246 Dorothy Ellen Palmer

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/246

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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 are listening to Adoptees On the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today's guest is author and accessibility consultant, Dorothy Ellen Palmer. Dorothy is a fellow Canadian adoptee whose story has some remarkable coincidences, including an unexpected overlap with my own.

We talk about the indescribable lure back to the places of our biological ancestors. Why mainstream adoption humor is so problematic and ableism in the adoptee community. This episode requires a trigger warning as we touch on some extremely difficult topics, including mentions of sexual assault, including infant sexual assault, and other mentions of abuse.

Before we get started, I want to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. We wrap up with some recommended resources and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website AdopteesOn.com. Let's listen.

I am so pleased to welcome to Adoptees on Dorothy Ellen Palmer. Welcome Dorothy.

Dorothy: Thank you. I'm delighted to be here.

Haley: A fellow Canadian at last. I love it. If you would start and share some of your story with us.

Dorothy: Certainly. One of my favorite quotes about a adoption searches is that you have to be prepared for the good, the bad, the ugly, and the unbelievable .

And my story certainly contains all of those things. I think the most important lesson of it is that I'm still learning at age 67, that you're adopted all your life. And so your story and the way you see your story and the way it affects you and changes you can change as your life progresses.

So I was born in 1955 to a working class mother who struggled with mental health issues. She was unmarried. And of course in 1955, nobody kept illegitimate bastard babies as they were called in the day. My mother's situation was even more traumatic for her. My conception wasn't consensual. She was date raped on her second date with a boy that she met at a dance, and I was actually conceived during Hurricane Hazel in October of 1954, which is cool. Not everybody gets to say that. I had six different foster homes and two long stints in convalescent hospitals before being adopted, just before I hit age three and in the course of one of those foster homes, I was sexually abused as an infant.

And that, and those events are actually my first memory. I was adopted in 1958 to a working class wannabe middle class family in the west end of Toronto. My mom and dad had tried desperately to have children and had suffered a number of miscarriages. I grew up in a home with two adopted siblings, me and my brother, and then two natural children, my brother and sister, and had actually adopted a third time when she was told she was pregnant and couldn't possibly both look after an infant and carry one. So they gave that baby back after having it about six months. I was eight years old at the time, and totally traumatized because they had told me that she was my real sister. So I of course, lived the next years of my life when my mother got pregnant with my brother and my sister believing I would be sent back because if there were two ways to have babies, there was, you get 'em at the store or you get 'em in the tummy.

And once you get in the tummy, you keep. So that was very traumatic and very difficult because I didn't understand at eight and my family didn't discuss my adoption. They told me I was adopted, but that was it. They told me they knew nothing more, and that was it. What I did have when I became a teenager was my non-identifying information.

Which is, I'm sure, as you all and all your listeners know, was the bare bones. My mother was 24. She worked as a stenographer. She'd been a Wren in the Women's Auxiliary Corps of the Navy. She was considered bright in her class. She graduated grade 10, took some business classes. Met my father at a dance.

That was it. That was my non-identifying information, and that they were Scottish and English. So that was never enough for me, obviously. And pre-internet looking for an adoptive family was very difficult. There were very few ways to do it. I joined an organization called Parent Finders. They did their best but were of little help, and the birth name on my adoption certificate was one of the most common names in the world.

It was Johnson, so that didn't help. Eventually in about 2013 in my fifties when adoption law changed in Ontario, I applied for and received my statement of live birth, which had my mother's maiden name on it and the name of the man she had married who was not my father. That's a story in itself. She got pregnant with me in October of 54.

Almost coincident with that, met the man that she married that April, so she was married when she gave birth to me in June, and they made all kinds of back and forth decisions, I eventually learned, and decided to give me up. After getting my statement of live birth. I had to hire a private investigator who specialized in adoptions.

She eventually found my birth mother, who in her eighties, was living in a retirement home in San Diego, and then she moved to a retirement home in Virginia where a year later my kids and I went to visit her and I met her once before she died. That was when she told me the story of meeting my father.

Everything she remembered about him. She remembered his name. She remembered that he drove a studebaker and came from a musical family. And it was very hard to watch, the pain in an 84 year old face, because she'd never told anyone in her family besides her husband, who was now dead.

She never told her own kids about what had happened to her. So she did, was very brave of her. She told her own kids and I met them and I met her and then she died about, oh, not quite even a year later, but I think she felt very glad to get some kind of closure about all of that. I think part of what is inextricably linked in my adoption journey is that I'm disabled.

I was born with multiple birth defects in my feet, and the doctors were always unsure if it was genetic, or more likely, but not certain. They said was that it was caused by cinching that my birth mother had pulled her belt so tight. There was no room in the womb. And of course if you think very hard about why she might have done that, the inability to access free safe and legal abortion, she might have been hoping that she didn't have to deal with a pregnancy.

So that's a difficult thing to deal with. But one that I view with empathy for her and that disability to when I talk to her to learn that no one else in her family had any kind of congenital abnormality. It was very relieving to me because it made me feel that if my kids went on to have kids it, they would likely be all right.

So that was good. Subsequent to finding her, there was this whole wonderful explosion of online genealogy. And I was able to trace, I'm an historian by... my first degrees in history and I've always been fascinated by local history. So when I went to university, I went to the University of Western Ontario.

I didn't know why I wanted to go there. No one in my family had ever gone to university, let alone gone there. But I needed to go there. I found out by searching her birth name, which was Mclane, I found seven generations of McLane ancestors living in a farm outside of what is now an abandoned ghost town of Mayfair, Ontario, which is a stone throw outside of London, Ontario.

There are papers of McClane's family in the library at Western, which I didn't know until I went back there after I discovered it. And two of my very best friends at Western who lived in the area, drove right past the McClane farm, still standing, right past the graveyard, still standing with seven generations of my ancestors in it.

So my son and I have been there and seen grave site, and taken photos. And when I went by myself to Melbourne, which is a tiny town right now near Mayfair. I just happened to walk up to a bunch of very elderly women who were sitting in this little cafe and asked if they knew any of the McClane's and one of them said, oh yeah, one of them was my best friend.

Let's go look at the farm. So she took me off and I actually got a chance to tour the ancestral farm now owned by another family, not McClane but that was also extremely cool. Subsequently online, I've found a uncle. When I was 65, I found a 75 year old uncle because my birth mother's father abandoned his family, moved to Alberta and had a second family, so he became my uncle.

He's wonderful and his family is wonderful and been loving to me. And then most interestingly, I found a half-brother who I just consider my brother Don. And in something you don't get to say everyday, he is exactly one week younger than I am. I was born June 23rd, 1955. He was born July 1st, 1955. Obviously same father, different mothers.

We also found another half sister who was born five years previous to us, and unfortunately we'll never be able to chat with her because she lives with dementia in a care home. And her husband said she would've, he, she would've been delighted. She was interested in her adoption her whole life. D n A testing just came along too late for us to get to know her, which makes me very sad.

She sounded like a wonderful human being. She was a social worker in the same area as my daughter, which is also kind of interesting. My father's side of the family, we have had minimal contact with. Also through DNA testing on ancestry, we encountered a cousin who was initially very interested in, sent us all kinds of information and and yet another amazing coincidence.

He was also born in St. Michael's Hospital, the same hospital that Don and I were born in a week apart, so our mothers could have met. Our cousin was born there a month ahead of us, which is cool. But in the most interesting coincidence of all, I named my son Connor, and I didn't know why. I just knew that was what his name was.

I didn't have anyone in the family named Connor. I didn't know anyone named Connor 41 years ago. Wasn't a common name then. My cousin, his son is named Connor. Why is his son named Connor? Because his grandmother, my grandmother, her maiden name was Connor. Just the fascinating, weird coincidence that my story is full of.

I'll give you one more and then I'll be thrilled to take your questions. My adoptive mother and my birth mother are 10 years apart. My adoptive mother was older than my birth mother, but they went to the same elementary. They went to Swanee Public in Toronto. They had almost identical childhoods. The things my mother talks about, going to Sunnyside amusement park, going to the windows at Eatons, being in the Santa Claus parade, all of those things.

10 years later, my birth mother did all of them. And weirdly enough, I was also in the Santa Claus parade. So it's just so bizarre that all of those things, it makes you question nurture versus nature. What kinds of things are passed down? Is there genetic memory? All of those questions are something that I would've resisted, I think being a fairly logical person.

I would've resisted until I came face-to-face with the, with my own story, because there just seems to be. Something leading me back to that, whether I recognized it or not, which I think is fascinating and something that adoptees can view as a gift that we have these two legacies and histories that if we can reconcile them can enrich our lives.

Haley: Do you remember being at the farm or the graves or having any like different kind of feelings I've talked about with people before about them having like this, I don't even know what to call it, but like this memory connected to the land, as if I've been here before or those before me have been here and there's this connection, did you feel any of.

Dorothy: I did and it's a little spooky and I'm a little embarrassed by it. When I was a teenager, I used to buy needlework kits and I bought one of this very nostalgic farm with a winding S-curve, driveway up a hill. Had to have it. Didn't know why. Still have it. Made the needle work, kept it. The farm has an S-curve driveway up to the hill. A red door and a red door. I changed the red door in the needle work. It was a brown door, didn't like it. I changed the door to a red door in the needle work.

And when I went, when I was at the graves, particularly when I was in front of the grave of my great-grandmother, I felt very connected to all of it and it's, I'm sure you understand this, but for, it's hard to explain what it means, like to go 53 years with nothing being related to no one but your own two children, and then all of a sudden being related to literally thousands of people.

Because after my memoir, a very kind woman named Jane Milkovich did my full DNA genealogical background for me and literally now I'm related to some 12,000 people. So it's just bizarre. And when I was standing at that grave in front of my great-grandmother, I felt very connected to her for some reason. And then subsequently learned that she was a writer, which I thought was really interesting. I have no writers in my adoptive family at all. No teachers. And she was a teacher and a writer. So that was also just a really interesting connection to make.

Haley: It's very interesting when you think about DNA and what could be in your D N A, predilection to teaching? Okay. Wow. Thank you for sharing all that. I am curious, so your sister who had dementia was adopted, was Don also adopted?

Dorothy: Yes. Our stories are so different. John and I are like a Petri dish for nature vs nurture. We were both born in St. Michael's a week apart. His adoptive family had come from a small town in New Brunswick called Rogersville, New Brunswick, and tried to make it in Toronto, didn't like it, and when Don was a kid, went back home.

So he had to change from English to French in school and that proved difficult for him. He was an athlete, he was a great skater. I have no interest in hockey. I don't know why people wanna strap knife blades on their feet, but Okay. And he, this tiny town of Rogersville and Brunswick, I think has about a thousand people in it.

And that's where he grew up. And I grew up in Toronto. He eventually, he quit school for a while, went back to school in English, good for him, graduated, became an electrician. Had a family, and again, in an interesting and cool coincidence, we both, our favorite dogs are the same dog. We both have the same dog, English Springer Spaniels.

We both had the same dog. He actually trained his in agility. My son's dog, Tasha, you could not train to do anything, but it was, you know, it was just such an interesting coincidence that we love the same kind of dog. He is much more positive human being than I am. He sees the glass is always half full. I'm already asking why it's half empty.

He is much quieter and more thoughtful and sweet. And I'm a little more verbal, but we get along like I felt instantly and totally connected to him. He's come out from he now lives in Moncton. He's come out two or three times. I've met his kids. They're lovely. And I, we talk about every 10 days or so on the phone, which is great.

Haley: I love that you have that. So in your memoir, falFallinging for Myself, you tell multiple different incidents of what a horrible woman your adoptive mother was to you. And it was really, challening for me to read because I felt so much for you and I don't know. What's it like for you to tell that part of your story, knowing in the adoptee world, we always get these things. Aren't you so glad you were adopted? And you had all these foster care placements, one of which was extremely abusive and at least now you had this family. Like, how do you talk about that and critique adoption when so many people are like, you're lucky. At least you had a family.

Dorothy: My work as a disability activist helps me to debunk disability tropes, like being the cheerful Tiny Tim. Grateful that you can walk at all. And it helps me at the same time to debunk adoption tropes; that you should be the cheerful adoptee, grateful that you were adopted, and trying not to be too negative about anything like Tiny Tim.

And both of those things are both false and harmful. The disability trope and the adoption trope are designed to keep critique out of the narrative. They're designed to keep complaint out of the narrative. They're designed to have no critique of patriarchal capitalism in the narrative, which we need to have a critique of patriarchal capitalism in both disability and in adoption.

Because after all, who gets adopted? Babies that fathers won't acknowledge, right? The mothers acknowledge us. It's babies that fathers won't acknowledge. So all of that critique I think is important and. I guess I can be grateful in the sense that I was adopted. I, we all know that kids who age out of the foster system have higher rates of everything, of alcoholism, of drug abuse, of suicide.

It's a horrible life to age out in the foster system and then be basically sent into the world with nothing. And yes, I'm grateful that did not happen to me. That doesn't mean I then have to hand the adoption system a cart blanche to say everything you do is wonderful. Because a lot of what adoptions systems, including the one here in Canada that disproportionately seizes indigenous children, is not going to get a carte blanche permission to just say you're wonderful.

Because what we have to have is solidarity to say that adoption, the way it exists in Canada and North America and most of the world is also very harmful.

Haley: Yes. Thank you for speaking to that. In your book, you have a section where you talk about ableist jokes. And when I was, of course as an adoptee, taking that the other to another point was all the adoption jokes and why is that funny?

And I'm curious if you have thoughts about that, cuz I know you have a amazing sense of humor, and used to teach improv and we're really involved in the improv community. And have you thought about that? The like stupid adoption jokes?

Dorothy: Yes, I have and I think you're right. I think they're like blonde jokes in that what they are designed to do is to tell blondes, i.e. Women, that they are inferior.

And what adoption jokes are designed to do is victim- humor; to say that they are, that adoptees are inferior. They are laughable. And it's also like what Stella Young would call inspiration porn about disability. What she sees in disability inspiration porn, are all of those articles where they, the young person with Down Syndrome is allowed to make a fake tackle on the football field, and they condescend and patronize them and everybody applauds.

And what Stella Young said was that's about abled people feeling good about themselves. And the disabled person is a prop. Many adoption jokes, the disabled person is a prop. And what it's really about is trying to make people who aren't adopted feel good about themselves. And say, thank God I'm not othered like them.

So it's very complex and very interwoven and no, it's not just funny.

Haley: Yes, and you talked about the inspiration porn in your book as well, and I remember always calling all those stupid, find my family shows reunion porn. For similar reasons. Again, taking your point, another level. It is very when you really look at it in depth.

I absolutely agree that's what it is. And so to go from putting up the narrative that it cannot be critiqued to looking at it at that level, is I think what we should all be doing as adopted people. So we can be speaking up for ourselves and trying to shut those things down. So you've been an organizer for years in a variety of different spaces as a teacher in the political realm, in the disabled community.

Can you talk a little bit about your work in that space and do you feel that it extends to the adoptee community? Do you feel that's integrated because you're an adopted person? Are you able to separate that at all or not?

Dorothy: That's an interesting question. I think I would say that everything I do is as an adopted person, just the way everything I do is as a disabled person, they're, they aren't, you can't leave them behind.

And I wouldn't want to, I think. That's important to me too. In all the years that I was a teacher, I was very proud O S T F executive member and was branch president and helped organize the biggest strike in this province against Terrace, and really am very proud of that work that my union did.

Since retirement, finally was able to write, I'd always wanted to write, but when you're a full-time teacher, that's pretty much a pipe dream. And I started to get published, oh, 12 years ago and have been working in CanLit ever since, trying to improve the accessibility and the profile of disabled writers in can. And that's been a struggle.

There have been some organizations and some writers who have understood it completely. There have been many who hit the right emojis, but continue to run, organize, and attend inaccessible events with steps at the front door, with stairs in the building with stairs up to a stage where they stand at a podium and they don't see anything wrong with that.

And then of course we have the pandemic. Where everyone originally said, oh, we're not going back to normal because normal isn't working. And then once Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, declared that the pandemic was over, everybody rushed back to inaccessible spaces without masks and I can't get CanLit to consider wearing masks at events. Very few people will, which means they're medically inaccessible to many seniors, immunocompromised people, disabled people. It means I'll never work at a live person event again unless they are masked. So that inaccessibility, the pandemic has created that medical inaccessibility is representative to me of the barriers I face as a disabled senior, but also of the barriers I faced as an adoptee. Because there was just this defacto decision that, I wasn't as good as other people so they could move me around like chattel when I was a child. And now there's this defacto decision that I'm not really as good enough as abled people, doesn't really matter if I can't attend.

So it's really interesting to see that hierarchy of colonial capitalism, which really tries to make me see myself as inferior. And I've have viewed all my work, which she kindly listed as resisting that. I'm not inferior. And adoptees aren't inferior, and disabled people aren't inferior. And, under disability justice, all of those things are linked together and everyone's struggle must move forward together.

Haley: Now I know the answer to this, but I'm going to ask it cuz I'd love for you to expound on it. Have you seen ableism in the adoptee community?

Dorothy: Absolutely. Ableism is everywhere. We're not gonna blame the adopted community for being any worse or any better than anybody else. . But there is also this notion somehow, That the real adoptees aren't disabled or they aren't particularly aren't intellectually challenged because that's a real issue in the adopted community.

Though people who struggle with intellectual challenges are not welcome to all the time in the disabled community, even the disabled activist community as well. So there is a sometimes, even the adoption community falls into the trope that adopting a disabled child with any kind of disability is an act of pity or is an act of courage.

And it isn't. Anymore than adopting any other child. But if it's seen as different even by adoptees, it's certainly gonna be seen as different by the rest of the world. So we have a standard to bear there that I think sometimes the adopted community doesn't necessarily hold up, and I've also seen all kinds of adopted meetings held in inaccessible buildings.

So that says that they don't see disabled adoptees as worth attending. All of those things need to change.

Haley: There's so much saviorism in adoption. And then to have that next level of elevation to saviorism for adoptive parents who are seen as taking on this extra challenge. Yeah I can see that, and I know I have been guilty of the same things in using ableist language and just not even thinking about it. And in the last few years I've been really conscious of my language, and it is so embedded in our regular vernacular. It's wild. It is so hard for me, it feels to stop saying things like blind or yeah. So blind to that or I've really tried hard on the word crazy. There's so many things and you, you list tons of examples in your book and use some of it.

It's so funny. Do you wanna talk about that? Because it's so tricky for us to unravel, but I think we should be aware of it and I think lots of people aren't.

Dorothy: Yeah, that, that's so interesting. The first thing I wanna say is that people get to let themselves off the hook. They're never going to be perfect. All they can commit to is to try to do better. I wanted, when I wrote my memoir, I originally said to myself, I'm gonna write this with no ableist language. Ha. It creeps in. We don't always recognize it. It is entirely pervasive, just as you say. The best example is I've always set a challenge for my friends, particularly those who swear.

I've said, go two weeks without using or hearing the word bastar. And if you hear the word bastard, you must say to the person, please don't call my friend, Dorothy, a slur. A bastard is the name of a child whose father did not recognize it. It's an insult under patriarchal capitalism. It's an insult to birth mothers.

It's not an insult that you should be using if you care about progressive ideas. Stop using the word bastard. And two weeks later, all these chagrin people who originally said, oh, I can do that, came back to me and said, I used it three times myself, and I heard three people use it, and I only stopped the first one cuz after that I got such a strong reaction.

I was afraid to stop them again. That's the most typical response. Because the word bastard is so completely ingrained in our language as a negative thing to say. Of course, disabled bastards feel badly about themselves or are beaten down because of that. So that language, just like disability language.

"That's so lame." Please don't say that I'm lame. I'm limp. But there is nothing bad or wrong or negative about me. And people go, oh my God, I'm sorry. And then a week later I'm on the phone with them and they go, "that's so lame." It's so hard to remember. And all we can do is try to remember as best we can, and try to apologize when we say it wrong.

Haley: As a, I'm a fat person and I'm trying to teach my kids that this is a neutral word, not a negative word. And that's, this minute drop in the bucket compared to all that. And you say that so lame. There's a really funny anecdote in your book where your friend, do you wanna tell that? It's like we literally can't.

Dorothy: I don't remember. Isn't that awful? You better tell it.

Haley: Okay. So you're asking your friend to review a chapter, and you're talking about ableism in the chapter, and he says to you something about, oh, that's so lame. And you both laugh right after cuz you're like, yeah, we can't even, we can't even get there. So yeah.

Dorothy: I was trying the other day with a friend who is a mental health advocate to come up with a word other than crazy and we were both trying to come up with possibilities and we came up with a couple and then no more than two minutes later I said, oh, that's nuts.

Because it is, again, so completely ingrained and it's a, it is just an ongoing struggle. It's something you commit to doing as best you can, but are we gonna make mistakes? Yes. Because the hold that ableism and that adoption has, our bastard, he has on our language is so deep that it's not something we can just throw off immediately.

We have to keep struggling.

Haley: I appreciate the challenge to us, and you share that throughout the book in multiple different examples, and I wonder you, as you share in your book, you act as though you're not in pain and you hide it from your students and for years and years. Can you talk about that and then coming into, I think embracing your identity as a disabled woman and being out with it. And that might sound surprising to people. If they're like, wait, how could she hide it? Do you wanna talk about.

Dorothy: Sitting right on the cusp where a lot of disabled people sit, that I could pass as abled. I walked, I would limp when I was tired. I would write that off as being tired. And just as you say, for years, I desperately wanted to remain in the fold of abled people and I didn't wanna be seen as disabled.

