292 Shelby Redfield Kilgore

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/292

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it, either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. oh my gosh, Haley, where have you been? It's been so long since you published an episode. You listen, I had double pneumonia. You guys, I'm so sorry. I was sick for two whole months and I was thinking to myself, I think this is.

I think it's the first, maybe second time ever that I missed a podcast drop date in eight years. So I'm trying really hard to give myself a pass. And I think it's been a while, but I think last time it was like, oh, I didn't hit publish. And [00:01:00] so it was up, Friday midday instead of Friday morning or something.

So that's a little different than ghosting you for six weeks or whatever it's been since I published it. I think it's been like two months. My apologies. We're back. We have all new shows ready for you. I want to thank you for all of you who sent your well wishes my way. I appreciate it so very much.

And we have brand new shows coming in every other week starting today. And it's so exciting to start back in with today's guest, Shelby Redfield Kilgore is a Korean adoptee and filmmaker. I'm going to call her a YouTuber since you can watch her documentaries and videos alongside 800, 000 other folks who've already had the pleasure on YouTube, we talk about Shelby's passion for sharing adoptee stories and how that has shifted in tone over the years.

And we also talk about her health struggles [00:02:00] and the impacts those have had on her reunions. And a recent motherhood. Before we get started, I wanna personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community over on adoptee on.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world.

And we wrap up with some recommended resources. And as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adoptee on.com. Let's listen in.

I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Shelby Redfield Kilgore. Welcome Shelby.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate being a guest on your amazing podcast.

Haley Radke: Aw, thank you. I'd love it if you would start the way we usually do. Would you feel comfortable sharing a little bit of your story with us?

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Sure. I am a Korean adoptee. I was adopted in 1983 when I was about [00:03:00] 11 months old to a white adoptive couple. And I was raised in a loving family. Where they allowed me the space to talk about my conflicting emotions about adoption in the sense of missing and grieving the loss of my first mother and talking about, just feeling like there was a hole in my heart, that there was something missing.

And so that was, I was fortunate to have that. And I also have another connection to adoption because my adoptive mother, and I'm okay to share this because of her she shared her story with me on my YouTube channel about being a birth mother. She was sixteen when she had to relinquish her child for adoption.

And they were reunited 47 years later. So I've known about that since I was 11 years old. So we've had a very close relationship in that sense, [00:04:00] because I just remember her telling me that I wanted to be the adoptive mother that I hope my son had. And when I was 17, I was able to meet my first mother in Korea with my adoptive parents, and that sort of, at the time, felt like closure to me, because I thought that's all I ever wanted, but what really happened was I started to have more questions and I started to process my adoption in a different way.

And so I it was a difficult process for me really, because I also struggled with identity issues as a Korean adoptee living in a very predominantly white community, which I hadn't really addressed as a kid, which is hard to when you certainly don't have this space at home to talk about that, because it's not that they probably wouldn't have been comfortable talking about it.

I just never brought it up and they never thought to bring it up. So [00:05:00] when I was in my late twenties is when I decided, because I am a producer in documentary work, I decided that I wanted to launch my own channel and share other adoptee stories, adoption stories too. And that's when I really started really realizing that I was in somewhat of adoptee fog, that term, and that I was experiencing a disruption.

But each time I was talking to a new adoptee and their experiences about reconnecting with other biological family members. So not just their mom. And I was like, oh, cause I knew from my adoption paperwork and meeting at least the maternal side of my biological family, that I had these half siblings, two half brothers.

So I started wondering about other family members. And that's where my adoption, [00:06:00] my personal feelings and evolution started really taking flight was when I started the channel. So that's my story.

Haley Radke: Okay, so I've been doing this podcast for a little over eight years. You've been telling adoptee stories for over a decade.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Yes, over a decade now.

Haley Radke: Okay, yeah. It's interesting how you know, community story sharing and things really shifts our opinions over time when you look back at your work from the early years. Can you do that now? And how has that changed for you? What do you think about having those? Early storytelling. Do you have cringe moments? You're like, ooh, I don't think that anymore. Do you have anything like that?

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Yes, when I am looking back at my earlier [00:07:00] videos I came with a lens of I know there's trauma and severe grief in adoption because of the separation of mother and baby. I grew up with that my whole life and processing that, but that was only one dimension of my adoption grief and trauma and but I thought I have these loving parents. I have a great relationship with them and so there is something good that came out of that. So is this idea of making something good come out of something bad and I wanted to share that with other adoptees and adoptive parents, and I think it was challenging for me because I was joining all these adoptee spaces on Facebook at the time, and so I wasn't necessarily ready to hear everything that they were saying about adoption through the lens that [00:08:00] it's an industry.

It's a billion dollar industry and children are looked at as like commodifying children basically. So it's very hard to look at it in that sense. And looking back on it now, there's some adoption stories that I was thinking do I need to take some of these down because some adoptees I interviewed were children and I know that as a child you progress and you change your views on adoption from your own personal experiences, especially big life events that may trigger your adoption.

And, but I, I remember reading this one adoptee that I follow on social media, and I love everything she says the Diary of a not so Angry Adoptee, which I know that you interviewed on your podcast and I listened to that. She said, she wa s considering or thinking of, should I remove some of my posts from when I first started out blogging, but it's the evolution of her journey as [00:09:00] well.

And so my sharing these stories, like keeping them there in the beginning, like from the beginning is I think so important because that's also the evolution of my adoption story and how I started seeing things differently. And I still will always be grateful because in the beginning, it was adoptive parents and adoption lawyers that wanted to tell me their story.

And it was adoptees that saw that. And then they came forward and they said I want to tell my story because adoptees should be centered in this narrative of adoption. And I was grateful that the videos that I did have, they're very varied perspectives on adoption, that it allowed, for other adoptees to come forward to tell me their story.

And that's how it started. It all started from people watching my videos and then reaching out to me on social media to ask if they could be a part of it and [00:10:00] I, it just, it's been an incredible experience and I feel so honored to be able to share these stories and I try very hard as a filmmaker to let them tell their story whatever stage they are, because I'll still find adoptees that see their adoption probably the way that I did a decade ago, and there was one time when I remember I struggled and I was really trying to, and I apologized about doing that. It was, what is the term you would call it, but being almost forceful, like a way about, are you sure you think that way? And I'm like, oh no, I'm stepping out of my non judgmental seat basically, or.

Haley Radke: Yeah. As a I just was talking to a qualitative researcher and she's talking about how she's interviewing adoptees and you have to be neutral, right? And you can't give your side or add in bias, especially when you're doing [00:11:00] research for academic work. So you have that stance as a filmmaker.

You don't want to insert yourself into the story. Yeah, I totally get that. I'm so biased, Shelby, I know that comes across. No, I appreciate that. I love having documents that can show our progression. I know if people go back and cringe, listen to the first season of my show. And you can hear me in real time unpacking so many things with the people that I'm interviewing.

So I so relate to you on that. Can we go back to childhood? I know you've shared before that you. grew up as a person of color in a very white community and you were experiencing racism, schoolyard situations, those kinds of things. And it's interesting to me that growing up with a mother who [00:12:00] is also mother of loss as a birth mother and I'm sorry that your adoptive mom experienced secondary infertility.

That's really common for a lot of birth moms. I don't know if our listeners knew that, but super common. Anyway, so she was able to give openness and language about talking about adoption, but not to the potential for you to be experiencing racism. Are you comfortable sharing a little bit more about that?

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Of course. So what happened was, as I was a young adult, like in my 20s, I started talking about it with them, and then I started writing about it when I started filming other adoptees. And I had forgotten that they really didn't know that I hadn't told them when I was a child. Because I never had the tools when kids in elementary school would call me flat face.

Or they would pull their face back so that [00:13:00] their eyes would be more slanted. I just shut down. I didn't have the language to respond. And that's, sometimes even as an adult, when something like that might happen I will just shut down and internalize it. And as a child in elementary school, when kids were like that, I wanted so much to disappear and I did not want to be Asian.

So there's a lot of almost self hatred in a way of not wanting to look like you do. Seeing yourself in the mirror and feeling like this is not how I feel and also I remember, I think I was in high school, a friend of mine at the time called me Twinkie and I'm like I'm like, what? And she said, you're yellow on the outside, white on the inside.

And I, again, just, I shut down and internalized it. But I, I remember [00:14:00] very strongly feeling incredibly upset by that, especially like a friend. And it's really because I don't know how even to this day, how to tell someone, but I am Korean American. I may not have been raised with the values and cultures of Korean American, but what does that mean?

Would it be over in Korea? Cause that's quite different than Korean Americans. And I'll still have people say, oh, I consider you my white friend, but I am not, I, I still, it's very frustrating. And it's I don't even want to get into it because I also recently read the book by Angela Tucker, You Should Be Grateful, where she uses the word exulansis.

So it's basically a term where it's impossible for you to describe your experience for someone who hasn't experienced that, which would be adoption, [00:15:00] for them to understand. It's almost what's the point? But basically I do wish my parents had the education to at least start the conversation or let me know that this may be something I would face.

I also felt it in the church we grew up in. I grew up in. I was raised in an Episcopalian church and was very white. And I remember bringing that to my reverend. And I was doing this school report. In high school, I remember that because we were talking about racism and segregation and how to end self segregation and all that.

And I'm like why don't we just make these churches require for, a certain amount of people of color to attend? Because I didn't understand why there was a church right across the street that was an all black church. And then this is an all white church minus [00:16:00] myself and my adopted brother from Korea too. That we aren't biologically related. And I remember talking to him that, and then the next weekend, there was a social gathering between our churches. And then after a few times it stopped and I found out why. Because people in my church complained. And I'm like, besides having my own issues with faith at the time, because of being an adoptee, I was like, I think I'm just, I think I'm done.

That's how I felt, at least with that church, that was my experience. It very much stuck with me that why are churches like this? They're supposed to be loving and accepting of all people, yet here we have pretty blatant racism.

Haley Radke: Blatant, overt racism.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Not just subtle.

Haley Radke: No. oh my word. Okay. Thank you for sharing [00:17:00] that. I'm sure a lot of our listeners will relate to those experiences. You know what's making me so frustrated, Shelby, is that I'm like how much has changed since then? Not that much. You know what I mean?

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Nope.

Haley Radke: Oh my goodness. Okay, so let's go to meeting your birth mother, which was like not gonna happen and then it happened and she had kept you a secret from her new husband and family. Can you share a little bit about that? That's another thing a lot of people can relate to for sure. Because when we're a secret, it's very hard to maintain a relationship.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Yes. I was 17 at the time when we were getting ready to go on a trip to Korea, South Korea, with [00:18:00] a group of adoptive families. And my parents took us to family therapy so we could all prepare.

And I was just focused on, whether or not I was going to get to meet my birth mother because they said that they had found her and they had asked her for a meeting and she said no. And I was so devastated. It felt like a second rejection for me because that's all I had ever wanted since I was five and understood what adoption meant.

And they also gave me this piece of information with more information about my biological family. That they had withheld for 17 years. So then I had this intense feeling of anger. Like why would you withhold this information? I have a right to this information. What I, it's. I didn't understand, especially as a child, why they would do that.

And I found out, I had several half siblings on my birth father's [00:19:00] side, and then two brothers on my mother's side. And, the kind of their story, I had both of their names, their ages. It's not like they were teenagers, they were in their mid to late twenties. And, just, this information, just one and a half pages of information.

And I felt like I, I learned so much in so little time that had, that my parents didn't know about. And anyway, so we went on the trip and I asked them to ask her again, just to tell her that we were there because I was, I, I was enjoying the trip, meeting other adoptees my age and sightseeing and, but it was an emotional rollercoaster.

They would make you cry and you would go to an orphanage or it was called Esther's Home at the time, but there was also an orphanage [00:20:00] attached to it. But you would speak with these birth mothers who were deciding to relinquish their baby the day that they're born and they're asking us do you have a better life?

Because this is the messaging that everyone is telling everyone. The adoptive parents, the birth mothers.

Haley Radke: You're part of the propaganda machine.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: I know and I know that I just, I couldn't say anything, at the time, yes, I love my parents and I I was for the most part very happy but you're telling me this while you're making this decision, but you're not a teenager and I don't think that you're you know you're single and you just I was trying to understand the culture because it was like a culture shock for me learning that the single unwed mothers in Korea are just ostracized by society even to this day to relinquish their child for adoption.

To find out that I would have grown up not being considered a citizen [00:21:00] because I was, my, my mother was unwed at the time that she had me, I don't know, it was just a lot of information to take in at 17 and I of course felt torn about seeing these children that would age out of the orphanage because their parents left them there since they couldn't afford to take care of them, but they wouldn't sign their rights away.

So that was also hard to see. Is it better for them to grow up in their country of origin in an orphanage, or to be sent to a loving home? I don't know.

Haley Radke: Or to be given the resources to

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Exactly.

Haley Radke: support their own children in their own home.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: I know. I know. But my birth mother relented in meeting me. She met me in secret and brought her sister along for support. And so I got to meet my aunt and she told me, I remember in the beginning, that I'm not going to cry. I'm going to stay strong. And I'm like, oh this is totally different because I am very emotional and I cry all the time. So she came across as very cold in the [00:22:00] beginning.

I remember asking her if she loved me, if she thought about me, and she said all of those things, that she thought of me every day.

I think I'm very emotional now because I am a new mother. So it's hard to imagine ever being parted from my son. And I asked her, did you struggle with the decision? She said she said no, that she always knew she was going to relinquish me for adoption, but she wanted to keep me for two months because she wanted to breastfeed me, which that's something cancer took away from me.

So as a breast cancer survivor, I had to have the bilateral mastectomy. But, so that was, I didn't really think about that until after the meeting because I had wanted to hear her say that she [00:23:00] was, I thought it was that she tried to keep me for two months and then decided it was too difficult and then to place me, but the plan was always to place me, at least in her mind.

And at the end, when we said goodbye. She cried. I think always goodbyes are very hard for me, even whenever I see it in, movies or TV series. That always gets me, for sure. But it's funny, I felt like my aunt was very warm. It's funny to me looking back why I didn't. My mom said that she did ask, about family health history at the time, but she didn't really give anything. She just said, oh, we're healthy. And that she just said my birth father had a good heart, so she didn't really talk about his health or anything or what she knew, but we didn't stay in contact [00:24:00] afterwards because I would have had to write a letter to the agency, then they would have to translate it, then it would have to be sent to my aunt who would give it or tell her the contents in secret since my birth mother had remarried and kept me a secret.

And she still keeps me a secret to this day because I have done two family birth searches. I did another one when I was filming an adoptee, a Korean adoptee, going back to Korea to find out more information about her biological family. And so I tried to do a second family birth search to find not just my birth mother or reconnect with her, but also my birth father and his side of the family, but it resulted in nothing.

I was at Eastern Social Child Welfare Society, they wouldn't let my husband, who was at the time my fiancé or Kathy, come in, the adoptee I was filming. [00:25:00] I had to be alone, and they wouldn't let me record it. And she said we feel that we were able to give the telegram to who we believe is your half sister at your father's house.

And I remember just bursting into tears because I was like, I'm in Seoul, Korea, and you're telling me, you're not going to give me the address and let me know, or, try and reach out. It felt so unfair to me, but I had to, I decided to just push it aside so I could focus on Kathy's story cause I was filming her story and I'm so happy that it has so many views now on my YouTube channel because her story is so important and I, it's, I feel like it's, it could have been a story also in the recent documentary on PBS, Frontline, the South Korea's Adoption Reckoning, because of her information being falsified.[00:26:00]

I did want to go into my third family birth search was after I was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer right after the pandemic hit, I felt the lump and it felt like it came out of nowhere. And then it was just a whirlwind of tests, scans, and doctor's appointments. And because it was breast cancer, and it's so funny, an adoptee that I have interviewed and worked with on other projects, she asked me, what did your 23andMe say?

And I was like, that I didn't have BRCA1 or BRCA2. But I didn't realize that it only tested for a couple strands. And I did go through genetic testing after I found out about the cancer, and I did find out I'm BRCA2 positive. That's what prompted me to initiate the third family birth search.

And I got a letter from my [00:27:00] oncologist that I sent to NCRC, the National Center for the Rights of the Child. And because of the family health issue, they could be more aggressive in their search and in contacting them, and they reached both of them. My mother was very upset about being contacted again.

She said, please don't ever contact me again, because I'm still a secret. Which is still very painful for me. And she said that she doesn't know of any cancer in her family. And then the same with my birth father. And he actually wanted to get a DNA test, which at the time I was still going through breast cancer treatment, very aggressive, chemo, the surgeries, everything, radiation.

And I said, no, because I had already done three DNA testing. In the US. 23andMe, Ancestry DNA, and My Heritage. So I didn't want to have to pay for another test that they have [00:28:00] done in Korea. So I just let that chapter close for now. And then, I was feeling terrible headaches when, after all the treatment and surgeries and I was on the medication to help the cancer from returning.

And so they wanted to make sure the cancer hadn't returned or spread. And so I got a brain MRI and they cut a mengenoma, which is a benign brain tumor. Thank goodness it's benign, but because of the location in my brain, it's very close to a nerve. So it has no room to grow. Or else it'll cause very severe damage.

And I decided to do this Gamma Knife procedure, which is targeted radiation. To hopefully make the brain tumor inactive, or to kill it, which we think, it did, but I still have to have brain MRIs once or twice a year for the rest of my life, besides all of the other things for my health. And so that made me, once again, [00:29:00] I reach out to my family to let them know about this if maybe this has happened in their family or to let their children know this is a possibility that could happen to them. And I decided to do the DNA test with my birth father to prove that I was his biological daughter and so that he could maybe be more open about family health history.

And fortunately, they sent me the test. So it didn't cost me anything, but it did cost me shipping. And to ship to Korea is like $70. So it was still a decent amount of money. And so that made me very upset. But I got the results the night before I had the Gamma Knife procedure. And it was a match. And I got this phone call from someone in Korea and the person was talking Korean and I knew in my heart it was my birth father.

And I felt this immediate sense of guilt because I [00:30:00] had not learned the language. And that is just another loss I've had to come to terms with that I lost the language of my country of origin. And it made me think of my parents. They had a Korean babysitter for me up until I was about four. And my mom would say that I understood her.

Like simple things like go put your clothes in the drawer or those kinds of things, and then something happened that was dangerous with my babysitter's partner. He was very violent and he, the house. And so that's when they had to let her go. But there was also another incident where she left pills out and I got a hold of them and I swallowed them and I had to go to the hospital for my stomach to be pumped when I was a toddler.

So there, so after that second incident with her violent partner, they had to let her go. So that was very unfortunate. But the [00:31:00] knowledge that up until I was four, I still had someone speaking Korean to me, and that I understood that. I wish I had been able to keep that, that going, because I never, I remember in college, I, the college, didn't offer Korean, but they did offer Mandarin.

So I was like, oh I want to try and learn an Asian language, but it was so hard. And I'm like this is not natural to me at all. And I actually had to drop that class because it was the first time I was feeling something. But back to my birth father, he was talking in Korean to me, and I told him, I'm so sorry, I never learned the language.

