159 Adoptee Remembrance Day

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/159

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This show is listener supported. You can join us and help our show grow to support more adoptees by going to adopteeson.com/partner.

You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is episode 159, Adoptee Remembrance Day. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Today is a special episode where we are going to learn about an upcoming day that I think will become critically important to the adoptee community. We are talking about ways to commemorate the first annual Adoptee Remembrance Day. You can find links to everything we'll be talking about today over on the website, adopteeson.com. Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome back to Adoptees On, Pamela Karanova. Welcome.

Pamela Karanova: Hey Haley, thank you so much for having me today. I'm excited to be here.

Haley Radke: Aw, I've loved our conversations. We've shared a few. [00:01:00] I'll link to those in the show notes so people can hear from you. We've talked about your personal story. We've talked about how you launched Adoptees Connect, which is so amazing and I'm so honored to be a part of that. And today we are coming to a more somber occasion and we are gonna be talking about Adoptee Remembrance Day. Can you tell us what that is?

Pamela Karanova: Yes, absolutely. Adoptee Remembrance Day is going to be a day that we set aside, October 30th of this year, and hopefully every year moving forward, that's gonna serve several purposes. This day is gonna be a reflection of raising public awareness of a lot of different dynamics to the adoptee experience, but one of them is crimes against adoptees by adoptive parents, and this is something that happens more frequently than people realize. I think the adoptee community is definitely tuned into that a little more, and it's also something that the media does not recognize. So we're gonna be focused on these crimes against adoptees by adoptive parents, [00:02:00] as well as publicly mourning and honoring the lives of our brothers and sisters who we've lost to suicide, and that's a very touchy and deep topic for so many of us. And we really want them to not be forgotten and we wanna raise awareness on the topic of adoptee suicide, which is very prevalent in the adoptee community. I know many people already know, but for those that don't, adoptees are four times more likely to attempt suicide and than non adopted individuals. And we are also wanting to shine a light on the topic that there are countless international adoptees who are living without citizenship and they have been deported due to mistakes made by their adoptive parents and adoption agencies, attorneys, and whatnot. And this happening to them is beyond devastating and we need to really shine a light on this because it's something that is destroying lives and adoptees are ending their life because of the trauma that this is [00:03:00] inflicting on them. Not to mention all of the trauma they already experienced by being removed from their homeland and being in a country where they don't resemble people, and we're gonna shine a light on that topic with this day.

And then another topic that we really wanna focus on is the whole concept of adoptee loss. I know from my personal experience and networking with adoptees all over the place, one of the biggest components to my experience and so many others is the loss that we all feel. And honestly, for so many years of my life, I didn't even know what was wrong with me, but I felt like something was deeply wrong with me that I was just so sad all the time. Finally, I ended up going through a lot of therapy and recovery dynamics, and I ended up figuring out a lot of what I was experiencing was the grief and loss process that nobody ever told me I could feel. I really think that is a huge dynamic for adoptees everywhere, all the way down to their childhoods that they should [00:04:00] be able to process the grief and loss from as early of age as possible. And some people might say, what grief and what loss? And I would say, the loss of everything that we lose when we are adopted into a new family. That’s two biological families, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, our medical history, our lineage, and for many of the adoptees that are international, their homelands, their culture. So there is a lot that we should be given a right to grieve about. And I felt like my whole life that it was taken from me until I started grieving in my forties. It's a pretty big ordeal to hold all that in your whole life. And so this day is really a reflection for adoptees everywhere to really share their voice and find anywhere in them to be able to grasp how they're feeling and share it publicly if they have the strength to do that. Because people need to start seeing and learning and realizing [00:05:00] how we feel. So those are the main topics or some of them that we wanna focus on with Adoptee Remembrance Day.

Haley Radke: Thank you. I think it's so important to spend some time acknowledging those things. And it's interesting, some of the things you were describing, it's almost like this is a moment to normalize the disenfranchised grief that so many of us have experienced. And I also notice a couple of the other things that are mentioned on some of your resources when we're talking about this day: the overrepresentation of adoptees in treatment facilities and incarcerated individuals, adoption disruptions, and rehoming. And I really appreciate that you have taken this day to really acknowledge all of those different things, and even the piece where you said that it’s not really talked about in the media or acknowledged that this is a [00:06:00] thing. This isn't funny, but I joke around with my co-host of my Adoptees Off Script podcast that's for Patreon supporters, we joke about this because we both have an adoptee Google alert. And I don't know if you have one of those set up, but they drag media articles for the word “adoptee” and then they get sent to you. And I can't even tell you how many of those articles are about animals and how many are just completely positive, happy adoption stories. And it's rare to see anything reported about even what you were talking about crimes against adoptees by adoptive parents, which I'm assuming you're meaning abuse, those kinds of things, and-

Pamela Karanova: And murder. And murder. Yeah. And murder. And that's definitely one of the ones that people don't want to talk about, but yeah, it happens all the time and it's pretty prevalent. If people wanted to look online, they could find story after story of that happening. So definitely [00:07:00] I wanna shine a light on that and I want everybody to. As well as adoptees being overrepresented in the prisons and jails and treatment facilities and mental health facilities. 'Cause there's no help for them, even though they're in those places, we know as being adoptees that there's so many root issues that come with the adoptee experience. I'm not a therapist or a psychologist or anything, but I've done enough research to know that the root issues that adoptees experience can manifest in so many ways through your childhood and your whole entire life that they do impact every area and they can impact every area. Of course it's different for every adoptee, but we definitely have to start shining a light on this because National Adoption Awareness month is November. It's coming up, it's right around the corner. But how about we pause and reflect before we celebrate everything about adoption and really reflect on the truth and the transparency behind adoptions today? If we can do that and really be transparent and really try to process what processing grief and loss looks like for [00:08:00] each of us, I think that little by little adoptees are gonna start coming out into the light at a younger age than 40 years old to start processing grief and loss.

Haley Radke: So another thing that you mentioned to me is that adoptees, some of us are talking about these things, but this day is for everyone. It's not just for adoptees to pause and acknowledge Adoptee Remembrance Day, but you want it to be for everyone. Can you talk about that?

Pamela Karanova: Yes, absolutely. I was pretty set on that from the beginning because I just feel like the more people involved the better. But the adoptee community, most of us that are living that experience, are in a position where we can acknowledge some of the difficulties that we have and acknowledge some of the grief and loss. But it seems like a lot of people that are not adopted are not able to fully grasp that because they're not in our shoes, and that's totally understandable. But we invite them to [00:09:00] support any adopted person that they may or may not even know. They might be an adoptive parent or a birth parent, or an aunt of an adoptee or an uncle of adoptee, grandparents of an adoptee, or a birth mother, birth father that has lost an adoptee. This day is for everyone to really reflect that adoptees lose on this day and reflect on all the other topics that we talked about on this day, and to really step into a new light that there might be more to the adoption experience than what we've always known our whole lives. And yes, we want everyone to get involved. There's a lot of ways to get involved and we can talk about that in a minute. But yeah, this day is for everyone.

Haley Radke: Okay. Let's talk about the color yellow. I see you have chosen yellow, and I wanna know why. What led you to that color?

Pamela Karanova: Doing research, I felt like I really had to pick a color and I did some research and found out that yellow is a symbol of remembrance and that was very fitting for the [00:10:00] day. And there wasn't a better color that I thought based on some other colors with different things. I had to really navigate what we wanted to call this day and remembrance was definitely in there. And so that's why I picked yellow, because it's a symbol of remembrance.

Haley Radke: Now you mentioned there's lots of different ways to get involved, so let's spend some time talking about that and what are some of the different ideas that you've had about ways to observe Adoptee Remembrance Day.

Pamela Karanova: Our website has a complete list, but for me to share a few, I would say one of them is to wear yellow.

Haley Radke: I ordered my shirts. Did I tell you that?

Pamela Karanova: Yay. I'm so glad. I ordered mine too. I ordered some coffee mugs and some other things too, to be able to spread the word, but yes. Yeah, I actually found yellow shoes the other day. I don't know if you saw them, but I was like, I gotta get these because they're gonna go perfect for the day. But wearing yellow and I wanna spark conversations of, wow, you got a lot of yellow on. I'm [00:11:00] gonna explain why. I've got a couple of the Adoptee Remembrance Day shirts coming as well, that I hope spark some conversations. I really encourage people to use hashtags that are #ard2020, #adopteeremembranceday, and #adopteesweremember. Those are the three hashtags that we're using for this event, and I really want everybody to try to use them so that we can share that on our Adoptees Connect page and on our Facebook page, and we can just go to the hashtag and find what everyone's doing. We're also gonna have a moment of silence at 12:00 PM Eastern Standard Time where everyone just pauses for four minutes. And that four minutes is basically a representation of adoptees being four times more likely to attempt suicide, and that's why I picked four. I will be at work that day and I will probably be in the corner with a box of Kleenex, and I already know that, I've already [00:12:00] pictured that, but I just feel like this needs to be done. So I just encourage everybody, wherever you are at that time, if you can just have a moment of silence for four minutes and allow yourself to feel whatever it is you're feeling and really cry it out if that's what you have to do. And, hopefully wherever you're at, if you're at work or if you're in your car, you have a few minutes to really honor that moment in remembrance of the adoptees that have passed away and all that you've lost in adoption. All that we have all lost in adoption. One of the things that I'm doing personally is my Adoptees Connect group here in Lexington, Kentucky, we're having a ceremonial bonfire, and that's gonna be something that I think is gonna be really fitting for our group. I prefer smaller, more intimate gatherings than big, huge things. And it's not really a public gathering because I just felt like for me personally in my group, we just wanted it to be more private. But if anybody wants to do something more public or go have their own thing, I totally encourage it. We're going to [00:13:00] have a candlelight vigil at 9:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, and that's gonna be a thing of remembrance as well to all of the things that we named in the beginning. That is something that I encourage everybody to do in their communities, in their homes, wherever they're at 9:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. Sorry, I think it's different for you. And then of course if people need to tweak it to their time zone or whatever of course, it's not like by the book, we just really want people to do something. We're gonna be having our candlelight vigil at the bonfire in real life in my backyard. We've got someone, Darren Zakin of Richmond, Kentucky. He's gonna come and sing a song he wrote called “My Home.” It's a tear jerker for sure, but it's an adoptee centric song. And I have another one of our attendees that's gonna sing another song. And so it's just gonna be a small little gathering. We ask that people tag the Facebook page and anything that they're sharing [00:14:00] online, and then what we can do from there is we can share it on the page. We really hope that this gets bigger every single year and that more people are made aware of this day and that it really should be acknowledged every day of the year. But if we can at least just get one day where it's really highlighted and it's like a fire where it just catches wind, all over. So if people can tag the Facebook page Adoptee Remembrance Day - October 30th, we would really be grateful for that. And let's see, do you want me to keep going? Because I have other ways people can get involved.

Haley Radke: I know you do. I know you do. You have so many ideas. I wanna pause you just because one of the things I really appreciate is that there's moments for remembrance and there's also moments of awareness. So you're doing both, right? Like the public acknowledgement and sharing and making sure we use the hashtags and all of those things. But I'm thinking of those quiet moments and I even wrote a piece for [00:15:00] you and as I was writing it, I was tearing up and you're talking about being in the corner with your box of Kleenex for those four minutes. I hear you. Just mentioning it, I just have so many feelings that come up, and that might seem silly to some people, like really? But it's true. I have so many feelings about adoptees that are hurting and just in order to acknowledge it and to think of those that we've lost, feelings bubble up right away. But when you were talking about the bonfire, it reminded me of something you wrote and one of the things you wanna do at the bonfire, the singing the songs and everything, that's really special. There was another thing that you mentioned, what was that?

Pamela Karanova: At the bonfire, we're gonna have the candlelight vigil at 9:00 PM. We're also each gonna have a chance to share spoken word or poetry. I'm gonna have something available for everybody to write on at that time, but everybody that might possibly be coming has been given notice that they can take as much time as they want to write something, but we're going to read them unless someone doesn't wanna [00:16:00] read them, they don't have to. But when we're done, we're gonna take turns placing our messages into the fire, and then, as the fire goes up, we're gonna be sending our messages to the heavens that something really changes in adoption and we start really highlighting these truths. And I totally understand what you're saying because I wrote a poem, I've already posted it online, called “It's Hard to Smile Today,” and it's a tribute to Adoptee Remembrance Day. And I literally bawled the whole time writing that and I have bawled anytime I read it, and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna bawl when I read it at the bonfire. We need to be bawling. We have a lot to bawl about. We have a lot to cry about, and I just really hope that people catch on to the reality and the real rawness that we all have to deal with every single day of our lives. And so I hope that people are able to come to a place of that transparent moment. And if you're not, I'm not a bawler in front of people. I'll just be honest. I get really weird bawling in front of people. Like I hold it in and [00:17:00] then I choke and oh my God, but this thing, there's no way to stop it because I'm like you. I welt up and immediately get emotional when I think of these topics. And one of the ones that gets me really emotional is international adoptees. Like I can't even barely say international adoptees without bawling. Like I'm starting to cry right now because I just feel so many different ways for their experience and it just totally breaks my heart. And this day is so much for them, as it is for every adoptee out there. So I'm gonna stop on that topic 'cause I get so emotional about that topic. Like I think of being a domestic adoptee and then I try to put myself in their shoes. I don't try to weigh out people's pain or people's trauma, but I just think being adoptees, if anybody's to understand a little bit of their experience and we can put ourselves in their shoes, we're the ones that can even comprehend a little bit as to what they feel like and it's still not enough. And that is a topic that [00:18:00] just makes me really angry and it makes me really emotional.

Haley Radke: I had Adoptees For Justice on the podcast earlier this year, July, and we shared an adoptee’s story, Anisa, who has been deported and I talked to their executive director and just the impact for adoptees, especially those who've lost citizenship. Not lost, never had citizenship in the first place and have been deported. And just the staggering statistics of those people who have died by suicide is really shocking. And yet not. Can you picture yourself, like you have no citizenship, you get deported back to this country where you have no connections. You probably don't know the language, you have no resources. It's really upsetting-

Pamela Karanova: Oh, yeah.

Haley Radke: Yes. Yeah.

Pamela Karanova: And I had a conference call as well with Megan and Emma from Adoptees for Justice yesterday, and I'm so thankful for them and Ed as well, for all they are doing for that whole community, but one of the awesome things that we're doing with Adoptees Remembrance Day is [00:19:00] they're coming on and co-signing with us, and they're gonna create a whole event of their own that obviously anybody can come and join. And we can talk more about that in a minute about other people coming together to pull this whole thing off. But they're amazing, and I totally stand for them and what they do, and it definitely needs to be brought to light in a more profound way. So hopefully this day will really highlight that area as well.

Haley Radke: So it sounds like there are so many different ways that we can observe Adoptee Remembrance Day. Whether you're a creative and you wanna do some spoken word performance, whether you're an activist and you are gonna use this to really light a fire and literally spread a message around the world, whether you are someone who just needs that few minutes to really mark the moment and process quietly on your own. Sounds like there's kind of something for everyone. [00:20:00]

Pamela Karanova: Yep. I agree. That’s exactly right. And if there isn't something that stands out to someone, then we really encourage you to create whatever does work for you. I think this thing is gonna be best when we open it wide up to everybody's ideas and everybody comes together to pull it off. So we are encouraging everybody to get involved and some people are more private than other people and some people might just wanna do something very private, which is totally okay. But yeah, hopefully we'll have something for everyone that is available for people to get involved. And we just spread the word.

Haley Radke: So I wanna just take a beat and go to your personal story. What I've seen from you over the last number of years now, you guys might not know, Pamela has been in adoptee land for a long time. I won't age you. For a very long time, and writing about adoption and blogging and collecting community together and in a [00:21:00] variety of ways, and I've seen you kind of transition and take pauses, short or long over the years, and lately what I have seen is you're just drawn to nature and hiking and searching out waterfalls and those kinds of things. And just to bring it back to Adoptee Remembrance Day, I noticed that some of the things that you've shared, you also have added nature in, or even some of the practices that other groups might use, you've noted these are some things we maybe shouldn't be doing to make sure we're honoring nature and not being detrimental in any way. But can you talk about those two things? I know they’re separate topics, but how you have explored nature as a self-care healing, why you've reached in that direction and why it's so important for you that a part of Adoptee Remembrance Day is honoring that [00:22:00] as well by not doing things that are detrimental to nature.

Pamela Karanova: No, I totally don't mind sharing about that. I think my story might be similar to a lot of other adoptees. I've basically spent my whole entire life running a rat race of trying to find a home, and for me, home has been nature. I think I tried everything for, I would say 44 years. I've really been doing the nature thing probably anywhere from two to three years as far as hiking and finding waterfalls, but everything that I tried to fill that hole with, it never worked. So I decided to start hiking and it actually connected me to a time in my childhood where everything was really good. I think the best childhood memories that I have are out in nature and I grew up in the country in Iowa and a lot of times we were just let free to run out in the corn fields and the forest. And so as I started hiking this connection came back to me from my childhood that this was actually [00:23:00] probably the safest place that I know that I've ever been. So I get emotional talking about it. Ooh. But Kentucky happens to have over 700 waterfalls. And so as I was discovering myself and discovering the new chapters of my life going through the last, I don't know, I'd say 10 years, I discovered that love for hiking really connected me to my childhood. And then I'm like, wow, Kentucky has over 700 waterfalls. I wanna put it on my bucket list to see all of them. I know I probably won't see all of 'em, but it's a good goal to have to just always find someone new to run off to and have an adventure. And it's become my number one source of escape. A lot of times I go by myself and I really don't need people to go with me because I love just connecting with nature by myself. And sometimes I take people and even my Adoptees Connect group, we've gone before and that's a whole new thing of fun because it's awesome to share something you love with other people. I go a lot with my kids and that's been my number one [00:24:00] healing thing for my adoptee stuff. And after running so many years at the rat race, I woke up one day and realized that everything I was actually searching for was actually right inside myself. And so doing more soul searching within myself, of my likes and dislikes and what I love and what I don't love, and what I will stand for and what I won’t, has been a key to finding moments of happiness and making great memories and doing it. And one of the things that we did put on the website for the guidelines for Adoptee Remembrance Day is that we're hoping, because of this love for nature, and I know I'm not the only one that has it, is that we hope nobody will release balloons into the atmosphere because they have to come down somewhere and somebody has to clean them up, and that is an important part because I know that a lot of people love to release balloons for occasions, but we're asking very strongly to please don't release balloons. But we do have so many other ways to get involved that are all listed on the website. Hopefully that answers your question.

Haley Radke: Yeah. You have [00:25:00] so many different ideas. We could literally, we could go a long time listing them all up. And there's so many really creative things I really love, even floating yellow flowers and trying to make sure they're from nearer to you so they haven't been transported far away. I love the opportunities to write, to sing, to do those kinds of creative things that we mentioned earlier. And I feel like there are adoptees that I know their names. I really do know their individual names of adoptees who've died by suicide or adoptees who were murdered by their adoptive parents. I do know those names, and some of them have become famous in some way, but there's so many that we don't necessarily know their names. And so finding ways to tribute the anonymous lost adoptee, I think is really [00:26:00] special too. So thank you so much for sharing those things. We've talked about a lot of different ways we can acknowledge this day. And you mentioned there will be multiple different opportunities for events within the day. And there's gonna be details for that on your Facebook page for Adoptee Remembrance Day, a specific website for that, which we will link in the show notes. You have a Facebook event page for Adoptee Remembrance Day as well, which I really like the event page and I don't know about you, but I've had a few people say, Hey, can you share this as an event? 'Cause it reminds me, especially when there's a specific date and time for something. So can you tell us a little bit about the event page and your Facebook page and the other things we can find there?

Pamela Karanova: Yeah, absolutely. If they consider getting involved, one of the easiest ways to do it is to go to the event, which is actually on Facebook. Right now there’s only one event there. The Facebook page is [00:27:00] Adoptee Remembrance Day - October 30th. But if you go to the event, you can RSVP that you're gonna be attending the event, and you can also invite all your friends and family, and we really encourage everyone to do that because it's a great way to spread the word. A lot of times when you like an event on Facebook, it shows up in your newsfeed and it shows everybody on your friends list as well that you're going to this event. So that's a great way to advertise and get everybody else involved. The Facebook page itself, what we're hoping is that when people participate in this day, that they will tag the Facebook page and then from that we'll see those and we'll be able to share them to the page. And we'll actually also be able to share them on the Adoptees Connect social media as well. And they'll probably spread from there online all over the place, but we don't have Twitter or Instagram for Adoptee Remembrance Day because it's just way too much to keep up with. So Facebook is definitely the main page and main social media source for that day. So yeah, I would say use the [00:28:00] hashtags and make sure you RSVP to the event. We did just create quite a few promotional graphics that I uploaded to the page for people to use for their Facebook profile pictures, and they can share 'em on all their social media everywhere to highlight the day as well. So if anybody wants to help promote it, that's a great way to do it too.

