332 Danna Schmidt
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/332
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're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today's guest is Danna Schmidt, a writer and celebrant. At 18, Danna found herself working in a courthouse with her own sealed adoption file within reach, and she began plotting how to read it. She shares her story of search, reunion, and estrangement, and how she's making room for the grief that runs through those experiences.
We also explore what it means to reclaim a story that's been told about us by other people, and how writing, meaningful objects, and personal rituals can help us honor our losses and ourselves. Before [00:01:00] we get started, I wanna personally invite you to sign up for my podcast newsletter, which you can find at adopteeson.com/newsletter.
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, Danna Schmidt. Hi, Danna.
Danna Schmidt: Hi, Haley.
Haley Radke: As I was reviewing your story and, preparing for today, I realized we have a lot of things in common. I think some of them may come up when you share your story with us. But first of all, you've definitely been in my city before.
I live in Edmonton, Alberta. This is where I was born.
Danna Schmidt: I was born in Edmonton, Alberta.
Haley Radke: This is where my birth mother lives and my birth father has lived for many years in the Vancouver area, so I think we have some commonalities there. Yeah.
Danna Schmidt: Some [00:02:00] commonalities there. Yeah. Yes.
Haley Radke: But before I spoil anything further, would you mind sharing a little bit of your story with us?
Danna Schmidt: Sure. Yeah. So I am a baby scoop era adoptee. I like to say I was adopted one and a half times, and born in the mid-'60s. And when I was relinquished at birth, my birth mother, though, wanting to, leave that clue behind, named me after herself. So her name was Danna, and she named me Danna. So that first, I was in foster care for a few months, and then placed for adoption with a couple, and they were going through with it.
They renamed me Wanda, and that adoption did not go through because they separated. And at the time it was the father that wanted to keep me, but at that time in this, there was no way the Alberta government was going to allow a, a single father to adopt a child. And so I was placed back into foster care where [00:03:00] my parents, who were foster parents, then brought me home and renamed me back to Danna Diane because they too knew that they wanted this to be a clue that would make it easier in later life to search.
And at that time, so I was about 15 months old when they adopted me. So I grew up in a house with two older brothers. And there were a few other foster kids at the time when I was quite young, and I always knew or had a sense that I knew that I was adopted. So it's one of my first memories with my family is being told I was adopted and the whole thing.
"You're special. We chose you. We wanted a girl," yada, yada. And mom had always said, "When you turn 18, I'll give you a hint about, the name that was on file," because Mom was privy to some information as a foster mom, or so she said. So I was always looking forward to turning 18 and finding out.
And then when I turned 18, they moved out to [00:04:00] Vancouver Island. I stayed in Edmonton and took a job at the courthouse. So I was actually working with, as a file clerk, with my adoption file. So I was down in the basement by myself, the only one down there working with files. And it was actually a few months into the job where I was like, "Wait a minute, my adoption file is here."
So I went to that section, the musty section of the basement, and found my adoption file, sealed envelope, very old, and I began to scheme and plot stealing the file. And so I had it all figured out that I was gonna come in on a Saturday, and I started shadowing with the adoption clerk to learn how she procedurally did everything, and under the guise of wanting to steal my file.
And I had it worked out that I was gonna backdate, re-stamp, re-seal, wear gloves, and photocopy everything, and then put everything back. Then I looked [00:05:00] at the criminal codebook on my desk. I was working in chambers. It was called Master's Chambers at the time in Queen's Bench. And I realized that, looking at that, 16, 18 years if I got caught stealing a government document.
But that's how obsessed I became for a time. I was always hounding the adoption registrar to find out information on my file. So Mom did give me the name, which was Kaushmann. That was my birth mom's last name at the time. And I did do the searching that was, archive files at the provincial archives, again, in a basement.
Library, microfiche. Searching at that time, pre-internet, wasn't easy. And I kinda gave up, 'cause it was a bit like a needle in a haystack phoning every single Kaushmann in the white pages, to see, "Are you my mother?" And so I gave up that search for a while in my 20s, until I started experiencing pregnancy losses, moved overseas, had a child.
And then when I came [00:06:00] back in the late '90s, the Alberta government had opened up the adoption files to third-party agencies to permit pay-for-play searching. And of course, I'm like, "Take my $500." And so that's how it went down for me, where my son was a year old and I paid to do that search.
