Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/7
Haley Radke: You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. This is Season One, Episode Seven: Mary Anna. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Today we'll be talking to Mary Anna King, a fellow adoptee who will be sharing her in-family adoption experiences. We discuss calm, and adoptive feelings of guilt and indebtedness. And as always, we will wrap up with some recommended resources for you.
I'd like to welcome our guest today, Mary Anna King.
Mary Anna King: Hello, happy to be here. I'm so excited. Thank you.
Haley Radke: Mary, you have a fascinating adoptee story and I don't want to spoil any of it for our listeners. So would you please begin by sharing your story with us?
Mary Anna King: I am one of seven biological siblings. We were adopted by five different families and we grew up apart. I was the second oldest. I was living with our parents while my five youngest sisters were placed for adoption. Our mother would take us to meet the prospective adoptive parents when she was pregnant with our sisters, to sort of vet them, I think. So I remember meeting some of my sister's parents. I remember being there the days they were born, and I always knew that they were out in the world somewhere. So from as long as I could remember, my first sister was adopted when I was two and a half, so it never seemed strange to me. You have more than you need, you share, and we just happened to have more babies than we needed, so we shared them. I've always been waiting for my sisters to come and find me. I always felt that they would.
Then when I was 10, I was adopted myself by my maternal grandfather and his second wife. I am kind of an in-family adoptee. I'd only met them a couple of times before. I was sent to live with them because my birth mother had run away from their house when she was a teenager. So there was a little bit of a ‘getting to know you’ phase, even though we were technically related. And I was lucky enough to be adopted alongside one of my sisters. So I grew up with a sister. And I also grew up separated from my sisters.
I guess the end of the story is that I ended up writing a book about our experience. I always consider the book a love story about siblings because it does follow that classic journey of: we were together; then we were separated; we overcome great odds; and we find each other again. Also, my way of being a sister to my siblings while we were separated was sort of cataloging our story so I could answer their questions when they came back. I guess because of my slightly tumultuous young childhood, I just intuited that they would have questions, because I had questions. So I kept journals, and I wrote things down so I would remember. When I started writing the book, I actually went back and read through some of those journals. And that’s mortifying, reading your journals from middle school and high school, it's just, oh, so much angst. But they were good resources to have. So when my sisters did return, I had, you know, because you always have those conversations that adults don't want you to hear, that you know you're not meant to hear, that I definitely overheard many times when I was a kid. And I would scribble those down and keep track of things. So then when my sisters did return and we all met and the reunions were over, I had this sort of catalog of everything that had happened to us, and why we had been split up and how we found each other again, and the feelings that had arisen there. Because reunion, it’s very joyful and it can be very exciting, but it can also have a lot of crashes. Which I was not expecting, and I know my sisters weren't either. And that's something that not a lot of– it's tricky to diagnose because I wouldn't say that any of the crashes were so horrible that I wished that we'd never met, but I think you have to be honest, if you're going to help fellow adoptees through a similar journey, that crashes are normal, complicated feelings are normal. If you're feeling complicated feelings in your reunion, you're doing it right, I think. Because there was certainly nobody telling us that. It was a bit like just wandering into the dark together.
Haley Radke: And you had multiple reunions over a period of time.
Mary Anna King: Yes. My first sister found me in 2001. She emailed me September 4th, 2001, when I was a sophomore in college, and it was a little bit earlier than I was expecting. Because I figured she wouldn't come looking for us until she was 18 and I knew her birthdate, so I was supposed to be 22 and out of college, and a very successful, wonderful person by that point. I was supposed to be a fully ripened adult by the time she came to find me. She started looking early. She found us when she was 16 and her adoptive mother was incredibly supportive of her search. It was really wonderful to see the two of them together and watch them interact with this whole thing, because it can be a very trying time for everyone involved. Lisa found us a little bit early. I was not prepared even though I had known from the time I was two and a half that she was going to come find me someday, this very long-range game of Hide and Seek.
When she did find me, I really had no idea how to react or what to do. I was in my dorm room in this tiny liberal arts college in central New York. I just kind of sat on my floor for, I don't even know how long, staring at the wall and the ceiling. Because I was very uncomfortable looking at my face, I remember, in that moment. Because I had this mirror on one wall and I had these beautiful windows that looked out over the quad, but when the sun went down, they’re basically big mirrors too. And my own face was freaking me out, when I was trying to download this information. So I sat on the floor so I couldn't see my face anywhere. And I called my sister, Becca, the sister I'd grown up with, and she wasn't home. She was at her dorm at Oklahoma State at the time, and she was out. She was not available, and I was so mad at her for not being there when I needed to talk to her.
And then of course I was an RA and I was on duty that night, so I had to keep my door open, and check out the vacuum cleaner and things like that to people. So it was very strange to feel that the world was forcing me to be exposed, in a moment where I just wanted to crawl under my bed, and pass out, and not think about all of these weird feelings. I was excited. I was terrified. I was elated. I wanted to be sedated. It was just very, very complicated. And so because I was so unsure how I felt about it, I found it impossible to describe to anyone. So I just didn't tell any of my friends what I was going through or what I was dealing with in that moment.
And after our reunion, after we first met over Thanksgiving of that year, I lost my voice for a month. I went to a doctor and she put a scope down my throat because the general practitioner physician couldn't find anything wrong with me. So they scoped my throat and she said, “Oh, well it looks like a lot of acid reflux, a lot of gastroenteritis or gastric distress.” And so she prescribed all of these pills and things for me to take. I couldn't talk for a month, and then of course I look back on it now and I think, ‘Well, of course it was this psychic reaction to not knowing how to talk about what I was going through, and so my body just decided we're not gonna talk about anything.’
Haley Radke: I’ve heard from a couple of adoptees in a group that I'm in that they have not lost their voice, but have had different– like eczema or some other physical manifestations, especially in stressful times.
Mary Anna King: For me, I know, and I feel like probably this had to be true for many of your fellow adoptees too, is that if someone had told me in the moment, ”Oh, this is a reaction to your reunion with your sister,” I would've laughed and said, “You're crazy. That doesn't make any sense.” The connection didn't feel physical. It didn't feel directly related, but of course it was. Absolutely it was, but I was completely incapable of breaking down these little compartments about ‘this is health’ and ‘this is family’ and ‘this is–’ everything was in its box, just like a little kid with those plates with the compartments in it so nothing bleeds together. I very much was very big on nothing bleeding together in my life, which was part of the reason I went to a school so far away from anyone who knew me. I had my biological family in New Jersey, and then I had my adoptive family in Oklahoma, which was kind of a very clean compartment because the only biological family members I had in Oklahoma were my grandfather and my sister. All of the other family, the cousins and aunts and uncles and things like that, were my step-grandmother's family, who were not directly related to us. And she was my grandfather's second wife, so they had gotten married much later in life. And all of her family anticipated they wouldn't have any children, and then suddenly they had me and my sister, so that was an interesting negotiation there as well.