And the next thing I do is I check my email, and the NCRC told me that he wants to communicate with me via an app called KakaoTalk. And then Papago is like a translator. And so we started talking that way, which has been a little bit challenging. But he told me his side of the [00:32:00] story. And that's where the stories don't match between my birth mother and my birth father.

He told me that he was injured and in the hospital. And that before he was in the hospital and estranged from my birth mother. They were in a disagreement about what to do with me. And by the time he got out of the hospital, I had been sent away already. He didn't know where I was. Learning that information, it was still something I'm processing and it's been a couple years. But I could have lived a different life.

Haley Radke: It makes it real, right? The other imagined life, it makes it more real, like a real possibility.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: And I learned from him, this is where I think I get my compassion from, is that he has, besides several half siblings of mine, like children, so half siblings of mine, two that live at home that are adults, one with [00:33:00] special needs, and so learning disabilities, so he's not able to live on his own, and then a daughter who had an injury when she was a child that the treatment was incorrect and they weren't able to have the finances to have it redone. So she was handicapped. I don't know the specifics, but so she has to live at home with him. And that makes me feel like he must be very compassionate to be taking care of his two adult children, that are special needs.

He has told me that he loves me, which is, means so much to me and that he accepts me and everyone knows about me. So completely opposite of how my birth mother is. I wish I knew the circumstances that if what is the fear of her telling her husband, would he leave her? Is she in, I don't know.

There's so [00:34:00] many, there's so many things that go around in my head for me to try and understand why to me, her silence, her inability to have a connection with me, it seems very cruel. That's how I feel. But I know that my birth father really wants to meet me in person, and it was really strange. There was a lady trying to call me, and she texted and left a message, and I'm like, I don't know who this is, but it was a Korean American lady who said that her husband was over in Korea, and met my father, and told my father told him this story, and so they want to try and help facilitate us meeting.

So I, I don't know when that will happen, but I hope maybe in a couple years. I just wasn't, I just haven't been ready because I don't know who he really is. To me right now, he seems like a wonderful person and compassionate, but I guess I'm just not quite ready to meet him in [00:35:00] person because we do have that language barrier and their stories don't match.

And I know that there are so many lies sometimes surrounding adoption. And also there's shame for the parents relinquishing for having to make that decision. And so maybe there's some truth in what they're both saying. I don't know. Or maybe I'll never know.

Haley Radke: I want to go back to that you're a new mother and you got super emotional when you were talking about your mother keeping you for two months in order to breastfeed and connect with you.

And this is just like totally an aside, shall we? And I don't know if it's welcome or not, but I know how much you wanted to be a mom and it was. You shared some of that journey publicly and challenging, of course, with health issues and stuff, but our [00:36:00] connection with our babies, you're giving your child nourishment, he is with you physically, you're getting the skin to skin and the connection you're building all the connections.

And I know you're missing that piece, but you're still giving him all of those. Yeah. I'm so sorry you're missing out on this extra experience that maybe you had hoped for, but he's still getting everything that he needs from you, in my opinion.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Are you comfortable talking a little bit about becoming a mom? We're the same age. I was thinking today, oh my goodness. If I had a baby right now, how would that be? I'm already tired. I gotta just tell you, I have two boys. They're 10 and 12. And I remember when I gave birth to my first son, literally one of my first thoughts was, how could anybody? Yeah, okay. [00:37:00] So can you talk a little bit about that and what, what's that done for your adoptee lens that you see things through?

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Oh, that is, that's a very good question. I can start with when I was pregnant, I knew it would be emotional for me. And I knew that at six months, if I was feeling in distress or emotional so would baby in utero.

And so I wanted to work with my therapist as much as I could about grieving the loss of not being able to breastfeed him because of the cancer taking that away with surgeries. And I wanted to really also process being pregnant and being in the total opposite environment of what I know my birth mother was.

That I so desperately wanted this child and and I have a loving husband who so wants this child too. And, having that [00:38:00] support and I was thinking about her a lot and what she was going through. And also my adoptive mother, when she was just a kid at the time. And the desperation that they both must have felt.

So it was very, it made me think why aren't there more resources for mothers? If they feel they have no choice but to relinquish their baby for adoption. But there is still a desire. My mother, my adoptive mother I know, wanted to parent her baby. I know that for my mother, my adoptive mother, like for her trauma, she couldn't go to baby showers when she was younger.

A lot of times for my big events, her trauma would be triggered. I've always been sensitive to that, but at the same time, it's still hard for me that I would try and put her feelings before mine when it was something about my experience, if that makes sense. [00:39:00] And, by the time I was six months, And it was funny.

When I would watch movies or things that I would normally cry at or during for certain parts, I wouldn't. So I'm like, oh, I think my baby is very chill and he's making me more chill. Which I was, this is great.

Haley Radke: That's nice. I don't think I was chill when I was pregnant.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Really?

Haley Radke: I was busy puking.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Oh no. oh no. The shock for my husband and I was that Rowan came four weeks early. We were going to just a regular gyno appointment and they're like, oh, your amniotic fluid is low and you need to go to the hospital and be induced. And we're like, what? No, thank you. That would be. That was, I remember bursting into tears and he's like, why are you crying?

I'm like, we're not ready. I'm not ready. I was reading books up to the stage of the month that I was at in my pregnancy. So it was like, [00:40:00] I'm like reading a little bit about what labor was like, but not really. And I'm like, but I haven't studied enough. But we get to the hospital and it's, I'm not going to go into details about being induced and how long the the labor was, but when he was born and you could hear him crying and then after they dress him, they first put him on my stomach, but I was so like, out of it. I couldn't really be in the present when that happened because it was so quick too. And because they did take him away to clean him up and dress him.

But, and as he's crying and then they bring him to me It was just this incredible moment where he just recognizes me and he stops crying and looks at me. I just felt this incredible, huge emotion of just pure love. A love like we all say, [00:41:00] we've never known before. But it was just overwhelmingly, powerful and beautiful and I'm so I was so happy that I didn't have to have an emergency c section because I was preparing myself actually for a c section more than actual labor because in the groups that I'm in on Facebook support groups for breast cancer survivors most of the women that I saw had to have emergency C sections.

That went through my same journey of IVF before chemo. And then once it was safe to pause medications to help the cancer from returning. But then also when Rowan was handed to Travis, my husband, that was a beautiful moment of him recognizing his voice. I just, it was just, ah. I feel so grateful that I got to experience that.

I know some people don't. And then I knew just reading [00:42:00] adoptee memoirs and speaking with other adoptees that, the age that your baby is when you were relinquished will always be a difficult time for you. And so when Rowan was two months, cause that's when because that's when I was removed from my mom's or, I was relinquished and put into foster care.

I also had very loving foster care family and that I met my foster care mother in Korea too, when I was 17 and she had so much love for me. And she brought a picture of me in this bathtub, a wooden bathtub outside with my hair and a ponytail sticking straight up. It was so cute. And I remember thinking later after the trip, what, why couldn't I have stayed with that family?

They loved me, her husband and her child. It just took me a while to understand the culture about how children out of wedlock were just also ostracized besides multiracial [00:43:00] children and everything, but at two months it was definitely more emotional for me, but I knew it was coming and so I had prepared as much as I could with my therapist and I, Rowan now is eight months. No, he just turned nine months old. So I know at 11 months old, it's going to be another emotional time for me because that's when I left my foster family. And started a new life. But, I do my best to keep that separate because I know when you feel anxious, so does your baby. He just feels how you feel. So for the most part around him I'm very zen, or try to be.

Haley Radke: I think though, so you've mentioned, and I see it too, that you're, a compassionate, empathetic person, and I really think when we model, in front of our children, like [00:44:00] showing our feelings like that's what creates also kids that are in touch with their feelings and adults who are free to express their feelings, right?

You're just being a good example. Yeah, I see all kinds of conversations in your future with your son about what it's like to be an adoptee and what your experience was like and he doesn't have to experience that and you can give him his history and yeah, building the new legacy. Very cool. Thank you for sharing that. It's big stuff big feeling stuff and I can also tell that you've been working with therapists that you've processed a lot of these things and it's easier to talk about probably.

I really want to recommend that folks check out your channel. You have so many videos, documentaries, docu series, where you, we mentioned before that you document adoptee stories, adoptive [00:45:00] family stories. Do you know you have over 814, 000 views on your channel on the day we're recording?

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: I did not know that. I didn't look at that. Usually I just look at, oh which video has the most views right now? So I'm just really glad it's my adoption documentaries from 2015. But those were a long time ago.

Haley Radke: That's a big number, Shelby. One of the things we didn't get to talk about, but I wrote down a bunch of words because I wonder what you feel about them now, but these are some of the titles for either a series or videos. You have kindred, placed, surrendered, kismet, beyond biological, adoptee lens. You're making a face. God, I wish people could see your face. That's the beauty of video and the beauty of audio. There you go.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: I, that's why I'm like, I. Yeah, I wanted to explain some of my names that I've come up with. Placed was because [00:46:00] I heard this term in an adoptive parent support, where I came to speak at as an adoptee about my experiences.

And they were using this term I placed my child, that's the language we use instead of giving up my child or relinquishing. And I remember it not sitting well with me at all. It's because it's, you're taking all of the emotion out of this word where a child is being transferred from their parent to another, to a stranger essentially.

And this is a time in my life where I still struggle with people pleasing, which I've now learned is a trauma response called fawning. And so I use that because I wanted to make this a space, a safe space for people to share from all different aspects of adoption. And the reason why I did that was because of my adoptive mother, who is also a birth mother.

And I [00:47:00] am so sorry for using that term. It just, that's what I grew up saying. And I know that's offensive, but I'm only using it in the context of how I know these women are referring to themselves, that they use that word. So just because I've actually spoken with Karen Wilson, who coined the term, the baby scoop era, and she, I read her book and I've spoken with her a lot.

And she got me the interviews for my Surrendered Series, which is mothers of loss. But yeah, so that's where placed came from. And then. It's so funny, I remember thinking of the name for my next one. oh, and Kismet was this idea that adoption is meant to be. So I was still in the belief that things are happen for a reason and it's meant to be so that's where kismet came from and then for the Kindred what I was also thinking of calling it was tethered. And I used that word and everyone was saying no Shelby don't use that I'm like, [00:48:00] okay, I guess I'll do kindred

Haley Radke: I feel like I'm taking you trip down memory lane. Maybe you didn't want to go down.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: And then, okay, I know Beyond Biological may throw people off about what that series is, but I really, that is my really, that's a heart piece of mine. I interviewed all different sides of adoption, a trauma therapist, so in episode two, I really do hope a lot of people watch that, that are considering adoption, because it really does go into all the different faces of adoption, open adoption, international foster care adoption, there's it just has everything, but Beyond Biological comes from my name, or not my name, part of it, and, but from the Korean documentary called Yoonmei, Beyond Korea.

Because Yoonmei is my, the name my Korean mother gave me, and it means shining truth, [00:49:00] and that's the story of my life. I want to tell my truth, and I want to help other people tell their truths. In whatever stage of the journey that they're on, because it is so freeing and not only is it helpful to you, but someone who might need to hear what you have to say to connect or to realize that's what I've been trying to articulate for years that I haven't been able to.

Thank you for giving me that language to finally say that and understand it in myself. And Yoonmei Beyond Korea means your life beyond where you came from. And so it doesn't mean that, that biological roots don't matter. It means just what happens to you after you're adopted. And so that's what Beyond Biological means.

It means what happens after you were put into another home. So that's actually, I really [00:50:00] put a lot of thought into that one. And I know that may think people, or turn people against that. Because of the name, but that's where it comes from. And then Happy Girl is also one of my documentaries, but it's not what you think it is. If you watch it, it is, it'll take you down a very emotional journey, for sure.

Haley Radke: You also do the adoption education series where you touch on different things, which is super helpful. Like I, you have so many different things and of course people can tell, I'm sure, as an interviewer. The questions and the things that you draw out of your subjects, I relate to that. I guess we have similar jobs hey.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Oh, yes, definitely.

Haley Radke: Mine just has a lot less cameras. And so I know folks will learn a lot from you by checking out many of your videos. So we'll make sure to link to your channel in the show notes. And people, also if you Google Shelby's name, it'll pop up for you. [00:51:00] But what did you want to recommend to us today?

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Oh, that was really tough for me to narrow it down because there's so many books and podcasts and I would love to recommend adoptee advocates, but I'm going to narrow it down to Adoption Unfiltered Revelations from Adoptees, Birth Parents, Adoptive Parents, and Allies.

I chose that one because I think it's the perfect book for anyone who's considering adoption or considering relinquishing their child to adoption, but also adoptees who are just beginning to look at adoption critically. I really think it's a great book that goes into that from all three perspectives from the triad, because they're all out of the fog, if that's the term you want to use, or disruption adoptee consciousness model.

Haley Radke: You're coming into consciousness. Yes.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: And that is a term from, I don't want to say her name wrong, JaeRan Kim.

Haley Radke: JaeRan Kim. [00:52:00] Yes. Yep. And Dr. Susan Bronco, there's several adoptees that worked on that model. We'll link to it in the show notes to make sure there's credit to all the authors of that model. It's super helpful, especially for folks who are new to that. And we have an episode with one of the authors and we talk all through the model, which is so cool. The other thing I just wanted to mention before we let people know where they can connect with you is that you also helped write a book with filled with adoptee stories Rooted in Adoption and so we'll make sure to link to that too.

Like I love that we're fellow adoptee advocates sharing adoptee stories I think we have a lot of things in common that you might not know we have. Yes, we have many things in common.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: We do, and I love it.

Haley Radke: Yes. My birth mother also did not want to stay in reunion with me. My birth mother also wanted to keep me a secret. We can relate to all kinds of things. [00:53:00] Anyway, it's been a delight to hear your story, and thank you for sharing it. Where can folks find your work and catch up with you online.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: You can just Google my name, Shelby Redfield Kilgore, and my YouTube channel will pop right up. And then I have a Facebook group or community group called Adoption Awareness.

And you can find me on Instagram @yoonmeichae. And I have a website called WeAreMirrorLight. com.

Haley Radke: Perfect. Thank you so much, Shelby. Such an honor to talk with you.

Shelby Redfield Kilgore: Thank you again for having me on your podcast. I am so grateful and thank you for all the work that you do. I feel like there are times when I have to take breaks from my own filming of adoption stories because of it's just a lot of emotions go into it. And so sometimes I have to take breaks. And so I always feel okay doing that because there are always other adoptees out [00:54:00] there doing this work. And it's so vital. And thank you. Thank you for all you do as well.

Haley Radke: Thank you.

Okay. I just want to reiterate my thanks for those of you who send such kind messages and healing thoughts, and all of those things. As someone who must be reliable, slash perfect, lol, how are we all perfect? It's I know it's impossible. Being so incapacitated was so hard for me, hard for anybody. I get it.

I sent, I think, two different episodes to my editor where I was like, oh, hey, can you cut out these 45 coughing fits from an hour long conversation? Also, thank you to my [00:55:00] editor and it has been so nice to be feeling better. And I feel, frankly, I feel totally back to normal now. My energy took a long time to come back as well.

I feel totally back to normal and just so excited to be working. The other thing, I don't recommend this. This is not healthy, but I kept going on all the Patreon side of things. For all my Patreon supporters, they kept hearing me every single week. Bleak health or not. You can ask them if it was worth it to listen to Haley.

It was like, sometimes I was okay. And then I edited one episode and I was like, wow, I sound like really out of it. Anyway, I don't know if it's worth going back to listen to me being out of it, but I don't know. Anyway, thank you for your support. I'm so thankful to be back recording. I know I've already said that [00:56:00] and we have a brand new healing series episode coming up.

Not this Friday, but the Friday after. And yeah, so much good stuff coming your way. Really excited to share it with you and thanks for listening. Let's talk again soon.

291 Kae Wangare Leonard

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/291

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it, either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today, we welcome Kae Wangare Leonard to the show. Kay is a writer, athlete, an artist born and adopted in Kenya by white Americans. She shares some of her story with us, including what does home mean when you've lived in multiple countries.

We discuss what it means to be an adoption abolitionist, and we have a little disagreement whether Kae's art, poetry, and prose is therapeutic or not. Just a quick trigger warning, we do mention and describe self harm during the course of our conversation. Before we get started, I want to [00:01:00] personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com./community, which helps support you and the show to support more adoptees around the world. Kae and I wrap up today with some recommended resources for you. And as always links to everything we'll talk about are on the website adopteeson.com. Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On Kae Wangare Leonard. Welcome Kae.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Thank you for having me.

Haley Radke: Such an honor. I'd love it if you would start by sharing some of your story with us.

Kae Wangare Leonard: I am a Kenyan American adoptee. I was born in Nairobi, Kenya. And I lived the first couple months of my life in an orphanage. And then I was adopted into a family who had already adopted one other Kenyan child from the same orphanage. So it's just me and my sister. She is six months older than me. We are not [00:02:00] biological. And she was adopted, I think six months before I was. And my family lived in Kenya until I was four.

And then we moved back to the U. S. for seven years. So I did all of my grade school there. And then when I was 11, I moved back to Kenya for middle and high school. And after I graduated high school I went out to Oregon for a year and then I bounced around the East Coast and back and forth to Kenya a little bit. And now I live in the UK. I live in Brighton.

Haley Radke: This is an unusual story. So are you comfortable sharing a little bit about like why your parents were in Kenya and why the back and forth? I'm curious.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Both of my parents are Mennonite, actually. They grew up in Lancaster ish area, Pennsylvania. Grew up Mennonite.

Went to Harrisonburg, Virginia for university at Eastern Mennonite University. And then when they're both [00:03:00] teachers, so after they graduated college, and they could not have biological children, they started looking for different opportunities to teach elsewhere. They applied to a school in remote Alaska, they applied to school in Kenya and then they decided on the school in Kenya.

The school in Kenya is a Christian American education school, and it is owned and run by the Assemblies of God, Southern Baptists, and Mennonites. They went to Kenya and during that time in 1999, in and around there, there was an orphanage that a lot of people from the community would go to, to adopt children.

So I actually know, I think around 17 children adopted from that orphanage, actually same orphanage as me. And my parents, yeah, I picked out my sister and then six months later or so, picked out me from the orphanage as they did, like in the, as their friend group and as the community did during that time. And then [00:04:00] I had very severe allergies and asthma, was in and out of the hospital a lot with asthma.

So to get me medical help, the treatments in Kenya weren't suitable, especially for pediatric care. So we moved to Virginia so I could see some specialists and I did allergy and asthma treatment for seven years. Until I was able to breathe again, basically and such. And then, once the doctors gave the okay, then my parents decided to move us back to Kenya.

So we could reconnect with our culture a little bit more. So they went back to Kenya to teach at the school that they had taught at. When they had adopted me and my sister, and then we stayed there for seven years.

