249 Angela Tucker
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/249
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 Angela Tucker, one of the most well-known, adopted people in our community, subject of the documentary Closure, now turned author of You Should Be Grateful: Stories of Race, Identity and Transracial Adoption.
Angela shares about her time as a caseworker in private adoption and about the difficulties of balancing the Tightrope Act of critiquing adoption, and still being invited back into adoption spaces. We also chat about how the subject of adoption shows up in Hollywood storylines is slowly evolving.
Before we get started, I wanted to 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. We wrap up with some recommended resources for you, and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, Adopteeson.com.
If you are a first time listener, welcome, glad to have you with us. We elevate adoptee voices in this space. It is our soul focus, and so I hope you feel seen and understood and have at least one or two takeaways where you can feel validated and like. You belong because you do. Let's listen in.
I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Angela Tucker. Hello, Angela.
Angela Tucker: Hi, Haley.
Haley: I know this isn't the first time we've talked, but it is the first time you're on the show. How is that possible?
Angela Tucker: It's really wild.
Haley: Yeah. Well, why don't we start how we always do. Do you share a little bit of your story with us?
Angela Tucker: Sure. I would be glad to. I also kind of irk at the phrase, "share your story" because I think it kind of feels like adoptees are placed in a binary when we're asked. I know you asked this of all your guests, and it's not a critique on that, but it's, it's this strange pressure that I automatically feel to like entertain by sharing my story.
Resisting the urge to entertain just the cut and dry facts are that I was adopted from foster care from the state of Tennessee to Washington State. Adopted into a large family. My parents adopted several children and multi- race family. My parents are white, I'm Black. My siblings are, some are Black white, Asian, and my parents had one biological daughter.
I was in a closed adoption, and it was just about 10 years ago, a little more than a decade ago, that I found my biological family, which was a thrill, and that is all documented in my documentary called Closure, which is available and, it was originally, the intent was just to gather home video footage for myself in moments when I wasn't sure that I'd ever get the opportunity again.
So I thought if this was the first and last time that I'd ever seen my birth mother, I wanted it on camera. So he captured it. But at the time, I was also working as an adoption case worker for private domestic adoptions, and I was finding that a lot of my clients were afraid of the very thing that I was going through.
So a lot of my clients would say things like, we wanna adopt a newborn baby and give them the best life possible. We don't really feel like they need to know their biological family, cuz we're gonna give them everything they need. And so I was like, oh, you know, why don't I share with my clients that I'm adopted?
I have wonderful adoptive parents and that was not enough. And if I could show them some clips of this video where perhaps they could see themselves in my parents and see their future child in me, that it might lead to them choosing openness for the future adoption of their child. So with that, we decided to make this home video footage into something a little more presentable. And we're just shocked and floored when Netflix and Hulu and iTunes called wanting to put it on their platforms. It was just all a great surprise.
Haley: I, I've seen you say the title Closure was your goal at the start of your search. And I can anticipate that lots of folks, especially outside of the adoption world, would see that title and come to the point that, oh yeah, you have closure now.
So can you speak to that a little bit? Do you have closure now?
Angela Tucker: Is everything all wrapped up tidy in a bow. No. But yeah, my outset at the outset, not just of making this film, but for my entire life of wondering who my birth parents were and where they were, I thought, yes, at the moment I met them, I would feel complete like a puzzle, missing puzzle piece just snapped together.
And of course, that's not how it works. I did gain an immeasurable amount of confidence and kind of self-esteem, less fractured identity, when I met my biological family. But I was surprised when my birth mother couldn't tell me the details that I thought she would just have.
And so it, that experience kind of helped me realize that she is a human being that has undergone so much trauma that has made it tough for her to remember all of the details when she gave birth to me. And I think that's really a, a lovely point, you know, to, to understand that not only did I not get closure, but that concept is unattainable for even the best of us because we're humans.
So probably to give a an example of that, I thought for sure that I would be able to meet my biological mother and ask her, what time did you go to the hospital? Did your water break? What was that like? Who took you to the hospital? I was kind of centered on those facts and those experiences that I wanted to know right away and she can't remember.
She doesn't know. And so that assumption that I had was quickly replaced with, I think, more empathy about, you know, why would she want to commit that to memory, and what a great survival skill for her to kind of wipe that out if she's not gonna have the privilege of being able to know me and see me grow up, you know.