Haley Radke: Nice, nice. I love it. Making it easy for us. And if we are not on Facebook, it's totally fine on Instagram or Twitter too. Just make sure you're using those hashtags when you're posting about it. It just means you're not gonna reshare it on a specific Adoptee Remembrance Day thing, right? So you're not monitoring. Okay. Awesome. Okay. I feel like we've talked about so many different things. Today, this is our recommended resource, you participating in Adoptee Remembrance Day. It's very important. I want to see it grow, just like you do, of course. And I really think that this is an [00:29:00] incredible way for us to teach people around us about the loss and trauma in adoption and also have that personal moment of reflection and giving ourselves an opportunity for some space for grief. Is there anything that you wanna make sure you tell us or anything else I missed asking you about that you wanna share about Adoptee Remembrance Day?

Pamela Karanova: I think the only thing that stands out to me is some people might be more comfortable doing something in person. Maybe you could have a Friday evening dinner or get together with a small group of friends, of course, being careful with the current situation, or maybe share something at your work with a few coworkers. And then there's other people that are going to want to participate in online things, which are gonna be available. But whatever your thing is, if it's not there for you, just maybe consider creating it yourself, whatever works for you. But exactly like you said, whatever you can do to get involved in that [00:30:00] day, we’re really excited for people to get involved. And that's everyone, not just adoptees.

Haley Radke: Thank you. Thank you. And I wanna thank you for your role in leading adoptees in various ways through Adoptees Connect, through your Facebook pages and blogging and creating Adoptee Remembrance Day. We are so blessed to have you in the community, and I thank you for your service to us and for your leadership in this way.

Pamela Karanova: Oh, thank you, Haley. It's honestly the biggest pleasure of my life. It takes purpose to the pain, so thank you. I appreciate it.

Haley Radke: All right I just wanna remind everyone, I'm gonna have links to all of these things in the show notes, but you can find more information about Adoptee Remembrance Day on the Facebook page in the event page. So just search Adoptee Remembrance Day on Facebook, and you'll find both of those things. And then we'll also link to the Adoptees Connect page. That has all of those [00:31:00] ideas that we only got to a few of them of ways you can acknowledge the day and then also has a list of other events that you can participate with online. Some of them are pretty cool, I think. So anyway, I love that and I just really thank you again. It's just been such a pleasure talking with you.

I am so thankful for Pamela Karanova. You guys know what a gem she is in the community and all the things that she has done for adoptees and she's just one of my heroes, truly. I'm so grateful she was able to share with us about this important day. And like I already said, I would encourage you to acknowledge this day in some way, even if you're listening well after it's passed, make sure you mark it on your calendar for next year. I'm sure this is something we'll be seeing for years to come. And I'm hopeful that it will raise awareness [00:32:00] about all of those adoptee issues that we mentioned before when we were talking with her. And I think there's so many adoptees doing such great work, especially looking ahead to November Adoption Awareness month. And I think this is a special way for us to acknowledge adoptee loss and take that moment of pause to really center ourselves before we decide what we're going to be doing in November. Whether you are out there on Twitter and debating the people who are drawing happy faces on their hand or if you choose to take a break from November, whatever is best for you. Not that you need to debate all the people with happy faces on their hands. There's nuance there. I totally get that. Just take good care of yourself and I hope to see a lot of you posting next week. And we'll have a special episode next week on the [00:33:00] actual Adoptee Remembrance Day, which will be a little bit different than most of our episodes, so I hope that it is a good tribute to the day. So thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.

158 Amanda Medina

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/158

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Haley Radke [00:00:00] This show is listener supported. You can join us and help our show grow to support more adoptees by going to adopteeson.com/partner.

You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is episode 158, Amanda Medina. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Today we are talking with Amanda Medina, creator of This Adoptee Life. Amanda and I talk about how she came out of the adoption fog in the past few years. She shares what adoption separation from our ancestors looks like via a beautiful and heartbreaking symbol of a broken legacy, and we discuss her commitment to building community among adoptees. We wrap up with some recommended resources, and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com. Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, [00:01:00] Amanda Medina. Welcome, Amanda.

Amanda Medina Thank you, Haley. I'm so happy to be here. It's such an honor.

Haley Radke Oh, I'm so excited to be chatting with you. I'd love it if you would start and would you share your story with us?

Amanda Medina Absolutely. So I was born in Columbia and the story that is in my adoption papers is that in November of 1984, an unknown woman came to a police station in Medellín and she handed me over, saying she had found me in the streets and couldn't find my mother. She claimed to have had me for about a month, and at the time I would've been about four months, and the police takes me to the Colombian Family Welfare Institute. I'm placed in an orphanage/transit home and my photo is published in the newspaper. It says I am an unknown baby. Name unknown, parents unknown. There's an address [00:02:00] where if somebody would like to come claim me, they can, but nobody comes. So this way the authorities in Columbia can claim that they have tried to locate family, and now they can label me abandoned and I can be entered into the adoption program. Also around this time I was examined by doctors that estimated my age, 'cause again, they didn't know. So they say I'm about six to eight months and they give me my birthdate and I don't know where in this process or by whom I'm given my name. That's not mentioned in the papers. I'm placed in a foster family where it says that I catch up developmentally and physically, and there's also a note saying that I'm doing so well because this is an emotionally stable environment for me. Before it had said that I was exhibiting the typical signs of an [00:03:00] abandoned or institutionalized child, the biggest one being that I was not attaching or really accepting any adults to come close. In October of ‘85 (so now we're about a year after I was handed over to the police) I am matched with a Swedish couple for adoption. They fly to Columbia from Sweden. They adopt me. The papers are signed. The civil registry in Columbia is changed so that my last name becomes the name of my adoptive parents. And with that, all the legal ties to any first family that I have is essentially done, broken and cut. Then I am taken to Sweden and that's where I grew up. Until I'm about nine, I would say I had a very happy childhood. I always knew I was adopted. I never thought about it. It was almost something I was a little proud of, made me unique [00:04:00] and made me special. But when I'm about nine, my parents were starting to have marital problems and with that everything shifted for me. I started feeling less safe emotionally. I almost felt like this wall coming up and I was like, okay, I need to protect myself here. I can't attach too much to this. I lost trust in our home and in us as a family and I decided to distance myself mentally, emotionally, and even physically. At a young age, I decided I was gonna leave Sweden and I was just gonna go and live my own life, and I did. When I was 20, I moved to the US and I've lived here since. And, yeah, that's the adoption story.

Haley Radke So you can look back at age nine and already feel like this is the time I made a plan that I'm not even gonna be in [00:05:00] Sweden anymore.

Amanda Medina Yeah, it was. For many years I wouldn't feel comfortable saying that it was because I realized my parents had problems in their marriage, but I definitely have come to terms with that's just a fact. I don't have to feel guilty about that. I don't have to feel ashamed over that. But for many years I did and I think that's a thing for us adoptees. Many of us carry this guilt because we have these feelings, these thoughts, questions, emotions that we don't know where they come from. We don't know that it makes sense, the trauma we've been through and all of that. So that's very much what was happening to me for many years.

Haley Radke What was it like growing up in Sweden? I'm Canadian, so I don't know. I feel like we have a few things in common with the Nordic countries temperature wise-

Amanda Medina Yeah, I grew up very much the [00:06:00] compliant adoptee, deep in the fog. I would tell you well into adulthood, “Oh, I'm like the success story of adoption.” Meaning it hasn't affected me. “I'm totally fine. Sure, whatever questions you have, no problem.” I'm gonna answer them. Search for family? “No. Why would I wanna do that?” All those kinds of standard phrases that we tell ourselves, or at least that's how it was for me.

Haley Radke Did you know anyone else from Columbia when you were there? Like was adopting from Columbia common there? Did you know other adoptees growing up?

Amanda Medina There was my brother, my adopted brother. We never talked about the adoption experience. His was more tumultuous, I would say. He was acting out more, and I was just keeping myself in check, which I think it's in The Primal Wound, Nancy Verrier, she talks about how a lot of times if you have two adopted children in the same family, they can take opposite roles. And that's very much what [00:07:00] happened for us and we just never fully connected. I would say with my adoptive family, all in all, it's not bad relationships, it's just very shallow and I'm okay with that today. It just is what it is. But growing up it was hard. And you asked if I knew other Colombian adoptees? No, I did not. There was one kid in a different high school that I knew of. We did have mutual friends at some point, but there was never a thing where, “Oh, you're adopted. Oh, me too. Oh, cool. How's that for you? How do you feel?” No, it was more like, oh, you're adopted. Oh, okay. Yeah, let's not talk about that because that's just too heavy. That's too uncomfortable or whatever the case was at the time. I don't even really know.

Haley Radke Okay. What's it like coming to the States at age 20 on your own?

Amanda Medina Yes, well the first time I was here, I was 18. So to backtrack a little, I lived in Spain for a year when I was 16. [00:08:00] There was a Swedish school where my parents let me attend for a year and live with the Spanish family. So like a guest student with the purpose of learning Spanish. And while there I met this guy and we became really good friends and then he moved to the States and I went back to Sweden and then we reconnected later. And so I went to visit him and you know-

Haley Radke Oh, the rest is history.

Amanda Medina The rest is history. We are today married with two kids and it all worked out pretty well.

Haley Radke Okay. Interesting. So how many languages do you speak?

Amanda Medina Fluently, comfortably: three.

Haley Radke Okay.

Amanda Medina Yeah, I just did a podcast that released yesterday in Spanish. That was the first. But Swedish was the language I learned, like that's my native tongue.

Haley Radke Yes.

Amanda Medina In the sense that's the first one, that's my first language. And then English and Spanish.

Haley Radke So were you learning Spanish even as a child or was that something that you [00:09:00] learned as a teenager?

Amanda Medina Yeah, as a teenager. I did not know any Spanish growing up, and in the beginning I would speak like a Spaniard, not like a Colombian at all. And to this day, I don't really have the Colombian accent. So yeah, I got the language, but I still wouldn't fit in. If I went to Columbia, I would be made on spot as soon as I open my mouth.

Haley Radke Oh my word. I'm just picturing in Canada, we have a province, Quebec, and they speak French there. And so when they go to France, it's like, well this isn't French. This is not right. There's that barrier. So that's so interesting. Wow. Sweden. Okay. But you were outta there. Now, I've seen a photo that was shared on a blog post, and it's the photo of you as a baby in the newspaper.

Amanda Medina Yeah.

Haley Radke Where did you get that and what's it like for you when you see that? [00:10:00]

Amanda Medina My adoptive mom, or my mom, gave it to me. She gave it to me, so now I have it. But she had the original newspaper, like the actual page, and then it's also copied into the adoption papers that I've been given. Since I asked for it. They gave it all, so they're very supportive in that sense that my adoption papers were always available to me. I just never wanted to look at them. I never wanted to read them until I was starting to dig into it. But yeah, when I see that picture, I look very sad. There's two girls sitting next to me and I think they look neutral or I don't think any of us are smiling, but I definitely look very sad, like ready to cry. And in other pictures too, from that time, I feel like there's this serious face and then I try to look at it and I wonder what I was thinking 'cause I was obviously going through a lot in that period.

Haley Radke It's quite a stark, shocking image. [00:11:00]

Amanda Medina Yeah.

Haley Radke There's two adult hands.

Amanda Medina Yeah.

Haley Radke Propping you guys up 'cause you're babies.

Amanda Medina Yeah.

Haley Radke You can't even sit up. So yeah, it's quite a shocking photo. So you said something there. What does that mean when you're starting to unpack things, starting to look at what's happening for you?

Amanda Medina Yeah, so like I said, well into adulthood I was very fine with everything. And then, as is true, I think for many of us adoptees, once we have our own biological children, something happens, there's a little switch. At least it was for me, where all of a sudden, this is the first time I can feel and really understand the importance of a biological bond. That it is truly unbreakable. Like it doesn't matter if we have a fight, it doesn't matter if we say we will never speak again. That bond is there and it will never, [00:12:00] it cannot be physically broken in a way. Just seeing so clearly my daughters. Like this she got from me, that she got from her father. And just over time realizing there are people out there, there are people in Columbia with whom I share that. And then I never shared it with my adoptive family, obviously. And so that contradiction and that kind of just weird place to realize that. And then also I think what really bothered me was not being able to provide medical history for my daughters. That's where I realized that my story isn't just mine. I can reject it for myself. I can say I don't have an interest in knowing, but in doing so, they won't have access to half of their story. And I'm not sure still to this day exactly what I will do, whether I'm going to go full mode searching one day. I haven't yet. If it will be enough that we reconnect with just learning about food and music culture, [00:13:00] going to Columbia. That's still a decision in the making, but just realizing that. And then my husband had around the same time started saying, “There are these DNA tests coming out. Would you want one?” And I said, “No, absolutely not.” And he could not wrap his head around how I would not wanna know. “There are people out there. You don't wanna find them?” And said, “No, don't even ask me anymore.” And he didn't. He respected that. But then little by little, like I said. And there was a specific interaction in a text message with a person who I was connecting with on Facebook over something completely different, but I told her I was from Medellín. I told her my last name in Medellín and she says, “My best friend is from Medellín and that's her last name.” And we're leaving Ikea as I get this message. I'm in the parking lot about to load my kids and all this stuff in, and it just clicks. I go, “Oh, I have real biological [00:14:00] family.” There are people in Medellín that have my last name, whether it was my last name for real or not. But just in that moment and I go home and I say to my husband, “Okay, buy the DNA test. Let's do this and also-

Haley Radke Can I just stop you?

Amanda Medina Yeah, for sure.

Haley Radke It had to happen in the IKEA parking lot. That’s just very-

Amanda Medina Oh yeah, that is funny. I never even thought of that. But yeah, that is definitely a funny point to the whole situation. And then, yeah, in the same process, I found a group on Facebook. So I was like, you know what? There must be other adoptees out there. I looked for a group on Facebook, adopted people from Columbia or something, and I found one and there were 1500 members and this is where I was introduced to adoption with language like trauma, corruption, first mothers. I heard stories of fellow adoptees that had reunited with their family [00:15:00] in Columbia and found out that the mothers were lied to. The baby was either kidnapped, the mother was lied to in the hospital, told that it was a stillborn girl, and then it turned out it was a boy, and that was said just to erase traces and make it harder to look and all that stuff. And reading my own adoption papers, realizing there were no names in there, and starting to doubt is this actually my story? How come they didn't bother to put details? It's a very generic story hearing from others having very similar, if not the same story. And so, Pandora's box flew open.

Haley Radke Once you see that stuff, you can't unsee it right? Can you make broad sweeping generalizations, sorry to put you on the spot there, but I know you are connected with a lot of adoptees that are adopted from Columbia and I'm curious if you've seen a pattern. How does searching happen over there? I've heard [00:16:00] both DNA stories and I've heard like hiring a private investigator kind of stories. Just curious, if you did wanna search and you wanted to go that route, just in generic kind of terms, what do you see most people having success with?

Amanda Medina Depending a little bit on which era you were adopted in, so seventies, eighties, there will be more stories like mine where there's no identification of a mother. There might be a very generic story, lacking details, and so for us it would be DNA, possibly a private investigator. I know a lot of people do that and combine the two. They might find somebody and it seems okay, the story matches, let's do the DNA test to confirm. If you were maybe adopted later, like in the nineties and on, I think they did put stricter laws, stricter regulations on needing to have signatures or at least like it's called cédula, which is the identification number of a person [00:17:00] for the mother. There tends to be more information and some people have even been able to just find via social media relatives and then confirm with a DNA test. Yeah, seventies and eighties, it's, for us it's harder. It's definitely harder. And it was a time in Columbia without going into politics or history, it was a time in Columbia where things were tumultuous and there was a lot of corruption. And then Sweden has one of the biggest adoption agencies in the world, I think it's the second largest that they facilitate. Sweden is the country with the highest number, from what I've heard, the highest number of international adoptions per capita. And they didn't necessarily do their jobs, so you can't just blame the first country. So there's definitely, there's a lot there to unpack, but yeah.

Haley Radke Oh yeah. Oh yeah. What a tangled web we weave. Okay. So going back to you, your personal story. Did you buy the DNA kit?

Amanda Medina Yeah, we did, but I have not been able to [00:18:00] find any close matches. The closest is second to fourth cousins, which, once you find that, if you've never had that before, that is, I have a cousin, I'll take it. I don't care if you're like 1%, but it's that one little percent of drop of blood that we share. We're cousins, we're primas, we're primos. So yeah, I connected with a few and stay in touch with some of them.

Haley Radke Okay. I wanna ask you about another part of your story that you mentioned, that you were literally guesstimated how old you were and given a birth date.

Amanda Medina Yeah, so that I always knew. I can't say how or when, but that was always just a matter of fact. And I think it's one of the things my parents did do right because it meant that I actually got to claim that day. So I [00:19:00] never wondered, oh, is it that day? Is it not? I didn't have that. Some adoptees, once they read their papers, having thought their birthday was a set date and then they realized it might not have been that date, or in fact it wasn't. And then that's adding to the identity crisis of coming out of the fog and the grieving. Now it's yet another thing to grieve. I didn't have to go through that. So for me, it's worked out in my favor in the end. But yeah, it's definitely growing up and being a teenager and everybody's reading horoscopes and, oh, what sign are you? And it was still there. It was still something that on some levels, a reminder or something that bothered me a little bit, but not so much adding to the coming out of the fog dilemma. And in that sense that other adoptees, I know many struggle, really struggle with their birthday.

Haley Radke I don't know why I'm just stuck on it, like just knowing that oh yeah, the date on my driver's license, it's just like an estimate of [00:20:00] my birth date. Like it's just kind of like, I don't know-

Amanda Medina Yeah. If even that, because honestly, at this point I don't trust a thing, a single thing in my papers. It's just, that's the story I was given and that's why I always, I've started adding that when I introduce myself and when I tell the story it's like, “In my papers it says-”

Haley Radke I noticed that. And interestingly, sadly, I guess you're not the only person to share their story that way now. Just because of what you mentioned, all the corruption and things that now we've come to learn about how they were doing things. I shouldn't say were. How things are sometimes done.

Amanda Medina Yeah.

Haley Radke Okay. So you have this kind of epiphany like, okay, there's things happening. I am connecting with other adoptees online, and oh my goodness, there's trauma and all this stuff. What led you to starting your blog and actually talking publicly about adoptee issues and sharing your story and other adoptee [00:21:00] stories?

Amanda Medina I had always wanted to, I had always written my entire life. Poems, letters, diaries, song lyrics, like I've always been writing. That's how I process, that's how I make sense of everything. I write. And so I always knew I wanted to, for many years I said, I wanna write a blog. I wanna share my story, but I didn't know what my story was until that adoption piece came in. I wrote my first piece on adoption that was shared on Dear Adoption. I think that's now two years ago, two/three years ago.

Haley Radke Oh, I love Dear Adoption. One of my very best friends runs that. Hi, Reshma.

Amanda Medina Yeah. Oh, she's awesome. Yeah. Hi. I think I wrote that before I even had started the blog, and the things that I shared in the group were received very well. People were saying, ”Wow, you express yourself so clearly in ways that you're validating what I felt like. Thank you for putting words to my feelings.” And I just [00:22:00] decided to go ahead and see what would happen if I just started sharing my story in a blog. I didn't share my name at first. I was hiding behind This Adoptee Life because I didn't know where it was gonna go. But then I realized quickly that by sharing my story, by telling my own story, I got to own it. And I realized how empowering that was to do that. To get to choose the words. To get to decide from which angle. And there was, like I said, so much empowerment in that, that I wanted to give the same opportunity to fellow adoptees. So that's when I started inviting fellow adoptees to share their story on the blog as well. And then I shared some of my writing as I processed coming out of the fog and all of that. And that's how that went. And I think at some point it also became, because I grew up feeling so alone, never talking to anybody about what I felt, always [00:23:00] feeling very guilty for wondering why was I adopted to this family and not another, feeling guilty for not feeling connected to my family, but never feeling like I could talk about that with anyone because nobody would understand that there was probably something wrong with me for feeling that way, but then realizing later on that that made perfect sense. Once I knew what I had been through, and then just wanting to say to other adoptees like, you're not alone. I'll share my story so that if you are reading it, you know at least one other person out there who feels like you, who has been through the same. And that's really it. Just none of us should have to feel alone. Whatever it is you're going through, adoption or not, but specifically because I'm an adoptee, that's what I can speak on.

Haley Radke You glossed over this and I don't want it to get missed. You really do give other adoptees the opportunity to share their stories, and I'm curious why that part of blogging also is so important to you because there's so many [00:24:00] adoptees that their blog is specifically about them and their specific story, and it's very focused on just the one individual. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that. Why did you want to give others the opportunity to share your space?