Haley Radke: Okay. I think you're uniquely suited to answer one of these questions that I think a lot of people throw at adoptees, who are like if we're going to abolish adoption, then what about all these kids languishing in orphanages? [00:05:00] So I'm sure you've thought about that a lot in your lifetime, and other kids adopted out of the orphanage. Were you able to ever visit the orphanage? Was it a part of the school? Was it around when you were living there? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Kae Wangare Leonard: Yeah, when we lived in Kenya, we would go to the orphanage at least once a year. Back, I think, in the early 2000s when I was like four or younger. I think it was a lot easier to get there, traffic wise and such but as Nairobi has kept growing, it's a little bit harder to get there, but it's still very possible. Every time I'm back in Kenya, I also go to the orphanage.

I've been back as well with some of my other friends who were adopted from the orphanage. So we've all been back together. Not all of us, but some of us have been back together at the same orphanage. And then last time I went was I went on my birthday last year in 2023. And then I think I went in April as well, [00:06:00] back to the orphanage.

And yeah it's always been a very interesting. Very interesting, I think like pretty emotional experience when I go. I also think you don't always emotionally process. I just shove it in the back of a corner of my mind usually, when I go when sometimes I take some of my friends with me we volunteer we help feed the children we help do some of the laundry that kind of work. And then last time I went I was getting a tour of the place and then I talked to one of the social workers and a couple people have been there since the orphanage opened, so some of the workers and nurses and directors actually remember me.

On my birthday, I met the person who had driven me from the hospital to the orphanage when I was younger, because I think when I was like admitted to the hospital when I was an infant, I was four pounds. And so the person who ended up taking me when I was discharged from the hospital to the orphanage [00:07:00] happened to be there that day on my birthday.

So I ended up meeting him and a couple other workers. They have a mural at the orphanage with pictures of children's faces cut out and glued onto this mural, and it's suns and moons and caterpillars, rocks, flowers, along with the names that we had in the orphanage. They did it for one or two years only.

I can recognize, I think, at least 10 names on there, generally, maybe a bit more, this wall of faces, and I can see little me and some of my other friends, and yeah, that's usually my routine when I go back.

Haley Radke: What's it like for you to think about abolishing adoption and knowing I don't want to make an assumption, what would happen to kids who might stay in the orphanage for longer if they weren't adopted?

Kae Wangare Leonard: Yeah. I think that's a hard one. And I think that, but I also think that comes with [00:08:00] understanding maybe a little bit more of what abolishing adoption like can look like as it can be like, hundreds of different solutions. And so instead of just like in my mind when I think about the abolition of adoption, it's a lot about family preservation and supporting families and supporting communities to take care of kids and how can we actually care for our kids and also avoid displacement.

And when I was talking to people at the orphanage and talking about different Kenya adoption laws to just one of the social workers, a lot of it was asking, like, how, what's the process these days in finding biological families for these infants? Because back when I was abandoned, when I was adopted.

They did not have solid records family reunification is very hard near impossible. And so then the question becomes now so what do we do now? How can we better keep track of where children come [00:09:00] from? Where children can return to? And then what are the reasons why children are in orphanages?

So if it's a matter of supporting families or getting people out of unsafe situations so that they can parent better, or if it's a matter of like housing or job security or all of these other, different policy failures, how can we change policies? How can we stop systemically failing our families for them, like for the children who do quote unquote need to be in an orphage or be separated from their biological families for safety reasons, for health reasons, for any of these other reasons? Then it's just a matter of like, how can we keep them in community? How can we take responsibility and honor in protecting, keeping our children safe, raising our children as community members and as people that take pride in our culture and passing it down as well.[00:10:00]

Haley Radke: What's the culture like in Kenya for adoption? Is it more kinship care? What sort of I know international adoption from Kenya has been fraught and it's unusual. So I think it's because your parents lived there for a while, right? That they were able to adopt you. Is that right?

Kae Wangare Leonard: I think laws like changed in 2016, 2017, maybe something like that, where international adoptions, they started banning them a little bit more and tightening legislation around international adoption. But back then it was very common, or pretty common.

Haley Radke: Okay, so what does, what's the public sentiment regards to adoption in Kenya?

Kae Wangare Leonard: I don't want to speak too much on that as I am I'm still learning. I'm still trying to get a grasp on public sentiment on adoption in Kenya. [00:11:00] When I was back in Kenya, back in 2023, I was working on, I'm working on another book and I was asking people around and asking people who worked at the orphanage and such and I think that so many places that you go on globally, kinship care when it comes to Indigenous cultures is a common practice.

And Kenya has many indigenous folks to the land, to the area, and so kinship care and community care is definitely something that does happen, and that happens quite a bit in Kenya. And yeah, I think it's always been interesting, at least for me and my story, in interacting with people and letting them know that I'm adopted and hearing their varied responses.

Because a lot of times I'll get the, oh, you're so lucky, but then there's a whole aspect of you're, you've been removed from us. You're not us anymore. So that's been something I've been trying to navigate whenever I go back [00:12:00] and

Haley Radke: Sorry, can you say more about that? Kenyan people would say that to you? That you're, you don't belong here.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Yeah, I get that. I get that some from people. And I think it doesn't does not help that I don't speak Swahili. I'm working on it, though. I am working on it.

Haley Radke: Okay.

Kae Wangare Leonard: But there is an aspect of displacement that comes with adoption. And even though I lived in Kenya, then being raised by my family, who is they're white Americans, they're Mennonite, and then being in the international community that I that I went to school in as well.

Yeah, it's, at least for me, there's a one step removed, if not a couple more steps removed. And when I was younger, I wasn't prepared to move back to Kenya when I was 11. I did not want to move back. I thought that the whole country had rejected and abandoned me. And I did not know what to do with those feelings, with those thoughts.

And I didn't speak Swahili. And it was like, why would I [00:13:00] go back to a country that doesn't want anything to do with me? And so it was tough when I was 11 going back, and I didn't really start making an effort to try to understand my culture a little bit more until honestly, probably until kind of high school ish, and then probably until I started getting some more friends in Kenya, but it's tough.

It's tough when you're adopted and when you receive a lot of sentiment that you're lucky to not be it was sometimes positioned as an us versus them you've been saved from this population of people and brought to this like white, American, Christian, raising and growing up in, and that's considered you've been saved, you've been lucky, you've been chosen.

And that, that, that can be tough to navigate, tough to know how to deal with those messages, tough to figure out how to still reconnect with your people [00:14:00] when you're actively being told that you're somewhat better off without your people. I might not be making linear sense. Apologies for that but yeah, it's it's confusing.

It's confusing for an 11 year old. It's 12 year old 13 year old and still i'm 24 now. And it is still what do you do with all of these feelings and what do you do with the rejections that you deal with and with stepping into an Uber and then being told, Oh, you look Kenyan, but you're not really Kenyan because you've been Americanized.

Or, then there's that, but then there's other people who will call me by my Kenyan name, Wangare, and will tell me, we're calling you Wangare because we want you to remember what it's like to come home. And there's people in my life who specifically Kenyans in my life, who only call me Wangare, or really work with me on let's learn this about our our culture, and let's teach you these words, and let's help you integrate in these and these ways back home.

I think it's just tough. It's, it really is. There, there's always that grief of what did [00:15:00] I miss and what don't I know and why are these gaps here? Who's going to accept me? Who's going to reject me again? How do I deal with other rejection or what do I do with this acceptance when I still am one, one, two, three steps removed from really understanding?

Haley Radke: You said the word home a couple of times and I wonder what that word means to you as someone who's moved around quite a bit, especially in your young adult years, I'll say young adult, listen, I'm in my 40s now. So you're still young adult to me.

Kae Wangare Leonard: That's a hard one. It's always been a hard one. What home is to me. So I think if you would have asked me, when it was three, four, five, six years old, I would have said home is Kenya. And that's what I knew. And I knew Swahili up until, I think probably the age of four or five. And Kenya was very much home. And then I got used to the U. [00:16:00] S. And I started riding horses in the U. S. I started playing football soccer. And I was playing basketball, was very involved within all of that. And that was very much the I don't know any different, and I wanna continue seeing what my life looks like in this other home after I've been removed and, yeah, removed from my Kenya home.

And so going back to Kenya, so many people would tell me that it's a homecoming, it's a returning. And I don't know if I ever really felt that until adulthood. I think it was always oh, this is. It became my other home in a sense, but it never really was like a, oh, it's a pilgrimage or, oh, it's a homecoming until I was 19, 20 or so.

It just happened to be like another place that I live, another place that I call home, same with Virginia. And then these days, like, when I think about [00:17:00] going to Kenya, it very much is a homecoming. That's such a tough question. What a home means to me.

Haley Radke: You're international, right? You live in, you're living in England now.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Do you hope to have a permanent address somewhere? Do you want to live in Kenya later on? Do you have goals or dreams of going back there? Do you want to live in the U. S.? Do you know? Or do you just, are you cool with just playing it as it comes.

Kae Wangare Leonard: I think so. I've, so I've moved maybe close to 16 times in the past five, six years now.

Haley Radke: What? Oh my goodness.

Kae Wangare Leonard: And I still have two more years left of my degree here. We'll see how this, the next one, two years goes. I do dream of playing for the Kenya national team for football. So that is definitely a goal of mine. Would love to play professional football somewhere. It really is like wherever football can take me.

I don't necessarily see myself [00:18:00] as having like a house somewhere that I live like all 12 months of the year all around. Maybe that'll come when I'm in like my 30s or 40s, who knows? But yeah, I just I'm not 100 percent sure. I think it will depend on football quite a bit. And then, yeah, I can write anywhere. So it'll just depend on football.

Haley Radke: Is that what you're taking? Is, are you taking English or?

Kae Wangare Leonard: I'm doing anthropology.

Haley Radke: Oh, okay.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Yes. So the study of humans. I am loving it. I, a lot of people thought I was going to do creative writing or English, and I did not really want to get burned out in that aspect.

I think before. Before my arm was disabled when I was 17, I was going to go to art school. That's what I wanted to do. And then a lot of things shifted. And now I'm doing anthropology. And I want to have a focus to be able to use anthropological findings, whether or not that be my own research or other people's research [00:19:00] to bring into creative writing projects to be able to create, if not writing multimedia pieces for it.

Haley Radke: Okay, cool. Are you comfortable about talking about your disability and how that came to be? It's totally cool if you don't want to talk about that. And also, I'm so curious about how your art has evolved since then. I've seen some very cool videos of you painting in an unorthodox way.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Yes absolutely. Yeah I Severed my radial nerve in my right arm and ended up pretty much paralyzing my right arm from just above the elbow, and this was my dominant arm as well.

I was put on some antidepressants and they lowered my inhibitions and I was dealing with some other shoulder pain from basketball and wasn't sleeping either. And so one night [00:20:00] I thought, if I just give myself pain somewhere else, I won't think about my shoulder, I'll just be able to go to sleep. I ended up stabbing myself in the arm with a knife at midnight.

Accidentally severed my radial nerve. Didn't know where my nerves were in my arm, nothing like that. And ended up having to have surgery the next weekend. For it. I had complete wrist drop, lost the use of my thumb, middle finger, and pointer finger in my dominant arm, and I was at AP Art Studio at the time.

Some art teacher had a talk with me and said, if you need to drop the class, nobody's going to blame you, but if you are going to continue, then you need to learn how to create art with your other hand. So we had maybe three months or so to work on doing art with my non dominant hand learned how to do that.

I was doing everything one handed with my left hand at the time, and then finished my art year with my left hand got overuse injuries in my left hand. My right hand [00:21:00] was, I was slowly starting to regain function, but it has never come back 100 percent fully, and so both of my hands don't work properly, and I took about a year or so off, thinking if I just give them some rest, some time off art, it'll be better, and they never improved.

So I took another couple of years off, upset about it all. And I finally decided I was going to create art by any means I could. So I put a paintbrush between my feet, between my toes and I got to work. So I paint with my mouth and my toes now.

Haley Radke: Do you do that as a relaxation? Is it more, I'm focused on creating art?

I know a lot of adoptees who use art as a part of a healing modality for them. They're getting the feelings out. It's like a physical expression of, unsaid things that we have in our body. What is it for you, Kae?

Kae Wangare Leonard: I think I use [00:22:00] art to story tell whether that be, visual art, or whether that be writing. I don't necessarily think of my writing or my art as therapeutic in any sense, really.

But the the process of thinking through what I want to what I want to convey, and then how I want to convey it, and the intentions in which I have behind it, and the thoughts that I put into my work. I think I take a lot of pride in that. Yeah, I wouldn't necessarily say it's necessarily therapeutic or anything like that for me, but it is a way for me to think through some things. And maybe a way for me to draw out some things that I might need to go to therapy about.

But unless I'm doing like a really quick sketch or a really quick little piece, which I don't do as much right now, generally, I'm doing like bigger pieces and bigger meaning pieces or just like heavier meaning pieces as [00:23:00] well.

Haley Radke: I saw that you really love sunflowers. That's my favorite flower all time.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Yes.

Haley Radke: And we also have another thing in common. I grew up in a very small Mennonite town. So when you say Mennonite, like I get it.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Can you talk a little bit about if you're comfortable. What it was like to grow up in a fairly religious environment and where you are today. You addressed some of that in some of your writing. And I know it's complicated. A lot of us were adopted into Christian families with a sense of social justice in some way. And it, it can leave some woundedness in our thoughts about God and those kinds of things.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Yeah. I think complicated is I think that summarizes I think a lot of my thoughts around religion, adoption, growing up in religious communities with adoption.

[00:24:00] I feel like I was taught and when I say taught, like maybe not directly from my parents, but also by from communities and such that like adoption was God's plan, or it was or was a straightforward like there was a biblical answer or there was a saving or there was like a, oh you're better off this way, or at least you're adopted into a community of what they like believers, which, when I think about that word, I'm like, believers in what, and

my family, so my family was more, was and is, or my immediate family at least, was and is more liberal Mennonites, like not as like old order Mennonites. In a lot of ways, I grew up with like my parents on a ledge of do we let them wear leggings? Do we let them wear a skirt?

Like or like shorter skirts and we let them wear skinny jeans. Do we let them drink like there was all of that. And like with me and my [00:25:00] sister me and my sister were and are very different but like I would clubbing back when I was younger when I was in high school and like I was partying and I was doing what?

You know when my homework was done my parents wanted to at least know where I was, so I wasn't sneaking out and lying. I was about to do what I wanted to do. But the school that my parents taught at was an international Christian school, and I lived on campus at the school as well, so on the compound of the school.

And I think if you're not careful, that becomes your whole world. And that messaging, in the messaging for people who go to the school, who work at the school, the other teachers, the community can be sometimes all you've received in. And you consistently, I think, be told, you were given up because you were loved so much.

And then you were chosen because you were loved so much. And it aligns with God's plan and God's [00:26:00] teaching, or this is part of fixing the brokenness of the world. Or all of these different messages that you can receive to justify mother loss and abandonment. Instead of just letting people sit with the hurt and sit with the grief.

I think that was maybe some of the most confusing for me. And then I came out as queer. In so many ways. The abandonment trauma that I had from adoption sprung back up because I was then abandoned again by a lot of the community that welcomed me because of adoption and it was almost like a betrayal and sometimes was told to me was a betrayal of my parents and of God and of adoption and a like. You were saved from this and brought into this like white American family who are believers, but now [00:27:00] you want to like, go live a life of sin, and you don't want to like, whatever else I and I think that was hard for me to navigate and losing people that I loved and losing people that I thought really loved me because I came out.

That, that was hard. That brought up a lot of, I think, adoption trauma and wounds and abandonment trauma. These days, I say I'm a lot more spiritual than religious. I think the Bible can be used as a tool of liberation. Should be used as a tool of liberation. I don't think it's the only vessel for truth. I don't know if I'd call myself Christian or not, but I do think that there is a lot of beautiful theology and lessons and liberating theologies and lessons like we can get from the Bible if we choose to use it that way, but it's not necessarily all of my focus.

So I do enjoy taking lessons I've learned and I do enjoy taking what I [00:28:00] was taught to be true about God and God's love and God's welcomeness and doing poetry around that. And spicing things up a little bit and trying to use it to free myself more than to constrain myself. If any of that makes any sense.

Haley Radke: I think our spirituality or religion or whatever, however you want to categorize it, it's so deeply personal, right? And I think my question is because I'm curious about how adoption has impacted that part of our unpacking as adults. And when we're looking back on what impact adoption has had on our lives, It's interesting that it twists that up too, so as you mentioned, you came out as queer and I've asked this of many of my queer guests before, so, forgive the repeat, but I'm curious as a member of the queer community where so many folks [00:29:00] will automatically think of adoption as the first family building tool available to them. How you. Navigate that in queer spaces. And do you feel some kind of pressure to be like hold on a second. It's complicated. We can't just go straight there. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Kae Wangare Leonard: Oh, for sure. Yeah, it's, that's been a journey. Yeah, I think like for me, a lot of things come down to we're not entitled to have a child and what do we think family is?

I think it's like another one of my questions always, and are we being, like, child centered? Whose child are you trying to get? I think when I think about queerness, when I think about what queerness demands of me, and how queerness, for me is a way to figure out how to exist and how to love in this world, in other, in alter in alternative ways, [00:30:00] I also have to bring that into family structures.

So what have I been taught about family and what have I been taught about what family is? Correct, quote unquote, or not. And then how does that, how do I bring that into, the future and into my conversations with others and what have they been taught? Because if we're taught that family is just, okay, you get married and then you have kids.

Oh, of course people are going to be thinking about okay, then I guess maybe next step could be, could we adopt. We could be trying to do that as like family building. But to also recognize. Family could be your friends, could be chosen, could be who you love, you can mother in a, gender expansive way, mother in many different ways, you can mother the kids down the street, the kids you coach, the kids you teach you can parent and be a part of all of these kids lives in a way that could also be fulfilling for you in terms of what family is for you.

Where is that voice and that pressure saying that [00:31:00] you have to have a child that you like legally have that responsibility slash own is like, where is that coming from? And if it's not coming from like you and you're want of just It may be a biological connection or, I don't know, something internally or connection.

Then, how can you go against that? And, how can you find other ways in which you can parent? And then it is just a, okay, maybe you're dead set on the fact that, okay, we want a child in our lives that we're on their birth certificate and we've adopted them and whatnot. Then, what are ways in which we can do this in more harm reductive ways?

And ways in which are more child centered, ways in which we don't displace kids as much, ways in which we're not putting as much value and price tags. on kids lives and expectations [00:32:00] then, I think, is a lot of my follow up questions.

Haley Radke: Thank you. I didn't ask you this at the beginning but I I'm curious. You said that there's, not really a lot of paperwork from the time that you were put in the orphanage and those kinds of things. Do you have a desire to find out more about your biological family? I know lots of folks go right to, oh you can just DNA test, which is tricky and complicated, especially for adoptees from other countries.

And it's not, I think a lot of domestic adoptees like just put that as oh, that's easy. That makes everything so much easier, but it's not necessarily the case. Are you comfortable sharing a bit about that?

