Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/303

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

You are listening to adoptees on the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. What a delight to host our guest today, Craig Mod, the author of Things Become Other Things, A Walking Memoir joins us to share his story. We deep dive into Craig's recent reunion with his birth mother, including the complexities of searching in the digital age when so much of our personal information is publicly available.

Being fairly new to adoptee land Craig also gave me a chance to talk through some of those things that complicate the usual sunshine and rainbow views of adoption. We do make reference [00:01:00] to sexual assault briefly at a couple of different points during this conversation. So please take care when deciding if this is a safe episode for you to listen to.

We wrap up with some recommended resources and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com. Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Craig Mod. Welcome, Craig.

Craig Mod: Thanks for having me.

Haley Radke: I'd love it. If you would start the way we usually do, if you would share some of your story with us.

Craig Mod: I am a writer and photographer and 99% of my work is book related writing books. And for most of my life I've been like an independent book maker all throughout my twenties and a big chunk of my thirties, I was running independent presses and or I was art directing independent presses and involved with the publishing world in that capacity.

And then I did some digital book stuff around [00:02:00] 2010, but now I am just fully my own person producing and writing books that are mainly connected with my big walks across Japan. So I've been living in Japan for 25 years. I moved here when I was 19 and for the last decade or so, last 15 years, I've been doing huge walks across the country.

So I've walked from Tokyo to Kyoto three times on various different paths to Nakasendo, the Tōkaidō. I've done pilgrimage roots. I've walked a lot of the Kii peninsula, so I've just really tried to touch as much of the country as I can on foot. And that is my life now. So it's working on the books, living in Japan, which is my home.

I consider myself an immigrant to the country. I bristle at the word expat, which is filled with these connotations of apartness and like living above a place or a people. And also historically, if you kinda look into it it's fairly racist to a certain degree. There's a kind of built in racism, [00:03:00] embedded in the word, in the sense that expats were their own little group and they felt like they were better than the locals.

And so I definitely don't consider myself that at all. In fact I've struggled my whole life to connect with the expats that are here. It's I don't naturally feel an affinity towards the moneyed kind of foreigners that choose to live in, not just Japan, but like a lot of Asia.

That's a pretty common trope. So I consider myself an immigrant trying to be as engaged as possible with the country and the people and try to be an additive part of the world here. And I try to do that through my books and walks and I write for the New York Times and all sorts of stuff. So that's basically it.

Haley Radke: And how about your adoption story? When did you find out you were adopted?

Craig Mod: I found out I was adopted for as long as I've had memory. I don't, there's no, I have a vague, fuzzy memory of maybe when I was, I don't know, four or five or something like of [00:04:00] getting an adoption book. And I think my adoptive parents, and at that point it was just my mom.

So the parents who adopted me got divorced almost immediately. So I was raised by my mom and her parents, and I just remember getting this kind of, this sort of picture book for adopted kids and them explaining it to me and it not making any sense. I think this is this is the thing I think adopted parents misjudge over and over and over again, is how complex emotionally and like physiologically, this idea of birthing and who you come from and what you come out of and who you know, who you literally, who you come out of and how that's family.

And I remember for years and years asking my mom my parents went to Hawaii on their honeymoon and I just assumed that babies like sprouted in bellies on honeymoons. That's how where I thought kids came from. And I [00:05:00] remember asking, even after I knew I was adopted over and over again, I'd tell friends, oh, I've technically I've been to Hawaii because like I was in my mom's belly, but I remember saying that over, several times to people, to kids and thinking back on it now, it's just so funny how that it didn't register for me what it really meant to be adopted. And then I think my parents, I mean my father taught me like literally nothing. It's like amazing to think back to my adoptive father. He's gone now and there's a whole story of burying him.

He moved into the woods and I had to go bury him alone. And I wrote this whole novel based off of that, which is not published, thank God. But that was like my training novel basically. I used that to get a bunch of residencies. I did Ragdale and VCCA and I've gotten into Tin House with it and stuff like that. But Iowa Writers Workshop with that manuscript. But my mom and my grandpa, her parents, I think they tried their hardest, but like they also didn't really get it. I think they didn't [00:06:00] really empathize with me as an adoptee and the amount of work I think an adoptive parent has to do to help a kid work through the notion of being adopted, I think is about a thousand times more than most parents understand.

And so I was left wondering. And also, the amount of guilt I think an adoptive kid feels. Towards their adoptive parents in the sense of if that, if the parents don't hyper normalize the idea of thinking about where you came from or the fact that you came from somewhere else so that you have this blood connection to a totally different family.

If that isn't hyper normalized, I think it's real easy to feel incredible guilt about having those impulses to search or to look. And so my family did not do a good job at assuaging that guilt. So I've known my whole life, I'm adopted, but it wasn't until just a couple years ago that I did any kind of real [00:07:00] work to find my birth parents.

Haley Radke: Did you hear she loved you so much she gave you away?

Craig Mod: Oh, yeah. Or no. It was the call from the adoption center was a call from Jesus himself. That was

Haley Radke: Oh.

Craig Mod: Yeah, that was the framing.

Haley Radke: God ordained family separation.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Haley Radke: So you had a story growing up about the circumstances of your conception and the reason you were available for adoption.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Do you wanna share that and then,

Craig Mod: yeah.

Haley Radke: So when you find out the real story.

Craig Mod: Yeah. So the little bit of information we had was in the adoption papers that it was a Catholic adoption service that did the adoption, and they gave us a little paper that said a little info about the mom who was 13 when she got pregnant and she'd smoked weed and done Valium.

That was like, those were listed on, I don't know why that was listed on the paperwork. So my mom smoked weed and liked horses. I think that was all I knew. And my birth father [00:08:00] was listed with almost no information except for the fact that there was a car accident. I think he was listed as 17 or something like that, and there was a car accident.

And then at the site of the car accident, he got in a fight and was murdered. So that was my genesis story was just this terrible, oh, my birth father was murdered and my mom was 13. It was probably kinda rapey, and I, and of course to protect myself as a kid, because with other kids this idea of being adopted is you were thrown away or whatever.

Oh, you're not your real they're not your real family. In movies, the general comedic trope is, oh, you're actually adopted. That's what older brothers say to younger brothers that they don't like. And so to protect myself, I was like, oh yeah, my mom was a hooker and she probably got, she was a drug addict.

She smoked weed. She probably did crack or whatever. That you just concoct this really terrible sort of genesis story in order to protect yourself from the other kids. And also from the, because of the fact I wasn't given permission by my birth parent, my adoptive parents to do [00:09:00] a bigger investigation into things or to be like, Hey, I'd to look, let's find out more about this.

What's the real story? That wasn't part of the set of options available to me that I think concocting this kind of worst case genesis story was a way of setting up walls to protect myself. But that's what we knew.

Haley Radke: And so I heard you talk briefly in another interview about not wanting to be curious because of some sense of adoptive parent loyalty, which is so super common.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Or not wanting to talk about that when did the curiosity like come to the surface for you?

Craig Mod: Honestly, it was not until, my whole life there's been curiosity of course. And it's funny, since I've come out publicly with a little bit of this story, I've gotten all these messages from old friends who, who were like reminiscing about my meditations on adoption when I was a [00:10:00] teenager. So clearly this was really, I don't have any memory of these conversations, but for a few friends that were like really powerful moments of me, yeah, just being, talking about how I didn't feel like I connected with my adoptive family and I felt apart from it all.

And I don't really have a strong memory of that, but clearly my whole life that's been underlying something. And I don't know, in my twenties I was so focused on figuring out who I could be. I moved to Japan when I was 19 and a big part of that was to kind reset the game, the whole system, to reset socioeconomic status and to also reset just personal narrative, genesis narrative.

And to be able to be in a place where you are forever gonna be the other. And so you're given permission to embody whatever you want to, whatever you wanna be. You aren't seen through the eyes, the classic eyes of contemporary American sort of judgment or whatever, which, me coming, I came from a middle lower, I'd say working class [00:11:00] factory town.

My grandparents met at the factory, my parents met at the factory. Their parent, everyone's parents were working there. And then when I left my town, I felt acutely the fact that a big part of America going to university did not come from places like I came from. And you could just feel this kind of judgment.

So Japan was like offering me many layers of reset. And my twenties were spent just purely trying to figure out who I could be in the world trying to desperately look for archetypes of people I could trust. I think trust was a big part of it. And I imagine a lot of adoptive kids have issues with trust because that is having your core identity the exploration of that, not normalized by your parents is actually a pretty big breach of trust, I think. And so I, I can imagine a lot of adoptees being like having lots of weird trust issues. Anyway, I definitely did. And my twenties were about figuring that out and it wasn't until my thirties and I moved briefly to [00:12:00] California and I and 23 And Me came out and I was like, oh, I'll do that just to find, not to find my birth parents, but to just find out genetic information.

That was like, for me, that was 99% of the curiosity was just, I just wanna know genetically what's happening in my body. And so that prompted the 23 And Me registration, which didn't really bring up much, to be honest. 23 And Me seems like it's like the, now they're bankrupt. They just filed for bankruptcy, but they seem like the redheaded stepchild just to use all of the terrible things we're probably not supposed to say about it, poor redheads, poor step kids, but it felt like the unloved DNA resource, because it wasn't until many years later, almost a over a decade later, when I joined Ancestry that then I really connected with, found all these people from, my birth father's side and mother's side popped up.

Haley Radke: Yeah, when we talk about search now, folks do DNA testing in multiple places. They import [00:13:00] their stuff into GEDMatch. There's all these tools that have come so far and yeah, 23 And Me, I don't know, people are deleting their data, so just so you know, like.

Craig Mod: I deleted mine.

Haley Radke: There you go.

Craig Mod: But it never had, there were never any good matches on it. That was the thing. It's it was always like, oh, your fourth cousins on here. Which like, we're probably fourth cousins, I mean it's.

Haley Radke: We could be. Well, and it makes sense that you would test there 'cause they were the ones giving you the medical stuff more so than anyone else. That was their whole deal.

Craig Mod: And they were first out the gate. I think they were the first at home spit in the tubes and put it in the mailbox and get your matches or whatever. And it actually, even before I did Ancestry though, I found out my birth mother's name actually my birth name, because I was able to get my birth certificate, I was born in Connecticut and state law changed in 2009.

