190 Barbara Sumner
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/190
Karri: [00:00:00] Hi, my name is Karri from Seattle, Washington. I'm a longtime Patreon supporter to Adoptees On because the voices and stories shared are similar to my own and help with my feelings of aloneness. Please join me in supporting the podcast at adopteeson.com/partner, where any level of contribution is appreciated. Thank you.
Haley Radke: You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is Episode 190, Barbara Sumner. I'm your host, Haley Radke. I am thrilled to bring you Barbara Sumner today. Her literary memoir Tree of Strangers is one of the best books I read this year, and I'm including my non-adoption-related reading in that. Today, Barbara and I talk about some of the painful experiences she recounts in her book, but we also talk about some of the issues facing the adoptee community today, including [00:01:00] Barbara's perspective on adoption reform versus the complete abolition of adoption. We wrap up with some recommended resources and, as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website adopteeson.com. Let's listen in.
I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Barbara Sumner. Kia ora, Barbara.
Barbara Sumner: Oh. Oh, aren't you lovely? That's great. Kia ora.
Haley Radke: How did I do? Am I close?
Barbara Sumner: Really good. You did great.
Haley Radke: I'm so excited to connect with you on the main feed show. We did a Book Club a couple months ago for your fantastic memoir Tree of Strangers, but thank you so much for agreeing to come and talk with us today.
Barbara Sumner: Thank you.
Haley Radke: I'd love it if you would share a little bit of your story with us.
Barbara Sumner: Well, of course, I've written about my story in Tree of Strangers. Although it's not just about my story as a book, it's also [00:02:00] about a lot of the issues that all of us, many of us as adopted people face. But my story's pretty common. Taken from my mother who was coerced and forced into relinquishing her child. She made the choice of no choice. There were no options for her. And so I was grafted onto a stranger's family and was expected to act my whole life as if they were my natural family. And, I think the thing many adopted people find is that we are required to be so performative. And I think adoption in itself is a performative act because we are pretending that we are the natural children, and it's not necessarily... Yes, I guess it's false. You could say it's a false paradigm that we are put within. But my story is I left home very early. It was a very [00:03:00] unpleasant place for me to be. And I got married young. I had children very young. And then I looked for my mother in my very early 20s and was able to find her through a whole series of very strange and obscure coincidences. This is in the early '80s, so it's long before DNA. And we connected. She was living in Spain, and we connected, through a third party. She got on the next plane to come to New Zealand and that plane crashed, and she was killed. So I guess the story is the idea that when we're born and we're separated from our mothers and we suffer that crushing defeat of losing the maternal dyad; as far as we are able to understand as babies, our mother has died. It is as if our mother has died. So for me, [00:04:00] of course, she came alive for three days because the three or four days between contacting her and her getting on the flight, she was no longer dead. And then she was, then she really was dead. So that double dying is something that only adopted people get to experience. It's a very unique and sad situation for us.
Haley Radke: I was so moved when you wrote about it in your book. I just was deeply grieved for you, and so I'm so sorry that you lost her and weren't able to meet her in person. One of the really painful things you recount is the courage you summoned up to tell your adopters that this had happened, and the reaction from them was just...it was staggering to me to read about, but I can't imagine the painful crushing, soul-crushing to hear this from [00:05:00] them.
Barbara Sumner: I think it was also crushing for them because they had, I now think, willfully lived playing that game, the as-if game. And so to have that reality thrust at them was very hard for them. The thing I understand now is that you can't be both the cure for someone's infertility and someone else's child. And so that truth for them was too much. And yeah, I had a photograph of my mother. It's not long after she's passed away, and I show it to them, and my adopting father takes the photo out of my hands and rips it up and screws it up and throws it across the table and yells, "There is your mother." And we never talked about adoption. It was: They did their duty by telling me I was adopted, but we were not allowed to discuss it. It was one of those no-go zones. And I [00:06:00] think many people experience that where it's just something that's there. It is. But it's not something you can explore. So whatever feelings you have around it, you're not allowed those feelings and so you suppress them or repress them. And for me, that was me starting to come out of the fog, I guess. And that whole idea of fog, I didn't even realize I was in it until the moment she died, when I kind of woke up, to the extent that I took my three small children–one, two, and three–and left my marriage. The parting of the clouds, I guess, was so great that I realized I was living a life that was not for me.
