316 Jennifer Lauck
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/316
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. Today we are honored to have with us New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Lauck, whose memoirs have shaped how so many understand the adoptee experience. Her landmark book, Blackbird is celebrating its 25th anniversary edition this year.
In our conversation, we talk about Jennifer's childhood, how she first met Nancy Verrier, and her synchronicities in her reunion with her birth mother, Catherine Diane. We mention abuse at multiple times during this conversation, including sexual abuse. So please take care when [00:01:00] listening. Before we get started, I wanna 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.
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 am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Jennifer Lauck. Welcome Jennifer.
Jennifer Lauck: Thank you so much for inviting me.
Haley Radke: Your work has been out in the world for years and years. You're an accomplished memoirist. So I know some folks will definitely know parts of your story, but I was wondering if you would share for folks who are new to you, a little bit of your story with us.
Jennifer Lauck: Yeah. As you said, it could fill many books in our pre-conversation, so let's just get it down to the cliff notes.
So I'm gonna look at this from the perspective of my biological mother. My birth [00:02:00] mother, she got pregnant with me in 1962 in Reno, Nevada, and she was with a guy named Bill who was my dad. And they were quite in love apparently. And had this little problem. I think she was a junior in high school at the time, and her father, or her father was dead. But her mother and her older, much older siblings did not approve of Bill. He was a little rough. He came from the wrong side of town and they were considered a respectable family. So they shunned him out and they locked Diane down and initially they were gonna send her to a a girl's home in San Francisco, but she pretty much on bended knee begged her mother not to send her to this girl's home for women who were pregnant.
But it was decided absolutely that she would give the baby up. So my grandmother brought her back home and let her live with her older sister, and pretty much from the moment the pregnancy was [00:03:00] revealed when she was starting to show she was in isolation in my aunt's house. And teachers would come in and bring her lessons. And she was confined to a room, horribly shamed. Of course, this is the worst possible thing. And her boyfriend snuck, snuck to the window a couple of times and they were trying to figure out a way to get away. It didn't work out. And eventually, I think through, I don't believe the family was Catholic, but they worked through Catholic Charities and a doctor named Noah Smernoff, who coordinated the adoption.
And they arranged it directly with a family in Carson City, Nevada. So Diane's living in Reno and then they found this family in Carson City. Bud and Janet were their names and they were looking for a child. And the doctor was the lynch, the hinge between this situation. I think that Catholic Charities really relied on his [00:04:00] recommendation and he made a very high recommendation for the adoption. And I believe my aunt and my grandmother met my adoptive parents who are, very attractive, successful people. My father, a CPA who ran his own firm, my mother was very beautiful. Jackie Kennedy, look, I think that they, that mattered to the people that Diane's, Diane's family appearances mattered.
And so I eventually was born and the adoption arranged, and she's was a, had a very difficult labor, so I was sucked out of there with forceps. And this machine disfigured my head, and so then I never, that was it. She was whisked away and I never saw her again. And a year later she married my dad and they went on to have my brother.
So they continue with their life and she said, what about our first child? And he told her we'll just make more babies. It's [00:05:00] fine. And so the other little part of that story, which I think is really interesting, which should come up, is that while she was in isolation, she started to read novels a lot.
And one thing that she did was name me after the plantation in Gone with the Wind. So she always called me Tara and or Tara, I think it was. She was saying after that plantation. And so she would talk to me and she would say how sorry she was, I guess this is what she told me in reunion. And so as for me. I stayed in the hospital for three days. I don't know why they took so long to come get me. I had heard various stories that they needed to go buy the baby supplies. They didn't know exactly when I was coming. Somebody else said there was a bowling match and my adoptive parents needed to finish that no matter what it was like three days in the hospital. And apparently I was that baby who just wouldn't stop crying. And [00:06:00] so based on the medical records that I was able to find, there was some kind of barbiturate or something given to me to keep me from crying. And when I was brought home with Bud and Janet in Carson City, I don't think I stopped crying for a year.
And their response to that, and I did this thing called the stiff arming, like I would just not let them hold me or comfort me. And at that point. I earned the reputation of being the crier and the one that is a pain, and they would just put me in the back room until I cried it out. They were silence oriented people if we just treat her with the silent treatment, she'll stop.
And I did. Of course, the problem with my adoptive parents, and this was right away, is that my mother had been diagnosed with cancer once she had her first child. My older, their natural child, Brian, she had been diagnosed with a tumor in her [00:07:00] spine. It was 21 inches long. And so she had, they told her she wasn't going to survive this tumor after she had my brother.
This is like four years prior to I, my coming into the home. But then it turned out to be benign and she was a down winder. In Idaho of the Nevada test site. So she was probably a victim of, these releases, these massive releases of nuclear fallout. And so she had grown this bizarre tumor in her spine. They cut it out and she sewed her up and she lived, but now she wanted another child and they told her it'll kill you. And so the campaign began, let's adopt. And my father was really good friends with the doctor who facilitated the adoption. He did his accounting. And in fact, the doctor owed my father a good deal of money.
