6 Liz Prato

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/6

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Haley Radke: You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast for adoptees to discuss the adoption experience. This is season one, episode six, Liz Prato. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Today, we'll be talking to Liz Prato, a fellow adoptee who will be sharing her search and secondary rejection experience with us. We also discuss her beautiful reunion with her sister.

We'll wrap up with some recommended resources for you.

I'd like to welcome our guest, Liz Prato, to the show today. You've experienced a great deal of pain in your search to connect with your biological family. Thank you for being willing to share your story with us.

Liz Prato: I'm honored to do so. Thank you.

Haley Radke: Could you start by telling us about your birth and relinquishment?

Liz Prato: I was given up for adoption in 1967. It was a time of closed adoptions, and my adoption was handled by Catholic Charities, which also handled a lot of adoptions at that time. My birth mother relinquished me when I was born. I was born prematurely, and under fairly traumatic medical circumstances. I was in an incubator for a while, but she relinquished me right away. So I was an incubator by myself. I had no one who loved me, basically. No one who was visiting me, nobody who was my people looking out for me while I was in an incubator.

And then I got out of there and I was released into an orphanage for the next several weeks. My parents, my adoptive parents, took me home on August 11th. I was born on June 3rd. So that was the whole period of time that I was either–that I was alone.

Haley Radke: Oh, that's heartbreaking.

Liz Prato: And I didn't really think about it until I got much older: What does that mean? To have been alone during those first two months of my life, to have no one who loved me, did not have that kind of touch?

I'm a massage therapist as a job, and I don't think it's a coincidence that touching people in a nurturing way for a living is a coincidence that that's what I do. I think that's something that I missed. It is certainly something that calms me and makes–and I crave all the time. Yeah, I think it's a really big deal to not have that in the beginning.

Haley Radke: Mhmm. And so do you know why your birth mother relinquished?

Liz Prato: I do now. I didn't for many years, not until very recently. She wasn't as young as I had always assumed she was. I had a–My parents had always said, “Oh, I'm sure your birth mother was a teenager and too young to give you a good life.” But she was, in fact, 23 years old when she got pregnant with me.

However, what I now know is that she and my birth father were not in love. They had no plans to get married. That would've been just a disaster if they had, but they both came from Catholic families. And her father, in particular, was extremely Catholic, and I think there was even a member of her family (an uncle or somebody) who's a deacon or something like that.

So it was a big shame to her dad, in particular, that his unmarried daughter got knocked up and he sent her away (which happened back then). She, my entire biological family, lives in Buffalo, New York. And she was sent away to stay with her godfather in Denver, Colorado, because he did not want any of his friends knowing about this.

And not only that, but before she left, he would not talk to her. He didn't talk to her for an entire year. He was ashamed and he was punishing her for what she had done. So that was this extra trauma that she took on. And she was sent away to Denver, and that's where I was born.

Haley Radke: That's so sad.

Liz Prato: And my birth father, from what I understand, totally abandoned her, too. I mean, again, they weren't in love. They weren't gonna get married, but he was not there for her in any way during that time.

Haley Radke: Was she a student, or working, or do you know?

Liz Prato: She was working. She was–I believe she was a bookkeeper at that time. But she was living at home. I think it's hard to understand in modern times why a 23-year-old wouldn't have more autonomy than she did. But I think we need to take ourselves back into a very traditional Catholic family, maybe even to a place in the country where things were a little more traditional than that, so…

Haley Radke: Yeah, and you're right, I mean, the sixties. The Girls Who Went Away, that book by Ann Fessler, right? Yeah. It was very common for them to be sent away, birth mothers to be sent away to have their child in secret.

And so were your adoptive family, were they Catholic to adopt from Catholic charities or…?

Liz Prato: Yeah, my dad had been raised Catholic. My mom wasn't, but that was also just kind of where you got babies from then. You know, that was an easy way to do it. And I think since my dad had ties to the Catholic Church, it made sense at the time.

But my Catholic education ended pretty early in my life. Like I never even did First Communion and all that stuff. My dad broke away from the Catholic Church.

Haley Radke: And did they have other children?

Liz Prato: Yeah. A year and a half before I came along, they adopted my brother Steve, and… I always have to explain this to people. He was adopted from a different family, biological family than I was. So we are not biologically related in any way. And so it was just the two of us.

Haley Radke: So you said in your email to me how you've lost all of your adopted family now. Is that right?

Liz Prato: Yes, correct. My mom died when I was 26. She died from emphysema. She was only 58 years old.

Haley Radke: I'm sorry.

Liz Prato: Thank you. My dad died when I was 43, and then my brother died the following year, when I was 44. And in addition to that, all my aunts, uncles, grandparents were deceased by that time as well. So I was really utterly abandoned and orphaned by the time I was 44 years old.

And you know, I think when you're young, 44 sounds old and “Oh, that's a total grownup.” But I did not feel like a grownup. I felt like a little kid who was abandoned again.

Haley Radke: That was really sad. I'm sorry.

Liz Prato: Thank you.

Haley Radke: My goodness. There's a lot of sorrow in your story.

Liz Prato: I know.

Haley Radke: When did you decide to search for your birth mother, Liz?

Liz Prato: I started thinking about that, I think, in my early thirties. But it was a really slow brew. It was like, I thought about it, and then it sat for a while. And then I looked to see, how would I go about that?

And at that time Colorado's adoption records were still closed. But they did have a program called the Confidential Intermediary Service, where I could hire an intermediary (who was court appointed) who could go in and open my adoption records, see the names of my birth parents, and search for them. I still couldn't know it.

She was not allowed to tell me this, but she could search for them and ask them if they wanted to be in contact with me. I found out about that program online and I thought about it, and then however long later, I downloaded the forms and then they just sat in a drawer in my desk. Yeah. So it was this long process, until one day I just filled out the forms and got them notarized, and I cannot tell you why, what happened in that moment, but in that moment, I was ready.

And for me, being ready meant being somewhat emotionally prepared for the possibility that they will not want to have reunion with me. I needed to be ready for that. And I felt like I was finally in a place where I was strong enough and stable enough to be ready for that possibility.

So, I think I was about 35 when I started the process. And the intermediary who was assigned to work with me, it was this wonderful woman named Pat. And Pat contacted my birth mother first, and that process took a very, very, very, very long time. That took about a year and a half before my birth mother made her final decision not to have contact with me.

And then Pat contacted my birth father, and he took about six months before he made the same decision. So by the time all was done with, I was–I remember this so clearly because we were still going back and forth with my birth father, and it was the week before my 40th birthday.

And I remember thinking, I can't keep going through this. I can't go into another decade going through this with these two not able to make up their minds whether or not I am worthy to be in their lives. And it was either right before or right after my birthday that my biological or birth father made the decision not to.

Haley Radke: And how did he let you know that?

Liz Prato: Both my birth parents had the opportunity to write me a letter that was sent through the intermediary. I had no idea where they lived, where it came from. It didn't have their name on it. And in his letter he– It was interesting. It was a really kind letter and he explained to me, as much as possible, the circumstances surrounding why I was given up for adoption.

He told me that I had a brother and a sister, and he told me a little bit about them, but he said it was a very difficult time in his family's life at that point, because his daughter had just found out that she wasn't able to have kids. They were– And it would just be too much of an emotional blockbuster to all of a sudden hear about me. He said he had not refused contact with me easily. He wanted to let me know that he hoped someday things would be different, and that was the last thing he said in his letter.

Haley Radke: That must have been hard to hear.

Liz Prato: I was prepared for it by that point. It was hard to hear. I'll tell you what was the hardest about it: It was still an open door. Hope is always the last thing to die, you know. So that last sentence of, “I hope someday things will be different” was there, but it was so vague at the same time, and so I didn't know what that meant.

What does “someday” mean? When is “someday”? How do I, like, how does my heart calibrate “someday”? I don't know.

Haley Radke: And knowing, too, that you have siblings and he's closing the door to that, too?

Liz Prato: Yeah, and my birth mother, I found out through her, I had a brother and a sister from her as well, who also didn't know about me. And both of my birth parents said basically the whole reasoning was, “None of my kids know about you, and it would just be too traumatic. It would be…”

I mean, really, they felt like it would be catastrophic if their children knew about me.

Haley Radke: Wonder where that feeling comes from for them. Just the shame of your history and keeping secrets...

Liz Prato: It just so doesn't give people the benefit of the doubt. It doesn't give their kids, for sure... It doesn't give them the opportunity to just be compassionate adults, to take it as they want to. I mean, these are grownups. We're not talking about children, you know?

We all have curve balls thrown at us as grownups. And I'll tell you something that I forgot to tell you earlier, which is that actually my father (who I grew up with, my adoptive father)-- I found out when I was in my thirties that he had given a child up for adoption with a woman he met before my mother, and I had never known that. He'd never told me that, which is so bizarre, because my parents have always been so open about the whole idea of adoption, and if I want to find my birth parents, and all that stuff. But out of the blue in my thirties, his biological granddaughter contacted him, tracked him down, and contacted him with the blessing of her father (my dad's son).

And so suddenly, in my thirties, my dad said–I found this out, that my dad has this son out there in the world. So I do know what it's like to have that curve ball thrown at you. I do. And it's weird. And my brother, who was definitely a more closed down, protective person than I am, was finally even able to accept it. So it makes me very sad that my birth parents were not giving their kids even that opportunity.

Haley Radke: I just, I'm just so upset about it. It's not fair.

Liz Prato: I know. It's terrible. It's not fair.

Haley Radke: You're right. It's not fair. You're right. They're all adults and grownups can make their own decisions about whether or not they want to have a relationship with you, but it's not fair for them to keep you a secret, I don't believe.

Liz Prato: I agree with that.

Haley Radke: You shared what your birth father had written. What communication did you get from your birth mother?

Liz Prato: I shared two letters with her. It was very weird, because here's this thing I had wanted for so long to have some communication with this woman who brought me into the world.

And then when it really came down, when the onus was on me to ask those questions, or launch that relationship, it was a really hard letter to write. And at that time, I was so… I didn't wanna scare her away, because she was scared. It took, I wanna say maybe nine months to even get her to agree to do this kind of anonymous contact with me.

She really went back and forth and back and forth a lot, and so I really didn't wanna scare her away. So I was trying to strike this tone of being kind of lighthearted, but not like , “Hey, this is all blasé, this doesn't matter to me.” But I didn't tell her my mom was dead. Both my dad and my brother were still alive at that point, but I didn't tell her my mom was dead, because I didn't want her thinking I was looking for a replacement (because I wasn't).

We shared a little bit of information, but it was all pretty surface level stuff. And I had the feeling that she was only doing this to keep me away from her kids, actually. Because she knew that through this law in Colorado, if she refused contact with me that I legally had the right to contact her children.

I suspected that was the only reason she agreed to this anonymous communication. And so I talked to the intermediary and I said, “I want to give her my name and my address and my phone number and see if she'll still continue communication.” And my intermediary was very clear: “If you do that, I can't be a part of this anymore. The case is closed because the confidentiality has been broken.” And I said, “I get that.” And so I did that. I sent my birth mother all my information, and I never heard from her ever again.

Haley Radke: It's worse not hearing anything than hearing, “I don't wanna talk to you again.” In my opinion, that's what I feel like.

Liz Prato: Well, and as you know… And as we talked about earlier, I later went on to find out who they were. I was able to get that information many years later. And even in those circumstances, really, I just wish they'd given me the benefit of the doubt of being a grownup, capable of having a conversation, being understanding and compassionate, instead of just shutting me out entirely.

Haley Radke: How were you able to get their information?

Liz Prato: So it was about eight years later. It was, I remember this, it was December of 2013, and I decided I wanted to know who my siblings were. And so I decided I wanted to go back and hire the intermediary service again to contact my siblings.

And I contacted the woman who had done the search for me before to ask if she was available, and she said, “Yeah, probably. But hold on, because Colorado is trying to get a law through the legislature that would open up all adoption records for adult adoptees.”

And so I did some research into that and I found out that they were introducing a bill in the house in Colorado. I wrote a letter in support of it to several—everyone on that committee. I sent this letter out telling them how important it is for people to know where they come from, that it turns out is not a right in our society, that's a privilege that not all of us are afforded. I explained some of the ways in which not having that information had impacted me, not just in the physical ways, but also in my heart, in my soul, and I asked friends to do the same.

And sure enough, they passed that law and the governor of Colorado signed a bill saying that all adoption records could be opened. And it took a while to get all the administrative stuff figured out. And then at the same time, like around the same time that they opened up records, I had my first book published, and I was out on book tour and I knew I could not handle that.

And being on book tour with my first book at the same time, it was just like, Oh my God, that's too hectic. And I wanted to make sure that when I did this, when I got this information about who these people are, when I got their names, that I could commit to it in a sort of grounded way or as grounded as you can be, under such circumstances.

So, it was about a year after the bill passed, and this was just last year, August 23rd, 2015. I was in Denver. I went down to the courthouse, I got my records. And for the first time in my life, I saw the names of the people who brought me into this world.

Haley Radke: How did that feel for you?

Liz Prato: I thought it was gonna feel much crazier than it felt, and it just felt like everything settled into place. I just felt calm, I felt– I was excited. But not like spazzy excited, not, I wasn't manic, and I thought I'd be manic. Oh my God. Oh my God. And actually it didn't get manic until I started sharing that with my friends and my husband. And they're like, on the internet, we're all on the internet at the same time, searching, trying to find out information about all these people and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And I finally had to say to them, “Listen, this information's not gonna change. I gotta go take a shower and eat lunch.” But really for the most part, it's just–something settled into place that had not been there before. It was so simple: It was names. It was names; it was a piece of paper with names on it was the thing that brought me this huge piece of relief of myself, into place.

Haley Radke: And so you had the names of both your birth mother and birth father?

Liz Prato: Correct.

Haley Radke: And also their children?

Liz Prato: No, their children weren't on there. It was because it was only the information that they had then. And strangely, for reasons that I still haven't been able to get to the bottom of, the records from when the intermediary did the search, I can't find or I can't get access to.

I think they're actually in Catholic Charities. And Catholic Charities isn't letting me have them, and are being very weird about stuff. So that's a challenge. But no, anyway, so I got the names of both my birth parents. And birth fathers are always easier to find, because they don't get married and change their last names.

And my birth father was very easy to find. It's not like he was named Mike Smith or something like that. He had a name that was relatively unique. The intermediary who had done the search before, I just asked her, “Is this the right person?” She, of course, ethically and maybe even legally wasn't allowed to tell me his name, but she could say yes or no (I think).

And she said, “Yes, this is the right person.” And then the other thing I knew, because she had shared this with me way back when she did the search for my birth mother, is she had told me back then, and I remembered that the way she found my birth mother's married name was she actually looked for an obituary for her father.

And so I knew to do that. I knew to type in “obituary” and her name and look for her father's obituary. And then through her father's obituary, I saw what her new married name was and what her husband's name was. And that's how I was able to find her. And again, these were totally uncommon names, and especially for the town that they live in.

And I was really quickly able to find all of my biological siblings. Well, that's not true. There's one that I had a harder time finding than others. But on both sides I was able to, and especially (interestingly), my biological father's daughter, she has a pretty public presence because she's a performer and a model. And she had a Twitter feed, and she has a Facebook page, and an Instagram account.

And there's like a billion pictures of her out there. And we look alike. And it was the first time in my life I'd ever seen someone who looked like me.

Haley Radke: Isn't that an odd feeling?

Liz Prato: It's again, one of those things that people who are not adopted take for granted, I believe .

Haley Radke: When I first met my birth mother, it was before I had children. I remember just looking at her face and just basically being in shock.

Liz Prato: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Have you connected with any of your siblings then, now that you have their information?

Liz Prato: I connected with my sister on my birth mother's side. I had called her before I did this, by the way. I called her, I left her a message. I said, “This is Liz Prato,” and she already knew my name because I'd revealed that to her before.

I let her know that Colorado had opened their adoption records, so I now knew her name. I was more emotional in that phone call than I'd been in our entire correspondence before. I was kind of over the whole, “I don't wanna scare her away” thing. I'm just like, “Wow, this is what I feel.” I said, “I wish you'd just please talk to me and tell me what happened back then.”

And I didn't hear from her. But some voice told me–I mean, this was such a profound story for me. I really thought, Oh my God, this is it. I can't ever know these people. She wants nothing to do with me. And for some reason, I still to this day, very much intertwined their parents not wanting anything to do with me and my siblings.

I think it's the same thing, for some reason. Even though I should know better; I'm a grownup. I know I have very different ideas than my parents, you know? But one day I was trying– I was having kind of anxiety over the whole thing. I was trying to calm myself down. I was lying in bed. I had finally calmed my brain down and my body down, and it's like I heard this voice say, “Email your sister.”

I know it sounds like I'm crazy or something, but it was just such a strong, clear voice and I heard it…not heard it. I felt it, whatever, three times. And so I did. I got up and I went and emailed my sister. And I told her who I am and I said, “I hope I did this right. I don't know how to do this. I've never written a letter like this before, exactly. I just want you to know that I hope you're doing okay and...”

I just tried to be really careful about it, too. She wrote me back in about two hours and said, “My mom has never said anything about this to me and what makes you think you have the right person? Can you give me more information?” And it was very pleasant. It wasn't at all defensive.

And I wrote her a long email telling her the whole story. I scanned copies of my adoption papers, the whole thing. It was instantly clear, of course, that I had the right person because she and I don't look alike. Even though I look like my birth father's daughter, I don't look like my birth mother's daughter.

And she said, wrote back and she said, “I'm in shock to say the least, and I need some time to absorb this. And will you please just do me a favor and don't tell my brother about this? Don't get in touch with him.” And I said, “That's fine.” And I said, “Take as much time as you need. I'm not going anywhere.”

And then the very next morning, she sent me an invitation to Google Chat. And we chatted for two hours, and then for the next nine months we were in touch every single day.

Haley Radke: What was your first conversation with her like?

Liz Prato: Oh gosh, I wish I could remember a little bit better. I think we were going back and forth about what I wanted to know about my family, so I was just asking her lots of questions about, “Who are these people,” yeah. So I think it was like that, but it was really clear early on that she had a sense of humor and we shared that. I often use humor to not necessarily diffuse difficult situations, but because there's usually something funny (even in difficult situations) that you can pull out. She had that, as well.

We made lots of jokes. She was very honest with me. I would ask her about health things. I would ask her about, not just physical health in my family, but mental health–all really honest about that stuff. And it was more of a sharing, a back and forth, this is who I am.

Oh, it's funny, I just got a text message from her pop up on my screen right this second, asking if I would send her a copy of the recording of this interview. That's hilarious.

Haley Radke: So you're still in touch with her, then?

Liz Prato: We are…The contact has faded a little. So, we have met in person three times since we first got in touch. And the last time, I went to Buffalo. And it was her birthday, and I happened to be on the East Coast for a conference, so I just…. There was no reason I wouldn't bop over to Buffalo to see her. And that was so hard for two very different reasons. One, it was hard because we drove by my birth father's house (and we have to get back to that story in a sec).

