if it was plantar fascitis at this point, but that was such a relief. It was, and we all know that feeling. Something's bothering us, and we find out that like there is a name for this and this is what it is, and this is, these are its features, these are its symptoms. So if you're feeling this way, this way, this way, that's understandable.
It's explainable. And that to me is the gift of the primal wound. It's like how many of us had been or have been living in the grips of something kind of amorphous? And, and nameless, but, and yet definitely there, but so kind of intangible. And then along comes Nancy Verrier, who, who is an adoptive mother herself and also a biological mother.
So she had felt these differences beyond just being different daughters. She did a deep study of Bowlby and all of the attachment literature, and she came to find that We kind of turned a blind eye to what we had learned about attachment when it comes to adoption. Sort of like, oh, adoption's supposed to insert this big exception to basic mammalian principles.
We are mammals. We are born with what Joseph Chilton Pierce, I believe, called biological imperatives. And one of them is that you stay connected with your biological mother. They've counted up to something like 17 or more avenues of kind of mutual regulation that happen at between the nervous system of the biological mother and the baby.
I mean, this is just looking at it just strictly from a neurobiological standpoint. Okay. And I find that that is a way that you can help people really get it. You know, without putting a whole overlay of is adoption good or bad, or, You know, even the whole cultural sociocultural piece of 'we've separated this person from his or her familial story and, and biological origins' just sticking with the, the mammalian thing.
We don't, we don't like to take puppies from their mothers until they're at least six or eight weeks old for God's sake. So I find that that's kind of a common ground to help people, kind of get a frame of reference that is a little bit more objective and less controversial, I guess. And so the primal wound really just came into a huge void.
There was, there was a void there. I think that's why it was such a huge revolution, really. I mean, it was a watershed moment in, in adoption land, as you would call it. So then, yes, one of the criticisms. Is that, then people just go, okay, that's, that's my answer. I'm a victim. I'm just gonna wallow here.
Nancy Verrier herself wrote a subsequent book in which she tried to, you know, really answered your question, which is, it's like, yes, so, so now what? Now that you've explained this, John, now that you know you have plantar fasciitis, you're not just going to sit there, you're gonna go to physical therapy, you're gonna ice it, you're gonna do all these things.
And so you can kinda look at the primal wound the same way. It's like, now that this has restored a certain sense of sanity to me, I mean in, in a certain way we're, we're gaslighted so much. Adoptees. You're grateful and you're happy and you're chosen and you're special. How many of us were grew up feeling special?
And the one last piece about that is, I mentioned James Hillman in in my article, James Hillman was a very popular writer for like a minute and a half back in the nineties. He wrote a book called The Souls Code and in in writing about things like your early story and being upset about it, his basic argument was, his basic position was the same as a lot of people's, I think, who have sort of a more cosmic view of like, we choose the lives we come into.
It's a whole, you know, more eastern philosophy of we live many lives and when we're in the spirit world, we choose the next life so that we can learn the lessons we need to learn and such. And his, his position is, It's ridiculous to complain about anything because you chose it, which I just find so like inhuman because I do believe, I happen to believe that more Eastern sort of leaning thing.
I believe in karma. I believe I've had other lives and I, and I can believe that I chose to come into life in this more complicated way, but that was when I was in the spirit realm. Then I also, in a paradoxical way, for that life to come to fruition, I need basic human empathy for that painful human experience that I went through, if that makes sense.
So it's a kind of a mobious strip kind of, kind of a thing. So I encourage anybody who has read The Primal Wound and who's just really wallowing in that. I think there is a moment to wallow. Hell, we've, you know, we've gone through, for me it was 31 years by the time I read The Primal Wound. For others, it's less, more, whatever you've gone through all these years of being told, no, you don't feel this.
Take your moment, take your weeks, your months, whatever it takes, but always keep in mind that next question, so as Mary Oliver would say, so now what are you going to do with this one wild and precious life? Now that you've got some more intactness to you by being empathized with, that's essentially what it is.
You've been heard, you've been felt. Now what's next?
Haley: I'm so grateful for that answer because it is such a simple quote, unquote question I asked you, but it's so complicated. It's really I love that picture of the Mobius Strip. It really is exactly right. I'm curious, I I just found this out that you were on a four year sabbatical from anything adoption related.
What was that like for you after being in this work for so long and knowing how taxing that can be?
Marcy: Right. Well, actually, let me back up a little bit because I will say that one other thing that contributed to me changing gears out of adoption, not so much out of adoption, but to broaden it to, to human development in general and and how important those very early years are, is a little thing called alt adoption. It was the ascendancy of the internet in the early two thousands and the absolute like wild west of the internet and some of the just viciousness and the extreme, what, just vitriol that you could encounter online and I mean, honestly, I may never be healed enough to, to be willing to be happy to walk into that.
