54 Nicole R. - Our Story Isn't Told
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/54
Haley Radke: [00:00:00] You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is Season Three, Episode 14, Nicole R. I'm your host Haley Radke. Nicole Rademacher is a multicultural adoptee and a professional contemporary artist. She tells us about her reunion with her biological parents and her two brothers, and how it has informed her creative practice.
Nicole lets us in on some of her projects, including one that is still in the works, and I'm still in awe of the brilliance of it. We wrap up with some recommended resources and, as always, links to everything we talk about today are on the website, adopteeson.com. Let's listen in.
I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Nicole Rademacher. Welcome Nicole.
Nicole Rademacher: Hi. Thank you for having [00:01:00] me.
Haley Radke: Oh, I'm so excited to chat with you. I know you do a ton of different things, which hopefully we'll touch on everything. But why don't you start out and just share your story with us.
Nicole Rademacher: I am a multicultural adoptee. My biological father is Mexican and my biological mother is white. I grew up in a white family. I was adopted into a white family with an adopted brother. So I grew up always knowing I was adopted. I have a really great relationship with my adoptive family.
I always wanted to search out my biological family. It was something that was, ever since I can remember, that was something I wanted to do. I was adopted in Wisconsin, in Milwaukee through Catholic Social Services. I remember when I was 18, I called Catholic Social Services in Milwaukee. They told me when I turned five, they changed the age from 18 to 21. And I was devastated.
Yeah. I was like, No! But I [00:02:00] finally turned 18 and my adoptive parents are super supportive. When I turned 21, I was kind of in a different, you know, 21-year-old state. But just before I turned 26, with the encouragement of a friend of mine, I contacted Catholic Social Services again and filled out the paperwork. I happened to be finishing my undergraduate degree and so I actually got to do it for free, which was pretty exciting.
You know, I thought this was gonna take ages. I'd read about searches where you never find your biological parents or they find you and they don't or they can't meet with you or meet you. You just never get that connection. But I was really fortunate that, I mean, I think I was fortunate that three months later in March of that same year, I was contacted by a social worker and he [00:03:00] had found my biological parents because my biological grandparents, my maternal grandparents had never moved.
And so he still had that same contact information. And my biological parents were married two years after I was born.
Haley Radke: To each other?
Nicole Rademacher: Yes, to each other. Right? Like that's really beautiful and really amazing. And I have this whole family and I have two younger brothers that are full younger brothers.
But it was, uh, really difficult. I mean, as any adoptee that finally meets your biological parents, it's. I remember this bath that I took that was like this eternal bath where I just kept looking at my skin and touching each part of my skin and realizing that it belonged to something other than just me, because for the first 26 years of my life, it had only belonged to me.
And I didn't look like, I mean, even though I grew up in a white family and I totally passed for [00:04:00] completely white, my parents are Nordic and tall and blue eyes and big bones, and I'm, you know, I'm petite. I'm 5 foot two, with dark hair and brown eyes. But it was weird, right? Because you are supposed to be super happy.
But I felt this added layer of, I guess it's rejection. I don't know what the word is. It took me, once I found that out, it actually took me a long time to call them and make the contact. I remember very specifically, like I wrote it. Really, I was shaking. I was at work when he called me and gave me the information, I just kind of stared at that number and those names for weeks and didn't know what to do with it.
I called and I got voicemail and so I hung up and I called again and I got voicemail and I just like wasn't calling at the right time. You know, I remember I talked with him and I don't remember the specifics, but yeah, it's this big [00:05:00] blur of emotions.
Haley Radke: Hmm. Can you talk a little bit more, Nicole, about knowing that your parents stayed together and had more kids and what does that feel like?
Nicole Rademacher: It's kind of cool in one sense because my adopted brother and I, like, there was so much that we could have done to bond as adoptees, but we never did that.
They were just really different people. So it's cool to have another two other options as brother, you know? But it's also like, I don't know. Like if they had kept me and then we'd live together, like would these two people exist? Would I be the older sister? I mean, yeah, but it's tough.
It feels like, especially now being a mom and having a child and he didn't come at a super opportune time, my child. We’d been talking about having kids, but not at the moment that he came. And so there is a bit [00:06:00] of resentment or something at that. I don't know if it's resentment towards them, but it's like, Couldn't you have, like, toughed it out? Couldn't you have figured it out?
