Brian Stanton shares his story of reuniting with his birth mother, how he decided to write a one-man-show about his experience and how sharing it with audiences with a personal connection to adoption has taught him more about himself than he ever expected. We talk about some incredibly vulnerable things in this interview, including the impact the public sharing of our personal stories have had on our loved ones.

Show Notes

Topics We Discussed

Brian shares his story of how his adoptive mother helped connect him with his birth mother
What happens when Brian receives his first letter from his birth mother during an acting class, and the emotions it brings up in him
Brian’s birth mother discloses in her letter that she wanted to keep Brian, but she wasn’t able to; and that she had been gang-raped at a high school party
The initial honeymoon of reunion and then what caused Brian to step back for a period
How Brian decided to write his one-person show, where he found inspiration and the push to finish writing it including seeing Alison Larkin’s The English American
The difficulty Brian and his birth mother have had keeping in contact regularly and who holds the “ball in their court”
The impact our public sharing of stories has had on our loved ones.
The ways others relate to adoptees: through the mother-child relationship
Brian shares that he is actively searching for answers about his biological father, and has found ways to humanize him despite his biological father’s past poor choices.
Healing through creativity, talking acting and Brian calls us to share our creative work, we need your voices!
How Nancy Verrier (figuratively!) punched Brian in the face: adoptees as chameleons