Haley Radke: What did it take to rediscover who you really were? I think that so many of us are just trying to unpack that. I kind of joke around sometimes we don't even know what we like. It’s identity reclamation of some kind.
Barbara Sumner: Yeah, but it doesn't happen overnight. I'm now 61. My daughter that was three at the time is now 40. And I'm still understanding it. I'm still explaining it to people. I was talking to a friend in Canada earlier today, and I was explaining to her how I hate making mistakes. She was recounting some of the things that she had done when she was younger that she wasn't proud of, and she said, Well, what about you? And I'm thinking, I don't know what that would be because I've been terrified of making mistakes. Because to make a mistake is to risk being rejected. And that immediately triggers the fact that you might die because that is the feeling when you are a newborn and you are suddenly separated from your source of life. The underlying feeling is one that you might die. And so, [00:08:00] I stole one thing once when I was 12 and then I took it half used and put it back on the shelf in the store because I didn't want to get caught. And that's a terrible burden. I wish I was free, I had felt free to be more loose with my life, I guess.
Haley Radke: Oh, that's interesting. Wow. That's a conversation for another day. The what-if Barbara. I just watched this news interview you did and you're doing all this amazing activist work in New Zealand and really are an outspoken advocate for adoptee rights there especially. And the other person that was on with you, a fellow adoptee, as soon as she was asked the very first question, she does what so many of us do. There's this sort of apologetic kind of "Oh, but I grew up in a really loving family." She gives this caveat, and [00:09:00] so then it's okay to explore. I thought, oh yeah, this is really a contrast because so many of us did have that experience but we can still be critical of adoption. And then for someone like yourself, when you can show us some of the negative experiences you had and in fact, this is a whole other topic, but you even talk about how much you disassociated, like you kind of forgot you grew up with an adopted sibling. You just erased this from some of the conversations I've listened to. So it's this, really I don't know, these contradictory experiences, where we can be critical of adoption and hope for something better.
Barbara Sumner: It's an interesting thing, isn't it? Because that person that I was on that show with, we talked later and she said, I'm only just beginning to get it. And she has a PhD and she's a very outspoken person. She speaks for Māori, and I don't, for Māori people that have been taken in adoption. [00:10:00] But the thing that I do say all the time is that it doesn't matter. It's not about whether we had a good adoption or a bad adoption. It's not about good adopters or bad adopters. All of us suffer the same loss of human rights, of universal human rights, and good or bad is not the point. Good adopters take away, erase our identity just as bad adopters do. And then being adopted is not welfare. It's a piece of property law in this country, and I'm sure it is there too. It's a combination of contract and property law. Being adopted is no guarantee that you won't be abused or you won't have a difficult life because we are adopted into families as diverse as people are born into. What is different [00:11:00] is that we have fewer rights than non-adopted people. And I guess my entire raison d'être is that I want what non-adopted people have. I want parity. I don't want to be a second-class citizen or a different citizen. I want what they have, and I don't think that's too much to ask.
Haley Radke: When you put it like that, no, that's not too much to ask. I think I really love hearing your perspective on that because I think so many of us wrap up our personal experience and our healing journey and, talking about coming out of the fog and things, and we wrap that up along with the adoptee rights issue. And we need reasons for it. And when you just talk about it like a human rights issue, it makes it so much simpler to talk to legislators about it.