And then she took me…and I saw her mother's house. Her mother was out of town, but I did see her mother's house. She showed me the house that her grandparents lived in, where her mother lived with me when I was in utero (before she was sent away). And that was all so much more difficult for me than I could have imagined.

I so clearly felt this sense of, I don't belong here. I was never meant to belong here. This is not my place. That was really hard. And certainly in her house, in my sister's house, I felt welcome and warm and comfortable, and her friends were very, very, very welcoming to me. They were so sweet; everybody was so kind.

And at the same time, it was really clear: we are very different people. We live very different lives. I'm just the West Coast liberal and her friends aren't. And some of our ideologies are very different.

And I think it's really easy to pretend those things don't matter, or to not even recognize them when you're kind of exist— Your relationship is existing in this vacuum, because up until then, the two times we had met before, we’d met in other cities where neither of us had people; it was just us. And so it was kind of like having this really intense romantic relationship, you know? And then as soon as you bring it out into the outside world, you see the honeymoon period is over; the bubble pops a little bit.

That was at the beginning of April that happened, and I'm not really sure where we are as a result of that. I love her, and I want her to be in my life forever. And it doesn't matter to me at all that she and her friends live a different life than I do, and I hope she feels the same way. And we can just kind of put that somewhere else. Does that make sense?

Haley Radke: It totally makes sense. And as I was listening to your story about her, and you said “the honeymoon stage,” it is very much the stages of reunion. And it's interesting to hear that from a sibling perspective, because all the writing is about reunion with a biological parent. And so it's interesting that transfers on to siblings as well. You can use the same stages.

Liz Prato: Yeah, and it's real. And I kind of knew something like that would happen, because I knew we couldn't carry on that level of excitement and communication every single day for the rest of our lives. And that doesn't mean I'm not sad about it. It was really fabulous and I loved it. And I loved being able to tell people that's what the situation was, and I just hope we are able to find what our next phase looks like in a grounded, loving way. It's okay if we don't have communication over this period of time, or that period of time, or whatever...

Haley Radke: I'm so glad that there is a joyful reunion moment there for you and her.

Liz Prato: Yeah.

Haley Radke: That's really awesome. Okay, so you said there's something we should go back to about your birth father.

Liz Prato: Right. So last we heard from him, I think you'll remember that he had sent me this letter years ago saying he hopes someday that things would be different.

So I, all these years, had been carrying around that in my head and thinking he was gonna be the person who I was going to connect with the most. When I got his name, I sent him an email. I said, “Will you please confirm that you get this? Because I don't even know if I have the right email address.” And I just said, “This is me. The adoption records were opened. This is where we are.”

I said, “I don't really have concrete expectations about what I want to have happen next, but I want you to know I'm out here and I know this is a shock for you. And let's kind of see what happens next.”

And he wrote me back and he said, “I got your email and I'm thinking about it.” And that's all he said. And I didn't think much of that, which is interesting, because all my friends who I told that to said, “Really? He didn't say anything like, ‘I'm glad to hear from you’? Or, he didn't say anything emotionally related to it or…”. No. I'm like, “No, that's really all he said, what I just told you.”

And about a week or 10 days went by, I didn't hear from him. And then I woke up one morning and there was, on Facebook, a friend request from him. And I was really excited about that, because to me that felt like a gentle way to get to know somebody. He could just look at my Facebook page, you know? He could just see what's on there, and see what kind of things I post, and who my friends are.

And it's a very kind of non-confrontational way to learn about somebody. And I thought that's what he wanted to do. So I accepted the friend request. I had just woken up. It was a Sunday morning. I came upstairs, I told my husband, he said, “Wow, that's so much better than being blown off.” Poured myself coffee, sat down to look at his Facebook page, and he had deleted my friend request.

Like, he had unfriended me already, and I just had no idea what that meant. And my husband was saying, “Maybe it's just ‘old-person-using-Facebook syndrome,’” and things like that. And so I sent him another friend request just to be like, Okay, maybe that was an accident, that he unfriended me, somehow.

And when I went back to check to see if he accepted my new friend request, he’d deleted his entire Facebook profile. And that was the day I called my birth mother for the first time. And that's why I was so emotional in that phone call, because of this bizarre experience with my birth father on Facebook that did not make sense at all.

And that's–I was saying to her, “Please let me know what happened.” And, because I was like, Why? Why am I such a big deal? Why am I such a catastrophe? Why? Why am I so scary? And she didn't call me back, as I said. And then, a couple weeks later I thought, I wanna contact my birth father’s siblings, specifically his daughter, since she and I look so much alike. And there's something about that's so compelling.

I mean, we could be like completely different people in this world, but there's something so amazing about seeing this other person who looked like me. So I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt (and I do not know why I kept giving him the benefit of the doubt). But I wrote my birth father an email and I said, “I don't really know where we are, especially in light of the weird Facebook incident, but I want to know if you've told your children about me yet. I would like to be in contact with them. They're a huge part of who I am and my lineage, and this is really important to me.”

And I said to him, “I know this is really hard for you, but I want you to know this is hard for me too, but I am your blood. I am your DNA.” He wrote me back and he said, “As for the, ‘Where are we now?’ question, I'll have an answer to that for you in a couple of days. And let me explain about the Facebook incident.”

And he said he accidentally sent a friend request to me and then when he saw the mistake he had made, he rescinded it. I said, “Okay.” And I wrote him back and I said, “Thank you very much for replying to this.” I always wanted to let him know, “I am grateful that you’re doing this.” So that was on a Wednesday.

Then he said, “I'll have an answer for you in a couple of days.” And what I got in two days was an emailed letter from his lawyers telling me to leave him and his family alone. And it said at the end that if I chose to ignore the letter, he was ready and willing to do anything necessary to protect the harmony and privacy of his family.

I was devastated. I just can't explain how heartbroken I was, that he never ever gave me indication that's what was coming. He not only sent a letter that you know, at that secondary rejection, but he did not give me any reason to believe that's what he wanted. All he had to say at one point was, “I am not ready for this,” and I would've said, “I understand. Let's revisit it later.”

He did not give me the benefit of the doubt in any way, shape, or form, as being a person capable of being reasonable. And he just shut me down in this very impersonal, degrading way. And I think he assumed I'm not a very smart person or a very resourced person. And I think he thought I was just gonna accept that at face value.

What I did was I sent it to my attorney right away. “Hey, guess what? I have an attorney!!” And my attorney said, “This is BS. There's no legal standing behind this whatsoever. His children are adults. You can do whatever you want. You can contact them if you want.” He said, but I don't know why he would want– My lawyer said this to me, “I don't know why you'd wanna be involved in this man's life.”

That's kind of where that landed. And that was a long time ago. That was back in September of 2015, and here we are now in 2016. His daughter, like I said, has a public presence. I followed her on Twitter for a while and she followed me back, which I realize is creepy.

But I saw someone who looked like me for the first time in my life, and I could not turn away. I don't know if she knows who I am. I don't think she does. I wanna tell her so badly, but my birth father has bullied me into the shadows. He has done what birth parents do for a lot of adoptees, which is push us away, pretend we never existed.

And I have let him do that. And I hate that, that I've let him do that. I have let him make me believe that my presence in his kids' life would be a catastrophe.

Haley Radke: I'm just–I'm in tears listening to this.

Liz Prato: I'm a little teary, too. Terrible.

Haley Radke: I don't understand how they don't understand that we're human, and all we want is that connection.

Liz Prato: Yeah, and I like… I don't wanna be invited to Christmas dinner at his house. That's not what I'm asking. I'm asking like…wow. Just like you said, the connection, the understanding of where I came from.

Haley Radke: I'm so sorry.

Liz Prato: Thank you. But you know, I'll tell you one thing. I got that letter from his attorneys. It was really terrible, because they sent it to me via email and then followed up with a hard copy in the mail. So I get the email on a Friday morning, and I told my sister who I'm in touch with (Kate), and she was supportive and horrified and that he would treat me that way. So I think it was the following Tuesday, I got the hard copy of that letter in the mail from my birth father's lawyers.

So yay, I actually have proof of it!! In the mail, the exact same day, I got a card from my sister and it was a thank you card. And on the inside she wrote, “Thank you for finding me.” And it doesn't make up for what my birth father did. It's not a replacement for that, but at least there is this one gem in the middle of all that crap. And she gave me that; that's a huge gift.

Haley Radke: That's beautiful.

Liz Prato: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Just like other adoptees, it sounds like you've got a lot of woundedness and rejection. And is there anything that you've done to work on that in your life?

Liz Prato: I think for me, what was surprisingly healing was I've been very open about my story, on Facebook and on Twitter. Because I– Even though (like I said) I've let my birth father bully me into the shadows when it comes to contacting his children, in every other way I am very open about this.

I talk about it on Twitter, and what's funny about it is I talk about it on Twitter (without using names). And my half-sister, who doesn't know she's my half-sister, was following me. So she'd be reading this stuff and it was just so bizarre, anyway, where I was going with that is… being very open about that. People have started telling me their stories. They have written me emails and private messages on Facebook and on Twitter. At readings that I've done, people will come up to me and start to tell me their stories about being separated from their half-siblings.

There are a lot of us out there. That's the thing that's just amazing me all the time. I mean, I feel like everybody needs to go– Even if you think you know your parents' life, you need to go ask your parents, “Do I by any chance have any half siblings out there?” Because a shocking number of people do.

I was amazed at how many people came out and started telling me their stories, and what was very clear to me very early on, is how many stories there are. I'm happy to recommend books and websites and things like that. I find that books focus on one person's story more often than not, and every story really is different. There's some strings that run through it, of course. And I think it's important to know what those strings are, but I actually got so much out of talking to individual people who have been at different points in their story.

And for that matter, I have two close friends who are birth mothers who reunited with their children. And talking to them about the way that went and what it felt like for them… I mean, I am not lucky enough to have birth parents who wanted to reunite with me like my two friends did with their children. But at the same time, it's just having the support and the understanding from all these different perspectives has really been more helpful and healing to me than anything.

Haley Radke: I’ve found that, too.

Liz Prato: Yeah. You're doing this podcast–that's why, right?

Haley Radke: Absolutely. Thanks for sharing your story, because others are going to hear and feel, I'm not alone in this secondary rejection. And as you said, I mean, there are so many of us, there's so many, there's millions of adoptees, so we're connected to–-connected somewhere.

Liz Prato: And so many of us have a second class citizen status when it comes to being able to have our birth certificate. You know, I wrote a piece several years ago, in which I took my amended birth certificate. And I, in the piece, wrote, “Okay, here's my amended birth certificate. This is not my original birth certificate.” Because I think most people don't even understand that we have fake birth certificates.

I don't know what it's like in Canada, but that's what happens here in the U.S., is we're given this kind of fake birth certificate that makes it look like our adoptive parents are our biological parents. And nowhere on there does it say that we're adopted, and these people are not our biological parents, and it's this huge lie. The first piece, the proof of our existence, is a lie. And so for me, I wanted to expose that lie. So I took that birth certificate, and I annotated it to tell the story of my adoption.

Haley Radke: Powerful. I have a fake birth certificate, too.

Liz Prato: It's all weird, right?

Haley Radke: It is, it is.

Liz Prato: Yep. And it's legal. That's the crazy thing about it. It's a huge lie, and it's all legal.

Haley Radke: Sad that our time is coming to a close, because I've really enjoyed our conversation. Is there anything else that you want to share before we go into recommended resources?

Liz Prato: I guess I would just always encourage adult adoptees to know: This is your life and you have a right to know your lineage. You have a right to know your background, you have a right to know where you came from. Push for that right. If you live in a state, or a country, or a province, whatever, that doesn't have open adoption records, write to your senators to your whoever represents you in politics and make a strong case for why a law should be passed to open those records.

And if you need some help about how to do that, look at the state of Colorado, look at the state of Oregon. Those are both states that have done that successfully.

Haley Radke: Thank you. Yes, that is really important.

Okay, so I asked you if you would have something to share with our listeners to recommend, and I prepared something as well. So if you don't mind, I'll go first.

Liz Prato: Yeah, go ahead.

Haley Radke: Mine is a Facebook group. It's called “How Does it Feel to be Adopted?”

Liz Prato: I like it.

Haley Radke: And it has almost 4,000 members and it's run by Pamela Karanova (and I follow her on Twitter as well). And she blogs at adopteeinrecovery.com. Now, the Facebook group has adoptees answer each other's questions, and also questions from other members of the triad. So adoptive parents, or biological parents, extended family, a variety of different questions.

It's fascinating to go back through the old posts, and it's just crowdsourcing wisdom. If you're a really sensitive person, I would say this would be a trigger warning, especially for me at some times of year, especially Mother's Day, Father's Day, birthday…

Liz Prato: Father's Day!! Right?

Haley Radke: Exactly. Those times of year, maybe I wouldn't particularly look at it just to protect myself. I'm gonna just read off…Let's see, what's one of the questions right now? There's a question from an adult adoptee: “My birth father and I have been in contact for a couple years now. It's been a complicated relationship with him, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah….”

Right? So she's just asking about, “What should she do in this situation?” And all of these people reply, so there's “out of the fog” adoptees replying, but there's also “in the fog,” too. So it's a big mix, anyway.

Liz Prato: Yeah. There's no right answer.

Haley Radke: Exactly. There isn't. Yeah, but it's a fun group to join and like I said, almost 4,000 members. If your question gets posted, you get plenty of replies.

So what did you want to recommend to our listeners today?

Liz Prato: I actually have two books I want to recommend. One is Found by Jennifer Lauck. She's a memoirist, and she wrote about finding her birth mother and connecting with her birth mother. But also she writes very eloquently about the sense of displacement, and the lack of grounding in her identity that followed her throughout her entire life that she believes comes from being adopted. And I think that's a really profound thing that's hard to articulate.

When people ask adoptees, “Why do you want to find your biological parents? Why does that even matter?” That's a very difficult thing to articulate. And I mean, I can say, “Oh, I wanna know where I came from.” That doesn't mean anything to someone who doesn't know what that experience is, necessarily. So she does an amazing job of articulating that, and so I recommend that.

And then I recommend, also, a book called Black Baby White Crib by Jaiya John. And he is an African American who was adopted into a white family in New Mexico. And he talks very specifically about what that's like to be in an interracial adoption. Because I think that in itself is a very specific set of identity issues that arises from that: to be so separated from your ethnic identity, in addition to just not knowing, out there.

I mean, because it's very clear. He was Black; his parents were white. That's very different. So I think that's a really important thing to put out there, too, because we don't all have the experience of even sharing the same ethnicity as our adoptive family.

Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing. I haven't heard of either of those books, so I'm definitely gonna go get them and read them.

Liz Prato: Good.

Haley Radke: There's a lot of wonderful memoirs out there, and so I'm excited to collect all those titles to share with our listeners. How can our listeners connect with you?

Liz Prato: I have a website, which is www.lizprato.com. That's L-I-Z-P-R-A-T-O.com. I'm on Twitter. I honestly don't remember my Twitter handle.

I'm not a very good Tweeter, to be honest, but you know, there's not that many Liz Pratos out there, luckily. So you can find me pretty easily,

Haley Radke: I'll link in the show notes to that, so everyone can connect with you if they have more questions for you.

Liz Prato: Thank you.

Haley Radke: Thank you so much for your time today, Liz. I really appreciate your sharing your story and your heart.

Liz Prato: Thank you for having me. I feel very honored to have the opportunity to do this.

Haley Radke: If you would like to thank Liz for sharing with us, you can find her on Twitter @Liz_Prato. Liz has links on her website to all of her writing projects.

To share your adoptee story, ask a question, or to find the show notes, visit our website, adopteeson.com. You can also find us on Twitter or Instagram @adopteeson.

Today, would you share our show with an adoptee you know that’s struggling with feeling rejected by their biological parents? Maybe hearing Liz's story would encourage them that they aren't alone. Thanks for listening. Let's talk again soon.

Hey, you made it to the end. Thank you all for your kind words about the podcast, and we especially loved getting this tweet from @filmplane on Twitter: “As an adoptee actively searching, I really appreciate the generosity of adoptees in sharing their adoption journeys.”

Thanks, Matthew. We agree. If you'd like to send us your feedback, we'd love to hear your thoughts. You might hear them on an upcoming episode.

5 Ellie

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/5

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Haley Radke: You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is Season One, episode five: Ellie. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Today, we're going to be talking to Ellie, a fellow adoptee who will be sharing what it's like to be adopted by extended family members. We discuss what her relationship is like with her birth mother currently, and her longing for something more. We wrap up with some recommended resources for you.

I'm pleased to introduce you to our guest, Ellie. Ellie is an in-family adoptee. Welcome. Thanks for joining us today.

Ellie: Hi. Thank you for having me.

Haley Radke: I'd love it if you'd start just by sharing your story with us.

Ellie: Okay. So it's a little complicated. I'll try and give the basics. So my biological parents (birth mom and birth dad), they met when they were in their, oh, early twenties. He was in the Air Force and they met; they got married. There's some speculation as to whether or not they were already pregnant with me when they got married. I don't know for sure if that's true, but at some point during her pregnancy, he cheated on her and they got a divorce.

And along the lines, my birth mother, (she was, you know, 23), didn't know what to do. Obviously, her husband turned out to be a jerk. So my adoptive parents, (so this is where the whole family part gets complicated through adoption). My birth mother is my cousin. I was adopted by my birth mother's aunt and uncle (so biologically, my great aunt and uncle). And that's really hard to follow, I know!

So through adoption, she's now my cousin. So they (her aunt and uncle) had offered to take me for a time to let her get back on her feet, you know, figure life out. And at some point, about a month before I was born (and again, there's conflicting reports here), she decided that she was going to give me up for adoption for good.

And the reasoning…there's been two reasonings. One was that she wanted me to have a mom, and a dad, and siblings. I have three older sisters that are my adoptive parents’ biological children (so I'm the only adopted child in my family). So she wanted me to have two parents and a family, and she, I think, really also wanted to go back to school, and have a life, and have a career. And to her credit, she's a very, very successful woman. So, I mean, that worked out.

So, I was born in March 1989 (I'm 27 now). I was born and my adoptive mother flew out to California (where I was born). It was there–it was about a month after I was born, they finalized the adoption. I was given a different name when I was born, but my adoptive parents changed it (which is good, because I didn't like my first name). And that was sort of that.

And my mom flew home with me and my dad and sisters met me at the airport and had this whole little family reunion type thing. And some stranger, who probably had no idea why this woman is walking off the plane holding a pretty newborn baby and this whole family is so excited… He probably had no idea what was going on, but he offered to take their picture. So I have a picture of that, which is neat.

I don't know. There's not, it's never really been a reunion. It's just always been there. They had pictures and you know, “how I was doing” updates sent for the first couple of years. I think they came to visit once or twice. Or we would see them when we went out to visit family out there.

But I guess the part—I believe I talked about this on one of my blogs. The part, I guess, for me that was the reunion was when I was 11. My grandfather passed away (my grandfather on my mom's side). And so we had to go out there for his funeral. And it was sudden, and so maybe the night or two before we left for the funeral, my parents sat me down at dinner and proceeded to explain to me that this blonde lady (that I had always known as my cousin) was, in fact, my birth mother.