So it was this very compartmentalized experience. And then I went away to university in central New York where nobody knew me. I didn't have any friends from my childhood or my high school. Nobody knew anything about me that I didn't tell them. And that was the sort of thing too, because we had moved to Oklahoma and when we had been adopted, it was this very public experience in our community, in our church especially. Everybody knew when my grandparents adopted me and my sister, everybody knew when our names changed. We were attending a very small school at that point too, and so everybody knew what our situation was. I don't know if they knew about our biological parents and why we had been sent to live with our grandparents and then were later adopted by them, but there was very much this experience, I remember I was in fifth grade and it was the end of the term sort-of awards ceremony. I'd won some award for something, I can't remember what it was. It was probably perfect attendance or something like that. And my teacher read my name with my new last name, because I'd previously been Mary Paul, and now I was Mary Anna King, and it jolted me intensely that it felt very public. And she was of course doing it to be very welcoming and very warm, and embrace this family story and be very supportive of our little bit of a transition, but I remember feeling very exposed in that moment. It was very much a relief my first year of university to not have anyone who knew me; to have these very clean words when I said mother and father, everyone knew I was talking about one person and it was my father, who dropped me off at school, and my mother, who was not there that day because she'd just gotten outta the hospital with a lung ailment.
So, mother, father, very clear, very cut and dry just like everyone else had. And then I started communicating with my biological mother. And we had spoken all through my childhood. She was very present over the phone. She came out to visit a couple of times. She was always very present, always sending me letters and things like that. I still have quite a few of the letters she sent me when I was a kid, and they don't say anything specific. They just said things like a quick scribble on a notepad saying, “Just got home from work, thinking of you, love you, Mom.” And that was really– I kept them. I kept them, for some reason. They were very sweet and very simple, but it was more just knowing this constant presence was out there wishing me well. Which was lovely and wonderful, because even though we were adopted by family, it was still a difficult transition because we had these intergenerational differences, because our adoptive parents were so much older than my sister and I were, and we were very, very different generations.
They, of course, had me, they didn't get me until I was seven, and then it was only meant to be a temporary situation. And then two years went by and they started the process to adopt my sister and me. They had Becca since she was three months old because she had a stomach ailment and she couldn't really eat, and our birth parents were too poor to really get her the medical attention she needed. So my adoptive mother took Becca to Oklahoma when she was three months old, and they got her tended to. And she was perfectly healthy and very sassy very quickly. So they'd had her all along and they had expressed an interest in adopting her before they ever got me alongside her. So it seemed very natural that they would adopt the two of us together. I remember feeling that it was my choice. It was presented to me as my choice. I could stay in Oklahoma with my sister and my grandparents and not be adopted; I could go back to New Jersey to live with my mom; or I could stay in Oklahoma, be adopted and change my name; or I could not change my name and still be adopted.
And the kicker really for me, was that my sister was definitely going to get adopted. That was going to happen, and we were sitting in the living room one night watching television. She, during a commercial break, very knowingly says to me, “You know, if I get adopted and you don't, I'm gonna be your aunt.” And I was nine at the time and I thought, ‘Never! You will never be my aunt.’
So we, you know, held hands and jumped together and took the opportunity to change my name, because the changing of the name actually really did help solidify our family unit a little bit more. When you don't have the same name on all of the school forms and things like that, people have questions in their mind whether or not they ask them. So that was actually nice. And I like my name. I like my name now. It was a little bit of a transition for me, but I very much like my name.
Haley Radke: In your book, you share why it was just you and your sister adopted, but your grandfather and his wife, they didn't know about the other children?
Mary Anna King: They did not. Yes, that's a very important point. My birth parents kept a pretty tight lid on the adoptions of my younger sisters. I sensed from our birth mother, that a little bit from her end, she felt a little bit ashamed about it. I don't know if that's the word she would use, but it seems that she just didn't want people to know because she didn't think they would understand. I definitely saw her go through a process of, when she was placing my sisters for adoption, everyone around her was saying, “You're doing a good thing. You're doing the best thing. You're doing a brave thing.” And then once they were adopted and they were gone, and people in her life later found out that she had placed these children for adoption, “Oh, she was horrible. How could she have done that? They could never part with their children that way. And what a horrible thing to have done.’” And that was a very bizarre thing for me to wrangle with, because I always understood that she placed my sisters for adoption out of a desire for them to have something more than she felt she could offer them, that she wanted them to have something better. Because she had been in foster care herself as a child. She had been a runaway. She had never really felt that she fit in with her biological family. Family was a big struggle for her. She very much wanted to keep all of my sisters, she really did, but they just didn't have the money. And my biological father sort of felt that it was part of a divine plan, that this was God's will that he and my mother were meant to place these children with couples who ordinarily would not have been able to have children. This was in the 80s and 90s before in vitro fertilization was really commercially available in the States, so it was not a far stretch to think that, you know, these couples that were adopting my sisters would not have otherwise had children. And that carried a lot of weight with my biological father, from what I know. But even still, they did not tell a lot of people about it, and I've always wondered why that was. I know it was a different time, but there wasn't an opportunity for anyone else in the extended family to step in and say, “Let me help you. If you need help, I can help.”
And that was one of the things with my grandfather-cum-adoptive-father. When he did just find out about the younger girls their adoptions had long ago been finalized. They were school age by the time he discovered they existed, he very much felt very saddened by that. And I remember during one of the reunions when I was going back to Becca's to meet my sister Little Rebecca –beause there are two Rebecca's, of course there are– he drove me to the airport and he said, “Would you make sure she knows we would've taken all of you?” And that's been a really important thing for him to articulate as he's been mean, because he is of course, all of their biological grandfather as well. So that was a really important thing for him to feel that they knew that if he had known he would've helped. If he had known, he would've done more. He would've done something.
Haley Radke: I can't imagine the feelings for him. You know, he's trying to keep your family intact by taking you and your sister, and then to know that he just didn't have the opportunity.
Mary Anna King: Yeah, to help out any more than that. Or to– yeah. He's a very fascinating man, and I just always think of him like a rock, like he's just very sturdy, very stable. He's always there. Some people can mistake that for boring, I suppose. But when you are living in a storm, that's a very comforting image to have. Say, “Oh, all I have to do is get to that spot to have one stationary point.”
As a kid though, I felt very troubled by some idea that somehow becoming too entrenched in my adoptive family, I was somehow choosing them over my birth mom, who I loved beyond reason. I mean, just like a child loves a mother. I just– she had an innate skill at just being delighted by her children. I mean, every little thing I did, she was fascinated by, and she was supportive of everything, and it didn't matter what I did. We had an extreme, immediate connection that was easy. We didn't have to think about it. Then coming into Oklahoma where kids didn't like me because I talked funny, and I was coming into this community that was already, you know, had already grown into itself. And my grandparents-cum-adoptive-parents very much I think, had been a little heartbroken when my sister left for a very brief time, and I think that they were a little bit on guard when we first came to Oklahoma, against being hurt again. So it made a solid connection for all of us a little tricky, and there was no one really to talk to about that. There was no one to reach out to and say, “How do we do this? How do we knit a connection together where one did not exist before?”
I had been a little bit of a wild, running-around-the-neighborhood kid. I'd been a free-range kid in New Jersey and I'd been accustomed to that, and in Oklahoma, that was just not the way things were. It was a tricky transition and I think it would've helped very much if someone, instead of saying, “Oh, well they're family, they know each other. It'll be easy,” had checked in a little bit more to say, you know, “How are you doing? Are you having difficulties connecting on any of these levels or understanding one another in any of these ways?” Or even just to say “It's okay if it's difficult. If it's difficult, you're doing it right. It's going to get better. It will get easier.” But there was no one to say that. There was no one even directly to reach out to for that kind of conversation. So I do hope that in the future, that we as a community find better ways to give people resources like that.
