3 Maeve

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/3

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Haley Radke: You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is Season One, Episode Three: Maeve. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Today we'll be talking to Maeve, a fellow adoptee who will be sharing her search and secondary rejection story with us. We discussed some deep feelings, and how our views of adoption shifted when we became parents. We wrap up our time with some recommended resources for adult adoptees.

I'm so happy to be interviewing today, Maeve Kelly, and that is a pseudonym. She's asked me to use her birth name to share with you guys today. Maeve, I'm so excited to hear your adoption story. Tell us about when you were born, when you were relinquished.

Maeve Kelly: Sure. Thank you for having me. It's not often that I get to talk about this, so I'm happy to talk about it. So I was born in the 70s. I was relinquished immediately after birth, within about seven days. I was born in the Philadelphia area and born at a Catholic hospital there. And there was an orphanage at the time– they called it an orphanage, but it was essentially a part of the hospital that they turned over to infants like myself that were being relinquished. And I was relinquished right after birth, and my adoptive parents took me home seven days later.

Haley Radke: And did your adoptive family have other children?

Maeve Kelly: They did. They had already had a biological son who was seven years older than me, and then they wound up having another biological daughter four years after me. So I grew up as the middle child and the only adopted child in the family.

Haley Radke: And do you know anything about the circumstances of your birth mother choosing to relinquish?

Maeve Kelly: I do, an unusual story, maybe. So my birth mother is an RN, and she was one of 10 children born in Ireland. She came to New York City to pursue her profession in nursing, and she met my birth father there. Wound up having a relationship with him, became pregnant with me, was not happy about the situation, and decided to move to Philadelphia in order to hide the pregnancy from everyone that she knew. So she moved to Philadelphia. She took a job at the hospital where I was born. I'm not sure how it was arranged that that would happen, but she took a job there, and then gave birth to me, and then went back to New York City. And so the reason I was in Philadelphia, born there, was just because she went there to, like I said, hide the pregnancy. I know that she was incredibly embarrassed and upset to find herself pregnant and worked in a Catholic hospital in New York and then wound up working in this Catholic hospital in Philadelphia, turned me over to Catholic Charities, and her one request was that I be placed with a Catholic couple.

One thing I found out later about her, I don't know if you know too much about the Catholic Charities, maybe you do after doing some research, but their way of doing things was they would fill out this sort of 2-page non-identifying information document. And it went with the infant, in the file. And they would describe who the birth mother was and then whatever information that the birth mother wanted to give about the father. And I found out later– I'd had that information. Catholic Charities had turned that information over to my adoptive parents, and I'd had the information for a long time. And she had told Catholic Charities that my birth father was German. And he wasn't, he was Jewish. And I found out that, later, the first time I ever talked to her when I was 40 years old, I had one conversation with her and she said, “I need to tell you something. I remember that I told Catholic Charities that your father was German. He's not, he's Jewish.” So that was a big shock to me to hear that. I think probably one of the reasons that she was so desperate to lie about the fact that he was German and she was so desperate to get me placed with a Catholic family is maybe the guilt that she felt around that.

I'm sure she lied about the fact that he was Jewish because maybe a Catholic family wouldn't have agreed to adopt me if they'd known that I was half Jewish and not German as she had indicated.

Haley Radke: It's such a different time back then than now, right? Oh my goodness.

Maeve Kelly: Yes! Yes.

Haley Radke: So there's all sorts of layers that it sounds like of shame that she had.

Maeve Kelly: Yes.

Haley Radke: Okay. So you had a conversation with her. Tell me how you found her.

Maeve Kelly: It's interesting. In the state of Pennsylvania, in the United States, until 1985, I believe, you were still able as an adoptee to get a document from the Bureau of Vital Statistics. It's not your original birth certificate, but it's a document that this other agency in Pennsylvania kept, and it has the adopted child's birth name and the birth mother's name. I'm not sure why they keep these information separate from the birth certificate, but in any event, up until 1985 adoptees, even though their original birth certificates were sealed and had no option of getting them, you could still get this document, this statement of vital statistics. My adoptive parents got that in 1985, just before the law changed. I've had that since 1985, I've known what her name is. And I never did anything with it. I tried to pretend that it didn't exist. I tried to tell myself that it didn't matter. I tried to convince myself that I didn't care. And so I didn't do anything until I was in my early 20s. I went away to law school and I couldn't shake it anymore. I had to do something about it. I had to find her and find out who I was and why I was on the earth. So I actually started with Catholic Charities. I thought that was the most respectful way to go, rather than just hire an investigator and find her. I had her name and I had her date of birth, I knew I could find her if I wanted to, if I really wanted to. But I decided to go through Catholic Charities. Unfortunately, they strung me along for a really long time, told me that they were looking for her, they told me that they were sending her letters, and that they were hopeful that she was gonna call back, and just kept me going for maybe 10 years. I would check in once a year with Catholic Charities and ask them how it was going and they would tell me they were gonna get back to me, I should just keep praying about it, and ask me how my adoptive parents felt about the search.

Haley Radke: Oh my goodness.

Maeve Kelly: In any event, at the age of 40, I'd had enough and I had her name, and I had her date of birth, and I hired an investigator and she found her in about 6 hours, and called me back and said, “Well, I have found her. Here's her name, here's her address. This is where she lives.” What happened then was my mother, who had been getting all these letters from Catholic Charities for years and throwing them away, she had kept the contact information for the person at Catholic Charities who had been contacting her. She got a call from this private investigator. She knew what it was, and she called Catholic Charities and said, “How dare you have given out my information?” And Catholic Charities didn't know what she was talking about. The representative called me and said, “Your birth mother just called and apparently you found her, is that accurate?” And I said yes. And they yelled at me and said “how dare” I do that, and it was “against the law”, and I was “upsetting everyone”. And it was a pretty awful phone call. But to make a long story short, they agreed that they would set up a call between me and my birth mother, you know, be an intermediary. So they set up the call, Catholic Charities. They gave my birth mother my contact information and she called me maybe a week later, and that was about five years ago, something like that.

Haley Radke: So one phone call.

Maeve Kelly: One phone call.

Haley Radke: How long did it last and what did you talk about?

Maeve Kelly: It lasted maybe a half an hour. It was surreal. It was surreal. She had a brogue. I knew that she was from Ireland, but to actually hear her with a brogue, I can't describe it except it being surreal. It was very emotional. I was trying to hold it together, and what I really didn't wanna do was scare her off. And I had no idea, I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know if she was gonna be angry with me. I didn't know if she was gonna deny my existence. I didn't know if she could potentially be happy to be talking to me, I certainly hoped for that.

I actually wrote out things I wanted to say, and I just tried to keep it really light. I went over some of the things that were in my 2-page non-identifying information that I'd gotten from Catholic Charities. And we actually had a laugh about some of the things because they had just made stuff up. Like, they said in this non-identifying information that my birth parents had met because they were in the orchestra in New York City, and that my mother was an accomplished violinist. And so I asked her about that and she started laughing. She said, “I don't know where that came from. I have never played the violin in my life.” And then she asked me about my family and she said, “Well, you have an adoptive brother, right?” And I said, “No, my brother is biological to my adoptive parents.” And she was silent and I said, “Did you think that he was adopted?” And she said, “Yes, they told me he was adopted, and that was one of the reasons that I really liked the idea of you being placed with them.” I found out there was some real untruths going both ways.