I didn't even, like no one told me, it's like I, I didn't have any Google alerts about adoption law changes, and I emailed the [00:14:00] Catholic Agency and I said, hey, is there any way I could get my birth certificate? And they were like, oh, you can just email the town hall of the city you were born in and they'll, they can send it to you now. They don't need parental permission. And so I got that actually two months before I joined Ancestry. But that was interesting. That was quite powerful to see. Oh, I have a birth name. Oh, I have, oh, wow. This is my last name. It's, it was pretty affecting. It was pretty, it was more interesting than I thought it would be.

Haley Radke: There's so many states that are still closed, you can't get your original birth certificate. And there's, so there's a lot of adoptees advocating for that. And yeah, when people get their OBCs, it's just whoa. It's a lot.

Craig Mod: Yeah. Yeah, to see the definitive name of this person and of you, in their eyes. It was also interesting to see she gave me first and middle name, and so just imagining like a 13-year-old going through all of this and then naming this child that, [00:15:00] she's gonna give up. It's a pretty, it's a pretty intense thing to do.

Haley Radke: Did you feel, okay, so did you feel like, oh. This makes it more real that there's a person in versus the honeymoon Hawaii baby or the stork drop.

Craig Mod: Yeah, a little bit. I, I think something I hadn't realized was just how pervasive my walls were that I'd built up over my entire life. And, like I have not had, I would say, many adults acting like adults in my life. And I think I was terrified. Probably the scariest thing about, and the reason why I didn't do more intensive searches earlier is that I think I was traumatized by the lack of actual adults in my orbit for pretty much all of my childhood. And thinking back, just, there's just all these different things where you're just like, why?

How, and this both on a local level, like in my immediate orbit, but also [00:16:00] on a more global level like. Why wasn't the state taking care of my town? Why wasn't the country taken care of my state? Connecticut's the richest state in America. The GDP average in Connecticut is insane.

It's probably close to a hundred k . And yet my town was like less than a quarter of that. And you just go, okay, why wasn't my school funded? Why weren't these programs funded? And so I think that also created a bunch of trust issues about adults not really being adults. And so the last thing I wanted in my life was to have another adult.

So my, and my, of course, my genesis story being so terrible. My mom's a drug addict and a hooker and blah, blah, all this stuff. It's I don't want that close to me. So that was subconsciously or consciously a huge barrier to going and doing the search earlier. And I think seeing her name did shift that a little.

It just humanized her. She wasn't this, apparition in my mind, oh, she's a name. And then I could Google her 10 seconds later, and now I know everything about her, see her [00:17:00] Facebook page, I can see the family and all this stuff and my worst case scenario was like, oh, she's this destitute, she needs money.

It's gonna be this issue of someone in debt or someone with extreme political views that don't align with mine, America right now is so weird. You don't know who you're gonna get on the other end. And it's the last thing I want is to be connected with someone that I can't talk about the state of the world with, or don't agree or have to like do phone calls where we pretend to like wanna talk to each other or whatever.

Which is basically the relationship I've had, I had with my dad for all of my adult life, just politically extreme in the opposite direction and to a certain degree with my mom. And so I was just like, I don't need another one of these in my life. But getting the birth certificate was and being able to like Google her and I was kinda like.

Looking at the Facebook page, I was like, did they look like they might own AR fifteens? I'm not entirely sure how many guns they might own. I'm like, I don't know if I need these [00:18:00] people in my life. And it was just nice to see them and be like, oh, okay. That's good. That's all I need.

Again, like the, just funny feeling all these walls and being like, okay, I've taken a peek and I made like a document where I was just like dumping screenshots of just creating this family archive thing that I could go back to if I wanted to later.

Haley Radke: And so what happened when you tested with Ancestry?

Craig Mod: So then, yeah, I went on this walk, I run these walks with this guy Kevin Kelly, who is the co-founder of Wired Magazine. He's 73. We met 15 years ago, and I'd say one of the things that's come up, unsurprisingly, the fact that I didn't really have a dad, and so I've been drawn to surprise, surprise, like really having their bleep together, older male figures, not in a father figure search sort of way, but just as like a set of archetypes of what is possible in the world.

I think that's really important to say that it's not about finding, it was like none of these friendships were, and they are friendships about [00:19:00] finding a father replacement, or, oh, my birth father was murdered and my adoptive father was not really present at all. And so you could go are you searching for dad?

It's, and it wasn't, it was just, I was, I had seen no real fathers ever in my life. And so when I started writing and getting my name out there and connecting to incredible people via my writing, I started meeting these amazing humans. And so Kevin Kelly was one of them. And we just started walking together and slowly but surely, I just realized listening to how he raised his kids was mind-bending to me, just in the fact that he was such a present force in their lives.

And so he became like archetype number one of the prime archetype for me of what an incredible father can do in the world. And so anyway, we run these walks recently, like twice a year. We just finished one in Spain. I just got back two days ago. And we run these walks. We invite people from around the [00:20:00] world.

We do these walks together for a week. And every day we have conversations as we're walking. And then at night we do Jeffersonian dinners, which is a single topic dinner where there's only one conversation, so there aren't, so everyone sits around a kind of a circular table and we all talk together.

And there aren't like sub conversations happening on the side. And about two years ago, 20, or I guess three years ago now we were doing one in England and everyone was like, you gotta do Ancestry. They're like, you aren't on Ancestry? And I was like, no I did 23 And Me, they're like, oh man, get off 23 And Me, that's garbage.

And I was like, all so I came back I'd gotten my birth certificate and then I joined Ancestry and of course, boom right away matched with my birth mom and I knew her name. And so it was like, okay, yeah, this is definitely her 50% DNA match and all that. So that was pretty interesting. But then as soon as we matched, like her Facebook page shut down and she started locking down, like her LinkedIn, [00:21:00] my take was like, oh damn, okay.

She was on there because like maybe her family coerced her to joining it and she didn't really want to connect, and now I'm like, this thing she's never talked about maybe with her family. And so I don't wanna create chaos either, so I'm just gonna step back. So that was to me, like seeing kind of all these things shut down right after we connected on there.

I was like, all right, that's great. Definitely her and I focus more on the dad side, which I, the paternal side of ancestry had all these interesting connections and I started looking people up and like my, like an uncle figure character with three, so three cousin like figures, which is really fascinating.

Like the uncle was the CEO is the CEO, he's not dead. At least he wasn't a couple years ago. He's the CEO of a biotech startup. I was like, oh, that's cool. I resonate with that 'cause I have a strong technical background I've done, even though I'm doing a lot of book stuff my major in university was I focused on computer science and fine arts.

So I have a really strong technical background [00:22:00] and I've done a bunch of work with the startup community and I was like, oh, this, that resonates. That's cool. And then his son's one is like a poet that lives in Brooklyn and does like directing and has worked on HBO shows as like a AD or whatever.

And I was like, oh yeah, that resonates. And then one of the other sons was something else. And then one of the other sons was, I looked at his Instagram and he's this super hardcore gay swimsuit influencer. Like he's just naked. Yeah. He's just like super buff and like in his swimsuit and like showing off his body and he's got all these followers.

And the, I was like, that's cool. Like that resonates with me. Like gay swimsuit influencer. And I was like, oh these people make sense to me in a way that like looking at, and again, this is also superficial, but like looking at my birth mom's stuff, I was like, ooh, I don't know like this could go either way.

They could be like extremely conservative. Whereas like this paternal side was like, oh, these guys are pretty [00:23:00] liberal and funky. And I actually met up with my cousin two years ago after we, I, we connected on Ancestry and I found him on Instagram and I just DMed him. I was like, hey man, I think we're cousins like could we do a call? And he is yeah, he was super into it. He is like 29. I think people in their twenties are excited about finding birth connect, blood connections that are there's a mystery. And then we had lunch in Brooklyn and it was like, it was fun. But also he was like, my dad, he said, my dad totally shut down the conversation 'cause apparently like one of our uncles was in the mob and he like abandoned his family and disappeared for 20 years. And he thinks that maybe you're the son of this mob uncle, so he is I, he didn't want to touch it. I was like, whoa, okay. That, but that kind of also tracked with the story.

I was like, oh, maybe this mobster got murdered and he raped this, young woman. This young girl. And I was like, oh, this all kind of makes sense to a certain degree. But it was also really interesting and it was fun. It was like, it was just nice to meet my sort of [00:24:00] cousin, I say cousin because it's not ex I'm, we're still not entirely sure what the connection is, but it's close if, whether it's a first cousin or second cousin, a first cousin once removed. I actually don't know all the terminology, but cousin ish.

Haley Radke: Sure. Yeah. And they give you the percentages and they estimate what your relationship is, but.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Yeah. A half sister could be an aunt percent, like there's

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Haley Radke: All kinds of, yeah.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Okay. Did he know who you were when you met up with him?

Craig Mod: Just in yeah. Yeah. And that's because I DMed him on Instagram.

Haley Radke: Okay. So he saw your profile and Yeah. Okay.

Craig Mod: Yeah. And I trusted him, it was like, 'cause on Ancestry in 23 And Me I was anonymous to protect myself again, I just didn't wanna open these doors. I couldn't close. And so I was deliberately very anonymous, no information in my profile. With this guy, it's oh, a poet who lives in Bushwick, [00:25:00] Brooklyn and works on HBO TV shows. I'm like, yeah I want to connect with this guy. I want, I just wanna be friends with him. So I was happy to de anonymize immediately with him.

Haley Radke: And how about your mom?

Craig Mod: The mom thing was a little more complicated just in that, when we connected or when we matched on Ancestry and I was, still anonymous, she shut down or locked down her Facebook profile and locked down her Instagram profile. So two months before when I got the birth certificate, I could see everything.

And then after we connected on Ancestry, suddenly that was all I could only see like the profile pic. So I just treated it as great. I'm glad we were able to connect and I know kind of everything I need to know in, in the sense of she's been demystified, I have the photos from when her Facebook page wasn't locked down.

And I was like, that's fine. That was it. And so I, and I didn't wanna send her a message, I didn't wanna, I would let her make the first move if she wanted to. And it seemed like she had made a move indicating that she didn't want to connect. That was how I read all that. [00:26:00] Again, walls protection, self preservation, it's like, how do I not get myself hurt in this situation?