Haley Radke: Yes. That's definitely so important. And in your case, I mean, I'm assuming, I guess in-family ones, that there aren't the social workers and the other support that sometimes, you know, new adoptive parents might have.
Mary Anna King: I think it depends. We had definitely, I remember there being a home study. I remember there being a social worker that came into the house. Once. I don't remember her ever coming back, but I remember she was there at least once, and she was there for about five or six hours talking with my adoptive parents, and Becca and I, of course, little performers that we were, in music lessons and dance lessons and all of these things, could not have been more excited to have an audience. So we were playing piano, and dancing, and just being goofballs. I think we actually played a duet on the piano, which at that age we would never have been capable of doing without, you know, someone getting pushed off the piano bench if we had not had a stranger there to perform for.
So yeah, I remember there was at least one home study. I remember the day we went to the courthouse to get the whole thing finalized, and I was 10 at that point, and I had thought it was going to be like a court TV show, like something similar to Law and Order where we would go into a courtroom and there would be a judge in a robe at the thing, taking all of us in and making a decision and saying, “Yes, let's stamp all of this. This looks great. Everyone's fantastic,” and making it– that it would've felt more official. But we were in just sort of an anteroom to the judge's chambers. It was very small. It was very hot. It was very dry. I remember, I think she had red hair, at least in my memory she does. And just sort of going through and just, “Okay, okay–” signing things. And I don't remember there ever being a conversation sort of, you know, like you do with a wedding or something where you say, “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” or “I now pronounce you–” if it happened. And I realized, when it didn't happen, that's what I'd been expecting. I'd been expecting a sort of ceremony, and there wasn't one. And then we went to the Social Security office to get our Social Security cards changed, because our names were different now. And I was 10 and so they had me sign it, and I thought that was really weird. When you're born and you get a Social Security number and a card and things like that, you don't sign it. But I had to sign this one, and it was the first time I'd written my full new adopted person name. I was really hoping that someone in the Social Security office, or someone– I wanted there to be an audience for this day. There had been an audience when the social worker had come to the house. I wanted there to be an audience to make it feel more real, to make it feel more ceremonial, I guess. I remember very distinctly wanting the woman on the other side of the window where I was signing my social security card to say, “You know, what's going on? And what's the story here?” But she could not have been less interested. So yeah, I remember feeling very much that I wanted it be more ceremonial. And then we went home and ate hamburgers. And Becca and I didn't go back to school that day. And then the next day we did go back to school and our names were different, and then a couple weeks later, the award ceremony happened, which was the first time anyone had occasion to say my full name. And I felt like that was too real. I wanted there to be an audience when I wanted an audience, and then I wanted there to not be one when I didn't want one.
Haley Radke: Oh, that's funny. Yeah. And I guess there's so many adoptees that, you know, it happens in infancy or very young, and so there's not these memories, so you've had to process in a different way. You talk in your book about feeling very indebted to your grandfather and Mimi. Would you talk a little bit about that?
Mary Anna King: I think that came from– it definitely came from me, personally. It was something that I absorbed. It was not something, anything anybody ever said to me. Nobody said, “Oh, you owe them for rescuing you.” I just felt it intrinsically, and I remember with my birth family, we had struggled quite a bit financially. We were rather poor. And I never felt that poor, because everyone around us was in the same situation. So it didn't seem that we were any different from anyone else in the world. Then, when I went to Oklahoma, my grandparents were solidly middle class. They were not millionaires, they were just very responsible and had saved up over the years and taken care of things. So I remember feeling the day that I walked into their house. We were coming from five of us living in a two-bedroom little apartment in New Jersey. My brother and my sister and I shared a bedroom. We spent most of our time just running around outside, because outside was much larger than the apartment. So going to Oklahoma, suddenly this was a three-bedroom house with an attic and a basement, and two dens, and an acre backyard, and dogs, and lots and lots of furniture, and a washer and dryer in the house, and a refrigerator that you opened that had two doors. And there was food everywhere. The thing that I struck me the most was when right before we went to bed, we had some kind of a snack, and Mimi opened the the pantry and looking at these floor-to-ceiling shelves of cereal and crackers and cookies and snacks was like going to the grocery store. I mean, because we had food in New Jersey, but we never had that much on hand, constantly. And they had air conditioning, which was a big one. Big difference. I remember feeling, ‘Oh my gosh, we were broke!’ Like, ‘We lived in a cracker box. What is this?’
And I realized very consciously, although I may not have put it in these words at that age, but I felt very consciously that choosing to stay here was choosing socioeconomic security. That in some way I was voting that money and security were better than love, were stronger and more important than this very real, ferocious connection I had with my birth mother. And I also felt my grandparents at that point were, my grandfather retired pretty soon after we we were adopted, and I remember very clearly feeling that this was the time in their life where they were supposed to travel and they were meant to do things that they had postponed for so long while they were buying houses and setting up retirement accounts and things like that, that this was the time in their life that they were meant to relax and they couldn't because they had us.
No one ever articulated that to me. I just felt it, and I felt very much that because of all of that, because of what they were sacrificing to take care of me and my sister, and give us dance lessons and music lessons and prom dresses, that I did not want to be a problem. I wanted to be the most excellent, inoffensive, wonderful child I possibly could be so that I wouldn't be sort of deepening the debt, that I wouldn't be making it harder than it actually was.
Haley Radke: I think a lot of adoptees might feel that way, subconsciously. I know I felt that way. I don't know if I've shared this before, but my husband and I were going to adopt. I felt like I owed that somehow to the world, that there's some poor baby somewhere that needs a home. I think that's the public script for adoption, and I definitely felt that subconsciously. I don't remember ever thinking it the way you– I think you actually maybe thought those things. But it was in my spirit. Probably I didn't realize until I was coming out of the fog that was the case for me too.
Mary Anna King: Yeah, I think it's important for me to articulate that. I never felt that from my adoptive parents. And I never felt that from my birth family either. It was simply –and I don't think there's anything they could have done to have erased that sense– it was just something I definitely felt based on what I saw, because kids are like sponges. And based on the things that I had absorbed up to that point, I was just always going to feel that way.
When Mimi got sick –she was hospitalized right after I graduated high school– I was so angry with my sister Becca, because she processed Mimi's illness in a much different way than I did. She really just didn't want to see it up close. She wanted to keep her distance. I feel like because she kept such a distance, she could still deny that it was sort of going on, and she could preserve herself emotionally a little bit. And I was so angry with her that she couldn't just make it easier for everybody, that she couldn't just come in and pitch in. If she wasn't gonna be at the hospital, couldn't she make dinner for everyone so that when we came home there was something? And I was so angry with her then, but I think she was actually just really feeling the emotion of the situation in a way that I was not at the time, because I was focused so very much on ticking the boxes of being at the hospital, and tending to answering the nurse's questions, and brushing Mimi's hair, and making sure she ate, and coming home and cooking dinner, and cleaning the house, and making sure that it was everything was the way Mimi would've kept it while she was there. So that when she came home –because of course she was coming home and she was coming home soon-- so that when she came home, everything was just as it had been. And for me it was– we were just different. We just dealt with it in different ways. My sister was angry with me, too, that I was sort of doing all of these things and not leaving any room for her to pitch in, a way.