And so my father said, I'll wipe that out if you put this at the top of the list. So he [00:08:00] also made a high recommendation for this family. And they put on a good show. My mom is a very beautiful woman. She could dress up and make it look good. And apparently that's what happened. And when I was, when Diane was pregnant with me, my mom and dad, my adoptive parents put on a good show, but when I got there, she was dying and it was not good.
She was always in bed. She was hallucinating, she was on all sorts of different medications. The tumor was growing back because part of it was captured in the nerve bundle of her spine. So she was eventually crippled by it, had multiple surgeries and my job at my earliest memory was to take care of her.
They had an older son. He got to go to school and he got to have friends, but my job was to really attend to her, and I did. This is what we do. We, this is what's required and she's my mother and this is what I need to do. So I pretty much was in a panic most of my [00:09:00] childhood. What can I do to help this dying woman?
And if I didn't do well taking care of her, my father would come home from his job as a CPA and he would put me in these ice cold showers. All this is the result of years of therapy, Haley. So it's very concise. I could tell you all this very concise information because I've been in and out of therapy for years and this makes a lot of sense because I developed a really profound terror of water and a terror of men, and they were Catholics. So I also had a terror of God. So if this is the way God is through these men, and this is how Catholics are, maybe this is not so great. My mother did die when I was seven years old and the year prior to the adoptive mother dying, I had been told multiple times, I actually was called the adoptive daughter, but adoption and that word didn't really fit in my brain as a child.
It was just too big for me to [00:10:00] grasp. And so when I was about six, my mother, very sick. She had just overdosed from seconal and valium. She was such a sick woman. And my brother was the one who told me, look, you're not one of us. Why are you so uptight about mom being sick? And I was like this is my job and I'm gonna get thrown in a shower.
And he's you're not even one of us. Who cares? And I was, he said, you've heard everybody say it a thousand times. What's wrong with you? Are you retarded? Apologies for that word, but that's the word they used back then. Adopted. You're adopted. Everybody said it. What's wrong with you?
And I what does that mean? And he said your parents threw you away in the trash. This was like, okay, I can comprehend this at six. So I raced into the house that I was living in at that time. I locked him out and I called my dad on the phone and I was like, okay, what's the deal? Brian says that my parents threw me in the trash, that I'm not your, I'm not one of you guys.
And then he explained it to me. Yeah you were adopted. No, you weren't thrown in the [00:11:00] trash. And I was very relieved actually, because being in that house with those people who were quite frankly, crazy, and the way that they treated me was stunning. I was like, just get me a bag and a plane ticket or a train ticket or even a bus ticket, I don't care. Just get me outta here because you people are nuts. And I'm so grateful not a drop of your blood runs through my body. And now with all the love in my heart, but I was just so grateful this wasn't going to be who I would become. And even at six, I can't believe I fathomed that, but I did. And then she died.
And so that then there was this kind of big chaos because my mother died when I was seven. My father immediately started to connect with another woman who I suspect he was seeing in the final year of my mother's life and her illness. And he left the Catholic church and became a [00:12:00] Scientologist. And now he's married to this new woman with three of her own kids. And my brother and I are wrapped into this world. And then he died like 18 months later. And in between that on top of everything else, my mother dies when I'm eight and my father dies when I'm almost 10. And in the Scientology 18 months, I'm involved in this really weird cult. And one of the things that happened was that I was sent to a summer camp as part of this group.
And a man, a young man, I think he was about 19, picked me apart. I think people like us who've been through a lot of trauma and abuse are pretty easy to spot by predators. And he basically put a fence around me so the other kids would leave me alone, including my brother, and began to sexually abuse me for it turned out, I think about six [00:13:00] weeks. Two weeks into this, my father came to visit us at the camp, and I told him, I am many things, but quiet is not one of them. And I told him, this is what's happening. This man is asking me to take off my clothes. And of course I'm crying because it's devastating. In this family you're not allowed to cry, and apparently you're not allowed to tell the truth either. He said he didn't believe me and he left me there for another month to go through that. And I would call that probably the most profound betrayal by a man that I've ever experienced. And that would lead to a whole life of deeply confusing relationships with men.
And so eventually he died. I was raised by an aunt and uncle on that side of the Lauck side of the family. I was adopted again and called by a new name of which I didn't really want, and I feel like I just crawled my way through my [00:14:00] adolescence, made my way out as fast as I could, got on my own. And this was when I was finally on my own age, 19 and I was living in my own apartment. And a woman who lived next door to me about the same age as me, her name was Patty, and she was adopted. And I was like, wow, that's crazy 'cause we sensed that with one another. We would sit and talk on the stoop and two single girls in the city, trying to figure our lives out. And we were both in college. And she told me she was adopted and she had just learned and that she was gonna search. And I was like, wow, that's crazy. Really. And she did. And she found her mother and father, they had married and they were always looking for her. There was apparently some system where you sent a letter and the letters were matched up.
And so she found her. And so I was like, wow, that's amazing. Maybe I should do that. And I did, but there was no letter waiting for me, and I pushed and pushed. [00:15:00] I didn't understand at the time that I was adopted through Catholic Charities. I thought it was through the state of Nevada based on the records that I had access to and because she really wasn't looking for me or there was no letter in the state file, which I took to believe she's not looking for me, or maybe she's dead.