So I don't have closure, but in a sense I have something better, which is a humanizing of all the people in my biological family, and that's quite wonderful too.
Haley: I think there's a stereotype for a lot of us that our biological parents were you know, could be what teens or, you know, impoverished or struggling with drug addiction or, you know, there's, there's the stigma around biological parents and for a lot of adopted people, that is absolutely a fallacy. It's not true.
Now, in your case, you discover and you share in your new book, You Should Be Grateful, which is, we'll talk a little bit about as well. But I wanna make sure people know the title. So you share in the documentary and as well as in your book when you are searching and you do find out these pieces that your, both parents are in a position of poverty and houselessness. When you found those things out and, and through the years, how have you processed those pieces of information?
You know, I've talked to adoptees before who are, you know, find out the nature of their conception can sometimes be upsetting and having to kind of go through that. So how has that been for you, understanding that, and what would you say to fellow adoptees who do find out that, that those are the circumstances of, the reason for relinquishment?
Angela Tucker: For me, getting a better understanding of my biological, both sides of my biological family's, like socioeconomic status has, I think it catapulted me into thinking more about the history of the United States, the history of Black people in the South specifically, which is where my biological families are from.
I think it's always important to remember that there's not a single adoption that isn't complex. You know, I think sometimes we tend to compare traumas and, you know, your story was harder than mine or that kind of thing. And I think in general, there's not a single adoption story that is easy, or if it is, perhaps an adoption should not have happened in the first place.
But for me, thinking, trying to understand why I needed to be adopted with just the information that I had, which was that my birth mother struggled with homelessness, my birth father as well, it made me think about, you know, mass incarceration of the 1980s and nineties when Hillary Clinton called Black men super predators.
And I think about that because that really led to kind of the demise of Black families staying together. I couldn't help but think about the Jim Crow era. I couldn't help but think about redlining and how all of those like policies and practices that we did in the US in the south led to people like my biological mother not being able to have stability in their lives and therefore leading to not being able to raise their children. Not having a home.
Part of this I think, is really important to think about the ways that our history, for me, Black history impacts my transracial adoption. I think a sliver of it is also a bit of an excuse because, or perhaps a denial, instead of a possibility that perhaps my biological mother simply didn't want to parent me.
That could be the case, but I, instead of facing that really deep sadness, I like to think about her lack of choice as a result of laws, policies, within the United States.
Haley: I heard you share, and I think you comment on it on your book as well about how Deborah says like, you know, you went out one side and, and were adopted and whatever, and where are the resources for her? You know, after giving birth unhoused and like, where's my supports?
Angela Tucker: Yeah. It was so sad to hear her say that she said, to me when I've talked with her on the phone and in different ways, she has said, you know, right after you were born, everyone mobilized to make sure that you were okay. But I walked out of the hospital and was homeless that night, you know? And I was just like, oh, isn't that the truth?
And I write in my book about how social work, social workers initially did care about pregnant women. But there was a point in which that switched and pregnant women who didn't have resources became the villains and the children, the unborn children or the newborn children, became what we all looked at to save.
It makes me so sad. I know I've experienced that in my own work. I remember when we had, I was working at a foster care agency and there was a call from CPS who had found a child at a homeless encampment in Seattle. And everybody was racing around trying to find a home for this child, and there was not a word said about the parents who were also in that homeless encampment, also needed, of course, stability.
But I remember thinking like, how long are we all gonna have case management meetings about this child without having anyone mention the fact that their parents are there too. You know, I think our society really loves to, to save a child. And who pays for that? Biological parents. And then they are looked at quizzically when they might bring that up, you know?
Haley: Yeah, there are so many issues in adoption and, and that is one of the most puzzling things to me. Like, just not even thinking, doesn't even occur to them, like to support the parent.
Angela Tucker: No.
Haley: This is just ridiculous.
Angela Tucker: Right. And I found myself taking a little bit more like drastic measures when I was working at an adoption agency trying to implore prospective adoptive parents to think about the biological parents as more than just surrogates. I would say things like, have you thought about your child's biological mother getting care for when she has breast milk coming in but no baby to feed? And that to me felt like I was pushing really hard, like being obnoxious, but I had felt like I had said in so many other ways: what about birth parents?
