246 Dorothy Ellen Palmer
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/246
Haley: 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. Today's guest is author and accessibility consultant, Dorothy Ellen Palmer. Dorothy is a fellow Canadian adoptee whose story has some remarkable coincidences, including an unexpected overlap with my own.
We talk about the indescribable lure back to the places of our biological ancestors. Why mainstream adoption humor is so problematic and ableism in the adoptee community. This episode requires a trigger warning as we touch on some extremely difficult topics, including mentions of sexual assault, including infant sexual assault, and other mentions of abuse.
Before we get started, I want to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community over on adopteeson.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 AdopteesOn.com. Let's listen.
I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees on Dorothy Ellen Palmer. Welcome Dorothy.
Dorothy: Thank you. I'm delighted to be here.
Haley: A fellow Canadian at last. I love it. If you would start and share some of your story with us.
Dorothy: Certainly. One of my favorite quotes about a adoption searches is that you have to be prepared for the good, the bad, the ugly, and the unbelievable .
And my story certainly contains all of those things. I think the most important lesson of it is that I'm still learning at age 67, that you're adopted all your life. And so your story and the way you see your story and the way it affects you and changes you can change as your life progresses.
So I was born in 1955 to a working class mother who struggled with mental health issues. She was unmarried. And of course in 1955, nobody kept illegitimate bastard babies as they were called in the day. My mother's situation was even more traumatic for her. My conception wasn't consensual. She was date raped on her second date with a boy that she met at a dance, and I was actually conceived during Hurricane Hazel in October of 1954, which is cool. Not everybody gets to say that. I had six different foster homes and two long stints in convalescent hospitals before being adopted, just before I hit age three and in the course of one of those foster homes, I was sexually abused as an infant.
And that, and those events are actually my first memory. I was adopted in 1958 to a working class wannabe middle class family in the west end of Toronto. My mom and dad had tried desperately to have children and had suffered a number of miscarriages. I grew up in a home with two adopted siblings, me and my brother, and then two natural children, my brother and sister, and had actually adopted a third time when she was told she was pregnant and couldn't possibly both look after an infant and carry one. So they gave that baby back after having it about six months. I was eight years old at the time, and totally traumatized because they had told me that she was my real sister. So I of course, lived the next years of my life when my mother got pregnant with my brother and my sister believing I would be sent back because if there were two ways to have babies, there was, you get 'em at the store or you get 'em in the tummy.
And once you get in the tummy, you keep. So that was very traumatic and very difficult because I didn't understand at eight and my family didn't discuss my adoption. They told me I was adopted, but that was it. They told me they knew nothing more, and that was it. What I did have when I became a teenager was my non-identifying information.
Which is, I'm sure, as you all and all your listeners know, was the bare bones. My mother was 24. She worked as a stenographer. She'd been a Wren in the Women's Auxiliary Corps of the Navy. She was considered bright in her class. She graduated grade 10, took some business classes. Met my father at a dance.
That was it. That was my non-identifying information, and that they were Scottish and English. So that was never enough for me, obviously. And pre-internet looking for an adoptive family was very difficult. There were very few ways to do it. I joined an organization called Parent Finders. They did their best but were of little help, and the birth name on my adoption certificate was one of the most common names in the world.
It was Johnson, so that didn't help. Eventually in about 2013 in my fifties when adoption law changed in Ontario, I applied for and received my statement of live birth, which had my mother's maiden name on it and the name of the man she had married who was not my father. That's a story in itself. She got pregnant with me in October of 54.
Almost coincident with that, met the man that she married that April, so she was married when she gave birth to me in June, and they made all kinds of back and forth decisions, I eventually learned, and decided to give me up. After getting my statement of live birth. I had to hire a private investigator who specialized in adoptions.
She eventually found my birth mother, who in her eighties, was living in a retirement home in San Diego, and then she moved to a retirement home in Virginia where a year later my kids and I went to visit her and I met her once before she died. That was when she told me the story of meeting my father.
Everything she remembered about him. She remembered his name. She remembered that he drove a studebaker and came from a musical family. And it was very hard to watch, the pain in an 84 year old face, because she'd never told anyone in her family besides her husband, who was now dead.
