271 Healing Series: Ask an Adoptee Therapist with Marta Isabella Sierra, LMHC

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/271

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it, either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today's episode is our last one before our holiday break, we'll be back with brand new weekly episodes on January 12th, 2024 for you. I wanted to bring you a healing series episode to make sure we all had a little extra support before the holiday rush takes over.

And this year we started a brand new event for Patreon supporters called Ask an Adoptee Therapist. It is monthly. It has been absolutely amazing for our community, and I'm [00:01:00] really proud of this offering. And today's episode is a compilation of some of the really helpful conversations we've had together this fall with Marta Isabella Sierra, one of our favorite adoptee therapists.

So I'm going to be posing some questions to her that have been submitted by the community and she gives us the answers and some really great advice. And before we get started, I wanna 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 have monthly events called Ask an Adoptee Therapist just like this episode. Except for once we're done recording, we hang out with the therapist and get to chat with them and ask them questions off the record or ask for clarification. And it's just a really special time. We also have our book clubs and off script [00:02:00] parties and adoptee hangouts, and we'd love to have you join us.

There's a seven day free trial if you're interested. adopteeson.com/community has those details. All right, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, adopteeson.Com. Let's listen in.

Welcome back to Adoptees Off Script. I'm Haley Radke, and we are here with a special episode of Ask an Adoptee Therapist with one of our favorite adoptee therapists, Marta Isabella Sierra.

Marta is a qualified therapist and licensed, but they are not your therapist. Our conversation and any advice given is for education and entertainment Only. Welcome back, Marta! That's your thing now. You got it. You've got your catchphrase. I love it. Okay. We have some great questions today and I thought we could spend a little extra time on our very first one because it's one of the most common questions I get.

I even did an episode myself on [00:03:00] it super early on in the healing series because I'm such an expert at that. But here is our question. I am looking for a therapist who specializes in or has experience with adult adoptees. Is there anything I should look for or ask them before starting? Marta, what are your thoughts on that?

Marta Isabella Sierra, LMHC: First of all, like those just seem like such different things potentially, right? Like adoption competent versus experience with adoption. So I guess just like a, really knowing what are you comfortable with. Sitting with that. And you may not know, and you may have to, try out a therapist and see is experience with adoption enough for you or do you really want someone who specializes in this area?

That's so individual. Of course, I can't name that for you, but really knowing what are you. Looking for what are you hoping for? What are non negotiables for you? It's such an [00:04:00] intimate relationship. Whatever you need, whether that's like a therapist, who's also a mom, a therapist, who's a person of color a therapist who identifies as queer, all of those might be factors in addition to the adoption piece.

And so just always want to be encouraging people to, sift through what you might need and to just honor what you need. And then there's, of course, the finding piece. I mean, resource wise of course the 1st thing I always go to Chaitra's list of adoption, competent therapist.

And, of course, not everybody's on there. I'm not on there. What's left after that, I think, is like community networking because we all know a lot and reaching out to people, maybe even if you've heard their full and just asking if they know anybody else, there's therapists that are either like done with training, maybe not licensed, but have done work in a specific area.

I, of course, get asked a lot for IFS. And [00:05:00] sometimes I have someone that I've actually had a hand in training, but maybe isn't licensed yet. So you're not going to find them on any forum, but it might be open to private clients. So you, I don't know, you just have to be relentless unfortunately, in this current mental health crisis climate of asking anybody that you think might know anything about anything and just following the path where it goes.

Haley Radke: I think a lot of people don't know too, right? You can ask questions of your therapist in advance. Yes. You can email them questions.

If they don't have time to get on the phone with you, you can preemptively sort of screen them in advance before you book a session. And what are some of the things that you think we should be sort of asking before we ever meet with somebody?

Marta Isabella Sierra, LMHC: I mean, definitely, what's their experience and training with adoption? Have they worked with multiple parts of the [00:06:00] constellation, right? You could ask all of those things. I also think you're just, I would like, encourage at least a conversation, whether that's a short zoom or phone, or some people will do a whole session for free to see to assess fit. And so you can get to know them.

For me it's also in my own history of searching for therapists has sometimes also been about how what I'm bringing is being held so I'm like flashing back to like when I was pre estrangement and I was looking for someone to support me through that in some of those like 15 minute phone calls I would just say what I was wanting to work on and the response told me everything that I needed to know about is this person safe? Is this person going to be able to help me with this? So some people were kind enough, but I was just like, nope. Okay. Just everything in my body said nope, it's not you. Okay, thanks for your time, and just keep going. But yes, and you can ask a provider anything [00:07:00] you want to know.

Again, anything that you feel like you need in order to trust this person. Some people might be like, I'm not willing to share that with a potential client. And again, I think then you have your answer. There shouldn't be anything that you're scared to ask because it's your care and it's important and it matters who it is.

Haley Radke: I know we have that amazing list that you mentioned Dr. Wirta-Leiker's list, Grow Beyond Words with all adoptees who provide adoption, competent therapy, and a lot of them are booked. If we were looking for a therapist and couldn't find one, that was an adoptee, do you think there's other providers that can adequately care for us?

And what are some ways that they could demonstrate that? Because we've talked about before we don't want to be giving our therapist lessons in coming out of the fog.

Marta Isabella Sierra, LMHC: In my own [00:08:00] professional career working specialized in adoption, not everybody that works at the nonprofit that I work at is an adoptee and they know what they're doing and they do incredible work and they've been doing it for a really long time.

So I'm not a person that believes that a therapist has to be adopted to be able to work with it or do or do a good job. My own therapist right now is not an adoptee. She's Latina. She does EMDR. She's super trauma competent. And what she does get that I think got my buy in the beginning was she understands intergenerational trauma and she understands racial trauma.

These are things for me that are non negotiable. And so those were really important to me. And I again, I would say a mix between interviewed her about that and also just said some things and watched and waited to see how she handled them. And that was enough for me in that moment.

So I think I've seen [00:09:00] really trauma competent therapists be able to just understand it to understand the separation trauma. And again, whatever other maybe trauma layers you have on top of that to just understand the severity of it. Of course, there is always going to be a moment, right? That's true of me too.

As an adoptee therapist. I don't we're not a monolith, right? We say this so much, but I can't assume that just because of my lived experience, I'm going to get everybody that sits across from me and understand exactly how that's manifested for them. So I think there's always that risk of not being understood in a certain moment, right? But overall do you feel that this person sees what happened to you, sees the severity of it?

Haley Radke: I think that's all excellent advice. Thank you. Any thoughts about age and coming out of the fog? I'm a 50 year old lesbian and only recently discovered this adoptee and adoptee therapist community.

[00:10:00] Everything is resonating, even things I never imagined. I'm questioning my life from so many new angles. To have those dense 50 years stacked up in my face and discover a gigantic laundry list of coping mechanisms that I thought were just life experiences and emotions. It's shocking and overwhelming. I was already exhausted with my life, which is how I found this community in the first place.

So now it seems I need more strength than I can muster to be patient a bit longer to let this all in and finally show up for myself. 50 years is a very long time to reflect upon. Ooh, that's a. That's a big spot to be in. And I think just right, the question writer I think a relatable to a lot of folks in our community.

Marta Isabella Sierra, LMHC: Yeah, it's so interesting. I do think that it is such a widespread experience of whenever you come out of the fog to feel like it's too [00:11:00] late. I hear this will be laughable probably to most people in this zoom room, but, I've had 18 year old adoptees say that to me, like, how come I'm so late to this? What am I going to do? I didn't figure this out soon enough, and I have to not laugh. Yeah, it's hard. Like we figured out ups through clients in their seventies that are newly coming to this, there is no timeline on when we come out, but I think it is a very common experience to, to have grief about the when, whenever the when is and that feeling of lost time, not having the map and what came up for me when I read this question too, is I feel like I talk about this episode all the time. Someday I need to look up which one it is Haley, but one of this episode that made such a big impact on me that was one of the late discovery adoptees and he was in his fifties [00:12:00] and talked about the Lincoln Logs, I use this with clients all the time.

He was, to my memory, he found out that he was an adoptee when he was cleaning out his adoptive parents house. They had both passed and he found his paperwork in the basement. And he talked about feeling like his whole life was constructed out of these Lincoln Logs. And that in that moment, when he found his paperwork, The whole structure collapsed and that he spent about three years sitting, I get emotional every time I tell the story, sitting in the middle of all the logs, just sitting on the floor, right?

And picking them up one by one. And really looking at it, is this mine? Is this really me? Is this, was this something else? Is this meant for me? Three years, right? Of course, we know in that time, he was also paying his bills and being a [00:13:00] person and, but we have to do both. That's what we're tasked with to continue living somehow.

And also have this side project of who am I? How did I come to be here. And how do I feel about all of that? So I'd love that, like the patience a bit longer. I mean, and there, there truly is no race. Like we are on this train for as long as we are on this earth. Like it's and we make sense of it as we can.

And I think there's that initial urgency sometimes when we come out of the fog of I want to know it all right. And that comes from, of course, I'm sure so many different parts of us that want it to be different and it will and it won't. And I think, what also struck me about this was that this person has found [00:14:00] the community.

And yes, do you need more strength to hold what. We hold. Yes, and we don't have to do it alone once we get connected. And so don't, again, it's becoming quite the Marta quote, but don't be alone with it.

Haley Radke: What are some things you tell clients to do sort of in that very first stages? I can't really remember.

I feel like I was pretty gradually, like a gradual, I didn't have this big awakening. But I can just imagine like the overwhelm as you described, but let's talk about the first month what are some things like people will binge my show and I'm like, whoa, that's too much, I don't know if I think that's a good idea or not.

Things not to do, things to do. What do you see people doing and what do you wish they were [00:15:00] doing?

Marta Isabella Sierra, LMHC: It's funny, right? I think we go in one of two directions. So that's one. So actually, I would say more often than not. And again I'm seeing this subset of our community that is wanting to lean in.

And so I'm often the playing the role of the brakes more often than not of please don't binge that. How about this week? We don't watch a film about adoption trauma and take the week off and let it start to filter down. And then in other case, and then I would say there is the other direction, right?

Have I, I feel parts of me that want some of this knowledge or yearning, but I'm terrified about how I'll feel if I read X, Y, Z, watch this, listen to this. And so at the other end of the spectrum, I might invite someone to do that stuff in session again to not be alone with it. Okay. Primal wound is terrifying. Let's read it out loud together and talk about it as it's happening. And you say, stop, we stop. [00:16:00] So I think in both directions pacing. Because the feelings are so intense, so our desire to go 90 miles an hour or stop an armadillo in the middle of the road can be very intense.

Haley Radke: I think this is the kind of situation where I would really want, if they're wanting to lean into therapy you don't want to find someone that's not adoption competent, adoptee competent.

Because if we're uncovering like, oh my gosh, adoption, my maternal separation is responsible for this trauma. We don't want to go to someone that's okay. I mean, maybe and someone that's not going to validate those things for us because they don't know.

Marta Isabella Sierra, LMHC: Absolutely.

Haley Radke: Any other thoughts on that one?

Marta Isabella Sierra, LMHC: I think also just making time for either writing or talking, however you express yourself, right? Again, I think we have this [00:17:00] looking out thing, right? Like I'll, I want to look outside of myself to figure out how I feel. And so that some of coming out of the fog is being with ourselves, our own thoughts and feelings and being a witness to our own process.

Yeah, it's a great to read a memoir and see like where your feelings and thoughts and lived experience lines up with that person's. Absolutely. As a means of shining a light on where you're hurting and then maybe you take a break and you journal for a little while so that it's not just that external mirror, but that you're really mirroring yourself and giving yourself some time to think hard things, feel hard things, be in the confusion that not knowing

Haley Radke: I like what you said about this discovery of Who am I? And I guess the piece for me is, when you're diving into community, we know the adoptee community contains [00:18:00] multitudes. Do you want to join up with us radicalized adoptees? Do you want to just be nice to yourself and just take care of yourself first? There's a lot of different ways to go. So I love that reflecting to yourself I think is super important.

On to the next question. After 28 years in reunion, I'm estranged from my biological mother. We met when I was 20. Looking back at our relationship now through therapy, etc. I can see how unhealthy it was. Talk about attachment trauma. Before coming out of the fog this spring, hard and fast, I might add. Oh, that's very recent.

I was the perfect grateful adopted in reunion. Now, I'm effing furious about the whole thing. Because my adopted parents have passed in the last five years, and I'm also estranged from my adopted brother, I'm hearing, but she's the only family you've got, way too much, and I'm having a hard time not losing my cool with each conversation.

[00:19:00] There's a lot of grateful being tossed around, if you know what I mean, and I'm just getting madder. Okay. This is pretty relatable Marta, what are your thoughts on this?

Marta Isabella Sierra, LMHC: I mean, first just, I'm so sorry for this adoptee, like the, that sounds all like a really rough unfolding, both the long term reunion and then for it to go that way at the end to end up, needing to set those boundaries. And so I just want to say I trust that person really did what they had to do and now how to sit with it.

I think that a being really protective about who we're talking to about this stuff is like a first one and I know that can be hard and maybe there's just like questions that are out of this person's control.

But it's okay to just say I'm just, I can't talk about that anymore today or any more this week, or, maybe we can circle back when I have the energy, but right now I'm fresh out. If you feel like you can't even hold a [00:20:00] boundary in a conversation, I think what jumped out to me like the most was this but she's the only family you've got piece.

Which also just made me think about, I know a barrier to estrangement sometimes for people is I don't want to feel family-less. And so again, like what I know about that then is that this had to have been tremendously painful for the decision to have been this much space and so to hear that, I think there is this like assumption that goes like way past relationship, right? That something is better than nothing, but something that hurts you all the time is not better than nothing. It's just not and loneliness is painful, but we again, I think there's this black and white view. Of like relationship equals connectedness and solitude equals loneliness, but you can be [00:21:00] incredibly lonely in an unhealthy dynamic and that can be more piercing and the loneliness that you might experience in solitude, while painful can sometimes also be extremely peaceful and the reference here to like the attachment trauma, the attachment wound, I'm going to just make an assumption that there was a lot of like push pull, right? And that is so exhausting when we're like, never sure what it's going to be. We're never sure what we're gonna get so to get off of that ride and choose peace, even if, again, that means more grief, more loss, more loneliness definitely can be the right thing and is something that not a lot of people are going to understand.

Haley Radke: It's hard to avoid the topic. So I liked what you said at first about some responses you can give. Do you have [00:22:00] some language that you can say to someone that like maybe, a friend that kind of is constantly on the topic to just be like, this is a no go zone for me if we're going to continue to be in relationship.

Marta Isabella Sierra, LMHC: Yeah, I just again, you could try to get in front of it with the pieces about if I'm going to talk to you about this you have to understand how sensitive this is for me right now and how much I'm hearing about how grateful I should be in this situation. A I just cannot hear that word from you. You'll have to take those feelings somewhere else if you have them, because it's. You can't bring them to me and then if, if one gets thrown at you from here you didn't see coming. I think it's and this is a vulnerable choice, of course, but to say, ouch, right? To say, you can literally just say, ouch. If that's all you can get out, but to be transparent about the impact that was really hard to hear. What you just said, like that [00:23:00] landed really rough on me. And I'm feeling like more unseen and I don't, and then you can maybe set the boundary right there. Maybe we can come back to this later. Maybe not. But that wasn't it for me. That was not what I needed. This is so one of my favorite lines from my favorite series, which I've been referencing that I've been rewatching is. This is so not how I need you to be right now, which I think is just like a really lovely general like reflection of you're not attuning to me.

This is so not what I need from you right now. You're not seeing me. And so like until you can approach this theme or this topic with me from curiosity, I'm not going to be able to engage with you about it.

Haley Radke: Can you make a comment on this feeling that this person has about being [censored] furious, getting madder?

Because I don't want to shame someone for being an [00:24:00] angry adoptee. We all have stages we go through, so I want to hear your thoughts on that.

Marta Isabella Sierra, LMHC: I mean, I love rage. But I mean, there's just so much of it. I think even in the healthiest of reunion, there's so much rage that comes up about even the original like situation, relinquishment, separation.

Sometimes there's multiple separations in there in the first year, two years. And never mind, on top of that, to maybe not have been aware of how I'm hearing that this person was maybe disconnected from their anger, and so it wasn't just like reunion anger and like primal wound anger, but like all mixed in together, plus whatever anger about whatever was going on in the relational dynamic during the reunion.

It sounds as happens when we come out of the fog one tile gets pulled and then the whole thing comes crashing in. Yeah, of course it's big, right? Cause it's really, [00:25:00] it's rage over time. It's not like rage about today. It's really has such depth of, like, how long this anger has been there and been untouched and unseen and unvalidated.

Haley Radke: Okay. Thank you. All right. Our next question is, I hold a lot of anger inside for obvious reasons related to trauma as an adoptee and double trauma of being a transracial adoptee adopted by a white family. The white family has no idea about white privilege. How can I release this anger in a healing way so the anger doesn't eat away at me? My health is affected by this trauma.

Marta Isabella Sierra, LMHC: I'm just going to be a broken record around this. I feel like this is one of my new catchphrases. Don't go through it alone. Don't go through it alone. Check out resources in your area or get connected with other adoptees of color specifically given this question. It seems like the racial identity piece is really important for this person.

And get around other adoptees of color who [00:26:00] are dealing with white privilege and racism and white supremacy culture in their adoptive family systems, carrying the weight of that, whether or not they're estranged, right? There's a heavy weight to it either way and to be in spaces where you can just really talk about that with the safety of knowing that everybody else understands.

I run some POC groups, and it's just such a sacred space to name some of this stuff.

Haley Radke: Can I interject a little question here? Yes. What do you see happens to adoptees of color when they take on the job of I'm going to teach my family that they're racist?

That last line, my health is affected not only by the trauma, but also by the explaining, right? And by the desperation, I think, unless you have willing listeners, like curious adoptive parents that do want to learn[00:27:00] but if you're trying to make somebody care about something that they don't already care about, every time you knock on that door and it doesn't get answered, you're deepening the wound.

And it's getting like more and more infected because you're feeling unseen. Which is so central for us. And so you're really not saying can we talk about racism? You're saying, do you see me? Do I matter to you? Does my experience in this world and the way that it's different from your experience in this world matter to you?

So that's an incredibly painful question to ask over and get a no. And the how to release it in a healthy way again also connecting to people of color who aren't adoptees necessarily, who again are also holding this wound of racialized trauma. I'm [00:28:00] reading one of the books I'm reading right now is My Grandmother's Hands.

It's an incredible book around racialized trauma and healing from it. It's full of exercises that literally help you. It's the answer to this question, right? Move the trauma out of your body because it's physical, this experience of being raised in white supremacy is physical. And again, that's people of color who aren't adoptees and who are, and so it does need movement.

I mean, my other answers were all movement based. Like you have a somatic therapist you're talking to. So rage rooms, if you have one in your area are a great resource.

Haley Radke: Okay. Wait, tell people what that is. If they haven't heard of that, I just learned about these this summer.

Marta Isabella Sierra, LMHC: Oh, cool. Yes. So you go and you get to sign up for a room and usually they have different packages, things you can destroy, whether that's like a bunch of glasses and plates, or they usually have a dummy that you can beat on if you want to.

There's like office set up [00:29:00] sometimes with printers and old TVs and they're all a little bit different, but I think a, it's, really safe. They give you a lot of safety gear versus just going off in your own space one night and that can be really physically unsafe for your body.

So you get like all the good gear and then you also don't have to clean it up after. Which I think is like also an act of the self love, right? Of I'm going to break all this shit and you can deal with it. It's their job, they're consenting, but, then you get to just have that lightness after and I'm personally really passionate about boxing.

I box most days and I really feel the brain chemistry is very different when I don't get there or, martial arts, any kind of movement that feels strong and empowering and also has that impact.

Haley Radke: I didn't know that about you. We learned a new interesting fact about you If you need a little extra [00:30:00] support for holidays we have our surviving the holidays episodes linked in the show notes for you and Lesli Johnson has been on several times where we have talked through some of your holiday themed problems, I guess you would call it.

So you can go all the way back in your feed to episode 14, 126, and 166 for those themed shows. Oh my goodness. I'm so thankful for our amazing Adoptee Therapists Marta Isabella Sierra has been on, Lesli Johnson has been on, Pam Cordano has been on with us, Janet Nordine, so many amazing therapists with tons of wisdom.

