230 Marcy Axness, Ph.D.

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/230

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Haley: This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

(Intro music) You are listening to adoptees on the podcast adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm your host, Haley Radke today. We are excited to welcome Dr. Marcy Axness. This episode is a mix of a history lesson about adoptee activism and the psychological impacts of infant and mother separation. Marcy has her PhD in early human development and brings a unique expertise and lens to the adopted person's experience.

We discuss what it's like if we bring consciousness to our experiences and how we can be always moving towards healing. But also, unfortunately, there will likely always be opportunities for more healing. We wrap up with some recommended resources and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, AdopteesOn.com.

Before we get started, I wanted to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on AdopteesOn.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome to adoptees on Dr. Marcy Axness. Welcome Marcy. Thank you.

Marcy: Great to be with you.

Haley: I have heard so much about you. You're a prolific in the adoption community and have been doing this work for so many years, but I would love it if you would start by sharing a little of your story with us.

Marcy: Wow. My story. Well, I was one of the very first pioneering what they called independent adoptions at the time, what we would call an open adoption. Back in the fifties. So my birth mother, or at the time prospective birth mother, I am pretty clear always about a pregnant mother being only prospective at the most when it comes to adoption.

But she, she had really firmly decided that she was, that she couldn't parent me, although she and my birth father at the time were living as man and wife. They were living this sort of pretend life in Santa Barbara, his hometown. And one day Liz, my birth mom, she went crying to their next door neighbor, Marcy Densmore.

They're all dead now, so I can use their whole names. She said, you know, we're not married and I can't keep this child, and what am I going to do? And Marcy had a dear friend who had suffered some pretty severe reproductive losses and was looking to adopt. She had a friend who had, had recently done a, a private adoption and so, They all put their heads together and Liz moved up to San Francisco to be near my prospective adoptive parents, Bea and Bob, and they went shopping together.

They had lunch at Blums together, all of those kind of fairy tale ish things. And I was born, I spent six days in the newborn nursery for reasons that, like I said, everyone's long since dead, so I really, I never was able to find out why, but after six days, I was taken home to a not really healthy adoptive family, and when I was 21, my adoptive mother Bea died of ovarian cancer.

And not long after that, my adoptive father, they had divorced when I was 11, by the way. Not long after my adopt, my adoptive father took me to lunch and he said something like, aren't, are you interested in meeting your real mother? That, that was the terminology he used, and I really wasn't all that interested.

He seemed almost more interested than I did. But anyway, he couldn't remember her married name. She got married shortly after she relinquished me and then had two other children, a son and a daughter, who I'm still close with to this day. And he just, my, my, my adoptive father who had a mind, like a steel trap, he could not remember her married name, but he did remember that she had some complications with her first delivery and he donated one pint of blood at Irwin Memorial Blood Bank in San Francisco.

He called them up, this is 20 years later, and said, I donated a pint of blood in 1957 or whatever it was, and they had the record and they gave him the name and I was on the phone with her like later that day. And you know, reunions. As many people as there are in the world or adopted people or people who've been separated from their biological family, there are that many reunion stories. Mine is probably somewhat in the typical range. We had this wonderful honeymoon period and we had a blind date at a fern bar in San Francisco, , and then we had our ups and downs. I, you know, I uninvited her to my wedding, which years later in various therapies I kind of came to see, form of recapitulation, like, let me show you how it feels to be invited and then uninvited. I didn't get that at all at the time, but absolutely. I have seen, you know, through the decades how we do these, kind of reenact these patterns and Freud would say that this is our way of remembering anyway, so.

We were estranged for 10 years and then not long after the birth of my second child, Annette Baron, who's name I'm sure is familiar to many of your listeners, she was really, I considered the matrefamilias of the adoption reform movement. She, with Ruben Panner and another one of their colleagues, wrote The Adoption Triangle way back in the, I wanna say, seventies.

Three social workers who sort of had an awakening about. What they were doing and the effects it was having on all, all members of the, of the constellation, which we came to call it constellation instead of triad, cuz it's just ripples out so far. Anyway, Annette said to me at that point, she said, don't continue the, the, the separation.

Do everything you can to not continue the separation. So one day I picked up the phone and I called her. And we were in touch ever since. I was at her death bed. This was, you know, 10, 5, 8 years ago, something like that. And we had a, a really quite a good relationship than the whole, and there's a whole other story with my birth father, but I will say I met them both in the same week and that is a lot.

Haley: Oh my goodness. Do not recommend. What's the ?

Marcy: You know, it's, You know, I had this big, exciting blind date reunion with my birth mom, and it turns out that within the prior, within that previous year, she had gotten back in touch with him. I mean, it was kind of very coincidental or synchronistic. If you will.

And so she picked up the phone, she said, guess who called me? And you know, so she. had plans. We jumped into her... and, and the reason I was up in the Bay Area actually at that time was I had sprained my ankle very bad. I was hoping to be a professional dancer at the time, but I had sprained my ankle really badly.

I didn't have an automatic transmission car, and so in Los Angeles, if you can't drive your car, you're pretty much dead in the water. So we just decided, hey, you know, my aunt, who was really much more like a mother to me, she said, come on up here for a couple of weeks. And that's why it even happened. I just happened to be in the area anyway.

So Liz came up with this whole plan of, instead of you flying home, let's hop into my VW bug and I will drive, we'll drive back to LA and we'll stop in Santa Barbara and you can meet your birth father. So it was all a, a real whirlwind at a time when I personally was still quite, I guess, asleep, as we say.

Or in the fog, there's various terms that are thrown around. So it was I, I think probably a lot of it washed over and off me. You know, I, I believe I lived a lot of my life, had lived a lot of my life up to that point semi dissociated, truly. But, you know, so that's, that's the basic reunion story. One, one button that I like to put on it now that I'm in my mid sixties, is now my birth mom like I said, died, I wanna say eight years ago.

My birth father died quite a bit before then. I still cannot go to Sacramento and get my original birth certificate and that is just an outrage. So, and yeah, so I'll stop now, and see, see where you wanna take this.

Haley: There are so many things. Thank you for sharing your story and yes, original birth certificate access, we are absolutely support that here. So outrageous is understatement that we can't have that document...

Marcy: and I've been involved in many, many movements. You know, I've written so many letters, you know, with my little adoption expert, whatever, nomenclature. But my own state, which is supposedly one of the most progressive in the country anyway.

Yeah. So, and then the one other thing, I'll just button, you know, a book came out not long ago called, I'm Glad My Mother Died. I think it was, I think the title of something like that by an actress who was writing about her years as a child actor and her like horrible mother. And I will say, That I have a certain amount of gratitude that my adoptive mother died when I was young.

It freed me in so many ways, in ways that I've watched other friends of mine with mothers not necessarily adopt, you know, adoption related, but just narcissistic mothers like my mom was, and they haven't been freed like that. So I'm quite grateful. And, you know, in my dark humor ways, I, I often have said, you know, my parents had the good graces to die when I was young, but they were older when I was adopted too, so, you know what I mean?

Haley: Mm-hmm.

Marcy: So, yeah, there's that.

Haley: Well, I mean, I, I appreciate you saying that because I think so many people feel like their hands are tied and they don't wanna hurt. But you know, I mean, you choose whatever you'd like to do. There's not a prescriptive thing, but you should have a right to have your information and connection to the people you wanna be connected to.

Marcy: Absolutely. But I, I know for myself, I, I was not a late discovery adoptee. My parents told me from the very beginning, I had The Chosen Baby, was it the chosen baby right, in my bookshelf. And, and yet I absolutely picked up so strongly on the vibe that it was not okay to ask about anything related to who I was or where I came from.

And I had all, you know, my mom had had a dear, dear friend Mary Owens, she had this really long waist length hair and she sang, You Are My Sunshine, and she kind of had this mythic place in my child mind. And I kind of, I think I, I definitely had a fantasy that this was really my mother. And I'm sure that this is an experience.

I know it is shared by many adoptees. We have this whole like fantasy scenario because we're not allowed to ask about just the very pedestrian regular scenario, that is most likely the case.

Haley: Right? Right. All of our celebrity parents in the ghost kingdom. , quick question. So you're named after that neighbor cuz she connected you?

Marcy: Yes.

Haley: Okay. Yes. Okay. I thought so.

Marcy: But I will, I will share with you and your listeners that my birth name, that I claim very proud. Is Catherine. Catherine McDavid. Mm. I'm a I'm a Scott's lass, all through and through.

Haley: Okay. So moving forward in time, you do a lot of education and I think you, you switched gears once you had your children. So can you talk a little bit about that and the expertise that that you have in early childhood and perinatal development, all of those things?

Marcy: Yeah. My adoption work really was just such an organically emerging thing after my second child was born. My daughter, as part of, you know, the day before she was born, I had this spontaneous regression is the, is the way I've come to understand it, that it was just, it was so very visceral and physical and I just found myself lying in bed sobbing and sobbing and saying these words over and over. "Mommy doesn't want me, mommy doesn't want me." And the words didn't come from my brain. They just like came up from my gut and out my mouth and I was, I was surprised to hear them and yet I had read just enough about prenatal psychology at the time to kind of in, in real time go, oh, I bet that's what that is. You know, I didn't spend much time analyzing it. I was too busy, like literally vomiting and just, it was a purge and it just kind of cleared the way for my daughter to just come through such an easy birth.

And going back not long after that, I got back in touch with Annette Baron, whom I had interviewed. I used to work for C B S News in LA and I had interviewed her for a series called Adoptees in Search. And you know, I can still, I literally, these, what, 45 years later, can still hear, her words like from that piece in my head, you know, "Adoptive parents, if their children in adulthood seek to search, need not feel threatened. They're looking for someone who looks like them. They're looking for someone who feels like them genetically, but emotionally their ties will still be with their adoptive parents." I mean, those are lit word for word in its words and, but here's the point here. After we were done and the crew was packing up their equipment, and Annette and I were just chatting. She said to me very like, she got very serious. She said, she gave me her card. She said, look, feel free to call me if you ever need me, if you ever wanna talk. And I at age 21, and this is all the same year I met my birth parents. This is what kind of inspired me to propose that I do this piece.

I was like, What for? I felt like I was, I was the ever gleaming, hyper achieving , good adoptee, like all the time. And I just couldn't imagine what she was talking about, about having any issues or anything. And, and then so what it was almost 15 years later that I called her and when, when I told her who was calling, she didn't even miss a beat. Like she, Annette was always so beautifully unfazed by anything, and she had me, I, I described to her my experience and I, I said, I said, do you think it's possible that adoptees come into the world already wounded in some way already, you know? And she said, well, there's this woman, Nancy Verrier and she's writing about something she calls the primal wound and said it like it was real exotic. And, and I just went, ding, ding, ding. Like, I need that. And at the time, I don't even know if Nancy's book had come out. She had just had an article in the, the Journal of the Association for Pre and Perinatal Psychology and Health. Anyway, I got that and then I ended up in Annette's kitchen soon thereafter over coffee. And she did say to me, we were kind of commiserating over the state of adoption at the time. This is in the early nineties, mind you, she said, you know when you can advertise for children next to the Volvos in the newspaper, you know you've gone wrong as a society and I was getting ready to go to AAC's next conference. I had been to AAC before and she said, no, if you, if you really wanna see the cutting edge of what's happening, get yourself out to Traverse City, Michigan to Jim Ritter's conference on open adoption. And so long story short, I go there, I'm sitting there, I'm listening.

I listen to the adoptee talk about adoption issues. And I had just started my own primal therapy. So there, there you have a dangerous situation, like a bit of a powder keg and I, I just was so, just so full of passion for the topic and it was so immediate for me because I was just really delving into it right then in therapy, that I went up to the organizer, Jim Ritter at the break and I said, I think there's room for another perspective. Would it be possible for me to have five minutes at the microphone? So he gave that to me and that was the beginning. It was like I just got up there and talked about, you know, writhing on the ground, getting back in touch with these, these visceral, I won't even call them emotions, because emotions are fairly a little more advanced in terms of nervous system development and brain develop.

They're like states, states that, that as a baby, we don't yet have the equipment as a newborn and a prenate, we don't yet have the equipment, the parasympathetic, calming branch of our nervous, nervous system, and we're just sort of flooded with these overwhelming states really. Anyway, so I just started writing and there were, at the time, there were magazines, Roots and Wings.

I was big into writing letters to the editor. My proudest moment was a letter to the editor in Time Magazine, which I have perma plaque in some box somewhere, you know, in response to always trying, I mean, I've really had, I've been pretty one note in what I've tried to teach through all these decades is that I'm a pragmatist.

I, I understand the argument that adoption should be abolished and we should have a guardian system. I, and I absolutely can see the merit in those. But I'm also a pragmatist and I just sort of believe adoption's always going to be with us. So if it is, let's do it in the most humane, healing way. And the number one thing is to understand that everyone comes to this experience with deep losses.

And so this whole relationship is built on deep losses and, and most often upon ungrieved losses. And this is where we run into so many problems. You know, when we swallow our grief, tuck away our grief, sweep it under the rug, like nothing good happens. So that's really all I was writing on throughout the nineties and writing about my own healing experiences and such.

And then I did shift gears because once I got into the prenatal piece, Haley, what I recognized is these issues, you know, being carried in a stressed womb, being carried as an ambivalent, you know, by an ambivalent mother. By a mother who possibly contemplated terminating the pregnancy. These are not the sole province of adoptee, of adoptee people.

A lot of people go through this, but within their biological family, and in some ways in kind of flipping the, the framework, I've said in some ways adoptees have a bit of a leg up because at least we know what happened to us. Think about the person who is kept in their biological family, but did go through all of that.

They were conceived through an affair, or they were, yeah. Who knows? I mean, there's so many different scenarios, but then it's like you're in your family and everything's good and you can't put your finger on what's going on and why you feel so out of your skin and all these things. So that's why I shifted gears and, and really started looking more into, sort of looking in a human development lens. And so that's what I got my doctorate in, was early human development with a, with an emphasis on prenatal development. And then I, you know, I wrote my book that came out in 2012, Parenting for Peace, Raising the Next Generation of Peacemakers, which it's based on seven steps in time.

And the first five step, I mean step five is postpartum. So you can see how front loaded it is, and I really believe that that is the way that we're gonna get some traction on a lot of our issues in our societies, really finally recognizing how early these things are in play.

Haley: Hearing some of the information we know about how much, you know, stress soup Uber cooked in to just be graphic about it.

Marcy: Yeah. Stress soup. That's good.

Haley: It can be really disheartening to think about for me because I'm like, well, I mean, is there anything you do? But it's, that's what happened. Right? So I think the more we understand about that, it can just be heavier and heavier on us. What have you seen? In terms of like a positive thing, like we know that you mentioned so that's a positive mm-hmm. . But being aware of that, how can that be helpful for an adopted person?

Marcy: Well, for one big principle that informs so much of my, my work and my life is that consciousness can change everything. And by consciousness I don't mean the state of being awake, I mean the contents of our consciousness.

And this goes for the pregnant mother with a crisis pregnancy too. Most long-term relationship people, if you say, what's the secret to your good relationship, almost always the answer is communication. So I would say this goes for this too. We carry so many selves within our own self, we carry the prenate that we were still and always, we carry, you know, , as I said in one of my talks, it gets real crowded in there so.

But you know, if we look at that in this, if we could kind of see ourselves more in quantum terms, like there's always the opportunity for healing and you know, that's sort of a, a double edged sword. While there's always opportunities for healing, the healing is always happening. It's... how many times I got bit in the butt by thinking, oh, that was the piece.

You know, whatever breakthrough I had in therapy that day, oh, now I'm fixed. Now I'm good. All right, I'm good. And I actually, it exists in print in some places, kind of when I was in that, like, ugh, I finally discovered the golden key and now I'm good. My mantra now is "always healing, never healed", which can sound disheartening.

I've never healed. And yes, sometimes it is a pain in the ass. I'm not gonna lie. Sometimes it's like I actually just started up a new round of therapy. I mean, here I am at 66 years old. I've been doing therapy for 45 years. All different kinds, modalities, whatever. And honestly, there are times it's like, oh, going back and dealing with this stuff is like the last thing I wanna do.

And yet, you know, if it hasn't sort of healed me, well then what has it done for me? It has illuminated the minefield, whereby I'm no longer sort of stumbling around and oh my God, I just stepped on a mine and why did I have such a huge emotional response to this little trivial thing that happened just now?

It's like I know where those are and I can recognize them really quickly. It doesn't mean that I don't sometimes get triggered. It's way, way less. I didn't even like that term by the way. Triggered. It's so violent but...

Haley: Activated That's....

Marcy: Activated There you go. Just this last week I had a really intense session with my new therapist and it had to do with shame. And, you know, shame. I mean, since Brenee Brown came out and sort of took shame out of the closet and made a big thing about it, a lot of people talk about it, including me. And yet here I am, 45 years into therapy and just sort of like a very, very intensive state, like overwhelming state experience of shame, didn't come up for me to deal with until now. That's crazy. And so to your question, how can we look at it in a positive way rather than disheartening way? I really believe that awareness and consciousness, putting the light of consciousness on something right there is just your, your leaps and bounds ahead.

Like I said to my therapist recently, how many times I've wished I could be one of those Ignorance Is Bliss people. Have you had that? You know,

Haley: Oh yes.

Marcy: You like, Ugh, I wish I could just be so blissfully ignorant, and walk through, you know, and just live happily through the fog. But then we get into karma and who you are as a person.

I'm a good Aquarius. That's just not me. And so I could kind of play around at wishing it were me, but it isn't. And you know, when you shine the light of consciousness and awareness on anything that's, that's immediately gonna bring some healing movement. I think one of the things we like to be looking for, not just as adopted people, but as human beings, is to avoid stasis, just this calcification in one place. We're kind of like sharks. We need to keep moving.

Haley: Well, one of the things that I have seen over time, I, I mean I'm newer in community if we're comparing our stories , but I've been podcasting for six years, sort of in adoption land for maybe a decade and I see this thing where people sort of discover everything about the primal wound and you know, some of what we've touched on today, and then they get stuck. It's, and, and I think some folks can, you know, be accused of like living in this victimhood mentality.

Marcy: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Haley: And I wonder if you can speak to that a little bit because I mean, I think there is a absolutely a time for like, oh my gosh, this is what happened to me and you're becoming aware.

And of course you'll have that time period of maybe being stuck, feeling stuck and staying in that, but how do we help those folks move into the next state? Or should we, should we just let them be in there? If that's, I just don't think it's productive. But anyway, you go.

Marcy: I, I wrote an article about this um, again, way back in the nineties when I was writing so much about adoption and speaking and at conferences and such. And when Nancy's book first came out, yeah, there was a bit of controversy around it, and one of my close colleagues wrote a critique of it, and so then I wrote kind of an, an answer to that. The title of my article was In Defense of the Primal Wound, and it circulated as that for a while, and then once Nancy and I became friends, she did say to me at one point, I don't feel like I, I need to be defended.

So I changed the title, it's now In Appreciation of the Primal Wound, and I'm pretty sure it's on my website. You think I would know, but I don't for sure. Pretty sure it is, but you can certainly Google it. It's all over in, In Appreciation of the Primal Wound, but I did address this issue; is the primal wound...? Well, the way I set it up in the article. As I recall, I started with a, a, a quick little snapshot from my now ex-husband's life, which is he, he was having this terrible, terrible pain behind his ankle, in his ankle or his foot, and he didn't know what it was, and it was really holding him back. And finally he went to the doctor and it had a name.

I don't remember if it was plantar fascitis at this point, but that was such a relief. It was, and we all know that feeling. Something's bothering us, and we find out that like there is a name for this and this is what it is, and this is, these are its features, these are its symptoms. So if you're feeling this way, this way, this way, that's understandable.

It's explainable. And that to me is the gift of the primal wound. It's like how many of us had been or have been living in the grips of something kind of amorphous? And, and nameless, but, and yet definitely there, but so kind of intangible. And then along comes Nancy Verrier, who, who is an adoptive mother herself and also a biological mother.

So she had felt these differences beyond just being different daughters. She did a deep study of Bowlby and all of the attachment literature, and she came to find that We kind of turned a blind eye to what we had learned about attachment when it comes to adoption. Sort of like, oh, adoption's supposed to insert this big exception to basic mammalian principles.

We are mammals. We are born with what Joseph Chilton Pierce, I believe, called biological imperatives. And one of them is that you stay connected with your biological mother. They've counted up to something like 17 or more avenues of kind of mutual regulation that happen at between the nervous system of the biological mother and the baby.

I mean, this is just looking at it just strictly from a neurobiological standpoint. Okay. And I find that that is a way that you can help people really get it. You know, without putting a whole overlay of is adoption good or bad, or, You know, even the whole cultural sociocultural piece of 'we've separated this person from his or her familial story and, and biological origins' just sticking with the, the mammalian thing.

We don't, we don't like to take puppies from their mothers until they're at least six or eight weeks old for God's sake. So I find that that's kind of a common ground to help people, kind of get a frame of reference that is a little bit more objective and less controversial, I guess. And so the primal wound really just came into a huge void.

There was, there was a void there. I think that's why it was such a huge revolution, really. I mean, it was a watershed moment in, in adoption land, as you would call it. So then, yes, one of the criticisms. Is that, then people just go, okay, that's, that's my answer. I'm a victim. I'm just gonna wallow here.

Nancy Verrier herself wrote a subsequent book in which she tried to, you know, really answered your question, which is, it's like, yes, so, so now what? Now that you've explained this, John, now that you know you have plantar fasciitis, you're not just going to sit there, you're gonna go to physical therapy, you're gonna ice it, you're gonna do all these things.

And so you can kinda look at the primal wound the same way. It's like, now that this has restored a certain sense of sanity to me, I mean in, in a certain way we're, we're gaslighted so much. Adoptees. You're grateful and you're happy and you're chosen and you're special. How many of us were grew up feeling special?

And the one last piece about that is, I mentioned James Hillman in in my article, James Hillman was a very popular writer for like a minute and a half back in the nineties. He wrote a book called The Souls Code and in in writing about things like your early story and being upset about it, his basic argument was, his basic position was the same as a lot of people's, I think, who have sort of a more cosmic view of like, we choose the lives we come into.

It's a whole, you know, more eastern philosophy of we live many lives and when we're in the spirit world, we choose the next life so that we can learn the lessons we need to learn and such. And his, his position is, It's ridiculous to complain about anything because you chose it, which I just find so like inhuman because I do believe, I happen to believe that more Eastern sort of leaning thing.