I just forgot it. It was just a door closed. The natural child of my adoptive parents, his name was Brian, he ended his life when I was 19 and he was 23. So that was the end of my adoptive family in many ways. And my launch into the world where I became an investigative reporter working in TV news, and eventually, after years and years, a creative writer and I decided before I would have my own children, I would try to figure out my past in order not to inflict my children with the kind of sorrows that I was carrying deep in my heart, while also passing as a normal, very highly functional, appearing, highly functional [00:16:00] person who drank every night and had giant explosions of fury and sorrow, behind the scenes.
As soon as the door was closed, I'd melt down. But in the world I seemed very highly functional. And so then I was working on Blackbird and Blackbird started to get this momentum and I wrote this book and then I wrote Still Waters, and then I wrote, Show Me The Way. And it was in the midst of all this big Blackbird success in 2000.
And I did have a child at this point. I was pregnant with my second that I got a call from this adoption association and they were like. We love your book, we'd love for you to be our keynote speaker. We'll pay you $3,000. And I was like, I don't know anything about adoption. I don't think I would be a very good speaker.
And they're like, no, we really want you. We love you. We've all read your book. And I just did it for the money. I just like, okay, I guess I didn't know anything about adoption. Zero. So I [00:17:00] researched the group, I prepped a speech, I didn't even know what I said. And I was just dropped in, I think it was a CUB organization or it was one of these birth mother organizations, and it was just like being dropped into a whole universe I didn't even know existed.
They were all birth moms. They demand justice.How have, why haven't you searched yet? They asked me, why haven't you found your mother yet? I'm like, dude, back up, man. I didn't even know it was a deal. They're just outraged and they're ready to search and they all wanna take me home with them. I'm freaking out.
They were just the [00:18:00] injustice was what they were addressing. And I understand it completely now.
Haley Radke: Yeah.
Jennifer Lauck: But at the time I was just like, again, I have just landed on planet birth mom and I just absolutely have no idea what to make of you people. And they are demanding I find my birth mother. So I gave the speech and it was fine.
And at the end I was signing books and I was just ready to get on the plane and get the heck out of there because the pressure was so intense from them, make this wrong for all of us. And I don't think that's really my job. So this woman who was very controversial and they were already dissing her there, came up to me during their signing.
Her name was Nancy Verrier, and she is a birth, not a birth mom. She's a, an adoptive mom. And she gave me this book she had just written, it was a couple years earlier, called The Primal Wound. And I remember a lot of the birth moms going sh don't read that. Don't look at that. Don't talk to her. Nancy seemed like a very reasonable person and her book, very [00:19:00] reasonable.
She admitted something I've never heard another person say up to that point, which was, I feel differently about my adoptive child than I did about the child I gave birth to. And it took a lot of guts for her to say that. And I feel the same way. I have children, I've given birth to them, and you put a different baby in my arms. I know the difference how I feel. It might not be popular, people might not like that idea, but it's biologically true, at least in my own experience. And so Nancy felt like a really safe island. And she and I worked together, we did therapy together, and she started pointing to decisions I was making in my life and the ways that I felt about myself as potentially part of the adoption wound and that yes, it would be very good for me to find my birth mother and really push hard, but in my own timeframe, which I so appreciated.
She wasn't bossing me around. And so I hired a search angel, that's what they were called at that time. [00:20:00] And she helped me get some non-identifying information that was available through Catholic Charities. It turned out, and then it was just very surreal how fast it happened. It was just like all these doors flew open and I was fast on my way back and I got phone numbers and background information.
I discovered, everything about my family and I started making calls. And the reunion process began. I found my sister first. I talked to my sister first because my mother didn't pick up the phone. She heard I was coming I think she had seen me on some kind of group chat because a bunch of women at a high school put me on a group chat saying if anybody has put up a child for adoption in 1963, this young woman is looking and here's this picture of me.
And I think my mom saw that and immediately darted under the bed. And so I talked to her daughter who was my half-sister, and she's [00:21:00] oh my goodness. Now I finally understand my mom. All her life, something has been off. And I sent photographs and we talked and she said, look, she married your dad and then they divorced.
Your dad just died a couple years ago, but you have a full brother. I'm gonna make sure she talks to you. And then, we eventually did get together. I wrote about this in Found it was a hot mess. My mother was a total mess. She had never told anybody in the family other than my grandmother and my, her older siblings, nobody in her world knew.
And my father was dead. They had divorced right after my brother was born, apparently. Yeah, it was crazy. And the last thing I think I'll just say about this is when I started the reunion, one thing that broke my heart, probably the most, was that at the same time she was pregnant with me. Her brother, who was older than her, by 10 years, they [00:22:00] couldn't have a child.
And so they adopted a child from Germany at the exact same time. So I was given away to a family in Carson City, and they brought a child from Germany into their family. They would've rather had that than their own blood. It was shocking to me. Devastating in many ways.
Haley Radke: When you were in reunion with your mother, did you ultimately tell her the painful, traumatic things that happened to you in childhood?
Jennifer Lauck: Oh yeah. She read Blackbird.