She's my best, best friend, Becca is my best friend at this point in life, and it was so wonderful to have her to go through these reunions with, to have someone that I knew so deeply and who knew me, and that I didn't have to be polite around, and who could also sort of help diagnose the tumultuous aspect of it. We, oh my gosh, we could not have been more antagonistic toward one another in those years of our lives. But I realize now that is a function of love, in that I knew she wasn't going anywhere and she knew I wasn't going anywhere. So we could be ugly to one another because we were always going to keep showing up.
Haley Radke: Those safe people in our lives take the brunt of it, don't they?
Mary Anna King: They do, unfortunately!
Haley Radke: I would love it if you would talk a little bit about your perspective shift. You talk about this in the book, the triple-win perspective, going to triple-loss. Can you unpack that?
Mary Anna King: I had always been waiting for the happy ending to happen with my sibling story. I grew up watching Disney Movie-of-the-Weeks and Hallmark movies and things like that, and I was waiting for the happy ending resolution where everyone got along and held hands and danced around a maypole together, I guess. Where everyone fit easily, and somehow all of this would make sense. I realized around the time that Mimi passed that it wasn't gonna happen that way. There was no maypole in the future. It was just all of us, here, doing the best we could. And as I started really unpacking some of the difficulties, some of the ups and downs of the reunions that I'd seen and been a part of. You know, the incredible, exuberant meeting; and then the crash; and then dealing with the aftermath of the potentially stepped-upon feelings of birth family and an adoptive family; and people who felt shortchanged; and people who were angry, even though they hadn't been expecting to be. I started thinking more about everyone else's perspective in it and about maybe some of the more unsettling feelings that I had not been comfortable articulating when I was younger.
That was really, for me, when I realized what a lot of adoptive people that I've spoken to have realized as well, that there is a win aspect to adoption of: child needs family; family wants child; family can't take care of child; everyone gets that need met. But then, of course, all of those wins have incredibly closely linked losses that frequently– In the case of my sister's adoptive parents, many of them had struggled with infertility and they had miscarried children. Whether they had lost actual children or they had simply lost the idea of having their own children, their own biological children, they had lost something before adoption ever became a real option for them. My biological parents clearly lost their offspring. My birth mother, who had very much wanted children and was very good with children, and who loves her children, lost all of us. And then of course, my adoptive parents lost their retirement. They lost their years of traveling, and going to Hawaii, and getting to be just grandparents where you know, you have the kids over holidays and you spoil them rotten and then you send them back to their parents to deal with They'd lost that. And I, of course, had lost, and my siblings and I lost one another. It seems a little disingenuous for me now when I talk about adoption. When people ask me sometimes, you know, “Give me two upsides of adoption,” I can never just say two good things about adoption without also saying that yes, there are good aspects and these are good, but for me they will always exist immediately and intrinsically linked to the losses. That for me is the tension of existing in the world as an adopted person, is that all things are true and nothing is strong enough to erase the others. My siblings, my biological siblings are my siblings, and they are real. They are also, on paper, strangers. Both things are true. Neither one of them is strong enough to erase the other. Because they influence one another and they impact one another constantly. And part of the reason I called my book Bastards is because when I did finally start articulating my relationship with my siblings and the nature of our family, I had people who would say –not trying to be malicious, just trying to synthesize the story– “Oh, well, but they're not your real sister. Your real sister is Becca. But they're not your real sisters.” And that's where I started the phrase of saying, “No, everyone is real. They're not ghosts.” Like, “Everyone is real here.” And that's what makes it tricky and confounding sometimes. I sometimes have difficulty on holidays, big holidays, like Thanksgiving and Christmas, because those are days everyone spends with their family. And people very frequently take that for granted, that family is this very simple concept. But I can't possibly spend Thanksgiving with all of my family because every single one of us has a sort of primary family that we spend time with on those days, and if we don't, they will feel a loss. And I would feel a loss, too. That's the thing, is that either way I go, on the other side of it there's a loss. And I'm not saying that to be sad or bring anyone down, it's just to honestly articulate what the world feels like and what it looks like to me.
Haley Radke: That's so well put, thank you.
Well, I would love it if we could share our recommended resources, and I'm going to start by recommending your memoir. It's so wonderfully written, Mary, I honestly loved it. It's fascinating and candid and funny and sad, and it's everything. You share so many deep feelings as well as just what day-to-day life was for you. So I would love it if our listeners would pick up a copy. Like you said, it's called Bastards: A Memoir, and where can we find it?
Mary Anna King: You can find it at pretty much any major bookseller. I know they've got it at Barnes and Noble. You can go through IndieBound and find your local independent bookseller. I love independent booksellers. Also, it's on Amazon, too, and it recently came out in paperback. And a lot of libraries have it too. So you can check it out at the library, that's fine.
Haley Radke: I did get it at the library. That's my source, so yeah, it's well-read, but I definitely will buy a copy, because I loved it and there's so many good things to refer back to. Now that you've described some of the ways you've kept journals and things, it's evident, because the memories that you share, they're so clear and vivid, and so that's cool to hear.
Okay, and what would you like to recommend?
Mary Anna King: I would definitely recommend for any human, but definitely all of the adopted ones as well, Angela Tucker's amazing site, The Adopted Life. She's also doing a little bit of a series, that you can watch the episodes on the website. And Angela, she did the wonderful documentary Closure a couple of years ago, where she followed her journey in reuniting with her biological parents, and it's fascinating, and so honest and heartfelt, and complicated and wonderful. You can find information about how to watch Closure through her website, theadoptedlife.com. But she also has these wonderful blog posts. She really articulates the experience of being an adopted person, and also unpacking transracial adoptee perspectives very eloquently and thoughtfully.
Haley Radke: Yes, I agree. So where can our listeners connect with you online?
Mary Anna King: I do post sometimes on my website, maryannaking.com. And I also, more frequently ,tweet on Twitter: @MaryAnnaKing, spelled just like it sounds.
Haley Radke: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for sharing your time with us today, and I know our listeners are going to love hearing from you personally and reading your book, so thank you.
Mary Anna King: Thank you, Haley. Thank you so much. It was an absolute pleasure.
Haley Radke: If you have more questions for Mary Anna, or to thank her for sharing her heart with us, please connect with her on Twitter @MaryAnnaKing. To find the show notes, ask a question, or share your adoptee story, visit our website, Adopteeson.com. We also love to chat with you on Twitter or Instagram @adopteeson.
Today, would you please show someone how to subscribe to our podcast? Just take their phone and add us! You'll be able to discuss the episodes with them and you'll seem technologically advanced in their eyes. Thanks for listening, let's talk again soon.
You guys, I have a little postscript for you. Two things: I wanted to let you know that Angela Tucker has her second episode out of her web series, The Adopted Life. It's awesome. So check it out on her website.
And I also want to thank you for all of your emails and tweets. I am honored to share these stories with you. I recently lost my grandma and I was struggling to finish producing this episode for you. I'm sure you know how funeral and grief and all the family stuff can disrupt a schedule, but I want you to know that all of your kind words and seeing your tweets recommending the show, that encouraged me immensely in this hard season. Thank you again for your support.