When you, cuz some of the families would say like, you know, this is gonna be a really intense time. Having a newborn is so overwhelming. We're gonna be up all night, sleepless nights. And so in so many different ways I would ask the parents to consider the biological mother and what they're doing. And it just didn't work.
And so I found that I was finally just like being really brash and thinking about. Okay. Don't forget that she is producing milk. And what does that do when there's no baby to feed? It gets hard. And what do, what do you do if you don't have a doctor there to teach you how to alleviate that pressure and pain?
You know, I felt like I just had to walk people step by step in order to produce any sort of empathy for this position, and that is really aggravating.
Haley: Yeah. No kidding. I bet. What was it like for you as an adopted person to work at a private agency and you, you made several, you know, career choices along the way with which adoption, part of adoption you were working with. What was that like? The, the private agency and literally talking with mothers and then prospective parents and, ooh.
Angela Tucker: Very complicated. I think I chose to work at an adoption agency largely... this is right out of undergraduate, but I think my initial hope was to learn more about the home study process, and it was a little bit selfish, like I wanted to learn what exactly do parents have to do in order to adopt a child?
And so writing a home study was really helpful for me to gain that understanding. My parents had been really honest and open about their processes for each of their children, but it's a little bit different because they adopted through foster care. With private adoption the home studies are very expensive, and so that leads to a lot of the perspective adopters feeling a sense of entitlement that the home study is written in a certain way and at a certain pace. And that felt pretty odd to me.
It was hard to go from a meeting with a pregnant woman who was trying to figure out what to do, to a glistening, shiny humongous home where they had baked me fresh cookies upon arrival. It was such a whiplash of socioeconomic clashing, and I knew that I was right in the middle of this arrangement, and that was pretty tough.
Part of the home study is also a lot of interviewing of the parents of whomever lives in the home. And during those interviews, it was tricky to hear parents talk about what they did and didn't want in a child or even in a biological mother.
They wanted to be able to name the child and they didn't want the first parents to do that. Or they wanted to make sure that there were no cigarettes smoked from month three on or just different qualifications. And for me, being somebody who was in foster care for a long time because people did not want a Black child, they did not want a child with special needs, which when I was born, there was a whole host of disabilities that I was perhaps going to have and.
So I, I ended up talking to some of my clients to say like, okay, I know that you're, you say that you're not interested in this, that, and the other. And I just wanna disclose that that was me. And some of them who didn't know I was adopted would just look sideways at me. Like, wait, you were exposed to all these drugs in utero and look like this and do this today. And I said that not to make anyone change their mind, but it felt like I had to stand up for my own little baby self at the time or something like that. It was pretty tricky to wear both hats.
Haley: I can imagine. You know, so many of us have watched your documentary. We have seen you share your life on social and in various, you know, media opportunities over the years, and knowing that you had this job right out of university, getting your degree in psychology, I'm curious, over the last, you know, however many years, not to age ourselves, but how your perspective on adoption has changed and morphed over your interactions with adoptees and prospective parents and all, all, all of those kinds of things.
Angela Tucker: Oh, how can I count the ways. There's so much. I mean, I know on your show you've chatted with a lot of guests about the issues within the adoption system, specifically international adoptions, but child welfare as well.
One of the big things though, that I have taken to my career to this point is to try to amplify adoptee voices. Exactly what you do. But it was so clear to me that within agencies, within child welfare, even at the courts, this concept of adult adoptees was lost on people. This, this idea that there are people who have lived this experience that can talk to you about it, was rarely considered. People really when they thought of adoption, they thought children and babies that need an adult to come in and speak on their behalf.
And that was a little bit flabbergasting to me, to realize that adult adoptees were not, not only not asked to be part of the conversation, but if and when we were, it was seen as kind of an asterisks. Like an extra. And then if an adoptee is speaking to any of the places I was in, a courtroom or to executive directors of different agencies, their stories were often, whatever their stories were, it was always an, oh, that's their story. This one is, most adoptions are different.
So whether the adoptee was sharing, you know, positive experience of their upbringing or challenging or mix of both, people typically responded by saying, that's a one-off. That really made me stop and try to think about how I wanted to frame my practice and my work.
Haley: Can you talk about bringing that to some of the opportunities you've had for consulting on This Is Us and the Jagged Little Pill musical, and how you're trying to expand that conversation to include adult adoptee voices?