Amanda Medina Because I grew up feeling like I didn't have space to express myself in. Because again, I felt like I was alone. So in a way, not in a selfish way, but it's like I am giving others what I needed, what I would have wanted. So I'm trying to validate, support, and give that space, be it on the blog where you share your story or on social media where you can come in and comment. And if you are an adoptee, I got your back. If you're contacting me and you're an adoptee, I prioritize replying to you before non-adoptees and that kind of thing. Because having pushed our feelings aside for years and years, feeling like either we're gaslit or we're not validated, or we're told to just feel differently, [00:25:00] I'm here to say, “No, you don't have to feel pressured for anything and I got you.” Basically. That's what I try to do.

Haley Radke That's wonderful. I've also seen you share that family preservation is very important to you.

Amanda Medina Yeah.

Haley Radke Can you talk a little bit about that? Why things shifted for you there?

Amanda Medina I think a lot of us, adoptees and society, we cling to this positive narrative of adoption, not realizing that a lot of times adoption is not the only, if even a necessary, alternative for children who find themselves, be it in foster care or whatever it may be. Adoption is, what is it they usually say? Adoption is a permanent solution to a [00:26:00] temporary problem. A lot of times there might not be a need to cut ties to your actual family or your first family. I try to put into question and really let's examine adoption, the concept, how it's carried out. Is it really such a good thing? How can it be harmful? Because it can be, what's the support that's needed out there? And so family preservation was presented to me, and now later on, legal guardianship I've heard about where a lot of adoptees will say, when people ask what's the alternative? Well, legal guardianship can be an alternative. I have to look into it more. I can't really speak on it, but that's come up a lot of times.

Haley Radke When people connect with you to write on your blog, I'm curious if you have any adoptees that you might say, “I think you're still processing a little bit of foggy things.” What are your thoughts on sharing [00:27:00] space for all the adoptee voices? Because, we do sometimes talk in generalizations about, oh, most adoptees feel this way, or most adoptees feel, but really everyone has had a completely individual unique experience and has thoughts and opinions in all kinds of matters that are different.

Amanda Medina Yeah, no, for sure. And that's why I am actually very careful not to use absolute language. I don't say, “Adoption is-” I do use language like, “Many times.” It may very well be, “Many of us,” or I'll base it on my own personal experience and just say, “Hey, but I know I'm not the exception here. I know there are others like me.” So that's one thing. And then most adoptees that have shared, I haven’t not shared anyone who has reached out, obviously, because I stand by my word that it's for all and every adoptee. But so far I think I am very clear in where I [00:28:00] stand. And so it's been adoptees who feel like, okay, here's someone who will listen to me, validate me, and will share my story. This is a space where I can, and I've had some say this is the first time I share my story and that they've read the blog or seen my social media posts and say, “You've helped me feel like I can tell my story,” which is such an honor and so humbling because that is exactly what I hope to do. So it's a mutual thing where we're in this. That's what I say right in my post, to all my fellow adoptees, “PS we are all in this together.” But yeah, then there are some who contact me and well, you said this and I don't feel like that. And I say, that's okay. I can't ascribe an experience to all. I'm not invalidating your happy story with my struggle. But, there's room for all of us to share our truth. We have to respect each other though, all around. That's how I look at it.

Haley Radke No kidding. I think [00:29:00] some people might need reminding that we should all be respecting each other, especially lately. Whew. Seen some nasty things.

Amanda Medina Yeah, there's a lot going on. All around.

Haley Radke All over. Yes. Yes. I know we're not always gonna all get along, but I do feel some respect is missing occasionally.

Amanda Medina I can just say super quick just what my thing is. 'Cause people have heard, how do you reply so calmly? Or how do you not, and I rarely, if ever, reply in my reaction. I'll read these things and things will trigger me left and right. I'll get upset, I'll get angry. I feel I wanna just throw my phone out the window. That's how angry I get it at what I read sometimes, but that's not when I type my answer. That's not when I reply. Instead I'll process it. I'll think on it. I might write something and then I might go and edit. Not to silence myself, but if I want my message to come across, I don't know [00:30:00] about you, but I don't respond to attacks very well. If somebody comes at me, I won't necessarily be, oh, okay, yeah, sure, we'll do it your way, but if you wanna introduce some ideas, sow some, throw out some seeds and watch the plants grow, that's how I look at it. The change that's gonna happen over a longer period of time. It's not gonna happen overnight as much as we want it to.

Haley Radke I will often ignore that stuff. And that’s-

Amanda Medina That's so great. And that's just what it works for me.

Haley Radke Oh, totally. But that's my method of self preservation to keep me in the work, because from past experience, I have seen that I can put a lot of effort into replying to someone, and I think I am being as gracious as I can summon up and filled with facts and all the things and bring them to the table and be shut down again. And I’m-

Amanda Medina Oh, absolutely. [00:31:00]

Haley Radke I'm, I don't know if you can tell this I'm super sensitive sometimes, a lot of the time, and so that's what works for me, but I do appreciate that you are willing to have those hard conversations, and I've seen that in a lot of adoptees lately that are, especially, we will talk a little bit more about this during recommended resources, but adoptees that are open to having a conversation with adoptive parents or with first parents.

Amanda Medina Yeah.

Haley Radke Prioritizing the adoptive voice, but yet still teaching out of your adoptee experience. And if you're gonna listen, then I'm gonna teach you. And maybe we do have a conversation back and forth. So I appreciate that because not all of us are willing to do that.

Amanda Medina It's been a learning process too because, when I first came out of the fog, having gone through what I had gone through, having realized what I had realized and just essentially having just completely [00:32:00] broken down to, I call it, I had my eat-pray-love moment where I was just on the kitchen floor crying and just ran out of tears. And I was like, I don't know how I will ever come back from this. This is it. Like I'm sitting in this dark hole and I'm gonna be stuck here. I've lost myself, the person I was before, and I don't know how I'm gonna build her back up in any kind of way, but I did eventually. But having gained that strength, at first, that was, you mentioned adoption. I'm ready to give you a two hour lecture on everything that's wrong and just, “You think you know? No, no, no, no. I'm gonna tell you about this and this.” So I've been there too. I definitely have. I've been anything from kicked out of groups to blocked from people and I've gone at it that way and it didn't work. So then I had to reevaluate and I also learned when is it even worth answering? It's not always worth answering. There are comments on my social media that you'll see I actually did not reply because maybe it's, [00:33:00] “Are you really trying to engage in the conversation or do you wanna just tell me that I'm wrong?” And I've had times when I have replied and then no conversation is happening. So you learn as you go what works for you-

Haley Radke Whether or not to take the bait?

Amanda Medina Yeah. Basically.

Haley Radke I don't know. I think there's so many conversations that happen on social media and a lot of the public ones I feel like don't necessarily go places but I know there is a lot of hard work also being done in the DMs where-

Amanda Medina Absolutely.

Haley Radke There's some really amazing conversations and changes of opinion I think happen when it's just that more one-on-one personal connection. And no one else is jumping in to give their 2 cents and I know you're having those conversations, so thank you for serving in that way.

Amanda Medina For sure.

Haley Radke I watched a piece on YouTube that you posted [00:34:00] not too long ago. It's called A Piece Broken Off, and you describe feeling like you were broken off from a chain. You talk about the richness of the history that now your link is broken away from. And you're really talking about the loss of a family legacy of adoption. I thought it was really powerful and-

Amanda Medina Thank you.

Haley Radke I'm wondering if you can share a little bit about that and what led you to the chain metaphor and if you could just speak to that a bit.

Amanda Medina Yeah, for sure. So I had said in one of my early posts, I remember saying that I realized that as the adopted child of a couple who were not able to have biological [00:35:00] children, I will not be carrying on their family line. And also, again, being an adoptive child with no information about my first family, it also falls on me to start a new family like I am now the roots of a new family tree. So feeling very in between there. And then this specific piece that you're referring to came out of, somebody shared in a group that I was in a poem read out loud by two Mexican American girls who had written a poem celebrating the rich heritage of the Latina women before them, their mothers, their grandmothers, and you know how they were these strong women in their Latina culture, in their origin, in all of the ancestry. And I just felt like [00:36:00] that should be mine, right? I was born in Columbia and I know there's so much richness in that country in terms of culture and heritage and ancestry and all of that stuff and I have no access to it. So that's where I felt like I had been just plucked out of the ground and placed somewhere else, somewhere where there is no tree for me to attach to, touch my branch to. So that's where that poem was inspired by and came out of.

Haley Radke Beautiful. Before we do recommended resources, when I ask guests on, and we always have like a few minutes ahead of time before we record, and one of the questions I ask, and I asked you before we started, is do you have preferred adoption language? Because I like to be respectful of the guests and, oh my gosh, first/birth/bio/natural. I don't know, I'm probably missing a few there, but I always do that to be respectful. And one of the things that you had mentioned to me earlier is [00:37:00] that there is a difference between positive adoption language and honest adoption language. And what I said was, do you have preferred adoption language? I'm curious if you would like to share a little bit about that 'cause we've seen some kind of hot button topics on social media in the last few months about positive adoption language.

Amanda Medina Yeah. Yeah. So I love linguistics and I love sociology, and so language is extremely important to me. I say that one of the ultimate ways to control people and shape their reality is via language, right? You tell them what words to use, and that then reflects in their mind. So when people talk about positive adoption language, first of all, we gotta see who is putting out positive adoption language. Who is that for? It's not necessarily for the adoptees. We are not the ones that say, oh, we wanna be called blessed. We wanna be called chosen. We wanna be [00:38:00] called loved. That comes from the agencies, that comes from the adoptive parents because that fits their narrative. That allows them to feel that they're doing a good thing, that everything is to be celebrated, and there are no problems. Meanwhile, I made a post, again early on, on Instagram, saying, no, I was not chosen. My parents were chosen. It even says in the adoption papers, we have the pleasure of informing you that you have been selected to adopt this child. I was available. And I'm okay with that language because that actually reflects the truth. So that's where honest adoption language comes in. This way, I don't have the pressure on me to feel lucky or blessed or fortunate or grateful. So I think it's really important for adoptees because that's where we will find the space to explore our true story, our true experience, and own our feelings. Because we should. We deserve to process [00:39:00] what it is that we've been through. We deserve to know that losing your mother, doesn't matter what the circumstances are, losing your mother at any age is traumatic and that's something that needs to be processed, healed from. However you wanna put that. But so that's where I feel it's so important to talk about honest adoption language. And that's not gonna be easy adoption language, that's just gonna be honest. That's all that I'm saying with that. Truthful and honest. And that's where we will hopefully be able to make change and actually approach the adoptee experience for what it is for many of us, not all, but many of us who need that support, who need to know that it's okay to struggle.

Haley Radke Thank you. Okay, let's move to recommended resources. And we've already mentioned, Amanda, that you have the blog, This Adoptee Life, and I love that you are sharing your own story. You've got like a whole ton of posts sharing your story, going more in depth than we did here today because of [00:40:00] time. What is that? But I've attended some of your lives on Instagram and what I really appreciate about you is what your commitment looks like from the outside to community building and really connecting with other adoptees, bringing them in. There's pockets here and there, we see lots of different Facebook groups and things, especially the really huge groups. It's hard to connect really in person with adoptees. And so I really am thankful that you are building your own community and gathering together adoptees.

Amanda Medina Thank you.

Haley Radke It's really important work. The other thing I wanted to mention is Amanda has a mantra.

Amanda Medina Oh, you got it.

Haley Radke I'm showing it to her on video. You can't see that, but you can hear me crinkling the paper. Maybe not. Maybe my editor's just too good. I'm just gonna take it out. [00:41:00] I'm doing it extra for you, Jen. I'm not gonna read it out 'cause I want you to go to Amanda's Instagram and she's got it there in a couple places and I think it's also on your blog. But the very last thing you say is, “I belong on this earth.” And to me, even as you share it through the interview, and I got stuck on the fact that your birthday is fake, and you have no idea where you were for your first months of life. I just thought, man, to ground yourself in that thought: I belong on this earth, is just so powerful. Is there anything you wanna speak to about the mantra or your blog that you wanna share with us?

Amanda Medina So I could just say about the mantra that there is a video where I introduced it on Instagram and Facebook. But just for anybody who's listening here and hearing about the first time, it's essentially a set of phrases that I've realized so many adoptees struggle with, and I've been one [00:42:00] of them for sure and still do, but it's just realizing that where I have been wanting for other people to tell me, I can tell myself and I can find strength and confidence in just claiming that for myself. And so that's why I wanted to share it with, again, I wanna share it with fellow adoptees so you can order it and I will be so happy to send it. And people have bought it and they send me pictures. It sits on their bathroom mirror or by their bed or some have it in their office and just a daily reminder that you deserve this. You can say that, yes, I exist and yes, I deserve to live happily.

Haley Radke Powerful. What did you wanna recommend to us?

Amanda Medina My recommended resource is a page on Facebook, and they are also on YouTube. They're called Trauma Informed Parent. And while it's not adoption [00:43:00] specific, for me as an adoptee, seeing their posts and what they share, it is definitely relating to the fact that I have been through trauma. And I think a lot of adoptees can find information on there and specifically adoptive parents because adoptive parents and prospective adoptive parents need to know about the trauma that the adoptee child has been through.

Haley Radke And I think, you know what I've learned so much from the therapists that have been on the show is that we can re-mother and re-parent ourselves, especially when we have an understanding of trauma. I don't wanna talk down to us, but sometimes it is easier to learn about it from an adult looking at a child's perspective, at first, when we're first learning about it. So I really like this. I'm really excited to check it out. I'm so glad you brought it too. I hadn't heard of it before, but I'm gonna go check that out as well. Thank you. Where can we connect with [00:44:00] you online?

Amanda Medina I have the blog, which is This Adoptee Life, so www.thisadoptteelife.com. And from there you can also find me on Instagram, Facebook. I am intending to become more active on Twitter. I'm still figuring that one out, but I'm on Instagram a lot.

Haley Radke Yes, Twitter is a whole beast and you gotta have the right timing to join Twitter as well. That's an inside joke for if you knew when we were recording this. Yikes. Anyway, thank you so much for sharing your story with us. I really appreciate it. And thank you for also making a space for adoptee voices. I think we share that passion. It's so important and we really wanna hear each other's stories.

Amanda Medina Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. It's been such an honor and a pleasure to speak with you and share my story here. [00:45:00]

Haley Radke One of the things I really appreciate about Amanda and so many other adoptee bloggers is that they are willing to share their platforms with us. And so if writing has been on your heart and you haven't built up a platform for yourself yet, you wanna just dip your toe in and try things out. That's what Amanda did to start. She wrote a piece for Dear Adoption like she shared with us, and there's so many adoptee bloggers who are sharing their space, sharing an opportunity to have your words go to maybe a wider audience than you would have if you did a Facebook post on your own, or there's a lot of places that will let you share anonymously also, if that feels safer. We've got November National Adoption Awareness Month coming up, and I always feel like adoptees are [00:46:00] working their hardest to be louder during November than everyone else. And our voices often get drowned out. So if you've been thinking, maybe I have an idea that I wanna share with the adoptive community, or maybe you just wanna get some feelings out, this is a good time. There's a lot of different people that are accepting guest posters right now, so I'd encourage you to look around, see who's accepting posts, make a connection there and write something. We wanna hear from a variety of adoptee voices and maybe we haven't heard from you yet. So if you want to, I would really encourage you to do something like that. And I've always said that one of my most sad things about making the podcast is that I couldn't possibly interview everyone who listens. I just would run out of weeks and time and so this is a really great opportunity for you to share a part of your story, perhaps. Maybe it's something that you've really wanted to come on the podcast and [00:47:00] weren't able to. This is a great way for you to start out sharing what the adoptee experience has been like for you. So there you go. There's your little push. If you needed a sign, should I write something? Yes. Yes. You should write something.

Okay. I really have enjoyed talking to so many really incredible adoptees lately. It's just been wonderful. Now, our next two episodes coming up are a little bit more of somber topics. We are gonna be talking about Adoptee Remembrance Day with Pamela Karanova, and there's going to be some opportunities for community input. I will be putting some details out on Facebook, Instagram, but my Patreon supporters knew about it first, and some of them have already gotten on and gotten to work on their submissions. So if you want to hear about those things first, you can go to adopteeson.com/partner to find out the details of how you can join Patreon. And there's lots of bonuses over there. There's another weekly [00:48:00] podcast called Adoptees Off Script that is unfiltered-Haley, much to the chagrin of my co-host sometimes. No, we have a lot of fun over there. There's a secret Facebook group just for adoptees. There's other levels with other bonuses, and there's some really fun things coming up. I know I keep saying that. It's coming. It's coming. I promise I'm working on it very hard, but I'd love to have you over there. Adopteeson.com/partner helps sustain the show, helps keep the show going and growing and supporting adoptees around the world. Okay. I thank you so much for listening, and let's talk again next Friday.

157 Damon Davis

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/157

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This show is listener supported. You can join us and help our show grow to support more adoptees by going to adopteeson.com/partner.

You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is Episode 157, Damon Davis. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Today I'm excited to welcome a fellow podcaster, Damon Davis, creator and host of the Who Am I Really? podcast. Damon gets a turn to share his story of search, reunion, and loss.

We also chat about why reunions get held up as this mythical gold standard of heartwarming six o'clock news bait and what we've learned from talking to hundreds of adoptees over the past few years. We wrap up with some recommended resources and, as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website adopteeson.com. Let's listen in.

[00:01:00] I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Damon Davis. Welcome, Damon.

Damon Davis: Thank you so much, Haley. How are you?

Haley Radke: Good. Podcasters unite. I got a chance to be on your show. I don't know, it was your big episode 100, which is a huge milestone and now you're well past that. And anyway, it was time. It was time. I would love to introduce you to my listeners and to have you share your story with us.

Damon Davis: Thank you so much. It was such an honor to have you on. When I started my show, I started looking around for other podcasts and you were one of maybe two that I found. So I thought it was really appropriate to have you on for show 100, so thank you for being my guest. I appreciate it.

Haley Radke: Absolutely.

Damon Davis: To start my own story in terms of being an adoptee in reunion, I began my search after several things happened, and it was a confluence of about three different things. The first of which was, well, I should probably start back at the beginning and just talk a little bit about myself as a child. [00:02:00]

I was perfectly comfortable in adoption. I had no worries, issues or complaints. My parents were great people. I'm African American in descent, and my mother is lighter skinned black than I am. My dad is darker skinned than I am, and I'm in the middle. So for all intents and purposes, we looked like we could have been family if you had mixed their genes together and produced someone in the middle.

So I had a great upbringing in Columbia, Maryland, and I really didn't have any issues with adoption. And I was told I was adopted from an early age and I came to accept it. So I could speak very openly and freely about it with other people, which is something one of my guests said was eye-opening for him.

This is my best friend Andre, who was my very first show. He said, you were like the first dude that I knew that would speak openly about adoption and that was freeing for me. So just as a sidebar, I think that's why part of our shows are important because it allows other people to speak [00:03:00] out and it's freeing for a further network of adoptees.

Haley Radke: Totally.

Damon Davis: I didn't really have any desire to search. People would ask me about it from time to time and I was like, nah, I'm good. I've got parents. I don't need two more parents. I'm fine. But the birth of my son was a real eye-opening experience for me because this little person that we created out of love and after some challenges, we tried to do in-vitro fertilization and assisted conception.

And it didn't work and he was conceived naturally. And so I, I abbreviate that piece of the story, but you can imagine the breadth of emotion that probably happened for us as we traversed that whole assisted conception sort of path. Then for him to be conceived naturally thereafter was just magical.

And then, you stop and you think, wait, this is the first biological relative I've ever known in person and I made him. It was really, really impactful.

Haley Radke: How old were you?

Damon Davis: I was in my early thirties, so he's 12. I was about 36. [00:04:00]

Haley Radke: Okay.

Damon Davis: And, just being at home with him, I was, I like to say fortunate to have been laid off. So I was lucky to be at home with him as an infant and I bonded with him tremendously, both, as my first born, but for the importance of who he was as a biological child. It was just unbelievable. That was one factor.

The second factor was my father-in-law came to town from the Caribbean and he would come into town and he would sometimes stop and sometimes he wouldn't stop by and this particular time he said he wanted to go see one of his relatives in Baltimore. And this guy was really into family and really into sort of the connections that you can make around the world. He's a very big philanthropist in every way.

But he was also a family person in terms of holding the family together. So we go see this person whom I've never met before, and this elderly woman answers the door, greets us, brings us into her home, and as she's sitting there, she's spreading out all kinds of artifacts [00:05:00] from their lives, my wife's life and his life, and other members of the family.

And it was just this stark moment of realization that there's a historian in my family, someone who knows all the facts, all the stories, all the pieces that I don't know in my biological family I'm referring to. And I say, if that person, my family historian in my biological family is elderly, like this person who by the way is dragging an oxygen tank behind her, like she's clearly in the autumn of her years, I might miss out on these kinds of stories being spread out on the table before me if I don't look and search.

So that was thing two. Thing three was I was going through some challenges with my adoptive mom. My adoptive mother was starting to show signs of mental deterioration. She was hallucinating things, accusing me of things. We had a very tumultuous relationship around the time that my son was born, and it was really difficult for me.