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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 Seven: Mary Anna. I'm your host, Haley Radke. Today we'll be talking to Mary Anna King, a fellow adoptee who will be sharing her in-family adoption experiences. We discuss calm, and adoptive feelings of guilt and indebtedness. And as always, we will wrap up with some recommended resources for you.
I'd like to welcome our guest today, Mary Anna King.
Mary Anna King: Hello, happy to be here. I'm so excited. Thank you.
Haley Radke: Mary, you have a fascinating adoptee story and I don't want to spoil any of it for our listeners. So would you please begin by sharing your story with us?
Mary Anna King: I am one of seven biological siblings. We were adopted by five different families and we grew up apart. I was the second oldest. I was living with our parents while my five youngest sisters were placed for adoption. Our mother would take us to meet the prospective adoptive parents when she was pregnant with our sisters, to sort of vet them, I think. So I remember meeting some of my sister's parents. I remember being there the days they were born, and I always knew that they were out in the world somewhere. So from as long as I could remember, my first sister was adopted when I was two and a half, so it never seemed strange to me. You have more than you need, you share, and we just happened to have more babies than we needed, so we shared them. I've always been waiting for my sisters to come and find me. I always felt that they would.
Then when I was 10, I was adopted myself by my maternal grandfather and his second wife. I am kind of an in-family adoptee. I'd only met them a couple of times before. I was sent to live with them because my birth mother had run away from their house when she was a teenager. So there was a little bit of a ‘getting to know you’ phase, even though we were technically related. And I was lucky enough to be adopted alongside one of my sisters. So I grew up with a sister. And I also grew up separated from my sisters.
I guess the end of the story is that I ended up writing a book about our experience. I always consider the book a love story about siblings because it does follow that classic journey of: we were together; then we were separated; we overcome great odds; and we find each other again. Also, my way of being a sister to my siblings while we were separated was sort of cataloging our story so I could answer their questions when they came back. I guess because of my slightly tumultuous young childhood, I just intuited that they would have questions, because I had questions. So I kept journals, and I wrote things down so I would remember. When I started writing the book, I actually went back and read through some of those journals. And that’s mortifying, reading your journals from middle school and high school, it's just, oh, so much angst. But they were good resources to have. So when my sisters did return, I had, you know, because you always have those conversations that adults don't want you to hear, that you know you're not meant to hear, that I definitely overheard many times when I was a kid. And I would scribble those down and keep track of things. So then when my sisters did return and we all met and the reunions were over, I had this sort of catalog of everything that had happened to us, and why we had been split up and how we found each other again, and the feelings that had arisen there. Because reunion, it’s very joyful and it can be very exciting, but it can also have a lot of crashes. Which I was not expecting, and I know my sisters weren't either. And that's something that not a lot of– it's tricky to diagnose because I wouldn't say that any of the crashes were so horrible that I wished that we'd never met, but I think you have to be honest, if you're going to help fellow adoptees through a similar journey, that crashes are normal, complicated feelings are normal. If you're feeling complicated feelings in your reunion, you're doing it right, I think. Because there was certainly nobody telling us that. It was a bit like just wandering into the dark together.
Haley Radke: And you had multiple reunions over a period of time.
Mary Anna King: Yes. My first sister found me in 2001. She emailed me September 4th, 2001, when I was a sophomore in college, and it was a little bit earlier than I was expecting. Because I figured she wouldn't come looking for us until she was 18 and I knew her birthdate, so I was supposed to be 22 and out of college, and a very successful, wonderful person by that point. I was supposed to be a fully ripened adult by the time she came to find me. She started looking early. She found us when she was 16 and her adoptive mother was incredibly supportive of her search. It was really wonderful to see the two of them together and watch them interact with this whole thing, because it can be a very trying time for everyone involved. Lisa found us a little bit early. I was not prepared even though I had known from the time I was two and a half that she was going to come find me someday, this very long-range game of Hide and Seek.
When she did find me, I really had no idea how to react or what to do. I was in my dorm room in this tiny liberal arts college in central New York. I just kind of sat on my floor for, I don't even know how long, staring at the wall and the ceiling. Because I was very uncomfortable looking at my face, I remember, in that moment. Because I had this mirror on one wall and I had these beautiful windows that looked out over the quad, but when the sun went down, they’re basically big mirrors too. And my own face was freaking me out, when I was trying to download this information. So I sat on the floor so I couldn't see my face anywhere. And I called my sister, Becca, the sister I'd grown up with, and she wasn't home. She was at her dorm at Oklahoma State at the time, and she was out. She was not available, and I was so mad at her for not being there when I needed to talk to her.
And then of course I was an RA and I was on duty that night, so I had to keep my door open, and check out the vacuum cleaner and things like that to people. So it was very strange to feel that the world was forcing me to be exposed, in a moment where I just wanted to crawl under my bed, and pass out, and not think about all of these weird feelings. I was excited. I was terrified. I was elated. I wanted to be sedated. It was just very, very complicated. And so because I was so unsure how I felt about it, I found it impossible to describe to anyone. So I just didn't tell any of my friends what I was going through or what I was dealing with in that moment.
And after our reunion, after we first met over Thanksgiving of that year, I lost my voice for a month. I went to a doctor and she put a scope down my throat because the general practitioner physician couldn't find anything wrong with me. So they scoped my throat and she said, “Oh, well it looks like a lot of acid reflux, a lot of gastroenteritis or gastric distress.” And so she prescribed all of these pills and things for me to take. I couldn't talk for a month, and then of course I look back on it now and I think, ‘Well, of course it was this psychic reaction to not knowing how to talk about what I was going through, and so my body just decided we're not gonna talk about anything.’
Haley Radke: I’ve heard from a couple of adoptees in a group that I'm in that they have not lost their voice, but have had different– like eczema or some other physical manifestations, especially in stressful times.
Mary Anna King: For me, I know, and I feel like probably this had to be true for many of your fellow adoptees too, is that if someone had told me in the moment, ”Oh, this is a reaction to your reunion with your sister,” I would've laughed and said, “You're crazy. That doesn't make any sense.” The connection didn't feel physical. It didn't feel directly related, but of course it was. Absolutely it was, but I was completely incapable of breaking down these little compartments about ‘this is health’ and ‘this is family’ and ‘this is–’ everything was in its box, just like a little kid with those plates with the compartments in it so nothing bleeds together. I very much was very big on nothing bleeding together in my life, which was part of the reason I went to a school so far away from anyone who knew me. I had my biological family in New Jersey, and then I had my adoptive family in Oklahoma, which was kind of a very clean compartment because the only biological family members I had in Oklahoma were my grandfather and my sister. All of the other family, the cousins and aunts and uncles and things like that, were my step-grandmother's family, who were not directly related to us. And she was my grandfather's second wife, so they had gotten married much later in life. And all of her family anticipated they wouldn't have any children, and then suddenly they had me and my sister, so that was an interesting negotiation there as well.