So I was like no thanks. You know, I, I got a few tastes of it and very little that I write about I think it's very controversial. But anyway, I was like, Hmm, I'm just gonna take a minute there. So I had actually stepped back from adoption per se, you know, quite a few, you know, at the beginning, like 2003 or so, or even before that when I was doing my doctorate. Now I got deep into the topics that I've been talking about actually, how very important those, those months of the mother's pregnancy are, you know, how shaping those are for, for a human being and those early years.
And so I was very involved in that. I was very involved in Waldorf education cuz my kids went to a Waldorf school and so I, you know, my interests got naturally pulled into what my life experience was. And then when my book came out, I was crazy with the online promotion and the blogging and sending out newsletters and just all of that. And, right around the time that I, you know, this sabbatical opportunity came up, I was also sort of wearying of all of that.
And so it kind of was a perfect storm really of certain financial need. I mean, I definitely, you know, took this job out of financial need. It turns out that, you know, writing and speaking about human, early human welfare and mother well, you know, women's welfare does not necessarily pay the bills. And, you know, we see with what's going on around us right now, where the state of women's women's healthcare is and, and child welfare and all of that is all pretty depressing.
So, you know, it was like a complete pivot. And I was deeply engaged. I worked at a newspaper and basically wrote most of the stories for this small community newspaper, which is one of the last bastions of newspapers, by the way, are community newspapers, and they're very important. And so it was, it was a really good experience to, to be writing like, like workmanship writing, writing, writing, writing every single day about just the basic news.
And so, you know, kind of coming back, I've been sitting here and just kind of waiting for some real organic impulses. Like where do I want to put my, my energies and my, and my efforts. I do feel that my heart, you know, my heart really is in adoption first and foremost. I mean, that, that's, it's my ground of being, right?
And so it's, it's a basic frame of reference for me. I had just, just right when I, before I took the sabbatical, I had just started rolling out what I called my 25th anniversary edition of my Adoption Insight series, which were just these writings from the nineties. I have two adoption insight booklets that came out at the end of the nineties, and I was just starting to roll those out when this happened, and so that kind of got put on hold.
So, you know, I may start putting those up on my website again, I don't know.
Haley: Their 30th anniversary .
Marcy: Yeah, exactly. Hello. Thank you. Yeah, it really is. It really, if I, if I, you know, hold off and do it next year it will be the 30th anniversary and I'm marking it really from that watershed moment at Jim Ritter's conference, which was amazing.
And then I, I will say to footnote that then I, I had the honor of being invited by Jim Ritter to come and present at subsequent of his open adoption conferences in Traverse City, which really did set the bar. There's never really been anything else ever like them since, I don't think, and it was all the big, you know, Joyce Pavo, Annette Baron, Ruben Panner, all the true, you know, Sharon Kaplan Roszia just all the lights.
Patricia Dorner, who I love, and adore.
Haley: I think the only one of those people I've gotten to like learn under in person is Sharon and she is just like tremendous.
Marcy: Sharon is just a wonderful . Yes.
Haley: Yes. Okay. I know we're wrapping up and we're gonna talk about our recommended resources and ...
Marcy: oh yes.
Haley: But first I just wanna ask, is there any, like one thing that you really wanna say to fellow adoptee.
Just a broad question. Easy, easy peasy.
Marcy: Oh, that is a broad question. You have a huge community and adopted people are at such different places, you know, so it's, it's, I guess I would just say that you were wanted by the universe to be here no matter what may be living way down deep in your marrow. You were wanted and you were welcomed.
Haley: Thank you. Okay, so my recommendation for folks is to check out your website.
You have so many blogs as you've referred to, extensive writings on adoption. I, I read so many articles and was like, print. I still print them off, underlining things, and what I see happening is, Some one thing is welcome. There's new adoptees all the time, coming in and writing. They're like starting their blogs and they're writing.
I really wanna encourage people to go back and see what other folks have done, you know, and we think we're like starting something new here. But there's decades and decades of work. Okay, go ahead.
Marcy: I wanna thank you so much for saying that. If you had said if there's something that you wanna say to adoption activists, yes. I honestly, I often find it really irritating when I hear a, a younger adopted person, an activist who, in their expounding on these things, never gives any indication of being aware of, at all, let alone appreciative of the shoulders upon which they are standing, whose shoulders they're standing on.
People, you know, people have been doing this work for 30, 40, 50 years and they laid a foundation and, and it only strengthens and enriches, you know, the work of people in your, in your cohort to know that and, and to un and to have an awareness of, of what they're building upon. So thank you for saying that.
Oh my goodness. Thank you.