And a few months later, the agency called me to say, "We found your birth mom, and you're never gonna believe it, but her name is your name too. And she lives 10 minutes from you." And then they started listing all these commonalities, all of the synchronicities in both of us working in the hospitality industry.
And so we reunited on that, fateful phone call day, April 21st, 1998, and it was fast and furious and, in retrospect, very overwhelming, and would ultimately, decades later, lead [00:07:00] to estrangement. And she is now dead. She died in December of 2021. I say dead in that blunt way because I work in death care, and I don't believe in the euphemisms of passed away and graduated.
Haley Radke: Grad- graduated. Graduated to the great beyond. I haven't heard that. This makes me wonder if you were working in the adoption in the court when I was adopted. I was adopted in 1983.
Danna Schmidt: I was, yes. Yep.
Haley Radke: You might have handled my folder.
Danna Schmidt: Oh, my gosh. That gives me chills. Yes. Yeah, I graduated from high school in '83.
Now I'm dating myself, and everyone knows how old I am and I'm 60. And yeah, that's exactly when I began working at the courthouse. So your paperwork was probably going through even later than that.
Haley Radke: [00:08:00] Yeah. Wow. Okay. There's another match-up reunion is so complicated.
And I'm wondering if you are comfortable talking a little bit more about that. You have this dream for so long, you're willing to break the law. No, not quite. And you pay to search and all this, and then ultimately you're the one that chooses to walk away. And I think we have all these ideas of like what finding our birth parents might be like.
And, society has romanticized it in a way to the airport moment, and, I call it reunion porn. And yet, like you just find a human, and it's difficult, and that's the reality of it.
Danna Schmidt: Yeah. It is messy stuff. And it's to be continued in how I'm unpacking, looking back at that, especially now that my birth mom is dead and we were [00:09:00] estranged at the time of her death, although we had spoke a month prior and, kinda rehashed our words of, "I love you," "I love you, too."
And yet when I look back at, just how I leaped into it, what I would say now, which is make it mediated, take it slow, have a therapist, all of those things that I did not do. And we were both doing our level best. We were doing the best we knew to do. It was a big, fat Ukrainian family, and a week after we reunited, there was a big 70th birthday party for my birth grandmother, and a cousin had commented, as soon as she met me, "Nice to meet you, and you should be lucky you didn't grow up in this family."
And that was, that was a cautionary. In retrospect, she was right, and there is no greener grass. Every family is messed up and dysfunctional in their own special way. But I really struggled with [00:10:00] addiction in the family and not knowing how to cope with that. So my birth grandmother was sober by that time, but that was kinda revealed as a secret.
You should know that she used to be a fall-down-the-stairs drunk, and, that was a very open secret, but they were letting me in on that. And it would be years before I would figure out that my birth mother too struggled with addiction with alcohol. And I just didn't know. It was yet more space between us.
I didn't know how to navigate, this, this new intimacy where we became very close very fast. Not a mother-daughter relationship, but very much kind of a friend relationship But then to have this other thing, this unwelcome guest of, alcoholism in there too. And that just for years was weighing on me until finally one day I just had to cut off.
And it was about a month [00:11:00] after my father died, my adoptive father and her mother had died in November of 2016. And in December, just a regular phone call in which she, I was talking, and she was not really listening, and the tinkling of the glass. And I just hung up knowing this is it. Kinda like this older part of myself taking my younger self by the hand and going, "We're not gonna do this anymore."
And so that's kinda how that went down. And yeah, and that was by my choice. So as much as the search was everything, and, I wouldn't do anything differently in terms of leaping into everything, I would still have that same drive 'cause you can't as an adoptee, I don't feel, unless you're completely disconnected from self, you can't help that need to know.
That is, the great longing. And so I know that I would still be approaching it the same way of wanting to [00:12:00] leap into things. And, our story was our story, and we had a great ride for a long time, and we were very close for a long time. And yeah.
Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. So another thing we have in common, I'll say, is that I'll speak for myself, I have always thought that my next career would be working in a funeral home and helping the bereaved in some way, like being a part of, taking care of them in some way.
And you're a celebrant. You work with folks who would like to celebrate all kinds of different occasions, but you're intimately familiar with death and grief. When did that become interesting to you, or when were you drawn to that?