And if you ever have a question you want to submit, you can go to adopteeson.com/ask and our questions will always be asked at the next Ask an Adoptee Therapist event. I'd love to have you join us at [00:31:00] adopteeson.com/community, which would be an amazing holiday gift to me if you would join us.

And thank you so much for listening this year. It has been a wonderful 2023. I hope you have a nourishing and restful break if you get one. I hope you find some ways to add joy into your holiday season. And I will see you in 2024. Thanks for listening. Let's talk again soon.

270 Sara Easterly

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/270

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] 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. Sara Easterly is back with us. She's the author of Searching for Mom and the founder of Adoptee Voices. Today you are talking about how Sara became friends with an adoptive mother and a birth mother in order to write a book called Adoption Unfiltered.

It's a hard conversation because when I got asked to endorse this book, I had to say no to a friend who I value and deeply appreciate for her contributions to the adoptee community. So we got together to talk about it. We address the power dynamics when interacting with adoptive parents. We talk about whether or [00:01:00] not adoption really is always going to be around and what adoptive parents need to be doing now that they know that they participated in a terrible system.

Before we get started. I want to tell you I have a puppy! And you might hear little puppy snores in the background. I'm excited, but, you may hear him showing up from time to time. And if you want to see him he's on my Haley Radke Instagram. He'll probably be on the Adoptees On Instagram stories too.

Anyway, he's a very cute little pug named Spencer. And sorry about the snuffles, but He's sleeping right here. I also wanted to invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world.

We wrap up with some recommended resources and as always links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website adopteeson.com. Let's listen in.[00:02:00]

I'm so pleased to welcome back to AdopteeZone, Sara Easterly. Welcome, Sara.

Sara Easterly: Haley, I'm so glad to be back here again.

Haley Radke: I love seeing your face. This is your fourth time on the show, I think.

Sara Easterly: It is. Yeah. Although one was with my Adoptee Voices crew.

Haley Radke: Yes.

We'll link to all of your previous appearances on the show in the show notes for folks. But if they want to go back to 143, that's It's when you really share your full story. And we talk about your memoir, Searching for Mom. And that was in 2020. And we're like reflecting on oh, it's pandemic times.

We're both scattered. And I'm coming to you today with a new puppy, very tired. So also feeling a little bit, it's like, when does Sara get my best? I don't know.[00:03:00]

Sara Easterly: You're at your best all the time, even through all the chaos. Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I believe.

Haley Radke: So we're fellow adoptees, of course, and you have a book that is now out called Adoption Unfiltered.

And two of your co authors have a very different adoption experience than you. Can you talk about that and how you guys came to connect and be friends and do the work you're doing together?

Sara Easterly: Yes, I'm happy to and I appreciate you having me on to talk about it. Just want to say that. Thank you so much. So we met. I met Lori in January of 2020 when I was in Denver for a book event for Searching for Mom and she attended and introduced herself to me and that was lovely. We even took a picture together and, I met lots of people and in. Many of whom [00:04:00] I actually have still have relationships with today, which is fantastic.

Just a nod to in person events and how those things go. And I ended up doing a little bit of writing for Lori on her blog. She often was she and she still does elevating working to elevate adoptive voices. So having adoptees right on her blog and I pitched a couple of things to her and she took them and posted them and.

Haley Radke: And this is Lori Holden, who is an adoptive mother.

Sara Easterly: Thank you for the background. Yes. And and so we, just built an online relationship and it was later in that year, I remember seeing as you and I both know Haley, just there can be some contention in these spaces when you're out there in adoption advocacy work.

And she was taking some heat and I just. Because I had a relationship with her, I reached out and just said, Hey, are you okay? It just, it was, I don't even remember the exact details around it, but it was really like a [00:05:00] very, I felt just harsh reaction, the kind of thing someone wouldn't say in person as happens all the time online.

And we ended up hopping on the phone together and. We were like, why is it so hard to talk to each other and we get keep getting misunderstood and we kept having these realizations in this conversation and I think I just kind of cheekily said we should write a book together and she's okay, and it's one of those things you put out there and we put it out there and then we were like we want a birth parent and who would that be?

And we just kind of have this conversation going for maybe two months. And then we were both at a conference. We didn't even know, like we weren't really close friends still. This was just kind of a, those things you say. And then we were both at an online conference again, because the pandemic and we saw Kelsey presenting.

I saw that Lori was there and I chatted her, Hey, Hey, hi, good to see you. And then we were both in a presentation that Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard was [00:06:00] presenting and Lori and I both chatted each other, the birth mom we want because she was so articulate and she'd been doing work. She'd been looking at adoption in a really great deep way.

That struck us both immediately. And I already knew that Lori had been for many years. She way preceded me to the adoptions at advocacy spaces. And so we just reached out to Kelsey and she did not even know who we were. And she said, yes, I'll write about, basically sure. And then the next, we were meeting weekly and having it took us that was January 2021.

So a year after Lori and I met, and then it took us another few months to figure out what are we going to do together? What would a book look like and start envisioning it? We did some practice writing together. We took some heat for some of the things we, some, some things we wrote.

And so we learned from that of, okay, what are, how does this work with communicating between the three of us as a team, as co [00:07:00] writers, and then so that people can hear what we're trying to say and that we can get points across and hopefully by this unique configuration model, what it's like to work together across aisles to take advantage of power dynamics.

And educate in a different way, so it took another year, basically, like that we started in January 2021, and we weren't even ready for the book to be out there pitched for another year, so it took a full year full calendar year by December, I think was when it, October, maybe October, November, December.

I'm trying to remember exactly. But when we finally we're getting it out and then we got the book contract, we got an agent, we got a book contract, and then I had to write the book and now it's out as of December 1st.

Haley Radke: Out in the world. I only talk to adoptees and occasionally I'll talk with first parents and I have a really hard time engaging with adoptive parents.

[00:08:00] Because most of the engagement I get from adoptive parents is trying to correct me, and I don't appreciate that, and it's hard for me to dialogue with folks who are not able to listen and understand my perspective. Especially because I'm a grown adult and I've been doing this for a long time now and we were just kind of joking before we got on like how many hundreds of adoptees, right?

Both of us have spoken with over the years and so it's I don't think you're going to change my perspective at this point. And what's the point of me trying to change theirs? How has it been navigating these relationships with Lori and Kelsey? Like you guys getting along all the time?

What's going on there? It sounds hard to me.

Sara Easterly: So glad you asked this question. Yeah. I mean, [00:09:00] I am so lucky. I mean, we were the three of us were just talking yesterday because. We really didn't know each other that well, and we, you just don't know, and we feel like we each, I think, feel really lucky for the ways the people that we are, that we, because I've never felt like Lori or Kelsey have ever tried to talk me out of anything or tried to change my mind.

I'm just really lucky. And I, I know exactly the people you're talking about because I've had them in my DMs or a Facebook post or whatever, and or in conversations and it's so activating and I feel really thankful that's not what happens. They're both really good about centering adoptees.

They're both really great about not asking me to do emotional labor for their personal situations. We never really had to say here's my boundary and you can't cross it because they already kind of they already had an awareness about that because they were already [00:10:00] in these spaces. For so long that they've done enough work to know this is how you do and don't interact with an adoptee and a fellow human being, some of the way people interact, it's kind of to the point I was saying earlier when you when I felt bad for Lori, it's like I feel bad for you, Haley for the stuff that people drop in because they wouldn't say that. Maybe some of them would say it to your face. As it's coming out of my mouth. I've had that.

Haley Radke: You know what? I would love that. That would be really interesting. I get to know who I really am if they said it to my face. Yeah. Okay.

Sara Easterly: But, all that being said, I mean, We've had some hard things. It's been hard. Like it's not like super easy.

We've had hard, we've had some challenges to work through.

Haley Radke: Can you tell me one topic that was super challenging and that you guys batted heads on?

Sara Easterly: I'm, I can tell you one topic [00:11:00] in the book and then I can also tell you one just way of working together. Yeah. But the topic that was challenging was on attachment.

And Lori had written a chapter on attachment and of course, I I say, of course, the listener hasn't read my book yet but my whole kind of focus of study since becoming a parent and since looking at my own adoption is all about attachment and looking at attachment and studying attachment dynamics and how we relate to as people, how we love, how we grow, how we trust, how we, how vulnerability affects us and our emotional responses to separation.

And so that is my entire section is about attachment minus my chapters on classism and racism and religion, but everything else is all about attachment. And so Lori had a chapter on attachment and she hadn't read yet my chapters. [00:12:00] And because we had different working styles and so my work style is to wait until the deadlines right in front of me and then with that pressure I will write and Lori we found out has a different style where she was drafting she had I think all the framework for all of her chapters drafted before Kelsey and I had even started. So

Haley Radke: That's unrelatable. I don't understand that either. Sara. This is how I work like you work. There you go.

Sara Easterly: What was so interesting about this whole thing there's so much I could talk about just on that whole thing alone too because you've got the adoptive parent As the adoptive parent already drafted and she's waiting on me for my feedback, but I can't give feedback to her because I need to get my own thoughts out before I'm looking at her content because I don't want that influencing me.

And so there was that whole dynamic at play. And then when I turned my head to look at it, I'm like wait a minute this [00:13:00] doesn't make sense for you to have a chapter on attachment when my entire everything I'm going to write is about attachment. And what you're saying about attachment is kind of different from my view of attachment.

And I see what she was doing, but I have a different perspective. And so that was our first interaction with collaborating in our writing. And I read it and I got to tell you, I didn't react in a way that was like real attachment friendly. I sent this long email and I was like, I disagree with this. I disagree with this. I disagree with this. I had red lines all over. And I said, in fact, I feel so strongly about this. If this is not, if this stays in the book, I can't be a part of it. So it was kind of like a, that adoptee, it was my adoptee. Like I see the exit doors and I'm out, and I also felt really strong.

I also knew I [00:14:00] have a pretty clear boundary on that, like that, that I was like, I see that I have some dealings here. So I sent the email and it was wounding. And for a couple of days, Lori did. I'm feel very comfortable saying this because we talk about this all the time with each other. But Lori did respond in a way that was kind of unkind, she sent a note and it wasn't kind her response.

And I didn't say anything. We let the weekend go. And then we scheduled time. We both came back on Monday and talked because we're both really committed to the project, ultimately. And we came back and we had a phone call and we heard each other. And I think we both saw how our own adoption related dynamics were at play there and we could talk about it.

She's I'm really sorry. I never should have said that to you. And it wasn't like it was, I mean, I'll just say it. I don't think she would have a problem with me saying it. I think she said. Something about. And you're right. [00:15:00] You're the expert on attachment.

Haley Radke: Oh,

Sara Easterly: It wasn't. And those are not her exact words.

Haley Radke: Yeah, but, yeah, actually, I am. I'm like, yeah.

Sara Easterly: No, I'm not, clearly. Yeah, it doesn't come alongside you at all. It was funny. We learned from it. And then we also learned about our working styles and I learned, I need, I can say that now, but at the time, I didn't have the insight to be like, I need to get my stuff out on paper before you do it like you and I'm sorry, I can see how that's really frustrating for you because you've got all this energy and organization and you're it's not fair, but I can't, I got to write my stuff first and then you can respond and go after me.

And so it did light the light of fire for me. Okay. I can't wait until the very last deadline here because we're, I've got colleagues and we have a process we need to go through. And then the other piece of that was real that other big aha for us was like we're writing about coming together and [00:16:00] we were off in our own silos writing and we thought we would just dump it all together and then it was like, Oh, we have to actually do what we're saying to what we're saying we have to do we have to go back and forth.

We have to bounce off of each other's words. This isn't just we all go in our corners and write the book and just. Place it in it's not going to work that way.

Haley Radke: So one of the things that I bumped up against when I was reading wasn't quite the final, I guess. You asked me if I would endorse the book, and this is a long time ago.

And I was like, sure. And so I read a giant chunk of the adoptee section, which was first good job, . And then I was like flipping through towards the end knowing that I'm gonna come up to the adoptive parent section in particular. And I saw some of the chapter [00:17:00] titles and things and I was like, oh my gosh, I don't think I can read this.

It really felt like activated and I was like, I can't finish reading this and I have a rule that I only endorse things that I've fully read and actually want to endorse And I had to email you and tell you I couldn't do it. And I felt so bad, Sara, because, I mean, we've had a really good connection all these years.

And I'm gonna cry just thinking about it, but my dog died. You were one of the people that... you sent me this really thoughtful gift and I still have your card on my wall. I can see it from here, and I know how much work you've done for adoptees and helping them unlock their writing and through your writing classes and all of those things.

Right. I was like, Oh my God, I'm really going to let her down, but I can't do [00:18:00] it. It was so scary to send that email to you.

Sara Easterly: I appreciate you saying that. I knew that. I mean, when I got the email from you, I, that was my first thought is, Oh, I hope I didn't put her. I'm. I just, I felt bad because I was like, Oh, I put I just figured I know you and I know that it would have been a really hard to write.

And I think you even said that in your note, it was a lovely note. And I totally understood. And I want you to know, I feel like I'm going to cry too. I mean, I am so thankful. And so are Kelsey and Lori that you spoke up because we needed, it was a really key moment in the development of this book because they go through so many drafts and you get to a point where you're like, I'm sick of this book. It's done. And there were some things that I know were not really working. And a part of me was like, an editor is going to fix this. Our [00:19:00] editor will get this, like we'll get this down the road and then it didn't happen.

And a part of that, I think it's an important part of the conversation that I'm just going to flag for maybe later is when you're publishing traditionally editors don't always. They're not adoption fluent, so only in here can we do this. So what your feedback was a pure gift. I have goosebumps, truly because we realized that we have this book title and this idealistic vision of unfiltering adoption and not, and bringing out into the open the things that have been swept under the rug and not addressed, or we gloss over and pretend there's no loss and pretend all these things. And that works for adoptees and for birth parents.

We think it does. And then we realized, wait, adoptive parents are the ones who've been in power and we can't have the full unfiltered perspective. If [00:20:00] we want everybody to read this, that's a different book. Like this book, we're trying to reach all the audiences. And so we do need to be like really aware of those power dynamics and how it affects every reader and your honesty meant so much.

And by the way, if it also makes you feel better, you weren't alone because I had a second adoptee come forward and someone I'm very close with and a mentor and said the same thing. So I was like, okay. And in writing groups, they always tell you, if you're in a writing group and you're getting feedback, if you get something critical from one person, you can decide what you're going to do, you do or don't have to listen to that.

But if you get two or more and they're saying the same things. You have to listen. And so you and the other, I was like, I really, I've been in writing groups for 20 some years. So I knew exactly this is what this is. It's this. And I had been hoping it would get fixed and kind of just ready to be done with it.

And it's nope, we're not [00:21:00] done yet. Go back in and we've got to pick this apart and figure out what is palatable. And I know it's not the same thing at all. But we, when you make the metaphor of race, so it is, it's easier to see like we would never expect people of color to listen to all the backstory of why white people are racist, a racist some something hurtful that we did out of our unconscious or conscious racism.

And it's the same dynamic. We were like, okay, that we can't that chapter on baby fever. I think may have been the, that was a title that was in there. It's gone. That chapter is done, but we don't need to understand that adoptive parents can have their spaces for that. And I think. I will say, that was good for me too, because I think just being, I had the luxury of three years in relationship with Lori and Kelsey, and I know their full work and I know the end.

Like for Lori, I know her [00:22:00] character arc that yes, she started with baby fever. And she has modeled a different way and she was trying to that was what she was trying to do with that chapter is model how to get past that and not have that mindset and model for hopefully prospective adoptive parents not to get it get myopic on baby fever and.

It's too uncomfortable. We don't, we don't need, that's not the point of really what we're trying to do in the book is unfilter everything. There's still a place for some filters and you got me.

Haley Radke: I have read it in full the new version that everyone else is going to be able to read and I did get through it and I didn't feel activated.

Of course, I was reading with a different lens this time. With the purpose of us having this conversation, and I really appreciated first of all, we already talked about this, having the [00:23:00] adoptees be the first voice in the book, and your really cool diagram of the adoption constellation with the adoptees at the center.

And it actually looks like I just was at this event. It's like a Canadian adoption event thing. And they call it the galaxy instead of the constellation and I was like, oh yeah, okay.

Sara Easterly: And that,

Haley Radke: Yeah, so I could see both of those in the in the diagram. So when I was reading through the, at the end, I thought, okay, this book still isn't necessarily for someone with the full lens of full family preservation, I was going to say at all costs. It's not that, but there is a line I think that is in your section where it's like adoption is still going to be a thing. [00:24:00] And there's many of us who really fully believe that abolition is possible, and there is a different way to call it permanency, I guess, give kids permanency who are unsafe, and we know that is a very small minority of what we're talking about in adoption with permanent legal guardianship or those kinds of things.

And so coming to it with that and thinking of how Lori does work with adoptive parents and Kelsey is working in the adoption field still, these are things that I thought, oh, okay. That's hard for me. That's hard for me to see adoption still, what do I say, perpetuated, I guess. What are your thoughts on that?

Sara Easterly: Yeah, I mean, I don't, what we say, and I'm sure you read this, but what we say is if you are, [00:25:00] if you, the reader, are adoption is love, it's beautiful, or if you're on the other side of that, adoption has to be abolished, then it probably isn't the book for you. You're right. I mean, it may not be. And that's okay.

I mean, I think every book has its market and its audience and that's okay. We are not pro adoption in the book. It's not like we're adopt. And I want to say Kelsey does tremendous work. Her work in adoption is all advocacy. She just was presenting to the House of Representatives last week, and it's all for stopping harmful practices in private adoption and getting regulation.

So it's not that she's out there. When she's working, the way she's working in adoption are for the good and for the better. Now I will say I have my own mixed feelings, and I think I've had some conversations with one of my interviewees and they lately just, we were just talking, I mean, it's.

I mean, I have now, this is my second book on [00:26:00] adoption and this one's more of a teaching educating book than of course, my own story, but my writing and my essays are all trying to teach. And, then what is the, I think there's a real philosophical question of that I like talking about and thinking about and having in the back of my mind, because I don't want, are we teaching so much that we're now saying, okay, do X, Y, Z, and now you get to go do go forth and do adoption, and that's not my vision.

I really appreciated Lori interviewing two people who decided not to adopt.

Haley Radke: Yes.

Sara Easterly: And why they decided not to adopt. And I have a little bit of a, a part of me is I hope we can get prospective adoptive parents to read this book. And maybe we will talk people out of adopting. And I don't know about you, Haley, but I have had friends who struggled with infertility and they've said, I really appreciate your work because I'm not going to pursue adoption. And I'm like, wow, I thank [00:27:00] you, because, and if you do still, then you got to have your eyes wide open and not think this is just your answer to your prayers, and so I do, it's important to me to tell the truth for that reason. But I, I do, I wear that.

I keep that in mind and it's complicated. It's complicated for me. I still want to teach. There are still adoptees out there. Who need support who are being raised by parents who need to know how to raise and better support those children. And there are birth parents who need to do a better job of stepping up and supporting their kids in different ways.

And I really appreciate the ways that Kelsey models that in her section of recognizing that you didn't, you might have legally signed your rights away, but you are still a parent. And I love that she models that for other birth parents to see that the other piece that I want to say that's complex of the whole thing. And this is another thing I really value about Kelsey is she's [00:28:00] because her adoption took place only seven years ago. Because of the advocacy work she does, she's very well versed in what's happening today in adoption. And I think a lot of us and myself included we are basing what we know on adoption of our experience of whatever era our adoption took place and the landscape is changing.

And I think the when I look at it from the decades, I see how it's kind of the same thing over and over again. When you read The Search for Anna Fisher, it's like, what I thought this was all fresh, but that was in the seventies. And so it's, there's a lot of the same undercurrents, but things are changing.

And so I think it's really important for us to know that and be aware of what, how it's changing and why, and then to be able to kind of fill in the pieces now to apply with what's going on. So that definitely informs. Forms my perspective and all those [00:29:00] things are at play and I, it's adoption, right?

We live with complexity and not ever fully reconciling everything to this nice, tidy. Tidy package. And we just, I think we're kind of, that is a strong suit of adoptees, right? We can live in those things that are both.

