By Laura L. Engel

The author and her son Jamie.

In 2016, I was living a great life, newly retired after a 35-year career in the corporate world and enjoying the extra time to indulge in travel with my beloved husband. That spring, on a whim, we decided to submit DNA tests to Ancestry.com.

Privately I hoped for a miracle. I had a secret.

In 1967, I’d given birth to my first-born child in an unwed mothers maternity home in New Orleans, Louisiana. I had been a typical 17-year-old high school senior with plans for the future that evaporated overnight.

In the sixties, it was considered close to criminal for a girl to become pregnant with no ring on her finger. The father of my child had joined the Army, preferring Vietnam to fatherhood. After my parents discovered my shameful secret, I was covertly hurried away and placed in an institution for five months. There, I was expected to relinquish my baby immediately after giving birth to closed adoption and I was repeatedly assured my child would have a better life without me.

After his birth, I was allowed to hold my son three times. My heart was permanently damaged when I handed him over the final time. The home allowed one concession—I could give my baby a crib name. I named him Jamie.

***

For decades I privately grieved my son but never spoke of him. Many times, I furtively searched for Jamie but always hit a brick wall. Adoption records were still sealed in Louisiana, continuing the archaic shadow of secrecy.

In October 2016, while out walking my dogs one evening, a  ‘Parent/Child Match’ message popped up on my iPhone, causing me to stop me in my tracks as my knees gave out from under me.

After 49 long years, Jamie had found me. Who was he? Where was he? Would he hate me? How would this affect my life? My family? His family?

I had always dreamed of finding Jamie but never thought past that point.

My hands shaking, I gathered courage and wrote back to this man who now called himself Richard. Within minutes he answered. At first, we tiptoed around each other, answering basic questions, but soon we were pouring our hearts out. My son was back in my life, and I learned I had three new grandchildren. All the while shame and fear bit at me as tears streamed from my eyes, but simultaneously overwhelming joy and hope flooded through me.

That night I heard my son’s voice for the first time. The wonder I felt when he said, “I know your voice” transformed me. In minutes, the secret of my son changed from fear of anyone knowing about him to wanting to shout out to the world, “My son has found me!”

Between tears and laughter, our first conversation lasted four hours. It was torture. It was euphoric. I cried. He cried. A tremendous relief replaced fear.

All the reunion experts warn, ‘take your time—do not rush into your first meeting.’ Neither one of us cared what experts said. Within four days, Richard flew from Louisiana to California to meet me. That first meeting was magical. My son was back in my life, and suddenly I was whole.

We discovered we delighted in each other’s company, and nature trumped nurture in many aspects of our lives. Richard resembled me in appearance and personality, and to my delight his oldest daughter was my tiny clone. I was smitten and immediately fell deeply in love with him and his children.

My husband, children, and stepchildren welcomed Richard and his family with open arms, and I pinched myself. My life took on a whole new dimension as Richard and I tried to make up for lost time. Two thousand miles did not keep us apart.

For three years, we made multiple trips to see each other, spending holidays and time together. His family welcomed me with open arms, too. Both of his adoptive parents had passed away, and I sorely regretted not being able to thank them for loving my son and giving him a good life.

2020—COVID happened—suspending all trips back and forth. We called, we texted, and all the while I watched as this son of mine started to break down before my eyes. A messy divorce, loss of job, and unhealthy isolation began to destroy him. Depression had colored my mother’s life, and I watched with hands tied as it was destroying his. Desperately, I advised him as a mother, counselor, cheerleader—but this was beyond my mothering skills. He seemed unable to pull himself out of a dark hole and I worried daily.

In February 2021, we had what would be our last conversation. Before hanging up Richard said, “I love you, Mom. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”

I cherish that phone call. Two days later, the son I had mourned for 50 years, the son who had found me, left me again. He took his own life. Now I had lost him twice and this time was forever.

A year later and I have torn myself up over the “what ifs” the “could I have done more?”  My grief has been crippling, but slowly I have come to realize that as painful as his loss is, I am forever grateful for our fleeting time together and I would not trade it for anything. Without our magical and much too short reunion, I would never have known about his childhood, the good man he was, or felt the love he imparted to me. I would never have forgiven myself for leaving him, and I would never have known my beloved grandchildren. Through them, I still have Richard.

I wish I could speak to all the birth mothers out there, who continue to carry the shame and guilt that society placed on us. For those who refuse to allow their relinquished child back into their lives. I want to say I know your fear. I know your uncertainty. I lived it and still live it. It is deep-seated in us, regardless of the circumstances that resulted in us leaving our children. Please know if you are brave enough to welcome that lost child into your life again, you may create a peace and a bond worth all the fear and guilt. There is nothing quite like reuniting a mother and her child, and you may be giving a gift of connection to that child and yourself, as it should have been all along.

One thing I know for sure—the memories of those short years with Richard will uplift me the rest of my life.Laura L. Engel, author of You’ll Forget This Ever Happened: Secrets, Shame, and Adoption in the 1960s, was born and raised on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and was transplanted to San Diego more than 50 years ago. Retired from a corporate career, she’s married to the love of her life, Gene, and is the mother of five beloved grown children and an adored Golden Retriever, Layla Louise. She’s the president of San Diego Memoir Writers Association and an active member of the International Women Writers Guild. Find her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. 

Louise Browne and Sarah Reinhardt created The Making of Me as a platform for conversations about all aspects of adoption. But it’s a podcast with a twist. In each episode, the hosts and their guests discuss a book about adoption. In the first season they tackled Nancy Verrier’s The Primal Wound, and now just a few episodes into their second season, they’re exploring another classic, Journey of the Adopted Self, by Betty Jean Lifton.

Meet the adoptee friends who pivoted from operating an ice cream truck to hosting a popular podcast.Can you each summarize your adoption journeys?

Sarah: My bio parents met in their first year of college but went their separate ways after the second semester ended; he went back to New Hampshire, and soon after, he was drafted in Vietnam. I’m not sure if he dropped out of college or what the circumstances were that he was drafted, but he never learned of the pregnancy. My bio mom kept it from her parents—weirdly, she was also adopted!—and on a plane from JFK (she was from Queens) to St. Louis where she was to go to nursing school, her water broke. There was no hiding that from her mother. She was not allowed to even hold me. I was immediately taken from her. I was placed with a foster mother for about six weeks and then adopted into my family. A few years later, they adopted a boy, and when he was five months old, they discovered they were pregnant with twins. They divorced when I was seven, and my brothers and I stayed with my dad (who remarried about five years later). My bio mom had four kids after me (and another she carried almost to term but lost after a terrible car accident)—all of whom were kept. My bio father, who died before I was able to meet him, had three kids, one from a second marriage. So I’m the oldest of seven biologically, and three from adoption. I also have three step-siblings. I met my bio mom and siblings in 1998 and stayed in touch with her until she died in 2009. I’m still in reunion with my sisters.

Louise: My biological mom chose to put me up for adoption in September 1968 after leaving college when she became pregnant with me. She was 18 years old. She’d known my biological father in high school in Colorado, where they dated. From what I’ve gathered, they met up again during the holidays and I was the result of that encounter. My biological father was already engaged to his girlfriend at the time who was also pregnant previous to their encounter. My bio mom took on the journey of having me on her own. My bio dad did know about me and signed off on my adoption. I believe that the decision to relinquish me was made by my bio mother “in her right mind” because I have letters from her to family members who had asked her to consider letting them raise me. She was very insistent that I have a father figure who was strong because of her missing some of that in her childhood and she did not want to see me being raised and not be my mother. She had strong convictions on having me be with an intact family. I do think it critically changed her path. From what I know from relatives, she may have regretted it later in life. She passed away at a young age in a drowning incident so I’ve never been able to ask her. I know who my bio dad is and who many of my family members are from knowing his name and having it confirmed on Ancestry. I have not had a reunion with them. I do stay in contact with my bio mom’s sister and cousins. My parents adopted me through an agency several days after I was born in Denver. They had one biological son and had lost a baby girl a few years prior to me in delivery. My mom could not have more children of her own. I then grew up in Littleton, Colorado

How did you meet?

Louise: Our sons were in elementary school together and we met through a mutual friend.

Sarah: Once we discovered we were both adopted, we became instant friends. Ultimately we opened a business together—a gourmet ice-cream truck in Los Angeles.

How did you decide to do a podcast about adoption together and what was your goal at the start?

Sarah: Adoption was what we initially connected over, and we had talked about starting a podcast. We were tossing around ideas and finally we were, “Uh, duh! We should talk about what we both know.”

Louise: Honestly, we didn’t really have a goal except to hear adoption stories and connect with other adoptees.

How did you find and build your audience? Were you already connected with a number of adoptees or with the adoptee community?

Sarah: We were not connected with the adoptee community. In fact, we didn’t even know there was such a thing until a few months in and we found Adoptee Twitter. Our initial audience came from word-of-mouth and friends listening and sharing, and then we started to build a following because people related to the stories and our connection with each other.

Louise: And then it took on a life of its own. People started reaching out to us to thank us, asking to be on the podcast and share their stories.

There are a number of adoptee podcasts – how do you describe The Making of Me?

Louise: I’d describe The Making of Me as more of a conversation around adoption. First we discuss a chapter of an adoption book. in Season One it was The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier, and Season Two is Journey of The Adopted Self by Betty Jean Lifton. After we discuss the book, we bring on a guest to tell their story.

Sarah: I think what draws people to the podcast is that even though it’s a deep topic, we bring levity and honest back-and-forth with our guests.

How and why did you conceive of the idea of linking chapters of books to adoptees’ stories?

Sarah: The chapter discussions are not necessarily linked to the stories. It’s kind of its own thing that we do together before we bring a guest on. But every chapter, every adoptee can relate to.

Do you plan to continue basing the podcast on books about adoption, and if so, do you already have thoughts about books you want to highlight in the future?

Louise: We plan on continuing to base it on books about adoption, at least at this moment. We’ve got a list we’re going through. We’re thinking possibly about a memoir by an adoptee for our next book.

Louise, on your website bio, you write about learning that your birth mother had been killed in an accident, saying “This piece of information proved to be a touchstone between the guiding and protective voice in her head and the events of the past.” Can you say more about that and what you mean by that?

Louise:  My bio mom’s family found me when I was 32 years old due to my bio grandmother being terminally ill. I learned the night that I got the call about them finding me that my bio mom had been killed in an accident when I was in the 2nd grade. This just made sense to me. I was overwhelmed, saddened but not that surprised, strangely. My entire life from around the fourth grade until my late 20s, I felt that I had a voice that protected me. Not my own internal voice, but a voice that would set me on the straight and narrow or give me warning signs when I was going off track too far. I always felt that it was ‘otherworldly’ and I have had many experiences since childhood with sensing people from beyond. When I found out that she was no longer on this earth I wasn’t shocked. I sort of knew this internally. It’s hard to explain. When I found out that she had passed away, I stopped having this sixth sense or voice in my head.

Louise, you’ve said that hosting the podcast has been life changing? In what way?

Louise: The way it has changed my life is that I never really had the experience of community with other adoptees. I have had adopted friends (many in fact), but when we touched on deeper issues about adoption that we all felt, I almost feel like we were scared to broach the topic. We would bond immediately over certain shared experiences that I couldn’t relate to others about, but would be a bit guarded about anything after that. I now have a sense that I can be more open to explore parts of myself that I have kept to myself and haven’t been able to describe or flush out. It is freeing and a bit scary.

Can you both describe your understanding of what is meant by being in the fog or coming out of the fog?

Sarah: How I see it, it’s waking up from the narrative I was told my entire life; I was “lucky,” I was “chosen”—and that was the end of the story. It’s having my eyes opened and understanding that was only the beginning of the story— seeing the deep trauma, how that first relinquishment (and subsequently second from my adopted mom and emotional abandonment from my adopted father) altered the course of my life, affecting almost every decision I’ve made, how I felt about myself, how I relate to people and the world around me. It’s been enlightening and also a grieving process. I’m getting to know myself in a different way. Even though there’s been some grief, it’s also been liberating because I now know I’m not alone, I’m not a freak, and I can begin to heal in a new way.