Haley Radke: And what was her response to that?
Jennifer Lauck: Total devastation. She said, I was told that you would have a better life.
Haley Radke: Yeah.
Jennifer Lauck: I was told that I was doing the right thing, that a child 16, 17-year-old girl could not possibly raise you in the ways you deserved. She [00:23:00] said, honestly, you would've been better being in a dumpster than in that family. I'm stunned by what you had gone through. I'm stunned. You're even sitting here and that you're capable of talking to me. I'm, she was heartbroken. And I believed her. I believed that was true.
Haley Radke: Yeah. I can, I could see, being in the room at a CUB conference and having read that book, many of those women don't know what happened to their children, and they were told the same things that your mom was, forget about this close the door. The shame of especially the girls that got sent to maternity homes, incredible. And your child's gonna have better parents than you could have ever done. And so your story like encapsulate this no, it's a different life. You don't know what you're gonna get.
Jennifer Lauck: Yeah. It was intense. I was really struck, actually, we were lucky because Nancy [00:24:00] coached me all the way through the reunion. One she said, don't ever feel guilty for basically bulldozing her life. She goes, you have every right to do that. It's empowering for you to reclaim your right to ancestry.
I did feel bad. I just totally blew in there like a storm. But she said, don't feel bad. And she goes, and don't take anything personal because they're gonna have their own baggage, their own problems, their own emotional reactions. Don't take any of it personal. Just get as close to your mom as long for as long as you can.
And the reason is that they all the bonding. That's been waiting for your, in your brain has been put on pause since the moment you two were separated and your biology will snap into action and you will absorb sensually all that you need. And none of it has to do with the way she thinks or the stuff that comes out of her mouth except the sound of her voice.
And I thought that was such great advice that she was giving me, because my mom did have a lot of psychological problems [00:25:00] and she was emotionally undone. She hadn't done any personal work, so I just sat really close to her. If you see any pictures of us, I'm always really close to her and I'm just absorbing her.
And I endured the reunion process for a really long time in order to get as much of that as possible. And Nancy even coached me to have her hold me and let me hear her heartbeat. And I think Diane thought that was really weird, but she did it and it was very dear, actually. It was very sweet to just have hear her heart close to my ear and to feel it, against my cheek and to smell her and be with her, even though I'm this grown woman. I'm like 40 and she's in her sixties. But it was one of the most beautiful edifying human moments. And the other thing that happened with Diane is that she would tell me, I remember times feeling absolutely certain that you were in danger and horrible peril. [00:26:00] And all of those times were corresponding with the worst suffering I went through the rape, the abuse at that summer camp, the time I was homeless right after my dad died and I was in LA stranded until my family came and scooped us up, I was, that was stunning to me how deeply she felt her connection to me. And I was so grateful to hear that because honestly, when you go through those things, you think you're utterly alone.
Haley Radke: The other thing that you talk about throughout are these like synchronicities and you mentioned her wanting to name you Tara, and there's like birthdays that line up and like different dates and things and it's easy for outsiders to talk about how coincidental those things are, but for us it's my god, anything that can tie these stories together is helpful and healing in some [00:27:00] way. What's your connection to the synchronicities and why did you feel to share them?
Jennifer Lauck: I think that they're very important. They're little breadcrumbs along the way, and I think that there is a higher moral truth about being human and the biological connection to mother is so profound and so holy in a way that, I think you call it God or you call it the universe or whatever, but it organizes itself around that truth. That is a central relationship that is vital to our functioning. No other mammal gives up their child. No other mammal that we know about facilitates these kinds of crazy financial arrangements and justifies it in these, rationalizes it in these ways.
So when you're working in a system that is so heady and so logic-based synchronicities, the arrangement of the greater elements of the universe become [00:28:00] little portals of truth that help map reality taking place all the time. And quite interestingly about the Tara thing, which is why I planted that little seed, and I'm really glad you asked, is in the years between my finally, getting, making the reunion experience happen. I was, I left Catholicism and I became a Tibetan Buddhist practitioner. And Tibetan Buddhism was very big in the United States, as many people had gone in the sixties to India and these various countries, and brought back these traditions to the United States.
So Buddhism was really infusing the United States. The Dalai Lama was a big deal, especially after the Chinese occupied Tibet. So there was this kind of big movement. So I was really into the Tibetan Buddhist movement, and I was doing all of the meditation practices that my teachers were handing to me.
And my very first one, the one that got it all started was [00:29:00] Tara. It was called the Green Tara Practice. And when you enter in a tradition like Tibetan Buddhism, your entry practice is your identity practice. So I did mantra to Tara for years, and so when my mother said she named me Tara, I was just like, I always knew. I always knew at this subtle level you could call it a coincidence and that's fine, but for me it was like, no, that's my identity. My name is Tara Wright. My mother is Catherine Plummer. My father is William Wright. That is who I am. And that matters. I was listening to the podcast you did with Lynn, and she was like, she renounced her adoption and she renamed herself. And I was like, whoa, that's bold. I don't know that I would do that. I've often wanted to be called Tara Wright, but another part of me is you've already [00:30:00] established, your career and everything is Jennifer Lauck so you might as well stick with it.