Barbara Sumner: Yeah. One of the things that I find really interesting is that [00:12:00] non-adopted people particularly, but not only, want to know what your story is. And non-adopted people don't get asked what their story is. And what happens, I think, is that when we get caught into telling our story and our stories become anecdotes. The moment you say, as I have, that I was adopted into an abusive family, somebody will inevitably say: Oh, but I know someone who's really happy with their adoption. That's where I have an issue because, yes, of course, people have had happy adoptions. It's not about that. It is about how the law treats us differently, how we are denied our basic human rights for genetic information, how we are denied our ancestors, how we are required to act as if we are the offspring of people that we are not, how there's a lie at the center of our lives, which is birth certificates that are falsified. [00:13:00] In New Zealand every birth certificate, adopted or not, has a little statement on it that says that it's illegal under the Crimes Act to falsify the details of a birth certificate. And yet there on my second one is my adopter's names as birth parents. And they're not. Then I have another birth certificate, which is my first one, and it has a big fat stamp on it. It doesn't have the same depth of information, but it has on it a big stamp that gives the names and really detailed information about my adopters and my adopted name. And when I spoke to Internal Affairs, who run the births, deaths, and marriages, they said it's to stop me using my original birth certificate to create a false identity. And you begin to [00:14:00] see how twisted the thinking is, how all of us have been gaslit into thinking things that are really quite twisted.
Haley Radke: The irony in that. You may use this, your original birth certificate to create a false identity, but we've already done that for you,
Barbara Sumner: Yeah. In this country, I have it in writing from a person at births, deaths, and marriages, Internal Affairs, that describes my original birth certificate as “essentially ornamental,” and my adopted birth certificate as “a legal fiction.” And I think both of that is probably very accurate, that we are legal fictions, and I talk about the fictive family, how your adopted family is a fictive family. For me, that is particularly powerful when I think about – You talked about my sibling. [00:15:00] And I was wondering, maybe he's like an “adoptling” rather than a sibling, because both of us were forced to pretend we were brother and sister. And yet there was nothing in common between us. Nothing, just nothing. So you're always acting, you're always performing somebody. You're performing a role. You're performing the role of someone's sister, someone's child. And then they're performing the role as well, the parents, of being as if you were their natural child. I know you can look at someone else's child who is wonderful and lovely, and you think that you're in love with them or you're caring for them. But you know they're not yours. You know they're different. And we all know that, even if we won't, even if we can't talk about it.
Haley Radke: I know you've talked to so many adoptees about these things. And in fact, I went to look at Goodreads to see your [00:16:00] reviews because your book is wonderful. It's transformative. It is so beautifully written. You're a writer. You are a writer. It's so good. But I was curious what the general public had to say about your book. Interestingly, some of the critical reviews came from fellow adoptees, who had this challenge with the way you spoke about adoption. And I thought, Oh my goodness, we really are still just living in the fog here. Do you have thoughts on that? I know in your book you quoted from another adoptee rights activist from Australia. This is a quote from your book:
“Dr. Catherine Lynch, who runs the Australian Adoptee Rights Action Group, believes the compliant, well-adjusted adoptee has repressed their infant trauma. ‘They have learned to negotiate and secure their relationships within their adoptive families.’ They do this, she says, to avoid repeating their initiating [00:17:00] experience of abandonment and rejection."
Barbara Sumner: I can't improve on that. She's absolutely correct. That is what happens. And I don't blame adopted people for feeling that way because what if it all falls apart? What if we do tell the truth, to ourselves first, and it all falls apart? And then of course, this leads, I think, quite naturally into what I call reunion porn. Here there's a show on TV, and there's another one coming soon, that's actually by an adopted person. And what I think happens is that those kind of shows are like the third part, the final act of adoption that feeds back and says: Well look, it wasn't so bad after all because now you're lucky you've got two families. Aren't you lucky? But I know that [00:18:00] the family in reunion is nothing like the family relationship you would've had with those people had you had an experience of them growing up with them, or even had you known about them and had some interaction with them during your life. Essentially, we're talking about fear, fear that if we speak the truth, we will be rejected. It always comes back to that. If we do something wrong, we will be rejected. If we don't play the game the way it has been allocated to us, we will be rejected. And it's a deep wound. I don't know if it ever really goes away.
Haley Radke: I understand that concept. You get it, right? You get why so many of us are like, I can't even go there. That thought just never even consciously surfaces because it's too scary. And [00:19:00] you told your truth and you've paid the price. You've lost your connection with your adopter. She cut contact with you. Was it while you were writing the book? Was it after it was published?