Haley Radke: Yes, live in the middle. Okay. I appreciate those things. I want to touch on a couple.

First, let's talk about openness in adoption. I told you I was just at this event and one of the people that I connected with told me they had just done this, finished this research comparing adoptees who experienced closed adoptions with adoptees who've experienced open adoptions. Because now, right, those folks are becoming adults and we've, we can look at their experiences and they've had the decades and comparing their, the psychological outcomes and if there was a difference or benefit.[00:30:00]

Her research lines up with what I've heard anecdotally is that adoptees from open adoptions in whatever capacity openness means from a full connected relationship ongoing with one or both of their biological parents, they still have the same issues that the closed adoptees have. So I think there's this idea that like we're doing all these things so differently and openness is really like the fix and that's the one thing that was missing that I'm gonna have to just roll my eyes at when folks say that because I'm like, okay, but have you talked to adoptees that have experienced that? Because that's not their experience.

Maybe some. Not my friends and I really, I liked how Lori laid out some of the what does openness mean, right? Does that mean a postcard once a year versus [00:31:00] a full relationship and, having your adopted child go for full visit with bio parents without them there and those kinds of things.

Yeah, you have any comments on that piece of it? I mean, this is what we hear, right? It's the fix. Open is the fix.

Sara Easterly: Yeah, we hear it. Yeah. Yeah. And it is so great that we're getting, starting to get research and that those adoptees from that era are growing up. They're adults that can say, wait a minute.

Yeah. And because it wasn't the fixed end all be all. And I mean, it kind of gets to what I was saying earlier too, like just even for adoptive parents to have knowledge of attachment and what happens to us? That's not the end all be all either. Like it's still, there's still going to be pain and hardship and loss.

You cannot get around that. There is loss and in adoption open or not. We can make it easier for the adoptees. And I think I would have loved, I mean, when I read Lori's section on openness, I love [00:32:00] that because I, there's that part of me that was like, Oh, I wish I had grown up with openness, even if it wasn't an open adoption.

Of course, there's, but I would have loved to have openness where I could just talk about adoption and how I felt openly. And, anything I, the other piece of that too, that I wonder about as a thought that I think about often is. What's it going to be like another 20 years from now when today's adoptees are grown up I mean, will they feel like all my parents would do was talk about adoption, because there was so much openness.

I don't know. Either way. I don't think. There's no quick solutions. Adoption can't have a quick solution. That's, I think that's the, that for me was the challenge of writing this book too. I was like, anyone who's not an adoptee reading this, it's going to be feel so hopeless when I finish my section, because I wanted, that is one of my key points.

You can't fix it. [00:33:00] You can't, you can understand better, but you can't fix it. And I think that was the trap that people fell into with open adoption is thinking this is going to make it and it didn't.

Haley Radke: I mean, I was at a conference last year, the year before, and one of the keynote was like one of the pioneers of open adoption and the way she talked about it because she'd been in adoption for years like working in adoption and the way she talked about it. I was like, oh my gosh, you don't have a clue you don't have a clue like and you're a keynote speaker. What is? So I mean that's one of the great things about your book right is you're really saying the hard things like if there's a book about adoption that's all positive and is purporting to have the solution it's [00:34:00] not real.

Those these are the real conversations, like the ones we're having now, that you guys talk about, right? In the book you're like, look, we've been glossing over this for so long. I think I even wrote down the... Oh, yeah. On page 18, there's a quote from you, putting a happy face on adoption doesn't serve anyone, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Sara Easterly: I also I've been really lucky. I've been in, in this happened almost shortly after Kelsey and Lori and I embarked on this book project. I joined Adoption Mosaic's Better Together group, and it's a group with adoptees and adoptive parents and a birth parent. I think we only have one birth parent right now.

And I've been in this group the entire time. And there are a lot of different kinds of adoptions. And these are parent, the adoptive parents are actively parenting right now. And I see, it really helped inform for me a lot of [00:35:00] remembering to see this. That open adoption is not the end all be all because I see the complexity.

I hear when you talk with even the parents, it's really complex for them to, and you put yourself in those shoes. If I was well aware that my birth mother had three children when I was younger, even as an adult in reunion, that can be hard for me. I feel the, even as an adult, I'm 51, I feel there's jealousy or there's hurt that why did she keep them and not me.

And and put that like a child growing up, seeing that, and that's really complicated to navigate for parents and the children alike. Yeah, I mean, I think in some ways, maybe it even adds complexity. Not that I'm saying don't do that either, it's just, everything's complex. There's just, there's no way around the complexity and the loss.

Haley Radke: No, there isn't. Okay. I want to make sure we touch on the Kelsey's section and the [00:36:00] birth parent section. I, one of the stories of one of the moms that she interviewed talks about how She didn't, she wasn't getting into trouble until after she had placed her child. And I think that was that was one of the key moments for me.

I'm like, yeah the trauma of placing your child for adoption. Even if it's in an open adoption, even if you sort of have some idea of what's going to happen to your child, like that can be just full of so much brokenness. And I think that the stereotype is that the birth parent is already having these sorts of issues, which is what led to this unexpected pregnancy.

Can you talk about some of your... insights and things that you know now about the birth parent experience from your [00:37:00] relationship with Kelsey over these last few years.

Sara Easterly: Yeah, I'm trying to think of how I can do this because I don't want to I so badly want to talk and tell you what all the things she said, but I learned so much from her section.

There's so much that heals my own, heals and informs my own relationship and the way I view my own birth mother, because there's understanding. That's the good and the hard of working across. About, across the lines of both, I will say, because you kind of are aware of your loss in a way to when you're like, Oh, look at her, like doing her work and understanding the impact and that can be painful.

So there's the grieving that I have to do in that and the yearning that someday, I might encourage those people in my closest circles to dive deeper [00:38:00] and look a little closer. So there's that, but there's the healing in that too. There's the healing and even knowing that grief is there because I might not have even paid attention to that before.

It brings it to consciousness and then there's just the understanding and the compassion that I can offer. And it's beautiful and it's heartbreaking, it's all those things at the same time, again, the dualities that we have to sit with all those things. But I've learned a lot and I've been able to put myself in Kelsey's position in a lot of ways to just as a young woman and I had an unplanned pregnancy myself and I went a different direction, and I can. I could have gone that could have been my situation. So there's a lot that's relatable of and I think in both cases, there's a lot of Kelsey writes a lot about the religious pressure and the pressure and [00:39:00] her family and the ethics and the feeling she had no say and I think, when you're young and you're vulnerable and you find yourself in a situation, an unplanned pregnancy, then your choices get limited and get distilled and set the course.

And so I, I could see my story turned out differently, but there's so much that I could relate to through Kelsey's story.

Haley Radke: I'm not necessarily expecting an answer. I'm sort of just kind of putting this out as an observation, I guess, is when I see her still a young woman in my mind,

oh, this will be the last time I say it. I turned 40 this year. So seeing that and knowing she's in relationship with her child, and just a couple years down the road she's in a position where she could be a parent, and, it's, oh, that's tough, [00:40:00] that is so tough and this is what leads me to this observation is, I really wish we were working at the upstream problems, versus having these again, this feels like a downstream conversation, where we're like, It's happening. It's happening. It's already happened. We're dealing with this versus setting those mothers up for success in parenting. Even in an unexpected spot where they're in,

Sara Easterly: I agree completely. And so does, so would Kelsey feel safe in saying that. I mean, she's in a community with a lot of birth moms and doing that in lots of different ways.

But it's, yeah, it's, that is where it needs to happen and, Kelsey and I both have been talking a lot and and she writes about it in the book too, about informed consent and what that means and birth parents do not definitely do not get informed consent. They're not told that, they're and Kelsey was [00:41:00] too.

And again, this is where I want. I just want her in the room to say this stuff. But, like we talk a lot about just the complexity of not being told that this will hurt or you'll be running from the hurt for the rest of your life. There will be guilt involved. And your adoptee will be your child will be in pain for potentially the rest of their life. There's, that's not, if that information is not given to them when they're being told they're selfless and doing the right thing and making the right choice and which, she writes about. So it's really important. And that's where I feel strongly that adoptive parents aren't given that, that informed consent either.

This is just the answer to your infertility or your, this is will help you make the family if it's not in, if it's not fertility related, but not told, again, like I said that's why I feel like it's a win when I have people who are coming to me and saying, yeah, I don't think we're going to adopt like knowing how hard this is.

Either hard, it would be a hard journey as parents, or it would be really hard on the child. Whatever their [00:42:00] reason, like that they're able to see this isn't what culture tells us it is.

Haley Radke: Okay. Last thing before we talk about our recommended resources, there is a section towards the end about talking about some of the things that adoptive parents can do.And I think, let's go there, let's go there. You've mentioned several times power dynamics in our conversation and, well, not me, a friend got into it with an adoptive parent during November and was asking them. What are some of the things you're doing to help adoptees? And their answer was highlighting adoptee voices and re sharing their stories and this is a conversation on Instagram, where they all are.[00:43:00]

And so my friend and I, we're like rolling our eyes at this thing, okay, that's the least you could do, the very least. And so what I see concrete things adoptive parents should be doing is like the bare minimum, right? Advocating for original birth certificate access. Advocating for mental health supports for adoptees.

Like, where's your money going now? Do you have thoughts on that? And what do you want to challenge adoptive parents to be doing versus just resharing our Instagram stories?

Sara Easterly: Yeah, or building platforms, just building their own platform.

Haley Radke: Yes, and making money off how to braid their black child's hair. No, thank you.

Sara Easterly: Yeah, I know. I like, there's a part of me that wants to start naming names and taking people down right now.

Haley Radke: Our listeners know, they know. They know.

Sara Easterly: We know. Yeah, we know. We all [00:44:00] sometimes I'm like, why do I keep them in my feed? Just to like. But it's my fuel.

Haley Radke: Oh, no, I just block them.

Sara Easterly: I keep a few in there. I really do. I keep them in there for my fuel. What? Okay, now I got all fired up, Haley. What?

Haley Radke: Okay, boss the APs.

Sara Easterly: Yeah, okay. I do. I got a little nervous. There was one, one point in, I think you're talking about chapter 21 on supporting adoptee maturation. So I think it's okay. I'm not quizzing you, but I think that's the chapter. And in that chapter I did feel like I was kind of saying, here's what you have to do, make space for us to grieve. There's kind of the practical in terms of supporting adoptees today of. But then I also I have under one of those points was, and I snuck a whole bunch of things in, but, assuming a leadership role and I have a lot of stuff under leadership, but one of my sub points under that is don't make everything [00:45:00] about you and, I wrote and I was like, again, sometimes as I'm writing this stuff, I'm like, as it is when you're in on Instagram and you feel so brave when you're writing and then I'm like, okay, I hope they can handle this because I'm leaving it in, don't take our instincts personally, don't make us responsible for your emotions, don't expect the adoptee to take care of your emotional needs. Even if they try to do it, don't take advantage, don't overshare our stories. And then overshadow, don't, and don't even blast your story 'cause it overshadows our stories. So

Haley Radke: You have that memorized. Sara, that was

Sara Easterly: I do it's important to me .

Yeah. So there, that's my bossing . There's probably more.

Haley Radke: Oh, that's good.

Sara Easterly: Yeah. And don't, yeah, I think I've written about this too don't go on social media. I mean, come on. Oh, it's so painful. It's so painful. And then even saying my child gave the [00:46:00] permission, they can't give permission.

They cannot do that right now. Their children, understand it could take 40 years. I'm raising my hand. That's how long it took me to realize the little kind of nodding permission I gave was not permission.

Haley Radke: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I really appreciated that you even put you say this overtly in the book that the adoptees that you talk to for your section are all a bit older and have processed their adoption thoughts.

I thought I might bring this up earlier, but I'll say it now. I commented on this viral post of this baby being placed with their new adoptive parents. And this was like, had to be at least a month ago, maybe more, maybe six weeks. And I'm still getting replies to me about how stupid I am because my comment was like, you're looking at this as this [00:47:00] beautiful moment, but this is a really traumatic event for the child, right?

This means they're losing their connection with their biological family. And so I'm just like, okay. And the ones that really, I feel are the adoptees commenting and saying, Oh, what are you talking about? What do you know? Because I didn't identify myself as an adoptee in the comment. I love that I'm adopted. This is the happiest moment of this baby's life. And I was like, Oh. Okay. I don't think you've examined fully the impact adoption has had on you. And that's fine. That's how nice for you. But I appreciate that you really did talk to folks who have. And I recognize some of the names, some of the people I know, some have been on the show before.

And so that was really beautiful. So I really loved your section on adoptees. [00:48:00] I learned so much from Kelsey. And I'm going to say, who is this book for, Sara, who is this book for? Will our listeners benefit from reading this? I think so. I do. I think so. I think there's things that you point out to us as adoptees that could help us in our healing journey.

Some things that may be unexamined for us. Who do you want to read this book when you're talking to, our listeners here on Adoptees On?

Sara Easterly: Okay you mentioned the adoption constellation visual that I made and I want anybody who sees themself in that visual of the constellation to read the book.

I mean, that is ultimately our audience when we were writing the book and again. Pay back to you when we, when you came back and said, Oh, I can't read that 3rd question. We really went back and said, okay, let's, well, who are we writing for? [00:49:00] We had to get the clarity and what we came to is that each of us are writing to our own people.

Me to adoptees, Kelsey to birth parents, and Lori to adoptive parents, and we're writing to, we're writing to help, like for me, I was driven by feeling like I was crazy for the first 40 years of my life, on some level, because I didn't understand all the different ways that adoption affected me, and then becoming a parent so I guess it wasn't quite 40, I exaggerated, but, becoming a parent, In my 30s made me start realizing I just started a waking up and realizing, okay, and then I got into, I started studying attachment and I'm like.

Oh, my God, all the ways I was responding were normal ways humans respond in the face of separation. And I pretty strongly believe there isn't much separation greater than adoption. So because we face it for our entire lives, it's constant in so many different ways which I write about in the book. So I [00:50:00] wanted to explain us to us, and I wanted to explain us to the people who are constantly not getting us. And getting it wrong it the timing was perfect again sometimes triggers are great I went to a conference a retreat and I had I was. I was at an author table with an author who had a book about it was totally pathologizing. She was a foster parent and adoptive parent, both. And she's writes books about these raising traumatized children.

And I'm like, Oh my gosh, the whole thing was pathologizing. And I'm like, I get, I'm tired of that. But it was my fuel. It was my fuel. Okay, I'm explaining us to us and I'm explaining us to that author and any person who read that author's book and all the other people who pathologize us. We don't have reactive attachment disorder. We have a human brain that responds to separation in a certain way. That's [00:51:00] what we do. and we aren't crazy, we're doing what our brains do and we've got too much separation to bear. And so that for me was my driving fact factor behind the book for the audience and Kelsey the same way. Birth parents, sometimes there's, I think it's like for adoptees, it can be so painful to look.

I, as you experienced, it's really hard when you get, when those adoptees are at that point in their journey, because, we're sitting in a different place now, you're in your forties, I'm in my fifties and I keep talking about that too. These milestones are big because you have new perspective, and you don't want to take away where they're at right now. It's part of the journey that we've all been on. And and you don't want to shut them down. You don't want to tell them, you don't want to tell them how their journey is going to unfold. That's not right either. But yeah, it's hard.

And I think that happens for birth parents too, was where I was going with that. Is I think that happens to it a different. It may not be quite by a year, but it happens for birth parents as well. And so that was a, Kelsey has talked about wanting to explain [00:52:00] that. And I think for Kelsey, she said this a lot is wanting to show the full well rounded three dimensional aspect of birth parents to others too.

She is not only a birth parent. She's a lot of. A lot of roles and a lot of she's a human being. She writes a lot and speaks, says that a lot. And for Lori too, I think there's the less about, because of that whole filtering and unfiltering exercise we went through.

But I think for her, it's, she said sometimes adoptive parents don't know that they're doing these things. And she also wanted to help kind of show, show that they're doing that. How to model thinking beyond certain stereotypes, how to model looking at your own situation only from your angle and then, of course, we hope that people are making policies and looking at what's best for the child will read this and come to some of those same conclusions of, Whoa, this goes deeper than we ever knew.

Haley Radke: I want to link to a video, you all have a podcast on, it's available on [00:53:00] YouTube and there's a video that released pretty recently. If you're listening when this episode is released it's called Adoption Constellation Roundtable: What is Hard About Adoption? And I really appreciated the comments from everyone.

I think it's a really great discussion that helps add to the conversation you and I've had today. What did you want to recommend to us Sara?

Sara Easterly: It's so hard when that question is so hard. It's so hard. I have so much I want to recommend.

Haley Radke: Your first time. You practically tried to. Recommend my show. I was like, but you're on it. They're already listening.

Sara Easterly: They're here. I remember struggling with this on that one. And the other one I did with Donna. I have two. Can I say two or is that cheating?

Haley Radke: Okay.

Sara Easterly: Okay, so I, the one I said in my, when [00:54:00] I emailed with you, I said Adoptee Voices E-Zine. But then it felt so self promoting, but it's not because it's other adoptees. It's the adoptee writers in my writing group. And I dedicated the book to my portion. Each of the three authors of adoption and filtered had a dedication and mine is dedicated to Adoptee Voices, writers that their stories matter and their voices matter. So, and that's why the E-Zine is so near and dear to my heart.

And I like to lift it up and point people to read it whenever they can, where I'm working on the next issue right now. We've had 11 issues and just some tremendous writing of adoptees, but then the other thing I wanted to highlight is the Adoptee Consciousness Model from Susan Branco and JeaRan Kim and others.

If you're not familiar with it, it's just such a, I'm really loving it. And I just keep returning to it. And I just I just love that it's a spiral and it's not, I just like the metaphor in so many ways. And I think, it kind of speaks to how, this work in [00:55:00] adoption for all of us, we are all building and growing and getting it better and better.

And the more we all, it, all of it adds value. And I like the evolution of kind of going from out of the fog, which I still use sometimes, but I also like the evolution of speaking to adopted consciousness. So much richness there.

Haley Radke: Yes. JeaRan Kim was on the show talking about that model in 235 if people want to hear her elucidate on it and perfect timing. The, I don't know if you heard that jingling. That is probably the first public jingling of my new puppy.

My editor is going to be so happy about all the little puppy noises, but is what it is. Okay. I wanted to say it out loud because you grieved with me for my old puppy and now you get to you too see my new puppy [00:56:00] in a minute when we're

done.

Sara Easterly: Yeah, you have to, I have to have a viewing.

Haley Radke: Yes. Okay, let's do it right now.

And then you've got to tell people where we can find your book, books, and where we can connect with you online.

Sara Easterly: Okay. Yeah. If I mean, I might, my heart might melt here. I mean, you have no brain capacity after that. Oh, what a beauty. Oh, I love the bow tie. Oh, big yawn.

Haley Radke: If you want to see Spencer, you can go to my personal Instagram. Videos and pictures of him. Okay, Sara.

Sara Easterly: That's a sad to be set up. I just want to reach through and cuddle him. Yeah, he's on Haley's shoulder here and it's the sweetest thing ever. Oh, he's going back to sleep. I love it. I've got a puppy right now too, Haley, and he's at the naughty stage. He's a teenager now, six [00:57:00] months.

Haley Radke: There's another naughty stage. . Great

Sara Easterly: Let's not talk about that. Yeah. Okay. .

Yeah. So to find a book probably the best place to go is adoptionunfiltered.com. That links to our podcast, that links to information about the book. And it's available every anywhere. Bookshop.org, Amazon, you can request it through the library, anything. So it's published by Roman and Littlefield.

Haley Radke: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Sara.

Sara Easterly: Thank you, Haley. I appreciate being back and I loved having this hard conversation like talking. I'm glad we could do this.

Haley Radke: We did it.

I so appreciate when friends can have different perspectives on things and we can still get along and do work together. And I [00:58:00] mean, Sara and I both kind of talked about this. In email and sort of off recording, but I really don't think we have very different perspectives on adoption. I think we both really highly value adoptee voices and I mean, she started a whole thing to help adoptees storytell and write their thoughts and get things onto paper in order to elevate adoptee voices, which I think is amazing, incredible.