Haley Radke: But you were adopted a second time and renamed, and you did go back to your original adoptive
Jennifer Lauck: Yeah, I was retitled Jenny Leatherwood yuck. Yeah. So I actually did go back to my original name. Cause I didn't wanna be adopted that second time.
Haley Radke: There's this really profound scene where you're in the courtroom and the judge is asking you this, that are you consenting to this of your free will? And you're like, I don't even wanna ask like it, when I think about, I'm gonna go off just slightly to the side to get to this point. When I think about parents that post their children online and they ask for their consent, and kids are like, yeah, sure, that's fine. It's not really true consent because kids have no idea what can happen when their images are online forever. And, whatever that can go with. And asking at how old were you at the time? 11? [00:31:00] Or were you
Jennifer Lauck: 11?
Haley Radke: Yeah, 11.
Jennifer Lauck: Yeah. And think about all the abuse that came prior to that, right?
Haley Radke: Sure.
Jennifer Lauck: I'm not capable of crossing the street, let alone making a decision.
Haley Radke: Consent. Your adoption, you don't even know what that means. You don't even know if you're going to, where are you gonna sleep with these people? Which bedroom is
Jennifer Lauck: Yeah.
Haley Radke: It's egregious the pressures we put on children in that sort of, anyway. That's totally fine.
Jennifer Lauck: No, you're not wrong. You're not wrong. You look back at it, you're like, wow, that was a hot mess. That's one of the reasons I didn't really stay in the adoption community for very long, because I did do some adoptee conferences and I did meet with some adoptee groups, but I found that it was a really tough community for me to maintain my own sanity.
Plus I have my children and I didn't wanna always have my life always be about whatever my wound was. I wanted my life to be about [00:32:00] growing them into fine young men and women, so I was always striking, trying to strike this balance between, okay, these are my stories and this is my involvement in them, and then this is your life and you're the subject of your lives, not the object of my life.
And that's always what I was, I think, 'cause I lost so much perhaps that I wanted to give them everything I didn't have, which was these freedoms to be and enjoy their lives and be happy individuals, not be stripped of identity at every turn or hurt. I was always building fences around my kids, just getting them where they needed to be.
Haley Radke: Yes.
Jennifer Lauck: So I didn't really come back. I just, I couldn't, and my reunion with my mom it went its course it only went so far. It turned out I think she was bipolar. I'm not a hundred percent sure, but there was some kind of serious problem there. And her son, my brother, my full brother and I discussed it and he was quite concerned about her.
And as was her daughter, my half sister. And they were wrapped up in their [00:33:00] lives and they had built a world and it was awkward for me to be in their lives and that we just couldn't figure out a way to make it work. I tried. We tried. I think we took, we all should get an A for a valiant effort. But eventually I think it was best that I just ease out of their world and continue on mine and, I don't know what's happened to her. I don't know what's happened to them. I obviously pray for them often and think of them many times. I'm so grateful she had me and didn't abort me. I'm really at the point of total gratitude for my life and what I'm capable of doing with it. I don't, I also have a deep faith in God now and I, most of the healing I've done a lot of therapy obviously a lot of dream analysis was very helpful to me. I've done neurofeedback, which has to do with trauma in the brain from complex PTSD, but I kept going back to Catholicism has really [00:34:00] helped me because God is really worthy of arguing with, he'll wrestle with you. He wants to, he wants your truth. He wants to work with you. He doesn't want this homogenized relationship. That's what I've found, and so through my reading of scripture and wrestling with God about some of these huge questions I've come to a realization that he knitted me in my mother's womb, and he understood what I was capable of bearing, and he didn't want these things to happen to me.
But God's draws straight with crooked lines. And so I feel honored in a weird way, especially after what happened with Blackbird and the success and all the people I'm able to talk to over the course of my life, that he's entrusted me with my experiences and that I can in some way offer a hand when it's appropriate and do my best, to do my best in every situation, because I'm okay. I'm here. No, it's not [00:35:00] great. No, it's not been perfect. Yes, I'm saddened often, I struggle just like anybody else, but I do feel at peace with it all.
Haley Radke: I did not suffer the level of abuses that you've shared with us, but I connect you on many points of your story, more so than a lot of adoptees, in fact, that I've interviewed. And I too have this strength. I don't know where it comes from. I'm also from a Christian background and still attend church regularly. And I think about adoption and how, like this was not the plan, but this is where I ended up and now what am I gonna do about it? And so I have lived in adoptee community for the last decade and a little more, if you count all my Twitter chats back in the day.
And I feel like it is my [00:36:00] position here to change things in the future so that we don't have, kids going to the next available in line. You have a line in here and found any baby would've done it wasn't personal. Whoever was at the top of the list, whoever. And some of those things are still happening today.
Jennifer Lauck: It's a form of slavery. It's absolutely wrong.
Haley Radke: Yeah. Yeah.
Jennifer Lauck: What they're doing is wrong.
Haley Radke: Yes. And it's still happening today. And so this passion I have for advocacy is so big. And I do feel like it's a calling in some way.