Louise: The concept of the fog perplexes me somewhat. I do feel I have crossed a line that I hadn’t crossed before in exploration and understanding of what some of my deeper issues are and what caused these issues (where they may have stemmed from). I’m not sure I had the understanding of the deeper core reasons as to why they were there before this. That feels amazing. So, yes, that does feel like coming out of a fog. I understand the fog and how important it is in describing these feelings. I feel I may always be moving through this fog and not just stepping out of it. Or stepping out and then maybe going back in. Maybe it’s a place I may always be in or out of? The way I can best describe it for me is like I am living in it and some days it is sunny and clear and other days it is so thick it may rain. I now feel that I am on a journey that has shifted, and wherever it takes me, I’m excited to have a deep understanding of myself. I feel calmer with this new insight and have developed some grace (for lack of a better word) in looking at the situation from many angles. I am not sure how else to describe it. I hope that makes sense.

What has most surprised you in the course of doing the podcast? What story most affected you?

Sarah: What has been most surprising for me is how far and wide the reach has been, and how many people want to connect, tell their stories, and just tell us how much they relate. And again—the community that I never knew existed!

All the stories have affected me in one way or another, but there are a couple that stand out. Sam, who was an LDA and didn’t find out he was adopted until he was in his early 50s with a life-threatening kidney disease. He had humor in dealing with it. Rachel, whose birth was the result of a violent act, and the grace in which she lives her life. And John, who was part of Operation Baby Lift out of Vietnam! Everyone’s story is so unique and yet the same. I love that.

Louise: I am going to echo Sarah here. I’m blown away daily by those who want to share their stories bravely and connect with us via many means. I feel so honored to have others reach out to us and tell us about their struggles and why they are ready to share their stories. It makes me care greatly about what we are doing and wanting to make sure we let others tell the truth as it is for them. Adoptees and our guests are so resilient, have great humor, and also have such deep souls. I’m grateful I’ve had this time to share with them and to grow in this along with my friend Sarah. Each story is my favorite when it comes out and after our interviews.

From your experience after so many episodes, what do you think is most misunderstood about adoptees by people who are not adopted?

Sarah: People who aren’t adopted don’t understand that it’s a trauma from the start—the “primal wound.” They assume the narrative that we were told—we’re “lucky,” we’re “chosen,” we were “spared a terrible existence.”

Louise: I think they don’t understand that babies carry that trauma on a cellular level. It seems that the mainstream general public hasn’t dug into hearing what adoptees have to say and focuses more on the adopters.

How much were you aware of the adoptee community when you began doing the podcast?

Sarah: How about this—ZERO awareness of the adoptee community! Isn’t that crazy?

Louise: For me, it’s been eye-opening and so informative. We’re really grateful for the community.

As with most communities, the adoptee community isn’t always unified in its beliefs or in its approach to advocacy. Has that ever been an issue for you as you’ve been working on the podcast?

Louise: We had a couple of bumps, mainly to do with being new in the community but because we were open to listening we’ve been welcomed by mostly everyone.

What do you love, if anything, about adoptee Twitter, and what, if anything, do you not love about adoptee Twitter?

Sarah: We love the community, that there are others who have gone through and feel the same as we do—mirrors that we never had, really. We love hearing about issues that we’d never heard in a public forum.

Louise: What can be difficult is that sometimes it feels black and white – not much nuance. If you don’t agree, then you are wrong – no middle-ground. Sometimes legitimate feelings feel dismissed if they’re not the exact same as others.

Why is it important for adoptees to share their stories?

Louise: It’s important to share stories so we can connect as a community, have a safe space to tell your story to people who understand you. We’ve talked to people who have never told their stories and listened to our podcast and found the courage to finally want to talk.

Sarah: It’s liberating to tell your story and be heard with love and compassion.

As advocates for adoptee rights, what do you think is the most significant issue that needs to be addressed?

Sarah: For starters, taking a look at why there are so many infant adoptions. If it’s really about wanting to be a parent, why must it be a baby? Someone else’s baby? Prospective adoptive parents might want to examine—is this about parenting or is this about wanting a baby for our own needs?

Louise: Take profit out of adoption. Resources to birth mothers and families—making keeping that family together the priority. Putting that first, not the needs (or wants!) of the prospective adopters.

Sarah: Legal guardianship rather than adoption (in most cases) is a better option. And NOT changing the child’s name. Why? Just, why is that even a thing anymore?

Jan Beatty’s American Bastard, winner of the 2019 Red Hen Nonfiction Award, is a blistering, take no prisoners account of adoption that may leave non-adoptees astonished and many adoptees shaking their heads in recognition.

A domestic adoptee from the Baby Scoop Era, Beatty was born in the Roselia Asylum and Maternity Hospital in Pittsburgh, adopted into a working-class family, and told when she was young that she’d been adopted. She writes about the emotional life of an adopted child—the longing, yearning, the feeling of erasure and brokenness—and her fractured encounters with the birth parents she discovered after years battling the bureaucratic gatekeepers of adoption information.

Beatty’s lyrical prose sparks like a live wire. For anyone taken from a parent, her words will resonate, at times landing like a punch to the gut and other times like a balm. Adoptees will feel seen, and those who were not adopted may see adoptees for the first time after reading the memoir.

American Bastard punctures the rose-colored vision of adoption that poses the practice as a strategy for social betterment. In its place she offers the reality: “I had assembled huge walls of protection over the years as a way to stay alive. An adoptee needs to have a strategy from a young age, whether conscious or not—a way to manage this hole of abandonment, loss, and grief. It’s too much for a child to handle. The loss of identity, the complete erasure of history, the floating in the world without a name. The original loss of being taken from the mother at birth, and then the adoptive parents pretending that they are your parents. The primary lifelong trauma.”

Beatty blasts away the whitewashed fantasy that casts adopters as saviors and children as rescued. She offers an unflinching picture of the damage adoption can inflict, the lifelong pain of abandonment it leaves in its wake, the lies and the effacement of identity.  She shatters the myths from the very first page, slaying every erroneous belief held by those who think they know what adoption is. “Maybe you are saying, ‘I’ve felt that way—I always thought I was adopted.’ Please, let me stop you. You weren’t.” She disintegrates argument after argument, makes sawdust of all the well-meaning responses adoptees hear all their lives, like those from people who think they understand because their mothers died when they were young. To one after another she says, “Please, let me stop you.” And sets the reader straight. “This is not about measuring sorrow. But this one’s about you—how you can’t seem to imagine, not even for a second, how it might be for someone who doesn’t know who they are—without boomeranging back to your own life. Try it. Try staying with the foreign idea that a baby is born, then sold to another person. Stay with it. There is the physical trauma of the broken bond. There is the erasure of the baby’s entire history. There are these hands that have a different smell, a different DNA—reaching for the baby, calling it theirs. Stay with that for a while. No talking.”

It’s devastating right from the start. And Beatty, in a letter to adopters, offers this brutal assessment—a startling, uncomfortable, and wholly welcome honesty: “What are you thinking? That you could tie it all up with a bow? You’ve erased a baby human to make yourself happy, to fill a hole, to do a good deed—at least own it: it’s for you.”

In no way a traditional memoir, Beatty’s poetic account mixes lyricism, essayistic rambling, fantasy, and stream of consciousness. It drifts back and forth across time and space, circling its subjects, diverting, and circling back. It breaks down, comes apart, and weaves back together. In a structure like no other, it dips and drops readers into the center of scenes and makes them work to get their balance. At times her words seem to dance on a knife’s edge—language that’s painful and raw and beautiful and ugly and insists on every page that you do not look away.—BKJ

Rebecca Carroll, author, cultural critic, and podcast host, was adopted at birth by a white couple and raised in a predominantly white community in rural New Hampshire, where, as the only black resident, she’d see no one who looked like her until she was six years old. Growing up among her white relatives and white townspeople, she had no touchstone for what it meant to be black, no mirror of her own blackness to reflect and illuminate who she really was. And worse, no one cared. Her only point of reference as a child was the character Easy Reader from The Electric Company, whom she fantasized was her father. When she first encountered a black person in real life—her ballet teacher, Mrs. Rowland—she wondered, “Did she know Easy Reader from The Electric Company? Did she go home at night to live inside the TV with him and the words and letters he carried around with him in the pockets of his jacket?” As she grew older, Carroll was aware of being seen by this teacher in a way her parents did not, yet she was also aware of the differences. “I felt small pangs of fragile awareness regarding who I might be, what my skin color might mean. There were days when I wanted to be, or believed I was, black just like Mrs. Rowland, but it also seemed as though I would have to give something up in order for that to remain true.” She was increasingly aware that unlike her teacher, she moved through the world with the “benefits afforded by white stewardship.”

As a transracial adoptee, Carroll had to hurdle barrier after barrier merely to become who she was always meant to be. And considering that the most formidable obstacle to her ability to truly recognize and finally claim her authentic identity as a black woman was her family—both her adoptive parents and her white birthmother—it was an extraordinarily lonely struggle carried out by a force of one. How, isolated in an overwhelmingly white world, could she know what it meant to be black?

While Carroll’s adoptive parents were largely oblivious to her need to understand, absorb, and assert her racial identity, her birthmother aggressively denied her daughter’s racial and cultural heritage. When they began a relationship, 11-year-old Carroll was curious about and soon enamored of her mother, but learned there was a cost to the relationship. She carried that burden for a long time, making excuses and ignoring her intuition as her birthmother did everything possible to torpedo her growing attempt to construct an understanding of herself as a black woman—gaslighting her, subjecting her to blatantly racist comments, and effectively dispossessing her of the right to her own blackness. She straddled two worlds, ill-fitting in one and made to feel like an imposter in the other.

All adoptees are stripped of their histories and their genetic information, but in her powerful memoir, Surviving the White Gaze, Carroll shines a light on this additional theft of something equally fundamental—racial identity—and details the painful journey to take back what should always have been hers.

When she was writing the memoir, one the few black students she taught at an all-girls private school wrote to tell her what she meant to her. “This,” Carroll writes, “is what black folks are to one another—we are the light that affirms and illuminates ourselves to ourselves. A light that shines in its reflection of unbound blackness, brighter and beyond the white gaze. The path to fully understanding this, and my ultimate arrival at the complicated depths of my own blackness, was a decades-long, self-initiated rite of passage, wherein I both sought out and pushed away my reflection, listened to the wrong people, and harbored an overwhelming sense of convoluted grief—a grief that guided me here, to myself.”

In this moving coming of age story, Carroll illustrates the cost of feeling unseen, of being disregarded, not only by the community but by those closest to her who thwarted her at every turn. She pulls no punches, squarely placing the blame where it belongs, on everyone who failed her again and again. It’s the story of pride and persistence, of hard-won healing and redemption.—BKJ

By Charles K. Youeli.
I am sitting on a giant red rock. All around me as far as I can see are more red rocks and red dirt. The sky is brilliant blue. There is no one else around, at least not that I can see from where I sit. All I can hear is the wind. I do not know where I am, but the scenery burns itself into my memory forever. I am 18 months old.

ii.
There’s a tree growing next to the fence in the far corner of the back yard, next to a swing set and a sandbox which no one in our family uses anymore. One summer day, I haul some scrap lumber, a hammer, and some nails out of my dad’s basement workshop. I’ve cut up five boards that used to be part of a picket fence, and I nail them to the tree to make a ladder that gets me just far enough up to reach a branch that I can use to climb higher into the tree. I tie one end of a rope around a stack of boards and tie the other end around my waist. I put the hammer through a belt loop, fill my pockets with nails, and climb up into the tree to a spot where three large branches come to a fork. I haul the boards up with the rope and use them to build a simple, sturdy tripod. I haul up more boards the same way and build a small platform on that tripod, just big enough to sit on.

