150 [Healing Series] Mother Loss Part 2
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/150
Haley Radke: This show is listener supported. You can join us and help our show grow to support more adoptees by going to adopteeson.com/partner.
You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm your host, Haley Radke, and this is a special episode in our Healing Series where I interview therapists who are also adoptees themselves so they know from personal experience what it feels like to be an adoptee.
This is Part 2 of our discussion about Mother Loss. Let's listen in.
I'm so pleased to welcome back to Adoptees On, Stephanie Oyler and Amanda Transue-Woolston. Welcome back.
Amanda Transue-Woolston: Thank you for having us.
Haley Radke: Okay, so last time we talked about some very sad things you both shared about the loss of your first mother, Stephanie, and Amanda, the loss of your adoptive mother. And you really talked us through some of the practical things that were just happening for you in the moment.
And we even mentioned that you're kind of in shock and you're kind of going through the motions at that point, and not necessarily that there was anything that you could have prepared ahead of time for this sort of loss.
Now let's put on therapy hats, social worker expertise hats. Looking at mother loss, Amanda, I got this quote from your Facebook page you shared:
“Because I am adopted, I will lose more than one mother more than one time throughout my lifespan.”
That's pretty powerful. Do you have some thoughts on that?
Amanda Transue-Woolston: Yes. When we talk about the “adoption triad,” which I don't use personally but it's very popular, we think of the adoptee, the first mother and the adoptive mother, and it's like this triangle with equal sides, which we know is not a thing, first of all, because there's power imbalances and representation imbalances in adoption and also because there's so many other factors and players involved.
I love the idea of the constellation so much more. But that idea of the triad, I think, causes people to see, if they're going to agree with me, that adoption involves a lot of loss which is still hard for people to comprehend. They're thinking, well, okay, you lost your first mother and then your adoptive mother died. The end.
And it's even more where I personally pull in the visual of the constellation because I lost a foster mother. I lost my first mother one time, but then I also reunited. So I eventually will also be involved as an adult in her end-of-life planning because we're close. And then also I have the loss of my adoptive mother, and I have this kind of ambiguous loss of never having gained much information about my foster mother either.
And being a therapist and being a social worker and working with children, I have an understanding of childhood development and I know better than to think that I'm not affected by these losses of my first mother or my foster mother just because I was young and couldn't remember those times.
I know better, and it's actually more concerning that I didn't have language at that time to process because you carry it around with you. And when emotions arise now, as an adult, I have to wonder when was the first time I actually felt this way? And was it when I was a child? And what is behind the feelings that I feel now as an adult, just in my everyday life? Because I don't know a lot about the first five months of my life. I won't have answers.
Depending on how many placements you had, depending on if your foster or your adoptive placement was disrupted, depending on if you were reunited later, you can lose multiple primary parental figures over and over again and also be in a position of having to teach people what that is like for you, if they're even willing to put aside their own assumptions that it doesn't matter or that only one of those mothers or fathers is allowed to matter.
When you get past that part, now you have to teach them what “mother loss” is.
Haley Radke: Talk about grief through the life cycle. Like, wow, do we get layers?
Stephanie, even when I was talking with you and Amanda about having this conversation, I broached the subject of I feel like this was pretty recent for you guys. Do you want to wait a little bit longer? And you guys both were like, no, no, no, we're ready, let's go.
Stephanie Oyler: You know, everything Amanda just said really, really hits home. I mean, just the amount of loss, and I'm thinking of the kids I work with even now, and just how people don't recognize it. They don't recognize anything but the loss of a mom, like the one mom who raised you.
And even going into the foster care piece, you know, I was in a couple of different foster homes. I was in one foster home for a pretty long time, and that was pretty significant because I was described as a very different child in their home. And then redescribed and re-, I don't even know, I was just a whole different child when I moved into my adoptive home.
So just the idea that I want to be able to know who I was before that point and I'm probably never going to get that opportunity.
It is a lot of loss. It's a lot of, it's just a lot of loss.
Haley Radke: I'm curious, both of you have mentioned that you have your children and how were you able to tell them about losing their, I'm not sure, sorry if this is presumptuous, Stephanie, but if you presented your first mother as a grandmother figure to them or not, and then Amanda, your kids losing their grandmother, how were you able to present that to them?
Was that really challenging? You know, I think, just that extra layer why I'm asking this is: For a lot of us, we feel like we're starting a new legacy once we have children and keeping our family intact. So I think there's this whole extra piece to it. Sharing this loss with our kids.