But, you know, they were 19, and I remember when I was 19. Thinking like this is the age that they were, and knowing that I was still just a child. So I mean, I have a lot of empathy, but I also have a lot of just unresolved emotions around it. There is an anger, but I think my anger is not as strong, I think, if I don't know.
It's not, it's not as strong as maybe it was before, but like before it was masked by all these other things because I thought I was supposed to be super happy 'cause I was 26 when I met them and really unsure of who I was. I really thought I was still in the fog, right?
And so then learning that, I was like, Well, I'm supposed to be happy. This is [00:07:00] really amazing. Like I don't have to find my biological mother and my biological father, like both of my biological parents, they're together, and I have this whole family and it's like picture perfect and we'll just tie a bow and it's great.
Haley Radke: And yet, what happened next?
Nicole Rademacher: And so I, being 26 and thinking it was this picture perfect bow, like they sent me pictures of them and that was profound. Just seeing my own physical attributes mirrored in ancestors and in people. Within or maybe a month later, I went down and met them all and being the ideological person that I am, I stayed with them for, I think, a week and a half.
Haley Radke: Oh, wow.
Yeah. I know, I didn't know what I was doing. I would never do that now. And I was like, Well, I have a [00:08:00] family so I'm gonna be in this family. Right? My youngest brother was 16 at the time, and so he was in the house, and no one knew what to do. You know, like now looking back at it, it's been 13 years, I didn't know what to do.
I think my brother who was 16 was the only person who knew what to do because he was totally oblivious to all these emotions that were going on. But no one else really knew what to do. You know, like, how do you treat this person that's your child, that's not your child, that you haven't known, that you didn't raise.
And so even though they look like me. I really do look like both of them and I act like them too, which is, you know, that profound thing about genetics. Yet they didn't know me and I didn't know them. And so here we are as adults trying to get to know one another and I didn't see it then. And like the following year I was living in [00:09:00] Europe.
They came to visit and we went on this month-long trip together, and that was when the [censored] kind of hit the fan. There was one point where I did something emotionally, or like I talked to my youngest brother in a certain way, and there was a lot of tension and I had no idea I had done this.
And my biological mom said something to me like, Oh, you really hurt Luis. And I was like, Well. Luis needs to tell me that. You know, and it was like really in your face. Like, who are you? What are you? You are not my mom. He's my brother because he's my brother and he'll always be my brother, but I don't know him.
And I think we still go through these things. Um, I talk with them often. My, who is now the middle brother who grew up as the oldest, his girlfriend's sister lives in Los Angeles where I live, and [00:10:00] so he'll often end up coming here and visiting. And so we have this growing relationship and we're growing it like you do with your extended family, like with your cousins if you don't live in the same area.
I mean, I don't live in the same area as the cousins I grew up with, my cousins that are part of my adoptive family, and so we're growing it that way. You know, there's still weird hurdles. I think for the last two, three years I've really been delving into the adoptee community at least here in Los Angeles, and digitally as well, which is, you know, how I found Adoptees On.
It's really helped me to understand who I am and how all these pieces fit in together and how my relationship is with my biological family. I think it helps that too. It helps me understand the situation that they were in and kind of calms [00:11:00] the anger because I can logically think about it and understand that. But still allow me to feel those emotions, if that makes sense.
Haley Radke: Mm-hmm. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I have talked to so many adoptees, more than I would expect, that have been in your situation, who have searched and then found their bio parents are married and have more kids, full siblings, and it's just, like, it sounds unusual, but it actually happens quite a bit.
And so I just think that's so much to process, which is why I asked you kind of how you felt about it, to give some language to people about that. I don't know. It's for me, you know, when I found my parents were teenagers and so there's this sense of understanding of why they couldn't parent [00:12:00] and yet still, there's a lot of feelings like, Well, why didn't their parents help them? And, you know, so it's just like the mixed bag. I feel like we're always like walking that line. Right?
Nicole Rademacher: Yeah. And I think, you know, as an adoptee you always feel like you're this singular being, you're this island out there because you're growing up in this place where no one's mirroring. You're not mirroring anybody and you don't look like anybody around you. And then from all the tales you've ever been told of people who find or could possibly find their biological family is, you know, the parents aren't together and they're all messed up and all of this stuff and blah, blah, blah.