These are, there's so many layers of that. And then it took a year for her to send me a message and she sent me this really weird message that was all like lowercase, and it was like one sentence and it just said, Hey, I think we're related. Are you American or something like that? It was just, it was, 'cause I think the only thing my profile said was, I live in Japan and, but it was like 50% match and exactly, 13 years younger than you.

It's obviously, it's like I, I'm your kid. So that really frustrated me getting that message. It really annoyed me. 'cause I'm like, great, another adult, I've gotta like parent, I've gotta be the one, it's like I had this core memory of like my dad crying in the car after I graduated high school.

My adoptive father, like [00:27:00] saying oh, you didn't in include me in your life enough. And I was just like, what are you talking about dude? You're the adult. Step up and enter my life. It's yes, you were divorced but you weren't. It's not like you had been your legs had been chopped off and you were in like a wheelchair and you couldn't like walk and you couldn't you lost some kind of agency.

It's like you could have come to anything I was doing. You could have entered my life as much as you wanted to. So just the fact that I remember just sitting there this guy is looking for some kind of absolution from me for not being a great, it was just like, oh my God, I can't have another one of these people in my life.

And so I sat on it for three months and I talked to my therapist, which I highly recommend having a therapist. I've been doing therapy now for eight years, pretty much weekly. And if I could say one thing that's had the greatest positive impact on my life, it's a hundred percent that. Committed weekly talk therapy with this guy in [00:28:00] New York that I just zoom with and I love him to bits.

I don't know anything about him really. I've very deliberately kept our relationship professional and even though we've been talking for eight years, I I vaguely have a sense that he is like married and has a kid vaguely, but I love that we have this, anyway, this distance that for me, that's been really good.

And I talked with him about it. I talked with a couple friends. I was just like, what the bleep? I can't have another one of these parents that need me to parent them. And finally I just thought, okay, you know what? If I was her just trying to sum up as much empathy as possible, what would I want if I was her?

And I just wanna know. Am I okay. And so I wrote this kind of snarky letter that was a little distanced, but it was just basically hey, look, I know it must've been really hard for you to do what you did, and I thank you for going through that, and I'm sorry that you had to go through it. I can't imagine how difficult that must've been to have been pregnant at your age and then to like, put me up for [00:29:00] adoption. Those are all, such emotionally difficult, complicated things to do. So thank you for doing that. And just, here's a little snippet. This is what my life is like. And my childhood wasn't perfect, but the people who adopted me tried the best they could, which I do think is true. Although I really wish they, I really wish they had a few more parenting skills.

Looking back on it now, and look, I've played music in front of thousands of people I've given talks in front. It's like I've had this in many ways a charmed life and I just wanna let you know that things are good and thank you. And that's it. I didn't tell her my name, I didn't give her any identifying details, like she couldn't have Googled me or anything.

And then I got no response from her at all and I was like, great, this is completely dysfunctional adult that you know, has got a closet full of automatic weapons and this is my, and yeah. Okay, great. She doesn't really wanna connect and okay, I can't deal with this. Three [00:30:00] months later I'm in like the busiest period of my life. I have this new book coming out. I'm running a walk with Kevin in Thailand where everything is super intense. My adoptive mother and her, my stepfather are coming to Japan to visit and I'm trying to organize that. I'm just so overwhelmed. And in the middle of all that, I get this reply from my birth mom and she's oh my God, I don't have email notifications on for Ancestry I didn't see this. And she writes me like the most empathetic, beautiful, emotionally intelligent, like 3000 word letter. And it's just overflowing with smarts and curiosity and I'm just like, I just, I don't, I can't process it. This is when would this would've been, yeah like 15 months ago. And I'm just like what do I do with this?

I can't, I don't have the room for this. And I, so I didn't respond to it. And then three weeks later, she sends another one even longer, even more like beautifully written talking about, [00:31:00] oh, this is what your grandfather was like. And I'm, I have four siblings and I'm one of five kids and he passed away when I was nine.

And we all, the oldest was 17 and my mom was a single mom and we were all working hard 'cause the family didn't have much money and all this. And we, here's all the pets I had, and this is what I used to do with your grandfather. And you come from this line of hardworking Polish immigrants and all this stuff.

And I'm just like, I've, again I'm like, I don't, what do I do with this? I can't. I don't have the time, I'm completely freaked out and exhausted. And then I got this weird MRSA infection in my arm, like MRSA bacterial infection. I'm in the hospital. Anyway, it was like there was this too much going on.

And so I just sent her a little note and I said, oh my God, thank you for these letters. They mean a lot. I do not have the time to respond to these properly right now. I'll get I'll send you a message in the new year. New year comes, I'm just as busy, burnt out on a bunch of stuff. I'm doing all this media here in [00:32:00] Japan.

I'm doing all these radio shows and TV shows, and basically I've, I did not respond. And then Mother's Day comes and she sends me a note on Mother's Day on Ancestry again. I'm like, anonymous, right? And she goes, thinking of you on Mother's Day, and I hope you're hugging your adoptive mom. And just, I just wanted to let you know that I'm here if you want to talk. And but again saying I realize this may be a lot for you if you don't wanna talk I understand if you do, I'm here. I hope this isn't our last communication, but I also under understand if it is she's saying things like that. So being really, again, emotionally intelligent, very adult, not being selfish, not being narcissistic about things, not expecting or demanding love to be returned.

She was honestly like textbook doing things exactly how you, I think you're supposed to do things as a parent. But she was also excited. I think she was just like, oh my God, I've been waiting my whole life to connect with this kid and here he is and now it's like I might lose him or he's not [00:33:00] responding.

So then I went on another walk with Kevin and co like these Kevin walks. Actually, now that I'm replaying this are actually pretty seminal weeks of my life 'cause I get to be around seven to eight, nine other people who are all top of their class, just best of the best doing what they're doing. In Spain, I was walking with this neuroscientist who is probably gonna win a Nobel Prize.

Just that level of just incredible humans and then also who are all great parents and incredible archetypes. And so I was in Bali and Kevin was like, we were having dinner one night with everyone talking about families. And I was like, oh, my birth mom keeps sending me these messages and I feel so terrible.

It's now I have two moms that I'm not being a great son for. I feel it's like I'm not sending enough messages to my adoptive mom, or now my birth mom. And Kevin was like, just go have lunch with her. And I was like, oh God, I can't just go have lunch. She lives in Chicago. And it was like, I, when am I [00:34:00] gonna be in Chicago?

And then a couple weeks later I was like, you know what I bleep it, let's just go have lunch with her. And I just messaged her on Ancestry, was like, hey, do you wanna have lunch? I was giving a talk in Portland, I'd been invited out for a talk. And I was like, all right, I'll slap Chicago onto that. And I was like, do you wanna have lunch on like August 14th?

And she was like, yes, I'll here for absolutely, I'll make reservations. And again, I'm still anonymous, haven't told her my name. And I was like, apologies, apologizing. I was like, I'm sorry I'm still anonymous. I'm just, this is just a lot for me. And I would rather you not know anything about me because you can Google me and find out everything about me before we meet.

I'd rather just meet I don't know, on that plane of an anonymity. And so we set up that lunch and I'm like, I'm a little nervous, not super nervous, but also, I feel really good about who I am. There was no part of me that was like, oh, I need this to be something. I need her to be some person in my life or occupy some space in my life as like a mother or [00:35:00] whatever.

None of that. And I was also like even if I didn't think she wouldn't like me, but I was just, I was thinking, and maybe this sounds a little like narcissistic, but I have to say this is not, I do not think this is a narcissistic way of looking at it. In fact, I think it speaks to the amount of self love I've worked hard on over the last 10 years to build up for myself.

I just felt like she's so lucky to meet me as I am today. I feel I just feel good about who I am and what I'm working on and what I've built. And I have this incredible relationship with my stepdaughter from a previous relationship that in the end we broke up. But I have this stepdaughter out of it, and she's 15 now.

And building up that relationship with my stepdaughter and going through, when she was 8, 9, 10, 11, especially about being a father to her and being adopted, that's a superpower where it's like blood doesn't have to matter and you can create these strong family connections without the blood.

And for me on, for people on the outside, it's oh my God, I can't believe [00:36:00] you're such a father figure to this kid. But for me it's I, we had the connection and I'm just honoring it. And even though I've broken up with her mom, we separated. That doesn't stop that connection.

It's I think that's the adopt again, adoptive superpower is not needing the blood to define things or feel like, okay, because we don't have a blood connection. And because I broke up with the mother, now I don't have to be in your life. That's absolutely not the case. But when we were, when she was 8, 9, 10, 11, we were still together.

And obviously I was a present in her life and feeling like I could be a good father through all these small interactions that we started to have. And I think parenting, this is I've become this real strong advocate of parenting because these experiences I had with my stepdaughter, I don't think could have appeared anywhere else in my life.

And the way they forced me to grow. Like we'd get in a fight and I would be like, okay, she's gonna throw me away. Which is an insane thing to think about an 8-year-old, I was like, oh yeah, she, we these stupid little fights. And [00:37:00] then she wouldn't talk to me for a week and I would just go, okay, she's done with me.

Because I had so internalized this narrative of I'm something to be thrown away. And I think that was just such a core narrative for me, such a core narrative for a lot of adoptees. And I was like, okay, this eight year old's gonna throw me away. This nine year old's gonna throw me away now. And it killed me.

And then we would reconcile and I'd never witnessed reconciliation again this is why I say I had no real adults as parents in my life in the sense, because there wasn't a reconciliation. So when would get in a fight, or they would break up. And my mom had all these boyfriends and she would, they would break up and then they would just disappear.

There was no attempt to think about me and who these people represented for me and to go, hey, maybe for Craig, we should talk to him about this. It was always, there was an incredible selfishness on the part of my mother around these relationships and never saying, oh, maybe Craig [00:38:00] needs this guy who broke up with me, still in his life in some way.

Anyway, so reconciliation was something I had never witnessed. And then with my daughter, I just call her my daughter. I don't call her my stepdaughter. I think that's like a weird pejorative. And then with my daughter, we started reconciling after these like little, these dumb little fights, which is insane to think now, like how certain I was that she was gonna throw me away from these like dumb little things.