Stephanie Oyler: So my son is younger and he's a little bit crazy, so bringing him around my first mother would've been difficult because she had a lot of mental health issues and she took a lot of things very personally. She didn't understand certain things, so my son met her but I didn't really bring him around.
My daughter I did, and she's nine. She was eight when my first mom passed. She was there. She actually came into the room to say goodbye, and it was very difficult to explain because she understands adoption to an extent, but she didn't understand death. So I think the idea of that being a first real loss for her and then also just getting to know my first mom, she was a grandmother figure, but not in the same sense as my adoptive mom.
So I think it's still complicated even now. We're still kind of having conversations around it. There's actually been a lot of loss over this whole Covid situation. Our dog passed away a couple months ago, so there's been a lot of conversations around it and a lot of confusion.
So that's just an ongoing conversation, just developmentally, with both of them.
Amanda Transue-Woolston: I've asked myself this question and it's hard. It's been hard for me because I want to give people advice that I personally connect to. And it's hard for me to say how much of the explaining for my children was on me because it was really my husband that told them because I was in Florida.
So when he picked them up from school that day, I was already in Florida and he had to tell them why I left and where I was. And so I don't exactly know how he did that. I assume it would be very similar to the way that I would because he's been a paramedic for a long time. He works in a big city. Death and trauma is kind of just what he does every day. So my children are very familiar with that just because, you know, fire service and emergency service becomes part of a family culture.
My children also have participated in my interest in positive death culture literature and media. And so there's a death-positive creator that I really like. Her name is Caitlin Doughty and she's written books for kids. So I've read those with my children.
A lot of that was a part of me wanting to continue staying competent for my work in hospice, but also, even though I'm not working in hospice anymore, because within two years prior to my adoptive mother dying, my biological paternal brother died. My biological father's sister died. My grandmother, who was my kid's great-grandmother, my mom's mom, she died and was close to my children.
Other people died. There was more. People that we knew. It just seemed to come in waves. And so we had had this conversation already. And also our dog had died too.
So we don't use “pass away.” We don't use “went to heaven.” We've always said their heart stops. Their brain is not functioning anymore. Their personality words, the ability to take in information doesn't happen anymore. The body immediately starts breaking down, you know, and this is what happens when you bury something that's been alive. It becomes part of that whole cycle of life again.
And so we've always been very literal and concrete about death. And so they, my kids, seem to be able to apply that to when their nanny died. My youngest son, he has some mental health disabilities. And so he seems to understand, but I do answer some rather childlike questions. He's nine but he's developmentally younger in his thoughts, and so I do tend to answer more questions for him, and so sometimes I'm unsure how much he understands or is it a matter of how he's expressing himself.
Does he not know how to tell me that he understands, or does he generally still not kind of get what's happening? His first reaction was, what is wrong with Florida? Because his great grandmother had just died in Florida almost about a year prior. So he's like, Florida is where people go to die?
He did not really want me down there with my dad because I stayed in the hospital room with my dad. I slept on the chair and on a cot for eight days when he was in the ICU. So, that was the whole thing, them trying to get me out of his room. I was like, no, I'm not worried about any of you people here liking me. I'm not leaving my dad's side. That's just not happening, nope. We are loyal, we adoptees. We can be loyal to a tee.
So, anyway they didn't want me in Florida because Florida's a bad place. So that was my youngest son's first reaction. It's also been very weird because of the pandemic.
I feel like when people died when I was younger, I processed a lot of it through the awkward questions other people would ask me as a kid. Like, do you miss your whoever-it-was? It was just weird things people ask because they don't have to talk to kids.
But nobody really had contact with my children or my family, so it's hard to know if we're understanding and explaining normally because we haven't even had my mom's funeral yet. So this is completely new territory.
Stephanie Oyler: Yeah, it’s so interesting because I started to think more about my son in the mix, and he was in the hospital as well. He didn't go into the room. We kind of gave him an idea of why we were there, but just recently he's been very concerned about death. And I'm sure it's part of the pandemic that we're in and the dog dying and then my first mom, and he actually asked my adoptive mom when she had dropped by, we haven't seen her that often just because of all the restrictions and whatnot.
But he actually looked at her and was like, oh, I thought you were dead. And I thought about it and it just dawned on me the connection between the grandmother piece as well, because my first mom was considered a grandmother, and then, you know, she disappeared and then now we're in a pandemic, and then my mom disappeared, my adoptive mom.