Then I find out that my parents are together and actually they're in a higher tax bracket than my adoptive parents. And you know, [00:13:00] it's like, it's really fantastic. And you know, and then you feel like, Oh, I must be this anomaly. I'm finding that I'm not an anomaly. There's lots of us out there.
And then I know that you've talked to so many adoptees. You know, we do exist and there's a lot around that and I actually, I mean we'll talk about this in a little bit, but that's one of the things that I'm processing in my creative practice. It’s this idea of what could have been that never was.
You know, it's not even trying to decide whether one thing was better, because that's, you know, don't talk about that. Like, I don't wanna think about that. But to sit in a space that never existed and just kind of let it be and feel your feelings with that and just give yourself the space to do that, or I'm giving [00:14:00] myself the space to do that.
Haley Radke: It's so wild to think about back to when we were born and just that, that life ended there. And there's a different life that we're living. I love that, giving yourself an opportunity to process that. And so many of us just, we either go there and we really fantasize about it, or we just totally block it out.
Nicole Rademacher: Yeah. I mean, and it's all good. Like, I've found myself, because that family exists, really kind of daydreaming about it, and I'm like, I don't think this is really healthy for me. I don't think that this is really helping me. So, trying to figure out a space where I'm allowed to do that, but I'm not carrying it too far, where maybe it's [00:15:00] wasted energy, you know, where I really need to concentrate on what's here.
But I don't want to shame myself into not being allowed to think about that.
Haley Radke: That's pretty good. That's pretty good. Okay. I was just like, oh my gosh. So you hinted at it, Nicole, what do you do?
Nicole Rademacher: I am a professional contemporary artist. The point of departure in my work is my adoption and my reunion with my biological family.
So I look at nonverbal communication between people as a starting point and really kind of look at gesture, space and object as cultural facts of that and kind of look at identity construction, ideas of belonging, intimacy, alienation. I've been really delving into ethnography and psychology. So it's not just about me and [00:16:00] my experience.
So I'm starting to understand it in context and how it's shaped by the world around us and how my experiences might also relate to other people and other people who are not adoptees as well.
Haley Radke: And what are some of the types of projects that you would work on?
Nicole Rademacher: So I have a couple projects that are kind of half today that I'm working on right now. I just wanna talk about one of them because it's the one that I hinted at. And then the other projects I'm working on are really community based. So the project I'm working on has the working title “Invisible Images.”
It's taking photographs of my biological family, of them as a family and then figuring out how old my younger brothers are, and then finding a picture of me, like doing the math, it's not very hard doing the math, and trying to find a picture of me. Not at the same age, but at the same time.
So I'm 11 years [00:17:00] older than my youngest brother, so if he looks like he's one, I'm trying to find a photograph of when I was 12 and using this optical toy that was popular in the 19th century. It's called a thaumatrope, T-H-A-U-M-A-T-R-O-P-E. And basically it's this disc, on one side it's one picture, on the other side, it's another picture.
So using the theory of persistence of vision, where basically you oscillate it back and forth and it appears in your mind that the images are together even though they're separate. And it's dealing with this idea that they'll never be together. Like this reality never happened, but what if it did happen?
And then it would be, and so it's only happening in my mind, right? And it's only happening in the mind of whoever's looking at this thaumatrope. And so the strings, there's strings tied to each side, and they're twirled really quickly between the [00:18:00] fingers so that these two pictures blend together. Does that make sense?
Haley Radke: Yes. And I'm just like having my jaw open, like I'm having this moment. Wow, that's incredible.
Nicole Rademacher: And I actually need help to do this because it's so emotional for me and a good friend of mine is helping me. She is actually tracing the images, so I'm finding the images and then I kind of stare at them for a while and I look at them in Photoshop together and kind of freak out, and it's a little bit too emotional for me to draw the images, and so she's actually drawing the images for me.
Haley Radke: What I'm picturing is, uh, sometimes when I go to my bio family's house and every once in a while, you know, they'll bring out some pictures and just looking at old family photos is so difficult for me. Like I love it. I wanna take it all [00:19:00] in and I wanna absorb it all. And yet I'm always like, I'm not in any of these pictures.
It's very triggering. And I have literally pictured, what was I doing at this exact time? And so that's why I'm just like, that's amazing. I love that you thought of that.
Nicole Rademacher: So, I mean, my bio mom. When we met, she gave me a scrap she had put together. She's so lovely. And she had put together the scrapbook of them for me, of her and my biological father before I was born.