Barbara Sumner: She cut contact with me. I told her that I was going to court to get my files, and in New Zealand that's almost impossible. You have to come up with a reason that is called a special reason. It says it in the act, “a special reason.” And that special reason is not defined in law but defined by any judge on the day, and it has to be something that has not been before the courts in the last 65 years. So you have to come up with a reason that has not been rejected before. So if you are dying of cancer, because I've got a whole pile of court decisions, minutes of court decisions, and so I know many of the reasons why people were rejected. You're dying of cancer? That is not a good enough reason. You will be rejected. [00:20:00] And that was 15, 20 years ago. So if you go with that now, you will not be allowed your files. I was able to come up with something–evidence of three different birth dates–that hadn't come before the courts before. It was still a choice, but they had to give me my files. So my female adopter was not happy about that. But in doing so, I discovered from some of the files –. In the end, I didn't get all of them, and I have to now go back to court again to get the rest. But I discovered that, really, I was trafficked. That weeks before I was born, the doctor was trafficking me to these people that adopted me, and they'd always said they knew nothing. They knew nothing about my mother. They knew no names. They had nothing. And I had evidence that they did, and I had evidence that my adopter's sister was involved with the doctor. And so therefore, I was trafficked [00:21:00] well before I was born. That was illegal then as it is now to promise away a woman's child before it's born. And when I said that to her, that's what did it. The fact when I said that your sister had trafficked me and the doctor, that was what it took.
So that has been nearly three years ago. She just lives around the corner, and I thought, I want to take her out for lunch and just see how she is, see how she's getting on and let her know that this is her decision not mine, and I'm here. I'd already asked her if she would like to come on this journey with me because I believe that she was also a victim, that she was told that it will not be any different. She had to suppress her own feelings, and she had to force herself to look at this baby and pretend it was her own, especially as I began to grow and become quite different to them. [00:22:00] We took her out for lunch, and I said, Tell me really what the problem is. And she told me that the problem was that I believed that they had lied to me. And I said, But I have the evidence. Actually, no, let's go back. I said: It doesn't matter what the evidence says. I understand how hard it must have been for you, and I just want to get past that. It doesn't matter anymore. Let's forget that and just make a relationship from there. And she looked at me and her face went blank, which is a face I remember well from my childhood, and she said, “I can't hear you.” And for the next 10 minutes, she repeated that. Every time I tried to speak, she said, I can't hear you. And so we left the lunch and I took her home and that was it. That is [00:23:00] exactly how it is. She couldn't hear me then, and she can't hear me now, and she doesn't want to. And I'm sad about that because this is a person I've known my entire life. And I know for myself as a parent, my relationship with my daughters has changed over the years. I am less a mother now and more a friend. I have an adult relationship with them. And what I understood from her is that she had not been able to transition, that I still had to behave as if I was her child, and she didn't want me in any other way. So I wasn't able to be in an adult relationship with her. Now, of course not all adopters are like that, but that's not the point. The fact is that because we've never had a public discussion and a public debate about this, because we don't talk about it in these very [00:24:00] clear terms, it's very hard for people to transition to understanding.
Haley Radke: I did a whole series on estrangement earlier this year and that was a really common thread. Really common, sadly. Going back to adoptee perspectives, I've seen so many adoptees go into helping careers. They go and train to be social workers or therapists in some way, and a lot of them end up going back to work in the adoption system. There's this hope, I think, that they can make some kind of changes from the inside and, I don't know. I don't know. I've never done that, so I'm not exactly sure. But what do you think about that? Adoption reform, is that possible? There are so many people who say they're working towards that, but I don't [00:25:00] necessarily see progress in that. I'm curious about your thoughts.
Barbara Sumner: It's an interesting one, isn't it? Obviously, the cry for reform and people going into the helping industries is a way of trying to work out their own feelings and to try and believe that it's not as bad as what their heart knows it is. But I don't believe that adoption should be reformed. So for instance, I was following a woman recently who's a therapist working with people that are hopeful parents who are trying to create children using assisted reproductive technologies and surrogates. She's an adoptee herself and it's almost like it's a front or a protection. The answer always is she's an adoptee so she would understand. But what I see is that she is trying to make her own experience marry up to what she wants [00:26:00] it to be rather than what it really is, and so she's trying really hard to make it okay. And she's there not to assist people who are adopted or who are created from anonymous gametes or who are going to be born through surrogates and then have suffered mother loss. She's there to meet her own needs, which are completely unmet in her own personal experience. And of course, we all do that. We all try and meet our needs in these ways.