She never told her own kids about what had happened to her. So she did, was very brave of her. She told her own kids and I met them and I met her and then she died about, oh, not quite even a year later, but I think she felt very glad to get some kind of closure about all of that. I think part of what is inextricably linked in my adoption journey is that I'm disabled.
I was born with multiple birth defects in my feet, and the doctors were always unsure if it was genetic, or more likely, but not certain. They said was that it was caused by cinching that my birth mother had pulled her belt so tight. There was no room in the womb. And of course if you think very hard about why she might have done that, the inability to access free safe and legal abortion, she might have been hoping that she didn't have to deal with a pregnancy.
So that's a difficult thing to deal with. But one that I view with empathy for her and that disability to when I talk to her to learn that no one else in her family had any kind of congenital abnormality. It was very relieving to me because it made me feel that if my kids went on to have kids it, they would likely be all right.
So that was good. Subsequent to finding her, there was this whole wonderful explosion of online genealogy. And I was able to trace, I'm an historian by... my first degrees in history and I've always been fascinated by local history. So when I went to university, I went to the University of Western Ontario.
I didn't know why I wanted to go there. No one in my family had ever gone to university, let alone gone there. But I needed to go there. I found out by searching her birth name, which was Mclane, I found seven generations of McLane ancestors living in a farm outside of what is now an abandoned ghost town of Mayfair, Ontario, which is a stone throw outside of London, Ontario.
There are papers of McClane's family in the library at Western, which I didn't know until I went back there after I discovered it. And two of my very best friends at Western who lived in the area, drove right past the McClane farm, still standing, right past the graveyard, still standing with seven generations of my ancestors in it.
So my son and I have been there and seen grave site, and taken photos. And when I went by myself to Melbourne, which is a tiny town right now near Mayfair. I just happened to walk up to a bunch of very elderly women who were sitting in this little cafe and asked if they knew any of the McClane's and one of them said, oh yeah, one of them was my best friend.
Let's go look at the farm. So she took me off and I actually got a chance to tour the ancestral farm now owned by another family, not McClane but that was also extremely cool. Subsequently online, I've found a uncle. When I was 65, I found a 75 year old uncle because my birth mother's father abandoned his family, moved to Alberta and had a second family, so he became my uncle.
He's wonderful and his family is wonderful and been loving to me. And then most interestingly, I found a half-brother who I just consider my brother Don. And in something you don't get to say everyday, he is exactly one week younger than I am. I was born June 23rd, 1955. He was born July 1st, 1955. Obviously same father, different mothers.
We also found another half sister who was born five years previous to us, and unfortunately we'll never be able to chat with her because she lives with dementia in a care home. And her husband said she would've, he, she would've been delighted. She was interested in her adoption her whole life. D n A testing just came along too late for us to get to know her, which makes me very sad.
She sounded like a wonderful human being. She was a social worker in the same area as my daughter, which is also kind of interesting. My father's side of the family, we have had minimal contact with. Also through DNA testing on ancestry, we encountered a cousin who was initially very interested in, sent us all kinds of information and and yet another amazing coincidence.
He was also born in St. Michael's Hospital, the same hospital that Don and I were born in a week apart, so our mothers could have met. Our cousin was born there a month ahead of us, which is cool. But in the most interesting coincidence of all, I named my son Connor, and I didn't know why. I just knew that was what his name was.
I didn't have anyone in the family named Connor. I didn't know anyone named Connor 41 years ago. Wasn't a common name then. My cousin, his son is named Connor. Why is his son named Connor? Because his grandmother, my grandmother, her maiden name was Connor. Just the fascinating, weird coincidence that my story is full of.
I'll give you one more and then I'll be thrilled to take your questions. My adoptive mother and my birth mother are 10 years apart. My adoptive mother was older than my birth mother, but they went to the same elementary. They went to Swanee Public in Toronto. They had almost identical childhoods. The things my mother talks about, going to Sunnyside amusement park, going to the windows at Eatons, being in the Santa Claus parade, all of those things.
10 years later, my birth mother did all of them. And weirdly enough, I was also in the Santa Claus parade. So it's just so bizarre that all of those things, it makes you question nurture versus nature. What kinds of things are passed down? Is there genetic memory? All of those questions are something that I would've resisted, I think being a fairly logical person.