Of course we laughed about the music thing. I asked her a little bit, I said, “Is there anything I need to worry about with my medical history?” And she told me there wasn't. I didn't ask her about my father because I was afraid to scare her off. I was really, really scared to scare her off because this was such an important moment for me and I didn't want her to run, so I didn't ask. I also didn't wanna keep her on the phone, I wanted to keep it light. And so I said, “I'd love to continue the conversation somehow, whether it's in the phone call or whether it's a meeting or whether it's a letter, but I'd love to just try to continue this conversation in some way.” And she said that she would think about it.

I really thought about it, and then about a month later I wrote her a letter. And I enclosed pictures of myself and my three children. And I spent days, more than days, weeks, working on that letter, just perfecting it, trying to get it to strike just the right tone of respectful, but not coming on too strong, just trying to say the right thing so that she wouldn't reject me. And I just said–

I'm sorry–

Haley Radke: It's okay.

Maeve Kelly: I just said, “I want to know who I am. It's important to me to have a biological connection with someone in the world, and I don't wanna disrupt you and your family. I'm not looking for another mother. I don't expect you to do Christmases with me from now on, it's not what I'm looking for. I just want to have a connection with someone in the world who's related to me, and I hope that we can meet someday, or talk again.” And then I waited. And then I waited. And about a month later I got a letter from a lawyer. It was a horrible letter. It was a nasty letter. And I'm a lawyer, and so I didn't need that. I didn't need the fact that some law firm had taken on this case and written this letter to me after having read my letter. My letter was so personal and I got a letter from this lawyer and he said, “My client doesn't desire any further contact from you. Please be advised that any further contact is unwarranted, and please never contact her again.” And enclosed in the letter to me was my letter to her, and the pictures.

Haley Radke: I'm so sorry. I don't know what to say. That's just devastating.

Maeve Kelly: It was devastating. So what I did was I did what I had done for 40 years before that, I put it away. I just, I couldn't– it was so painful that I just put it away and I told myself it didn't matter. And there's an analogy I think of sometimes when I think about what I've done to put those feelings away. It's like you have a box, and you put all those feelings and all that hurt and shame, and you put them in the box, and you close the box up and you close it with, like, duct tape and locks, and you just close it as hard as you can. And you put that box in, like, the deep recesses of your closet, in the dark corner of your closet, and you put all that hurt and shame in that box. And sometimes, when you're getting dressed, you look at that box and you see it, and you know it's there, but you ignore it and you tell yourself that it's not there.

And so that's what I did. I put all my hurt and shame and sadness and devastation in that box, and I put it in the deep recesses of my closet. And I put it there for five years or so, and only more recently, like in the last year, have I gone into my closet and taken that box out and opened it up and let myself feel those things.

Haley Radke: It's easy, and difficult, to put things away in the box, but they come out. They come out whether or not you go and willingly open it. If you left it any longer, it was gonna come out, right?

Maeve Kelly: Yeah. And I think once the box is open, I can't close it again. I can't do it. I can't close it again, it's open and I have to let myself feel these things. I'm letting myself for the first time really feel these things, and I think that's good. I think it's good. It's healthy to feel it and not pretend that it's not there.

Haley Radke: The things that you said about how you were treated by Catholic Social Services when you were looking and you kept contacting them, and also your birth mother, like they just treated you like, still like a child.

Maeve Kelly: I think that's right. Yeah.

Haley Radke: Like you're never allowed to grow up and I just don't understand.

Maeve Kelly: Yeah. Undeserving and “how dare you”, very much like that. Yeah. And it's surprising, one of the most frustrating things for me recently after I've been reading a lot more and quote-unquote “come out of the fog” about adoption, one of the frustrating things from me is when people say things have changed. “Oh, it’s so much better now. You went through a terrible time, but things are so much better.” It's not true. They're not better. They're not better at all, because of the attitudes that are still associated with folks like me, adult adoptees, who are just looking for the most basic human knowledge in the world about why they're on the earth. And the way that we're treated and the attitudes associated with that, things have not changed. Things are not better. They're not better at all.

Haley Radke: Yeah, and I was born in 83. I was allowed to get my non-identifying information when I was 18. And then later on, the Alberta government opened the records and I was able to get my identifying information, and that's how I was able to find my birth mother and my birth father. That's really still rare as far as I know. There's so many states and provinces that have closed records and just like yourself, you had to hire an investigator. So fortunate that your adoptive parents had her name.

Maeve Kelly: It is fortunate. For all the terrible things that my adoptive family did and didn't do around my adoption, that was the one thing that they did that was right. That was right. There was apparently a lot of press going on around that time in 1985, right before the law changed and this Department of Vital Statistics closed the information forever and it's still closed now. There was a lot of press, and a lot of adoptive parents went ahead and got those certificates right before the end. And it's funny cause mine is stamped like February 1985 and I know that's right before the law changed. So if it weren't for that, I definitely would not know who she was. I am positive about that.

Haley Radke: And so you don't have your birth father's name then?

Maeve Kelly: No.

Haley Radke: And have you ever tried to look for him?

Maeve Kelly: I used to look for him all the time just because I knew– although I think she probably lied, I don't know who he is, and she gave him a first name on the non-identifying information that I have from Catholic Charities, but nothing else. And also it said that he was a lawyer, so I used to look in any records of lawyers in different states. I would look for his name and what I thought his address may be. I was always looking, but I have no idea, he could be anybody. I was joking with my husband today, he could be Bernie Sanders. I have no clue. He very well may be, I'm not kidding. He's the right age, you know? It's a strange thing for people that aren't adopted. Whenever I go to a new city, especially in New York City, and I'm walking down the street, every time I pass somebody that looks a little bit like me or may be my father's age or may be my mother's age or what have you, I'm always looking at that person wondering if they're related to me. They could be related to me, just like anybody else could be related to me. I feel like I'm related to no one and I'm related to everyone.

Haley Radke: When you first had children, did anything shift for you?

Maeve Kelly: Tremendously. Tremendously. I felt a connection with someone for the first time that I had never felt, ever. It was this visceral, primal connection and I felt, with my first child when he was born, I realized how unnatural adoption and a relinquishment is, that there must have been some major social forces at work for my mother to have walked away from me like that and given me to perfect strangers. I could never have done that with my son. And I also realized, I think I faced it for the first time, that my parents, of course, think of me differently than they do my brother and sister. Of course they do. And I don't fault them for that, that's just life. That's just reality and that's okay. I don't think that adoption has to be a worse relationship. I think if you have adopted children, you have biological children, I don't think you necessarily love your adopted children less, but you love them differently. And I think it's important for adoptive parents to just acknowledge that. It's true. It just is true. There's no way that my parents felt about me the way they felt about my brother and sister. No way. Not after I've had my own children, and I feel that connection with them. I look at them and I see myself. It's visceral. It's primal. It's human, at its most basic level.

To answer your question, yes. I think I felt loss. I think I let myself finally accept that being adopted was not the same as being a biological child. It's just not.

Haley Radke: Yes. I couldn’t have put it better. I really couldn't have put it better.

Maeve Kelly: I hope it doesn't make you feel bad. I was just thinking, I wonder, I hope that doesn't make you feel bad, because you were being a [inaudible] person too.