My dad comes home from work to find me sitting 30 feet off the ground in a tree. He is not happy that I didn’t ask permission to build the platform—something that I fully anticipated, and also the reason that I didn’t ask him. But he says that it seems sturdy enough and does not make me take it down, although he does insist that I take off the lowest of my ladder boards so that my little brother, who is three years old, can’t reach it.

That summer and the summer that follows, I will spend hours sitting on that platform, high above a world that I don’t feel like I belong in, can’t make any sense of, and don’t have much interest in fitting into. Mostly, I read science fiction paperbacks: Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven, Piers Anthony, and other authors I’ve long since forgotten.

I’m as happy as I’ve ever been. I am 10 years old.

iii.
I wake up on the floor of a small church in a reservation town called Towoac in Colorado. Everyone else in the church youth group I’m here with is still asleep. We arrived the night before after two straight days on a bus and basically slept where we fell. I rub my eyes and tiptoe around sleeping bodies until I find the stairs, and, ultimately, a door that leads outside.

I step through it and look out across 40-some miles of desert at Shiprock. It’s hard to miss, because it’s incredibly huge and also because it’s literally the only thing to see. The Navajo call it Tsé Bitʼaʼí, or “winged rock,” hearkening back to the legend of the great bird that brought them from the north to the desert.

I am overcome by my smallness and insignificance in the greater scheme of the universe and history. And this feeling is surprisingly comforting and reassuring because everything else about my life seems uncertain and unnerving and one bad day away from falling apart completely. I am 18 years old.

iv.
Later that same year, my parents and I make the 500-mile trip from St. Louis, Missouri to Saint Paul, Minnesota, where I’m going to college. We arrive at my dorm and carry my suitcases to my room, along with my most important possessions. These consist of my bass guitar, my stereo, and boxes of records, cassette tapes, and CDs.

I am supposed to have a roommate, but he hasn’t arrived yet. We talk for a few minutes, but they are as anxious to be on their way as I am for them to be gone. The door closes behind them, and I sit down on the bed closest to the door, which I’ve chosen to be mine. It feels like a tremendous weight has been lifted off of me, as if I’ve been holding breath for a very long time, as long as I can stand. It feels like I’ve been waiting my entire life for this moment, the moment when I’m finally on my own.

v.
I am standing on the edge of a cliff that overlooks the vast, barren, and seemingly endless expanse of the Badlands in South Dakota. There’s so much to see that it’s impossible to take it in all at once. It’s early in the morning, and I am the only person in this part of the park.

In a few days, I will pull into the driveway of a small house on the Missouri River in the town of Craig, Montana. The driveway leads down a short, steep and uneven hill, and I will drive down it at what must look like a comically slow speed to Jeff, who is waiting for me at the bottom. Jeff and his twin brother, Jerry, are my older brothers. Well, two of them. As it turns out, it’s a long, complicated story.

We were born five years apart to the same mother, but we have different fathers, and we are meeting in person for the first time. I will get out of the car, we’ll give each other a long hug, and I will say, “Sorry it took me so long,” which is not a great joke but in this instance works on a number of levels. And we will walk inside to start a conversation that somehow feels like the continuation of one that we’ve been having for years, maybe even all of our lives.

But none of that has happened yet, and I am standing on what feels like another planet, a beautiful alien landscape that somehow also feels like home. All I can hear is the wind. And for a few perfect moments, I am the only person in the world.Youel is a writer and creative director. Born, adopted, and raised in St. Louis, he lives and works in Minneapolis with his wife, two dogs, and a frequently fluctuating number of bicycles. He regularly shares words, ideas, photos, and questionable advice on Instagram and Twitter. In what used to be his spare time, he also manages ARTCRANK, a pop-art show and online shop dedicated to bike-inspired poster art.

By matthew charlesAs a transracial adoptee raised by a white family in a small racist town in Oregon, I’ve always known that being Black meant being different. My Black body was both a cocoon and a womb, working overtime to birth and metamorphosize my self.

I used to long for my father. The one whose seed impregnated the woman I was told I looked like—the woman whose picture I’d never seen.

Looking like a ghost can be a kind of curse.

As a child, I fantasized that my Black body was a descendant of African royalty. That one day, a man with skin like the soil would knock on the door of my adopters’ home and tell them he’d come for me. He’d tell them flowers grow best in the soil and most eagerly when they are watered. He’d tell my adopters that he was my soil and he wanted to be my water, too.

Being a Black boy without a Black father is a common experience, but it hits different when the Black child is a transracial adoptee and lives in a town with almost no other Black people. Adoption scholars call this phenomenon “a lack of racial mirrors.”

How was I to imagine who I was? Who I could be? Who I might desire to be—without a robust intimacy with Black people?

My three most enduring and long-standing relationships with Black people are myself, my twin (with whom I was adopted), and Hip-Hop.

I discovered Hip-Hop at 12. Before that, I’d heard friends rave about Eminem, but I was so disconnected that when Eminem was at the height of his career between ’05 and ‘10 and I heard people talking about him, I thought they meant the M&M’s from the candy commercials were putting out albums. I couldn’t fathom why anybody would be interested in music made by animated candy. I mean, really!

Eventually I’d discover that Eminem was, in fact, a real human. I never connected with his music but it inspired me to probe Hip-Hop. As a West Coast kid, that meant I discovered folks like Snoop Dogg, NWA, and Tupac. Coming into contact with their music was the first time I was experiencing Blackness or Black cultural productions. Even though I couldn’t relate to their stories of gangbanging, drug dealing, partying, and hood life, the kinds of pressure the music placed on me was immediate and life altering. These gangsta rappers became my stand-ins for the Black father I longed for.

As I let myself be fathered by them, I changed the way I dressed, talked, and behaved to be more like them. To be more like the only image of Blackness I was presented with.

I call this my first identity crisis. I was 12. And I had no one to talk to about what I was going through—the invasive and ever crippling doubt that I wasn’t and could never be “Black” enough. This was reinforced in the schools I attended by white classmates who would chastise me for my intelligence by saying, “you’re so white” and who would reward me for performing the kinds of Blackness I learned from Gangsta Rap by remarking, “you’re the Blackest person I know,” even though they only knew a handful of us.

None of us knew what Blackness was except for what mass media and music told us.

Back in the day, I used to use LimeWire to pirate music, and somehow in that journey I discovered Lupe Fiasco. He presented a different kind of Blackness. One that, sometimes, I could relate to. Nowhere was this more evident than in his song “He Say She Say,” about a single mother and a fatherless child. For the first time, I was seen.

And then I discovered B.o.B.

Mixtape era B.o.B was different. He was a trailblazer. A genius. A Black man who was actively trying to be different, a breath of fresh air in a stagnant industry—an Andre 3k throwback.

When I started rapping at 12 the first thing I did was try to remake “I’ll Be In The Sky” myself, exchanging words and phrases so that B.o.B’s story would be mine as well.

As my Hip-Hop tastes evolved, so too did my ideas of Blackness. And as my perceptions of what Black people could be expanded, like our universe did when the Creator big-banged us into existence, I began to fathom that I might have permission to be different, too.

But I was still isolated. Marooned in a sea of Whiteness. I still had to contend daily with how Whiteness policed my body and behavior. At the end of the day, for survival’s sake, I could only be as “Black” as Whiteness and my adoptive family permitted me—and their permission was filtered through their own (mis)understandings of what Blackness might be.

I was told the reason there is a higher percentage of Black people in prison than white people is because Black people are a more criminal race.

How can a Black body that is both womb and cocoon birth and metamorphosize a self that is not criminally malformed when it is laden with expectations like that?

I was pimping myself before I ever heard of Kendrick Lamar. Tryna figure out how to sell myself to a people who were in the market for a pre-prescribed Blackness that was self-destructive. And as a transracial adoptee raised in racial isolation, this pimping was a survival skill, and a violence inflicted on myself.matthew charles is the host of little did u know, a podcast that centers the lived experiences—the learned and inherited wisdom—of transracial adoptees. He is also a poet, and his debut poetry collection, You Can Not Burn The Sun (2020), is sold out, so you can’t buy a copy. But you can eagerly anticipate book2. And you should definitely listen to his podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @CantBurnTheSun or Instagram @matthewcharlespoet.Severance Magazine is not monetized—no subscriptions, no ads, no donations—therefore, all content is generously shared by the writers. If you have the resources and would like to help support the work, you can tip the writer.

On Venmo, @matthewcharlespoet

By Kristen SteinhilberI had just moved, with only a couple weeks in my new apartment under my belt. I had very recently begun to emerge from the fog, so as you might imagine, this particular moving process was my most hectic yet. Reunion with my biological mother had fallen through about five years prior, and she hadn’t spoken to me since. But I knew, with the new insight I’d gained about the impact adoption has had on me, that I had to write her a letter.

First, with every muscle in my body clenched so hard it hurt, I wrote to push her away; to tell her every horrible thing that had ever happened to me, and to vehemently convey that it was all her fault. I finished a few interpretations of that letter, each time with my finger hovering above the send button, unable to press down. I didn’t understand; I’d thought about the closure sending it would bring me for a while. But then I remembered the time The Dixie Chicks’ Wide Open Spaces came on the radio and we sang along together and how her embrace felt like home. And I realized I didn’t want to push her away. I finally admitted to myself that not only did I need her, but I also wanted her in my life. I finally admitted to myself that she is my mother.

I went back to the drawing board; this time with hope and a sense of relaxation in my shoulders. I started to write the letter that I just knew would fix everything and get me my mother back.

Dear Ava,*

I don’t know how to let you know about a lifetime’s worth of feelings without bombarding you. So I’m resorting to doing just that. Please try to keep in mind that I only intend to help you hear, acknowledge, and understand me, and that I entirely lack the intention to attack, shame, or berate you.

I don’t know if you think that I’m the same as a peer or another family member with whom you have a more conventional and grounded relationship. Or that disagreements followed by years of radio silence is fine. But I’m not a peer or a family member who always knew you. I’m the daughter who was raised in a family that wasn’t my own because of bad timing and circumstance.

I acknowledge all of what you had to weigh and that the decision you made was pure, out of love, and made in order to give me the best chance at the best life possible. I’ve had admiration and respect in multitudes for it. But I had no choice other than to accept and forgive since the day I was born. As I got old enough to decide for myself, I still chose to accept and forgive. The moment I was given a chance to meet you, I chose to accept your presence in my life. Eventually, I chose to give you pieces of myself, and finally, I even chose to give you my trust. Acceptance and forgiveness regenerate with ease, but when your life starts the way mine did with a broken bond and no choice in the matter, it also starts with a massive deficit of trust. I actually never got out of the negative space; something always happens to keep me there. The amount I gave you, I got it on loan.

I have given more to you throughout the course of my life than I realized until all I got was your disregarding absence. That absence continues to further break something in me, and I don’t deserve it. Candidly, I’m running out of tape and glue.

I know you suffered an unimaginable loss when I was born and that a part of you died when you couldn’t take me home to raise in your family. I know that the very subject of me causes you pain and grief. I also know the world doesn’t make room for the particular kind of pain you’ve felt and that opportunities to talk about it freely and without filtering are rare. I know that causes the pain and grief to turn into anger, guilt, shame, and numbness.

I don’t know the lay of the landmine on your end, but I do understand that’s what it is. A landmine of 33 years’ worth of explosive affliction underfoot.

I know this because unimaginable loss was my birthright.

Again, I respect it. You were mature and capable beyond your years. You didn’t leave me on a doorstep with a note and an extra bottle. You placed me responsibly into the hands of professionals whom you knew had found me a home and fit parents. I think I remember hearing that I was physically healthy, so at some point you must even have started intaking more nutrients than the average teenager. You left your friends, your pom poms, the boyfriend who knocked you up, your home, your family, and everything else about your adolescent life behind to take care of me. You were up north at your aunt’s house preparing to give birth to a child you knew you might never meet while you should have been having senioritis.

You did good, Ava. Maybe it’s weird to say that I am proud of you, but I can’t think of a better way to say it. You did everything you could have. You didn’t just become a mother that day; you outdid yourself in your role as my mother.