So it was this very compartmentalized experience. And then I went away to university in central New York where nobody knew me. I didn't have any friends from my childhood or my high school. Nobody knew anything about me that I didn't tell them. And that was the sort of thing too, because we had moved to Oklahoma and when we had been adopted, it was this very public experience in our community, in our church especially. Everybody knew when my grandparents adopted me and my sister, everybody knew when our names changed. We were attending a very small school at that point too, and so everybody knew what our situation was. I don't know if they knew about our biological parents and why we had been sent to live with our grandparents and then were later adopted by them, but there was very much this experience, I remember I was in fifth grade and it was the end of the term sort-of awards ceremony. I'd won some award for something, I can't remember what it was. It was probably perfect attendance or something like that. And my teacher read my name with my new last name, because I'd previously been Mary Paul, and now I was Mary Anna King, and it jolted me intensely that it felt very public. And she was of course doing it to be very welcoming and very warm, and embrace this family story and be very supportive of our little bit of a transition, but I remember feeling very exposed in that moment. It was very much a relief my first year of university to not have anyone who knew me; to have these very clean words when I said mother and father, everyone knew I was talking about one person and it was my father, who dropped me off at school, and my mother, who was not there that day because she'd just gotten outta the hospital with a lung ailment.
So, mother, father, very clear, very cut and dry just like everyone else had. And then I started communicating with my biological mother. And we had spoken all through my childhood. She was very present over the phone. She came out to visit a couple of times. She was always very present, always sending me letters and things like that. I still have quite a few of the letters she sent me when I was a kid, and they don't say anything specific. They just said things like a quick scribble on a notepad saying, “Just got home from work, thinking of you, love you, Mom.” And that was really– I kept them. I kept them, for some reason. They were very sweet and very simple, but it was more just knowing this constant presence was out there wishing me well. Which was lovely and wonderful, because even though we were adopted by family, it was still a difficult transition because we had these intergenerational differences, because our adoptive parents were so much older than my sister and I were, and we were very, very different generations.
They, of course, had me, they didn't get me until I was seven, and then it was only meant to be a temporary situation. And then two years went by and they started the process to adopt my sister and me. They had Becca since she was three months old because she had a stomach ailment and she couldn't really eat, and our birth parents were too poor to really get her the medical attention she needed. So my adoptive mother took Becca to Oklahoma when she was three months old, and they got her tended to. And she was perfectly healthy and very sassy very quickly. So they'd had her all along and they had expressed an interest in adopting her before they ever got me alongside her. So it seemed very natural that they would adopt the two of us together. I remember feeling that it was my choice. It was presented to me as my choice. I could stay in Oklahoma with my sister and my grandparents and not be adopted; I could go back to New Jersey to live with my mom; or I could stay in Oklahoma, be adopted and change my name; or I could not change my name and still be adopted.
And the kicker really for me, was that my sister was definitely going to get adopted. That was going to happen, and we were sitting in the living room one night watching television. She, during a commercial break, very knowingly says to me, “You know, if I get adopted and you don't, I'm gonna be your aunt.” And I was nine at the time and I thought, ‘Never! You will never be my aunt.’
So we, you know, held hands and jumped together and took the opportunity to change my name, because the changing of the name actually really did help solidify our family unit a little bit more. When you don't have the same name on all of the school forms and things like that, people have questions in their mind whether or not they ask them. So that was actually nice. And I like my name. I like my name now. It was a little bit of a transition for me, but I very much like my name.
Haley Radke: In your book, you share why it was just you and your sister adopted, but your grandfather and his wife, they didn't know about the other children?
Mary Anna King: They did not. Yes, that's a very important point. My birth parents kept a pretty tight lid on the adoptions of my younger sisters. I sensed from our birth mother, that a little bit from her end, she felt a little bit ashamed about it. I don't know if that's the word she would use, but it seems that she just didn't want people to know because she didn't think they would understand. I definitely saw her go through a process of, when she was placing my sisters for adoption, everyone around her was saying, “You're doing a good thing. You're doing the best thing. You're doing a brave thing.” And then once they were adopted and they were gone, and people in her life later found out that she had placed these children for adoption, “Oh, she was horrible. How could she have done that? They could never part with their children that way. And what a horrible thing to have done.’” And that was a very bizarre thing for me to wrangle with, because I always understood that she placed my sisters for adoption out of a desire for them to have something more than she felt she could offer them, that she wanted them to have something better. Because she had been in foster care herself as a child. She had been a runaway. She had never really felt that she fit in with her biological family. Family was a big struggle for her. She very much wanted to keep all of my sisters, she really did, but they just didn't have the money. And my biological father sort of felt that it was part of a divine plan, that this was God's will that he and my mother were meant to place these children with couples who ordinarily would not have been able to have children. This was in the 80s and 90s before in vitro fertilization was really commercially available in the States, so it was not a far stretch to think that, you know, these couples that were adopting my sisters would not have otherwise had children. And that carried a lot of weight with my biological father, from what I know. But even still, they did not tell a lot of people about it, and I've always wondered why that was. I know it was a different time, but there wasn't an opportunity for anyone else in the extended family to step in and say, “Let me help you. If you need help, I can help.”
And that was one of the things with my grandfather-cum-adoptive-father. When he did just find out about the younger girls their adoptions had long ago been finalized. They were school age by the time he discovered they existed, he very much felt very saddened by that. And I remember during one of the reunions when I was going back to Becca's to meet my sister Little Rebecca –beause there are two Rebecca's, of course there are– he drove me to the airport and he said, “Would you make sure she knows we would've taken all of you?” And that's been a really important thing for him to articulate as he's been mean, because he is of course, all of their biological grandfather as well. So that was a really important thing for him to feel that they knew that if he had known he would've helped. If he had known, he would've done more. He would've done something.
Haley Radke: I can't imagine the feelings for him. You know, he's trying to keep your family intact by taking you and your sister, and then to know that he just didn't have the opportunity.
Mary Anna King: Yeah, to help out any more than that. Or to– yeah. He's a very fascinating man, and I just always think of him like a rock, like he's just very sturdy, very stable. He's always there. Some people can mistake that for boring, I suppose. But when you are living in a storm, that's a very comforting image to have. Say, “Oh, all I have to do is get to that spot to have one stationary point.”
As a kid though, I felt very troubled by some idea that somehow becoming too entrenched in my adoptive family, I was somehow choosing them over my birth mom, who I loved beyond reason. I mean, just like a child loves a mother. I just– she had an innate skill at just being delighted by her children. I mean, every little thing I did, she was fascinated by, and she was supportive of everything, and it didn't matter what I did. We had an extreme, immediate connection that was easy. We didn't have to think about it. Then coming into Oklahoma where kids didn't like me because I talked funny, and I was coming into this community that was already, you know, had already grown into itself. And my grandparents-cum-adoptive-parents very much I think, had been a little heartbroken when my sister left for a very brief time, and I think that they were a little bit on guard when we first came to Oklahoma, against being hurt again. So it made a solid connection for all of us a little tricky, and there was no one really to talk to about that. There was no one to reach out to and say, “How do we do this? How do we knit a connection together where one did not exist before?”
I had been a little bit of a wild, running-around-the-neighborhood kid. I'd been a free-range kid in New Jersey and I'd been accustomed to that, and in Oklahoma, that was just not the way things were. It was a tricky transition and I think it would've helped very much if someone, instead of saying, “Oh, well they're family, they know each other. It'll be easy,” had checked in a little bit more to say, you know, “How are you doing? Are you having difficulties connecting on any of these levels or understanding one another in any of these ways?” Or even just to say “It's okay if it's difficult. If it's difficult, you're doing it right. It's going to get better. It will get easier.” But there was no one to say that. There was no one even directly to reach out to for that kind of conversation. So I do hope that in the future, that we as a community find better ways to give people resources like that.