And one of my best friends, [00:06:00] Kelly said, maybe you should search for your biological mother. And I wrote it off like why would I insert someone else into this position when I'm trying to fix this relationship over here? But she told me later, I asked her why she recommended that course, and she said, because I just felt like you were lost. Like you were looking for something and you needed some grounding and that potentially finding this other woman and some answers might be helpful for you.

So that was the third thing. So with all of those things coming together and having the knowledge that I was born in Baltimore, I reached out to Baltimore’s city social services and I asked, how do I go about search and reunion? I was connected with a lovely social worker. Her name was Lee Burress, and Lee was able to help me down the path of what it takes to do a search, and she set expectations for me, which I thought was really important.

She said, look, this thing doesn't always go fast. It's not a rapid process. It could take some time. [00:07:00] And she asked me some questions about why I was searching to make sure that there weren't any, for lack of better words, red flags for her about what my expectations might be, what I thought I needed out of the process.

And I was able to tell her, thankfully, look, I'm good, like I've got two great parents. I admit my mom and I are going through some challenges, but I'm not doing that, for any reason. I don't have any medical issue, thankfully. I just want these answers.

And so she helped me to go down the path of writing an introductory letter that so many of us have done, and really crafting a message to my biological mother that would help me introduce myself. And I went to work. I tell you, I joked in my book, I was working for the federal government at the time and I went to work that day and I spent the entire afternoon writing this letter. And I feel like I owe the American public a couple of dollars back because y'all paid me to write my letter at my desk. I did not do your [00:08:00] work that day but I tell you I made up for it in spades, by the way.

But I crafted a letter, sent it off to Lee. Lee held it for a while. Lee sent it off. And then, I'm walking through the building that I worked in, the Department of Health and Human Services, downtown and I get this call on my phone. I'm looking at the caller ID and it's Lee, and I was like, that's weird. Why would she be calling me unless she had news?

And sure enough, she said, I found her. And I was just flabbergasted. I just could not believe the news I was getting. It was really unbelievable. And so through a series of back and forth with Lee, we ended up coming to Ann, my birth mother, writing an introductory letter back to me.

And then after she received that letter back at her desk, she read it to me over the phone and I remember I sat on a park bench in the park outside of the building I was working in, and I just cried as I listened to this sweet [00:09:00] voice of Lee reading my mother's words to me for the first time.

And it was as if she was a surrogate for my biological mother, and she was just so kind in reading that letter. And I'm hearing her name for the first time, I'm hearing about her history. For the first time I'm hearing her express herself. I heard the words that she used and it just all felt really good.

After she finished reading the letter, Lee said, look, I can connect you guys, and then it's up to you. And so I sent her a text at that moment, and I wanted my biological mother to know that was the moment that we were in touch, that I knew who she was and that we were ready to move forward.

And she called me that night and, it was funny, I missed the call initially, but I got a message from her because I missed the call and it was so sweet. She says, this is your birth mother Ann. [00:10:00] She said, I don't know what to say to you, but I'm so excited to get in touch with you and you can call me any hour of the day or night, which was really cute.

And she was like, you could hear her holding back tears of joy and confusion and excitement at the same time. It's just the sweetest little message.

Haley Radke: I love that and I love that you texted her so she can have like concrete, this is from Damon and then you have this voicemail that, I don't know, maybe you played it more than once, I'm guessing.

Damon Davis: Yeah, it was a really great moment. I wanted her to know right then, you and I are now connected. And it worked out in spades. We had a great conversation after I called her back and, it was funny, I picked up on some of the nature in that conversation. We talked about our dispositions in life.

Like I told you before we started the show, I'm a glass half full, like more than half full kind of person, and I'll do little random acts of [00:11:00] anonymous kindness for people. Things like that. And we talked about some of that stuff in that very first call and it all resonated and it was just amazing to hear what her disposition in life was as it compared to mine.

So we maintained our own individual relationship at first. So we talked by phone that night. I texted her the next morning because I’d learned in that first letter that her birthday was the next day after I was being read that letter by Lee Burress.

So Lee is reading me my mother's words, and she's telling me in that letter, tomorrow's my birthday. So I called her the next morning as I went to work and I said, happy birthday. And she was like, oh my gosh, the best birthday ever. And it was just so cute because I literally hadn't done anything but shown up. And my presence back in her life was a gift that she [00:12:00] appreciated and I thought that was so cool.

But what she didn't know was that she had told me the night before that basically she worked around the corner from me also as a federal government employee. She was two blocks away and we were sharing the same metro station when I chose to get off at that station from time to time.

So she didn't know, but I was planning to surprise her at her office that day, and that's exactly what I did. I left a meeting, jumped in a cab, went over to her building, and I cleared building security. And it was so funny. I'll never forget, I told the security guard. She says, who are you here to see?

And I said, Ann Sullivan. And she says, and what's her number? And I was like I don't know. I've never met her before. I'm in my own head. I'm thinking, I'm here to reunite with my biological mother, and I thought to myself, I've never met her before. That sounds weird. You should tell her what you mean by that. Don't be a weirdo.

So I said, it might interest you to know that she's my biological mother and I'm [00:13:00] meeting her for the first time right now. And the guard, this person who's like churning people through these turnstiles with zero emotion, looks at me with bright eyes, smiles and looks her up in the computer and dials the phone. Like her whole demeanor changed and she points me to where I'm going through the turnstile and wished me luck.

And I'll just never forget that day. I stood there on that elevator going down and I'm looking in the reflection of the elevator doors and I'm fixing my tie. I am tugging at my suit. I'm trying to look my absolute best. And the door opened and this woman is standing in front of me and she looks at me, like holy….. And I said, oh my God, that's gotta be her.

So she had gotten up from her desk to come receive me at reception. Meanwhile, I'm coming downstairs to go to her desk. And a piece that I left out, I had put [00:14:00] in my introductory letter, a photo of myself, my son, and my wife so she knew what I looked like. I had no idea who I was looking for. So when she saw me, her jaw dropped, and it was just a jaw drop that was unmistakable, like we are here in this moment together.

And I practically dove out of that elevator onto her shoulders. I wrapped her in a big, huge hug and I cried on her shoulder and she cried on me. And it was just an amazing moment. And I whispered in her ear, happy birthday. And it was just. I'll never have a moment like that again. It was just absolutely incredible and it was so fulfilling to then build a relationship based on what I feel is a very fortunate unfolding of my own reunion story.

Because as you and I both know, having interviewed hundreds of people, they do not always go that well. And so I feel extremely fortunate for her receptivity, her close proximity, for her openness in telling my story to me about how it was that I was conceived, who she thought my birth father was, and the whole shebang. [00:15:00]

I was very, very fortunate in how that all went down.

Haley Radke: Can I pause you there? Because I saw that you had even some news coverage about your reunion and we've all seen those stories and Damon's was like that. It was the happy reunion, the picture-perfect kind of thing. The heartwarming one that gets shared across social media.

And I don't know if it was shared on socials, it was a few years ago now, but you know what I'm talking about. And I am curious what your thoughts are now, knowing what you do and having talked to so many people, what do you think is going through that security guard's mind when she hears that story and the people that read that article and have that heartwarming oh my goodness, this is like so beautiful?

Thinking of the reunion moment, what do you think is going on [00:16:00] in their mind subconsciously that this is such a heartwarming thing?

Damon Davis: Yeah. I think they have, you know, we make the joke about Hallmark made for TV movies that are intended to tear you down and build you back up with heart-wrenching stories that end in bright lights and roses and all kinds of warm, heartwarming stories.

And I think that this is the challenge with that kind of publicity for a story like mine and others is that it perpetuates the narrative that adoption reunions are awesome, and you and I and our listeners know they are not always awesome. Even mine did not have ultimate awesomeness all throughout it.

They all have their ups and downs, and I think that this is part of the value of your and my show, is that it's real, it's reality. It's stories told by the adoptees about [00:17:00] how it perhaps didn't go so well. You'll never see a story on the news that played as much as mine did. Mine was on the next morning at 7, 9, 11, 12, 5 and 7 o’clock. They played it the whole next 24-hour news cycle.

Now, if my story had been, I reached out to try to find my biological mother and my social worker Lee found an obituary or reached out and she said she was summarily uninterested in speaking with me. That's not gonna make the news, but that is, I think, a significant portion of the stories that you and I help to tell that don't get told more broadly on the news, on social media and stuff like that.

I've never seen a tweet that says, hey, I just reached out for my biological mother and I wanted to share the story of finding her obituary. I mean, you do, but it's not in a celebratory manner.

Haley Radke: That's not going viral.

Damon Davis: Exactly. That's not the [00:18:00] positive news story that gets shared broadly. You're right, you've helped me to articulate what I was trying to say.

Haley Radke: I always struggle with words for this part. Like deep down those people that are reading it and thinking this is just super heartwarming. There's gotta be something underneath that's like, huh, I don't know if this was the way it was originally supposed to be and now they're back together. There's some kind of hint of that.

Like what's so heartwarming about reconnecting if there wasn't a brokenness in being disconnected in the first place?

Damon Davis: Yeah, that's a really good point and it's a great question, and I think that also is part of the value of the platform that you and I have chosen is it helps people to understand everything that happened up until that moment of reunion, right?

So you and I, we've had guests on our shows that have expressed true gratitude, immense love and appreciation for the adoptive [00:19:00] parents that they were reared with. And many of us will often say, I can't imagine my life a different way than what I went through. However, there's a great many people who before that reunion moment went through immense adversity, almost inhumane treatment.

Some stories that we've covered just make you look at other humans and go, how could you be like that to a child, another person? Even if it was an adult, how could you treat somebody that way? And that's the part that doesn't get covered in the five o'clock news heartwarming story. And it's the kind of thing, like what's the documentary that many of us saw? Three Identical Strangers.

That is a classic example of that kind of thing because on the outside, people across New York and that whole area up there, we're seeing these three brothers brought together starting a restaurant and bar and hanging out all the time and joking and [00:20:00] living it up. But it wasn't until more recently when these stories started to come out in their entirety that you start to see that those brothers were actually pretty troubled by the fact that they were separated at birth as part of an experiment.

They were challenged to make some of their successes continue, and challenged to think through what would it have been like had I lived with my brothers, of which there were two others that I didn't know until I was an adult. These are the kinds of things that have an initial wave of warm feeling when you only get the headline. But it's not until you get to dive into the entirety of the story, which you and I facilitate, that you really get to see the full picture.

And it's just like so many other stories, they have their ups and downs. It's like a marriage; it's like raising a child. It's like trying to navigate your professional life. It has its ups and downs. And adoption is a prime example of how you [00:21:00] can start off on one end of the spectrum and potentially end up on the other. You could have a great adoption and a terrible reunion. You could have an awful adoption and amazing reunions.

You just never know how any of this stuff is gonna unfold. And I talk about that a lot. I did a blog post where I talked about the adoption journey, almost like you know the control board that you have there for your sound, your mixer thing, and it's got all these dials on it, right? You could turn any one of those dials on the adoption board and get a completely different story, right?

You could take myself and put me into a family, a white family, and put me in the Midwest. So you change locality and you change the ethnicity of the parents. And I have a totally different story. You take me and you put me in South America or Africa, and you adopt me internationally into a new name, the family type, and you change the dial on the geographic area and you've got a totally different [00:22:00] story.

And I think, that's one of the things that I enjoy about being the host of a show that allows for the cultivation and the extraction of those stories, is that you get to hear the richness of what happens to a variety of people, of different religions, of different socioeconomic backgrounds, from different geographic areas, etc., telling their story about how it unfolded for them.

So it's just, it's really fascinating. But you're right, they don't all make the news in a heartwarming way.

Haley Radke: Okay. I am gonna dig some more. Damon. You've said you're a really positive person. You exude gratitude even in your book you're expressing some of that right at the beginning. And you do talk about coming out of the fog, and I know you know what that lingo is. I'm wondering if your perspective on adoption has shifted over the course of doing more and [00:23:00] more interviews with adoptees?

I don't know if a lot of people know you are actually an adoptive parent yourself in an in-family circumstance. And I don't know, there's a lot of things in adoptee land where we have big feelings about lots of different topics, but I'm curious for you how things have morphed and changed if they have.

Damon Davis: It's a great question because I'm influenced by multiple different factors. As you've said, I am an adoptee myself. I have adopted two children within my in-law family, so I raised two kids from their preteen years. Each of them came to us when they were nine years old, respectively, and we've raised them through adulthood.

I will admit that they have struggled. There are reasons why children are in need of a home and that was how they came to live with us. They had needs that the family wasn't entirely able to fulfill. And [00:24:00] we were in a strategic position to do that. And we took on the challenge gratefully, willingly, because I'm an adoptee and I was open to it anyway.

However, I will admit that I've heard stories from some of my guests and I just think to myself, geez, I wish that person could have stayed with their biological mother or father, right? But on the flip side, I'll admit that personally, one of my kids has a child and the child, my child, is not doing that great.

And it's now putting their child in a really tough position. And so adoption is on the table and I can now see why a parent who is in a bad place and is not able to care appropriately for a child, might need to place them somewhere else for that child's welfare. So I will admit, I remain very confused by the whole thing because [00:25:00] I'm just being honest with you, I can see why there are some people who are very fervent in our community that are like, no adoption. Never, ever.

And I respect the position that they come from and the experiences that they have. But I will say on the opposite end of the spectrum, I think there are some children out there who will be in grave danger if they are not extracted from the places where they currently live to potentially have a better or alternative chance at their life in a different place.

So I don't think there's any one answer. I think it's literally case by case and it should be devoid of opinion. It should be based on facts. It should be based on what is in the best interest of the child and that child's safety. And those are the only blanket statements I'm willing to make about it because it's just too hard. It's too hard.

Haley Radke: It's so complicated. I totally get that. And I've heard recently [00:26:00], I was watching a discussion about adoption versus legal guardianship and how that can impact and all the complexities in the foster care system and how systemic issues of racism and injustices keep being perpetuated.

So it is terribly complex and it's very hard to make a blanket determination, I think. But I appreciate you addressing that because I think some people like yourself will be stigmatized by other adoptees who are not grateful whatsoever, and nor do they need to be, but I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about that.

Damon Davis: Yeah, I appreciate it.

Haley Radke: Okay. I paused you. We took a detour. Let's go back to your story.

Damon Davis: Yeah, no problem. So we've talked a lot about my biological mother, and I think it's only fair to speak about my biological father too, because there's a fascinating story on that side. And that's kind of the interesting piece of all of these [00:27:00] biological reunion journeys is that they don't necessarily unfold the way you think.

I'll have guests on the show and I'll think to myself, I know where this is going. This person found their biological mother and then they found their father and blah, blah, blah. And they will throw a curve ball, and I'm just like, oh my God. That's what you get for settling in and getting comfortable and thinking you know everything, genius, 'cause you don't.

Haley Radke: I've made some similar assumptions, just so you know.

Damon Davis: Yeah, and I'm glad you can admit that too. It's just crazy. You start to settle in and you think, I can see where this is going, and they just take a hard left turn and you're like, whoa.

So mine had an interesting story along those lines as well. So I had a phenomenal relationship with my biological mother. We were in reunion for six years before she passed away, sadly. She bought a house, retired from the federal government, moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. And, I'm not even kidding you, within several months she was gone.

So it was an interesting time for me because [00:28:00] obviously the woman who carried me, brought me into this world, had passed on and we had only just had several years of relationship. We hadn't even gotten into double digits. So it was sad to have lost her, but it was phenomenal to have ever known her in the first place, which is something that many adoptees don't get.

And I feel incredibly fortunate for having ever spoken to her, come face to face with her, gotten a chance to hug her and talk to her about my story. It was just amazing. But what happened after she passed was I realized I have an opportunity here to seek out this biological father whom when I would speak with her about my story, I could sense the pain in her voice of how it unfolded.

So I said, you know what? While she was alive, I said, I'm not looking for this guy right now. I'm good. She's good, I'm good. This is good. Let me just stay right here. But after she passed away, I said, I can't hurt her if I find this guy. And I decided to do it. So I did the classic thing. I [00:29:00] started internet searching and trying to find this guy's name, and he had a very basic name that brought back thousands of guys across all social media platforms and stuff.

And I was just like, I'm never gonna find this dude. So I was finally able to track him down based on some characteristics that she told me about him, that he was a Detroit police officer. I think she gave me his name. So I was finally able to find some archives about a police officer with this guy's name. And I tracked him down and I wrote him a letter and I said, I think you might be the guy.

And it was such a weird experience because I gave him all my contact information and he called me on the phone and it's this loud, booming voice. He is very dramatic in his speech and all this other stuff, and he's really overbearing. And I was just like, ugh, this doesn't feel right at all. I just [00:30:00] couldn't feel any of the same kind of connection that I had when I spoke with Ann.

And so I was immediately standoffish with him and through a series of different phone conversations it just got weirder and weirder. And I was like, you know what? I think I'm gonna let this die. I don't really feel like I need to meet this guy at all. And probably a year or two went by and it just hit me. You know what, man, if you don't see your biological father face to face, he could pass and you will have lost this opportunity.

You might not like him, but you might have to suck it up and go out there and meet 'em. And you meet 'em one time and you don't have to ever meet 'em again. And right about the time that I made that decision, I texted him and we talked about it for a minute, and he was like, are you sure I'm the right guy?

And I said I know how this whole thing works and she said you were there. So I have an eye-witness to your presence. And so he said [00:31:00] have you seen my name on anything? And it started to put questions in my head like, you're right, it's possible that we're not right.

And so he suggested that we do a blood test, and he called me back and he said, I got a great idea. Let's do it on the Maury Povich show and do a big reveal. And I was just like, that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard in my life.

Haley Radke: Yikes.

Damon Davis: So shortly after that little exchange he sent me a note in the mail and it was very definitive. I'm sorry Mr. Davis. I'm not the guy. And I was like, how does he know this and how can he reject me? I said he was the guy. How could you? That's not cool. And I had some feelings about it for a while, and then I just said, you know what? I didn't really like that dude anyway, so I just have to try to get over this and let it go.

And it was in that moment that my immediate family was doing some DNA testing of our own, because my wife's [00:32:00] mother, my mother-in-law, is also an adoptee from Canada. And she never had any desire to search for her story at all. And so we are now in this era of a lot of very easily accessible, consumer-friendly DNA testing.

And so we were like, hey, let's spit in some tubes and find out about some people. And I'm thinking to myself, it's also gonna give me some additional information about Seth, my son, because I only know a piece of my family tree and so I only know an even smaller piece of his. Therefore, knowing something about my mother-in-law and her lineage is going to help me fill out his story and beyond.

So we submitted our Ancestry DNA tests, and they came back. Mine came back first and I didn't even really pay that much attention to it because when I met Ann, my biological mother, I had already done 23andMe with her. So the whole gravitas and [00:33:00] surprise and deep interest in what the DNA test was revealing had already washed away six years ago when I first met her.

So when I got my Ancestry DNA test, I didn't pay two seconds of attention to it. I was more interested in my wife's and my son’s because they had pieces that I didn't know at all. When theirs came back. I saw some really cool stuff that Ancestry did, like global migration patterns and this is where your people come from.

And it was just so fascinating that I decided to dig into ancestor DNA on my own record, and it was there, where one night I'm sitting in bed digging into my own record, not even thinking about any of the relationships that I wanted, because again, over on 23andMe I had four or five sixth cousins, whatever, reaching out, saying, hey, and it just was too far off in the distance to really build any meaningful relationships.

So I started getting those relationship connections again, and I didn't look at it at all on Ancestry DNA, but then [00:34:00] I just peeked in on it and I had a very close match and it said parent-child relationship. And my jaw dropped and I'm staring at the screen like, you gotta be kidding me. Who?

So I'm clicking on this thing and it says, extremely high confidence. Parent-child relationship, this person is your father. It doesn't say anything like you might wanna check into this 'cause this seems pretty interesting, in print, like close. They were definitive in their proclamation that the person I was connected to was my father.

And it was not the initials of the man's name who Ann had given me and I had connected with in Detroit. It was a different dude, which lent itself to even more confusion 'cause I'm like, wait. She said it was that guy, but science says it's this guy. And so I'm going round and round in my head.

So I message them, they don't [00:35:00] reply. I message again, they don't reply. I sent another message and I'm like, look, I don't want anything, but I'm an adoptee. I've got nothing. And this guy's popping up on my screen, you gotta tell me something. We don't have to say anything to anybody else in the family, but I would like to talk about this for a few minutes.

And lo and behold, a couple of days later on a Saturday, I'm driving along and I get a call from a family member who is, interestingly, this is a white descendant of mine in the South, and they were slave owners back in the day. They had done a very extensive sort of family search for all of these people that were connected to them because while doing their own Ancestry DNA.

They started to see that their DNA heritage was bringing up a lot of black people as connected to their family. So they started reaching out, trying to learn more and more about how far this went. [00:36:00] And among them was my biological father, Bill White. So to cut a story a little bit short, they finally agreed to connect me with Bill White, who lives out in Las Vegas.