The moment your role was to relinquish regimentation and have faith, I inherited a massive role and responsibility—to adapt. The world’s lack of acknowledgement that I experienced that unimaginable loss as well was what dismally became my inheritance.

Science shows that infants have instinctual awareness and memory. The loss of you was a trauma my brain doesn’t recall, but my body does. Apparently, I wasn’t knitting a sweater in there; I was bonding with you.

Fighting my biological awareness and memory of that broken bond as if it were natural was expected of me from the start. I was told losing everything with my first breath was something to be grateful for. I was saved. That never clicked with me as quite right, because it wasn’t. Now I know that attachment disruption is acknowledged as relinquishment trauma, and not being given a chance to grieve is acknowledged as adoption trauma. How well I adapted to surroundings that didn’t reflect me became how I understood my value and place in the world.

When I was in 3rd grade, my best friend who lived down the street was at my house and we were playing with sidewalk chalk. We were arguing about who gets to choose what game to draw and play. I went with the typical nine-year old’s stance: My house, my sidewalk chalk, my choice. Keep in mind that she was a sweet kid, just thoughtless in the moment (yet impressively calculated) with her rebuttal, “Yeah but your parents aren’t really your parents, so it’s not really your house or your sidewalk chalk.”

“What a relief, thank you for saying that out loud,” I remember thinking. “Now please do me a solid and go ask my mom to explain like, all of it and then come back and tell me what she said. Word for word. Do. Not. Paraphrase.”

Instead, I stormed away angry on behalf of my mother. On behalf of myself, I felt nothing but numb and confused. I knew that I was supposed to be mad, so I was. I stayed fake mad because it made my mom happy, and I thought maybe I would be mad mad if I tried hard enough. I couldn’t, which I felt guilty for. So much that I almost confessed to my mom so she could punish me appropriately. But I didn’t think telling her how I really felt was worth hurting her feelings, so I just made myself sick with shame. And to punish myself, I didn’t talk to my best friend for almost the entire school year. I caved on the last day of school. Self-sacrifice is a very strange instinct for a third-grader.

My whole life I’ve been consumed by trying and failing to maintain a sense of self because I’ve been trying to exist in two worlds; one that doesn’t accommodate my longing for the other, which is filled with mystery and ghosts. It’s relentless discomfort, anxiety, phantom pain, and hiding.

I was listening to a TED Talk by a social worker whose work focuses on adoption. It was about the unnecessary obstacle course along the path to reuniting with birth family and the need for change in this process. She said something that seemed to stop my heart for more than a few beats: my original birth certificate is state property, and I have no legal access to it. But if I were able to see it, I would see on the side of the document that it had been stamped with one of those ink stamps used to save time. Like the original birth certificates of adoptees in many states in the country, the document was stamped with the word “Void.”

What I have instead is an “amended birth certificate.”

I have always relied on the language of symbolic comparison as a way to explain and relate, and a stamp that invalidates my original identity is the most perfect symbol to explain why. I rely on anecdotal relatability because my access to a real sense of belonging is void. It’s never been tangible.

I am an amended version of myself, and that’s a very hard way to live. I am defined by the loss of you I didn’t grieve for, and the rest of me is made up of dissonance.

I have lived my whole life in fear of the fact that I could lose my seat at the table in an instant. I come by it honestly. I know you feel many of the things I feel and that the very subject of me causes you pain. But I finally am able to have compassion for myself after 33 years of thinking I’m not worth the trouble. Only now can I definitively say that your pain is not a good enough reason for you to treat me as if I’m unlovable. Your fears are not a good enough reason for me to let them amplify mine.

I thought reunion was supposed to fix me, but I’ve learned that isn’t how it works. I always enjoyed spending time with you all, but I think I just went through the motions and ended up feeling more alone. I know now reunion could never be that simple. Meeting you would not have repaired my traumatized brain, and it wouldn’t fix yours either. There’s absolutely no way you don’t have PTSD in some form as well. Giving up control over everything that will happen to a child that you gave birth to is unnatural and goes against every instinct a mother has. It’s not something you just move on from with only faith to hold you up.

As for me, I’ve blamed everyone and no one at the same time for the wreckage. I’ve gone down the list and been angry with pretty much everyone I know for at least a little while. Doctors who throughout my childhood attributed clear cut signs of manifested trauma to stress, but shrugged them off and said I was “just a little tightly wound.” The therapists and psychiatrists who misdiagnosed me after I spent countless hours on their couches. My parents, of course, for not helping me find my own truth, which would have helped me obtain a proper diagnosis a long time ago. I landed on “everything” for the most amount of time. The ignorant, narrow, and damaging speak surrounding the whole topic of adoption. A reductive narrative that takes a process where most everyone involved is either nobly intended or an innocent newborn, all of whom have lost something so significant that they will never be the same, and wrings it out until it’s a shitty, low-budget Hallmark film. I blamed the fucking thing it’s called. “Adopted.” If that was intended as some form of shorthand, they should not have been in charge of naming things. It’s too fucking short. It’s a denial of enormous grief, and erases everything except what goes on some legal documents that end up sitting in a file cabinet. It takes away the story and, more importantly, the voice of everyone involved in one way another.

As I said before, I don’t know the lay of the landmine on your end. But in the midst of all the anger I felt when trying to figure out who was to blame, it occurred to me that whoever named it the thing it’s called—“adopted”— it seems like it had to be a birth mother.

The whole thing about the adopted child being chosen by the loving adoptive family and saved by them to go live a happily ever after life—it sounds like a hopeful birth mother who felt she should keep herself out of it just in case it would cause her child pain. Or she was made to go away because of stigma, but requested that her child be told they are the main character in a real-life fairytale.

That got me thinking about what happened to you. The fact that you were expected to leave your home and move to a strange place to endure one of the most traumatic experiences a person could have, at 18 years old, because others might shame and stigmatize you instead of supporting you. I always recognized that as a load of fucking horseshit, but you had told me about those circumstances so casually that it never sunk in how horrible that really was. There is nothing about that you deserved, and it never should have happened. You never should have had to go through that. You never should have been burdened with shame and rejection on top of loss. You were a child.

I’m not convinced that the situation would be a whole lot different today. Definitely not as different as it should be. So that’s my answer. The only thing to blame is “the way things are.” I have never had goals or very much direction in life until now, but I know I want to help change this garbage version of “the way things are” for as many adoption triads as I can. I don’t know what that means yet, and I have a lot of work to do on myself before I can start to figure it out.

I don’t know who I am, but I do know what I stand for. I wholeheartedly believe everyone deserves to heal and that they should. Especially from the things they went through as kids. And I know there is no way that you have. Adoption-competent mental health professionals are like unicorns even today, so there is no way in your situation that you got the support you needed. The fact that we don’t speak is proof of that. And you have to stop pretending that the problem is me. I don’t deserve it at all.

I’m a good kid. I have a larger than life capacity to provide a safe space for people to feel their pain, especially the kind the world does not make room for. I have been through enough. I lost you before I could ever know you at the beginning of my life. I lost my mom before I could ever know her at the beginning of my coming of age story. All of that was so hard on me that I tried to die. Then immediately after that, as I was trying to want to live, I lost you again. Give me a damn break, man. Stop treating me as if I am the problem. I can help, and you can have some time, but this is the last time I will be reaching out.

I don’t trust easily, but I sure as shit don’t scare easily either. We are not a conventional mother and daughter. Our shit is very extra by nature. Trust me, I had a much different letter written just last week. I had a right to every teenage angst-influenced word, too. It’s natural to idealize your mother and be disappointed and furious and crushed by her when she doesn’t live up to that ideal. I have gone through a lifetime of emotions, naturally childlike, when it comes to you on a very strange and inconvenient timeline, and I have had to parent myself through every bit of it. I have reached an adult resolve without even writing emo song lyrics on my Converse with a Sharpie. I am a proud-ass mama.

You have a right to all your feelings too. I am hurt by open-ended silence, but I don’t think there’s anything you could say that I wouldn’t understand to some degree. I’m a subject that’s caused you 33 years’ worth of pain. You don’t need to slap a pink bow on that shit. You could have wished I was never born, and I would understand that.

Try me. I will absolutely surprise you. Just don’t deflect and avoid and leave me alone in the process. I can’t even act tough and stand up to it. I have never had the luxury of not knowing exactly how fragile I am every moment of my life. So, please. I deserve persistent acceptance and kindness.

Anyway, about everything else, I am a bit of a psychological breakdown junkie, and I have read a ton lately about the adoption triad in general. I am happy to send links and resources. And to listen.

Btw, seeking community has helped me a lot. There are plenty of online adoptee support groups, and I would imagine that there are also birth mother support groups out there. Hearing other people’s stories is healing, even if you don’t have the desire to interact with the group.

Xoxo, Kristen

It’s been 9 months, and she hasn’t sent any sort of response. I imagine this is still sitting there, swarming in on her, perceived at a glance to be the indictment of the ages. Misunderstood and avoided like bad news. My unsung apocalyptic longing weighing down her inbox.

*Name changed for privacy reasons Steinhilber is a private domestic adoptee with a passion for adoptee rights and mental health advocacy. You can follow me her on Instagram and Twitter: @girlxadapted Severance is not monetized—no subscriptions, no ads, no donations—therefore, all content is generously shared by the writers. If you have the resources and would like to help support the work, you can tip the writer.

On Venmo: @sandrafckingdee

By Kristen SteinhilberMy whole life, when everyone told me that biology doesn’t matter, I did everything I could to believe that they were right. I learned to ignore my gut and tirelessly struggled to silence my insides that grievously screamed otherwise. It took me more than three decades of fairytale-oriented platitudes and assumptions thrown like bombs my way about adoption to piece together one very relevant thread: everyone who told me that biology doesn’t matter—including both sides of my own adoptive family—had intact bloodlines and genetic histories. And that what they were really saying, whether they meant to or not, was that my biology doesn’t matter.

Before I finally understood this, my takeaway was hardly stretch, considering the message I was sent: if my biology doesn’t matter, then I do not really matter. That’s what I believed above all else.

After my adoptive mother died, I found out she knew exactly who and where my biological family was and had kept it a secret from me. She had even allowed certain biological family members to attend my gymnastics practices without my knowledge. These kinds of things—withholding and secrecy—are encouraged in the world of adoption when it comes to the biology of adoptees. In fact, withholding and secrecy are legally enforced through sealed birth records. So when I found out, I assumed this was normal, understandable, or even maybe for my own good. My adoptive mother may have even believed that herself. Still, to know that there was nothing but a glass wall that separated me from the family I’d only daydreamed about as they watched me, or that maybe I’d accidentally brushed up against one of them on my way to get a drink from the water fountain, was a a mind fuck, even at the time. It just didn’t equate to anger the way it should have.

That’s what a person feels and should feel when they find out they have been lied to their entire lives by the person that raised them and who insisted that honesty is paramount. Anger. But since I’d always been told that adoption was such a gift, I didn’t feel I had the right to it. I pushed my own feelings away and suppressed what was in my gut. Of course, the lesson I took away from this is that my truth (or the truth in general) doesn’t hold much value. I’m not worthy or deserving of the truth; betrayals are to be immediately forgiven, no matter how all-encompassing. I applied this lesson to every aspect of my life without realizing, allowing others to manipulate me and believing them when they told me it was for my own good, telling lies myself and dismissing the feelings of those I’d wronged.

When I met my biological mother, I also found I had two sisters, one who is just four years younger than I am. Four years. So, my mother wasn’t an unfit parent, yet, through adoption, I was still legally severed from all ties having to do with her. My sisters got to grow up together, and I, an inherently and dangerously lonely only child without even the knowledge that they existed.