And when that pretense became impossible when I needed a crutch, then a walker, then a mobility scooter in a wheelchair. What was my internalized ableism? I learned that term from the disability community online and realized that I had internalized the shame of being disabled, that my culture wanted me to feel, but that I didn't need to feel.

And I think that also helped me with my adoption journey. Because I had internalized shame about being an adoptee, that I also rejected and said eventually, no, I can disclose that. That's not my fault. I haven't done anything wrong. And I find that in defending Don too, like I really wanna feel, I feel very strongly about defending him.

He didn't do anything wrong and it's really important not to see him as being any kind of lesser- than. So when I eventually disclosed as a disabled person, it really was because I had to come out in CanLit and say, look, I can't do stairs anymore. You wanna have disabled people, you have to have buildings with no stairs.

And it was both energizing and totally defeating because a lot of people offered sympathy and nothing else. Then wouldn't change and didn't see anything wrong with what they were doing. And it was a struggle and it remains a struggle, as I said, worsened by the pandemic because the medical inaccessibility, which too many in CanLit also won't address, is really difficult.

And the only thing I tell myself is just the way the adoption narrative has a hold on the culture. The able bodied, everybody is able-bodied and the pandemic is over narrative has a hold on the culture, and those are to keep people at work. Those are in the interests of colonial capitalism that keep people going to work and going to school. And not rising up in arms against their government trying to privatize both healthcare and education, right?

We need to be complaining against, about those things and stopping those things, but if you don't believe it's a problem, you don't. So that's the brainwashing that conservative governments in particular have done so well. They've brainwashed the population into thinking that everybody's abled and the healthcare system is a little stressed, but it's okay, but hey, here's this private option.

Just the way with education here will be this private option. That's deliberate. They're doing that on purpose. They, that's been their agenda all along for years to make them and their cronies money. Do the privatization of both those. So that helps me realize that my coming out as an individual, it's connected to that resistance and that really is very sustaining to me.

Haley: I'm curious of your thoughts on emotional pain. Pain, the emotional tax I'm going to assume cuz you share in your book a lot of these things, but you're start the day with only so much physical capacity and at any point in the day, your body can be like, okay Dorothy that's enough And that's it for the day.

And I think as adoptees we also have this capacity for what we're willing to go out into the world and, stand up for ourselves and critique the adoption narrative and all of those kinds of things. Can you talk a little bit about that and in your writing and other speaking events or other interviews you've done? The emotional cost of always having to challenge the societal narrative of you should be grateful about adoption.

Dorothy: Yeah that's a really interesting question. There is a huge emotional cost and one that I think I have shared only in private for the most part. I don't talk publicly very much about it.

For example, years ago, right after I discovered my birth mother's name was McClane and that I was Scottish and I had a clan. An adoptee's dream. I went to Scotland during a McClane reunion. And I was standing there talking to a genealogist who would look up your family on the spot for you.

And I explained I just happened to say, oh, my birth mother is McClain. And he looked up at me and he went, your birth mother. Then you weren't a real McClain, aren't you? And I just rose and I turned away and I went back to my hotel and cried for literally two days. Because the this, to finally have that identity and to have somebody so cruelly and so casually hurt me like that, the emotional cost of that was horrendous.

It's tainted the whole visit. And I think that's, I'm almost crying now. I think that it's, something that people who aren't adopted don't understand that there can be moments that just sideswipe you and knock you to the ground and take all the stuffing out of you. Like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz.

You're just done. You're done. And having to fight all the time on every front, on the disability front and the adoption front is exhausting. Luckily, I guess luckily I'm combative by nature and had lots of training in my union and try not to take it personally. But you're right, it's still completely exhausting at times.

Haley: As you say this, you're combative by nature. I thought about several points in your book where you share some things that you do that I'm like, oh, I don't know if I could do that, cuz I'm a chronic people pleaser. Do you know what I mean? Maybe you don't relate to that anymore since you've had that trained out of you, or have you always been one to say it like it is?

Dorothy: I've always been one to think it like it is. When I was a little girl, I was so busy trying to please my mother and so afraid that, that anything I'd say was wrong, that I didn't speak up for myself then. And maybe I've spent the rest of my life making up for that. My kids would say that might be true.

But I also think there's a real truth to getting a certain age where you just don't give a cluck anymore. You're quite prepared as a senior woman to say exactly what you think, because why not? At that point? And I sleep better having said what I really think, rather than going to bed at night and wishing I'd been clearer or more direct.

So there are some benefits to being, clearly outspoken. I also think about it sometimes that, how do you convince people? I don't believe you convince people by being nice. I really don't believe that. I believe that some stand of change is made by someone. I call it an alphabet argument. That if somebody wants this population is sitting at a G or an H and you wanna move them to M, down the alphabet, you've actually gotta go, not just to M, you've gotta go to P Q R S T, and then they feel comfortable moving along to M, right?

You've gotta create space for people to move into, to be able to feel comfortable. So I'm quite prepared to be the Malcolm X, of the disability movement because I think that then makes lots of room for people to be like Martin Luther King, the more public image, I guess you could say of the kind of change that the Civil Rights movement wanted.

So I guess it's for all those things I, sometimes I think I go too far and sometimes I think I don't go far enough. And I guess that's a good balance.

Haley: You share in your book. We're gonna do recommended resources right away. I have a little coincidence of our own here. Coming up, you're share in your book about all of these different things that you've taught your students over the years, anti-racism, work included, and talking about inclusion for the L G B T Q community, years ahead of where the rest of us caught up.

So I know that you've been doing that work for a really long time. Okay, Dorothy, here is our little coincidence. And when I tell you I giggled so hard when I read this in your book, I grew up in La Crête.

Dorothy: Oh my god.

Haley: I know everyone else is I don't, okay. I don't get it. So I was born in Edmonton. And adopted by a couple who were teachers. And so they taught almost their whole career in La Crête. And so I was a teacher's kid up there. And you spent one year of your teaching career, I think your first year if I was doing the math correctly in La Crête.

And when I tell people about La Crête, like they don't believe me cuz it's a weird spot. So when I was like, okay, Dorothy will get it.

Dorothy: I'm astounded. I have never met anyone from La Crête. Now what years were you and they there?

Haley: You taught in 83 there and I was born in 83, so I didn't move there until 86 and I left when I graduated high school in 2001.

Dorothy: Now, did your parents teach high school or grade or elementary school? What did they teach?

Haley: Elementary.

Dorothy: So they knew my colleagues. Isn't that interesting?

Haley: Okay. Let's dish after briefly so we don't name names publicly, but there you go. That's our little unique connection. You and I. Let me tell you, I hope everyone gets your book Falling for Myself. I laughed out loud. I'm like, I can't remember the last book I was laughing out loud, not just at the La Crête thing. There was a whole chapter, I cackled all the way through. And then I felt bad about it cuz then I was like, wow, to live this must not have been funny. But yeah, it's... I love how you weave the hard with the humor, with the challenges to us about really focusing in on what it is like in the world.

And how we can change it to include everyone. And I just really appreciated those challenges. And I also saw that you've written a few other fiction books and they didn't get here fast enough, but I'm really excited to read your other work. But yes, Falling for Myself.

Do you wanna talk about a little bit about writing it and what that took out of you to share some of those really personal things with anyone?

Dorothy: I decided after the death of Stella Young, who I had so much admiration for as a disabled activist, and she encouraged us all to tell our stories. I decided after that, that I reluctantly wanted to tell mine because I can fight publicly for any cause, but I'm a private person about my own. So I'm not a likely candidate to write a memoir.

However, I decided that the way in which adoption and disability were interwoven in my story could really be interesting and helpful to other people. So I thought that it was important to do it for that reason, and I had I, I did this sort of, put it in. Look at that. That's hilarious.

Haley: I'm showing her all my tabs in the book

Dorothy: That's a very great compliment. Thank you . I wrote it by the, put it in, take it out method. I would put something in and go, oh my God, I'm embarrassed. I'd take it out and then I put it back in. Oh my God, I'm embarrassed. And then I put it back in because I realized embarrassment is why it had to stay.

So that's, that was the process of writing it. I think I told enough to still feel that some of the things that are, that I didn't tell, I can keep. But I told enough that the world understands. And I think that was the balance.

Haley: I truly enjoyed reading it and getting to know you. Like I was like, oh my gosh, I feel like I know you.

So that is like for me, such a great memoir when you're like, oh, could we be friends maybe?

Dorothy: Sure.

Haley: What do you wanna recommend to us, dorothy,

Dorothy: I'm gonna recommend something a little bit off center. I'm gonna recommend the movie Crip Camp for two reasons. One, because it was the beginning of the disability activist movement, and it's a story of a bunch of teenagers at a camp in upstate New York for disabled kids.

And as an adoptee watching that, so many things that they say about themselves, about the way society treats them, about the way they've decided not to accept that treatment eventually slowly is so dovetails the experience of adoption and disability. And the second reason is that, It was the sort of birthplace of the activists of the activism of Judith Heumann.

Judy was a leading disability activist that we just lost a couple weeks ago. And she was involved in every piece of American legislation about disability. She was Obama's first special advisor on disability, a really important disability activist. To pay tribute to her and to pay tribute to the way those two struggles intersect, I'm gonna recommend the movie Crip Camp.

Haley: Thank you. Appreciate that. I haven't seen it yet, and I will do that very soon, I'm sure. Okay, so if people wanna check out your book, Falling for Myself, if they wanna connect with you, where's the best place to do that?

Dorothy: On both Facebook and Twitter. I've lost a lot of faith in social media lately for obvious reasons. But anybody wants to try to find me there. I'm just under my own name, so easy to do.

Haley: Okay, perfect. We'll link to that in the show notes. And you also recently wrote this article about finding your brother, and I'll link to that as well. And that's actually how I first found you. So, the incredible story of finding my brother in my sixties.

Dorothy: Yeah, Broadview has been very kind to me. I've written both disability activist articles and adoption articles in Broadview and that one about finding my brother Don at that late age has been a real gift.

Haley: Yeah, I bet you've had lots of people connecting with you about it. Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing your story with us, Dorothy.

For challenging us a little today, and I hope that folks will read your book.

Dorothy: Thank you. It was delightful to be here with you and your listeners.

Haley: Okay, so if you are a little bit of a geography nerd, La Crête is this tiny little town. When I grew up there, it was called a hamlet and after our call, our recording, Dorothy and I got off and she expressed to me, I don't know if your listeners will get it, how strange, a coincidence that is because La Crête is so unbelievably small.

I know it's bigger than when I grew up there. I think they have a traffic light now. I think Main Street has two lanes, but it's been a while. So anyway, I was really delighted that we had that little quirky overlap, because believe me there are lots of people who have heard of it cuz it's a strange place. But there's not very many people who have lived there.

So anyway, that was just like, that's my little nerdy Canadian moment. I hope that you grab falling for myself and read more from Dorothy. She goes a lot more in depth than we were able to get to in the interview about ableism and how harmful it is and how we can really be more mindful of both our language and accessibility for events and all the things.

So I have been working to transcribe the back catalog of our show and have transcriptions live for every single episode as soon as they're released, and I'm really thankful for those of you that have been donate donating towards that project. Thank you. That is one way adoptees on, is trying to be more accessible.

And it's cool to have transcripts because if can't hear us talk, or if it's challenging, you can, read along while you're listening. Or folks that English isn't their first language, you can actually copy the transcription into Google Translate and get a pretty remarkable translation.

So I really appreciate that can also lend itself to more people around the world to hear from adoptee voices. So that's a bonus. Anyway, I really think Dorothy is so funny, and I loved learning from her. I hope you did. Thank you so much for listening, and let's talk again next Friday.

245 Mary Gauthier

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/245

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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 are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radkey. What can I say about today's guest? She is an iconic songwriter, Grammy nominated folk artist, an outspoken adoptee advocate, Mary Gauthier. Mary's first book, Saved By A Song, the Art and Healing Power of Songwriting is a nurturing exploration of how sharing our stories can be a healing experience.

Her 2010 album, The Foundling, has become a soundtrack for many of us as we've grieved and processed our own adoptee stories. Mary and I talk about her path to songwriting, how important adoptee community is to her, and the power of story to overcome trauma. 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 wrap up with some recommended resources and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, AdopteesOn.com. Let's listen in. I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, the Iconic Mary Gauthier. Welcome, Mary.

Mary Gauthier: Hey, thanks. Thanks. It's great to be with you today. Thanks for having me.

Haley: I would love it if you would share some of your story with us. I know lots of folks know you, but for those who are new to you some of your adoption story and how you came to songwriting.

Mary Gauthier: Yeah, my story is long now. I'm, I'll be 61 March 11th. My adoption story is one of discovery. I was adopted at about a year old and it was something that was never kept from me.

I always knew I was an adoptee in a time when a lot of, a lot of adoptees weren't even told that they were adoptees. I came from St. Vincent's in New Orleans on Magazine Street. It was a home for un unmarried women, Catholic women. It was a Catholic adoption agency, or I don't even think it was an agency.

It was the Catholic Church running a, they called it an orphanage, which to me is always, never really fit well in my mouth, given the fact that I have four parents. I'm not an orphan. But the award orphan was used around the St. Vincent's and women in infants asylum. So I was adopted at a year old.

And I really didn't start trying to understand the impact of that until my fifties. I had a lot of struggle with drugs and alcohol. I had a lot of struggle with relationships that didn't last. And with with curiosity on my side and the guitar in my hand, I started using my talent, I guess for songwriting to use, use it to answer some of the questions.

And I wrote a whole record around my adoption story called The Foundling, and that necessitated me doing some really deep thinking around it and a lot of research and reading. Through a series of events that really wasn't something that I decided, I ended up back at St. Vincent's. I was brought there when I played a show in New Orleans by the show promoter.

And I didn't. I never thought of going back there as an adult. I didn't even think it was a place. I didn't know anything about it or wasn't curious or rather,_ and_ wasn't curious. I didn't have an need to go back there or see it or nothing like that. But I ended up back there and that opened this whole thing that led to writing these songs around what I'd call the Primal Wound after Nancy Verrier's classic book.

Haley: I know that you, once you started diving into adoption things that you spoke at the AAC and you got to meet Betty Jean Lifton.

Mary Gauthier: I did.

Haley: What was that like for us? Newer to the community?

Mary Gauthier: Yeah. Nancy Verrier was at that conference and I got to sit with her for a while and she came to my keynote address and I didn't really speak, I just played every song on the record that was my keynote address. I played it live, which was emotionally intense, obviously, and liberating for many.

And Betty Jean Lifton came to a show that I did in New York City before she passed away and I got to meet her. She was a radiant, beautiful woman whom I, when I met her, I was of starstruck. Read all of her books and really. Appreciated her pioneering work around adoption trauma and the consequences of secrets and lies. So yeah, I met our, I think two female heroes for those who have chosen to do some of the work. Especially I think my generation. I think this story's very different every decade around adoption, as I'm sure your show explores in depth. But for my generation, what really wasn't spoken about and Nancy Verrier and Betty Jean Lifton were the two women who not only wrote about it, but they spoke about it constantly.

And they really created the opening for us to have conversations around this that we were questioning. And I think it led to changes in laws and is still leading to adoptees getting their rights around their own birth certificate. They changed the world and I think that their work is monumental.

Haley: And so from my perspective, you're carrying on that work and that legacy. And I know the album, The Foundling has been profound and healing for so many of us. Can you talk about what it's like to be in the public eye and speaking critically about adoption in an industry where there are so many celebrities who are adoptive parents and who continue to glorify adoption and don't talk about the hard sign of it.

Has that cost you anything? Has there been any regrets on your part of speaking out your truth in that area?

Mary Gauthier: No, not a single regret. In fact, I think if I didn't do it. I let's, let me rephrase that. I had to do it, I had to do it to save my own life. I was drowning in things I didn't understand.

Why didn't my relationships work? Why did I become an alcoholic and an addict at age 12? 13. What was going on inside of me that made me different? And what was this pain? I felt sometimes when I was sleeping, like I was falling through space, untethered eternally, the horror of untetheredness.

I had to get it sorted. I talk a lot about using music and song as a transformative medium, and for me, I think writing the fouling was a lifesaver, literally a lifesaver. I think once we tell our story in an honest way, and if we do it through writing it, speaking it, singing it. We start to have agency in a way we didn't have before.

It gives us some power and if people don't like it, th that, that to me is honest to God, not something I can internalize. I have to like it and I have to be proud of the work that I do around it. Yeah the true story is not something people want to hear. They want the Disney version. They want the the consensus version, which is still a myth in many ways.

They want the cleaned up. It's it's easy version and it's not easy. And I've had people say the damnedest things to me after I play these songs, and it is almost as if I've startled them and they need to regurgitate what they've been told rather than search for what they think. Really, and I see that in their eyes that I've created a deep confusion. And so I don't rebut anything. But I stand by my work and I stand by my songs, and I will, I won't be silenced because I think that the more we speak, the more the real story gets out there. And the real story around adoption is trauma, period.

Haley: Thank you for saying so. Yes, I agree. I've, I read your book. It's so good. Loved Saving by Saved by a Song,

Mary Gauthier: Thank you.

Haley: The Art and Healing Power of Songwriting. And in it, you share, that you toured with The Foundling, and you played the songs and as you just said it's it healed something in you to write them, but just playing it over and over you're bringing up the most traumatic thing that has happened in an adoptee's life, right? The separation from our genetic connections. And what was it like to, decide to put that away and decide you're not gonna perform those songs anymore, but then write your story on paper for, again, the masses to read?

Mary Gauthier: What a great question. This is awesome. This. Type of questioning is so beautiful and I don't get it very often. So writing it into songs that I sang for about a year and then I really don't sing anymore was part of my healing. It was naming it. Claiming it. Owning it. And then doing the best I can to let it go.

This happened. It shaped me. I was wounded, but I don't have to spend the rest of my life limping. What I can do is find strength in the telling. And so I don't need to tell it over and over again. I need to tell it till it makes sense to me. And then let it go. And then I was asked to write this book and writing long form around the story was a different experience than writing songs.

In the songs, some of it was fictionalized. I didn't feel compelled to have to write exactly what happened. In fact, a song that does that is usually pretty boring. So in songs the fictionalization freed me in some ways to make it a story about all of us. In the book, I got into the particulars of my own story because it was partially a memoir, and that liberated me as well, so that I could look back over the story of my life and say if that hadn't happened, this wouldn't have happened.

And if this wouldn't have happened, I wouldn't have been given this thing that I really cherish. And I think that writing it long form really was an addition to the healing of writing the songs around it. It, it alchemizes it in a different way. I think if we're drowning, we've gotta find a lot of different kind of life jackets.

And for me, they're, both of the art forms long form and song, were were driven by this thing inside of me that needed to be shown the light. The healing light of truth. It really strengthened me. It took some of the weight out of the sorrow.

Haley: When you think about processing your adoption trauma, and you said you came to it in your fifties.

Mary Gauthier: Yeah.

Haley: How did that impact your relationship with your friends, your adoptive family? Did it? I know I'm turning 40 this year, and as I get older, I just don't care anymore. And I just say what I think. There's that freedom in aging and, but opening up our adoption wounds and seeing those hard things out loud can have a steep cost to our relationship. Are you willing to share a little bit about that?

Mary Gauthier: Yeah. The honest truth is I haven't talked to him about. I don't know if they liked it or not. I don't even know if they listened. They don't follow along with my art. I'm not sure they read my book. And that when I was younger really mattered to me that they didn't really listen.

And today it's yeah, I've got a lot of friends that don't read my book or listen to my songs and that my family is not invested in my art is fine with me. I, what I did do, though, is take care. When I wrote. I took real care, not to blame or to not to what I wanted to do, and what I did do is keep the focus on myself.

I have no understanding of their understanding. I don't know what they understand about what adoption did to me. We don't talk about it that much. My mom didn't, my birth mother and I met once on the phone. So when I say my mom, I mean my adoptive mom. My, my adoptive mom didn't tell me I was catatonic when I was adopted until I was 48 years old.

She didn't tell me I was catatonic. She didn't think it mattered. All she thought was that after a little bit of time being held by her, I started to respond. And so she figured, why, tell why, why tell Mary that. I'm like, oh my God. Oh my God. If you'd had told me, ah, nevermind, there's no point in going down that road because she doesn't understand.

So in some ways these conversations, I just don't have 'em with these people. I just don't. I have 'em with people like you cuz you get it.

Haley: There's a safety in the knowing. Yeah. And I think for myself, like I try to express the, we're different. We're, we're not getting it and because they didn't catch on to any of those things, it's oh, maybe it's not safe to say things that are even harder than just that.

Mary Gauthier: Yeah. And maybe that's just not the right people to have the conversation with. They're understanding. And my understanding very different. And it's not like I need them to see it my way. What I need to do is articulate how I see it so I can then find what I need to help me heal.

Whether they see it my way or not has no impact on whether I heal. I didn't know that when I was young. They can see it however they wanna see it. I'm the one who needs to articulate my truth uncensored so that I can then reach for what it is that I need.

Haley: Oh god. That sounds like that comes from such an empowered place like, Respect. That takes a lot of work to get to a point like that. Have you noticed in doing interviews and press for, I'm gonna compare it, so the release of The Foundling and then the release of Saved by a Song, has there been any improvement in the questions you get from folks meaning, like, prying into your adoption things.

Often when I talk to people that are in the public eye, they're always getting questions like, yeah, what did your adoptive family think of that? Or, those kinds of things. And it feels so obtuse cuz it's what about me? It's my thing. Ask me about me. Have you noticed any shift in the conversation over 10 years?