And coincidentally, I spoke with him by phone the night before I'm leaving for a family trip to Los Angeles and I was like, look, I'm gonna be in your neighborhood. I'm in Los Angeles tomorrow and you're in Las Vegas. And he said, yeah, let's see about connecting. He was really receptive, which was refreshing because the other guy was very confrontational, I don't know how to put it. It wasn't like a warm, fuzzy fit.

And Bill was like, oh, wow. Huh, I had no idea. Wow. This felt like it was an interesting, cool development for him. And he was 80 plus at the time. And he's still alive. I don't mean to talk about him in the past tense, it was just the past tense of the story.

So we took a day-trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, and I meet this guy, and I tell you, I looked at him and [00:37:00] I thought I looked like my biological mother when I first saw her. But then my wife took a picture of myself and Bill next to each other with Seth in the picture as well. And I'm looking at the way we smile and squint our eyes and all kinds of stuff.

And I was like, I look just like this dude. It was crazy. And we ended up developing a great relationship. It turned out he was a genealogist, which Ann had also been. So between the two of them, never having met them before in my life, within a very short time of meeting each of them, they were both able to hand me an entire family tree, full lineage with stories about every person in it, almost.

It was just astonishing to make this connection and we continue to have a good relationship. I called him a couple of weeks ago when I was in LA and we had a great chat and it's just really great to find connectivity, reach a place of peace that you didn't know you [00:38:00] were actually needing.

And to hear the stories about yourself and your own bloodline. You accept the stories of your adopted family because that's the story you grow up in. But when, as you alluded to earlier, you come out of the fog and you acknowledge what adoption actually means. That you are a child of a different family's lineage. I don't think there are that many people who don't have some level of curiosity about that.

I think the folks who don't search are likely suppressing that curiosity. And you can get really good at it, especially if all of your needs are met. If you've got a great loving home, you are not wanting for anything, you've reached to some level of what you decide is success in your life, whether that's building your own family, your own career, traveling the world, whatever those things are, and you're not really feeling like that is an answer you need. It's easy to suppress that. [00:39:00]

And I'm not saying that people have to resurrect it and dig deep to search. I'm simply saying I do think it is within everybody to some degree when you reach that realization, that adoption means you came from somewhere else. And it has been an incredible journey to find these adults that I came from, hear the story about what they were doing when they were adults and how this whole thing came to fruition to bring me into this world.

And it's been incredibly enlightening to then turn my story into a passion for hearing other people's stories, starting the podcast and writing the book. It's just been amazing.

Haley Radke: Oh, wow. Thank you for sharing your story. You go into it way more in your memoir. And I love hearing those little excerpts from your voice. It's so good. I love that you addressed that feeling that some adoptees might be suppressing that desire. Because I was [00:40:00] gonna ask you about that.

Your show really does focus on the search and reunion, or if they're finding someone, like finding a grave, or those kinds of things that happen, too, which is very sad. I was just challenged recently on asking everyone, when did you decide you wanted to search? And just being challenged on that not everybody wants to and that's okay.

So thank you for saying that. I think that acknowledges that part of our community that just doesn't have that desire for whatever reason. I think it's time for us to do recommended resources, but that is gonna give me a chance to ask you another question. So of course, I'm gonna recommend your podcast.

You have almost 130 episodes already and more coming and there's just so many different stories. I love how you've covered all kinds of different topics. And so if you like Adoptees On, you're gonna love Who am I Really? [00:41:00] because it's more adoptee stories. And you have a really beautiful way of producing the show, and I really enjoy that.

I also wanna talk about your memoir, and I bought the hard copy in my hands. And I started reading it. And here's how you know that I have listened to a number of episodes of your show because I started reading it and you were talking in my head. I was reading it in your voice, and I will admit I got a little bit irritated and I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna read it in audiobook. So I bought the audiobook instead.

So I listened and that was such a great experience. I loved hearing your voice tell me the stories and not all adopting memoirs are available in audio. You can get it on Audible and I just really enjoyed that. And another special thing about Damon’s book in audio is you have a section where you [00:42:00] give the eulogy after your adoptive father passes, and you actually have the audio of you sharing that and it's so powerful.

Damon Davis: That was the moment, boy, I tell you. It brings me to tears right now, man. I tell you, I had the foresight to when my father passed in, I think, 2017, I knew that I was gonna be the focus as his only child of giving the speech at his celebration of life.

And so I was the final speaker and I put my phone up on the podium and I just said, you wrote it, you should record it 'cause you can't be in the audience to hear it and you're gonna want to hear it later. And I didn't listen to it for years and I'm glad that I did record it because as you've said, in doing the audio book, there was a moment when I talk about losing my father.

And it was really powerful to be able to bring back the very moment in my own words, when I laid him to rest, for all intents and [00:43:00] purposes, in front of an audience and to hear the things that I said and the expression of gratitude for his life as it applied to mine.

To put that in an audiobook is just absolutely amazing. I feel so fortunate that I had the foresight to think to put my phone up on the podium. And if you listen closely at the end of my speech, you'll hear my son say, great speech, dad. It's the cutest.

Haley Radke: Okay. I have to go re-listen for that. Okay. I did not think we were gonna have a cry today, and it wasn't me.

Damon Davis: I'm an emotional dude, man. There's no question about it. And I cry with my guests too. I don't know about you, but

Haley Radke: Oh, gimme a break. I'm a disaster half the time. Anyway, I thank you for sharing that. And again, there's something about the power of audio for me. That's of course that's what I do. But I've always been like that.

And so to [00:44:00] hear you read your words and to hear your eulogy, all of those things are just really powerful. So if you have been listening to Who Am I Really? And I'm not converting you to be a listener, then, and you haven't got Damon’s book on audio, you gotta get it. There, because you'll for sure love it.

Okay. My question for you. That was a long lead up to this question. I want you to address what the words “Who am I really?” mean to you?

Damon Davis: When I crafted the idea for the podcast, I was driving down I-95 and it just hit me that I've spoken to so many adoptees before I had even recorded a story.

They all had this thematic piece to them of the search and reunion component where the people were wondering who they actually were as it applied to their biological family, to their natural relatives, and it just jumped out at me that that was what I was asking myself. [00:45:00] Who am I really in this world of an adopted family and a family out there that I don't even know?

Who am I really as it applies to them? And so it just seemed like such a natural fit for any adoptee who may be out there wondering to themself where they fit in the entire mix. And I thought of that title and I never looked back. There was no list of titles or anything like that; it just hit me and I ran with it.

Haley Radke: I love it when that happens. Okay. Do you have a specific episode that you think you could recommend to people? Or is there a search? This is gonna sound a little bit out there, but you and I both have a lot of episodes. So sometimes to a new listener, it's a little bit overwhelming where to start.

So do you have one or two that you're like, oh, you should listen to this one, or search on my website for whatever, late discovery or something like that?

Damon Davis: Yeah, no, it's a great question. I'll tell you, for [00:46:00] folks who haven't listened, you should definitely listen to Episode 100. Haley tells her story on there, and I was grateful to her for being a guest. And it sounds like I'm playing up to the host here, but I'm being serious about that because oftentimes the person behind the camera, the person who is the writer, the person who is the interviewer or host, doesn't often get out to tell their own stories.

And so I wanted to make sure that I got to hear who Haley is and how she got to where she is doing this podcast for herself. So if you haven't listened, we're gonna exchange show guests here, and I'm gonna say definitely listen to Haley's, but there's such a breadth of stories on my show. It's hard to pinpoint them.

I will often tell the story of a recent guest. She is an Ethiopian descendant who was brought to this country, terrorized as a child, sent back to Ethiopia and came back again and found her sister. And is finding her way through adulthood after just tremendous [00:47:00] adversity. I think that her show is highly impactful.

There was a guy who tells this great story of searching for his biological mother and as he's sitting in the public library, internet searching or microfiche searching. I think it was a long time ago. This image starts to unfold very slowly on this old computer. And you can just imagine the line going up as the computer generates this image. And it was a picture of his mother in her wedding dress. And he said, I'd never seen her before. And here's this beautiful, angelic woman appearing before me for the first time. There are so many episodes: one where a woman is reunited with her biological father and she had been married in the prior years, but her father was not able to walk her down the aisle, nor do a father-daughter dance. So she invited him to do a father-daughter dance in her backyard, which was so cute to me.

And another guy who went [00:48:00] on this journey to try to find his biological family. And he ends up searching through records and he ends up contacting the hospital where he was born. And he said he slipped the lady in the records room, this is 30 years ago. He slipped the right lady in the records room a sum of money and said, I want all of the names of all of the women who gave birth on my birthday. And she slips him a list and he ends up contacting his birth mother and he decides I don't want to actually meet her and let her know who I am.

I just wanna meet her and not let her know who I am. So I'll cut his story short, but he knocks on her door and after a couple of conversations there, she invites him in and they're talking in her kitchen and he's freaking out. He's standing in his birth mother's kitchen and her back is turned and he reaches for the calendar on her wall. And he flips it up and he sees his own birthday circled on her calendar.

The stories are just unbelievable. And those are [00:49:00] just a couple of the ones that stand out for me. I could go on and on. So you know, I say to anybody who's listening to your or my show, just pick one, dive in. Because they're all so vastly different. All these different lives and different experiences.

Haley Radke: And it's just about hearing adoptee voices. Adoptee voices matter. And I love that you're highlighting that so, thank you. What did you wanna recommend to us?

Damon Davis: I wanna recommend a different resource. There's a guy online, his name's Greg. What's Greg's last name?

Haley Radke: Luce. L-U-C-E. Luce.

Damon Davis: Yeah. He runs the Adoptee Rights Law website and I find it to be a fascinating resource because he has all of these different maps. For one, the “United States of OBC” talking about where you can find your original birth certificate. He's got an interactive map of OBC access. So he can tell you things about whether your state has unrestricted access to your OBC, whether there are [00:50:00] some restrictions, and he calls it compromised in terms of your access, or completely restricted as in you're not getting your OBC in that state.

And I just think it's a valuable resource because there's a lot of questions about where to start in the adoptee search and reunion journey. And starting with knowing the laws for either the state where you were born or the state where you live, the state where you think you were conceived, whatever that thing is, having some kind of resource that you can go back to, I think, is incredibly valuable.

So I would highly recommend the Adoptee Rights Law Center, and it's at adopteerightslaw.com. Lots of valuable information there.

Haley Radke: Awesome. I love Greg. I met him at a conference a little while ago now and he's a great guy, a very amazing adoptee advocate, so that's a great recommendation.

Thank you so much, Damon. I just really appreciated hearing your story from your own voice and I'd love for you to share where people can hear the podcast and connect [00:51:00] with you online.

Damon Davis: Absolutely. You can find the podcast online at whoamireallypodcast.com. You can follow the show on Twitter at waireally and you can follow me there. I send out tweets with quotes from each of the shows. There's so many different ways that you can express how a show goes down and I try for getting the shows to live on in perpetuity.

I've been recording them to YouTube as well. So I now have a library, a channel on YouTube where you can listen to any one of the shows. There's nothing visual. You're not gonna see me or my guests, but it's just a straight slideshow with the audio. And you can find the podcast anywhere you get your podcasts.

They're all over Amazon, Apple, any podcast platform, it's out there. So check it out and let me know what you think of the show and feel free to reach out if you would like to be a guest. There's a form on my website: whoamireallypodcast.com/share. You can write in to [00:52:00] be a guest on the show if you would like to tell your story as well.

So, thank you so much, Haley. It's been great to be here with you today.

Haley Radke: Wonderful, my honor.

One of the best things I have found as a podcaster, an independent indie podcaster, is that there is a real spirit of community and helping share resources, education, and I have always found that to be true, that it's not necessarily this big source of competition, but it's more collaborative and I really appreciate that about Damon.

And there's other adoptee podcasters that I've had on the show before. We've recommended each other's shows. And I think that you've seen that and I really appreciate that about the adoptee podcaster space, which in itself is very niche. [00:53:00]

But, like I said, there's so many adoptee podcasts that you can listen to. There are people sharing their own personal story. There's other interview shows. Anything you can think of that is adoption related, there are some really talented adoptees leading conversations in that area, so I'd encourage you, if that's your thing, to branch out and look for some other adoptee-led podcasts. I think that you will be greatly blessed by doing that.

And the other thing is, this podcast and so many adoptee podcasts would not be possible without your support. So if you love Adoptees On, if you want it to grow and reach more adoptees, to connect to the community and do all of those things that I strive to do, be educational and entertaining and a support in your earbuds.

So we can hang out every week. I love doing that for you. If you want that to continue, one of the best ways you can do that is sharing [00:54:00] the show with one other person that you know is adopted, especially picking one episode that you think they would enjoy and showing them how to listen to it.

And the second is becoming a monthly Patreon supporter. If you go to adopteeson.com/partner, you can find out details of how to support the show. You get bonuses. There is a bonus podcast every single week that I do, mostly with my friend Carrie Cahill Mulligan, who's also an adult adoptee. And we talk adoption topics. We talk nonsense, we talk things that we would never share ever in a million years on the main feed.

But we do share them with our closest friends who have been, some of them have become close friends, supporters of the podcast. So adopteeson.com/partner has details for that. And there's a couple other levels of support where you can access a private Facebook group for adoptees only. You can schedule a call with me, which has been really fun. [00:55:00] And I've been doing Zoom calls here and there, which I'm gonna be continuing.

So if any of those things sound good to you, go to adopteeson.com/partner and sign up today. I'd love to have you as a supporter. Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.

156 Astrid Castro

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/156

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This show is listener supported. You can join us and help our show grow to support more adoptees by going to adopteeson.com/partner.

You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is Episode 156, Astrid Castro. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Our guest today is Astrid Castro, founder of Adoption Mosaic. Astrid serves the adoption constellation through a variety of innovative trainings designed to highlight the adoptee experience.

We discuss how she came to work in the adoption industry, the current state of ethics in adoption, and what it's like working in such a challenging space, especially as an adopted person. We wrap up with some recommended resources and, as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com.

Let's listen in. [00:01:00] I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees on, Astrid Castro. Welcome Astrid.

Astrid Castro: Hello. Thank you so much.

Haley Radke: I'm so happy we're finally talking. I've seen you online for years and doing some really good work, and so it's so exciting to connect. Finally, I'd love it if you would start and share your story with us.

Astrid Castro: Thank you, Haley. I ditto. I have watched you and followed your work for years and it's so exciting to be here. So, my personal adoption story starts about 45 years ago when my sister and I were about four and a half and six years old in Colombia. We had been taken to an orphanage and we didn't know by who.

We were left there and then stayed in the orphanage for a very short amount of time, and then were adopted by a family here in the [00:02:00] United States. They were living on the east coast in Massachusetts, Wayland, Massachusetts, at the time and they were a couple who had not been able to experience pregnancy and they had tried for many years.

So when they finally decided to stop trying to have a biological child, they went ahead and adopted my sister and I from Columbia. And it's interesting depending on which parent you ask. We all have our own stories. I don't think I realized that when I first asked them in my twenties.

I asked them separately. I did an interview for a college essay, and I asked them separately the story about why they adopted us and what they had hoped for and why they adopted older siblings. And I was pretty sick when I came. Why they [00:03:00] chose a sibling group with one of the kids who was pretty sick, and so forth and so on.

And we knew that they had never been to Colombia, so I was really curious as to why they chose Columbia, of all the countries that they could have chosen. And in this interview process, I just pretended that my professor had asked me to interview them and ask these really deep personal questions.

And I think that really speaks volumes to us adoptees who, I feel, have the right to this knowledge. I don't think we should have to feel that we're being sneaky to get information about what I think is our birthright, our birth stories, our birth. Our existence into the family that we live in, why we are with that family, we have the right to know the depths of those if we choose to.

And I know that there's a lot of adoptees who are like I don't need to know the details. I know enough. And [00:04:00] I was the kid who wanted to know every detail, every thought that went behind it. And I needed to know that there was a process, that there was a thoughtful process because I needed to matter enough that there was a process that showed the value of who we were in their family and how we came into their family.

And so I asked my parents, it had to be an interview that was asked separately, so I asked my parents separately the exact same questions. And I wanna say maybe I had 10 questions that I asked each of them, but I had to ask them exactly the same way separately. They couldn't be in the room. And it was on the phone.

And the first question was, how long did you try to have a birth child before adopting us? And my mom had said, oh, about seven years. And my dad had said 10 years. And I remember thinking, wait a second. That's a really big difference. That's a gap of [00:05:00] three years that one person seemed to be trying and the other person had stopped emotionally. Maybe emotionally, maybe physically, and that the other person hadn't.

And I think that also speaks volumes to the era and the time. My parents didn't talk a whole lot about this process. I remember in my twenties when I heard that, it was more frustrating than it was understanding and knowledgeable. For me, it was frustrating. I remember saying to myself, did the two of you talk to each other during this process? Like, how is this possible that your stories are so different?

The other question I asked was, why did you adopt from Columbia? You didn't speak the language, you didn't speak Spanish, you had never been there and you didn't have anybody in your life that was Colombian. And I was just really curious as to why Colombia. And at the time, they weren't able [00:06:00] to travel to Colombia, so we had an escort that brought us to the states.

And so when I asked them that question, my mom, she's the kind of person who wants to paint such a beautiful picture, wants us to know that we come from a beautiful place. So she said we chose Columbia because the people are so kind and wonderful and loving and, oh my gosh, the landscape is just incredible. We also knew that there were a lot of children in orphanages at the time that needed permanency.

And you asked my dad and he said, we tried to go through the foster care system here in the States and they said, you can't move for three to five years. And my job moved me all the time. And so we decided to go with an international agency. And the reason we picked Columbia was because it was the country that would get us to getting to start our family the quickest.

And so [00:07:00] once again, that experience was just two very different experiences on their part, which in my early twenties just confused me. I share this story because I think it really has propelled me in a lot of the work that I do.

Which is how do we create space to tell, to communicate such an important piece. So I work with adoptive parents all the time. And so how are you communicating? How are you making these decisions? Are these decisions the best decisions for you and your family? Is transracial adoption even something that you should be considering, or should you not?

And how do couples gather information that is not biased by an agency or not biased by an attorney. And instead Adoption Mosaic is an organization which is not either an agency or an [00:08:00] attorney agency. We provide education and adoption support.

So, hearing my parents say that was really confusing, really hard for me. And when, later in life, I realized that each of us have our own experiences and I was able to just hold that for what it was, it really helpful to figure out how to do that, to say that each of my parents had their own experience and their own reasoning and their own justification for how and why they decided to adopt the two of us.

So, throughout our childhood, my sister was the kid who was the compliance child who got good grades, didn't stir the pot. She was the older one of the two of us. She was the one that never really talked much about adoption, never asked any questions about our birth family or Colombia.

And then, I, on the [00:09:00] other hand, was exactly the opposite, I was not compliant. I was always getting in trouble. It wasn't until I was 14 that I was diagnosed with severe dyslexia, and I say severe. So to the point of I had gone through my entire education and had tricked the system into thinking that I knew how to read, but I didn't.

And so then I was pulled out of regular school, high school. In my last four years, I went to Carroll High School, which was a school that was focused for and specialized in dyslexic teaching and dyslexia. So I went to that school and graduated from high school and swore I would never go back to school 'cause I hated it so much. It was awful.

Haley Radke: But somehow you have a degree. So I feel like something else happened.

Astrid Castro: [00:10:00] Something else did happen. I found my path, right? And for those of us who struggle in traditional academia, if we find our path and it's clear that continuing our education is necessary, we have a tendency to figure it out and do it.

And that's exactly what happened. I took some time off from school and snowboarded and became a professional snowboarder for a couple years and traveled. And I met my husband snowboarding. He was a professional snowboarder as well. We traveled and did the World Cup and raced in Europe.

My ex-husband is Italian, born and raised in Italy, and so we were racing a lot in Europe and doing tours. I also lived in Colorado and was on Team [00:11:00] Breckenridge. And during that experience I had a lot of downtime in the summer during dry land training and I decided that I would volunteer during my off-season.

I would volunteer at an adoption agency. That was what I was gonna do. I thought my adoption turned out pretty good. Like my parents, I am pretty content and pretty happy where I am in my life, and I wanna give back to an adoption agency and support adoptions. However, I also was very aware of how my transracial adoption experience affected my life and affected it negatively.

And so I also was frustrated and upset that my parents had not received any support or training or anything around race and adopting older children. I now identify as an immigrant. [00:12:00] That's a super interesting conversation to me. Adoptees who were internationally adopted and many of us don't identify as immigrants. Instead, we identify as adopted people, which is really interesting that we haven't been given the rite of passage, if you will.

It is different, I think, than a traditional immigrant family coming to the states. Absolutely. It is different. And my sister and I, being four and a half and six years old, I think we could have really benefited from being seen as immigrants to receive some services.

I think my dyslexia was highlighted, I will say, and it probably didn't help the fact that I was dyslexic as far as trying to learn another language and learn English before starting kindergarten. That was the goal that us girls had to get English [00:13:00] down really well.