There is no way I at 18 (or anyone at any age for that matter) could possibly wrap my head around that thought all at once without exploding. That my mother gave me away and then had two more children, and that they all built a life that went on without me, and that the only thing that separated me from them and that life was four measly years. So I pushed it away and again, suppressed what was in my gut; the same method of self-protection I’d used my whole life. Your feelings don’t matter. Don’t have them. Biology doesn’t matter, and therefore all of the years you missed out on don’t matter either. Yes, you were the one who was given away but it doesn’t matter. You had a “better life.” Believe that, not yourself.

I had a beautiful reunion with them for years and “fit” naturally. Not in the same way that they fit with each other; that’s simply not possible when you miss out on all those years. I was also still under the thumb of the responsibility placed upon me to believe and feel they didn’t really matter. Not like the adoptive family who “saved” me. So I kept the feelings of everyone else protected and them at a distance.

Then one day they were gone. One fight was all it took. This is extremely common in biological reunion; many of our birth mothers have been both pressured to relinquish as well as shamed from every angle for relinquishing their children, not to mention having rarely been supported through their grieving process. So by the time we meet again, the combination of intense desire and fear of authentic connection often backfires, as do the reunions themselves.

During all of those years that I was included among them, I could never allow myself to be present with them. I never let myself dwell too much on the fact that my mannerisms and sense of humor are exactly like theirs and that I grew up without that. I didn’t dare admit to myself how good it felt to lay in the arms of my mother and sisters while we talked about everything under the sun and laughed in sync. I certainly never allowed myself to ask questions about my birth or the before and aftermath. I felt that would only cause upset and come across as ungrateful for the “gift” I’d always been told she had given me by giving me away. Like, “Did you ever regret your decision? Did anyone in the family want or try to keep me? Did anyone hold me or comfort me during the five days I spent in hospital nursery before I went home with my adoptive family? Did you name me? Can you tell me more about my father?”

And now, it’s too late.

After a lifetime of searching like Nancy Drew on the case of “Why am I like this?” Only now can I see my adoption trauma and maladaptive coping qualities through a lens of clarity. Because of the fairytale narrative that is everywhere and enforced by seemingly everyone who has ever seen a movie about adoption, my clarity has been systematically hidden from me. What I was conditioned to believe was self-preservation was actually self-abandonment.

The spiritual and psychological isolation of having two families but not belonging to either has ripped me from limb to limb, over and over, my entire life. My humanity has never once been seen by the adoption industry and the laws that bind, through which family ties and preservation are rendered unimportant. My voice and dignity have been robbed. Every memory of family I have is tainted either by lies or painstaking regret.

My story is not any other adoptee’s story. But the gist of it is not uncommon. These themes of diabolical dishonesty, betrayal, unbearable rejection, and hopelessness run through countless adoptees’ stories, and are begging not to be ignored.

Adoptee Rebecca Autumn Sansom made a film titled Reckoning with The Primal Wound that captures the complexities, forsaken years, and mirror smashing pain of adoption better than any other I’ve seen. My favorite part is the “Adoptee Army” featured in the credits. There’s a massive number of names listed, all those of adoptees who stand in solidarity for adoption reform. After a lifetime of feeling utterly alone, I was moved to tears seeing my name included with all of the rest.

We are the adoptee army, and our biology matters. It did all along. Steinhilber is a private domestic adoptee with a passion for adoptee rights and mental health advocacy. You can follow me her on Instagram and Twitter: @girlxadapted Severance is not monetized—no subscriptions, no ads, no donations—therefore, all content is generously shared by the writers. If you have the resources and would like to help support the work, you can tip the writer.

On Venmo: @sandrafckingdee

By Jennifer CarraherI am the daughter of an adoptee. My mother, adopted from an orphanage when she was nine months old, was raised by parents who were loving, protective, and kind people. They raised my mother, a second adopted son, and their third and only biological child in a pastoral, rural setting where the kids rode horses to their one-room schoolhouse, kicked around in the surrounding woods and pasture, and lived a pretty idyllic existence. When my mother was 18 years old, she became pregnant with me. In a whirlwind of impulsive action, she married my birth certificate father, moved 2,000 miles away from home, and six months later gave birth to me. By the end of the year, she had packed me up, returned to her parents, and essentially disappeared the man I believed to be my father. Within the next twelve months, she remarried, gained two more young children, and, four years later, she and my stepfather had a daughter of their own. Amidst this chaos, I immediately began to identify myself as an outsider in the family: a sensitive and insecure child, an interloper among the three children of a man with whom I lived but hardly knew. In just a few years, I was both born of and made into a fatherless child.

The psychological construct known as object relations theory has shown us the cruciality of early childhood relationships to identity formation; that is, the origins of the self emerge from exchanges between the infant and others. Originally theorized by Austrian psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, the essential idea is that the infant’s bond to the parents shapes future relationships. What this means is that the mother as a physical object is invested with emotional energy from the child, and the psycho-emotional impression of the mother—the internal object—comes to represent what the infant holds in her absence. If the object formation is disrupted early in life—as, I would argue, it is with virtually all adoptees and MPEs/ NPEs*—the failure to form these early relationships leads to problems later in the child’s life. Object relations theory also points out that situations in adult life are shaped by and mirror familial experiences during infancy.

My mother’s own adoption unquestionably caused for her a failure of identity formation leading to problems in later relationships. No doubt and with good reason, the sense of attachment and security that adoptees can, and likely do, feel carries over into adult relationships in all kinds of ways. The question is how this manifests itself. Adoption is not, by any means, the only way that this attachment disruption occurs. In fact, biological children may suffer the same disruption for a variety of reasons. The lack of attachment demonstrated by my mother in her adult relationships is not necessarily a reflection of her relationship with her adoptive parents, and not all adoptees develop in this same way. In our case, whatever the disruption my mother experienced as a child, whether the result of her late-infant adoption or some other barrier to her attachment, it severely affected her identity formation. This affected identity formation is where the intergenerational disruption of object formation can be seen most clearly.

I found out about my NPE status one year ago today. While reeling from the news for many months, I had not a single thought about my mother as a child—let alone as a daughter. I was too busy contemplating the questions, “Who is my father? Where has he been? Where can he be?” Over time, I began to ask myself questions about my mother’s own history, her fractured parental bonding as an adoptee, and how this object formation may have influenced her as a new mother in the NPE scenario. How does the attachment become so fragmented that the next generation could be subjected to suffering in this way?

The foundation of the relational object is one in which, as the infant grows, she naturally wants to consolidate the work of managing her most basic needs, which are described by Klein as drives; she does this by forming an attachment to an adequate caregiver who can contain these drives. For example, how the caregiver responds to the baby’s need to eat, comforts her if she cries, and meets her most fundamental needs. If these drives are met, then a good object relationship is developed. The caregiver, usually the parent, is the “good object.” To soothe herself, the infant eventually must be able to internalize that good object.

Conversely, if the caregiver cannot accommodate the infant’s drives, then the infant will experience the drives as being out of control and instead of developing a positive attachment to the mother or caregiver, the infant may develop a negative attachment. If the caregiver herself has inadequate object relations, if her drives have not been met and she is identified with a bad object (her absent parent), then it’s possible that in order to cope, the mother will project that identification onto the baby. This defense mechanism arises so that the mother may defend herself against unbearable feelings; it also works to defend the internal object against rage, which can destroy the internal object. The mother copes with the unbearable feelings and rage by externalizing those feelings. This is called projective identification. Because of this projection, the mother may begin to see the baby’s experience as the embodiment of her own bad object and perceived reality. For example, a mother may witness the baby crying uncontrollably and in that crying she will see the manifestation of the experience from which she has tried to distance herself. Because of this, her identification with a bad object is affirmed through her projection onto that child’s crying, and the child is left carrying that projected reality.

But how does this play out in the NPE experience? In my case, the object formation disruption seems to be about the attachment with the father. If the NPE’s mother is enacting her own loss of the father object by projecting it onto the baby, the NPE child may grow to identify herself with this negative experience. This means that the child suffers the mother’s perceived losses (fatherlessness in this case) because the mother’s own drives are disorganized. Instead of nurturing and helping the child to consolidate her needs, the mother continually and repeatedly projects chaos onto the child.

Because I was born to my young mother, perhaps in the midst of this object disruption, no doubt in part due to her experience as an adoptee, she exercised her projective identification on me. This allowed for an erasure of my father, or the man I understood to be my father—the exact experience she imagined for herself. She did this not only by removing me from my birth certificate father almost immediately after my birth, but also as I grew and developed, I was told in both explicit and subconscious ways that my step-father/father figure, with whom I had lived since the age of three, could not belong to me either. When I learned in my adult life that my biological father was someone else entirely, the projection further solidified.

It is not hard to envision that—because my mother was in an orphanage, was adopted, and expressed throughout her life massive levels of alienation—she continually saw herself as severed from her family, regardless of any external reality. Every detail of her experience as an adoptee could have triggered this alienation; for example, the birth of a biological son to her adoptive parents when she was 10 years old manifested as a catastrophic event for her. So many experiences of the adopted child can contribute to this perception of severance from the family.

All of these experiences, in turn, influenced how she saw me as a child. My mother was experiencing the absent father. By enacting a dramatized reality, she was able to facilitate her projective identification as a fatherless child onto me. She played this out by running from her own (adoptive) father, disappearing my biological father, and sticking my paternity on a non-father/stranger she almost immediately abandoned. In both subtle and overt ways, I was continually reminded that my step-father was not a legitimate parent either; he could never belong to me because I didn’t “come from” him. Ultimately, though, it was all a futile effort because the enactment and projection did nothing to contain her own distress. As an example of how this played out, when I discovered my biological paternity and asked her who she thought was suffering most in this situation, she simply replied, “Your father.” Like many other NPE mothers, there’s no ability for her to imagine the suffering of the child because she is so resigned to her own suffering.

Another developmental psychological theorist and psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, theorized that the role of the father is to temper the ambivalence between the mother and the child. Ambivalence arises when the needs of the parent and the needs of the child are in conflict. Maternal ambivalence, specifically as theorized by Freud, is a universal maternal experience in which the feelings of love and hate for the child can exist side by side. When the father is absent, there is what Freud calls an ever-present “third” in the mother’s unconscious mind. For the NPE, the role of the father to modulate the mother-child relationship does not exist. This may be why so many of us have long-standing conflict with our mothers and spend years saying things like, of all of the children, I was always the outsider, or I never understood why I didn’t fit in, or asking why did she dislike me, what did I do wrong, and, eventually, why could I not have known my father? The answer to all of these questions lies quite simply in the projective identification of the mother onto her child: “If I can’t have a father, neither can you.”

While my mother may have subconsciously or otherwise attempted to make me into a fatherless child, I do not see myself that way. In fact, I don’t actually believe that my mother perceives me as without a father. She sees it only in herself, and she projects her own suffering as an internalized, fatherless child onto me. I have come to understand over the protracted and immensely heavy year since my misattributed parent discovery, that even as NPEs, even through all of our intuitions and suspicions, detachments and alienations growing up, we do have fathers. We should never diminish the significance of this fact because if we continue the pattern of projection of the fatherless child in our own lives, the cycle can never be broken. The gift of the NPE discovery is the acknowledgement of what has been lost to us, the chance to discover ourselves anew in order to protect our own children by offering them our solid and unwavering belief in their fathers. The only way to do this, I am afraid, is to begin to forgive our mothers.

*MPE/NPE: misattributed parentage experience/not parent expected or nonpaternity eventJennifer Carraher lives with her family in Sebastopol, California, where she’s an advanced practice public health nurse in the areas of women’s health and forensics. She’s also a medical sociologist who has worked extensively over the past 20 years in assisted reproductive technologies, kinship, and the social studies of science. Her current research is dedicated to promoting harm reduction as medical practice.   

Since her misattributed parent discovery in December 2020, she has established The Mendel Project, which will provide DNA testing and genetic support at no cost to patients in the hospital setting. She also continues to collect narratives from other adoptees, NPEs, and those affected by genetic surprises for the podcast Unfinished Truths. Find her at themendelgeneticproject@gmail.com & unfinishedtruths@gmail.com.