Haley Radke: No, no, no. We're on the same page. You mentioned before that you were out of the fog, and I don't know if all of our listeners would recognize that phrase. Where did you first hear that, and how would you unpack that?

Maeve Kelly: When I started, like I said, I put that away about five years ago, you know, my hurt. And I just tried to pretend like it hadn't happened. And then about a year ago, I just started very gradually, Googling and looking things up and reading things on the websites. And the first website I ever found was called Lost Daughters, I'm sure you've heard of it. And it's a sort of collection of pieces written by women adoptees about their experiences. And that was the first time I had heard the term ‘out of the fog’. And it really resonated with me. I felt like I was coming out of the fog and it was good to put a term on it. And also, I always struggled with ‘Well, I'm a bad person if I have these thoughts or feelings or sadness. I need to work through that because there's so many other adoptees who are totally fine with being adopted, they don't care. So there's something wrong with me. I have an issue, I have a problem. They're normal and I'm not normal.’ And then I realized they're in the fog. I'm out of the fog.

Haley Radke: Their box is tightly bound up.

Maeve Kelly: Right. And so the term for me was just, it was very freeing to realize that I am not necessarily the one that's wrong in feeling this way. It felt really good to hear that term “out of the fog.”

Haley Radke: Yeah. I had had a similar experience when I was first– well, I was coming out of the fog, I just didn't know it. I've always felt my whole life that I have to be grateful that I'm adopted. And I was an only child, I had a happy upbringing, a fine childhood. Everything was just normal family stuff, nothing traumatic or anything. And I always felt different than my adoptive family. I always felt that I wasn't exactly where I was supposed to be, but because I really felt like I was supposed to feel grateful, I felt so guilty for those feelings of wanting to know where I came from, wanting to know my history.

And really when I started coming outta the fog was when I reunited with my birth father and then, subsequently had my children. We actually had been planning to adopt prior to that, because I did feel a sense that I owed that to the world. I'm really grateful that we were able to shift directions and instead have our own biological children, cuz that's really been a meaningful change for me in my worldview.

Maeve Kelly: It's so interesting, isn't it? How, you think about adoption in one way and it's always changing. I think it's just a constant change with me. I thought about it one way 30 years ago, and I thought about it another way, 20 and then 10, and then 5. Every day I feel like I learn a little more, I think about it a little bit more, and I change a little bit. It's the gift that keeps on giving, right?

Haley Radke: For better or worse, yeah.

Maeve Kelly: Were your adoptive parents, did they talk with you about the fact that you were adopted and talk with you about their decision to adopt you and all of that?

Haley Radke: I always knew I was adopted, so it definitely was always out there. And they adopted because they were infertile. And they waited a very long time to adopt me, so my parents are older. My mom was 38 and my dad was 40 when they adopted me. I knew they moved to be closer to social workers that would do the home study and things. So I knew that my adoption really disrupted their life and they really focused to have me. They focused their whole life plan to have me, and once they adopted me, then they moved back up to where they were before, in Northern Alberta. Only in the last few years I found out that they had actually planned to do a second adoption, but because mine had taken so long, they just sort-of decided against it. But it was just unspoken, really. I don't feel like we talked about it very much. Now, how about yourself? You had mentioned before that– you just kind-of hinted at some things with your family.

Maeve Kelly: It was never discussed. Never, it was a subject that was never, ever discussed. I can remember, I mean, I always knew I was adopted, it wasn't a secret from me. And there wasn't some big reveal. It was always there. It was a fact. But beyond that, it was never discussed in any way. There was no discussion of why they adopted me. I have put two and two together and realized it was because they were having trouble conceiving, but there was no discussion of how they felt about me, or how I felt about it, that's for sure. And when I would, very rare, I would say maybe five times in my entire life have we ever discussed it. The reaction always was a little bit of anger from my mom and telling me that it didn't matter and she didn't care that I was adopted, and it just doesn't matter. And then kind-of a changing of the subject, and that was it.

I would do these projects at school, like we all have to do, on ancestry and family tree, you know, that kind of thing. I used my adoptive family and certainly there was no discussion with my adoptive family on that. They would dutifully help me figure that out, and I'd write down all of their relatives and turn that in to school.

I would go to the doctor. I can distinctly remember being at the doctor, the pediatrician, and discussion going on about how tall I may get, and the discussion was about my adoptive family. The doctor would say, “Oh, let me see. Let's see, you are 5’4” and your husband is 6’, so I put her, she'd probably be about 5’6”. It's the average of the two of you.” I remember standing there just thinking, ‘This is so weird.’ But I couldn't say anything because it was just a subject that was not discussed.

Haley Radke: And did you look similar ?

Maeve Kelly: I do. I look similar to my father. I look similar enough that it was able to be that way. Yeah, so I looked similar enough and it just– occasionally my dad would say things to me. It was an angry subject with my mom, like, really, we couldn't talk about it at all. My dad occasionally, would say to me, whisper to me things like, “You're really the only Irish one in this family.” Because his ancestry was Irish, but many generations away from Ireland. His great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, let's say, had come from Ireland. And when there'd be Irish music playing or something like that, he would whisper to me, “Well, you're really the Irish one here.” Things like that. I think he got a kick out of it and didn't realize the devastating loss that it was for me. There was never an acknowledgement ever, in my entire life, that it was a loss. I didn't have biological relatives. It was just never discussed, never asked me. There was never a question put to me. “How do you feel about it?” I grew up feeling that it was a shameful secret, very shameful, because it was never discussed in any kind of healthy way. So part of coming out of the fog for me is being able to talk about it with folks like you. I've never talked about it before because it was so, so shameful to me.

Haley Radke: I think I got that same message, now that you're saying that, and I don't feel like we talked about it ever, either. Yeah. That's the message.

Maeve Kelly: Yeah. “Doesn't matter, so stop talking about it. It doesn't matter to me,” was the message that I got. My mother would say, “It doesn't matter.”

There was a very strange group that they enrolled in. It's such a strange thing. I'm sure it was going on at the time, but they belonged to this group, they called it The Mother's Club, and a bunch of families with adopted kids would get together and do social things. And this went on for a couple of years, this is when I was really young, every so often we'd have to get together with these other families from different towns, and the only connection was that they had an adopted child and the parents would socialize in one room. I don't know what they were talking about, maybe– I always got the impression they were talking about how terrible it was to have an adopted child. That's what I always thought it was about. Because I was like, ‘why would they get together with these folks? It must be a support group of some kind,’ was my thought. ‘We must be so terrible that they need support from each other.’

But in any event, we'd get together with these families and I remember thinking to myself, ‘I just so wish that I was my sister. I don't wanna be the weird one. I don't wanna be the adoptive one. I wanna be the regular kid.’ They never talked to me about why they're bringing us to these groups. We just went to these groups and there was no discussion. It was just, we'd go to these groups and I would just die inside, wishing that I was the real kid and not the adoptive one, and then we would go home. It was so strange. Yeah. Besides that weird adopted kid thing, and that's about it, it was never discussed. Never ever discussed. And I was the only adoptive kid in my entire– all of my cousins on my father's side, there were 17 of us. I was the only adoptive cousin. Every time we'd get together with this part of the family, it was always a gigantic discussion about who looked like who, and I just wanted to crawl a hole and die. It was, oh, horrible.