I know so many people that have gone through. One or more of their writing cohort groups, and I think it's amazing. But the value I see in folks like Sara, who can work with adoptive parents and hopefully coach and lead them to a better understanding of adoptees is enormous because [00:59:00] I don't want to do that, it's a lot of you don't want to do that either and so I feel so grateful for someone like Sara who has the patience and the compassion and the patience and the patience to deal with some of those ongoing shenanigans. I really appreciate that. And I think these conversations are really good. And I also, they show me some of the areas I still need to grow in for sure. I love hearing from birth parents. Because it helps me gain a better understanding of my mother and why she won't have contact with me and where can you get that? Where else can you get that? And I've had so many mothers sit with me and be very generous with their stories. And I hope we can do the [01:00:00] same for them. And I always like to say adoptive parents are welcome to eavesdrop here. So listen, but we won't be taking questions. Thank you. Anyway, if you were like worried that all of a sudden I'm going to start interviewing adoptive parents on the show, no, don't worry about that. Adoptees On. Adoptees only. We're good with that.

I want to thank my Patreon supporters for making this show possible. When you are a patreon supporter you are paying for the costs of Adoptees On to be produced Sara has been a patreon supporter and I really appreciate everyone who has donated in some fashion towards the production cost of the show and if you join patreon we have levels where we have online events monthly with book clubs and Ask an Adoptee Therapist events.

[01:01:00] And there are so many good things about being in our community together. It's just really special for me. And we have scholarships available if you would like to come. You can go to adopteeson.com/scholarship and find out how to apply there. We would love to have you. Thank you so much for listening.

Let's talk again next Friday.

269 Dr. Liz DeBetta

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/269

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You're listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. Today, we welcome back Dr. Liz DeBetta, author of Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal, Migrating Toward Wholeness. Liz shares some reunion updates with us, including some very sad news about her sister.

We discuss what led her to choose to remain child free. And of course, we talk about how writing, rewriting, and examining the stories that have been placed upon us can help reconnect us to ourselves. Today's episode has mentions of sudden death, abuse, and abortion. [00:01:00] Please take care in listening. 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 are on the website, adopteeson. com. Let's listen in. I'm so pleased to welcome back to Adoptees On, Dr. Liz DeBetta. Welcome, Liz.

Dr. Liz DeBetta: Hi, Haley. I'm so excited to be here.

Haley Radke: You're a third timer. Did you know that?

Dr. Liz DeBetta: I did. I'm, and I'm like, ah, yay, three times. I'm so excited. It's so great. It's so great to continue our conversations and sort of track over the years, right? The changes and the shifts and the growth and the exciting things that are ongoing and continuing.

Haley Radke: I know, right? Okay, so Episode 118, you share a lot of [00:02:00] your story, and at that time, you're working on your Ph.D. Oh, that was in 2019. Then we go to Episode 187, and that's from 2021. And you are leading some adoptees through writing and healing. And now we're recording in 2023, and it's a book.

So exciting, and we're going to get to that. But first, I'm curious if you can update us a little bit on your story. One of the things we talked about was you were meeting for the first time your sister when you and I met in person in D. C. a number of years ago, and you were just a couple years into reunion with your mother, and what's been happening with that for you in the last few years?

Dr. Liz DeBetta: Yeah, so it's actually a little sad because my sister Pam died suddenly last summer. Oh no. Yeah. I'm so [00:03:00] sorry. Thank you. And in August of 2022, I got a phone call from Mary, my first mom and, or voicemail, I should say. It had come in late at night and I woke up in the morning and was puttering around and doing whatever and my, Jeremy my partner was out in the yard doing some yard stuff and I listened to this voicemail and I'm like, and she was like, I'm sorry, I have to leave this voicemail for you, but I'm really, I just heard that Pam died and I don't know what's going on and I'm trying to find out, but I wanted you to know and it was such a visceral response that happened to me in that moment, like I literally felt in my body the pain of that loss and it was the first time that I haven't experienced losing someone who was actually [00:04:00] biologically connected to me and loss is hard in general, like I think a lot of adoptees can relate to that, right?

But, especially death, like death for me has always been a really hard thing to, to grapple with and to deal with and to accept. So this hit me pretty hard and it was unexpected. She's, she was less than two years younger than me. So you know, and we were establishing a relationship and we were looking forward to spending more time together and our lives were pretty parallel.

We both. Chose not to have children and, had pretty good careers going and were, pet people and I was really excited to try to, get her to come visit now that I was living a little bit closer to the East Coast and spend and try to spend more like time and do maybe sister weekends.

And so that's one of the, hard parts of this adoption journey is the continued [00:05:00] losses. And there's no, it's not easy. And then, a couple of months later, this is also related to reunion it was really crazy, and I'm still not clear 100 percent what happened with her husband, who was withholding a lot of information from my first mom and from, Pam's siblings, my other, my half brothers, and her dad.

It was like, a lot of trying to solve a mystery, trying to get answers and like trying to figure out who knew what and I was like on the other end, just trying to hold space for our mom for my first mom in this terrible loss and then like I kept thinking like now she's, now she's lost two daughters, right?

I mean she has me back in a sense, but like we're still slowly [00:06:00] developing a relationship I think as anyone who has been in reunion with first parents fully into adulthood. It's hard to establish a relationship when you've missed the first 40 years of life together. And so eventually there was some kind of rift and they weren't allowed to go to the memorial that her husband planned.

So they ended up planning a separate one in New Jersey in October of last year. And I felt like really strongly that I needed to be there. And I decided that I was going to go and Jeremy was like, do you want me to go with you? And I was like, no, I think I need to do this by myself, which I don't know if that was the best idea, but it's the decision that I made.

It was the thing that I felt like I needed to do. And I also didn't know what exactly what I was walking into [00:07:00] because I had never. Spent time, we had spent time with Mary, in restaurants and like public places and had lunches and things, but I had never been to her home. I had never met my other brothers.

I had never met any of the extended biological family and I was really concerned. I was like, I don't know what I'm going to walk into and like I need to be able to manage myself and not take, not have to be concerned about it. taking care of Jeremy in that situation. Not that he needs taken care of, but you know, like just the awareness of also being attuned to another person's nervous system because, we all have our family traumas and he's got his own stuff and so I just, I went to this thing and I think, people in adoptee land will understand the crazy thing that happened, which was like, I ended up meeting all of, I met [00:08:00] my two half brothers and I met some cousins and some aunts and uncles who are Mary's siblings and everybody knew who I was and you know so it wasn't like weird in that way because they were she was like oh this is my daughter Liz and I was like okay hi while we're also there to grieve the loss of Pam so it was this really charged and fraught and strange dynamic and then Mary's ex husband, who's the father of my half siblings, and who was her boyfriend at the time that she went to the adoption agency, and is the one that signed the papers with her.

And is the one whose information is on my non identifying information, but it's not actually my biological father was there and sat down with me while I was trying to eat my lunch and [00:09:00] unloaded all this stuff about we did the right thing. We were trying to do the best thing that we could and you turned out okay, right?

And I'm just like, Oh God, I don't even know what to do with this. And I, I'm telling you this right now, a little over a year later, and I think I still haven't quite fully processed that interaction. And I just in that moment was like, okay, I'm just going to keep eating my lunch. I'm going to listen.

I'm not going to offer too much because this man is also grieving the loss of a child. And for whatever reason, he thinks that he needs to make himself feel better by sharing this with me. I'm just gonna let that be but it was really bizarre and like I said, I'm still not a hundred percent sure that I've really processed that conversation and so like maybe I'll write about it at some point

Haley Radke: Oh [00:10:00] my goodness. That is a lot Liz. I'm so sorry I think it'll be very relatable for many of us and There's this thing in grieving where you're in community with other people that again in reunion you lose because you didn't get the chance to know her that and you're probably not connected with her friend group and all of these external people that we would be like communally grieving with in whatever way that is.

Talking on the phone with them or commenting on Instagram about, oh these memories we had and there's this other part of her life that you don't have access to and now you won't. Like it's just this multiple layers of loss.

Dr. Liz DeBetta: Yeah.

Haley Radke: I also think, not that you need my stamp of approval on anything, but like in the moment, it takes a great strength to [00:11:00] not respond to something so hurtful.

And I don't know I probably wouldn't have said anything either. It's like not the moment to be like actually thanks for separating me from my mother for my entire life. Thanks for that. It's just not the place and it's just going to make things worse. But yeah. Oh, you're going to write a poem about that?

Dr. Liz DeBetta: Probably. Yeah. I mean, as I said, I'll probably, I probably will write about it. There's always things to write about. There's always things to, to process through the writing and it's just, they come up when they come up and yeah, as far as all the things I could have said, and maybe that's the prompt, right?

All the things I could have said, and I'm going to write that down right now because I said it and I don't want to forget it.

Haley Radke: Oh, that's good. All the things we could have said. And I think there's probably a lot of those moments that folks can think about right now that they've had where [00:12:00] someone has said something to you and you're sort of in shock so you don't even know how to respond to them because it's so out of pocket and interesting.

That's good. You gave us a prompt already.

Dr. Liz DeBetta: Yeah, but yeah, the other part of that is that like one of the big things is that like she wanted to keep me and that is has been like the biggest part of the conversation that she and I have had over the years and the way that like she still feels so guilty because, every time we talk she apologizes, and sometimes it's related to, adoption stuff if that's coming up in the conversation, but often it's just like a continual apology for something.

Oh, I'm sorry. I haven't been in touch. I'm sorry. I'm so forgetful. I'm sorry this and it's and that's that's just like what I have come to know as her continued sense of guilt around the, being forced to [00:13:00] make this choice. by this man who refused to raise another man's child, which is the other part of it.

And so those are things like in that moment, could I have said thanks for being an a hole and refusing to raise a child that wasn't your own and making. No, but what does that look if in, at later this later point now a year later where I have some distance from it to be able to do that writing and to reframe that conversation in a useful way, in a healing way, in a way that allows me to say the things.

Haley Radke: Has your connection with your first mother changed at all in the last year? Do you feel like anything shifted? When I understand when a parent loses a child we're not supposed to outlive our children it really can be so hugely impactful on them. And she was the only other daughter, right?

Dr. Liz DeBetta: [00:14:00] Yeah. I mean, I will say that our communication has been less frequent and just, yeah, just more, more sporadic in general and, I'm not a hundred percent sure what's, what exactly is going on. I know that she had some other changes. after Pam's memorial and after the holidays last year in terms of one of my other half brothers who had been living with her, who she finally had to say okay, you have to get out.

And so there's the, just having to push an adult child out and deal with that. And realize that the need to not enable an adult child who is not making excellent choices, let's say, and I don't know the full depth [00:15:00] and breadth of that story, but my sense is that there's some ongoing stress there and then her own grief and probably not wanting to burden me overly much with, that, and then of course the other side of it is that, in my own family, my own adoptive family, like there's a ton of stuff that's really stressful going on that I can, I, have and can talk to her about, but also that I feel this can't be the only thing.

Like I can't. Continually burden her with that because then that's like, how does that make her feel right? Even though it's this both and, right? It's the both and of adopted of adoption of being adopted is that we can both have had really good, loving supportive for the most part experiences in our adoptive families and also have challenges in adulthood with those [00:16:00] families and the ways that we are choosing to live our adult lives or the stressors of in my case, a younger sibling who is disabled and his care as he ages, as we age as our parents age, and then the stressor of another slightly older adopted sibling who, has caused a big rift in, in our family and me being over here orbiting around on the outside with all of this knowledge and all of this experience sort of watching that kind of semi train wreck

Haley Radke: I think any time we're critical of our adoptive families it might feel like to our birth parents that this is just one extra thing like, oh, [00:17:00] so you gave me up and I got stuck with this issue.

So that's also your fault, right? I think that's what probably lands with them. So I absolutely understand that level of keeping it separate, keeping them protected and for better or worse, it's our debt to our detriment, right? Okay. Yeah, they want to be supportive if you're in a good relationship and they want to be supportive and helpful and you want to share the real, but, oh, it hurts.

Dr. Liz DeBetta: Yeah. And it's not, and it's not that I feel that I can't because I do, I have had some really great open and honest conversations with Mary over the years but at this point, it's also like sometimes I don't have the energy for that, right? I don't, I just don't have the spoons to navigate, to sort of balance those relationships in ways that allow me to fully engage.[00:18:00]

Because I have to protect my own peace, cause I've spent so much of my life not protecting my own peace and not having boundaries for myself that , at this stage of my life, I'm really fierce about my boundaries. And I'm really fierce about protecting myself and my best interests and that of my family.

And but it is painful. It is painful to sometimes have to disengage or, to not be allowed to engage in some cases.

Haley Radke: You shared before that you and Pam both had decided to be child free. Can you talk a little bit about how you came to that decision? Did adoption play any part in that for you?

Dr. Liz DeBetta: Yeah, so I'm so glad you asked me about this because this is such a big part of the conversation [00:19:00] that we don't often have in society in general. And, particularly what in relation to adoption and like the culture of adoption and the culture of family and family building. Particularly in the West, in North America, the sort of privileging like the white heteronormative nuclear family structure, like the sort of cisheteropatriarchy of that.

And I can break that down if we need to, but, just this privileging of white heterosexual couples and having children at any cost and feeling like that's like your main goal in life. And so for me, I spent many years really wanting to have a family, really thinking that was the thing that I needed and wanted, because that's what I saw in my family.

That's what I saw all of the women I [00:20:00] knew do, like all of my aunts and cousins and women, other women that I knew in my life growing up in New York City. They had all got, they all grew up, they got married, they had babies. That's just what you did. And I got married for the first time in 2006 and, assumed at some point that my first husband and I would think about having a family and then he was against it for the first couple of years and then things went from bad to worse and I realized I was in an abusive situation and so I had to get myself out of that and really grateful now in retrospect that he kept making excuses not to have children.

Because then I would have been stuck with him, you know I mean like he's not a person that is safe [00:21:00] or that I would have liked to have to be tied to in any way even for the sake of children I thank the universe there and then I spent the next few years, post divorce really figuring out, re figuring out a lot of who I was and what I was doing with my life and getting back to some things that were important to me.

And I ended up beating myself up during those years. I was, sort of, I was in my, early to mid thirties. And my younger cousins were getting married and having babies and they were, and I was like mad. I was, I got really angry at times like that I was like failing at life that I was like failing at whatever the thing was I was supposed to do.

And then when I was 35 or maybe 35 or 36. I [00:22:00] had started dating this person and about six months into our relationship, birth control failed and I got accidentally pregnant and I freaked out. I was like, what? This is not, I can't do this this is not a thing that I want I didn't even know for, I mean, let's just have the conversation so many women, I didn't even know until I was, like, at least eight weeks, you know what I mean?

I had no idea. And then I was like, oh, shit. Okay. I got to do something and I have to figure this out. And I chose to have an abortion. And that was a whole other sort of huge hoop to jump through hill to climb, whatever metaphor you want to put on that. Even in New York City, as a, pretty privileged white person, I still had a real difficult time accessing appropriate [00:23:00] care.

In fact, I was sent to a women's clinic at one of the main hospitals, and they made me go to all of these like classes before they would even let me see a doctor. It was, and like now I think about it now all of these years later, and there was this huge assumption made that obviously, I wanted that child.

Obviously, I was going to go through with that pregnancy. And so go to all the classes, check off all of our boxes, and then we'll let you see a provider. And in those interactions, nobody ever asked me what I needed or what I wanted. It was always about the unborn clump of cells that was growing.

And then when I finally got an appointment with the doctor, I said, what do you recommend for patients who don't want to continue with pregnancy? And the physician [00:24:00] assistant who was in the room doing the preliminary part of the examination looked at me like I had six heads and was like I'm going to have to ask the doctor like nobody had ever asked them this question.

It was bizarre. And then like they required, I'm going to say they forced me to have a sonogram and look at it as if that was going to change my mind. And then like really reluctantly gave me this like small piece of paper with four or five suggested providers for termination. And when I started making those phone calls, four of them were no longer in practice.

And one of them was not taking patients. And so I had to go through, fortunately my best friend is a nurse practitioner and I called her up and I was like Kathleen, I need help because this is what's happening to me. And she was like, holy, okay, [00:25:00] let me figure this out for you. And so at the time, like that was a hard decision for me to make because I had been raised Catholic and I had all of this, external guilt.

About just the, cultural narrative about abortion and how it was like a terrible thing and like that. I was making a terrible choice, but a couple of years later, I was in a new relationship, a very stable, loving relationship. The one that I'm currently in. Will be in for forever.

And that's what really, having a partner who was willing to have hard conversations with me is really the thing that allowed me to start thinking about what I wanted. And so shortly after we moved to Utah, Jeremy came to me and he was like, I know that we've talked about having kids [00:26:00] and I know that this is something that's important to you, but I'm really thinking, rethinking my own feelings about it. And I really think I don't want to have kids. And I was like, okay, I'll have to like, think, I have to think about this. Like I had to take that in and let that sit. And there was a little bit of a grief process because I was like, oh, like this is a thing that I have held on so tightly to for my whole life that like, I just thought I was going to do it.

And then, after he said that to me and I, spent some days like In my own head, thinking about it and like thinking about what does life look like alternatively? What is our life like? What is our life like now? What do we want our life to look like?

Why, like why do I even, yeah, why do I even have to have kids? Do I even want to have kids? And it like was the first time somebody had asked me. Or allowed me to ask myself what I wanted and then I realized no, actually this is maybe not what I want and I have just been taking the [00:27:00] swallowing the social construction of here's the, like the external directive of here's the thing that you're supposed to want. Here's the thing that you're supposed to do. So just do it and don't question it. We don't often question a lot of these things. And that's when we end up in situations that are not necessarily good because we don't ask the questions before making the decisions. And I think a lot of people do a lot of these things without thinking, people get married without thinking about like the bigger picture and the longer term. Outcomes, shall we say. And the same thing, sometimes people have kids and don't really think about that either, right?

Haley Radke: That might be some of us listening. We're the outcome of those things.

Dr. Liz DeBetta: Yeah. Yeah. And so it's just so and then to the other thing that I have come to realize is that I really couldn't imagine myself being pregnant and giving birth because I, at still very much at that point, felt like I had not [00:28:00] been born, like I had, I did not know, I didn't have any information about who my first mother was in my biological family. And so I still felt very disconnected. I was like, I can't even imagine like this process. But I think the big thing was like really taking a step back and being given permission to ask myself what I wanted because I have a really, loving and supportive person in my life who like as I said is willing to have really hard conversations and I you know, I was like, oh, okay.

No, actually this is not what I want and I remember saying that to my mom and to my best friend And after the fact, and they kept saying, but are you sure, but are you sure? And I kept saying, do you think that if I really wanted to have children, that I would have chosen to have an abortion a couple of years ago, I would have had that baby.

Plenty of people do. [00:29:00] Plenty of people figure out how to make it work. If I really, in my heart of hearts, wanted that. Yeah, so that's, I think, yes, I think, yes it's a bit tied to being adopted and not having that sense of biological continuity and that fear of and I knew too, actually, that I didn't, I was not willing to have a child and not raise it as my own.

And then, so I didn't want to be in a situation where I had to repeat that pattern and potentially lose a child to adoption because I couldn't, or, so it was like. Not an option. And I think I also too was like really, had really deeply internalized the message that my, my entrance narrative told me, which was that in order to have children, you had to be married.

And I wasn't married at the time. I was in a relationship with a person I didn't necessarily trust. It was a new, fairly new relationship. And I was like, I'm not sure about this person. I'm not sure where this [00:30:00] relationship might go. And do I really want to do this by myself? No, so it's like lots of layers of all of that, too.

Haley Radke: I really appreciate you talking about this. It definitely isn't something that people share freely about, and I know there's lots of listeners who are child free by choice and want to be having this conversation and want to feel seen in this conversation and so thank you. You said this word that is activated for me. So you, your new book is called Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal Migrating Toward Wholeness and you used entrance narrative. And those are some notes I have from the book entrance narrative, concealed narrative. So can we shift and talk about that? Because a lot of light bulb moments in [00:31:00] conversations I've had with you are looking back at our stories we've been given as little ones when we're first adopted and told our adoptee story. And this is your mommy love you so much she gave you up and now you're here and all those kinds of things. And looking at healing in adulthood, and what is the true narrative?