Haley Radke: Yes. That's definitely so important. And in your case, I mean, I'm assuming, I guess in-family ones, that there aren't the social workers and the other support that sometimes, you know, new adoptive parents might have.
Mary Anna King: I think it depends. We had definitely, I remember there being a home study. I remember there being a social worker that came into the house. Once. I don't remember her ever coming back, but I remember she was there at least once, and she was there for about five or six hours talking with my adoptive parents, and Becca and I, of course, little performers that we were, in music lessons and dance lessons and all of these things, could not have been more excited to have an audience. So we were playing piano, and dancing, and just being goofballs. I think we actually played a duet on the piano, which at that age we would never have been capable of doing without, you know, someone getting pushed off the piano bench if we had not had a stranger there to perform for.
So yeah, I remember there was at least one home study. I remember the day we went to the courthouse to get the whole thing finalized, and I was 10 at that point, and I had thought it was going to be like a court TV show, like something similar to Law and Order where we would go into a courtroom and there would be a judge in a robe at the thing, taking all of us in and making a decision and saying, “Yes, let's stamp all of this. This looks great. Everyone's fantastic,” and making it– that it would've felt more official. But we were in just sort of an anteroom to the judge's chambers. It was very small. It was very hot. It was very dry. I remember, I think she had red hair, at least in my memory she does. And just sort of going through and just, “Okay, okay–” signing things. And I don't remember there ever being a conversation sort of, you know, like you do with a wedding or something where you say, “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” or “I now pronounce you–” if it happened. And I realized, when it didn't happen, that's what I'd been expecting. I'd been expecting a sort of ceremony, and there wasn't one. And then we went to the Social Security office to get our Social Security cards changed, because our names were different now. And I was 10 and so they had me sign it, and I thought that was really weird. When you're born and you get a Social Security number and a card and things like that, you don't sign it. But I had to sign this one, and it was the first time I'd written my full new adopted person name. I was really hoping that someone in the Social Security office, or someone– I wanted there to be an audience for this day. There had been an audience when the social worker had come to the house. I wanted there to be an audience to make it feel more real, to make it feel more ceremonial, I guess. I remember very distinctly wanting the woman on the other side of the window where I was signing my social security card to say, “You know, what's going on? And what's the story here?” But she could not have been less interested. So yeah, I remember feeling very much that I wanted it be more ceremonial. And then we went home and ate hamburgers. And Becca and I didn't go back to school that day. And then the next day we did go back to school and our names were different, and then a couple weeks later, the award ceremony happened, which was the first time anyone had occasion to say my full name. And I felt like that was too real. I wanted there to be an audience when I wanted an audience, and then I wanted there to not be one when I didn't want one.
Haley Radke: Oh, that's funny. Yeah. And I guess there's so many adoptees that, you know, it happens in infancy or very young, and so there's not these memories, so you've had to process in a different way. You talk in your book about feeling very indebted to your grandfather and Mimi. Would you talk a little bit about that?
Mary Anna King: I think that came from– it definitely came from me, personally. It was something that I absorbed. It was not something, anything anybody ever said to me. Nobody said, “Oh, you owe them for rescuing you.” I just felt it intrinsically, and I remember with my birth family, we had struggled quite a bit financially. We were rather poor. And I never felt that poor, because everyone around us was in the same situation. So it didn't seem that we were any different from anyone else in the world. Then, when I went to Oklahoma, my grandparents were solidly middle class. They were not millionaires, they were just very responsible and had saved up over the years and taken care of things. So I remember feeling the day that I walked into their house. We were coming from five of us living in a two-bedroom little apartment in New Jersey. My brother and my sister and I shared a bedroom. We spent most of our time just running around outside, because outside was much larger than the apartment. So going to Oklahoma, suddenly this was a three-bedroom house with an attic and a basement, and two dens, and an acre backyard, and dogs, and lots and lots of furniture, and a washer and dryer in the house, and a refrigerator that you opened that had two doors. And there was food everywhere. The thing that I struck me the most was when right before we went to bed, we had some kind of a snack, and Mimi opened the the pantry and looking at these floor-to-ceiling shelves of cereal and crackers and cookies and snacks was like going to the grocery store. I mean, because we had food in New Jersey, but we never had that much on hand, constantly. And they had air conditioning, which was a big one. Big difference. I remember feeling, ‘Oh my gosh, we were broke!’ Like, ‘We lived in a cracker box. What is this?’
And I realized very consciously, although I may not have put it in these words at that age, but I felt very consciously that choosing to stay here was choosing socioeconomic security. That in some way I was voting that money and security were better than love, were stronger and more important than this very real, ferocious connection I had with my birth mother. And I also felt my grandparents at that point were, my grandfather retired pretty soon after we we were adopted, and I remember very clearly feeling that this was the time in their life where they were supposed to travel and they were meant to do things that they had postponed for so long while they were buying houses and setting up retirement accounts and things like that, that this was the time in their life that they were meant to relax and they couldn't because they had us.
No one ever articulated that to me. I just felt it, and I felt very much that because of all of that, because of what they were sacrificing to take care of me and my sister, and give us dance lessons and music lessons and prom dresses, that I did not want to be a problem. I wanted to be the most excellent, inoffensive, wonderful child I possibly could be so that I wouldn't be sort of deepening the debt, that I wouldn't be making it harder than it actually was.
Haley Radke: I think a lot of adoptees might feel that way, subconsciously. I know I felt that way. I don't know if I've shared this before, but my husband and I were going to adopt. I felt like I owed that somehow to the world, that there's some poor baby somewhere that needs a home. I think that's the public script for adoption, and I definitely felt that subconsciously. I don't remember ever thinking it the way you– I think you actually maybe thought those things. But it was in my spirit. Probably I didn't realize until I was coming out of the fog that was the case for me too.
Mary Anna King: Yeah, I think it's important for me to articulate that. I never felt that from my adoptive parents. And I never felt that from my birth family either. It was simply –and I don't think there's anything they could have done to have erased that sense– it was just something I definitely felt based on what I saw, because kids are like sponges. And based on the things that I had absorbed up to that point, I was just always going to feel that way.
When Mimi got sick –she was hospitalized right after I graduated high school– I was so angry with my sister Becca, because she processed Mimi's illness in a much different way than I did. She really just didn't want to see it up close. She wanted to keep her distance. I feel like because she kept such a distance, she could still deny that it was sort of going on, and she could preserve herself emotionally a little bit. And I was so angry with her that she couldn't just make it easier for everybody, that she couldn't just come in and pitch in. If she wasn't gonna be at the hospital, couldn't she make dinner for everyone so that when we came home there was something? And I was so angry with her then, but I think she was actually just really feeling the emotion of the situation in a way that I was not at the time, because I was focused so very much on ticking the boxes of being at the hospital, and tending to answering the nurse's questions, and brushing Mimi's hair, and making sure she ate, and coming home and cooking dinner, and cleaning the house, and making sure that it was everything was the way Mimi would've kept it while she was there. So that when she came home –because of course she was coming home and she was coming home soon-- so that when she came home, everything was just as it had been. And for me it was– we were just different. We just dealt with it in different ways. My sister was angry with me, too, that I was sort of doing all of these things and not leaving any room for her to pitch in, a way.