Angela Tucker: Yeah. It's so thrilling that media is really invested in getting the stories right. I'm so excited about that. I, I heard from the directors of Jagged Little Pill, which was a, a show on Broadway. Right now it's touring and the main character is a transracial adoptee. And the screenwriter is Diablo Cody, who wrote Juno, and so she has had previous experience writing about adoption and...
Haley: Just sorry, you said Juno and I was like, ouch. Oh boy. That's that. That movie has so many activating things for a lot of us, honestly. So I hope you say something about that. Go on .
Angela Tucker: Okay. Diablo Cody, much like many folks who wrote about adoption perhaps in the nineties, early two thousands, would say that they had a pretty one-sided perspective. In fact, I was recently interviewed by a journalist for the New Yorker, and she had previously written about adoption within the New Yorker. It was back in 2014.
She wrote a story about a family who adopted 20 kids and had two biologically. And her story was all about the parents. How did you do it? Why did you do it? How did it work? Nothing about the 20 adoptees and what their experience might have been growing up in a family like that.
So when she reached out to me this year, 2023, almost 10 years after that piece, she said, I don't regret the piece that I wrote previously, but I've learned a lot since then. And I want to write another story that centers adoptee voices, because honestly, I hadn't thought about those adoptees when I wrote that piece.
So the, the, the saviorism aspect is I think is slowly dying in media. And I'm really grateful that people are starting to see that that isn't everything. Adoption is not just about the people who take us. Oh, thank goodness for them taking us, but it's like, what is our experience? So that was the case for Jagged Little Pill where they brought me in and said, we just want you to work with the main actor.
And actually, I worked with the whole cast and crew to teach them about the adoptees experience in, for both, This Is Us and Jagged Little Pill, transracial adoptive families.
One place that I start when I'm working with media is to ask them if they've ever considered why transracial adoption is so synonymous with white parents and Black and brown kids. And most of the time people are like, I've never thought of that. Like, of course it's transracial adoption looks that way. And I say, well, why is that? Why would it be unfamiliar familiar to see a Black couple with a white child? And that question often leads into great discussions about white saviorism, white privilege and, and how that plays a part in child welfare.
So that's, that feels like a really exciting win for me when that starts to happen because then they are very likely to weave stories of whiteness into their shows in a way that is honest. That honestly had not been discussed before.
Haley: I, I hope you're right, that it's slowly dying. May, let's hasten the dying of those tropes, please.
Angela Tucker: There are a lot of us working on that. I do think that social media has evened the playing field, thankfully, that through TikTok, through, instagram, Facebook, Twitter podcast, that adoptee voices are getting out there.
Haley: I hope so. Hopefully this is a piece of it, right? Sharing our real honest feelings. And I'm, I'm curious, I have, I have a quote written down from your book I wanna read to you, and then I have just like a follow up question.
This is really about balancing this line of who we want to hear this message. Who can change the societal narrative and how do you get invited back if you're talking critically about adoption? Okay, so this is from your book. You say:
"Speaking to large crowds, meet and greets and such are my bread and butter. I feel at ease in a big crowd. Happy to glitter amid an admiring and enthusiastic audience."
So how do you balance these feelings of being critical of adoption, hoping for change, broadening the conversation about family preservation and being invited back to these events where a large majority of the audience are likely white adoptive parents.
Angela Tucker: I smile so big. Make sure my teeth are freaking white. I'm saying that kind of in jest. It's kind of a joke, but it's really not because I know that as a Black woman, if I don't couple a my humongous smile, which is such an asset, thank thanks to my biological dad. I now know where I got it from. Yay. But, if I don't offer my big smile with a statement like transracial adoption might be cultural genocide, then people will run for the hills.
But if I do both, I have been able, successfully to, to get people to stay and invite me back. It's internally the strangest gymnastics that's happening because I understand that I represent, on stage, that I sometimes am so tokenized as like the pillar of what some of these parents want their child to become.
And I also understand that I will not allow that sort of racism and disgusting projectionism to continue. And then, like you said, I, I don't want to be cast out. I've seen too many adoptees not invited to the same spaces that I'm invited to, and they are fully qualified. As qualified as I am, but because they perhaps aren't using, they, maybe they aren't as bright skinned as I am, they're darker, and that therefore that is threatening because of colorism.