Danna Schmidt: I was first drawn to death in childhood. I [00:13:00] grew up on an acreage outside of Edmonton.
I could tell you the exact points, and you would probably be able to map it on the map, but a listener would not. And when my dog died, I buried her, and so performed my first green burial at that time. And so death was just a natural part of, having animals on the acreage and living with that, even though I had not really experienced death in family until my grandfather died much later.
But, I suppose there was that latent curiosity then, which became more acute when I had gone back to university. When I was a young mom, I decided to attend the University of Calgary, and I thought I was gonna be an English major, but then I took a sort of a survey class, an anthropological perspectives on death class, and I was hooked.
That was it. And so I switched my major to religious studies. It took me a long time to tell people I was a religious studies major b- 'cause anyone who knew me knew I was [00:14:00] pretty irreligious. And so it was always a funny thing. And so I did study comparative religions, predominantly myth and ritual.
Began collecting death poetry, and it would be years later before I would become, I would pivot from my career as a marketer in tourism to becoming a celebrant. But it was that interest that... it's just funny that we do need to pay attention to our curiosity. So that grief and funeral home interest of yours, stay with it. Don't, don't ignore those, those inklings of the soul.
Haley Radke: Yes, I'm sure someday I'll be there.
I thought, a lot about this and I, in fact, I invited many years ago a, a death doula to come on the show and that didn't end up happening. But I'm so fascinated by adoptees and how we process our grief through the [00:15:00] lifespan, and I'm curious your thoughts on that having now, seen people die, helped people die peacefully, helped their loved ones to process all of those kinds of things. I'm sure you have thoughts around this.
Danna Schmidt: Yeah. Absolutely. My work in the world, I do death doula work as well as being a funeral celebrant as well as being a medical aid in dying volunteer and advocate. So I'm at the deathbed pretty much every week in my work in some way. So I get to see dying people all of the time.
And, it's not, being a celebrant and ceremonialist, I'll say, a lot of times that medical aid in dying death is not is not super sacred and filled with ritual. A lot of times it's very mundane. And what I will say, too, is that I do witness people [00:16:00] tiptoeing from this world or attempting to without having dealt with their stuff.
I'm a huge believer in all of life's threshold moments, and I absolutely believe it's never too late to go back and reconsecrate a moment. One of those moments that's really pivotal to, I think, a lot of humans is coming of age, where we maybe didn't have a great coming of age experience, especially as women.
And it's not too late to go back and revisit those moments. The same too for all of us adoptees. We can look at our key life moments where we didn't really feel like we got what we needed, and we can re-gift that to ourselves. We can reclaim those moments, reconsecrate them. And so relative to death, I would say, that, death is the great leveler.
So for every human and all of our way points throughout life, I think it behooves all of us while we can to do our work as humans of assessing, what our needs are and were along the way. And we can do [00:17:00] that a lot through story and re-storying and, as I say, reclamation work. Because I think as adoptees in particular, there's so much that we have kicked to the curb.
There's so much that as our identity that we've subsumed under somebody else's or society's perception of who we are. And so getting at our core authentic identity, I believe takes great work like ritual as well too.
Haley Radke: Do you think that there's something different about us as adopted people that we understand grief to a certain level versus kept people, or it's all kinda the same and some of us have processed those things and some just haven't.
Danna Schmidt: Yeah. I think one of, one of my lines in my memoir that I'm working on that I begin my [00:18:00] birth chapter with, because I basically rewrote my birth when, back in 2016, my adoptive mother said, we took you in when no one else would." And that was my moment of, "You know what? You don't get to tell my story anymore. I am done hearing my story told via you." And so that was when I began to remythologize my story. And so that first line in my chapter is that I'm, "A fourth-day of Christmastide baby, birthed like a song that is great cry, bright lights, and cold air." And that "birthed like a song that is great cry" really speaks to the grief.
And, every baby experiences that coming into the world, and there's an author, Martin Prechtel, who speaks to that in this fabulous grief book called The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise. And he insists that, our first cry, our first great song is grief. For adoptees, [00:19:00] and obviously those of us relinquished at birth, it's even more acute, right?
We experience loss upon loss, not just loss of the womb, but loss of, first mother. So yeah, I think we're definitely as adoptees experiencing grief in a different way. How we metabolize that and compost that, completely different. There's a lot of adoptees in denial and maybe not out of the fog, quote-unquote, and/or just, grievers that will do what in the grief world we call constructive grieving, where, we busy ourselves with our work and other things as a way maybe not to really face our grief.