Jennifer Lauck: Yeah. It's your vocation. You were called to do this.
Haley Radke: Yeah. Yeah.
Jennifer Lauck: And that's, I just, I'm so respectful of what you're doing and anyone who decides to stay in this space, because just like any space, I work with writers. Writers carry their own stuff, and, I'm in a community and the people in my community all carry stuff. My kids, they carry stuff, but it feels like I can manage it. [00:37:00] Whereas the adoptee community, at least when I was in there, it was just a big throbbing wound. And the people that I talked to were like man, I don't even know how to put my own mask on, let alone help you put yours on. So I didn't think that I could really be very effective in that community for a very long time until I was well enough to even be having this conversation with you. I think I said, when you originally reached out, I was like, no, I don't wanna talk to anybody about adoption, because I was in my mind, right?
Back in those days. But I've come so far, and then I listened to your podcast and what you were doing, and I really had deep respect for you and your obvious commitment and the people who are talking I just couldn't believe the range of people that are sharing stories and the stories are all saying the same things.
And there's so much strength in the community that I didn't have an exposure to back then.
Haley Radke: Yeah.
Jennifer Lauck: And so I, I'm in, I'm edified by that and I really am cheering you on.
Haley Radke: Thank you. [00:38:00] I think first, I totally see what you are explaining. One of my passions is to help direct people to the resources and supports that they need to be functioning humans and, heal those wounds to the level that is possible.
And so they can either, go back to their quote unquote, real life and be the good, whatever it is, parent, partner, in the workforce, all those things. Or if you've done the work and you wanna be an advocacy, like great, we need people who are high functioning and healthy and have supports in place to do the work or make you know that's not sustainable.
I have a question for you on, writing memoir and [00:39:00] using stories from our past and people see things differently and I feel that adopted people are often not believed when we're recounting our history, especially when there's other people in the family who, you can live under the same roof and experience different parents.
I, I don't know if you've heard this lately, but people will say the youngest child did have different parents be than the oldest because the parents are that many years older and that much more experienced, and those kinds of things, right? So you can have these different accountings.
I know that you had a little bit of pushback on some of your stories in your writing, and I think you dealt with it so well, but can you comment on that? For us not to be believed, it's like our story, that's the only thing we've been given, like that's all we have.
Jennifer Lauck: Right? I think that a lot of people, when they think about writing, they [00:40:00] immediately think about publication. And they think about fallout, and I'm here to say, thinking about publication and fallout from other people when you've just decided to start writing is similar to holding a baby in your arms and imagining what they're going to do when they are 45. It's impossible. If you desire, if you feel compelled to write about your life, close the door, call up as vivid of images as you can, the first vivid memory you have, and then sit down and write it in hand or on a typewriter or whatever.
On a word processor. Print it out, stick it in an envelope, and then come to it another day. Another vivid memory. Write it. That's between you and the idea. This is such an American thing, I think, and maybe a Euro thing. It's like it's all about outcomes. It's all about will this become something?
It's you becoming. And so when you write, you are [00:41:00] basically writing love letters to yourself, to God even you could write letters to God. Here I was, Saint Augustine, the first memoirist in many ways. We can go back to Marcus Aelius in meditations. He certainly did a lot of personal writing.
I don't think it was intended that way, but great thinkers have always been writing about their lives. Without the intention, it would become anything. And Saint Augustine, he just wrote to God. The color purple, I think, is a series of letters. Dear God, whatever, however you wanna do it, even dear mom or just dear my former self, just sit down and write and have this conversation with yourself.
And again, the vivid images are very important because when we have a vivid memory and we write about it, it increases the vividness of memory. And it can really be very empowering and it helps to overcome the, you don't have a right to say something different than our collective agreement. It starts to break [00:42:00] that.
And until we live in a society that doesn't give us this freedom to write and to be alone with our thoughts and a page of paper and a pen do it, if you're called, if you're called, and again, it's a beautiful thing. You never have to do anything with it, but it's starting to open doors within you, open your mind, open doors in your heart, starting to uncover a layer of truth that you deserve and that is your inheritance.
Like you said, without our story, what are we are our stories and we have the right to tell them even if they diametrically disagree with anybody around us. Just keep it to yourself. If you've got those kind of people in your lives, don't talk about it. It's none of their business like your journal, right?
It's nobody's business. What's in your journal. That pressure is very real. Anyone who reads memoir knows that it's coming through the filter of the writer. You're not paying attention to story at all. If you think this, I'm not a, I never claimed it was a reported accurate event. [00:43:00] It's a memoir.
It's creative writing, and writers have creative license. Now, there's an argument within the writing community about the spectrum of truth and memoir. Some are purists and they believe, unless you can prove every single thing that you put in your memoir, you should call it fiction. Then there are other people over here who are like, anything goes, and that's James Fray who said he was in prison when he wasn't even in jail, and Oprah gave him a spanking on her show and it was all horrible. And then there's this middle ground, and this is where I like to stand, which is do your best. Have a pact with the reader if you're going to take your story into the realm of the world and say, I'm doing my best. My brother remembered this, or my father remembered this, and others would say this or that, that's fine. But that's for a final product. Not in the early stages of writing. I'm not, I would never tell anybody not to write about their lives. In fact, the opposite. I think everybody should write about their lives if they're called to do it. It's tremendously transformative. [00:44:00] And secondarily, if you decide to get it out there in the world, that becomes another conversation.