Or maybe they aren't, they haven't perfected the art of like entertaining throughout trying to educate. I think about Colin Kaepernick's film, which was really a work of edutainment and how that worked on some, but not on others. I feel like I, I have accepted that role, which means that I can't be completely blunt.
It means that I have to avoid becoming the "angry adoptee", which I hate that phrase, but I know that when people see me that way, they go for the hills. I also use different strategies to try to decrease the tension and around race. Like there are so many selective attention tests online that I use.
They have nothing to do with race, but I use to talk about, how all of us have implicit biases, whether we like it or not, and these selective attention tests help us understand that it's not a, it's not a good or bad thing, but it's more what we've been conditioned to see or not to see. I feel like that helps people feel a little sense of calm, like I'm not calling them out specifically, and that allows them to take in the message a little bit more.
Although it, it is what has led me to create this new workshop, which I call cultivating an anti-racist network for transracial adoptive families. This is a workshop where I'm talking about racial norms within the United States, how to handle race related adoption microaggressions, and talk about the history of transracial adoption.
So I'm talking about the Indian Child Welfare Act and the Multiethnic Placement Act and all of these things, but I'm doing it with just a couple and whoever they've invited to this Zoom session. So their neighbors, their parents, their good friends, their kids' doctors, their kids' teachers. All people who are like in their community.
I've done that because it seems like when I speak to large groups and I'm doing all that tightrope walking, people may hear me and but oftentimes they leave by saying like, wow, you really sparked my interest in learning more about X, Y, Z, or that was really fascinating. I'd never thought about race in that way or whatever. But rarely do I hear people in large groups say, I'm gonna make a personal change in my life.
And so I was like, okay, something's missing. So doing this workshop with the family unit on Zoom, I'm able to use photos of their child. We're able to use that child's name. And I feel like that's the difference where people are starting to see in that session. Like, oh, there's 80 of us here in the Zoom.
We all love Johnny, and wow, we're all white. Or maybe there's one person of color in our network, but I can't believe it. And that alone, that picture helps them understand that they are part of this system. They are not separate from it. And that's the, that's what oftentimes gets lost in the, the big groups.
So I, I kind of have to like shift my goal. I guess in answer to your question when I'm speaking to large groups. And my goal is to not be seen as a token. It's to create some additional conversation that perhaps they weren't having before. But I don't feel like I can have that micro level impact in those settings that I can after I've developed trust with a couple and they bring me into their whole family network.
Haley: I love that you're doing that because I, I, I've wondered right, how many times do people need to hear from an adoptee's perspective before their mind is really changed to see the complexities of adoption.
Angela Tucker: Yeah. Yeah. I have wondered that for so long. And that is exactly why this is my result. It's also interesting to see the, the people, the parents who will attend all the public events on adoption, but won't do this, do mine. You know, and I'm like, I think that's telling.
Haley: No one's gonna see me . I'll just say, I'll say, right, it's a little bit of...
Angela Tucker: Well, a little virtue signaling, you know, look where I went. I did this thing, I attended this town hall event and I listened, or I bought this book and that isn't good enough. Let's talk about your child.
Haley: To prepare for this interview, I re-watched all the things. I re-listened to all the things. I watched the Red Table talk again, help me. I look through comments on your YouTube videos and in straddling this line, which let me tell you, I'm all the way on the other side of the line. I just, I don't have time. I, I can't, but my, but I ...
Angela Tucker: yeah.
Haley: I have a privilege in that I could say whatever I want on my podcast, and I'm not waiting. I don't, I'm not looking to do conferences or, you know, that's just not my calling. Yeah. So that's why, yeah, I just say whatever, and I totally understand.
Angela Tucker: I'm so thankful that you can say what I often hold back. You and so many others. That's great. For me, it's definitely like, I see this family has this child and I want a different life for that child, and so I'll play the game.
Haley: I get it. I get, yes. And you have, you've already explained kind of why, like, so for folks that are like, why don't you, you've, you've already said. When I was looking through the comments. Holy moly. Okay. "Remember, family is heart not blood." Come on.
Angela Tucker: I have, okay, so just to, just to interrupt you real quick. This might be new to me, whatever you tell me right now, because I had for a long time a little print on my wall that I framed that said, 'Do not read the comments.' So.
Haley: I'm glad it might be news. No.