So can you explain what entrance narrative is and the concealed narrative and any other narratives I'm missing from my notes?

Dr. Liz DeBetta: Yeah so the entrance narrative is the story that's typically told to us adoptees about Why we were adopted how we fit into our adoptive families. Often it includes information that our adoptive parents might have been told by the social worker. In many cases, lots of these stories turn out to be [00:32:00] fictionalized to a degree. And so they actually fall into the category of what Dr. Amanda Baden, who is a friend of mine, and also an adoptee and researches adoption. What she calls micro fictions. These micro fictions are these things that, these little stories, these little fictional narratives that have to be told to make up for the things that we don't know in adoption.

And so that's entrance narrative. And if you think about concealed narratives, like the concealed narratives, I think are the things that are hidden in something like the entrance narrative. So for example, I was just talking about how in my entrance narrative, I was told that so my entrance now I'll tell you the entrance narrative and then I'll pick it apart and sort of give you the what the concealed narrative there is and what that might mean.

I was told that my birth parents were young and they [00:33:00] weren't sure they were going to get married and but they knew that if they were going to have kids and raise kids that they wanted to be married and that they wanted me to go to a Catholic family and to people with college degrees And so that's pretty much the story I've been told my whole life about why I was given up for adoption, why I ended up in my family, right? Because my parents both have college degrees and happen to be Catholic. And so the concealed narrative there becomes this message that in order to have and raise children, you should be married. And that it's better to have two parents than one. Also concealed in that is the idea that sex before marriage is shameful in some way. Because if you have sex before you're married, then you aren't allowed to parent. And you, and it's better off if you give that baby to somebody who has done the right thing by getting [00:34:00] married.

And then the less harmful concealed narrative there is that education is important, like it's important to have a college degree or that like somehow, but also then the flip side of that is that somehow by virtue of the fact that my parents had college degrees that they were somehow better. They were somehow better than the, than these young people, these young irresponsible people. And that's the other, sort of concealed thing there is like the implication that they were young and irresponsible and therefore, it was better to give me to somebody who was had a home, and actually that is something that shows up in my one woman show on mother.

There's a whole section about that, there's a whole poem, maybe more than one poem actually, where I pick that apart and deal with it.

Haley Radke: Can you tell us about that? I love the name, Un-M-Othered, by the way.

Dr. Liz DeBetta: Yeah. So Un-M-Othered started as part of my dissertation in the course of my Ph.D. Work I... got to the dissertation stage and I was like, [00:35:00] what am I gonna do?

Like I knew I was, you know writing about adoption and I was writing about, through a feminist lens and you know through the lens of women's and gender studies and I was thinking like, okay you know I was sort of critiquing patriarchy in that process and then it just it became apparent that I needed to take some of my writing and my background as a performer and put it together and so I wrote this one woman show called Un-M-Othered and it's written in poetry and little chunks of personal narrative the full title is Un-M-Othered A Story of Adoption and Patriarchy and it's about my experience of being an adopted person and the lack of agency and choice afforded to women in patriarchal culture, particularly when it comes to reproductive choice, right?

So like the [00:36:00] choice made in the absence of choice is not a choice. And and the disruptions of, so the title itself is Un dash capital M dash capital O othered. And that rhetorically is very specific because the dashes indicate the separations that are inherent in adoption, right? The separation from the first family or the first mother and the adoptee and then the separation the adoptee feels from them between themselves and the adoptive family and then the fact that like adoption in and of itself is an othering for everyone involved and that actually if we think about it both first mothers and adoptive mothers are unmothers.

Many adoptive mothers become adoptive mothers because of fertility issues, so they're not able to mother, and then because first mothers are, in many cases, lack the ability to choose, they are forced [00:37:00] to surrender children, and they become un mothers in the process.

Haley Radke: I'm staring at the word. It's just on my screen while we're talking because I have the event here. And... I mean, the word othered is just like lighting up for me. I love your description of all of that. And you know what, that's the experience I had reading the first chapter of your book. It just lit me up because all the things you outline and say are the things that so many of our guests have articulated in pieces here and there and here and there.

And you just have this way of just saying the thing, we have false stories given to us. We are looking for healing. We are disconnected. These are ways that I have been exploring this and unpacking this. And, [00:38:00] when I came to the realization of the wrong things in adoption and I just felt so seen and I have.

Too many book darts. In fact, I got annoyed because my book darts are actually like these beautiful things, but they kept sticking out because I was trying to put one on this side and one on this side, and it was just irritating to me. So I just, I don't know. I just. It's felt so seen while reading it and I'm shifting to recommending your book, I guess, but I still want to talk about it more.

So let's, I'm still leaving space to talk about it more. Can you talk about how you came to bring this book into the world as a creative. I know we mentioned earlier that you had led a group of adoptees through these writing prompts through several weeks. We talked about that last time that you were on the show, and now it's like [00:39:00] it's a book, and it has all the prompts in it, and people can follow along and do these things on our own if they choose to. But what made you come to this to actually have it be a thing, a real thing in the world. Sorry. I'm so excited for you.

Dr. Liz DeBetta: Yeah, thank you. I'm so excited too. And I'm so happy that you said you felt seen in reading, reading it because. And I think I, I say that in some way in the introduction and, throughout the book is that the, really, this is like my gift to the adoptee community that I hope that's what it does for people, that everyone who picks it up feels seen and valued and heard.

And one of the things that I say before each of the writing prompts is that. Your story matters and so do you and this is true for all of us. And so like the reason that it needed to be out in the world and I needed to take what I have learned and experienced and give it to other people is that this [00:40:00] is really a lifetime in the making.

I mean, one of the stories that I tell in the book is about how I started writing at 14-years-old, not knowing that I was helping myself in any way just at the suggestion of a really insightful teacher who said to me why don't you think about writing poetry which I at the time thought was stupid and I might have this is a story I might have probably told on the first time we talked, but like I thought it was so stupid until he shared a poem with me and then I thought, okay also at the time I was like deeply in the, not only the adoption fog, but the patriarchy fog.

And I thought if a man can write poetry, right? And I got this little notebook and I started writing these poems and, fast forward to many years later when I was, in the midst of my Ph. D. study, I took a course on poetry and healing, and I was like, oh, this is the thing I've been doing my whole life.

I [00:41:00] have been using poetry as a way of managing these really deep, intense, dark, overwhelming feelings. But now I actually learned that it's a field and it's a legitimate, it's a legitimate field of study. It's a legitimate tool. And that other people have written about it in different ways, like about how we can use writing as healing.

And so I got really interested in that. And then, in the writing of my dissertation and writing Un-M-Othered and putting together that piece of creative writing, that was an act of using writing and healing and then further putting it in public performance was like the added layer of then making that story known and being able to speak those words out loud and not just on a page.

That was also another added layer of both my healing and also opening up conversations about so many of these things that we'd rather not talk about. And then during the [00:42:00] pandemic had the opportunity to run that writing group because I knew, I was like, I, this is a thing that has been so valuable for me.

And I had finished my dissertation at that point. And I had all of this information and all of, this also like lifetime body of work. And I wanted to see how it affected other people. I wanted to share it with other people. And then that group, those 11 adoptees at the end of seven weeks, were all changed in some way and profoundly and I said, okay, now I've done this work and I think I can start thinking about putting it all together and then sort of the way the universe is, I had the folks at the Rudd Adoption Research Institute who were supportive of that particular group and that was part of the presentation of that work was the culminating presentation for a year long online conference on adult adoptees.

And they, one of them said to me, you need to write a book. And I was [00:43:00] like, yeah, I do, I will. And then a couple of months later, one of my grad school mentors who was on my dissertation committee said me, hey, I am on the board of the editorial board of Brill and we have a new, a series on creativity and healing and we're looking specifically for books on creativity and healing.

Do you think you might have something you can propose? And I was like, let me think about that. We were having dinner and then the next day I woke up and I was like, yes, I do. This is the book. I said, yes, I'm gonna write the book about adult adoptees and writing to heal.

And, I wrote the outline, I wrote the proposal and I wrote the, the sort of outline via the table of contents, right? What I knew what each of the chapters were going to be, but it wasn't until I started writing that the book really started to make sense because then I went back to all of my original poetry [00:44:00] and started looking at it in a way that I hadn't before and so much of the book was really me using my lifelong stash of poetry to illustrate the things that the concepts that I was talking about, right?

And to come up with a methodology to say here's how here's me doing this and showing you and then here's how you can do it yourself. So it's really, I think, at this point now that it's been out in the world for a couple of months and I've had time to talk about it with people and think about it.

It's really the book I needed to write. It's the book I needed to put in the world now because people need healing. Like I have, I've. So many conversations with other adopted people and I've held so much space in different writing groups with adoptees and every time it comes back to the same thing.

[00:45:00] Thank you so much for this. Like I needed

Haley Radke: This is a line from your book one of the biggest benefits of writing our stories as adult adoptees is the reconnection to ourselves and the agency that comes from valuing ourselves enough to write and share our stories, which I think you've really expressed well during our conversations even all the way back before this book was even an idea in your mind. And then here you say I consider it my life's work to help others heal using my experience as a guide I mean, I really think you're walking that out Liz

Dr. Liz DeBetta: Yeah. That's exactly it. I feel really compelled and called to do as much as I can to help people heal because it took me so long. It took me so long to find the right help and to be able to tell my story and to be able to figure out that I even had a story and to be able to feel safe and comfortable and integrated enough,[00:46:00] and think that's, for me, the most important thing, especially at this point in my life, is being able to take what I've learned and what I've experienced and use it for the benefit of other people.

Haley Radke: I mean, same. In different ways,

Dr. Liz DeBetta: Right? Yeah. And you are and have been doing it for so many years through this podcast, right?

It's like you see, we see a need and we fill it. And also within the adoption community, within the adoptee community there's so many of us that are doing. So many parallel but different things that are helping and that are healing and we need all of us.

Haley Radke: Yeah, definitely. Speaking of that, what did you want to recommend to us today?

Dr. Liz DeBetta: So I'm going to recommend a couple of things. We sort of talked a little bit about Un-M-Othered, and there is a collaborative project that Rebecca Autumn Samson and I had launched back in [00:47:00] August called Operation Fog Lift. And it is a joint project where we do a screening of her film, Reckoning with the Primal Wound, and a performance of my one woman show, Un-M-Othered.

And then we do an audience talk back and we have an upcoming Operation Fog Lift, New York City edition coming up in February. That will be the weekend of February 2nd. And the event itself is on February 3rd. It's a half day event, so plan time, folks, plan time.

Haley Radke: And this is 2024, if you're listening to this in the future.

Dr. Liz DeBetta: And that, our sort of goal with Operation Fog Lift is to help people, come out of the fog using the arts as a tool for opening up conversation and healing in community. So it's for adoptees. It's for the general public. It's for, it's really for anyone. But it does have particular meaning to [00:48:00] adoptees because so many people have told me they see themselves in my story and that it's so helpful to hear me talk about my journey.

And then also, Rebecca's film is really powerful in uncovering some of the really difficult truths that folks don't want to talk about through the lens of the documentary and her story that people also feel really validated by and then having the opportunity to come together in community and be witnesses to those two things is really vital for creating our own spaces to heal and come together and connect and talk and find solidarity and then we will be doing or we should I, uh, the day after Fog Lift on Sunday, February 4th, I will be offering a small writing and healing group as a post event [00:49:00] for any, for a group of up to 15 who attend Fog Lift.

So that's one resource. The other resource is I will have Haley share a link to sign up for my mailing list and I have in January in 2024, I will be beginning a ongoing series of online mini writing retreats for adoptees, as well as, starting to offer one on one writing and healing coaching for folks who are interested.

And so signing up for the mailing list will help me to connect with you and provide you with information about those dates as they become available. And just, I think I'm the resource, right? You are the resource. Folks can just reach out to me, by my website if they have questions or want something sooner than January.

Haley Radke: Perfect. What is your website?

Dr. Liz DeBetta: It's https://www.lizdebetta.com/. Real [00:50:00] easy.

Haley Radke: Easy peasy. If you want to hear more from Liz about writing for healing, I mean, we really dive into that in episode 187, and you give some writing prompts in there if you want to get another idea of other things that you can write about if you want to get started on this.

And then, of course, your book has so many prompts, so many things to consider, and it's just really tremendous. Amazing thing for folks to grab. We will link to that in the show notes. If you're listening when this goes live, there's a coupon code for you for 25 percent off as well. And I'm really excited that this is in the world.

Thank you so much.

Dr. Liz DeBetta: Thank you. Me too. I'm so thrilled that we got to spend time talking a little bit about the book and talking about some other like really deeply important things that are part of the complexity of our experience as adopted [00:51:00] people. Definitely. Thank you for, being with me in the, being okay with saying all the things.

Haley Radke: Saying the hard things out loud. There you go. Yeah. That's what we're good at. Liz, besides your website, where else can folks connect with you online?

Dr. Liz DeBetta: They can find me on Facebook and Instagram. Also real easy @LizDeBetta.

Haley Radke: Perfect. Thank you so much.

I am. So thankful to Liz and the other adoptees who are leading and teaching in this area of writing to heal. I think it is such a valuable resource and if it stirred anything up in you, go for it. Go for it. I really encourage you to engage that creative part of yourself. I also want to let you know that we have an [00:52:00] Ask an Adoptee Therapist event this month.

We would love to have you join us. If you are a Patreon supporter, you should have access in your account to the Zoom link. If you would like to apply for a scholarship, that is available on adopteeson.com/scholarship. We will likely be talking about holidays and boundaries and those kinds of things, but if you have a question for our adoptee therapist, you can go to adopteeson.com/ask and submit your questions and we will address them live in our call and then Patreons get the audio recording sent to them the week after so they can listen and re listen to all the helpful tips from our adoptee therapist. Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate, especially those of you who are supporting the show and making this [00:53:00] possible.

Let's talk again next Friday.

268 Kimberly McKee, Ph.D.

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/268

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Haley Radke: [00:00:00] 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, I'm so excited to host critical adoption studies scholar, Dr. Kimberly McKee. She's the author of the impactful book, Disrupting Kinship, and her brand new release is Adoption Fantasies, the fetishization of Asian adoptees from girlhood to womanhood.

We talk about Kim's reunion with her family in Korea, where she's currently living with her young son, and what it's like parenting through reunification and reculturation. We talk about adoption in pop culture, and how preserving adoptee history and acknowledging the work of those who've come before us is vital to community building.

Before we get started, I want to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on [00:01:00] 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, Kimberly McKee, welcome Kim.

Kimberly McKee, Ph.D.: Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited about being here today.

Haley Radke: I'm embarrassed. It's taken me seven years to get to you, Kim. I mean, you're prolific. I have read your writing. I have attended conferences and learned from you.

I'm just, I'm so excited that finally we get to connect in this way.

Kimberly McKee, Ph.D.: You know, I've listened to so many of my friend colleagues on your show, and I was like, Oh my gosh, I really want to do this. And so I was just, I'm super happy we were able to get connected.

Haley Radke: Great. I'd love it if you would start and share a little of your story with us.

Kimberly McKee, Ph.D.: I Was adopted [00:02:00] from South Korea when I was five months old and I grew up in Western New York. Actually, if you're interested in reading about that journey, from my perspective, when I was about 15, I was, I believe I was like 17 when it was published. I have an essay in the volume, Yellow Girls the edited collection.

And so Yellow Girls was edited by Vicki Nam and it came out in 2001. So it just celebrated. It's 20 year history and in that I spend about two and a half pages reflecting on what it was like for me growing up in a primarily white community. And so that's just like one snippet about kind of my life. But I think currently I'm living in South Korea.

I've lived here before when I was studying language through a state department, critical language scholarship. Currently I'm a U. S. Fulbright Scholar at Sogong University for academic year [00:03:00] 2023-2024. And what's been a privilege for me this time, as I'm making Seoul my home, is that my young son is with me and he's a toddler, and so I'm thinking about parenting in different kinds of ways now that we're in Korea and one of the things I've spent a long time thinking about is how he is so articulate at telling me about his own adjustment being here, and I honestly, and I've probably said this somewhere else, too. It takes my breath away thinking about that in relation to international adoption.

I've read so many adoptees talking about how they would call out saying they want to go back and they want to go home and they were speaking Korean and everything else. And I think about my son who's here with me. And he knows he's safe and he knows he's loved and we speak English at home and all of those things.

And what that must have felt like for so many international adoptees. And so it gives me pause. And I [00:04:00] wonder if it gave anybody else pause who were adopting at that time. And here, but at that time, I'm thinking about folks who came over in the 1980s, like myself or earlier, and I can't help but just, it makes you think, right?

Haley Radke: Yeah, I think for any of us who have children, there's this very different thing for their legacy that we're trying to create. And now you as a Korean adoptee, you get to go to a country and it's this very physical thing. Like I'm literally changing locations and languages. And so there's an embodiment that is unusual and so amazing. Like it forces you to think about it.

Kimberly McKee, Ph.D.: And it's so deeply layered. And I think that's something [00:05:00] I don't want to say people forget, but it's not just Oh, we're picking up and I'm spending a year in some other country. That's not the United States where we were living. This is a country that has so much meaning for so many of other adoptees from Korea, including myself. And so thinking about what navigating life is I'm not fluent in Korean. You know, I've studied Korean language, but so many adoptees, I know that unless I have dedicated time where I can do full immersion, my ability for language acquisition isn't going to be the same.

And you know, thinking about what that means to for us. And so this is an incredible opportunity. And I'm really excited to be here. But it also makes me think so much about adoption and return and what that means for so many of us, especially for those adoptees who maybe don't want to return, can't return.

And being able to do like I said before, is such a privilege.[00:06:00]

Haley Radke: I know you've been back before, and I heard you talk about being on a TV show for searching. Can you talk about that? Because I know probably a lot of Korean adoptees will be like, Oh yeah, we know about this, but a lot of the rest of us maybe don't.

Kimberly McKee, Ph.D.: Of course. My first time back to Korea was in 2007. And then, and that was for the International Korean Adoptee Association's gathering. I specifically went in 2007 because I'm a nerd and was really excited about the first international symposium on Korean adoption studies and I couldn't wait. That was the reason I was going.

It wasn't necessarily for the other components of the gathering, but really for the research symposium, which as a side now, I will say it's been an incredible privilege to be part of the co-organizing committee for that since goodness 2016. And so it's been really delightful. So I also was back in [00:07:00] 2010 and then in 2011 and 2010 was for the Aika gathering as well.

And in 2011 I was here studying Korean. And then 2013 I was back for the gathering. Same with 2016. But I had the privilege by virtue of the work that I do in the academy, being able to come back to Korea for a conference almost every year since 2013. Obviously with a pause for Covid. And so that's been lovely. In 2011 I was not on one of those formal search shows. Let me be clear. In 2011, I was living in Jeonju and my seonsaengnim. She knew I was adopted. There was another adoptee also in the program and we were on local or regional TV. Where I sat down with a reporter and shared part of my story and that aired on kind of like the local regional news.

It was not fruitful for me. And so that was really the last time that I contemplated searching. [00:08:00] And so I had previously queried my agency and I came through Eastern Child Welfare Society and I wrote to them, I think in 2007, maybe in 2010 again, and it was always, you know, in relation to me coming to Korea.

Cause that usually is what sparks it. And I think what people forget, and, you know, I'm sure, you know this, I'm sure many of your listeners, but for non adoptees, or maybe adoptees who have thought about searching, but really haven't, it takes up a lot of emotional energy and it does things to you, to your body that I think you're not aware of in terms of the kinds of stress or the anxiety that and how that manifests itself because there's so many unknowns. Personally, I knew that I was okay if I searched and they found my birth parents and they did not want to meet, and I attribute that in part to really understanding kind of the reasons why a birth parent may not be able to meet you, especially for birth mothers, if their family, their [00:09:00] current families don't know that they relinquished.

And I know that's really complicated and what I'm saying may be very unpopular to some people, but I was never trying to ruin somebody's life and by ruin, I don't mean oh, because I'm a terrible person or you're a terrible person or anything like that, but rather, I think a lot about the trauma of adoption and the fact that I'm not the only person inhabiting that trauma.