Kae Wangare Leonard: Yeah, no, I appreciate you mentioning, yeah, it's not as straightforward because I think Kenya is now having a database from what I've [00:33:00] heard maybe or trying to start a database of DNA or searching for reunification, but I have never put my DNA in there just because there's so little that I know and so little that I know about My biological family anything and yeah, for me, I don't see a point necessarily, at least for myself. I don't really think that it would be on that. I'll be able to find anybody and I think there's a large part of me that even if that was the case that I'll be able to find somebody. I don't know if I'd be ready, but I don't think I really, even when I was younger, I didn't necessarily have in my mind this dream of reunion or biological family or anything like that.

Even when I would daydream when I was younger or think about what things might be like, I'm not sure that it was ever really an option in my mind to think about biological family.

Haley Radke: [00:34:00] So growing up with a sister who's also adopted, did you guys ever talk about what it's like to be adopted? What it's like to be black in a white family? Going back and forth do you ever talk about those things?

Kae Wangare Leonard: I think we talk about it slightly more now that we're a little bit older. I don't, I wouldn't say that we were that close growing up either.

So I don't think we would talk about that much when we were younger. When we moved back to Kenya, we all, we got to know other adopted kids from our orphanage as well. And so I think sometimes we'd have those conversations separately with our other like friends who were adopted from the same orphanage as me. Yeah, I don't think that we really talked about it much growing up.

Haley Radke: And now your views and the things that you write about can bring up a lot of [00:35:00] very big topics. Does she read your writing? Does she have thoughts? Are you guys on? For a lot, I'm asking because so many of us come into adoptee consciousness at very different points in our lives, and want to examine those things, and lots of people don't and sometimes that can create the conflict or the divide, or come on, just get over it already, or whatever.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Yeah. I, we definitely have. My sister is, she's a lot more degreed than I am. And she is currently, she's currently going into law school. I do believe that she does believe in like adoption abolition as well. She's very intellectual about things too, so we come at things from maybe a different angle.

I'm sometimes more of a burn all this beep down and, you know, come in blazing, but my sister, I think is a lot more diplomatic when it comes to [00:36:00] things, maybe a little bit more reserved, but I also think at the end of the day, our politics are like a little bit more similar than people might think, but we also don't talk about it that, that much, but yeah, like she, she will back like a lot of what I'm saying. If she's asked, I would think. Maybe she'd listen to this episode and be like, that's not true. But I do think that yeah, she would agree with a lot of things.

Haley Radke: It's nice that you have some support there in your family. I'd love to talk about your writing and this came about I recommended your chapbook already on a previous episode just a couple of months ago when people hear this.

Going Unarmed Into the Wail, and you also have just such a beautiful book on your website that folks can read, Lightning on My Fingertips, and I was rereading it yesterday to prepare, and I just thought, [00:37:00] some of your writing, it's so raw and vulnerable and insightful, and I know a lot of adoptees will really connect to some of the ideas that you're sharing. And I was wondering, would you read something from your work for us?

Kae Wangare Leonard: Absolutely. Ah, thank you so much for all of those kind words. I'm going to read the poem, Going Unarmed Into the Wail. Poetry, prose, and I wrote this back in, I'm pretty sure this was back in 2023 when I had just booked my ticket to go back to Kenya again and I was going to be in Kenya for a couple months and I was trying to reckon with, what it might mean to try to go back to Kenya. And remember,

I grew up in a family of hunters, I've never touched a gun, yet I've been [00:38:00] perfecting killing all my life. That memory, they always tell me where I ran faster than anyone had seen for a kid at age four, dead. The recollection of that story when I wore rainbow knee socks with pink cowboy boots and a tie dye shirt and walked away from potential friends. Gone. Ages 5 through 11, killing doesn't have to be quick. It doesn't even need to be intentional. Sometimes you're just trying to survive. Sometimes you book tickets to your mother's country and realize your tongue has died in your mouth, but you're not sure when it happened. What does it mean if the closest my voice sounds to home is the wail I make when I think no one is listening?

What is home other than haunted? Haunted as in memory, as in hunted, as in the estranged noise in my throat as I try to call forth belonging. What do I name the gasp I make when I suck in air between the howls? Is that not also home? I know I exist in the clamor of [00:39:00] grief, but I think I can also fit in the relief of the release.

My therapist says trauma can leave you an unreliable narrator. She also says we can't always decide what stays and what goes. She says a lot of other things I try to pay attention to, but retaining knowledge is hard when you're struggling for air. I grew up in a family of hunters. I've never touched a gun, yet I've been perfecting killing all my life.

I sever language from the images that stumble their way by the place I go when my eyes close. Anything that hurts too badly I try to embrace. I haven't learned how to keep the good alive. I'm not sure I can decide how to make the joy stay. I scorched my earth. I'm nothing like my family who takes down deer in the forests of Pennsylvania and uses their kills to nurse us in the winters.

I'm more concerned with forgetting. I don't share my takedowns. There's no feast at the end of my [00:40:00] hunt. Only hollowness and a wail that reaches into the abyss, sounding something like I'm still here. My family adopted me from Kenya when I was eight months old. I think. There's nothing more traumatic than mother loss.

There's nothing more I'd like to pretend to forget. But some days when I'm not threatened by the magnitude of sorrow or the asked attention of anger, I wonder what it would be like to capture without killing, to have a path I don't run from. If home is a haunting and a haunting is memory and I am the hunter of memories, that doesn't keep my prey alive.

Will anything remain? God, I've done so much in the name of survival, but I'm trying to move beyond. I'm not sure if it's possible, but I bought myself a ticket, a chance, an invitation to stop making prey out of my memory and to try to leave home and return home. I'm going unarmed into the wail. Don't come [00:41:00] after me.

You aren't invited into my intimacy. Wait for me and the gasp for air. I will come back up. I will come back up. I will. Remember.

Haley Radke: Thank you. Oh my goodness. So powerful. I think this is such a great example for folks to hear from you. So I know they'll go out and pick up your book and read some more of your work on your website.

You also have a lot of art pieces on your website that are just really amazing. I don't know why. I love the self portrait. It's yeah, it's so good. Anyway, people have to go and look because this is audio.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Thank you. I just, I think for me, but with writing and art and so much of it feels like an unearthing feels like looking in the mirror and figuring out like what I can see, what I can discover. A lot of my work focuses on me [00:42:00] in my relation to like the outside world, but like. Centering myself first, hence I do a lot of portraiture, and I do a lot of talking about myself, my own story with mother loss, and with proclamation, and with what it means to, the homecoming, and return home.

I don't know. I think that there's so much that adoption takes from us, and especially when you don't have knowledge of where you came from and you don't always have the ability to gain that knowledge of biological family and lineage and histories. You gotta, you don't have to, but I have decided that instead of birthing children, instead of wanting more of a biological lineage, it's going to be my art and it's going to be my storytelling and it's going to be what I can pull out of myself while I'm alive here and now, that. That's what I'm going to, labor and birth into the world and leave it at that. [00:43:00] That's the closest I get to understanding.

Haley Radke: I'm, as you're saying that, I'm thinking back to you being like, yeah, no, it's not therapeutic. No. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Kae Wangare Leonard: I need to redefine therapeutic. I'll say in the sense of I think people think Yeah.

That I do work and it might make me feel better or feel maybe more healed or feel, I don't know, any kind of resolve or closure. And my work usually does the opposite of that. It's, I think it's tough when you're pointing towards wounds and when you're pointing towards loss and when you're pointing towards grief.

And especially when you're trying to acknowledge it yourself or when you share it with the outside world to also see if they also see, where it hurts. And I think in that sense, there's not, it's not necessarily a relieving experience for me because it's something that, that you bring up and you unearth and you relive.

And then on, even on the flip side when [00:44:00] you think about joy, or when I think about joy, when I write about love, when I write about happiness, there's also always a, this is great, and there's still, there's something still missing. And I don't know, on one hand I think that it is part of what the burden I carry, as with mother loss, and with adoption, and with trying to rebuild.

And oftentimes, it just leaves a lot more questions than any answers, and maybe that's the point of therapy. Maybe I've been doing therapy wrong my whole life. But, yeah, for me, it really is kind of excavation.

Haley Radke: I think you're getting more feelings out than you may imagine. I think it's maybe more beneficial than you may imagine if I'm to be prescriptive in some way. I'm not a therapist. Okay. What do you want to recommend to us today? Kae.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Today. I want to recommend We Are Holding This. We Are Holding This is [00:45:00] actually what I published my chapbook, my second book with, but We Are Holding This is like a media hub for adoption abolitionists, people that have been adopted, trafficked, impacted by these family policing systems.

Their website says, We are holding this as an invitation for people directly impacted by systems of family regulation, surveillance, and policing to gather our creative expressions and to know one another through the liberatory practice of independent publishing. As this space grows, it will feature zines, newspapers, manifestos, and other printed materials you can hold in your hands.

The only theme is abolition, and I think there's something so beautiful and something so comforting to not hold who we are and what we've been through and what we've been put through alone. And to be in spaces with other people [00:46:00] who also believe in the liberatory practice of abolition, and adoption abolition, and the and, fighting against family regulation, surveillance, and policing.

There's something so hopeful to know that you're not the only one who believes what you do and who holds hope and who works towards this future that we hope is that we hope is coming quick.

Haley Radke: Thank you, yeah, I love of course I ordered through there to get your chapbook and I know they've got a lot of awesome things happening over there so that's a great recommendation.

Thanks so much. Speaking of where can we find your work and connect with you online to see your art and read your beautiful writing.

Kae Wangare Leonard: You can find me on my website, https://www.karenwangareleonard.com/, and I also have a free [00:47:00] newsletter. It's supposed to be weekly. It is weekly ish. But I have a free newsletter that comes to your inbox.

And that is the most consistent writing I am doing right now. I also can be found on Instagram @karenwangareleonard and I do put stuff out on my Instagram. A little bit less so now that I am working on other writing projects and I'm in school and in my football season, but I am able to be connected with people through there as well. Those are my two main.

Haley Radke: Perfect. Thank you. I look forward to seeing more football soccer videos, too. We didn't even talk about your athletics. Thank you so much, Kae, for talking with me today, sharing some of your story and your wisdom with us. I really appreciate it.

Kae Wangare Leonard: Thank you so much for having me and yeah, for reaching out for inviting me.

Hope that my, my ramblings made some sense [00:48:00] and, ha! And just thank you for the work that you do. And the work that you do with connecting adoptees together and bringing us into this space and knowing each other some more. Very vital, very receiving.

Haley Radke: Thank you.

If you're listening in real time when this episode gets posted, you'll know it's cold and flu season. Classic. Haley's sick again. I've been so sick. So apologies for the voice. I'm sure my editor took away all kinds of things that would have made it harder to listen to me. But so thank you so much, Jen.

I loved my conversation with Kae. And such an unusual story to be in and out of your country of origin and I love the dynamics of how she writes about that in her poetry and prose. So [00:49:00] I hope you'll grab her chapbook and check out her website and newsletter. Thank you so much for listening and let's talk again soon.

290 Kristal Parke

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/290

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it, either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. I'm so excited to introduce you to today's guest, filmmaker and fellow podcaster and fellow Canadian, Kristal Parke. Kristal is the subject of the documentary Because She's Adopted. Today, Kristal shares some of her story with us, including her non paternal realization, her road to sobriety, her visits back to the Opaskwayak Cree Nation in Manitoba, and meeting many of her biological family members, including her biological father.

Before we get started, I want to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on [00:01:00] adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. Kristal's film is our September documentary club pick of the month. So please join us over on Patreon and you can hang out with us for that.

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 my friend, Kristal Parke. Welcome Kristal.

Kristal Parke: Hello friend Haley. I am so happy to be here with you today and your podcast was the very first podcast that I ever listened to around adoptees.

And it really helped me through the beginning part of my journey into discovering more about the impact of adoption or relinquishment on me. So [00:02:00] thank you so much.

Haley Radke: Makes me feel so good. And I was thinking this morning as I was prepping for our call that you've been in my office, .

Kristal Parke: I have, I feel very lucky. I do. I really do. And your office is everything and more that I would expect it to. It's you and it's. It's such an indication of what you stand for and the impact that you've had on people's lives. Yeah.

Haley Radke: Thank you. For people that don't know you, would you mind sharing some of your story with us?

Kristal Parke: Yes, absolutely. My name is Kristal Parke. I was adopted as an infant. Actually, it was most recently that I just looked at my paperwork and I wasn't adopted until I was two years old. I didn't know that. I always thought I was adopted right at the beginning, but my adoptive parents picked me up when I was five days old from the hospital.

I'm Canadian, [00:03:00] and it was a private adoption. Interesting kind of fact about my adoption or piece of my adoption was the beginnings. And if I was going to be a boy, my adoptive mom's sister and her husband would take me. And if I was a girl, then my adoptive mom and dad would take me. And, that was always just a story that was told to me.

And you know how you grow up with these stories and you think that they're normal and then become a mom and then you realize how abnormal it really is and how messed up it is in a way. That's a little kind of piece of my beginning. I feel like I was, my path could have gone so many different ways, anyway, I, for all intents and purposes, I think that I had a good adoption. I had a family that loved me, my adoptive mom and dad had two biological sons already. They [00:04:00] were 11 and 15 years older than me and they just adored me growing up, all of them. But I felt a great expectation on my life and I felt like there was just a lot of pressure on me to be the best.

There was a lot of perfectionism imposed on me, I would say. And maybe it was because my adoptive mom didn't have a lot growing up and wanted me to have everything she didn't have or have all the opportunities that she didn't have. Or maybe it was because she believed she had a second chance at raising a child because that 11, 15 year gap is that's a big age gap to start all over again.

Anyway when I was 17, my adoptive mom and dad supported me in finding my biological mother and father. And my biological mother and [00:05:00] I reunited along with my biological half brother who was two two years older than me when I was 17. And that was a great experience. I was really glad that I did it. It felt like the pieces of my puzzle were complete at the time, but as I grew older, there was still so many unanswered questions. And when I was 17 and found my biological, my adopted parents found my biological father, he was very disinterested. He said you are a blood relative, so I guess you do deserve to know your family history.

And I always say that was very . It was almost like, okay, the line in the sand, this guy doesn't want anything to do with me. I felt rejected and I was scared to reach out to him a after that, and I never did until [00:06:00] 2021. I had done ancestry, DNA and sorry. I had done ancestry DNA in about 2018, I think it was, and in 2021 on a Friday night at nine o'clock, I logged on to my ancestry account and I had a top match and it said parent child, and it was my biological father, but it was not the man that I had spoken to when I was 17 who had rejected me. It was someone else and that was a shock it it, to say that I don't even know if I have the words to explain what a shock it was and now that I've made more connections with people who have experienced that, it really does shift kind of everything that you thought.

Was and it shook the, my [00:07:00] foundation, I would say, but this lovely man just embraced me and told me he loved me. He had no idea I existed. And he said, I want to know you. And if there's anything that you want to know, I'm here and call me anytime. So he only lived like four hours away from me.

I found out that his dad, my biological grandfather, lived 45 minutes away from me. And this experience was what sort of inspired me to tell my story through documentary film. So I was a hairdresser for many years. I've done all sorts of things. I'm a mom of three teenagers. I've never been in film before, but I just thought, I would really love to share this story in this way.

And that was what, was the [00:08:00] catalyst. And then after that, oh my gosh, everything just opened up and unraveled and was beautiful and was painful. And here I am today with you, Haley.

Haley Radke: What does it feel like for you to have a lot of these moments preserved on film and you can go and revisit them anytime?

A lot of us have, we have the memory in our head and can replay it, but you can literally watch it. What's it like watching some of those things back?

Kristal Parke: oh, sometimes I feel very detached from it and sometimes it brings me to tears again. It depends where I think my emotional capacity will let me go to in at that particular time.

But all in all, I'm so glad that I had it on film because it was really one of those moments in time that I [00:09:00] never wanted to ever forget. And I think our memories can evolve too over time, right? And we might think that it was this way and maybe it wasn't that way, but that's how we recall it. But I do appreciate having it on camera for sure.

Haley Radke: Just talking about, the reunion moments, when you knew you were going into it with the cameras, do you feel like you acted differently or were you able to be fully in the moment?

Kristal Parke: Yeah it's really interesting, the first time meeting my biological mother, I didn't know I was going to be on camera.

So that, that was such a beautiful surprise to be able to have someone have captured that and not have had to organize that.

Haley Radke: That's like a whole movie that's you know

Kristal Parke: it totally

Haley Radke: somebody standing by and just videoing it and Yeah. Yeah.

Kristal Parke: Yes. And, but with my biological father, we had a whole film crew.

We were doing this in a park, in a public park, [00:10:00] and. I don't know. You really just forget that the film crew is there. Like for me, anyway, I did. I was able to really, and I never wanted to look back on the moment and wish that I hadn't said something or hadn't done something. So I really went into it with I'm going to just show up as me to the best ability that I can.

And yeah, everything just, and when you're experiencing a moment like that too, everything just fades away. It was just me and him in that moment. And especially because of how he responded to me so beautifully in that moment as well. Not everyone, not everybody is a hugger, right?

And I'm a hugger and, we both just embraced and I couldn't let go of him. And then there's a [00:11:00] moment where I turned my head and I put my head on his shoulder. And that hug felt like it lasted for hours. It didn't, but it did last like probably three to five minutes, which is a long, that's a long time to be embracing somebody. That you've never met before.

Haley Radke: So special. So you have a lot of adoption trauma in your life, in the people that surround you. Okay, so you're an adoptee yourself. You're also an NPE. So not parent expected.

Kristal Parke: Yes.

Haley Radke: But then your birth mother was also an adoptee and was a part of the 60s scoop. And then your parents, adoptive parents as well, have an adoption identity aside from adoptive parents. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? [00:12:00]

Kristal Parke: Yeah. Yeah. So my my adoptive parents, when they were teenagers, they had a son and they relinquished him. And my adoptive mom, I didn't know this until many years later, but she had gone back to the foster home to see him, to see their son over and over again.

Like she wanted to stay in his life. She really did want to raise him. Back then I'm so shocked that the foster family allowed her to do that. And then when he was two years old. She had gone back for the last time and decided that, she did in fact feel she was capable and ready to raise him with my adopted dad and he'd been adopted out without her knowledge.

And she carried that trauma with her forever and she wore it and you could see it. [00:13:00] And even though nobody other than our immediate family knew that there was this son that was out there, she, it caused her a lot of pain. She seemed like a little bit of a tortured person in some ways like internally tortured.

Haley Radke: When did they tell you that you had a sibling out there somewhere?

Kristal Parke: When I was 17 it was interesting when I was 17 and I started to go a little buck wild My mom I remember my mom, she could never just have these calm conversations with me. And so she was worried that I was like, gonna, I think being 17 myself, I think it really triggered her because it made her remember when she was 17.