I believe in karma. I believe I've had other lives and I, and I can believe that I chose to come into life in this more complicated way, but that was when I was in the spirit realm. Then I also, in a paradoxical way, for that life to come to fruition, I need basic human empathy for that painful human experience that I went through, if that makes sense.

So it's a kind of a mobious strip kind of, kind of a thing. So I encourage anybody who has read The Primal Wound and who's just really wallowing in that. I think there is a moment to wallow. Hell, we've, you know, we've gone through, for me it was 31 years by the time I read The Primal Wound. For others, it's less, more, whatever you've gone through all these years of being told, no, you don't feel this.

Take your moment, take your weeks, your months, whatever it takes, but always keep in mind that next question, so as Mary Oliver would say, so now what are you going to do with this one wild and precious life? Now that you've got some more intactness to you by being empathized with, that's essentially what it is.

You've been heard, you've been felt. Now what's next?

Haley: I'm so grateful for that answer because it is such a simple quote, unquote question I asked you, but it's so complicated. It's really I love that picture of the Mobius Strip. It really is exactly right. I'm curious, I I just found this out that you were on a four year sabbatical from anything adoption related.

What was that like for you after being in this work for so long and knowing how taxing that can be?

Marcy: Right. Well, actually, let me back up a little bit because I will say that one other thing that contributed to me changing gears out of adoption, not so much out of adoption, but to broaden it to, to human development in general and and how important those very early years are, is a little thing called alt adoption. It was the ascendancy of the internet in the early two thousands and the absolute like wild west of the internet and some of the just viciousness and the extreme, what, just vitriol that you could encounter online and I mean, honestly, I may never be healed enough to, to be willing to be happy to walk into that.

So I was like no thanks. You know, I, I got a few tastes of it and very little that I write about I think it's very controversial. But anyway, I was like, Hmm, I'm just gonna take a minute there. So I had actually stepped back from adoption per se, you know, quite a few, you know, at the beginning, like 2003 or so, or even before that when I was doing my doctorate. Now I got deep into the topics that I've been talking about actually, how very important those, those months of the mother's pregnancy are, you know, how shaping those are for, for a human being and those early years.

And so I was very involved in that. I was very involved in Waldorf education cuz my kids went to a Waldorf school and so I, you know, my interests got naturally pulled into what my life experience was. And then when my book came out, I was crazy with the online promotion and the blogging and sending out newsletters and just all of that. And, right around the time that I, you know, this sabbatical opportunity came up, I was also sort of wearying of all of that.

And so it kind of was a perfect storm really of certain financial need. I mean, I definitely, you know, took this job out of financial need. It turns out that, you know, writing and speaking about human, early human welfare and mother well, you know, women's welfare does not necessarily pay the bills. And, you know, we see with what's going on around us right now, where the state of women's women's healthcare is and, and child welfare and all of that is all pretty depressing.

So, you know, it was like a complete pivot. And I was deeply engaged. I worked at a newspaper and basically wrote most of the stories for this small community newspaper, which is one of the last bastions of newspapers, by the way, are community newspapers, and they're very important. And so it was, it was a really good experience to, to be writing like, like workmanship writing, writing, writing, writing every single day about just the basic news.

And so, you know, kind of coming back, I've been sitting here and just kind of waiting for some real organic impulses. Like where do I want to put my, my energies and my, and my efforts. I do feel that my heart, you know, my heart really is in adoption first and foremost. I mean, that, that's, it's my ground of being, right?

And so it's, it's a basic frame of reference for me. I had just, just right when I, before I took the sabbatical, I had just started rolling out what I called my 25th anniversary edition of my Adoption Insight series, which were just these writings from the nineties. I have two adoption insight booklets that came out at the end of the nineties, and I was just starting to roll those out when this happened, and so that kind of got put on hold.

So, you know, I may start putting those up on my website again, I don't know.

Haley: Their 30th anniversary .

Marcy: Yeah, exactly. Hello. Thank you. Yeah, it really is. It really, if I, if I, you know, hold off and do it next year it will be the 30th anniversary and I'm marking it really from that watershed moment at Jim Ritter's conference, which was amazing.

And then I, I will say to footnote that then I, I had the honor of being invited by Jim Ritter to come and present at subsequent of his open adoption conferences in Traverse City, which really did set the bar. There's never really been anything else ever like them since, I don't think, and it was all the big, you know, Joyce Pavo, Annette Baron, Ruben Panner, all the true, you know, Sharon Kaplan Roszia just all the lights.

Patricia Dorner, who I love, and adore.

Haley: I think the only one of those people I've gotten to like learn under in person is Sharon and she is just like tremendous.

Marcy: Sharon is just a wonderful . Yes.

Haley: Yes. Okay. I know we're wrapping up and we're gonna talk about our recommended resources and ...

Marcy: oh yes.

Haley: But first I just wanna ask, is there any, like one thing that you really wanna say to fellow adoptee.

Just a broad question. Easy, easy peasy.

Marcy: Oh, that is a broad question. You have a huge community and adopted people are at such different places, you know, so it's, it's, I guess I would just say that you were wanted by the universe to be here no matter what may be living way down deep in your marrow. You were wanted and you were welcomed.

Haley: Thank you. Okay, so my recommendation for folks is to check out your website.

You have so many blogs as you've referred to, extensive writings on adoption. I, I read so many articles and was like, print. I still print them off, underlining things, and what I see happening is, Some one thing is welcome. There's new adoptees all the time, coming in and writing. They're like starting their blogs and they're writing.

I really wanna encourage people to go back and see what other folks have done, you know, and we think we're like starting something new here. But there's decades and decades of work. Okay, go ahead.

Marcy: I wanna thank you so much for saying that. If you had said if there's something that you wanna say to adoption activists, yes. I honestly, I often find it really irritating when I hear a, a younger adopted person, an activist who, in their expounding on these things, never gives any indication of being aware of, at all, let alone appreciative of the shoulders upon which they are standing, whose shoulders they're standing on.

People, you know, people have been doing this work for 30, 40, 50 years and they laid a foundation and, and it only strengthens and enriches, you know, the work of people in your, in your cohort to know that and, and to un and to have an awareness of, of what they're building upon. So thank you for saying that.

Oh my goodness. Thank you.

Haley: Absolutely. Well, and the other thing on your website, I mean, I'm still in the middle of parenting littles. I have two little boys. I'm eight. Eight and 10. and the quote unquote new thing now that's trending is gentle parenting, but your work on Parenting for Peace is really a piece of that.

Again, it's foundational for you. Like, look at me kind of funny. Have you heard of this? The Gentle Parenting, but you've....

Marcy: heard of Gentle Parenting? I was like, everything old is new again.

Haley: Uhhuh. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, I for our parents out there who are looking for something like that, you of course are an expert in that as well.

And we didn't even get to touch on adoptee parenting, Marcy, this time went by so fast. Okay. What do you wanna recommend to us?

Marcy: Well, my recommendation is I, I wanted to come up with something that hopefully nobody else had recommended, and maybe that's true. So this is, this was a cassette that I have an actual cassette tape but I know it's available in more modern formats too.

So my recommendation is called Warming the Stone Child: Myths and Stories of Abandonment and the Unmothered Child, by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. And she was she wrote Women Who Run with the Wolves in the nineties. She was huge in the nineties, and I was listening to the tape one day and she was talking about ways to get in touch with your memories, childhood memories.

I, I don't think I'm unusual as a, a traumatized child that I don't have a lot of memories of my childhood. It, it's kind of a blank, kind of just blankness there. And so I was listening to her tape and one of her recommendations was think about what was your favorite book or your favorite movie or your favorite music when you were a small child.

And even when I first heard her say that, I was like, oh, I can never remember that, but I let that percolate, and suddenly what came to my mind is Thumbalina. When I was little, I had the book Thumbalina. It's not the same one I have now, I'm sure old outdated edition. But I went and I got a copy of this and I'll just read you the first.

Do I have time to read the first few lines? Okay. And I, after I had this big discovery, I, I started sharing this whole thing when I would, when I would do talks at adoption conferences. So I, and I would put the pictures up on the, on PowerPoint, but the story starts:

"There was once a woman who did so want to have a weed child of her own, but she had no idea where she was to get it from. She went off to an old witch and said to her, I would so dearly like to have a little child. Do, please tell me where I can find one."

That's how the story begins. Oh my, that was my favorite book. The social workers didn't like the old witch part. But anyway, and then the illustrations in this book just absolutely like captured this tiny little, like an alien.

I I, I, I know that alien is a term that comes up often in the narrat, narratives of adoptees, but you know, just feeling like so out of place in a dangerous world. And all of these illustrations, which again, are not exactly the ones that I would've seen as a child, but they would've been similar. You know, just this little, little fairy girl, this little flower size girl.

Just in all these dangerous situations.

Haley: You showed me one photo or one picture of, she's on this giant lily pad in.

Marcy: Yeah. With these big, ominous looking fish underneath the water.

Haley: They look like they're gonna eat her any second.

Marcy: Nibbling away at the stem of the, of the lily pad. I mean, I, I was like, this was such a revelation to me. It opened up a huge door to my inner life as a child. It was just such a blessing. So, you know, she's wonderful. All of her stuff is great. I recommend all of her stuff.

Haley: Amazing. And fellow adoptee?

Marcy: Yes. Yes, that's right. Oh, and, and, . I got a fan email from Dr. Estés about my article about the primal wound. That was like, wow, that was something else.

Haley: Oh my goodness.

Marcy: Yep. She just emailed me. I know.

Haley: Top 10 day of your life. Like what a memory.

Marcy: Yeah. Really.

Haley: Amazing. Thank you so much. I've just really enjoyed our conversation and your insights. Where can we follow you and connect with you online?

Marcy: My website is my name, MarcyAxness.com or another way to do it, it's easier to remember, ParentingForPeace.com, all all run together, goes to the same place.

Haley: Thank you, Marcy.

Marcy: My pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Haley: Marcy's Social media links are also in the show notes for you. If you are listening on a podcast app on your phone. You can click on the cover of this episode and it'll bring you to a link for this episode's. Show notes on adoptees on.com where you can find all the show notes for every episode we've ever published.

Every amazing episode of Adoptees On is brought to you by the folks who support US Monthly on Patreon, who are the real heroes. Thank you. Patrons have been receiving podcast episodes called Adoptees Off Script every single Monday in their podcast apps automatically. And my main co-host, Carrie Cahill Mulligan and I have been doing a little mini-series on the abhorrent practices adoption agencies and pregnancy care centers have been using to coerce expected mothers to relinquish their babies. To this day.

If you need a little fire lid underneath you to get into activism, I think the two episodes we released on the 14th of November and the 21st this month are just the trick for you. So if you join us at AdopteesOn.com/community, you can hear My Spicy Takes About Brave Love.

Yuck. Thanks very much for listening. Let's talk again next. Where we are going to be celebrating a really exciting milestone for the podcast

229 Tiffany Henness

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/229

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Haley: This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today I get to introduce you to my friend Tiffany Henness. Tiffany shares her story of growing up in an open adoption and how it isn't the panacea that many hold it up to be. We discuss how she came to explore race, adoption and faith, and what shifted her perspectives on all of those topics.

Now, Tiffany is an adoption and racial literacy expert who writes, speaks, and leads others. To unpack the complexities of these experiences, we wrap up with some recommended resources, and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adoptee design.com. Before we get started, I wanted to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on AdopteesOn.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world.

We are gonna be talking about some faith things and Christianity today, though, if that's a hard topic for you. I just wanted to give you the heads up. Let's listen in.

(Upbeat Music)

Haley: I'm so pleased to welcome to adoptees on Tiffany Henness. Welcome Tiffany.

Tiffany: Woohoo. Thank you for having me. This is very exciting.

Haley: You're already celebrating. Me too. Me too. I'd love it if you would start and share a little of your story with us.

Tiffany: Well, we go back to the beginning. I was born on a Tuesday. Yeah, I, I am an infant domestic adoptee, a multiracial Asian and white.

My first mom is white American and western European American. And I was immediately adopted into a white family in Oregon. So if anyone has heard of Tillamook cheese Tillamook, Oregon or Tillamook Ice Cream, Tillamook, Oregon is where I was born. And this was in the eighties when there were more cows than people.

So, yeah, I, I also like to say that there were more different colors of cheeses than there were people in this town.

Haley: Okay.

Tiffany: So if that paints a picture. Okay. Okay. Yeah. . But yeah, I, you know, I had no contact or really information about my biological father, who I have since found out is Chinese Canadian.

But I grew up in this Christian home, evangelical Christian home. We did Sunday school. My, I think my adoptive mom was actually the Sunday school teacher. We did church every Sunday, youth group every Wednesday growing up. And we also played in the woods and in the forest of Oregon, which is beautiful.

If I can plug for, for Oregon's natural environment. It's very beautiful. But I had no Asian friends. I had... the only other Chinese Americans that I think I ever saw was like the one family who owned the Chinese food restaurant in town. You know, like there's, there's like a Chinese food restaurant in every town, right?

And there's this Chinese family that runs it, but you never see them unless you go to their restaurant. So they weren't even family friends necessarily. But we would go there and I would always order the cheeseburger because I did not know what Chinese American food was. I was not sure about this. So I'd order the cheeseburger on the kids menu.

But yeah, growing up I had two older siblings. They were the biological children of my adoptive parents. They were 10 and 12 years older too. So they were kind of more like built-in babysitters than they were siblings, you know what I mean? Like yeah, they're just their whole generation ahead of me. And so I was like the baby of the family.

And I would say that I was about 10 or 11 when I met my first mom for the first time. So this was an open adoption. My adoptive mother communicated with my first mother via letters. She, you know, they'd send photos of me to her. And then I think I was about four when we had that conversation, right?

Like, why, why do I look different? And my adoptive mother told me this story about how a mama cat adopted a puppy because the puppy's mom died. And so, of course, cats can't give birth to dogs. But the mama cat became like the mom to the puppy, and that's what adoption meant. So that's how I was told what it, what it meant.

But your mom didn't die. Right? Like she's alive.

But that was, that was the explanation I got for why I looked different and what adoption really meant. They always told me I was adopted, I just didn't actually know what it meant. And it was one of those things where a friend was like, you're not adopted. And so I went home and I was like, so what does that actually mean?

Cause I've been saying this to everybody, but I don't know what it means. I'm only four. Yeah. So that's when I was told, and at that point, my adoptive mother told my first mother, she knows now exactly what it means to be adopted and that you're out there. So pretty much from my fifth birthday forward, I got a letter in the mail, a birthday card from my first mom, and it had a picture of her when she was the same age that I was.

And that was an interesting thing because it gave me the sense for who she was, but it, it, it wasn't a picture of her as an adult. It was a picture of her as a child. And I think that the idea was that then I wouldn't see this picture of this other adult woman and be like, oh, she's my mom and you're not my mom or something.

I'm not really sure. But as a kid it was interesting to receive those birthday cards. My adoptive mother would keep the envelope from me so I wouldn't see the address, which is interesting because I wasn't even thinking about, you know, trying to like contact her myself. Like that wasn't even a thought in my mind.

But I do remember her being careful to remove the, the envelope and just give me the card with the photo in it. I remember being a little weirded out about seeing a photo of my first mom as a kid who had blonde curly hair and bright blue eyes, and I was like, how is. How is this someone I'm related to? I have black hair, brown eyes, Asian features...

so yeah, that was, that was my growing up. That was my, my version of what the spectrum of open adoptions can look like. And when I did finally meet her around 10 or 11, that was a very odd moment. In walks this tall blonde woman, who is just so different from me as a kid. All I could see is our differences.

And I think it's funny looking back at that now because when my first son was born, so this was like seven years ago, she came to visit and, and stayed for like a week. And now we're both adults. I'm a grown adult now. I know who I am a little bit better. I'm, I've grown into my adult features. My nose, my ears.

And that's the most time I've ever spent with her. She visited me for like 10 days and, and I could not stop seeing all of our similarities. Even though we have different hair color and eye color, but like the way we walk and the sound of our voice and, and the, and it was so weird to be in my thirties and finally seeing myself in my mother, who I had technically known for 20 years. And so yeah.

Haley: Well it, it's interesting to me that you were, were talking about the different, the mannerisms and things that were similar. And as you were talking, I was trying to picture you like, what would you look like if you had blonde hair and? Like, yeah, I don't know. I, I've never heard of someone getting pictures of their parent as a child in the birthday cards.

Tiffany: Mm.

Haley: I want Did you ever ask, like, was that your idea? Whose idea was that?

Tiffany: I didn't ask. My impression was that it was my adoptive mom's idea. So I do have some letters that my first mom had sent to my adoptive mom within the year after I was born. I have a few things like that that was given to me in like a keepsake from my adoptive mom.

And I didn't read those letters until probably four years ago. I didn't know they existed. I knew that they had communicated, but I didn't know how, and it was actually really crazy. Now, as a mom in my thirties, you know, to be reading this letter of my first mom, not long after she had given birth and left me and drove off and went home.

And then she went into the Marines, actually, she got married there met, met a Marine and they, the two of 'em got married and they had three kids, my, my half siblings. But to read her letters of her just asking how I was doing and, and trying to share about her life and what was going on, and... trying to put myself in that position of like, gosh, you know, all they communicated it seemed was through these letters.

And she's writing to ask and inquire about me. And as a mom now, I just can't imagine like how much emotions go into putting that letter together and sending it off. You know, but my, my impression from those letters, is that she's very much trying to follow the lead of my adoptive mom, that who was her senior by probably at least 15 years.

Right? So I can't do the math right now. It'll take too long. But yeah, she was quite a bit older and and my first mom was just barely 19, I think, when she had me. So I think that the idea for those photos was, you know, Tiffany knows now and we want to facilitate a connection between the two of you. But I think that there was some concern, you know, a lot of folks at the time, I remember my adoptive mom telling me, a lot of people told her, are you, aren't you worried that the first your, you know, her first mom's gonna come and, and try to get her back?

You know, like, so in the eighties, like there were these, these were some of the things she heard from the people in her community. And so I think she was trying to be cautious to not set me up to have that, oh, here's my mom. You're not my mom. I'm identifying with this adult woman who is my real mom. And I think she was trying to avoid some of that confusion or area of tension. But I, I'm not sure that that's how I would've responded, because looking back, thinking about myself, when I would get those letters, I felt very disconnected from this person and it felt like a, whatever emotions or feelings or reactions I was having, I, I couldn't even really access them. I think I kind of went numb and it was like an out of body experience to read this birthday card from somebody who, like, logically I knew that she was the one who had given birth to me, but I didn't know what to do with that information.

And so I just kind of read it and was like, huh. And that's interesting. And I looked at the photo and I was like, huh, that's interesting. And then I literally just went on with my birthday because I didn't know what to do with it. So I did nothing with it. I didn't ask further questions. I didn't stare at it and look at it all the time.

I wonder if it would've been different if my mom had been Asian and my dad had been white and I was seeing a picture of someone who looked like me. I don't know. Maybe I would've responded differently, but since she didn't look like me, or I didn't think she did, I just, I didn't feel a connection through a little kid wallet sized school photo from the, you know, sixties. Yeah. Sort of that brown sepia tone. Right.

Haley: Yeah. Yeah. That feels such, like, such a disconnect. I mean, in, in adulthood when any of us who are fortunate to have a reunion of some kind... getting those pictures of your parents as a kid, it's kind of like, oh, wow. Like, it's so interesting and fascinating and then you have this, but you're not really sure what to do with it.

Tiffany: Hmm.

Haley: And the other thing I think is so interesting is, I mean, I, I feel like I've almost exclusively, there's a few exceptions, but almost exclusively talked with adoptees who are from closed adoptions.

Tiffany: Oh.

Haley: Whether it's domestic or international, or transracial, some kind, but closed adoptions who don't have access to that. And do you think, I mean, and that's what's touted as like, well this is the like high, highest form of option is open adoption. And so I know you talked to tons of adoptees and you're very connected in adopteeland, but what do you think about that? Like, did it make a difference for you?

Like you don't know the other, you don't have the other experience of closed adoption, but

Tiffany: Right.

Haley: It sounds like it was perplexing as well.

Tiffany: Yeah. So I'm gonna say something that might be a little bit unpopular, but I don't think open adoption solves that many problems. It just makes the problems different. And, and that's just the truth of the matter. Here's something I, I'll often try to express or explain about open adoption is just because you have access to someone in some form or some capacity or knowledge about them, right? It doesn't make it make any more sense why you are given away. It doesn't make it make any more sense, you know, why they didn't want you.

Even, you know, when you get to hear their story from them firsthand, which to be honest with you, I have not yet heard that story firsthand from my first mom for all of the times we've talked and the fact that she visited me, that doesn't mean that we actually had open and honest conversations about any of this stuff. okay?

And, and I think that the thing that I experienced with open adoption was the assumption that, well, if she wants to know, she'll ask because we're right here and, right, and so that's what the adults are thinking. But I'm a, as a kid thinking, well, if they want me to know, they'll tell me cuz we're right here together.

And if they don't want me to know, they won't tell me and I shouldn't ask. And so there's this assumption too, that I had growing up, that I could always get the answers if I wanted to because I knew how to contact my first mom. And yet my experience has been that's not the case. Just, you know, just because your family, adoptive family, they told me, well, if you ever wanna search for your first father, like we will help you do that.

They would tell me that like, someday if you wanna do that. But as a kid someday meant, well, not today. So that means there's a point in the future when it's gonna be okay. And I don't know when that is and, but it's not, must not be today cuz that's not what someday means. And then the reality is that by the time I did kind of ask or expressed curiosity, it was so long ago and, oh, I don't really remember.

So like my first mom had said like, well it was just so long ago. And you know, I don't remember some of those details. And then you feel that pressure of not wanting to press them and pepper them with more questions. You know, it takes a lot of courage. It took a lot of courage to just ask the initial, can you tell me what happened?

And when the response is, well I don't remember all the details. You know, and they give you just a little bit and you're like, okay, then what do you remember? You know, that's what you wanna say, but then you're like, gosh, you know, we've had this whole history and pattern of not talking directly about it, of assuming that, you know, if they wanted to share, they would've told me and they didn't.