Mary Gauthier: Not really. I don't think so. I think discussion discussions around adoption and trauma are nuclear, and I think people will go outta their way to avoid them. When we talk, and I talked about my book for months with the press, we never went there. We never went to those chapters. We worked our way around it.

They wanted to hear more about my work with the military. Around PTSD and trauma that happens during wartime. They wanted to hear more about my recovery from addiction, using music and songs to help me to stay clean and sober. I'm in my 32nd year of recovery. They wanted to hear about the songwriting process, but we just leapfrogged right over the whole primal wound. That is the genesis of all the work that I do, and I didn't need to talk about it. The, I think it makes people uncomfortable. I think it's very hard for people and they know they're likely to say something stupid because they don't understand, and so they don't wanna do that.

They don't wanna step in it. I, I've had so many people in the triad say things that were just kinda insensitive or just ignorant or un unschooled. Everybody feels like an orphan. Is that right? That's good to know. Like we're gonna argue with that, but that's unschooled.

Haley: Yes.

Mary Gauthier: That's the lack of curiosity around what an adoptee actually feels. Yeah.

Haley: I you shared your book that you've worked with veterans and helping them sing songs. And again, your sobriety and I'm curious. Who are the people that you feel most connected with when you're writing songs? Cuz listing off those communities. We all come from a place of some sort of traumatic incident and yeah. What are your thoughts around that? Do you get different feelings when you're working with different people?

Mary Gauthier: The work I did with veterans was very specific, was part of an organization. A program that paired professional songwriters with wounded veterans. So that, that I was dropped into that community and really loved it. I enjoyed that work very much. I did it for 10 years. And then life changed and the organization changed and I moved on. I've written with healthcare workers during the height of the pandemic who were also, were highly traumatized.

They went from being heroes to being feared because they could be carrying this deadly virus. And there's different types of songwriting. When I write generally I'm trying to just write from my own observation of the world and my own emotion. But when I'm paired with other folks through any number of reasons I do resonate as a songwriter with people who have story and people with trauma have story. And it's untold story, which is rich.

Rich, rich to be mined by a songwriter. There's very few people who don't have some kind of deep trauma. There. There's just such a long list. I would argue it's probably traumatic just being a woman in our culture. The things that women have to endure are astronomical.

And it's pretty much unavoidable. There's just medical trauma and the pandemic was traumatic for so many people. The sudden loss of elders in their family who were perfectly healthy and then dead. There, there was just so much uncertainty. I imagine that the question is unanswerable because there's so much to write about always if you're looking for truth. If you're looking to write something that says something,

Haley: You shared in your book this line about Mercy Now being one of the top 20 songs from Rolling Stone Sad songs. Yeah. And you say it's not sad, it's real.

Mary Gauthier: Yeah.

Haley: And I think that's why people connect so much with your work is that vulnerability in the real, bringing that story to, to bear. And how have you seen this for adopted people? So you share that real in The Foundling and in your memoir, what do you call your book? I feel like it's so much memoir. I know it's about songwriting too.

Mary Gauthier: It's memoir and a sort of a I think it's an instructional guide for songwriters and also I think a discussion of how to alchemize trauma.

How to alchemize things that are trying to pull you under. Through art and in my, my life. It's been songwriting. Yeah. But yeah. Yeah. Rolling Stone named it one of the 20 saddest songs of all time, and they missed it. It's not a sad song. I think that we live in escapist culture, and if music and art is not escapist, then they call it sad.

They got two settings, escapist or sad and. Yeah, that's just a lack of imagination. If it makes you feel something, a variety of some things I think that's great art and you're supposed to experience emotion, and if you cry, it doesn't mean you're sad. It means something really touched you.

It's almost a cultural fear of tears and emotion. Because sad is bad, but not all tears are around sorrow and sadness and grief and loss. I've cried at staring at a Van Gogh in person. His self-portrait. It's just so moving. And it wasn't because I was sad. It was because it was beautiful and so yeah.

I think when we talk honestly and openly about our life as adoptees, people are gonna inherently characterize it as sad, but sads only one of the experiences. The one of the other really I think important things to discuss is how resilient we are and just how amazing human beings can be in, in that department to create a world that we can survive through our imagination and then have to dismantle it and get to reality somehow. So that we can survive again and again. And that there's something about that's hopeful. Very hopeful that hope is a part of it. You know that we need hope and I think hope can come from rewriting the story over and over again.

Haley: I think that is one of the critiques of folks in our community who are talking about that adoption is trauma and it comes across sometimes as like sharing from a place of like victimization cuz we didn't have any choice in it. And I think when you talked about in your book about, going to treatment for codependency and learning that you were abandoning yourself.

Mary Gauthier: Yeah.

Haley: And you had to kinda show up for yourself. Can you talk a little bit through that? Cuz that's oh that's a, that could sound like easy. Oh, that's to the place I need to get. But that is a huge leap to go from, I'm abandoning myself and what happened to me to, okay, now I'm gonna choose myself.

Mary Gauthier: It's so hard. And it's so much work. It's so much work until we become conscious of what we're doing. I should keep this in first person because we're all so different too. Everyone's experience is so unique, but for me, until I became conscious of what I was doing, I couldn't stop doing it. And I was just reenacting abandonment.

Unconsciously. I expected to be abandoned, so I behaved accordingly, and I had to bring that to the surface that this is what I'm expecting. And that's a lie. I'm telling myself a lie. I don't need to expect to be abandoned. You know what, how do I rewrite that story? And as, as far as the community at large talking about this, and being criticized, whenever you tell the truth about anything, you're gonna get criticized.

Have at it, critics. There is more power in telling the truth than in being a critic, because when you speak truth, you help others and you you model courage so that others might be brave. The critics just create fear. They're not doing anything particularly useful. And so I say speak up and know that the critics are always waiting to criticize.

It's what they do. They don't get to define us. We do.

Haley: Can you talk a little bit about the importance of really digging down when you need mental health supports. I try very hard to normalize going to therapy and we talk so much about that here because there's so many things we can learn from listening to shows or reading books and reading self-help books and things, but often that's still looking outward and it's really hard to look inward just with yourself with no supports, especially for a wound like the primal wound.

Mary Gauthier: Oh gosh. I've been in recovery and I go to 12 step meetings and I've been doing that for 32 years and I probably, hopefully always will. I need support. I need support around my addiction. I need support in my recovery. I do therapy and I've done therapy for a very long time. I've done very many things and will continue to do very many things to disassemble the wound, I don't want it to kill me. I want to not only not die from the wound, I want to thrive.

I want to experience my full potential as a human being. I don't wanna be held back by what happened to me at birth. And look we're not in a level playing field with everybody. When you have that severing at birth, you're gonna have to deal with a different reality emotionally and spiritually.

And knowing what that is, is helpful. Naming it, identifying it, and seeing how it makes decisions for me, allows me to then make different decisions. My, my belief systems were formed by this, and I've had to rebuild this stuff. It's not an overnight thing. It's decades at work.

There's joy in the work too. And there's joy in finding people who genuinely help us or let me get it back to first person. I've experienced joy in finding beautiful people who have truly helped me. There is so much meaning in the work and I'm at peace with doing, I call it work. It's not even work. Yeah. I'm at peace with actively healing.

Haley: That's so wise. That's so good. You mentioned at the start of your story even at the time of your adoption, there was parents that weren't even telling their kids they were adopted, which still happens to this day. It's rare, more rare, but it still is happening shockingly. But now there are more and more studies coming out about us as adopted people, and one of the really staggering stats is that we're two times more likely to be diagnosed with a substance use disorder and what are you seeing anything in, in having more information accessible like this?

Like I know in, in your story you share that you were abusing alcohol in your teens and there was a tumultuous home life as well and lots of hard things happening for you. But do you see any movement in that. If we have more research to show that, and for parents to be on the lookout and knowing that adoption is trauma. I don't know. I'm looking for some hope for the younger generations that they won't be so in the dark as we were.

Mary Gauthier: Just speaking what you spoke when I started talking this way, the only people talking this way were Betty Jean Lifton and a handful of others. And I think it's pretty common knowledge now that the primary cause of addiction is trauma.

I think that the experts in trauma have articulated that from Gabor Maté to Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk. Addiction is caused primarily by trauma. That it's it's not a hundred percent always caused by trauma. There's a genetic component, but it's understood by by mental health experts that when you have trauma, it creates this pain that chemical substances can relieve for a little while.

So if it's understood that there is a primal wound in the separation from the birth family, that is a deep trauma, then I would imagine that more and more people understand that you're at risk for addiction. And you're, my ACEs scores, there were no ACEs scores when I was a kid, but if there were, mine would've been through the roof.

I'd have burned the test down. I was ripe for the trouble I got in and so was my adoptive brother. And we just, absolutely. A Hollywood version did exactly what would be expected with the trauma that we carried. And intervention, I think is, I think hope is real. When you are aware of a vulnerability, you address it, you discuss it, you say, you know this is what's going on, and here's what could be.

We have to be careful around this. We need to talk about this. And I think the light, letting the light in speaking, honestly about it can avert some of the worst of it. If we stay in the dark and pretend it's not happening, nothing's ever gonna change.

Shows like yours and so many books are being written now that, that speak these truths. Mine included. And there's just a vast amount of truth telling going on, which I think is transformative.

Haley: Yeah. The more of us that speak up, it does lend that courage as you were mentioning earlier. Okay. Let's talk about the joy. I love that you started songwriting a little bit later on, like that was a discovery for you later.

Can you tell us about what it's like to find out who you really are later on? I think so many of us adoptees struggle with identity issues in particular cuz we're in a family that are strangers and where's our mother. But that is just a piece of your story. I just love I love when people come into who they're supposed to be, yeah.

Mary Gauthier: Yeah. I I was in the restaurant business. I got arrested for drunk driving. I got sober. And next thing I'm at a open mic with one of my waitresses and she plays an original song and light bulb screws in, and I just saw it. I wanted to do that. And so I've always had a guitar banging around, played cover songs and, I re- strung it and got some callouses built up and I started writing songs.

And I moved to Nashville when I was 40. I live in Nashville now. So I've been here 21 years. I I really didn't know I was a songwriter until after I got sober. And I, even then I had to become a songwriter. But it felt right and it felt true and it it still does. I think the restaurant business was a bit of a placeholder for me as I got stable, as I, it helped me stable stabilize after I got sober and then leap frog into becoming a an author and a songwriter and a teacher.

I teach songwriting all the time and I work with adults who are trying to articulate hard things.

Haley: What's it like to be on stage? And I have a friend who is absolutely obsessed with you. I know she's come to a show and she got to meet you and you signed her book and her copy of your book and. What's it like to perform and then sometimes get to connect with adopted people.

Mary Gauthier: It's fantastic. It's awesome. It's really beautiful to, to meet the Kindred folk. It's there's just an understanding. We understand. We understand, there's so much we don't have to say we get it. We know. And that this intensifies also as you get older, because it is a it's a lonely experience.

If you don't have these type of connections with other adoptees who get it. Because it is, there's no explaining this fully. It's too much. Any trauma cannot be explained fully. You can explain aspects of it, but in its entirety, it's too big. You can't submerge somebody into this experience who hasn't experienced it. It's just not gonna happen.

Haley: I'm imagining that you get emails and letters and correspondence from. All members of the adoption constellation, and I have people send me very hard stories and it can feel overwhelming sometimes because you're, you become a carrier of their pain. How have you managed to do that? And I, I think, I don't know, you seem just like a very empathetic person and that you're really good at walking alongside people in that. But at your level, it's just not possible to do that for everyone. So how are you able to manage those feelings?

Mary Gauthier: Yeah. I do receive a lot of a lot of stories, a lot of. Because I tell mine people want, wanna tell me theirs. And I think for me, I acknowledge their experience. And I think the thing that matters is, there's an acknowledgement. They're not asking me to fix 'em or anything. They know that nobody can fix it. It's work that has to be done, but to just say, I see you and your story matters.

Thank you for honoring me with it. I don't overthink it anymore. I don't try to carry it along with me or take it as a burden that I need to add to the pile or anything. I think a simple acknowledgement and follow it up with your story does matter. Everyone's stories matter. People tell their stories cuz they're asking does it matter?

And it does matter. And we tell it looking to connect and looking for I think resonance. And when stories resonate I let people know they resonate. And then I move on out of necessity. And it's what you do. You don't stay stuck in someone's story. You move on and, but you have to, honestly, it's a, it's about respect. Really taking it in, really seeing it, and then releasing it.

I think that's the only thing you can do.

Haley: So you shared in the book that you grew up with so you were the first child that your parents adopted and then they adopted a brother and then they had a biological daughter. So you grew up with a fellow adoptee. Did you ever talk about being adopted?

And I asked you earlier about sort of your family and you said they didn't really engage with your art. How about your brother?

Mary Gauthier: Nope. He sees it as a betrayal of my adoptive parents to talk about adoption, and so I honor that. I used to see it that way too when I was a young person. He's never grown out of that.

I think he's afraid that if he acknowledges the amount of his pain, and I'm just reading this into him, that he could lose the two parents that he had. My father's passed on, but my mom's 86, she's still alive. He, my brother sees her almost every day and he wouldn't, I don't think ever talk about his adoption wounds or anything like that while she's still alive. and I don't think she wants him too. I don't think she wants me to, but my brother and I are different. I don't see it as a betrayal. I see it as self-preservation. I can do it in a loving and respectful way, but I have to do it.

Haley: I also was rejected by my biological mother, so I had a four month reunion with her and then she cut off contact, and that was in my very early twenties and it took me, I think about eight years before I looked for my father.

And we have a really great relationship now over 10 years. Have you ever searched or wanted to know, or was the door closing with your mother? Just that was it.

Mary Gauthier: I would love to know. I asked her, but she won't tell me. And she is adamant about that. She won't tell me, and there's no genetic testing that gets us the paternal side as women.

So it's in her, she, it's up to her and she won't, and I'm not gonna, I'm just gonna have to let it go. Yeah. Unless genetics figures out a way to get the paternal side for a woman, I just won't know. And, at this stage, he's probably deceased. I would like to know if I have siblings on my paternal side but it might not be something I ever know and I can't, I can't make, and I got my original birth certificate when they opened it up in Louisiana last year, and it does not have the paternal side on it.

So that's that. I don't think I am gonna know.

Haley: Yeah, there is, there's a lot of movement forward in dna, so who knows? Maybe someday you'll have some answers. I really appreciate you digging into so many of those deeply personal things with us and for, I don't know if you see it this way, but a lot of us look up to you as a leader in the adoptee community for the things that you've shared.

So I absolutely want people to, if they haven't yet, to listen to your music. And if you need a good cry, you need to really get in your feelings, and journal. The Foundling is the place to do that. But look at all the tabs I have in your book, Mary.

Mary Gauthier: Thank you.

Haley: Yes, it is so insightful and thoughtful, and I think this would be a great book to share with non-adopted people in your life because it has part of your story in it, but as you mentioned it, it's talking to trauma survivors and just people that wanna process story and it's so amazing. I listen to it as well, which is like such a huge gift cuz it's from your voice and you have some of your songs on there. Even songs you wrote in process and you sing it. Oh my gosh. Like amazing. Like 10 outta 10.

Mary Gauthier: Oh, thank you. Thank you.

Haley: Yeah. So for people who wanna start the conversation about adoption with people that aren't adopting their lives, I think this be a great sort of entry into that. What do you wanna recommend to folks?

Mary Gauthier: I'd say build your understanding on the classics of our literature. I think Journey of the Adopted itself is a must read. The Betty Jean Lifton book and the follow up. I have 'em right there on my counter. Right there. I reference Betty Jean a lot. And she wrote another book about a polish doctor named Corsak who marched orphans out of the orphanage during World War II.

And the story, I will not give it away, but it's incredibly moving. Betty Jean is one of my favorite writers around this stuff. I think get the foundation. And I read over 60 books when I was writing The Foundling. I read everything out there in our literature at the time, there wasn't a lot. Nothing surpassed BJ and and Nancy Verrier.

They added to it. But those are foundational for me. And. I couldn't recommend them. More they gave me a language to my own experience that I didn't have before I read it. That's truly foundational. That would be my suggestion.

Haley: Wonderful. And the other thing I love that you shared earlier was being in community with fellow adoptees because

Mary Gauthier: Yes.

Haley: We're the ones that get it.

Mary Gauthier: Yeah. We don't have to explain it to each other. We get it.

Haley: I love how you've cultivated community and on your YouTube channel through part of the pandemic you had Sundays with Mary. Yeah. Just so special, like a place for people to come live and hear you. And so anyway, if people need some comfort as well, they could check that out on your YouTube channel.

But when we're recording this early 2023, you are on tour so people can come and see you.

Mary Gauthier: Yeah. I'm always adding tour dates. I'm really a troubador at heart. I go from town to town and play music and tell stories and I I tend to be very on the go. I love my job.

I love my work and it does take me around the world. Just hop onto my website if you're interested in catching the show. I play relatively small venues, usually under 300 people. And it's a very conversational show. It's an ancient art. I'm a troubador. I'm a storyteller at heart.

And so I tell stories in between the songs, which also tell stories. And what I'm motivated to do is create connection. Resonance. I think resonance is very important, especially for adoptees. We desperately need resonance.

Haley: Yes. Thank you. It has just been an absolute honor. Thank you so much for sharing some of your story and wisdom with us, and I know that it'll be very exciting for some, maybe of my younger listeners who haven't gotten into Mary's work yet to dive into some of your albums, which there are many available, so amazing.

Mary Gauthier: Yeah. Thank you for what you do. Thanks for articulating this for the next generation of folks that have to deal with it. Thank you. Thank you.

Haley: Thank you so much, Mary.

Oh my goodness. Mary is amazing. And if you've ever had a chance to see her perform live, I would love to hear about a common comment on the Instagram. Post about this show and share what it was like to hear her perform. Her book Saved by a Song- it just, it's truly so wonderful. It's an amazing, listen, I already said on Audible, but I think we're gonna be reading it later this year for our book club.

So if you're interested in reading more adoptee authored work, come on over. AdopteesOn.com/BookClub has a list of our book picks this year. And if you're a patron, you have access to the Live Zoom recordings, and then we always release the audio afterwards so you can hear if you're not able to join us live.

The other fun thing about Book Club is it's really a community experience. So we usually have an hour discussion about the book, but then afterwards when we're not recording, we hang out and just talk about the book and adoptee related things. So this if you're listening when this goes live, the book we're reading right now is Invisible Boy by Harrison.

And we're gonna be joined by him on May 6th for our live Zoom book club. So if you wanna join us, adopteeson.com/bookclub has details of how to become a Patreon supporter. We would love to have you, and thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.

244 Deanna Shrodes, D.Min. (Part 2)

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/244

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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 are listening to adoptees on the podcast or adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radkey. We are back with part two of our interview with Dr. Deanna Shrodes. Last week, Deanna shared with us how her father Gus Nicholas, was found in May, 2022 at the age of 92 after a first cousin, DNA match.

Deanna was his only daughter and they had several precious months together in Reunion before he passed away in December of 2020. Their story is so unbelievable that it's been featured on CBS Mornings and has gone viral around the world. Today we talk more about grief, the adoptee community, and how Deanna is handling some hard news that some of her maternal family members were keeping secrets from her and Gus for decades.

Before we get started, I wanna personally invite you to join our adoptee Patreon community over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world. We wrap up with some recommended resources for you, and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, AdopteesOn.com.

Let's listen in.

I feel like I got to know Gus through all the stories you shared as you were writing about him on Facebook. And I'm curious how, and I mean like the minutiae if you wanna go into it, like how did you get to know him from being a stranger, to having him in your home? And I, I know you documented some of it and videos and things, but like, were you always asking each other questions, like, how....

Deanna Shrodes: Oh, yeah.

Haley: How were you getting to know part of his history and things?

Deanna Shrodes: Until he got too sick to have those conversations, we constantly talked. Matter of fact, his nurse, who was a huge part of me being able to bring him home and huge part of our lives, and sh her name is Charlotte. She's still a huge part of mine and Larry's life today.

We will never not be a part of each other's lives. We've gotten very close. But, um, his nurse even stated on his funeral service and his funeral video, she said, Deanna visited Gus from sun up to sundown, and they never stopped talking. She said, I don't even think there was a moment that they ever stopped talking.

Now the moments we stopped talking, we were usually sitting there listening to music for a while together, and that was really the only time we stopped talking. But I would always think, I would even make lists on my phone of what are some of the things I wanna ask my father? While he's still alive. And like I said, Hailey, I never knew whether I had a day, a month, a year, two years.

I, I never knew. So I would write down, I mean, I had lists of, what's your favorite color? What's your favorite movie, what's your favorite number? What, what are your favorite music artists? What did you like to do most as a child? Tell me what you remember most about Elementary School. Tell me what you remember the most about middle school.

You know, tell me what you remember the most about high school. And of course, tons of questions about my mother. Questions about, you know, just his life as a dancer, questions about his career, questions about what it would've been like had he raised me. I would ask him things like, would you have allowed me to do this as a kid?

And he would tell me, well, yeah, as a father I would've done this, or, Nope, I wouldn't have allowed you to do that. And we would just, we would talk about things that were, that were, for lack of a better word, real or imagined we would talk about what was definitely real. Like, what is your favorite color or your favorite movie.