And so she gave me a box of condoms. And I, and wanted to have this sex talk, and I was like, Mom, you are so [00:14:00] late to the game. Thank you for the condoms. But what are you even doing? And it did turn into quite a, an argument. Her and I were just we were really combative with each other, and she, in her distress, screamed at me and said, I had a baby when I was 17, and it just shocked me.

I was like, what? And so that's how I found out. My adopted dad never discussed it. And then when things calmed down and I tried to talk to her about it again, she was just way, way too ashamed and caught in her pain and her trauma of relinquishing a child that she couldn't even discuss it with me. It was a traumatic way of finding it out, it was, yeah and then I think too, that was the same year that I found, that she found [00:15:00] my biological parents for me too. Like that whole year there was probably so much going on for her. To watch me walk through this. I can imagine she might have even felt a little bit of jealousy that, I was able to be reunited with my birth mother and she hadn't yet found her biological son, even though she'd looked for him for years and years, she couldn't find him.

So yeah. And then finally they did find him in 2020 and you could just see. She finally had peace. She finally had peace because she'd found him, her and my dad both. And I feel like it gave her a little bit more compassion towards me as well as an adoptee.

Haley Radke: I, this is, this feels like an ouchie question to ask you, but I'm going to ask you.

Kristal Parke: oh, please do.

Haley Radke: An adopted person, we're wearing a bunch of different [00:16:00] hats, right? We're wearing the hat that our parents have put on us and we're trying to fit in and be safe and be a member of the family. We're also like, who would I have been? You're looking at who would I have been if my birth mother had kept me or who'd I have been if I had been adopted by this other aunt and uncle and just because of my gender, that's why I'm ended up here.

But then you're also looking at your adoptive parents and they had this other kid. So when you're meeting him, he's like disrupting this, and it's like, would they have adopted me if they had been able to keep him? It's this world changing thing. How are you doing with that when that's happening? Because that would upend me.

Kristal Parke: oh, I was coming unglued. I was absolutely coming unglued. And, I've always felt like a bit of an outsider in my family. And I don't think it [00:17:00] was because of anything they necessarily did or didn't do. But I remember saying to my mom you need to make sure that if you go and meet him, then that you invite me because I could see them just not being very thoughtful and just all going and meeting him and forgetting to invite me or something.

And so I made a point of saying you need to make sure that I'm invited to this thing. And when the day came to go out to dinner to meet him. I couldn't go. I couldn't go. It was too painful. It was, he was a representation of them, of him truly belonging to them, of him being a biological child to them.

And that was something I could [00:18:00] never be to them. And it illuminated so much more that I wasn't theirs. That he was theirs and I wasn't theirs. That's how it, that's how it translated to me. Yeah, it, that was a really hard time for me. And I remember asking my adoptive mom to read a book called Adoption Healing.

It was the one of the very first books that I read, and I felt so understood in that book. I can't remember who it's by Soll or something.

Haley Radke: Joe Soll.

Kristal Parke: Yeah, Joe Soll. And I had given her the book and she never read it and I'd asked her and she was like, oh, when I read it I fall asleep and like she just had such an unwillingness to read it.

She could only read it from [00:19:00] an adoptive mother's perspective. She couldn't put herself in an adoptee's shoes at all. Not many people can, but I'm just saying she couldn't even attempt to do that. And I begged her. Sorry, go ahead.

Haley Radke: Do you think that's because she couldn't put herself in a birth mother's lens?

Kristal Parke: I think that she either. Existed in her birth mother box, or she existed in her adoptive mother box. I don't think she could exist in she compartmentalized those so aggressively, And then it just left no room for her to even try to understand what it might feel like to be an adoptee.

And she, of all people, really did have that conditioning that [00:20:00] adoption was such a beautiful, perfect solution to a child not having a parent that could take care of them or chose to take care of them. My circumstances was in it and it's in my paperwork. Like the moment my birth mother knew I was, she was pregnant with me she chose adoption. She did not want to raise me. So yeah it's weird. It's, it, when I look at my adoptive mom, even the way she treated my birth mom. My birth mom was below her because now she was an adoptive mom that was raising her daughter. And I've seen this where birth mothers feel like they have to stay quiet and they have to just placate and they have to just, they don't get to have a voice in the matter or anything [00:21:00] like that, and I can't believe that she wouldn't have more compassion for my birth mother, maybe because she didn't have self compassion for her choice. Maybe because she blamed herself and was just, under such a blanket of guilt for her choice,

Haley Radke: yeah. Yeah.

Kristal Parke: Yeah. And then the weirdest thing was when, so I never met him until later on. And when I did finally meet this brother, he looked just like my dad and my brothers, so that was even an extra little bit of that hurts, and, but then he came to our childhood home and it was, he's sixty I think he's in his sixties and my parents have lived in that home since 1970.

And I had so much compassion for him when he walked into that [00:22:00] home. And there's family pictures everywhere of a life that he could have had and didn't. And I'm even, I'm having like chills right now thinking about it because that must have been very painful for him. I will admit through all that, I felt so, looking back on it now, I was very self centered in the beginning I really couldn't, I could only see my own pain in that whole experience of him coming into the family.

And because of that, I wasn't able to be as welcoming of him as I know, because I am a very welcoming person like that is just not even within my character to not be, to not have welcomed him, especially being an adoptee, right? And knowing how difficult that is to feel like you, are rejected by your birth family, whatever.

He was very patient and [00:23:00] understanding and compassionate with me. And, and he knew that I was going through my own stuff with that too. And and then, when he came to our home, that was the moment where I was able to really look at him as a fellow adoptee. And I still have a hard time calling him my brother, though.

Yeah, and it's still hard when he talks about like my mom and his mom, but he'll call her mom or my mom, he'll say sometimes. And I still find that a little is, but he has every right to, he has every right to. Yeah.

Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. I know someone will be listening that can very much identify with those feelings and it's so complicated in your story that you share in Because She's Adopted [00:24:00] touches on so many different experiences that a lot of us have had.

And another thing that you share that is so deeply personal is your journey to recovery and becoming sober. And you have done that for many years now. How many years sober are you?

Kristal Parke: It'll be 13 years in November.

Haley Radke: Okay.

Kristal Parke: November 14th, 2011 is my sober date.

Haley Radke: oh, congratulations.

Kristal Parke: Thank you. Thank you.

Haley Radke: As you filmed the documentary and got into more adoptee community and those kinds of things, were you surprised to know how overrepresented we are in treatment for addictions?

Kristal Parke: Not really. And because I don't know, have you watched shows like Intervention and things like that or, okay. So like I, before I got sober, I would, I was obsessed with like recovery shows. [00:25:00]

Haley Radke: Okay.

Kristal Parke: It was weird. I, it was like somehow I knew that I had a problem, but wasn't willing to really look at my own self. It was easier to look at other people, but a lot of those people are adopted a lot of them. And yeah, so I wasn't necessarily surprised, but what I was really moved by is, was when I would show the film and adoptees would say, oh my gosh, it, this was such a perfect time in my life to see this film. I'm 22 days sober today, or thank you for sharing your journey. I've, I have a number of years sobriety behind me as well. And, I look at adopt, I look at addiction, I think we all have something that we turn to to not have to feel the feelings that we're feeling or experience the things, the thoughts memories, emotions that, that are uncomfortable.[00:26:00]

And for an adoptee, I think there's a level of uncomfortability in your own skin right from the very beginning, for me anyway there was. And addiction for me started very early on. And yeah, so it's, I'm grateful. I'm grateful to be sober. I, my life would not be what it was, what it is today.

I would not be the friend. I would not be the mother. I would not be just the person I am today, if I had have continued down that path, I don't even know if I'd be raising my own children if I hadn't gotten sober. So

Haley Radke: I don't know it's like this, I was going to say, it's like this miraculous moment, when you come into awareness. of it's time, which probably doesn't feel miraculous, probably just feels like [00:27:00] horrible and that, but that part is documented in the film some moments and you share some really I don't know if it feels like an ugly moment with your husband and some of those things and it's really profound to watch because we know the other side, like it's I don't know, I'm just, you impress me so much with your strength of character and showing that to us.

Kristal Parke: Thank you. That means a lot to me. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. And it was a miraculous moment. If you had asked me if I had a drinking problem the night before, I would have said absolutely not. And I literally woke up in the morning and had this awakening that I needed help. It really was. I went to bed and then the next morning I woke up and I was like, I need to get [00:28:00] help. I'm going to lose everything. So yeah, I'm grateful for that moment. That's for sure.

Haley Radke: Another special moment that you share in the documentary is going to the Opaskwayak Cree Nation, which is where your birth mother was from.

And can you talk a little bit about that? And then I know that you went back this year with your children. And I'm wondering if you can share about that. We haven't even mentioned even from the beginning that you're also an indigenous person and grew up in a white family.

Kristal Parke: So for me growing up, I felt proud to be indigenous. And at the time we did call it Indian, like we, that, that was the terms that we used. But when I would share that openly with people outside of our family, my adoptive mom would say, you're just a little bit native, like nothing to speak of. That's a very impactful statement. And I don't think I realized how impactful that [00:29:00] statement was until I got older.

Because to me, it was just. Basically saying it's nothing to speak of that part of you is nothing to speak of. It's nothing to share. It's nothing to expose. It's nothing to be proud of. Like it's nothing to speak of. And so I would say that over my life time growing up, I was taught that being indigenous was something to be ashamed of.

I remember a family member taking me. We had a, the Katzie Indian Reserve by where we lived, and I remember a family member driving me through there to show how decrepit the place was and how, look at how these people live. And I don't want to believe that any of this was intentional. I think there's such systemic racism within [00:30:00] Canada that we, I think that there's people still that don't really recognize how colonial minded they still are in a lot of ways, but it was something that I felt like I was not to be proud of that it was something that I should be ashamed of. And then even as I got older, I remember working in a hair salon and the ladies thinking it was funny to tell native jokes and I don't dare say that I'm native in that space now because you've just made it very clear that it's something to joke about.

For me, it was, it's been a journey of really coming back to a place where I am able to claim my Indigenous identity. And with that came having to deal with my own colonial mindset and my own, for lack of [00:31:00] better terms, racist ideologies. That's been a big journey and I started that journey, a lot long before I started the film.

But then when I decided to do the film and wanted to go back to the Opaskwayak at Cree Nation and really started to desire to connect to that part of myself and that culture, I got pushback from family. I got pushback from, white friends. Saying things like, oh, you're an Indian now. Like, why do you need to focus on your indigenous heritage?

Why can't you focus on your Italian heritage or your English heritage? Like that kind of stuff. So there was still this. I don't know what do you call that, Haley? That's,

Haley Radke: it's racism.

Kristal Parke: It's, yeah, it's complete and utter racism and it's hard because, [00:32:00] yeah, it's just hard.

Haley Radke: Can I'll make an interjection if that's okay?

Kristal Parke: Please do.

Haley Radke: Okay. A lot of our listeners are not Canadian, American or worldwide. And Canada has this like reputation, right? We're like, we welcome all these newcomers and immigrants and.

Kristal Parke: Yeah.

Haley Radke: And, I think public facing, there's this thing that like we're not racist, but towards indigenous people, absolutely.

Kristal Parke: Yes.

Haley Radke: I grew up in a very small Mennonite town, totally white, and the only people of color we would ever see were Indigenous kids that happened to be in foster care for a brief time, and it was a the racism was disgusting, outrageous, and 100 percent accepted across the board. And that is, yeah very common [00:33:00] still.

We mentioned earlier that you're, we can maybe talk about the 60s scoop just a little bit. And now researchers are calling it the millennium scoop because it's still happening today. So do you mind talking just a little bit about that?

Kristal Parke: Yeah, absolutely. As most people know the residential school system, the Indian residential school system was an intentional plan by the Canadian government to assimilate Indigenous kids into white colonial culture. They really did believe that these kids would be better off to be removed from their land and from their parents and the influence of their parents and go into these Indian residential schools where they could learn English and learn to be white. And now we know that [00:34:00] there was horrific abuse in those places and a lot of Indigenous people, if not all Indigenous people who went to these places experienced severe trauma.

The Sixties Scoop was a branch of this assimilation agenda. It was just another form of Indian residential school. So they quite literally would go in and take children from their reserves, from their land, steal them from their parents, blatantly steal children, abduct children. Other cases maybe weren't quite as

Haley Radke: obvious, blatant,

Kristal Parke: weren't that blatant yeah, but, they basically would take these children, put them into foster care. And then this is what really gets me like this. They would put pictures of these children in newspapers. There was a program [00:35:00] called Adopt Indian and Métis Children, AIME, and it was put on by the government for white families to adopt Indian and Métis children.

And they would separate children from their siblings and adopt one child out into the States and one out into Canada and so it was really just tearing these families apart and when you say that to somebody, when you tell somebody about this. It doesn't quite hit until you say to them, can you imagine somebody coming to your home and lying and saying that you're not providing your child with the proper care, the proper food, and then having police or social services come in, take your child, put their picture in [00:36:00] a paper, adopt them out, and you never get to see those children, your children again. It's a different story when you explain it in that way. I feel like Canadians still, when you try to explain this and a lot of Canadians still don't even know what the 60 scoop is when you try and explain this to them because it's got you know, the indigenous umbrella over it they just don't hear it until you start to make it personal and say what if this was your situation, you know. There's a lot of people that are hearing and are listening and are advocating for Indigenous people and children.

That's what the Sixties Scoop is. My birth mother was a victim of the Sixties Scoop. We call her a Sixties Scoop survivor. And now with the millennium scoop, Canada's foster system has over 50 percent of children in [00:37:00] foster care are Indigenous and Indigenous people only make up 7 percent of the population.

So that's pretty imbalanced, right? And so that's what they're calling the Millennium Scoop right now. I was asked actually for Truth and Reconciliation Day on September 30th to open the ceremonies, the Truth and Reconciliation Ceremonies for the Métis community here. And they're having all the children in foster care, the Métis children in foster care come to the event and they're honoring them. And they're doing a sashing ceremony where they give them sashes and I have the privilege of being able to speak at this event, but I keep thinking to myself, what can I say to these kids? What did they need to hear? What will leave an impact [00:38:00] on them, and I'm still trying to figure that out.

Haley Radke: So many people, when you went back to the OCN, the social worker, the, some family members just members of the community. Were saying to you welcome home.

Kristal Parke: Yes. Yes. Yeah. So when I, like, when I first got connected with the Opaskwayak Cree Nation, I just reached out to somebody that had a Facebook page.

It was like the Opaskwayak Cree Nation. elders page or something. And I told her who I was. I told her who my birth mother was. I told her who my grandparents were and my great grandparents. And she said, just make a post, just make a post and people will, they'll be able to connect you to your family. No problem.

And so I made this post and it got shared and shared and shared. And all the comments were welcome home. [00:39:00] I had no idea that they, that it mattered to them that I had never been there before, or that I didn't know them, or they didn't know me. I didn't know that would matter so much to them.

And when I did go back there, that was the first thing that almost everybody said to me was welcome home. And I really did feel at home there. I really did feel like I belonged there. And it was an incredible experience. I can't believe how gracious they were towards me. Like they here we are we come in.

We roll into town. I've got, this camera crew and we're, and it's a small town and we're filming and, but people were just so willing to be part of, to be part of the story and to be part of my journey home. [00:40:00] And it was incredible. It was really quite incredible. And then, and my biggest fear was when I went there, that they weren't going to accept me, that they were going to reject me like, oh, what's this white girl here doing here?

Like I was worried that they thought that I was coming with a camera crew to, exploit them in some way. And I really, that was the furthest thing from my mind. And it was always very important that I operated and that my team operated with extreme honor and respect for the people there because it really, it's their home.

Haley Radke: Tell me about seeing your kids there. This summer.

Kristal Parke: oh my gosh. Okay. So we went back just this in August and the intention was to go back and show the film. I wanted to show the film to the community there. Thank them. And. It was because of OCN CFS that we could actually go there. [00:41:00] Like they paid our whole way to go.

Haley Radke: The children and family services.

Kristal Parke: Yeah. Yeah. And Donna is, she works there and she has been a great sort of connection point for me. She's, she sends me newspaper articles and helps to keep me updated and has helped educate me in like around indigenous issues or issues within that, my community there. So now when you tell three teenagers that we're going to the Opaskwayak Cree Nation

Haley Radke: in Manitoba,

Kristal Parke: in, in Northern Manitoba, where there are so many mosquitoes, they don't jump for joy.

My oldest daughter did. Okay. She was very excited about it. She's very excited. And so the time that we went was during Opaskwayak indigenous days, it [00:42:00] was their 59th year. So they have activities going from morning to night. It was a great time to go because there was so much going on. I was able to connect with a lot of people.

And so I would say my two younger teens were, they were stinkers. They did not want to join in. They were super lame. And I know they're going to look back on it as they're, as they go into adulthood and they're going to be like, I was a stinker because now I want to connect to my indigenous heritage.

We, it was great. Like my oldest, she really embraced it. She is quite a girly girl and she was wearing this yellow, pretty summer dress and joined in with the other youth females, her own age, doing knife throwing. So she's like throwing these [00:43:00] knives at a target in this like beautiful, yellow dress and stood out like a sore thumb.

And, but, she just embraced it. She showed up as she was in that space and just joined in. And it was really great. The chief of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation chief Maureen Brown. She's the first female chief ever there. And she was there as a council member, when I first came to the Opaskwayak Cree Nation and she knew my family and she gave me a lot of history and it was interesting because the audio didn't, it wasn't good.

With all of the stuff that she had shared with me and I was so worried when we were about to watch the film and I pulled her aside and I said, I just want you to know that all these incredible things you shared with me, these stories that you told me about, these [00:44:00] traditions that you told me about, they were lost because the audio, like I couldn't, include them in the film because the audio wasn't working.

And she said to me, that's because they were sacred and they weren't meant to be in your film. And I was like, yeah I hear that. And I, yeah. So when we came back, she remembered us. She welcomed my family. She gave gifts to me and my family. She opened up the screening itself by sharing what her experience with me was and just really encouraged me.

She said, Kristal is most definitely an Opaskwayakak woman and she has the qualities of an Opaskwayakak woman. For her to see that in me and say that out loud about me, it just it, I feel like it continually allows me [00:45:00] to step into that identity as an Indigenous person. And yeah, like it's just incredible.

So anyway, going there with my kids, it was great. They experienced lots of new things. I hope to go back with them again. Hopefully the younger two will be more excited. Although my youngest and my oldest joined in on, they had this really great music competition for the youth on the very last night we were there and it was like a big deal.

Like it was, they had a full five, five piece band behind like the performers. Like it was the stage, everything, lights, cameras, everything. And there was 11 contestants and my son took fourth place and my daughter took second place. So that was probably the highlight [00:46:00] of their summer. And, even though they were stinkers while we were there, I think that was the redeeming experience. So.

Haley Radke: That's pretty cool.

Kristal Parke: Yeah.

Haley Radke: I want To recommend that people watch your documentary Because She's Adopted. I loved it. I've seen it several times now. The first time I saw it was when you screened it here at an indigenous film festival.