But I used to believe that adoption could be reformed. I no longer believe that. I think that adoption should be abolished and that we have to replace it with a very strong understanding that family preservation must come first, that whatever we do we must try and protect the mother-child [00:27:00] dyad. We must support mothers to parent even when it seems really difficult. Obviously, there are always going to be children that need care, that are unable to stay in their families. They should not have to pay to be cared for with the loss of their identity. The cost then goes on to the child who is adopted. And for anyone else who is adopted, but who is adopted because their parent, their mother or father, can't care for them, they shouldn't have to lose their identity. Instead, what we should be doing is replacing adoption with forms of enduring guardianship so that it's understood by would-be adopters that you don't own this child, that you can't take away their identity and replace it with your own. I think that what we need to do is [00:28:00] change the underlying ethos of ownership, what I would call the tabula rasa, the idea that a child is a blank slate and that you can pick this child up from this person and dump it over here and there will be no harm. We know there's harm. The science is in that there is harm, great harm, and that harm lasts all our lives. So I really do think that we need to start talking about the abolition of adoption and a replacement with family preservation first, and when that's not possible with enduring guardianship that doesn't change birth certificates, that doesn't brand you with your adopters' names, that doesn't say you don't have siblings or cousins or grandparents or all those things.
Haley Radke: I remember hearing you talk about all the generations that you're severed from, and then also that your daughters are severed from, [00:29:00] this other layer of disconnection that's perpetuated through adoption. Can you talk a little bit about that? And then also–I'm going to link to this in the show notes–your daughter, Bonnie Sumner, is a journalist, and she interviewed you when Tree of Strangers came out, and it's really powerful to read her questions as a non-adopted person who gets it because you've obviously shared with her your experiences, etc. But can you talk a little bit about that?
Barbara Sumner: Yes. The issues around adoption I have talked about a lot with my daughters. I have four daughters and one stepdaughter. So we talk about these things always, and we have done for years. Not when they were smaller because I didn't know either. I was just learning. But we certainly talk about it a lot so they are probably [00:30:00] non-adopted people who get it, obviously. But the thing that I understand now increasingly at this late age is that the way I parented was based on being adopted. I created this very intense environment of us and them, that I probably held far too tight to them. In a way, subconsciously, they needed to meet my need not to be rejected. And I think now what a heavy burden I placed on my children. I don't blame myself for it because I get it, but it was a burden that they were required to meet my needs. And of course, they've lost their extended families as well. They've lost those relationships. I have three half-sisters: [00:31:00] two with my mother and one with my father. And my children have missed out on the culture of that wider family, as much as I've missed out on that culture. That's one of the things, again, getting back to reunion, one of the things is that you can't just suddenly torpedo into another family's life, and because you're genetically connected, that you are also culturally connected. There's a million little things that make up a family culture. We talk about culture as in, you know, I'm half Jewish, so I talk about Jewish culture. It's much more granular than that. It is that each of our families, within a family, there's a culture, and that's what we've lost as well. So yeah, my daughters get it, and it's a burden for them as well.
Haley Radke: When I was reading some of Bonnie's questions to you, I thought, my goodness, if only there [00:32:00] were other non-adopted folks who had this level of understanding to be our allies. Because it's like they don't believe us. Will they believe them? I feel like I go to that so often, how do we change the whole narrative? How do we change society's narrative about adoption? And I know you're a part of that movement, but it just feels so big, and yet you're doing it with your own daughters. Hopefully we're doing it with this conversation and so on.