I'm not the only person who lived with those decisions that obviously affected birth mothers, maybe birth fathers, other biological relatives, maybe siblings, et cetera. And you know, I think sometimes we can be very inward in terms of thinking about adoption is only about me, but rather there's so many other people involved and their own experiences.

And so I really wanted to make space and honor that. By the time I was on that show in the summer of 2011, I had really made my peace that I probably would not be reunited. I kind of assumed that was a dead end because I mean, once you [00:10:00] go on TV there's only so many things you could do. And this was really before DNA testing kind of was really being used, I think, in, in the way it is now.

I mean, it's been over a decade. I was fortunate that my birth mother actually reached out to my agency in 2013. This was spurred after she saw my birth father again at their high school reunion. And so that is how we kind of made contact, uh, the agency. And I don't know, I think if you traffic and dark it out, the humor, the agency emailed me and was like, we have some news for you, but is this your right email address?

So it's it was one of those moments. I was like, yes, this is the right email address. Tell me the news. Could you just, could you lead with the news? I mean, I understand maybe why not, but it was just very odd. And that's how we connected. And so in December of 2013, so close to 10 years ago, I flew to Korea.

It was right after [00:11:00] I submitted my grades. When I was a postdoc at Grinnell College in Iowa, I submitted the grades for the semester, and then I flew to Korea to meet them in person. I was really fortunate to be able to do that. I know that's not possible for so many people and I recognize that privilege, but I really wanted to kind of, I think, pull the bandaid off and just do it.

And then it was kind of a whirlwind experience. And then I came home and the day after we drove out to see my family for the holidays. So it's just kind of a lot. And so being on the show with another adopted person as well. It was, I think. It's always hard sometimes to talk about your adoption story, and it's always difficult because you never know what the outcome would be to get back to your original question.

And I think for me, like I said, I knew the odds of something happening was probably going to be slim. And so I think about if it wasn't for her, for my birth mother, seeing my birth father at their high school reunion, [00:12:00] I probably would not be in reunion and you know what that means. And I think, too, now that I'm in reunion, I see the way relinquishment had a long standing effect on my birth mom, and that's why even now I am trying to be very mindful about how I tell my reunion story specifically thinking about what parts that I share that I feel like I can share without breaking the trust in the relationship I'm forging with her, my birth father, my siblings, their families.

Haley Radke: So are you still in contact with him?

Kimberly McKee, Ph.D.: Yes. We were very fortunate. We, my son and I spent Chuseok, which is colloquially known as Korean Thanksgiving with my birth with my Oma and my younger siblings. And so that was, it was a privilege and incredible and strange, not like in a bad way or strange and it was just different because I think I'd read this and this is [00:13:00] where I sound like.

You know, an academic or somebody who studies adoption. I'd read so many things about people spending their holidays with their families, their birth families, if they were in reunion. And so like in my head, I had this, I didn't even know I had this idealized version of what it should be based on what you read.

And then I was experiencing it and I was like, oh, it's not the same. That's okay. This just feels just different and that's when I was like, oh, because I went in with all these preconceived notions and assumptions about what this should be like based on reading about other people. And we know that's not how life is.

And so I had to really step out of that situation and reflect on that because that's not fair.

Are you able to be present in a moment like that? Are you looking at your child and being like, getting this experience that I might have had at your age if I hadn't been adopted. I mean, that's whoa.

Yes and no. I think at times, you know, as [00:14:00] he starts to speak more Korean and it's the intonation of some of the words when he calls me Oma and it's a particular kind of pitch. And my husband and I, who, and he's, my husband's also adopted. We're talking about how that it warms our souls inside, right?

Like it makes us feel good in a way that I don't think either one of us imagined. And my husband was adopted when he was older. So he remembers living in Korea. And so I think us having this opportunity and watching our son it's kind of crazy and awesome. And yeah, it's just I wish everybody who was transnationally adopted, or just adopted in general, could be able to kind of have those moments.

I saw on Instagram, because I'm on Instagram a lot, people talk about those, I think, as glimmers, right? Those really warm and fuzzy moments. I was scrolling, so I cannot attribute that to anybody. But anyways, it was one of those moments where I was like, oh, it is exciting to see. But I think it's exciting to, for anybody [00:15:00] who may identify as an immigrant or who has experienced displacement. So I don't think it's just unique to adoptees. I think being able to sort of see somebody having opportunities that you wish you had when you were a child, it's amazing.

Haley Radke: That is like such a neat experience. I'm as you were sharing it, I was like, oh my gosh, I'm so happy for you.

You know, there's something about those moments that has to be healing for us somewhere deep down in there. I don't know if you think that way, too, but I don't know. It's the wounds that we carry from separation is just it feels like this never ending pit for me. So anything I can do to fill in a little bit at a time, just important.

Kimberly McKee, Ph.D.: I think for me, I've always been cautious of discussing or labeling adoptees as melancholic and [00:16:00] in part because there's always this assumption that we're in constant search of something that's missing as if adoption isn't trauma or adoption doesn't involve malfeasance and fabrication. And all the things, these things that we know to be true, but because it's supposed to be this good, happy feeling, then I think when you map melancholia onto that, it creates kind of a pathologized adoptee subject instead of that's devoid of nuance or context.

And so something that I've been sitting with and thinking through and starting to write about a little bit is to really thinking about the melancholia or the haunting or The Korean word Han to talk about sort of loss and sorrow and unnamed grief about what it means to be living with that grief, a palpable grief that for me, I finally could name. In relation to sitting at dinner this was about a month ago with my appa, with my Korean father and my son [00:17:00] and myself and my appa really doesn't speak English. My Korean, I mean, I can care, I can order food. I can give him. Get directions, but I can't, you know what I can't do. I can't have that sustained deep conversation. And for me, it's recognizing those losses and warning, even though I am in reunion, because there is. There is a grief there and it's palpable and you can feel it on both sides and, you know, I'll say, gwaenchanh-ayo like, it's okay when my appa tells me something and I kind of look at him and I smile oh, gosh, this is, yeah. And, you know, we rely on either siblings to translate kind of thing, or we use translation like apps like Papago or Google Translate because they have conversation features and stuff.

And I don't think there's been a lot of, at least that I've come across. About that kind of living grief, and this is in part two, I think, because there's so few of us in reunion, and so reunion is kind of seen as an end point, even though I don't think [00:18:00] it's an end point. It's just a, it's just one marker in one's adoption journey, if that happens, and so then it's living in reunion and you'd ask me am I still in contact because we know that doesn't happen all the time. And so I'm very mindful of that as well, because I know when you do start raising these kinds of questions about reunion, it can be also incredibly painful for those who have not, who've had less success.

Or for those who, for whatever reason, have decided that's not the route they want to take. I think that, for me, I'm really hoping that we can have complex and nuanced conversations, where we can hold everything in tension with one another, to recognize that there's not one path forward, but rather we have to be able to have complexity at a time when I think just not just talking about adoption, but just thinking about what's happening in the world right now, where context [00:19:00] gets to be lost.

People want something that's very black or white. There's no room for gray. And, you know, that feeling of grief and loss. We have to be able to do many things, and we have to be able to recognize how complex reunion can be. And I really hope that as I think through this and start writing about it more, that people want to be, want to have that conversation with me.

Haley Radke: I think even as you mentioned, we don't always think about the emotional labor just with searching that space that takes up. I mean, being in reunion, I'm in 12 years, you're in 10. That's just a chunk of space that we're always giving whether or not we're really focused on it or it's running in the background. It's the process of reunification into a family takes more labor than we probably know.

Kimberly McKee, Ph.D.: So I know you'll ask me at the end of your show, but I just real quick wanted to mention because we're talking [00:20:00] about reunion. Sara Docan- Morgan has a book coming out called In Reunion and she's looking at Korean transnational adoptees and I was privileged enough to read an early copy of it and it's a wonderful book.

But she discusses that labor and she names that labor and it's really incredible and moving because it's something that's so often I think those of us who are in reunion can acknowledge, but it's having these kinds of conversations like the two of us are having right now, we don't necessarily hear from unless it's kind of not necessarily whispered in like real corners, but like where we're talking to each other inside conversations or we're DMing one another, but it's not necessarily shared openly because I think for adoptees, we also hold space for, like I said before, other adoptees and their experiences and what that looks like too.

Haley Radke: Absolutely. Definitely. I want to shift and talk about your work because you are a [00:21:00] critical adoption scholar.

This is a quote from your book, Adoption Fantasies. I'm just going to read one line to you because I was like, how did you figure out a way to watch some TV shows and movies and add it into your work life? That's pretty cool. So I figured that out too, by the way, I turned toward popular cultural artifacts to critically engage how adoption is packaged, commodified and sold as a social good.

And I will talk, I'll recommend your book later to spoiler alert. There's your two spoiler alerts, but I'm, I love how you go through several examples in popular culture and talk about how adoptees are represented. I was earlier this year, I did a two part episode on Patreon about how Friends deals with the adoption storyline, [00:22:00] because I was thinking about what were the messages I was getting in those formative, you know, teen, young, adult years about adoption. And, yikes. Do you remember from when you were a kid, any TV shows or things you were watching then that had an impact on you?

Kimberly McKee, Ph.D.: Yes, and I'm not sure what kind of impact. So I think a lot about the fact that Losing Isaiah used to be on cable television a lot. It would be on Lifetime. Kind of. Not necessarily on a loop, but you would see it. I mean, this is back when you could watch the like Breakfast Club and all those kind of movies also on TV a lot. So I think about Losing Isaiah. I think about those made for TV movies. So do you remember Switched at Birth about the oh, gosh, maybe I butchered the title to of the movie where these families to calm the wrong infant.

So it's not necessarily adoption, but like the idea of being raised or separated at birth or [00:23:00] something like that, right? Being raised by different families. I think a lot about. It was a book and then it was turned into a movie The Face in the Milk Carton. So again, it's a lot about stolen children.

Haley Radke: I remember that book series. I read it so much. I was obsessed with it. It was, there was three books. And I think in the second book, she goes back to live with her original family and how disruptive this is. Oh, wow. You really got something in my, I've got a whole section of my brain lit up.

Kimberly McKee, Ph.D.: But I think about those moments, because I think for me, at least there was this, I don't want to say obsession, but there was this interest about what that looked like and what that felt like in society at that time.

Okay. And. You know, I know you've had Shannon Gibney on, right? So like Shannon's memoir, The Girl I Am, I Was, and Never Will Be gets to some of that's similar but obviously different because it's adoption themed. And then I think too about other representations, you know, in Adoption Fantasies, I discuss [00:24:00] Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, and Soon-Yi Previn, and I think about kind of what I knew growing up and then what I've learned, obviously working on the book to think about S oon-Yi I, for me, in terms of where else there was adoption, it would oftentimes appear oddly and shows, right? It was always strange in TV, but a lot of times it was always packaged as we adopted you for a better life. Shouldn't you be happy? Yay. Or, oh gosh wasn't, it was like Macaulay Culkin and Elijah Wood in that horror movie, like The Good Son or something where like Macaulay Culkin was like adopted.

I'm not the, I don't look at horror film because I will freely admit. Horror films freak me out. I like, I'll watch them, but they're not my jam.

Haley Radke: I'll watch them for you. That's my fave.

Kimberly McKee, Ph.D.: I just, I can't do it. I like, I need all the lights on and I'm gonna still jump. I'll cover my eyes.

Anyways. so It's either there is this positive experience or, oh gosh, [00:25:00] this adoptee is so damaged. Look at how incredibly messed up they are. Look how, you know, it's pathological. And you know, I remember those kinds of things, but a lot of the time it was about when I think about pop culture, it was more about how other people understood Asian Americans and Asian people and thinking about the racism that I experienced, some of which I share in the book as well.

And so that's what I spend a lot of time thinking about.

Haley Radke: Going back to Woody Allen, I think another thing we don't really spend a lot of time talking about, but I think we should be highlighting more, is I think adoptees are at higher risk of sexual violence and incest from either their immediate adoptive families or their extended family because you're not biologically [00:26:00] related. Do you have thoughts on that?

Kimberly McKee, Ph.D.: Oh, goodness. I will first say that is not in my area of expertise. So my work looking and applying the lens of incest to really understand, uh, Soon-Yi Previn, Woody Allen, and Mia Farrow comes from a particular lens of thinking about power and privilege and the operationalization of that power in father or paternal like figure daughter relationships.

And so I am not trained in social work or psychology to make sort of specific assessments around kind of the number of cases of abuse, trauma, et cetera, rather what I'm hoping to do by shining a light on what happened and kind of how the 1992 scandal and fallout really reverberated in society is to have us have that conversation to think about when people believe these families are good families because they've allegedly been screened and vetted, except for we know that's [00:27:00] not the case.

We know of adoptees who have shared their painful experiences. With sexual and physical violence and emotional abuse. So we're all too aware. I think when you look at how society reacted to Soon-Yi and how even Mia Farrow reacted to her own daughter, it becomes very evident the way adoption clouds people's understandings of sexual abuse.

And frames their understanding of how we will protect some kinds of girlhood over others in some childhoods over others. I think that when you look at. How Woody Allen supporters, you know, really justify that Soon-Yi was never really adopted by him and, you know, stuff like that. It raises questions about what does it mean then if somebody's long term boyfriend sexually abuses someone's child?

It [00:28:00] doesn't make it any less, it's not a lesser form of violence or like a different kind of violence, right? At the point in which you're splitting hairs like that we really have to have a different kind of conversation because you are, you so far missed what's actually happening. And so I'm hoping that folks who are survivors of abuse, when they get to that particular chapter, they see, or they can recognize, and if they can't, I will accept that feedback as well. But what I'm really trying to do is provide space for talking about why isn't it? Why don't we see that happening here? You know, how does the Asian adopted woman's, girl's body become subsumed under racialized and gendered stereotypes of Asian women's sexuality? And what's at stake there when we see the limits of adoptive kinship.

Haley Radke: I know this is going to be like, this is like a [00:29:00] giant question because your whole book covers it, but I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about the word fetishization and you talk about it from the start. So infants as babies, commodities, and then growing up into I think you call it oriental fantasies, plus a combination of anti Asian racism and all of that.

Like it's, this is like a huge subject, huge question that all you're covering. So I know it's unfair, but I'm curious if you can describe that a little bit for us. So we can kind of go along with your premise here.

Kimberly McKee, Ph.D.: The book looks at both of fantasies of white adoption and Asian American fantasies of adoption.

And when I think about The fetishization of adoptees. I look at how as other scholars have demonstrated. So here I'm thinking about the work of Andrea [00:30:00] Louie or Sarah Darrow, Heather Jacobson and Christine Ward Gailey when they've talked to adoptive parents of Chinese children. I mean, these parents sometimes describe their children as China dolls, porcelain dolls.

You see that in the work of Soojin Pate and Suzy Woo when they describe the earliest Korean war orphans and how they were the girls and how specifically Soojin Pate's work and transformed into adoptable commodities and how the labor of these young girls was used to support morale of military troops in South Korea. I think a lot about how Asian adoptees in particular, and here I'm thinking about East Asian adoptees who came over from South Korea and China, but I'm also thinking about the packaging of kind of Vietnamese war orphans and what that looked like. It was under the banner of saving these, again, doll like being, and they were [00:31:00] fetishized as being readily available blank slates where you could raise them like your very own.

So we have to think about how legacies of assimilation also shaped that. Because if you could not obtain a healthy white infant, adopting from Asia was kind of seen as the next best thing. You see, you know, if you're interested in the racialized marketplace of U. S. adoption, at least. And I apologize for being so U. S. centric to your listeners, because I know they come from all over, and you're in Canada. Elizabeth Raleigh's book, Selling Transracial Adoption, does a good job of kind of articulating the assortive marketplace of children. And so when we think about fetishization, though, in adulthood, I'm very much aware of how gender notions of Asian womanhood have penetrated and circulated the U.S. public imaginary, as well as the global Western imaginary for some time. So thinking about how other scholars have [00:32:00] also said this too, right? So when we think about some of the earliest anti Asian exclusion laws in the U. S., It really does position Asian women, specifically Chinese women, along the lines of sex work and what that looks like, out of fears of Asian women as sex workers.

We see this with legacies of US militarism and militarism abroad. And so you have those fantasies coupled with a lack of understanding of what that means to be Asian American in the US, Canada as well. To really get that we are full people. We're autonomous subjects, like everybody else who, you know, negotiate the world.

But when, you know, there's assumptions about you being passive, submissive, sexually available, easy to please, and see how long standing these stereotypes have been, and then recognize the fact that so many white adoptive parents. If they knew of these assumptions, didn't want to recognize and recognize [00:33:00] how those fantasies and fetishes map onto our bodies and how they actually may be complicit in some of those things as well.

I think I answered your question. I may have meandered a little bit.

Haley Radke: No, I think that was great. It's hard to touch on all the things when you're like I wrote a whole book to answer that. One thing I really appreciate, this is a little bit of an aside, but you're so good at pointing us back to where ideas originate from and who said.

You know, so and so said this, and I know some academics do this, but not all. And I've never observed anyone do it in as generous a way as you do. Why is that so important to you?

Kimberly McKee, Ph.D.: I'm indebted, I think, a lot to Black feminism and thinking about the citational practices of Black feminists. But just thinking about how citing matters, citations matter, recognizing that, you didn't just invent sliced bread.

[00:34:00] Is hugely important and it's not about necessarily being humble, but it's recognizing those genealogies and so being able to trace a conversation and to understand how a field developed this isn't to dismiss somebody who's like coming into adoption studies to be like, Oh, no, but it's rather okay, so if you want to have these conversations, who are you engaging with?

So how are you, if you're having a conversation about Korean adoption studies, you know, how are you engaging the work of Tobias Hübinette, Kim Park Nelson, Lene Myong, Rich Lee, Oh Myo Kim, Adam Kim, you know, there's so many folks out there who've done this work. You know, I've mentioned Soojin Pate, Susie Woo, thinking about the work of Kelly Condit-Shrestha and others, right?

There's so many people that. We need to be able to sort of see how, again, if you're looking at race and ethnic identity, who are you talking to, who are you in conversation with, whose ideas are you departing from or [00:35:00] building on, if you're thinking about transracial adoptions within the U. S., and understanding adoption as violence are you engaging Kit Myers and his concept of violence of love, and those sorts of things, because that, that matters.

And it matters because it demonstrates that you recognize that, again, you know, you are part of a community. And I think about how generous my colleagues were when I was a master's student in 2006, 2007 finishing up my master's thesis with the London School of Economics about the gendered reasons why Korea still participates in inter country adoption.

You know, I remember reaching out to them and then making time to talk with me. So Kathleen Bergquist, Kim Park Nelson, Eleana Kim, Tobias meeting Lene Myong and Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, thinking about how these folks really brought me into a community where I am now situated and what that looks like and thinking about friendships that have developed over time [00:36:00] with these scholars, some adopted, some not adopted doing the work.

And so I'm very attentive to that. I also, and it's funny because, you know, you bring it up here, but this came up when I was in at, symposium back in March that Kelly, Rich and Catherine Nguyen organized. It was a Harvard Radcliffe Symposium up in Cambridge. And I remember one of my friend colleagues, she was like, Kim always sort of does this.

And it's because it's so important to me. And I can't say it enough. Being able to say who or where you're getting ideas from and attributing them. It just, it matters. We don't want to engage in that kind of, I just don't want to engage in bad scholarly practice. This is something I really encourage because it matters. And I don't know.

Haley Radke: Can I say? I've had it modeled to me when talking about adoptee activism, right? I'll be interviewing somebody and then they'll be like so and so [00:37:00] did this first and so did that right? And now I find myself doing that too. I mean, usually younger adoptees as well, and I think it's important too, and I just, I really respect how you do that, and like I said, I think it's in a really generous way, and so yeah, good modeling.

Kimberly McKee, Ph.D.: No, thanks, and I think it, I think a lot about sort of activism too, because, you know, the way social media has transformed those conversations, but I think about kind of the group now. I sound like an old person in the early days of the Internet. I think about how different how adoptees were coming together kind of a decade ago, more than a decade ago.

What was that looking like? How did those folks push a conversation to enable us to have the conversations we're currently having and why that's significant? We have to understand those genealogies because if we don't, you're just going to assume, oh, we're doing it better or they did it wrong. And that's not the case.