So, yeah, I think it's just a lot more coming up with him just around death. And where do people go? And, well, I wanna visit them. He's five, so he's younger. Well, how do we get there? That's been a lot more, I think it took him a little bit to realize that when someone passes away or they die, they're not coming back.
I think that was something that's just now kind of recently started. So the conversations are coming back up, it's just ongoing. As we move through the emotions and the processing and just how each wave is different and how different things can trigger emotions or memories and just how that's impacting right now.
Especially with all the extra stuff happening around the pandemic.
Haley Radke: Totally, totally. Oh my goodness. There's so many things that kids just are expected to kind of jump on board and know right now that we, even as adults, don't know either.
Now I'm curious, in the same vein of having conversations and things, what both of you mentioned in our last episode was some of the ridiculous things people were saying to you as you're in this state of shock and grieving, or not even necessarily to the point of grieving yet.
But do you have any advice, coaching, anything that, now with hindsight, you can think, okay, if I had phrased something this way, this might have shut down some of those inappropriate questions? You know, it should. The onus shouldn't be on us. I totally get that. But if there is some piece of advice that you could give another adoptee who might be in a similar situation at some point.
Things we can say to shut down those inappropriate things. Especially when you're dealing with someone who doesn't understand the grief piece we're going through, like we mentioned disenfranchised grief last time.
Stephanie Oyler: I think it's hard to give advice because when you're in the moment, it's really hard to think about what you're going to say. So I think that that's where I trip up.
I think what I should have said was, this was my mom and I'm hurting. And that probably would've shut it down. But I think I was just so taken aback by the fact that people didn't even realize that this would be a painful thing for me and a hard thing. That it just kept me tripped up in what to say.
And I don't know if I have advice on how to combat that because I just feel when you're in the moment, your emotions are your emotions. And I guess I would say it's not a reflection on your relationship. It's not a reflection on the experience that you've had with your first family or whoever at that point.
It's just that people don't get it. And that doesn't mean that it's any less important or you grieve any less. And just being kind to yourself in that, because I think I was hard on myself in the sense that maybe I didn't speak about her enough.
Maybe I should have expressed that I had this relationship with her, and then people wouldn't think that I didn't, and they would understand that it hurts. So I think that's the piece, just being kind to yourself and allowing yourself the grace in the moment when you don't have all the right words.
Amanda Transue-Woolston: Yes. I think that Stephanie's strategy of preparing yourself to safeguard yourself from the reactions that people are going to have is the best, most self-loving way to get yourself through that process.
One thing that I keep in mind for anybody that's going through any type of death and loss is that people tend to respond to the grieving in ways that meet their own needs first. And I don't think that people realize that they're doing that.
And so to give an example, my aunt came to the hospital when I was with my dad and she kept taking me aside for coffee, and I didn't want to leave my dad's room. So it's her wanting to take me aside, she needed to feel like she was doing something for me, even though that's not necessarily what I needed or wanted. Her desire to take me aside for coffee.
She got so frustrated with me because I wouldn't cry in front of her, and she actually gave me feedback that that made her feel like she wasn't being helpful or that we're not very close, because I wasn't crying in front of her. And so it was that people tend to feel like this is what I have to give you and I need you as the grieving person to make me feel as though what I have and what I want to give is helpful to you.
When we mix adoption into that, it becomes even more painful because a lot of people have their own assumptions about adoption. Even therapists who aren't adoption competent will approach adoption as though it's something easy.
And if you just had that one right thing that a therapist could tell you. The adoptee must not realize how simple this is because it's simple in the mind of the person or of the therapist. So I'll just say a few phrases at you and then you'll get it. Like, oh, well, you don't need to be sad because she loved you so much, she gave you away. And it's like, oh, that never occurred to me. Thank you so much!
But people have those grief snippets that they want to throw at you with adoption too. Like I can make you feel better and I can make myself feel good for being the person that made you feel better in your grief by reminding you that you still have your other mother. Like, you still have your adoptive mother and she's the one that raised you anyway. Or if you just realize this adoption thing was so simple by these one-liners that I have to throw at you.
I didn't hear as many as Stephanie did, but one thing that I did hear was the story with my aunt and then doctors and nurses making comments in the hospital about if I was related because I don't really look like either of my parents. And I told one of the nurses that my mom had died and I wasn't crying again because I don't feel comfortable crying in front of people.