Angela Tucker: Tell me what it, tell me what people are saying.
Haley: It's not, these are not news. None. None of these things are gonna surprise you.
"Remember, family is heart, not blood."
"You're so blessed to have so many people that love you"
And I could go on, but I, I know people say these things to you after your speeches as well. You share about really some yikes moments in your book about that as well, but I'm, I don't know how you deal with those things. And also you have expressed, "I am grateful. I do love my adoptive parents". Like you, you have the both and, and you're living it out and you share that enclosure and et cetera, right? So, Yikes. How do you take care of yourself in processing those things and not being held up as, you know, from, from on my side of the fence, angry adoptee and on adoptive parent's side of the fence...
Angela Tucker: What what...
Haley: Right? How do you take care of that?
Angela Tucker: I think I use a therapist approach where, when I get comments in my brain, I, I think this isn't about me.
Haley: Mm-hmm.
Angela Tucker: You know, if you're so angry that I haven't shown my adoptive parents enough public gratitude for quote, what they did, I am curious immediately about them and what's lacking. I think a lot, some of that is defensive denial perhaps, I think a lot of it is the, that's the protectant protection I need to put around myself, so I don't, I'm not completely debilitated. I think it's also research for me. Like that is one great way to continue to understand what societal messaging is on this is to, to try to listen to what people are saying.
I also take a bath every Sunday night without fail. That is the most glamorous bath ever. I mean, I have all the products. I have my little laptop in there, so I watch whatever I want. It's not a bath to clean myself. It is just a bath for pure relaxation. And I look forward to that Sunday night bath. You know, I have a few other things that really help.
I have some really good friends who, who can keep me balanced. I know after some of the bigger media spots, like Red Table Talk was one, I had a, a little team, a little committee who shielded me from the comments. They went through my, my Instagram, they went through my emails, they went through my Twitter and deleted stuff. Or I did want to know a few things and so they, they picked and chose certain things to tell me.
I know when those moments are coming, you know, I know if I've said something really controversial or if I've been edited in a way that makes me sound aloof or foolish that it's coming. And so I'm, thankfully, I have a, a great team that keeps me a little bit insulated from that. So I can just focus on the content, which is, which is really what I wanna do for evermore.
I don't see an end, but it gets pretty cloudy and it's hard to continue to focus on the content when there's such loud noise, and I really wanna focus on the content. And by content what I mean is a few of my focuses are one, that I feel like white adoptive parents need to outsource some of their parenting duties if they're, if they have a Black or brown child. So I'm continuously focused on that point, which means trying to learn about what it is that makes racial mirroring so important, like physiologically to us. Why do we need it?
I'm focused on trying to learn about collectivist societies and how children in those communities are, because I don't feel like the nuclear family model works in adoption. That's, you know, one step outside of that is, is promoting openness, but that's just like a baby step. It's really what I would really rather see is families really working together. I don't often understand why we need to terminate parental rights for a child to grow up safe, healthy, and happy. And so kind of doing a lot of research and thinking and reading about those two specific things. And I, I find that I can't do that if I'm going too far down the rabbit hole of, of comments that might be really hurtful, nasty, and, and rude.
Haley: I loved how you share in your book about playing piano as well as one of your joys and yeah.
Angela Tucker: Yes. Yeah. I love my piano. I love being able to sit there and, and just kind of float into another space. I, I, my house is pretty Zen sanctuary like. It is really calm. It's clean and, and for a specific reason. It's, my head is it's pretty loud. And so when I can do things like the bath and the piano, it is really lovely for me.
Haley: Thank you for sharing that. I know that there are a lot of folks that listen that want to be in advocacy work in some way, but it just can seem scary when we read some of those comments and just wonder like, how do people deal? So I appreciate you sharing that.
I, of course, am gonna recommend your brand new book, you Should Be Grateful: Stories of Race, identity, and Transracial Adoption. Oh my God, great title. Holy moly.
Angela Tucker: Yay. Thank you.
Haley: And the cover is so beautiful.
Angela Tucker: Yes, thank you.
Haley: I read it in one day. I really enjoyed getting to know more about you beyond the social media posts and all of that. I really loved hearing about your adoptee lounge participants and knowing younger adoptees are able to talk. And have an opportunity to talk openly about their adoption experiences more than my generation did. It feels like there's some semblance of improvement happening for adoptees. We're just so excited to have another adoptee authored work in the world.