We started reconciling over and over again and I came to realize like not only was reconciliation, actually really easy to do, but she was so hungry for it and she didn't know how to do it. So it was like two eight year olds essentially, me and her sort of trying to figure this thing out of oh wow, you can get in a fight and then reconcile and actually be stronger after it and hug and she was so hungry for that.

And, oh, in fact, not only did she like not want to throw me away, she really needed me in her life and was so happy to have me in her life. So that was, those were pretty seminal moments I'd say, in the last eight years. And so to have gone through that and to [00:39:00] feel this value in myself as a father and to my, to this daughter.

And so to have done all that stuff and then with the work I'm doing, being really proud of the work I'm doing and there's all this stuff with Japanese cities that I've done that, there's a huge story around that, but like with New York Times and blah, blah, blah. But these have been pretty powerful, impactful things like, I've had a hundred million dollar impact on one of these Japanese cities, like in terms of growth and helping it out and giving resources to the city. And so to have done those things and then to be able to meet my birth mother, I was able to go to that meeting and be like, man, she's really lucky to meet me as I am today.

As opposed to 20 years ago where I was basically an alcoholic and didn't know who I was and had no faith in my ability to be a parent, let alone even take care of myself. Anyway, quite a big shift in, in the story. And so I, I go to Chicago with that mindset and with this version of who I am today, and that felt good to be able to [00:40:00] go to that meeting as that person.

Haley Radke: This reunion is really recent. Yeah, I know. You're like it's 15 months ago. It's super recent.

Craig Mod: Oh, but the Chicago was eight months ago.

Haley Radke: Okay.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Okay.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Haley Radke: So eight months ago you went but anonymously. So she still didn't know really your accomplishments and all of those things.

Craig Mod: And so anyway, it's the morning of, I'm like starting to feel, oh yeah, what's gonna happen? Are we gonna burst into flames when we hug? You know what's, I don't know what, how does this work? And so I go to the steak restaurant she had made a reservation at this steak restaurant, and she was, she's I'll be standing in front of it. And I knew what she looked like. And I showed up and was like waving, hello. Hey, I'm the anonymous weirdo that wouldn't tell you my name, and we hugged and it was we're both just so nervous. And looking back on it, I realized like she was so nervous and she hoped, she so hoped I would like her.

So like that, it's interesting to think about her perspective of it. [00:41:00] Like just really desperately wanting to be liked by me or just being nervous about it, or just being, you think of the parent as not being nervous, but actually she was. Very nervous.

Haley Radke: Well and a 13 year age difference is. You're essentially peers now.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Age wise.

Craig Mod: It's so weird. So we go in and sit down in this booth, the waitress comes over and she's just oh my God, okay you guys honey's you just take your time. We didn't order for two hours. It was like we could, we sat down and the first thing she does is she like opens her wallet and she takes out a baby photo of me and she goes, I've been carrying this my whole life.

I guess the adoption agency gave it to her. I've been carrying this my whole life, and every year on your birthday, I think of you and I think I pray for you. I hope you become a good person and you've had a good life. And and I'm just like, oh my God, I, I can't believe already, it's starting to rewire this genesis story of, wait, maybe this wasn't traumatic for her in a way that [00:42:00] I had always assumed it was, and she just starts telling me about everything. It's like she was 13 and she was, she presented much older than she was, or more mature she says, than she was. And she was working part-time job at a deli, because everyone in the family kinda had to work because the family, it was the father had passed away.

She just met this son of the deli owner and he wasn't 17, he was 22. So there's a lot of, okay. He was a pedophile a little bit, but she presented, oh yeah, I think she probably told him she was, 16 or 17 or whatever. Whether I, now that I've, I have a daughter and I've seen her at 13.

I go, when it's a 13-year-old, this is like pretty weird. Anyway, but her retelling of it all was that it was totally copacetic. It was not like this weird power thing. And they slept together once she got pregnant. And yeah, she was just like, he didn't want anything to do with it. He didn't believe it was [00:43:00] his, and she was just like, all right, bleep you, I'm gonna figure this bleep out.

She just had this really like working class I'm going to get this done, bleep all of you guys. And she just described, she's finally she told her mom, she was like trying to figure it out on her own. I think she tried to have an abortion, but it was like too late or something in Chicago.

And then she finally told her mom, and she was, and her mom was like, oh, okay, yeah, we can't deal with this here, but your aunt and uncle can maybe help out. And so she went and lived with her aunt and uncle and they were super supportive and she was like, oh, that time living with my aunt and uncle was actually great.

And the high school I went to was so supportive, even though I was like six months pregnant, when I started there and they gave me like a senior that was like my mentor and I was, getting prenatal vitamins, so like this image of her like, oh, she was just smoking weed and doing crack and was, and this desperate place. She was like, I was, surrounded by so much love and I didn't want to give you up, but I knew I couldn't support you. I knew I couldn't raise you, we just didn't have the resources and I wanted you to have the best [00:44:00] possible life, and so I had to put you up for adoption, but I got to hold you for two days in the hospital and I, loved just holding you.

And I wrote you this letter. Did you get the letter? And I was like, what? I was like, I don't have a letter, but just imagining this 13-year-old writing this letter to this kid she just gave birth to and feels all this love for and having to give him up. That was all, it was just so wild to hear her describe all this.

And then she was, she's I've just always been so independent. When I was 16, I bought my first car, second car when I was 18, first house when I was 24. She's I never graduated college. She felt really bad about that, but like I just hacked my way through things and it turns out she's like a computer programmer, which is crazy to hear. It was just so in insane to hear that. And just as I'm sitting there and she's telling me her story and she's erasing all of this trauma genesis that I had concocted and I'm listening to her talk about how she navigated life and navigates life. I'm, [00:45:00] I was just in awe because all my life I had felt almost no cerebral connection to any of my adoptive family.

Anything you, like a black family could have adopted me and I don't think I would've felt more adopted in certain, in a certain way. It's like a family that kind of looks like me, adopted me. And so we, that was also what was weird about being a kid is that we didn't talk about me being adopted.

So people would be like, oh, you look, you have your grandfather's nose. And we wouldn't say anything, wouldn't be like, technically it's not his, because, and but psychically, from a very early age and certainly from teenage years, I did not connect with my adoptive family on a mental level, to have this woman sitting in front of me telling me her story and being like, I get every beat of this.

Everything you're saying makes sense. Everything you're saying is how I've approached the world and how I've hacked my way through the world, and how I've been like, all right, bleep you guys, I'm gonna figure this bleep out. Oh, you don't wanna be a, you don't want to be, take [00:46:00] responsibility and be a dad. Whatever.

I don't need a dad. I'm going to, I'm gonna figure it all out on my own. Screw you and she, her brain. For the first time ever in my life, I realized I have her brain, her, that's where my brain came from. I felt that it was like, oh, birth mom's brain is in my head. That's interesting. And that was pretty profound and pretty crazy.

And she was asking me, she goes, oh, do you know anyone in Chicago? I'm like, yeah, I've got a couple friends, I'm gonna, I've got dinner reservations with a friend tonight and she was like, you have dinner reservations. And like we had just over, messages on Ancestry, just planned a lunch.

So I thought that's all we were doing. She was like, I booked, I got us tickets to the symphony and I got us pizza reservations on the river and like that. And we were, I wanted to take you on an architecture tour. And I was like, oh my. I was like, yeah, great. These are, and she's saying all these things that like, I would really love to do, that.

And I'm just like, like someone inviting me to the symphony. Like it sounds insane, but that, I was like, that's a dream invite for [00:47:00] me. No one's ever invited me to the symphony before. So that was really interesting and really bizarre. And we ended up walking around Chicago for six hours and I was like, I have to go back to my hotel and just decompress for a couple hours before the symphony.

And she was like, of course. And we went to the symphony together and it was just so bizarre 'cause again, yeah, our age difference isn't that big. And it wouldn't be that insane for me to date someone 13 years older than me. And so it kind, it was like this, looking around it was like, how are people perceiving us together? Would they ever think we're mother and son and we kinda went to this symphony thing and we're taking selfies together and I'm just, it just felt so out of body, surreal, the whole experience. And like the pizza place she booked was like this, it ended up being terrible.

She didn't know. She had never been, it was like a club that served pizza and it was so loud. And again, I was just like, oh my God everyone thinks we're on a date. And it was just funny. [00:48:00] And we had to scream to like talk and I was also just so exhausted and overwhelmed and I was like, look, it was like 10 30, and I was like, she clearly just wanted to talk until 3:00 AM She just wanted to keep going. And I was like, I'm so sorry. I have to go shut down now. And she's of course. She walked me back to my hotel. It was just, it was a lot. It was so much. I'm still processing it eight months later and doing this, like going on a show like this is part of my forcing function to force me to think about this stuff more, because I think my impulse, I'm so busy with my life.

I've got so much going on. I have this new book coming out in May, prepping for that. I am doing a book tour. I'm running all these other things. I've got all this media stuff coming in. I have 12 seconds to myself a day. And so my impulse is to be like, okay, great, that happened. Let's never think about that again.

That's that's the bizarre impulse. But yeah. So talking about these things in public, I think for me it's forcing me to just sit with it. A little bit. [00:49:00] And also I did the Tim Ferriss show a couple weeks ago, and I've just, my inbox is bananas right now with people, mostly adoptees reaching out and some birth parents reaching out, sharing just hundreds of stories.

And so I also feel like having a positive adoption reconnection story is maybe more rare than I knew 'cause like I told you over email, I have engaged with this world 0%. I have never looked at an adoption Reddit subreddit. I have never read any forums. I've never listened to any podcasts. I've never looked at any YouTube channels.

And again, that was part of the preservation thing and also part of the guilt thing, like my adoptive mother, I think feeling like by engaging with this world, I'm doing her disservice, or I'm hurting her, or dishonoring her in some weird way. That narrative was pretty strong in my head. And [00:50:00] so also part of doing this is to eviscerate that narrative, to get rid of that narrative and also to maybe help others who might be listening think about whether or not they hold that narrative and whether that narrative's holding them back or not.

So with the birth mom, anyway, I go to bed, it's like Saturday. Clearly she just goes back to the hotel and calls literally everyone in her family, like all of the aunts and uncles, the, all of her brothers and sisters, the aunts and uncle she connected with. And I'm telling her my story during the day and she's just oh my God, I can't believe you're my kid.