And then we would talk about imaginary things, like, if I would've been raised with you, would you have allowed me to date as a teenager? Things like that, you know. I don't know for sure, but you know, in his imagination, this is what I would've allowed or not allowed. And so we just talked for hours. We, if Gus was feeling up to it, usually it would take me an hour to feed him.

And usually dinner time was the time where, in between bites we would be talking and I would ask him questions or he would ask me questions. And then after dinner we would sit and talk for a long time. And just like I had people send him, he, we had several holidays together. We both had, during the time he was alive, we had both of our birthday.

And we had Father's Day, we had Thanksgiving and then we celebrated Christmas early together cuz he's was starting to get so sick. I didn't know how long it would be, but when I ask everyone to send him birthday cards and he got hundreds in the mail and I ask everyone to not just sign their name but write a little something more.

And he would, he would ask me on every card, how do you know that person? How are they in your life? How did they come to know you? And he would want to know the backstory of each person that sent the birthday card. And we went through those birthday cards again and again and again cuz he was so thrilled.

He wanted, he wanted to keep hearing them, you know, and I'll never get rid of the birthday cards. I mean, they're, we're always gonna have the birthday cards.

Haley: I saw you share a quilt as well recently. Do you wanna talk about that?

Deanna Shrodes: Yeah, so he wore t-shirts every day. And I had a dear friend, Melissa Kendall, makes t-shirts and she made all kinds, they would, when he was in the nursing home, he wore one, uh, well, several of them that said, my daughter loves me, and it had a Greek flag.

And then we had one that said, Mr. Greek, And then when we were bringing him home, I said I wanted a few of them. I wanted one that said Florida or Bust, and it was gonna be one for him and one for me. And then our, our date of birth on like our years that we were born on the back.

And then one that said, free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, free at last, cuz he was finally breaking outta there. And I had various shirts made for him over time and those were what he wore every day. Different ones of those. And then once he passed away, I didn't just wanna leave them hanging there in the closet. I wanted to have something where I could see them often.

And so my son's mother-in-law made, made them into a beautiful quilt for me.

Haley: I love having those tangible things, right? Like that's when your person's not there anymore, having something that you can hold onto. It just feels like. This extra level of importance.

Deanna Shrodes: Absolutely.

Haley: Okay. Let's talk about the very hardest thing, the grief. And so you lost your biological mother, and so you know what that grief was like for you, and I don't know how you experience it to this day. But then Gus passed, your adoptive mother passed very soon after that. Funerals were two days apart.

Deanna Shrodes: Yes.

Haley: And this is just a couple of months ago when we're recording this. This just happened just two, two months ago. How are you doing like this is such heavyweight to bear, and then can you talk about it from the adoptee lens where so much of the world would say, Maybe support you more when an adoptive parent dies and count that grief more than the disenfranchised grief that we have where our biological connections don't seem to matter as much to everyone else.

I don't know. Gus sort of wove his way into many of our hearts though, so I don't know if you experienced that or not.

Deanna Shrodes: Yeah, I was gonna say that if I wouldn't have gone so public with my relationship with Gus, I mean, I post every day, usually multiple times a day and our photos together, I mean anybody, even somebody who's not my Facebook friend right now could go to my public Facebook and see that my cover photo is him in my arms on his last moments dying.

I posted the photos of me laying, you know, the day that they told me he was transitioning out of this world. And it was so hard for me to come to terms with that. And when I came home that day, they called me at work. I just thought he had a U.T.I. That I was not thinking this was it.

And I had called and said, Hey, I need somebody to stop by today and just take a culture and let's get some antibiotics going. That's what I thought this was gonna be. And instead they called and said, no, he's transitioning. And I raced home. Literally crawled into, you know, into bed, you know, on the side with him and just held him.

And I just sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. And all this time my husband would document everything. So, you know, he snapped a picture of that. And I posted something like, you know, they say big girl shouldn't cry. This big girl's crying today. You know, and posted that of me and Gus. Like the old song, Big Girls Don't Cry.

And I said but I'm crying today. And I, I just lost it. I lost it. I absolutely lost it. And, That was that was on a Tuesday. And honestly, he was, he was doing super bad that day. He was kind of non-responsive. And when I started, when I began crying like that and just held on, he started fighting. He started roaring back, as I call it.

He started rallying because again, he's gonna make it okay. He knew I was not okay. It was so upsetting to him that I was not okay. He even said, are you okay? I said, I'm not okay today, Gus, I'm not. Okay. And he came roaring back and for the next two days he came roaring back. We made all these incredible, hilarious videos together and I posted 'em online and we took a ton of pictures together.

We listened to so much music together. I read story after story to him. We had two glorious days and I thought, oh, these doctors, they're wrong. They had no idea what they're talking about. He's fine. This was just a stupid infection, and if they had only listened to me. And then I noticed he started going into that again two days later.

He wasn't okay. He had just rallied for me cuz he had seen how upset that I was and it became clear then that he couldn't just keep rallying back. And yeah, those, I think that you're right. I have received so much support, probably only because I went to so public, even showing our intimate moments of me gripping onto him crying while he's sick, you know?

And posted a lot of hilarious videos of him talking when he was better and everybody loved him and thought he was hilarious. And I would post our little antics. We're just writing them out of funny conversations and things. And so, you're right, he wormed his way into people's hearts. And so when he passed away, everybody was devastated for me too.

And they totally, they totally accepted him as my parent. As my father. As my family member. The world seemed to see him as that too, so I was so lucky. I know all adoptees are not so lucky that people view their family members that way. I, you know, I realized that when Gus got real sick for a week before that he was in the hospital and I went in with him and I stayed the whole time.

I just, they had a bed there and I never left. I was there for a week and I never told them our story. Because I was so afraid they would not accept me as his real daughter and that I would not be respected when I was calling the shots and when I was taking care of him, and when I was stipulating, you know, this is what you need to do to make things right and to take care of my father.

I was afraid of that disrespect, that adoptees so often have. I thought, I the whole time he's laying there in the bed. I'm thinking if one person, if even one person in this place finds out our story and starts treating me like, I'm not his real family. I will ex, I will explode on this place. So I'd never told anybody our story until the day that we left and they were wheeling him out of there to go home.

I finally told a few of the nurses, and of course they wept and wept and they, they just thought it was the most incredible thing they ever heard. And they said, why didn't you tell us you've been here a whole week? I said, in case you didn't view me and says real daughter, I just could not, I couldn't take the chance that you weren't gonna see me as real.

If you didn't see me as real family, I wouldn't have been able to cope with that because this man means everything to me. So, yeah, I had a lot of support when he passed away, and I still do of people who do view him as my real family.

But the grief answer to your question, it is extremely hard. I'm not living with bitterness, I'm not living with anger.

I have a lot of reason to be those things. I found out three weeks before he passed away, we were recording, well. I always just set the phone up and pressed to record and just kept it going and just, we lived our life. I didn't go, Hey, we're gonna record this conversation. I wanted to just have all these moments preserved, and so when I walked into the room, I would just set it up and let it go and just, we would live life.

And I was having a conversation with him three weeks before he died and I said, Hey, did you ever think about me through the, through the years? He said all the time, all the time. And I said, well, what did you do about it, Gus? And he said, Deanna, there were obstacles. There were obstacles. And he said, I tried. And in my heart, I believed him.

I did believe him. And I don't think he could recall or remember exactly what, who he approached or what he tried. You know? I'm not sure if it was just.... that wasn't, those weren't memories that he could call up in his mind at the time, but he told me, I tried. I tried and there were obstacles, so I just, I did believe him, but I had no proof of it.

And then he died. And then just a few weeks ago, I found out what some of those obstacles were. I had been asking my maternal birth family for years. I ask every one of them anything about my father and I would be told, we know nothing. We know nothing. We don't know anything. Most of them support my mother's decision to keep it a secret.

They want her wishes to be respected. And I had repeatedly asked this one section of the family, there are three girls, and I had repeatedly asked all three of the, my cousins, do you know anything? And nope, they, they knew nothing according to them. But they would get very, the two, the two oldest would get very offended that I was asking.

And would even say, one even said, don't ever ask me these questions again. Don't ever contact me again. And one, you know, blocked me on Facebook. Well, if you know nothing, why are you so sensitive about it? You know why? And it happens to be these cousin's mother and her husband that took my mom to the maternity home and brought her home several hours, several hours one way and several hours back.

Do you mean to tell me that she doesn't tell them who got her pregnant or what her circumstances are? So I always felt these, these are the people that know who my father is, and they would constantly say, we know nothing and please don't ever ask us this again.

So a couple weeks ago we were looking through Gus's papers because I've got, you know, all of his business paper, all of his stuff, and I was looking through it.

I hadn't really gone through it at all when I was taking care of him and he was sick. I didn't have time. Stuff from way back. I mean, just, you know, recent. Started going through all this stuff from way back, and Larry uncovered this folder that was a file of his important papers from long ago. And Gus kept everything. And due to a issue with his eyesight, he had this large block, very large handwriting. So I know exactly what his handwriting was.

And Larry opens this folder and right on top is a piece of paper with Gus's handwriting, and it's my aunt's name and phone number. The girl's mother, the cousin's mother, the one that drove my mom to the maternity home, and it was her, it was her phone number. And she's passed away now. But this was her phone number that she had for like her, you know, entire adult life.

And I instantly, first of all, I cried for two reasons. I cried because I had proof that my father told the truth. He reached out. He was trying. He was trying to get ahold of them and say, where is my child? And who has her and what's happening. I, I was upset because I had proof that Gus did try.

Number two, I was crying because I had proof that they lied. I had proof that they really did conspire to keep us apart. So I took a photo of this piece of paper and I texted one of the girls and I said, so you guys knew nothing, but here's your mom's phone number and Gus's name and phone number in his handwriting. What do you have to say for this?

Well, it was a different time back then. I wished it wasn't so different back then. Things were just different then. I said, you know what? Things were different then, but this is 2023 and you're still acting the same way. Things aren't any different now. Apparently, because you're still doing the same things, the same secrets, the same lies.

Well, you know, my sisters and I just feel that, you know, we just need to protect our mom. Well protect her from what? She's in the grave. She's dead. What are you protecting her from? So I have proof that they did know who my father was, and I have proof that he was reaching out. And I could be bitter and angry and hateful about that.

I'm just not going to let them turn me into something I don't wanna be. All this is already taken enough away from me in my life. I don't need anymore to be taken away. I'm not gonna let it turn me into someone that I don't want to be.

Haley: I'm sorry. That is, it's so upsetting.

Deanna Shrodes: I know

Haley: Because when I hear that, I just hear of the time you were robbed, robbed of, with him.

Deanna Shrodes: I know. I have to get up every day, Hailey. And as much as it hurts, I have to focus on what we did have instead of what we didn't have.

Haley: Yeah.

Deanna Shrodes: I'm really not trying to spiritually bypass this. I'm not sure how much you're familiar with that term. I know you're familiar with a ton of psychological terms and things, particularly concerning adoption, but you know, as Christians we can spiritually bypass by just using a bunch of Christian cliches and quotes and not really grieve and feel our pain.

And I'm not, I'm trying so hard not to do that and just spiritually bypass the grief that I'm feeling. But I try to think about things like, okay, you know, Gus could have lived apart from me in Virginia and I could have visited him once or twice a year. But no, I moved him into my house and had him every, you know, basically had my father every single day for months and months and months and months.

So I console myself by saying even some people that are with their natural father don't get to see him that much. You know, my adoptive dad lives far away. I see him very, very little. Of course, he had me for 18 years growing up. So there's that. I know that. I had Gus every day for months and months, and I have to just keep focusing on, wow.

It's such a miracle that I was able to have Gus for months and months before he passed, and it was such a miracle that he accepted me from second one and that was never a struggle and that we won the battle to bring him home. And I, I have to just keep focusing on tho those things or it will swallow me up.

Haley: Okay. Hopefully this is my last hard question, .

Deanna Shrodes: I welcome hard questions.

Haley: I know, but I hate making people feel painful things. It's not what it's here for. But, you know, I know you're such an open person and, and you've shared so vulnerably about this journey, and, and I feel like, you know, you and I both are people that talk about the things that no one else is like really gonna say out loud.

How has it been different for you and are you able to separate, you know, I don't know what the relationship was like with your adoptive mother. But I, I could read the difference in your posts when you posted about her funeral and then two days later, Gus's service, and then I was able to watch the memorial service that you had for Gus. It's still available on YouTube if anyone wants to see Gus dance. Like there's, it's, there's all these photos of him in the dancing. Oh my goodness. It's just really special. A special treasure that, to share that with us.

Are you able to kind of see the differences in your grieving or are you willing to talk a little bit about that, share about those relationship differences?

Deanna Shrodes: I, I've never, spoken about this openly before, except in one article interview that I just did that hasn't even come out yet. And I share more freely about it now because she's passed. But unfortunately, I wasn't close to my adoptive mom for many reasons. It's probably a podcast all in itself. Not that I'm inviting myself back or anything.

But we weren't close and she never accepted why we weren't close. It had nothing to do with my birth parents. I think she wanted to blame it a lot on that, particularly my birth mom, because we were in relationship for 20 years. But she and I had differences and struggles even way before I ever reunited. And I wish it wasn't that way.

I don't come to this conversation. In fact, I've never come to this conversation before. This is the first time I've ever spoke of it directly publicly. But we struggled forever . For a long time, I didn't want it to be that way. I still wish it weren't that way. I wish it didn't have to be that way.

Just to give you illustration of just one example of what I'm saying regarding my birth parents being blamed, when my birth mother died, I was devastated. I was devastated on two levels, first of all, because we had been in a relationship for 20 years, and aside from not agreeing about my father, it was a really good relationship. And I was devastated that she passed away, and I was also devastated that she took his name to the grave. Absolutely devastated.

So I'm grieving that. And it hadn't even been hours. Hadn't even been hours that my birth, I mean, I think it might have been four or five hours that she passed away. And my adoptive mother... and I ignored the phone call because I just knew it was gonna be terrible and I was not ready to answer that phone in the distraught state that I was in....

Not that I would never have answered the phone, but in that moment it just, I needed time. I didn't answer the phone. And so then she followed up minutes later with an email. And like I said, it hadn't even been, you know, just hours since my birth mom had passed away.

And my mom's comment on the email was, I'm so sorry that she has passed. I know how much she meant to you. Maybe now that she's dead, we can spend some time together.

That was the comment. And I messaged back and I said she's never the reason we haven't spent time together. So there's that. And then that was it. I didn't communicate the rest of that few weeks or however many, you know, however many weeks.

I don't know if it was, I don't know how long it was, but it, it wasn't forever. It was maybe a month or two. But I, I stayed away from communication during those weeks and months, because again, the first thing you say to me is now that she's dead, I hope we can spend some time together, when she's not the reason we weren't, you know, she, we already weren't spending time together before I reunited with her, but she's a convenient scapegoat, you know? And then when she's dead, now it's okay, now the problems are solved. No, because she wasn't the problem.

So, When my adoptive mom died, just within days of Gus, the grief is different. There's still grief, but my grief with my adoptive mom is that I will, it will never be able to be the way that I longed for it to be.

I, I've often told people behind the scenes, just close friends that know and they all see it, see it, and they agree. I say, who wants to have a bad relationship with their parent? Nobody. We all dream like, at least I know for me, I dream of having what a lot of my friends have. You know, they go out and they get their nails done with their mom and they go to lunch and they go shopping and they go to the movies and they have girl nights and they have a good time together.

And I'm like, oh my gosh. Okay. So I would love that with my mom. Who doesn't want that, who doesn't want to pick up the phone and be able to talk to their mom for hours and have this go-to, that you see so many of these other women have of this, you know, incredible fountain of support.

You know, who doesn't want that, right? So for you not to have it, something has to have happened where, there's a reason that's not happening. There's a very deep hurt there that it's not taking place.

And I know that a lot of people, not just adoptees, but other people, I have many people in my life, adoptees and non adoptees who are estranged from their parents. And I never chose to make that move. Although I have listened to your entire estrangement series and I thought about it many times. And I had every reason to, I would always keep a tie there, but many times it was a very thin tie. Almost non-existent tie, but I still kept that tie. There's many reasons for that. That's probably a book all its own.

But my grieving with my adoptive mom has been for what never will be. She's gone. It's never possible now, and I know there, there may be people that will say, well, if you would've tried hard enough when she was alive, maybe it would've been possible. I did try and many people who even know us, don't know the extent of, you know, how I did try, but I did try.

And it, it never went like I hoped it would go and prayed it would go. And now that she's dead, it will never go the way that I would pray or hope that it would go. So my grieving with her is that, wow, this is over and it's never gonna be the relationship that I dreamed it could be.

And with Gus, it's, everything you and I have just discussed and more that even in a short time, he tried so hard. You know, Hailey, you asked the question and like I said, I've never shared this publicly before, but I'm gonna share it now and hopefully this will bring some understanding and light here.

I timed at one time when I was on the phone with my adoptive mom. In 20 minutes of conversation, and she never once asked, how are you? What's happening in your world? Are you okay? What's going on in your life? 20 minutes. And that's, that wasn't uncommon.

I wouldn't walk in this door for two minutes without Gus saying, how are you today, Deanna? Like, when I was coming home from work and he hadn't seen me all day, how are you, Deanna, and are you okay hun?

And I can't even describe the joy that brought to my life. That's the number one thing I miss. And the number one thing that, you know, I didn't, I didn't have that with my, with my adoptive mom. So, that was super hard.

So I just grieve two different things. With Gus, I grieve what I had for a brief time and lost with my adoptive mother. I grieve for what I did not have for a long time and never will be.

Haley: Thank you for sharing that. Okay. Before we do our recommended resources, I love for you to tell us some of your favorite things about Gus and then also, just speak to adoptees who might not get this glowy, happy ending. Might not get this answer cuz you lived without the answers and thinking you probably might not get the answers for a decade.

Deanna Shrodes: Yeah. Things I love about Gus. Oh, oh my gosh. There's so many. Just things I love that he did, that we did together. I mean, we listened to music all the time. His favorite was Frank Sinatra. And we loved a lot of the same foods.

We loved a lot of the same music. We would listen to music all the time. I love the fact that he was a huge dreamer. I love the fact that he never gave up. He was such a big dreamer that even in his elderly years, he had this big dream, kind of like in the movie. Oh gosh, now it's zapping outta my mind. But "If you build it, they will come.".

Um, what is that movie? Kevin Costner.

Haley: Oh, field of Dreams.

Deanna Shrodes: Field of Dreams. Thank you. So he, even just a couple years before he died, had this, had this dream, he's gonna resurrect his career and he's gonna build this big dance studio in his backyard and he. He did it. He never got to see that dream come true as far as actually opening the studio.

But he was a big dreamer and he was a leader. They would tell me at the nursing home all the time, especially Charlotte, his nurse, she would say he's a triple A personality. He has real high expectations of himself and of others.

And it was just laughable. My, I had my, my team members on the team that I'm blessed to lead our last team meeting that we had before Gus passed away. I had, I had our team meeting at my house so every one of them could meet Gus. And I didn't know like how long he would be here, but I wanted everyone to have the opportunity and so all my team got to meet him and they're like, your father is so much like you. He's driven. He is a type A. He's a leader. I love seeing all that in him and just how he lived that out and how many people came out of the woodwork after I found him.

I went on social media in the Richmond, Virginia area and just blasted everywhere. This is my father. I just found him. I don't have many videos or pictures of him, cuz course he was in the nursing home. I said, I want videos. I want pictures, and I want memories.

Anybody that has them. And people came out. People came out. Students and parents. Came out of the woodwork to say he was our teacher, he was our kid's teacher, and they came with pictures and videos. And I've gotten to become very good friends with a few of them, and they tell me the stories about how driven he was and how much of a leader he was and how he impacted people's lives.

And so I just, I love hearing, I still love hearing the stories. Anybody new that I meet that has a story about him, just any, any little tidbit I treasure. So those are the things I love.

As far as adoptees who may not have this same story, I'm sure there's a lot of them that don't, because I, I've seen, everybody's told me this is like a one in a million story. And I feel sorry about that because I wish that everybody could experience it.

All I can tell you is that for so many years, I remember one day I prayed, I said, God, am I always gonna be the bridesmaid and never the bride. Because I, I helped, whether it be just, even just a little word of encouragement, all of my adoptee friends that were looking for fathers. And I didn't help every one of them on their search.

I helped a few of them tangibly on their search, but all of them that I knew that I would, you know, correspond with, I, I would at least give a word of encouragement, a prayer, something, anything to just be kind to them. And I would say, you know, God, I'm willing to help anybody out there. Like, is this ever gonna happen for me?

And I really felt like it was too late. I really felt like my time had passed. So first of all, I would say don't ever give up because I, I thought my father had to be long gone and dead and in the ground.

But for those that are still waiting for that, and it may not materialize, or I've been told by a couple friends who say, you know, the sad thing is some people do find their fathers and they don't open their arms. They, you know, they shut them out. I know it's devastating. I don't have any magic words. I can tell you that I hung on in, in prayer and just doing everything that I knew to do to be okay through those years. And I know it didn't sound like I was very successful when I was in the beginning of this talk here, talking about the low levels that I went to many times.

But I will say this, what really helped me was community. I don't know what I would've done without this community. I really don't. When I went through secondary rejection the first time, I wasn't in the adoptee community and I cried for years through that. I, yeah, it was, it was bad. And then Laura Dennis, my best friend in the adoptee community, pointed out to me that when my birth mother, when she took his name to the grave, I cried. Yes, I cried very much, but she remarked about how shorter my downward spiral lasted once I was in relationship in the adoptee community.