So like them when she went to visit them in Mexico and my aunts and uncles, both in Mexico and in Milwaukee, and all my cousins and my younger brothers and, you know, just this scrapbook. And so that's where those pictures are coming from. Otherwise, I don't know. I wouldn't know how to ask her for them, you know?
And I asked my mom, my adopted mother, I asked her to send me a bunch of pictures and she just went through stuff and just [00:20:00] started sending me things and she has no idea what I'm using them for. And I usually post stuff on Instagram or whatever, just to like process based, but I can't bring myself to do it because they all follow me on Instagram.
I feel like I'm not doing anybody right by doing it, but I know I need to do it. So, I don't know. My biological maternal grandfather died recently and I was so touched by actually being included in his obituary, right? I was like, yeah, I do belong.
Haley Radke: I'm actually here. I am in this world.
Nicole Rademacher: Yeah. So, yeah, so like I said, it's half baked. I don't actually know where it's going. I don't know if I use the objects. Right now the objects are just experiments. Oftentimes, doing visual work I usually work in video, so I don't know if they become videos of that and then the object is next to it. I'm not sure where that's going.
Outside of that piece, I have a couple different [00:21:00] community-based projects that I'm working on. One I'm kind of in a pause at 'cause recently in the fall I did a bunch of workshops around it. It's called “Origin Stories,” so it's a community-based artistic project.
It began as just an artistic project where I was exploring these imagined histories that I had as a child. Everyone imagines that you're something else when you're a kid, but as we all know, as adoptees, there's more staying power to the stuff you imagine as an adoptee, especially in a closed adoption, because you could be anyone or anything.
I had always latched onto this idea. I knew my biological father was Mexican, but I grew up in North Carolina and with a white family, and so I had no context for what Mexican meant. I had no idea of what Mexican culture was [00:22:00] except for what I'd learned in social studies class. And I grew up in the eighties, so I knew that there were Aztecs in Mexico. And I grew up in the eighties with Disney and Disney princesses, so I fashioned myself to be this long lost Aztec princess.
And at the same time, I did not have a studio at the time, so I had some space in my house that I was working in, but I didn't really have a lot of time to myself.
I have a son and he was one and a half. So anybody who has kids knows that you don't have a lot of time for yourself. But the one thing I did have is my commute and anyone who lives in Los Angeles knows that commutes can be really long. I had all this time in the car to talk to myself and I began to elaborate on the story and kind of just expand and [00:23:00] explore what it was or what it could be.
And this was the same time that I started going to Adopt Salons with Jeanette Yoffe, who is an MFT here in Los Angeles, also an adoptee. And so that was really the time when I felt I could explore myself as an adoptee and I could explore my community and I really could explore what that particular thing means in my work as an artist.
So I just started creating the story and I'll be this long-lost Aztec princess or indigenous princess, or whatever. I'll make up this story for how this, how this girl came to be. I researched fairytales and I researched oral histories, and so I was like, Well, I'll do this in the oral history tradition. And so I never wrote it down. Every day or almost every day, I would just continue to tell the story and get further and further and further.
In the end, I realized that it really wasn't about [00:24:00] my story, it was about the fact that I could imagine the story and then how can I, as an artist and also somebody who works with the community, how can I inspire, or how can I help be a witness to other people figuring out what their story is or imagining their story.
So that's really how the workshop evolved. So it's called “Origin Stories” and it's been going on, I guess, for a couple years. Originally, it was designed to empower adopted and foster people to record their unique histories. It's about a two-hour workshop.
And the attendees, the participants work in groups to create a story using visual prompts. People will come to the workshop. I'll tell my story as an adoptee and [00:25:00] give a background of the project. So I tell them the same thing as far as imagining myself as this long-lost Aztec princess. And then we talk a little bit about storytelling and what goes into storytelling.
And then in the beginning we're using these tarot cards as visual prompts so that people, you know, people who aren't usually creative always get really shy about it, even though everybody has this creativity. And so I wanted people to be relaxed about it, that they didn't have to invent everything, that they could, you know, rely on different things.
But as I started to work with my community of adoptees and foster youth, I realized that the tarot cards I was using really, um, even though I hand chose them from different decks, really didn't speak to who they imagined themselves to be or who they wanted to be in the future. I began to expand it to the general public, to artists, to people who felt marginalized because I think that's who we are [00:26:00] as adoptees.