I can't believe you're doing these things. And so then like even a couple days later, I start getting dms from like cousins in Wisconsin who are like, hey, I run a flower shop. And I heard you're my cousin. That's cool. Do you wanna do a call sometime? And I'm just like, what is happening?

So I went from having my adoptive family is so small. A bunch of only children. Everyone's dead, basically zero family. There's almost no, my adoptive mom is the only person left in my life, essentially from that family, both sides, mothers and father's side. And so to go from this super tiny thing [00:51:00] where all of my life I dreamed about having a Christmas with, a big family, and all these, and now I've got four aunts and uncles on my mother's side.

I've got a bunch of aunts and uncles on my father's side. I've got all of these cousins now and everyone wants to integrate or to accept me. And it's just whoa, what? What is going on? And during that day of talking with my birth mom, I said, so what is the story with dad? He was murdered. Who was this guy? And she goes, actually, yeah, he wasn't murdered. I picked him out. I picked a random guy out of the newspaper who was murdered and said, that's the birth father because your real birth father was 22. And so it was statutory rape and I didn't wanna deal with legal stuff. And it turns out that he's alive and he lives in Florida.

It was like, what? Oh my God. So again, like this. And it turns out you have a half sister who's 28 or something like that. I was like, oh my God. [00:52:00] And actually, of all the information I got, that first day, that half sister thing made me so happy. And I had not realized how hungry, I guess my, I've been my entire life to have a sibling, a real sibling, and part of what this book that's coming out in May is about, this book, Things Become Other Things, is this brother person I had throughout my childhood who is murdered as soon as we graduate high school. And so like that one person who was a brother had been taken from me. And so to suddenly have this half sister was really profoundly moving and affecting. I was like, oh, my impulse was like immediately I wanna protect her. It was like really bizarre. Again, this sort of whatever, me having to be the father all the time, like I, immediately went to that place because my birth mom was like, oh, she has this terrible relationship with her birth father, with your father, and he has a bunch of problems and he's an alcoholic and they haven't talked in 10 years and all this stuff.

And I was like, whoa. And so my, I was like, I want to talk to her. [00:53:00] Let me connect with her. And through a few channels, there's, the whole story's extremely complicated and long, and we, you need diagrams to figure it all out. But through some channels I heard back that she wasn't ready to connect with me.

So she didn't know I obviously didn't know I existed. And I was, I feel like I'm, I've been really lucky connecting at this point in my life. Again, I needed nothing from this meeting with my mom. I was going in there not expecting anything, not demanding anything. I didn't need for her to like me, I didn't need for her to accept me.

I didn't need for my story to be a good story. Like I didn't need any of that. I was just going into it as an adventure. Okay, this is a really weird thing to do. And I would probably regret not doing it if like I'd heard she passed away or something, and I missed the opportunity, so let's just go do this.

And then same with the half sister stuff, where I was like, I'd love to connect with her, but if she's not ready, that's, this is heavy, weird, complicated stuff. She has one guy in her life, her father, that kind of doesn't work as a relationship. And I can totally see her being like, I don't need another dude, [00:54:00] older dude who I'm not gonna get along with.

I'd like completely sympathize. So that thankfully didn't hurt me or I didn't feel bad about that. I was like, you know what? If she ever wants to connect, that's cool. And then two months ago, my father's older sister who I'd also tried to connect with and didn't wanna connect with me, emailed me outta the blue and she said, I just read this book about adoption.

I'm really sorry. I didn't want to connect with you. I've thought it over. I'm ready to connect. Now. The first of all, everyone knows who I am, so it's like, all right, I don't have this anonymity armor anymore. So like everyone knows they can Google me, they can see what I'm doing. Do you wanna do a call?

I was like, yeah, of course I do. 'cause like I wanna connect with everybody. I'm like, I, this is now. And it's sure, let's just do it. Let's just connect with these people. So we did a call, she's super cool, really interesting, very smart. She doesn't have any kids. She's become like a mother figure to my half sister.

And I said, look, I still wanna connect with my sister. Can you make that happen? She's I'll try, I'll ask her again. And then two weeks [00:55:00] later, she's okay, she wants to connect. And so we did a zoom call. It was me, my half sister, and her husband. So she's 28, her husband's 27. And my aunt, I guess as, almost as like a chaperone.

Oh, it was very. A little bit strange, but my aunt immediately had to like, go do something else. So she left the zoom call and it was just me and my sister and we talked probably for an hour, 90 minutes. And we just clearly really liked each other. Immediately it was just like, or at least I liked her.

I don't know. She, I was just like, she's, I was like, you're just such a cool, kind, smart person. Like everything you're saying is awesome. You are, you've got this like kindness to your eyes that is really affecting and beautiful. And I was just like, wow. Like I feel honored to have you as a sister. Great.

And I don't think she knew what to get out of it. And I think if you get me as a sudden sibling, it's pretty cool. I'm just doing a lot of cool stuff. Again, not in a narcissistic way, [00:56:00] just in an objectively, like I have a cool life. I'm doing cool stuff I like, and it's taken me a long time to be able to say that.

Or believe it about myself or have that kind of like self-worth. And so I'm like, of course she's gonna be excited to connect with someone like me doing cool stuff. And so after the call, like immediately she messaged me and she's hey bro, just wanted to say it was so amazing connecting and she's can I call you bro? Is that weird? And I'm like, no. Like I, so calling her sis, she's calling me bro. And we've been like texting like pretty regularly, sending little photos of our life to each other. And then I'm going on this book tour in May, all over America, and she's can I join?

Can I come like my husband and I wanna fly out to one of these to, and I was like, of course. And so today actually, she just messaged me and said, we bought our tickets, we're gonna see you in Seattle. And I'm like, awesome. I'm like, I'm so happy that they're gonna come. That's she's is it okay to come to the event, the reading?

I'm like, yes. Like I'm realizing like people are being like way too cautious at this point. I'm like, you guys like [00:57:00] you, you get a free pass, sis gets a free pass. Anything you wanna do, I'm here for you. Come on. Hopefully next year they come to Japan, we can do a walk together. I'm trying not to give too much information about them.

I, because they don't know I'm talking about them, so I'm not saying like where they live or whatever, but I wanna go where they, visit them and do stuff together. And, I don't know, it just feels, it feels really wonderful. I don't to have this new person who we both like each other for now. We may hate each other.

Sibling rivalry. Sibling rivalry to come, but I don't know. It's all of this is so new. Like I said, connecting with my sisters like two months ago, I think that happened. Connecting with my birth mom was eight months ago. We only just did another video call like a couple weeks ago. I've just been so busy and she, with my birth mom, it's been such a respectful amount of texting and communication.

She's so cognizant of not overwhelming me and, but at the same time, letting me know she really wants me to be part of her life. Same with the sister. [00:58:00] We're just, everyone's being really careful. It's awesome. The birth father side of things is a little more complicated, a little weirder.

He, you Google him and he's got two, the only two Google results are court records and one's 20 years ago filing to pay lower child support payments, and then the other, and then the other one is filing for bankruptcy and it's oh, great. Yeah, he's, he embodies exactly what I was, my worst case scenario for these kind of birth parent figures would be.

And his sister told him, hey, here's your son. And, do you want to connect with him? Even though I wasn't asking to connect with him, and he wrote back, he's he, here's, give him my home address. He can write me a letter. And I was just like, what? Write you a letter, like bleep you like another one of these baby adults.

Who are these people? Write me a letter mother bleeper. If you're gonna, sorry, I don't know how like language sensitive.

Haley Radke: We'll beep it, it's fine.

Craig Mod: You'll beep it. I'm like, this is just the language of where I come from. I'm like, write me a letter, ding dong. And then two weeks later I [00:59:00] get another message from the aunt and she's oh, now he sent his email address. I'm like, F you man. I like now, okay, you like write your sister a letter and have her give it to me. So I ignore that and then a month later I start getting these insane emails from I guess his girlfriend. The emails are coming and like the entire body of the text of the email is all in the subject.

It's like one of these like crazy, super crazy people that like don't know how to use email properly and like they don't know where to write the letter. Anyway, I'm getting these like emails with these insane subjects that are like, have no punctuation or are like, I can help you. I know your father, here's my number. Please call me now with no periods or all lowercase. I'm just like, what the heck? And she's sending me like three, four emails a day. I just ignored 'em all. I'm like, I can't let this crazy into my life. I think having those boundaries is really important when you do these things.

And for me right now. Processing the goodness of my birth mother and my sister, and then the extended family. I've got like an aunt in [01:00:00] Switzerland who's like a yoga teacher or whatever, like all just cool stuff. Another aunt who's like a beekeeper or something like super weird, wacky bee keeper aunt I wanna sit with and just relish and feel the love and coolness of that connection, the father stuff, because I've dealt with these sort of non father fathers my whole life.

I actually have a lot of empathy for this guy. I feel like I may be the only person in the world who can absolve this man, who can give him a second chance to try to have a relationship with someone. And this isn't, again, it's not an attempt to save him or it's not this attempt of subjugating myself or diminishing myself.

There's a bunch of stories I can tell about these older, broken male figures that I've connected with, and we've formed these interesting connections that were, I think, mutually beneficial and mutually elevating. And so I, I have a weird ability to empathize with broken men and me, myself [01:01:00] also having been a broken man for most of my life.

And so I do not think it's my role or I have any duty to help or elevate this person, but I think some interesting essays can come out of going and meeting this guy and sitting with that and just seeing if, as in the twilight of his life, 'cause now he's, in his late sixties, I don't know how he's doing health wise.

Who knows how much longer. Maybe he's got 20 years left, maybe he's got three years left, who knows? But in this kind of twilight period of his life, can he and me too, I think have an interesting connection that doesn't feel parasitic. And a, again, to use that term, mutually elevating. Is there a way to be mutually elevating in this relationship in a way that's really careful?

And obviously that I don't put myself at risk and psychologically, but again, it's only because I'm in this place that I've gotten to myself to in the last, I'd say five to eight years that I can even think about this. [01:02:00] And because I've had experiences with super interesting, older, broken people in weird, very weird connections that have turned out to be really beautiful stories of my life in my life.

So that's how I'm thinking about the birth dad thing. But man, just processing mom and sis like. That's a lot. And.

Haley Radke: Reunion is so complicated.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Haley Radke: And layering all of these new people into your existing life. And trying to right size all of those things. And I would say you're in the early days, we often call it the honeymoon stage.