And she just looked at me and was like, oh, well you must be the stepdaughter then? Because I wasn't acting the right way and I didn't look the right way. And so she felt the need to parse out why I wasn't and that was her selfish curiosity that wasn't about me.
All that is to say we need to safeguard ourselves for how people will seek to meet their own needs in grief through us needing them or us telling them they did a good job or whatever. And they will mix adoption themes into that.
You can try to educate and you can try to explain yourself, but it's okay not to, as well, because the more you explain to someone who may not be interested in learning, the more you just give your power and your time for yourself away.
Haley Radke: Well, that's some amazing insights from both of you. Thank you. I know that as friends and colleagues, you guys have been talking with each other about these things and your losses and have been kind of going through this mourning together.
Can you tell us any other things that have kind of popped up for you that are really different, you know, grieving the loss of an adoptive mother versus a first mother. I don't know about “versus,” it doesn't sound right to say it that way, but I hope you know the spirit of the question I'm asking, not necessarily for just comparison's sake but just it's different circumstances.
So do you have any thoughts on that?
Stephanie Oyler: I know for me it was very difficult to go into the hospital and speak to doctors. I don't want to say uncomfortable, but I just felt like an imposter. Like, she didn't raise me. Am I allowed to do this? Are they going to want me? I almost felt like I had to tell my story every single time I went. I was adopted and this and that.
I spoke to a couple other people who were in similar situations and that's a common theme that I've seen. Just the idea that we're put into this situation to make these decisions, life or death decisions, and sometimes we just ask ourselves: Are we allowed to? Is that okay?
I feel like an imposter because she didn't raise me. And am I allowed to make these decisions for her? And what if it's not what she wants? And I'm confident that I made the right decision. I did know my mom, and I did know that this is what she would've wanted, but it still creeps up. Am I worthy of making these decisions?
So I know that that was a really overarching theme. Every time I walked into the hospital, every time I answered the phone to a doctor, every time I spoke to the agency who provided case management services with her, I just felt like a person, almost like on the outside, coming in to make the decisions, if that makes sense.
Amanda Transue-Woolston: Yes. So we've covered a lot of the overarching themes that Stephanie and I would need to cover if we were making a book or we were making a resource. What is everything that we would need to cover? We've covered a lot. We've touched on a lot of it so far in this two-part series.
Some other things that I know we've put on our list. We talked about spouses and children. We talked about belonging and relatedness. How do people perceive you as being related depending on birth or adoption. We've talked about finding support.
It looks different if you are biologically related but weren't raised with that family versus being raised with the family but not sharing that genetic connection, when it comes to instructing others about how to respond. Or adoption competence and finding support.
Some other things that we talked about were the idea of obligation, because that is family systems theory. Murray Bowen, who is the father of family systems theory, actually proposed as part of his theory that it's being cared for as a child that obligates.
The better you are cared for as a child, the stronger your sense of obligation will be as an adult to take care of a parent. But adoptees kind of throw that for a loop because they have had their caregiving often split up between multiple caregivers or contentious relationships with their adoptive parents. And then they have biological parents that may not have raised them, but they will step in and make those end-of-life decisions.
And that obligation is, I don't want to call it “obligation,” but that's the theory. It's there, even though the early childhood caregiving wasn't there. And so we challenge that theory. And what is that? What makes adoptees step in regardless of childhood connections.
Inheritance of heirlooms. When you have no legal ties, when your legal ties are severed from your biological family, you are not legally entitled to anything. I mean, there may be some exceptions in a few states.
When you are adopted, you are legally entitled to whatever, but your family may not agree that those items should be yours because your family may feel that [you are not family].
Personally, I inherited a necklace from my mother that was made from her grandmother and her mother's wedding rings. And I know she would've wanted her wedding ring added to it, and I've already put in my will that it's going to my niece, my niece who is genetically related.
I don't even want to know what my family thinks about me keeping those things, you know. It's fine, but your legal relationship versus your nurturing relationship affects how entitled you feel to these items versus whether someone else thinks that you should have them.
We talked about being entitled to grief. That was another one. And the differences between making next-of-kin decisions.
So for us, neither of us were legally, technically the next of kin, but when you're in that position anyway, we had talked about [how] there's a lot of emphasis when we're children on keeping biological and adoptive families separate and making sure that adoptive families have all of the decision-making and all of the rights and everything.