And so yeah I absolutely think, hey, let's do it. Let's create a grief retreat for adoptees. I think that would be fabulous. Let's get on it, because really, that's a core common denominator too for all of our stories.
Haley Radke: I love this idea of going back and marking moments that [00:20:00] perhaps we weren't able to at the time or didn't know to do that and this idea of reclamation.
And I wonder if you can speak a little bit more about that. I think for so many of us we're so ready to just keep going, and yet there's something underneath that we bury and These I'm gonna call them even small things of ritual you can do can really make an impact more so than folks might think.
Danna Schmidt: Oh, absolutely. And yeah, I think that, rituals of reclamation don't have to be anything fancy. It doesn't have to be. It's really, And I come at ritual in a very personal way. It's not one size fits all, "Here's a ritual on the shelf, use it." It's very much connected to our own personal story.
So I would invite [00:21:00] adoptees to go back through their life story, even if it's just timelining, and pick out those pivotal moments that, maybe are pain points or moments where there was lack, something was missing, and to consider the symbols that connect through the decades as well to those moments.
For me, we had a house fire when I was five, so our house burnt down to the ground. I was blamed for it because I ran next door to get my aunt, and as this family lore goes it was, a cold winter day, and she had cookies and hot chocolate, so forgot to tell her about the fire 'cause, I was warming my feet by her other, you know- stove fire. But with that, came loss of my my pivotal doll, my doll that I had just gotten for Christmas. And so that doll would be one I have been doing some work around that reclamation of I, really [00:22:00] identified with that doll. There was a almost a genetic mirroring, if you can, through a doll, that the doll looked like me, and that was meaningful to me at that time.
And so symbols like that, like really looking at those, and then how can we work with those symbols to help to... and it could be a photograph. It could be, just whatever the ephemera of our life, and I do that. As a funeral celebrant, when I'm meeting with families I low-key snoop through the home.
Not up and snooping through the home, but I'm looking around, noticing what those symbols are of a life, and we all have them, whether it's a collection or if it is just cherished things from the past. So that's a start in terms of entering into some of those rituals. Things like a receiving blanket can be a powerful way into doing a, a blanket ceremony in adulthood to receive ourselves again in our wholeness because we were [00:23:00] always whole and, always will be, and yet there is that feeling in our soul like there have been so many pieces of ourself, as I say, kicked to the curb.
So it is a soul retrieval kind of process, and we can do it through story as well, and through writing and et cetera, et cetera. I could talk about rituals of reclamation for adoptees forever, 'cause there are, oodles of ways that we can get at that in order to honor ourselves again.
Haley Radke: You talk about one that your birth mother did for you, really, in reunion.
Sorry, I'm just looking to make sure I'm in the right spot. In Bone Mother, in your essay Bone Mother, you talk about that.
Danna Schmidt: Yeah. Yes. Are you talking about the 32 gifts? Yeah. Yeah, that was a really... And when I talk about the [00:24:00] overwhelm of reunion, the overwhelm started with this big fat Ukrainian family party, and everybody partying and drinking and, telling me that.
But connected with that was her pulling me to the side and gifting me 32 gifts to represent all the years that, all my birthdays that she had missed, which is, the most incredible thing, right? To feel welcomed. But... And it was everything from, PD Eastman's Are You My Mother to ending a porcelain doll, a large porcelain doll that has always sat up on a high.
And so yeah, that was a lot to process, and it was a very cool, for a birth mother, I would say that's a great idea. But probably prep it a bit not just lamb based, us adoptees with that kind of thing because I took it in as really grappling with worth and self-worth, and there, was just something about it that just felt I was, taught all my life to [00:25:00] be grateful.
So the, the appropriate response in the moment was like, "Oh, thank you," and the fawning that I do so well as an adoptee, but it would take me years to process that. And my is out there of how I was kinda processing that a little bit too, of things that were nailing, a nail in the coffin of our relationship.
Haley Radke: As I was thinking about it, it's, again, it's someone else doing a ritual with no input from you. And I think the hope was, and the intent, right? Was to be the big welcome, and yet it doesn't land that way.