I would've resisted until I came face-to-face with the, with my own story, because there just seems to be. Something leading me back to that, whether I recognized it or not, which I think is fascinating and something that adoptees can view as a gift that we have these two legacies and histories that if we can reconcile them can enrich our lives.
Haley: Do you remember being at the farm or the graves or having any like different kind of feelings I've talked about with people before about them having like this, I don't even know what to call it, but like this memory connected to the land, as if I've been here before or those before me have been here and there's this connection, did you feel any of.
Dorothy: I did and it's a little spooky and I'm a little embarrassed by it. When I was a teenager, I used to buy needlework kits and I bought one of this very nostalgic farm with a winding S-curve, driveway up a hill. Had to have it. Didn't know why. Still have it. Made the needle work, kept it. The farm has an S-curve driveway up to the hill. A red door and a red door. I changed the red door in the needle work. It was a brown door, didn't like it. I changed the door to a red door in the needle work.
And when I went, when I was at the graves, particularly when I was in front of the grave of my great-grandmother, I felt very connected to all of it and it's, I'm sure you understand this, but for, it's hard to explain what it means, like to go 53 years with nothing being related to no one but your own two children, and then all of a sudden being related to literally thousands of people.
Because after my memoir, a very kind woman named Jane Milkovich did my full DNA genealogical background for me and literally now I'm related to some 12,000 people. So it's just bizarre. And when I was standing at that grave in front of my great-grandmother, I felt very connected to her for some reason. And then subsequently learned that she was a writer, which I thought was really interesting. I have no writers in my adoptive family at all. No teachers. And she was a teacher and a writer. So that was also just a really interesting connection to make.
Haley: It's very interesting when you think about DNA and what could be in your D N A, predilection to teaching? Okay. Wow. Thank you for sharing all that. I am curious, so your sister who had dementia was adopted, was Don also adopted?
Dorothy: Yes. Our stories are so different. John and I are like a Petri dish for nature vs nurture. We were both born in St. Michael's a week apart. His adoptive family had come from a small town in New Brunswick called Rogersville, New Brunswick, and tried to make it in Toronto, didn't like it, and when Don was a kid, went back home.
So he had to change from English to French in school and that proved difficult for him. He was an athlete, he was a great skater. I have no interest in hockey. I don't know why people wanna strap knife blades on their feet, but Okay. And he, this tiny town of Rogersville and Brunswick, I think has about a thousand people in it.
And that's where he grew up. And I grew up in Toronto. He eventually, he quit school for a while, went back to school in English, good for him, graduated, became an electrician. Had a family, and again, in an interesting and cool coincidence, we both, our favorite dogs are the same dog. We both have the same dog, English Springer Spaniels.
We both had the same dog. He actually trained his in agility. My son's dog, Tasha, you could not train to do anything, but it was, you know, it was just such an interesting coincidence that we love the same kind of dog. He is much more positive human being than I am. He sees the glass is always half full. I'm already asking why it's half empty.
He is much quieter and more thoughtful and sweet. And I'm a little more verbal, but we get along like I felt instantly and totally connected to him. He's come out from he now lives in Moncton. He's come out two or three times. I've met his kids. They're lovely. And I, we talk about every 10 days or so on the phone, which is great.
Haley: I love that you have that. So in your memoir, falFallinging for Myself, you tell multiple different incidents of what a horrible woman your adoptive mother was to you. And it was really, challening for me to read because I felt so much for you and I don't know. What's it like for you to tell that part of your story, knowing in the adoptee world, we always get these things. Aren't you so glad you were adopted? And you had all these foster care placements, one of which was extremely abusive and at least now you had this family. Like, how do you talk about that and critique adoption when so many people are like, you're lucky. At least you had a family.
Dorothy: My work as a disability activist helps me to debunk disability tropes, like being the cheerful Tiny Tim. Grateful that you can walk at all. And it helps me at the same time to debunk adoption tropes; that you should be the cheerful adoptee, grateful that you were adopted, and trying not to be too negative about anything like Tiny Tim.
And both of those things are both false and harmful. The disability trope and the adoption trope are designed to keep critique out of the narrative. They're designed to keep complaint out of the narrative. They're designed to have no critique of patriarchal capitalism in the narrative, which we need to have a critique of patriarchal capitalism in both disability and in adoption.