Haley Radke: Do you still get triggered by that?

Maeve Kelly: Tremendously. Yeah. You do too?

Haley Radke: Absolutely. Anytime anyone says anything about “So-and-so looks like so-and-so” in a family situation, I'm just like, ‘Oh my gosh. Must be nice to know that.’

Maeve Kelly: I feel the same way. And it's not– and I think probably you and I are so sensitive to it, because it's everywhere and I don't think people realize how it is so prevalent in our society to talk about the traits that we get from our biological relatives. And not just what we look like, but “Oh, you must get that from your mom. Oh, that musical talent, that must be from your mom,” or, “Oh, you get this from your dad,” or “You're just like your dad. You're just like your uncle so-and-so.” And that's so prevalent in our society, not just with medical records, which is obviously becoming more and more important, your DNA for medical reasons, but everything else, too. And I'm triggered every day by that. Every day I'm triggered by that. Absolutely. Yeah.

Haley Radke: So my adoptive mom will say things to me around my children, like, “Oh, this child is so much like this other person in her family.” And I think, ‘Oh. Okay, then. You tell yourself what you need to. Because they're not related.’

Maeve Kelly: Do you get angry though? I get angry.

Haley Radke: I do. I do. Yeah. I get very angry about it. And she's just making conversation and I know she doesn't mean anything by it, but it really does upset me.

Maeve Kelly: Me too, so much. And I think it's because for me, it feels like they're not acknowledging my loss. Like they're trivializing my loss by saying that. It's almost like, ‘how dare you?’ My parents do the same thing with my children. They'll say about my son, “Oh, don't worry about him. He'll grow because so-and-so grew really late. He grew when he was in college,” my uncle or what have you. I just look at them. I'm like, ‘are you kidding me? That has nothing to do– and the fact that you're even saying that again, you're just not acknowledging the reality in front of you and what I've lost.’

Haley Radke: Yeah. I don't wanna say, “It's so nice to hear that from you,” but it's just, it's so validating, right? It's like, ‘okay, our feelings are normal.’

Maeve Kelly: Oh my god, yes, thank you!

Haley Radke: It's so nice to hear that someone else feels that way.

Maeve Kelly: Yes, I know, I know. And I think because the dominant narrative still is that we should just be so grateful and happy, and you just see all these memes all the time. “Biology doesn't matter!” “I don't care about DNA!” “Love is all you need!” It's– no. Absolutely no. No a thousand times. No. And it does feel so good to talk to you, Haley, because I so rarely can talk about this with anyone. I actually have– do you have any siblings? Do you have any biological siblings?

Haley Radke: I have three. Half.

Maeve Kelly: Wow. How did they react to you?

Haley Radke: Really wonderfully, actually. At first they were very surprised that their dad had had “extracurricular activities”. But once they got over that shock, they've been so welcoming and amazing and I'm just their big sister now. It's really incredible. So they're all younger than me, obviously, and two of them have graduated from high school, and the youngest will just be starting high school in the fall. It's been pretty incredible to watch them grow up over the last five years. I have a lot of grief over the loss of their first years, but I'm just grateful for the time that we've had since then.

Maeve Kelly: And you're growing up as an only child, that must have been even more meaningful and surreal to have these siblings now in your life. I can't imagine.

Haley Radke: It’s so bizarre. It's so bizarre. When I first went there to meet them– they live in another province. When I first went there to meet them and like, the banter back and forth and the teasing and stuff, I was just like, ‘I cannot handle this.’ And my husband, he's from a family of four, so he totally understood, but I was like, ‘I don't– how can you treat each other like this?’

Maeve Kelly: That’s right. That’s funny.

Haley Radke: So, I do feel used to it now, but it was quite an adjustment. But for me, I've gotten to see the similarities between me and them and my dad and even some of his siblings, so some of my extended family on his side. And that's all been really both healing for me, but also triggering. It's like I just, I don't know.

Maeve Kelly: Oh my god, I mean, there's never a happy ending in these situations. Even the best possible outcome where they are welcoming to you and they don't think you're out for money, or an axe murderer or what have you, still, it's like you still lost so much. You lost that relationship with them. You're still on the outside.

Haley Radke: Yep, I am. So Maeve, what could your birth mother do now, if she changed her mind and wanted to connect with you and rebuild a relationship with you? What could she do for you?

Maeve Kelly: It wouldn't take much. It wouldn't take anything. I'm so desperate to make a connection with her. I'm so desperate to know who my father is. She wouldn't have to do anything. Nothing. Like I said, I got a terrible letter from her lawyer saying to stay away, and I have, but all she has to do is pick up the phone and call me. She knows exactly where to find me.

Even if she can't bring herself to have a conversation with me, I would certainly love to have communication with her two children who are my half siblings. I know exactly who they are. I know exactly where to find them. I've seen many pictures of them on Facebook and other places. It's a loss that I can't describe. I would love to communicate with them, but I can't bring myself because I'm so afraid of getting hurt again. I am afraid that if I reach out to them that they're going to do what she did and reject me, and I don't know if I can take another rejection again. I've held off communicating with them. I think at some point I will reach out to them even if I never reach out to her again, just because I feel like I'll never regret trying. But I will regret not trying. And I don't regret making contact with my birth mother at all. I don't regret looking for her. I don't regret making contact with her. I would never regret that. And so I feel like I need to go ahead and do the same with my siblings at some point. When I feel a little stronger, I will.

Haley Radke: I hope you do connect with them. I just wanna tell you that it's your right to have a relationship with them, and even though she's kept you secret, I think?

Maeve Kelly: She has. Yeah, she has.

Haley Radke: I feel like it's still your right. It might not be right now, but I hope you do.

Maeve Kelly: I hope so, too. I hope I can bring myself to do it. I will. I just need to get a little stronger. I think I need to be ready for whatever may come from it. I can't at this point. I think if I reached out to them and they rejected me in the way that she did, I think I'd fall apart and I wouldn't be able to function. And that's not an option for me right now in my life. Three kids and a job and everything. I have to function. So I need to get to that point, I think, where I'm strong enough to take it if they were to turn their backs on me. They're there, I know where they are, it's gonna happen.

Haley Radke: That's just such a weird feeling to know them and see pictures of them and they don't know that you exist.

Maeve Kelly: I know. It is weird. It's very weird. Again, I come away thinking that adoption is just a very strange social construct, especially closed adoption. I remember reading someone saying, “Closed adoption is a failed social experiment,” and I think that's right. I don't know who thought of this great idea of closed adoption. Like whose idea was that to, close off your biological relatives, change your name on your birth certificate, hide your existence, pretend that all the secrets and lies and pretense– I don't know whose idea that was, but it was a terrible idea and it definitely failed.

Haley Radke: I agree. I agree. Well, we are coming to the end of our time. I'm so sorry, because I've had such an awesome time talking with you. Thank you so much for sharing your story.

Maeve Kelly: You too. Thank you for talking to me.

Haley Radke: I had asked if you had any recommended resources that you wanted to share with our listeners, and I have one to share, so why don't I start: have you heard of Angela Tucker?

Maeve Kelly: I have.