It, yes, I was still devastated. Yes, I still spiraled down, but it was like I had people to catch me and I didn't last in that phase for quite as long because I was in community.

And so, stay in community and push forward. Don't isolate yourself. That's the worst thing you could possibly do going through this where you're rejected or you're waiting and it doesn't seem to be panning out, staying in community is super important.

Haley: Thank you. I think that's really wise. Gosh, it's just been an honor to hear your story from your faith and Thank you.

I, my, like, my recommendation is that people follow you. You have a new website and I know you're blogging on there. You've shared so much of your story on Facebook, but I know you're writing another memoir and so, I wanna make sure people follow so they can see when that's coming out and everything.

And we kind of alluded to it, but you've had massive media coverage over these years. You were on CBS Morning, David Begnaud did a whole piece on you, and that went totally viral.

Deanna Shrodes: Yeah.

Haley: Think of millions and millions of pieces that, uh, people have seen your story.

Deanna Shrodes: It's crazy. It's crazy. And here's the thing. I wanted to savor my time with GU and all these people on social media when I was, I was posting chronically on our journey just with snippets here and there and some videos and stuff. And everybody kept saying, write a book. Write a book. And I said, I'm, I wanna savor every moment I have with Gus. All you're getting right now is sentences, paragraphs in between taking care of him.

I'm not pressing to write a book. I'm not calling anybody. I'm not doing anything about this. I'm just savoring my time with him. And then a bunch of people, evidently I didn't, I didn't even, I wasn't even really in tune with who David Begnaud was or anything like that. But a lot of people that were reading my post started sending him stuff. And that's how he, I had no idea it was a shock.

I was feeding Gus fish one night for dinner and suddenly there was a text and it was from David and he said, some people let me know about your story. And that was where it just took a life of its own. From there it was, it was a shock, cuz I wasn't planning on taking anything, any bigger or further while I still had Gus here with me, but it kind of, you know, just didn't go that way.

And that's okay. I accepted it as, you know, the Lord's plan, but, Yeah, so it did.

I'm writing at Drdeannashrodes.com now. I used to write very regularly, a couple times a week at adopteerestoration.com. All my writings are still there, and I'm not saying that I'll never, ever post again there. But since I had finished school, I had started DrDeannaShrodes.com and my plan was to write about trauma there because my dissertation was on trauma based upon my personal exper-.

No my dissertation isn't based on the personal experience, it's based on research, but it comes out of a heart for that since I had gone through these personal experiences. And I had intended on kind of going a little bigger with that direction once I finished school. And that was just kind of the way things went and where I've landed now.

But people can still follow me at adoptee restoration, but I'll be blogging a lot more and putting a lot more information out drdeannashrodes.com.

Haley: I think I shared in our last episode how much adoptee restoration meant to me. And still does. I was reading through some of the posts earlier in the week and just, I was just like, oh yeah, this is when, this is where I fell in love with Deanna.

So there's so much good stuff there.

Deanna Shrodes: And it's gonna stay there. I'm not, I'm not removing it. I'm not removing it. I just wanna add my trauma work and all of that and put it together. So I'll still be writing about adoption and being and adoptee things, but again, it's probably gonna be from the DrDeannaShrodes blog.

But I'm not removing the adoptee restoration blog. It's still there for anyone to read, and I'll still answer people from there.

Haley: Wonderful. So yes, we are gonna follow you and cheer you on as you write your newest memoir. And what did you wanna recommend to us?

Deanna Shrodes: It's a book that I absolutely adore. It's called Perpetual Child, and it's written by adoptees and compiled by Diane René Christian.

And it's just incredible. It resonated with me immediately when I read it because I've always felt like a perpetual child. I have always felt like that regarding not only my adoptive parents, but everybody pretty much, and especially in my adoptive family and the way that we're treated by social workers, adoption agencies, regarding, you know, our personal adoption. And it gets... and even strangers when you talk about adoption, you can be treated like a perpetual child and you just get sick of it. So that book has really given me a sense of, okay, I'm not crazy. I'm not alone. This really happens. This is, yeah. And just kind of understanding that we don't face this alone.

Haley: Yes. Thank you. Love reading those pieces from adoptee authors in an anthology like that. And I, you know, what I wanted to mention was the piece that aired on CBS Mornings. I was really thankful because so many times these stories, they always are like, oh, and tell us how great your adoption was and like, well, your adoptive parents think or whatever, and it's none of that.

It's all about you and Gus and it, a hundred percent. And I was like, I don't know if you advocated for that or not, but I just found that refreshing.

Deanna Shrodes: I do have to advocate for it a lot. And there's times where, man, I'm telling you, I know this is, taking things in another direction here. I'm sorry we just have so much to talk about, but with so many people calling you right now for articles, podcasts, and all that, there are times where I've had to just really put my foot down.

I had one, one media news outlet call me for an interview and they said, we really need to bring your adoptive parents into this, and if we don't, then we're gonna get a ton of questions from our readers. Our, you know, our readership will just not be able to handle that we're not bringing them up. And I said, well then I guess I'm not the person to do your article.

I really don't. They said, well, you understand that we're gonna get a ton of emails and a ton of calls as to why if we don't include them in this article. I said, so, so what? You know? And they said, well, you might get a lot of emails or calls about why. And I said, you don't think I'm used to that? I mean, really?

But yeah, it's: they're gonna be just so hurt if you don't. And I have, like I said, 95% of people have supported me, but 5% haven't. And I have gotten some crazy comments on my social media that I've had to delete even from people, sadly, people in the Christian community, which I'm a big part of. I mean, I'm a minister. But I've gotten some kooky comments from ministers about that.

Even these words from God, you know, saying, you know, things about my adoptive parents or whatnot. And I'm like, okay, delete, delete, delete. Yeah. You have to advocate for that. I couldn't completely control, I can't completely control what's gonna come out in a news article, but I can just say, if this is what you're gonna do, I don't wanna be a part of it.

Or if this is a direction you wanna head, I, I don't wanna head there. You know, and just kind of see where that lands.

Haley: Well, speaking of Perpetual child, right?

Deanna Shrodes: Yes. And I did let them know. I mean, I, I could not demand the way it was gonna go, but I did say I want this to be a story, but if, if this is what you're asking. I wanted to be a story about Gus and I not veering off to my adoptive life, and they respected it.

Haley: I, that's the kind of representation I appreciate and I'm going back to adoptee restoration. You know, you were, I think the first person that I saw who was a Christian, talking about the complexity of adoption.

And saying it like it really is. And so, of course, no surprise to me that there's still pastors commenting on your stuff inappropriately. It just sort of....

Deanna Shrodes: oh my gosh. You can't even, you can't even imagine Haley. I've lost a few friends in the process and it's, it's really okay. It's okay.

Haley: Well, I really appreciate your leadership in that area. And you know, so many of us respect and follow you. And no matter what our beliefs are, you've always stayed consistent and that is not the case for many of our leaders. So we really appreciate that. I love you. I'm so glad we got to talk today. Thank you so much for sharing with us.

Deanna Shrodes: Oh, I love you too. I love you and I'm cheering you on too, and I just love everything that you're, I love you as a person and I love everything you're producing for us.

Thank you. Thank you. You know, when I was going through the worst of my stuff in adoption, there was no Adoptees On. there was none of this. It's just, it's such a blessing that adoptees going through this today, have these resources. That we just didn't have back then, so thank you, Hailey.

Haley: Thank you. Okay, so if you wanna follow Deanna, best place is DrDeannaShrodes.com and we'll have links to all of that in the show notes for everyone.

Deanna Shrodes: Thank you.

Haley: Oh my gosh. She is just one of my favorite people. I'll just say it. I wish, maybe someday, I will have that full spirit of generosity that Deanna has. I remember when she told us about taking in her grand niece and what that looked like for her and just how natural she is. Open doors, and I just really admire that in her.

Also, I think I said last week, I really respect her vulnerability and willing to just say the hard things and you know, a lot of us have been met with family members that either have kept us a secret or have kept secrets from us, and that is so, so painful. And so if that has happened to you, I see you and I do encourage you actually to go and look up the phrase Deanna used, the spiritual bypassing, because I think a lot of us can get there. Meaning we have the hard thing, we feel like we need to forgive and move on, and it kind of like glosses over the processing part of understanding that really painful thing that happened and it was really crappy that they did that. And how can we build a safe boundary so that doesn't happen to us again and you know, move through all the steps to either forgiveness, if that's your jam or whatever, never talking to them again. Or maybe that could be a piece of forgiveness too.

So anyway, if that phrase kind of like lit something up in you definitely research more about it cuz it's a very interesting phenomenon, especially that happens in faith communities where we can often be pressured to like forgive and forget and move on.

Which can be really unhealthy. So I appreciated Deanna bringing that up. And yeah, this stuff is so hard and in a time where you're in this like beautiful reunion moment and then grief, and then finding out that people have been lying and keeping secrets from you is like, it's just, that's just not it. So.

Let's just try and be better people. Goodness. Anyway, I'm just blathering on you. I wanted to tell you one more time that we are doing transcriptions now, which is so cool. I really am excited and our goal is to always have our episode, go live with a transcription in the show notes available for accessibility, and we're also working on the entire back catalog and there's over 240 episodes now.

So we have a long ways to go and it's a huge project and it also is really expensive to pay for all the time to do that transcribing. So if you're able to, we would really appreciate just a one-time gift is so meaningful. AdopteesOn.com. There's a PayPal button.

Or if you wanna join us for our off-script podcast episodes on Mondays or our book club, we're reading Invisible Boy by Harrison Mooney right now, which is so good, and we're gonna have a live event with him in May.

So if you wanna join that and Patreon is a great way to contribute to the costs of funding the podcast as well. So adopteeson.com/community has info for that. And thank you so much for listening. Next week on the pod is Mary Gauthier, the icon. Yes, very, very excited to chat with Mary and share that conversation with you.

Thanks for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.

243 Deanna Shrodes, D.Min. (Part 1)

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/243

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Haley: You are listening to Adoptees On the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radkey. Our guest is Dr. Deanna Shrodes, a minister and well-known writer of the Adoptee Restoration blog and multiple books back in 2019. Deanna and I discussed the challenges of searching for her father and coming up with false leads and dead ends over and over four years.

Well, today she's back to share her heartwarming and heartbreaking story of finding her father Gus Nicholas after a lengthy search. Her story is so unbelievable that it has gone viral with millions watching on CBS mornings, we talk about the joy and grief and messiness of all of it. I wanna give a trigger warning that we do discuss suicidal ideation in this episode.

This is part one of a two-part series on Deanna's story. Next week we'll finish her story and share our recommended resources with you. 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 shows to support more adoptees around the world.

Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome back to Adoptees on Dr. Deanna Shrodes. Welcome, Deanna.

Deanna Shrodes: Thank you, Haley. I'm so excited to be here with you. I just love hearing your voice on your podcast, and of course, I love to have the privilege of being with you here on this podcast myself.

Haley: Well, this is your second appearance on the show and you were on in 2019 and at the time we talked about your biological mother, your relationship with her for 20 years, and then she told you she was gonna take your father's name to the grave and died very shortly thereafter.

And so you had this decade long search for your biological father and we were talking through in that episode, you can go back and listen, it's episode 124, talking about some of the matches you had here and there that were very hopeful, and even you looked similar to one of the gals that you tested with and thought you had a relationship, you thought you had found the family, and then it wasn't to be. In 2022 something really miraculous happened. So would you share that story with us?

Deanna Shrodes: Yes. Well, I had, this has been such a long journey, as you know, and when my mother passed away, which was literally months after she said, I'm going to take his name to the grave. She passed away. I was devastated. I literally did something I had never been done before, which was taking a 40 day leave of absence from work. I was so upset. About all of this because it felt hopeless. It felt like this is totally hopeless. She has died, taken his name to the grave.

She tells me that no one who's alive knows what his name is. And sure enough, anyone I ask in the family would say, or among friends or anybody, you know, we know nothing. So all I knew was that he was Greek. She told me he was Greek, but of course I didn't know that until I took a DNA test. She told me he was Greek.

She told me that he was older than her. She told me that he had black, wavy hair and that was it. That was all I had to go on. And so I quickly took the DNA tests at all the, you know, most popular sites like Ancestry and 23 and Me and Family Tree and all of that. And I was really depressed when they came back.

The only great thing when they came back was that I could see that she had told me the truth that he was Greek because I was, you know, overwhelmingly half Greek. It basically showed I was 50% Greek and then I had all these Virginia American matches on the other side. And so that I knew for sure. But that was it because all the other matches were like fifth through eighth cousins as far as on the Greek side.

And then I had tons of matches on the maternal side. So we really had nothing to go on. And this is the part where a lot of people could really get skeptical, and I understand. But I began to pray about it. I was already praying about it, but I got really, really serious about praying about this, Haley, because I just felt like outside of a miracle, there's no hope.

I, I sincerely felt without a miracle of God, there is no hope. So I started praying about this and I just said, you know, I, I totally believe all this stuff that I teach other people I to, I mean, I honestly believe all of this stuff that I have been teaching for so long. And I said, God, I just believe you can tell me his name.

And after about three intense sessions of prayer, I sense this name. Many people will say, well, are you telling me you heard an audible voice? No. Are you telling me that uh, you know, someone appear, an angel appeared to you? No. What I'm telling you is that I sense this. All I can say is I sense this name just drop into my mind.

Just like any thought would drop into your mind, just like, oh, I need to go get a burger from McDonald's or whatever. You know, you have this thought drop into your mind. I had this thought drop into my mind and this, this voice in my mind simply said, your father's name is Gus. So I often tell people these things that happen to me like this, uh, partly because, you know, first of all, you know, I could, I could be wrong and I have been wrong before, but I also could have really heard the voice of God.

And I, I want absolute witnesses to that. So, I told my husband of course, and I told some other friends, like Gail Lechner Lechner, who's on my search team and some other people, but I also told some total unbelievers, like my closest adoptee friend is Laura Dennis, and you know, she's in heart of our community and she's also a writer.

And, uh, she's a total believer. She is an atheist. And I will never forget standing at my stove stirring spaghetti. And her and I are on the phone and you know, we talk all the time on the phone too. And I said, Laura, I just need to tell you something that just happened to me. And you know, she's taking care of her kids and I'm stirring spaghetti.

And I said, the Lord told me my father's name is Gus. And she's what, What? So I literally took her to the Bible, even though she doesn't believe in the Bible. I took her to the Bible, showed her the scripture where it in first Corinthians 12, where it talks about that, you know, God will still tell us things today and through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and I'm trying to explain this to her, and of course she calls it something else.

She calls it the collective consciousness or something like that. And I said, well, I believe that that's the Holy Spirit. And she says, well, I believe you. I believe you. I, you know, I, you know, you're my best friend. I totally believe you. So I'm not sure whether she thought it was God, but she did think that I had heard something.

So anyway, I told people, believers and unbelievers alike, this voice spoke to me. My father's name is Gus. And then, I know this sounds a little crazy, but I had put together my search team and they're called Finding Mr. Greek. And I had started this on Facebook. It was a secret Facebook group. And, uh, Laura's in that group.

And, uh, some other people that are really key in that group are Regina Ziland, Lynn Grub. There's Gail Lechner, other people that are in this group, and I told the people that were helping me search at the time, Priscilla Sharps another person from the first mother community, she was helping me search at the time and I said, I know that you might think I'm crazy and I know that you might think that I'm wasting your time, especially if you don't believe the same way that I do.

I said, but I feel like my father, his name is Gus. I feel like God told me that his name is Gus. And you know, I didn't have one friend laugh at me. And this is so key, Haley, because it's really important that even if we sound a little kooky at times, that our friends don't laugh at us and that they support us.

And not even Laura, who's an atheist. She didn't laugh at me. She said, I'm, I'm listening. I'm understanding. I, I don't know what this is, but I believe you. So we searched for a man named Gus and we decided, that it would be the best to go 10 years younger and 10 years older than my mother. You know, to go a 20 year time span.

And you know, then we felt certain that we would find him if his name was Gus. And so there were a lot less Greek people in Virginia at the time, and you know, less people had immigrated there. And so we started looking for anybody named Gus or also Constantine, Constantinos, Costas. Those are all also Greek names for Gus.

And we were searching for anybody in that age span that was living in the area at the time. And when we would find them, we would rule them out. Sometimes we would rule them out, like if we found out that like they were serving in the military overseas or something like that during the year that I was conceived or other things like that, that would be absolute proof that they were, or maybe just other mitigating circumstances.

But anyway, if, if we could find them or their family member, I, I would ask them to take a DNA test and that I would pay for it. And we ran out of people, Haley, none of these Gus candidates worked out. None of them. And so it was depressing because I really did feel as well that, well, maybe I really don't, you know, hear from God or know God that well after all.

I mean, I don't know. We were back to square one and we kept looking and we had leads that we followed. We would find people in the Richmond area that were Greek that maybe looked, you know, favored me. We found photos online of people that favored me. We found people that had, you know, gone to school with my birth mother or other people in the area that may be connected to her or to her family that we would call and also ask them to test, and I would pay for it.

and I paid for a lot of tests. We, we tested a lot of people and every time they would come up that not a match to me and every time that, that would not be a match to me, I would just be devastated again, all over again. But we kept going and nothing really of consequence happened for the next eight years.

And Wow. That was really, you know, very hard. We did have really a quite a shock when, sometime later after I had already told everyone that God had told me this. I called my aunt who was very close to my mother and I said, listen, she's been gone for a while now. I've waited what I feel is a respectable amount of time.

Could you please tell me anything about my father? Could you please tell me anything? Anything, anything at all that you recall? And she says, well, I'm getting older and my memory is not what it used to be, but if memory serves me correctly, his name was Gus. And I just about fell off my chair because yes, you know, I did hear that voice, but wow, just having my aunt say that was huge.

But then it was also extremely depressing because we'd already looked at every Gus and they weren't panning out. So eight years went by and then that brought us to May 11th, 2022, not even a year ago. And I was on a three hour leadership zoom call with this leadership group called the Stronger Leadership Cohort that I lead.

And I had brought a friend of mine on that call to teach that day. Her name is Pastor Stephanie Smith. She's from Washington State. She was teaching, and I know this might sound, again, kind of kooky, but I'm just telling it like it is. That Stephanie said to all of us on that call. She said, I want all of you to take a piece of paper out right now on this Zoom call, and I want you to write a question to God, and it's just gonna be between you and God.

We're not gonna share these. So I took out my paper and I wrote, and I still have that paper today. It, it just says, when are you gonna help me find my father? And then my friend Christie, who's a pastor who was on that same call, she, on her paper, she had three questions she had. And then the third one was, will you please help Deanna find her father?

And I have a lot of people that go, what is the big deal with that? Like, didn't you already pray about this a thousand times? And you know what? What's the significance of that? And I always say, first of all, the Bible says, don't stop asking. Don't stop seeking. Don't stop knocking. Keep asking, keep praying.

And secondly, the people you surround yourself with are really key. The people that you surround yourself with have a lot to do with where you're gonna go in life and how you're gonna do. My friend Christie cared. She knew that even after all these years of me talking about it again and again and again, my friends could have been so sick of me talking about this, and especially my friends that are not adopted, and Christie's not adopted.

She really cared about, wow, this really hurts Deanna, that she doesn't know who her father is. We need to keep praying for her. So really significant to me that I had friends that cared, and so we went through that Zoom call. And when I got off of there, Regina Ziland, who was really, at that time, her and Gail were kind of like the lead people on this search and they were working on my behalf daily.

I mean, they would check my DNA things daily to just to see all day long, like if something popped up. And when I got off that call, Regina called me and she says, Deanna, I, I could not wait for you to get off this call, your Zoom call because you're not gonna believe this, but we should know within an hour who your father is.

She said, you have a very close match and we should be able to drill down on this and know who he is in about an hour's time. And I was like, what? And sure enough, I had a first cousin match and then the team online, they started researching him, building out his family tree, looking at everything they could about him.

And very quickly they discovered that he is an X match, an X DNA match. And if you have high enough centimorgans, I believe it's called, if I'm saying this right, if you have a high enough, centimorgans, then you can pretty much be assured that that person comes through that matches Mother's Line. So this, this was a definite, it was high enough that it was an X match with my cousin, and that meant that his mother's brother had to be my father, had to be my father.

And then we just had to wonder, how many brothers does she have? How complicated is this gonna be to drill down on this? And we were elated when they, with sure enough, within an hour's time, they had built out that family tree. She only had one brother and her brother's name is Gus. It was Haley. It was just the most amazing moment to stare at that tree and to know that, oh my gosh.

And I know that people probably wonder, how did you miss him? Well, we were, we were off by a few years because we discovered that when I knew that when I was born, my mother was 20 years old. I didn't realize my father was so much older. She was 20 and he was 36. And we only went on a 10 year span and they are 16 years apart.

So that's how we missed our Gus. My Gus that's how we missed. Yeah, within just a few hours time, not even a few hours, I had reached out to the first cousin match on email and he said, I'm in Greece right now. Can I, can I call you? And he called me and he said, I think you might be my Uncle Gus's daughter.

And I said, I believe that too. And he said, what else do you know? And I said, I know absolutely nothing other than that. And that he had black, wavy hair. That's all I know. And he said, okay. And, and you know, would you like to know some more? And I, yes, absolutely. Then we just took it from there. And that led into me finding out that unbelievably, all this time, Hailey, I thought I was finding a grave.