Because after all, who gets adopted? Babies that fathers won't acknowledge, right? The mothers acknowledge us. It's babies that fathers won't acknowledge. So all of that critique I think is important and. I guess I can be grateful in the sense that I was adopted. I, we all know that kids who age out of the foster system have higher rates of everything, of alcoholism, of drug abuse, of suicide.
It's a horrible life to age out in the foster system and then be basically sent into the world with nothing. And yes, I'm grateful that did not happen to me. That doesn't mean I then have to hand the adoption system a cart blanche to say everything you do is wonderful. Because a lot of what adoptions systems, including the one here in Canada that disproportionately seizes indigenous children, is not going to get a carte blanche permission to just say you're wonderful.
Because what we have to have is solidarity to say that adoption, the way it exists in Canada and North America and most of the world is also very harmful.
Haley: Yes. Thank you for speaking to that. In your book, you have a section where you talk about ableist jokes. And when I was, of course as an adoptee, taking that the other to another point was all the adoption jokes and why is that funny?
And I'm curious if you have thoughts about that, cuz I know you have a amazing sense of humor, and used to teach improv and we're really involved in the improv community. And have you thought about that? The like stupid adoption jokes?
Dorothy: Yes, I have and I think you're right. I think they're like blonde jokes in that what they are designed to do is to tell blondes, i.e. Women, that they are inferior.
And what adoption jokes are designed to do is victim- humor; to say that they are, that adoptees are inferior. They are laughable. And it's also like what Stella Young would call inspiration porn about disability. What she sees in disability inspiration porn, are all of those articles where they, the young person with Down Syndrome is allowed to make a fake tackle on the football field, and they condescend and patronize them and everybody applauds.
And what Stella Young said was that's about abled people feeling good about themselves. And the disabled person is a prop. Many adoption jokes, the disabled person is a prop. And what it's really about is trying to make people who aren't adopted feel good about themselves. And say, thank God I'm not othered like them.
So it's very complex and very interwoven and no, it's not just funny.
Haley: Yes, and you talked about the inspiration porn in your book as well, and I remember always calling all those stupid, find my family shows reunion porn. For similar reasons. Again, taking your point, another level. It is very when you really look at it in depth.
I absolutely agree that's what it is. And so to go from putting up the narrative that it cannot be critiqued to looking at it at that level, is I think what we should all be doing as adopted people. So we can be speaking up for ourselves and trying to shut those things down. So you've been an organizer for years in a variety of different spaces as a teacher in the political realm, in the disabled community.
Can you talk a little bit about your work in that space and do you feel that it extends to the adoptee community? Do you feel that's integrated because you're an adopted person? Are you able to separate that at all or not?
Dorothy: That's an interesting question. I think I would say that everything I do is as an adopted person, just the way everything I do is as a disabled person, they're, they aren't, you can't leave them behind.
And I wouldn't want to, I think. That's important to me too. In all the years that I was a teacher, I was very proud O S T F executive member and was branch president and helped organize the biggest strike in this province against Terrace, and really am very proud of that work that my union did.
Since retirement, finally was able to write, I'd always wanted to write, but when you're a full-time teacher, that's pretty much a pipe dream. And I started to get published, oh, 12 years ago and have been working in CanLit ever since, trying to improve the accessibility and the profile of disabled writers in can. And that's been a struggle.
There have been some organizations and some writers who have understood it completely. There have been many who hit the right emojis, but continue to run, organize, and attend inaccessible events with steps at the front door, with stairs in the building with stairs up to a stage where they stand at a podium and they don't see anything wrong with that.
And then of course we have the pandemic. Where everyone originally said, oh, we're not going back to normal because normal isn't working. And then once Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, declared that the pandemic was over, everybody rushed back to inaccessible spaces without masks and I can't get CanLit to consider wearing masks at events. Very few people will, which means they're medically inaccessible to many seniors, immunocompromised people, disabled people. It means I'll never work at a live person event again unless they are masked. So that inaccessibility, the pandemic has created that medical inaccessibility is representative to me of the barriers I face as a disabled senior, but also of the barriers I faced as an adoptee. Because there was just this defacto decision that, I wasn't as good as other people so they could move me around like chattel when I was a child. And now there's this defacto decision that I'm not really as good enough as abled people, doesn't really matter if I can't attend.