Danna Schmidt: And it was performative too because there was this big audience of family, of look what I have done for her. I'm a worthy... it's the, her having to deal with her own guilt and everything that, again, you know, to be in reunion is to consider everybody in the adoption [00:26:00] triad of what lack was she feeling at that time too, what insecurities. And so I can, what I would make up is she was trying to make up.
Not that we can ever make up. And it, and we always set the ground that we're just gonna go from here. There is no going back and woulda, coulda, shoulda, t- it's always from this point onward.
Haley Radke: Can you I'm curious how you came to, write and- you speak about writing letters for certain moments as well. So can you talk a little bit about that? Like how you started writing and how it's helped you process and then maybe some prescriptive writing opportunities for adopted people?
Danna Schmidt: Sure, yeah. When did I start writing? I guess as a child. I was at the age of 10 when we moved into town, into Edmonton.
I was writing the great, summer novel, right? And so and that, of course, was a creative act abandoned for a zillion [00:27:00] reasons. And so I really didn't get- I've always written as part of my career, whether it was copywriting. But it really wasn't until, I would say, going back to university, writing essay after essay on, Indian philosophy and all the heavy, deep, and real stuff as a religious study scholar that I really began to write, kinda more prolifically.
And then in English class, we were journaling. And so I think that was, that journaling was my entry point into more reflective writing. When we moved to the US, we moved to Seattle in 2005, and so that was, like, the Katrina, Bush two era. And I was experiencing a lot of kinda disconnect as an immigrant.
And so I began blogging at that point. And so I kinda have never stopped since that point. So for 20 years I've been writing prolifically, whether as a blogger. [00:28:00] And then, of course, to pivot into a celebrant career is to write ceremony, which is great. I get to write people's love stories, their life stories, their healing stories, and so that's another great outlet.
It wasn't actually funny enough until the end of 2023 when I kinda fell off the apple cart. My daughter is a social worker, and her mentor at the time and continued is SooJin Yu Simpson. And so she had told her, which I know she's been on your show before, and as a therapist. And when my daughter said, my mom's an adoptee," she said, "Oh, does she know about all these resources, including Adoptee Voices as a writing group?"
And I was like, "Oh, adoptees talk to each other?" So keep in mind, this was the end of 2023. I'm such a lone wolf and had always been and had always been [00:29:00] processing my adoption, but alone. It never dawned or occurred to me that I could be in community with other adoptees. So that's when I joined Adoptee Voices and began writing with fellow adoptees, which has just been the greatest thing, and we continue to write, together weekly.
I really believe in the power of writing. I do work with my families and clients to encourage them to be writing, healing letters to connect to core relationships current or past as a way to get back into those moments and look at unhealed, be that trauma or just the stuff we're carrying.
The courthouse moment, I went back and wrote a letter to my younger self, and that was published in Severance Magazine, and that was a lot of fun to do, to kinda go back and, 'cause my story at the time was, oh, I was getting too obsessed with this, and that was just not healthy, and it was [00:30:00] illegal.
But, current self, had I been guiding myself at that time, would've been, "Steal the file. Don't even replace it, just take it." And and that was my letter, was just this facetious, do it quick before the janitor comes kinda thing. And so these moments of writing can be really fun and cathartic and meaningful, and we can mine a lot of, epiphanies from it, too, I think.
Haley Radke: You have this found poem that we're gonna link in the show notes for people that I think is such a great example of that. And it's such a, I don't know, it feels like an, I'll call it an easier way in to cut something up and use someone else's words perhaps to express something for yourself, especially for folks who are like, "Oh my God I'm not gonna journal, I'm not gonna write a letter, I'm not gonna..."
Danna Schmidt: Yeah.
Haley Radke: If that's a barrier, it's like why don't you photocopy your adoption records [00:31:00] and chop it up and see if you can make a found poem out of it?
Danna Schmidt: Absolutely. And yeah, when I said fun, I don't mean that writing a healing letter is fun, but I was thinking of that poem that I had written which was basically composting my, all of my literary rejection letters and starting to submit work out into the world.
And because many of them were adoption-related stories, and adoptees don't have the easiest time getting our stories out there. So I was able to have so much fun cutting words and phrases out of all of these rejection letters and basically rejigging them into a found poem of basically how an adoptee reads a literary rejection letter.