And to this point, I had known I was adopted. They told me that from the start. Before I even knew what the word meant, I knew that I was adopted. I knew (whatever that meant), I knew what it was. I knew I was that, and they'd always said it was in-family, but it never really registered what that meant or who it might be.

And people have asked me, “Well, did you wonder? Did you have any idea?” And I really didn't. It wasn't something I'd thought about. I was 11, it just hadn't crossed my mind. So that was a bit of a jolt, to say the least. And then to have to go out and see her and face her.

And honestly, I guess one of the most dramatic things… And it's not like anything significant happened. I just had no idea how to handle it. So that was my reunion, I guess.

Haley Radke: I'm just—I'm sorry, I'm just in shock. You know, the most common story for adoptees, mostly, that I've heard so far is that their biological parents were teenagers or… But yours were marr—I mean, my goodness! What a complicated situation.

Ellie: And that's the part that I've struggled with a lot. My birth father is not in the picture. They divorced. I think he stayed in contact for the first year I was born and since then, nothing. At some point, he found my birth mother on Facebook and I then saw his profile. And proceeded to block him immediately, because I wasn't ready for that. Didn't like what I saw. I just didn't really want to deal with that.

But I guess what bothers me is that, you know, she was 23. She was a stable person. She had her parents there for support. And it's always struck me as a little bit of a selfish decision. It's both selfless and selfish in my opinion.

She had good intentions in wanting me to have two parents and a family, and I am always grateful for that. But at the same time, she got to go out and live her life and be very successful and I… You know, it's one of those things you just kind of question.

Haley Radke: I'm sure. I'm sure. So what's your relationship with her like now?

Ellie: It's weird. I mean, really the only time I see her is at weddings or funerals. I'm in the process of planning my wedding, and so I'm a little wary of what her role is gonna be in that. I mean, we talk every now and then and we're friends on social media. I hide her from my feed, because I just don't need that reminder popping up all the time.

She's actually also getting married this summer, which is a really weird juxtaposition for me, to be planning a wedding at the same time as my birth mother. And he (the man she's marrying) has a family. And that's a little weird for me, too. Like logically, I'm happy for her.

I'm happy she finally found someone, because she never… She hasn't married since my birth father. But at the same time, it's hard for me to be like, “Oh, well look at—you're getting this whole new family. Great.”

Haley Radke: Has she— she didn't have any other children then?

Ellie: No. Which I've always said I was grateful for, because I don't know how I would handle that.

So I'm the youngest child. But biologically, I'm an only child, so I feel like I often display characteristics of both. I have always felt different from my sisters, because they're all the same, you know. They're all, you know, biologically sisters and I've always been the odd one out.

Haley Radke: And what's your age difference?

Ellie: The oldest and I are 12 years apart. The next one up for me is three years, then the next one up from that is nine years older than me, and then 12 years older. So there's a pretty significant gap. And obviously the oldest was very much old enough to know what was going on when I was adopted. So she probably has the best understanding of it, you know, how it was at that point.

Yeah, I think that's something that's probably been one of the hardest things for me to come to terms with, is being okay to be myself. I always tried so hard to fit in with them and do the things that I knew they would approve of, you know. Eventually, sometime in college, I gave up and I was like, Nope, this is me. I'm different. That's fine.

And it still bothers me a little bit, but not as much as it used to.

Haley Radke: Your sisters, have they married or had children?

Ellie: Yep. All three are married. Two of them have kids. So, there's always that whole, at what point do they tell their kids, you know. And my birth mother has two brothers, and they have kids who are in their teens now. And it's well, Do they know who I am? You know?

And I always go into situations with family wondering if people know, you know, that I'm biologically her daughter. I did (I should add, I wrote about this in my blog, too)-- When I went to my grandfather's funeral, I had just found out who she was, my birth mother's mother tested me. She looked at some pictures of my birth mother's brothers and referred to them as my uncles (which they were biologically). But through adoption, which I'd only known them through up until now, they were my cousins. So she referred to them as that, to see if I would react, to see if I would be like, “Oh, they're not my uncles, they're my cousins.”

You know? And I didn't react, because I knew that's what she was doing. But to this day, it just bothers me so much that I was 11. I had just found out, she didn't know that I had found out, and she was testing me to see how much I knew about my own adoption.

Haley Radke: I don't even know what to say about that. Who does that? Who does that? That's bizarre.

Ellie: I don't know. I think it's a situation that no one really knew how to handle. I think it was handled poorly by some.

Haley Radke: Yeah. Well, it sounds like you all still don't really know. You still don't really know how to handle it.

Ellie: Not really. No, not really. I'm sure that's one of the questions that you'll get to later is, you know, “What would I say? What would I change about the situation?”

Haley Radke: Well, I'd love to hear that.

Ellie: I guess the hardest part for me has been the lack of open communication about it. It's always been this hush-hush topic. I mean, it's come up, my family and I talk about it. I wouldn't say a fair amount, but you know, sometimes, especially when family events come up that she's going to be at. I think they always ask how I'm doing, ask how I'm handling it.

And it seems well-meaning, and on some level I think it is. But on another level, I think they just want to hear that I'm fine and I don't care about her and, you know, and that I am part of their family and she doesn't matter to me.

And so it's always been the narrative that I've gotten, that I should stick to, is that I shouldn't get too close to her. I shouldn't talk with her that much. And so I've been in this limbo of, How close do I get to her?. And not only for my own sake, but for fear of hurting my family and for them thinking that I am replacing them with her, or something like that.

I think my mom told me that she was always afraid that when I turned 18 I was gonna run off and go be with her. That's not a lot of confidence in your parenting. And it bothered me. She wasn't a bad parent, you know? They raised me in a way that they tried to make it seem like I was exactly like their other three daughters.

And logically, again, I understand that. I wrote a whole blog about logic versus emotion, because I like to, you know, sort everything out. Logically, I completely understand why she tried to treat me exactly like my sisters. That's…it makes sense to me.

But at the same time… And again, that was 27 years ago. Adoption wasn't talked about that much; there wasn't a lot of literature on it. You just handled it how you thought was best. And I truly do think they thought that they were doing the best they could. But looking back, I think I needed to be treated a little bit differently. For them to at least acknowledge that I wasn't the same as my sisters. That, you know, I was–I don't even know what exactly…

I felt like it was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, and I tried so hard for so long to get that to fit. And it never did, and it's never going to. And I think a lot of adoptees probably feel that way, you know, trying to fit in and knowing they can't, but not really why.

Haley Radke: It sounds like it's even more complex in your situation, because in a closed adoption, of course, you're obviously different. You're completely different genetically. And I'm assuming that there's some misconceptions about that. I really don't know that much about in-family adoption. What would you tell me about that? What are some misconceptions?

Ellie: I think adoptees who come from closed adoption think that it's the best way to have an adoption. And I'm not saying it's not, but I'm saying there's still things that add another layer of complexity to it. I have so much sympathy for people that are trying to find their parents and connect with them, and they have no idea where they come from.

I can't imagine that, because I do know where I come from. But at the same time, I've had to grow up knowing she's there, but just dangling. I know she's there, but I can't really have this relationship with her, because then I'd be betraying my family. So we all kind of tiptoe around this whole thing and it's just–it's really complicated.

I never know the right thing to say or do. I mean, she offered to pay for my wedding dress. That's what my mom does, you know? And I was so taken aback by that and I didn't know how to handle it. I don't know how to handle it when I have kids at some point. Is she gonna be around? Is that normal for a cousin/birth mother?

It's just, it’s confusing, I think is the main word I would use to describe it.

Haley Radke: It sounds very confusing. Yeah. I will admit that I have been one of those adoptees who's said, “This closed system is so ridiculous, you know? What about in-family?”

Ellie: I mean, it is, you can't–-I don't think you can argue only for one or only for the other. I think that's the way that adoption in general is trending, is to be more open. And in general, I think that's good. In general, I wish people never had to be given up for adoption, so…

Haley Radke: Yes. Family preservation, that's where it's at.

Ellie: Yes.

Haley Radke: Have you actually ever had a conversation with your birth mother just about, “What should our relationship be?” Or have you ever told her anything like that?

Ellie: Not really. She, from what I can grasp, she's very closed off about this. She dealt with it 27 years ago, and has spent a lot of time trying to compartmentalize it, trying to put it in this far corner and not deal with it, except when it's convenient for her.

So, at certain times she'll reach out. She tries to (for lack of better term), she tries to buy me. She'll send me presents, she'll send me gift cards. And I guess the hard part for me is that these just indicate that she doesn't really know who I am. We've never had a real conversation where she's really sat down and gotten to know me, beyond what I share on social media, beyond what my family could tell her.

I tried to have a conversation when I was about 22. I had all these questions ready, and it just, it… First off, she put it off for probably four or five months before it ever actually happened. And when it did happen, she just danced around the questions and just gave really vague answers, and it was really frustrating. And so I've never tried since then. It just didn't seem worth it.

Haley Radke: When I was first in reunion with my birth mom, I had asked her a couple of times, “Would you ever go to counseling with me?” And it was because I knew she had blocked out a lot of things and hadn't dealt with it, and was hoping that if she went, she could deal with some of her issues. But at the time, I really didn't realize how many issues I had stemming from it as well.

So I can hear that, that she's definitely not dealt with those things.

Ellie: Yeah, and I guess, to me, it is what it is at this point. I'm not gonna push it. I’m dealing, in my opinion at least, I'm dealing very well with my emotions.

You know, I go to therapy every couple of weeks and it's hard. It's really hard. You talk about some really intense feelings and it–you go to places that hurt and it's raw. But I think that I'm so much better for it, because I know exactly where I stand with myself, at least. And I know how to cope with emotions as they come up and deal with things. And I just–I like to be open and transparent, and that's just me.

Haley Radke: Was there a point when you realized that you were coming out of the fog, so to speak (the adoptee lingo)?

Ellie: Probably when I first came across #FlipTheScript. That would be…is that 2014? (I think it was 2014.) And I guess, sort of naively, I had always considered myself to be in this bubble. Adoption isn't something people talk about. It's just not. People knew, you know, people that are close to me. I'd mentioned it in passing, but in general, it's just not something society talks about. So then to come across this whole Twitter feed of all these people saying all of these things, I was just like, Oh my gosh. You're just like me, you feel the same things.

And I was like, This is… It just really justified it for me, like, What I'm feeling is real. Other people feel it. And it just made me feel so much better in a weird way. You know? The other people knew how I felt.

And especially when I connected with two other open adoption adoptees, I was even more–My eyes were even more opened at that point. And along with that, when I started reading The Primal Wound, I started reading some blogs, and really just diving in to just intake as much information as I could and see what was out there.

And that's when I decided to stop covering it up and stop masking my feelings and, you know, stop pretending that it didn't bother me. Because it did. It does, and it's always going to, and that's just how it is.

Haley Radke: How long have you been in therapy?

Ellie: Almost two years. So around the same time that I started getting into all of the adoption stuff was the same time that I moved across the country to start a new job, and to be closer to the man who's now my fiancé.

And so as I'm going through all of this, I am moving to a new city where I don't know a lot of people yet. He's my only support there. And I realized at that point that our relationship wouldn't survive if I didn't go see somebody. I couldn't put it all on him. I couldn't expect him to carry this burden and help me with it.

That's what really pushed me into it, and it's one of the best decisions I've ever made, I think.

Haley Radke: Does your therapist have experience with adoption and adoptee issues?

Ellie: Not really. She has experience with family, in general. She was the one–well, there was one in particular, that the place I was going to that did have adoption experience, but she didn't have any openings.

So I got recommended to this lady, and it was great. She just–I don't even, I don't really know how to explain it. We just talk a lot about accepting feelings, not judging myself for feeling certain ways. And trying to not, you know, write all these stories in my head about what other people are feeling, because it's probably not true. And I tend to catastrophize things, especially with family.

Haley Radke: Well, thanks for sharing that. I've been in counseling for quite a long time, so I've definitely had many benefits from dealing with that. My stuff.

Ellie: I definitely would recommend it for anybody, not even people going through adoption. Just in general, I think everybody could stand to talk to someone every now and then.

Haley Radke: Absolutely. Well, my BA was in Psychology.

Ellie: Oh, nice.

Haley Radke: So I've always been a very big believer in counseling, so that's why I'm always curious about that. Ellie, how has faith or spirituality hindered, or helped, impacted your adoptee journey?

Ellie: My biological mother is what she calls “Catholic-light,” meaning she doesn't really practice, but at some level, she considers herself Catholic. My adoptive parents are Southern Baptist. And that's how I was raised. I was raised in a pretty, pretty strict church. You know, there were strict rules about dating and sex before marriage and, you know, alcohol.

And it was a very closed minded way of thinking, looking back now. And when I got out of high school and into college, I stopped going to church. And I really haven't been back since. Through the years, I've come to be a little bit more spiritual. I still really don't like organized religion, mainly because of the experiences I had in the church growing up.

I wasn't treated the best when I started to question things. So I don't–honestly, it hasn't played a large role. I mean, growing up, I really do think that the morals I have were instilled in me because of that religious upbringing. And so I wouldn't ever change that. And I don't at all fault my parents, I just don't really believe in the same things anymore, or not– I guess it's not even the same things, it's just not to the same level that they do. I've always tried to make it on my own, and do everything on my own, and be this really strong person. And most of the time, I can do that. And there's sometimes every now and then that it's just like, I can't do it, you know?

So that's when I go to my happy place, which is nature. That's where I feel closest to God. That's where I can be spiritual. So it's….I don't really know how you'd describe it. It's there, but it's not a huge influencing factor, I guess.

Haley Radke: Do you think your adoptive parents' faith was a factor in them choosing to adopt you?

Ellie: Probably. Probably. I think it probably was, because I know for a fact (at the time) they couldn't afford to adopt me. They had three other kids, you know. My dad was working, but still wasn't making a lot to support a family. And I have heard stories from my older sisters that there was one year that they shouldn't have made it through.

They didn't have enough money to get through everything, and somehow, they just did. And so I think that's, you know, them believing in some kind of divine intervention. I don't know. But I do think that it played some role. I know they prayed about it a lot. I know they talked with people at church about it.

Haley Radke: You had mentioned earlier that you blocked your birth father as soon as you saw his name come up on Facebook.

Ellie: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Why do you think you have such–I mean, I feel like there's… He's the inciting factor as to why you were relinquished, and so that can't feel very good.

Ellie: Yeah, that's definitely a part of it. And the fact and I– Until I found him (or he found me and I blocked him), up until that point, I had so much anger. I was like, Why did you never try to find me? Why did you never try to contact me? I'm here. I'm out here. You could easily find me, through my birth mother. That wouldn't be hard. And so I had so much anger. And I still do, to an extent.

It bothers me that he's never even tried, you know? And I don't know for sure if he ever saw my Facebook, if he ever saw at least what I look like now. But I, at that point, decided to block him (given what I saw). There was a lot of really interesting political stuff that I did not agree with whatsoever, and I really just didn't want to be associated with someone like that at that point.

And I don't know that I ever will be. I don't know that I'll ever get past that lingering little bit of anger, and the fact that he’s still, 27 years later: not once. And yeah, to an extent part of it's on me, but part of it's on him, too.

Haley Radke: Does he have other children that you know of?

Ellie: Not that I'm aware of. But again, all I've seen is his Facebook page, so I really don't know. I don't think so, but I don't know.

Haley Radke: Birth moms have a lot of shame, and that's often why they aren't good in relationship. There's a lot of secondary rejection, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I think the fathers do, too. And so maybe that's one of the reasons. Now, I'm not telling you all this, so I think you should reach out. I'm just saying: I hear you.

Ellie: I don't know. Maybe at some point I will, but for right now, I don't… I don't have any desire.

Haley Radke: Also, how much capacity do we have to work on all these different relationships at once? You've got this wedding coming up, so you're gonna have a new look to your relationship with your fiancé, being married. And because your relationship with your birth mom doesn't sound settled or like you might like it to look like. There's only so many things someone can handle at once.

Ellie: Yeah, I totally agree.

Haley Radke: I understand that.

Ellie: Yeah. I really just don't want another thing on my plate at the moment.

Haley Radke: Sorry for bringing it up.

Ellie: No, that's fine. It's not–I really don't. I'm very apathetic about it. I really just don't have a lot of emotions about him at this moment and I'm okay with that. I'm great not feeling a lot about him.

Haley Radke: Yeah. I have to–With my mom, I have to think about that that way sometimes. Like, she still doesn't want to contact me. I'm not thinking about that. Yeah.

Ellie: That'd be so hard. I can't imagine meeting her, and having conversations, and suddenly having it just completely cut off.

Haley Radke: Yeah, she– It was right before Christmas and we were gonna meet up before Christmas and I had to cancel. I was still in university at the time and I had a bunch of exams and stuff. It just was bad timing.

And so we were gonna reschedule for after Christmas, and she emailed me and said something like, “The way that you've described some of my family and you've interpreted things….” you know. And just she's, “Let's put it off for a while,” or something. Or, “Let's give it a while.”

Ellie: So she tried to put it on you. Oof.

Haley Radke: Yeah. And then that was it. I haven't heard back from her since. And I've reached out multiple times, but… And she lives in my city, so….

Ellie: Really? Oh gosh.

Haley Radke: Yeah. So sometimes I wonder, Am I gonna bump into her sometime?

Ellie: Whether intentionally or not, I've put a great deal of distance between myself and my family. We're on opposite coasts now. My biological family (in particular), my birth mother, my family… The rest of my family's all spread out, but I like it that way. I feel like I'm just removed from all of it, and I have my life here.

Haley Radke: And you're building a new life.

Ellie: Yeah. I'm building (at some point) my own family, if I ever decide that I can handle that.

Haley Radke: Yeah. That's a whole other layer of feelings to work through.

Ellie: So I've heard.

Haley Radke: Yeah, yeah. So is there anything that we didn't touch on that you wanna share with our listeners?

Ellie: I think what makes my situation fairly unique is that I am the only adopted child. I feel like in a lot of situations, they'll adopt multiple kids, or just one. And I don't know how common it is to have, you know, three siblings and then one that's adopted.

And that has always been a little hard for me to always feel like the odd one out. But then to feel like, Well, they are family, so shouldn't I still feel a little bit like them? You know? And I'm not. I am not at all like any of my sisters.

I think one of your questions that you had was, “What's the dream?” You know, “What would be the ideal adoption situation?” And I think, like you, I'm very much in favor of family preservation. I think she could have kept me; her mom was very supportive. She would've been a single mom. Yeah.

But you know, you wouldn't have broken that connection. You wouldn't have caused that trauma for both people. I think if I were to have a completely magic wand, I would just be the biological daughter of my family. Because they are good people, for as much as they maybe just were a bit ignorant about how to handle it.

They're good people, and they meant well, and they are my family at the end of the day. And I know that they have my back and they care. I guess that would be the ideal situation. One of the two. Either she kept me, or I was biologically already their daughter.