She's my best, best friend, Becca is my best friend at this point in life, and it was so wonderful to have her to go through these reunions with, to have someone that I knew so deeply and who knew me, and that I didn't have to be polite around, and who could also sort of help diagnose the tumultuous aspect of it. We, oh my gosh, we could not have been more antagonistic toward one another in those years of our lives. But I realize now that is a function of love, in that I knew she wasn't going anywhere and she knew I wasn't going anywhere. So we could be ugly to one another because we were always going to keep showing up.
Haley Radke: Those safe people in our lives take the brunt of it, don't they?
Mary Anna King: They do, unfortunately!
Haley Radke: I would love it if you would talk a little bit about your perspective shift. You talk about this in the book, the triple-win perspective, going to triple-loss. Can you unpack that?
Mary Anna King: I had always been waiting for the happy ending to happen with my sibling story. I grew up watching Disney Movie-of-the-Weeks and Hallmark movies and things like that, and I was waiting for the happy ending resolution where everyone got along and held hands and danced around a maypole together, I guess. Where everyone fit easily, and somehow all of this would make sense. I realized around the time that Mimi passed that it wasn't gonna happen that way. There was no maypole in the future. It was just all of us, here, doing the best we could. And as I started really unpacking some of the difficulties, some of the ups and downs of the reunions that I'd seen and been a part of. You know, the incredible, exuberant meeting; and then the crash; and then dealing with the aftermath of the potentially stepped-upon feelings of birth family and an adoptive family; and people who felt shortchanged; and people who were angry, even though they hadn't been expecting to be. I started thinking more about everyone else's perspective in it and about maybe some of the more unsettling feelings that I had not been comfortable articulating when I was younger.
That was really, for me, when I realized what a lot of adoptive people that I've spoken to have realized as well, that there is a win aspect to adoption of: child needs family; family wants child; family can't take care of child; everyone gets that need met. But then, of course, all of those wins have incredibly closely linked losses that frequently– In the case of my sister's adoptive parents, many of them had struggled with infertility and they had miscarried children. Whether they had lost actual children or they had simply lost the idea of having their own children, their own biological children, they had lost something before adoption ever became a real option for them. My biological parents clearly lost their offspring. My birth mother, who had very much wanted children and was very good with children, and who loves her children, lost all of us. And then of course, my adoptive parents lost their retirement. They lost their years of traveling, and going to Hawaii, and getting to be just grandparents where you know, you have the kids over holidays and you spoil them rotten and then you send them back to their parents to deal with They'd lost that. And I, of course, had lost, and my siblings and I lost one another. It seems a little disingenuous for me now when I talk about adoption. When people ask me sometimes, you know, “Give me two upsides of adoption,” I can never just say two good things about adoption without also saying that yes, there are good aspects and these are good, but for me they will always exist immediately and intrinsically linked to the losses. That for me is the tension of existing in the world as an adopted person, is that all things are true and nothing is strong enough to erase the others. My siblings, my biological siblings are my siblings, and they are real. They are also, on paper, strangers. Both things are true. Neither one of them is strong enough to erase the other. Because they influence one another and they impact one another constantly. And part of the reason I called my book Bastards is because when I did finally start articulating my relationship with my siblings and the nature of our family, I had people who would say –not trying to be malicious, just trying to synthesize the story– “Oh, well, but they're not your real sister. Your real sister is Becca. But they're not your real sisters.” And that's where I started the phrase of saying, “No, everyone is real. They're not ghosts.” Like, “Everyone is real here.” And that's what makes it tricky and confounding sometimes. I sometimes have difficulty on holidays, big holidays, like Thanksgiving and Christmas, because those are days everyone spends with their family. And people very frequently take that for granted, that family is this very simple concept. But I can't possibly spend Thanksgiving with all of my family because every single one of us has a sort of primary family that we spend time with on those days, and if we don't, they will feel a loss. And I would feel a loss, too. That's the thing, is that either way I go, on the other side of it there's a loss. And I'm not saying that to be sad or bring anyone down, it's just to honestly articulate what the world feels like and what it looks like to me.
Haley Radke: That's so well put, thank you.
Well, I would love it if we could share our recommended resources, and I'm going to start by recommending your memoir. It's so wonderfully written, Mary, I honestly loved it. It's fascinating and candid and funny and sad, and it's everything. You share so many deep feelings as well as just what day-to-day life was for you. So I would love it if our listeners would pick up a copy. Like you said, it's called Bastards: A Memoir, and where can we find it?
Mary Anna King: You can find it at pretty much any major bookseller. I know they've got it at Barnes and Noble. You can go through IndieBound and find your local independent bookseller. I love independent booksellers. Also, it's on Amazon, too, and it recently came out in paperback. And a lot of libraries have it too. So you can check it out at the library, that's fine.
Haley Radke: I did get it at the library. That's my source, so yeah, it's well-read, but I definitely will buy a copy, because I loved it and there's so many good things to refer back to. Now that you've described some of the ways you've kept journals and things, it's evident, because the memories that you share, they're so clear and vivid, and so that's cool to hear.
Okay, and what would you like to recommend?
Mary Anna King: I would definitely recommend for any human, but definitely all of the adopted ones as well, Angela Tucker's amazing site, The Adopted Life. She's also doing a little bit of a series, that you can watch the episodes on the website. And Angela, she did the wonderful documentary Closure a couple of years ago, where she followed her journey in reuniting with her biological parents, and it's fascinating, and so honest and heartfelt, and complicated and wonderful. You can find information about how to watch Closure through her website, theadoptedlife.com. But she also has these wonderful blog posts. She really articulates the experience of being an adopted person, and also unpacking transracial adoptee perspectives very eloquently and thoughtfully.
Haley Radke: Yes, I agree. So where can our listeners connect with you online?
Mary Anna King: I do post sometimes on my website, maryannaking.com. And I also, more frequently ,tweet on Twitter: @MaryAnnaKing, spelled just like it sounds.
Haley Radke: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for sharing your time with us today, and I know our listeners are going to love hearing from you personally and reading your book, so thank you.
Mary Anna King: Thank you, Haley. Thank you so much. It was an absolute pleasure.
Haley Radke: If you have more questions for Mary Anna, or to thank her for sharing her heart with us, please connect with her on Twitter @MaryAnnaKing. To find the show notes, ask a question, or share your adoptee story, visit our website, Adopteeson.com. We also love to chat with you on Twitter or Instagram @adopteeson.
Today, would you please show someone how to subscribe to our podcast? Just take their phone and add us! You'll be able to discuss the episodes with them and you'll seem technologically advanced in their eyes. Thanks for listening, let's talk again soon.
You guys, I have a little postscript for you. Two things: I wanted to let you know that Angela Tucker has her second episode out of her web series, The Adopted Life. It's awesome. So check it out on her website.
And I also want to thank you for all of your emails and tweets. I am honored to share these stories with you. I recently lost my grandma and I was struggling to finish producing this episode for you. I'm sure you know how funeral and grief and all the family stuff can disrupt a schedule, but I want you to know that all of your kind words and seeing your tweets recommending the show, that encouraged me immensely in this hard season. Thank you again for your support.