Too much time has gone by and I thought for sure he would be dead. But I was absolutely stunned to know that my father was alive and that he was 91 years old and that he never got married and that he never had any other children, and that I was his only child in the world.

Haley: It is the miraculous story.

Deanna Shrodes: Mind blowing.

Haley: And he was living in the United States.

Deanna Shrodes: Yes, he was here in Virginia, never left the same city. Matter of fact, never left the same house. I mean, he's where he was all along. He was at the same spot all along when. He and my mother conceived me same spot. He's never moved.

Haley: I wrote down something that you shared, that you're a biological mom's partner at the time had said to you, saying that your mom, speaking of your father said something like, I could have danced all night with him. And when I re-listened to that interview I had with you Yes. And you shared that, I thought, oh my gosh. We didn't know it at the time, but that was also a clue.

Deanna Shrodes: Yes.

Haley: So anyway, you come to meet him.

Deanna Shrodes: So I find out that my, he was 91, never married, never had any children, and that he was a very well-known, popular teacher, dance instructor and performer in the Richmond, Virginia area. He didn't just stay there all the time where that was always his home base. He also worked in New York City. He worked in Los Angeles. He won many Fred Astaire awards all over the world for both performing, and then he won many awards for teaching.

So a lot of people in the area knew him and my stepfather had no idea who he was, or he would've told me. Something to know about my stepfather, he, he loved my mother fiercely, but he also had a real soft spot for me because we were in the same situation.

He was never told who his father was and he knew how, how much that means to a person and how much that can hurt when they don't know. And he would plead with her, please tell her, please do the right thing. Please tell her. And he told me, despite how much I love your mother, if I knew that name, Deanna, I would tell you.

And especially after she died, he would say, Deanna, if I knew, if I knew, I would tell you. And he didn't know that my father was a dancer professionally. He just knew that my mother told him, I could have danced all night. And the very first night she and I were reunited, she said, oh, he was my Greek God.

That's what I called him, my Greek God. And she told my stepfather I could have danced all night. And then he said, you know, everything was you know, she didn't want you to find him and she didn't give you any help or any information. But the moment you said you were doing DNA testing, it was like as if she started screaming, get me off this stance floor. Get me off the dance floor.

Yeah, so the reason for all that now becomes clear. He was a professional dancer and it, it was just amazing getting to know him. Within less than 24 hours, I was on FaceTime with him, and it's an even more miraculous story because he was in a nursing home at the time, and I came to find out from the nursing home staff what had happened was he was pretty much alone. He lived alone and he was just looking after himself and he didn't show up to a doctor's appointment. And his wonderful doctor, I will always thank God for her at V.C.U., did a wellness check and they came to the house, and I don't go into all the details on this except for just a few close friends privately, just for his own dignity.

But he was, he was on the floor. He had taken a fall and he was in terrible, terrible condition. Such bad condition. He went to the hospital by ambulance. He stayed there for the next two months where they were just trying to get him well enough to go to a nursing home, and adult protective services had taken over because he was by himself and he was insisting on going back home by himself.

And they said that he couldn't because he was, it was too dangerous to do that, and he had no one to take care of him. So they said, unless a miracle would happen, you're gonna be in this nursing home the rest of your life. And he was so depressed. He hated that, absolutely hated it, but because of the dire condition that he was found in, that was what needed to happen.

So the very next day, May the 12th, I FaceTimed with him and he instantly accepted me and knew who I was. There was no doubt in his mind, he, it wasn't so much the DNA. It wasn't so much that he was told right away that he looked just like me. It wasn't any of that. It was, he knew he had a relationship with my mother.

He knew they had conceived a child in 1966. He knew all this, and so he knew. He knew this was not a some fake thing or whatnot, even though we would go on to take a home kit DNA n a real quick first, and then we ended up taking a legal third party DNA test that, you know, came back absolutely a match.

He believed it from second one. Second one, he believed it. I never doubted it and welcomed my FaceTime call, and I didn't know it at the time, but he's not a crier, he's not real emotional and he got real emotional on that call and, I thought at first, okay, I need to back off here. And I said, Gus, I've known that I was coming for you.

I've been coming for you for over a decade through DNA testing and before that, you know, searching for you in my mind, and as I think probably all adoptees do with our, with our parents, and I said I've known I was coming, but you didn't. And I can see you're getting real emotional. And I said, do you need a minute or do you want some time?

And we can come back to this later. We can have a phone call. And he just said, how soon can you come? That was how he responded to that question, how soon can you come? And we just continued talking as long as we could. You know, we, we talked constantly after that. He didn't have a phone. And we had to rely on the kindness of others who had a cell phone or we had to rely on the people at the nursing home that would come with an iPad and put us on FaceTime together.

But every single time, we never wanted to hang up. And I remember even on one call he said to me, well, I guess we have to hang up sometime. And it was always hard to hang up. It was always hard to say goodbye. You know, we, all we wanted to do was just talk nonstop. And then of course that led to me pretty quickly going there in person to see him and to meet him in person for the first time.

Haley: I know that so many of us just need to have our answers and it eats away not knowing where you came from.

Deanna Shrodes: Mm-hmm.

Haley: So do you have a sense of how that shifted for you, the instant you saw the name on the screen from the Search Angels to the first call, and he actually wants you to come. Do you have a sense of how that actually impacted you, like emotionally, psychologically?

Deanna Shrodes: I don't know that you and I have talked about this on the last call. Our last time that I was on Adoptees On. It instantly changed me. It instantly impacted me. I had told my husband for 35 years, cuz that's how long we've been married, and then two years of dating before that. And he's seen me struggle with this, our whole relationship.

And I promised him way back in my twenties, if I could just meet my biological parents, everything would change. And I would settle down in such a way that, you know something, this, this restlessness inside of me would instantaneously settle down. And I knew he was skeptical because he saw how bad it was.

He lived with me every day. And this was an everyday thing. And when I met my biological mother, it did settle down about 50% it, it did largely settle down. He saw a dramatic change in me when I reunited, but there was still a big element of restlessness. So much so that I, even though I'm a minister and have been for all these years, even though I'm a leader who's even had success. I don't say that to brag.

I say it for the context of you understanding of everyone understanding the depth of this. Even though I had a lot of successes under my belt, and many people even in my field would say, oh, Deanna has so many open doors. And she's so confident and she does so many incredible things.

I was plagued with suicidal ideation. It was something I struggled with for all these years, and my husband in particular, that was a huge weight that he carried. When I had a DNA test that was not a match a couple years ago, he walked into our room the day I got that back and it was not a match, and I spiraled down into one of those periods of despair.

And it's important to note, you know, I've had various Christians who I am in relationship with that say, well, couldn't you just pray? Couldn't you just seek God? And he's going to take these feelings away? Oh my gosh, you know, did they not think I did that? You know, hello, I have prayed.

I have laid on the floor. I have cried. I have sung worship songs. I have gone to retreats. I have had people pray for me. I've done all these things, and I've truly, truly, truly sought God over this. But I could not just pray this away. And my husband walked in the room, turned on the lights, and begged me to stay alive, begged me.

He started naming like 50 people that would be devastated if I was gone. I know that's probably not the best way to get somebody to, to not leave this world, but it, he was desperate. He was just standing there naming all these names, begging me not to leave the planet and saying, you know, this is how this person would react.

And babe, they love you. They love you so much, and please, you know, please, please, just for our sake if nothing else. The bottom line is this, Haley, that when I found out who Gus was, and then especially when I came into a relationship with him, that was instantaneously changed in my life.

Now, I know people can say, well, you know, it's only been even now, it hasn't been a year.

How do you really know that? This was the revelation to me. I know I'm skipping ahead, but. You know, Gus and I had time together and he's, you know, he's passed away now and I'm sure we'll go back and kind of revisit those, those happenings in a little bit. But he passed away. And I remember when hospice came and said, Hey, we're on our way over and we've got another staff me member on the way over and you need to gather up the drugs and we're going to destroy them.

And I can remember gathering all that up. And you see, before when I would have these thoughts, it would be about emptying out my medicine cabinet and just mixing a bunch of stuff together. And in my worst moment of grief of saying goodbye to Gus, I mean it was, it was the hardest thing, and when they told me to gather about all that up, there wasn't even one moment where I thought about, Hey, this would be so easy. I could just gather all this up and go out of this world because a person I love so deeply is gone and it hurts so bad.

Did it hurt? Yes, it still hurts. I told you that he's only been gone a short time. Still hard. I'm still going through the grief processing, grief counseling, but never once, never once since the day I gathered up those drugs to destroy and even now, I've never, never, never had one more thought of suicide. It's been total peace. Total peace.

Even in all the pain of having to say goodbye to him. The fact that I finally knew who he was and knew him took that restlessness and that pain away, and I've never struggled with another thought. And that's what's kind of proved it to me.

I'm not an expert, I'm not a psychologist, but it was just mind blowing to me how that struggle in my life was gone. It was. It's never come back and the restlessness, it's gone. It's completely gone. So that's how it's impacted me in such a way. It's, it's changed my whole life.

And again, I know I'm skipping ahead here a bit, but my husband is not emotional. And sometimes to a point where I'm like, what's wrong with you? And I've seen so many people die. He hasn't even shed a tear. He's, he just doesn't get worked up. And the night that Gus passed away and they were taking him out and they paused in the living room and said, would you like to see him one more time?

And before we take him? And I said, yes. And I didn't think my husband was gonna come in. He's a pastor, but believe it or not, he, he doesn't go up to the casket. Even at, uh, it's, it's weird. Even at viewings and funerals, he avoids the casket and he just goes to the pulpit and does a service, and then he greets the family, walks, walks down, greets the family, but he never goes to the casket.

I'm thinking, Larry is never gonna come to this gurney. He is never gonna come to the casket. He's not gonna do any of that. As I was saying goodbye to Gus, my husband was standing, I didn't know it, but when I, when I lifted up and I was, I was holding him and hugging him. And when I stood up, my husband was standing over me and he was weeping, weeping, weeping.

And I, I, I just, I didn't understand it cause I'd never seen it before. And then as they wheeled him out, my husband went to the front steps of our house. And as they were leaving, he was just on the front steps, bent over and he was just weeping. And he came back in and I said, who stole my husband? Like, where, where have they taken my husband?

Cuz I've never seen you do any of this before. And he said, this is about 15% Gus, and it's about 85% you. And I said, what are you talking about? And he said, Deanna meeting that man changed everything for you. And thereby it changed everything for me. It changed everything for our marriage. It changed everything for our world.

Him saying yes to you, him opening his arms to you and welcoming you into his life, changed it so that I never, ever have to stand over a bed again and say, babe, we really need you to stay in the world. He said, all of this has changed because he welcomed you in. And he, he loved him. He, um, they had so many good times together.

They had such a great relationship. He said, don't get me wrong, I'm gonna miss him like crazy. But he said, I'm crying so hard because he's changed your life and I'm the one that lives with you every day. And I see it. I know for a fact this has completely transformed your life.

And so moving beyond the loss of Gus has really affected Larry a lot as well.

Haley: Thank you. Appreciate you sharing that.

Deanna Shrodes: I don't think I've ever cried this much on a podcast.

Haley: I told you before we got on, I've been crying all morning. I had a funeral this weekend as well, so. The, the grief is just like at the surface, you know? And, um, you messaged me, I think in June of 2022 saying you wanted to come and share about finding Gus and come back on the podcast.

And I did not message you back . I, I was like, yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. And then I did not want to impose and take one second away from your time with your dad because as you kept sharing on Facebook all the stories about Gus and you know, your story has gone literally worldwide viral because of your decision to bring him home and care for him.

Deanna Shrodes: Yes.

Haley: You've been sharing through, through months and months and months. And I was like, she's not, I'm not taking one second of her time from her dad. So anyway.

Deanna Shrodes: I appreciate that. Yeah, I little did. I know we would have such a short time.

Haley: Yes. And you, you had a battle, I don't know how much you wanna go into that or not, but you had a battle to take him out of his nursing home, because of, we'll just say greed from, you know, one person at the nursing home to bring him home.

Deanna Shrodes: Yeah. So we, of course we met in person. Just talked and talked and talked, and I was able to share my faith with him. You know, I don't know how deeply you wanna delve into this, but you know, we prayed together and I found myself just not only getting to know my father for the first time, but even strangely enough, you know, leading him, you know, in a spiritual journey and.

Wow. It was, it was a lot. And then it became clear, you know, how miserable he was there. Well, first of all, my boss was so amazing. Is so amazing. And he was letting me just go up there constantly and see Gus and I would work from the road. I would work from a plane. I would work from my car as my husband was driving us there.

I would work in the hotel rooms, you know, but I could see this is just not sustainable. Gus right away wanted me to just move there and be with him. And I said, you know, Gus, I have a husband, I have a job. And so I just kept going up there to see him and spend time with him and spend days and weeks at a time.

And it just wasn't sustainable to keep doing this long term. And I wanted to be with him every single day. I didn't know how much time we had. He was 91 and. So the decision, it came to a decision where I realized, you know, we wanna spend every second together because we have been kept apart for so long.

We don't wanna miss a moment together. I have to keep my family intact. I have to keep my job intact, but I, I wanna be with my father. I wanna be with him every day. So the decision was made to bring him to be with me in Florida and everyone was so excited about that. His doctor was over the moon about it.

So happy. Adult Protective Services was super happy. A lot of the people in the nursing home were super happy and one person, the financial administrator was not happy at all cause they would lose a lot of money by Gus leaving and. So, you know, on that, on that aspect, I was fought. You know, she never accepted that I was Gus's real family.

She couldn't imagine. In fact, she said this, you know, don't you see how crazy this is? Like this is a stranger. You don't know this man? And I said, well, I'm sure this would seem crazy if you didn't realize that, first of all, he is literally my father and I have a legal DNA test to prove that. And I've been searching for him for a super long time and have proof of that and I've been longing for him for all this time. And he accepts me and we wanna be together.

And she thought it was the craziest thing that anybody supporting this has lost their marbles. She said over, you know, months of time, she said he's gonna get sick of you and you're gonna get sick of him. And it's, this is just a bad situation here waiting to happen and your strangers and blah, blah, blah.

So she fought me on it. She fought me on it a lot, and we ended up, I, I fought it just Larry and I ourselves doing what we knew to do to fight this battle. And I could see it eventually, and, and again, the clock is ticking and I don't know how much time we have. I didn't know whether Gus is gonna last a month or five years, and I wanted to have him as quickly as possible.

And so we went ahea and sought legal counsel. We got attorneys and then, we won that battle and with the help of his doctor as well. Cuz his doctor 100% supported us. She was so excited. The staff at his his doctor's office was separate from the nursing home, but they would still come to examine him and, and, uh, check in on him.

And his doctor's office, they were just thrilled beyond belief that this had happened cuz they knew how miserable he was before and how happy he was now and how much he anticipated being with his family now that he found us. And so June 26th, we brought him home. And he needed full-time care. The reason, even though he was so unhappy at the nursing home, he did need to be somewhere where he had full-time care because they were right.

They were right about the fact that he could not care for himself. He was a danger to himself if he had tried to do that. So he needed absolute 100%, 24 hour a day care, and he was bedridden. And we brought him home the 26th of July and I became his full-time caregiver. I still had to work my job and, you know, the first month my boss was so wonderful.

He allowed me to work from home the first month that I had Gus at home. And then during that month I was interviewing people to be able to do caregiving. Nurses, to do caregiving while I was at work, and I work three days a week in my office, which is an hour away, and then I work from home the other two days a week.

So I was interviewing people during that month to take care of him while I was at work during the day, and then also for us to be at church on Sunday. We got, we hired another caregiver so that we could be at church on Sunday morning, and after a month I had those people and was able to go ahead and do that.

And so then I went back to work after 30 days. And had I known that Gus was going to last such a short time, I don't, I wouldn't have done that. I would've asked for a leave of absence. But hindsight is, I mean, you don't know what you don't know. I was looking at it like, oh, you know, I was thinking I'm gonna take such excellent care of him and I'm just believing that he's gonna last another, you know, two to three minimum and maximum maybe five.

And that was what was in my mind. Had I known the future, I would've said, Hey, we need to talk about a leave of absence. But I didn't. I didn't realize that. And of course I've beat myself up for that a million times, but I just realized you don't know the, nobody knows the future. So we had several months together, and then he passed away December the sixth on St. Nicholas Day, believe it or not, St. Nicholas Day, his name's Gus Nicholas, and he passed away on St. Nicholas Day.

Haley: I think for those of us who know you and have followed you for so long, to me, this wasn't a surprise because of how you shared this, In our last interview, you shared how you took your niece's baby and went to in the efforts of family preservation and

Deanna Shrodes: Yes.

Haley: You just walk out the walk and so. But for the world, I think this is like this just shocking, unbelievable thing. Cuz when you were talking about caregiving, like this is 24- 7. Can you tell us about that? Like the real, real, yeah.

Deanna Shrodes: Yep. I had never, okay. Well first of all there have been, I would just say Haley, I'm really blessed that probably 95% or more of the people that have ever talked to me about this or even talked to my friends about me or whatever, they're over the top and they, they're so supportive of this.

I think it's the most amazing thing ever. But probably 5% of people have said really mean things like I, my husband has had people taken aside, and even my assistant has had people take her side and say, Deanna needs mental help. She's going off the deep end. She's taking in a stranger. She's, you know, uh, she's diapering a stranger. She is bathing a stranger. This is just the craziest thing we've ever heard of. She needs psychiatric help.

And yeah, a lot of people, not a lot, about 5% of the people, I just wanna try to be more exact here and not exaggerate. About 5% of the people said she's, she's gone crazy. And even when this made national news media, I would say 95% of the comments were amazing, but there's 5% of just hateful people who say terrible things.

Turning this from a beautiful story into either this lady needs psychiatric help, or there's gotta be more behind this, or Nobody helps somebody like this unless they're ill- motivated. Well, like you, like you say, first of all, the majority of those people don't realize other people that I've taken in and helped. And for nothing.

And secondly, those people probably don't know that I blogged about this incessantly for 10 years, that I was craving my father not knowing whether he was dead, alive or who he was or anything about him. I was craving more than anything to know who my father was and to have a relationship with him.

So, you know, there was no ill- motivations here. I just really craved a relationship. And when I got that, I fell very hard for him as a father and desired that relationship. And when he opened his arms to me, man, I just ran full speed ahead into his arms. But there were those people who said, Deanna has gone nuts and tried to get Larry to get me some help.

And he's like, well, Deanna's actually already in therapy. And with a licensed counselor who thinks that this is great, you know, and it was a lot of work. It pushed me to my limits. Uh, I finished school 12 days before I met Gus. I earned my doctorate 12 days before. I had all these grandiose plans of what I was gonna do with my dissertation and with my work.

And in 12 days, life turned upside down. And I often tell people, taking care of Gus full-time was harder than getting my doctorate. It was harder than a dissertation. I seriously, I my total view, my life view, my respect for people that are caregiving. It's like a whole new world that I never knew anything about.

I was embarrassed as a pastor that I did not know certain people in my church were going through this. Like I knew they were taking care of people, but I didn't realize the full extent of what that took and what that meant. And then I, you know, just suddenly felt just embarrassed that, oh my gosh, I didn't realize this is what these people are going through.

And like, how can we as a church support them better? And, oh, my lands this is just, you know, an unbelievable new world that I'm walking in. And we had to have Gus's doctors come to the house. This was before he was ever, you know, on hospice, but just when he had regular doctors, and I remember the first time his, his new doctor came to the house to give him his first examination.

And I called someone to come right away. The soonest they could come was eight days in. And eight days in. The new doctor comes in, sits down and says, tell me a little bit about your family and you and your father. And I started telling the story and his mouth just hung open. And he goes, oh, wait, wait, wait.

You've only known him since since May 11th and you've never taken care of any adult in your life and you've never done any of this, and you're, you're doing like, this is only eight days in that you've been doing this? And I said, yes and he, I mean, he was dumbfounded, dumbfounded. And it was the biggest learning curve I've ever gone through.

Like I said, even with a doctorate, that pales in comparison to this, and that was pretty hard. So when it was about, I would say two months ahead of me bringing him home, the first month, I would step outta the room whenever they did anything for him. I would just automatically leave. They wouldn't even have to tell me to leave.

And then when it came to a month before, they said, would you like your daughter to step out? And he would say, no, no, don't make her step out. And then they would say to me, well, what is your comfort level? Do you want to stay in the room or go out? And I said, well, if I'm gonna be bringing him home, I need to know how to do all this.

And the nurse said, you're exactly right, you do. And so she says, you, you need to stay here. So the next morning she showed up. I would go to the nursing home at about 7:00 AM and I would stay until bedtime. And when I showed up at seven o'clock the next morning, here comes the nurse and she's got a box with her.

And she said, this is the day. And I said, the day for what? And she said, the day that you do everything, and I watch and coach you through it all. And so she said, get on your triple gloves. And so I triple gloved up and she walked me through every step of what it was, from start to finish to get Gus ready for the day and walk through the day with him, and then get a, you know, everything, everything that it took to take care of him.

So I did have their coaching, so to speak. They were kind of mentoring me. And then, um, when I brought 'em home, it was still scary doing it all myself without a nurse right there. So I had some nurse friends that I would call on the phone and be like, am I doing this right? Please, somebody help me. Uh, and got some help that way.

I was really grateful to be surrounded with people who wanted to, wanted to help me with things like that. When I needed to just reach out for a phone call and some friends even just came over to say, Hey, let me just come over and, I will be that person to stand beside you while you do this. Help you through it.