And there's a lot to overcome there. So, no, I, I think that being where I'm at today as an adult who is estranged from her adoptive family, who has actually reconnected with both sides of my biological family not fully with my, my father, although I've reached out to him, we'll just leave it at that.

But like, I do have a lot of the answers that I had of the questions I had had because of the people I've reconnected with and the things they've been able to share with me. But on the whole, I don't feel like I have had this lifelong experience of more confidence and resolution that I hear people talk about or peace about being adopted that I, I hear people say when they talk about the benefits of open adoption and, you know, everyone's experience is very different.

But I'm 38 today and I've gone through enough of my journey to, to be able to reflect more deeply about my adoption than I could 10 years ago. And as I do that, I think, yeah, no, it was open. It wasn't easy. It was, it didn't make sense to me. And on the whole, I, I don't think it, it was a very healthy experience.

And so I hate to say that and burst some people's bubbles, but I do know that there are other adoptees I've talked to who their version of an open adoption was, more candid, they got more intentional conversations to head- on address some things, and I could see how that could help them process stuff in a, in a better or healthier way.

But I feel like I have been clawing for answers, paying thousands of dollars, doing DNA tests, doing genealogy research, scouring Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn and, you know, yellow page online listings for people, connected with people to find parts of my family, just like closed adoptees have had to, you know, has have had to do, on my father's side.

And on on my mother's side, who we had connection with, I have felt a lifelong experience of a strained reunion that there was a lot that wasn't said, a lot of opportunities that weren't taken, maybe fear on both sides. And so we don't have, I don't have like full peace or resolution there either.

I still have questions and I'm still hoping they'll be answered someday, and I'm still daily accepting the fact they may never be.

Haley: Mm-hmm. . Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Tiffany: Oh, and I, I still can't, I still am trying to get my own adoption records. Oregon's adoption records became open the first state that opened their records to adoptees in 2005.

Right. Because of the activism of Bastard Nation adoptee, adoptees. And so that's where I was born. I'm born in this state who opened adoption case records to adoptees, and I've been having this big mental and emotional hurdle over the fact that when you apply to get those records, they ask you on the form what your reason is for asking for these records. And I can't, I can't.

Haley: No.

Tiffany: Like they ask you for a good reason and I'm like, I want to write something explicit and mean, but then if I do that on a government forum, I'm afraid that I'm gonna be put on a watch list or something. Like, these are my records. I don't need to give you a reason. They're just mine. Like, if I requested, like if I divorce my husband and later I wanted to request a record of that, you know, divorce, like court proceeding or whatever, cuz I, whatever.

Would I, is that on the form to request those records? Give me a good reason why you want these records of your, of your life. I don't think so. I don't think it is. I think you just fill out your information, you pay the fee and then it comes to you in the mail. But I have to get, I have to come up with the reason why, a good reason why they should give me these records.

And I just have sat there and stared at that and been angry as opposed to just filling in something and sending it off.

You know what I mean? Oh.

Haley: Absolutely. It is the perpetual infantilization of adopted people asking for permission with, to what should rightly be ours. Un friggin believable I mean, it is totally believable.

Tiffany: And they give you like two, like a line and a half to like enter your answer. And I'm like, if you wanna know my reason, I'm gonna give you like a 2000 word essay.

Haley: Okay. What would we pay to just see from the database what people have written in that space? Like I wanna see everybody's answers. Show me all of them.

Tiffany: Yes. Show me them all. Mm-hmm. . . Okay. I might need to get a job at the Oregon Health Department, like records, we can have access to see what people have said.

Haley: Right?

Tiffany: Oh, that is fascinating.

Haley: Like, I, I wonder what's the ex quote, unquote acceptable reasons. I imagine illness of some kind. So we need our medical, right? Yeah. I don't know. I dunno. Wow.

Tiffany: But that's the assumption in, in the way that they, they put that is that there is, there's a bad reason and therefore your application or request could be denied because what you wrote here wasn't an approvable answer.

I did reach out to an attorney who was involved in changing Oregon's laws on records, and I, I expressed my frustration with this question on this form, and, you know, she's an adoptive mom too. She's not an adoptee, but she just said, well, just, just write in there that you want them because they're yours.

And I'm like, yeah. But, the question shouldn't be there. Yeah. Because if that's the answer that's acceptable, why ask it, you know? Yeah. Anyway, so that's a, that's another interesting thing.

I've had this open adoption, I've lived this ideal scenario where I, I think some people think the ideal scenario is there was a young woman who wasn't ready to parent. And so there were parents who were happy to take in a child, and it was all arranged and set up for everybody's benefit. The win-win- win we hear about. And that was kind of like the life I lived, right? Like she was, my first mom was young. You know, I was told she loved me and that's why she gave me up and wasn't ready to parent.

And then I got to live with this family who was able to, you know, give me both a mom and a dad and a house and amenities and all these things and love me. And it was open. So I had contact and all of that stuff. And in the state that has open record laws, you know, so all of these things that are going for me on, from this one perspective.

And from this other perspective, I'm like, then why am I still paying so much for therapy? Like, why do I still struggle with all of this lifetime of, of, of trauma? And it feels like even more of a disenfranchised grief because when people hear I had an open adoption, or when they hear that it wasn't because, you know, of my first mom, like it wasn't out of living in bad conditions and being taken away by Child Protective Services or I didn't have those adverse childhood experiences that people think of when they think of like child, child welfare or CPS getting involved, right?

It's like, well, you were fresh, you were a newborn baby. You got handed over and you got the the good start, and, and I'm like, yeah. So if that is the case, and I'm still struggling so much, the older I get the more the, the weight of it feels heavier and heavier because the experience of adoption, you collect more and more experiences as you get older and older that show you how heavy it can be to carry.

I was like, so if I'm the best case scenario and I'm still struggling with this much , then that doesn't bode well.

Haley: There's something wrong in the system.

Tiffany: Yeah. There's, there's something that, that we're not acknowledging here. Yeah. I'm not crazy for feeling like, I don't think any of this was really Okay.

Haley: Mm-hmm.

Tiffany: You know?

Haley: Mm-hmm. Well, one of the things I know that we have in common is that you were raised in a family that was evangelical and you church attendance. Mm-hmm. was a big part of your life and I don't think my experience in that way was identical, but I definitely, church was a big part of our life and I went to youth group and, you know, was all in, we were all in Tiffany.

Tiffany: Oh yeah.

Haley: We were sold out for Jesus. Yeah.

Tiffany: Did you do mission trips to Mexico too?

Haley: No. We,

Tiffany: Or did you do mission trips to the U.S.? Are we your Southern neighbors? You, you came to evanglize?

Haley: No, actually the only mission trip I went on was within my province. We went to a city in southern Alberta, Calgary. Ever heard of the Calgary Stampede. And then we did work for some of the homeless shelters. And that was sort of the, so I grew up in a really tiny Mennonite community, so a lot of those kids had never been to a city before, so that was plenty to be exposed to.

Tiffany: Ooh, nice.

Haley: Yep. Anyway. So I'll speak for myself now. I remember feeling in, you know, all the way along, like, I need to adopt, I gotta pay this back. This is part of God's plan for my life. You know, there was a reason for me to be placed where I was and, and all of those kind of tropes. And as I got older, I mean, and, and I was complicit in that whole, I, I would tell anybody that asked me, like, I'm thankful to be adopted and like, going into the system to like adopt myself and, and all of those things.

And then when things, when I started, like, I know not everybody likes outta the fog terminology, but that resonates for me. But as I started like processing all of these things, and then looking at church stuff, for myself, I really started deconstructing both adoption stuff and then later all the church stuff.

Because when I saw how complicit the Evangelical church was in separating children from their biological families and connections and calling it good and calling it God's plan, when I see the pain that people experience ... could, does not compute.

Tiffany: Does not compute. Yes, that's right.

Haley: So how was that experience for you and d do you, does any of, was any of that from well, what I shared similar to your journey. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about that.

Tiffany: Oh, sure. Yeah. I was actually, sorry if you hear my clicking. I was trying to find, that paper that was, I think it's called out of the fog and a model of adoptee awareness that JaeRan, Kim and Susan Branco and other adoptee scholars put out this year because I've been trying to read through that because it helps to give a framework or a model for understanding how we experience that coming outta the fog or coming into a consciousness of adoption, right.

A as a system and as a matter of social justice issues with social injustice.

Haley: It's called adoptee Critical Consciousness.

Tiffany: Mm, yes.

Haley: And I definitely wanna have some of them on at some point to talk us through that. So we'll, we'll link to that in the show notes, so

Tiffany: oh, great.

Haley: You can good find that. Okay.

Tiffany: Yeah, they self-published it online, so it would be available for anybody to get it and not put behind a scholarly journal, you know, paywall. And I appreciate that so very much. And it's great to see adoptees like rethinking how, how we experience this, especially for trans racial adoptees, because our experience of adoption and injustice and racial injustice go hand in hand.

And so, so yeah, let, that kind of ties back to my experience growing up. I definitely did not think critically about my adoption at all. In fact, I saw it as something that happened the day I was born, and then the rest of my life just went on without being impacted by it. That's how little aware I was about my own reality that I was experiencing.

And it's the same for my racial identity. I had didn't have one. I, you know, would joke about being a banana, you know, yellow on the outside, white on the inside. And I had the same racial ignorance and like white, white cultural perspective of my family. So because of that I also grew up thinking that I was totally gonna adopt someday because that is just like the best thing to do.

Cuz my parents did it, my parents are so great, and what a great way to show God's love. And I went to a Christian liberal arts university, like I was on track for staying in the Christian bubble for the rest of my life because that was where it was at, right? The world, we are not of it. We're gonna do our own little Christian thing over here and just be so holy and pure.

So there was this, there were cracks that were beginning to form, right? And usually that happens when you leave the home of the adoptive parents. So it didn't all happen at once. For me. There was like the time period in college where I was actually now engaging with the world who didn't know me as being a, a kid adopted by white parents, right?

So I was engaging in the world as this multiracial Asian. Some people think I'm ethnically ambiguous, you know, some people are like, no, you're definitely Chinese. And others are like, what are you like are you like like Alaskan or...? It's so funny. I get the what are you question a lot. Multiracial people get a lot.

But I realized that that was something I had to answer for more regularly out in the world where people didn't know, oh, you're Tiffany, the one who was adopted by, you know, so and so.

And then I studied abroad in China. So that was actually a big eye-opener for me. Looking back, I realized I studied abroad in China because I was trying to connect to my Chinese roots. I, it's a form of searching and I, at the time, I, I recognized that I wanted to know a more about Chinese culture because I was part Chinese, but I didn't recognize that I had this bias against Chinese Americans as if they weren't the real Chinese people. So I didn't wanna go to like LA Chinatown because they're not like real Chinese. They live in America. I wanted to go to the motherland, to the source. China, cuz that's where the real Chinese people are. Oh my gosh. I was, I was so blind.

Anyways, but I had that experience. I studied abroad there for a, a semester and after college I even went back there to teach English. And I lived in China for seven months.

And all I found out was that number one, I am not, I'm American, I'm American. And that my Chinese friends that I made while I was there, they all wanted to know where my hometown was. I found out that that's really important, knowing your, where, what village your ancestors came from, that places you in the story of being Chinese.

And so I couldn't say that. I had no idea. And that's when I began wanting to find that out. And that was a safer thing for me to say, I wanna know where my Chinese ancestors came from in China. It was safer for me to say that than to say I wanna find my dad. That was too scary. But they were the same thing really, to be honest.

I just couldn't say it that way. So starting in college, I became obsessed with this idea of finding my ancestral hometown in China so that I could tell my kids someday so that I could know how to locate my, my lineage in history. And never curious about my, you know, ancestral hometown in western Europe from my mom's side, of course, because, she was the side I had access to and assumed I knew I, I was connected to and knew about. But my Chinese side I didn't.

I also, that's began my, like deconstruction of Western Christianity was when I went to China in college. I met friends there who were Christian. And they went to the Chinese Christian, the three self Chinese Christian Church. It's like the, the PRC's approved Christian religion . And I grew up hearing about the underground, the underground church in China that has to meet, in my head, literally underground, which is not true, but like in my head, I imagine people like in caves with candles and stuff. Cuz you know, I was like 12 when I first heard about it.

And, and that was the real church and those, you know. And, but then I went there and I went to Sunday service in this beautiful church building in the open. People are pouring off the streets in there. And I sat down with the Bible that's printed there and my friend who attended this church and I was looking at my English Bible and I'm looking at their Chinese Bible. And I'm struggling to find where they have hidden the real message of Christ in that Bible. That they're allowed to have. I'm like okay, my Chinese isn't great, but from what my friend is reading to me and what I'm, what I'm piecing together here, they, they do have access to the gospel. So, so they're not, they're not all underground everywhere in China?

Like these, it's a bright Sunday morning, everyone can see hundreds of people pouring into this church. And that made me start questioning what I was told about God and the church and the world. And I came back after that study abroad experience, pretty aware that America had a version of Christianity that put America first as if we were the superior type of people.

I didn't recognize it as whiteness or, or white supremacy. I recognized it as American exceptionalism. And from that point forward, I had a strong inclination to think that our American worldview, wasn't "it". It was one worldview, but there is other ways other cultures have access to God and Christ in ways that we don't understand. And that's okay and that's good. And, but I still totally about adoption and my racial didn't have a racial identity, hadn't developed a critical consciousness of adoption that happened when I had my first kid. And it was about that time, you know, I, I had, I had went off to college, I got a job, I moved out.

I wasn't around my adoptive family a whole lot. And, and things changed, you know. Their path went one way, my path went another way. And by the time my first kid came, I was pregnant with my first kid. That's when I realized that I was grieving my own in initial separation. That's when I first discovered stuff about the primal wound and was like, okay, that is explaining what's going on in a way that I never would've thought.

And then my, 18 months later, after my son was born, I donated part of my liver to my adopted second cousin. And because of that, I had to actually live with my adopted aunt and my adopted mom for like a full month in recovery and like be in their life daily.

And this is the time when Colin Kaepernick is kneeling. Donald Trump is running for president. And I saw them in a light I never really realized before. And Colin Kaepernick is an interesting one for me because to me, even though he's black, right? He was raised by a white family, right? And so when they would yell at the TV screen because he was kneeling or because they were talking about him, and they would say things like, you're not really black, or you don't really know what, you know what black people think? Cuz you were raised by a white family. It was as if they were saying it to me and it it made me realize, oh, they don't, they don't see me as Asian. And that was a huge eye-opener for me and it sent me on this journey to find a way to make sense of how my racial identity fit into this, how my adoption fit into this.

And it really actually sent me into a dark place. Let's not describe the journey as if it was like this fun, personal exploration, you know. This was a this was a spiraling, descent into chaos and madness and my desire to literally just wanna burn it all down. And so let's, let's describe it accurately.

I was angry. I was, you know, ready to give up God. I was ready to give up, like, literally, but I, I, I didn't know. I still didn't know how to make sense of it, cuz I still hadn't learned a lot about social injustice, racism, adoption. I just know that this was not right. This didn't feel right and I was mad.

I, I think the, the one thing that helped me the most was finding this organization called Be the Bridge. So Be the Bridge was started by Latasha Morrison, a black Christian leader who was in Texas at the time and had, had started uh, a group of, of her friends from her church, multiracial group to sit down and to start having discussions about, about race and racism and what was going on. And over the years, developed a small group curriculum. Got on Facebook so that people could interact and, and it just ballooned, you know, into a lot of resources being curated. A lot of volunteers coming together to develop more curriculum for these small groups that were starting to pop up all over the U.S. following her discussion format, you know. And now it's a full blown nonprofit with staff. And I'm a, I'm a contractor who works for them for discussing race and adoption stuff. And and it's great.

But at the time when I first found them, it was the only space that was Christian and was being honest about race. And it was the only person, the only group of people, the only Facebook group where when someone shared their experience they were treated like, a person of color, they were treated like an expert in their own experience. They were honored. To say, okay, they're telling us what they experienced with this person and how, how it went down. And they're naming it as racism. And we honor that and we hear you.

And if a white person would jump on that comment thread and try to gaslight, they would get lovingly shut down. And say, no, you need to sit with the uncomfortable thing that this person of color is telling you and understand that they are an expert of their own experience. And so I saw that first with race before I saw it with adoption.

But very quickly I realized that there was people in this group who were in the world of transracial adoption. And to, to be honest, that's when I first heard the word transracial adoption. I didn't even know , that there was a name for what my experience of adoption was until I went into that group, and then I just, I just like I read every single post that that group has ever had in there since like 2015.

Every single conversation, every single, they had resources that they would link to NPR articles, podcasts, books. I spent three months just like a drinking from a fire hose. And I really think it saved me and it saved my faith to say, wait a minute, the American exceptionalism, the Christian nationalism, the white supremacy, and even the adoption injustice that's all crashing down on you and it's exposing all of the lies that you believed that you didn't realize were not true...

That doesn't mean you have to throw everything away and burn it down. I mean, some of it you can definitely burn down, but, it doesn't mean that there is no truth. You know? And that doesn't mean that you just throw up your hands and give up. There is another way to look at this. There's another way to understand God in all of this chaos that does honor the truth of your experience and your pain and that that is real.

And that was huge for me. So I started a group, a Be The Bridge group in my area, and I just tried to educate myself as much as possible. And so then that's when I realized I need to develop my Chinese American racial/ ethnic identity. I need to have a healthier perspective of myself because you have internalized whiteness and you have hated your Asian and Chinese self and you didn't realize that's what you were doing.

So give yourself grace, but let's, let's fix this cuz this is not healthy. And so, you know, that was like 7, 6, 7 years ago. So the racial awareness and the adoption awareness, a critical consciousness on both really happened at the same time for me. And it was dove tailing off of my spiritual Christian deconstruction that was a process had already started, but didn't really get going until the three of those things combined, like, three powerful forces exploding together at once. Religion, race, adoption (exploding noise). And I feel like , you know, I've been living in that combustion of of awareness and learning and educating, and it's been like a five, six year journey I think, at this point.

So, yeah. Long answer, but there you go. There you have it.

Haley: Well it's one of those things that once you see it, you can't unsee it? Nope. And you can't hide from it anymore. Yeah. Oh, well I actually first like really personally connected with you last year when you put out the we're gonna talk a little bit about this soon, but journeying home.

Tiffany: Mm-hmm.

Haley: The advent readings for adoptees, deconstructing their faith, and I was like right in the midst of deconstructing, because I'm sure I've shared here before, but I'll just very briefly. At one point, a number of years ago, I started an adoptee support group in my city. I asked my church if I could host it there, where they host other meetings.

Tiffany: Mm-hmm.

Haley: Like recovery meetings and other, they have other community groups there. And we had just finished building, being a big construction project. And, you know, one of the main things they were saying is like, we wanna be welcoming to the community and like community functions and da da, da. Right. The, you know, you, you know exactly what I'm saying.

Tiffany: Mm-hmm.

Haley: And so I, I, you know, emailed and was like, oh yeah, can I host my adoptee support group here? Cuz I was hosting it in my home and you know, that's fine until it's not , so.

Tiffany: Mm-hmm. Oh yeah.

Haley: Yeah. And I had to have a series of meetings with a couple of pa different pastors. They had printed off some of my Facebook posts that were critical of adoption, showed them to me, and in the end they declined to host my adoptee support group.

And one of the reasons I was given was because of my Facebook posts and because there's so many adoptive parents that go to our church that we wouldn't wanna offend them. And so my personal journey on that front was, this is a church I had been going to for almost 20 years. I had worked at that church, I have volunteered a lifetime at that church,

Tiffany: Right.

Haley: And to have my experience shut down so profoundly was now I'm coming to recognize it as a spiritual.

Tiffany: Mm-hmm.

Haley: And so that's what has led me...

Tiffany: Yes. Say that again.

Haley: Yeah. That's what's led me to deconstruction. So when I was reading these devotionals from fellow adoptees, you and, and several others, I was like, oh, this is it. right?

Tiffany: Yes.

Haley: It's so painful when it, you know I know not all of my listeners are people that have identified with any faith tradition. But if you, if you have like, it can just be like this intrinsic part of yourself to, so to have that as something that is injuring you , is just a real mind F.

Tiffany: Mm.

Haley: And it's so hard. And when you were talking about that chaos, that downward, like spiral, like Yes, I relate to that part of it.

Tiffany: Mm-hmm.

Haley: So, yeah, it's so deeply personal and to know there's other adoptees that are walking that and unpacking those things together is like really helpful for me, you know? So...

Tiffany: Thank you for sharing that. I'm, I'm so what is the right word? It's hard to say that like, I'm glad that we're all experiencing this hard thing so that we can help each other. Cause that's not, that's not the reality. I'm like, I'm glad to have connected with you and I'm, I'm glad to be along this journey with you, to connect with you, to be on this journey with you.

I was speaking with Mark Anthony (correction: matthew anthony) who contributed to this wonderful poems, to this advent reading that you're talking about, Journeying Home, I was on the phone with him the other day and I said the same thing. I was like, you know, I'm really glad I've connected with you for as awful as adoption has been for us, you know, I'm just really honored to know you and. And I hope he's okay with me sharing this, but he was like, yeah. But that being said, like if I could choose between like having not been adopted or like knowing you, I would totally choose having not been adopted. I was like, I, yes, no, I get you.

Haley: Agreed.

Tiffany: And I, no offense taken, no offense taken. But, but yeah, I experienced the same thing with my church that I had been attend. I was gonna start that Be the Bridge group where we were gonna talk about race and we had to meet with the church elders, my co-facilitator and I. They brought up my Facebook post. They said that they didn't think I would be capable of leading such a group and that, you know, it, it wasn't just the group that we wanted to do and host it at the church and they denied us the use of the church.

It was also, I was trying to tell them our church needs to have this conversation because there are people in this church who are not acting right. They're acting white. And we need to talk about it. And they were like, I just, you know, I don't really think we know enough about this. And, and you know, they don't actually like, have women in leadership anyway, so there's a whole other thing going on there too.

But I walked away from that meeting and my co-facilitator was like, are you okay? Like they really just totally discredited you as being someone like capable of doing this work. And I was like, I mean, I'm not surprised, but it took a long time to like recover from taking that step, being vulnerable with your faith leaders, your spiritual leaders, the one who are supposed to be guiding you in your faith journey.