My mother hired a Spanish-speaking nanny to help out for the transition. As soon as the agency found out that she had done that, they said no, no, no, you need to let her go. Find an English-speaking nanny because we need these girls speaking English before they start kindergarten.

So all of those things were in the back of my head, even though I wanted to volunteer and support an agency, I wanted to find the right agency. I wasn't super supportive of international adoption. And so I wanted to find a domestic agency. That specialized in domestic adoption and, granted I was 18 years old, so please keep that in mind, I

Haley Radke: Just, okay, so Astrid, you could see me cringing, right? And so just hang in with us, guys, like we're going, oh, she's learned so much. We've all learned a [00:14:00] lot from when we were younger.

Astrid Castro: Exactly. So I decided that I was going to call the agencies. Look, it was back in the day when we had phonebooks and I opened up the yellow pages to the word “adoption” and saw there were a ton of attorneys, but also decided I was gonna call all. I wanna say there were maybe seven or eight, maybe seven adoption agencies in the area.

And I was gonna call each one and I was trying to think of a way that I could find out whether they have ethical practices or not? And so I called and I said that I was pregnant. I said I was pregnant and I was looking for an agency to place my baby. [00:15:00] And looking back on that now, and with all of the first mothers and birth mothers that I know, there's a part of me that's really proud of myself that I did that.

And there's a part of me that has a lot of shame that I did that, because infiltrating as something that I am not, which was a woman who was pregnant trying to make a plan for my baby, and yet I felt at the time, at 18, that would be my kind of right to the point, that I would instantly know how somebody who was calling, who was pregnant, who was looking to find an agency, how that individual would be treated.

I told them that I was Latina, that I was brown and I told them that the father was African American. I wasn't treated very well by any of them actually. And [00:16:00] I remember after every call hanging up and just being in shock. It was like, oh my gosh, I am being treated like this is a commodity. I am being treated with, Oh, okay, the baby's father is black. Well, we just don't have very many families. And just being talked to this way, it was such an eye-opening experience.

And it was one agency that I called and they said, oh, you know what, we are not a placement agency. We help do special recruitment for children who are in foster care, who have been in foster care for a very long time. And these kiddos need some additional recruitment and so we do, we help out with that. That was the Rocky Mountain Adoption Exchange.

And now there are lots of exchanges, Adopt US Kids [00:17:00] is a part of those programs and special recruitment for kids that are in foster care. And they said, however, here is an agency that we think that could help you and here are the questions that you might want to ask.

I felt like they were there to support me. They were there to help me be informed and make more of an informed decision, and they weren't even a placement agency. Then I hung up. I called back and I said, can I speak to your volunteer coordinator? I gave my real name and told them that I wanted to volunteer for them.

That's where my career started in this field. I was pushing papers and filing and I was doing anything anybody asked me to that needed help in the office. And I was helping with some fundraisers and so forth, and I would share my story openly. And I was there during dry land training. I was there quite a lot.

I wanna say there was a period of time that I [00:18:00] was there 20 hours a week and volunteering and just giving back. And feeling really good about that. And one day my volunteer coordinator, my supervisor said to me, Astrid, we have a prospective adoptive parent panel, because they did do some training for adoptive parents.

They had a contract through the state to offer some of these trainings, and they asked if I would be a panelist and just share my story. And they said all of the other panelists will be adoptive parents, but we've never had an adoptee speak. So I spoke. This was one of the first times outside of my snowboarding career that I felt heard and that I was good at something.

And all I was doing was storytelling. I was storytelling my experience of the things that my parents could have done better, the things that were really hard, the parts of being transracially [00:19:00] adopted, what I knew about my birth family's story, what I wanted to know, and just shared all of this stuff.

And I saw people sitting on the edge of their seats just so just absorbing and soaking this in. And I felt really empowered and I felt really good to have literally an audience that wanted to hear my story, that was there and absorbing this. And I could tell that people were listening in a way that they wanted to learn.

And at the end of that experience, I had people come up to me and make comments like as a result of you sharing your story, I am going to do things differently if we end up adopting and thank you. And in that moment, I knew that I was going to work in adoptions in some capacity. There you [00:20:00] have it.

Haley Radke: There you have it. Thank you for sharing that. So I mentioned I have the cringe moment whenever we talk about adoption agencies. I feel like on the show there's always like a little bit of a yucky feeling. I've shared so many times that I have a big passion for family preservation and, working for years in this field, all the unethical things that are going on.

In fact, part of your story is discovering some of that in your lived experience. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that, about discovering some of the unethical things that go on and how you try and balance that while still serving in some capacity in this field where there's some good things happening, but there's a lot of naughty things, very naughty things happening.

Astrid Castro: Yes. [00:21:00] Haley, I think that's something that I grapple with, I think about all the time. I would say that as soon as I stop thinking about that is when I need to stop doing the work that I'm doing. I feel that to be good at what I do I need to be asking those questions.

But also, and this is the hard part, creating space for, at the end of the day, we have thousands and thousands of children that are the results of this system, this corrupt system, this system that supports a lot of the things that I don't. And I think that is the number one, primary way that I remind myself, when I'm doing kids groups and when I'm doing trainings for [00:22:00] prospective adoptive parents, that I don't believe adoption is going to go away in my lifetime.

So how can I find a balance between these; I'm gonna ask my families that I work with really hard questions. I'm going to support their kids in a way that I think they need support. And that might not be super popular to the families. It might be hard for the families to have me hold them accountable. Why haven't you talked to your child about X, Y, and Z?

And back in the day, 25 years ago when I was new to this work, it was questions like, why haven't you told your child that they're adopted and that's not okay? And now it's, why aren't you creating space for your child to have these conversations about things that you have information on? You owe it [00:23:00] to your child to tell them everything they should know by the time that they are off on their own and not living with you.

They should have access to every piece of information that you have. The good, the bad, the ugly, and if the child were to read their paperwork that you have on file, that there are no surprises. And so those are the things. I think it's the hundreds and thousands of kids that I've worked with that I've realized that have benefited from the work that I do that helps me to navigate the industry that I have a lot of strong opinions about, about their practices and what's happening in industry at large.

Haley Radke: So there's so many of us that talk about our experiences as an adopted person online, and what I see [00:24:00] is, well, I see a couple different groups that may push back.

I would say the vast majority are adoptive parents who insist their adoptees don't feel that way. And then some others are adoptees who, validly, might say I've had a different experience. But that becomes really taxing, and especially when you are sharing your personal story, your personal experiences, that comes at a cost.

How often do we talk about the emotional labor it takes to share something so intimately personal, perhaps interacting with people in comments if we're talking about social media, and paying a price for that. Can you talk about that? Because I know you've seen so many adoptees doing this advocacy work and paying that price and burning out.

Astrid Castro: Yeah. Burnout is, I think, in our field, and so many of us are attracted to this [00:25:00] field because of our personal experiences and I will even say because of the healing aspect that it could potentially have to share our stories and have a platform and have an audience and have people say thank you. Thank you for that. That is making me a better person. Or thank you for that. That made me feel normalized. That made me feel seen.

And when you hear comments like that, who gets to have a job where they hear comments like that all the time? And so I think that there is this draw to this field, that we have a draw for us adoptees to come back to this field for those of us in this industry, for those of us who have an interest. And I think that so many of us come into this with the intention of getting and experiencing that, and that when we experience the opposite, that [00:26:00] we don't have a community ourselves.

Oftentimes we don't have a community ourselves to go to and say, I need some support. And I have to say the thing that has helped me not have burnout and, of course, there's certain days where I'm just like, whew, I'm glad I know how to meditate. I'm glad I know how to love myself. I'm glad I know how to remind myself of my goodness and the core of who I am. I'm glad that I have the ability to do that because if I didn't, this would've tipped me over the edge and I would be out. Out.

And it is to me about community and I am so excited and it’s so thrilling to see how many groups and communities are popping up. We've got amazing programs out there like Adoptees Connect that Pam is creating, you and the [00:27:00] podcast and uplifting adoptees voices, and Anne Heffron and Pam, Adoptees who are offering platforms for practicing and writing your story and being heard.

And there's so many other individuals that are doing this work, that are creating these platforms for individuals. And then there's adoptees who are doing it behind the scene, right? Who are doing research for us that gives us these platforms. And I think about Dr. JaeRan Kim, who uplifts her adoptee community in such an amazing, phenomenal way.

And so I've surrounded myself with those people. And that is what gets me through these hard times. That is who I call; I don't call my adoptive parents. I don't call my girlfriend who doesn't have any personal connection to adoption. And I find my people who I know will ground me and help me remind me of why I do [00:28:00] the work that I do.

So because I've been doing this work so long, Haley, right now I have a young woman who started off in my kids groups when she was five and she's now 19 and she is a volunteer. She helps me and she's on panels and just loves being in this community. And every time I see her, Saiming, she is a phenomenal human being, see her come out and her voice and the strength that she has and her ability. Of course her parents signed up for these kids groups and bravo to them for doing so. And she has taken it to the level of this is what it looks like when I'm supported from five years on.

And she is such an example of what I want every adoptee to experience.

Haley Radke: Isn't that exciting? Because I think there's so many of us who don't get to that [00:29:00] place till we're in our thirties, forties, fifties, and some might never, and that's okay too. But I love that there's resources for younger adoptees to really be processing things in real time, as they should be, just my opinion.

Okay. I'm curious. You mentioned this first experience of being an adoptee on a panel sitting next to a bunch of adoptive parents and how that was transformative for you. And I've also heard you say before that being on a panel can be therapeutic. Now I've been to a few different adoption conferences and have had good experiences and have had literally terrible, worst-ever, core-shaking experiences.

So I've seen the gamut as many of us have. I think [00:30:00] there's a lot of, sorry, I'm stumbling because we're gonna talk a little bit more about this in recommended resources because you've been doing something with panels that I think is really powerful. But can you talk about adoptees on panels, the power of that, and some of the pros and cons? So some of those kinds of things from your experience?

Astrid Castro: Yeah. So like you, Haley, I have experienced lots of panels at conferences, local agency panels, except for the conferences, very few non-promotional panels, if you will. So most of the panels that I have either seen or been on or experienced historically in the past before I started doing my own panel work through Adoption Mosaic had all been with the emphasis on promotion. [00:31:00]

And what I mean by that is that it's an agency that is bringing in adoptees or adoptive parents who have a very specific narrative. And even if the narrative is: It's hard, we've had some struggles, etc., etc., the outcome is, adoption is wonderful and I would've never done it any other way.

So let's back up to back to that time when I was between the ages of 18 and my early twenties, I was on a lot of panels. It was like this adrenaline rush that I would get by being on these panels. And all I had to do was be a good storyteller. And I've always enjoyed storytelling.

So I would be on these panels, have that adrenaline feel really wonderful, and oftentimes I would over share. I was young; [00:32:00] I didn't realize the power of storytelling and how it could sit with you afterwards and what would happen, the aftermath of being on a panel, if you will.

Haley Radke: Can I pause you there? Can you just elaborate a little bit on oversharing because I think we say that quite a bit. And I think it's important to elaborate on that to hopefully protect other adoptees from having that experience too.

Astrid Castro: Yeah. I think that when we have spent so much of our life not having a platform that when we're asked to sit on a platform and we're gonna have an audience that's going to listen to our every word and be engaged and excited, that we have a tendency to get sucked into this moment of this feeling that everybody's going to be supportive [00:33:00] of the things we have to say, even the hard things. And we've never shared this in public, or we've never shared this with anybody.

How many times I have heard the statement, this isn't something I've ever talked to anybody about. That's, to me, when the facilitator should hear a scratching record and just stop, pick up the needle and stop. This is not the place for somebody to be sharing something for the first time. And yet oftentimes that is when the facilitator is sitting on the edge of their seat and saying to themselves, this is gonna be a fabulous panel.

Without really thinking, wait a second. What is this person gonna feel like when they're at home by themselves tonight alone? And have we done our job on giving them the resources that they need, the community that they need? Saying I will call you and check in with you? [00:34:00]

We benefited as an agency hugely from you sharing your experience, right? And yet, we are completely disregarding the toll that it will take on you as an individual, and we will disregard that. And so many of us, because we've never been given a platform, we've never been asked. Actually we've never been asked by the people who should be asking us the most and the people who should love us the most.

We should be so well practiced in this story that when we get out there on that panel, we shouldn't be, I am not saying crying on a panel is a bad thing 'cause I've cried on my panels plenty of times and a crying is an expression of emotion that I do a lot. But if the result of that is that I'm not going to feel good about myself when I'm done, then we have not done anyone a service.

We've done the adoptee a huge disservice, and the [00:35:00] adoptee is the one to whom the adoptive parents are sitting there saying, I wanna learn from you so I can be a better parent. Well, right now you're not being a very good parent because you're allowing this to happen, and this is not okay. And so we see adoption agencies, we see individuals put youth on panels, which I am very, very against.

I get it. I get why. And I don't believe that a 15-year-old, a 12-year-old, and, I mean, I've seen as young as 12 on panels, and I will say that one 12-year-old was very well spoken. And I get why somebody said, you would be great at this. And they were a fabulous speaker. And yet I just sat there thinking they're 12. This is not consensual. I would say even at 15 or 16.

I have had a 17-year-old on a panel, and the only [00:36:00] reason is because it was Saiming who grew up since she was five, and she had seen all of my panels. She had practiced to the point where this was not new. Nothing that she was gonna say on this panel was new to her.

The emotions and feelings that she was going to experience were not new to her.

And so I think that's what it needs to look like. I knew she was supported. I knew I would be calling her. And that's the way I run all of my panels. I would love to see a complete overhaul on either agencies don't do panels, period, ever, or just adoptive parent panels, not adoptee panels.

Or, if they do adoptee panels, they come to an organization like Adoption Mosaic and they say, we know that you have a pool, or Adoptees On or an organization that has support for the adoptees. We know that you have adoptees that have practice. And do you have [00:37:00] anybody that we can contract with?

And the adoptee, as a result of being on an Adoption Mosaic panel, knows that they should be compensated financially. Knows that they should be getting support resources in their community from this agency, and they know that if you're gonna be on a panel, I will put it on a calendar, I will give you a call, and I will follow up with you. Having that individual be as supported as they can be.

And that adoption agencies are subcontracting, if you will, through an organization that offers this support to their adoptee community.

Haley Radke: This might take us way too far off track, and we're just about to do recommended resources, but I'm gonna bring it back to family preservation again.

Have you seen agencies and things that you feel are doing a good job on both [00:38:00] sides of things? Making sure expectant mothers are supported if they want to parent, and making sure they're encouraging older-child adoption, even though it's “harder.” And I feel like so many of the things that I see are just, ugh. It's for profit or the coercion is still there, and all of those kinds of things. Give me some hope.

Astrid Castro: Oh my goodness, Haley. I don't know that I can.

Haley Radke: Okay.

Astrid Castro: And when you said, oh, it's for profit, I think that we have a lot of people who have hidden behind nonprofits. We have a tendency to say, oh, they're a nonprofit. If you look at how much the executive director makes, you realize that there are ways to be a nonprofit and that's where you hide the profit.

Haley Radke: So it's a for-profit, but tax-receiptable organization. [00:39:00]

Astrid Castro: Yeah.

Haley Radke: It's funny, but it's not.

Astrid Castro: But it's not. This is the tricky part, Haley, in the work that I do, I partner with agencies all the time. And I will continue to partner with agencies. Agencies call me up and ask me to help with their training. And I am grateful that I get to have access to the families that I do and that are currently parenting children that are needing support.

And yet, that being said, I will say I could piecemeal pieces of what one agency does that I think is really wonderful and what another agency does well. And it’s this patchwork of these things. When I was thinking recruitment, okay, so DHS, Department of Human Services here in Oregon, but there's such a big part of this huge system [00:40:00] that is so drenched in its own type of corruption, in its own type of unethical practices. And there are social workers who work in that who say, I know we want this changed, but who's gonna change it?

At the end of the day there are people like Haley and Astrid who are the product of this system and that we need support. So I actually am not in the pre-adopt world, if you will. The most I do in supporting or helping if a family is trying to decide whether they're going to adopt or not adopt, they can consult with me and I will talk to them about what I know.

Haley Radke: Shoot them straight. That's good. I have a feeling you don't hold back in those conversations. Good for you. Okay, let's do [00:41:00] our recommended resources. And recently I got to attend one of Astrid’s adoptee panels that we were talking about a little earlier, and it's called “We the Experts, the Speaker Series.” And it was really powerful.

Now, the one I attended was about suicide. It was extremely challenging. It was difficult to hear a lot of those things, even though it wasn't new for me. I have guests that share some of those hard things, as well, regularly with me. And I felt encouraged by the end.

Of course I knew some of the panelists, so maybe I'm a little bit biased, you had very well-chosen panelists, and I love the aspect of what you described earlier about the storytelling, right? We get a little piece of their story and then they share their hard-won wisdom with us and the questions are really well thought out. [00:42:00] There is an opportunity for the attendees to ask questions or contribute their own feedback in certain sections.

But what I was really impressed with, and this is unique to you and I think everybody should be copying you, sorry about that, is that even on your registration form, you ask, are you an adopted person? And then, if you're not, you're here as a listener and you're not gonna give your 2 cents. It wasn't worded like that, but you know what I mean. So I felt safe there. I felt safe listening.

While we're recording this, it is during the pandemic. Ugh. Boy isn't our world in a good state. And so there's been lots of things happening online for adoptees, which is wonderful. I love seeing more adoptee resources, but a few of the things I've attended, and were marketed as adoptee-centric, turned out not to be a safe place.

And you talked about my adoptee community. [00:43:00] I have my Patreon supporters and we have Zoom chats sometimes. And a couple of them shared with me an extraordinarily triggering event that happened at another supposedly adoptee space. And I just think, oh my gosh. Like even if it says adoptee on the front, we can't trust. So I'm just saying that Astrid has really created a safe space for adoptees to speak, share, listen, learn from each other.

And there's so many great topics. Even next week, there's one coming up on searching. I see you have one planned about religion and then on your website you can go back and download past episodes. There's a very small fee to register and, from what I understand, if you reach out and there's financial hardship, they'll take care of you.

So is there anything more that you want to share [00:44:00] about the “We the Expert” speaker series, Astrid? I really wanna commend you for how you have created a really safe and helpful space for adoptees there.

Astrid Castro: Thank you, Haley. And from one adoptee to another, when I get feedback like that from somebody like yourself who has been doing this work for as many years as you have been, that just means so much to me. So thank you.

And I think that you summarized it beautifully. And I would say that the one thing is no adoptee is turned away for wanting to attend the live “We the Experts.” For the recorded ones, we do ask that you pay the fee. And like you said, it is a small fee and I, of course, will make an exception to that rule if somebody emails and says, I really don't have the financial ability [00:45:00] to pay this and I really could use the support. Absolutely.

The whole idea of having the waiver and having non-adoptees sign that waiver, I have to say it has been such a blessing. I borrowed this model from a BIPOC event that I went to (black, indigenous and other people of color event), and non-BIPOC people were allowed to attend but they had to sign a waiver. And this waiver was similar to what I have written.

That waiver says I'm here as a listener. And it's only happened once where an adoptive parent wanted to ask a question, and when I realized that she was an adoptive parent, I asked, are you also an adoptee? And she said, no, I'm not. And I think I was kind and [00:46:00] gracious and thanked her for wanting to participate, but said that this was not the space for her. And then I followed up with her.

And I think that is a huge thing that is missing in the industry right now. The place where spouses of adoptees, parents of older adoptees, prospective parents, siblings of adoptees can go to get information that will help them be a better support for their adoptee person, right? And so getting to be a fly on the wall in these conversations, I think is really helpful.

So yeah, the waiver's working really well.

Haley Radke: That's brilliant. Okay. What did you wanna recommend to us today?

Astrid Castro: Okay, so I was given only one. That was the hardest thing to have to think of one resource.

Haley Radke: Space. Space for one. I didn't assign you a [00:47:00] resource.

Astrid Castro: Yeah. No, exactly. No, you gave me space for one. Just because there are so many of us out there doing this work or versions of this work. So I would say Dr. Chaitra's directory of adoptee therapists specifically. I had the privilege of meeting Chaitra in Denver when I was visiting once. She is a phenomenal human being.

And then she told me, and actually I had asked her, I had reached out and said, can I be on this list? And she very kindly said, this is a list for therapists. And she knows I am not a therapist. And so she said maybe someday we'll have another list. So if there's one of your listeners out there who's wanting to get involved or has programming or is doing things, I hope somebody will create a list like this with non-therapeutic services that [00:48:00] are led by adoptees.

So Dr. Chaitra does this list. It's nationwide. I don't know if it's worldwide. I don't believe so.

Haley Radke: It's nationwide, but she does have therapists indicated who will do tele-health or online even if they're not in that state.