We feel marginalized, our story isn't told. Our narrative is like this same narrative that none of us really feel connected to about being saved or lucky or you know, whatever, whatever it may be. And so after the storytelling part, there's this card making part. They make these three by five cards that is something about themselves or something that resonated with them about the stories that they tell in this group. And then those cards are scanned and put into a deck that then get recycled back into the workshop.
You come in, we talk as a group. I tell my story. We go into the storytelling part, where you work in a group of three to five, create the story. You tell it back to the group. And then we take out the crayons and the markers and the watercolors and the drawing pencils and the collage [00:27:00] materials, and then you're asked to create a card of something that resonated with you in the story or something that speaks to you and who you identify as.
Haley Radke: And so what does that do for you and the participants to really write this sort of fictional, alternate story and process that way? Like what, what are some of the things that you're seeing happening from doing this?
Nicole Rademacher: Well, it's been really interesting because as I opened it up to the general public and to people who felt marginalized, I started to realize how many people feel marginalized and how isolated a lot of us feel, whether or not we're adoptees, and how we as adoptees can kind of connect with these other groups.
The workshop itself is I'm sharing something intimate. They're not very large workshops. I think the largest has been 25 people. I'm sharing [00:28:00] something really intimate and I'm asking people to share this time with me. I also do these breathing exercises beforehand to like ground everybody.
Really like the social emotional part of it so that there's this understanding that we're going to share this time together and it's gonna be something personal. And it's not just a workshop. Oh, I'm gonna come and learn how to collage something. It's about something different and it's about something I'm asking them to go a little bit deeper.
And I've been really surprised by what people have done. Some people wanna talk about it and some people don't wanna talk about it. I also still do them with adoptees. And one adoptee had this tracing paper on top of hers and it said “death.” And then when she went to share it with the group, because it was in this adoptee group where we actually go back and talk about it, she took the tracing paper off and just showed the collage and the drawing underneath.[00:29:00]
And I was like, But wait, but you know, I can't say it 'cause she took it off. So there's something where people are connecting with this idea of they can really imagine themselves as anything and who could they be?
Haley Radke: Processing our identity in so many different ways is so powerful when you're talking about, you know, inviting the general public in that has been marginalized in some way also, and having them identify with adoptees.
I have some listeners now that don't have any tie to adoption, and yet they find commonalities with us and some of the different experiences that we share and feelings and et cetera. And I just find that so fascinating. So I love that you are doing that as well and finding those connections.
That's so cool.
Nicole Rademacher: Yeah, and it's interesting because like, oh, in [00:30:00] passing talk with people about just being an adoptee and kind of not feeling like you belong or these ideas of identity and family, things will resonate with them. But then when you spend like two to three hours with them, then you're seeing them produce something creative and I'm facilitating it.
So I'm not actually creating the stories with them, but I'm listening to this story and to that story. And the stories were really kind of amazing because half of it was fiction, or part of it was fiction, and another part was based on one person in the group, something that happened to them and then another person, it's based on something that happened to a friend of theirs or a family member of theirs.
And so it's all this fact and fiction that's all mixed together, and people can't help but bring that in. And then from an activism standpoint, we have to find [00:31:00] connections with other people out there and other communities that are bigger than ours that are fighting for their rights as well and fighting to be heard and for their voice and their narrative to be changed. And I think if we can really harness that, then, you know, we have a way in.
Because there's so many people right now fighting to have their narratives in the general collective society be changed. And I don't know if we're on the top of that, you know, near the top of that list at all. So I think that if we can figure out how to figure out those connections with the other communities that are also marginalized. And commonalities. You know, like people have to bond together. Whether or not you're part of the same group. We all are fighting for common goals.
Haley Radke: And I think there's something to this, like we are showing up [00:32:00] and saying, You know, we're adopted. It actually was a trauma. These are the ways it's impacted me.
Any way we can flip people's picture of adoption. Right? Any way, and to start out by showing our heart and our wounds to someone else, and that's what they can see and that's what they can identify and understand with, like, that's amazing. Oh my gosh, Nicole, that's so cool. I love that you're doing this.
I just wanna go back. You said it's an oral tradition, meaning these don't get written down? Does anybody record them?
Nicole Rademacher: I audio-record them. Right now I've just been saving the audio recordings. I need to go edit them and put them into the archive. I have an archive of the workshops I've done since April, which is since April it's been with the whole card part of it. [00:33:00] That's on my website, and it includes some images of people in the workshop and then some of the cards that have been made in the workshops. Once I finish editing the audio, I'll start adding those to it, and those will just be the stories that people tell.