Like they see themselves as ordained by God to be guiding other people in their faith journeys. And when you come to them with something that is so raw and it's, and you're just, you're trying to create a space for a conversation, you're not trying to, you know, and they react to you that way. I mean, that, that to me, it took me a few months, but that to me was what made me realize church is not safe.

At least not these churches led by white men. But like, I, I need, I need for my own healing journey to not continue exposing myself to this type of treatment and, and posture. And I need to spend more time finding people who can help. And people I, who are, are going to listen and offer some Christian Biblical like wisdom not from the perspective of, of like white American Christianity, but from the perspective of, you know, people who understand historical oppression, marginalization, historical you know, social injustice, economic injustice.

And so that was one of the things where this advent reading, I was struggling for a few years. Advent would come around, my friends would be doing their devotionals, sharing their verses, or this website or this blog, or this podcast. and Advent wasn't a huge practice for my family growing up. Like we didn't have a lot of traditions necessarily around it, but I always felt like it was a special time to be reflective and meditative.

And, and I remember my dad reading the nativity story, my adoptive dad reading it one Christmas Eve. He, we rarely did that, but the one time he did like, I remember it cuz it felt special. And here I was going through this deconstruction journey, which, you know, deconstructing means different things to different people.

So for me, I just wanna share, like, I used to have this really tight hold on what my core beliefs were. They were clearly defined. I was fully committed to them. And deconstructing has just been the process of letting go of that tight grip, holding my beliefs with an open palm, so that can get a better look at them, and being being okay with letting go of them, with questioning them, taking them apart, seeing if they go back together or not. If they don't, then maybe they, they aren't something I should put so much faith and hope in. And, and being okay if the, the questions I have about my beliefs don't have immediate or satisfying answers.

And that's, that's just what it means to me. And so Christmas would come around and it, it felt really hard to engage in this season that used to contain hope and joy. And it used to contain a sense of connectedness in my spirit. And every devotion I would read was so tone deaf to, you know, about race and about adoption, you know. Lord forbid, a Christian author says that God adopted us. I close the book right away and, and I like freak out. Right. I can't, I can't.

Haley: Let me just link in the show now. It's the episode I did with Dr. Erin Heim. Yeah. Aaron Heim Yes. About adoption in the bible because Yeah.

Tiffany: So if you, if you listening and you haven't wa listened to Dr. Erin Heim's, just pause this one. Go listen to that one and come back and finish this one. Yeah. so yes, like I, there was a part of me that was like, no, like they can't take this from me. That is, that's not fair that because of the racial stuff, because of the adoption injustice stuff, that it's already taken so much from me. And and I know that there are many Christians of color who are great, like they do a good job of articulating how Christ is for the oppressed and not for the power structures, you know, and, and I've found so much like healing from reading their work. And so I thought it's, I wanna write an advent themed prayers or reflections or something that takes into consideration my viewpoint as a transracial adoptee and my experience as a transracial adoptee.

And so for a couple years I would just post those things on my Instagram and they were just little carousel posts. I would make them in Canva like we do, and we just post them up and people swipe through and, and they got really good responses from other adoptees and even a few adoptive parents who wanted to find a better way to talk about their faith with their, with their adopted kids than the, the typical message that is harmful, you know?

And so after doing that for a couple years, I was like, I'm not the only one though. I know. Bonita and I know Anthony and Matthew, Matthew Anthony, who also are right, great writers who also have thought deeply about their faith, their racial identity, their adoption experience. So I got us all together last year and I said, here's some of the things I've already written.

But what if we all wrote on this theme and made a booklet, like, I don't wanna call it a devotional, cuz that word comes with contextual associations. We just called it a, you know, reading. Advent readings, it's a booklet. And I said like, what do you think? And they were, they were game, you know, they, they were excited about the project.

We got it together and we self-published this digital advent booklet and I could not be, you know, more proud of it. A year later, reading it again, advents coming up again and I was like, guys, we're gonna, we're gonna make it for sale again online. I had taken it down cuz it costs money to keep things up and for sale on a site in using, you know, the, I used like a, an online e-commerce thing and it had a high monthly, monthly like fee to just keep it available.

And I was like, I can't actually afford to just have this up indefinitely. So we'll just have it up for advent season and then we'll take it down and see how we feel about it. And I, I realize now like, okay, it's time to put it back up again and, and if we can keep it up so that people can continue to access it, we, we will try to do that this year.

But last year I wasn't ready to make that commitment. So and this year Matthew Anthony's written another poem to be added, so there will be an additional entry that is new and I'm excited about that. But it really just talks about a way to look at advent and a way to look at the stories that, and themes that go along with advent like from the lens of, of adoptees.

And so I've enjoyed reading through it again as we get ready to republish it. It's, it's been, you know how sometimes you, you read something you wrote a while ago and you're like, oh no. This is one of those times where I'm like, yeah, no. Like I, I am still really, I'm still, I still get a lot out of reading what I wrote last year and I'm, I'm glad that this is something we, we've preserved , and it's not just gonna fall into the Instagram hole and never be seen again. Like, like my original posts all have.

Haley: I scrolled way back on your Instagram today in preparation for our talk.

Tiffany: Oh, no. Like how far back? Like if you go, oh no. If you go all the way back to you, you'll see my CrossFit days.

Haley: You're a very fit, fit person.

Tiffany: I was. Okay. But you know, you're, you're raised in sort of a cultish religion....

Haley: Discipline. Discipline is next to godliness. Is that a verse? Right?

Tiffany: I thought that was cleanliness. No, I...

Haley: oh sorry. No discipline. Mm-hmm. Okay. , I'm a bad Christian. I don't know.

Tiffany: I'm just making stuff up.

Haley: I'm a bad Christian too. Okay. So we, we are really, we've transitioned already, but we're talking about what I'm gonna recommend as our resources today and I, there's a little section here that you write in the introduction.

This advent theme booklet is by adoptees and for adoptees, dear Souls who have wrestled with decolonizing and deconstructing our faith and the role adoption is played in our lives. Disclosure. We are still very much on that journey. We share our hearts in this moment while anticipating our perspectives will continue to evolve. And I really appreciated that thought. And you know, I was rereading some of it today as well, and it's sort of like, it doesn't really matter where you are on your faith journey. It's a call to just processing things and thinking about things and, and some things we... that are painful and we kind of set to the side. So if it's something that you are like, oh, maybe I could process a few of those things this year. You know, it's like an invitation in to thinking about those things.

And so I really appreciate that. And the, the wisdom that your writers have brought is so profound. Some of the observations, they feel really insightful and also familiar. And it's like this beautiful kind of meshing together of that for me. So I really appreciated it and it brought me to you so....

Tiffany: That's right. Yeah.

Haley: Yeah. And tiffany and I actually worked through, I don't know, spiritual direction together this year. And that was really powerful for me to like, sit in like, what does it look like? Do I go to church anymore? Do I go to that church anymore? Is the apology I received enough?

Spoiler alert, it's not enough to overcome spiritual trauma, just to have someone say to you, oh yeah, we did the wrong thing. Sorry about that. Like, it's, it's not enough.

Tiffany: Right? Nope.

Haley: So, unpacking those things and unpacking, if you were raised in a Christian home and hearing about how this experience of ripping you away from your original family, this was God's plan.

Tiffany: Mm-hmm.

Haley: Unpacking that with fellow adoptees who've heard the same is really powerful. So thank you and thank you to your other writers and contributors. And the artwork is just beautiful. Beautiful.

Tiffany: Yeah. Artwork by Natalie Boone, also an adoptee. And I, I am hopeful that they'll be recording just a little bit of their thoughts and sending those along. But no, I just, I wanna speak to what you said about the apology. With Be The Bridge, it helped because they have this framework for what reconciliation really does look like. And a confession saying what we did was wrong. And an apology, I'm sorry, do you forgive me? Forgiveness and confession is like halfway through the journey of reconciliation.

It's not the end. And so we do need to go through those steps, but that doesn't repair the relationship. Confession and forgiveness does not repair what's been broken. It doesn't restore to what formerly was or reconcile what has been divided. And that was a helpful framework I got from Be the Bridge was to recognize that while confession and forgiveness might be a place that I've come to in certain situations or relationships with people with, with the church or certain church people, you know, I was raised to see forgiveness as, confession and forgiveness as being the end result, like the end goal, and then automatically things would be repaired.

But , it's, it's the initial step in the reparation process and what they do after that to decide to change how they interact and what they say and what they do to repair- that is a process that those who have caused harm have to go through and prove that they're trustworthy again, prove that they're able to be in community with you again.

And if they just stop at confession and asking for forgiveness and they don't go further, then I don't think it's actually genuine. Cuz true reconciliation means that someone is gonna work through that ongoing process of repairing the harm or, or restoring what you know, what they broke. And if they don't do that, then it's not enough.

And you don't need to stay in relationship or stay at that church or, or pretend that just the confession and forgiveness part was all that needed to happen. It's not. That's huge.

Haley: And when the injured party is the one that is coming to you saying you should apologize, it's like Okay. And there's nothing after that. Yeah. I mean we could talk about that a whole nother thing, but I appreciate so much you saying that cuz I, I mean it applies to so many situations for sure.

It does. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Oh, you're so wise, Tiffany. Okay. Now you briefly mentioned it, but what do you wanna recommend to us today

Tiffany: When it comes to like racial literacy and education, whether it's faith-based or values-based, Be The Bridge has really great resources that have done a great job helping me as a transracial adoptee, like unpack the internalized whiteness that I have struggled with. And it's also one of the only communities where there's the, Be the Bridge BIPOC community has a, a separate Facebook group for Be the Bridge BIPOC Care Group, was is what they call it.

And it's really hard as a transracial adoptee to go into a space with other people of color and not feel like an in total fraud and imposter. Right. And feel like my experiences are totally invalidated cuz I was raised by a white family. And yet the, the Be The Bridge because of the way they do ra, racial reconciliation and the way that they posture themselves in these conversation, it's been the most welcoming place and the most, like I've been given the most space and the most honor to say this has been my experience.

And even though it's wildly different from most other people, because I was transracially adopted, I'm not like shut down or gaslighted, I'm not, you know, I'm seen as an expert in my own experience of transracial adoption and, and it's been very healing because of that. And so I recommend, they have resources for, white people have resources for BIPOC.

They have resources for just general like learning about racial literacy. They have professional development trainings for organizations. And one of the things that I've been able to do with them, and we're still working on it, it's gonna come out next year, but it's called Bridge Building and Transracial Adoption.

It's an online e-course and it's different because it's not written to tell adoptive parents how to parent children of color. Most, most courses you find about transracial adoption are oriented toward adoptive parents and trying to teach them how to cause as little harm as possible, and be as as helpful as possible.

This is more of a course, we're sort of orienting it more as racial literacy education and how to understand trans racial adoption in systems of injustice so that all people, whether you are an adoptee, an adoptive parent, a counselor, a teacher can, can get a handle on, on some of these dynamics of transracial adoption, from the perspective of understanding systemic racism, understanding how whiteness works in our systems of child welfare and then how that does impact kids on the individual level and helps us see what it is they need on an individual level in, in a clearer way.

But the goal is to, is to really help all racial bridge builders understand where transracial adoption fits in our pursuit of justice and our pursuit of equity in our pursuit, and how we go about being bridge builders. So that's something I'm really, really excited about because it's a conversation that I'm dying to have with anybody who will listen. It's a more bigger picture look at things. And when that does come out, I'm hopeful that we will get a lot of different people around the adoption constellation to, to go through that and, and to, to see how it helps them better understand where adoption fits into this bigger systems of like race and, and things like that.

And, and I, I think that that's a piece that has been missing. Let me put it this way. It's the piece of information I was looking for when I started putting the pieces together about race and adoption and faith. And all I could find was stuff written for adoptive parents, and how to raise a kid.

And I was like, but nobody's telling me how adoption fits into these bigger systems. And, and now I know a lot of adoptees are talking about this, but it's, it's still something, I think that it's still a conversation that gets dismissed as a niche topic, niche topic that you know, you only really need to know about it if, if it directly impacts you.

And I'm trying to be over here being like, no, our collective liberation is tied up with each other. We all need to learn about each other's forms of oppression and marginalization and historical exclusion. And that includes adoption. So.

Haley: As you were talking about it, I was like, oh yeah. , I could bring this to the teachers at my school and you know, there's lots of, you know, kids in the class that are adopted and to have teachers know like, okay, maybe we shouldn't do the family tree project because it Right. Excludes the kids that, or makes them be imposters, you know? Like pretending your adoptive parents are like your direct line and uh. Yeah. Just one little example of how it all continues to perpetuate everywhere.

Tiffany: It does. Yeah, it does. Yes.

Haley: Tiffany, that work is amazing and I know how much work behind the scenes that you've put into that course and I know it's gonna be fantastic. So tell us a couple things. Where can we get Journeying Home, the advent readings for adoptees deconstructing their faith, and where can we follow you and make sure we are keeping up with all those updates?

Tiffany: Awesome. Okay, so Journeying Home is available on, there's links to it on either of my websites. I have two websites; CallingInTheWilderness.com that's more of my personal blog. And then AdoptionLiteracy.com is more the website for my professional side where I do some speaking, where I, where I talk about other ways that I can collaborate with people and they can hire me.

And then social media. I'm on Facebook as Tiffany Henness and then on Instagram as Coach Henness, because back in the day I used to be a personal trainer and running coach, and that's when I created my Instagram. So I'm Coach Henness on Instagram.

Haley: And now you're an adoption literacy coach. So you're just like,

Tiffany: Oh yeah, yeah, good spin. Good spin. I like that. I like that.

So yeah, so those are the places where I will post about personal thoughts and or where I'm speaking next or what I've participated in, or even this advent booklet and reading will be posting it about it there. So come find me.

Haley: Wonderful. Thank you so much. I so appreciate being connected with you and I really, I learned a lot more about you today.

Tiffany: Yeah. Well, thank you. It's, it's awesome to get to be on a podcast that I've listened to and enjoyed and benefited from so much. The work that you've done with this is, and the impact is just immeasurable.

Haley: Thank you.

[ (Upbeat Music)

If you'd like to hear some samples of Journeying Home and from one of the artists who worked on the project, I'd encourage you to listen all the way to the end of the show where we'll share some clips with you from matthew anthony, Natalie Boone, and Bonita Croyle in that order.

I feel really thankful that at this time Tiffany is one of the fabulous folks working behind the scenes on this very podcast, so if things are running smoothly and show notes are in the right place, you know, she's been in there keeping me on track.

It's only because of people like my Patreon supporters that this show can keep going and is sustained to hire and pay folks to work on it. So thank you so, so much to those of you who do and you are making the show free and available to everyone, and especially those people that aren't able to support it financially.

So I appreciate you so much. If you are able to and you wanna join us, you can go to AdopteesOn.com/community to see all the benefits and extras you get for supporting the show. Which also includes another weekly podcast, book club adoptees, off-script parties, and Facebook group for different levels of support.

So you can check that out, AdopteesOn.com/community. Okay. Thanks so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.

(Excerpts from JourneyingHome)

Haley: (Voice of matthew anthony) Psalm of the Aware adoptee. My adopted body bears the brunt of abandonment and dispossession. This means that home has been cleaved from my imagination, like a toy from the hand of a misbehaving child. And I have not believed I am worthy of having one. I have called my body and being problem and reason for rejection repeatedly, God of family.

Remind me that before I was a daughter or son, brother or sister, or to any earthly kin, I was first and most gloriously a direct descendant of divinity. My lineage is love, and though my birth certificate may misname my sire, I have seen that this body is god's because I look just like my father. I both siren and sailor upon your living waters, calling to myself, falling so precariously in love with myself, that I would shipwreck and be marooned with the self.

I despise the self. I blame long enough to know I am worthy of being at home and whole and held in myself. And if there is room for me, then there is also room for love. Love. Remind me that you are always at home within me, and there is nothing I can do to evict you. Ours is not a reunion because you have never left.

I have only ever become more aware of your presence. matthew anthony.

(Voice of Natalie Boone) Hi, I'm Natalie Boone. I'm an adoptee and artist. I created the artwork for Journeying Home. I loved being a part of this collaboration because I feel like this advent book fills a need that hasn't been met for the adoptee community.

As adoptees, we deal with a lot of complex issues and emotions. Sometimes reconciling those with our faith can be hard or confusing. I hope that our book helps other adoptees feel like they are not alone, that their questions are valid, and that through it all, God cares about them. I hope that my artwork brings a sense of calm and peace as they read through the book, and most of all, I hope they feel loved.

(Voice of Bonita Rockingham) Our liberating God. The scripture is from Isaiah chapter nine, verses two and six and seven. The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light. Those who lived in a land of deep darkness on them, light has shined. For a child has been born for us, a son given to us. Authority rests upon his shoulders, and he is named wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting Father, prince of peace. Great will be his authority and there shall be endless peace for the throne of David and his kingdom. He will establish an uphold it with justice and with righteousness from this time onward and forevermore. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this.

For reflection.

As we approach the birth of Christ, we are reminded of a liberating God that calls us by name, stands with us in solidarity, and speaks peace into our future. As adoptees, we sometimes carry experiences with advent that are complicated and nuanced. Some of us might even carry experiences with Advent and the institutional church that have been violent and deeply painful and have necessitated boundaries, which include leaving and or reevaluating our relationship with the church.

What does it mean to hold space for advent as adoptees carrying pain? What does it look like to engage in Advent with our trauma and our deconstruction? What if it's holy? Advent is the story of liberation and justice embodied. Pay attention to what your body is saying in this holy night. Your questions do not denote your worth.

Your trauma does not denote your worth. Your pain does not denote your worth. You and your body are worthy and named. We are promised this and for closing a breath prayer. Inhale in this holy waiting and exhale. I am enough.

228 Grace Kelly

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/228

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Haley Radke: This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it, either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. I have to admit to you, this is the first featured guest I've had on the show who is not adopted. Do we pause for effect here? I'm excited to introduce you to Grace Kelly, who has successfully had her adoption reversed in Australia, and now works to help other Australians annul their adoptions.

We discussed the impact having her adoption reversed has had on her personal healing journey, and Grace also shares about the importance of our language and why she doesn't use the term adoptee. We wrap up with some recommended resources, and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.com.

Before we get started, I wanted to invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. Here is my conversation with Grace Kelly. Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On: Grace Kelly. Welcome, Grace.

Grace Kelly: Thank you, Haley. It's lovely to be here.

Haley Radke: I would love it if you would start by sharing some of your story with us.

Grace Kelly: Okay, well obviously, I'm Australian. You can tell that from the accent.

Haley Radke: It's delicious. I just gotta say.

Grace Kelly: I was born in 1969 in Melbourne, Australia, and I was adopted at birth. And I was adopted by missionaries, and grew up in Papua New Guinea. Came back to Australia when I was–I think I was about 10. The family came back. There was one other child adopted a few years after I was adopted (a boy), and we came back to Australia and then in– When I was about 16, the adoption laws changed and we were able to contact our families.

And so I put my name down and my mother (she was in Queensland at the time), she put her name down, and we had reunion just before my year 12 exams (which was probably really stupid in hindsight, because it was very upsetting). And then, I mean, then I just, you know, muddled on with the situation of having, sort of two families and not fitting into either. And not feeling that I belonged anywhere.

And then I sort of muddled on through life, and I guess did my best and had very, very complicated and difficult relationships with everybody involved in the adoption. And then when I was– oh gosh, four years ago, and I can't remember how I found out... I was just looking on the Internet and I found out that I could apply to the court to have my adoption reversed.

And I would have to say it was the happiest day of my life and it's a hard thing to say, because not everybody feels this way. And I'm not saying that everybody should feel this way, but for me, being adopted was like being in prison. It was like being on death row. It was a life sentence and I felt I'd done nothing wrong. I didn't deserve it.

And so the day I found out I could get a discharge, it was like, I saw a hole in the wall of that prison and I knew I had to get out. I had to get out of that hole. And I can honestly say I've never experienced more pain and angst in my life than going through that process.

And just desperate. Desperate to get out and terrified that the judge might not give me what I wanted. And it was hard. It was confronting. I had to tell the people who adopted me. I had to serve notices on everybody at the start, and when I put my application in, I wasn't in contact with any of them.

I'd effectively lived as an orphan for many years. And so I had to sort of send people letters out of the blue to serve notices on them and tell them what I was doing. And the court allows them to have a say. So that was terrifying. There was all those emotions and, anyway, in the end I got what I wanted. And my mother and my two brothers came with me to the court on the final day, and we sat there in the court and the judge gave me back to my mother, and it was just–it was just fantastic. We walked out of the court, we stood on the steps of the court. My husband sent two big bunches of flowers and we had our photo taken. And then we went to lunch, and that's the day my life began.

Haley Radke: That's the day your life began. Were you fearful that the people who adopted you would say something–that they wanted to still be named on record as adopting you? Was that something that you expected or anticipated?

Grace Kelly: I was fearful. I was fearful of hurting them. I was fearful of them opposing it. I was fearful of my mother and my family rejecting me. There was a lot of fear, but at the end of the day, I thought, “This is about me. It's time. It's time I took my life back.”

Everybody else made decisions for me when I was born. Nobody really cared about what I thought. They took my identity off me. They gave me new parents. They gave me a new birth certificate. They took one birth certificate and destroyed it, and gave me an identity that I was forced to live in, which was a lie, and I'd had to live that life. I'd had to live with the stigma and the discomfort and the anger and the shame. And I was not going to have it any longer. And I was going to take my life back and I was going to take my rights back.

And I came back to my family, not as a second class citizen, but as a fully fledged member of the family. Not an associate member, a real member with all of the rights, all of the moral legal rights, all of the natural rights of a child. I took those rights back. I claimed them for myself. The judge gave them to me, and I stood up and I was an equal in my own family.

I was no longer a kind of, "Yes, this is kind of a member of our family, but not really because she's actually legally a member of another family." And then, from that point, every day the pain faded. Every day, there was just less pain. And I'm not saying it's been easy, remaking those relationships. We've had challenging moments, and we'll always have challenging moments.

But the pain is pretty much gone now. The pain that I used to feel, I just don't feel it anymore. I'm a different person. I'm me. I'm finally me, and it's just the best thing.

Haley Radke: Grace, I have goosebumps. When you're speaking from this place of empowerment and you know, fully yourself and it comes across so well even over the Internet here.