Haley: Absolutely. Well, and the other thing on your website, I mean, I'm still in the middle of parenting littles. I have two little boys. I'm eight. Eight and 10. and the quote unquote new thing now that's trending is gentle parenting, but your work on Parenting for Peace is really a piece of that.
Again, it's foundational for you. Like, look at me kind of funny. Have you heard of this? The Gentle Parenting, but you've....
Marcy: heard of Gentle Parenting? I was like, everything old is new again.
Haley: Uhhuh. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, I for our parents out there who are looking for something like that, you of course are an expert in that as well.
And we didn't even get to touch on adoptee parenting, Marcy, this time went by so fast. Okay. What do you wanna recommend to us?
Marcy: Well, my recommendation is I, I wanted to come up with something that hopefully nobody else had recommended, and maybe that's true. So this is, this was a cassette that I have an actual cassette tape but I know it's available in more modern formats too.
So my recommendation is called Warming the Stone Child: Myths and Stories of Abandonment and the Unmothered Child, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. And she was she wrote Women Who Run with the Wolves in the nineties. She was huge in the nineties, and I was listening to the tape one day and she was talking about ways to get in touch with your memories, childhood memories.
I, I don't think I'm unusual as a, a traumatized child that I don't have a lot of memories of my childhood. It, it's kind of a blank, kind of just blankness there. And so I was listening to her tape and one of her recommendations was think about what was your favorite book or your favorite movie or your favorite music when you were a small child.
And even when I first heard her say that, I was like, oh, I can never remember that, but I let that percolate, and suddenly what came to my mind is Thumbalina. When I was little, I had the book Thumbalina. It's not the same one I have now, I'm sure old outdated edition. But I went and I got a copy of this and I'll just read you the first.
Do I have time to read the first few lines? Okay. And I, after I had this big discovery, I, I started sharing this whole thing when I would, when I would do talks at adoption conferences. So I, and I would put the pictures up on the, on PowerPoint, but the story starts:
"There was once a woman who did so want to have a weed child of her own, but she had no idea where she was to get it from. She went off to an old witch and said to her, I would so dearly like to have a little child. Do, please tell me where I can find one."
That's how the story begins. Oh my, that was my favorite book. The social workers didn't like the old witch part. But anyway, and then the illustrations in this book just absolutely like captured this tiny little, like an alien.
I I, I, I know that alien is a term that comes up often in the narrat, narratives of adoptees, but you know, just feeling like so out of place in a dangerous world. And all of these illustrations, which again, are not exactly the ones that I would've seen as a child, but they would've been similar. You know, just this little, little fairy girl, this little flower size girl.
Just in all these dangerous situations.
Haley: You showed me one photo or one picture of, she's on this giant lily pad in.
Marcy: Yeah. With these big, ominous looking fish underneath the water.
Haley: They look like they're gonna eat her any second.
Marcy: Nibbling away at the stem of the, of the lily pad. I mean, I, I was like, this was such a revelation to me. It opened up a huge door to my inner life as a child. It was just such a blessing. So, you know, she's wonderful. All of her stuff is great. I recommend all of her stuff.
Haley: Amazing. And fellow adoptee?
Marcy: Yes. Yes, that's right. Oh, and, and, . I got a fan email from Dr. Estés about my article about the primal wound. That was like, wow, that was something else.
Haley: Oh my goodness.
Marcy: Yep. She just emailed me. I know.
Haley: Top 10 day of your life. Like what a memory.
Marcy: Yeah. Really.
Haley: Amazing. Thank you so much. I've just really enjoyed our conversation and your insights. Where can we follow you and connect with you online?
Marcy: My website is my name, MarcyAxness.com or another way to do it, it's easier to remember, ParentingForPeace.com, all all run together, goes to the same place.
Haley: Thank you, Marcy.
Marcy: My pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Haley: Marcy's Social media links are also in the show notes for you. If you are listening on a podcast app on your phone. You can click on the cover of this episode and it'll bring you to a link for this episode's. Show notes on adoptees on.com where you can find all the show notes for every episode we've ever published.
Every amazing episode of Adoptees On is brought to you by the folks who support US Monthly on Patreon, who are the real heroes. Thank you. Patrons have been receiving podcast episodes called Adoptees Off Script every single Monday in their podcast apps automatically. And my main co-host, Carrie Cahill Mulligan and I have been doing a little mini-series on the abhorrent practices adoption agencies and pregnancy care centers have been using to coerce expected mothers to relinquish their babies. To this day.
If you need a little fire lid underneath you to get into activism, I think the two episodes we released on the 14th of November and the 21st this month are just the trick for you. So if you join us at AdopteesOn.com/community, you can hear My Spicy Takes About Brave Love.
Yuck. Thanks very much for listening. Let's talk again next. Where we are going to be celebrating a really exciting milestone for the podcast