Barbara Sumner: Definitely. You're definitely doing it with your fantastic work. I think each of us do it in our own way. I look at the wider adoption community, the adoptee community around the world, and I can see we fall into disagreement all the time because we are so sensitive. We are damaged people and we take offense very easily. I've noticed a lot of that [00:33:00] within the community, and we end up in-fighting rather than rising above individual issues and joining on the things that we can agree on. That it's not about a good or bad adoption, that it is about loss of human rights, that it is violations of the United Nations treaty on the Convention on the Rights of the Child, those things. These are the things that we need to agree on, rather than that we have to speak well of adopters or you had a good adoption and I had a bad one. So we're a difficult community to communicate with, let alone communicate beyond into, as you call them, our allies. It's difficult to find allies because the gaslighting is remarkable.
I was actually talking with Bonnie and my other daughter, my next daughter down, Rachel, about this the other day. We were discussing how gaslighting is so pervasive that [00:34:00] almost... I don't know how they did it, but it had to be using the very strong lever in society of shame. 1955 is when the Adoption Act came in. In 1954, and prior to that, it was illegal to abandon a child. It was considered shameful to leave your child. It was not something people did. And then what appears, to us, almost overnight, although I'm at the moment just starting to research what actually happened, we went from that understanding that a mother and child are indivisible to it being considered a good thing for mothers who had no support to give away their child. And in fact, it was shameful to keep your child when somebody else could give them more: more love, more money, more stability, more support. And of course, we're talking about married women able to give children what a [00:35:00] single woman could not. And so we're talking about how amazingly society switched very quickly from one way of thinking about a mother and child to a completely alien way. And we hear quite often actually from the adoption industry that babies have been looked after, children have been looked after by other than their family from the beginning of time, and it's just not true. In the odd cases, of course, but the family unit has always been, and that's the genetic family unit, the basis of society. But what I think happened then, and I still am working my way through this, is that the whole idea of the nuclear family was starting to be part of society. And a single mother with a child does not fit the nuclear family. And this was, of course, part of economics. It was an economic thing. The [00:36:00] nuclear family is an economic family. It's an economic unit. So it was part of how we were changing as a society. So a single woman and her child does not fit that description. A married woman who's infertile also does not fit that. So you cannot make a nuclear family on infertility. So of course, that's what we started to do. We started to say: Oh, look, we can take the babies from here and pop them over there. Et voilà, the nuclear family. All done, dusted. Fresh loaf of bread from this one over to this one.
Haley Radke: And as you're recounting that, I'm thinking of your story and, as you shared earlier, when reunion was imminent and you left your husband, you became a single mother with three little teeny, teeny ones at that time. [00:37:00] And you talk through the impoverished times and all the things that you've done to support your family. I wonder what your perspective is on that. You did it. You did it with no support. How did you do that? And you share about that in your book. So I could see why family preservation is just so deeply ingrained in you.
Barbara Sumner: Yeah. I remember when I first left with my children. When I look back now, I think that was insane. What a crazy thing I did. How did I expect that I would survive with three babies aged one, two, and three? It was a madness, but all I can say is I was very young and so I had a lot of energy. Certainly, I couldn't do it as I got older. But also, I don't know. One of the things that happened was at one point, [00:38:00] and this is a thing, I had a problem with some behavior in my adoptive parents' family. There was some drinking and some bad male behavior, and it was over Christmas and I didn't want to expose my children to that. I went home early from this, went back to their house–we were staying with them–and I said to them that night: "Look, I'm not gonna do that again. This is not a safe place for my children or for me." And they were being rude to me, the men. There's another thing I think that happens sometimes in adoption where because you are not genetically theirs, there's a freedom to behave in a different way, even if it's a subtly different way, and I think many of us understand what I'm saying here. And my adopters went cold. They did the cold face and stopped speaking to me. And so I left the next day and drove home with my kids. And then a few weeks [00:39:00] later I got a letter from them, a registered letter in the mail, that said that if I couldn't accept their family as my family, if I couldn't accept their family, then they needed to disassociate from me. And I understand that it wouldn't matter what my kids did, I couldn't disassociate from them. It's just not possible. And I then understood that I was truly alone. I had three small children. I was living in a city, I had managed to find a rental house that I could afford by some circumstances that were remarkable, but I had no one and there was nobody to turn to. And part of, for me, for adoption, we moved house every few years so I had no long-term friends. I was completely disconnected from any support networks. So those were [00:40:00] tough times, and I don't think anybody should have to go through that. We should not treat women in such a way. We need to change not just how we are with single women and family preservation, we need to support what it is to be a mother. We don't. We don't mother. We don't mother our mothers. We just expect you to get on with it.