And I'm curious about how you got to that place of deciding that and feeling that. Because, you know, I was just speaking to a friend the other day– We were just talking about how so many adoptive people wait to search until their adoptive parents have died. You know? Cause they don't wanna hurt their feelings or anything.

Grace Kelly: Yes.

Haley Radke: And, and so you're just like, all in.

Grace Kelly: All in. That's right. Because you know, my feelings never got considered. You know, I was born and I was a problem that people needed to eliminate, and I was a– And you know, we were part of the forced adoption era. This is what–I'm not saying… This is, again, I don't want to hurt anybody out there who's adopted.

They might be happy with it. It might be the best thing for them. This is my story; it is not a reflection on their story. It's not, “Just because I feel this way, it means others have to feel this way.” But the way I felt was that I was a problem that needed to be eliminated and no one cared about me when I was born.

I was just something to be gotten rid of and they never–no one ever thought about how I might feel about it. They all thought about themselves. All the adults thought about themselves, the people who wanted to be rid of the problem, and the people who wanted a baby to love. So, you know, you have enough pain in life and you get to this point and you think, "No, sorry. It's my life and it's my turn."

And I think the legal– We need to separate… In the adoption space, we need to separate the act of giving a child a home versus the legal act of adoption, which is destroying a child's identity, taking their birth certificate and giving them another one, giving them a fake identity. That is wrong. It should not happen.

And if you have good relationships with the people that adopted you, if that relationship is strong, then it should be able to survive you getting your own identity back. You know? Because life's complicated, right? We have relationships with people. Our relationships can be parental, they can be parent/child.

It doesn't have to be that a reversal is a divorce. It's really, and I think this is… In Australia, we are–we've had an apology for forced adoptions (federally), in 2013. We have– The adoption legislation is different in each state. In Victoria, the state that I was born in and adopted in, and I gave evidence.

We had recently a Senate inquiry here. I gave evidence in that. There's now a report and a recommendation that if adoptions do occur, they don't occur with any change to the birth certificate. So, when a child can't live in their family of origin… When they lose that, and they go to a new place, it's–adoption should be additive.

We shouldn't take off that child. We should be additive, so we should never take their identity. And we don't need to; we don't need to tamper with their birth certificates. We can simply have an adoption certificate, which is like a marriage certificate, where the people that take care of the child then assume the rights and responsibilities, and the child assume rights. So a child shouldn't have to lose their identity to gain a home.

Haley Radke: Absolutely. I mean, everyone that's been trying to work in original birth certificate access has been, you know, saying that, and just coming from this place of, I mean, basic human right, to know your identity?

Grace Kelly: To live in your identity.

Haley Radke: Yes! And you and I, it's just, it's obvious. How is it not obvious to other people, you know?

Grace Kelly: How is it not obvious? I've had the conversation with various people and I think, you know, you just have to explain it to them. And once you explain it to them, they do get it. But if you ask them, "How do you know who you are? How do you know who…? Tell me your name. What is your name? Who is your mother? Who is your father? Who are your grandparents? What is your heritage? Where did you come from? What's your family line? Who are your ancestors? How do you know that? How do you really know?” At the end of the day, there’s only one way that you can prove who you are, and that's your birth certificate.

So I gave a talk recently to an adoption group in New South Wales and they're doing (that's a state in Australia), and they're doing sort of two birth certificates and three birth certificates, you know, you can get. And I just said, "Why do you need a second and a third birth certificate? You're only born once. You're not born twice. You're not born three times."

So this birth certificate business becomes–it's an archaic tradition, which comes from people not wanting to– people wanting to cover up the fact that the child isn't born unto them. And what it is, is I'm not a religious person, per se, but you know, we're born to our parents and that's a God-given, right, okay?

And man can't play God and say, "No, you're not born to them. You were actually born to someone else." And this bang, the gavel, sign a piece of paper, and this court order makes it so. It doesn't make it. So it's just a piece of paper. It doesn't make fiction fact.

After I went through mine, (I write a newspaper column), and so my name changed. So I couldn't keep my old name, and I didn't wanna, I hate seeing that name, that I hated that name. I hated that name all my life. And that name was a yoke I had to wear around my neck. And I knew it wasn't mine– it wasn't me, and I couldn't wait to be rid of it. And I had to change my name in the public eye.

I thought, "How am I gonna do this? Do I just start writing with a new name?" And then everyone goes, "Oh, why did you change your name?" You know? And I thought, "This is really ghastly. I'm a very private person. I don't like talking about personal things.” Here I am talking on a podcast; I'm a very private person.

I don't like–I don't do social media, really. I don't talk about it, but I have to. It's my obligation now, to tell everybody why my name's changed, because A), it's the truth. People deserve to know, and it might help other people out there to know that you can do what I did.

So I wrote a column saying that this is the last column you'll ever read by this person, because she no longer exists. And this is why, and I explained about adoption and how it's about a change of birth certificate and how wrong that is, and how I had to undo it. And then I ended the column by saying, “This is my name. I'm here ready to continue writing for you, but it will be under my new name. I'm really happy and I hope you'll be happy for me, too.”

So, then I started writing in my new name and then I thought, you know, “Other people aren't as good as me at writing and filling out forms. And that was the part–that's really what getting an adoption reversal, that's where the hard work is. It's filling out the forms.” I thought, “I can help other people who can't do that.”

And so I just started a Facebook page Adoption Reversal @Cribmates and I called it Cribmates because we're all in the crib together and we're all mates. And so since that time I have been shepherding people through the reversal system in various states around Australia, and we're sort of up to number 10 this year.

So just, you know, always got a couple of cases on the go at a time and depending on the states, the processes for reversal vary. And, yeah, so I just do the forms for them, lodge for them with our email address, deal with the courts, deal with the attorney general's department, and then sit with them in the court as a support person. And speak for them if they want me to speak for them, and, yeah, get them out the hole in the prison.

Haley Radke: Without breaking confidentiality, what has been the experience for the folks you've walked through this with? What are the unexpected things? Like for you've kind of shared it's like this peace and you feel like, you know… But it's really changing your identity that you've lived with since it was changed for you. I imagine it can be quite emotional for folks.

Grace Kelly: It's very emotional. It is really, really hard. I spoke to one lady yesterday that we just achieved a reversal for, and she said that she feels like she's been born again. She feels like her life begins, and that's a common thing.

People suddenly realize that they are who they were always meant to be. So there is grief. There is grief for the lost years. There is absolutely grief for the lost years. There's anger at “the person I could have been if the person that I could have been wasn't taken away.” But more than anything, there's hope, and growth, and peace, and there's not–you're not trapped. You're not trapped living in this identity that was chosen for you instead of the one you were born with.

Haley Radke: And has anyone come and sort of, like, put their toe in? They kind of are curious, but it just feels like too much right now?

Grace Kelly: Yes, yes. I have had people come and we talk them through it. And so what I do now is, I talk people through the process.

I now send them away to talk to the other members of their circle, talk to everybody about it, talk to their family, make contact with people that they may not have had contact with. Think about it for a while. And then come back and let me know if it's really what they want to do. And sometimes they come back and they say, "It's great. I'm not gonna do it right now. I might…"

And a lot of people do want to wait until the people who adopted them pass away because they don't want to hurt them. Or there's other issues with inheritance that they don't want to disrupt.

Haley Radke: Right. Can you talk about that? Because it does change your legal status, right?

Grace Kelly: Yes. It changes. It changes it, yes. So, as a child, you have natural rights, you have the inheritance rights that… You don't have the right to inherit, or the right to demand anything. But if your parent doesn't– disinherits you, you have the right to challenge that, because you're the child.

So when you reverse your adoption, you’re put back in your family and you gain the inheritance rights, but you lose the inherited rights of the people that adopted you. Because the way that the reversal’s done here, they're done– It's a complete annulment, so it's as though it didn't… So legally, it never occurred.

So it's completely and utterly reversed. So now legally, I was never adopted. It never happened in the eyes of the law. So it's just an extraordinary thing to try and absorb. It's really hard.

Haley Radke: Do you know…? I'm sure you do, I'm sure you've heard this. But I mean, I have asked around. I'm in Canada. But most of my connections are with American adopted people and the process there, it really seems like, I don't know… Listeners, if you know differently, tell me.

But, if you want to be back in your family of origin, there has to be another adoption and they have to adopt you back and… Okay, talk about your reaction to that.

Grace Kelly: Oh, look, I just find that galling. It's the most shocking abuse of human rights. I just think that it's a fundamental breach of your human rights to have your identity taken off you without your consent, and to then have to go through this rigmarole to get it back.

It's absurd. It's absurd. And look, we are changing attitudes in Australia. We are– people are realizing that it's outrageous to take a child's identity and to take their birth certificate and give them another one with new parents on it. It's unnecessary, for a start. And it's just outrageous.

And I feel so desperately, desperately sad for people who want to have a reversal that can't do it. And, you know, it was the most empowering thing for me in the world. Because as someone who was living in an involuntary adoption construct, (and that's the term that I use when I apply)... I don't use the term, “adoptee.” I use the term, "person living in an adoption construct," because that's what it is.

And we also use the term, "survivor of forced adoption," because in Australia, it's been recognized that our adoptions were forced adoptions and they've been apologized for. So what do you do when you apologize for something? What's the next step? You make it right.

So what we need to do now is make it easier in Australia for people to have their adoptions reversed. We shouldn't have to go to court, we shouldn't have to jump through hoops. We shouldn't have to prove that, you know, we have special circumstances. It should really just be: tick a box, reverse it, give me my paperwork back. So that's where we are working towards.

But yeah, sorry, I know that what I'm talking about is going to be very confronting and very upsetting and it's going to give some people hope, but it's also going to hurt other people. And I'm just so aware of that. So I just want to say again, I just don't want anybody out there listening to think that I'm passing judgment, or that I'm saying that, you know, "Just because I felt this way, you should feel this way."

Everyone has a different experience. People living with adoption experience it in all different ways.

Haley Radke: Absolutely. Thank you for saying that. And, you know, it's incredible to me that you've walked through with these people, to assist them in their choice to annul their adoptions. Because I've seen you write it can cost $15,000 to have a lawyer assist you. So, it's really amazing that you're doing that. The other thing I wanna…I'm curious if you have a comment on this. Since you've been a columnist and, you know, working in the public and really have your finger on the pulse of a lot of these things, since the apology, you mentioned you've seen sort of a shift…

Can you talk more about that? Have you had, did you have comments when you posted your column? You know, "Hello, nice to finally meet you." Did you have people react to that? Were things, are things more positive now that there's more awareness in Australia?

Grace Kelly: I think things are more positive. I think I did… It's the only time that I've ever received angry letters. So, I did receive a couple of angry letters. One began, "HOW DARE YOU?" That was the first few words. But most people were positive. I think the general feedback is that most people said, "Well, yeah, I didn't realize that adopted people had their birth certificate taken away. How ridiculous.” And, “Of course that shouldn't happen."

So I think it's very important when we're in the adoption space to always clarify the difference between providing a child with a loving environment and a home versus the active adoption, which is the legal act of adoption, which is taking their birth certificate, severing that link, giving them a new one.

So they're two very, very different things, and I object to the taking of the birth certificate. I don't object to giving a child a home. I don't object to that, because I know that there are circumstances where people just simply cannot be with their family. The other thing I'm doing is, I'm encouraging people here and when I make my applications to the various courts, this is the language I use.

I never use the language “adoptee,” because people who adopt don't like to be called “adopters.” Okay? So I use the language– instead of "adopted parent," I say, “woman who adopted me,” “man who adopted me.” That's the language we use in the court. Instead of "adoptive brother or sister or sibling," we say "other child who was adopted by the people who adopted me."

We make it very clear what the truth is here. We also do not use "birth mother." We say "mother." "Birth father," "father." So it's very simple in the court, for the court records, for the applications, we say "mother, father, woman who adopted me, man who adopted me.” Applicant: “adult survivor of forced adoption practices seeking restoration."

So that's the language we use, and by using that language, we move the debate forward. In Australia (and it sort of varies between the states), but the legislation in most states is that you can have a reversal if you have exceptional circumstances. Okay? So that's the one we have. That's the thing we have to go under.

And what I say is, “This adoption was exceptional.” The circumstances were exceptional, because it had a federal government inquiry into it. It was classified by the federal government as a forced adoption. You mean, once the Prime Minister apologizes? That's exceptional and that's exceptional circumstances in itself, before we even begin the life story of the applicant.

So what I do is I start with that. And then I tell the life story of the applicant, which is usually exceptional. Always exceptional, actually (in itself), in that the treatment dished out to them, the things that they had to bear, or the pain that they suffered is not usual. It's not normal. It is exceptional.

And so the courts, the judges, the people in and around the court, the clerks of the court, the Attorney General's department, all of the people that deal in this space, they're very compassionate. They're very compassionate, and they take a compassionate interpretation of that exceptional status. And we have not had one knocked back.

Haley Radke: Congratulations.

Grace Kelly:Thank you. Thank you.

Haley Radke: That's really amazing. Now, speaking as someone who's just a little younger, was the apology, did it cover only certain years? Is there any limitations to, kind of, using that? Or it's just blanket for everyone?

Grace Kelly: It was–there was an identified era of forced adoptions, and I think it was something like from the 40s onwards, but I couldn't be quite sure. But basically, it's pretty much everyone who's alive in Australia today, really, other than just the very young.

And the one thing that I will say about the apology, is it did focus very much on the mother relinquishing. Mothers. And people who were adopted found that very hurtful. And we’re still fighting that, because– I understand there's extraordinary pain and grief in losing a child to adoption, but when you are adopted on the day you were born, if you are adopted at birth, you lose everything.

You lose everything and everyone; you lose your mother, your father, you lose your grandparents on both sides. You lose your aunties, uncles, cousins, siblings, everyone. You lose your entire family on the day you were born.

It is a catastrophic loss and so I think there's not enough recognition of that catastrophic loss that you suffer on the first day you're born and there's just too much focus in Australia, anyway, on the reparations and the apologies to the mothers who lost their children.

Haley Radke: So you hope for more balance there?

Grace Kelly: Yes.

Haley Radke: Okay. Now just to follow up on that and double down. I'm sorry to do that, but it's sort of connected. Then I could hear someone listening, thinking, "Well, what about the mothers who chose to relinquish? And they don't want their child legally back?" You said all parties do get notified of the process?

Grace Kelly: Yes, they do. Yep.

Haley Radke: And…I don't know. Can you talk about that? It's painful to think about, but I'm rejected from my mother and I can't imagine if I went to her and said, "Hey…!" She wouldn't be excited to have me back on the family register.

Grace Kelly: It's a hard one. So this is my attitude: "It's not about you. It's not about the mother. It's about me. It's about me and my life and my right to be me. My right to have a birth certificate that shows who my mother is. And if you don't want to be my mother, well, tough. Too bad. It's not about you, it's about me." And the courts here, they don't take that into account.

So the legislation, yes, they do allow the other people to say, and they can have their say, but the legislation is about the person who was adopted and whether it's in their best interests. So the court looks at three things. They look at, one, what was the impact of the adoption on the person who was adopted?

They want to know all about that. Secondly, they want to know, if the adoption reversal is granted, what impact will that have on the person who was adopted? Thirdly, if the adoption reversal isn't granted, what impact will that have on the person? So, you need to make the arguments that address those points.

Sometimes, depending on the jurisdiction, the court will get an independent report from a social worker or a psychiatrist, and we say, (and that's several thousand dollars, by the way).... And we always say, "No, we're not paying for that. You pay for it. You pay for it” (as in the state). The state took this child, the state was involved in this forced adoption.

The state usually placed them in a scenario that was dissatisfactory. It was negligent and there was a lack of duty of care. "And so you, you pay for this $5,000 report." And they do.

Haley Radke: Isn't it weird? And this is the first thing I'm thinking, “Wait, so the person that was adopted is centered? And it, and those three things are all about them?”

Grace Kelly: Yes, and when you bring it back to the legislation, that's the way the legislation is written. So if you bring that back to the legislation and insist on the legislation, it comes back to that. If you overlook the legislation, the person at the adoption isn't the one that's centered on, because all of the adults involved have their own wants and desires, and they bring their own needs to the table.

"My need to have a child.” “My need to be rid of a child.” “My desire to have a child.” “My desire to be rid of this child." Those are the things when it comes to the legislation, the legislation is crafted in the interest of the child. So we must bring it back to that and we must insist on that.

Haley Radke: Gold star for that. Oh my goodness. I don't know. It just– Over here, I'll just say North America. We have been really focused on allowing access to original birth certificates and, you know, here and there-- there’s some states that are fully open, some provinces that are fully open, et cetera. But to hear…

It just feels like you're all so ahead of us, you know? Is this the next step? So when you hear things like, for me, “Well then, the biological family has to adopt the person back,” you know? Or there’s some states where adoptive parents get to choose the place of birth on the birth certificate? If you could see Grace's face, you would know her reaction to that.

Grace Kelly: Contempt. That was contempt and disgust. Yeah.

Haley Radke: So, yeah. If you were talking to activists over here, what would you say? Like how would people start looking for that? Does it take one case of someone trying to get their adoption reversed? What do you think are the best next steps for someone working in this?

Grace Kelly: It's hard for me to answer that because I don't have a full sense of where you are at, but I'll tell you where I want to take this, Haley.

Haley Radke: I'm ready.

Grace Kelly: Now, here's a dangerous idea. Why is it that people are allowed to… If you have a child today in Australia, you are responsible for that child whether you wanted it or not; you are responsible. If the parent decides to abandon the child, they have to pay maintenance, for the rest of…until the child's 18, or perhaps even 21. They're not allowed to just shirk their responsibilities and say, "Oh, well, you know, it was a one night stand." Or, "Oh, you know, I was a mistake. I really couldn't be bothered with this, and I'm, you know, it's just not what I wanted to be doing with my life, is having this child."
They're not allowed to do that. And, you know, the state will requisition money from the parent's bank account and make sure the child's provided for; they pay maintenance. It's called maintenance. I think you call it alimony, or something, but we call it maintenance. Now, why is it that people can adopt a child and wipe their hands of them? Why shouldn't people who adopt a child have to pay maintenance?

That's where I want to take it. Because really, when that child grows up, they find their family and they feel very hurt that no one made a contribution to their upbringing. Why? Why do we allow people to just adopt a child and wipe their hands of them, wipe all that responsibility? It's not fair. It's not fair to the child. It might be fair to them, might be more convenient for them, but it's not fair to the child. And I can tell you that if my mother and father had paid maintenance for me, even if it was a nominal amount, things would be a lot different.

My life would've been a lot different. I would've not had such a deprived existence, or childhood. I would've been far better off to have had that maintenance coming in from then. And that fundamental recognition that, "We put this human being on the earth and we just don't–we do not have the right to wipe our hands of this person that we created. We have an obligation."

I believe parents have a moral obligation. And you know, when I went through my reversal, as I said, I was estranged and I was thinking about, well… Before I sent off the notice to say that I was going to, you know, apply, I was thinking, "Well, what if they don't want anything to do with me?"

And I just came to the conclusion that that's their problem. If they're gonna be like… I'm getting my reversal, I'm gonna get it. And if they don't want anything to do with me, well that's down to them. That's their problem. But I'm gonna have all my legal rights. I'm going to legally be part of my family.

I'm going to legally be my mother's child. So, if they don't want anything to do with me, that's their problem. But, you know, my family are really good people, and I, you know– They recognize the fundamental importance of it. They recognized that I was gonna be given back, and they stepped up and, you know…

I'm not gonna say things are perfect. They're never perfect in relationships, but, gee, they're as good as I could have ever have hoped they ever would be. And more. And look, as time goes on, it just gets better and better, because the length of time that I spent separated from them becomes less and less.

Haley Radke: So, we started back... Go back to the beginning when we shared your story and you talked about your state of mind this far out, from four years ago. And so many adopted people have pain and are, you know– We're always in therapy, and we're looking for healing and all kinds of things. Can you say– What's the one thing? What do you think is the peace? Where is that coming from?

Grace Kelly: It's the peace comes from, "I am where I was meant to be. I am who I was meant to be. I am who I was born, and I am where I was meant to be." On my birthday, I can celebrate my birthday now. It's the day I was born. I never used to celebrate my birthday. I used to spend my birthday trying not to be in tears, because why would I celebrate the day I was given up? What's to celebrate about that?

So now, on my birthdays, I don't have that pain anymore. I just don't. It took a while to fade. But it faded quite quickly. You know, when I say–I know, I just contradicted myself. I felt normal within probably a year, you know? And my husband's watched me with the reversal work, and he has said that every one I get through, he says, I get stronger. He says he's watched me get stronger. And I honestly feel like I'm standing on the outside of a prison wall, and there's a hole and there's a person inside and I have to reach through that hole and pull them out. And I tell you what, I'm going to keep doing this work for as long as I can, because I'm not gonna leave that space.

Anyone who wants out of that, all they have to do is stick their hand out through the wall, and I will do everything to pull them through to the other side, and pull them through to the freedom that I have, because I've seen how it's changed their lives. And I'm just gonna keep doing it, and I'm gonna keep doing it, and I'm going to keep telling. I'm gonna keep writing to governments, I'm gonna keep writing to the courts, and I'm just gonna keep doing it, until everybody realizes that adoption should occur without destroying a birth certificate and an identity.

When I first started doing the reversals, with the application forms on the courts, there wasn't even an application form for a reversal. You had to use the application form that people use when they wish to adopt a child.

Haley Radke: No. I thought you were gonna say, like, divorce or something. Ooh.

Grace Kelly: Yeah. And so I would have to cross out, you know, “name of child to be adopted,” and I would have to cross that out. And I would write in big capital letters, “APPLICANT IS ADULT SURVIVOR OF FORCED ADOPTION.” And I wrote to every court and said, "You don't have these forms; you don't have forms for us. We need our own forms and we need a section on your website, and you need to adjust your website." And most of them have, so we're working through that. We're bringing awareness to the fore.

Haley Radke: Amazing. You mentioned earlier that you had given testimony, and I have a quote from this. This is from the Parliament of Victoria. Query into responses to historical forced adoption in Victoria, and you're quoted in here: "Adoption legally takes a child out of one family tree, puts them in another, and issues them a new identity to make this administrative rearrangement appear a biological fact."

And I love how you have, even throughout the interview, you've talked about language use, and what you write on the forms, and this. And it takes out all the emotional things that often someone like me brings into it, you know? Because I wanna know the story and I wanna know… But that's not what's helpful in government situations.