So it's really interesting to see that hierarchy of colonial capitalism, which really tries to make me see myself as inferior. And I've have viewed all my work, which she kindly listed as resisting that. I'm not inferior. And adoptees aren't inferior, and disabled people aren't inferior. And, under disability justice, all of those things are linked together and everyone's struggle must move forward together.
Haley: Now I know the answer to this, but I'm going to ask it cuz I'd love for you to expound on it. Have you seen ableism in the adoptee community?
Dorothy: Absolutely. Ableism is everywhere. We're not gonna blame the adopted community for being any worse or any better than anybody else. . But there is also this notion somehow, That the real adoptees aren't disabled or they aren't particularly aren't intellectually challenged because that's a real issue in the adopted community.
Though people who struggle with intellectual challenges are not welcome to all the time in the disabled community, even the disabled activist community as well. So there is a sometimes, even the adoption community falls into the trope that adopting a disabled child with any kind of disability is an act of pity or is an act of courage.
And it isn't. Anymore than adopting any other child. But if it's seen as different even by adoptees, it's certainly gonna be seen as different by the rest of the world. So we have a standard to bear there that I think sometimes the adopted community doesn't necessarily hold up, and I've also seen all kinds of adopted meetings held in inaccessible buildings.
So that says that they don't see disabled adoptees as worth attending. All of those things need to change.
Haley: There's so much saviorism in adoption. And then to have that next level of elevation to saviorism for adoptive parents who are seen as taking on this extra challenge. Yeah I can see that, and I know I have been guilty of the same things in using ableist language and just not even thinking about it. And in the last few years I've been really conscious of my language, and it is so embedded in our regular vernacular. It's wild. It is so hard for me, it feels to stop saying things like blind or yeah. So blind to that or I've really tried hard on the word crazy. There's so many things and you, you list tons of examples in your book and use some of it.
It's so funny. Do you wanna talk about that? Because it's so tricky for us to unravel, but I think we should be aware of it and I think lots of people aren't.
Dorothy: Yeah, that, that's so interesting. The first thing I wanna say is that people get to let themselves off the hook. They're never going to be perfect. All they can commit to is to try to do better. I wanted, when I wrote my memoir, I originally said to myself, I'm gonna write this with no ableist language. Ha. It creeps in. We don't always recognize it. It is entirely pervasive, just as you say. The best example is I've always set a challenge for my friends, particularly those who swear.
I've said, go two weeks without using or hearing the word bastar. And if you hear the word bastard, you must say to the person, please don't call my friend, Dorothy, a slur. A bastard is the name of a child whose father did not recognize it. It's an insult under patriarchal capitalism. It's an insult to birth mothers.
It's not an insult that you should be using if you care about progressive ideas. Stop using the word bastard. And two weeks later, all these chagrin people who originally said, oh, I can do that, came back to me and said, I used it three times myself, and I heard three people use it, and I only stopped the first one cuz after that I got such a strong reaction.
I was afraid to stop them again. That's the most typical response. Because the word bastard is so completely ingrained in our language as a negative thing to say. Of course, disabled bastards feel badly about themselves or are beaten down because of that. So that language, just like disability language.
"That's so lame." Please don't say that I'm lame. I'm limp. But there is nothing bad or wrong or negative about me. And people go, oh my God, I'm sorry. And then a week later I'm on the phone with them and they go, "that's so lame." It's so hard to remember. And all we can do is try to remember as best we can, and try to apologize when we say it wrong.
Haley: As a, I'm a fat person and I'm trying to teach my kids that this is a neutral word, not a negative word. And that's, this minute drop in the bucket compared to all that. And you say that so lame. There's a really funny anecdote in your book where your friend, do you wanna tell that? It's like we literally can't.
Dorothy: I don't remember. Isn't that awful? You better tell it.
Haley: Okay. So you're asking your friend to review a chapter, and you're talking about ableism in the chapter, and he says to you something about, oh, that's so lame. And you both laugh right after cuz you're like, yeah, we can't even, we can't even get there. So yeah.
Dorothy: I was trying the other day with a friend who is a mental health advocate to come up with a word other than crazy and we were both trying to come up with possibilities and we came up with a couple and then no more than two minutes later I said, oh, that's nuts.