The complexity is yet to come. And I often don't interview people till they're well down the road past how long you've been in reunion because there's so much to process. So I feel honored that you shared this with us and I'm excited for you. You got quite a journey ahead [01:03:00] of you. More walking to do.

Craig Mod: Yes. More walking literally and metaphorically. But do you have any advice for me in this position? You've talked to so many people, you've heard so many stories. Is there anything to like, look out for or to be careful of or I don't know.

Haley Radke: The fact that you have a therapist to walk alongside you during this time

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Is super important.

Haley Radke: Yeah.

Craig Mod: So you can process those things outside of your relationship with your birth mother. And your sister and slow is better. I think,

Haley Radke: Yeah. Slowing down is better because we get really caught up in, in all the things. It's really easy.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Haley Radke: To get caught up in it.

Craig Mod: I feel like the pace that we've taken Connecting on ancestry, no message for a year.

Weird message, nothing for three months, me responding nothing for three months, and then some letters and then we still don't even meet until eight months after that. I feel like that was a pretty sane pace. And then also [01:04:00] after the super intense, we ended up spending that Saturday together and then Sunday morning we had brunch and it was cool. We, I have all of these friends who are whatever famous, people who've are connected with all sorts of different crap in the world. And one of my friends is a big food guy and he produced Chef's Table, the Netflix show. And so anywhere I go, he's always dude, who do you want me to connect you with?

You should eat here. You have to eat here. And so he connected me with this brunch place that doesn't take reservations and that there's like a two hour line every day waiting outside of, and he's don't worry, I've messaged them. You're all set. Go in the back kitchen door and just tell 'em who you are, and so my birth mom and I meet at this place and she's oh my God, the line. And I'm like, come with me. And we go through this like back patio space and I opened the kitchen door and like we walk into the kitchen and they're like, Craig, oh is that you? Oh my God, we've been waiting for you. We have your table right over here.

So it was just so funny 'cause my birth mom was like, who are you? Who am I having brunch with? So it was a pretty [01:05:00] funny to, to be able to like flex that weird oh yeah, I'm a guy who like gets us in the kitchen back door, skips the line, sort of person. And we had this amazing brunch and at the end she, we hadn't cried or there hadn't been anything really emotional through the whole thing.

And then at the end of brunch, she was like saying all the things she wanted to do now I wanna go on this. Let's walk down this tour. Let's do, and I just said, look, I can't do this. I'm done. I'm so overwhelmed. Like this brunch even was like my breaking point. And I'm like, I just need to be alone now for four days.

That's what I need. And she's I totally get it. And she just, started tearing up and saying, thank you for trusting me and for making the time and for coming out. And she's I have a gift bag for you. And she had this like very cute gift bag that had, she's don't open it now.

It took me like three days to open it. I like just couldn't just so much. And I think. I've also learned that you can operate on your own timeline and actually having a therapist, the great thing about that tool and [01:06:00] something it's taught me is if something in your life is happening that's emotionally overwhelming or you get a stressful email or something stressful is happening, not that this is stressful, this is more just so many emotions.

When you have someone like a therapist, a tool like that, a resource like that, you can say, okay, I'm gonna put this over to the side now and then in five days I'm gonna talk to Dan and we'll unpack this together. And I think I've just learned to do that even without the therapist, just knowing okay, I don't have the mental space to open this gift basket right now. That's like too much. And then when I did finally open it, it had this Christmas ornament for the city of Chicago in it, and it had all these, like a chocolate bar and Twizzlerss and these other candies. And she was, and she wrote me this letter clearly the night after we met, she wrote me this big letter about the meeting that day. And she created a book of the, our family history, so like a full family tree and [01:07:00] photos of my grandparents and great-grandparents and talking about this grandparent ran like a hat shop and this is what your grandfather did. And like he, I want you to know who you are and where you come from.

And it was just amazing. Like she had just, she hadn't met me, she didn't know who I was, on that brunch. She was like, I was so worried. You were like, gonna be morbidly obese or something. And we couldn't walk around the city. And I was like, I didn't know what we were gonna be able to do.

And like she had, had all these worst case scenarios in her head, but even though she did, had no idea who I was or who I would be, she still had all of this love for me. And, went into this book and went into wanting me to know these things, which I found to be really affecting. And that was quite amazing.

So any birth moms or dads who are listening to this story. Do what my birth mom did all of this stuff was, I couldn't imagine a better reunion unless, the only better reunion would be like, she picked me up in her [01:08:00] private jet and was like here's a suitcase of gold.

I've, it's I don't even I've just tried to imagine there's like only these insane things. Oh, and by, it's like I have no idea what could have made this better. Just her level of emotional intelligence, of her concern for my wellbeing. Also, there's some selfishness on her part in the sense of like really wanting to connect and really wanting to be, have this work out and like you could tell she was nervous and she really wants to maintain a relationship and all that stuff, but that's, it's tempered with this understanding and affection for who I am and emotional intelligence from what I'm feeling and a concern for what I'm feeling.

And that altogether was amazing to feel that from an adult because it's been so rare for me to feel that from any of the adults for most of my life as a child, certainly a kind of selflessness in the meeting. And I think that's how, that really is how you have to go into it. And she's just been, she's just been so cool.

Just little texts here and there sharing, hey, I'm running this project in Portland, she's got a consultancy. She's [01:09:00] been to Taipei and Shanghai and Tokyo, like with work and stuff, yeah. I'm having dinner at this Michelin starred restaurant. It's really great. Here's some photos of the entrees, I'm just like, great.

That's exactly the kind of message I wanna get. And then I think she's also following along with all the, all this stuff too and not saying she is, 'cause she doesn't want me to be too overwhelmed by it, by her presence. And so again, just like a perfect, at least at this stage, being like a really perfect birth mother in this reuniting process.

And my sister too. Sensitive and emotionally intelligent and grounded and concerned for how I'm feeling. Really amazing to have humans at operating at this level entering into my life. So we'll see. So if you're listening and you're on the non adoptee side, do what these people have been doing 'cause it's been pretty good.

Haley Radke: For you. And for some adoptees that might've been like, whoa, this is a lot. And I can't deal. And so it's amazing that you're both in the [01:10:00] right place and the right mindset and all those things. You got a lot of good stuff going. Your new book, Craig. Things Become Other Things, A Walking Memoir.

I loved it. It's so what's really beautiful, you, we didn't even get to talking about photography or anything, but the photographs are so beautiful and moving. The stories, the mystery of your friend propels people forward. You mentioned earlier, he was like a brother figure to you, and as an adoptee activist, I really appreciate mainstream books that talk about adoption in a true way.

And you have all of these nods to the complexity of adoption rather than the usual glossing over happy rainbow sunshine all the time, and instead the impacts it had on you. So I really appreciated that, and I don't know if you expected this or not, but I'm a mom to kids who [01:11:00] are about the age that you were when you were, you're telling these stories of childhood.

And so I'm reading it with my mom lens and being like, oh my gosh, if my kids were up to this stuff. And so I had all kinds of experiences reading it, and it was just really wonderful. I know it's gonna be well received by so many it's just an honor to get to read early and I loved it. Congratulations. It's so well done.

Craig Mod: Thank you. Yeah I'm happy the adoption stuff is in there in the way it is. And I've had a few, my PR person at Random House is actually also adopted very different adoption experience. This part of the Korean adoption wave adopted by non Korean families in America.

And it's a different kind of complexity, but she actually was first of all, she's like the most amazing PR person. She's just been the most incredible person to work with. But also she was like, I need to be on this book. She's I love how this book is [01:12:00] talking about adoption and I've highlighted all these passages you wrote about it and I need to be, I need to be your person for this book. So that felt,

Haley Radke: I wondered why I got the email.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Oh, that is so cool.

Craig Mod: Yeah. And so to hear you also say the adoption stuff is, feels true or not exploitative, not that it could be exploitative, but that means a lot. And part of why I'm doing this book with Random House is because I think the themes and the stories in it deserve a bigger platform.

And so part of my book tour, I'm doing this book tour. I think when this pod comes out, it'll be just at the start of the book tour. And so people can still come to a lot of these events. I'm doing this book tour. All across America and definitely adoption. And that part of the story will be a central part of the themes I'm talking about at all these events.

So I know I said earlier, I've never engaged really with the adoption universe as part of a [01:13:00] form of self preservation because I wasn't really ready to. But I love that you're doing this and I have listened to a few episodes. I went through to just see, what's the deal?

Haley Radke: See what you're getting into.

Craig Mod: What's the deal?

Haley Radke: Yeah. What's the deal with Haley? Yeah.

Craig Mod: How much crazy am I walking into even? But I love that you're doing this and I think if I had been in a more, if I had been in a better place in my twenties to think about this stuff, I would've, I think this resource of allowing people to tell these stories is so profound.

And I think it's, I think it's just magical and wonderful and I'm so grateful that. You're doing this and.

Haley Radke: Thank you.

Craig Mod: Man. I'm sure. You must get lots of emails from people too. And I'm overwhelmed by the number of adoptees out there who have struggled or are struggling or have had suboptimal reunions and stuff like that, as I've now just started to get these emails from. And so any kind of [01:14:00] resource to help people process that, it's a big deal.

Haley Radke: Send them my way.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Haley Radke: We have a show about them.

Craig Mod: Oh yeah.

Haley Radke: Thank you. I can I read to a couple lines?

Craig Mod: Sure. Yeah.

Haley Radke: Okay. Okay. You write, how does it feel to be adopted? It feels like floating off in your own little bubble apart from everyone else.

A bit lonely, a bit distance, a bit mythic, and you go on. It's so for people that listen to the show and they're like, oh, you're new to adoptee land what is that gonna be? Craig gets it. You can read it. It's a safe book.

Craig Mod: Oh, that's so interesting that people might be like, oh he's, he is a, he is still wet behind the ears about reconnecting. That's funny to think about that. Yeah. No, I've been. Thinking about adoption and it, being adopted and it has clearly shaped, I live in Japan. I've this is my home. You have, there's a lot of broken stuff in me to have chosen to live. No, truly to have chosen to live in a culture that will never accept you [01:15:00] as part of it.