Yes, please.
Angela Tucker: There's a lot this year. There's a lot coming out. Yes. From adoptees in terms of books. It's gonna be a great year for adoptees.
Haley: Absolutely. So as the adoptee community, we know. Okay, so ordering adoptee author books, giving a great review is really helpful. Is there anything else that you're hoping that the Adoptee community does to show up for you for your book.
Angela Tucker: My hope is really that the book reaches outside of the adoption world, and so I, I hope that the title, You Should Be Grateful, prompts, discussions from people within the adoption world to those they are in community with who may not have ever thought about adoption.
It is, I hope that it can be an entry point to broaden the conversation. I still feel like we are on that periphery, and one way I think that we can make our stories and our experiences a little more mainstream would be to talk to someone who you don't think even thinks about adoption. I mean, I, I, this became evident to me during the Trump presidency when everyone was up in arms about kids being locked in cages at the border, and there was a lot of chatter.
It was, it was heated there were news anchors with tears in their eyes that couldn't believe that parents had to go days and days and days on end without knowing where their kid was or seeing them. And in the small silo of hashtag adoptee Twitter, we all saw the parallels. I was wishing that there could be some crossover for mainstream media to see this practice actually happens here every day, not just at the Mexico US border, not just with people who are trying to migrate. Here is our very own United States citizens are, don't know where their kids. Can't get access and vice versa. We can't find our parents and are told we're crazy for wanting to.
So I feel like if people can share this book with someone who they think doesn't have any connection to adoption, that would be really exciting for me.
Haley: Great. I know we will show up for you. So what did you wanna recommend to us today?
Angela Tucker: There's a post by Robert Ballard who talks about this concept of narrative burden, and it's a short article that I know you'll put in the show notes. And I love it because I think people don't always understand why it might be kind of an adoption microaggression to ask an adoptee, like, where were you adopted from or how did you get here? Why are you here in this family?
Those kinds of questions create this narrative burden for adoptees. It makes us, makes our personal narrative kind of like a burden that we have to carry. And in a split section, second, we have to think, am I gonna supply like a migration narrative to some random stranger to help them understand why I'm here? Or do I somehow politely, like with a huge smile, say, oh, I don't wanna share my story publicly and risk them thinking we are terribly unkind. You know, I, I think this article does a great job of explaining that burden and perhaps might have just everyday conversations be a little bit different.
Haley: Yeah. Wonderful. I will absolutely link to that in the show notes and it, I think it really mm-hmm. , it does what you say, and gives people back a choice, right? Like you might not feel like you had a choice to answer that or not, but Yeah.
Angela Tucker: Yes. Give back agency for an adoptee. Yeah. That our stories aren't automatically fodder for everybody else because they're curious. We don't have to satiate everyone's curiosity. It can be really hard because so many adoptees are people pleasers by nature because, well, I'll say by nurture because of being adopted.
Haley: Oh my God, that's good.
Angela Tucker: And so it's really tough to say, I don't want to share that, but how great it feels when we can all of a sudden feel totally in control of our story, who we tell it to, how we share it. And that's a lot of the work that's happening in the adoptee lounges with young kids as for me, as young as 12 and, I'm thrilled to see a new generation of adoptees who perhaps will feel more in control.
Haley: Wonderful. Tell us where we can connect with you online and find your book.
Angela Tucker: Yes, I am at Angie Adoptee on Instagram.
My website is angelatucker.com. My book is there on my website and I dabble in Twitter and Facebook, but really if you wanna get me an email through my website or a note on Instagram is best.
Haley: Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing with us today and challenging us. Appreciate your work and congratulations on You Should Be Grateful.
Angela Tucker: Thank you. Thank you for having me, Haley. I'm just so thankful for your work in this community as well.
Haley: I love celebrating another adoptee authored work in the world. If you want to read some adoptee authored books in community with other adopted people, join our book club. Adopteeson.com/bookclub has details of the books we're reading in 2023. Often we will have the author join us for a live Zoom call, and then the audio is always recorded and dropped into a private Patreon podcast feed for supporters of the show and they help this main feed show stay free for everyone to consume and be supported by. So thank you so much to the financial backers of the show, the Patreon supporters. You help adoptee on stay alive in this world. So thank you. Thanks so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.