Haley Radke: And what about your relationship with her right now? What would you like it to look like?

Ellie: I've (and this is something I've talked with my therapist a lot about), like I have this deeply rooted need to understand things. And it probably stems from being adopted and not having an understanding of that situation. I would–I really just want to understand what happened 27 years ago. How she got to that point? How she could hold me and look at me and keep me for a month, and then give me away? Why she can't have an in-depth and meaningful relationship with me now? Why she is so satisfied to keep it shallow and on the surface? Because that's not me.

And it's really hard for me to just pretend like, La-dee-dah, everything's fine. You know, it's hard. So that, I guess I just–I wish that we'd have a really real conversation where we actually share our true emotions about things. But I know, on some level, it's never going to happen.

Haley Radke: Well, thank you so much for sharing that. You're really sharing your heart, and I appreciate that. It's not easy.

Ellie: No. But it feels good.

Haley Radke: I'm glad I asked you to bring some recommended resources for our listeners and I have two to share, if that's okay. I'll go first.

When you were talking, you mentioned the #FlipTheScript hashtag, and so I think it would be awesome for our listeners to go back on Twitter and read through some of those tweets. They’re usually in November, because it's National Adoption month. And so adult adoptees have been asked to share their feelings about adoption using that hashtag #FlipTheScript.

So I think you said it was started in 2014, so you can look back through 2014 tweets, 2015 tweets. And this year, I'm sure they're gonna have it again in November. It really does share the “adoptee out of the fog” picture of adoption.

Ellie: Yes, absolutely.

Haley Radke: I had fun tweeting through that, too, in November.

Ellie: Yeah. It was great to connect with so many people.

Haley Radke: So the real resource I really want to recommend that I prepared before was The Sister Wish blog, and it's written by Kat Stanley (and Kat with a K). And her Twitter handle is @KatSwrites. And she is an open adoption adoptee, and she's got links on her blog to other adoptee blogs, other open adoption blogs, and she's very vulnerable with her feelings in her blog as well as on Twitter. She's got this really amazing word cloud on the top of her blog.

And I just want to read one phrase from it that really hit me hard when I read it, because it just reminded me how much I don't know about open adoption.

“I dealt with every single reunion issue adult adoptees have, except I was six.”

Pretty powerful.

Ellie: Yeah. To add to that, Kat found me and one other open adoptee in 2014, and we were the first open adoption adoptee she'd ever come across.

So the three of us have a (I don’t know if clique's the right word), but we have a support system in each other, that we all have this situation in common. So I've video chatted with Kat and this lady, oh, a handful of times, and she's great. She really has a way with words and is very mature and thoughtful about things.

I feel like that's what happens when you find out something like this at such a young age. I feel like you're forced to grow up and deal with this really, really heavy thing. And so you just become a really strong person, I think.

Haley Radke: Yes, I can definitely see a lot of strength in you. Being in my thirties, and seeing that you're 27, you have a lot of wisdom for your age.

Ellie: Thank you.

Haley Radke: Just even having the knowledge that, you know, “I think I need to go in and talk to someone.” There's a lot of people that wouldn't even have the strength to do that.

Ellie: Well, thank you.

Haley Radke: So you have a book to share with us.

Ellie: I do. This was a book that, at some point when I was delving into adoption stuff, I came across. And it's called The Primal Wound by Nancy Newton Verrier.

And it was, I think, the first thing I read that really hit home. I would just be reading, and I was going through and highlighting things that stood out to me. And whole pages were highlighted. So all these sections… There was one, I'll share this, because it just popped into my head. There was one passage in particular, about how she compared adoption to plates being broken. And how this plate breaks, and you try and put all these pieces back together and fit them just right. They never quite do, you know, there's glue and it works, but it's not the same. And it's never going to be the same. And that really stuck with me, for whatever reason.

But she is just so insightful and she's interviewed, you know, numerous adoptees and has their stories and their thoughts. And I just connected with so much in that book. Especially if you're just starting out, you know, learning about your adoption experience and getting involved. I would recommend it.

Haley Radke: I've also read her second book. Have you seen that? Coming Home to Self?

Ellie: Oh boy. No, I haven't.

Haley Radke: When you're ready for the next level, it's just one more added layer on top.

Ellie: Oh boy.

Haley Radke: There's a chapter in there strictly on reunion, and when I was into the reunion rollercoaster (let's say)... When I reunited with my biological father and his family, I photocopied that chapter and I emailed it to my adoptive parents, to him and his wife, I brought it to my counselor. And I said, “Read this, so you know what's going on here.” Yeah. I recommend that too, if you're listening and you're in reunion or, yeah, just trying to figure out those puzzle pieces. Yeah. What a sorrowful picture, a plate getting glued back together.

Well, Ellie, thank you so much for going in depth into your story. I really appreciate it, and I know that our listeners will have great value from hearing your story.

Ellie: I hope so. I don't know. I feel like it should be shared if anybody can benefit or learn from it. I benefited and learned from everyone else's story during #FlipTheScript. So, you know, just trying to pay it forward a little bit. Thanks for having me.

Haley Radke: If you'd like to connect with Ellie, her Twitter handle is @Ellie11122013, and we'll have a link to her blog on our show notes. You can find those on our website, adopteeson.com, where you can send us an email or a voicemail to share your story. You can also find us on Twitter or Instagram @adopteeson.

If you are enjoying the podcast, we would love it if you would share the show with your family. Maybe they would be able to understand you a little better if they heard some of these adoptee stories.

Adoptees On would like to pass on our heartfelt condolences to Becky Drinnen, who shared her story with us in episode four. Becky's biological father recently passed away. We're sorry for your loss, Becky, and are grateful you had the chance to reunite with him. Thanks for listening. Let's talk again soon.

Hey, you made it to the very end. I'd love to read you one of our latest reviews from iTunes. And this one is from the U.S. store, from Lily C.:

“Thank you so much for this wonderful podcast. I've enjoyed so much of the written work of so many people I'm hearing mentioned here, but now I can listen while I drive or do chores and keep learning more about how to empathize with my children as an adoptive parent.

Hearing from grown, adopted people reflecting on their past and present experience of being adopted has been the most valuable resource I've found. Cannot recommend enough. Listen, listen, listen. Put your defensiveness aside. Be quiet and really process what you hear. If your child isn't speaking aloud about being adopted, you may hear something about what they might be feeling from others.”

Thank you, Lily C., for your kind review. You can leave us a review on iTunes and you may get to hear it on an upcoming show.

4 Becky

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/4

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Haley Radke: You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is Season One, Episode Four: Becky. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Today we'll be talking to Becky, a fellow adoptee who will be sharing her experiences as a Baby Scoop adoptee. We also discuss her Sherlock Holmes-level searching skills. We'll wrap up with some recommended resources for you.

I’m so happy to welcome Becky Drinnan, and she's gonna be sharing her adoption story with us today on our show. So thank you so much, Becky, for agreeing to share your story with us today.

Becky Drinnen: Well, I'm glad to be here, Haley.

Haley Radke: Would you mind starting out and just saying a little bit about when you were born and the circumstances of your relinquishment, if you know those details?

Becky Drinnen: I would be happy to. I was born in 1962 in Cleveland, Ohio. Although I did not know this until I was already an adult, my mother was 20 or 21 years old at the time that I was born. She was single. She got pregnant by someone who was– it was more of a short-term relationship, and he was not interested in marriage at that time. And right in the heart of the Baby Scoop Era, single moms just didn't keep their babies. So she was forced– she had a choice, but she really didn't see that she had another choice. She lived with an aunt during the pregnancy and then placed me for adoption right at birth. So I was relinquished right at birth. I did not discover this til 2011, but she never saw me. I was in the hospital for 10 days. I was in the hospital there and she never even laid eyes on me during that entire time. And as I've learned more, that was very typical for pregnancies of unwed mothers in that era.

Haley Radke: That's heartbreaking. I didn’t know that.

Becky Drinnen: It is heartbreaking. And as I've talked with other mothers who have relinquished babies in that timeframe, the shame and the lack of compassion that was shown toward them by the church, by their parents, and by other members, you know, other officials in society and the agencies that they entrusted to take care of their babies, is heartbreaking.

Haley Radke: You were adopted after the 10 days?

Becky Drinnen: No, at that point in time I was in– and again, I didn't learn this. I knew that I did not come to live with my adoptive parents until I was three months old. So I did not know. I grew up not having any idea if I was with my mother for those three months, if I was in an institution, if I was in a foster family. I really didn't know those circumstances until much later, until I was an adult. I don't think my parents were really told where I was at, at the time they adopted me, or if they did know that, they didn't remember. But I was in a foster home for three months. And the reason for that, what I've learned, is that the adoption agencies wanted to make sure they weren't passing on damaged goods. They wanted to make sure the baby was healthy and was developing well before they put that baby in a potential adoptive home.

Haley Radke: And do you know why your parents chose to adopt?

Becky Drinnen: They had tried to have a baby. They had been married for seven years and they were not successful in getting pregnant. And in that period of time, it was fairly easy to adopt because there were many, many babies available during that Baby Scoop Era. So actually from the time they applied for adoption until they brought me home, was less than nine months. They didn't have the fertility treatments and that type of thing that parents try now when they're unsuccessful in conceiving immediately.

But then, my parents were actually in the process of adopting another child, they had started that application process, when my mom got pregnant. So she had my brother, who was their biological child, when I was three-ish years old. And then my sister, also their biological child, was born when I was eight.

Haley Radke: So you were the oldest, but of a family of three.

Becky Drinnen: Yes.

Haley Radke: And so when you were growing up, did you notice differences about being the adoptive one in the family?

Becky Drinnen: I don't ever feel that I was treated any differently. I know that my parents loved me, my brothers and sister, my cousins. We had a fairly large extended family that we got together with regularly. I was close with my grandmother, my mother's mother. And I never felt ostracized because I was adopted. I did feel different temperament-wise, I don't know, my personality is different. I tend to question things. I don't accept things for face value, and my mom, especially, did a lot more

Physically, I could look at especially my mom's family, and I could see so much resemblance that I did not see in me. I don't know that that bothered me a lot when I was young because there were enough other family members there that didn't resemble me, it wasn't like I was the only person there. Extended family members who were in the family by marriage and that type of thing. I didn't really feel strange by that, but I felt different inside and I don't know that I really communicated that to anyone.

Being adopted did not bother me until my mom was pregnant with my sister. So I was at that age where I was very aware that my sister's way of coming into our family was much different than mine. I saw my mom, you know, her stomach grow, I felt my sister kick. I don't remember the pregnancy with my brother, but with my sister, I was very aware of just how different that was. And I knew she went off to the hospital, and I went and visited her in the hospital with this little baby in her arms that I wasn't able to hold or touch. Because at that point in time, in 1970, children, if they could come in and get a peek at the baby, certainly weren't allowed to touch it. I think at that point is when I became, obsessed, I guess is the word. I knew at that point that I would find out where I came from and I would learn about the mother who gave me life and gave birth to me. So it's been from a very young age that I was very curious, interested in, and driven to find out where I came from.

Haley Radke: When did you actually search for your birth mom?

Becky Drinnen: Well, because of the way Ohio's law was written, my birth certificate was available to me when I became 18. I didn't know it until I saw a newspaper article when I was 19, but my adoption was finalized in December of 1963, and Ohio didn't close records until 1964, and those prior to January 1st, 1964 remained open.

Haley Radke: So you were just a month, just that year? Oh my gosh.

Becky Drinnen: Yes. Three weeks later and I would not have been able to access my birth records until 2015. So once I learned that, I hopped in my car and I drove to Columbus, Ohio, and I walked into the Bureau of Vital Statistics and I gave them my ID that I needed, and I was able to look at and then get copies of my original birth certificate and my adoption decree. So by the time I was 19, I had the name of my birth mother and I knew my name, the name that she had given me at birth.

It's been many years ago, it's been over 30 years ago, but I can still remember sitting in that room and I can still remember that feeling that I had. It's almost this feeling of looking at something that you're not supposed to, because that's the way society teaches us, right? That ‘that's forbidden, that's a secret, that was in the past, that's not supposed to be brought up’. This feeling of excitement and this feeling of almost, it's like I connected with the name and with her almost immediately. It was just, it was very strange. I also noticed then, once I had taken in the names, I noticed that she was 20. And for me at 19, I was younger than she was when she gave birth to me when I looked at that birth certificate. And I could not imagine why she would've given me up because I had imagined– because I didn't have any facts growing up. All I knew is that she had red hair. That's the only fact that my adoptive parents remember being told about my biological mother. So I didn't know. I had fantasized she was 15 and she was in love with her boyfriend, and they weren't allowed to get married because she was too young, and all of this. And to know that she was already an adult, that was hard for me to take a little bit. And this was all in the span of a few minutes when I was sitting in that room, with this disapproving clerk watching me as I looked at these records for the first time. This was pre-internet, so I didn't have Ancestry and Spokeo and all of those resources that are available on the internet now. So it was a paper search. I started searching Vital Statistics records. I would ask Ohio Vital Statistics to search for her marriage in a 10-year period of time, that they would search for a fee of maybe $10. So I was able to get her birth certificate. I was able to get birth certificates for her– so then I found her marriage certificate, so I had a married name. And then I ordered birth certificates for children born to her and her husband, and I was able to get my siblings’ birth certificates. And so I knew from the time I was 20 that I had a brother and two sisters. And through that I was able to trace her from Cleveland down to the Columbus, Ohio area where she has lived most of her adult life.

At this point in time, I had not talked to other adoptees. I hadn't talked to birth parents. I had read a few articles and maybe a book or so, but I really didn't know that much about what I was getting into.

How I ended up finding her phone number is, a friend of mine was good friends with a police officer on the local police force, and with her name and birth date, he ran her driver's license and was able to get a phone number and a current address. Which is probably not all right to do, but I think back in the early 80s that wasn't so taboo, the privacy and all that stuff. So I had that phone number and I never gave it the first thought that she wouldn't be as thrilled to hear from me as I was to find her and be able to reach out to her.

Somewhere in an article that I had read, though, I did read that it was best to have a third party make that contact. At that point in time, I worked with a very good friend of mine, and I had kept her in the loop on all of the details of my search. And so I asked her if she would make that phone call for me. So we did that during a break at work, just a few days after I had learned her phone number, and I was listening in on the phone extension while she made that phone call and spoke with my mother. And I don't remember a lot of what was said, but what I do remember is I can hear her almost screaming, “What is she trying to do, ruin my life?” And so with that, I was crushed. I was absolutely crushed. Because I had never allowed myself to think that that is what the response would be, from this woman that gave life to me. At that point, I think I was 22 at the time that I had finally tracked her down. It took me a few years. That was the first time I remember hearing my mother's voice, was her telling me that.

Now, my friend Kay did keep her on the line long enough to get her to take my telephone number. And about 15 minutes after that phone call ended, I got a phone call at work, cuz Kay had given her both a work and a home phone number. And I received a phone call from her sister, who would be my biological aunt. And I thought at that point in time that she was very interested in developing a relationship with me. When I look back on it now, I think probably the only reason she contacted me was to elicit a promise for me that I would not try to contact her sister again. But I did get pictures from my aunt. I also met my aunt maybe a year or so later. My daughter and I were camping up in the area near where she lived, and we met for maybe a couple of hours. And we talked on the phone quite a bit for a couple of years, and we exchanged letters and Christmas cards and that type of thing. And then she just suddenly stopped contacting me. And I don't know, and I never will know why, because she died in 2010. So I had not had contact with her from about 1989 until she died in 2010.

So with that, I pretty well stuffed things for a while. Haley. I don't know if it was ‘fog’, because I was very aware. But my way of dealing with it was just to try to ignore it, and if anybody asked me about it, it's like, “Well, she just doesn't know what she's losing,” or, “she doesn't know what she's missing out on, and it's her loss, and I'm fine.” I didn't really want to acknowledge, I don't think even to myself, how much that rejection had crushed me, but it did. And it scared me to the point that I was afraid to reach out to her again. And that really lasted for probably up until 2008, 2009, somewhere around there where it just got to a point, I think I was getting to an age where I realized that if I was going to get answers, I needed to start getting them. And at that point I started reaching out to the adoptee and birth parent community more. I found some online groups that I became a part of, and I really started to acknowledge that hurt pain that came with that rejection, and started to think about what I could do about it at that point.

Haley Radke: And so about what age would you have been then, when you started that?

Becky Drinnen: I would've been late 40s at that point in time.

Haley Radke: Okay. You have some children, too.

Becky Drinnen: I do. My daughter actually was born when I was a senior in high school. So I, in a way, was living out the same thing that my mother did, but with a very different result. And I think my adoptive parents knew that if they had pushed me to place her for adoption, that it would've driven me away. They knew, we'd had enough discussions about– they knew that I wanted to find my birth mother, and they knew that I struggled with that not knowing, and I think they knew that would not have been a good choice for me. And they were very supportive. I lived with them ‘til she was about a year and a half old, and they supported my decision. It was their first grandchild and they loved, and love, her dearly. Then when I married, I had three more children, three more instant children. When my husband and I got married, he already had three children. So I have a daughter and three stepchildren.

Haley Radke: So you connected with the adoptee community online, and did you try and reach out to your biological mother again?

Becky Drinnen: I did. In 2011. As a matter of fact, I remember the exact date, it was June 30th of 2011. I decided to reach out to her again. And I wanna back up just a little bit to say that probably a couple of years before, I had a new Facebook account, when Facebook was something new and exciting, and I did some searching and I discovered that not only did my birth mother, but all three of her kept children also, had Facebook pages. And at that point in time, privacy was a little bit more hit and miss, and I don't think it was as easy. So I was able to find lots of pictures and a lot of information about my family, and it was the first time I'd seen pictures of them as adults. And I'm looking for resemblance and trying to find out do we have anything in common? Do we like some of the same things?

And what I discovered is that little feature on Facebook where it suggests friends, and it says that you have a mutual friend in common? So after I looked at my brother's page, I can still remember sitting at my desk looking, and he popped up as a suggested friend because we had a mutual friend. And as I looked at that a little bit further, I discovered that he works– So I was born in Cleveland, Ohio. I lived three hours away in southwestern Ohio, and my mother lives halfway in between that. Well, my brother works eight miles up the road from me at a local factory. And, because of course I reached out to the mutual friend that we had on Facebook, I discovered that she's worked in the same unit with him. It's a fairly large factory, but they've worked in that same unit for about 12 years together.

I think that got it from interest to obsession. And fortunately at that time– When I searched for my mother initially, I had no support, no resources, didn't know anybody else that was searching. I didn't really know anybody else to reach out to. I live in a small community and that just wasn't something that was happening. This time, I had the adoptee community to support me. I had online friends that I'd met and some people I'd met in person. So I was a lot more vocal in trying to talk it out and figure out ‘what do I do, what do I do, what do I do?’ And I had a lot of advice that said, “Reach out to him, have the mutual friend arrange an introduction. Call 'em, you've got all their phone numbers. Call them. If she doesn't want to talk to you, let your brothers and sisters decide if they want a relationship with you.”