By Aimee Seiff ChristianMy hair is unusual. Thick, coarse, wavy, and curly all at once. Every stylist I’ve ever gone to marvels at it, fears it, or both. People tell me they envy my tresses, but for most of my life I did not appreciate their tenacious temperament. Step outside in the summer humidity and poof, I am a dandelion, a big frizzy, fuzzy one. I leave souvenirs of myself everywhere: little fuzzles of hair, reminders that I sat in that seat, used that pillow case, or borrowed that jacket. My hair listens to no one and wants everyone to know it.

I’m adopted; I am boring brown hair brown eyes white skin, but in the guess where Aimee’s from-from game, my hair is always a special contestant, and no one ever surmises its origin. Least of all me.

The first time we played the game it went like this:

Neighborhood kid: Where are you from?

Me: Here.

Kid: No, I mean where are you from?

Me: Here. Queens. Jackson Heights.

Kid: No, I mean, where are you from-from?

Me: Oh. Well. I don’t really know.

Kid: Wait, what?

My parents have garden variety Jewish hair. You know. Basic. Brown. Like mine, but not. Fine. Straight. Even if I passed as their biological kid a lot of the time, people looked at me quizzically, touching my hair without permission, saying you sure didn’t get your hair from them!

There are pictures of me as a toddler with my hair in rollers. The night before school photos my mother would furiously comb and set and trim my bangs. In every single elementary school photo, my bangs are a line graph plotting steady progress from where she started just above one eyebrow across a series of cowlicks to where she ended on the other side of my face, some two inches higher. By middle school, I refused to let her anywhere near me when a camera was about. In high school I stopped brushing it altogether.

My hair became a stand-in for the rest of me. In elementary school was when things with my mother began to go awry. In middle school, she and I stopped talking. By high school, well, shit was bad, and it was not just my hair, which was down to my waist. I was studying art history and I joked to everyone that soon I’d look like Mary Magdalene emerging from the forest. When I shaved my head in defiance of not even I knew what, people started to worry.

When I reunited with my birth mother at 26, I saw she too had thick brown hair. In a photo she gave me of herself as a teenager, her hair was shiny, lush, and smooth, brushed out long over her shoulders. She was salt and pepper by the time she was 45, like I am now, but her hair, while thick and wavy, was less wild than mine. It responded to blow outs, perms, and keratin treatments. She looked like she just came from the salon up until the day she died. On the other hand, I looked like I’d never set foot in a salon. But at that point I hadn’t. Box dye, crimpers, Aussie Sprunch Spray, bandanas, clips, and backcombing all made my hair even more impossible than it already was. Over time I vowed to embrace the curl and the thickness and the rest, learning to go natural thanks to my Black friends and the internet. But it was harder than I expected. I wanted to look like my birth mother. I did. But my hair didn’t.

Turns out, she too had been adopted. Generations of adoption, I learned, are not uncommon. But this left me not knowing anything more about where I’m from-from with my birth mother in my life than without her. After she died, I spat in a cup and discovered I was only 25% Ashkenazi Jew. The rest of me was Northern European. All British and Irish.

When I met my birth father, it was like looking at the definition of a recessive gene: blond hair closely cropped to his head, blue eyes, left-handed. All the things I was not. But then he emailed me later, apropos seemingly of nothing:

Do you need to buy your baseball caps at the extralargebaseballcaps.com online store?

I have never worn a baseball cap, I responded. And I hate hats in general. They don’t stay on my head. My hair is too thick.

Well, you got that from me, he replied with a laughing emoji. Try that store.

I investigated. They sold about three ugly caps, so no thank you. But when I looked at him closely, I could tell that his very short, now white hair was coarse and feral with cowlicks. I recalled the blurry high school yearbook photo my birth mother had given me years before: a teenaged, cranky expression and a bushy, blond bob that refused to obey, pointing this way and that. His adolescent hair was just like mine.

I never would have guessed that my wild mane came from these roots, but that’s the irony of not knowing the answers to the where are you from-from questions. Anything’s possible.

My birth parents created the perfect genetic storm for this riotous hair. They created me, this person with otherwise innocuous features and hair that no one could figure out. And now that I know where it came from, I’m kinda loving it. And now that I know where I came from, I’m kinda loving me too.—Christian is an adoptee who writes creative nonfiction, essays, and memoir about identity, adoption, parenting, and disability. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Independent, Cognoscenti, Pidgeonholes, Entropy, Hippocampus, the Brevity Blog, and more. She reads creative nonfiction for Hippocampus and is an instructor at GrubStreet and privately on her own website. Find out more about Christian at her website, find her on Twitter and Instagram, and see more of her work here. She is offering Writing Personhood: For Adoptees beginning Sunday January 9, 2022. Find information and register here. 

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is not the first, and certainly won’t be the last, to pose abortion as a problem and adoption as its solution. The adoption argument has become a pillar of the anti-abortion movement’s platform. Each time the words abortion and adoption appear together in headlines, there’s a rapid and robust response from adoptees and others to counter the fallacious proposition. This time, however, Barrett’s comments have roused ire not only for their essential, objectionable content with respect to adoption, but also for the cavalier language she used to dismiss the impact giving birth has upon a woman’s health, her career, and her life.

During the recent Supreme Court oral arguments concerning Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, Barrett, an adoptive mother, not only posed adoption as a substitute for abortion, she further suggested that if the consequences and obligations of motherhood are deleterious to some women, they can simply sidestep the “problem” by taking advantage of safe-haven laws, as if dropping off a baby to a police or fire station has no repercussions to a mother or her baby. As if there were no career reverberations and no health risks. As if the wellbeing of the child were of no concern. As if it doesn’t matter that adoptees may be weary, enraged, or traumatized by having again and again to field a question that should never be posed: Would you rather have been aborted?

Unfortunately, the burden of dismantling these destructive narrative falls upon adoptees and allies. Following is a sampling of their efforts. Please join the conversation by adding your comments.—BKJ“I Was Adopted. I Know the Trauma It Can Inflict,” by Elizabeth Spiers, The New York Times

“What We Get Wrong About Adoption,” by Gretchen Sisson and Jessica M. Harrison, The Nation

“Adoption is Not the Answer to Abortion,” by Lora K. Joy, My Adoptee Truth

“Barrett is Wrong: Adoption Doesn’t ‘Take Care of’ the Burden of Motherhood,” by Gretchen Sisson, The Washington Post

“Why Adoption isn’t a Replacement for Abortion Rights,” by Anna North, Vox

“I’m Adopted and Pro-Choice. Stop Using My Story for the Anti-Abortion Agenda,” by Stephanie Drenka, HuffPost

“Amy Coney Barrett’s Adoption Myths. ‘They’re Co-opting Our Lives and Our Stories,’” by Irin Carmon, New York magazine.

“A Choice in Name Only,” by Nicole Chung, in “I Have Notes,” a newsletter from The Atlantic.

“Is Pro-Life Evangelicalism Killing Adoptees,” by Sara Easterly, Red Letter Christians

“Adoption is Not a Simple Solution to An Unwanted Pregnancy,” by Lucia Blackwell, The Seattle Times

“Adoption doesn’t mean abortion isn’t needed, even if some Supreme Court justices think so,” by Aimee Christian, NBC THINK

By A.D. HerzelThe return flight was most memorable. A six-month-old boy slept in my lap for 18 hours, never crying once. He was not my baby and legally no longer belonged to the woman who gave birth to him. On many papers signed by governments and agencies on opposite sides of the world, he belonged to a family in the United States. I was 19, and my thoughts and memories reeled back and forth through time. I reflected upon the experiences and challenges I had encountered as an Asian adoptee in America, and I wondered about the known and unknown possibilities his future would hold. As I thought about his journey to the other side of the world, I silently cried. Did anyone notice? No one said a word. My tears fell on and off through the course of the long night. We were flying together in limbo, he and I leaving one home on the way to another, though I felt neither place was truly ours to claim. Was this only my story? Would it be his too?

In the summer of 1987, after I completed my first year of college, my adoptive parents generously sent me on the Holt Motherland tour. Holt international was an Evangelical Christian adoption agency founded by Harry Holt and his wife, Bertha, in 1953. Harry Holt is credited with creating the logistic and legal pathway for the intercountry adoption of Korean children to families in the United States. The Motherland tour was an effort by the Holt organization to create an opportunity for adult Korean adoptees to learn about their Korean heritage and visit their “homeland.”

I did not ask to go on the tour, but when it was offered, I readily accepted. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I didn’t have much access to Korean culture. My parents were not the kind who celebrated or shared the beauty and culture of the country I and my two adopted siblings had come from. I recall meeting Bertha Holt on two occasions at large gatherings when I was very young. The evangelical church community my adoptive parents belonged to recruited new members throughout the suburbs of Long Island, New York. The church members adopted roughly 100 Korean children. I have a picture in my mind of us all posed in a hall with Bertha wearing a hanbok. Somewhere on Long Island, in a box of my now-deceased parents’ photos, it may be hidden.

Unlike most Korean adoptees dispersed into the white American population, I was raised among many other Korean adoptees and their families. When my parents’ church devolved into a conservative, Sephardic, Kabbalistic, messianic cult, I was in first grade. I was told we do not pray to Jesus anymore. Two of my brothers and I were put in its private religious school until sixth grade, where half of the children in my class were Korean adoptees.

Yet we never talked about being adopted. My best friend was a Korean adoptee, as was her sister. My adopted siblings and I talked quietly, privately, about many things, but never about our lives before adoption or our families on the other side of the world. We, according to my adoptive mother, were God’s will in her life, her mission. Thus, I was named Amy Doreen—beloved “gift of God.” Amy is a common name among Korean adoptees. When I was a child, I imagined it made me special. As a teenager, I held on to the name of “love,” hoping if I embodied it, it would come to me.

As I grew up, I came to find the name silly and ill-fitting. Amys were pretty, sweet, and bubbly. Cherished, they were something that was not me. Inside, and occasionally outside, I was mean, cutting with words, hungry, lonely, awkward, uncomfortable in my skin, angry, and always afraid. I cursed myself, as I was cursed at, and felt cursed. Being “God’s gift” was always a chain.

In a recent interview with an adoptee, she reminded me of my past self. I had forgotten the feeling of my anger, my self-hate. Though I spent my elementary school years in a religious bubble where I did not think about my race, when I was in my home, my neighborhood, and when I finally went to public school in seventh grade, I was harassed, afraid, and I hated being Asian. I cringed at the sight of another Asian in public or on tv. I was ashamed of being part of the denigrated class. I was taught at home that Asians were stupid and ugly and weak. Was I made fun of? Of course, this was the 70s.

After learning the breakdown of my DNA, I was reminded of having been taunted with “Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these!” I used to say, “I am Korean, stupid,” with fury and fear bubbling inside. The kids never knew what or where Korea was.  But now I know. I am Chinese and Japanese and Korean. I knew it never really mattered. The truth was always clear. I was more interested in being invisible or at least visible on my own terms. It would take me decades before I even knew what my own terms were. This was never possible within my adoptive family or within the upper-middle-class Long Island suburbs where I grew up. I escaped Long Island and my adoptive parents’ home at the end of college and returned only for major family events.

My Motherland Tour shifted many things. The American spell of my “minority self”—”ugly, powerless, and unworthy”—broke when I saw the beauty of the landscape and the masses of people and witnessed the culture. It was an awakening that some Korean adoptees have, but not all. The tour helped create a space for “Korean pride”—a long well-guarded taboo. It was also the first time I actually spoke about the nature of my adoptive family struggles with fellow adoptees. How many tears were shed? How many cheap Korean cigarettes were smoked at Il San Orphanage, sitting around Harry Holt’s gravestone? No one understood. Counselors might have been helpful. Alcohol, cigarettes, tears, and late-night confidences carried us through the two-week tour—“orphans” once more figuring things out on our own. Seven of us were close in age and created an odd “Breakfast Club.” It was a strange brief enlightenment and a respite for those of us not wanting to return to the families that sent us. We would all return to our respective states—Tennessee, Minnesota, Wisconsin, South Dakota, California, Kansas, New Jersey, and New York—after sorely straining the nerves of the late Dr. David Kim, the former director of Holt International Children’s services.