We also have to [00:38:00] recognize the material conditions in which people were doing that work to really understand perhaps why did they stop at X even if they were still talking about some of the other issues, too?

Haley Radke: I know this isn't technically your field of study but I really feel like in both of your books that I've read so Disrupting Kinship and Adoption Fantasies you're also playing the part of historian because you are referencing all of these things again showing my age that I feel are, you know, current events, quote unquote, in the adoptee community in the recent history, recent past.

How do you say that? And so you're preserving those things for future generations as well. So I'm like, Oh my gosh, big hearts on that. I don't know.

Kimberly McKee, Ph.D.: No, thank you. Also, it just reminds us that I don't think we're old. And then there's those moments where I'm like, Oh, okay. Yeah, you, yes. It feels, you know, 20, 2015 wasn't yesterday, right? Or like [00:39:00] 2002 wasn't five years ago. And you're like, oh, time. It happens.

Haley Radke: You have a toddler to keep you young. I have a kid who's a couple years away from the learner's permit and I'm like, Whoa, you know?

Kimberly McKee, Ph.D.: And it's funny you say that. So my step kids are older. One graduated college already. The other one is in college and I remember when, you know, when they get to be the same age as the students that I'm teaching or the students that I'm teaching are their age. I don't know. One of the two. It's always Oh gosh, wow. You are a grown up.

Haley Radke: It just happens, right? It's in a blink. I really want to recommend your books to everyone. I'm sure lots of people have already read Disrupting Kinship. I love your unpacking of your term adoptee killjoy, which, I don't know, maybe you can talk a little bit about that to us.

And, but we're talking about Adoption Fantasies today, The Fetishization of Asian Adoptees from Girlhood to W omanhood, which is just out if you're listening when this [00:40:00] releases. And I really appreciated the critical lens that you brought to Sex in the City, Modern Family, Soul Searching, Twinsters, all of these pieces that a lot of us are familiar with and looking at it with different eyes, right? I mean, I know there's a lot of us that would have consumed some of that content and been like, gross or like, why is this uncomfortable? Or oh, I can't believe they're doing this, but you really help us break it down in a way that you're like, okay, here's all the really problematic things in regards to this.

And this is what the public is consuming. And has the warm fuzzies around this is their glimmers is like, oh, let's watch Modern Family together, you know, and when we see all these adoptee tropes, just being over overused, and we're [00:41:00] complaining about it, you really break it down for us. And then, of course, the added lens of the Asian American racism that is going on and I need to be more informed about that as a white woman and I'm, I was, you know, really, you really unpacked a lot of those things for me as well.

I really hope people read it. I know you're an academic writer, but it's very accessible, and I think it helps us build skills in our conversations with people when we're talking about how problematic adoption is. Okay, that was a big mouthful. Any comments on that? And plus, Adoptee Killjoy, please tell us what that is.

Kimberly McKee, Ph.D.: The term adoptee killjoy actually originates from Sara Ahmed's use of the term feminist killjoy. So I have to mention that because I'm really indebted to what Sara Ahmed was doing with feminist killjoy. But with adoptee killjoy, I'm thinking about how, and I know you're not supposed to [00:42:00] use the words and the definition, but like how the adoptee does kill the joy of adoption by voicing critiques or criticism. About the malfeasance, the fabrication, the violence of adoption, and thinking about the ways that adoptees are so aware of what it means to keep their place within their adoptive families and what does it mean to be legible. As kin, what does it mean to disrupt those fantasies of adoption by voicing dissent by kind of acknowledging what transpired was nothing short of either forms of trafficking, violence, et cetera. And I don't mean to repeat myself ad nauseam, but it's to use the concept of adoptee killjoy it also into embrace it really means we want to have those critical [00:43:00] conversations and I think what's also important, it's getting us to move away from the other binary about adoptees.

Like you're happy and well adjusted or you're angry, you're maladjusted no. And also it would be okay if I was angry because wouldn't you be angry when you'd be angry if you don't have access to your original birth certificate. Here I'm thinking about domestic adoptees as well as international adoptees. Wouldn't it, wouldn't you be angry if you were told this one story and then you found out it wasn't true or that you were told this, but you knew in your heart that it wasn't true or wouldn't you be angry if you were used as a prop for your family to feel like they did something good and that they're amazing, even though we know about so many examples of glorified families who have enacted trauma or have murdered their adopted children, but they were lauded at the time.

And so we know those things. So that's just my short piece on that. And now I'm going to switch [00:44:00] gears super awkwardly to think about what I'm doing with this book and why I'm looking at these pop culture artifacts. And you know, if you go to my public Instagram @AdopteeKilljoy at one point this summer, I had hopes and dreams. Don't we all that I was going to be able to look at the second season of and just like that and really dig deeper into thinking about Lily. However, as I also posted on my Instagram later this fall because I have the move to Korea and, you know, literally moving my life here and other things. And, you know, I haven't had the chance to yet.

It's something that I really want to do, especially in light of some of the other conversations that I've had and the work that I did with both with not both because there's more than two of us with Sun Yung Shin, Grace Newton and Grace Gerloff around our discussion guide for Joyride. Which came out this past year and features an adoptee storyline and thinking about fantasies of Asian American adoption [00:45:00] and what does that mean when adoptees are not at the table or when our stories are used as vehicles for larger narratives. Without really thinking about some of the deeper ramifications and impact.

Haley Radke: I think you even mention in one of the chapters on the documentary you asked the question who is behind the camera? Are we thinking about that?

Kimberly McKee, Ph.D.: Yeah it's important because who's telling those stories matters. And so other things that aren't necessarily in this book, but I'm working on. So I have a piece in a book edited by Jennifer Ho that should be out hopefully next year. It's a collection on global anti Asian racisms. And I discuss how adoptees of color Asian adoptees have known anti Asian racism very intimately.

Because of the adoptive family and what that means. And so the majority of us were adopted by white families. And in that piece, I actually discuss what does it mean when you also look at documentaries [00:46:00] featuring young people and youth. And so I do reflect on my own personal essay in Yell-OH Girls that I mentioned at the beginning of this episode.

I also kind of expand because if you read Adoption Fantasies, you'll be like, but Kim, didn't you say that you didn't look at youth because you are reticent? And I'm like, yes, I am reticent. And it took some time as I was digging through and thinking about looking at youth and documentaries about what I was doing and why, which is why I turned my own critical gaze on myself and what I wrote and it mean when you take a snapshot of a young person's life and then you just leave it?

And I think that's something we need to be thinking about, especially given the ways that adoptive parents have monetized their children, or any parent, right? Thinking about sort of momfluencers and like dads on TikTok, you know, all of that kind of stuff. So there's that piece.

Haley Radke: Yeah. Or brave love using the young birth mom who is not processed her grief yet as poster child for [00:47:00] giving away your baby.

Kimberly McKee, Ph.D.: Yeah. We need to have that conversation and really think critically. The other thing that I've been spending a lot of time thinking of, too, when it comes to popular culture, I know a lot of folks have been very reticent about talking about the show This Is Us and thinking about Randall Pearson and so many adoptees never watch the show. The series that has since gone off the air, but I submitted an essay to for an edited collection, thinking about racialized childhoods and spent time with the season that This is Us and now I'm forgetting the season because my, you know. I'm a human. But it was the season that the show dealt with COVID and Black Lives Matter and kind of the post George Floyd uprisings in the U. S. And thinking about Randall's character and character development, and I watched, I can and I re watched the, that particular season to discuss that, because I think we need to be able to have a [00:48:00] language to start pushing back against some of these, understandings of adoption. Think about what happened in the news, at least in the U. S., around Michael Oher and the conservatorship with the Tuohy's. You know, I reference, I think it might be in a footnote in adoption, or an end note rather, in Adoption Fantasies that The Blind Side is like the most watched Netflix movie. And I remember hearing it. I was like finishing up doing either like copy edits or page proofs on the manuscript.

And I heard that and I was like, holy moly, that says a lot. About how adoption is understood. So if that's all you know about adoption is The Blind Side you're gonna come in with particular kinds of investments, right? So if all you know about adoption is because you watched Sex and the City in college, and that's why you wanted to adopt, I mean, that, again, tells you a lot.

And I think so often people for people think, oh, pop culture. No, pop culture has a huge impact on society [00:49:00] and it does make meaning. It's how parents of other kids. Also, are understanding adoption. So if you're an adoptive parent and you have an adopted child, you know, other families, you may not watch those shows, but other families might.

And so other families might engage in like weird interactions with your kid as a result. And what does that mean to when you have adoptees who continually speak out and push back in. In memoir in essays in fiction, you know, we should be listening. I mean, I know I've been listening. I know you've been listening and many of your listeners have been, but I think we continue to move the needle in terms of how those voices and the reckoning that we're going to be having if.

And I think we're having that reckoning. I think you could see that when The Lost Daughters. So here I'm thinking of like the writing collective spearheaded by Amanda Transue-Woolston. And then Rosita González also helped sort of push this term forward too, is to flip the script. And so that was a decade [00:50:00] ago.

And so what happens when you have that moment and thinking about how that hashtag really changed conversations and considering what we're doing now. And again, it. It is that genealogy. It is recognizing that we are continually moving that needle. And while it may not be fast enough for everybody, we're having conversations about abolition and adoption abolition.

You're seeing how that is in conversation with around the family policing system and the Up End movement in the US to talk about foster care and the violence associated with that. We're seeing conversations and people being able to kind of think broadly and coalition build about the experiences of like donor conceived children and having that conversation around adoption and what that means moving forward too.

And so for me, it's about where are we going next? And what, how can we create the change that we want to see?

Haley Radke: Your friend has a new book coming out [00:51:00] in January that you wanted to tell us about. Speaking of new things changing.

I am really excited about Sara Docan-Morgan's book, In Reunion, that comes out in January from Temple University Press and by, I'm sorry, by January, I mean January 2024, in case you're listening to this episode in 2024 or beyond.

What Sara is doing is weaving accounts from Korean transnational adoptees adopted abroad to not only the U. S. but elsewhere to really think about. Not only that first point of contact and reunion, but what does that look like in the intervening years? And then when she reconnects with the participants, her research participants, she also interweaves her own experiences.

She, like I said earlier, gives voice and is able to name the labor associated with managing not only your affect, but also the experiences [00:52:00] of others. And so here I'm not just thinking about adoptive parents and adoptive families, but also thinking about what that looks like in terms of labor with your birth families.

And she does it with such tenderness and care. I love her book, and I can't say more about it. I think everybody needs to read it, not just if you're Korean adopted, not just if you're in reunion. It's an important book because it helps, like I was saying earlier, change the conversation and narratives we have about reunion, because it's not an end point, and we know that.

We know it's not. We've seen how it's not an end point in documentaries, and yet it always still is seen as the end point. And this isn't to say that everybody is going to want to search or that everybody has success in reunion. Rather, she's giving us the tools, though, to have much needed dialogue and much needed conversation about such an important topic. And so I can't say enough or gush enough about Sara and her work.

Haley Radke

I'm really looking forward [00:53:00] to reading it. I've already been messaging her and hopefully she'll be on to talk about it a little bit with us. Okay, thank you so much, Kim. What a delight to talk to you and hear your wisdom and your shoutouts to all your people you've learned from and we've also learned from.

Where can we find Adoption Fantasies and connect with you online?

Kimberly McKee, Ph.D.: Adoption Fantasies is published by The Ohio State University Press, so you can go directly to their press website. You can also purchase the book online. Or in a probably online wherever books are sold. I would like to think that I would be carried at some big box retailer, but I'm not. So why pretend you can also connect with me on my website, mckeekimberly.com or you can find me over on Instagram @ adopteekilljoy. I will freely admit I am not very strong at managing my DMs on Instagram. So [00:54:00] sometimes if you message me, I will message you back. It just may not. Be very quick.

And I'm always very apologetic. And trust me, it's me. It really is me. It's and as you can see, if you're if you go over to my Instagram account, I don't tend to post a lot. And I think it's because people forget, you know, that's not my full time job I'm not a I don't, I manage my own social media, so I'm a person, like everybody else, so I hope people give me some grace if you try to find me online.

Haley Radke: That might be one of the things I relate to most about you. Relatable, DMs gone unanswered for a long time. Yes, me too. Yes, we're human on the other end. Thank you so much, Kim. Thank you.

This has been so much fun talking with you.

I'm so thankful for Kim and the other critical adoption scholars who share their wisdom and knowledge with [00:55:00] us. On the show, it just means so much to me that we are getting a high quality education here on the podcast from these really tremendous folks who have put so much effort in researching Adoption from the adoptee perspective.

So one amazing way to support these folks is to make sure we are ordering their books and writing reviews for them. Wherever we order our books from or on Goodreads, it is a big help and a lot of them love hearing from you and knowing what impact their work has had on you. So make sure you are kind and generous when you are supporting these fellow adoptees. Who are spending a lot more time researching adoption stuff than a lot of us would like to spend on it. And I'm grateful for their efforts for us. I want to thank all of the [00:56:00] people who are supporting Adoptees On, whether it is a one time donation or you are a Patreon supporter, you make this show possible. Thank you so much. If you want to join them, go to adopteeson.com/community to find out more details. And we have book clubs going on. And we have. Adoptee's Off Script Party is going on where you can make a new adoptee friend. We have our monthly Ask an Adoptee Therapist events and I just, there's so many good things going on over there.

I hope that you'll join us. Thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.

267 Jessica Hairston

Transcript

Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/267

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267_Jessica Hairston

Haley Radke: [00:00:00] This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it, either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.

You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radke. I am so excited to introduce you to our guest, Jessica Hairston, author of Power of Our Wombs. Today, Jessica shares her complex origin story where both of her biological parents were struggling with addiction when she was born.

Jessica was apprehended and adopted soon after. We talk about the traveling trauma, that's a quote from one of Jessica's poems, that has impacted her family system, and the power of the word womb, which features prominently in her poetry collection. Before we get started, I wanted [00:01:00] 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 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'm so pleased to welcome to adoptees on Jessica Hairston. Welcome Jessica.

Jessica Hairston: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm really grateful to be here. Really looking forward to this.

Haley Radke: Oh, I'm so glad. Me too. I would love it if you would start and share some of your story with us.

Jessica Hairston: So I'm from Oakland, California. I was born June 19th in Oakland, 1998. And I, guess I'll say that I was born to drug addicted parents. And I mean, I can get into [00:02:00] where the story fits in the larger scheme of Oakland, but I was born to drug addicted parents. My mother had another child 12 years before me. My father had two kids before I was born as well.

So there was already a kind of a standing history of family struggle and family separation. It's kind of unclear. Some reports say they were married and others say they were not married. And then I have two younger siblings who share the same parents as well, mother and father. I was as commonly done with kids who are born to drug addicted parents.

And also found cocaine in my system as well. I was put in foster care pretty soon after. What I learned from going through my adoption records was I was able to do so a little later in life around college, my college years, my early college years. My mom was able to breastfeed [00:03:00] me for a few days while CPS and the courts were doing an investigation which revealed her first child from 12 years prior.

And the child abuse or housing was denoted as child abuse allegations with that child. So her drug addiction was definitely something that was really apparent and integral in her life. And my older sister was taken out of her custody around two years old and placed in foster care. And so the courts used that as evidence of being an unfit parent a second time around and promptly terminated her parental rights.

But what I did find interesting was that both of them put in for an appeal against the parental rights cutoff. And my birth father actually kind of labored, so to speak, for that reversal for almost four months. But ultimately the judge ruled no in his against his wishes due to the fact that he also was HIV [00:04:00] positive and had progressed into AIDS.

So at that time being off and on homeless and whatnot. They determined that he wouldn't be a good parent in the long run. So yeah, I was born in 1998 and my birth father passed away in 2008 when I was 10. Yeah, he was definitely terminal. And then my birth mother passed in 2016 when I was about 17.

Haley Radke: Really sorry for your losses.

When you were taken into care, did you maintain a connection with either of them?

Jessica Hairston: No, ultimately, no. My mom told me somewhere around high school that they, I don't know if this was something afforded to them because they were doing the appeal. And honestly, I'm not sure that lines up because I do think that this happened a little bit later when I was around because it took it took my mom or everything took about three years to be finalized or when I was about [00:05:00] three.

So I guess you could say that I was in foster care until I was about 10 months. And then at about 10 months, I started going home with my mom occasionally, and then I would go back to the foster home for a little while and go back and get used to her. And then about at a year is when I was full time placed with her.

And then around three is when the adoption was finalized. So I believe somewhere at the age of two is when I think she was, my mom would go down to the Alameda County building and do possible supervised visits. Story that I was given that she didn't show up for them. .

Haley Radke: So once you were adopted, you didn't have a connection with them?

Jessica Hairston: That is correct. I had a closed adoption.

Haley Radke: Yeah. And what about your siblings? So you had older siblings and then you had younger siblings. You were kind of in the middle of six, is that right?

Jessica Hairston: Yeah, there's six of us total. I have five siblings.

Haley Radke: What was it like for you [00:06:00] building relationships with them as young adults, essentially strangers to each other?

Jessica Hairston: I think partly there was this feeling of wow, how could we mostly all still be located in the Bay Area? I mean, it's definitely one of those adopting narratives where you're like, it could be you, it could be you, it could be you, it could be you, it could be you, it could be you. You kind of think any person that I'm passing, any person I'm sitting in this class with.

I did kind of have a lot of connection with community members, whether it was dance or like some little volunteer work that I would do with people who are, long standing folks in Black Oakland, and so I would kind of just throw my last name out there from time to time, which I did have and I could say more about that later, but got nothing back, actually.

Nobody's heard the last name. Nobody living that would know knew about that last name, so that was a little bit frustrating, but nonetheless, meeting them, it's been one of the most incredibly beautiful experiences, [00:07:00] wouldn't change it for the world. I was definitely that kid that wanted to meet them, prayed for that experience.

And I, to this day, I'm mostly close with my older sister on my father's side. She lived in Las Vegas now with her 10-year-old son, and my dad. So that's a really wonderful relationship. It's been difficult because essentially we met, I started to meet all of my siblings in 2018 2019.

So we got about two visits in before the shelter in place. And at the time the shelter in place, my sister lived in Roseville, which is like two and a half hours from the Central Bay Area. So we really couldn't even sneak and see each other, that's a really far drive. And so it was almost like five years before I really got the opportunity to really spend a good amount of time with them.

My relationship with my sister on my birth mother's side, it's also really [00:08:00] wonderful. It's been getting better. One of her favorite activities is to hike, so we go and we bond by hiking and talking. I also enjoy being able to meet her friends because being in foster care, she doesn't have any main parental figures in her life.

So meeting her friends and whatnot, or her foster siblings, those that is her community, and of course her kids as well. But at the same time, when we first met, it was a little bit more tricky because she wasn't ready to introduce me to anyone in her life yet. And she wasn't ready to have a full on relationship per se.

So I kind of had to just be patient and kind of just sit back and let her trust me and come to terms with that. She met our birth mother at 18 19. She invited her to her son's first birthday. And her mother kind of did not come inside and had an emotional breakdown and just kind of left the party and so that kind of stained her one and only chance or her one and only [00:09:00] desire to reconnect with her birth mother.

My sister is also biracial, so I was afraid possibly that meeting me would be triggering as I have the skin tone that my mother has and whatever features I have that are similar to her might be very feel like she's kind of talking to her. She took her time and I had to be patient and then a year or two ago, she invited me out to her son's graduation from high school, friends were there, and I'm always a little bit awkward around new people, but I think one of the things that kind of stood out to me was seeing a lot of the people in that space are fossies themselves, and so there's this sort of connection that I can kind of see, even if it's not spoken per se all the time, that's we've survived a certain kind of lifestyle together, a certain kind of struggle together and they support each other, but she has so much community within those people. They have their kids, they have, [00:10:00] there's just so many people at that party. And I guess I don't know why I thought there would be anyone there, but I, some folks who come, age out of foster care don't have really anybody in their corner.

And so I didn't exactly know where I would stand. I know that sounds crazy and a little bit selfish, but I didn't know. If my presence was needed, I mean, it seemed like all her friends were like her sister and I was like, oh I'm like our sister, but I don't have any of this history with her like personally and then on top of that, she didn't invite me.