But I knew, from that conversation that I'd had with her way back in 1984, that she had not told her husband about me, and her children had no idea about me, and that was the reason that she was so freaked out when I called. I did not feel comfortable, regardless of what all of the people in the adoptee rights community said. I didn't feel comfortable doing that. Because what my goal was, I wanted to connect with her. So after a lot of conversations and a lot of soul searching, I decided I was gonna reach out to her again. And so I think it took me probably 15 tries at the phone. I'd pick it up and I'd start to dial and I'd hang it up. And it was terrifying to do because now I knew what the range of reactions could be. But I finally did it. And I called her, and it was certainly shocking to her to hear from me again. She first denied that I had the right person. But then I asked her about her sister, and the conversation went on, and she finally said, “Well, okay,” and she says, “but I really can't talk right now. Can we talk later tonight?”

I wondered at that point, when I hung up, if I had had the only conversation I would ever have with her, but we did end up talking that evening. So that's been almost five years ago. At the end of this month it will be five years. And we had about an hour and a half, two-hour conversation at that point. I will say that it was probably one of the most healing phone conversations I've ever had. She told me about the circumstances of my birth. She wouldn't tell me my father's name, but she told me a few more details than what my aunt had told me and what the adoption agency had put in the non-identifying information that I had requested from them. So I learned a little bit more about him, and about her, and about her family. And she talked a lot about her husband and her children and her grandchildren and that type of thing. But what sticks out with me the most from that conversation is she remembered what she named me. She told me that she loved me. And she told me that she prayed for me every day. That was more of a gift than I can imagine.

Now, when we left the phone call, I really felt like we would have– she really left it open, and I truly believe that she is interested and curious and wants to have more contact with me, but I think her biggest fear is that she never told her husband about me, and she fears the reaction if he would find out. And I think she worries about the reaction of her kept children as well. But I did feel like we'd have more contact. And we have had some brief emails. She had promised to send me pictures –that I never received– and I put a bunch of pictures in an online album for her and sent her a link to it. And we had some friendly email correspondence, but we have not talked. And I've been at that place where I'm unsettled enough with it now that I will at some point, probably in the not too distant future, try to reach out by phone again to see if we can connect again, because I feel like I need some closure with that. It was left open. It wasn’t a ‘this is the only phone call I'm ever gonna have with you, so you better ask me every question that you have’ type thing. I thought we would have more contact and I've been disappointed that we have not.

Haley Radke: Do you have a desire to connect with your siblings?

Becky Drinnen: Absolutely. Absolutely. I've talked with other adoptees, too, that, you know, it's a connection. I'm not particularly close to my brother. My sister and I are close, but we don't live close together, so I don't see her a whole lot. But I have an intense desire to be able to connect with them, but it's not as strong as my desire to have a connection with my mother, with the mother that gave me life. And she's 74 now, so I also have this little bit of a sense of you better not wait forever.

Haley Radke: I understand that. What's going through my head is sometimes I Google the name of my maternal grandparents because I wonder if I would know, if someone would tell me if they passed away. So I understand that feeling. So she told you some details about your biological father but not his name. I read on your blog that you were able to piece some of those together.

Becky Drinnen: I was. Probably a year or so after, maybe not quite a year after we had talked, I was beginning to realize that I probably wasn't– Because when we talked again, I wanted to ask her again about my father because half of who I am came from him. And I was always very close to my adoptive father, and I wondered about my biological father as well. I wondered a little bit more about him. So I thought I'm just gonna have to see what I can find out.

So that's when I connected with an organization called Adoption Network Cleveland, and I spoke with a woman there who was their search expert. And I was asking her first for advice about how I should handle reaching out to my mother again. And then I also said, “What can I do about finding my father?” And she pretty much said, “You're kind-of outta luck unless she wants to give you a name.” And I kind-of accepted that as a challenge, and I started thinking about it. I'm not one to accept being told that I can't do something very well and to hear her say that, I don't know, hearing somebody reflect that back to me, it's like, ‘now, just wait a minute’. And at that point I learned about DNA testing and I thought, ‘By golly, I'm gonna do some DNA testing and see what I can find out there’.

And so I talked with a few people who had studied genetic genealogy, and I also had read quite a few articles online. I knew enough to know that, just spitting in the tube or scraping your cheek, it wasn't gonna give you all the answers, that it was gonna take a lot of work to do that. So I ordered my Family Tree DNA kit, and I scraped my cheek and I sent it back and I started building a family tree. I had done some of this already on Ancestry just because– it’s I think kind-of a curse for an adoptee. My dad was a history teacher. I'd always had an interest in history. I'd always had an interest in roots and where you come from and all that kind of thing, and here as an adoptee, I didn't have that.

I'd had enough information about my mother's family that I started to build some of that tree. Now, I knew I needed to do that in earnest, because I needed to build that part of the tree to be able to rule out the people that were maternal DNA matches so that I could maybe try to pin down my father. So while I was waiting on that, I was really obsessed with the genealogy piece and putting that together. I pulled out every piece of information that I had gathered from letters from my aunt, from talking with her, from the conversation with my mother, from the adoption agency. And I realized I knew a little bit more than I thought. Because I knew that my parents had met when my mother was visiting an aunt in Illinois. And when I looked at that, I thought, ‘Gosh, the census records are out. I can look at the census records and figure out which aunt, and where’.

And I was able to figure out what aunt she had to have been visiting, cuz she only had one aunt that lived in Illinois. So I was able to pin it down a little bit. I knew a few facts. I had a basic physical description. I knew he was a farmer, and his father was a farmer. And I knew then where she lived, and I knew her name and that family, and she was also married to a farmer, my aunt was married to a farmer. So I had a pretty small area of where I could start looking. And I also had a note from one of the conversations with my aunt that talked about them meeting at a wedding.

So at this point, now this search was so different because first of all, I was armed with more information and second of all, I had the internet at my hands. So I was looking through indexed records of newspapers in the area where they lived, and I looked for every mention of my aunt's family in that area. And what I came across was a wedding announcement for a daughter of that aunt, who would've been my mother's cousin, and they were the same age, and my mother was a bridesmaid in that wedding.

The timing was such that from everything I knew it would've fit about the timeframe when she had met my father. I started researching everybody in the bridal party. I had narrowed it down. Just this gut instinct told me that I knew I was on the right path with this, and I researched every single male that was listed in that newspaper wedding announcement, that was a part of that wedding, and found some information online about them. And I knew he wasn't married, or at least I was told he wasn't married at the time that I was conceived and there was only, I think, one in that bridal party that met that criteria.

So I had it figured out and then I thought ‘let's go for broke’, and I called the bride in the wedding. And I didn't specifically tell her what I was doing, what I was looking for, but just a few minutes into that conversation when I told her that my birth mother was a cousin of hers, she knew exactly who it was, and she confirmed for me that I had the right person. So my father was the best man in that wedding. So within five minutes after I talked to her, I had a picture of both of my parents. It was a wedding picture with both of my parents in it, but it wasn't their wedding. Cuz she emailed me that almost immediately. You go from growing up with knowing that your mother had red hair to, wow, you've got a picture of both of your parents. And you have it confirmed that's who they are.

I reached out to him by phone and I think he's hard of hearing a little bit, and I knew we weren't really connecting by phone. I was able to learn quite a bit about him because this cousin had been married to his best friend and she knew him and still lived in the same community with him. So I knew a bit about his personality and I also knew that there’s an event in his town that he is very integral to putting on every year. So my guess was that I would be able to find him at that show somewhere and get a look at him and that type of thing. So my husband and I drove over to this show, and within 15 minutes of the time that we drove onto the grounds of this tractor show, I had found him. And so I ended up introducing myself to him at that tractor show.

Haley Radke: You're so brave, Becky.

Becky Drinnen: I was terrified. I don't think I would've done it if my husband hadn't been there with me because I was shaking, but what my husband ended up telling me is, he says, “If you don't go up and talk to him, I will.” So with that, I did. It was certainly a shock for him, but I could see that he was starting to put the pieces together as we were talking. And we had a very good conversation that day.

That was in 2013, so that's been three years ago. And we've got a very good relationship. I have four additional siblings. He was married about eight years after I was born, and he and his wife have four children, so I have a total of seven siblings. So I've met these siblings. He and his wife and his sister, their entire family, they've been very welcoming. One sister's not real happy about my existence, but everybody else has been very, very welcoming to me and it's been a completely different experience. I've learned so much about where I come from and who I come from and I've been able to go from knowing that my mother has red hair to being able to trace back to third-great-grandparents on both sides of my family and developing relationships with my father's family. And the interesting thing is I've also had the opportunity to meet an aunt and an uncle and some other cousins on my birth mother's side of the family as a result of finding my father.

Haley Radke: Unbelievable. That must be healing for you to be welcomed into that family.

Becky Drinnen: Oh, it has been. Absolutely. It's very validating and healing and I've got a picture of my sister and I, and it's like, ‘wow I've got a picture of me taken with somebody other than my daughter that I resemble’. And they're great people. I've loved being able to add those extra pieces to my puzzle and be a part of that family and get to know these people that I'm related to by blood.

Haley Radke: So beautiful. That's a nice happy side, right?

Becky Drinnen: It is, and it's a mixed bag, just like the rest of life is. It's not all good, it's not all bad. But I feel that I've learned really when you think about it, from our ancestors on back, they all made decisions that end up making you who you were. Several generations back, if one person had done something different, you would be a different person than you are today or maybe not even exist. It's just a lot to think about. And it's great to know, to be able to put names and some stories behind all of those names.

And the interesting thing is, though, because I started building this family tree stuff so that when I got DNA results back, I could start to do that work to maybe be able to put those pieces together at some point. I would've been able to do that with what I can see with the DNA matches now, but I was able to figure it out from a paper trail even before I got the DNA results back.

Haley Radke: When you were describing all the different things you did to search, I just thought this is like Sherlock Holmes. I can't–

Becky Drinnen: It really gives you a sense of pride and accomplishment to be able to do that. And I say that with knowing that I have adoptee friends who have done just as much hard work as I have, and they've come up with dead ends. And with a lot of compassion for people who aren't able to put all of those pieces together. The right person hasn't tested or the right paper trail's not there.

Haley Radke: Yeah, I feel so fortunate that my searches were extremely easy compared to that, and so I really have no concept of what it would take. So it was really wonderful for you to share all that. It's so complex.

Becky Drinnen: It is. It's definitely not for wimps, is it?

Haley Radke: No. So, I'm gonna ask you if you feel comfortable discussing this, you know, adoptees, we have a lot of wounds and hurts from that rejection initially when we're relinquished, and you've shared a little bit about that. Have you done any work through counseling or other kind-of healing things to work on those woundedness in your life?

Becky Drinnen: I have, Haley, and there's two things that I can really point to that have been very healing for me. One of those is reaching out to other people in the adoption community and not just adoptees. I think I have learned more and gotten more information, or things that helped me heal from other birth parents who relinquished children in about that same era that I was born. So that has been very healing, to learn about what the experiences of other adoptees are, to see what we share, to see what's different, and to talk with birth parents who share with me things that are in their heart, that my own birth mother's not in a place to be able to do. So that has helped me very much.

And though I have not gone to counseling, what happened at about that same time in my life that all of this was coming up for me in 2010, 2011, I started a side business. And through that, I was connected with this group of people called life coaches, and most of these coaches that I connected with were trained through a lady named Martha Beck. Through this coaching community, through some classes I took, and through a couple of retreats that I attended, the biggest thing that I took away from all of that is: what we have choice over, you know, that we have choices that can keep us from playing the victim, that we don't have to play the victim, we can choose not to. And probably the biggest point that I took from all of that is that I can only choose the actions that I take. And I can only choose my reactions. I can't control what anybody else does. And really internalizing that I can't control what my mother says and does, or any of my siblings, or my father or my husband, or children for that matter. I can only control my reactions. And so to realize that has been very affirming for me, very powerful for me because what I've been able to realize is that I've got those certain things that I can control. I can control whether to search or not for my father. I can control whether to try to reach out to anyone else in my family. I can't control what their reaction is. All I can do is deal with it, and as hurtful as that may be, realizing that that's outside of my realm of things that I can control has been very powerful.

Haley Radke: When you don't have to take personal responsibility for other people's actions, it can be really freeing. So thank you for sharing that. So is there anything else that I didn't ask you about that you wanna touch on?

Becky Drinnen: One of the questions that I've been asked a lot is where my faith or religious beliefs come in with all of this adoption experience that I've had. The interesting thing for me through all of this is, I was adopted through a Lutheran adoption agency, I was raised a Lutheran. And I think there was a whole lot of midlife crisis stuff going on when I was ready to reach out to my mother again, when I was in my late 40s. I was struggling with faith. I had backed away from church a little bit, the same church that I had gone to from the time that my parents adopted me. And I was really struggling with that.

Through all of the searching that I did, I realized how deep the Lutheran faith was not only in my adoptive family, but in my biological family. On both sides of my biological family there's a very deep Lutheran faith, where my father's very involved in his church, as were his parents before him. And on my birth mother's side I have grandparents and great-grandparents that were teachers and principals in Lutheran schools. And it really caused me to reevaluate a little bit what role faith had for me. And where I've come out with that is that I feel like my relationship with God is even stronger now than it was, just through that process that I went through of evaluating what that meant to me.

That said, though, in all of this adoption stuff, the anger that I still have is with the adoption agency and the way they try to play God over the information that they will give me or not, and over how they treated those moms that came to them for for help when they were pregnant in the 60s and 70s. It's this two-sided coin.

Haley Radke: Definitely. Thank you for sharing that. I'm a person of faith as well and my adoptive parents are Lutheran and my husband and I go to a Baptist church. But when I reunited with my father, his family's Catholic. They are very involved in their church, and that's been a wonderful bond for us. It's nice to hear that the faith aspect can be healing as well. I've heard from a lot of adoptees, especially with Catholic agencies and Mormon agencies, that there's a lot that have rejected faith because of that. I'm glad to hear that you were able to reconnect with that.

Well, I would love it if we could share some recommended resources for our listeners, and I know that you have a couple to share and I'm hoping that you're okay if I go first. So I came across this article, and it's by Frank Ligtvoet. And you spell his last name L-I-G-T-V-O-E-T. So I actually tweeted him to ask him how to say it. He's actually quite a prolific freelance writer. He writes about adoption and he's an adoptive father. And in this article, it was released in May 2016. It's called On the Venerable American Bar Association, or the Myth of Normal and Good in Adoption. He just outlines his views on adoption and how he has researched over time, actually mostly via Twitter, it's quite interesting. And there's one sentence in here I wanna read: “Like everybody else in the adoptive parent community, I long time believed that adoption was a good thing that came with loss, of course, but in the end was all around a beneficial child welfare intervention. I don't believe that anymore.” And so he goes on and talks about the money involved in adoption, the ‘goodness of adoption normalcy’ myth. And it's a really powerful article and I really appreciate, as an adoptive parent, him speaking out on that issue. So I'm gonna link to it in our show notes, and I really recommend that our listeners look it up. And it's a good article to share with people that aren't familiar with the profit side of adoption.

Becky Drinnen: Yes, that's very disheartening when you start to realize that babies are a commodity, isn't it?

Haley Radke: Yes. Human trafficking is alive and well, even in America. Yeah, it is. It's very sad.

Becky Drinnen: I look forward to looking that article up.

Haley Radke: He's tweeting all the time on Twitter, not just his writing, but anything he comes across in adoption.

Becky Drinnen: Okay. Good. I look forward to checking him out.

Haley Radke: Becky, what resources did you bring today?

Becky Drinnen: So I really had a lot of trouble just finding one resource. So what I'd like to share with everyone who's listening today is two resources and then a recommendation. One is a blog and it is written by a woman named Deanna Shrodes. She is an adoptee, she's also a Pentecostal minister in Florida, but she writes a blog called Adoptee Restoration. And the URL is www.adopteerestoration.com, and she shares a lot of her journey in a very easy to read, open, thoughtful, caring way. And it's just amazing how she hits on points, and she hits with compassion while sticking to her guns about what she believes about what's right and wrong in adoption. She's about my age, I think, a little bit younger, so she's also that Baby Scoop Era adoption. And she just writes very eloquently about the adoption experience, and I think every adoptee that has read her blog comes away with something. So for adoptees and for adoptive parents out there, I think that's a great resource.

The other is– I'm a prolific reader, I love to read, and I have a whole shelf full of books about adoption. But the one that I go back to, the one that has taught me the most and has helped me the most in healing in my experience as an adoptee who has faced rejection, is a book called The Girls Who Went Away by Anne Fessler. It is interviews with a lot of birth parents who relinquished children in that era post-World War II to Roe v. Wade, and what they endured, and what they have endured since they relinquished their baby for adoption. And it's very powerful.

Haley Radke: Yes, that book. That book!

Becky Drinnen: Have you read that book, Haley?

Haley Radke: I have read that book, yes. That was something I read. Oh boy. I think I was just out of secondary rejection with my mom. I'm not sure, but I remember reading that and just being shocked and horrified and I don't know if I finished it because it was just so overwhelming.

Becky Drinnen: It is overwhelming. And it's not one of those books that you can read in one sitting, it's one of those you have to bite off pieces of it a little bit at a time. I agree, it's very triggering and you can't read it without getting a knot in your stomach, but it's very educational for us who don't understand what it was like to be pregnant and single in the 50s, 60s, or early 70s.

And then I guess the last thing I would just like to mention is, as much as I have healed and learned and connected with people online, I really encourage everyone who is trying to deal with anything to do with adoption issues, or rejection or, even relationships and how to navigate them: find an in-person support group, go to a conference, reach out to someone that you've read their blog online and try to develop more of a personal connection with them. Because nobody can get it like another person who has lived adoption, and doing that in person is amazing.

Haley Radke: Absolutely. So speaking of that, where can we connect with you online, Becky?

Becky Drinnen: I am frequently on Facebook and a lot of what I share is private, but I love to have people who are connected to adoption as friends on Facebook. And you can find me under Becky Conrad Drinnen there. And I'm also on Twitter, my Twitter username is @drinnebe. And you can also find me at my –much neglected at this point– blog which is at puzzlesandpossibilities.com.

Haley Radke: Thank you. I so enjoyed our conversation tonight and I thank you so much for being so candid with us and open with your story. I'm very grateful for that and I'm sure our listeners will be, too, as they listen to you share your heart with us.

Becky Drinnen: Well, thank you very much. That's been an amazing experience talking with you, Haley. I appreciate it.

Haley Radke: I would love it if you would tweet Becky and let her know your appreciation for her candor with us. If you'd like to share your adoptee story or contact us, visit our website Adopteeson.com. You can send us an email, or you can record a short voicemail that we could feature on an upcoming show. You can also find us on Twitter or Instagram @adopteeson. Today, would you share our show with your adoptee community? Someone in that group may need to hear Becky's story today. We'd love to hear your feedback, rate and review us in iTunes to let us know what you think of the show. Thanks so much for listening, let's talk again soon.