And so that was very satisfying. I recommend every adoptee do that, whether it's, the microaggressions and tropes of adoption that, we can begin to collect and just [00:32:00] put all the words into a bowl and make something else of it. And of course, our birth records. There are a lot of... I didn't get my birth records until 2023, and it was a great big file because of all of the foster care visits as well, and there's a lot of activating language that I will definitely have to do something with.
And in fact, I was copying on that poem online that you're, you were referencing, I have an image in there that is from one of my birth records, and it's on the graphic of the poem.
Haley Radke: I see it now on the side. "Child returned from VTA placement."
Danna Schmidt: Yeah.
Haley Radke: "See memo dated March 9th."
Danna Schmidt: Yeah.
Haley Radke: Oh my God. This, this poem is I this is so good.
"Unfortunately, we are sorry that despite consideration, adoptee, you were not [00:33:00] chosen."
Danna Schmidt: All of the words were there. Like it just was so amazing that I could, you know-
Haley Radke: Oh, yeah ...
Danna Schmidt: craft it into a kind of form letter, a form rejection.
Haley Radke: It's so good. This rejection of you as a person is very telling. You should be grateful we considered you.
Anyway folks, you gotta click on over to that. That's, it's wonderful. Okay, another thing I think we, we have in common is I think you would be very good friends with my neighbor. She runs a antique booth at the local antique mall, and in addition to her best-selling creepy doll head planters, one of the things that she sells is skulls and preserved bird wings and [00:34:00] butterflies and bones as art- pieces.
Danna Schmidt: Love it. Love it. Yeah. And yeah, doll head planters aren't creepy, by the way.
Haley Radke: Okay.
Danna Schmidt: Those of us that have them, yes.
Haley Radke: The, the ones she chooses are intentionally Chucky adjacent, I'll say. So
Okay, so anyway-
Danna Schmidt: Yeah, I love her already.
Haley Radke: You should. You should. She is a character. Anyway I wanted to talk a little more about that in your piece Bone Mother and Bones. And- this isn't bone adjacent, but I still have the three quarters that was the first thing my biological father ever gave to me.
And it's just a, it was a weird little exchange for some reason, and I [00:35:00] have the three quarters, and I keep them in my jewelry box upstairs. And there's something about having this tangible thing that he gave me that it's even just saying it I'm like, "Oh my god, it's so embarrassing. I have three quarters."
But I'm never gonna get rid of them, and so can you talk about that having something tangible and I'm thinking of your piece bone mother, but I'm sure you can go other places with that question
Danna Schmidt: Yeah. I... And I think as humans, we are wired to we are collectors. Back in the day, once upon a time, we were bone collectors.
But those items, have morphed into things like your neighbor. And the things that we carry that, again, it's connected to meaning, so the talismans. And I, if I could run the world, I would have everybody have an altar to be able to place those meaningful [00:36:00] items on. And I think part of that is the wound of never really never having attended kindergarten, so I never really got show and tell, so I'm constantly making up for show and tell in my life.
And I think that shows up through these objects that either are an object of veneration or an object that, again, tells story. And so even in my late life legacy work that I do with people we talk about artifacts a lot because artifacts are a partial show and tell of, items and our stuff is imbued with meaning, unless it's not, in which case, get rid of it.
Do that Swedish death cleaning thing. But yeah, so I don't know if I've answered your question, but...
Haley Radke: I was thinking about how you have some of your birth mother's ashes, and this idea of maybe I should create something with it. Maybe I should send some of it, to nature. Maybe I [00:37:00] should-
Danna Schmidt: Yeah
Haley Radke: Make something out of it that I can hold onto in my hand. And I think one of my regrets when our last dog passed was that I didn't have her remains given back to me. And so what I have instead is like her collar. I had a rock made with her name that sits right outside my window here. I have those things, but I don't have like something-
Danna Schmidt: Yeah ...
Haley Radke: of her.
Danna Schmidt: Yeah. When I just came back from the UK and I was doing a lot of sort of release rituals connected... it was an ancestral pilgrimage. So I was visiting where my birth father was born, and then, I took some tree bits from, his home there where he used to live. And then when we went to Liverpool, that's where the family departed from on the ship to come to Canada.
And so I didn't have his cremains. I had some of my birth mom's cremains with me. [00:38:00] And so I just wrote a letter to him and, you can burn those into ashes and create ashes from burnt, and I do that a lot. So we don't have to have cremains. We can make our own ashes, from other ephemera, right?