Haley Radke: Thank you for those thoughts. That is really powerful. It is something that I I always throw around, family preservation first, and it's very important to me, too. But really understanding what that means and the level of support a mother and child need to stay together, it looks very different than just a quick, snappy phrase, right?
Barbara Sumner: Well, I read some research and I can't bring it out right at this moment, but some research that said in the States they [00:41:00] looked at women who were relinquishing their children and asked them what the dollar figure was that they needed to parent. And it was $3,000. And adoption in the States is, I guess, something around 30,000. It's very expensive. So I think where the education needs to be is around family preservation. That if you want a child, we seem to think that there's a right to it, that your right to a child is greater than that person's right to their identity and to be with their mother. So we have to change that sense of absolute right to have whatever it is that you want, a privilege, that that privilege belongs to you. What if we were saying to anyone who couldn't have a child: Well, you can't have a child, but here's a mum and child that really needs support. They live near you. [00:42:00] Could you take them into your wider group and help care for them? Would that be so difficult? You couldn't own the child, but you could still have a relationship. Why don't we pair people up? If you've got an alcohol problem, we pair you up with somebody through AA who's going to mentor and assist you. We do that in other areas. Why not this area?
Haley Radke: That's a beautiful picture, right? That's community. That's really like what it should be. Thank you so much, Barbara. I've really enjoyed our conversation. Is there anything, any other thoughts you want to leave us with before we do our recommended resources?
Barbara Sumner: In the end, as adopted people, we should be kind to each other, understand that we're all in really different places. We're not all on the same page with it. We all suffer the same loss of rights, but our relationship to those loss of rights is different. Each of us is at a [00:43:00] different place with it.
Haley Radke: All right. Well, I don't think it's a surprise. I'm going to recommend your amazing book, Tree of Strangers. Like I said earlier, it's so beautifully written. I loved it. I just said too, that we did a book club with you, so we read it together as a group, a lot of my Patreon supporters, and you joined us and we really deep dived into the book. I have one reader who is notoriously stingy with her five stars, but she gave you five stars.
Barbara Sumner: Oh, bless.
Haley Radke: Yes, bless her. So anyways, she loved it too. I want to encourage people too, if you want to see more adoptee writers in the world, and if you want to encourage fabulous books like Barbara's, make sure you're giving our authors reviews. Go on Amazon, Goodreads. There's all kinds of places you can review Tree of Strangers, and make sure you give it five stars. And you don't have to write a [00:44:00] huge paragraph. You can write two lines about why it was important to you. I really like to encourage folks to do that. It really can highlight adoptee authors and this excellent work. So, thank you so much, Barbara. Look how many book darts are in there.
Barbara Sumner: Oh my goodness.
Haley Radke: Yes. It's double the weight.
Barbara Sumner: Oh, it's hilarious.
Haley Radke: I really loved your book, so thank you so much.
Barbara Sumner: Oh, thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you.
Haley Radke: I would love to hear what you want to share with us today.
Barbara Sumner: Rather than a resource, like a book itself, I think the thing that I really want to share is that I get the most satisfaction and comfort from small groups of adopted people. And in New Zealand we have this group, Adult Adoptees New Zealand it's called. It's a little group on Facebook. It's a beautifully supportive place. We're not all on the same page all the time, but the underlying belief system of this group is that we're there to [00:45:00] help and support each other. And it is well moderated. So there are three women who moderate it, and they do a beautiful job. I think for me, it's that connection with other adopted people that really helps me, helps me to not feel so alone in the world. I do feel alone in the world, even with children and a lovely husband. I am alone because I may know my family and I may know my heritage now and my ancestors and all of that through DNA, but I'm not legally on my family tree. When I die, I won't be on my family tree. My death certificate will have my adopters as my parents, and that hurts me. So it hurts me not to belong where I belong. I'm out of place. It would be wonderful if one day all adopted people could be in place. [00:46:00]
Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. I, too, am such an advocate for community, adoptees supporting adoptees, who get it. I think it's so important, and what a beautiful way to frame it, even though it also comes with this melancholy. But it's true. We're disconnected and, actually I don't know if you can summon up my logo in your head. I'll see if I can show you here. But when I had my friend design it for me, I asked her to make sure this one leaf was completely disconnected, and I said, make it blue like a tear because we are separate. And it doesn't matter what we do, there's no trying to graft it back on and have it be the same as if we had stayed with our original families.