3 Maeve

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/3

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Haley Radke: You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is Season One, Episode Three: Maeve. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Today we'll be talking to Maeve, a fellow adoptee who will be sharing her search and secondary rejection story with us. We discussed some deep feelings, and how our views of adoption shifted when we became parents. We wrap up our time with some recommended resources for adult adoptees.

I'm so happy to be interviewing today, Maeve Kelly, and that is a pseudonym. She's asked me to use her birth name to share with you guys today. Maeve, I'm so excited to hear your adoption story. Tell us about when you were born, when you were relinquished.

Maeve Kelly: Sure. Thank you for having me. It's not often that I get to talk about this, so I'm happy to talk about it. So I was born in the 70s. I was relinquished immediately after birth, within about seven days. I was born in the Philadelphia area and born at a Catholic hospital there. And there was an orphanage at the time– they called it an orphanage, but it was essentially a part of the hospital that they turned over to infants like myself that were being relinquished. And I was relinquished right after birth, and my adoptive parents took me home seven days later.

Haley Radke: And did your adoptive family have other children?

Maeve Kelly: They did. They had already had a biological son who was seven years older than me, and then they wound up having another biological daughter four years after me. So I grew up as the middle child and the only adopted child in the family.

Haley Radke: And do you know anything about the circumstances of your birth mother choosing to relinquish?

Maeve Kelly: I do, an unusual story, maybe. So my birth mother is an RN, and she was one of 10 children born in Ireland. She came to New York City to pursue her profession in nursing, and she met my birth father there. Wound up having a relationship with him, became pregnant with me, was not happy about the situation, and decided to move to Philadelphia in order to hide the pregnancy from everyone that she knew. So she moved to Philadelphia. She took a job at the hospital where I was born. I'm not sure how it was arranged that that would happen, but she took a job there, and then gave birth to me, and then went back to New York City. And so the reason I was in Philadelphia, born there, was just because she went there to, like I said, hide the pregnancy. I know that she was incredibly embarrassed and upset to find herself pregnant and worked in a Catholic hospital in New York and then wound up working in this Catholic hospital in Philadelphia, turned me over to Catholic Charities, and her one request was that I be placed with a Catholic couple.

One thing I found out later about her, I don't know if you know too much about the Catholic Charities, maybe you do after doing some research, but their way of doing things was they would fill out this sort of 2-page non-identifying information document. And it went with the infant, in the file. And they would describe who the birth mother was and then whatever information that the birth mother wanted to give about the father. And I found out later– I'd had that information. Catholic Charities had turned that information over to my adoptive parents, and I'd had the information for a long time. And she had told Catholic Charities that my birth father was German. And he wasn't, he was Jewish. And I found out that, later, the first time I ever talked to her when I was 40 years old, I had one conversation with her and she said, “I need to tell you something. I remember that I told Catholic Charities that your father was German. He's not, he's Jewish.” So that was a big shock to me to hear that. I think probably one of the reasons that she was so desperate to lie about the fact that he was German and she was so desperate to get me placed with a Catholic family is maybe the guilt that she felt around that.

I'm sure she lied about the fact that he was Jewish because maybe a Catholic family wouldn't have agreed to adopt me if they'd known that I was half Jewish and not German as she had indicated.

Haley Radke: It's such a different time back then than now, right? Oh my goodness.

Maeve Kelly: Yes! Yes.

Haley Radke: So there's all sorts of layers that it sounds like of shame that she had.

Maeve Kelly: Yes.

Haley Radke: Okay. So you had a conversation with her. Tell me how you found her.

Maeve Kelly: It's interesting. In the state of Pennsylvania, in the United States, until 1985, I believe, you were still able as an adoptee to get a document from the Bureau of Vital Statistics. It's not your original birth certificate, but it's a document that this other agency in Pennsylvania kept, and it has the adopted child's birth name and the birth mother's name. I'm not sure why they keep these information separate from the birth certificate, but in any event, up until 1985 adoptees, even though their original birth certificates were sealed and had no option of getting them, you could still get this document, this statement of vital statistics. My adoptive parents got that in 1985, just before the law changed. I've had that since 1985, I've known what her name is. And I never did anything with it. I tried to pretend that it didn't exist. I tried to tell myself that it didn't matter. I tried to convince myself that I didn't care. And so I didn't do anything until I was in my early 20s. I went away to law school and I couldn't shake it anymore. I had to do something about it. I had to find her and find out who I was and why I was on the earth. So I actually started with Catholic Charities. I thought that was the most respectful way to go, rather than just hire an investigator and find her. I had her name and I had her date of birth, I knew I could find her if I wanted to, if I really wanted to. But I decided to go through Catholic Charities. Unfortunately, they strung me along for a really long time, told me that they were looking for her, they told me that they were sending her letters, and that they were hopeful that she was gonna call back, and just kept me going for maybe 10 years. I would check in once a year with Catholic Charities and ask them how it was going and they would tell me they were gonna get back to me, I should just keep praying about it, and ask me how my adoptive parents felt about the search.

Haley Radke: Oh my goodness.

Maeve Kelly: In any event, at the age of 40, I'd had enough and I had her name, and I had her date of birth, and I hired an investigator and she found her in about 6 hours, and called me back and said, “Well, I have found her. Here's her name, here's her address. This is where she lives.” What happened then was my mother, who had been getting all these letters from Catholic Charities for years and throwing them away, she had kept the contact information for the person at Catholic Charities who had been contacting her. She got a call from this private investigator. She knew what it was, and she called Catholic Charities and said, “How dare you have given out my information?” And Catholic Charities didn't know what she was talking about. The representative called me and said, “Your birth mother just called and apparently you found her, is that accurate?” And I said yes. And they yelled at me and said “how dare” I do that, and it was “against the law”, and I was “upsetting everyone”. And it was a pretty awful phone call. But to make a long story short, they agreed that they would set up a call between me and my birth mother, you know, be an intermediary. So they set up the call, Catholic Charities. They gave my birth mother my contact information and she called me maybe a week later, and that was about five years ago, something like that.

Haley Radke: So one phone call.

Maeve Kelly: One phone call.

Haley Radke: How long did it last and what did you talk about?

Maeve Kelly: It lasted maybe a half an hour. It was surreal. It was surreal. She had a brogue. I knew that she was from Ireland, but to actually hear her with a brogue, I can't describe it except it being surreal. It was very emotional. I was trying to hold it together, and what I really didn't wanna do was scare her off. And I had no idea, I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know if she was gonna be angry with me. I didn't know if she was gonna deny my existence. I didn't know if she could potentially be happy to be talking to me, I certainly hoped for that.

I actually wrote out things I wanted to say, and I just tried to keep it really light. I went over some of the things that were in my 2-page non-identifying information that I'd gotten from Catholic Charities. And we actually had a laugh about some of the things because they had just made stuff up. Like, they said in this non-identifying information that my birth parents had met because they were in the orchestra in New York City, and that my mother was an accomplished violinist. And so I asked her about that and she started laughing. She said, “I don't know where that came from. I have never played the violin in my life.” And then she asked me about my family and she said, “Well, you have an adoptive brother, right?” And I said, “No, my brother is biological to my adoptive parents.” And she was silent and I said, “Did you think that he was adopted?” And she said, “Yes, they told me he was adopted, and that was one of the reasons that I really liked the idea of you being placed with them.” I found out there was some real untruths going both ways.

Of course we laughed about the music thing. I asked her a little bit, I said, “Is there anything I need to worry about with my medical history?” And she told me there wasn't. I didn't ask her about my father because I was afraid to scare her off. I was really, really scared to scare her off because this was such an important moment for me and I didn't want her to run, so I didn't ask. I also didn't wanna keep her on the phone, I wanted to keep it light. And so I said, “I'd love to continue the conversation somehow, whether it's in the phone call or whether it's a meeting or whether it's a letter, but I'd love to just try to continue this conversation in some way.” And she said that she would think about it.

I really thought about it, and then about a month later I wrote her a letter. And I enclosed pictures of myself and my three children. And I spent days, more than days, weeks, working on that letter, just perfecting it, trying to get it to strike just the right tone of respectful, but not coming on too strong, just trying to say the right thing so that she wouldn't reject me. And I just said–

I'm sorry–

Haley Radke: It's okay.

Maeve Kelly: I just said, “I want to know who I am. It's important to me to have a biological connection with someone in the world, and I don't wanna disrupt you and your family. I'm not looking for another mother. I don't expect you to do Christmases with me from now on, it's not what I'm looking for. I just want to have a connection with someone in the world who's related to me, and I hope that we can meet someday, or talk again.” And then I waited. And then I waited. And about a month later I got a letter from a lawyer. It was a horrible letter. It was a nasty letter. And I'm a lawyer, and so I didn't need that. I didn't need the fact that some law firm had taken on this case and written this letter to me after having read my letter. My letter was so personal and I got a letter from this lawyer and he said, “My client doesn't desire any further contact from you. Please be advised that any further contact is unwarranted, and please never contact her again.” And enclosed in the letter to me was my letter to her, and the pictures.

Haley Radke: I'm so sorry. I don't know what to say. That's just devastating.

Maeve Kelly: It was devastating. So what I did was I did what I had done for 40 years before that, I put it away. I just, I couldn't– it was so painful that I just put it away and I told myself it didn't matter. And there's an analogy I think of sometimes when I think about what I've done to put those feelings away. It's like you have a box, and you put all those feelings and all that hurt and shame, and you put them in the box, and you close the box up and you close it with, like, duct tape and locks, and you just close it as hard as you can. And you put that box in, like, the deep recesses of your closet, in the dark corner of your closet, and you put all that hurt and shame in that box. And sometimes, when you're getting dressed, you look at that box and you see it, and you know it's there, but you ignore it and you tell yourself that it's not there.

And so that's what I did. I put all my hurt and shame and sadness and devastation in that box, and I put it in the deep recesses of my closet. And I put it there for five years or so, and only more recently, like in the last year, have I gone into my closet and taken that box out and opened it up and let myself feel those things.

Haley Radke: It's easy, and difficult, to put things away in the box, but they come out. They come out whether or not you go and willingly open it. If you left it any longer, it was gonna come out, right?

Maeve Kelly: Yeah. And I think once the box is open, I can't close it again. I can't do it. I can't close it again, it's open and I have to let myself feel these things. I'm letting myself for the first time really feel these things, and I think that's good. I think it's good. It's healthy to feel it and not pretend that it's not there.

Haley Radke: The things that you said about how you were treated by Catholic Social Services when you were looking and you kept contacting them, and also your birth mother, like they just treated you like, still like a child.

Maeve Kelly: I think that's right. Yeah.

Haley Radke: Like you're never allowed to grow up and I just don't understand.

Maeve Kelly: Yeah. Undeserving and “how dare you”, very much like that. Yeah. And it's surprising, one of the most frustrating things for me recently after I've been reading a lot more and quote-unquote “come out of the fog” about adoption, one of the frustrating things from me is when people say things have changed. “Oh, it’s so much better now. You went through a terrible time, but things are so much better.” It's not true. They're not better. They're not better at all, because of the attitudes that are still associated with folks like me, adult adoptees, who are just looking for the most basic human knowledge in the world about why they're on the earth. And the way that we're treated and the attitudes associated with that, things have not changed. Things are not better. They're not better at all.

Haley Radke: Yeah, and I was born in 83. I was allowed to get my non-identifying information when I was 18. And then later on, the Alberta government opened the records and I was able to get my identifying information, and that's how I was able to find my birth mother and my birth father. That's really still rare as far as I know. There's so many states and provinces that have closed records and just like yourself, you had to hire an investigator. So fortunate that your adoptive parents had her name.

Maeve Kelly: It is fortunate. For all the terrible things that my adoptive family did and didn't do around my adoption, that was the one thing that they did that was right. That was right. There was apparently a lot of press going on around that time in 1985, right before the law changed and this Department of Vital Statistics closed the information forever and it's still closed now. There was a lot of press, and a lot of adoptive parents went ahead and got those certificates right before the end. And it's funny cause mine is stamped like February 1985 and I know that's right before the law changed. So if it weren't for that, I definitely would not know who she was. I am positive about that.

Haley Radke: And so you don't have your birth father's name then?

Maeve Kelly: No.

Haley Radke: And have you ever tried to look for him?

Maeve Kelly: I used to look for him all the time just because I knew– although I think she probably lied, I don't know who he is, and she gave him a first name on the non-identifying information that I have from Catholic Charities, but nothing else. And also it said that he was a lawyer, so I used to look in any records of lawyers in different states. I would look for his name and what I thought his address may be. I was always looking, but I have no idea, he could be anybody. I was joking with my husband today, he could be Bernie Sanders. I have no clue. He very well may be, I'm not kidding. He's the right age, you know? It's a strange thing for people that aren't adopted. Whenever I go to a new city, especially in New York City, and I'm walking down the street, every time I pass somebody that looks a little bit like me or may be my father's age or may be my mother's age or what have you, I'm always looking at that person wondering if they're related to me. They could be related to me, just like anybody else could be related to me. I feel like I'm related to no one and I'm related to everyone.

Haley Radke: When you first had children, did anything shift for you?

Maeve Kelly: Tremendously. Tremendously. I felt a connection with someone for the first time that I had never felt, ever. It was this visceral, primal connection and I felt, with my first child when he was born, I realized how unnatural adoption and a relinquishment is, that there must have been some major social forces at work for my mother to have walked away from me like that and given me to perfect strangers. I could never have done that with my son. And I also realized, I think I faced it for the first time, that my parents, of course, think of me differently than they do my brother and sister. Of course they do. And I don't fault them for that, that's just life. That's just reality and that's okay. I don't think that adoption has to be a worse relationship. I think if you have adopted children, you have biological children, I don't think you necessarily love your adopted children less, but you love them differently. And I think it's important for adoptive parents to just acknowledge that. It's true. It just is true. There's no way that my parents felt about me the way they felt about my brother and sister. No way. Not after I've had my own children, and I feel that connection with them. I look at them and I see myself. It's visceral. It's primal. It's human, at its most basic level.

To answer your question, yes. I think I felt loss. I think I let myself finally accept that being adopted was not the same as being a biological child. It's just not.

Haley Radke: Yes. I couldn’t have put it better. I really couldn't have put it better.

Maeve Kelly: I hope it doesn't make you feel bad. I was just thinking, I wonder, I hope that doesn't make you feel bad, because you were being a [inaudible] person too.

Haley Radke: No, no, no. We're on the same page. You mentioned before that you were out of the fog, and I don't know if all of our listeners would recognize that phrase. Where did you first hear that, and how would you unpack that?

Maeve Kelly: When I started, like I said, I put that away about five years ago, you know, my hurt. And I just tried to pretend like it hadn't happened. And then about a year ago, I just started very gradually, Googling and looking things up and reading things on the websites. And the first website I ever found was called Lost Daughters, I'm sure you've heard of it. And it's a sort of collection of pieces written by women adoptees about their experiences. And that was the first time I had heard the term ‘out of the fog’. And it really resonated with me. I felt like I was coming out of the fog and it was good to put a term on it. And also, I always struggled with ‘Well, I'm a bad person if I have these thoughts or feelings or sadness. I need to work through that because there's so many other adoptees who are totally fine with being adopted, they don't care. So there's something wrong with me. I have an issue, I have a problem. They're normal and I'm not normal.’ And then I realized they're in the fog. I'm out of the fog.

Haley Radke: Their box is tightly bound up.

Maeve Kelly: Right. And so the term for me was just, it was very freeing to realize that I am not necessarily the one that's wrong in feeling this way. It felt really good to hear that term “out of the fog.”

Haley Radke: Yeah. I had had a similar experience when I was first– well, I was coming out of the fog, I just didn't know it. I've always felt my whole life that I have to be grateful that I'm adopted. And I was an only child, I had a happy upbringing, a fine childhood. Everything was just normal family stuff, nothing traumatic or anything. And I always felt different than my adoptive family. I always felt that I wasn't exactly where I was supposed to be, but because I really felt like I was supposed to feel grateful, I felt so guilty for those feelings of wanting to know where I came from, wanting to know my history.

And really when I started coming outta the fog was when I reunited with my birth father and then, subsequently had my children. We actually had been planning to adopt prior to that, because I did feel a sense that I owed that to the world. I'm really grateful that we were able to shift directions and instead have our own biological children, cuz that's really been a meaningful change for me in my worldview.

Maeve Kelly: It's so interesting, isn't it? How, you think about adoption in one way and it's always changing. I think it's just a constant change with me. I thought about it one way 30 years ago, and I thought about it another way, 20 and then 10, and then 5. Every day I feel like I learn a little more, I think about it a little bit more, and I change a little bit. It's the gift that keeps on giving, right?

Haley Radke: For better or worse, yeah.

Maeve Kelly: Were your adoptive parents, did they talk with you about the fact that you were adopted and talk with you about their decision to adopt you and all of that?

Haley Radke: I always knew I was adopted, so it definitely was always out there. And they adopted because they were infertile. And they waited a very long time to adopt me, so my parents are older. My mom was 38 and my dad was 40 when they adopted me. I knew they moved to be closer to social workers that would do the home study and things. So I knew that my adoption really disrupted their life and they really focused to have me. They focused their whole life plan to have me, and once they adopted me, then they moved back up to where they were before, in Northern Alberta. Only in the last few years I found out that they had actually planned to do a second adoption, but because mine had taken so long, they just sort-of decided against it. But it was just unspoken, really. I don't feel like we talked about it very much. Now, how about yourself? You had mentioned before that– you just kind-of hinted at some things with your family.

Maeve Kelly: It was never discussed. Never, it was a subject that was never, ever discussed. I can remember, I mean, I always knew I was adopted, it wasn't a secret from me. And there wasn't some big reveal. It was always there. It was a fact. But beyond that, it was never discussed in any way. There was no discussion of why they adopted me. I have put two and two together and realized it was because they were having trouble conceiving, but there was no discussion of how they felt about me, or how I felt about it, that's for sure. And when I would, very rare, I would say maybe five times in my entire life have we ever discussed it. The reaction always was a little bit of anger from my mom and telling me that it didn't matter and she didn't care that I was adopted, and it just doesn't matter. And then kind-of a changing of the subject, and that was it.

I would do these projects at school, like we all have to do, on ancestry and family tree, you know, that kind of thing. I used my adoptive family and certainly there was no discussion with my adoptive family on that. They would dutifully help me figure that out, and I'd write down all of their relatives and turn that in to school.

I would go to the doctor. I can distinctly remember being at the doctor, the pediatrician, and discussion going on about how tall I may get, and the discussion was about my adoptive family. The doctor would say, “Oh, let me see. Let's see, you are 5’4” and your husband is 6’, so I put her, she'd probably be about 5’6”. It's the average of the two of you.” I remember standing there just thinking, ‘This is so weird.’ But I couldn't say anything because it was just a subject that was not discussed.

Haley Radke: And did you look similar ?