She didn't introduce me to her children, her, like her son, who was the main focus of the party she not introduced me. Towards the end, when he finally came out and started saying hello to people, I, when it was my turn, I said, hello and congratulations. I even kind of gave him a gift who are you?

I have no idea who you are. And I was like, oh, I'm, I'm your mother and your sister by birth. And he was like, oh, and some of the other folks at the party some of the men at the [00:11:00] party or whatever, boyfriends or foster people from male foster folks also did not know who I was and were very interested to know who I was and who is this 12 year younger person in the mix.

And so that was a little bit overwhelming for me because it kind of retriggered this original fear when we first met that she didn't really want to integrate me into her life. And I don't think it was to be malicious, which is a very tender topic for her in general. But after 3 or 4 years, I was like this is, it would be good for me as well if we could at least talk about, I don't know, it's a tricky one, it's a tricky one.

Haley Radke: Speaking of tricky, having a birth mother who had trauma in her life and I mean, something causes someone to seek out escape and I'm curious if there are things that you found out about her or [00:12:00] your biological father. Characters, traits, things from their younger years when they weren't struggling as much from your siblings, or have the things that impacted their lives been a barrier for you to even think about asking those questions?

Jessica Hairston: Yes and no to what I've been able to find out, I know some things about my mother's side and my father's side of the family in general, what they come from generationally. It's, I know even by their teen years, they were already overcoming a lot of just poverty in general. I think my father kind of bounced around family member a lot.

And then there was undetermined accusations of our grandfather on my mother's side, touching his children sexually, and that possibly being a motivator for drug use to start. As far as character traits [00:13:00] go, there are definitely two people, or, my birth family is, they're not the most talkative as to, on one hand, a lot of people don't remember a lot from that time, almost 25 years ago or more.

And then of folks who are still alive, it's even harder because a lot of people are not still alive. My father has, I'm not even sure how many siblings he has, but it's many siblings. And a good chunk of them have passed away. And the same with my mother's side of the family. It's hard to find people who can give me information in the first place.

I asked a little bit of my younger sister. Who was raised by our cousin, adopted by our cousin, as when she was adopted, our birth mother did try to sort of come around when she was about, so I guess they had tried to do supervised visits when they were, she was a bit younger, 1, 2, 3 years of age didn't work out, same thing that had happened with me, [00:14:00] and then around 4 or 5, she started popping back up again, trying to have a relationship with my younger sister, but was kind of insistent on, if I'm going to be in my younger sister's life, she needs to call me mom.

She needs to be the sort of intimacy that kind of ignores the original trauma and... The separation that's been some years now and the fact that, her, our cousin is now her legal mom and it has to be feel tricky, my mother would have been 45, 50 at this point with someone who is 25 raising her daughter, but not being able to sort of exercise any real control of the situation.

And she was, they kind of just described her as being very, just emotionally aggressive demanding, and when she doesn't get her way, she kind of disappears, and that kind of thing, but that could very well just be someone who has been addicted to hardcore drugs for a very long time, and their personality and their thinking patterns have [00:15:00] been severely changed by that because, my, one of my other mother's sisters, We occasionally speak on Facebook, and I immediately noticed she told me she had done cocaine for 15 years.

But, one of the first things I noticed was kind of the inability to sort of make complete sentences or have sort of complete thought processes and really explain herself when she speaks. A lot of times I do not understand what she's saying. The thoughts don't follow a consistent, linear kind of understanding.

And so I think whoever they are, it's been a very long time since they've been who they were in the beginning, and I don't think anyone has the capacity to kind of decipher it, which is frustrating for me because I want to know, and these are the kind of things that I find important in general as someone I find, I love sociology, I love history, and of course, studying the Black experience and supporting people is very important to me, so There is sort of that saviorism within me to kind of support my birth family after all this time, but that's [00:16:00] very difficult to do.

I think I'm a lot like my father. I definitely look like him. Definitely his doppelganger of my, all my siblings, I look the most like him. Oftentimes my siblings mothers, who also had a relationship with him, will kind of, I'll catch them staring at me. They'll kind of be like, oh my god, here he is in the present tense after all these years.

But other than that, I don't know much about the personalities, very little about our health history as well.

Haley Radke: So I'm going to make an assumption that from the fact about your origin story, it possibly was untenable for your mother to care for you. And and we can talk a lot about all the upstream things that need to change so that we don't keep removing disproportionately more black and brown children from their parents, and you had a [00:17:00] really difficult situation. So placed in foster care and adopted, your adoptive mother was black. And... So you were raised an only child, at least minimum, same race adoption.

That's what I experienced as well. Do you have thoughts on that? Do you feel like you got to have a different experience than some of the, we talked to a lot of transracial adoptees and that extra layer of not understanding racism by their white parents is so difficult to overcome.

Jessica Hairston: That's one of the things I definitely wanted to speak on today, I, especially as I've been listening to more adoptee podcasts and just really diving into the world of adoption literature, I think that yes and no. But when I say yes, as a different experience from what transracial adoptees experience, [00:18:00] I don't have a lot of clarity of folks who've come from same race adoption, like myself, who're also Black, because it seems to be very uncommon from what I've experienced.

Not that it doesn't exist across all 50 states and the world and whatever, but I have actually met quite a few adoptees over my lifetime. We haven't all been able to maintain relationships over the years, which I think is interesting. But most of them have all been adopted by white folks, but living in urban environments, not in the suburbs or in sort of more, in less metropolitan areas.

But my experience, my mother is something I'm still trying to figure out myself, but she's very conservative, not like homophobic, not Christian homophobic. An evangelical, super conservative in that way. She definitely knows that [00:19:00] racism is a thing. She grew up during the Martin Luther King era. Her oldest brother was born in 1947.

But it was not exactly what you would think or expect. My mother is, her family is from Illinois. Her mother's side of the family is from Illinois, and that is where she was raised. And they were raised in the suburbs of Illinois. Definitely comes from poverty trauma. But as far as growing up, like I said, in an urban environment that has high policing, particularly after, the 80s and 90s and the war on drugs there's a lack of experience during the formative years like that and during years where you would have needed parenting or some sort of mentorship in an environment like that.

So what I experienced growing up was more like, as I got older, I started dealing with suspensions and expulsions. Between both public and private school, when I started to experience micro, macro aggressions, like being followed around the store being accused of stealing, [00:20:00] those were times where I did not experience a parent who was able to support me with coping mechanisms or understanding the level of racism that I was facing, and oftentimes was dismissed and gaslighted about the situation.

There's many experiences, like even when we would go out to eat at a restaurant and I'd say we're not being served or we're not being served properly because this is this would be racism. I have definitely detected some prejudice racism something's going on here And I think also it's a cultural thing the sense of she was kind of raised during a time where even if the older folks kind of understood the nuance, I think as a child she observed was just don't make a scene don't speak about it.

Just ignore it. Just sort of let it happen. Take the high road something like that. I don't want to say turn the other cheek. It's a, that's very, I won't say that, but it was definitely, that's what comes out. And I think she's someone who also struggles with conflict resolution in general. And so I think that is [00:21:00] not something that you can be.

That can that's not conducive to an urban environment. Obviously, you can't always control your surrounding. You can't control the way you respond or how you support your loved ones through those experiences. And yeah, I also lived in neighborhoods that had high crime, essentially, a lot of killings from within the neighborhood, gang, street, drugs, that kind of stuff, or police killings.

So there was also a lack of support with that as well, coming from, I presume, not growing up in an environment. She grew up somewhere where they were able to leave the doors unlocked. We were not able to do that. We had to live in places that had gates in the front to catch bullets, essentially, or blackout curtains and that kind of stuff. It was not, I was not able to go down the block very far. I'm barely allowed to step outside for during certain periods of the day. And just kind of experience all around gaslighting and just, like even today I'll ask my mom I'll [00:22:00] bring up something about when we lived in East Oakland.

She'd be like, I don't know what you're talking about. We didn't experience any of that. What are you talking about? She's completely unable to go back and be clear about that. And when I would go, when I was in public school, especially during certain time periods, I think it was popular for kids of a certain, and this is not to shame them, like you go through what you go through.

This is the world you come from. This is what it looks like a privilege if other folks are not going through that or not having to come up with coping skills for that. So I'm not trying to shame folks who I felt bullied me, but I feel like there was a lack of compassion or anybody who was able to sort of pull me in and support me with what I was experiencing as well.

And so a lot of times people say they see my name, they see Jessica, they see my mom, they think we kind of live in some big house on the hill somewhere. That I had everything set out for me. They fear that I'm adopted and I'm not in foster care. So my life must be great and there's not a lot of investigation into what else is going on in my life.

So I carried a lot of stuff alone. [00:23:00] And I found myself learning how to take care of myself from listening to other people's conversations, but not being a part of the conversation, not being asked to be a part of the conversation.

Haley Radke: Thank you for sharing that. I think a lot of us have assumptions about what it's like to be adopted out of foster care, right?

You have this extra label put on you. And the trauma is there. The trauma is still real. It's layered. It's so complex, our relationships with the people that... or caring for us can be really complex and well into adulthood. I want to talk about your book, Power of Our Wombs. You are a poet and you share so many deeply personal stories throughout this.

And I wanna know, okay, first of all, do you have a word count on how many times the word womb [00:24:00] appears in this ?

Jessica Hairston: I do not.

Haley Radke: Okay. That's a challenge to you to go ahead and discover that, to search on your electronic file. I am curious what your relationship to the word womb is now that you have written so much about it, and I mean, obviously, it's related to being an adopted person.

Every human has a relationship to a womb in some form. And your poem stack of papers is really, I don't know, do you want to talk about sort of all that theme? I'll just leave it to you. What direction you want to go on that?

Jessica Hairston: Yeah. I think that part of the desire to, to write this book or to write it the way I've written it and use the word womb was definitely partly to push [00:25:00] myself to overcome my uncomfortability with the female experience, wombs, motherhood, pregnancy, because a part of the way I feel like my adoption trauma manifested or metastasized in a way was to sort of reject anything that reminded me of familyhood.

So as a young girl, I could not and I've heard this from a few other folks who are adopted. It's hard to look at pregnant women. It's hard to look at mother daughter relationships that look healthy. I had a science teacher one day that came in and announced her pregnancy and, or, well, later on she did a baby shower at our school and just out of joy and excitement, she like, turned to me because I was standing most closely to her because I came in late because I was avoiding the baby shower.

And she like put her hand out to have me kind of touch her belly and I was like, snatch it back so quick. I was like, oh no. I'm happy for you, but no, we're not doing that. So I know that sounds weird, but I needed to sort of get comfortable, investigate and sort of take my power back.

And [00:26:00] I think that it's just a fear that my inner child has. And now that I'm older, I have the power to sort of start that journey of positive association and positive recall, positive outlook on it. Not like toxic positivity, but I think that is something that I try to do in the book, which is sort of hold a balance of like the last poem in the book is Think About Mothers which was attempted to be a love letter, which, another thing is like writing about love, writing about joy to be difficult.

Sometimes it's easier to write about the feels More authentic to write about trauma, and it feels somehow inauthentic to talk about joy. And I think it's also kind of like pushing back on that overarching theme of just be happy, just be positive. Just be joyful. And so there's kind of like this uncomfortability I'm dealing with uncomfortability in this book.

And I think even now I, I've kind of self-diagnosed myself with endometriosis. And so now I'm kind of [00:27:00] dealing with the actual physical health of my own womb, whether that be, and even how does endometriosis start is the question, what has caused this rise in endometriosis in women in reading all kinds of articles, everything from early childhood trauma can start this internal scarring in the uterus or it could be something that is common in my birth family.

I do know that my brothers dealt with cysts, possibly fibroids as well. And then my sister has also dealt with cysts and just had to have a hysterectomy herself. So wombs really does cover a lot of stuff for me. And so Power of Our Wombs, the title is sort of speaking to the intensity of life emanating and surrounding the female reproductive familyhood and all of that kind of thing.

It's not so much to be like, we overcome, per se, because a lot of trauma around Wombs is. [00:28:00] Systematic, everything from birth control, everything from Roe v, Wade, and abortion rights, everything to adoption rights, birth motherhood, birth mothers, birth, family support. So yeah, I hope that answers your question.

Haley Radke: Well, it made me feel. So deeply, I think every time I saw the word, because for many adoptees have expressed something, some form of this to me in either private conversations or on air that you kind of feel like you got dropped by the stork or, you were born when a paper was signed and there's this extreme disconnection from the physical idea that you were in a mother's womb at some point, whether or not she wanted to be a mother to you and, then you also, God, this line, I don't know if I already said it to you or not, but the traveling [00:29:00] trauma.

And I was thinking about how, well, supposedly we're also carried around as eggs, one gen back as well. Yes. Yes. So there's all these themes to think about, and I think your book really masterfully brings us through some of those things that maybe we just don't want to think about. Yeah.

Jessica Hairston: I was going to say was yes, that, that life begins when the paper is signed. That's actually something I was thinking about this morning. I think one of the things that people don't fully understand, and I think I heard it on your podcast or a similar podcast was about adoptees, kind of, if this is your experience of not having birth or having pictures of yourself before a certain age.

So for me, it would be 10 months and, people who are not adopted said, well, that's not super weird, whatever. And [00:30:00] I'm like, well. I think when you parallel it with that, like you said, life doesn't really start until you are adopted. It kind of feels in an unspoken way, either things were quite literally survival mode both for me and for the foster family, so to speak.

There's no time to document my growth or my coming through a difficult origin story or, bringing into this world. And or my life doesn't I, I don't really it's not really valid. It doesn't quite exist. It doesn't quite meet the standards of existing until you're adopted. I don't really know how else to put it, but I often contend feeling frustrated, not so much because I need to see what I look like immediately coming out of the womb, but I, when you're dealing with trauma that started before you were able to speak.

Being able to do recall using your, using visual cues to kind of conjure up [00:31:00] memories that are just in the body. I feel like it's powerful and it should be available to us. And then if nothing comes from it, then nothing comes from it. It's not that important. It's not that important. But again, It's frustrating when everyone decides what's important for an adopted child, other than what, adopted kids would say and need.

Haley Radke: Absolutely. Hard degree with that. Well, I definitely want to recommend that people pick up Power of Our Wombs. I... Was trying to think of how to describe it. I had such a visceral experience while reading. It's very powerful storytelling Jessica and you've got these just deeply honest observations about painful circumstances and I think you're really bringing us on a journey with you.

The other thing that was unexpected to me and really helpful is you included a reading guide and you talk about some of the themes that [00:32:00] you're addressing in your poetry. And I think it will be really helpful for folks to reflect on. So I love that you did that. Yeah, I hope people grab a copy of Power of Our Wombs.

Is there anything you want to tell us about it that you think is important for us to know?

Jessica Hairston: I actually, I love that you mentioned the reading guide. It was a requirement, really, from the publisher, but I decided to sit down and kind of do it the way that I've done it, by breaking it up into these particular categories that I broke it up into family origins.

I tried to use language that had been used in the book. So what has been lost, which is kind of reminiscent of the first poem in the book. But I also, I wanted it to be, because I know that my writing style can be a bit visceral, a bit, really stirring of the emotions. And I think that's also partly to sort of push back on my own chronic dissociation.

But [00:33:00] I also include somewhere at the, after the reading guide, there was like an intuition. prompt. There's even a space to write to the younger self. So I really enjoy that you kind of went cover to cover with the book. Not everyone mentions that part at the end where I try to make it hands on, sort of interactive, so to speak, of getting both me and you to, not only me to look at myself, or you to look at me or think about the world outside of yourself, but also for you to look at you too.

Haley Radke: I think that's a part of it is definitely opening the door for us to do that. So thank you. I was just, I was flipping through the poems I've marked up and I, One Last Catwalk is just wow.

Okay.

What do you want to recommend to us? Cause I know people are going to go buy your book and so that's great.

They'll read along and enjoy. But what do you want to recommend to us?

Jessica Hairston: [00:34:00] I found through I'm not sure you may know or have seen, be familiar with the account on Instagram, Susan Ito, as a professor for news.

Haley Radke: She's been on the show. Oh, yes. Love Susan.

Jessica Hairston: Hey, oh my gosh, I missed that. Wow. So that's not my recommendation, but from her, I realized that I actually needed to branch out and connect with folks. And that's kind of what got me starting to follow these accounts. And I found BIPOC Adoptees from several accounts. Susan, from you, a few people, so I knew to go follow it. And took me to YouTube where I just got to really sit down and watch adoptees speak with Patrick on their stories.

And I think one thing that I really love about it is, and not too different from a podcast, is being able to listen to people speak about their experiences from adulthood. The last time I really had an integrative conversation with [00:35:00] someone else who was adopted was probably in high school. And we feel and that's a great time to be talking about.

I mean, there's no bad time to speak about adoption, right? But I think that we have our perspective is going to grow as we grow especially as we get to an age we may be starting families ourselves. So I really enjoyed those conversations those revelations made I think it's a great opportunity to see especially adopted folks of different BIPOC backgrounds speak about their experiences.

You get to see their faces as well. But I know you said only to say one thing, but I just in general have realized that there is a lack of adoption work and resources in my life, which sounds crazy after I've written a book and known about being adopted and even had friends about it. But there is a lack of really understanding the history behind adoption, how it's looked at different decades, how it looks internationally, and all of these things, so kind of really getting to sit down and look at the [00:36:00] field of study of it has been really enlightening, and anything that I was ever not sure was a real feeling that I've had has already been validated ten times over, which is sad in a way, because I think, someone had said, people try to say when an adopted person speaks up that it is, oh, your is an outlier. It's not. It's actually quite the norm, whether you're suburban, transracial or not, the identity issues, the abandonment trauma, the sort of be grateful and just all these narratives they're actually quite common. Unfair.

Haley Radke: Yeah. I mean, when people hear our stories and they're like, oh my gosh, I'm not the only one . It's no, you're not and welcome in. I hope you get connected. Welcome. Yes. Thank you for sharing that with us. I, when we're recording this. So they have a fundraiser going to help produce some of their content.

And so if that [00:37:00] is interesting to you, if that sounds like a project you want to support, we'll link to that in the show notes. So you can go check that out and support more adoptee voices in the world. It's important to me too. I think that would be wonderful. Thank you so much, Jessica, for sharing your story with us and for there's some really good nuggets here and there through our conversation of things I'm going to be thinking about for a while. So I really appreciate that. Where can folks get Power of Our Wombs and connect with you online?

Jessica Hairston: My website is new and it's up jhairstonwrites.com. And there you will, the first page will have a link to my book to buy, should be taking you both to the distribution website and possibly Amazon as well. There's also unpublished new poetry on the website. And you can also contact me through the website. Send me a message, send me an email. And my socials are on the website for [00:38:00] Instagram, kemaniii.j, my birth name. And, yes, you can find me most regularly on Instagram, at kamaniii.j with three i's. And, yeah, I'd love to hear from you all. The link to buy my book is also on my Instagram, plenty of places to find it, you can Google it, it should pop up.

Haley Radke: Wonderful. Thank you.

Jessica Hairston: Thank you so much for having me, this is a wonderful question session, fantastic.

Haley Radke: Thank you.

I want to remind myself how much of an honor it is for us to hear our fellow adoptees Stories and share them here. Sometimes because this is my job, I think I'm like, Oh yeah, I get to hear another story today or I'm recording and [00:39:00] I don't necessarily remember the gravity of it. And so I was just thinking about that after my conversation with Jessica and how many more young adoptees are becoming adults and thinking about adoption critically so much sooner than many of us.

And also sharing their stories a lot sooner than a lot of us ever did because we hadn't processed it yet and our stories shift and change over time, how we share them, what we're comfortable with, all of those things. And anyway, I really hope you pick up Jessica's book because her poetry is really evocative, and it made me feel some kind of way.

So if you're looking for something that will really make [00:40:00] you feel big visceral feelings. This is the perfect one to grab and support a new author. I want to thank all of my Patreon supporters. You guys make this show possible. I couldn't do it without you. And if you join Patreon, you get all kinds of extra bonuses.

I have. Adoptees Off Script Podcast, which is every week. We have our monthly Ask an Adoptee Therapist events. We have the Adoptees Only Book Club and some other community gatherings. We would just love to have you join us and you help keep the show going. So please join us at adopteeson.com/community and thank you for listening to Adoptee Voices. Let's talk again next Friday.