But yeah, it was a whole new world, Haley. It took, turned my life upside down and I'm ever grateful for every bit of it. I would not trade a bit of it for the world, but it was the hardest thing I ever did.

Haley: That's such an intimate way to get to know someone. And as the daughter caring for a father,

Deanna Shrodes: It is.

Haley: And doing a lot of the tasks that you would've done for your babies when they were little, you know? And it's like switching that role.

Deanna Shrodes: Yeah. He said something profound to me toward the end. I didn't, of course, I didn't know it was the end. I didn't know. It was just before I knew that it was coming to that point.

And one night I was, I had finished feeding dinner, I had finished getting him dressed for bed. I would, you know, every night I would tuck him in and then I would either read to him the stories that he liked to hear, or we would listen to music together, or we would just sit and talk for a couple hours. And it was just coming to the time where I was gonna turn out the lights and say goodnight.

And he said a sentence to me, I'll never forget. He said, you're a daughter who was like a mother to me. It just pierced my soul. I mean, I. I realized that he felt that level of care as a mother would care for her child, and it really was like that. In some ways, we would transition in our conversations many times to where I did feel like the daughter, and other times I did feel like the mother.

Like I would feel like the daughter. There wasn't really anything that he could do about my problems, but the, the one thing I miss about Gus the very most, the very most is that even though he didn't have the power to get outta bed and take care of anything, or do anything for me or solve my problems, every day, every day he would say, how are you today?

How are things going? And if you noticed that, especially when I worked from home, a lot of times he never wanted me to leave his side. I would take his side tray table, set up my computer, get my cup of coffee, and I'd just work right alongside of him. So I never had to leave him. And he would hear me on the phone and on zooms and stuff, just handling problems and stuff, and I didn't hide it from him.

I'm just, you know, I have to work. And so I would be handling problems and he would hear me get stressed. He would hear me in stressful conversations with people. And when I got off of those type of calls, he would say, are you okay? Are you okay? Well let me help. What can I do? I say, gosh, you can't do anything, but you're helping me just by being here.

Just you asking me if I'm okay. Just you asking me what you can do to help, that's helping. And just know that that's helping me a lot. Well, how is that helping you A lot? And he just couldn't understand that that was doing something for me that I had never received, you know, before. Especially from a parent.

So him asking me repeatedly, are you okay? And is there anything I can do to make it better? That is the number one thing I miss from him. It was the tenderest most amazing part of my day, and I 100% felt like his daughter in those moments. He was my dad who wanted to make everything okay. But then there were those times where I felt a shift, where then I felt like I was the mother because it would come to bedtime and I'm saying, you have to take this medication to, to live. And maybe he wouldn't wanna take it. And I would say, no, it's really important. According to your doctor, you really need this. And maybe we go back and forth about it and or I would need to bring him, you know, whatever it was that he needed to, to be okay physically, you know, whether it be a, you know, a drink, a milkshake.

You know, some medication, some ice, whatever it was. Those moments, a lot of times I felt more like a mother and that was okay.

Haley: Okay. Part two of Deanna's story will be live next week if you would like to follow her. Her website is DrDeannaShrodes.com. You can sign up for her newsletter there and we will have links to all of her social media handles in the show notes.

I'm really, really thrilled about bringing you this two-part conversation where we talk about some of the things that won't likely get covered in the news coverage around Deanna and Gus's story because the reporters that aren't adoptees just don't get all of it, and we do.

So I'm really thankful that she's willing to go there with us. And so make sure you thank her if you've appreciated her telling her story.

And the other thing I wanted to let you know is a new project we've been working on, kind of secretly, behind the scenes. We haven't really announced it. Is we are transcribing our episodes now, and so our goal is when we have a new episode go live, we have the transcription to go alongside of it, and we're also working backwards in our catalog to have old shows transcribed as well, with the goal being the whole back catalog being accessible via transcription.

If that is important to you, and you want to contribute to the cost of doing that, please go to AdopteesOn.com. There's a little PayPal button there that you can donate, one time donation. If you would like or join our Patreon community. And both of those things contribute to the cost of producing our episodes and including that big transcription project.

I really appreciate that. Thank you for being such a generous community.

And that's it guys. I guess we will do our recommended resources next week and we will finish up Deanna's story and yeah. She shared something with me next week that she was like, I haven't really told anybody of this yet, so get ready. I definitely cried. Okay. Uh, thank you so much for listening and let's talk again next Friday.

242 Andie Coston, LCSWA

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/242

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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 are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke.

Today we are talking about something that may feel triggering to many of us. Indeed, both me and my guests had a hard time at different points during this conversation. Today we are talking with an adoptee who is also an adoptive parent.

We don't talk about their adopted child's story, but we do talk about the impossibility of legal guardianship in their case. So as someone who doesn't really know what I feel firmly about this situation, I invite you to come into the gray zone with me. And if you already know, like this is gonna be a sensitive topic for me, no problem. You are always welcome to skip an episode.

Am I being over dramatic? Maybe. Andie Costin is here with us, and today we're talking about how to live in the gray world of both advocating for adoption, abolition, and/ or reform, and also the fact that there are children that do need permanence now. How do we look at the systemic upstream problems that cause adoption to exist, and how do we support the most vulnerable in a timely fashion?

There are very challenging parts to being an adopted person who also adopts in the adoptee community, and there are moments where an adopted person is the only other human who could understand what their adoptee is going through. Before we get started, I want to invite you personally to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world.

We wrap up with some recommended resources and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, AdopteesOn.com. Let's listen in.

I'm so pleased to welcome to adoptees on Andie Coston. Welcome Andie.

Andie Coston: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Haley: Yeah. Why don't you start and share a little bit of your story with us.

Andie Coston: Okay, so I am an adoptee. I am a domestic - whenever I say domestic, I know that's our lingo, but I always feel like I'm a cat, like that's what always comes, always comes to my head .

Haley: And I'm not domesticated by any means, right.

Andie Coston: Right. We are.... I run a feral family. We just moved and I just met some neighbors and I, and they actually have a kid that's also one of our kids' ages and we were, I was like, these are my children. They're feral and I was like, oh, so I've just reduced my children to that now. And he was like, great. We love feral children.

I was like, fabulous. Anyway, so I am a domestic infant adoptee. My adoption was originally closed. However, I came home with my hospital bracelet on, and so my adoptive parents knew my biological last name. And as it would have it when I was about, I think four or five, I wanna say more towards four, my mom's dad, so my biological maternal grandfather moved to my town and started working at the hospital that my dad worked at, and my dad came home and said to my mom, I think I just met Andrea's grandfather.

They didn't say anything cuz they weren't a hundred percent sure. And then six months later, my mom moved to town to live with her dad for a couple months. My parents even invited them to church and they came. I was in Sunday school. I did not meet my biological family at that point, which is actually one of my adoptive parents greatest regrets.

We talk about it all the time. But they were just scared. I mean, this was 1986, 87 and there was, there was no, no support or encouragement for anything like that. But they had been writing letters through the agency back and forth with my mom. And so there was some sort of openness. And then when I was 14, they said, now you can write her letters.

And so I, my mom and I began communicating. A very 19 century style through letters for, for those of you who you know, don't have, we didn't have the internet back then. It was letters only.

Haley: I thought you were gonna be like, there were these things called paper and pens and stamps.

Andie Coston: I, I had to, yeah. I even purchased my own, like specialized paper with my name on top. And that's where it all went, quote unquote downhill because I wrote on that special paper. It was like one of those like kits that you could order.

I found a coupon for it in the newspapers that come on Saturday. And, and they had coupons in them and advertisements for things like mom jeans that had elastic waistbands and coupons for ordering specialized paper. So I ordered my own kit and with my budget cuz my parents were, are Christian and they were into Dave Ramsey.

So I had a budget. I had to spend my own money at 14 and I used that to write my mom and then she put the pieces together and, and called her parents and said, holy bleep, I know who has Andrea. So we wrote for a couple years and a couple years later I did a, like, it's like a weekend retreat for Christian teenagers.

And on that retreat, one of my biological cousins accidentally signed up for the same retreat. And so she didn't know that I existed until the day before. She was not allowed to introduce herself until Saturday night. So for 24 hours I had this weird freaking stranger following me around, asking me questions like, what's your boob size?

Like, very personal questions. What are you into? Are you a theater person? Do you like crafts? Do you know if you're Irish or not? These are legitimate questions she asked me.

Haley: Very subtle.

Andie Coston: Very subtle, very subtle. And you know, being a teen, I was like, this is weird. I didn't catch on to subtleties. She was able to tell me that she was my cousin.

And then the next, so she was technically the first biological family member I met. Then the next day, at the end of the retreat, they do this like, you know, closing ceremony and we got done. We walked out of the sanctuary and my dad comes up to me and said, do you wanna meet your mom? She's here. And so that's how I met my mom. I was ambushed. And again, we've had to have some conversations about how to not introduce your adoptee to their biological parents. Because it wasn't just her. The entire family was there. Like people had flown in from like Chicago and the West to meet me. So it was a little overwhelming. I met my dad a year later and we met at my biological mother's house with just my parents that was a little bit more... less stressful.

I knew I was coming, it was fine. But yeah. Anyway, that's my story. So, yeah. Now I have a relationship with my dad. We are at opposite ends of the spectrum politically. So, there's some relationship there. We'll be seeing him in a couple of weeks. He's the greatest. I love him. He's very accepting, very chill. I take a lot ...we, we, I take after him more than I do my mom. So we get along much better. My mom and I are no longer communicating. Which I now am fine with. Therapy for a while for that, but that's, that's where I'm at.

Haley: Okay. That there's a lot there. Wow.

Andie Coston: There's, yeah. Right. That itself is a podcast and we're done. It's a wrap.

Haley: Wow. Well, I, I didn't say anything when you said people flew in, but my face was doing a lot of work at that point, but that doesn't help the audio. Yeah.

Andie Coston: Whew. Yeah.

Haley: Okay. Mm-hmm.. Yeah. That's a lot.

Andie Coston: That's, it was, it was a little much. It was a little much.

Haley: So now, fast forward, you have gone through school to become a social worker and therapist. You have four children, and you did something that in the community, in the adoptee community could be deemed controversial. .

Andie Coston: Little bit, little bit.

Haley: Let's, let's go there. What, what did you do?

Andie Coston: People don't have opinions about it at all.

Haley: No, no opinions.

Andie Coston: I, I, as an adoptee adopted.

Haley: Mm-hmm.

Andie Coston: I like how we both just had to like take a drink after that to like ground ourselves.

Haley: Listen we, I fully feel like this conversation is going to be triggering also for me, like so.

Andie Coston: Mm-hmm.

Haley: Just so you know. So we're just.

Andie Coston: Yeah.

Haley: Hopefully we won't just go activate each other back and forth. But I've shared this before occasionally, but growing up I always thought I was gonna adopt. Like I thought I owed it, like I owed it to the world.

Andie Coston: Mm-hmm.

Haley: To "pay back" in quotation marks...

Andie Coston: Mm-hmm.

Haley: ...this "good thing that was done for me". All air quotes please. So did you ever have those thoughts when you were younger?

Andie Coston: Oh, for sure. That's how it all started.

Haley: Okay.

Andie Coston: And I've, I've talked about this on my Instagram, so like this is all out there. I, I've been as transparent as I can about this. But when I was younger I knew I, I wanted to adopt for the same reasons. Like, I even verbally said "I want to save the children" at points because I'd been saved by such a great family. So I needed to do that for kids out there who didn't have that. Which is funny because I was able to recognize that even at that age, and I'm talking like eight guys, not like in my teens or twenties.

Like I, it was always kind of assumed and maybe other adoptees will understand this for some reason, it's just like assumed like that's what we're gonna do. Cuz it was done for us because, like you said, we owe it. We have to be grateful enough to do exactly what was done to us.

Haley: Mm-hmm.

Andie Coston: But I was able to pick up that not all kids got what I got. And so that's kind of where already I was starting to like lean into like the dissonance of what I have. And, and that's the thing I was, I was adopted by the quintessential adoptive parents. I literally was adopted by a doctor and a teacher. Like that's what they told, that's what Georgia Tann would tell people, like they're a doctor and they're a teacher.

Like, it's so cliche. And I, you know, I had a, I had a pretty decent adoption besides ambushing me to meet my biological parents. But already I was able to recognize that what I had received, you know, I, I felt that I had to be grateful for that because other kids didn't get it. So that's, what you describe is exactly kind of where it started.

Haley: Okay. So I'll share part of my story then too. So when my husband and I were, you know, the first few years of our, not first few, maybe like maybe five years in, I don't know exactly. We went to like foster training classes and that was sort of the route we were kind of thinking of going and it was so strange because all the people in the room, like I was like, this is an interesting bunch of folks, and all the questions.

Andie Coston: This, that's as a former foster parent that sums up foster parents so well.

Haley: Now, this is a stereotype, but like so many of the questions were with regards to money.

Andie Coston: Mm-hmm.

Haley: And what they were going to get.

Andie Coston: Mm-hmm.

Haley: And I was like, I feel like that is the wrong reason to be here. So that was pretty hmm. The disillusionment was real in that moment. And then when we were considering adoption. I, we also went to training for that. And so like the full, however many, two day, 10 hour something for the first step and the way they discouraged older child adoption.

Andie Coston: Oof.

Haley: They just kept pushing for younger and younger and then like, because of all the trauma. And so if you get an infant, there's less. And if you adopt from, well, I'm in Canada, if you adopt from the United States, like you can get a younger baby and like freshly born. You know, like, like..

Andie Coston: Freshly born!

Haley: I literally sat in those classes and I was just like, wow. So there's all this need. And this was from a Christian adoption agency, of course.

Andie Coston: Mm-hmm.

Haley: There's all this need supposedly for older child adoption, but there's no money in it for them. And so they're pushing you towards using their infant adoption program.

Andie Coston: Mm-hmm.

Haley: And it was just so upsetting. And so that was like the piece of the puzzle that I was like, I don't think this is the right thing. Like, I just do not. So, okay. There's my thing now. How about you? Where did you come to it when actually it's terms of things are starting here now?

Andie Coston: Yeah, it's, I wanna say it's, it's sort of similar. It's, I, I wanna come back to that like commodification piece that you're talking about. You know, it started for us, I, my husband and I got married. He knew from the beginning that adoption was something I wanted to do. You know, my views were changing a little bit towards, you know, they were moving away from saviorism to, I just want to provide a home for, you know, a child in need, but I still wanted to adopt.

Then lo and behold we struggled for three years with infertility. And we both knew we wanted children. He comes from a family of nine. Both of my adoptive parents come from very large families too. And so I was like, I'm gonna have six kids. Which now I laugh hysterically at having only four. So we knew we wanted a family and we tried.

We tried, we did. We knew we also could not afford things beyond natural options because we were still, we were still poor. Which is really funny because we're, we literally went to a class with a very large Christian organization, introduction to adoption. We started filling out the paperwork and it's, I sat. We were poor.

Like, where did I think I was gonna get $40,000.

Haley: At the time... and now with inflation.

Andie Coston: Right!

Haley: Where are you gonna find 60?

Andie Coston: 60, even 70.

Haley: Mm-hmm.

Andie Coston: Like, where, where did I think? But this is, this is, I just wanna pause here for a second and say that this is, because the way, what I was thinking and the way I approached it was very much because of the social rhetoric that we are taught in the Christian community about adoption.

And I can see that now. And I can give myself a little grace for that now. But, you know, 1000% I was still in that Christian way of thinking. And so, long story short, we ended up having three children biologically. The doctors are still not sure how, by the way. We would joke about that all the time. Like, I don't know how you people got here, but here they are.

After our second was born, we had a family friend who was fostering and, and we decided, we went to like the intro class and we decided this is something we can do. My husband was working full-time. I was home with the littles. I was like, I have the capacity to be a foster parent. We have the space, let's do it.

And so that's kind of where things started to change because at that time we lived in Michigan, and Michigan had just become a trauma state, meaning they were integrating trauma education into their foster care system. And that was changing how they did things. Supposed to. I don't know, it was supposed to.

So part of my story is we were in these classes and one of the social workers had legitimately just gotten back from a training on trauma with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. And they're like, oh, Heather just came back. Let's have her come in and tell you guys about trauma. Like this is the new thing, right? And so she walked in and she did this very quick five minute rundown on what trauma was and what it does to the brain.

I mean, she even got out her hand model. I wish you guys could see me. If you don't know what the hand model is, just Google brain hand trauma. And, and she showed how, you know what happens when our lids flip and something inside me broke. I was listening to this. I'm gonna start crying guys.

I'm sitting in a class with six other families. This is northern Michigan. We don't talk about our feelings to northern Michigan. We go hunting. As she's describing this, something within my soul broke and I started sobbing uncontrollably. Not just like little crying, you know, with like tears, and you're dabbing them away. I mean, like audibly hyperventilating, sobbing.

And my husband had to like put his arms around me and he's like, what's wrong? And I'm like, I can't. I can't talk. They had to pause the class. I had to regain myself. And I just simply said, that's me. That's what's wrong with me. And I think it was that moment where everything inside me shifted, where I realized I wasn't saving children. I wasn't helping children, I was tearing about apart families like mine had been torn apart.

And I was able to sit and feel the trauma that I had been hiding for 27 years. Actually, I think it was like 30, 32 at this point. And I think that's where every thing changed. That's where I started. What, you know, coming out of the fog, even though we hate that term. That's what I, it's the best thing I have to describe it.

And so, you know, we still, we still fostered, but our motivation behind it changed. It went from we're here to adopt, to, we are here to help families stay together. And we were placed with our now child shortly after that. We had fostered several other children who ended up either going into kinship care or one of 'em had, you know, one of our children had to move homes for different reasons unrelated to anything, but it was they ended up being adopted by that family.

But anyway. We were, we were placed with the child who's now our child. Fast forward to, we are still fostering. How our child came to be with us is not something that I'm going to share. I'm willing to tell y'all the details about my own story, but that's, that is our child's story to tell.

We ended up adopting through foster care because there was no other option. Our child was going to be placed and it was either us or someone that we didn't know. I, if you guys know anything about foster care, you know that they put children up on a website and people can browse the catalog to choose a child. And we did not want that either. And so yes, we ended up adopting through foster care because there was no other option.

I think. I think it's at this point, Haley, I already talked to you before we even started about this, but when... this is where I really had to sit with myself and it was hard. Because part of me was happy the case was over. Foster care is hard. It is difficult. It is even harder when you are either a former foster youth, a child who's experienced trauma, or an adoptee yourself.

You are bearing witness to your own story, playing out in a family that you care about. You are bearing witness to the system treating families unfairly. Manipulating them. Being coercive. Intentionally doing harm to foster families in the name of helping children. So it's very difficult. And, and so I really had to sit with myself and I came upon, I, I'd heard this quote before, but I came upon the, the Desmond Tutu quote.

"There comes a point where we need to stop pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in."

And this quote's been used a lot in the foster care and adoptive system that we gotta figure out what the root problem is. What, what's really happening here? And having walked through being a foster parent, having gone through a master's program and social work, and learning about policy and learning how these policies came to be and what their intentions really were, you know, I could kind of see where the root of the problem was, and I could see how I, I started to believe that we, we don't need to be doing this.

This is harmful. Something has to change. But also there are children who are in the river now. And we have to, I feel like the best way I can describe it is I'm a person who is actively working to figure out what's wrong at the top of the river. That's my job as a social worker. It's, it's in my code of ethics.

I need to be doing that. But also, I can't ignore in both my job as a therapist and my job as a mother, that there are children currently in the river. There are adoptive and foster families suffering right now, and they're raising children who need our help now. And so that's kind of, kind of where I've come to in our adoptive journey.

I wish, with everything inside me, every single day that there had been a better option. I wish I, again, I can't, I don't wanna share my child's story, but I wish we had been offered other options like guardianship. Foster care doesn't like guardianship.

This system, they will, if you say, I wanna choose guardianship, they will fight you. And they will tell you all the horror stories of how it's gone wrong to get you to not do that. But we were not even given that as an option. And I've, I've done a couple other podcasts talking about guardianship and all those other options, so I'm not gonna get into that.

But there's, there's not a day that goes by that I don't sit with the both/ and the nuances of how much I hate adoption and how much I've gained from it. And how I every day have to make choices for the betterment of my child where I lose. And I, and I'm okay with that because I'm an adoptee. I'm okay with that.

But I think that's why I'm so passionately working in this environment, in this community, because I see the top of the river and I can use my, I, I can, I can see the top of the river and I'm living in the river and I'm pulling people out of the river all at once.

It's a really, it's, it's, I know people legitimately hate me because I've adopted. I have known people who can't follow me, who can't participate in my work, who can't have anything to do with me because it triggers them, and that's okay. I understand it. I've been, I have experienced, we know social media on the internet.

I've experienced many, many, a, a bully, many a, a person who is triggered by me who says hurtful things. And after a lot of of work, I'm able to sit here and say like, that's okay. It's okay if you're listening to this podcast and you have to turn it off if, if it triggers something in you. I mean, Haley, you and I were just talking about how it's, it's gonna trigger stuff inside of us.

It's such a hard topic. It's such a difficult thing.

Haley: Well, one of the things I wanted to talk with you about, and I feel like I'm like poking a little bit. So, it's so awkward. It's so awkward.

Andie Coston: That's okay. That's okay. You, you can, you can poke, you can poke it.

Haley: So I've had guests come on the show before and right before we record, they'll be like, oh, and off the record, I'm also an adoptive parent, but don't ask me about that. I don't wanna talk about that. And I'm like, oh. Okay.