Maeve Kelly: I do. I look similar to my father. I look similar enough that it was able to be that way. Yeah, so I looked similar enough and it just– occasionally my dad would say things to me. It was an angry subject with my mom, like, really, we couldn't talk about it at all. My dad occasionally, would say to me, whisper to me things like, “You're really the only Irish one in this family.” Because his ancestry was Irish, but many generations away from Ireland. His great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, let's say, had come from Ireland. And when there'd be Irish music playing or something like that, he would whisper to me, “Well, you're really the Irish one here.” Things like that. I think he got a kick out of it and didn't realize the devastating loss that it was for me. There was never an acknowledgement ever, in my entire life, that it was a loss. I didn't have biological relatives. It was just never discussed, never asked me. There was never a question put to me. “How do you feel about it?” I grew up feeling that it was a shameful secret, very shameful, because it was never discussed in any kind of healthy way. So part of coming out of the fog for me is being able to talk about it with folks like you. I've never talked about it before because it was so, so shameful to me.

Haley Radke: I think I got that same message, now that you're saying that, and I don't feel like we talked about it ever, either. Yeah. That's the message.

Maeve Kelly: Yeah. “Doesn't matter, so stop talking about it. It doesn't matter to me,” was the message that I got. My mother would say, “It doesn't matter.”

There was a very strange group that they enrolled in. It's such a strange thing. I'm sure it was going on at the time, but they belonged to this group, they called it The Mother's Club, and a bunch of families with adopted kids would get together and do social things. And this went on for a couple of years, this is when I was really young, every so often we'd have to get together with these other families from different towns, and the only connection was that they had an adopted child and the parents would socialize in one room. I don't know what they were talking about, maybe– I always got the impression they were talking about how terrible it was to have an adopted child. That's what I always thought it was about. Because I was like, ‘why would they get together with these folks? It must be a support group of some kind,’ was my thought. ‘We must be so terrible that they need support from each other.’

But in any event, we'd get together with these families and I remember thinking to myself, ‘I just so wish that I was my sister. I don't wanna be the weird one. I don't wanna be the adoptive one. I wanna be the regular kid.’ They never talked to me about why they're bringing us to these groups. We just went to these groups and there was no discussion. It was just, we'd go to these groups and I would just die inside, wishing that I was the real kid and not the adoptive one, and then we would go home. It was so strange. Yeah. Besides that weird adopted kid thing, and that's about it, it was never discussed. Never ever discussed. And I was the only adoptive kid in my entire– all of my cousins on my father's side, there were 17 of us. I was the only adoptive cousin. Every time we'd get together with this part of the family, it was always a gigantic discussion about who looked like who, and I just wanted to crawl a hole and die. It was, oh, horrible.

Haley Radke: Do you still get triggered by that?

Maeve Kelly: Tremendously. Yeah. You do too?

Haley Radke: Absolutely. Anytime anyone says anything about “So-and-so looks like so-and-so” in a family situation, I'm just like, ‘Oh my gosh. Must be nice to know that.’

Maeve Kelly: I feel the same way. And it's not– and I think probably you and I are so sensitive to it, because it's everywhere and I don't think people realize how it is so prevalent in our society to talk about the traits that we get from our biological relatives. And not just what we look like, but “Oh, you must get that from your mom. Oh, that musical talent, that must be from your mom,” or, “Oh, you get this from your dad,” or “You're just like your dad. You're just like your uncle so-and-so.” And that's so prevalent in our society, not just with medical records, which is obviously becoming more and more important, your DNA for medical reasons, but everything else, too. And I'm triggered every day by that. Every day I'm triggered by that. Absolutely. Yeah.

Haley Radke: So my adoptive mom will say things to me around my children, like, “Oh, this child is so much like this other person in her family.” And I think, ‘Oh. Okay, then. You tell yourself what you need to. Because they're not related.’

Maeve Kelly: Do you get angry though? I get angry.

Haley Radke: I do. I do. Yeah. I get very angry about it. And she's just making conversation and I know she doesn't mean anything by it, but it really does upset me.

Maeve Kelly: Me too, so much. And I think it's because for me, it feels like they're not acknowledging my loss. Like they're trivializing my loss by saying that. It's almost like, ‘how dare you?’ My parents do the same thing with my children. They'll say about my son, “Oh, don't worry about him. He'll grow because so-and-so grew really late. He grew when he was in college,” my uncle or what have you. I just look at them. I'm like, ‘are you kidding me? That has nothing to do– and the fact that you're even saying that again, you're just not acknowledging the reality in front of you and what I've lost.’

Haley Radke: Yeah. I don't wanna say, “It's so nice to hear that from you,” but it's just, it's so validating, right? It's like, ‘okay, our feelings are normal.’

Maeve Kelly: Oh my god, yes, thank you!

Haley Radke: It's so nice to hear that someone else feels that way.

Maeve Kelly: Yes, I know, I know. And I think because the dominant narrative still is that we should just be so grateful and happy, and you just see all these memes all the time. “Biology doesn't matter!” “I don't care about DNA!” “Love is all you need!” It's– no. Absolutely no. No a thousand times. No. And it does feel so good to talk to you, Haley, because I so rarely can talk about this with anyone. I actually have– do you have any siblings? Do you have any biological siblings?

Haley Radke: I have three. Half.

Maeve Kelly: Wow. How did they react to you?

Haley Radke: Really wonderfully, actually. At first they were very surprised that their dad had had “extracurricular activities”. But once they got over that shock, they've been so welcoming and amazing and I'm just their big sister now. It's really incredible. So they're all younger than me, obviously, and two of them have graduated from high school, and the youngest will just be starting high school in the fall. It's been pretty incredible to watch them grow up over the last five years. I have a lot of grief over the loss of their first years, but I'm just grateful for the time that we've had since then.

Maeve Kelly: And you're growing up as an only child, that must have been even more meaningful and surreal to have these siblings now in your life. I can't imagine.

Haley Radke: It’s so bizarre. It's so bizarre. When I first went there to meet them– they live in another province. When I first went there to meet them and like, the banter back and forth and the teasing and stuff, I was just like, ‘I cannot handle this.’ And my husband, he's from a family of four, so he totally understood, but I was like, ‘I don't– how can you treat each other like this?’

Maeve Kelly: That’s right. That’s funny.

Haley Radke: So, I do feel used to it now, but it was quite an adjustment. But for me, I've gotten to see the similarities between me and them and my dad and even some of his siblings, so some of my extended family on his side. And that's all been really both healing for me, but also triggering. It's like I just, I don't know.

Maeve Kelly: Oh my god, I mean, there's never a happy ending in these situations. Even the best possible outcome where they are welcoming to you and they don't think you're out for money, or an axe murderer or what have you, still, it's like you still lost so much. You lost that relationship with them. You're still on the outside.

Haley Radke: Yep, I am. So Maeve, what could your birth mother do now, if she changed her mind and wanted to connect with you and rebuild a relationship with you? What could she do for you?

Maeve Kelly: It wouldn't take much. It wouldn't take anything. I'm so desperate to make a connection with her. I'm so desperate to know who my father is. She wouldn't have to do anything. Nothing. Like I said, I got a terrible letter from her lawyer saying to stay away, and I have, but all she has to do is pick up the phone and call me. She knows exactly where to find me.

Even if she can't bring herself to have a conversation with me, I would certainly love to have communication with her two children who are my half siblings. I know exactly who they are. I know exactly where to find them. I've seen many pictures of them on Facebook and other places. It's a loss that I can't describe. I would love to communicate with them, but I can't bring myself because I'm so afraid of getting hurt again. I am afraid that if I reach out to them that they're going to do what she did and reject me, and I don't know if I can take another rejection again. I've held off communicating with them. I think at some point I will reach out to them even if I never reach out to her again, just because I feel like I'll never regret trying. But I will regret not trying. And I don't regret making contact with my birth mother at all. I don't regret looking for her. I don't regret making contact with her. I would never regret that. And so I feel like I need to go ahead and do the same with my siblings at some point. When I feel a little stronger, I will.

Haley Radke: I hope you do connect with them. I just wanna tell you that it's your right to have a relationship with them, and even though she's kept you secret, I think?

Maeve Kelly: She has. Yeah, she has.

Haley Radke: I feel like it's still your right. It might not be right now, but I hope you do.

Maeve Kelly: I hope so, too. I hope I can bring myself to do it. I will. I just need to get a little stronger. I think I need to be ready for whatever may come from it. I can't at this point. I think if I reached out to them and they rejected me in the way that she did, I think I'd fall apart and I wouldn't be able to function. And that's not an option for me right now in my life. Three kids and a job and everything. I have to function. So I need to get to that point, I think, where I'm strong enough to take it if they were to turn their backs on me. They're there, I know where they are, it's gonna happen.

Haley Radke: That's just such a weird feeling to know them and see pictures of them and they don't know that you exist.

Maeve Kelly: I know. It is weird. It's very weird. Again, I come away thinking that adoption is just a very strange social construct, especially closed adoption. I remember reading someone saying, “Closed adoption is a failed social experiment,” and I think that's right. I don't know who thought of this great idea of closed adoption. Like whose idea was that to, close off your biological relatives, change your name on your birth certificate, hide your existence, pretend that all the secrets and lies and pretense– I don't know whose idea that was, but it was a terrible idea and it definitely failed.

Haley Radke: I agree. I agree. Well, we are coming to the end of our time. I'm so sorry, because I've had such an awesome time talking with you. Thank you so much for sharing your story.

Maeve Kelly: You too. Thank you for talking to me.

Haley Radke: I had asked if you had any recommended resources that you wanted to share with our listeners, and I have one to share, so why don't I start: have you heard of Angela Tucker?

Maeve Kelly: I have.

Haley Radke: So she did that documentary, Closure. And she has a new series that's just started on YouTube. It is called The Adopted Life, and the first episode is her interviewing several young people who are all transracial adoptees, some of them international, and it was really just a fascinating watch for me. Have you seen that yet?

Maeve Kelly: I did. I loved it. She's amazing. Absolutely. And I hope that Adopted Life gets a lot of traction and there's a lot of views of it. I think it's a really important subject and yes, I have seen it. It's terrific.

Haley Radke: That's awesome. Great, I'm glad you have. So what do you have for us?

Maeve Kelly: I've got a few. I had mentioned Lost Daughters before, which is a website that I read a lot. I get a lot out of that. There's another couple other blogs that I read a lot. I really get a lot out of reading other adoptees’ views and blogs and Twitter and that sort of thing because there's no sort of adoptee resources for me here. I don't belong to any kind of support group. I don't really know of anyone. I've looked for support groups, I can't find them, so I kind-of get my support from the web.

So there's a blog called Baby Girl B. Adoptee. I read that all the time. And she has a wonderful piece called Sympathy Seeking Vs. Empathy Seeking. And it's about, adoptees aren't looking for people's sympathy. We don't want people to feel sorry for us. We're just looking for empathy. And how different those two are. And that really resonated with me. There's a piece by a psychiatrist, his name is Paul Sunderland. He did a lecture and it's on YouTube and it's about adoption and about the profound effects that adoption has on a newborn. I read a blog called The Declassified Adoptee, and I'm sure you read that one, right?

Haley Radke: Yes, I do.

Maeve Kelly: She's wonderful, Amanda Transue-Woolston, I think is how you say her name, and she's from Pennsylvania and an activist there. I would love to meet her someday. She's like a rockstar.

Haley Radke: I agree.

Maeve Kelly: And then the last one is one that I go on every so often, Adult Adoptee Support. It's, just like it said, an adult adoptee support sort of website. Folks are anonymous there and it's a kind of a wonderful site for people all over the spectrum of adoption in terms of people, very much in the fog, totally out of the fog, everything in between. One of the administrators there wrote this piece called Am I Blood or Am I Water? It was transformative for me. It was a wonderful, wonderful piece of writing about his life, and about being adopted and how he felt about it and how he still feels about it. And it's one of the best things I've ever read about adoption. It's called, again, Am I Blood or Am I Water?

Haley Radke: That sounds wonderful. I'm gonna put those links up so that people can check those out. Thank you.

Maeve Kelly: Oh, you're welcome. You're welcome.

Haley Radke: Thank you for being so honest. I really appreciated that.

Maeve Kelly: Thank you, Hailey. It feels good to talk about it. It really does. It's a good thing, and I hope that anything I say could be helpful to any other adoptee out there if they hear one thing that resonates with them, I just hope that's helpful.

Haley Radke: If you would like to send a note to Maeve to thank her for sharing her heart with us, we can pass it along to her. You can email us on our website, AdopteesOn.com. We wanna hear from you. Connect with us to share your story, or record a short voicemail that we could feature in an upcoming episode. You can also find us on Twitter or Instagram @adopteeson.

We would love it if you would take a minute today to subscribe to our show in iTunes, then you'll never miss an episode. Would you share our show with a friend in your life that you know is adopted but never talks about it? They might be able to open up their box by hearing Maeve's story. Thanks for listening, let's talk again soon.

1 [S1 E1] Carrie

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/1

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Haley: You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is Season One, Episode One: Carrie. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Today we'll be talking to Carrie, a fellow adoptee who will be sharing her reunion journey with us. You'll hear her allude to how she flooded an entire family with postcards in an attempt to find her birth mother. We'll wrap up with some recommended resources for adoptees in reunion.

Well, I'm so pleased to welcome Carrie to the show. She's a fellow adoptee and I'm really excited to hear your story today, Carrie. You've got lots of interesting perspectives to share with us, so welcome.

Carrie: Thank you, Haley.

Haley: So I'd love for you to start with maybe telling us about when you were born and your relinquishment story. Anything that you know about that would be awesome.

Carrie: I was born in 1970 in Vancouver, BC, and was adopted by Americans who were living there working abroad. Although they were all blood family, I have two older brothers that were both blood children of my parents. They were having trouble conceiving and particularly a girl child, my mom wanted a little baby girl. And this was in the era of closed adoption still, and so they went to the Catholic Adoption Agency in Vancouver and put in for a little white baby and were matched with me, actually before my mother would have carried to term. Her final, like sixth or eighth miscarriage, very tragic start for them. So I came into a family that had all kinds of stuff, but were really excited to welcome a little girl. And I might have been what you would've called a poster child adoptee my whole life growing up. I was one of those kids where they said, "being adopted is special" and "being adopted, it means you were chosen", and I bought that. I really bought into it and felt really proud about being chosen and special, and sort-of sang the praises for adoption my whole life up until just about reunion, which happened with my birth father in 2008.

And in between there's a long story, but I just, I guess I just wanted to start off my story by saying adoption has always been just background noise, I never really felt overly compelled to search or felt uncomfortable not knowing. I always felt really kind-of grateful just for the chance to be here, and sort-of had this weird sense in the back of my mind that I could have not been here. It might have been a choice to have been terminated. So, not to make it political, but it just had always colored my view.

I was just gonna say I'm 45, almost 46 now, and I hinted that my relationship with my adoptee status started to get a lot less simple when reunion happened. And you know, you hear a lot about the reunion rollercoaster if you have at all considered searching and reuniting. It's one of the first things you'll read about if you search. And thank goodness there is stuff online because I'd heard about it, but I will say nonetheless unprepared because I thought I was so okay with being adopted. ‘What issues could I possibly have? I don't feel angry. What?’ And adult me wasn't angry, but it turns out the infant me was pretty– had a lot of stuff to say.

So in between, I guess I will just fast forward my story a little. I left Canada with my US family when I was six, grew up in California and sort-of lost touch with my Canadian identity and self and history and schooling, but didn't seem to mind. My family were– my parents were transplants from Chicago into California, so none of us really fit and no one really cares there.

And then my father died in 2000– sorry, 1994. And at that time I started really thinking about if I was ever gonna reunite. You know, 'life is uncertain, you never know', and 'maybe I should do it sooner than later'. And then as luck would have it, in 1996 the laws in BC changed and I was able to gain access to my original birth certificate, which at that time I had never had, I just had an identity card with a case number that linked to my actual birth certificate. So I was unlike a lot of people in the States. I was never issued a false one, I was just never given access to my real one. Which is interesting because I know that whole issue is very upsetting and concerning to a lot of people who get issued fake ones.

So in ‘96 when I was able to get hold of that, my birth mother's name and hometown were listed. But my birth father's information was left blank because they were not married. And with the magic of the internet, I was able to track down four women, in all of Canada, who had her full name, or at least first and last name, and then maybe 40 women with the first initial and same last name. And then anybody in the small town where she was from in Newfoundland who had the same last name, which apparently was all of her relatives. And looking back, I really was trying to word my little postcard inquiry very benignly and not let the cat out of the bag. I knew that because the adoption agency had given my parents two typewritten pages of non-identifying background information, which I know is just like gold and tons more than lots of adoptees get. Whether it's true or false, even to get it is cool, to have some sort of fairytale to spin out about these people who walked away from raising me. Sorry, what was I gonna tell you?

Haley: You're telling me about the postcard and that the information you put on was benign.

Carrie: Right, well, because the information I had about her– gosh, just thinking about it just overwhelms me with feelings of all the different people I created from that information and how it's still not even close to the person I met when I met my father. But the person that I understood her to be was a school teacher in Vancouver, or she was living in Vancouver and she was a school teacher, so I thought she'd been a school teacher there. But she hadn't. So when I wrote that I was looking for a school teacher from Vancouver, I thought it sounded like I could have been her student, and it just made everyone in her family really suspicious. And she wrote me, although none of the addresses I'd had for her were correct, because she had been unlisted her whole life. She wrote me a really cold letter that basically was about three sentences, and I have it sort-of memorized. It said “Dear Carrie, I understand you've been trying to reach me. My private life is my own,” double underlined. “If you would like to contact me, you can do so at this address.” And she signed her first and last name.

So I thought, well, it wasn't an outright dismissal, the door was still open. And I sent this really crazy, heartfelt letter and I happened to be planning a trip up to Newfoundland and maybe I could see her. And, by some happy coincidence, that letter got returned to me, so she never got that. And I did try again later, and then she never got back to me. So that was heart-wrenching on lots of accounts, but one of them was my own mom who raised me, who was my adoptive mother, but I just call 'my mom' cuz she's the one I experienced as mom. Sharon would've just been so pleased to meet the woman that gave me birth, and check in, and have a cup of tea and talk about how good Sharon had done raising me, and how great I am. That's all she really wanted to do, as a mom. And the rejection of me from my birth mother was as much a slap to my mom, and to see her, I don't know, it was really hard to see that pain reflected back and forth between us. And I was really impressed that she wanted in. Like, she was careful not to assume that I would include her. She asked if she could meet her if I ever did, and I said, “Sure!” And that was a big deal for her. My mom was pretty closed with her emotions. I always remembered that and felt like she was really in my corner, which was huge when that continued to sting over time.

And then I just stuffed that down cuz that's just, I would have to say, it's kind-of a horror story? And the chances are so small that it would happen to someone searching,I don't know for sure the numbers, but it's like 3-5% are rejected as the secondary thing in reunion. At least, rejecting any contact at all happens really rarely. Most people get at least something. And I guess I did get something, but not near what I would like. I would have to say that's hugely unresolved for me.

Haley: I can imagine how hurtful that was. Just three sentences.