If the original first family is present at all, they're there for visits and stuff, but they're not parenting, and we're alienating adoptees from their resources in that way. But when first parents and adoptive parents are aging and there aren't systems in place to take care of them, we have encountered, as social workers, [cases] where it's like, oh, they have a long-lost adopted child, let's find them because someone needs to come make decisions for Mabel.
Then all of a sudden, they want to pull us in. And then it doesn't matter. Like, oh, you met them once when you were five? Yes? Please, someone come and make these decisions because we don't care for our elders like we should. And that's when all of a sudden adoptees are allowed to be resources.
We hear that. I was hearing about that when I was still in social work school, where a caseworker for someone who was experiencing financial abuse, elder abuse, they found that they had relinquished a son like 50, 60, 70 years ago, and they went and found that son, reunited them so that he could become her new decision-maker. And he did. And he was glad to do it, you know, and so that's when, oh, who cares about secrecy? Someone needs to step in and solve these problems.
Haley Radke: Well, that's pretty fascinating. Wow.
Amanda Transue-Woolston: Yes. So there's all this other legal stuff about do we go with a feeling of entitlement through nurture? Or do we go through a legal entitlement through adoption? Or do we go through, we're biologically related? And adoptees are always adoptees and consistently show up on all fronts.
Whether or not we're accepted or embraced, adoptees tend to be the ones that are accountable and willing to help.
Haley Radke: Like I said, I find that really fascinating. Thank you for those points.
And you know, we're sort of wrapping up. The one thing that just keeps popping up into my head, you're both speaking from the point of view of you were connected to and had a relationship with the mothers we've been talking about.
How many adoptees have you heard from where they find out via a Google search that either an estranged adoptive parent passed? Or a first parent who maybe they had a brief reunion with and that ended? Or maybe they weren't reunited at all? And you know, there's all these themes of I'm left out of the obituary, nobody even phoned me to tell me. Those sorts of things.
Would you mind speaking to someone who's had that experience? And just as an encouragement, you know, even if you aren't acknowledged in that way, what are some ways you can still process the loss and take care of yourself? Because I feel like that would be extremely hurtful.
Amanda Transue-Woolston: It is hurtful. For me, I know it's hard to speak on because I haven't been left out of anything when it comes to my adoptive mother because everything has been on my shoulders.
I made all of her end-of-life decisions. I handled all of the disposition of her remains and all of those choices. It was a car accident with a reckless driver, so I've handled all of her wrongful death investigation and the insurance companies. I wrote her obituaries and I'm planning her whole funeral. And my dad, love him so much, my dad is just like, yeah, Amanda's got it. So, I don't want to be left out, but I'm too involved. I don't have boundaries with this.
The only thing when my aunt died, I wasn't told about any of her funeral arrangements. I wasn't involved. It was important to me. My biological father was, my readers are familiar with him. He was not a very good person. And of course, that affected my aunt through her whole life. It really alienated her from others, and I would've loved to have done special things for her when she died because she still celebrated my birthday, my growing up, even though she never knew if she would ever see me.
But her own sons were just kind of like….I can't even find that they put an obituary in for her. So I heard she died through town gossip in Maine, which the entire state of Maine is a small town. So that is not directly related to my mother's losses, but that is an example and I can empathize with other adoptees about that.
And I know Stephanie, it was all on you too, right?
Stephanie Oyler: Yeah, it was all on me. And I'm actually in the process of kind of planning everything out for her as well. But I do see and recognize the loss of wanting to find your family or wanting to find your mother or father and searching. And then to find out that they passed away.
And sometimes I've spoken to people for whom it was within the last year of their search and they just weren't able to meet them in time. And just the incredible amount of loss, not only for the parent, but the relationship that could have been and that was almost there. I can't imagine that loss.
And I, as well, empathize with that. And I can't imagine that as I'm grateful that I was able to have a relationship with my first mother and to experience and make memories with her. So there's just so much loss, I think, in adoption.
There's so many ways it can go, so many twists and turns. There's that all of a sudden it's loss again. It's a theme from the very beginning. And yeah, I really do empathize with situations like that as well.
Amanda Transue-Woolston: One other piece that I think is important to mention is the racial cultural ritual differences that I think are important to pay homage to.
I was not transracially adopted and as a white person in the United States, everybody wears black and, you know, sniffles at the graveside. I feel like that's generally accommodated in the funeral industry.
And when it comes to embracing the death rituals and experiences of communities of color, that's not as well represented and what the everyday person knows about death and dying.