Haley Radke: So she did that documentary, Closure. And she has a new series that's just started on YouTube. It is called The Adopted Life, and the first episode is her interviewing several young people who are all transracial adoptees, some of them international, and it was really just a fascinating watch for me. Have you seen that yet?

Maeve Kelly: I did. I loved it. She's amazing. Absolutely. And I hope that Adopted Life gets a lot of traction and there's a lot of views of it. I think it's a really important subject and yes, I have seen it. It's terrific.

Haley Radke: That's awesome. Great, I'm glad you have. So what do you have for us?

Maeve Kelly: I've got a few. I had mentioned Lost Daughters before, which is a website that I read a lot. I get a lot out of that. There's another couple other blogs that I read a lot. I really get a lot out of reading other adoptees’ views and blogs and Twitter and that sort of thing because there's no sort of adoptee resources for me here. I don't belong to any kind of support group. I don't really know of anyone. I've looked for support groups, I can't find them, so I kind-of get my support from the web.

So there's a blog called Baby Girl B. Adoptee. I read that all the time. And she has a wonderful piece called Sympathy Seeking Vs. Empathy Seeking. And it's about, adoptees aren't looking for people's sympathy. We don't want people to feel sorry for us. We're just looking for empathy. And how different those two are. And that really resonated with me. There's a piece by a psychiatrist, his name is Paul Sunderland. He did a lecture and it's on YouTube and it's about adoption and about the profound effects that adoption has on a newborn. I read a blog called The Declassified Adoptee, and I'm sure you read that one, right?

Haley Radke: Yes, I do.

Maeve Kelly: She's wonderful, Amanda Transue-Woolston, I think is how you say her name, and she's from Pennsylvania and an activist there. I would love to meet her someday. She's like a rockstar.

Haley Radke: I agree.

Maeve Kelly: And then the last one is one that I go on every so often, Adult Adoptee Support. It's, just like it said, an adult adoptee support sort of website. Folks are anonymous there and it's a kind of a wonderful site for people all over the spectrum of adoption in terms of people, very much in the fog, totally out of the fog, everything in between. One of the administrators there wrote this piece called Am I Blood or Am I Water? It was transformative for me. It was a wonderful, wonderful piece of writing about his life, and about being adopted and how he felt about it and how he still feels about it. And it's one of the best things I've ever read about adoption. It's called, again, Am I Blood or Am I Water?

Haley Radke: That sounds wonderful. I'm gonna put those links up so that people can check those out. Thank you.

Maeve Kelly: Oh, you're welcome. You're welcome.

Haley Radke: Thank you for being so honest. I really appreciated that.

Maeve Kelly: Thank you, Hailey. It feels good to talk about it. It really does. It's a good thing, and I hope that anything I say could be helpful to any other adoptee out there if they hear one thing that resonates with them, I just hope that's helpful.

Haley Radke: If you would like to send a note to Maeve to thank her for sharing her heart with us, we can pass it along to her. You can email us on our website, AdopteesOn.com. We wanna hear from you. Connect with us to share your story, or record a short voicemail that we could feature in an upcoming episode. You can also find us on Twitter or Instagram @adopteeson.

We would love it if you would take a minute today to subscribe to our show in iTunes, then you'll never miss an episode. Would you share our show with a friend in your life that you know is adopted but never talks about it? They might be able to open up their box by hearing Maeve's story. Thanks for listening, let's talk again soon.

1 [S1 E1] Carrie

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/1

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Haley: You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is Season One, Episode One: Carrie. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Today we'll be talking to Carrie, a fellow adoptee who will be sharing her reunion journey with us. You'll hear her allude to how she flooded an entire family with postcards in an attempt to find her birth mother. We'll wrap up with some recommended resources for adoptees in reunion.

Well, I'm so pleased to welcome Carrie to the show. She's a fellow adoptee and I'm really excited to hear your story today, Carrie. You've got lots of interesting perspectives to share with us, so welcome.

Carrie: Thank you, Haley.

Haley: So I'd love for you to start with maybe telling us about when you were born and your relinquishment story. Anything that you know about that would be awesome.

Carrie: I was born in 1970 in Vancouver, BC, and was adopted by Americans who were living there working abroad. Although they were all blood family, I have two older brothers that were both blood children of my parents. They were having trouble conceiving and particularly a girl child, my mom wanted a little baby girl. And this was in the era of closed adoption still, and so they went to the Catholic Adoption Agency in Vancouver and put in for a little white baby and were matched with me, actually before my mother would have carried to term. Her final, like sixth or eighth miscarriage, very tragic start for them. So I came into a family that had all kinds of stuff, but were really excited to welcome a little girl. And I might have been what you would've called a poster child adoptee my whole life growing up. I was one of those kids where they said, "being adopted is special" and "being adopted, it means you were chosen", and I bought that. I really bought into it and felt really proud about being chosen and special, and sort-of sang the praises for adoption my whole life up until just about reunion, which happened with my birth father in 2008.

And in between there's a long story, but I just, I guess I just wanted to start off my story by saying adoption has always been just background noise, I never really felt overly compelled to search or felt uncomfortable not knowing. I always felt really kind-of grateful just for the chance to be here, and sort-of had this weird sense in the back of my mind that I could have not been here. It might have been a choice to have been terminated. So, not to make it political, but it just had always colored my view.

I was just gonna say I'm 45, almost 46 now, and I hinted that my relationship with my adoptee status started to get a lot less simple when reunion happened. And you know, you hear a lot about the reunion rollercoaster if you have at all considered searching and reuniting. It's one of the first things you'll read about if you search. And thank goodness there is stuff online because I'd heard about it, but I will say nonetheless unprepared because I thought I was so okay with being adopted. ‘What issues could I possibly have? I don't feel angry. What?’ And adult me wasn't angry, but it turns out the infant me was pretty– had a lot of stuff to say.

So in between, I guess I will just fast forward my story a little. I left Canada with my US family when I was six, grew up in California and sort-of lost touch with my Canadian identity and self and history and schooling, but didn't seem to mind. My family were– my parents were transplants from Chicago into California, so none of us really fit and no one really cares there.

And then my father died in 2000– sorry, 1994. And at that time I started really thinking about if I was ever gonna reunite. You know, 'life is uncertain, you never know', and 'maybe I should do it sooner than later'. And then as luck would have it, in 1996 the laws in BC changed and I was able to gain access to my original birth certificate, which at that time I had never had, I just had an identity card with a case number that linked to my actual birth certificate. So I was unlike a lot of people in the States. I was never issued a false one, I was just never given access to my real one. Which is interesting because I know that whole issue is very upsetting and concerning to a lot of people who get issued fake ones.

So in ‘96 when I was able to get hold of that, my birth mother's name and hometown were listed. But my birth father's information was left blank because they were not married. And with the magic of the internet, I was able to track down four women, in all of Canada, who had her full name, or at least first and last name, and then maybe 40 women with the first initial and same last name. And then anybody in the small town where she was from in Newfoundland who had the same last name, which apparently was all of her relatives. And looking back, I really was trying to word my little postcard inquiry very benignly and not let the cat out of the bag. I knew that because the adoption agency had given my parents two typewritten pages of non-identifying background information, which I know is just like gold and tons more than lots of adoptees get. Whether it's true or false, even to get it is cool, to have some sort of fairytale to spin out about these people who walked away from raising me. Sorry, what was I gonna tell you?