And you deal with that when you get there. When I talk to people about writing memoir, I'm like, yeah it's a weird world and the internet makes it weirder and empowers people to do strange things. And now we have social media with, Twitter, and people feel like they can just vomit all over you and. I just say, go gently into that dark night, but don't ever let it make you afraid to tell your story again, you're at the infancy. Just grab a piece of paper and a pen and start writing. And then later if you feel like I've got something here, and go get a good teacher, and have them help you.
Someone who would advise you. And then if you do want a publication, gird your loins, because I can't tell you what's gonna happen.
Haley Radke: Who knows? You went quite on quite a ride with yours, your work.
Jennifer Lauck: Blackbird was just, I never intended Blackbird to get out there. I was married to a guy who wanted me to make some money, so I was like, okay.
[00:45:00] So I'd never written a memoir. I just, I was a reporter, a television reporter A news reporter. So I was like, all right I'll bang this out, and turned out to be this incredible story. And then I sold it because I wanted to get him off my back. Here's some money I was, I had that abandonment issue oh, if I'm not performing, I'm gonna get abandoned.
And then I gave him all this money and then he's now you don't need me anymore. So that revealed like a deeper problem within the marriage, he and I are actually really good friends, but the marriage didn't survive that kind of, pendulum swinging. And I didn't intend black, I didn't intend to be a writer.
I didn't intend to write about my life. I didn't intend to be successful. I think God just dropped it on me. It's been really wild. Because people felt through Blackbird that they could start telling me, like you said, can I tell you my story? And I'm like, yeah, tell me. Let me help you write that.
And ever since I've been a teacher, helping people write, having good boundaries, so I'm not all up in there personal business. [00:46:00] Let them have dignity. I think people all need dignity and respect and resources and let them make their own choices because just like God made you and made me, God's made all of us, and we're all on, on path.
We're all on purpose and we need to be whole to do that to serve others, but we have to be well versed, right? And so writing has been a huge resource for me to grow my life and to grow into myself and to give back at the same time. I've published four memoirs and I've got my fifth I'm working on right now.
Haley Radke: So exciting. So I know you have your flight school, you have teaching programs. We are gonna link to those for folks in the show notes. And you're recommending to us writing and you've talked about that, but I'm gonna do mine and my recommended resource. So we've referenced Blackbird the most frequently in, in our conversation.
And for folks that haven't read it, [00:47:00] you know you're telling the story from Jenny childhood, Jenny's eyes and it's really, it's incredible. I know why it's had such success and I love that you read the audio, so I have the hard copy but I also listened to you read it. It was wonderful to hear in your voice 'cause voices are so important to me.
But for adoptees, your book Found. Is, it was really meaningful to me, and you recount all of these things that we certainly, many of us will connect with. Talking about being chosen to be a nurse, for your first adoptive mother as a, very young child who, no one should be asked to do those things.
You talked about your connection with Nancy Verrier in here as well, and I was like, whoa, that's, I didn't know that you shared that here, but that was really amazing [00:48:00] and your reunion time with your mom and these connections, how you're reaching for connection and like desperate for it and those things. I think it can be so relatable even when it is awkward and uncomfortable and those things.
That's why I'm so pleased that you shared those things with us earlier. I think it'll be really helpful for people to read that. So yeah, that's Found. And Jennifer, where can we find you and follow along with you and your writing and your future work?
Jennifer Lauck: Thank you so much, Haley. As a writer, when you're working on these books, you're doing your very best at the time.
But now I've had 25 years of experience of writing. Being a creative writing teacher, I'm like, oh, I could have done this or I could have done that. I could have changed this. I could have changed that. Found was really a book that I threw out in a very fast way. As a kind of buoy [00:49:00] for the responses or for the requests I was getting from the adoption community.
So I was like, okay, here, I'll just write this book and make a statement about adoption from my perspective, but I'm gonna go through that door and go back to my healing process, so to speak, and raising my kids. So I'm really happy to hear that Found is so moving. It's very different than anything I've ever written before or after, but I really felt it was very important to recontextualize everything I understood about my life through the filter of adoption. And as I'm working on my fifth memoir right now, I can't believe how much that adoption is bubbling up and especially in relationship to, there's a character in Found named Rick, and that was actually a very dysfunctional, actually predatory relationship I was in the midst of, and I didn't understand how he worked his way into my life at the same time [00:50:00] I was finding my mom and how vulnerable I was during my adoption reunion process. And I think if there's one thing I would tell to people, man, go gently into that dark night of finding your birth parents because it's hard. Take your time. I know you've waited your whole life and you just wanna run.
But remember how vulnerable you are. Remember you're being reduced all the way back to your infancy and make good decisions. Surround yourself with good resources, people who can help care for you while you go through that. I would say that my reunion and all of that impacted me for at least a decade in a profoundly bad way, right?