Haley Radke: Wow. As an avid audio consumer. Did you know that about me? I don't know how, how could anyone tell?
Nicole Rademacher: I didn't know that. (shared laughter)
Haley Radke: No? I know. It's a surprise. Um, that's amazing. Oh, I love that so much.
Nicole Rademacher: I'm a little behind on my audio editing.
Haley Radke: Why does it take a long time? (more shared laughter)
Oh, so good. Okay. Thank you so much for sharing about that. Let's go on to recommended resources. And I mean, for me, your website and all of these different things you've done is an amazing resource for people to check [00:34:00] out. And so you're gonna share that right at the end of the show where we can get in touch with you. But I love that you're adding these audio things from “Origin Stories” and you have videos.
You have, like, it's the works, like all your work is up there. It seems like there's probably not everything, but yeah. Tell us a little bit about what else we can find up there.
Nicole Rademacher: The “Origin Stories” is there. “Gate Path,” which is a piece that I did that was up at LAX airport and that actually looks at privacy and security, which also stems from, you know, my ideas of and my experience as an adoptee.
“Potential Spaces,” which is a project that I did thinking about hybrid cultures as somebody who's in multicultural relationship. And then also growing up as a multicultural adoptee.
“You Are A Perpetual Tourist” which was my thesis piece for my Master of Fine Arts, and that's really [00:35:00] looking at nonverbal communication between children and adults in their lives.
And this is all found subjects. And so really trying to as a voyeur, as an observer, which I find, I don't know if you find this as an adoptee. You're always looking at how people are interacting and who people are, and always wondering if that's somebody you're related to and you're just kind of like dissecting all these little parts about what's going on.
Haley Radke: Oh, yes. Like I feel like I am a people-watcher, but like exponentially.
Nicole Rademacher: Yes, yes! So I took my people-watching skills that I had been honing my entire life and with my video camera and looked at kids in public spaces and how they related to one another.
Haley Radke: There's a video of what looks like a little family and there's a little [00:36:00] boy and they're at the bus stop.
Nicole Rademacher: Yes.
Haley Radke: Oh my God. That's part of it. I just watched that and I was like, oh my goodness, this is incredible. It's very short and there's no words or anything. It was really moving.
Nicole Rademacher: Oh, good. Thank you.
Haley Radke: Oh yeah, so there's all these little gems on Nicole's website, so you should definitely go and look at it. It's just really, really amazing. You're doing such cool stuff.
Nicole Rademacher: Thank you.
Haley Radke: You're welcome. I mean it, I mean it. You had sent me a link to the Celia Center Arts Festival. Can you talk a little bit about that? And Brian Stanton, actually I interviewed him. And he said, Oh yeah, Nicole did this whole thing. And this is what he was talking about.
Nicole Rademacher: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So Jeanette Yoffe, she's a marriage and family therapist who's also an adoptee here in Los Angeles. She actually got me and Brian together, so I curated the visual art [00:37:00] portion and Brian programmed, I guess is the proper term you use. He programmed the performing arts part of it, but it was a day-long festival of adoptee work. So we had professional artists as well as adoptees or foster youth that are still teenagers that sent in work.
We exhibited at the Electric Lodge here in Venice, and it was really amazing because we had like over 200 people that came, and we had workshops and we had the performances and we had spoken word poets and then we had all of the artwork up and we had like a couple videos that were going on around too. Like there was a documentary. Brian did his performance at the very end. It was like the show-closer. It was just amazing.
Haley Radke: Oh, Blank. Blank is so good. So good.
Nicole Rademacher: Oh, it's so moving. It's just [00:38:00] no words for that. We also had a panel of some of the professional artists that were involved in the show to talk about their experience. And that was really moving for me and I just moderated it.
But there was one artist, John Christiano. He's a sculptor here in Los Angeles and he had found the call, I think, through Facebook, or something like that, and sent in this sculptural work. And I realized that he'd had a career, you know, he's like an actual professional artist and has studied and sells work and works in a studio.
And so I invited him to be on the panel and he was fine with it. But then like the day before when we were installing, he was like, Well, I don't know. And so finally he decided to do it. His portion, like what he told about his story, was just so moving about how he doesn't get along at all with his adoptive family.