Haley: You're telling me about the postcard and that the information you put on was benign.

Carrie: Right, well, because the information I had about her– gosh, just thinking about it just overwhelms me with feelings of all the different people I created from that information and how it's still not even close to the person I met when I met my father. But the person that I understood her to be was a school teacher in Vancouver, or she was living in Vancouver and she was a school teacher, so I thought she'd been a school teacher there. But she hadn't. So when I wrote that I was looking for a school teacher from Vancouver, I thought it sounded like I could have been her student, and it just made everyone in her family really suspicious. And she wrote me, although none of the addresses I'd had for her were correct, because she had been unlisted her whole life. She wrote me a really cold letter that basically was about three sentences, and I have it sort-of memorized. It said “Dear Carrie, I understand you've been trying to reach me. My private life is my own,” double underlined. “If you would like to contact me, you can do so at this address.” And she signed her first and last name.

So I thought, well, it wasn't an outright dismissal, the door was still open. And I sent this really crazy, heartfelt letter and I happened to be planning a trip up to Newfoundland and maybe I could see her. And, by some happy coincidence, that letter got returned to me, so she never got that. And I did try again later, and then she never got back to me. So that was heart-wrenching on lots of accounts, but one of them was my own mom who raised me, who was my adoptive mother, but I just call 'my mom' cuz she's the one I experienced as mom. Sharon would've just been so pleased to meet the woman that gave me birth, and check in, and have a cup of tea and talk about how good Sharon had done raising me, and how great I am. That's all she really wanted to do, as a mom. And the rejection of me from my birth mother was as much a slap to my mom, and to see her, I don't know, it was really hard to see that pain reflected back and forth between us. And I was really impressed that she wanted in. Like, she was careful not to assume that I would include her. She asked if she could meet her if I ever did, and I said, “Sure!” And that was a big deal for her. My mom was pretty closed with her emotions. I always remembered that and felt like she was really in my corner, which was huge when that continued to sting over time.

And then I just stuffed that down cuz that's just, I would have to say, it's kind-of a horror story? And the chances are so small that it would happen to someone searching,I don't know for sure the numbers, but it's like 3-5% are rejected as the secondary thing in reunion. At least, rejecting any contact at all happens really rarely. Most people get at least something. And I guess I did get something, but not near what I would like. I would have to say that's hugely unresolved for me.

Haley: I can imagine how hurtful that was. Just three sentences.

Carrie: And looking at it with a lot more compassion, and having done a lot of reading and searching the ladies over at the First Mother's Forum, I posted a letter there asking, “What would one of you ladies say to a mother who refuses contact?” And they were super wonderful and wrote a wonderful response, so that was nice to get that validation like, ‘dude, that sucks and we wouldn't have done that to you’. Yeah, I don't mean it as a scare story, but it would've been nice. I just don't know why it didn't occur to me that that would be the option. I certainly didn't think we would necessarily be super chummy, it'd be kind-of awesome if the Hallmark thing happened, but I just didn't think there would be such a small option. And I get it, that she was sort-of leapt on outta the blue and felt very cornered. I don't know, I guess the door isn't fully closed for me, I haven't given up on that. Always keeping that wound just a little bit open.

But so then I got the other weird 3-5% lottery, which is the percentage of birth fathers that come looking, and since she wouldn't really have contact with me, and I did ask if she would tell me anything more about my past, which was maybe not a very direct way of asking for information about him. Lo and behold 12 years afterwards, in 2008, my birth father– actually what happened was I got an email from the adoption agency social worker who said “We believe that we have a match. In 96, you entered your name to be contacted if any of your birth family, aside from your mother, wanted to find you. Say, brother or an aunt, or an uncle or grandparent, would you be interested in being contacted?” And since it had been so long, they wanted a courtesy follow-up and just not share last names or contact information, go indirect.

And I wrote back immediately and we facilitated a couple times back and forth through the mediator, getting letters through, but then right away went to email contacts. And then I think within a month, three weeks or a month, I drove up to meet my birth father, and for the first time in my life, got to meet another human who belongs to the same genetic tribe, like an actual blood family member. And since I am not a mother myself, I'd never had that before. And I highly recommend it if anyone ever gets the chance. It is terrifying, and will fundamentally change your view of yourself when you get actual knowledge from where you're from, but it's like the butterfly from the cocoon. You gotta be something different if you're gonna change and grow. And I grew immediately. Immediately. You know how like the Grinch, his heart grows three sizes at the end? I have this really visceral image of myself, that adoption had cut me off from my roots in a way that strangled me and collapsed one of my lungs, and when I met my birth father, it was like a lung I didn't know was collapsed, suddenly inflated with air and life. And it was both exhilarating and wonderful. And almost like pins and needles, painful to realize what was missing. It's such an intense cocktail of crazy emotions, good and bad at the same time, it is hard to wrap your heart and head around them. And they happened so fast. We gave each other a big hug and we both were on the verge of tears. And I sat down on the couch and crossed my legs and said, “So. Where the hell have you been?”

And by some wonderful fate, I must have mumbled, or maybe he didn't wanna hear that. He misunderstood me to say, “How the hell have you been?” And we just had a normal start to the conversation, as normal as could be. And I spent the next three days tuning in and out while he tried to give me as much family background information as he could, which was amazing and wonderful. But all I could do was stare at his hands and the nail beds of his fingers and see how they were exactly the same shape as mine, but bigger. And I've always been a really– My mom that raised me was like 98 pounds when she got married. She could model 18th century clothing, and she did. She just had this tiny little waist and wrists the size of little chicken wings, and when I was six years old, I tried on her wedding dress and it couldn't button up the sleeves cuz I'm what you might describe as ‘sturdy’ or just, you know, a little more athletic. And my dad that raised me always hoped I would be a linebacker and get a scholarship to Notre Dame in football. Cuz I was always pretty tough, chasing my big brothers around. Lo and behold, I meet my birth father and instead of the man of English descent that the Catholic Adoption Agency told me about in great detail, non-identifying detail, he was in fact a Métis, a Labrador Métis man. So he's a First Nations population member. Descended from English-Scottish people on one side and Inuit-Innu people of Labrador on the other. Which is a pretty big oversight, to tell just the one side. But it was 1970 and I get it. I can see that a white baby is easier to place than a mixed-race baby, and that's still true today.

It's just so complicated to get that information. I can see those physical characteristics in myself when I look in the mirror now and it makes– I have videos of triple-great uncles portaging canoes up the Churchill River in Labrador to their hunting grounds. They have some cool old videos from the 20’s, movies that have been transcribed to video, you can find them on YouTube. If you look up 'The Lure of the Labrador', and if you see those people working hard, like I suddenly look at my bones and my hands and I go, ‘Okay, I get it. I get what my body was designed to do and where I'm descended from.’ And getting that information is amazing. It's amazing in a lot of ways. But I will also say that there was a really Peter Pan sort of quality where, when you don't know, that you can forever be inventing someone really cool to be your parent. And the hard truth of reunion is that you get to actual people and not to idealized people, and so I'm sure I've got habits that irritate him and he's got his human habits that irritated me. And it was hard to mesh all those things, the gratitude to getting to meet and then realizing, 'oh, this is the actual person now', the loss of the fairytale other people. 'This is what he is bringing and this is what he is bringing to the table. I'm not gonna get to wish him to be any other way, now, this is really what I'm working with.' It's interesting, because I feel like adoption has– I mean, reunion has been really wonderful, but I was surprised at the slight sadness of getting an actual specific person. Like, that's one of the few comforts you have if you grow up without knowing your background. Because, like, my mother could have been Joni Mitchell. Could have been, it could have been a lot of cool people, you know? And then you find out they're regular people.