The most profound stop for me on our tour was Holt’s unwed mother’s home. I do not remember the inside or anything I saw. I only remember being doubled over outside the building bawling my eyes out, finally having a complete emotional breakdown. I do not have memories of any words from the moment. A geyser of sorrow had broken free and I no longer had the will to fight it. The unwed mother’s home was considered progress—something Holt International was proud of. Dr. Kim always told us his dream was that adoptees would end up running Holt. I wonder how he interpreted all the tears and wailing sobs elicited by these annual tours.

As our tour bus obliviously rode through the South Korean peninsula, the June 1987 Democratic uprising was occurring. The demonstrations led to a democratic election and other reforms as well as the Great Workers’ Struggle, which was marked by the largest and most effective union organizing and walkouts in South Korean history. One night, our bus was stuck in the demonstration traffic, and several people were sickened by the tear gas that floated through the windows. The political struggle for Korean democracy was not on the Holt Motherland Tour cultural menu, so context was never given.

At 19 and older, had we grown up on the peninsula with or without our unknown birth parents, we likely would have been part of, or greatly invested in, the outcomes of the crowds on the streets.

Instead, we were buying tourist trinkets in Itaewon. “Eol meyeyoh? How much?” and “Kamsa hamneda, thank you,” were the pillars of our Korean language acquisition. My American freedom had already been bought by the war, by my adoption. I had not grown enough to truly protest with my fellow Koreans. In Korea, I was an “orphan” in an American wrapper, envied and looked down upon. In America, I was an American in a Korean wrapper, a dirty import.

Time has passed. The first experiments have grown up. The adoptee outcomes from the first wave of Korean adoptees and my subsequent generation resulted from prescriptions of assimilation and religious charity. Though research is scant and belated, it showed what many of us have privately known. A study by the Evan B Donaldson institute I participated in, reported by the New York Times in 2009, showed that 78% of Korean adoptees identified as white or wanting to be white. It also documented that, “as adults, nearly 61 percent said they had traveled to Korea both to learn more about the culture and to find their birth parents.” This shows us; the majority of adoptees assimilate and displace their identity with that of their foreign families, and that their innate identity is still almost equally important. Intercountry adoption and many forms of adoption demand the “erasure” of a life and identity prior to placement in the foreign environment, but identity can only be controlled by external forces for so long.

Revolution and a way to culture, identity, and citizenship reclamation is still being paved by adoptees born after me. According to data culled from US State Department reports by William Robert Johnston and the Johnston archives, only 4,400 Korean children were adopted the US in the 1960s. During the 70s, 25,247 Korean children were recorded as adopted to the US, and during the 80s, the number rose to 46,254. A small fraction of these younger and older adoptees would move back to Korea, search for birth families, and demand accountability from adoption agencies, the government, and their birth families. With the rise of the Internet and DNA technology, these numbers appear to be increasing, though they have yet to be measured.

Unceasingly, these same demands have been and will be replayed by every adoptee who understands what it means to ask for their rights as defined by the UN Rights of the Child Agreement. (The United States is one of the few countries that has not ratified, and does not subscribe to, the Rights of the Child Agreement.) Thus, our work continues: supporting Korean adoptees, making community, creating birth search and reunion resources, and sharing our stories in writing and through the arts. Today, adoptees are fortunate to find a varied handful of Korean adoptee-centered organizations, podcasts, and magazines online among them: ICAV, IKAA, AKA, KAMRA325, GOA’L, Adoptee Hub, the Adapted Podcast, and The Universal Asian.

When my return flight landed at JFK airport with the other HOLT 1987 Motherland Tour members, I was brought to meet the family waiting for the baby I carried. My service as an escort paid for my plane trip back to the US. I do not remember the name they gave him. I recall the family—white, with perhaps two older daughters. I may have intentionally not wanted to remember them. I had not wanted to give him up. I had not wanted to give him to them. I gave him up knowing, whether they were kind or not, the road could be difficult. America was uniquely hard on Asian boys. He would have questions they could not answer, desires for self-knowledge they could not fulfill, and my heart was inadequate and broken. I was still inadequate and broken.

I hope he was fine, was loved, was fairly treated, found pride, self-acceptance, friends, and self-love. He should be 34 now and still on the journey that never ends, reconciling the before and after, the with and without. My best hope is that he was one of those adoptees who was able to be proud and have an easy knowledge of his Korean cultural heritage and identity. What I could not do for him then is what I do now—share as much as I can and show what I am able.

And to him I say, “If you are out there looking for a friend on the road or the mule that carried you to America, here I am.”

미안해  Biahnay

I am sorry.

A.D.A.D. Herzel was “found” in 1968 in Hari, Yeouju eup, South Korea, and brought to the U.S. in 1970. She is a Korean American adoptee, visual artist, writer, and educator who has exhibited work nationally for the past 20 years. Trained as a painter and printmaker at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, she also earned her M.Ed. in art education from the Tyler School of Art. Her current project, titled Seeds from the East: The Korean Adoptee Portrait Project, will be shown in multiple venues in 2022-2023. These exhibits are scheduled for the Philip Jaisohn Memorial House in Media, PA, and the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University in Roanoke, VA. She’s working with Adoptee Hub for an exhibit in Minnesota, and plans are in the works for shows in Oregon and, possibly, Boston. She is also a regular arts contributor to The Universal Asian, which describes itself as an open and safe online database platform in a magazine-style to provide inspiration to Asian adoptees (#importedAsians) and immigrated Asians (#hyphenatedAsians) around the world. Learn more about her work here. Find her on Instagram @pseudopompous.Severance is not monetized—no subscriptions, no ads, no donations—therefore, all content is generously shared by the writers. If you have the resources and would like to help support the work, you can tip the writer.

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By Meredith KellerWhen a letter arrived in my mailbox saying, “I think you might be my grandma,” it dredged up shattering memories of a campus rape 52 years earlier. I threw the letter on the floor of my car and drove erratically in a state of high anxiety and angst. My body went rigid at the thought of reviving that story from my past. All would be revealed.

Would I want to go down that path? To relive scenes and open sores from episodes long buried, the chilling details of an incident that began with rape on a college campus in 1962?

How would this grandchild ever understand that repressive period I lived through after WW II and before the birth control pill? Society then held single unmarried pregnant women in their grip. Rape or unplanned sex led to blistering consequences as unplanned pregnancies made women face the scourge of what was labeled illegitimacy, undergo illegal and dangerous abortions, or carry a child to term only to sever that extraordinary bond between mother and child with separation. It’s estimated that as many as 4 million mothers in the United States surrendered newborn babies to adoption between 1940 and 1970.* I had had no choice but to carry my child to term.

At the time, thoughts of motherhood were tearing at my moral senses. After all, I’d been raised with the idea that motherhood within marriage was the shibboleth in our society. I was facing the dilemma of my life. Would I dare keep a child under these circumstances and bring shame on me and my family or allow the baby to be adopted?

Opting for adoption, I faced the deep sadness of that very moment you hand over your own child. That final act of severance between mother and child caused a quake deep in my soul. I can recall that moment with crystal clarity but mostly I keep it compartmentalized, forever afraid to revisit that devastating moment. The deep shame I felt should not have been mine but the rapist’s who drugged me and took me to his fraternity for his pleasure. After that sorrow of an unplanned pregnancy and what I had put my family through, the anger and resentment were knotted together and locked deep inside.

Returning to that letter in my hands, my emotions were jumbled thinking about the conflict of remembered pain and the promise of closure. I knew this letter was reopening wounds, but it was also exciting to think of learning what happened to my child after that sorrowful moment deeply etched in my soul.

Should I answer the letter?

How would I respond? I started to formulate a letter. What could I possibly say that would adequately explain my lifetime of secrecy and shame? They hadn’t lived through my restrictive times, that conservative era just before the bra-burning sixties and the new sexual freedoms.

What evolved from this request to be acknowledged was that I wrote a memoir. Through tear stained pages, I re-lived for my granddaughters and all young women every aspect of my journey when my self-esteem, ambition, certainty, and reputation were instantly erased and replaced by shame. I explained the hurdles I had to jump to restore my dignity.

So I well understand that not everyone wants to immediately meet their lost child. The pain of remembrance can be deep. The personal stories are wrenching. The reasons for relinquishing them can be quite complicated.

I did eventually meet my daughter and granddaughters in an awesome moment of pure joy, but it was writing the memoir and addressing that long journey that healed the pain.

Keller is reviewing her book, The Unraveling: The Price of Silence, in Zoom format conversation with her daughter Ann at the following Napa Bookmine event November 11. All are invited and it is free. Register here.

*The Baby Scoop Era Research Initiative.Meredith Keller honed her writing skills in a career as food editor of a leading restaurant magazine, copy writer for top advertising agencies, and publicist and marketing executive. All helped her articulate trauma and the emotional topography of rape and the blistering consequences. The Unraveling is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Find her on Instagram @theunraveling_9162.BEFORE YOU GO…

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Sonia Derory spent the first six months of her life in a hospital in a Parisian suburb while her parents reflected on whether they could raise a child with what they perceived as a disability. She was born in 1983 with dwarfism, a medical or genetic condition characterized by short stature. Ultimately, her parents concluded it would be too great a challenge to raise her and placed her for adoption. After spending another six months in a nursery, Derory was adopted by a couple from a small town in the St. Etienne region in center of France into a family with other children, some also adopted.

Derory had always known she’d been adopted—a fact that otherwise would have been evident because her Algerian heritage set her apart in appearance from her French Caucasian adoptive parents. But she always wanted to know who she looked like and where she came from. Early on, she was afraid to discuss with her adoptive parents her desire to know about her origins. “They weren’t particularly open-minded about my search,” she says, and she felt guilty and conflicted. But in 2006, when she was 23, she searched for her birthmother—not a challenge since her birth parents’ names and identities were listed on her birth certificate.

After several months, she located her birthmother, who at first seemed pleased by her appearance in her life. They were in contact for more than a year and a half, and Derory welcomed her mother into her home. She even wore an identity bracelet engraved on one side with her original birth name and on the other with her adoption name, to demonstrate the depth of her connection. “I did everything—in fact too much—in order to be acknowledged as her daughter because I had this deep-down need to build a relationship with this mother who could help me discover my cultural origins.” After those months, she says, her mother decided to cut ties and all contact, but by that time, Derory had already become very attached to her, so it was deeply difficult to accept—another devastating rupture.

“In her mind she had given me away as a baby many years ago and so felt nothing for me emotionally as an adult woman.” She didn’t want to have any type of relationship, and and they never met again. A few years later, Derory met her birthfather, who told her he’d searched for her when she was very small but was unsuccessful because her name had been changed. He, however, was also unwilling to engage in a relationship with his daughter.

Derory had grown up near her birthplace in Saint-Etienne in east-central France, where she went to high school and developed a love of theater. She took acting and circus classes and workshops but, daunted by the difficulty of earning a living as an actress, she turned to another career. For ten years she worked as a communications and media officer in Clermont-Ferrand, a city in Massif Central, a highland region in Southern France. But in 2014, drawn back to her love of theater, she boarded a train to Paris, intent on becoming an actress. She studied in a theater school and won some small roles in a few classical plays, a television show, and many short movies. She also nurtured an interest in directing and taught herself the necessary skills, learning from trial from trial and error and by being inquisitive on set. Soon she’d use those skills to tell her own story.