Barbara Sumner: Yeah. That's true. And then, of course, there is that dissension within the community often, and I don't see how we can expect it to be anything but, because we are disconnected from ourselves, [00:47:00] from our families, and it's very difficult to have relationships that aren't disconnected.
Haley Radke: Indeed. I'll try and do better, but we are what we are. What do you say, what do you say about that?
Barbara Sumner: Don't tell me about it. Yeah.
Haley Radke: Oh, dear. It's been such an honor. Thank you so much for your beautiful memoir, Tree of Strangers. It is five stars from me, too. Thank you so much, Barbara.
You can connect with Barbara on her website, barbarasumner (dot) nz, for New Zealand, and she's got links to her socials there. She has a newsletter you can sign up for so you can make sure to stay up to date with the goings on in Barbara Sumner land, which I encourage you to do. I have linked that in the show notes for you if you want to hear more from her. As I mentioned in the interview, she joined us on our Patreon Book Club. So if you go to [00:48:00] adopteeson.com/partner and join Patreon, you can have access to that recording. It's so good. I really just want to sit and listen to her even longer. I'm really thankful for her work in this space. And even if you are not there, even if her perspective on adoption is really more strongly than you feel, I have learned so much about just the language and how we talk about adoption to other folks, and really appreciated her perspective and work on this. You can tell she has honed in on the basic, most important messages that people will listen to. So I encourage you to read her book and follow her work.
And on that note, I want to hear from you. I am working on another Adoptee Remembrance Day episode. So if [00:49:00] you remember, last year was the first annual Adoptee Remembrance Day started by Pamela Karanova. Pamela came on the show to talk about Adoptee Remembrance Day and all the different things it's acknowledging, including adoptees we've lost to suicide, including the adoptee citizen rights issue, including the acknowledgement of adoption trauma and loss of our genetic families, all of those and more. And I would love to include your voice in an upcoming show acknowledging Adoptee Remembrance Day. So I have a link in the show notes. If you go to adopteeson.com/ARD, for Adoptee Remembrance Day, it will take you to a little website on your phone or your computer, and as long as you just give it permission to use your microphone, you can record a message and send it over. I will be [00:50:00] using some of those clips in the Adoptee Remembrance Day show. You have a couple of weeks to get those in to me by October 20th, so we have time to edit and craft that podcast episode for you. But I'd love to hear your voice. If you've wanted to be a guest on the show, but you haven't quite got there yet, this is an excellent way for you to share a little bit of your story or acknowledge maybe a friend you've lost or just comment on the importance of adoptee citizenship. Any message that you think adoptees and those who love us would need to hear.
And lastly, but definitely not least, I want to thank each of my patrons. You guys are making this show work. You are making it happen. Your money pays for all the costs of producing this podcast every week. I'm so grateful for you. If you want to [00:51:00] join them, adopteeson.com/partner has details. And you can hear from some of my too kind, way too kind patrons. I'm going to leave a little message from them for you here. They said it. I'm not going to put words in their mocguth. I'm going to share that with you now. But thank you so much for listening, and let's talk again next Friday.
Anonymous: The Adoptees On podcast connects adoptees throughout the world in a real and compassionate understanding of how we feel. When I listen, I am part of a tribe of people that truly get each other, led by Haley Radke, one of the most sincere human beings on the planet. I need to listen. I truly love our Adoptees On [00:52:00] community.