Grace Kelly: No. And in that inquiry, I gave evidence. I mean, I had everything written down that I wanted to say. And I thought about it, and I thought really carefully about what I was going to wear. And I got there, and I just burst into tears and cried all over them. Oh dear!

Haley Radke: It's so deeply personal.

Grace Kelly: It is.

Haley Radke: You know, as much as we can put on a business front, and this is… We're talking about legal contracts and things; it's so personal, you know. It's our very core of us.

Grace Kelly: It is. Speaking of being so personal, I… When I meet people now, I'm not frightened to meet new people. I'm not frightened to introduce myself. I'm not wary. I don't dodge making new friends. I don't have to dance around where I came from and try and avoid the topic.

They ask me where my family are from, and I just tell them, “Well, you know, my family are in Brisbane. I have two brothers. You know, my parents were elderly.” And it's at that. I don't have to go into the, "Oh, you know, but I was adopted."

And then, you know, because what always used to happen is they'd say, "Where are you from? Where are you family?"

And I would say something; they'd, "Oh, this doesn't sound like you."

"Oh no. Well, you know, I was adopted."

"Oh, really? How lovely. Oh, how was that?"

You know, and then you're into this story, and before you know it, you're pulling your guts out and putting them on the table. They're sifting through your intestines. And then they sort of, satisfy their curiosity, or they have an argument with you about how they, “knew someone who was adopted and they were happy, so why aren't you happy?” And you are left a shattered mess. And they walk away and say, "Oh, thank you. I thought your story was really interesting." And it's just devastating. And I don't have to do that anymore. I don't have to say, "I was adopted, blah, blah, blah." I don't have to do it. And it is just freedom, freedom.

Haley Radke: You're not an anecdote anymore.

Grace Kelly: And you know, it really, really annoys me when people say, "Oh, I knew someone who was adopted, or then, and they were happy," and it's just terrible. It's a terrible thing to say. I mean, I was speaking to a girlfriend recently about it, and she said, "Oh, why is it so hurtful?"

And I said, "Okay. So you don't have children. Do you ever have people say, ‘Oh, I knew someone who doesn't have children? Well, they're happy. Why aren't you happy?’" She says, "Yeah, I do. I find it really hurtful." I said, "Well, there you go." You don't speak to an adopted person that way. You don't say that to them, because everyone has a different experience.

Some people are very happy in their adoption; other people are not. Don't ever try and tell someone they should be happy with it, or should be unhappy with it. Because I mean, I have friends who are very, very happy in their adoption situation. They're very, very happy and you know, that's great.

I would never try and argue with anyone. I would never try and persuade. That's one thing I won't do. As I said, I have a Facebook page, and I've said on that Facebook page, "I'm not here to persuade anybody to do it.” I'm not here to argue. I'm not here to say, “You should do it,” or “You shouldn't do it,” or, “Here's why you should do it."

“But if you want to do it, and it's really what you want to do, I'll help you. But don't come to me looking for an argument, because you're not gonna get one.” I don't have time to sit on social media all day, arguing with people.

Haley Radke: Absolutely. Well, one of the things I really respect that you've shared today, I mean this sort of, this underlying thing– Everything is about the person who was adopted, and this process really isn't necessarily a comment on the state of the adoptive situation they were brought up in. It's literally just as simple as: identity reclamation.

Grace Kelly: That's what it is. It's just identity reclamation. And there are people who are very happy to just be in that journey with the person, and put their own feelings aside. As the person who adopted somebody, they recognize that, you know, they're an adult now, and that they'll always have that strong relationship.

It's simply that they're getting their birth certificate back. You know, a lot of people want… They have children; they have grandchildren. They want their children and grandchildren, and then the people beyond that to be able to trace back through their family tree. And to go to the correct lineage. It's as simple as that. It's just truth, isn't it? Truth, isn't that what we all seek, is truth? And you know, sometimes truth is confronting. It's still the truth.

Haley Radke: Yep. And it's not a comment on any person involved. Besides me.

This has been fascinating. Is there anything else you wanna tell us before we move and do our recommended resources?

Grace Kelly: No, not really. I mean, I just again, wanna say that I'm sharing my story and I'm raising awareness, and I don't wanna hurt anyone, or upset anyone, or offend anyone. I really don't. Just because it's the way I feel, it doesn't mean it's the way you should feel.

And if you’re listening, and you feel differently, that's perfectly fine. I'm not saying– I'm not trying to tell anybody how they should view things or feel. It's just this was just me at this point in time. So, I'm sharing with you my experience and my feelings at a moment in time.

Haley Radke: Yes. Thank you for saying that. Grace, I'm so honored that you spoke with us today. I hope folks check out your organization, which I absolutely wanna recommend: Adoption Reversal. And the other resource for folks that maybe haven't really heard too much about what's going on in Australia, I have a couple podcasts to recommend.

There's the Adopted Feels hosted by Hana and Ryan. They're both located in Australia, they're Korean adoptees. And then Adopt Perspective from Jigsaw Queensland. Both of those podcasts have tons of episodes. Even Adopt Perspective has a couple of episodes on adoption reversal. They also interview someone who's gone through the process and talk a little bit about it. So if you want to even hear more about what's going on there, you can listen to those. I'll link them in the show notes.

How about you, Grace? What would you like to recommend to us?

Grace Kelly: Google “Australian adoption apology,” and just read the one-pager. And then there's a report that goes with it, but, you know, that apology is– it's profoundly altered the course of people's lives.

And we now have to take that forward to the next step, because it's one thing to apologize and, you know, they've given a whole lot of money for counseling and support and all of that. But everybody's kind of ignoring that we now need to undo the wrongs, so that's the reversal stuff. So that's the next bit.

But yeah, look, have a look at the apology and the wording of the apology. I've also posted on my Facebook thing the words of a judge, which is a judge in Australia's legal perspective on what adoption actually is. And I can– I'll post that again. And so that'll be the most recent post. I'll post it again, because I don't post on Facebook very often; I hardly ever go there. I'm just on there because I wanted to put my email address there, so that if people want to do a reversal, they can email me.

Haley Radke: Okay, we will link to that post, and I can also link to the YouTube video of the apology. I've watched it several times. It's very profound. Thank you. I'm so thankful you mentioned those things.

So Grace, I guess the best place to connect with you is your Facebook page.

Grace Kelly: Yes, email is better, because I can respond to that individually. I'm not great–so my email address is on the Facebook page. I'm not great with Facebook. Like I said, I don't go there very often. So if people put comments and things like that and I don't reply, please don't feel slighted.

If you send an email, I will respond, but yeah, I just– I'm actually not very good at using Facebook. And so I reply to people and then it goes to all, instead of the person, and I just, I'm not very good at it, so I'm apologizing in advance.

Haley Radke: All right. We will look for your email on the Facebook page, and no problem. We get it. All of these things are not easy to navigate. We've all made a little error here or there, you know, on the social media. This has been so wonderful. Thank you so much. I also just wanna thank the listener who wrote in and asked me to interview you, because they admire you so much, and now I can see why.

Grace Kelly: Oh, thank you. That's so kind of you. And thank you to that listener and thank you, Haley, so much. It's been an absolute honor and a privilege, and I just send a big hello and a big warm hug to everyone listening. And just to say, you're not alone and we are all in this together. No matter where we are.

Haley Radke: Beautiful. Yes.

Isn't she so passionate? I hope that if you are an adoptee activist and you have tried or are interested in annulling or reversing your adoption (especially in North America or any other country besides Australia), and you've been successful, or you've figured out some research– we'd love to hear about that. Because you know we have lots of folks who probably will hear this and be like, "I wanna do that."

Anyway, thank you so much, Grace, and for your work for the community, especially over in Australia. I wanted to let you know about the Adoptees On Patreon community. I mentioned at the beginning of the show, right now we have some really amazing things happening.

We just finished our book club with Rebecca Carroll, author of Surviving the White Gaze, and the recording of that is available for Patreon supporters. If you're listening to this the day the show airs, tomorrow, Saturday, we have an Adoptees Off Script party. And we're talking about family BS, which is a kind of a fun theme to get us through the holiday season.

And there's always lots of great conversations happening with fellow adoptees. You can listen to me and my friends talk about stuff behind the scenes on the Adoptees Off Script podcast every week. And there is conversation in the Adoptees On Facebook community, and all those places. So, that is an amazing way to support the show to keep existing in this world, and to connect with some fellow adoptees, and maybe make some new friends.

I'd love your support. Adopteeson.com/community has info for you. Thank you so much for listening today, and let's talk again next Friday.

227 Adoptee Remembrance Day

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/227

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Haley Radke: This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it, either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today's episode has mentions of suicide, self-harm, and other potentially challenging topics.

Adoptee Remembrance Day is commemorated annually on October 30th. It is a day to remember our adoptee friends who have died by suicide.

On this day, we also acknowledge the adopted people who are without citizenship in the very country they were taken to as infants or children.

We think of those who have suffered abuse at the hands of their adoptive parents and grieve those who've been murdered by the people who promised to give them a safe home.

We mourn with those of us who have buried pain through addictions and lost time through incarceration.

On Adoptee Remembrance Day, we validate the experiences of those who have had adoption disruptions and multiple placements.

Today we recognize the disconnection and loss of all who identify as being separated from our families of origin by no choice of our own.

This is the third annual Adoptee Remembrance Day and the third annual Adoptee Remembrance Day episode on Adoptees On. In previous years, I've asked listeners to submit recordings of what the day meant to them. This year I recorded a live event with the Adoptee Voices writing groups, and 10 adoptee writers who are sharing a collection of their poetry and prose with us today.

It was powerful and moving, and deeply beautiful, and filled with sorrow. Thank you to Sara Easterly and Adoptee Voices for assisting in the curation of this episode, and to each of the writers who recorded their thoughts. It is deeply appreciated, thank you.

Before we get started, I want to invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on Adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you, and also the show to support more adoptees around the world.

Okay, friend. Let's listen in.

Maya Holmes: My name is Maya Holmes. I'm from St. Louis, Missouri. I am a same-race, African-American, domestic adoptee, and this piece is called A Day for the Forgotten and Broken-Hearted.

October 30th is our special day, much like birthdays and anniversaries are to others. Coming together, one by one, arms linked and hearts connected. We are one community with different stories and similar outcomes. We need each other, and that's what Adoptee Remembrance Day is all about.

Today is a day of freedom. Freedom to cry and to laugh. It's a day to release ourselves from the chains that bind us, to expose and start healing the scars that were passed to us in our prenatal environments. It's a day to release the tears from the pain inflicted upon us, not by choice. It's our time to not be grateful. To let go of the rehearsed storylines we tell to protect our hearts and others’. Today is the adoptee’s day to be selfish.

Adoptees are often forgotten. We become numb to our circumstances, causing us to stay in the fog. We are the shadows of our adoptive families. To be adopted is to be in a constant state of wanting: wanting to be seen, wanting to be heard, and most of all wanting to be celebrated.

To the adoptees abandoned by their chosen families: we see you. To the adoptees who face secondary rejection: we feel you. To the adoptees looking for validation: we know you. To the adoptees advocating for our community: we hear you. And to the adoptees calling for help: know that there is someone waiting for you.

It's our time to have a day, a day to be remembered, to be heard without judgment, to feel loved without conditions, and to be heard with no interruptions.

So let's reclaim our identities and stories, and celebrate.

Christine Koubek Flynn: I'm Christine Koubek Flynn. I was born in Massachusetts and adopted domestically in New York. This is called On Remembering Adoption.

I feel a little ashamed to admit, especially to other adoptees, that sometimes I don't want to remember adoption. There are periods when I struggle to talk about it or write about it, even as a journalist. I have a deeply rooted inclination not to say much about adoption. It's hard to find the right words, non-offensive words, politically correct words. Words that won't hurt someone's feelings.

When I was younger, I fantasized about going a whole year not remembering that I was adopted, which I could never pull off, because I look nothing like my siblings. Not to mention a year includes autumn, and autumn includes my birthday, which now also happens to be the first day of National Adoption Month. For me, the first day of November is the anniversary of when a rapid succession of loss began. Losses before I learned words, let alone had an ability to process them.

There are also constant reminders in the media calling me to remember. (Damn you, Randall, on This is Us. You're so good.) When the movie Philomena debuted several years ago, a friend texted, “Have you seen Philomena? Just saw it, so good. Made me think of Ann.” While I know she was being kind, there was no way I wanted to see that movie.

My birth mother, Ann, had passed away four years earlier, and I was afraid to re-trigger the lonely, complicated grief that would still hit me like a rogue wave. Why see a movie about an Irish teenager who had made love, got pregnant, was sent away, and then made to give up her son for adoption and keep quiet, whose son's existence was a secret? The trajectory was eerily similar to Ann's story.

I had sons to care for, family events, work deadlines, and a determination to avoid anything that might send me back to that somber place, remembering my own birth mother, whom I'd met when I was 19. We'd cobbled together a 20-plus-year relationship in which I felt both loved and seen, and then I lost her again, this time to breast cancer.

But then I had a change of heart, so I texted my friend, Heather, who was also adopted: “Philomena? Tomorrow?” We sat in a nearly empty theater for a Saturday morning showing and squeezed each other's forearms as we discovered that there was everything –and nothing!-- somber about Philomena. I laughed when she spoke bluntly about her sexual parts, and felt my heart rest as I listened to her soft way of saying hard truths, in scene after scene.

Phillomena reminded me of Ann. I remembered several autumn drives along her memory lanes. I sipped coffee as we rode along and Ann pointed out a baseball dugout, parks, a church: the places where she met the boy who'd become my father.

One movie scene replayed in my mind for days after. It's the part where Philomena grapples with which was her greater sin: having a child out of wedlock, or keeping the secret for 50 years? I was born in the late 60s, just before Roe v. Wade, a time when secrecy and silence, learned as if by osmosis, were the price a child paid for love and belonging. I don't think people understood –or perhaps wanted to acknowledge– how severing a child from its origins, its ancestry, and the mother it grew to know from within, is a life-impacting trauma. I was never supposed to know my birth parents, let alone love them. The messages, some of which might have been well-intentioned, were clear: I had a family where I belonged and could try to blend in. There's much to be thankful for, why dredge up the past, don't dredge up the past. That's the kind thing to do.

And yet there's a part of me that believes –that has always believed– that the kindest thing you can do for another person is to listen, to try to see him or her, the whole and true him or her, and honor that story.

As Fred Rogers once said, “Anything that's human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable.” That's the belief that sent me to the movies, and has me always circling back to listen and share adoption stories, whether in person or on a page. The times I talk with other adoptees help adoption’s aftershocks feel less overwhelming. They shine a light through the dark places, and remind me once again, how very connected, how tethered to one another we are.

Marci Purcell: I'm Marci Purcell from Austin, Texas, and I'm an adoptee, adopted out of foster care. This piece is called We Remember In Our Bones.

We remember in our bones. We can't remember in our heads, in our homes, in our beds, But in our bones, we remember. We can't remember the lands, the choice, the hands, But her voice, we remember. Our mind aches for what not it knows, But we remember, in our bones.

Rebecca Cheek: I’m Rebecca Cheek. I live in South Carolina. I am a transracial, international, Korean-American adoptee. This piece is called Individually, Collectively.

Part One. Let go of the anger and the pain, the collective disdain we have for those people who will never understand what we live through, but also never attempt to. No understanding without empathy, thinking of outcomes that only serve them well.

We are empty. Tapped out. Individually, collectively.

Part Two. Let's take rest and repair. The collective care we have nourishes our souls. We know without knowing the details of each other's lives, but also don't require them.

Breathe together to survive. Contemplating outcomes that serve us well. We are full to bursting. Individually, collectively.

Roberta Holland: I'm Roberta Holland in Boston, and I was placed as an infant through a closed domestic adoption. My piece is called Happy Birthday.

You weren't there, but you say I was born. You weren't there, but you say I was loved. You weren't there, but you say I was a gift. A pink, shiny newborn given away in love. Love, not pain, not fear. You weren't there, but you say my birth was happy. A day to be celebrated, a day no one mourned.

I mourned. Deep below my fontanels, I mourned. An antiseptic coldness, Seeping into my tiny bones as I whooshed out of my mother, out of the womb, Out of her orbit, Into the void.

The snap of loss, Of a connection breaking, Imprinted on my every cell like a permanent birthmark, An unshakable legacy you can't wrap with a pretty bow.

When I'm a toddler blowing out candles on a Raggedy Ann birthday cake, My eyes are watery and I don't know why. We will blame it on the smoke and not the sting of memory, For what can a baby remember?

When I'm in elementary school, Surrounded by friends in an ice cream parlor, I dive under the table as the waitstaff sings Happy Birthday. We will blame it on my shyness and not my feeling that something is wrong.

When I'm in high school, then college, I am sucked into a darkness Meters below the sheen of parties and pub crawls. We will blame it on who showed up, who didn't, Too much alcohol, not enough alcohol, And not the undertow of sorrow that permeates this day, always.

When I'm an adult and become muted, go still on my birthday: Don't blame it on a lack of presence or festivities. It's not the celebration that matters. Don't blame it on vanity about getting older. It's not my age that matters.

I can name what matters, now. That first birthday gift. The gift I could never return, the gift of me, The rupture from who I was supposed to be, The tumbling of the dice as I was given to a new family.

That gift of adoption, the gift born of loss, Can't be repackaged no matter the love, the festive decorations. It's a black armband, encircling my heart, A pang I'm not supposed to feel. Reaching out to my tribe of adoptees, I only need mention my birthday, and they get it. The care emojis and the empathy flow. A salve on the wound. Communal pain eased by acknowledgement.

They know the truth: That my birth and death are conjoined twins. The death of another life, Not better or worse, but different, first.

So remember, you weren't there, But I was. If you notice my watery eyes as I blow out the candles, Give me the space I need to breathe, The space I need to grieve, The anniversary of my joyless birth.

Adam Anthony: My name is Adam Anthony from Nashville, Tennessee. I'm a domestic, infant-born adoptee. This piece is called How Do I Really Feel About All This?

All my life regarding my adoption, I've been told stories with words of gratitude, love, excitement, and pride. The not-so-subtle Christian overtone for my family, friends, family friends, acquaintances, and such. Those are the origin feelings that I was supposed to feel and emulate with and identify. I'm not saying I did not genuinely have those emotions, it's just that the darker and more complex emotions of anger, confusion, frustration, and doubt were too much for many that I've grown up with. I put those emotions away in a box without discussing them much, but they were still apparent in my everyday actions and behaviors.

Anxiety became a best friend, and how easy it can be to expel those feelings on an unsuspecting person that I encounter. I then feel hurt. With the journey I've gone on so far, there's so much hurt accompanying the sadness and some regret. It's reserved mainly for those ancestors and biological connections past, that I never got the chance to connect with, or our time together on this Earth was much too short. It hurts that the people involved, and the system, did not consider my possible desires to want to know where I came from and the people who played a part in my existence. The assumption that I would just be okay with living a life that never fully suited me and having a limited backstory because “I'm so blessed” and grateful to have the life I've been given, so the rest is moot? Well, that's just incorrect. I feel the pain from the choices other people made for me, and because of my birth and adoption circumstances, there was nothing I could ever do.

Well, where is the space for me to say the feelings of what's really going on here? I know that it makes people uncomfortable because they're not used to me being so verbal and clear with my emotions on all this, but it is time.

Of course, I know the gaslighting and persuasion comes from unsolicited opinions, either from those who know my adopted parents and are ready to defend and support them, or those who know my biological parents and are ready to do the same. That reality makes me angry. I did not choose to be hidden or relinquished, but I know I must yield power and presence inside me, because I've talked a lot for most of my life and felt this strong internal purpose that would take time to yield and understand.

Not that I feel self-righteous or indignant, but purposeful, and overwhelmed because no one in my family consistently cares in the way I need them to without inserting their own biases or opinions. When it comes to healing and telling my story, it truly is up to me. No one else could do this journey for me, nor would I wish anyone else to go on it. This journey is not for the weak, I feel. It's for those who have the capacity to endure, as well as heal.

Tina: My name is Tina. As a toddler, San Francisco Catholic Charities facilitated my interracial, domestic adoption from foster care. This is Breathing Blue.

Inhale, exhale Crackling wet Wave moments, Tide of time near. Calm, blue, breath. Didn't we all begin Simply? Growing body, liquid belly swelling, Buoyant, rocking, kicking

What swam deep with echo Voicing ocean's sleep. What was the sound of her? Vibrations of male denial, Rogue wave, immaturity, Amniotic storm, tranquil innocence. Infant swimmer, waterfall escape.

Continue adrift, drowning differently. Who hears? Scream and cry, Witnessing shiny drips, slipping over round cheeks, Choke, cough, gasp. Water or air. Once submerged, now surrounded, Trying to live, Simultaneously dying. Last breath, last beat. First. Thrashing before birth, First breath, First beat, Last.

How did this all start? Ending so fast All this life, exiting Never knowing How the stars longed to marry you. How does the floating learn to travel like everyone else?

Crashing birth First breath, First beat, Last. Beginnings, Futures past, Last breath, Last beat, First.

Departure of you Brings rain. Welcome, sparkling reflection. Distant heart Thump, splash, pump. Moonlight’s answer calls Twinkling’s light Just enough, Quieting fight. Pulling horizon, Washing you Out to sea. Cradled, Free. Soaring and drifting are the same. Disappearing drenched, Or new day dawning. Permanent, perfect, in between. As the moon glows, radiant. Adoptee’s rebirth. Constellations, legacy, wake.

Cynthia Landesberg: I am Cynthia Landesberg from Washington, D.C., and I am a transracial, transnational adoptee from Korea. This piece is called The Day They Say I Was Born.

The day they say I was born is the day my umma wrote 9-21 on a piece of paper she pinned to me before leaving. Or, a social worker closed her eyes, pointed a finger, and landed on that date. Or, a doctor guessed based upon the number of kilograms on the scale. Who knows.

The day they say I was born is the day my umma was fooled by nature to nurture me, marking the start of seven weeks until the finish of us.

The day they say I was born is the day my adoptive parents celebrate my arrival. Not to the world, but to their world. Recalling the toes and fingers and nose of their six-month-old newborn, forgetting that I belonged to someone else before them.