Because it is, again, so completely ingrained and it's a, it is just an ongoing struggle. It's something you commit to doing as best you can, but are we gonna make mistakes? Yes. Because the hold that ableism and that adoption has, our bastard, he has on our language is so deep that it's not something we can just throw off immediately.
We have to keep struggling.
Haley: I appreciate the challenge to us, and you share that throughout the book in multiple different examples, and I wonder you, as you share in your book, you act as though you're not in pain and you hide it from your students and for years and years. Can you talk about that and then coming into, I think embracing your identity as a disabled woman and being out with it. And that might sound surprising to people. If they're like, wait, how could she hide it? Do you wanna talk about.
Dorothy: Sitting right on the cusp where a lot of disabled people sit, that I could pass as abled. I walked, I would limp when I was tired. I would write that off as being tired. And just as you say, for years, I desperately wanted to remain in the fold of abled people and I didn't wanna be seen as disabled.
And when that pretense became impossible when I needed a crutch, then a walker, then a mobility scooter in a wheelchair. What was my internalized ableism? I learned that term from the disability community online and realized that I had internalized the shame of being disabled, that my culture wanted me to feel, but that I didn't need to feel.
And I think that also helped me with my adoption journey. Because I had internalized shame about being an adoptee, that I also rejected and said eventually, no, I can disclose that. That's not my fault. I haven't done anything wrong. And I find that in defending Don too, like I really wanna feel, I feel very strongly about defending him.
He didn't do anything wrong and it's really important not to see him as being any kind of lesser- than. So when I eventually disclosed as a disabled person, it really was because I had to come out in CanLit and say, look, I can't do stairs anymore. You wanna have disabled people, you have to have buildings with no stairs.
And it was both energizing and totally defeating because a lot of people offered sympathy and nothing else. Then wouldn't change and didn't see anything wrong with what they were doing. And it was a struggle and it remains a struggle, as I said, worsened by the pandemic because the medical inaccessibility, which too many in CanLit also won't address, is really difficult.
And the only thing I tell myself is just the way the adoption narrative has a hold on the culture. The able bodied, everybody is able-bodied and the pandemic is over narrative has a hold on the culture, and those are to keep people at work. Those are in the interests of colonial capitalism that keep people going to work and going to school. And not rising up in arms against their government trying to privatize both healthcare and education, right?
We need to be complaining against, about those things and stopping those things, but if you don't believe it's a problem, you don't. So that's the brainwashing that conservative governments in particular have done so well. They've brainwashed the population into thinking that everybody's abled and the healthcare system is a little stressed, but it's okay, but hey, here's this private option.
Just the way with education here will be this private option. That's deliberate. They're doing that on purpose. They, that's been their agenda all along for years to make them and their cronies money. Do the privatization of both those. So that helps me realize that my coming out as an individual, it's connected to that resistance and that really is very sustaining to me.
Haley: I'm curious of your thoughts on emotional pain. Pain, the emotional tax I'm going to assume cuz you share in your book a lot of these things, but you're start the day with only so much physical capacity and at any point in the day, your body can be like, okay Dorothy that's enough And that's it for the day.
And I think as adoptees we also have this capacity for what we're willing to go out into the world and, stand up for ourselves and critique the adoption narrative and all of those kinds of things. Can you talk a little bit about that and in your writing and other speaking events or other interviews you've done? The emotional cost of always having to challenge the societal narrative of you should be grateful about adoption.
Dorothy: Yeah that's a really interesting question. There is a huge emotional cost and one that I think I have shared only in private for the most part. I don't talk publicly very much about it.
For example, years ago, right after I discovered my birth mother's name was McClane and that I was Scottish and I had a clan. An adoptee's dream. I went to Scotland during a McClane reunion. And I was standing there talking to a genealogist who would look up your family on the spot for you.
And I explained I just happened to say, oh, my birth mother is McClain. And he looked up at me and he went, your birth mother. Then you weren't a real McClain, aren't you? And I just rose and I turned away and I went back to my hotel and cried for literally two days. Because the this, to finally have that identity and to have somebody so cruelly and so casually hurt me like that, the emotional cost of that was horrendous.
It's tainted the whole visit. And I think that's, I'm almost crying now. I think that it's, something that people who aren't adopted don't understand that there can be moments that just sideswipe you and knock you to the ground and take all the stuffing out of you. Like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz.