Astrid Castro: Okay. Okay, great. And these are therapists that are both adoptees and specialize in supporting the adoptee community. And yet I also love the fact that this isn't a list that she is putting her rubber stamp of approval behind these therapists. She's basically being housing and collecting these active folks that are in the community.

And because of the work that I'm doing with the “We the Experts,” I share that list in every single We the Expert event we do, because we've had [00:49:00] lots of adoptees on these calls that I think need support outside of this once a month, two-hour event.

Haley Radke: Yes. Yes. Absolutely. I refer people to that list as well myself pretty regularly.

Thank you so much, Astrid, for sharing part of your story with us and for allowing me to poke at some hard places. I'd love it if you would share with us where we can connect with you online.

Astrid Castro: Yeah, so Adoption Mosaic has a website and it's just adoptionmosaic.com. And our Facebook is also just search for Adoption Mosaic, and same with Instagram and so forth.

We'd love to hear from folks. And if you're interested, the only other thing that I would like to mention is if you're an adoptee and you're interested in sharing your story and you would like to potentially be a future panelist, [00:50:00] I do have a form that you can fill out that indicates which topics you want to be a listener to and which topics you want to be maybe a panelist for.

And so I could send that; it's a Google form. Just reach out and I could send that to you.

Haley Radke: Perfect. And you have the “We the Experts” registration events on Facebook. They're really easy to find. And I'll link to your website, of course, in the show notes and also the specific page where you list all the previous events and future events for “We the Experts.”

Okay, wonderful. Thanks so much for chatting with me today.

I'm so thankful for Astrid’s voice in the community and how she is working hard to highlight adoptee voices. Of course, that's my passion too. So I'm really glad to hear that she takes very good care to do that in the area she works in. [00:51:00]

I wanted to extend a thank you for celebrating with me if you listen to last week's episode, we celebrated 500,000 downloads. It's not even real when I say it. It still doesn't feel real but so many of you celebrated with me and congratulated the show on the success, I think, of having 500,000 pairs of ears listening to adoptee stories and just the impact of that just gives me goosebumps. So thank you. Thank you for celebrating with me, and I'm just so grateful for you.

If Adoptees On is important to you and has been impactful or meaningful to you, I would love your monthly support. If you go to adopteeson.com/partner, there are ways for you to join the adoptee movement over here and help support the ongoing work of the show.

You keep the lights on and my editor paid, [00:52:00] and you help to serve adoptees who maybe aren't able to make a contribution. And just thank you so much for doing that. So thank you for your generosity. Adopteeson.com/partner is the spot for you to support the show monthly. Thanks so much for listening.

Let's talk again next Friday.

155 Celebrating 500K

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/155

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This show is listener supported. You can join us and help our show grow to support more adoptees by going to adopteeson.com/partner.

You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is Episode 155. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Welcome friends. I'm so glad you're here with me today. Today's show is a little different because I asked one of my dearest friends to come and celebrate a milestone moment with us. Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, welcome back to Adoptees On, Reshma McClintock. Welcome, Reshma.

Reshma McClintock: Hi, Haley. Thanks for having me again.

Haley Radke: I'm so excited 'cause you're here to celebrate with me.

Reshma McClintock: I am here to celebrate with you. This is gonna be a party. We are going [00:01:00] to get down, virtually.

Haley Radke: Virtually. Okay.

Reshma McClintock: It's a thing now.

Haley Radke: Okay. So we are celebrating a little late, but that's okay. Better late than never. The Adoptees On podcast has reached half a million downloads. Which is crazy.

Reshma McClintock: Okay, let's do that thing where we pause for just a minute and take in half a million downloads, 500,000 downloads.

Haley Radke: Okay. So is it okay if I tell an embarrassing story about you?

Reshma McClintock: Please. I mean, why else have I come here?

Haley Radke: No. Okay, so you guys, Resh is like one of my best friends and I told her this milestone was coming and I was really excited and so she secretly sent me a gift and it literally happened to arrive on the day that I hit 500,000 downloads, which was bananas. And I was sitting at our breakfast table [00:02:00] when it happened. I was playing Uno with Isaiah right before we went to school, and I was just refreshing my phone so I could get the screenshot. Anyway, I sent the screenshot to Resh, and waited, later in the day, got a delivery at the door and I was like, oh my goodness, what's happening?

And she sent me balloons. But what came in the box was 50, five-zero, K

Reshma McClintock: One 5, one 0, and one K.

Haley Radke: And so it was so sweet and I blew them up, but I effed up the K, these are like the foil balloons that you see. You'll see it in the picture; I'm going to use it as my show art. So just look at the cover art in your podcast app, wherever you're listening. And you'll see the picture of me with these balloons. But I messed up the K 'cause you put these little straws in and you blow in and I just busted right through. So anyway, I went to Party City and I got the [00:03:00] X, the missing zero and the K.

And I wasn't gonna tell her 'cause I was embarrassed, I don't know. I didn't wanna embarrass you.

Reshma McClintock: You were embarrassed for me.

Haley Radke: I was embarrassed for you.

Reshma McClintock: Because you thought that I was an idiot. It's okay. It's fair.

Haley Radke: No. Okay. So then when I sent her the picture, it wasn't all blue. There was some silver.

Reshma McClintock: I was so proud of myself. Okay. Because I found the “500 K” in blue and I was like, it's one of her colors. This is amazing. It's exactly the color.

Haley Radke: Yep.

Reshma McClintock: And I've never seen them in blue before. I was planning on getting gold and then I found the blue. I was so happy. Now let me just tell you something really quick. I checked six to seven “d” times to make sure that I picked two zeroes. I checked it like a hundred times to make sure there were two zeroes. And so when you said that you only got one 5, one 0 and one K. I was like, you've got to be kidding me. Actually, that's not what I said, but I'm not gonna say what I said.

Haley Radke: It was so funny because in the box, I was like [00:04:00] searching, it's a tiny little Amazon box. I was like, there's gotta be the other zero here. It's not here. But there was a slip that said we've only shipped part of your order.

Reshma McClintock: Yes. So this is the part of the story I've been waiting to get to the most.

Haley Radke: Oh, okay. Okay.

Reshma McClintock: Because, yes, the other zero was coming. It was proof that I did in fact check and make sure that I clicked two zeros for “500 K.”

Haley Radke: No, what's proof is that you're about to keep me so humble because at some point in time in the next few weeks, I'm just gonna get a zero delivered to me

Reshma McClintock: No. No, they canceled it.

Haley Radke: No

Reshma McClintock: I don't think the zero's coming. So that's the last part of the story, like a day later, two days later, I got an email that said we've refunded your $6.50 because the other zero wasn't gonna make it in time.

Haley Radke: I was waiting for my zero to just be like, listen, Haley, you hit a half a million, but you're still a zero.

Reshma McClintock: Yeah, seriously, that would've been a real boost. Too funny. But what did I tell you? Originally, I told you when I [00:05:00] found out that the last zero was still on its way. I said when you hit a million, I'll only have to send five zeros. You can hold onto that one. So anyway, as it turns out, when you hit a million in just a few short months, I'm sure, I'll have to get all six zeros. So that’s good. It's okay. I'm willing to spend the money.

Haley Radke: I appreciate that so much. Okay. Can I tell you, I wanna tell you a couple things. When I launched in July of 2016. So July 1 was my official launch date, but at the time, Apple Podcasts wouldn't give you a specific date that your show would go live. Now, standard practice, when you have a new podcast, you do a little intro and you put it up there, and then whenever it's up, then you're like, okay, good, now it's live.

Now I can promote it, put up a real episode, all that. I went through my screenshots the other night which is not a good idea if you wanna feel good about yourself, just look at all the things you've screenshot. [00:06:00] But I looked and I had a screenshot on July 4th. By then I had 300 downloads, and I remember showing that to Nick and being so excited and, oh my gosh, that was so crazy.

And then I hit 10,000 downloads in February, 2017. And I remember thinking, oh my goodness, this is such a huge milestone, like 10,000, picture 10,000 people, and here we are, it's 500,000, which is

Reshma McClintock: Did you ever think you'd get here?

Haley Radke: No.

Reshma McClintock: You didn't think so?

Haley Radke: No.

Reshma McClintock: So you would see the numbers going up occasionally as you would check, and you'd hit different milestones.

I'm just thinking about how many milestones you went through to get to 500,000. You think 10,000, then you think 15, and 17 even, everything's a big deal. And so I'm guessing you've watched yourself go in increments?

Haley Radke: Yeah, and I am in a lot of different groups with other [00:07:00] podcasters who are very indie, niche, similar to me. And when they hear about my numbers, they're often like, whoa, that's amazing. Because it's unusual. There are so many podcasts. There's just tons and tons of them, and it's unusual to have that many downloads.

The stats as far as I know, I listen to Libsyn, they're my podcast host, and they host about a quarter of all the podcasts that are available in Apple Podcasts, and they say that about 80% of shows get around 150 downloads an episode. So it takes a long time to add up to something like half a million for those kinds of numbers. So yeah. I didn't really expect it. And after a while, you're just producing the show, making sure you're making good content.

And like I said, I'll admit I used to check religiously [00:08:00] and in those first few days, just refresh, refresh, did I get one more? Did I get one more? And now I just go post the show. I don't even look often at the numbers.

Reshma McClintock: And the numbers are an affirmation. The numbers are not just numbers, they are people. And we know that the show has been wildly successful, apart from the numbers, just in transforming the lives of so many adopted people and opening the eyes of so many non-adopted people. And because of that you stop and think all of those numbers represent an individual person.

And then even how that webs out, right? Like how many people did they talk to about the show? How many people have they shared with, even if they just shared the information. And even if that person didn't listen, your reach is much broader than I think you can even fathom. And that is so exciting.

And so I know you go through phases where you look at the statistics and you become obsessed. And then you just do the job that you have been doing so beautifully for the last few years. This is so exciting. I cannot tell you, just to sound so [00:09:00] cheesy, how honored I am that I get to celebrate with you. As a personal friend, I'm so just in awe of you so frequently.

And also as someone in the adoptee movement, as someone who's an adopted person who stood up and said, I am not going to allow the world to speak for me any longer, and the way that you have done that so beautifully and so powerfully. I am so proud of you and I just can't believe I'm someone who gets to celebrate with you.

It's really worth noting. It is worth the pause. It's worth the minute to take the mismatched balloons and raise them in the air and say a cheer and just soak it all in. I hope you're really able to soak in what you've accomplished so far, and that this will just continue to catapult you forward.

And I can't really even fathom where you would go. At one point you could never have imagined being where you are now. And if you sit with that for a minute. Oh my goodness, imagine where you'll go next. It's really exciting.

Haley Radke: Goosebumps, hearing you talking about [00:10:00] that. I was just asking Nick the other day 'cause he's had a transition at work and his boss resigned and there's a new boss and I was like, oh, how do you picture yourself in five years? Are you gonna do the same job?

And then he asked me the same and I was like, oh my goodness. Will I still be podcasting in five years? I don't know.

Reshma McClintock: Right. Yeah. It's hard to know.

Haley Radke: It is hard to know. Another cool thing that I've shared before when I've hit these milestones. Before or on birthday moments, I might post on Instagram what the current stats are just 'cause I think it's fun and I think people are interested to see.

But the show's been downloaded in over 144 countries.

Reshma McClintock: Wow.

Haley Radke: Which is almost but not quite all of them; it's three quarters of them.

Reshma McClintock: Yes. Worth noting. Wow.

Haley Radke: Yeah. And so I think there's something of real significance there. Adoptees are scattered through the entire world. Now, not necessarily all English speaking of course.

That's North American-centric thinking in my head. But [00:11:00] yeah, I think that's really neat. And the other cool thing I wanted to tell you is the top 10 countries that regularly listen.

Reshma McClintock: Yes, I wanna hear this.

Haley Radke: Okay. So of course number one is the United States. 70% of my listeners are in the US.

Reshma McClintock: The US has to be first at everything. I'm just kidding.

Haley Radke: And then I go to my country. Did you know I'm Canadian? Some of my listeners don't know that I'm in Canada.

Reshma McClintock: This is international here.

Haley Radke: So 6% of my listeners are Canadian. And then we go to the UK, Australia, they're both at 4% each.

And then Ireland, Germany, New Zealand, France, Sweden, and South Africa.

Reshma McClintock: Oh wow. That is very cool.

Haley Radke: Yes.

Reshma McClintock: That is so significant.

Haley Radke: I love that. And I've interviewed adoptees, I think, in eight different countries and maybe adoptees adopted from probably only a dozen countries. When I started out podcasting, there was only a couple of other adoptee [00:12:00] podcasts and one of them strictly focused on international adoptees, and the host was an international adoptee himself.

And so I really was like, oh, that's your space. And that show has paused. We call it “pod-fading” as podcasters, pod fading. That doesn't mean he won't come back, but yeah, so I've had lots of requests for international adoptees to share, and so I started doing that a little further on in my podcasting journey. But yeah, it's really incredible the amount of lives touched by adoption all over the world.

Reshma McClintock: Yeah. And I have to tell you, as a transracial international adoptee, as a person of color, I appreciate that you at one point had paused to say, is that my space? Is someone else filling that space? Obviously. However I will say, because I've had the opportunity to be on your show a few times and listen to multiple transracial international adoptees, how powerful it is. And one of the things that [00:13:00] you do so well, which I know you are frequently complimented on, although you wouldn't share that yourself, is that you are so good at listening and elevating voices and so you are not like, let me provide you with this platform.

You're like, I'm here to listen. I want you to be able to share because I want to learn, because I want to know. And I just appreciate the way that you do that. It's a tricky thing, especially in today's cultural and political climate, but I think it's something you do really well. And it's something you've learned about as you've grown and as you've listened.

it's just something that I really appreciate. I know you so well, so I know you would never be like, I provide a platform for people of all colors and races. It's not about that. It's about the education. It's about the opportunity for all of us to learn from people of different cultures and backgrounds and different experiences. And you so well provide that platform without talking over your guests and just allowing them to share and asking all [00:14:00] the right questions so that we can all learn together.

It's a very unique thing that you're able to do so well.

Haley Radke: Thank you. I appreciate that so much. And I do try very hard to come into each interview just in a space of learning. A posture of learning. We've heard enough podcasts where the host tries to mansplain and all of those kinds of things. And this is not the place for that, for sure.

Reshma McClintock: Yeah.

Haley Radke: I heard that you might have a couple questions for me, and that makes me feel nervous, but okay.

Reshma McClintock: Okay. Might need a drum roll or something. I should have planned a sound effect, drum roll, something, because this is the moment that I've been waiting for to ask you questions. On air. We've gone back and forth a little bit, a few times, but you told me that I could basically ask you whatever I want, and I appreciate that. It's one of the things I love about you.

Haley Radke: I don't think I said that, but okay.

Reshma McClintock: Listen, we're here. Let's just go with it.

Haley Radke: Okay. [00:15:00]

Reshma McClintock: Yeah, you didn't say that. That's not true. You didn't say, I can ask you whatever I want.

Haley Radke: I feel like you're just trying to get me to acknowledge permission ahead of some invasive questions.

Reshma McClintock: Oh no. I'm not looking for permission. I've learned a long time ago, it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission so I’m kidding.

I wanna know, there are a lot of people in the adoption community who listen to your show, obviously. A lot of people use the word “transformative” when they talk about this show, that this show has been transformative in their life, that this show has made them feel less alone.

Anne Heffron, our good friend, has frequently said that in many ways this show saved her life and had a great influence, I should say, in saving her life. And a lot of us listen to you and think, wow. I listen to you and your guests, rather, and think, wow, where else could I have learned this information?

This is truly transformative. It's the first time [00:16:00] I've heard this specific thing stated in this specific way, and I have a better understanding of adoptees and their lives and their experiences, and it has been so incredibly transformative for so many people. I want to know for you personally, in what ways has it been transformative for you? Haley Radke adopted person, not Haley Radke the professional podcaster and interviewer? I wanna know what has that been like for you personally? In what ways has it transformed you?

Haley Radke: Okay. That feels like a, just a huge question and it really is true that it has transformed me and I could answer the professional one, you said not to, but I feel like I've gained a lot of confidence and, you wouldn't know it now, but I feel like I'm a lot more of a polished speaker. Editing is magical. But personally I feel like after every [00:17:00] episode where I record with someone, I think here's 10 more things I need to talk about with my psychologist. It's really shaped me to look at my own issues deeper.

Things that I had covered up, was coping with, things that I had hidden. And the more my guests share about the courageous steps they've taken to find healing from a variety of different ways that they feel adoption has impacted them, the more I feel brave enough to be like, maybe this is the next thing I can talk about with my psychologist.

Truly, personally, I've grown a ton from listening to other people and it also has really humbled me. It has really truly [00:18:00] humbled me. The honor it is to listen to people's stories. Sometimes they haven't shared them before, and I try and be really careful with that.

I try and make sure that guests are ready to talk about things publicly. We've seen so many people overshare things and can't reel it back in once it's out there. We've seen so many young adoptees especially, you have personal experience with this. I think I'm not oversharing for you, but you had become a poster child for adoption in youth and paraded around saying adoption's so amazing. Look, it saved my life.

Reshma McClintock: Absolutely.

Haley Radke: So there's the cost of that. So I try and really walk a fine line of not asking someone to overshare in that way. But the trust they put in me, sharing things sometimes for the first time, is so humbling. How am I, a stranger, able to hear these really deep things that are coming from the bottom of your heart, and then you're trusting not just me, but my [00:19:00] listeners.

So yeah, I've grown a lot and learned a lot. And trust me, there is no one who's been more impacted by the show than me.

Reshma McClintock: Wow. That is a really fascinating statement. Interesting. That you've been the most impacted. I guess what I really appreciate about what you had to say is that I think that in adoption land, and we all do this, and you and I have talked about this before.

There are these pedestals that we put different adoptees on. There's a rotation, right? After you've been in adoption land for a long time, you see these are the new faces. Oh, this is the new person. And that's not necessarily a negative thing. There's new people coming up and sharing all the time, and I love that.

And I talk about that frequently, about the seasons, right? We're in a different season. I'm in a season of. Productivity? No, not me, but this is just an example. Surely not me, but sometimes I have before, had seasons of incredible productivity. And really, this is my moment. This is [00:20:00] my season, this is my time.

I'm gonna be one of the people out there sharing and doing a lot of work and putting a lot of effort out there, which I appreciate and love that we can come and go because for me it's about taking breaks and for my own family's sake or for whatever reason, right? Different seasons for different reasons.

However, what I appreciate is that you are not putting yourself on a pedestal. I think that's a really important thing for us as adopted people to note, and you just demonstrated that so well, because I think a lot of people will look at you and be like, oh, Haley, I wanna get to where she is, not professionally. Well, a lot of people think that too, but I just mean thinking, oh, she clearly has it together. She's clearly got things sorted out and figured out emotionally as it pertains to adoption and all of that because of where she is.

And the reality is we shouldn't be trying to attain to get to where anybody else is. It's all about our own personal journey, and I just appreciate that you're willing to say, of course, I haven't arrived. And there [00:21:00] is no arrival destination, but that you're constantly working on yourself and discovering new ways that you can learn and grow and new things that you need to address.

I find that with your show, of course, and so many other people do, but to know that the host is I'm here to learn. I am here to grow personally in my own journey with my psychologist, with my therapist, with my family as it pertains to reunion or whatever the different specific areas are. I think that's a really bold statement that you made that one of the ways that it's transformed you is that you walk away with 10 things or so to really think about and work on.

I think that's a really powerful statement. And again, not to say that you aren't someone that people should look up to, I absolutely believe you are, but that is one of the reasons, not because you've arrived, but because you're working through all of the things that you need to work through on this journey.

Haley Radke: I think you're talking me up too much.

Reshma McClintock: Truly I'm not meaning to, that's not my intention. I'm not trying to flatter you.

Haley Radke: Okay.

Reshma McClintock: Yeah. So I [00:22:00] know you 'cause I know where you're going. I know I just think that it's a powerful thing that you can say that because I think a lot of people in your position with your kind of success wouldn't necessarily say, I am still learning every day and in the show that you happen to provide and host and curate that it is even benefiting you in your journey on your path. That it's not like I've arrived so I'm going to host this podcast so other people can get to where I am. That's not what it's about. It's about collectively growing in our own paths and our own journey.

So I think that's really wonderful.

Haley Radke: One thing I have felt fearful of with the show is we talk about a lot of hard things and a lot of adopted people are always being accused of being so negative if we're critical at all about adoption and I don't want us to stay stuck in the bad experiences.

And it's so important to me that we do seek healing and [00:23:00] growing ourselves. And if I'm not gonna model that, I'm a complete hypocrite. So I really do think it's important for us to be working on that. And I hope that with the ways I have, the Healing Series and I have therapists on and some of the questions of the guests, like sometimes I ask guests like, what have you been learning in therapy and is there a question I can ask you that you can teach us from, because I want them to give an opportunity to be like this is where I came from, but here's all the things I've worked on, because they're examples for us as well. It's so important to not stay stuck and that's just a human thing.