The day they say I was born is the day I share with my adopted sister, six years and seven days apart. “Close enough.” Joint parties with cakes that were half Big Bird, half unicorn. Half me, half her. Malleable, movable, mutable sisters, molded into convenience.

The day they say I was born is the day I announced I would not celebrate my birthday anymore, not celebrate the loss of being born, not celebrate the loss of being lost.

And it is also the day I cried, alone, because that was not what I really wanted either.

The day they say I was born is the day I have learned to draw closer and hold tighter. To my sons who miss their first mamas, too. To my daughter who taught me what a birth-day actually is. And to my husband who gets up early to slow-cook short ribs for my dinner, nourishing me the only way he can.

The day they say I was born is the day I howl, openly and bittersweet heartache, for what could have been. For the loss of not knowing what could have been.

Uncertainty of origin drives people to tell tales. Jews and Genesis, Greeks and Gaia, Koreans and Tongan. And me, and the day they say I was born.

Sandi Smith: I’m Sandi from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I am a domestic, infant adoptee, and this piece is called Earthquake.

Waves, aftershocks, tsunamis Shifting earth, swaying buildings, rippling of the ground, liquifaction. Two bodies once joined in their shared grief, a grief for which they had no words. Relationships ending, grasping for something solid, if only for the moment.

An earthquake: Two plates below the earth, moving against each other Under pressure And the pressure mounts. Small rumbles give a warning to what is to come. Then the shock, unexpected, Traveling secretly underground. A pregnancy, unexpected, Unwanted, shameful, and the earth quakes.

Liquifaction: Once-solid ground turns to rolling waves.

Aftershocks: Society's structures, once dependable, Sway and crumble. A tsunami builds on the horizon. It approaches to swallow up anyone in its path. Run away, find higher ground. What was once familiar is wiped out. Only detritus is left in its wake.

Detritus: A baby. Debris must be cleared. ‘Time will heal the horror,’ they say. ‘You'll forget the shock. The swaying and undulating of what was one solid. Simply push aside how it felt when you ran from the threat of your destruction.’ But, there was a scar on that landscape that cannot be erased. A baby. A child, a young woman, a new mother, a wise woman.

What you ran from lives on in me. How can I name the feelings? I was your shame, your secret, your story to conceal. But I too have a secret to tell. In my story, no relationship feels solid. Lliquifaction. All around me, the world appears solid. I alone feel the rumbles of what may come to swallow me up.

Aftershocks. Fear of abandonment. Tremors. Uprooted. Do whatever you must to stay rooted. If the ground shifts below your feet and loss is imminent, run! Run away to a safe place.

You ask me how I feel about my adoption? I feel that I have lived on the head of a seismograph’s needle. Sensing doom, Recording rumbles. Sensitive to the waves rolling just under the surface of what appears solid to others. My whole life? Liquifaction.

Chae Ryan: Hi, my name is Chae Ryan. I am an international, transracial, Korean adoptee from Perth in Australia.

I don't believe in heaven, but the closest my human conception can relate to is the glowing white holes of the emergency room. Here was a place for the living, for those fighting to survive, and for the unconditional love of the angels dressed in white and blue, who have dedicated their lives to saving them. Yet here I was, in such an intense, overwhelming pain that all I wanted to do was end mine. I was an imposter here.

I overheard whispers amongst the angels about the incoming Afghani refugees being airlifted to the hospital as part of Australia's response to the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. And though I'd been sitting in the room for 13 hours, by that point, I didn't mind. I could see that many of the staff had been there just as long.

When the attending doctor saw me, I remember being so physically ill and crippled, I could barely move. The agony and sheer feelings of anguish were unbearable. The doctor gave me a sedative and I escaped my pain into a spaceless, dreamless slumber.

I awoke 10 hours later to the sight of refugees crowded into makeshift beds from the gray padded hospital chairs. Their eyes had lost a sparkle of the infinite universe and the intricate wonders of a human soul. And if this was heaven, then only their physical bodies made it here, and their consciousness was left far behind in what I could only imagine was hell. This was what trauma and PTSD looked like, and I didn't know it at that moment, but this was what I was experiencing, also.

Noticing my staring through the rectangular window of my room, a friendly nurse interrupted my gaze with a wave and a smile, making their way over.

“Sleep well?” he asked with an ironic grin, suggesting that he knew that I had.

“I'm sorry, I don't think I should be here,” I responded, convinced I needed to remedy my feelings of guilt and shame in taking up a whole bed and room to myself while I could see that space was very limited.

“Nonsense. You're exactly where you needed to be,” he responded matter-of-factly. “Come on, they'll be waiting to meet you.” The nurse took me to a room where I presented in front of a panel of six doctors specializing in different areas of mental health. They asked me questions about my life, and the circumstances leading up to me now wanting to end it all.

Up until this day, anytime someone had asked me about my life, I always avoided sharing my story. It was too painful managing other people's emotions or beliefs surrounding adoption, and it's exhausting, and I was stubborn in my refusal to believe that my start in life had affected who I was. I had run away from home at 15, and I'd been running away trying to avoid this inescapable pain ever since.

The more questions the doctors asked me, the more I realized I didn't know who I was. I didn't know my family's medical history, and a lot of my memories of my childhood are locked away in a part of my consciousness that I can't access now. Or perhaps those memories have been erased completely. I'm not entirely sure.

I started to panic. I was having an identity crisis. I shared with them my story of how I was placed into a home as a child, where I should never have been placed. How I struggled in relationships and accepting love, how I poured myself into socially acceptable addictions, like exercise and work, to try to cope and fill the empty void of a family and a deep yearning in my heart. How in this moment, the separation from my girlfriend and my rejection in landing a work promotion, had evoked the reliving of the trauma of relinquishment from my birth mother, or what I now know as the primal wound.

Later that day, the nurse presented me with my treatment paperwork. I felt like I had just received a school report card. Only this time, instead of self-sabotaging and deliberately failing maths, as I had in high school because I was so desperately confused by my Asian identity, this report card was proof that I was failing at the life that I had been given. My results were in, and I had scored major depression and complex developmental trauma. And learning about what my diagnosis meant, I discovered that adoptees have a four times higher rate of attempting suicide than non-adoptees, and are at a higher risk of depression, addiction, and other mental health challenges throughout their lifetime.

I realized I couldn't keep running anymore. I couldn't keep telling myself that my adoption hadn't affected me, because the proof was in the statistics and the lived experiences that many adoptees have been brave enough to share. My adoption has affected every part of me, my mind, my beliefs, and every single atom within my body. And growing up in an environment that didn't accept, acknowledge, or validate my pain, had led me to a life of suffering in isolation, in silence, and an endless sabotaging of myself.

So for the very first time, I started to explore the complex and painful story of who I am and where I came from. To discover, advocate for, and reclaim my identity, to heal from the trauma before it took my life.

The nurse had been right: I was exactly where I needed to be, and though I didn't believe it, then, I know it now. All adoption starts in loss and trauma. I wasn't an imposter after all, and my body for a long time had been trying to tell me that this, this was important.

It's been a year since I visited those white holes. The path I followed has been incredibly difficult, and at times it's heartbreaking knowing that the next year of my life will be even more challenging still. But I've found support in connecting with organizations and purposely established government agencies that exist to help adoptees just like me.

I know now that I'm not alone. I have allies and I can see clearly now the footprints of the adoptees that have walked and survived this incredibly complex path before me. Their resilience, capacity to love, and bravery inspire me each and every day. I'm thankful that I'm still here, and I wanted to share my voice on Adoptee Remembrance Day.

Haley Radke: Thank you to each of the writers who poured their hearts out through writing with other adoptees, and sharing their personal experiences and pain and creativity. Just an honor to be able to share your work. A lot of these folks are private and don't have public social media. Those that have websites or social media that are okay with it being out there, they are linked in the show notes for you. And in future, if any of these pieces are published or find a home, we will link to that as well for you. But for now, I hope you have enjoyed and learned from their words and that something you heard today will resonate with you and you'll feel seen and validated, and know that you are not alone.

If the thought of writing with other adoptees sounds inspiring or interesting to you, I have a short interview with Sara Easterly of Adoptee Voices at the very end of this episode. So if that sounds good to you, you can keep listening to the very end, past the music, to hear my conversation with Sara. Thank you so much for being here with us, thank you for listening to adoptee voices, and let's talk again next Friday.

Okay. So we just finished recording everyone's pieces and it was so impactful and powerful and just full of emotion. I mean, how proud are you of the community that you have gathered together of adoptee writers?

Sara Easterly: Well, I'm still feeling really emotional coming off of hearing them read. The answer is yes, I'm bursting with pride in them and it's not in a superior way, I just feel so much caring. And just the courage that I saw each of them exhibiting, it takes so much courage to even get it out of us –as I think all adoptees know– to start just getting all of this built-up stuff out and on the page. And then there's another level of courage to read it aloud in our writing groups. And then today, just knowing that their words will be shared on the podcast, I think that's just taking that courage, you know, just pushing it one step further.

So I just– I'm in awe and I feel like I'm bursting, I feel like I could cry. I probably will go have a good cry after. Just so many emotions that are all swirling right now. Yeah, just so proud of them.

Haley Radke: So proud. I can see mother hen vibes– in a good way, in a good way.

Sara, tell us about Adoptee Voices. What made you create it? Tell us about some of the things that you offer in building adoptee confidence in writing and skills.

Sara Easterly: I've been a part of writing groups and writing communities for 22 years and different writing groups in all different forms and ways to go about them. During the pandemic, I joined a writing group that was all online, and it kind of opened my eyes. I was kind of thinking in the back of my mind, ‘gosh, this would be a really nice kind of way to do an adopt–’ You know, the adoptee community was starting to come together in so many unique ways because of the pandemic. It was one of the silver linings of the pandemic is just seeing how our community flourished in so many different ways with online spaces.

And so I had this idea in the back of my mind, and then an adoptee who read my book got in touch with me, Julian Washio-Collette. And we were talking and then he said, “Do you know of any writing groups for adoptees?” And I'd been kind of doing the adoptee thing where I had this idea, but I was too afraid to let it out, like too afraid to do anything with it. I was sitting on the idea for probably four or five months, and then as soon as he asked me the question, I said, “Yes, I do. I'm starting one.”

It was like I just needed that catalyst to move forward. And I actually had reached out to Jennifer –I kind of just did these side things– Jennifer Dyan Ghoston. We were in an adoptee meeting at some point, and I sent her a note, “Would you be a facilitator?”

And then I heard Alice Stevens on your podcast, and I heard her passion about publishing, and I had a very similar experience to hers in terms of having roadblocks when I went to publish my book. When we share the truth, we bump up against the narrative that, culturally, everybody wants to hear about adoption, and so it's hard to get published. Publishers look to trends, they look to what's gonna sell. I was flat-out told, “Adoption books don't sell,” by an agent. And so I heard Alice's passion and I'm like, ‘I want Alice to be along for the ride.’ And found other facilitators, Ridghaus.

And we started the first two writing groups and then we realized that we had a mix of different kinds of writers. We had writers who were interested in publishing, and we also had writers who didn't care about publishing –maybe not in the moment or maybe they will down the road– but just there to express and get it out, get it all out. And I realized I had both of those purposes myself when I was writing.

And so we started a second writing group. So we have now one called Hone Your Craft and another writing group called Honor Your Voice. And really those just came out of that need that we saw, that there are multiple reasons why we write. And I think what's amazing is just seeing that no matter the reason, there's so much healing that happens, it's just the magic, the outcome that happens when you're not trying to do that.

Haley Radke: Isn't that amazing? The secondary– for our hearts, it's really a primary reason to get those things on the page. What would you say to someone that's like, ‘oh my gosh, I do wanna write kind-of, but I need a push or…’ What are the benefits or some of the things that you've seen from your writers who maybe came into it with ‘Hmm, I'm not sure. How do I even have the skills for this?’

Sara Easterly: Well, I think to be a writer, you just have to write. And I love when we've had multiple writers come in saying, “I'm not a writer, I'm just, you know, gonna explore.” And then, you know, one of them was a reader today who, yes, she's a writer and she has claimed that she's a writer now. So I love seeing that evolution because all it takes to be a writer is to write.

I need accountability, myself. This is why I am a fan of this format, because we write together “side by side”. I'm putting my fingers up in air quotes because we're over Zoom and we have people from all over the world writing with us. And so we're turning off our audio, turning off our video and just writing for usually an hour and a quarter, hour and a half, writing side by side.

And I personally need that time myself, just otherwise, you can deprioritize your writing. It's so easy to do. Every writer does it, adoptee or not. It can get on the back burner. So if you're a writer who needs accountability, then find a group. It doesn't have to be ours, but find a group that can help you with that. There's a lot of in-person writing groups that do the same kind of thing, too. I've been in loads where I sit around a table with other writers and we all just write after we talk. But you feel the pressure, because you're like, ‘oh, look at all that's happening over there. I need to do that, too.’ So that helps if you need that pressure.

Haley Radke: Okay. Now, could you tell us about Adoptee Voices and what's coming up? If people are listening to this right when it's released, what are the opportunities for adoptees to write with you, write in community, write with other adoptees?

Sara Easterly: Okay, well I'll tell you: Adoptee Voices, we're just wrapping up Cohort 7 and we're starting Cohort 8, November 1st and November 3rd, respectively. So that's coming up. They’re six-week writing groups. We have our full schedule for the 2022-2023 program year up on our website, which is adoptee-voices.com.

Haley Radke: So if people are listening to this later and those groups have already started or wrapped up, we can always find links to all the new things, sometimes you have standalone workshops. If we just check the website, I'm sure the calendar has all the things that we need to know.

Sara Easterly: Yes. And I do want to give a plug to, if you're on the website, we have an e-zine that we publish after every cohort with more of the writing. So if that gave you a teaser today, listening to all the stories, then reading through the e-zine is a nice thing to do.

Haley Radke: I'm so glad you mentioned it. I know I've recommended it as a resource at some point in some episode. There's so many good– I love the combination of, just like today, poetry and prose and it's just a variety of writing styles and voices and experiences. It's just so important. Thank you so much, Sara, for all you're doing to help adoptees along in their writing journey, and the facilitators that you've gathered together are just so many remarkable people. I think, if not all, most of them have for sure been on the show before.

Sara Easterly: Yeah. They're amazing people. They're really amazing. I feel so lucky. I just pinch myself to have Alice Stevens and Ridghaus, Jennifer Dyan Ghoston, Kate Murphy, and Susan Devan Harness. I mean, it's just a dream team and I love working with them and it's amazing the friendships that develop just through being in community together. All around.

Haley Radke: Absolutely. Yes. Well, thank you so much to your writers and to Adoptee Voices for working with us on this episode. I'm just so, so grateful. And we'll have links to Adoptee Voices website and socials in the show notes and all the courses and everything that you've got coming up.

Thank you so much, Sara.

Sara Easterly: Yeah, thank you Haley. Thanks for the platform for the writers. I'm so thankful.

226 Harrison Mooney

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/226

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Haley Radke: This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests is to be construed as psychological, medical or legal advice.

You are listening to adoptees on the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today we are so honored to introduce you to Harrison Mooney, author of the incredible new memoir, Invisible Boy, where he exposes the trauma of transracial adoption. Harrison shares with us why family preservation is so important to him and how he was able to reconnect with his biological mother after a lengthy time of silence between them.

We talk about the complexities of being in a situation where it didn't feel safe to say the whole truth about adoption and about how good it feels when you're finally able to speak freely. We wrap up with some recommended resources and, as always, links to everything we will be talking about today are on the website adopteeson.com.

Before we get started with my conversation with Harrison, I want to invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community over on adopteeson.com/community. Which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. Okay, friend, I'm so excited to share this episode with you. Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, Harrison Mooney. Welcome, Harrison.

Harrison Mooney: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Haley Radke: Absolutely. My pleasure. I'd love it if you would start the way we always do here, if you would share some of your story with us.

Harrison Mooney: Yeah, so I was adopted as a baby. I was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and adopted at 11 days old.

As I understand it, there's a waiting period where some forms in Canada have to be filed or something. But my biological mom had me for five days and then they took me away. You know, she didn't really want to give me up. So she tried to hold onto me and she said every day the nurses would come in and kind of wrestle me away from her.

Because they didn't want her to get too attached to this baby that grew inside of her body already. Anyhow, I was adopted by a White, very Christian family. And we lived in Abbotsford, which is a little suburb just outside of Vancouver. Very religious, small town vibes.

It's getting a little bigger now, but it still just feels like the smallest, jerkiest town and we were radical Christians. So, I grew up understanding that God had built this family, that he'd taken me from, you know, a vessel and given me to this other family because, you know, they were Christian and they were God-fearing and they prayed and asked him to do that.

And so I really leaned into my faith and to Christianity. And as my family got more and more radical, we went to more and more charismatic churches. You know, I did my best to fit in and to ignore the white supremacy at the heart of these institutions and mine, in particular.

And at the same time, I wasn't really being taken care of. I wasn't given any guidance for how to be Black in these spaces. And it wasn't until I was about 19 and I got a call from the adoption agency. At that time they were called the Hope Adoption Agency.

I was told, now that you're 19, you're an adult, so you're allowed to know some things about your biological parents, and they want you to know that they love you. And I didn't know what to do with that information, but that kind of thing just rattles your foundation, you know?

It’s really like, okay, well, so somebody else is my mom, somebody else is my dad, you know? I mean, I guess I had always known that, but you don't have to engage with it until it's right on top of you. And, you know, that started a journey of, I guess, self-discovery.

I eventually went down to the adoption agency. I learned my parents' names. I was so much more comfortable in White spaces than Black spaces at that point that I reached out to my dad first. Or at least I met him first and that didn't go very well for me. But a little while later, I reached out to my mom and I met her.

And that was incredible. I mean, the moment that I met her, you know, my life was completely changed. And I don't know that I knew that at the time. At the time you're just trying to process it and, you know, get through it, try not to cry or throw up or just run. But it was actually seven years between meetings.

I met my mom that first time and we made plans to have dinner a week later. And then we both just didn't do that. And, yeah, seven years later I called her and we tried again. And you know, in that time it took, we had a few really good years of building a relationship and recovering what was lost.

I wrote this book Invisible Boy to really explain to her what my life had been like after she gave me up. And she read the first draft and we cried together and we commiserated and we shared stories that were just so similar. And then a month after that, she woke up one day and there was blood in her eye.

She went to the doctor. It turned out that she had leukemia and she died in May. So, now I'm post a lot of things. I'm post this book that I wanted to write my whole life. You know, I wanted to meet my mom and have a relationship with her and I wanted the 30 years with her that I got with my adoptive mom.

Yeah. Now, I'm reeling a little bit, you know. I've done this big thing and I've suffered this great loss, and I'm not quite sure where to go from here, but I'm really glad that I started this journey and I'm really glad that I met her and that I had an opportunity to know her before she died.

Yeah, it's an ongoing journey, but that's mine.

Haley Radke: Thank you. I'm so sorry for the loss of your mother, and I've heard you say a couple of times, “I'm proud of my sorrow.” I wonder, would you be comfortable sharing a little bit about what you did to summon up the courage to get back into a real relationship with her?

I'm hesitating because so many of us have had the luxury and privilege of meeting a biological parent. If we're so fortunate. And maybe having a brief reunion and then one or both just cut off contact because of numerous reasons.

But the reconnection following that, what led you there? What did you do? How were you both ready or not? I mean, that's really interesting.

Harrison Mooney: Yeah, it was so difficult because she meant so much to me and I meant so much to her, but you could tell, you know, like when I looked at her, I felt all this love that I wasn't used to feeling.

And I felt this attraction, you know, like an attraction to my mom. Like it was platonic or whatever. But it also felt weird. It felt stronger than my fondness for my friends, or it was an attraction that I didn't really know how to handle.

And I know that she had that too, and that just freaked us out. It was weird, you know, how do you deal with emotions this strong? And after everything that we'd both been through, we had all of our walls up and I think we were both quite withholding. Every time that we saw one another, it just made us want to drop all those walls and just like hug, and in my book I said I wanted to climb into her lap and ask her to tell me the story of how I was born.

That was just a real tangible feeling and it was intense. So, yeah, after avoiding each other for those seven years, I invited her over to the house and we made dinner for her. I listened to the episode with Tony Corsentino, and he talked as well about having his family over and making dinner for them.

It's part of the people pleasing thing. It's part of, Hey, I turned out really well and really responsible and I mean, look, I can even cook for myself. So, we did that and I remember after dinner we went outside and we smoked a joint together and I thought it would put us at ease and instead it made us so anxious and we couldn't look at one another.

And so we actually went back inside and we stood on either side of my wife and we talked to one another while looking at her because we couldn't do that. But I said, while staring at my wife, to my mom I said, I know that this is just so intense and awkward right now. But yeah, it won't feel that way in 30 years. This is the work, and it's the work we have to do to recover what was lost and to get where we want with one another. And every time I see you it's going to be less awkward.

And it was, we got to a point where we could chat and she came over and we could look one another in the eyes and the first day that she left, she said, I love you. And I said, thanks. And I've done that a few times in my life, but as our relationship went on, it just became clear that this is safe. You know, you can say, I love you, too. And I did.

At that time I was even struggling with my terms, you know, I had my adoptive mom who I was calling my mom, and I thought of as my mom. And then I had my birth mother, you know, this kind of formal distancing term that we have to just put some space between us and the woman who gave birth to us. But I didn't like it. I felt like I love her. She's my mom. I wanna call her my mom. And it took a long time.

I mean, it took the whole process of writing this book and it took therapy and just a lot of thinking and feeling sad. But, you know, one day I woke up and I thought of my mom and I thought of my biological mom, and it felt like a lightning bolt and I didn't know how to explain to other people. Like, no, you don't understand.

Like, I woke up today and when I thought “my mom,” I pictured a different woman than I've pictured every other time for my whole entire life. You know, I did it, and it was just so rewarding. And so, yeah, when I say I'm proud of my sorrow, it's because I just put in so much work. I went against all of my instincts for self-preservation and avoiding conflict and discomfort.

I just leaned right into it because I want her back. I want her in my life, you know? And I'm not going to let what happened to us keep us apart after we found one another. So, she's gone now, but I knew her. I loved her. And when I think of my mom, I think of her. And I can't tell you how proud I am to mourn my mom. When the first time I met her I couldn't think of her as anything else than a birth mother. I couldn't tell that I loved.

Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. The work, it goes unseen usually, and so to actually spell it out for folks who are likely along that path somewhere, I think is so valuable. And you alluded to or you mentioned these feelings of self-preservation and, you know, we often talk about the traditional adoption narrative and trying to blow that up here in this adoptee-only space, we've been working for a few years on it already, followed by multiple decades of other adoptees who've done the work before us. And I am curious how that's shifted for you now having your work out in the world.

There's a scene in your memoir where you're sort of hijacked to come into this meeting with a bunch of White adoptive mothers and this intense pressure to be like, Oh yeah, adoption was great. Like, I'm so glad a White family adopted me and answering those questions in the way they hope and expect is out of this place of self-preservation.

Can you talk a little bit about that moment and then what would you say now versus coming from a place of strength and not that fear of having to pull it together?

Harrison Mooney: Yeah. That moment in the book comes when I go down to the adoption agency and I'm there to learn my parents' names, but I get there and there's a support group happening for the White moms who adopted all these other versions of me.

And you know, they're all sitting around and when I get in there, they kind of jump up and they're really excited to talk to me. And it turns out that they knew I was coming. And so in their minds I was kind of their special guest and I realized then, I think, often as adoptees, we have this sense that we're really alone.

You know, we have our own language for what's going on but we learn that in our house, and it's so hard to connect with other adoptees and it's often hard to think of ourselves as part of a larger structure, this whole system that's scooped up so many of us and displaced so many of us and just left us confused and with this weird sense of loss that's like invisible and mostly unexplainable, but we feel it and it just handicaps us at every moment.

It's so bizarre. So that was the moment where I started to realize that there were just so many other people caught up in this, and my experience of being raised by these White parents who just had no idea what they were doing, that was quite universal. I think a lot of people had gone through that, but it made me mad.

Well, why are you all doing this? Like, why wouldn't you just even treat your adopted kids as people and be like, Hey, I actually don't know how to handle your Blackness. Do you know how to handle your Blackness? And then when I say, No, I don't, because you never taught me, we go looking together for a way for me to claim my identity.

I just feel that work could be done, but it's not. And I got so mad and I wanted to tell everybody, Look, you know you guys aren't equipped to raise Black children, like every one of you is disqualified. But yeah, I mean, these were 12 versions of my mom who I was terrified of.

So instead I said what you're supposed to say, which is, you know, “I'm grateful” and “I had a great life.” And “Wow, like I moved up a couple classes with this adoption. So look at me now.” And actually, you know, growing up around White people gave me a White voice, and that makes me really good on the phone, and that makes me very hireable in Vancouver.

I could say all kinds of things that people want to hear, but now I'm mad and now I've written a book and now I've done work that I know a lot of people haven't done, and I have some experience now in attempting to restore a relationship and in going back through your trauma and working on what to say to people and, you know, when I wrote the book, I said, this is my big powerful statement: Adoption is not necessarily good.

That's what I said. But, you know, as time has gone on and after writing this, I lost my mom. I mean, now I say it's not good. It's not a good system. And when people push back, and they do, because of course there are success stories or folks who are still in the sunken place and haven't realized how bad this is for them yet, or, you know, whatever else.

I get that those stories are out there. But, you know, because of that, there's always going to be a pushback. And that pushback is: Well, what would you do differently?

And my answer is: Adopt families, not children. My mom was 16 years old when she put me up for adoption. She was in the foster system, she was adoptable. And what makes me so upset is that instead of helping her and taking her in, she needed a home. She could have used all the resources that I got.

Instead of doing any of that, they just ripped me out of her arms and left her to die. I feel it's just so unconscionable. It makes me so upset and that I have to explain to people why that's a stupid system for helping me makes me mad. So, that's what I say now.

Haley Radke: Well, we are all about family preservation here, so yes, yes, yes, yes.

I don't know why, I've heard the word “adoption agency” like five million times. But at some point when I was reading and thinking about your memoir, I just kept thinking of the word “agency”. And the irony that adoption agencies are called agencies when we have no agency and they stole it from us. It's kind of funny to me.

Harrison Mooney: I know. That's fun. Can I just say that I intentionally included agency in their name because of that. And Hope Adoption or I think sometimes they were Hope Adoption Services, but I wanted to make it very clear that, no, they're out here peddling agency and I'm just delighted that somebody noticed that.

Haley Radke: Wasn't it something even worse? Before they were called Hope Adoption Agency?

Harrison Mooney: They were called Burden Bearers International.

Haley Radke: Well, we are a burden. Okay. I am going to go back to this idea of agency and I don't know if you're comfortable talking about this.

Harrison Mooney: I probably am.

Haley Radke: You probably are. Okay. So your biological father almost succeeded in quashing this book. And so as an adopted person who's had so much agency removed at the beginning of your life, what was it like to have him try and usurp your voice as an adult?

Harrison Mooney: Oh, it was so difficult. It was frustrating because I knew him. I knew from our first meeting, which is in the book, it's chapter 9, what I was in for if I decided to step back into his life or to reconcile with him. He is a man who didn't listen to me and he didn't really seem to care that I'd lived a whole life.

He wanted me to pick up where he left off. He called me by a different name. He said weird things about Blackness, about his kids. When I was writing the book, I called him and I told him, Hey, I'm gonna write this chapter and it's gonna have this first meeting in it, and it doesn't necessarily make you look the best, but I'm hoping that you'll understand that this is part of a larger thing that I'm trying to do.

It has a lot to do with how White parents engage with Black children. And, you know, he didn't take that well and I didn't send him a copy of the book before I submitted it to the publisher. But when my mom was on her deathbed, he came to visit her and got ahold of it and he read just his part and got outraged.

And he sent, he says, a cease and desist, but it was just a nasty email to HarperCollins customer service. And he called me a liar and he said that I defamed him in the most corrupt ways. And he came to my mom's house while I was there and he yelled at me and I fled the house.

And this is one of these things that I'll probably wind up writing about, but as I was running down the stairs to get away from him, he stood at the top of the stairs and said, You know, you're not even really Black. You only wanted to hang out with your mom because she makes you feel Black, but you're half White too.

And I said, Oh, you're blowing it. And he said, Get the hell outta here before I do something I'm gonna regret. And then I fled the house and I knew that somebody was going to do that. This book is not shy. I didn't hold anything back. I knew that some people were going to get upset.

I just didn't think it would be him. I didn't think that he'd get that upset. But, yeah, that's kind of where we left it. The last time I saw him was at my mom's funeral and he stood a ways off with his arms crossed and we didn't speak. And I'm sure he'll come around again.

I think that honestly he has more need of me than I do of him at this point, so I don't think I've heard the last of him. But, man, let me tell you, having your dad yell at you like that? I mean, it sucks when it's your dad who raised you, but when it's like your biological father and he's…oh, yeah.

I don't know. I haven't told that story before, so it's not polished. But it was a tough one. It was one of the worst days of my life.

Haley Radke: I'm really sorry you had to experience that.

I don't know what to say. You know, the silencing just doesn't end. Sorry to tell you this, but I've interviewed a lot of adopted people who've written memoirs and it's cost them so much, which is not a surprise to you.

One of the things is, when you've got this platform, which is amazing and it comes from all the work you've done over the years as a journalist and sharing other work that you've done.

And I'll tell you this, I don't know if you know this. I went to your book launch Zoom and one of the first events I think you did for the book when it was out in the world. And I had to turn it off immediately because the first question you were asked was “What do your adoptive parents think about this?”

Harrison Mooney: Oh, yeah. Right away.

Haley Radke: And I almost vomited. I was like, it's not even safe. You said everything you need to, this person obviously didn't read your book because they maybe would know, and that was the first question they landed on. And I just thought, God, it just doesn't end. So I'm not asking you what your adoptive parents think.

I'm asking you, how does that feel for you to still be like, wow, did I not put it all out there for you yet?

Harrison Mooney: Yeah. That's a fun question because, you know, as much as I've done this and I feel very brave and I feel I pushed through all these fears. I'm still really afraid of my parents, my adoptive parents, and when people ask, what do your parents think about this?

It makes me tighten up. I try not to think about what they may or may not think about this because there's so much else at play, right? They almost never looked at my other art, like I was in a band. We released an album. I gave them a copy, shrink wrapped.

And a year later I came over and it was still shrink wrapped. And I've written some short stories for journals and I'd say, Oh, I have a short story in this journal. And they didn't read that. I was in a play. They didn't come to that. So I feel like there's a really good chance that they never read this book, and that's heartening and somehow more hurtful.

I would love it if they didn't read the book because then they won't get mad at me. But at the same time, I mean, these are my parents. They're supposed to care about my biggest achievements. This is the best thing I've ever done. And I've been working on this in some way or another for like 20 years.

So, you know, the book's been out for two weeks and it really is devastating that I haven't heard from them at all, even to yell at me. But I don't like getting yelled at. I had to decide when I was writing this book that I don't care in the end what they think about my story because this is my story.

One of the major themes of this book is just the reclaiming of narrative. You're told that you're a bit player in somebody else's story. We prayed and God gave you to us. And I held onto that for so long, but then you want to be your own person. You want to be the star of your own show.

As I got older I realized the scope of my show, and the reality of where it began and where I am now and realized that my adoption was really more of an abduction. It's just that when you're in charge of the narrative, you can call it an adoption.

I realized I had to tell that story and come what may, so it was really terrifying. And there were times that I would write something that I knew was truly transgressive. Like, you're not supposed to say that about your family. You're not supposed to share those stories about your family.

And the fear that I would feel in those moments was so visceral that it felt like there was a scary man standing behind me. And there was one time where I decided to write something and I could swear that I felt him back there and I jumped and I screamed, and then it turned out that I was sitting outside on a sunny day.

I felt like I was in a dark dungeon and it was terrifying. But I mean, that's what you have to do in order to tell your story sometimes. You've just got to push through all of that abuse and all of that gaslighting and all of the ways that people say, Hey, you can't tell this.

You're not supposed to just say that. Well, screw you. I'm gonna tell it. I don't care. If I can't tell my story, I don't exist. And I do. I exist. So yeah, I've written it and I'm sure that my parents would have big thoughts about it and I don't give a (beep).

Haley Radke: Love it. What a great answer. Okay. I've heard you talk about a worry that you had that people from your past, the history that you're sharing about in your memoir, which really is like childhood to young adulthood as a main scope of time, that folks might dispute what you've shared.

And that you felt. Again, as a journalist, you felt the need to collect evidence and corroborate your story. And on the show here, we've talked a lot about so many of us are estranged from our adoptive parents or they've died and sometimes we're mourning the fact that they have been what we see as the history keepers, you know?

They still have the photos, they still have the family movies, you know? Home movies when that was a thing.

Harrison Mooney: What are those?

Haley Radke: I know I'm just a couple years older than you, so I related to the timeframe that you really shared about. Can you talk about how you got folks to corroborate your memories and how that felt?

And you just mentioned the gaslighting after being told so many of those things didn't happen. And in your memoir you recount multiple times where you would bring up an incident of racism that you experienced. And anyone you shared it with, they'd be like, Oh, no, no, that's not racist. That's, no, no, no.

Harrison Mooney: You're seeing things.

Haley Radke: Yeah. Could you comment a little bit about that? On looking for corroboration, but also how we can gain back our memories or have corroboration from somewhere else if we don't have a connection with our adoptive families.

Harrison Mooney: Yeah. I think the first thing is your memories are true. Right?

They're your memories. And even if you misremember something, the way that you misremember it, that impacts who you are, that impacts how you walk and you talk, and what you're recovering from. So writing this book, I was very confident that what I remember happened, but also that my memories are factual.

I'm not making anything up. I'm telling you what I recall, and if it turns out that there's something that has been narrativized or something where I've misremembered it in some way, that's also part of how memory works. So, you know, these things get twisted, but we need to be able to stand up for what we remember.

That said, if you write a book that insinuates that real living White people are racist, you're probably going to get sued. And I knew that. And so I looked for every single person that I wrote about. I'd call them, I'd email them, you know, I'd tell them what I was doing. And, I had a little bit of a trick because they never understood my experience.

And so even as I explained it, I knew that it was just washing over them so I could tell them exactly what I was doing and they'd be like, Oh, oh yeah, you know, that sounds good. But then I would ask them, what do you remember about this moment? What do you remember about this moment? And there were times that, you know, our recollections aligned and then there were times that they remembered it completely differently.

And that was interesting too, I think. Well, you know, how come I don't remember saying that thing? And I think often with memory, our memories are also trying to protect us and this kind of fragile version of us that exists. And so, you know, there are times that we'll omit something from our memory because it makes us feel bad about ourselves.

I did a workshop last night where we were working on memoir writing and storytelling and I asked one of the students to tell a story and she told the story about a time that a neighbor girl drank some wine from her mom's liquor cabinet. And then what we did is we asked her a bunch of questions about it.

Because any time that somebody tells a story, they've told you more about themselves than they realize, and, I mean, you can always find the pressure points. And so I asked her eventually, Did you have any wine? And she said, You know, I don't remember. I was like, Okay, well, see. Then I said, How much of a transgression would it have been for you to have wine?

She was like, Well, we were very Christian and it would've been a big sin. Again, I understand that whether she did or didn't, her memory is that she did not. That's how we work to preserve ourselves. So I love talking to other people and hearing their kind of Rashomon version of my story.

I know that they didn't engage with me as a full human being in many cases. So yeah, they don't actually remember my reaction. They don't remember saying these things to me, and they don't want to think of themselves as a racist, so they're going to omit that stuff from their own memory. But some people are really cool.

You know, you'll call them and you'll say, Oh, this is what happened, and they'll be like, Oh, I did do that. I'm really sorry. And then we'll talk all about it. I had to do that when I reached out to Ashley, my ex-girlfriend from my teenage years. I was part of gaslighting her.

I was on my family's side and they hated her. And I didn't know how to serve two masters in that case. I really think that she suffered as a result. And so when I reached out to her, the first thing that I had to do was just say, Hey, I've been doing a ton of reflection on my life. Turns out it was really messed up and I figured that out after I left Abbotsford

But now that I know, Oh my God, I'm so sorry. And it was really healing and it was just really incredible for her then to be able to corroborate our time together and those experiences and the things that I remembered and in the end, all of that research made me feel so much more confident in my story because all of the controversial parts, I have somebody who was there or somebody who can back it up or somebody that I told the next day, like, you won't believe what happened at my parents' house.

And then being able to do all of the other research to just find historical context. And political context. Yeah, it's made me very confident in the story I'm telling. And knew that I had to be able to stand on this as hard as I can because the detractors are coming. But you know, I'm really glad I did it.

Haley Radke: Well, let's go to recommended resources because I absolutely want to recommend Invisible Boy. It's, oh my gosh. Harrison. It's so good. I mean, I hope, you know, I mean, I think you know, it's good. But it's in, I don't wanna hurt anybody's feelings, it's in my top three adoptee memoirs of all time. I'm not just saying that cause you're just here, but,

Harrison Mooney: Oh, you're gonna make me cry.

Haley Radke: I'm a White woman. Same race adoption. So I'm actively unpacking racism. And of course I still carry that with me, so I don't identify with those parts of the book. But as an adopted person, I identify with so much of what you shared. And then, as a quirky coincidence that we have in common, I was raised in a very conservative Mennonite town in northern Alberta called La Crete.

Harrison Mooney: Isn't that suspicious?

Haley Radke: My parents weren’t Mennonite, but it just happened that we lived there. But some of your references to nineties kids’ evangelical culture working in a Christian bookstore, I was like, oh, I remember those songs.

And so you triggered lots of memories for me. Some in a good way. Some in a not good way. And you're so funny. I mean, God, there's so many funny moments, which is really strange when you're reading some really hard, hard things. So I unreservedly recommend your book. I hope everyone picks it up.

I love voices because I'm a podcaster. It's super important to me. I listened to a lot of it on Audible and it's so lovely that you read it. How was that like?

Harrison Mooney: I loved it. I just loved it. Yeah. It was the most fun thing I've ever done. I want to read the audiobook for every book I write. I want to be a freelance audiobook guy.

I can do other people's books. It's so fun. It took a little bit for me to get into it. I think when I started, I was nervous and you're working on your cadence and there was a lot of lip smacking and they told me to eat an apple. They were like, eat an apple and that will get rid of the lip smacking.

And it was a bad apple, obviously. It wasn't like a lip smackingly good apple, because that would've increased the lip smacking. So, I did that, but then eventually I got into it and I just had so much fun. There's a moment towards the end where I actually break down.

I'm reading my own book that I had not read. I wrote this in the middle of a mental health crisis, and then I tried not to look at large parts of it. It was like I don't want to engage with that. When I get it back from the editor, if there were no marks on certain pages, I'm not even gonna go back.

Those pages are done then. So the haircut scene, I wrote it and I did not read it again. The ending, I wrote one time, never looked at it again. But then reading the audiobook, I had to engage with this stuff, and now I was on antidepressants and kind of getting a hold of myself.

And so looking at this book and kind of seeing the dark place that I went to and how vulnerable and just kind of naked I was writing this book. Yeah, it really rattled me. And, so when I got to a part towards the end where I speak in tongues, or try to, and I just felt the tears coming on and my voice cracked.

It was like, Oh, no. But yeah, they didn't make me record it again, so I assume that you can also hear me breaking down as I read my own audiobook.

Haley Radke: It's so powerful. I love hearing your voice say your own words. I'll just show you. No one else can see, but look at all my book darts. So, it's funny when you're listening to the audiobook and I'm like, oh my gosh, I gotta mark that. And I didn't even open this while we were talking today, but I was like, oh, I gotta go mark that. So I would quickly flip to where that section I thought was so I could put the book dart right there.

So there we go. You gotta get Invisible Boy, everyone. And what do you want to recommend to us, Harrison?

Harrison Mooney: I want to recommend my friend Jenny Heijun Wills' incredible memoir, Older Sister, Not Necessarily Related. And I know that you guys have probably talked about it before. It's a big award-winning book, but man, what a book. And I just met her recently and we had just an incredible conversation about our own adoptions.

And we did a panel called “Transracial Adoption: Is It Any Good?” With me, Jenny and the Vancouver writer Wade Compton. And the thing that I just loved about Jenny was she's gone ahead of me in this space. She's answered all these questions before, and so there were times that I asked her the questions that, you know, where I was starting to get, and she would just smack me back with the strongest answer.

She's so strong. I've met a lot of adoptees and I feel like most of us are people-pleasers, we're willing to contort into whatever shape and that's how you fit in in a space. But Jenny is, I mean, in her own words, a brat and just from the moment she was born, it seems like you could not tell Jenny what to do.

And you know, her book was the first adoption memoir that I read where I was like, Yeah, I want to be strong like this.

Haley Radke: Yes, I love your description of her. I've been in spaces where she's the one to just like, instantly be like, Oh, nope, no, no, we're not doing that.

She is like, oh my gosh, one of my favorite, favorite people. She's been on the show. She was on episodes 133 and 218. We did a Book Club with her. Maybe we'll get to do a book club with you?

Harrison Mooney: I'd love to.

Haley Radke: Okay, lovely. Next year, 2023.

Harrison Mooney: I'm saying yes to all book club invites until it seems like it's not fun for me anymore.

Haley Radke: Okay. Hopefully you have a good experience for all the book clubs. No, it's amazing reading. We have a Book Club for Patreon supporters of Adoptees On, and every month we read another adoptee-authored book and then we're discussing it with adoptees, which is such a powerful experience.

So I'm so thankful for your work on your memoir. I can imagine it feels like you're standing naked in a field and we're all getting to see all the hard parts. But your bravery will help others be able to share their experiences as well. So thank you. Where can we connect with you online and follow your work and see what else you have going on?

Harrison Mooney: So I don't have a website yet, because I still haven't gotten any money, but as I understand it, the money's coming. It's tough. You don't get rich writing a book.

Haley Radke: What?

Harrison Mooney: No, no, no, no, no. I'm on Twitter at Harrison Mooney. I'm fairly active on Twitter. You know, some days I tweet a lot. Other days I just lurk and retweet.

But If I do anything interesting, I'm gonna tweet about it. And I'm on Instagram at picturesofharrison. You know, I'm in the process of turning this account from an account that was just for me into one more like a professional account. So, you know, right now there are a lot of pictures of my kids and there will probably be fewer of those as we go.

But who knows? They're very cute and I just want to post pictures of them all day. Maybe I'll be allowed to, I dunno.

Haley Radke: I know once your kids are old enough, I'm always asking them like, am I allowed to post this or this? So yes, it changes over time, doesn't it?

Harrison Mooney: Yeah. I've been asking them, too, but they're four and two, and they say yes but they don't actually understand the privacy considerations. Like maybe this isn't actually ethical for me to be like, Hey, two-year-old, can I post you on the Internet?

But you know, we're all working out the ethics of the digital era at the same time on the fly.

Haley Radke: Indeed, indeed. Thank you so much, Harrison. It's just been an honor to talk with you today.

Harrison Mooney: Oh, thank you so much for having me. This was just an absolute delight.

Haley Radke: It's such an honor that I could have a conversation with Harrison and I really hope you grab his book. I really did love it and I'm sincere. Hopefully he will come back in 2023 and join us for Book Club. So we have a Book Club that is semi-monthly over on adopteeson.com. A lot of our readers felt once a month is too much.

So this month we are reading Surviving The White Gaze by Rebecca Carroll, and she is joining us if you're listening to this, when this episode has gone live. She is joining us on Monday, October 24th, for a live Zoom call with Patreon supporters of the podcast to discuss Surviving the White Gaze with my co-host Sullivan Summer.

And we're really, really excited about that conversation. And if you're listening after that conversation was recorded and the audio will be available for Patreon supporters in their Patreon podcast feed. So I invite you to join us. If you want to see more info about Book Club, it's adopteeson.com/bookclub.

And we have read so many fantastic books. So definitely check out the list on the website.

The other thing I'd recommend is ask your local public library to buy these books and have them available. It is a huge gift to other adoptees who might not have the money to buy every new book every time we talk about a new book on the show and expose other people to adoptee-authored work.

So your libraries often will have a form on their website or if you go in you can tell your librarian, Hey, this is the hot new memoir. You guys should carry it. And I know, especially libraries across Canada will be stocking Invisible Boy, so you should be able to request it from your library.

Okay. Thank you so much for listening and reading with me and thank you so much to my Patreon supporters. You make the show possible. So thank you, thank you, thank you, and let's talk again next Friday.