That speaks to some kind of self preservation technique. And I think that's all, you can trace it all back to the story. The stories of adoption that we tell ourselves and the pain that finding out you're adopted. That psychic wound of it because it is a psychic wound, especially if the adoptive parents don't work so hard to normalize it and to make it part of the conversation for you and to make it part of your identity.

It becomes, and if that doesn't happen, I think it just becomes this wound. And so.

Haley Radke: Even if it doesn't, I'm gonna, I'll disagree even if they do normalize all of it.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Nothing about being separated from your biological origins is normal.

Craig Mod: So is there on, from your side, have you, what is the best case strategy for.

Haley Radke: With family preservation?

Craig Mod: How do you minimize, how do you minimize that psychic wound? What's the strategy?

Haley Radke: Let's go back in time and go up river and talk about, so [01:16:00] why couldn't someone come alongside your birth mother and her family and support her in some sort of kinship parenting? I know 13 is super young. My, my birth mother was 15 and it's so why are we leaving our biological families? It's not. It's tough. It's tough. I'm very for family preservation, you'll find.

Craig Mod: Yeah. I see. That's interesting.

Haley Radke: And I think open adoption has been promoted as the panacea, and this is the fix to the secret closed adoption era.

Craig Mod: Yep.

Haley Radke: And the secrets and lies. That's what's making us feel disconnected and crazy and stuff.

Open adoption adoptees have the same identity issues you mentioned in your book, and you shared just briefly here that you struggled with alcohol. Adoptees are overrepresented.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Haley Radke: in addictions. Gee, I wonder why.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Haley Radke: [01:17:00] You're not alone in that by any stretch. There's a wound and we can put band-aids all over it, but adoption is, it's a primal wound as the famous adoptive parent book says.

Craig Mod: So there's no, that's, so that's really interesting. I think about there's no cohesive strategy to not make it feel painful in some way or another.

Haley Radke: Yes, get your kids into therapy, but what heals the deep truth that you were separated from your biological origins and you get to meet your birth mother and your half sister and you're like so connected and you find all these similarities and

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Like you, you mentioned your people saying, oh, you look so much like your grandfather.

You have your grandfather's nose, or whatever. People said that to me.

Craig Mod: Yeah,

Haley Radke: I'm adopted. I would be like, no, I'm adopted as a kid. I'd refuse it. Yeah. I'm like no, we're not connected.

Craig Mod: Yeah. Yeah. [01:18:00] I definitely, I definitely said that to, friends and stuff, it's no, it's not, that's not real. That's not, the real connection or whatever. Yeah, it is funny. I think you could, not to diminish things, but like I think you, it's one of these people will see patterns where they wanna see patterns and so it's like you could have almost put a random person, a random woman in front of me in that steakhouse and had her tell a story and I would've projected into it a certain amount of kinship that said, there are a lot of things like I don't see connections with, so physically I wasn't like, oh my god, it's my eyes, or this thing or that. I didn't feel any of that. But there was just something about the brain processes that, and the fact that she's a computer programmer is pretty wild. And I have this like really strong technical side and the fact that especially women of that age group, being computer programmers is pretty rare.

Those things did feel real. And the sister thing too, I think I'm more, and again, [01:19:00] I'm trying to parse out like, are people excited to connect with me just because I'm me? If I was less successful, would any of these people be excited to, to have me in their life? And so that's something I'm trying not to overthink because that again allows you to shut down pretty easily and just write this stuff off and be like if you know you, if you couldn't Google me and find all this cool stuff would they like me or not?

But I think, even with, I'm not sure my birth sister knew who I was before we did that first Zoom and my birth mother certainly didn't. So there, there seems to be a kind of truth. And I think my part of being anonymous was to create kind of a bulwark against that voice in the back of my head being like, oh, these people only want to connect because of maybe I can give them money, or this thing or that thing or whatever.

And in fact, my birth mom was like, don't connect with your birth dad. 'cause he's just gonna ask you for money. It was really funny that she had, even though she hasn't talked to him in 43 years, she had this narrative of oh, this guy's no good. I've talked to his sister and she says, he's always asking her for money and yada, yada.

But [01:20:00] that's funny to hear you say that even open adoptions don't, but, open adoptions to me intuitively seem to make a lot of sense. Intuitively. It's yeah.

Haley Radke: We could have a whole nother conversation about that. Yes, it does seem to make a lot of sense. A lot of it open adoption's close. They're not legally enforceable. Have, open adoption can mean the adoptive family sends photos to a birth mother once a year.

Craig Mod: Wow.

Haley Radke: It doesn't mean you have any sort of meaningful, ongoing relationship with a parent. Also, even if you do as a child, it's wait, so you're here, but like you're not taking care of me. Like it's very confusing.

Craig Mod: Sure.

Haley Radke: So for all of it, our identity is impacted.

Craig Mod: Is training for adoptive parents just not good enough? Is that something we're butting up against? I don't think, I don't think there was any training for my parents, whereas like I talked to, I have a [01:21:00] friend who did fostering and the amount of work he had to do before he was able to accept a foster kid was bananas, a year of classes and all sorts of stuff. Before where I feel like my parents were just like, hey, we want a kid. And we're, hey, we're Catholic. And they're like, oh yeah, here's one. And then, God forbid all these freaking Korean kids who were just shipped often with like fake birth certificates and what, just shipped out to America in the eighties.

Haley Radke: That's still happening here. That's still happening in North America. I'm Canadian. People think I'm American, but that's still happening here.

Craig Mod: Wow.

Haley Radke: In, private infant adoption, there's maybe 45 to 55 couples for every available infant.

Craig Mod: Wow.

Haley Radke: And adoption agencies are like, actively, the most money they spend is on marketing and recruiting to try and find mothers to relinquish, just like in Korea, where

Craig Mod: Wow.

Haley Radke: Government officials were, going down the street and paying people to take babies. [01:22:00] Essentially we have similar things happening here. I know, Craig, we could go down a very terrible rabbit hole. I don't know if you wanna go there, but it's troublesome.

Craig Mod: Wow.

Haley Radke: Yeah.

Craig Mod: Yeah. And I, and at the same time, if I was aborted, I wouldn't know about my, I wouldn't be able to mourn my own existence. Yeah. So that's like the interesting paradox here. But for most of my life. I'd say my teenage years were incredibly painful psychically and my twenties were just so terrible, and my sense of self-worth was so low throughout my entire life. And it's funny saying these things actually I'm getting some permission from you.

Hearing even just this small bit of information again, like having, I feel like a dilettante having engaged zero with the community, but hearing from you how common all of this is, I think saying this almost feels like it's an indictment on my adoptive parents, but really they, because like I, because I feel like they don't [01:23:00] have the emotional capacity to process this stuff in the, in ways that I would hope they could.

So that's kept me from, I think, engaging with a lot of this stuff or thinking about a lot of this stuff directly, because I'm always like, if I engage with it directly, it's I'm dishonoring them in a weird way, even though they tried their best and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that crap. But actually it was a irreconcilable wound that even if they had been super awesome, maybe to a next level of greatness, like they could have probably, smoothed some of it out. But you're, what I'm hearing from you is that there is a fundamental like kind of Adam and Eve, eating the fruit, like understanding of evil that's implanted in every adopted kid. The psychic pain of the knowledge.

Haley Radke: Let's say it is a, actually it's an indictment on society.

Craig Mod: Yes.

Haley Radke: And the narratives that they have force fed us and everyone else that everything's good here, [01:24:00] everything's good. However, adoptees are the butt of jokes and however, adoptees are the ones that come back looking for money. And we're the serial killers, and

Craig Mod: right.

Haley Radke: There's a lot to dig into.

Craig Mod: Okay, here's a crazy question. Is it better to pretend a kid isn't adopted?

Haley Radke: No. No.

Craig Mod: Is that better?

Haley Radke: There's no secrets anymore. No. That's we call those late discovery adoptees.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Haley Radke: And there's no secrets anymore. So those folks, when I interview them.

Craig Mod: If you could avoid the psychic trauma as a child and teenager of adoption, and then get it when you're 25, is that a better scenario?

Haley Radke: I have only ever interviewed one late discovery adoptee who said yes she was happy her parents lied to her and she didn't find out till her mid twenties.

Craig Mod: That's so interesting. We need to run some experiments. Can we? We need to start some Harvard funded adoptee experiments. That's.

Haley Radke: Oh, don't worry those have already happened.

Craig Mod: Right? What is it? Three Perfect Strangers that you [01:25:00] know, that film that came out a couple years ago? Heartbreaking, insane.

Haley Radke: Oh, there's actually one of the books I was gonna recommend for you to read is called The Guild of the Infant Savior. It's by my friend Megan Culhane Galbraith, and I think you'd really enjoy it because it's essays and her art and there's photographs in it. So it's like a hybrid memoir. And she has an essay in it where she talks about this program where they used to take babies who were gonna be adopted. But they brought them into a home economics program to train young women how to be mothers. And they put these babies on a schedule, and these college mothers would come and take care of them and train the babies. Then if they were good enough, they would be adopted out into families.

Craig Mod: Oh. If the babies were good enough.

Haley Radke: But if the babies, yeah, and if the babies didn't take into the schedule, then they might go into [01:26:00] foster care. They're called the domecon babies babies.

Craig Mod: Oh,

Haley Radke: yeah.

Craig Mod: We're so twisted.

Haley Radke: Yeah. This is from the twenties. All the records of which babies had been in the domecon program, the records were destroyed. So if you were adopted at that time, you would never know you were a domecon baby.

Craig Mod: Whoa. And Japan has an interesting history with adoption in that a lot of it is adult adoptions into families to continue businesses or trades.

But it's, it's considered very real. Like they, they really do. You're now part of the family and I think the monocultural element of Japan where everyone is of the same race, the same quote, unquote blood according to their mythologies or whatever. So I think there's a little bit more fluidity there of moving people between families because it feels like everyone's already close. But it is interesting that.

Haley Radke: And there's a connection still to your original identity.

Craig Mod: Yeah. Yeah.

Haley Radke: It's not the full [01:27:00] erasure. Like our practice of adoption is.

Craig Mod: Right. Geez. Wow. It's a lot. Yeah.