And so publicly on their online life, no one knows that they're also an adoptive parent. And I think it's probably for those reasons that you just shared about. The online trolling and such.

So here's the thing that's at the poke. I feel like for some of us, we might think, oh, well there's like levels of okayness. Like, okay, in Andie's child situation, maybe there was no other option. But what about the adoptees that literally go through the infant adoption process and are participating in the for-profit system. Or choose to adopt also trans nationally, so they, there's no chance that their adoptee's family will come knocking and you know, like all of the, like, there's like these levels of acceptability or not.

Andie Coston: Yeah. No, I, I know exactly what you're saying.

Haley: Do you have thoughts on that? Because I feel like I have some thoughts on that, but I not sure if I should say them out loud. Do you know?

Andie Coston: Yeah, I, I do know exactly what you mean. Yeah. And I mean, full transparency. I think I skipped this part and I did not skip this part on purpose. It's just when you're sitting here talking, your brain is running a mile, a million miles an hour. But we originally pursued, oh, I did say that we had pursued infant adoption. But we pursued infant adoption enough that we did a fundraiser and that's where it ended. Like we did that fundraiser and I, I actually canceled the fundraiser.

Cause inside me I was like, this is, no, this is no bueno. And we ended up doing it cuz I felt there, like literally the people at my church came to me and were like, no, we want to give you money for this. Of course you do. Of course you do.

Anyway, so, you know, that is part of my experience and I think it was because so much was happening in my life with the trauma work that it all, just, that portion of my life stopped right there, for the reasons of the commodification that comes into play.

But I, I do wanna go back and I, well first I wanna say like, I don't speak for anybody else's story but my own. But also I have seen themes in, in speaking with other adoptees who adopt. I've, I've seen a lot of, a lot of common themes that, you know, why? Because a lot of adoptees ask adoptees who adopt? Why? Why would you do that?

And what I see most of the time is that adoptees who have adopted, number one, are still very much in the view, the POV that adoption is love and adoption is helping. And adoption, like they had wonderful adoptions and they're grateful, which I validate those. Like I had great adoptive parents. Not perfect, but so that's, I can understand it where they're coming from. I did understand it at one point. I just told you that we were pursuing that type of adoption.

A lot of adoptees also will not challenge that idea because to walk out of that is to break their safety net, is to. Now, I'm speaking as the therapist. A lot of adoptees cannot acknowledge that adoption is anything other than love because then they would have to feel the feelings that they have been hiding, that they have been ignoring, that they have been in, they have been storing in their hippocampus and their amygdala, and have not allowed to enter the prefrontal cortex.

It is a safety coping skill. And I, I really want people who are angry at us to hear that it is a coping skill. Is it a good one? I don't know, but it's, it's, it's no different than any other coping skill. It was developed as a protection mechanism for their infant selves, their toddler selves, to feel safe in a situation where their body was telling them they weren't safe.

That's basic trauma. I mean it's not basic trauma. That's basic trauma lesson.

So that's one aspect that I find on, on why adoptees adopt is because they wanna replicate that feeling. And if they can replicate what has occurred to them positively, then they can feel okay with what happened to them. That's what I've seen both online and in therapy.

Now another common theme I've seen is, I would say somewhat similar to mine, where who better to raise an adoptee than another adoptee? And I know a lot of people think that's a justification, but it's not. Because why are we all here? Why do we come onto podcasts?

Why do we speak out against what happened to us? Because it hurt. And no other person is gonna be able to see my child the way I see them. AS an adoptee, because I can, this happens daily, my husband cannot see things because he's not adopted. And he, we will be struggling in a normal child struggle and a normal daily thing that children get upset about. And I will say, Uhuh, that's not why, that's not why they're mad. They're mad because... and he'll be like, how do you know that? I'll be like, because that's why I'm mad.

And, and so again, it's not a justification for adopting, but going back to the river, who, who is better equipped than those of us who have been through it and done our own work? I think that's key. I I, there are many, many people adopted, parents, adopted or not, who haven't done their own work. And I think it's key that if you are an adoptee who has adopted to really be self-aware. And to have boundaries in your own life. There are certain points of parenting that I cannot do with our child.

It is an open discussion. There's therapy involved for all parties. And so I think, I think I put in the, the, the email to you, Haley that I wanted to talk about like even if you've adopted as an adoptee, there's good things and there's bad things. There's still the both and there's, there are things that I can see, things that no one else can, but there's also, I get triggered by things that no one else gets triggered by.

And my child wound gets triggered by things that aren't their fault, but are simply, that happened to me and, and now we're actively trying to parent it.

Haley: Well, when you were talking through some of those different reasons or the places where people come from, I remember talking to another adoptee who had adopted. She'd adopted internationally and she had already had adult children. And so now they were raising this adopted child together, her and her husband and. I asked her on two or three separate occasions, like if she felt any sort of differences in parenting or sort of, you know, I was trying to get at that. And that question just never connected for her. Because I really think she literally didn't think of herself as an adoptive parent.

Like, like she could not connect those two. And she was very outspoken and very critical of adoption and, and all of those things. And I was like, wow, you're really not putting it together.

Andie Coston: Yeah. And, and I think that's, that's so hard to, that's, that's difficult. I think people here, you know, being an adoptee who has adopted, my primary lens will always be as an adoptee. That's my story. That's how I came to be like my, my brain formed as an adoptee. The trauma formed my brain.

However, I am an adoptive parent and you know, we talk about this in adoption all the time. With that comes a power dynamic that's uncomfortable for our, for ourselves. It's uncomfortable for people around us. I would say there's a, there's a core group of us in, in the community, just like my online community. People I've found who were, were pretty good at sitting in that both/ and, but we really struggle with adoptees hate us cuz we adopted. Adoptive parents hate us because we mirror to them how they need to parent. What they need to change.

And, and, and we actively call them out and hold them account and you know, first parents are uncomfortable with us cuz we're both. So I think it's, it is hard to acknowledge that you're holding these two different titles. These two different roles. How do I, like, you know, daily, I have to say, yes, I'm an adoptee.

But my, the majority of my daily life has to be focusing on that I'm an adoptive parent. Because I'm, I'm raising a child. I'm responsible for that. I'm accountable for that. One day my child's gonna grow up, probably write an expose. You guys will all buy it. It's gonna be great. I'm gonna read it. I'm gonna support my child. I'll be at the book signing and it's gonna tear me to pieces I'm sure.

But I can't wait for that day as well because I want my child to be empowered as a, I want them to be able to talk about that. And that's where I focus on. I'm the adoptive parent and that's where I have to do the work. That's my job at daily. But yeah, it's, it's definitely hard to connect those pieces.

I don't know if that answered the question or the, the poke you were going for.

Haley: Well, here's my last thing before we go into resources. And again, you don't have to answer for someone else's bad behavior. So I'm just gonna give you a little, little story time. So.

Andie Coston: Oh, I love story time.

Haley: I used to co-host on adoptee support group and it's still going. My friends are running it, but I just didn't have capacity anymore. And, it was an adoptees connect group. So you always start out, you give the, like, we keep things confidential, all the support group things, right?

Andie Coston: Mm-hmm.

Haley: If you're more, if you're a member of more than one part of the constellation, this group is for your adoptee hat only, right? Adult adoptees support. So groups are confidential. I'm gonna share this part of a story because this person broke confidentiality.

Andie Coston: Mm-hmm.

Haley: So this person came to the group also as an adoptive parent. And she came looking for support parenting her child.

Andie Coston: Hmm.

Haley: And that is not the point of the group. And so, two or three times I had to say. Okay, but we're putting, put our adoptee hats on like this. We are not helping to give advice kind of thing. Anyway, so, so they left the group having had a really terrible experience because they came for parenting advice, not as an adoptive person. They came as an adoptive parent.

And so now this person publicly shares on all these podcasts about these angry adoptees and how we traumatized her and we told her we all wish we had been aborted. And just, just all of these things that, like fake news. Fake news. That is not what happened. Fake news.

Andie Coston: Yeah.

Haley: And so when you say we all need to do our own work, I mean that is the kind of person who's out there teaching other adoptive parents how to parent their child when they clearly have not done their own work, are somehow delusional because that is not the event that occurred. So what, what are we supposed to do with that? What are we supposed to do with that Andie?

Andie Coston: I don't know! I, you know, I think I can understand, like I said, I can understand adoptees who hate me and, and first parents. Like I, I get it. I, I can understand. I gained from adoption. I hold the power dynamic. I have a very difficult time, and this is my humanity showing, understanding adoptees who adopt, who aren't doing their work.

How do you wake up in the morning, like? I know this sounds, so this is not my therapist hat , but truly, this is my human hat. How are you like, how can you parent an an adoptee, being an adoptee yourself without doing your work? You are actively choosing to hurt your own community and your child's community.

I do this work both in my off, like in therapy myself. I do this work in my home as my business as my job because I am accountable to a child in my home, and I, I want to make it better. How I, like, I I don't know how to answer that question because I don't know what to do with that because I don't know how they cannot.

Haley: Well, here, here's something that I'll share that I really respect about you. Because I also know that woman's child's story. I could write a book about it because of how much she's disclosed. And she'll say things like, we're not allowed to tell our, our child's story. You know, it's, we have to keep them private and then goes on to spill all the tea.

Andie Coston: Oh, that's my favorite.

Haley: Yeah. So, but you have, I hope, demonstrated to folks like you can hold back personal details of something that is not your own. I hope you're modeling, I think you are. I think you're modeling the way and the both, and like sitting in it like, it's uncomfortable.

It's uncomfortable for me to talk about with you that you adopted. I'm my head. I'm like, oh my gosh, I wish we had another hour. Like, what do you think about abolition? Like you are part of the foster care system. And like, why? Like without getting to story, like,

Andie Coston: Oh I got opinions.

Haley: Yeah. Why, why is there even someone out there that says that parent can't parent this child properly according to this state.

Andie Coston: Who decides that?

Haley: Who exactly. Who decides that? So I know we, I

Andie Coston: and i, I know who decides it. I've seen them do it, and I'm like, why are you the person? Why am we ? Who said you were? Like you mm-hmm, you have a hard time getting your car oil changed. Why are you deciding who stays and who goes?

Haley: Mm-hmm. But I think, I think one of the most helpful things that you shared today is something that you kind of wrote a little bit about on one of your Instagram posts, you said, "somewhere deep within myself, I subconsciously believed if I became the rescuer, then I could fix that wound within myself."

And not to psychoanalyze every single person who's adopted, but I think there's real ring of truth to that for many.

Andie Coston: Mm-hmm. Yes.

Haley: So, I don't know. Bringing that to light hopefully will help. Ya'll stop bullying. Stop, stop sending these harassing messages. Like, it's done. It's done. Like, I don't, underst I don't understand.

Andie Coston: Yeah. I, and I think that it's, I wish every day that my adoption had never occurred. I wish every day that my child's adoption had never occurred. It shouldn't be this way. I think we hear that phrase a lot in adoption in this community. It should not be this way. And that makes me angry.

I'm an angry adoptee. I'm gonna just, I don't know if you guys know this, but adoptees can be anger, angry and it can be healthy. Anger is healthy. So when people call me an angry adopting like, thank you, that means a lot to me. Anyway I think that right now, why I'm here on this podcast, knowing that both you and I will get flack, knowing there will be both positive and very negative feedback, is because there is not a space for adoptees who adopted to wrestle that. To deal with that.

There's not a space for potential adoptive parents who are adoptees to sit and feel comfortable talking about it. That's why I'm here today is because we need to talk about it. We need to create that space so that adoptees can answer that question before more harm is done. So that we can say, without having to hide in the shadows, because so many of us do, like you said, I, I don't think there is a week that goes by that somebody doesn't message me and say I'm an adoptee, but I also adopted, I'm scared to let people know. And they have every right to be.

I have been called disgusting. I have been called evil. I have received death threats. I have received threats to find me and my family so somebody can take my child and save them from me. That's not okay. And that's why I'm here is because I want there to be a space for adoptees who either considering adoption, considering foster care have already done it, to answer that question within themselves. To, to face that reality of the, the quote that you just shared.

Because I think if we're gonna create change, if we're going to pursue abolition and adoption, if we're gonna rewrite the system, if we're gonna, you know, fix it, it's gonna take every single one of us.

Haley: Well, I really appreciate you sharing with us and , it's, it's heavy. Even as you said those things, I was like, well, no, but they shouldn't be considering adoption. Just like,

Andie Coston: Right. Right.

Haley: So, you know, like I, in my head I'm like, oh no, but we're not doing that anymore. So we all have very different views. But we can be civil and look, we had a whole conversation, you know? I've talked before, like, we could do it. It's possible.

Andie Coston: It's po It's not easy.

Haley: No, it's not.

Andie Coston: It is not easy. And it definitely triggers us. Like, I know full well after this I'm gonna go, I don't know, take a nap or something, whatever my body decides I was gonna process the, the trauma triggers.

Haley: When, when I post the social on this I am. I'm gonna feel unwell. So hopefully, yeah, you'll just behave yourselves. We don't please, you know, if you disagree. I don't, I don't need to know about it. Neither does Andie, frankly.

Okay. Let's talk about our recommended resources. So I have learned so much from your Instagram. You are one of my favorite follows. I don't know if people know this, but on Adoptees On, like I follow quite a few accounts, but I don't really check too often cuz I know ever want to replicate or steal someone's work inadvertently. It's kind of one of those things, that's why I don't really watch too much. But if I see an Andie story? Click!

Andie Coston: Well, let's be honest, there's a lot more humor in that there is education sometimes.

Haley: Oh my gosh, that's my, like, that's the best part. So anyway, if you're not following you make, gotta make sure you follow. And there is a lot of education and for those of us who are not interested in talking to adoptive parents or teaching them anything, you're picking up a lot of that slack and taking that on and really doing work that I literally cannot. I have rules on my page. I don't engage because it's not for me.

So I'm really thankful for people like you who are able to sit in the both/ and teach people what they need to know. Call them out on what they need to be called out on.

Andie Coston: That's always a fun time.

Haley: But the other cool thing that you're a part of, and I actually have you can't, you're not gonna be able to see them. But the POST Resource boxes, do you wanna tell us a little bit about that?

Andie Coston: So, POST resource, oh gosh, it's, there's so many ways I could like describe it or it came together. How it started was I met this lady online, Claire. She, she, her handle is _project_dawn, another adoptee.

And we got to know each other online and one day, we had not met yet. I got this text and she's like, we're gonna do this thing. And I'm like, I don't want to do this thing. I don't have the energy for it. That's why I felt internally, I feel like that's still some days, especially like as we're pushing to get things done.

But in a matter of 15 minutes we developed this idea and it literally only took 15 minutes because it's exactly what we needed as kids. And it is a business. We're very upfront about that because you're gonna pay us for our work and our lived experience and, you know, I got a degree. We're very upfront about that.

We are not a nonprofit. We are, we don't give these things out for free, but it's a connection. We started with this connection box and the connection box is this gorgeous box that we designed and had made, and it's a physical object that an adoptee or foster youth can have and hold and put in things that are important to them that they have, you know, relating to their adoption or anything that's just important to them.

The idea being then we provide you, we just started a subscription service where we provide the adoptive parents literal templates and activities with step-by-step how-tos based on age development and abilities that they can either share with biological, first parents. They, then it creates the relationship where we're learning about each other, we're sharing things.

If you're in an open adoption, you send these back and forth. Adoptive parents pay for everything. They send it or send the link with our subscription service. It's all downloadable. We specifically designed this for every single type of adoption and foster care and kinship placement and guardianship.

It is applicable to adult adoptees, to former foster youth. And really what it does is it is, if it's an open adoption, it, it encourages that connection because we believe connected families are stronger families. That's literally our motto. If you are in a closed adoption, it is a tool that adoptive parents can use to help encourage the adoptee to develop their identity to process.

We created it so therapists can take it and use it in therapy room to again, help with identity processing and developing like life storybooks. So there's, it can be used in so many different ways and we, with our subscription, we've adjusted all of the wording and all of the instructions so you don't have an excuse.

We hear a lot that adoptive parents are like, oh, well I don't have any, I don't have this tool. I don't have that resource. I mean, I grew up in the eighties, we didn't have anything. We're literally making this so that 20 years from now, if an adoptive parent says that, we can say, no, no, no. It was there and you, it was there.

So it's a no excuse tool for adoptive parents, foster parents, guardians, kinship, to create that relationship, to do the work. We provide journal entries and education that continue to educate and challenge the adoptive parents, and we provide tools and activities for the, the kids and/ or adopted people to continue to process their identities.

Haley: I bought them when you first launched them to support adoptee business, and I'm keeping all of my, Hmm, all of my adoption paperwork and genealogy history that I've printed off and emails I've printed off from both sides. I, that's, it's sort of like my treasure box. So that's how I'm using it.

Andie Coston: Yeah. That's kind of what we wanted it to be. A treasure box. We specifically designed it, it's look so that you did, it could be on your bookshelf and you wouldn't really know what it was because we do know a lot of first parents don't have the safety to share that part of their story and a lot of adoptees don't either.

And so we wanted it to be something that was gorgeous and beautiful and honored their story, but also was safe. To, to be able to use just like that.

Haley: Lovely. Okay, so where can we find those and where can we connect with you online?

Andie Coston: You can, POST Resources just postresource.com. You can read more about us. There's a way better explanation than what I just gave because I tend to get too wordy when I'm talking on podcasts. So you, and you can always email us. There's a link to contact us if you have any questions. We also do something at POST Resource called sponsorships where if, if you're any part of the constellation and you want to provide that for someone who can't afford it, we do not ask adoptees or first parents to pay.

We want to be able to one day be working with agencies so that all of this comes, you know, free to the adoptee and, and to the first parent because it should not cost us, should not cost them. So you can do a sponsorship and we have a list of people waiting and we will send them the whole kit.

So if you have any questions, there's a way to contact us there. I can be found andieink.com or AndieInk on Instagram.

Haley: Perfect. And if you wanna hear more from Andie talking about trauma and those kinds of things you have one season of a podcast called Trauma Informed Everything. We'll link to that.

And you've got so much of your writing and work is available online and linked on your website. So hopefully folks will check that out. Thanks so much for sharing with me. And yeah. I really appreciate talking about something really difficult with you. Thank you for spending your resources talking about.

Andie Coston: I'd like to say it was a pleasure.

Haley: Oh, really? Which part? When I told, when I told this story about the adoptive parent who was slandering me online. That hurts.

Andie Coston: Oh my gosh. I just, people anyway, that's why I became a therapist. But, but I think, you know, I, I wanna just say thank you to the people who did make it this far. The podcast. I know that this is not an easy topic. I know that there are, you know, where you live in a society that wants like black and white answers, it doesn't come often in adoption, and I'm sorry that I can't give black and white answers.

I wish I could and, and I know that any answers I give to some people are going to sound like excuses, and I acknowledge that it. You know, they're gonna sound like justification. I acknowledge that. So thanks Haley for sitting through it. I, I know it wasn't easy for you. It's a pleasure, right? It's a pleasure.

Haley: It was a pleasure. Can't wait. Thank you. It was a pleasure talking with you, Andie.

Andie and I chatted a little bit after our conversation here that was on the record, and she let me know that she will be announcing in the future a possibility of a community for adoptees who are also adoptive parents. So if that is of interest to you, make sure you're following her on Instagram and she will put updates up there as it's available.

You know, this was a hard one, and it's one of those episodes that I am going to feel a little nervous when it goes live. I think talking about the complexities of this, it's very easy for me to sit here and say adoption is never the right thing to do when I have absolutely no experience personally with children that need permanence.

And I am really, really hopeful that as more of us advocate for family preservation and kinship care and the importance of legal guardianship and access to our original records and identity preservation, meaning that our birth certificates are not altered in any way, that there is no secrecy about our genetic origins...

I think the more times and ways we're able to advocate for those and are successful, that, that is the way we wanna move forward, in my personal opinion. And I think probably there are a lot of folks that would agree with that. And I don't know in the time we're recording this in 2023, if that is too idealistic. I don't know because I don't have personal experience with how all the systems work.

The other piece that we really didn't get into, we just briefly mentioned, was the abolitionist movement and with specifically in regards to the foster care system or as the abolitionist groups may call it the family policing system.

And if you're not familiar with those terms, I hope that you will do some looking around Google and read some books on the topic because I think there is a lot we can learn from the abolitionist movement. And so many groups have very, very strong opinions about participating in the system at this time detracts from the abolitionist movement, right?

So once again, we're back in the gray. So I look forward to learning more about this in the future. And also being mindful for myself that talking to adoptive parents is hard. But once they become your friends and you see them and you see the heart behind it and you see we tried to do all the ethical things and, and, and... it's a lot easier to see the other side.

So I don't know. Am I talking outta both sides of my mouth? Believe me, I , I see it and I see the complexity and I still hope there are no more adopted people created in this world because I don't wish the pain of being separated from our original families on anyone. And yet there are very, very, very few cases where children need to be protected.

And I think that's the way that's, that's the argument so many people will come to and it is such a tiny percentage of adoption situations present day. So I will keep that in mind too.

Alright, my friend. Thank you for engaging in this, really looking critically at adoption from an adopted person's perspective. And yeah, go out there and be a good human on the internet. Thank you for listening.

Next week, , we are gonna have the start, part one of a two part back to back, very, very exciting interview with Deanna Shrodes. I can't wait to share it. Her story is amazing. So come back next week for a part one of my two-part interview with Deanna Shrodes and thanks for listening.

Well, let's talk again next Friday.