Kristal Parke: Yeah.

Haley Radke: But it was, and before I really knew you.

Kristal Parke: Yes.

Haley Radke: It was so amazing because it's so you, it's it's quirky, it's funny, but it's also so moving and educational and you've shared, some of the plot twists and reveals that happen

in the documentary with us today as part of your story, but as they come up in the film, it's really oh my goodness, like this woman has experienced some things. So anyway, I just [00:47:00] it's so good. And I do. It's so you. I don't know. I don't know how else to say that. Now that I've gotten to know you so much better. It's so you. Obviously, it's all about you. But yeah.

Kristal Parke: That's a great compliment because I think with editing, an editor can go in and edit from their own bias or their own perception of who you are as a person, like maybe you have an editor that doesn't like you and they end up showing all the, your most terrible qualities.

But I had an incredible editor. Her name's Chelsea McEvoy. She's also Indigenous and she understood what it was like to be somebody that was disconnected from your indigenous culture. She recognized that she did not have any clue what it meant to be an adopted person. And [00:48:00] so because of that, she actually invited me into the editing suite and had me there with her hours upon hours to help edit the film because she was, she's just I don't know what

adoptees need to hear and you don't always get that kind of creative control, but she honored my story so well, she got to know me so well that I think she was able to really translate who I was through the editing. And I really think that the film is what it is because of her. I really do. Yeah.

Haley Radke: In the trailer, you say, I'm not the same person that I was when I began filming this documentary. And as like a personal aside, we have had a couple conversations about some moments in the film that you're like, oh part of it too. When you see it, it's oh, I think you're [00:49:00] still unpacking some things.

I think you're still, as we all are over time, this is like a moment in time that's captured as a capsule.

Kristal Parke: Yes.

Haley Radke: And as we go on, especially the more into adoptee community you get, you're like, oh, my opinions change on this now.

Kristal Parke: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. There's don't come for me, but there is a part in there where I say, I think adoption is beautiful.

But. There's also a very painful side to adoption and, I now scroll through adoptees online and it's quit saying adoption's beautiful. And I hear that and I totally get that. And so that is something that if I were editing it today, I probably wouldn't have, I probably wouldn't have included in there.

There, I can look at my story now. I think from both sides, I [00:50:00] can look at the pain in it and I can look at the beauty in it too. And I think that's what the healing has done for me is I can, whereas there was a time in my life where I could only look at the good because I was so indoctrinated by adoptee narratives.

But then there was a time in my life where I could only look at the negatives of my experience and I was, I could only look at my adoptive mom. And I don't know why my adopted dad got such a pass on all of this, but I could only look at my adopted mom with suspicion, I didn't think that she had any good intention when it came to my adoptee adoption, I thought that it was all self centered.

And so I think I appreciate the journey of being able to acknowledge that, yeah, there was. This is true over [00:51:00] here, but this is also true over here. And yeah there's also a part in there where my husband refers to my adoptive family as my true family. And I want to punch him in the face every time I watch it.

Haley Radke: I almost asked you about it and I was like no, like he, our partners, our family, like they are a couple steps behind us in unpacking things.

Kristal Parke: I think so.

Haley Radke: Hopefully they come along too for the unpacking, but yeah.

Kristal Parke: Yes. And I don't think he would say that today, but where we were when he was saying that was I was, not experiencing the most loving treatment from my biological family on my mom's side.

And I didn't really know my biological father's side yet, and I hadn't made those [00:52:00] extended connections. So at that moment in time, really the only family that I really could call my quote unquote, true family or real family was the family was that family was the only family that like still that treated me with love and acceptance and that.

Now, a true family comes in so many different forms. I have a true family in my adoptee community. I have true family in my adopted family, but I have, true family in my friendships. And also in my biological family, and I have made more connections when I was at the Opaskwayak Cree Nation.

I'm, I made many more connections. I met aunts and uncles and great aunts and cousins, and turns out I'm related to everybody there, which is amazing. And, like truly [00:53:00] walking down the road and someone's I'm actually your cousin. We're related through da. It's oh my gosh, really do feel so much belonging and really feel like there is something to the biological piece there is.

And so for him to say that and discount that, I don't think that was his intention but, I would not have included that if I was editing today, so.

Haley Radke: We'll give him a pass. We'll give him a pass on that.

Kristal Parke: We'll get just this time.

Haley Radke: Just this one, one and only time Stuart gets a pass so don't send her emails about that. Okay. What do you want to recommend to us today, Kristal?

Kristal Parke: I want to recommend a series, a TV series called Little Bird. It was, I believe directed by Jen, Jennifer Podemski. She's a Canadian Indigenous woman in film. And it is an ex [00:54:00] it's a story about a adopted woman who was Indigenous and adopted into a Jewish family and just came to the point in her life where she couldn't move forward without going back and finding her roots and all of that what that included and from an adoptee's perspective, every episode I watched, I cried and I could relate to so deeply. And so I believe that it's on Crave.

Haley Radke: Yeah, Crave in Canada. I think it was on HBO in the States. We'll try and find some links for folks to, to watch it.

Kristal Parke: Yeah. I think that it's really taken off because it is a very good explanation of what the Sixties Scoop was and its impact. And then of course, for adoptees as well.

Haley Radke: So yeah, it's amazing. I've only watched, I think the first two episodes and it [00:55:00] cut a little close. And so I was like, okay the feelings.

Kristal Parke: A hundred percent. I would say watch it with a support person or, have someone that you can process through it with because it is so real. It's, it's like watching, it's like watching your first adoptee doc or listening to your first adoptee podcast and going, oh my gosh, I've never felt so seen before in my whole life, you know?

Haley Radke: We're wrapping up. Where can folks watch your film? And I know you also have a limited series podcast coming out soon, too. So where can we follow along with all the things?

Kristal Parke: Okay, so you can rent my film if you are in the states or in Canada on my website. So that's kristalparke.Net. She'll include it in the show notes because no one has ever spelled my name correctly ever.

Haley Radke: I got you. I got you. We'll link [00:56:00] it up.

Kristal Parke: And and then the podcast, it's sorry. So the film you can also watch if you have TELUS Optic TV you just go and search Because She's Adopted, it's in there. And then the limited series podcast, it's a six part series called the Because She's Adopted podcast. It's a video podcast series. You can also start watching that September 24th on TELUS Optic TV.

I believe they're going to be putting it out on their YouTube as well, but I'm going to be putting it on Spotify and Apple podcast. And so it'll be under Because She's Adopted. And then of course you can follow me on YouTube. Instagram, Facebook, and Tik Tok Because She's Adopted.

Haley Radke: Amazing.

Kristal Parke: Do you know how the title came to be, Haley?

Haley Radke: I think [00:57:00] it was a funny thing that your husband said to you when you had fails in your life.

Kristal Parke: Yes. Yes. Or any, yeah anytime anything happened, he's, he'd be like, it's because she's adopted. He him and I have a very humorous joking relationship. And he may joke like that, but he's been my greatest ally, my greatest support through through all of this. Yeah.

Haley Radke: Good dude. All right.

Kristal Parke: Yeah.

Haley Radke: Thank you so much, Kristal for sharing your story with us, talking about some of the really hard things. And I know it will be so helpful to many. And your film is just so beautiful. I can't wait for folks to check it out. And if you're on Patreon, you can do our September, instead of book club this month, we're doing documentary club, and we chose your film for this month. So really excited about doing that. So we'll have info [00:58:00] about that as well for folks to check that out. So thank you.

Kristal Parke: Awesome. Thank you, Haley. It was truly a dream to be on Adoptees On and you're making my dreams come true. And not only that I found a friend in you and I really do value you and appreciate you. So thank you for all you're doing and all you've done for adoptees in this community and beyond.

Haley Radke: Thank you.

I hope you'll come and join us to Talk more about Because She's Adopted in our documentary club this month on Patreon. We have scholarships available, which you can go to adopteeson.com/scholarship if you want to apply and there's also a free trial of Patreon. If you want to just hop in and check it out, I would love it if you watch the doc if you're able to share it with [00:59:00] fellow adoptees or friends or family that would be interested in learning more about Kristal 's story, which touches so many of the adoptee issues, like so many things, right? She's got so many circles in her constellation of folks who have been impacted by the 60s scoop by the adoption industry.

All of those things. And I think her story's really a powerful one that I think can help a lot of people. So I hope you'll share it with someone. And I really appreciate your ongoing support of the show. If you wanna make a donation, you can do that on our website, adopteeson.com or on Patreon, which is adopteeon.com/community.

Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again [01:00:00] soon.

289 Bruce Porth Part 2

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/289

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today is part two of a two part series that we began last week with my friend Bruce Porth. Today we talk a little bit more about reunion and what it looks like when someone is being dishonest with you.

And we also chat about using breathwork and psychedelics as healing modalities. Have you ever met one of those people that when they speak, you just have to listen to every word? Bruce is one of those people for me. So I hope you enjoy getting to know him better along with me. Before we get started, I wanna personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on [00:01:00] adoptees on.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world.

We wrap up with some recommended resources and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adoptees on.com. If you miss part one, I would recommend going back and listening to that first. Okay. Let's listen in.

Did you ever think about looking for paternal side? I know for a lot of us, that's like the second afterthought. It's it's the mother. They're the one that carried us. They're the, that's the first connection it feels like.

Bruce Porth: Exactly. Yeah. And I, I did find my father, as soon as I found my mom, she was more than happy to share that information with me along with a caveat that he was not a trustworthy person and they were actually both still living in kind of the same general area just to the west of [00:02:00] Chicago, but they, had didn't really have any relationship anymore.

At that point in time. I do know that at the time of my birth. He did want to stay with my mom and I think he wanted to raise me. She would not even let him anywhere near the hospital when I was born. I think he, he wanted to be there. I got his name and found his address pretty quickly and he was receptive to having a relationship, but I haven't really talked much about that relationship because it's a difficult one.

Especially considering that, my adoptive father was not the person that I really needed. And it turns out that my birth father was also not really somebody that could show up. I always sensed in our exchanges and it was started out by, regular snail mail and then transition to email.

But I always sense that there was something untrustworthy about him, so I never really felt compelled to go out to the Midwest and actually meet him [00:03:00] face to face. But he would tell me these elaborate stories about all the things that he had done in his life. He claimed that I, he had a daughter, half sibling of mine that was a famous movie actress and actually wove these really elaborate and detailed stories about how they were estranged from each other now.

And just a lot of detail about her life, as if it was real. And eventually I was able to get the name of this actress out of him. And, even a casual internet search, she did come from that same general region of the country, but nothing really lined up with, it'd be consistent with him being her father.

But the interesting thing was this actress, almost identical to my oldest daughter when she was about eight years old or so, so I couldn't really totally discount the story, but there were others, other stories that he shared that were glorified him, in his life and long story short, I found out that all of it was, [00:04:00] or most of it, I'm sure it was lies and I did actually end up contacting this actress.

Actually, she reached out to me through a mutual friend of ours, and it's a story that would take way too long, and it's too silly to even go into, but she was trying to explain some things in her own family. I was trying to get some kind of verification that, my father was telling me something real and so we both had different narratives and we both validated that neither one was accurate.

So that was the final kind of closure that I got that he was completely untrustworthy and had created this fantasy life for himself. And as it turns out, and I'm assuming that this isn't a lie, he is also an adoptee. So I suspect that he had to create a fantasy life for himself as a way to compensate for the pain of relinquishment that he was not able to face and to work through.

Haley Radke: [00:05:00] Thanks for sharing that because. So many of us go into reunion and have no idea what to expect, and we might have ideas of what it'll look like. And hopefully it's the open arms and willingness to share information and all of those things. But I would be naive enough to take it all hook, line and sinker. That's wild.

Bruce Porth: And I did for a while. And I was, I was telling other people that I had, my half sister was a famous movie actress.

Haley Radke: Okay when we're done, I hope you name names to me.

Bruce Porth: I'll be happy to share that with you Haley. Yeah, so there was, there was a period of working through a lot of those feelings of betrayal after that period of time. So I pretty much have worked through that. It doesn't surprise me that given his history that this is something that he would do.

It's unfortunate that people do end up [00:06:00] doing this, but I'm no longer taking it personally at all. This was really entirely about him.

Haley Radke: After your mom passed, did you have any extra support, like grief supports and things like you had said? I felt nothing, but I'm assuming something came after that.

Bruce Porth: Yeah I was doing therapy, I had found a therapist that I had started working with and it actually came out of doing some couples work and there was this resonance between me and this therapist that we started doing some work on our own and she was incredibly empathic and was a really a great witness and I could work through a lot of grief, with her.

But the problem was that she really had no skill at all in dealing with trauma and it feels to me like I was living in this really narrow world. And so I did not [00:07:00] really know anything different. And I didn't know really what was available out there. I wasn't aware of the various modalities at that time.

That are designed specifically to deal with trauma in a really effective way, the somatic modalities that Peter Levine had come up with and then Dick Schwartz coming up with internal family systems, which I think is just a remarkable model and really applicable for me as an adoptee because it feels like the experience, caused all this fracturing.

And having a model that I can work with these different fractured parts of me has been extremely useful, but it took me a long time to get to that point of finding those resources. Because I was locked in with this one therapist, and it's a subtle point, but she was all about integration, and the big thing that she was missing was the differentiation of the various parts, and then the linkage of those parts. [00:08:00] Or the integration. So she was skipping over a whole lot of work that I needed to do and was really clueless about it. But there's a great, I think he calls himself a neuroscience Daniel Siegel that talks specifically about that differentiation and then linkage. And when I started learning about that it made complete sense.

And then I happened to come across a pamphlet for a, it was actually sent to my wife, who's a clinical psychologist that was advertising for a workshop. And it was featuring a woman named Janina Fisher and talked about her book Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors. And just reading that description almost brought me to tears because I was resonating so much with it.

And I immediately got the book and started diving into it. This was my introduction into internal family systems.

Haley Radke: Okay. You married a psychologist?

Bruce Porth: I did.

Haley Radke: That's [00:09:00] funny. No, when you earlier, when you were talking about university and you're like, Oh, I went to engineering school. We didn't have any psych books. Like I, I took psychology because didn't know who I was. Like, and you just married one. So there you go.

Bruce Porth: And before I married one, I dated one.

Haley Radke: That's good.

Bruce Porth: So I think there was some part of me that was so desperate for safety. And I think I was making an assumption that a therapist would be a safe person to get close to. And that may or may not be true.

Haley Radke: Earlier you referenced oh, back then they didn't know as much, about adoption for therapists and stuff. And I was thinking they're still not training in school for that either, or if it is, anything about adoption it's a very brief period. And so I think you and I, and probably a lot of our listeners we're steeped in it.

And so I think there's this an assumption that, oh, [00:10:00] way more people know about this stuff now. And some more people know about it now, but not everyone. So even saying that to you, I bet she didn't have much training about adoptees when she went to school.

Bruce Porth: Oh, there was none. There was none at all. Her training was through me, really. And, to be honest, there was a lot of struggle for me because I wasn't feeling seen as an adoptee. That, that part of me was not recognizable to her and it was a drain on the relationship too. And so it was difficult to work through some of that. And I, I think we're on the other side of a lot of that now.

And a lot of that just has to do with my own healing and not having parts of me that were unconsciously looking to her for emotional sustenance. Because early in the relationship that was happening, in kind of an unconscious way, in a way that I eventually, even once I got conscious of, I couldn't necessarily control [00:11:00] it. I had to do a lot more of my own healing work.

Haley Radke: It's interesting that seeing the words fragmented self, you're like, whoa, that's me. Like you can, even recognizing that is a big thing.

Bruce Porth: That was a huge thing. Just, yeah, just, like I was saying earlier. In the absence of having language, I would just shut down, and I wouldn't say anything, and now I was coming across these very descriptive words and terminology to describe my experience.

And it was, yeah, it was just so validating. It was like crawling through the desert on your knees, repenting for all those years, to paraphrase Mary Oliver. And then, coming across these oases with this incredible validation. And I was harvesting all of these, bits and pieces. But still at the time wasn't, I hadn't totally found the adoptee community at that time.

And so as I did, [00:12:00] that was a whole nother level of validation and connection.

Haley Radke: Because you said you, your adoptive mom passed in 2020? And when did you first hear Adoptees On?

Bruce Porth: It was January or February of 2020.

Haley Radke: Okay.

Bruce Porth: So that first episode just came up in my YouTube feed and I have, never really gravitated to social media and I've just like never had time for it or, the drive to, dive into it.

But I was interacting in, in YouTube space a little bit and one of the episodes popped up there and I didn't know how the algorithm found it, but it did. And I listened to it.

Haley Radke: Do you remember which one it was?

Bruce Porth: I do not remember which one it was.

Haley Radke: No. Okay.

Bruce Porth: But then that opened the door wide open. Now, I had been part of a smaller group of adoptees, centered around New York City.

We would get together periodically and do workshops, [00:13:00] but the therapeutic approach. was a little bit limited for what I needed, and it was a self contained group. So I, it, that group didn't lead me into the broader adoptee group. I had to find it on my own.

Haley Radke: Did you just start listening? With, I don't know, I know you jumped in pretty quick.

Bruce Porth: Yes I did. So I, then I found your website and I found the back catalog and I did start binging some of it, but what it opened up for me was not just the, the podcast, but the literature. I had been familiar with a lot of the classical literature, Nancy Verrier, Betty Jean Lifton, I had read all that stuff, but I don't know, to me, it felt, a lot of that's still certainly still valid, but a lot of it felt a little bit dated to me.

And so now I was. I was discovering these other authors, and so a lot of these books started arriving at the door. And I think the first book I got was Anne Hefron's You Don't Look Adopted. [00:14:00] And that just blew the doors open for me. And from there, it just continued to lead into the community in a deeper way.

Haley Radke: Once you heard people talking about more, really, we talk, tell our stories here, but a lot of the time we're talking about the emotional side of things, the psychological side of things, and that sort of personal side. Once you started hearing more of those things, were you like, oh, this is more what I need to dive into? Or it sounds like you were already investigating that from your reading and things about therapy modalities and stuff.

Bruce Porth: I was, but it felt like I was only accessing a narrow portal of what was actually available and what I actually needed. Because as I'm discovering that, the internal landscape is extremely vast.

The pervasiveness of this wound, it doesn't occupy just a, a corner of my being. It's like it had over the years infiltrated my entire being. And so I needed validation from lots of different [00:15:00] sources and each author brings a different, slightly different angle of the experience to the table and I was really eating all of it up and needing it.

So now I'm at a point where I feel like I have, I finally have all the resources that I need, and the healing, the different healing modalities, including more recently some expanded states work, which is really exciting territory to explore. And so this part of my nervous system that was always searching and looking for a connection and healing can finally relax.

And even though I still have, I feel like I have a lot more healing work to do. I know I can just put one foot in front of the other and follow the path. And I will find the healing that I need. And there's just an incredible amount of relief from that.