Haley: I believe when I was younger I was imagining, of course, that I was some sort of princess. And, yeah, that was not the case for me either.

Carrie: I don't know that I– Well, I certainly didn't know that reunion was about to happen to me. And because it happened in a year where I first lost my only pregnancy in March, and then lost my mom that raised me in August, I was in pretty rough shape when my birth father found me in November, all in the same year. But it also was rash to just jump into it. And I studied as much as I could along the way as it was happening, I didn't know it was about to happen. But I don't regret it. I was definitely in the mindset that life is short and you don't know what's gonna happen. And you read so many stories of people that search and search and search and don't get the chance. I almost felt obligated, not only to myself, but to other adoptees. Like, ‘Just take advantage of the chance. Who cares if you don't like what you find at the end, but who would walk away from the chance to know?’ So, it got me propelled up into my car. My birth father is a hunt and peck typist, and so having an email relationship– neither one of us much like talking on the phone, so email was where it was at, and I just couldn't get enough information. And he was very generous and said, “Well, I can answer some of these questions, but if you want the whole story, why don't you come up and visit?” And so I did, and we do maintain contact and I would say the relationship is pretty good now. I had an intense period in the beginning. Got really overwhelmed and I backed out of contact for two years and then he gave me plenty of space. I didn't feel neglected by the space. I was still pretty hot and mad for quite a while, and then when I simmered down enough, I tried again. And ironically, it was one of the genetic gifts he gave me that brought us back together, which is, weirdly, I picked up a love of playing hockey before I met him, when I was living up in Alaska. And for a kid from California descended from no one– well, raised by people, none of whom played hockey or watched hockey, really. And certainly my mother didn't approve of me playing. Yeah, she was not thrilled. She told me quite late in my career. But in the beginning she was sweet and didn't. She kept her mouth shut. But I loved it. And it turns out that Alan played hockey from the time he was very young, and was still quite good. I met him, he was 63 or 64 when we first met, and we had played I guess once already together, or twice. And then when I broke it off for two years, in that time as I was cooling down, I realized that in certain sports and dance, you can communicate through movement in a way without using words. And since we were having trouble using words, I would at least try this other avenue to get back together, and I didn't need it to be anything more than playing hockey. And thankfully he was just ready and waiting for me to cool down, and was able to pick right back up.

And I will say he's been really super generous and in fact, I don't think he'd be upset if I shared this news, but you're familiar with Ann Fessler’s book, The Girls Who Went Away? Well, I don't know if you know, but Ann Fessler put out the call a couple years ago to find any birth fathers that might be interested in being interviewed for her research on their side of the story. And things came up and her research got delayed, but she just got back in touch with with my birth father and he's interested in speaking with her. I’m just really tickled because they're a small percentage, those birth fathers that get found. And to me it's just, I think he's doing it because it matters to me, and that says a lot. He’s doing the best he can with what he has, too. I'm grateful for that in a lot of ways. Okay, so that's my long, arching story of how I got to be me. And it's funny because I, again, up until reunion didn't really– when I was quite young, I was very into being adopted and how it made me special. But it just became something I quite took for granted. And even my brothers really forgot I was adopted. But I will say, I was thinking about this on the way home tonight, there was always a sense– they never used it against me, but people share characteristics in blood groups of family, and there are shared characteristics of people who just live together, for sure. But there were times when I was just different from my family and they would just remark on it like, “You're your own kid. Where did you come from?” kind of thing. And as much as you feel loved, it is very weird to perpetually and at the root feel like not quite ‘in’. And again, it was not malicious. My brothers, I don't think probably ever told me, “They don't love you cuz you're adopted.” They knew I was loved and they loved me too. It was never like that. But there's always just that sense. And my mom was really a tiny kinda girly woman and I'm a hockey-playing granddaughter of trappers and mushers and was a dog musher myself. Like I'm just cut from different cloth. And we overlap and got each other, but yeah, it's weird. And there's hard things in every family. And adoption is a blessing in a lot of ways. I don't mean to be the ungrateful adoptee, but I was so surprised cuz I was always such a cheerleader for adoption. It felt doubly hard to be upended by the reunion process cuz I felt sort-of betrayed by the whole institution. I felt like I'd really only considered the upside. And then you have to, when you meet the people that walked away from you, you have to really confront that part of your history, that you weren't always chosen.

There was actually a part, a little tiny, maybe a couple weeks only, but there was a portion where you weren't chosen. And relinquishment, you would– I know some people have all of the vocabulary and adoption-land is tricky and fraught with shades of fine meaning, but there's no other way to get adopted unless someone lets you go so, waiting to think about that till you're 38 is probably not ideal, and maybe that was part of what really hit me on the head so hard about it. But yeah, I think it was important to do and I'm grateful I had the chance to do it and that I came out the other end, with most everything intact and still moving forward and happy.

Haley: So it sounds like you've done a lot of reading and research, and that those things have helped you do some healing. Have you done any counseling or therapy to go through some of those issues as well?

Carrie: It's interesting. I've only just recently started going to see a lovely woman here who has some knowledge about adoption issues, and then I brought her a book that Laura Dennis recently put out a couple years ago about adoption therapy, from the perspective of adoptees and clinicians and therapists. I read it and loved it and handed it right off to her, and she's been wonderful. The only other time I tried to talk to someone about it, I guess I didn't really even bring it up, it was dealing with alcoholism in my family when I was in my 20s and just rattled off I was adopted as part of the background history. But I don't remember it being brought up at all. I did a lot of reading at the reunion phase and found a lot of online sites too. Two of my really favorite online folks, besides yourself, to connect with: one is Rebecca Hawkes, who on and off keeps a blog, another adoptee. And is it Lost Sisters?

Haley: The Lost Daughters.

Carrie: Sorry, Lost Daughters, yeah. They’re my sisters. Which I guess Rebecca's part of. But yeah those sites and all the people on them, you could branch off and find a ton of great adoptee support there, which was just critical for me in 2008, -09 and -10 as I was trying on new moods and expressing my early unfelt anger at my situation.

Haley: Carrie, do you feel like you hit all the different stages of reunion?

Carrie: Can you quickly remind me what, there's the five maybe or something? Do you have a little list there?

Haley: I have a list that's from Origins, Canada and they have: Fantasy, so that was the imagining that we did when we were young. And the First Contact. Then the First Meeting and the Honeymoon stage, which I think we hit all this already. And then the After The Honeymoon, so things kind-of–

Carrie: Down!

Haley: Yes, and you're like, ‘Oh, you're a real person. Okay.’

Carrie: 'Not interested!'

Haley: And then Time Out, which you said that you did. And then Making Adjustments. And lastly, Ongoing Relationship.

Carrie: Yeah, bingo! Oh my gosh. That's exciting. Yes.

Haley: You see, you're still a poster child. Now you're a poster child for the stages of reunion.