Haley Radke: Sorry, Craig. So we call this, there's this new paper out, it's called the Adoptee Consciousness Model. So we used to call it Coming Out of the Fog, and that sort of has a negative connotation. Oh, you're in the fog, so you don't get it, but you're outta the fog and it's like a binary thing. But the adoptee consciousness model talks about unpacking all these different touchstones

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Haley Radke: In your life and you may think about adoption differently, or you may think about your adoptive parents differently or your biological parents. All these things. But yeah, I feel like I'm like dragging you through the.

Craig Mod: No, I love it. I love it. I wasn't in a fog. I was in the, I was in a freaking swamp. I was just like swamp in a swamp. I was deep in the adoptive swamp where of self-loathing and suicidal ideation and stuff like that. It just like really.

Haley Radke: Yeah. That's so common.

Craig Mod: Yeah.

Haley Radke: It's so common. Suicidal ideation for us too. The studies will show that we're four times more likely to [01:28:00] attempt suicide.

Craig Mod: I believe it. I definitely, my drinking was definitely a version of that. The number of days I woke up and was just like, I can't believe I'm still alive after what I just did to my body, just falling over, waking up, cracked open head stuff like, just really looking back on it. Very sad stuff and even difficult now to fully empathize with who that person was 'cause it feels just like the journey has taken me so far from whatever that place was, and yet still knowing that's in there, that those feelings, that impulse or whatever. So I basically stopped drinking completely like 13, 14 years ago, mainly because I felt almost like a theological pull to do the work that I'm doing, and so it's I know people can have like religious conversions and that's like how you're able to pull yourself out of it or whatever. But for me, getting around a lot of the addiction stuff was creating a narrative around my work and wanting so [01:29:00] badly for nothing to get in the way of that. And then realizing the easiest way I could gain back so much time and energy and capability was to just not drink.

That allowed me to start saying no to drinking functions and drinks and stuff like that because it was, there was a clear purpose there and it, and building up self-worth, I'd say the most pivotal parts of my journey coming out of whatever the adoption haze, fog swamp was creating a sense of self-worth.

I'd say that was probably the most, the thing most affected by adoption was probably that I, from such a young age being like, oh, I'm a thing you throw away, I'm a thing people can throw away. And then my parents getting divorced so, so quickly and my dad not being present. It's like all of that stuff, just like layering on that narrative.

Oh, see, that's more data. It's like I'm, I get thrown away. I'm the person who's thrown away. I don't have any value, blah, blah, blah, blah. And ratcheting my way out of that place was I think the first step that, we talk about therapy. I had to get myself to a [01:30:00] place where I felt like I had enough value to warrant therapy, to be able to do that therapy, reach out.

And that was that was a big deal.

Haley Radke: Yeah.

Craig Mod: And for me, running was the first step in creating self-worth. That sounds like weird, but running, quitting alcohol, charging more for my work and then using my work, I getting a little bit of like the fame that I was accruing through some of my work. Being out in the world to connect with great people and spending more time with great people, going on walks with great people and just feeling that greatness and believing that it could exist in the world.

And then believing that I deserved to be in the presence of that. And then from that believing, oh, maybe I have a little bit of goodness in me too. And that's why these incredible, kind, empathetic, emotionally intelligent, wonderful people want to be near me and just, but it takes, that process is so slow.

This is, I started dragging myself out of the fog [01:31:00] swamp probably when I was 27. And it wasn't until I was 37 that I could think, oh, I should do therapy. It took me 10 years to be able to get to the place where I felt like I had enough worth to do therapy. And then the therapy and the daughter stuff and all this stuff, compounding and compounding as resources have gotten me, got me to where I am today and got me to the place where I was able to do that birth mother meeting.

And so now, yeah, a big part of what I've, the next stage of processing is definitely adoptive mom processing stuff where I'm like 'cause I just told her for the first time two weeks ago that I met my birth mom. That was its own thing. Maybe we could do a follow up in a year and see how things are going.

Haley Radke: I'd love to, we can, if you would like, we can also talk privately so you don't have to air all your everything for all to hear. I thank you. Thanks for letting us in. I'm really honored to have heard your story. [01:32:00] What do you wanna recommend to us today, Craig?

Craig Mod: Therapy, definitely.

Haley Radke: Okay.

Craig Mod: I just, it's like I can't, I literally can't point to anything else in my life that's had a bigger impact. And for me, therapy is just having a totally switched on, completely present listener in my life, which is someone I've never had, I'd never had before this therapist, I'm doing it all remotely.

So don't even think you have to. Oh God, I don't have a therapist near me. I, I can't do therapy like try a few people. It's, there's definitely a kind of pheromonal thing that happens, like whether or not you connect with the person on the other end. And talk to three or four people at least, and test them out.

And for me it was just like, wow, okay, this person's smart. They are super present, they don't have a horse in this race. So that they're able to listen to me in an objective way. I trust them implicitly. I can tell them my story and I don't worry about them judging me. I can tell them [01:33:00] exactly how I feel about X, Y, or Z.

A lot of people will say, oh, I don't need a therapist 'cause I have this good friend and we like go out for drinks and we can talk about anything. And there's a lot of people who say that's not therapy. That is, your friend is bringing so much crap to the table. They, your friend I'm almost certain, unless they're a trained therapist, is trying to solve everything for you.

And so that is not what you need. That's not what therapy is about. It's not about that solving process. It really is about having this person who can listen and synthesize for you and reflect back to you. What you've said, not just in a session, but over time. And so I have this eight year relationship with this person who's heard, who's seen me go through by these last eight years of my life have been insane just on every level personal and as a father and professionally and starting my membership program and doing these big walks and, all this stuff.

And so to have someone in your life that you're going on this journey with and having them be able to point back [01:34:00] to these different moments and say, hey what's happening to you now remember, this is this happened three years ago. This happened five years ago. And do it all in a non nonjudgmental way and help you think about these things is you cannot overemphasize the power of that resource.

It is so bananas. And I really think if I could snap my fingers and give everyone the world something aside after national healthcare as sane countries do, and, whatever, like funded schools and blah, blah, all that baseline crap. The bonus would be everyone has a great therapist, and I just think that would literally solve like, most of the issues in the world. It's crazy. It's crazy,

Haley Radke: yeah.

Craig Mod: When you think about it. So do that.

Haley Radke: Absolutely.

Craig Mod: And try to go on a big walk. I do these things called walk and talks. I've written about 'em on my website. You can find Kevin Kelly and I have done a full writeup of exactly what we've learned running these things for the last 10 years.

It's a blueprint for how to run one and do it. And I would say walk the Camino de [01:35:00] Santiago, do it in Spain. The Santiago is so easy to set up. The resources are so good. It's such a wonderful path to walk and go invite five incredible people that you want to connect with, you wanna spend a week with and do our walk and talk style thing where every night you do a Jeffersonian dinner and you have one topic and you talk for two or three hours about that topic and invite, really invite five or six people that you love and want, just want to connect with, and you will have a life changing week. It is so rare as an adult to spend that much time with other adults, especially adults that are non narcissists.

That's a huge thing. Don't invite narcissists. We've invited narcissists in the past. They're the worst. They're really hard to deal with. Don't invite the narcissist and go on, try to do a week of walking. I know that sounds like it might be a lot, but like Santiago for a week, it's basically $1,300. You can book everything. It's not that expensive. The flights will cost more, but try to find that time and do that kind of walk. And maybe, you should think about [01:36:00] in doing an adoption walk and talk, that would be

Haley Radke: adoptee walk

Craig Mod: be incredible. That would be, and every day is like a different adoption topic and you just kinda spend the week breaking this stuff. It might be, everyone might lose their minds. Like it's almost too emotional to talk about for a week

Haley Radke: Just cry all week. Yeah. We'll be dehydrated for sure. Oh, I love that. Yes. I read that today when I was preparing for our conversation. So I'll make sure to link to that in the show notes.

Craig Mod: Cool.

Haley Radke: Okay. So your new book, Things Become Other Things, A Walking Memoir. Folks can find it everywhere books are sold.

Craig Mod: Yep. Yep.

Haley Radke: And follow along with your book tour, we'll link to that as well in the show notes.

Craig Mod: Awesome.

Haley Radke: Thanks so much. What a delight to meet you, Craig. Just an honor.

Craig Mod: Likewise. Thank you Again, thank you for making this program and thanks for having me.

Haley Radke: That was so enjoyable for me. We had originally booked an hour and we just kept going. And so I love that Craig gave me [01:37:00] extra time and we got to talk through so much more than I anticipated getting to hear. And if I'll never get over this where an adoptee gets to share with another adoptee for the first time, their reunion experience, their story.

Like it's just really special. So I'm so glad we got to share that with you. And Craig's book I enjoyed it so much. I'll discuss just a little bit more. The photographs are so beautiful. They're black and white. We didn't go into this Craig is colorblind to a certain extent, and so he, he just has this ability to capture light and shadow just like it's remarkable.

And they're just so stunning. And they go along with, of course, all the stories and the vignettes he's sharing about his walk. And I loved it because [01:38:00] it's so much about Japan and things that I never thought about before and the rural landscape and what it looks like now and the farmers he met and all of these different characters from his past and the adoption identity, the adoptee identity, adoption complexity. It's sprinkled throughout the whole book. Like all the spots I marked in my book were adoption related 'cause those are the things I wanted to ask him about or touch on. And I've asked Craig to do book club with us and so I think that will happen this summer.

You can pay attention to our social media to see when, if that's available and I'll keep you up to date on that, but it'll be so cool to read that in community with y'all. So thank you so much for sharing your story Craig. I'll just, reiterate, it was just a pleasure and I had no idea who Craig [01:39:00] was when the publicist reached out to me.

So it was really cool to investigate and be like, oh my gosh, this guy's a literal book nerd. And making books. The old fashioned way, and it's very cool. He has so many amazing projects and neat things going on. We didn't get to touch on 98% of them. So if you connected with him and found his story interesting, do a deep dive, do just do a quick Google and you'll see all the amazing things Craig's working on.

So what a pleasure to welcome him into adoptee land. Okay, before we say goodbye, I want 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. And if you're new to adoptee land, this is a great [01:40:00] place to land.

We've got so many amazing people in our community. We do live Zoom events a couple times a month. We have book club or documentary club, or we have adoptees off script parties where you can meet fellow adoptees and connect and talk a little bit about deeper things that adoptees wanna talk about with each other.

So I'd love to have your support there. Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again soon.

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