Reshma McClintock: That really is, I love that. I think you've had so many, I couldn't even start to list, good therapists on who talk about that a lot, about them being on their own journey also. They want to help people; obviously, meet them where they are, but that they're also doing their own personal work.

And I think just in general, across the board, outside adoption, we all [00:24:00] have to be doing the work on ourselves. And that's where we flourish really. So the problem is just like what you said, the dangerous territory is when we get stuck. And there's no growth.

So I just appreciate looking at someone like you where, I think, professionally you've had this success. It's just remarkable what you've done, that you've created out of nothing without any experience. The fruit that you have produced is just really extraordinary.

And to hear from someone, frankly, at your level, that you are still learning and listening and all the benefits that you personally find, I love that. So thank you for answering that question. I know that was a lot.

Haley Radke: Let's just talk about me some more. That's just my favorite.

Reshma McClintock: Yeah, I know you, this is your favorite thing.

Okay, let's see. I also wanted to know what is your favorite part of the show? What is your favorite aspect of doing the show? And I've heard you say to [00:25:00] me many times, and I love hearing it from you every time that people will share their stories with you is so powerful.

What do you love about Adoptees On? If you can, can you pull yourself out of it at all? Are you able to separate yourself at all from Adoptees On and say this is what I love about Adoptees On?

Haley Radke: Oh my goodness. That's tricky. I was a podcast listener for a decade before I started this show, so when podcasts were starting. So I have listened to podcasts for years and years, and I structured the show in a way that was my favorite format. And I think some of my favorite moments of the podcast itself, each episode, are the last couple questions that come right before recommended resources.

So it's always the questions that are wrapping up the interview. This is their last chance to share with the listeners some powerful thing that has impacted them. [00:26:00] I feel like those are the moments that are like the penultimate, I don't know. Because we wrap up with recommended resources and I'm usually sharing something, if it's an author I'm usually sharing about their book, and they're gonna promo something else and that's great too. But it's just like those moments right before, and I feel too like guests often relax by recommended resources. So they're comfortable at that point and share some pretty amazing things. So I feel those last couple questions are my favorite usually.

Reshma McClintock: Oh, I love that. That's good to know. Now the pressure's on for future interviewees. No, I'm kidding.

Haley Radke: Yeah. Watch out. Question seven. That's the one.

Reshma McClintock: My last question for you is this: If I am new to Adoptees On, and I were jumping in and it's, whoa, she's had 500,000 downloads, a half a million downloads, how many episodes could she have? How could I ever jump in and get caught up [00:27:00] and listen and know what this show is all about? First, I'd like to know how many episodes do you have, quickly,

Haley Radke: This is gonna be Episode 155.

Reshma McClintock: Love it. 155 episodes. So if I'm someone coming in and there are 155 episodes. I'm not asking you to pick your favorite child or anything here, but could you pick a reasonable number of episodes that you would recommend to give someone a crash course in Adoptees On and, frankly, the host, who you are, because that's a huge part of the show, but are there a certain number of episodes that you could get to give someone a crash course on Adoptees On?

Is that something you could include in the show notes for this episode?

Haley Radke: Okay. This was a big ask and thank goodness Reshma did warn me about this question. I'm gonna separate it into two, okay? So if you wanna get to know me a little better and you haven't binged all the episodes, which some of you say you do, just a few days’ time, which is too many, that is too many hours of me talking. Don't do that.

If you [00:28:00] wanna get to know me a little bit better. I actually share my story in Episode 13 and it's a long episode. We start off with a couple different things, so if you just wanna hear my story, I start around the 28-minute mark of that episode and that is about my failed reunion with my first mother.

And then unusually the other two episodes where you could learn a little bit more about me. These are some of the only episodes I have that are with a guest who's not adopted, but they are people that are in my life. And so I have an episode, Episode 58, with my husband, and he talks about what it's like being married to an adoptee. So if you want more dirt on me, hit that one up. Nick shares all the dirt. There's not that much dirt.

And then the third one is an episode that I feel is quite controversial. I have had feedback on both [00:29:00] sides of that fence. It's very polarizing. So it's Episode 86 and I actually interview my biological father's wife, and I call her mom, because I call her mom, And she shares what Reunion was like for her. And it's a challenging listen, but it gives you a good perspective of how our reunion went.

So those are the pieces where if you wanna get to know me more, and if you have people in your life or around you, you probably do, and the impact that your presence might have in their life, you might see some of that in these.

Reshma McClintock: I just wrote 'em down too, because I've listened to all of those, but I'm going back to re-listen.

Haley Radke: Okay, great. Now the other ones, that's so hard, it's really tough to pick. What I did is I wrote down the top three downloaded shows.

And the first one is an episode I did with Carrie. It is Episode 1 [00:30:00] with Carrie Cahill Mulligan. She is my co-host most of the time on Adoptees Off Script, which is the Patreon-only show that I also do weekly. Did you know I have two podcasts every week? Oh my gosh, Resh. It's a lot.

Reshma McClintock: It's a lot.

Haley Radke: It's a lot.

Reshma McClintock: It's amazing.

Haley Radke: So if you need to hear me talk more, I talk a lot more on that one than I do on my own podcast here. But Carrie shares about her reunion and we'd really go back and forth. This was much more of a back-and-forth conversation. What you're used to now is really not hearing too much of me. My editor. I don't know. She might roll her eyes at this. Is this too many secrets? Sometimes I get her to cut out my questions so that the guests can seem like they just keep talking and they have another thought and they go onto a different topic because I don't want it to be about me.

Reshma McClintock: Wow. I love that.

Haley Radke: So this is a little bit rougher, and the sound, everything. We're a lot more professional around here.

Reshma McClintock: [00:31:00] Episode 1 and you're on 155. We can have grace for that.

Haley Radke: There you go. There’s some grace. The second most downloaded one. I wonder if you're gonna be surprised by this? It's Episode 128 and it's with Blake Gibbons.

Reshma McClintock: Oh, I love Blake Gibbons.

Haley Radke: So if you want to hear about adoptee advocacy and the challenges in that space, and if you wanna be thinking about ethics and all the complicated things that come with adoption and advocacy, this is the one to listen to.

Reshma McClintock: Blake makes my head hurt in the best way.

Haley Radke: Yes,

Reshma McClintock: Because they are so smart and wise and kind and energetic and all the good things.

Haley Radke: That's right.

Reshma McClintock: So yay, Blake.

Haley Radke: That's right, I agree. The third most-downloaded episode is an episode with a therapist we've had on the show multiple times, Pam Cordano. But this [00:32:00] episode is Episode 85 and she asked her two adult daughters to come and share what it's like to have an adoptee as their mother.

Reshma McClintock: Okay, how have I not heard that one? Okay, I gotta write that down too. 85.

Haley Radke: So if you wanna talk about putting yourself out there and putting yourself on possible blast and sharing our dirty laundry. That is an episode. It is amazing. It's one of the most powerful, and that's why I think it's one of the most downloaded. Who gets to listen in on that kind of conversation? Who?

Reshma McClintock: Wow. Yeah, I haven't listened to that episode and I'm going to do that today. That is wonderful.

Haley Radke: So there are a bunch of different series I used to do: the Reunion Series, the Adoptees in Addiction, Adoptees in Relationships, Healing through Creativity. And the Healing Series continues with all the therapist interviews.

So all of those are linked on adopteeson.com. I really can't pick a favorite, [00:33:00] but I do think if what you're struggling with the most right now is relationships, and that's number one thing that people will say to me, then listen to that series and I think you'll get a lot from it.

Reshma McClintock: I love that. Thank you so much for sharing those. I think that it can be really overwhelming to come into a show with 500,000 downloads and 155 episodes and think, whoa, where do I even start? So I think that's a really wonderful tool to have as a jumping off point. What I'm certain of is that as soon as anybody listens to any one, two, or all of those episodes, they're going to wanna go back to the beginning and have a Haley binge.

So yeah, I imagine that'll just be all that people need to get sucked in because there's just so much goodness. When you really think about what those 500,000 downloads entail, like the knowledge and wisdom and emotions and experiences shared in each of those episodes and downloads and how they must impact [00:34:00] people, it's really like the mind-blown emoji. It's a lot to take in.

Haley Radke: Totally. Thank you for grilling me. I mean thank you for interviewing me. I know she could have asked a lot for the dirt, but there isn't any

Reshma McClintock: I'm selfish. I like to keep those for myself.

Haley Radke: Oh, that's, yeah, it's private.

Reshma McClintock: That's for Vox.

Haley Radke: It's for Voxer. Blackmail later. Down the road. Yeah. Alright,

Reshma McClintock: Yours can be that someday you'll interview my daughter.

Haley Radke: Only when she's an adult. And she can consent to that.

Reshma McClintock: No, I'm not as brave as Pam Cordano.

Haley Radke: Oh my goodness. Yeah. She's pretty amazing.

Okay, we're gonna wrap up with recommended resources, but first I'm gonna tell you the five things I've learned after 500,000 downloads. So number five, we're gonna count up to the top. Number five is that internet friendships are really real [00:35:00] and the connections that I've made online are so true and can be deeper sometimes than some of my in-person friendships.

The friends I've made on the Patreon Facebook group, dms on Instagram, through emails people have sent me, it's really special and I don't have words for it. And including my friendship with you, it's pretty amazing the level adoptees can go to with understanding each other right away. And I think sometimes internet friendships get a bad rap, like is that really like a thing? And it is. It's a real thing.

Reshma McClintock: Agreed.

Haley Radke: Number four, something I mentioned a little bit earlier, the experience of being adopted and being human. This is gonna sound like obvious, but it's absolutely tangled together, enmeshed. I have multiple listeners, you might not know this, that don't have a connection whatsoever to adoption, and they [00:36:00] learn so much from our stories.

And I think that the pain, the trauma that we've been through from adoption leads a lot of us to seek healing like we talked about earlier. And it's actually really inspiring for others, even outside of our community to hear. And I'm really proud of that for us as adoptees speaking up that we can impact people even outside of adoptee land.

Okay. Number three is that adopted people are very generous. I right now actually have over 150 monthly supporters, and they keep the lights on here, they keep my editor paid and they keep the podcast free and available to anyone who needs support. And I see some of those same people giving to other adoptee podcasters.

Adoptee Kickstarters, other adoptee Patreons that are doing art, writing, you name [00:37:00] it, they are willing to put their money where they think the resources need to be made, and they are helping impact their community by doing that. And so I thank you for your generosity and your willingness to do that. And I see it and it's amazing.

Reshma McClintock: Oh, I love that.

Haley Radke: Okay. Number two, adoptive people can be extremely passionate about our fights for original birth certificates, for citizenship, for family preservation. Oh, my word. Have we seen the people doing the work in these areas? Wow. I don't even, I don't even know how much more I can speak on that point.

I think it's evident to me, it should be evident to you if you've listened to any number of these podcasts. The passion, the drive, the fire in some of these advocates. It is awe-inspiring. I don't know how they do it. It's [00:38:00] amazing. And like we are cheering you on. Okay.

Reshma McClintock: Yeah. That's amazing. And so true.

Haley Radke: Okay, number one, I think this will be my second time crying, so I'm okay. I mean on this episode. Okay, this is not new information, but it's the most important.

Adoptee voices matter. And when you create a place of safety and are willing to be vulnerable with your own story, there's something really magical that happens between us, myself, my guests, with you listening. You get to listen and feel like you're sitting with us. And truly you are because my office is surrounded with your words, the books you've written and sent to me.

I'm looking at a wall filled with cards and [00:39:00] letters. I have art you've made for me, embroidery, paintings. My purse, two of my purses are made by adoptees. I have a mug fired in a kiln that is by an adoptee. All of these things surround my office and surround me while I'm talking to guests. And it's a constant reminder that your voices matter no matter how they're expressed.

If I hear your voice and we're sharing them audibly with listeners, or I'm seeing your words and your art, your creations, the show has turned into my love letter back to you, to adopted people, and I just wanna remind you that you're not alone. Your voice matters and it matters so much to me. Okay. That's it.

Reshma McClintock: Oh my gosh. I [00:40:00] am wrecked. Haley, I just want to say on behalf of adopted people who love and appreciate you, who listen to your show, who've seen your work, who have read the things you've written, who've been impacted by anything that you have done for our community, thank you. I know that is not what you're looking for here.

We didn't discuss this, but I just want you to know how thankful we collectively as a community are for you and for your work and for how deeply you love our community and how committed you are to it. So thank you for elevating adoptee voices. I just couldn't thank you enough.

Haley Radke: Thank you. Okay. I'm supposed to be the one that's ready with the transition voice. Let's do a recommended resource. No, seriously. Thank you. I appreciate that. And I know that Adoptees On is appreciated and loved. And, like I said, I have letters from people. Did you know you could send me letters? I have a PO Box on my website and I love getting [00:41:00] cards and it's really fun. My boys love it. Where's the stamp from?

Reshma McClintock: I love that. That's great. I wanna add one thing really quickly. Sorry, I'm going off. I'm going rogue. Okay. Brace yourselves.

Haley Radke: Okay.

Reshma McClintock: I just also wanna say your show has also been the catalyst for so many other adoptee organizations or websites or podcasts. I know, because I get to talk to you personally, how many adoptees have consulted you before starting their own podcasts. You're very quiet and very humble about that, but you're also very gracious with sharing the space and acknowledging that there is room for all of us to do our own individual work, even if it's along the same lines of something that someone is already doing.

That there is space for all of us. So I think that's a really powerful, important thing that a part of that success, a part of those 500,000 downloads is that you have helped other people build their own dream of elevating adoptee voices in their own way, on their own podcast, on their own website, in their own book, whatever it looks like for them [00:42:00]. That Adoptees On has been a catalyst for that. And that is really important to acknowledge, especially as you go into recommended resources.

See, look, there's a good transition.

Because that's one of the other really powerful things you do is elevating adoptees, not just who you're interviewing but other resources in our community.

Haley Radke: Thank you for acknowledging that. I'm laughing because Reshma knows good and well that I do not like compliments or any of those things. It makes me very uncomfortable. I'm fine. Okay.

Reshma McClintock: That’s like the 16th time you've said, I’m fine.

Haley Radke: I'm fine, I’m fine. There's a terrible acronym for that and that is what I am. You can look it up on Google. I was gonna say Urban Dictionary, but don't do that. If it's really gross and terrible, I don't mean that. I just mean you're not really fine, but you're fine. Okay. You know what, since you brought that up, I know there are over [00:43:00] 35 other adoptee-run podcasts. Did you know that number was that high?

Reshma McClintock: I did not, no clue.

Haley Radke: Okay. Those are the ones that I have been watching and seeing grow over the years. The first one that I know of was started in 2016, and that's The Rambler. I actually had Mike McDonald on the show a long ways back but he was the first one that I know of.

And shortly after that, April Dinwoodie started Born in June, Raised in April in February of 2016. And I started July 1, 2016. So 2016 was a big year for adoptee podcasts and I recommended many of them on the show before. And if you're looking for more adoptee podcasts, just search 'em out. They are out there for sure.

The second thing that I should shout out is Lesli Johnson. She is an adoptee [00:44:00] therapist who has been on the podcast a number of times. She was my very first Healing Series therapist that I had as a guest, and I don't even know how many times she's been on. It's close to 10, I would guess.

Reshma McClintock: I love Lesli.

Haley Radke: Yeah, she is amazing. I've met her in person before. She's just as delightful in person. And, oh my word. The feedback I get from people that have been her clients, it's like topnotch. She has just launched a course just for us, for adult adoptees, it's pretty incredible. I trust her. I know her expertise.

She's worked in this field for a number of years, and she is up to date on all the things trauma related. So I haven't personally been through this course, but what I'm saying to you is I can endorse it because I know Lesli and I endorse her. The course is called “Come Out of the Fog and Into Your Life: Rewire your Brain for Resilience and Joy.” A six-week course for adult adoptees. [00:45:00]

Now, the time we're recording this, it's gonna start right away next week, but if you go to adoption.com, you can find out how to register and if you have already missed this round, I'm sure she's gonna be doing it again and I'm sure there's details there of how you can sign up and be notified the next time she's running it.

So please go and do that if that sounds like something that would be important for you. We talk all through this episode about how important healing is, and if you've connected with Lesli in some of the Healing Series episodes that she's done, then you probably know that this might be a good fit for you.

So if you sign up, let me know. I wanna hear about it. I wanna hear if it's something I should sign up for in my spare time. Honestly, if it wasn't pandemic times and I wasn't concerned my kids would be home again with me any day now, I would be signing up this round. But I'm gonna wait. I think that's my recommended resource.

Reshma McClintock: I love it. I love Lesli. I'm on board.

Haley Radke: Alright Reshma, we've talked a lot about me today, but you are [00:46:00] the creator of “Dear Adoption,” a producer and the subject of the documentary Calcutta is My Mother. And I know you've been on the podcast before sharing about those things, but where can people connect with you online to read Dear Adoption and to see more of your work and to find out more about your documentary?

Reshma McClintock: Dear Adoption is dearadoption.com and we've been on a bit of a hiatus for some time but there will be more at Dear Adoption. I think that Dear Adoption will forever be a thing, but there are going to be some breaks here and there, which I think is also really healthy. Dearadoption.com is a great place to go to listen to a wide variety of adoptee voices. Haley being one of them, actually. You've been on twice. We have, I think, two on there from you.

Haley Radke: I think I do.

Reshma McClintock: I love them both. And the film. Actually, we had to postpone our screening in Minneapolis last spring. But that screening is not canceled. Just postponed. Probably looking at 2021 at this point.

And then hopefully soon after, the film will [00:47:00] be released for streaming available worldwide. So we will keep you posted on that. But thank you so much for bringing up my couple of little projects. You're always so kind and generous with your promotion and I appreciate it.

Haley Radke: I'm eye rolling 'cause you said “little” projects. Okay. We know that Reshma is a force in adoptee land.

Reshma McClintock: Thank you.

Haley Radke: So, all right. Thank you so much for celebrating with me today. I have my balloons up here still, my mismatched balloons and I'm really sad to hear that zero is not coming. I was really hoping for that, but I'm using “zero day” just to keep me humble.

Reshma McClintock: I can still send you one.

Haley Radke: It's been a pleasure chatting with you. Thank you so much, Reshma.

Reshma McClintock: Thank you. Love you.

Haley Radke: Love you back.

On re-listening to our conversation, I feel like I did not express to you how shocked I felt that the show reached half a million [00:48:00] downloads and that each download represents a human person who most likely is an adopted person, some of whom have never heard from other adult adoptees on the impact adoption has had on them.

And so they found the show, and that download counts as a person who was able to hear someone else who had an experience just like they did, and they felt that they were not alone. So thank you. Thank you for being one of those people who downloaded this episode and thought adoptee voices were so valuable that you really wanted to listen and hear part of the adoptee experience. So thank you for being a part of that.

I also want to express my great thanks again to my monthly supporters. Without you guys, I don't know that this show would've reached this [00:49:00] milestone and continued for four years as it has. So thank you so much from the bottom of my heart. If you want to join my supporters and if you think Adoptees On is impactful, that is an amazing way to support the show. Adopteeson.com/partner has details of that.

And like I was telling Reshma, there's the Adoptees Off Script podcast that's also weekly that I do for my Patreon supporters. And there's other things in there. But honestly, the best way and the free way to support the show is to tell just one other adopted person about the podcast.

And Reshma was saying, oh my gosh, there's so many episodes, 155. Where would you get started? If you are sharing the show with someone, it's amazing if you show them how to download a podcast if they've never done it before. Pick your favorite app. I love Overcast. There's lots of free ones if you're on an Android.

Download your favorite episode of the [00:50:00] show, something that has really been meaningful to you, or if there's one that relates to your friend's experience that they might find value in. Pick one of those. I really appreciate it and I do think once someone has listened then they’ll scroll through and find what they're interested in. So I think that's really helpful. Sharing the show with one person is amazing.

Another thing you can do is share the podcast on social media. Again, share an episode that you love and that you think your friends would love. And I'm so grateful 'cause so many of you do that regularly and I really appreciate that.

So thank you so much for spreading adoptee voices all around the world to over 144 countries 500,000 times. It's more than that by now. I just checked as I was editing. I just checked and I'm at 507,000 or something already, so there's already another 7,000. It's just [00:51:00] snowballing, which is wild. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for listening. I love you. Your voice is valuable. Your story matters, and I wish I could hear each one of you share your story on the show.

If you have listened this long, if you've made it to the end, I want you to know that I have opened up applications to be on the podcast, and I'm already receiving more than I could possibly interview, but I know that you've listened all the way to the end of the show, that you are excited about Adoptees On, and maybe you wanna share your story.

So if you go to adopteeson.com and you go to the connect page, there's instructions there on how to apply to be on the show. It includes recording yourself. A little message about what you would wanna say to adoptees. Share a little bit of your story with me. Why you think you'd be a good [00:52:00] fit for the podcast, and who knows? Maybe you'll be on the next episode of the podcast.

Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.