And so I think it would be so cool for Stephanie to be interviewed, if she's comfortable in the future, about when you are a person of color trying to plan and have your rituals incorporated and the person that you're grieving may be of a different race than you. Or you're trying to plan for your mother who was a person of color with a white funeral director and they don't know how to manage hair or makeup or skin in a respectful way for someone that's different than them.
We talk about adoptees of color not having their hair taken care of properly as children. But even into adulthood, do adoptees of color have an opportunity to learn their original families’ death practices and also overcome the racism in the funeral industry that they may encounter?
And so that's something that I know Stephanie can uniquely speak on, and I definitely want to support her and other adoptees in doing that when they're ready because I'm not equipped to talk about that myself.
Stephanie Oyler: I think that's a really important thing. And actually it didn't affect me when I went to the hospital, but I was nervous going in because my mother is white.
My first mother was white and my father was black. And I don't really look like anybody. So I was nervous in the fact that I'm coming in as an adoptee. I wasn't legally raised by her and, on top of it, I have no paperwork saying that's my mom, you know. And just like how that was going to play out.
But I definitely agree. There's just so much to unpack with cultural pieces of that. So I agree with Amanda on that.
Haley Radke: Well, thank you so much for bringing that up as well. Like we've said, right? All the complexities of layers.
Wow. There's so much to unpack. And I'm excited to hear that you guys are going to be working on this, and I'm sure that as we follow your blogs and other efforts, we will hear more about this from you in the future, which is wonderful.
So speaking of that, Stephanie, where can we connect with you online?
Stephanie Oyler: You can find me at adopteelit.com. I just launched my business and it is a consultation business for adoptive parents, a mentoring business in the sense that for adoptees, both minor and adult, and then an education business that I hope to provide workshops on. And I also have a blog that is linked directly from that website.
Haley Radke: Perfect. And Amanda, how about you?
Amanda Transue-Woolston: I have my professional website, amandawoolston.com and my adoptee blogging website, declassifiedadoptee.com. All of my social medias are there. I forgot to mention last time, I have started a podcast for The Declassified Adoptee, in that I have been asked for years to make my content more accessible by turning it into audio, and I chose a podcasting format for that.
I am doing a dramatic reading, I guess you could say, of my written content at wherever you subscribe to your podcasts, for folks who find it easier or more preferable to listen instead of having to read. That's another accessibility option for them.
And I have to give credit to Stephanie because that was inspired by her because we are also working on a podcast together, which was her idea. That is different, that's a real podcast. It'll be a real podcast show.
I'm also on Stitcher and whatever else under The Declassified Adoptee.
Haley Radke: Perfect. Thank you so much. Look forward to hearing more news about that and we will make sure to share it on Adoptees On when you guys launch. Thanks so much for your wisdom. Really appreciate it. It's been such an honor talking with you both today.
Make sure you are following Stephanie and Amanda to see what they have coming up. I promise it is going to be worthwhile. And I love seeing more adoptive voices out there, more adoptees sharing in different ways that really help our community heal and actually look at the impact adoption has had on us and how we can move forward.
I really appreciate that so much. So, thank you so much, Stephanie and Amanda, for sharing with us. Grateful for your work. And I look forward to cheering you on in all the new things that you have coming up.
Okay, friends, I'm so grateful for you for listening. One of the best ways that you can help the show that's totally free is just sharing this episode with another adoptee that you know that might have had a loss in their life.
You can show them how to download this particular episode on their phone in a podcast player. The episodes are also available on Facebook and YouTube. There's no video. It's just sounds, you can just have it playing in the background. But it's a real help when you get just one other person to listen to an episode.
Another way to help support the show is to sign up for our monthly Patreon, which is adopteeson.com/partner. And there's more details about the weekly podcast that's produced just for Patreon supporters, the secret Facebook group. There are some Zoom calls that have been happening with that group. There's also a level where you can Skype with me, which feels silly, but you can.
So there's a whole bunch of different ways you can help support the show for free or with a monthly gift if that's something that's in your budget. So thank you so much for doing that, and the next few weeks are super-duper exciting.
Some of our upcoming episodes are with authors who have brand new books out. So we're going to do some book chat, which is so fun, and they’re really, really good books, you guys, I can't wait to share them with you. And, man, these authors are very insightful and thoughtful, and I have learned a lot talking with them, so I know you will too.
Make sure you're subscribed however you like to listen, and we'll be back again next week with a brand-new episode of the podcast. Thanks so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.