Haley Radke: If someone is listening, and they're like what you just said, like you have access to the things you [00:16:00] need that feels that has probably felt out of reach for a lot of people and what are like one or two things that now looking back you've got a big history with all kinds of different modalities that you've tried out and what are one or two things that If somebody's new that you'd be like I would have started here or I would have read this first, or I would have tried this first, or I don't know. That's a tough question. But what do you think?

Bruce Porth: There's a lot out there. And I think what one person needs is going to be, individual so for me, I needed to start with internal family systems and I did a lot of, one on one therapy with internal family systems. I did a lot of my own reading.

I watched a bunch of videos of Dick Schwartz. I also even, before I found IFS, I had gravitated to Gabor Mate. And so I [00:17:00] was watching as much of his material that I could find. And there's just something, deeply validating about what he had to say. And I was able to see him like three times, live and in person.

And I would actually, I remember one time talking to him about adoption specifically, because he does reference it periodically. And he has a history that involves similar abandonment to a relinquishment, although he was reunited with his mom at some point after or maybe partly during the war. So not quite the same, but he had a certain sensitivity to it that I really resonated with.

So all of that was important, but where I had gotten to, I was still feeling this sort of internal sense of what I called non negotiable unlovability. Where I knew that there were still places inside me that were heavily defended that I really, I was having a lot of difficulty accessing, even with the therapy that I was doing.

Haley Radke: I think I remember you asking a question about this in [00:18:00] one of book clubs.

Bruce Porth: I might have been trying to understand it, myself at the time, because that was that phrase just was very descriptive of my internal experience.

Haley Radke: I think it was with the Lisa Olivera conversation.

Bruce Porth: Oh, yes. That was a really good book club. And she's such a gentle soul. Yeah.

Haley Radke: Yeah. Easy to resonate with, I think, for fellow adoptees.

Bruce Porth: Yes. And quite a story of her own. I had so much compassion for all of us, but especially those who were foundlings. So I was just deeply moved to listening to her story. Yeah, so that was the progression that I followed.

But, like I said, there's still these spaces inside of me that I was having difficulty accessing and finding a way through. And it wasn't like these were neutral spaces. These were spaces that were haunting me. And really kicking my butt and I was having difficulty finding my way through it.[00:19:00]

I did eventually find holotropic breathwork, which is really profound and an amazing tool. I've been doing this for, about a couple of years now, and this is. It's a practice of deep breathing in a kind of continuous pattern. You're in a group setting, you have a partner, and it's usually anywhere from 10 to 30 people, in a given workshop.

And the breather will lay on a mat and their partner will be what we call the sitter. And we'll be there to attend to the needs of the breather as they go into their process through that breath and along with a, a soundtrack that is designed to be quite evocative. You enter into an altered or expanded state of consciousness, and I've been able to access the spaces inside of me, especially, my grief with holotropic breathwork [00:20:00] I seem to go and be able to access my grief quite directly. And another aspect of this breath work is it's focused body work. Your sitter might be involved in that, or the facilitators, for the workshop might be involved in that. It could be as simple as just having your sitter hold your hand, or it could be more involved than that.

It's funny for me. A lot of times I'm a sitter and I end up not really having to help the other person out. But for my sitters, I take advantage of every minute that we have, because there's so much in the way of tactile deprivation that I think I missed out on, I was being touched by my adoptive mother, but it was the wrong mother who was touching me.

And in effect, I wasn't being touched by the mother that I needed to be touched by and there's still these empty spaces associated with that. And so I did one breathwork session where, you know, and this was an 80 minute [00:21:00] session. I sat up partway through it and I, I asked my partner for a hug and I just entered this really deep state of grief and sobbed in her arms for about 10 minutes, extremely powerful experience. I had another experience in a different workshop where I was able to see my mom, my first mom, and she was. She took the form of a divine spirit. Of course, she, she, that's all she could be at this point in time, having passed away in 2003, but in my process I saw her there and I reached out and I was holding her hand and her other hand was reaching out and connected to this infinite source of universal love. And as I was holding her other hand, I was just downloading this love. And I could almost literally feel it filling in my heart. And I just stayed with that for, it [00:22:00] must've been a good 20, 20 minutes or so. And afterwards, as we were processing it, I was realizing another aspect of this is doing integration work afterward with the group.

And I was realizing that this is what happens for an infant with a mother. That I think I mentioned earlier about the communication between a mother and an infant primarily being energetic and it's just this download of love just being in the presence of the mother. I mean there have been studies with heart cells that you know as you bring two separate heart cells together they start to beat in unison and I think that's the case when mother and baby heart get into proximity with each other as well.

So that was a really powerful experience. The next workshop I was really hoping to continue with that and actually it was quite a different experience and not one that I should really talk about because it revealed a great deal of the violence of relinquishment and I was [00:23:00] able to go into a space where I could viscerally see that I see evidence of it, even though I wasn't so I wasn't like, reliving it, but I could see that it had happened and I could see what happened and it was an experience of incredible empowerment because as I showed up as an adult in that scene, I was really adamant and vocal advocate for that infant that I was and yelling out to the world can you see what happened? Can you see what happened? So it was a really powerful experience and I've had other remarkable experiences with breath work as well, including one where, I went back and revisited my mom at the time of her death. Because it was still felt abstract to me.

And so this was a process where I was able to go back and really make it a little bit more real. The day after that workshop, I realized that workshop was the eve of the date of her death too, which I didn't for some reason realize during the workshop. [00:24:00] Yeah. So I did, I had another really good experience as well, where I saw myself as a child through different developmental stages and my mom was showing up on the scene in these, in various situations and the message that I got from that was that, that's not really a question of, am I lovable? It was like, I was always loved, I just didn't know that. And through that process, I was able to actually experience her love in a more direct way.

And sometimes in the process of breathwork, we finish up by saying an affirmation that we took from the experience and in that particular event, I ended up out in space and just realizing initially how dark it was and how expansive it was. But then I started to see all of, the stars and all of the light that exists in outer space.

And the affirmation that I came up with at the end of all of that was that the universe is luminous and I belong in [00:25:00] it. This is a modality, like I said, that I've been working with for the past couple of years, and I'm really excited to see where it takes me going forward. I also think doing sacred plant medicine or psychedelics is also an incredible tool, and so I've been able to do some of that work as well with MDMA, psilocybin, and ketamine.

And my first experience with MDMA and psilocybin was a little bit less than a year ago. And the experience was one in which, as I was doing the integration afterwards, I realized that what had happened was that all of these rusty locks that represented this non negotiable unlovability had been broken open through this process and the medicine works inherently on its own, but there's also a lot of work that I had to participate in as well, both in terms of the prep work ahead of time and the integration work [00:26:00] afterwards, but the medicine itself is, it's compassionate enough that it's not going to blow open the doors that were, behind these rusty locks.

That was up to me to do, but it blew off the non negotiable part. That prevented me from opening those doors. So the 3 or 4 months after that 1st session brought me to a, a level of pain that I had not experienced before that was, it was both extremely scary, but also felt extremely productive.

And then at about 3 or 4 months, I emerged into a space of greater freedom that I have never experienced before and also entered a space where it feels like I never have to go back to some of these really dark places that I inhabited in the past. And so one of the things that came out of my breathwork was after one of my sessions, one of the facilitators said that she really admired my [00:27:00] grief stamina.

And she meant it, with the best of intentions. And she's really a really wonderful person and a talented facilitator. But in my breathwork group, I'm the only adoptee. And I have become increasingly aware of how much I wanted to do this work with adoptees. And when she said that, it just really validated that because from my standpoint, it's I'm an adoptee.

Of course, there's going to be this much grief get over it, and but I, from that point, what I realized is that I need to do this kind of work in community with other adoptees. And so I did more recently have an opportunity to do a medicine journey with a group of other adoptees. That was truly magical.

Haley Radke: Wow, that's really interesting. I think it's so amazing to hear what unlocks things for people, and I've heard from many of our friends that, that [00:28:00] truly has, but I also think you're a really great example of this. You've done a lot of other things to prepare. So I think when people hear that, they might be like, Oh that's my first step, right?

And I don't think that's true because there's so much integration work and things to do after, like you said, and if you're super new to therapy, I think some of that might feel challenging. I don't know. You have thoughts on that?

Bruce Porth: Oh, most definitely. I, I went into my first psychedelic session feeling like, oh, this is something that everybody should do.

And I got partway into that session and it became very clear to me. That's not true. This is definitely not something for everybody. And for those that it is something for my recommendation is take this very slowly and make sure of course, that you're working with somebody who's reputable and trustworthy.

And then also, like I said before, [00:29:00] there has to be a huge emphasis on the prep work going into it. And then during the session, the set and the setting, the set, meaning the mindset that you go into it and then the setting, making sure that there's robust safety that is really essential for having a, a good experience from my perspective and then the integration work afterwards be prepared and have a plan for doing that integration work.

That's definitely key and a lot of people, this is just not something that they ever have to do. And wouldn't gravitate to and that's a beautiful thing, too.

Haley Radke: I just put my hand up. Nobody can see that. It freaks me out so much. It would take a lot to go down that path for me. It feels very, it's like, interesting, exciting. I hear the vast benefits and learnings that so many people have had, and it also freaks me out. So there you go.

Bruce Porth: It did. It [00:30:00] certainly freaked me out the first time and I, and it, that did impact my experience because I wasn't able to fully let go and let myself have the experience. And I had a set idea of how it was going to unfold.

And I, I just, I remember the compassionate words of my guide at the time on numerous occasions. She said, Bruce, don't get ahead of the medicine, don't get ahead of the medicine. And it took me a while to understand what she was saying with that. Eventually I got it. So.

Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing. All of these things that you've done and I know that there will be things that resonate with someone.

All kinds of pieces of your story will resonate with someone. Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you want to make sure we get to before we do recommended resources?

Bruce Porth: If I had a final comment I might quote Mary Oliver in one of her poems where she says, don't waste time looking for an easier world.

And [00:31:00] I did spend a lot of time looking for an easier world, and it really postponed a lot of the healing that I'm doing now. I was certainly doing the best that I could, but this process of really coming out of the fog, I believe it's a long process. And I may be doing it for the rest of my life certainly there's plateaus, but there's always deeper levels to explore. And so I think it's important to find community, find some hands that you can hold through the process, and then hang on and lean in.

Haley Radke: Well said. I have a really great chap, poetry chap book to share, and it's from a fellow adoptee, of course, and it's by Karen Wangare Leonard.

She also goes by Kay, and this isn't her first poetry. Her first poetry is available on her website. We'll link to that too. This is called Going Unarmed Into the Wail, and it [00:32:00] is so beautiful. I'm going to show you, no one else can see, but she has these really beautiful poems, but also art that she's gone ahead and added in of herself. She does like collage work. Sorry for all my paper noise by the mic, but there's these like poems where some things are like erase, erase your poems, and there's another one like that. This one. It's overwritten a bunch of times. So she's this really incredible artist, plus her poetry is so very moving, and I really enjoyed this collection.

So her first one is called Lightning on My Fingertips, and this is called Going Unarmed Into the Wail. So I'll link But I also just want to say, Bruce, you're one of my favorite people and you have showed up in Patreon for so many [00:33:00] different book clubs, other events that we have. And whenever you come, I'm always so excited to see you.

And people will just be able to tell from our conversation how smart you are and how observant you are and thoughtful. And I said earlier, you come to everything with this wholehearted energy. And I'm so glad I get to know you and introduce you to more people today. It's exciting for me. And so I hope people will follow along with the ways you're now serving in the community.

I know you're on the board of another adoptee organization. You are doing some other interviews for podcasts. I know you're doing some writing that's going to come out. And so I think with all of the things that you've been doing and working on in yourself, like now it's like out coming out and is able to pour out of you as [00:34:00] well.

So I see that. I don't know if you see that in yourself yet, but that's what I see. So I'm really grateful for you. Yeah, I just I'm so glad we got to talk today, but before I don't want to skip to the end.

Bruce Porth: Thank you so much for that. The thing, that I've been realizing the best thing you can do with a gift is just receive it. And so I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna take that in.

Haley Radke: Okay.

Bruce Porth: And thank you for that.

Haley Radke: You can listen to it again whenever you like. That's the bonus of a podcast. What do you want to recommend to us today?

Bruce Porth: So I would like to recommend not so much a product as a process. I would like to recommend community and community has just been really important for me in the adoptee space. And, there's certainly a lot of opportunities for virtual connections, but I have more [00:35:00] recently found the value in person connections and the power in that is just enormous.

And and there's lots of ways that I've been doing that, for one, I participate in Adoptees Connect, which is something that Pam Karanova started some time ago. And there's chapters that are all over the world now, and you can just search online and find something near you. The closest one to me is 3 hours away by car.

And so I usually do not hesitate to drive 3 hours there and 3 hours back for a 2 hour dinner. To connect with these people that have become so meaningful for me, but there's also conferences and I recently did a in person conference and the face to face connection there was just really wonderful for me, but it also is leading to other events that I'm getting together with other adoptees to do and then volunteering as Haley said I'm on the board of Adoption [00:36:00] Knowledge Affiliates and I love serving the community that way and staying plugged in to the community that way, and building it, deeper and more connections through that as well. And the other big piece of community is the Adoptees On Patreon group. And this has, brought so much, so many connections for me, and has opened up so many doors for me both virtual and in person. And so I'm just I'm filled with gratitude for that.

Haley Radke: Thank you know, I was thinking before we were talking today. I was thinking this morning I was like, oh man, I think a lot of people when they first come like to patreon events, they're like oh, that's how do I get to know people from this but like I have over time, like I've gotten to know so many new friends through it.

And it's really cool. I don't know. I never pictured that, when I started the show to have it's a friend maker, it's fun. So [00:37:00] anyway, and I got to meet you, which is so great. Where can people connect with you online and follow what you're doing and bringing into the world?

Bruce Porth: My email address is briankeithswanson @gmail.com and that's my birth name. Yeah, I was named after two members of the Rolling Stones. It was 1967. I'm on Facebook under the name of Brian Swanson. I'm on Instagram with the name @Bruce_Porth, P O R T H. I'm also on LinkedIn at Bruce Porth as well. I don't have a whole lot of content on social media, I basically use it for a vehicle for connecting with other people.

Haley Radke: Which is perfect. When I googled you today, you're like a patent holder. You're like a smart dude. In case anyone didn't know that. That's pretty cool. Just a random fact for folks.

Bruce Porth: [00:38:00] Yeah, I think there's 15 or so patents that you can find out there.

Haley Radke: Yeah. That's pretty cool. All right. What a pleasure to talk to you, Bruce. Thank you.

Bruce Porth: Thank you, Haley.

Haley Radke: Thank you so much for being here. I just feel so thankful for these conversations and relationships that we're able to share over a podcast and I'm just, I don't know, I feel full of gratitude today for all of the special adoptees that I've gotten to meet through making Adoptees On. And I hope you do too.

I know that many of you will listen to episodes and reach out to the guests and connect with them and build friendships and extend your own community. For some of you, these podcast episodes are some of the first times you've ever [00:39:00] heard adoptees speak about their experiences in such a candid forthright manner. And so I hope you gain courage to start sharing your own story. And even if that's just with yourself or with a close friend or a fellow adoptee, and so you can start reclaiming parts of your identity. I'm so glad you're here. Thank you so much for listening to Adoptee Voices, and I appreciate you.

Please come join us on Patreon. adopteeson.com/community, or you can click through to the show notes and there'll be a link right there where you can click through to join us. Thanks for listening. Let's talk again soon.

288 Bruce Porth Part 1

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/288

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288 Bruce Porth

Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. I often share on this show that a great way to build your adoptee community is to join my Patreon group. And today's guest is someone that I have gotten to know over the past few years exactly because of that.

We are so fortunate to hear from Bruce Porth today. He is one of those people that only speaks when he's got something thoughtful and insightful to share. And today's conversation is no exception. Bruce shares about his childhood, some difficult relationship circumstances, his path to uncovering the impact adoption and [00:01:00] family separation had on his life, and what reunion has looked like.

This is part one of two, and don't worry, next week we'll release part two, where Bruce shares more about the healing modalities he's used, including breathwork and psychedelics. I want to give you a trigger warning, we have brief mentions of suicide and sexual assault in this episode. Before we get started, I wanted to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. Links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website adopteeson. com and next week we will share our recommended resources. Let's listen in.

I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On. Bruce Porth. Welcome, Bruce.

Bruce Porth: Thank you, Haley. It's really good to be here.

Haley Radke: I'm so glad we finally get the [00:02:00] chance to have a one on one convo. I feel like I've seen you in lots of my Patreon events and gotten to know you through those, but let's deep dive. What, do you want to share some of your story with us?

Bruce Porth: Sure. Yeah. And this is, yeah, this is great. Just me and you, Haley, and the millions of your followers. I can start with a little bit of my story. It's interesting. I just picked up Peter Levine's most recent book called an Autobiography of Trauma. He's really an amazing guy, but he's got a quote in there that I just came across the other night that really resonates with me.

And I think it comes from a Jewish proverb, but the quote is "what is truer than truth", the story. And the meaning of it is that our stories are really important and they can reveal more about us than any specific facts, or evidence based information about us. And people's stories are what I really love [00:03:00] listening to.

They can be extremely healing, and they have been for me. And there's a different take on telling our stories too, Anne Heffron's take on it is, it's like pooping a watermelon. And more specifically around writing our story, I think but I can relate to that as well. So a little bit of background for me, I was adopted at 10 days old in Chicago, Illinois, through a Booth Memorial Salvation Army Hospital.

And my mom was 16 years old and didn't have any resources. This is at the tail end of the the baby scoop era. The decision was made for her, like a lot of women in her situation. And so she went off to Booth Memorial hospital in January or February of 1967. I was born in April and I was adopted at 10 days into a family [00:04:00] that was a young couple, infertile couple, as is often the case, and I came into that family when my adoptive mom was, struggling a little bit with depression. She had just, suffered a few losses in her own life. She was struggling and I found out much later that was the answer to her dilemma at the time, and that I cured her of her feelings at the time of sadness and depression. And that was the way that I started out in that family. My, my adoptive father was pretty emotionally unavailable. He was prone to some volatility growing up for me, and he was a hollow dictator.

And not what I really needed, not what any adoptee or any child needed to grow in a healthy way. My dad grew up in a family that was, there was a great deal of pain there. And, his mother had, [00:05:00] attempted suicide a number of times. Her sister actually died by suicide. Unfortunately, there was a real, legacy of pain that my dad never had the ability to deal with.

And in the absence of any kind of intervention, a lot of that pain just slid right into the next generation, which was me. The family was really shame based and, that was the environment that I grew up in. When I was 10 months old, they, ended up getting pregnant and this is often the case, in some families when there's infertility as I've come to understand from listening to a lot of other people's stories.

And that was the situation with them as well. Not only did I cure my mom of her depression at the time, but I also apparently cured them of their infertility. And I've been thinking a little bit about [00:06:00] that. And being a proponent of family preservation, I was thinking of ways that we could support more family preservation.