But in this case, I actually composted it because it was a water ritual, so I was, adding that water to it. And I did that release with some of her cremains my letter to him, and then also to my birth aunt because I was in reunion with my paternal side of my family in 2019, only to discover my birth father had died, decades prior.
So I didn't have that, but I did have the intention and the emotion as that was fresh for me. It was like he had just died kind of thing. And I was able to grieve that. So yeah, I think it can be really meaningful to do stuff with it. This was the first time I had done anything with my birth mom's [00:39:00] cremains.
And to be continued. In Bone Mother, I talk about all the ways, and I will be making art from it. And, even a shadow box it sounds like for you with your dog. I would totally be on the shadow box thing with the collar and-
Haley Radke: Oh, it's right here. It's all... It's above our... Yeah, I see it-
Danna Schmidt: Yeah
Haley Radke: every day. You write about, a little more about your biological father in your piece Hungry Ghost, which is in the collection Relative Strangers, which is put together by BK Jackson of Severance Magazine creation. And I really enjoyed this piece, and it sounds like you have intentionally gone back and done travel.
My, friend Lisette Austin has talked about this genealogical travel, and if you could just speak to that a little more, because again, sometimes going back to places where maybe [00:40:00] we know that our biological, our ancestors have been, or some of those things, especially for folks who don't get the benefit of being in a reunion.
We have transnational adoptee friends who will go back to their home country and perhaps go to an orphanage that they were in for a brief time, or, like , this feeling of like place and trying to anchor yourself to the world. And I think this genealogical travel can maybe do some of that for us.
Danna Schmidt: I think so. For me, I'm still, fresh from the trip last week, having come home. I'm still very emotional about it. Of course, I'm still unpacking what it all meant because I was doing, releasing my adoptive father's cremains in Ireland as well. But I think that, in my piece in Relative Strangers, Hungry Ghost, I'm speaking to walking in those footsteps and the, the surreal, and I guess to take it kind of a big macro level, to consider [00:41:00] that all of us as humans, we all have our footprints on the planet.
We are going places, and we are migrating. And I think it's meaningful to, in the case of my birth father he died mysteriously in Stanley Park in Vancouver. And so my daughter and I went to Stanley Park to the spot where his body was found. And there's just something about connecting dates and time, and I write about that.
There were some incredible synchronicities to his death, and I happened to be in Vancouver that same weekend he died, decades prior and, of course, had no idea. And so I think sometimes when we can connect on a map places and traces, as I call it, some really meaningful things can happen. Or not, right?
It can just feel mundane. But when we're connecting again the myth part of ritual, when we're connecting story and meaning to that, like I think I felt really [00:42:00] emotional because I knew my birth father, part of the mythology that I have inherited from the family, is learning how much he loved being British.
That was his entire identity, which probably, you know, that severance for him of having to leave at the age of eight would've been really meaningful. And then, showing up in February in Winnipeg, Canada, is a bit of a harsh disconnect. But I think ancestral trips can really do a lot, and I
It's not a, once and done thing. We're continuing to do this work as humans and make meaning of our families and all that we carry and they carried. But I was also able to stand on land, for example, with my adoptive father and see where the Irish ancestors had farmed in the potato famine era.
And part of my journey back to the UK and Ireland was to look at all of the things [00:43:00] that they were affected by in these family lines and the traumas that we carry, and I'll be writing that into my memoir about some of that. So I think that's part of, as the descendants, that's part of our job to bear witness, and so I feel like that's what I'm doing.
My job, I didn't get to know him in life, but my job is to carry him for the rest of my life and to keep saying his name and telling his stories and being that descend- being that good, what I would hope would be, that I'll be a good ancestor one day myself.
Haley Radke: You are leaving your writings for the next generation, and I really hope people follow along with you, Danna, because you have such range in how you write.
Like this poem I find it so humorous while also very pointed. The, sorry, the found poem that I was referencing earlier it has some cross outs, so I'm gonna read the full thing, but, "How an Adoptee [00:44:00] Reads Literary Rejection Letters: A Lost and Found Poem." And then it says, "Adoptee Rejection: A Found Poem," which is the words not crossed out.