You're just done. You're done. And having to fight all the time on every front, on the disability front and the adoption front is exhausting. Luckily, I guess luckily I'm combative by nature and had lots of training in my union and try not to take it personally. But you're right, it's still completely exhausting at times.
Haley: As you say this, you're combative by nature. I thought about several points in your book where you share some things that you do that I'm like, oh, I don't know if I could do that, cuz I'm a chronic people pleaser. Do you know what I mean? Maybe you don't relate to that anymore since you've had that trained out of you, or have you always been one to say it like it is?
Dorothy: I've always been one to think it like it is. When I was a little girl, I was so busy trying to please my mother and so afraid that, that anything I'd say was wrong, that I didn't speak up for myself then. And maybe I've spent the rest of my life making up for that. My kids would say that might be true.
But I also think there's a real truth to getting a certain age where you just don't give a cluck anymore. You're quite prepared as a senior woman to say exactly what you think, because why not? At that point? And I sleep better having said what I really think, rather than going to bed at night and wishing I'd been clearer or more direct.
So there are some benefits to being, clearly outspoken. I also think about it sometimes that, how do you convince people? I don't believe you convince people by being nice. I really don't believe that. I believe that some stand of change is made by someone. I call it an alphabet argument. That if somebody wants this population is sitting at a G or an H and you wanna move them to M, down the alphabet, you've actually gotta go, not just to M, you've gotta go to P Q R S T, and then they feel comfortable moving along to M, right?
You've gotta create space for people to move into, to be able to feel comfortable. So I'm quite prepared to be the Malcolm X, of the disability movement because I think that then makes lots of room for people to be like Martin Luther King, the more public image, I guess you could say of the kind of change that the Civil Rights movement wanted.
So I guess it's for all those things I, sometimes I think I go too far and sometimes I think I don't go far enough. And I guess that's a good balance.
Haley: You share in your book. We're gonna do recommended resources right away. I have a little coincidence of our own here. Coming up, you're share in your book about all of these different things that you've taught your students over the years, anti-racism, work included, and talking about inclusion for the L G B T Q community, years ahead of where the rest of us caught up.
So I know that you've been doing that work for a really long time. Okay, Dorothy, here is our little coincidence. And when I tell you I giggled so hard when I read this in your book, I grew up in La Crête.
Dorothy: Oh my god.
Haley: I know everyone else is I don't, okay. I don't get it. So I was born in Edmonton. And adopted by a couple who were teachers. And so they taught almost their whole career in La Crête. And so I was a teacher's kid up there. And you spent one year of your teaching career, I think your first year if I was doing the math correctly in La Crête.
And when I tell people about La Crête, like they don't believe me cuz it's a weird spot. So when I was like, okay, Dorothy will get it.
Dorothy: I'm astounded. I have never met anyone from La Crête. Now what years were you and they there?
Haley: You taught in 83 there and I was born in 83, so I didn't move there until 86 and I left when I graduated high school in 2001.
Dorothy: Now, did your parents teach high school or grade or elementary school? What did they teach?
Haley: Elementary.
Dorothy: So they knew my colleagues. Isn't that interesting?
Haley: Okay. Let's dish after briefly so we don't name names publicly, but there you go. That's our little unique connection. You and I. Let me tell you, I hope everyone gets your book Falling for Myself. I laughed out loud. I'm like, I can't remember the last book I was laughing out loud, not just at the La Crête thing. There was a whole chapter, I cackled all the way through. And then I felt bad about it cuz then I was like, wow, to live this must not have been funny. But yeah, it's... I love how you weave the hard with the humor, with the challenges to us about really focusing in on what it is like in the world.
And how we can change it to include everyone. And I just really appreciated those challenges. And I also saw that you've written a few other fiction books and they didn't get here fast enough, but I'm really excited to read your other work. But yes, Falling for Myself.
Do you wanna talk about a little bit about writing it and what that took out of you to share some of those really personal things with anyone?
Dorothy: I decided after the death of Stella Young, who I had so much admiration for as a disabled activist, and she encouraged us all to tell our stories. I decided after that, that I reluctantly wanted to tell mine because I can fight publicly for any cause, but I'm a private person about my own. So I'm not a likely candidate to write a memoir.