And I don't think anybody's ever studied this, but I had the idea that perhaps what we could do for a mother who is under resourced and pregnant and not in a position to care for and raise her baby. Maybe we could match them with some prospective adoptive parents who are struggling with infertility and these prospective adoptive parents would provide financial emotional support through the whole, pre and perinatal period and, get to know the mom really well, go to doctor's visits, things like that and build some kind of, intimate relationship and then see if, any of that would [00:07:00] modulate their fertility, just, being around somebody who is able to get pregnant and being around a young child and having a part in the process of nurturing that, that child, and the mother through the pregnancy, but then the child, in the early stages of infancy, perhaps, I don't think anybody's ever studied that.

But I would be really curious to see if anything would become of that and see what the data would say. I know in my case, my parents had 10 months with me and that was enough to change their biology so that they could become fertile.

Haley Radke: Did you ever experience like feeling different than their biological child?

Bruce Porth: Oh, completely. Yeah. I always felt different.

Haley Radke: And treated differently?

Bruce Porth: No, I wasn't treated differently that I'm aware of. Although I was keenly tuned into whether or not I was going to be treated differently. I know at Christmas time, I would studiously, [00:08:00] count the number of presents, that me and my sister would get, I don't think that was entirely something I did.

I think my sister did it as well. And I think there's some aspect of just normal, sibling rivalry associated with that. But I never felt a sense of attunement in my family, but I also wasn't really, there wasn't much conversation around adoption with me. What my adoptive mom has told me was that she told me that I was adopted, but I think it was when I was around the age of three or four.

And the way that it was, told to me was in a very positive, tone and so I, that's pretty abstract thinking. I would not be able to understand what it meant. It's one thing to know that I was wanted, but, it requires abstract thinking to be able to figure out that the other side of that is that somewhere else I wasn't wanted and wasn't [00:09:00] kept and I wasn't capable of doing that during the period that she was telling me that and then I think she told me a couple of times and then she thought that her job was done. And so the way that I, I did find out that I was adopted was at least in a way that meant something to me was when I was about six or seven years old playing in a sandbox and a neighbor kid was making fun of me for being adopted and so I came home.

I was in tears. I was really in a state of despair and I asked if this was true. I asked my mom if it was true and she confirmed it. And then I don't remember much after that. I think it was, there's a lot there that I probably blocked out, but I do remember asking questions about my, quote unquote, real mom and she had no answers and the question seemed to be difficult for her to answer and it was [00:10:00] clear to me that it was bringing up pain for her.

And so I learned how to not ask questions about it and be quiet. And so we never really talked about adoption since that time, not in any really meaningful way. In fact, my mom passed away in 2020, ironically on my birthday, and in the couple years leading up to her passing, I really wanted to still have a real conversation about adoption with her.

And I'm a full grown adult trying to ask just a basic question, and it took so much effort on my part to even, raise the topic. And what I got back from her was these trite, cliche answers that she loved me as if I was her own and really what it told me is that she's extremely uncomfortable about discussing the topic still after all these years.[00:11:00]

And so unfortunately, I was never really able to in her lifetime have that conversation because it. I really wanted to connect with her around that issue, and I recall reading or hearing something that Anne Heffron once mentioned that really meant a lot to me, where she said that all she wanted from her adoptive mom was to grieve together the loss of her birth mother.

And when I read that or heard that, it really hit me like, yes, that's exactly what I wanted from my mom as well. So in my dad's case, there really was no emotional availability to have any kind of conversation like that about adoption or about, really anything else. That had any depth to it.

So I did grow up without a father, at least the emotional [00:12:00] presence of a father.

Haley Radke: You're a super unique individual in that every conversation I've ever had with you, you seem to lead with your heart and you're so emotionally vulnerable and I know these are skills that you've worked on over the years. Is it because you're like I'm not going to do that. Did you make a decision at some point about how your adoptive father was and like pivot? Or is this more innately you, which I know is a hard question for an adoptee to answer.

Bruce Porth: That's a really good question. There were times I do remember that I would be really frustrated with my dad, and I remember telling my mom on a few occasions I don't want to be like him.

And so there was, some consciousness around that. That I clearly didn't want to follow [00:13:00] in those footsteps to some extent I think it's unavoidable. That's the environment I was steeped in. I'm going to pick up on some of that children map to the state of their parents, regardless of what they say.

And so to some extent, I was, I think I was doing that. But I do have the benefit of having started a healing process pretty early. It was not too long after I left the house that I was forced into starting down some sort of healing path. And so I've been at it intermittently for quite some time.

What really got me into it was when I was a freshman in college, I knew that there was that I was struggling a lot and I had successfully gotten up in my head in the year prior to leaving the home to go to college and I did that with, literature and the type of friends I would hang around with and [00:14:00] it seemed like it was probably some kind of survival mechanism that I knew that I would be out on my own and I needed some kind of foundation to stand on and I knew there was a lot of pain inside me, I think on some level, but I didn't know how to deal with it or what to do with it.

But one thing that I could do was get up in my head and that did carry me through part of my 1st year of college and then it became unsustainable anymore. And a lot of that raw pain, that was lodged in my body going all the way back to relinquishment. I no longer had internal defenses against it.

I think partly just because it was so much. And over the course of a few weeks or so, I started losing my grip on who I thought I was and who I had made myself out to be. This part of me had taken over in an effort to survive. I don't like the term false self because I, it's a very legitimate part of myself that [00:15:00] was engaged in that process of saving my life, but that part can only do it for so long.

And then the authenticity in my body, that real visceral pain just came to the surface and I was literally overwhelmed and had no language for it either. And really had no idea that it had to do with adoption and relinquishment.

Haley Radke: How would you describe your pain? Were you depressed? Were you like having an existential crisis? It's if you don't have oh my gosh I wish I knew who my parents were or like if you're you know, if that's not in your gaze what's the I don't know. Could you describe to people what was happening for you? I remember feeling like I was going crazy at one point. Actually crazy.

Bruce Porth: There was definitely a feeling of that. That feeling of losing my grip [00:16:00] on what I thought was reality. And the orientation points that I think I had established for myself weren't really deeply rooted in who I was authentically. And so without those orientation points, it felt like I was starting to drift out to sea.

But on a physical level, I was. I was feeling nauseous and sick. There was throbbing in my head. On an emotional level, I was feeling, yes, depression. Mostly, at the time, I was feeling a great deal of rage. And it was rage that presented itself in a way that felt way too big to contain. I also didn't know really where it was coming from, and it felt extremely primitive.

And I just didn't know what to do with it. I was completely flooded, to use an IFS term. I did struggle for a couple of days. I found myself in the library of my school, [00:17:00] in the psychology section, trying to heal myself as perhaps any good adoptee would do, feeling like I'm alone in this world and I have to fix things, including myself, on my own.

It was an engineering school, so they didn't have a very big psychology section in the library, so I really didn't get that much in the way of resources there. Plus, it wasn't really what I needed. And unfortunately, at the time, I didn't know what I needed, but I did eventually find my way to a school counselor and really sweet, gentle guy.

And we started out doing sessions once a week, and we got to a point where I just. I had no words anymore. There was no language. Somehow I must have let him know. And I think it was an unconscious form of expression that I was adopted. So he knew that, but I didn't know that's what I was struggling with and [00:18:00] so he asked me at one point, do you think this has anything to do with being adopted? And I just remember, just almost violently saying, absolutely not. And so those defenses were extremely strong and I, I think in an effort to justify those defenses. I was perceiving a hostile reality to that was what I was experiencing.

So I would often just sit there in silence and not say anything. And at one point, he asked me if maybe we shouldn't continue and I was just shocked by the question. And I said, no, we need to be doing this. And looking back on that, I, what I was finding there was just a, a sense of safety, whether I was saying anything or not.

And I wasn't fully aware of how much I needed that safety. Because it literally felt like the world was hostile.

Haley Radke: So when did you come to really unpack for yourself? That adoption was like [00:19:00] even impacted your life in some way.

Bruce Porth: It was actually many years later. I did continue to struggle through my college years I knew I wasn't ready to go out into the world when I graduated and I did really well in school I think because all of my self esteem depended on doing and not being, which I think perhaps has its roots in, the commodification of adoption, that there's value in doing and not necessarily in being.

So I, I did really well, but I knew I wasn't ready to be out in the world. And so I went to graduate school and found a group of friends there that I really seem to resonate with, but I was also starting to drink quite a bit as a way to just put the pain somewhere else because I hadn't kept up with the counseling that I was [00:20:00] doing after that freshman year, I went back home and tried to get through that summer without showing how much pain I was in my family, and even before that's the first school year ended. The therapist was going into private practice and he asked me at that time just let your parents know and we can, I can get the insurance information and we can continue to work together.

And I couldn't bring that to my parents. It didn't feel like an option. It didn't feel safe enough to do that. And the option was to just try to struggle through on my own in isolation. And so that's what I did. But I, I couldn't mask it entirely through that, that first summer home. And I did just break down at one point and ended up, my mom did find me a therapist.

But this was. A while back, and there really wasn't that much [00:21:00] awareness of adoption as an issue, and certainly not, the depth of grief and anger that can come with that maternal separation. And it was around the time, I think that Nancy Verrier was probably thinking about her master's thesis and, starting to put that together and eventually turning that into the primal wound book, but none of these therapists had discovered that yet.

And actually, at one point, again, because I didn't have words, there was no language. I was just acting in. All the feelings that I was having the therapist asked me to just draw what I was feeling. And so I started to draw this picture of the view that someone would have if they were falling headfirst from a really tall building towards the pavement and I didn't totally appreciate, the significance of that until more recently, [00:22:00] but that was illustrating the nothing place that Pam Cordano and other people in the flourish experience have talked about. And for me, the nothing place is not a neutral place. It's a, feels like a really scary place where there's a lot of anger and a lot of terror and a lot of just no orientation whatsoever and just drifting out in space or falling head first towards the pavement, but I wasn't really in a position to continue with the work that I was doing, and instead I started drinking quite a bit. I did get through grad school and then I wasn't really willing to go through and do a Ph. D. I knew I wasn't Ph. D. material and I had seen some friends of mine, fail the qualifying exam to get into the program.

And I knew I couldn't survive a loss like that. So I did set out at that point in time and got a job and stepped out into the world. Totally ill equipped to be out in the world. [00:23:00] It took about, 2 years or so before I did find a recovery path. And I was drinking quite a bit, and I would typically drink about a half a bottle of Jack Daniels at a time, and that would happen a few times a week.

Sometimes what I, I would just, I would be drinking at home, and I would be watching movies, and one of the movies that I would watch was a movie that I had seen back when I was in grad school. And this was probably the first time that I was emerging from the fog, because we had a ritual of every Tuesday night a small group of us would go out to the movies And I was never in charge of picking the movie.

So it was always a surprise to me and this one week we happened to go see this movie called Immediate Family with Glenn Close and James Woods and we got about 20 minutes into that movie before I realized what it was about and then I was just flooded with grief, [00:24:00] but couldn't express it. And so I was biting the insides of my cheeks, just to hold it together.

And it was probably a few weeks after that, when we were out at the bar and I, it was closing time and we were leaving. And I left with a friend of mine walking back to our cars, but we stopped, short of our cars and just started talking. And I had been carrying so much of this pain and never really had a place to express it or find an empathic witness to validate it and as the conversation proceeded something about it must have felt safe enough for me to, disclose that I was adopted, but it wasn't just a conversation about it. There was all of this pent up grief that just flowed right out of me.

And my friend was right there for me. In a really amazing way, and it was the first time that I really felt held in a deep way by anybody. And the next morning I walk into my [00:25:00] office and there's a single rose in a vase that she had left me, as additional validation. And to me, what I was learning through that process was that love exists because there was a part of me that did not believe that love existed at all.

And it wasn't a small enough part of me that I could just set aside and move on. It was a significant part of me. And I, up until that point, had to keep it contained. Because I was never able to find a safe harbor to express it.

Haley Radke: So that was in your early 20s or mid 20s by that point?

Bruce Porth: That was my, yeah, my, my early 20s at that point.

So I was, I was coming out of the fog as early as that period of time. But then I, I did end up finding a 12 step recovery and I actually did an outpatient treatment and [00:26:00] this was another moment of coming out of the fog where part of that process was doing a family tree. I remember when the facilitator that day was drawing my family tree.

And put this dotted line from my family to me, and it was like, oh my gosh, like I don't belong there. I only belong there by a dotted line, not a continuous line, and it just validated that for all of my life it felt like I was connected by just this tenuous thread that could easily have been broken. If I didn't behave, if I didn't get good enough grades, it felt to me like it would jeopardize that connection there.

I think that's probably a common experience for a lot of adoptees. And the, just the amount of emotional labor that we have to do, to get through childhood is just astonishing to me. [00:27:00]

Haley Radke: We were talking before we started recording and mentioning oh, my kids probably get this vibe from the situation that is happening here. And I was like, yeah our adoptive parents don't have to say. We're not talking about adoption. We get the vibe. They don't have to say, I'm emotionally unavailable for you. We just get it. And kids are so perceptive. And we're uniquely so because we're literally looking for life or death resources as soon as we're separated from our mothers. Yeah.

Bruce Porth: Exactly. Infants don't really have any other way to communicate except through the energy that they experience with the parent. And I think it was Einstein who said that the sole governing agency of matter is energy. Everything comes down to energy, I think, including in, relationships.

And, of course, I'm [00:28:00] trying to, energetically bond with, somebody that I can attune to. And I did not have that.

Haley Radke: So going through recovery, also starting to examine this, like starting to come out of the fog is what you were saying, like, when did you first really dive into adoption stuff. I've heard you say some internet things from the 90s, late 90s. Is that right?

Bruce Porth: Yeah, it was interesting that I actually found my mom, but I, I still feel like I was pretty deep in the fog for many years.

Haley Radke: Did you search on purpose?

Bruce Porth: I did. Yeah.

Haley Radke: Yeah.

Bruce Porth: And.

Haley Radke: What made you want to do that?

Bruce Porth: It was the end of a relationship and so this was the kind of relationship that burned really hot, but not necessarily for a very long time. [00:29:00] And so I got more vulnerable in a relationship than I had ever done, up to that point. And when we both had significant issues, it really needed to end, but I wasn't ready for it to end.

And when it did, it threw me into a, a level of pain that I really didn't know what to do with. And even though I had support, I was doing some 12 step Al Anon work and had a pretty tight and close community. But this was territory that they couldn't relate to. And I didn't even know this territory or what to do with it either and how to navigate within it.

So it was at that point when it just became really clear to me that I have to find my mom and I had never really thought about it up until that point. But then it was just like neon flashing lights that it was time. And so I went about doing that. I did [00:30:00] get on the Internet. This is the very early days of the Internet.

And so there was no Facebook, no Instagram or anything like that, but there was. And I don't even remember how I found this, but I found this internet mailing list called AIML Adoptee Internet Mailing List and people would post things and it would go through a moderator and then they would eventually get, get posted.

And so every night I was coming up from work and I was reading through it. And occasionally I was taking the risk to post something and through that I. I'd already started to, I had sought out my non identifying information, which was basically worthless. But through that mailing list, I did find and get connected with an investigator.

And so after thinking about it for a little while I went ahead and decided to pay him his fee, which was 375 dollars. And then in a really short amount of time, literally like three days, he had an enormous amount of information about [00:31:00] me and about my birth family. Including birth certificate numbers, not only of my mom, but her sister and her other children, current and previous addresses.

It's still astonishing to me that other people have all this information that is denied us. And so I, I got that information and I sat on it for 6 months. Because it felt like I had, I found this nugget of gold. And I just wanted to hold it for a little while, and I was preparing for the next step.

And I'm always impressed by people who just, they get the information and they get on the phone like right away. And I needed to move slowly, through this whole process. But I did eventually, I wrote her a letter that coincided with my 30th birthday. And then waited and then two weeks later, she did write back and she was very receptive.

And a year later, I went out and met her face to face along with my 3 siblings, 3 half [00:32:00] siblings. And and we started a relationship and it was really good. She really. She did not want to let me go and hearing that was so validating because I was, I had been telling myself a story that I wasn't wanted.

And so there was the revelation that I got just from the reunion was it, it wasn't that I wasn't wanted. It was that I couldn't have been kept and that lifted a burden off my shoulders that I really did not know I was carrying. And it was just, it was really significant. And so we started a relationship and I was really impressed.

She was, the gifts that she bought me were like, exactly what I wanted. She just she knew me, like, energetically, we were just really on similar wavelengths. By that time, my, my first daughter had come along and she loved being a grandmother and we're slowly getting to know each other.

And unfortunately, just, 4 years or [00:33:00] so after we had met I got a call from my aunt. One morning that there had been a house fire and she was not able to get out and I remember getting that phone call and not feeling a thing almost as if she was a stranger. And I think, at that time, she still was a stranger to me because I still had a lot of work to do with thawing out, from that original wound of the relinquishment before I could actually feel her, her, the second loss of her.

And so that was, it was a really difficult time, getting through that because I really hadn't gotten to know her yet. And what I'm still grieving over is the fact that, what that relationship would have become because she was, so invested in it, in us getting closer. I do feel a sense of gratitude in that she has a twin sister and I have a very good relationship with my aunt.

[00:34:00] And through that relationship, I was able to get a lot of information about my mom that she would, that my mom would have told me, but didn't have the opportunity to do and that information was so incredibly healing for me. And just even little bits and pieces, like discovering that she and my aunt, shortly after I was born, that they were plotting to come find me.

And kidnap me or unkidnap me. And when I heard that it was so validating and I'm still integrating that now with what I, the new material that I'm learning and specifically around attachment and how it's important for the child as I've been learning, just recently for the mother to, to look for and find the child over and over again.

The child needs to know that they're findable and then they can go about the business of finding themselves. And [00:35:00] so knowing that she wanted to find me and take me back. Was really incredibly validating to me.

Haley Radke: I'm really sorry for your loss. That's devastating. I'm so glad you have your aunt. Are you still connected with your siblings?

Bruce Porth: I met all of my siblings when I went out to the Midwest to meet them and somehow we never really connected in a way that led to a sustainable relationship. I'm totally open to it and maybe it's just up to me to reach out and I just haven't done that. So I, I don't know what the future holds there.

I certainly would like to nurture those relationships a little bit more and make stronger connections.

Haley Radke: Did you ever think about looking for paternal side?

I hope I, I [00:36:00] don't gush too much, you just have favorite people or people you're drawn to. And I think. A lot of the friends I've made over the years are folks that are thoughtful, empathetic, kind, and have this thirst for knowledge and have a curious spirit. And I'm just so drawn to folks like that.

I think that's one of the reasons I so enjoy any conversation I ever get to have with Bruce. So I hope you'll come back next week to listen to part two of our conversation. And in the meantime, come join us on Patreon. That is one of the ways the show keeps living, keeps existing and helping adoptees around the world.

adopteeson.com/community. And I'd love to have you. Thanks so much for listening. Let's talk again next [00:37:00] Friday.