It's just wonderful. But your recent pieces, which we've been referring to, Bone Mother and Hungry Ghost in Relative Strangers, are just so powerful and I've never had this before, but when I finished Bone Mother, I had goosebumps. And to have a physical reaction to reading something was really different for me.
And I think there's gonna be a lot of adopted people who wanna read your work and will really connect with it like I did. So thank you so much for putting it out into the world for us. And it's a tremendous legacy you're gonna leave just with your words, not counting anything else.
Danna Schmidt: Yeah, I think it's, it can be really just it's part of how we process. It's very, the complexities of being an adoptee. This is one avenue. A few [00:45:00] months ago, I put together a an adoptee fortune teller kit, and actually wrote the whole fortune teller, and that, I'll link that as well for, or you can link it in the show notes.
And that was also really powerful to get at, how we're always searching and we always have that question of, "Where will I find my mother?" And, as, right from childhood, that those searing questions just stay with us. And but I believe in the power fortune teller is a form of divination, and I believe in the magic of, be it a ritual or a creative act, to manifest.
Not that I ever found out by doing that as a child, fortune telling. But if life's not linear and it's circling back on itself, then, there were, there was some fortune telling that did, come to be
Haley Radke: That's so interesting. I'm sure that there will be a lot of adoptees who are interested in that [00:46:00] too.
Wonderful. We will link to that as well in the show notes for folks. What do you wanna recommend to us today, Danna?
Danna Schmidt: I just read an adoptee book I love, and it's not out yet, Wonderland by Patricia Knight Meyer. That is a fabulous memoir that everyone should put on the horizon. I had an advance reader copy, and what I loved about her memoir is that she did talk about that messiness of reunion.
But I also do want to, I think, connect back to the grief piece that we talked about, and The Smell of Rain on Dust is definitely a grief book. I have all kinds of grief resources on my waypointceremonies.com website under the grief tab, and they're old. To have grief resources is to constantly update it, so I haven't updated it in a few years.
But there are some core books on there, including Martín Prechtel's The Smell of Rain on Dust. So I recommend that for everyone to [00:47:00] look at grief in a new way. He illuminates praise as being part of it and, praise is a pretty activating word for adoptees, to connect that we always have to be happy joy.
But he connects praise in a different way to that experience of being human, and grief is probably the most human expression we can have. So to be initiated in our grief is absolutely to come more alive as a human. I absolutely believe it. It cracks us open to our real living.
Haley Radke: You seem very in tune with all the things, so I think that can change a person. Wow. Thanks, Danna. I appreciate that that resource. It's-
Danna Schmidt: I'm gonna write that down and put that on my bulletin board to remind me when I'm not in tune which is a daily basis. Haley said I'm in tune with things.
Haley Radke: All [00:48:00] right. If that's the highest praise you get from today- ... then that's great. Where can folks connect with you online and follow along with your writing and your other offerings?
Danna Schmidt: Yeah. People can find my newsletter, Altared Moments, spelt as A-L-T-A-R-E-D moments.substack.com. That's my newsletter and where I post a weekly poem, 'cause I'm a poem hunter. I have adoption stories on there, and just my riffs and, meanderings and monthly rituals that I offer to my paid subscribers.
And then my work in the world, waypointceremonies.com. My blog is on there as well as other resources, too. So both ways are great ways to find me.
Haley Radke: Wonderful. Thank you. We'll put all your links, including your social media and your newsletter, everything, in the show notes for folks. So you can click there to follow along [00:49:00] with Danna.
Thank you. What a delightful conversation. Appreciated our time.
Danna Schmidt: Oh, yeah. To be continued, yeah.
Haley Radke: To be continued, certainly. Thanks, Danna. Before we go, I hope that hearing Danna's experience will encourage you to make some room for whatever you've been wanting to create or mark in your own life. Write it. Do it.
Do the thing. Find a way to honor someone you've lost or something you never got to have. You don't have to post about it or publish an essay anywhere. You don't have to explain it to anyone. It can just be for you. So much of our lives have been narrated by other people, and this is for you. This is a part of a healing journey.
I know therapy's not accessible to everyone. Your [00:50:00] therapist, if you're lucky to have one, probably gives you assignments like these on the regular, and you can do some of these things on your own. You're allowed to make something that matters to you, even if no one else ever sees it. Thank you so much for listening.
Let's talk again soon.