I mean, I don't wanna necessarily talk for him, [00:39:00] but it was really amazing to have somebody who was so ambivalent about doing this to then have something that really touched all of us. And so we're gonna do it again. We're gonna do a very short visual portion of it in November of 2018, but it'll mainly be film and performance.
And it'll be here in Los Angeles on the west side, and if you follow my social media handles, I will definitely be tweeting and posting about it. So, it's a bit away.
Haley Radke: I couldn't believe it when you sent me those links and I was watching, there's like a video recap that is, I mean, I think it's at least five minutes long and it's got all of these different snippets from that day and I was just like, oh my gosh, I wish I had been there.
That's like speaking my language. So, so cool. Yes, definitely gonna watch [00:40:00] out for that. And there was one other thing that you wanted to recommend to us.
Nicole Rademacher: Yeah, there is this cultural archive, so I'm also starting to try and build this archive. I've found that the more I get into my community of adoptees, I'm finding more and more adoptees who are also artists and creative professionals, and I've stumbled upon this.
It's called Adoptee Cultural Archives.wordpress.com. They are a Korean Belgian adoptee, from what I can tell, and they have this list of activists and artists and filmmakers and writers and books and films and shows, like all different kinds of things. It's all about adoption. It's mainly skewed towards transnational adoption.
But for those of us who are not transnational adoptions, it's still just this amazing, amazing amount of information and media and things for us to help us [00:41:00] understand ourselves better, I think, and be a bit more aware. So again, it's Adoptee Cultural Archives.wordpress.com.
Haley Radke: It's huge. Like there are so many links. It's a treasure trove for sure.
Oh, thanks Nicole. Thanks for bringing that to us. I have one more question before we wrap up. Is that okay? You just said something and I wish I had asked you about it when we were talking before, so I'm just gonna ask you now, what do you think it is that brings so many adoptees into working in the creative field,
Nicole Rademacher: Working creatively you're working in this language that's not English or Spanish or French or whatever, this language that has words, right? You're working in something else, and maybe you're a writer but you're still working with writing as a creative art, you know, or you're a comedian, but you're still working with these words in this creative realm. So you're building a different language, whether [00:42:00] it's visual or time, or you're building a different vocabulary.
I think that what we've experienced and the trauma we've experienced, it's so profound that we're oftentimes not allowed to feel those feelings or to express ourselves with it. We have to make up our own language for it, right? So that we can, and maybe we don't even know what that stuff means, but we can feel it.
And working in the creative realm really gives us permission to do that. We don't necessarily have to articulate everything. We can articulate it enough.
Haley Radke: I love that. Thank you. I put you on spot there, but that was so good..
Nicole Rademacher: Yeah, you did. I was like, Oh man. I dunno. Why do you do it? Lemme think about it.
Haley Radke: Oh Nicole, this was so good. Thank you so much for chatting with me. Um, where can we connect with you online?
Nicole Rademacher: So you can connect with me on social media. My handles are at NICRRAD [00:43:00] and that's on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. And then my website is nicolerademacher.com.
And feel free to email me if you wanna chat about anything. It's nic@nicolerademacher.com.
Haley Radke: Perfect. Thank you. And for sure, go check out Nicole's website and follow her to make sure you keep up with all the things that she's doing. Thank you. This was just such a great conversation. I loved hearing your story and I can't get that little picture-spinner out of my head. Like I couldn't picture, I don't even know what it's called anymore, but I can picture it and I’m just stuck on that.
Nicole Rademacher: Thank you so much, Haley. This has been great.
Haley Radke: This [00:44:00] show is brought to you by my Patreon partners. Patreon is a website that allows creators like me to raise monthly support to help me keep producing this podcast for you.
As a special thank you for our monthly pledge, I have a secret Facebook Group for adoptees only, where we support each other through search and reunion issues, and we get really real about all the things we are struggling with, like coming out of the fog. Come and join us. Adopteeson.com/partner has all the details.
Today would you tell just one person about the show? It is literally by word of mouth that podcasts are able to grow their audience. If you are able to do that for me, it's just such a huge help to raise up adoptee voices worldwide. I'm so grateful for you. Thank you for listening. Let's talk again next Friday when we wrap up Season Three. [00:45:00]
Isaiah and Griffin: Okay, say it. No, you say it with me. Happy New Years. Let's talk again next Friday.