Carrie: And looking at it with a lot more compassion, and having done a lot of reading and searching the ladies over at the First Mother's Forum, I posted a letter there asking, “What would one of you ladies say to a mother who refuses contact?” And they were super wonderful and wrote a wonderful response, so that was nice to get that validation like, ‘dude, that sucks and we wouldn't have done that to you’. Yeah, I don't mean it as a scare story, but it would've been nice. I just don't know why it didn't occur to me that that would be the option. I certainly didn't think we would necessarily be super chummy, it'd be kind-of awesome if the Hallmark thing happened, but I just didn't think there would be such a small option. And I get it, that she was sort-of leapt on outta the blue and felt very cornered. I don't know, I guess the door isn't fully closed for me, I haven't given up on that. Always keeping that wound just a little bit open.

But so then I got the other weird 3-5% lottery, which is the percentage of birth fathers that come looking, and since she wouldn't really have contact with me, and I did ask if she would tell me anything more about my past, which was maybe not a very direct way of asking for information about him. Lo and behold 12 years afterwards, in 2008, my birth father– actually what happened was I got an email from the adoption agency social worker who said “We believe that we have a match. In 96, you entered your name to be contacted if any of your birth family, aside from your mother, wanted to find you. Say, brother or an aunt, or an uncle or grandparent, would you be interested in being contacted?” And since it had been so long, they wanted a courtesy follow-up and just not share last names or contact information, go indirect.

And I wrote back immediately and we facilitated a couple times back and forth through the mediator, getting letters through, but then right away went to email contacts. And then I think within a month, three weeks or a month, I drove up to meet my birth father, and for the first time in my life, got to meet another human who belongs to the same genetic tribe, like an actual blood family member. And since I am not a mother myself, I'd never had that before. And I highly recommend it if anyone ever gets the chance. It is terrifying, and will fundamentally change your view of yourself when you get actual knowledge from where you're from, but it's like the butterfly from the cocoon. You gotta be something different if you're gonna change and grow. And I grew immediately. Immediately. You know how like the Grinch, his heart grows three sizes at the end? I have this really visceral image of myself, that adoption had cut me off from my roots in a way that strangled me and collapsed one of my lungs, and when I met my birth father, it was like a lung I didn't know was collapsed, suddenly inflated with air and life. And it was both exhilarating and wonderful. And almost like pins and needles, painful to realize what was missing. It's such an intense cocktail of crazy emotions, good and bad at the same time, it is hard to wrap your heart and head around them. And they happened so fast. We gave each other a big hug and we both were on the verge of tears. And I sat down on the couch and crossed my legs and said, “So. Where the hell have you been?”

And by some wonderful fate, I must have mumbled, or maybe he didn't wanna hear that. He misunderstood me to say, “How the hell have you been?” And we just had a normal start to the conversation, as normal as could be. And I spent the next three days tuning in and out while he tried to give me as much family background information as he could, which was amazing and wonderful. But all I could do was stare at his hands and the nail beds of his fingers and see how they were exactly the same shape as mine, but bigger. And I've always been a really– My mom that raised me was like 98 pounds when she got married. She could model 18th century clothing, and she did. She just had this tiny little waist and wrists the size of little chicken wings, and when I was six years old, I tried on her wedding dress and it couldn't button up the sleeves cuz I'm what you might describe as ‘sturdy’ or just, you know, a little more athletic. And my dad that raised me always hoped I would be a linebacker and get a scholarship to Notre Dame in football. Cuz I was always pretty tough, chasing my big brothers around. Lo and behold, I meet my birth father and instead of the man of English descent that the Catholic Adoption Agency told me about in great detail, non-identifying detail, he was in fact a Métis, a Labrador Métis man. So he's a First Nations population member. Descended from English-Scottish people on one side and Inuit-Innu people of Labrador on the other. Which is a pretty big oversight, to tell just the one side. But it was 1970 and I get it. I can see that a white baby is easier to place than a mixed-race baby, and that's still true today.

It's just so complicated to get that information. I can see those physical characteristics in myself when I look in the mirror now and it makes– I have videos of triple-great uncles portaging canoes up the Churchill River in Labrador to their hunting grounds. They have some cool old videos from the 20’s, movies that have been transcribed to video, you can find them on YouTube. If you look up 'The Lure of the Labrador', and if you see those people working hard, like I suddenly look at my bones and my hands and I go, ‘Okay, I get it. I get what my body was designed to do and where I'm descended from.’ And getting that information is amazing. It's amazing in a lot of ways. But I will also say that there was a really Peter Pan sort of quality where, when you don't know, that you can forever be inventing someone really cool to be your parent. And the hard truth of reunion is that you get to actual people and not to idealized people, and so I'm sure I've got habits that irritate him and he's got his human habits that irritated me. And it was hard to mesh all those things, the gratitude to getting to meet and then realizing, 'oh, this is the actual person now', the loss of the fairytale other people. 'This is what he is bringing and this is what he is bringing to the table. I'm not gonna get to wish him to be any other way, now, this is really what I'm working with.' It's interesting, because I feel like adoption has– I mean, reunion has been really wonderful, but I was surprised at the slight sadness of getting an actual specific person. Like, that's one of the few comforts you have if you grow up without knowing your background. Because, like, my mother could have been Joni Mitchell. Could have been, it could have been a lot of cool people, you know? And then you find out they're regular people.

Haley: I believe when I was younger I was imagining, of course, that I was some sort of princess. And, yeah, that was not the case for me either.

Carrie: I don't know that I– Well, I certainly didn't know that reunion was about to happen to me. And because it happened in a year where I first lost my only pregnancy in March, and then lost my mom that raised me in August, I was in pretty rough shape when my birth father found me in November, all in the same year. But it also was rash to just jump into it. And I studied as much as I could along the way as it was happening, I didn't know it was about to happen. But I don't regret it. I was definitely in the mindset that life is short and you don't know what's gonna happen. And you read so many stories of people that search and search and search and don't get the chance. I almost felt obligated, not only to myself, but to other adoptees. Like, ‘Just take advantage of the chance. Who cares if you don't like what you find at the end, but who would walk away from the chance to know?’ So, it got me propelled up into my car. My birth father is a hunt and peck typist, and so having an email relationship– neither one of us much like talking on the phone, so email was where it was at, and I just couldn't get enough information. And he was very generous and said, “Well, I can answer some of these questions, but if you want the whole story, why don't you come up and visit?” And so I did, and we do maintain contact and I would say the relationship is pretty good now. I had an intense period in the beginning. Got really overwhelmed and I backed out of contact for two years and then he gave me plenty of space. I didn't feel neglected by the space. I was still pretty hot and mad for quite a while, and then when I simmered down enough, I tried again. And ironically, it was one of the genetic gifts he gave me that brought us back together, which is, weirdly, I picked up a love of playing hockey before I met him, when I was living up in Alaska. And for a kid from California descended from no one– well, raised by people, none of whom played hockey or watched hockey, really. And certainly my mother didn't approve of me playing. Yeah, she was not thrilled. She told me quite late in my career. But in the beginning she was sweet and didn't. She kept her mouth shut. But I loved it. And it turns out that Alan played hockey from the time he was very young, and was still quite good. I met him, he was 63 or 64 when we first met, and we had played I guess once already together, or twice. And then when I broke it off for two years, in that time as I was cooling down, I realized that in certain sports and dance, you can communicate through movement in a way without using words. And since we were having trouble using words, I would at least try this other avenue to get back together, and I didn't need it to be anything more than playing hockey. And thankfully he was just ready and waiting for me to cool down, and was able to pick right back up.

And I will say he's been really super generous and in fact, I don't think he'd be upset if I shared this news, but you're familiar with Ann Fessler’s book, The Girls Who Went Away? Well, I don't know if you know, but Ann Fessler put out the call a couple years ago to find any birth fathers that might be interested in being interviewed for her research on their side of the story. And things came up and her research got delayed, but she just got back in touch with with my birth father and he's interested in speaking with her. I’m just really tickled because they're a small percentage, those birth fathers that get found. And to me it's just, I think he's doing it because it matters to me, and that says a lot. He’s doing the best he can with what he has, too. I'm grateful for that in a lot of ways. Okay, so that's my long, arching story of how I got to be me. And it's funny because I, again, up until reunion didn't really– when I was quite young, I was very into being adopted and how it made me special. But it just became something I quite took for granted. And even my brothers really forgot I was adopted. But I will say, I was thinking about this on the way home tonight, there was always a sense– they never used it against me, but people share characteristics in blood groups of family, and there are shared characteristics of people who just live together, for sure. But there were times when I was just different from my family and they would just remark on it like, “You're your own kid. Where did you come from?” kind of thing. And as much as you feel loved, it is very weird to perpetually and at the root feel like not quite ‘in’. And again, it was not malicious. My brothers, I don't think probably ever told me, “They don't love you cuz you're adopted.” They knew I was loved and they loved me too. It was never like that. But there's always just that sense. And my mom was really a tiny kinda girly woman and I'm a hockey-playing granddaughter of trappers and mushers and was a dog musher myself. Like I'm just cut from different cloth. And we overlap and got each other, but yeah, it's weird. And there's hard things in every family. And adoption is a blessing in a lot of ways. I don't mean to be the ungrateful adoptee, but I was so surprised cuz I was always such a cheerleader for adoption. It felt doubly hard to be upended by the reunion process cuz I felt sort-of betrayed by the whole institution. I felt like I'd really only considered the upside. And then you have to, when you meet the people that walked away from you, you have to really confront that part of your history, that you weren't always chosen.

There was actually a part, a little tiny, maybe a couple weeks only, but there was a portion where you weren't chosen. And relinquishment, you would– I know some people have all of the vocabulary and adoption-land is tricky and fraught with shades of fine meaning, but there's no other way to get adopted unless someone lets you go so, waiting to think about that till you're 38 is probably not ideal, and maybe that was part of what really hit me on the head so hard about it. But yeah, I think it was important to do and I'm grateful I had the chance to do it and that I came out the other end, with most everything intact and still moving forward and happy.

Haley: So it sounds like you've done a lot of reading and research, and that those things have helped you do some healing. Have you done any counseling or therapy to go through some of those issues as well?

Carrie: It's interesting. I've only just recently started going to see a lovely woman here who has some knowledge about adoption issues, and then I brought her a book that Laura Dennis recently put out a couple years ago about adoption therapy, from the perspective of adoptees and clinicians and therapists. I read it and loved it and handed it right off to her, and she's been wonderful. The only other time I tried to talk to someone about it, I guess I didn't really even bring it up, it was dealing with alcoholism in my family when I was in my 20s and just rattled off I was adopted as part of the background history. But I don't remember it being brought up at all. I did a lot of reading at the reunion phase and found a lot of online sites too. Two of my really favorite online folks, besides yourself, to connect with: one is Rebecca Hawkes, who on and off keeps a blog, another adoptee. And is it Lost Sisters?

Haley: The Lost Daughters.

Carrie: Sorry, Lost Daughters, yeah. They’re my sisters. Which I guess Rebecca's part of. But yeah those sites and all the people on them, you could branch off and find a ton of great adoptee support there, which was just critical for me in 2008, -09 and -10 as I was trying on new moods and expressing my early unfelt anger at my situation.

Haley: Carrie, do you feel like you hit all the different stages of reunion?

Carrie: Can you quickly remind me what, there's the five maybe or something? Do you have a little list there?

Haley: I have a list that's from Origins, Canada and they have: Fantasy, so that was the imagining that we did when we were young. And the First Contact. Then the First Meeting and the Honeymoon stage, which I think we hit all this already. And then the After The Honeymoon, so things kind-of–

Carrie: Down!

Haley: Yes, and you're like, ‘Oh, you're a real person. Okay.’

Carrie: 'Not interested!'

Haley: And then Time Out, which you said that you did. And then Making Adjustments. And lastly, Ongoing Relationship.

Carrie: Yeah, bingo! Oh my gosh. That's exciting. Yes.

Haley: You see, you're still a poster child. Now you're a poster child for the stages of reunion.

Carrie: Oh, that pleases my inner Hermione. It's amazing. I would not have thought myself to be the person to pull out as violently as I did. But I was upended and I needed to digest. And I guess that's my coping pattern anyway. But it was bigger than any time out I've ever had before. I've never– I'm a compliant, easygoing, overachieving adoptee. I definitely wasn't the acting-out type. If you're gonna divide into two basic groups, I was the Hermione type for sure. So I surprised myself with that long time out. That's nice to see those all listed, the time out, especially.

Haley: I didn't get to time out, but I was close. I was close.

Carrie: Fingers above the plug, just twitching.

Haley: Oh yeah.

Carrie: Well, that was big of you, and you must have learned a lot from that, too. Man, it's amazing how relationships really do put you right in the spot to rub up against the things you need to learn.

Haley: Yes. And I think you were talking about before, I don't know, what I was hearing was– what I've experienced is when you're with them, whoever it is, your birth mother, your birth father, anyone that you're related to, but you've lost time with, it's amazing in the moment, and yet all there is, is grief. It's joy and grief all intermingled. And I can't turn off the grief part and just enjoy the moment.

Carrie: Yes. And for me it was like, if you envision the way, say, a beach ball if you held it underwater, and just kept pushing it deeper and deeper, and then finally let it out. That's what happened with my grief, I think. And it just came out like a fountain. And ‘Where was it from? I'm not sad. Why? Why is this so sad? This can't be sad. I'm super lucky. I got to meet him. He tracked me down. He's trying to make it work. Why is this sad?’ And if you get a little more perspective, of course, there's grief there. Why wouldn't there be grief there? But the popular adoption narrative is one of so much joy and fulfillment and the grief being erased, that there's just not a lot of popular space to experience that. And that just makes it harder. And I think it's surprising because I was walking around not feeling sad, but grief. And they're such a different thing and I didn't really realize how different they were, that you could still be really happy about something and still be just overcome with grief.

Do you know Lori Holden, I think is her last name? @LavLuz, I think is her Twitter handle. She's an adoptive mom and she seems to have a very open mind about things and she's really of the mindset it's 'both, and' instead of 'either/or', which is just so freeing. If you can say, “Yes, I'm grateful I was adopted, and I had terrible grief. Yes, I was grateful for the reunion and it's tearing me apart and I'm suddenly someone you might– My sense of myself is never gonna be who I was before.” And that's good and it's important, but, wow, in my case, I wasn't really ready. I was having a hard year already,

So if you have the chance to time it, yeah, prepare yourself. If you don't have the chance to time it and it lands in your lap: prepare yourself. And if you walk away, that's your choice. But boy, there is a lot to get out of it too.

Haley: Looking back on that, the timing of it and everything, I can't imagine your sorrow from your miscarriage and losing your mom, because I haven't experienced either of those things yet. Was this something that was a distraction? I don't know, were you headed in a different direction and this changed things for you? Do you ever think about that?

Carrie: In some ways it was lovely because it felt like a new– I got a chance to meet my family. I didn't have to do the tricky juggling of worrying about, ‘even though my mom says she was into it, is she feeling threatened?’

And I'm sure we could have worked through it, but in a lot of ways it did simplify things. It also compounded the grief because I really wanted my mom, she would've loved to meet him. She wanted that chance to meet her, and she could have just, if my birth mother had written me back his name. I was so raw already. I think in some ways it propelled me to getting right to the raw emotions right away. I wasn't in a place to fake this reunion. I was not in a place. I was gonna do it to get real with somebody. And if you didn't have it in them, that was fine. But I needed to go and say my truth.

I just didn't realize how hard that would be and how I should have ideally had a little more emotional reserve to fall back on, ideally. In some ways also it's like, ‘Well, everything comes in threes, and I'm already beat down, let’s just get right to the very basics of who I am and build up from there.’

Haley: Thank you so much for sharing all that. That is a lot of big information. It's a big story. So Carrie, I'd love to hear if you have any recommended resources for our listeners. And I have two books actually I'd love to share with you and if you're okay with that. I'll go first. You mentioned Lost Daughters earlier. These are two books from one of the Lost Daughters, Deanna Shrodes, who I know that you're familiar with. And she wrote her memoir Worthy to Be Found, and part two is Restored. And she shares about finding her birth mother, their reunion relationships, their ups and downs, and then just the great grief from her birth mother withholding her birth father's name from her. And I just really love Deanna's heart, and she has a wonderful blog called Adoptee Restoration and her great heart is for adoptees to be restored. Her story is really powerful and I feel so badly that she's still searching for her dad and her mom had that information and she wouldn't give it to her. They're really both really well written books and I really recommend them.

Carrie: I have not read them, although I have spent tons of hours over on Deanna's blog and couldn't agree more. It's such a wonderful voice and heart and empathetic ear. My couple that I would recommend are reunion-specific, and the author is Evelyn Robinson and she's an Australian woman and I found her books on Amazon.

And I believe the one that I read, the reunion one is not in my hand, but it was Adoption Reunion: Ecstasy or Agony? It's a little subtitle. And it really resonated with me as I was just struggling just past the honeymoon phase and not being an American, the perspective was really refreshing. Because it doesn't seem like there's a lot of room in the States for there to be anything but the Hallmark happy narrative, and her book, just the title gave me room to have my reunion be any way that it was, and it could be both. And she has some other books as well that I'd recommend checking out.

Haley: Okay, good. And I can, I'll put a link to it in our show notes so that people can find it. So if our listeners wanna connect with you, Carrie, where can they find you online?

Carrie: My business is to make hats, warm woolen hats that I learned to make when I was living up in Alaska. And, come to find out all my women ancestors were making warm wooly clothing going way back in Labrador, so that's fun to find out.

But my initials are CCM, and then hats, H-A-T-S. So @ccmhats is my handle at Twitter and my Etsy shop for my hats. And I think my Facebook page probably has that and Google and YouTube and wherever else. That was generally what I tried to pick. Oh, actually my Twitter handle isn't that because someone in Germany had that. So my Twitter handle is @CCMFeltHats.

Haley: Okay, I will put a link to that up as well, and I can attest that Carrie's hats are so beautiful. I love your tweets about how you make them, and they're so colorful. And whenever you post a picture of your– I don't know what you call it, your shop, your workshop.

Carrie: The studio.

Haley: The studio, thank you. The hats on the wall, it’s just beautiful.

Carrie: Thank you. And I do love connecting with other adoptees and other people connected with adoption. It's just really added a whole lot to my life to meet people like yourself and the Lost Daughters online and have a community that I never had growing up. So thank you for the chance to get to talk.

Haley: Thank you. Well, I appreciate you being so vulnerable and authentic with us. It's rare to be able to hear someone's story in this depth. So thank you very much.

Carrie: Thank you for asking.

Haley: Didn't Carrie have some beautiful metaphors? If you have some more questions for her or would just like to thank her for sharing with us, you can connect with her on Twitter @CCMFeltHats. To share your story or to ask us a question, visit our website Adopteeson.com. You can send us an email or you can record a short voicemail that we could feature on an upcoming show.

You can also find us on Twitter or Instagram @adopteeson. Today, would you share our show with your adoptee network? We would be thrilled to have your support. Thanks for listening, let's talk again soon.