Because I went too fast, I expected too much, and I wasn't paying as close of attention as I needed to. Though Nancy did a great job holding me, I still, I threw myself over way too many cliffs. Okay, so that wasn't your question, but that's the primary thing I would say to any adoptee I ever [00:51:00] talk to, man, go slow.
And it's the same advice I would give about writing. If you're interested in writing and you find yourself called to be a writer. You don't need me. Go get a book called On Writing or Writing About Your Life by Williams Zinsser, and I'll give you both those books, Haley, so you can put them on your site.
Williams Zinsser is a really remarkable man who gives people permission to write about their life. And I've just recently found him and I love his books. I think I'm gonna build a program around this because I love what he has to say so much. What I do at Blackbird and through Flight School. Flight School is my substack and that's how people access my, like my billboard on the internet, right?
So that's the way people access me on the internet through Flight School, Blackbird and Flight School, they feed one another and it is a literary program, so it's for the writer who knows they're interested in not just becoming a, a good writer, but a great writer and they wanna to get published.
So I take you from idea [00:52:00] to publication, and this is a whole other thing. Never ever think, oh, I'm not good enough to write. You are good enough to write, start now. If you find down the line you want to become a great writer, then come find me on Flight School and I'll send you those links. Flight School is a great introductory handshake and it shows me if you're serious or not.
There are ways in the start page to get going, and if the writer is showing up on Flight School, commenting and getting involved in the community and sharing work, great. We'll start talking. Otherwise they can come to me and start taking classes, and I have a whole year long basics foundation program where I vet people because, relationship needs to be built in any situation, but especially when you're writing about your life or even all, even novels, everyone's writing about their life.
They don't think that they're writing about their lives, but they are, they're always writing about their lives. So I wanna make sure [00:53:00] I'm the right teacher for you, and I take a year of very careful interaction with you to make sure I'm the right teacher for you and that you will be a good fit in our community.
Because I'm working with, about 40 writers a week who are with me from anywhere from three to seven years, 10 years working on their project 'cause writing is a long term art form. It takes a long time to be a great writer. And so I wanna make sure we're in the right place. And if you're not, then I'm gonna recommend you to other people who I know are really good.
And so that's what Blackbird is all about. And again, I'm helping people towards publication and crossing that finish line, which has a lot of little moving pieces.
Haley Radke: Amazing. Yes. Wow. I commend you because that 10 years, oh, I'm working on a big podcasting project right now, and if you told me it was gonna take 10 years to do it, I'd be like, no. I don't know.
Jennifer Lauck: Haley. I've been working on a novel for 22, my first novel. I can't [00:54:00] seem to crack the, I finally have cracked the novel code and it's taken me 22 years. No. That's why you go to these book readings and people are like, yes, this took me, all of my twenties and thirties to write this book.
And you're like, how? When you read books, you think I read the book in nine hours. How could it possibly take you nine years?
Haley Radke: Yeah, exactly.
Jennifer Lauck: Because to write a really beautiful book, you have to work really hard. You have to know yourself really well, and you have to understand the human condition in a very big way. In order to build those worlds in a way that the reader can access. And yeah, my job is to help, you write a beautiful book.
Haley Radke: And so dear listener, you know that you can trust when I've recommended Jennifer's books. They're great.
Jennifer Lauck: Oh, that's very dear. And I'm gonna say thank you to that. Thank you for affirming me.
Haley Radke: Thank you so much for sharing with us today.
Jennifer Lauck: Oh, it's just been a pleasure. Thank you.
Haley Radke: It's always happens that I feel like I've [00:55:00] gotten to the end of any possible back listed, adoptee, authored work, and a new friend. Will tell me about some book in my collection I've missed, and Jennifer is just that for me. I had a new adoptee friend tell me about Jennifer's writing classes and how much she enjoyed them and have I read Jennifer's books?
I was like, no, I haven't. And so when I got to read them Blackbird and Found in particular, I was so moved and like truly just had a really amazing experience reading both of them. I was like, I'm excited to read her other two. They're already in my collection and I'm ready. When you find an author that you just really connect with and it's just like a real pleasure to read their work. This is totally the case for me with Jennifer's work. So I'm so glad I got to introduce her hopefully to some of you and perhaps some of you already knew of her [00:56:00] and that's lovely. It's 2026 already and we are planning out our 2026, 2027 calendar here at Adoptees On, and you may have seen in the fall, late fall, I opened up guest applications for the first time in many years, and I don't even know how many have come in already. It's a lot. It's a lot to sort through. But over the next year you will hear from, I'm sure returning guests yes. But new voices folks who are new to me. Hopefully I can introduce you to some more adoptees doing amazing things in this world and folks that are starting out on their journey of exploring what adoption has meant in their own lives.
And we're gonna have a real range of all of those different voices [00:57:00] in the coming years. And I'm also busy working on my other projects, including On Adoption. And I would love your support if you want to hear more about On Adoption. You can go to Adoptees for Family Preservation adopteesffp.org and see how you can help support that project and bring it to life.
And thank you so much for being here and for listening to adoptee voices. It's so important to me, and I'm glad it's important to you too. Thanks for listening and we'll talk again soon.