However, I decided that the way in which adoption and disability were interwoven in my story could really be interesting and helpful to other people. So I thought that it was important to do it for that reason, and I had I, I did this sort of, put it in. Look at that. That's hilarious.
Haley: I'm showing her all my tabs in the book
Dorothy: That's a very great compliment. Thank you . I wrote it by the, put it in, take it out method. I would put something in and go, oh my God, I'm embarrassed. I'd take it out and then I put it back in. Oh my God, I'm embarrassed. And then I put it back in because I realized embarrassment is why it had to stay.
So that's, that was the process of writing it. I think I told enough to still feel that some of the things that are, that I didn't tell, I can keep. But I told enough that the world understands. And I think that was the balance.
Haley: I truly enjoyed reading it and getting to know you. Like I was like, oh my gosh, I feel like I know you.
So that is like for me, such a great memoir when you're like, oh, could we be friends maybe?
Dorothy: Sure.
Haley: What do you wanna recommend to us, dorothy,
Dorothy: I'm gonna recommend something a little bit off center. I'm gonna recommend the movie Crip Camp for two reasons. One, because it was the beginning of the disability activist movement, and it's a story of a bunch of teenagers at a camp in upstate New York for disabled kids.
And as an adoptee watching that, so many things that they say about themselves, about the way society treats them, about the way they've decided not to accept that treatment eventually slowly is so dovetails the experience of adoption and disability. And the second reason is that, It was the sort of birthplace of the activists of the activism of Judith Heumann.
Judy was a leading disability activist that we just lost a couple weeks ago. And she was involved in every piece of American legislation about disability. She was Obama's first special advisor on disability, a really important disability activist. To pay tribute to her and to pay tribute to the way those two struggles intersect, I'm gonna recommend the movie Crip Camp.
Haley: Thank you. Appreciate that. I haven't seen it yet, and I will do that very soon, I'm sure. Okay, so if people wanna check out your book, Falling for Myself, if they wanna connect with you, where's the best place to do that?
Dorothy: On both Facebook and Twitter. I've lost a lot of faith in social media lately for obvious reasons. But anybody wants to try to find me there. I'm just under my own name, so easy to do.
Haley: Okay, perfect. We'll link to that in the show notes. And you also recently wrote this article about finding your brother, and I'll link to that as well. And that's actually how I first found you. So, the incredible story of finding my brother in my sixties.
Dorothy: Yeah, Broadview has been very kind to me. I've written both disability activist articles and adoption articles in Broadview and that one about finding my brother Don at that late age has been a real gift.
Haley: Yeah, I bet you've had lots of people connecting with you about it. Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us, Dorothy.
For challenging us a little today, and I hope that folks will read your book.
Dorothy: Thank you. It was delightful to be here with you and your listeners.
Haley: Okay, so if you are a little bit of a geography nerd, La Crête is this tiny little town. When I grew up there, it was called a hamlet and after our call, our recording, Dorothy and I got off and she expressed to me, I don't know if your listeners will get it, how strange, a coincidence that is because La Crête is so unbelievably small.
I know it's bigger than when I grew up there. I think they have a traffic light now. I think Main Street has two lanes, but it's been a while. So anyway, I was really delighted that we had that little quirky overlap, because believe me there are lots of people who have heard of it cuz it's a strange place. But there's not very many people who have lived there.
So anyway, that was just like, that's my little nerdy Canadian moment. I hope that you grab falling for myself and read more from Dorothy. She goes a lot more in depth than we were able to get to in the interview about ableism and how harmful it is and how we can really be more mindful of both our language and accessibility for events and all the things.
So I have been working to transcribe the back catalog of our show and have transcriptions live for every single episode as soon as they're released, and I'm really thankful for those of you that have been donate donating towards that project. Thank you. That is one way adoptees on, is trying to be more accessible.
And it's cool to have transcripts because if can't hear us talk, or if it's challenging, you can, read along while you're listening. Or folks that English isn't their first language, you can actually copy the transcription into Google Translate and get a pretty remarkable translation.
So I really appreciate that can also lend itself to more people around the world to hear from adoptee voices. So that's a bonus. Anyway, I really think Dorothy is so funny, and I loved learning from her. I hope you did. Thank you so much for listening, and let's talk again next Friday.