Carrie: Oh, that pleases my inner Hermione. It's amazing. I would not have thought myself to be the person to pull out as violently as I did. But I was upended and I needed to digest. And I guess that's my coping pattern anyway. But it was bigger than any time out I've ever had before. I've never– I'm a compliant, easygoing, overachieving adoptee. I definitely wasn't the acting-out type. If you're gonna divide into two basic groups, I was the Hermione type for sure. So I surprised myself with that long time out. That's nice to see those all listed, the time out, especially.

Haley: I didn't get to time out, but I was close. I was close.

Carrie: Fingers above the plug, just twitching.

Haley: Oh yeah.

Carrie: Well, that was big of you, and you must have learned a lot from that, too. Man, it's amazing how relationships really do put you right in the spot to rub up against the things you need to learn.

Haley: Yes. And I think you were talking about before, I don't know, what I was hearing was– what I've experienced is when you're with them, whoever it is, your birth mother, your birth father, anyone that you're related to, but you've lost time with, it's amazing in the moment, and yet all there is, is grief. It's joy and grief all intermingled. And I can't turn off the grief part and just enjoy the moment.

Carrie: Yes. And for me it was like, if you envision the way, say, a beach ball if you held it underwater, and just kept pushing it deeper and deeper, and then finally let it out. That's what happened with my grief, I think. And it just came out like a fountain. And ‘Where was it from? I'm not sad. Why? Why is this so sad? This can't be sad. I'm super lucky. I got to meet him. He tracked me down. He's trying to make it work. Why is this sad?’ And if you get a little more perspective, of course, there's grief there. Why wouldn't there be grief there? But the popular adoption narrative is one of so much joy and fulfillment and the grief being erased, that there's just not a lot of popular space to experience that. And that just makes it harder. And I think it's surprising because I was walking around not feeling sad, but grief. And they're such a different thing and I didn't really realize how different they were, that you could still be really happy about something and still be just overcome with grief.

Do you know Lori Holden, I think is her last name? @LavLuz, I think is her Twitter handle. She's an adoptive mom and she seems to have a very open mind about things and she's really of the mindset it's 'both, and' instead of 'either/or', which is just so freeing. If you can say, “Yes, I'm grateful I was adopted, and I had terrible grief. Yes, I was grateful for the reunion and it's tearing me apart and I'm suddenly someone you might– My sense of myself is never gonna be who I was before.” And that's good and it's important, but, wow, in my case, I wasn't really ready. I was having a hard year already,

So if you have the chance to time it, yeah, prepare yourself. If you don't have the chance to time it and it lands in your lap: prepare yourself. And if you walk away, that's your choice. But boy, there is a lot to get out of it too.

Haley: Looking back on that, the timing of it and everything, I can't imagine your sorrow from your miscarriage and losing your mom, because I haven't experienced either of those things yet. Was this something that was a distraction? I don't know, were you headed in a different direction and this changed things for you? Do you ever think about that?

Carrie: In some ways it was lovely because it felt like a new– I got a chance to meet my family. I didn't have to do the tricky juggling of worrying about, ‘even though my mom says she was into it, is she feeling threatened?’

And I'm sure we could have worked through it, but in a lot of ways it did simplify things. It also compounded the grief because I really wanted my mom, she would've loved to meet him. She wanted that chance to meet her, and she could have just, if my birth mother had written me back his name. I was so raw already. I think in some ways it propelled me to getting right to the raw emotions right away. I wasn't in a place to fake this reunion. I was not in a place. I was gonna do it to get real with somebody. And if you didn't have it in them, that was fine. But I needed to go and say my truth.

I just didn't realize how hard that would be and how I should have ideally had a little more emotional reserve to fall back on, ideally. In some ways also it's like, ‘Well, everything comes in threes, and I'm already beat down, let’s just get right to the very basics of who I am and build up from there.’

Haley: Thank you so much for sharing all that. That is a lot of big information. It's a big story. So Carrie, I'd love to hear if you have any recommended resources for our listeners. And I have two books actually I'd love to share with you and if you're okay with that. I'll go first. You mentioned Lost Daughters earlier. These are two books from one of the Lost Daughters, Deanna Shrodes, who I know that you're familiar with. And she wrote her memoir Worthy to Be Found, and part two is Restored. And she shares about finding her birth mother, their reunion relationships, their ups and downs, and then just the great grief from her birth mother withholding her birth father's name from her. And I just really love Deanna's heart, and she has a wonderful blog called Adoptee Restoration and her great heart is for adoptees to be restored. Her story is really powerful and I feel so badly that she's still searching for her dad and her mom had that information and she wouldn't give it to her. They're really both really well written books and I really recommend them.

Carrie: I have not read them, although I have spent tons of hours over on Deanna's blog and couldn't agree more. It's such a wonderful voice and heart and empathetic ear. My couple that I would recommend are reunion-specific, and the author is Evelyn Robinson and she's an Australian woman and I found her books on Amazon.

And I believe the one that I read, the reunion one is not in my hand, but it was Adoption Reunion: Ecstasy or Agony? It's a little subtitle. And it really resonated with me as I was just struggling just past the honeymoon phase and not being an American, the perspective was really refreshing. Because it doesn't seem like there's a lot of room in the States for there to be anything but the Hallmark happy narrative, and her book, just the title gave me room to have my reunion be any way that it was, and it could be both. And she has some other books as well that I'd recommend checking out.

Haley: Okay, good. And I can, I'll put a link to it in our show notes so that people can find it. So if our listeners wanna connect with you, Carrie, where can they find you online?

Carrie: My business is to make hats, warm woolen hats that I learned to make when I was living up in Alaska. And, come to find out all my women ancestors were making warm wooly clothing going way back in Labrador, so that's fun to find out.

But my initials are CCM, and then hats, H-A-T-S. So @ccmhats is my handle at Twitter and my Etsy shop for my hats. And I think my Facebook page probably has that and Google and YouTube and wherever else. That was generally what I tried to pick. Oh, actually my Twitter handle isn't that because someone in Germany had that. So my Twitter handle is @CCMFeltHats.

Haley: Okay, I will put a link to that up as well, and I can attest that Carrie's hats are so beautiful. I love your tweets about how you make them, and they're so colorful. And whenever you post a picture of your– I don't know what you call it, your shop, your workshop.

Carrie: The studio.

Haley: The studio, thank you. The hats on the wall, it’s just beautiful.

Carrie: Thank you. And I do love connecting with other adoptees and other people connected with adoption. It's just really added a whole lot to my life to meet people like yourself and the Lost Daughters online and have a community that I never had growing up. So thank you for the chance to get to talk.

Haley: Thank you. Well, I appreciate you being so vulnerable and authentic with us. It's rare to be able to hear someone's story in this depth. So thank you very much.

Carrie: Thank you for asking.

Haley: Didn't Carrie have some beautiful metaphors? If you have some more questions for her or would just like to thank her for sharing with us, you can connect with her on Twitter @CCMFeltHats. To share your story or to ask us a question, visit our website Adopteeson.com. You can send us an email or you can record a short voicemail that we could feature on an upcoming show.

You can also find us on Twitter or Instagram @adopteeson. Today, would you share our show with your adoptee network? We would be thrilled to have your support. Thanks for listening, let's talk again soon.