Derory had seen stories about people searching for their birth parents but thought they seemed unreal, like fairy tales. “I needed to give testimony about my own life and story that was realistic and true to what had actually occurred.” She particularly needed to address an entirely overlooked topic—adoption and disability. In her short film, “Encounters” [Recontre(s)], she tells the story of what happened during her reunion with her birthmother. Not a documentary, it relies on the participation of an actor who plays the role of her birthmother, and names and documents have been changed. The truth of the story, however, she says, is communicated in the voiceover. “I was faithful to the actual words of the protagonists through the voices—a choice, like the length, partly dictated by financial limitations. Bearing the costs of the film herself, she was restricted technically and materially, which is why the film is done in voiceover rather than with the actors speaking. She also made two shorter versions. One for the Nikon Film Festival, “Almost her Mother” (Je Suis Presque Sa Mere), with a running time of a little more than two minutes, tells the story from her mother’s perspective. And the 45-second “A Tear in the Heart” (La Larme Au Coeur), is from the perspective of a psychologist who mediates the reunion of mother and daughter. The longer story, “Encounters,” is from Durory’s perspective.

Her work is evidence of the importance of storytelling, both for personal healing and to raise awareness of the lived experience of adoptees. “I think everyone can testify on their own level to show their perspective on adoption and help advance the cause of adoptees.” It’s important, she believes, to counter stereotypes that paint adoptees as spoiled, special, or difficult children. “They’re like all other children who just need to be loved and to belong to a family. Sadly, they live all their lives with this wound of abandonment that is difficult to deal with in their social, personal, and emotional lives.”

“Today,” Derory says, “I’m at peace with my story. I can relate and talk openly about my life without feeling emotional, and I think I can say that it’s made me resilient and stronger. I’ve managed to reach many people all over the world who don’t know me and who in turn have been really touched and moved by my story.”

To learn more, look for Derory on Instagram here and here.

To view the films, visit https://www.carminos-production.com; https://www.facebook.com/Je.suis.presque.sa.mere/; https://www.facebook.com/La.larme.au.coeur/; and https://vimeo.com/carminosproduction.—BKJ

By Kathleen Shea KirsteinAccording to a 2009 study published in a prominent psychology journal, it takes 18 to 254 days for a person to form a new habit. It also takes 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic. I’ve been second-guessing every word that’s come out of my mouth for so long it’s as natural to me as breathing. I might say this obsession with doubting myself started when I first learned to talk. In school I was very quiet. In a yearbook I was described as quiet as a church mouse. I’ve always been this way—the heavy-set kid no one noticed.

One day in early February, when I was just a few days shy of my 50th birthday, I was working with the adoption coordinator of the Lund Family Center in Burlington, Vermont after only recently having learned I’d been adopted. For me it was painful to find out at 49 that I’d been adopted. And on top of the pain, there was the need to completely rebuild my identity from scratch. The foundation of my world had completely crumbled in those moments after this discovery. Rebuilding one’s identity is a never-ending roller coaster ride—exhilarating one moment and totally exhausting the next.

At the adoption coordinator’s urging, I’d received non-identifying information about my birth parents, so I knew the basics. My mother, who was of French-Canadian descent, was 32 when I was born. She was in good health, worked outside the home, and loved to knit. The file also noted that she was very helpful to the younger girls in the maternity home. I learned that my father, who was of Scottish descent, was also in good health, graduated from high school, and was an engineer.

I knew I had to ask my mother’s permission to search for biological family members. I called her and said, “ Mom, you know I always do what I am told. Leslie, the adoption coordinator, says I should ask for identifying information. I want your blessing. I want to make sure it’s okay with you that I take these next steps.” I can’t remember if I said this out loud or only thought about it: “It won’t change anything in our relationship.” Since she and my father confirmed that I’d been adopted, I’d been very careful not to give them even a hint that I was rejecting them. Mom assured me that it would be fine with her. And poor Dad. If mom said yes, he’d tag along, but he’d never actually been consulted.

I called the adoption coordinator and set the process in motion. I was required to write a letter to the probate judge for Burlington, Vermont, Chittenden County, requesting identifying information about my birthparents. Once the probate court denied my request, which is typical, Leslie would attempt to locate my birth mother. If she was successful and if my mother agreed to permit contact, then I would be asked to write her a letter. Once she responded, we would determine whether she was willing to meet me.

Talk about second-guessing! It felt as if there were so many places this could go wrong. My mother could resist being be found. She could decide that since I have been out of her life for 50 years, why let me back in now? She would be in her 80s. She could be dead. That would be so sad. What would it feel like, I wondered, to have all hope of contact gone. All hope of learning what she is like, what her family is like, who I look like? It’s an understatement to say it would feel like the rug was just pulled out from under my feet. It would be painful. It’s weird to know that I would grieve for someone I don’t know, except we were a team for almost nine full months. I decided for the moment it was best not to think about it and to go about my activities of daily living.

Leslie’s call came when I was at work. She wanted to tell me she found my mother, who lived in Florida. Then she called back to say whoops, she found the wrong mother. The first name and age were correct, but the Social Security number was off by one digit. I reminded myself to just breathe—that my job in that moment was just to take one breath after the other. A few days later on a Friday morning, Leslie called me again at work to tell me she’d found the correct birthmother. This time, everything checked out. My mother lived in Winooski, Vermont. Having never heard of it, I checked the map and found it was near Burlington. When we’d taken family trips to see my husband’s brother and his family in Rainbow Lake, New York, near Saranac Lake and Lake Placid, I loved when we’d go via Burlington. I never knew why I liked it so much, but it just drew me in and felt comfortable. After Leslie’s call, I knew why. I was born there. The roots of my ancestors grew in that Vermont soil.

Leslie advised me that it was time for me to write the letter to my birthmother, Helen. Her name is name is Helena, but everyone called her Helen. I only work a half day on Friday, so I spent all afternoon writing the letter. I sat at my computer and second-guessed every word as I typed. Should I tell my entire life story—49 years of information? Or should I just hit the highlights? What I said and how I said it would matter; this would be the first impression of me my birthmother will get. I wanted her to like me. But there was no one to guide me, to give words of support. Writing a letter doesn’t sound that hard, but for me—a champion second-guesser—it was very difficult. I wasn’t getting anywhere, erasing every word as soon as I typed it. Geez, what did you write that for? I asked myself. It sounds dumb. Don’t sound so full of yourself. Enough! I decided. I’d hit the highlights and let the rest go. But still, it took me eight hours to finish the letter. I imagine a person with less faulty thinking could have done it in two hours max.

At about the four-hour mark, my phone rang. It was my mother. “Hi Mom, sure pizza for my birthday supper sounds great,” I said. We chatted for a minute, but I have no memory of what we discussed because my brain had turned to mush. I managed to get myself back to my computer desk and into my chair. What had just happened? I could barely comprehend it. It felt surreal to be writing a letter to one mom and at the same time talking on the phone to the other mom. I thought my life could never be any stranger than it was in that moment. Wow, just wow. I had no other words. I couldn’t even think. I regained my composure, kicked my brain back into gear, and finished the letter. I took a moment to draw a red rose in a yellow vase in the Pointillist style. I hoped she’d like it. It seemed the right thing to do to personalize the computer paper.

The highlights only version of my life ended up taking three pages. Yes, Helena, your daughter is long-winded even when she’s trying to be concise. Too many words, like Mozart’s too many notes. If only I had equal talent.

Leslie called a few weeks later to say that my mother lived near her, so she actually dropped the letter off and read it to her. After time went by and no follow-up letter arrived, I asked Leslie if she could visit my mother and if I could tag along as Leslie’s associate. My mother didn’t have to know it was me. I just wanted to see what she looked like and who she was. The waiting was so hard. Leslie said I’d have to wait for the letter.

Finally, a card arrived in the mail. My mother told me my birthfather was tall and Italian. She hoped I was well, and she signed the card “Mama.” I just kept looking at the signature. I’d always called my mother Mom, so for Helen to sign it Mama seemed so right that all I could do was stare.

It was amazing for me to meet my biological mother and discover that we shared so many of the same traits. For her to cry was rare, and, similarly, I never cried. She has a great sense of humor, as do I. We share the same personality type. I am very much my biological mother’s daughter. That knowledge warms my heart.Kathleen Shea Kirstein was born in Vermont and raised in New Hampshire. She lives in Troy, New Hampshire. She’s a late-discovery adoptee, a mother of two boys, and a registered nurse.

By Ande StanleyAll you had

To do

Instead of saying

I love you

Was to tell me

The truth

Trust is essential in relationships. Honesty is one of the foundations of ethical behavior. When we grow up with lies, when we are denied the ability to make informed decisions, when we are taught that our senses are untrustworthy, when our identities are erased and we are made invisible, the ability to be in true authentic relationship with others is greatly hindered or made impossible. This inability for intimacy to exist within a context of deception is true for everyone, not just for people like myself. Trust is the engine of society. We need to be able to trust ourselves and others in order to be mentally, emotionally and physically healthy. We need to trust to be successful socially and economically. What happens to a person whose trust is betrayed at a deep and foundational level?

The last thing my adoptive mom said to me was that I must believe how greatly I was loved. I want so very much to believe in what she was saying. I long for that connection. My chest hurts and my eyes burn just sitting here and thinking about what that would mean. To be seen. To be heard. To be real, in a deeply intimate relationship with my adoptive family. The problem is that I don’t believe her. I believe she loved what she needed me to be, what she needed to fill the void in her own ego, to assuage the pain of her own failures and rejections. She never loved me because she never knew me. She knew the fiction that she created when she insisted that I not know that I was adopted.

I grew up thinking there was something incredibly wrong with me. I had no other explanation for the sudden silences and the awkward responses. I tried and I tried but never seemed to be enough. My older sister and our dad had an ease of communication and a closeness that, no matter how much I desired to live in that space, was beyond my reach. My youngest brother and our mom existed in a give and take where his protection and nurturing seemed to take precedence over that of mine and my other younger brother. He and I were the odd ones. We looked different, sounded different, acted different. To look at pictures of the six of us together now, I can immediately see what strangers saw—that we did not belong.

I had no mirror. I still have no ability to conceive of how I appear to others. When I asked why I didn’t look like anyone else in the family, I was told that of course I did. A child needs to believe their parents. By insisting that I did look like people I did not resemble, my mother set in motion a mental process that required me to deny the evidence of my own eyes. What I perceived to be real was in doubt. I could not trust what my eyes could see.

My mental health suffered because of the lies. Because I was told that my senses were unreliable. I was over-imaginative, being dramatic, making up stories. Better that I be the crazy one, the identified patient, than to simply tell me the truth. I looked and acted and was different because we weren’t related. Funny how liars felt comfortable accusing me of lying when they set in motion a family system that constantly had to be reinforced with more lies. It’s no wonder I never felt close to my adoptive parents or to their children. When lying is the basis of a relationship, you live in fear of being caught out in your lies. The more lies you tell, the more lies you must remember. I can only imagine how exhausting and anxiety producing that must have been and how much easier that made keeping me at a distance. Keeping me Other.

My physical health suffered due to the lies. My mom was more comfortable accusing me of hypochondria than willing to be honest with me and say we were not genetically related. I was warned of health problems that ran in my adoptive parents’ families, went so far as to have tests done to rule out some of those possibilities, even considered mastectomy—all based on false health information. I went wrongly diagnosed for genetically heritable conditions because there was no history of them in “my” family.

Being lied to has emotional consequences as well. If you systematically deceive and manipulate a person for decades, and when they discover the truth they are devastated and enraged, do you have a right to accuse them of being unbalanced? When they begin to learn to name their emotions and establish necessary boundaries that change the family dynamics, is it okay for you to command them to stop being disruptive and upsetting the people who created the trauma? Do you have any business telling them that they are responsible for the mental health of the people who hurt them?

When the people who you are supposed to be able to trust most are the ones who betray you? I was taught to not trust myself. Then I was taught to not trust anyone else.

My mom said she would have told me about my adoption at some point. She was hurt when I said that I had no reason to think she actually would have done so. Even 20 years after I found out by accident about being adopted, she was still telling me lies. I think the habit was too ingrained by that point for her to do otherwise.

And then she died.

I wasn’t the only one who was the victim of my adoptive parents lies. Their natural children were also. I can’t imagine what it does to a child to be told that they must always be on guard around a sibling. They must always lie to that person and never let on what they know. The habit is ingrained in them as well. They cannot hear or see me. So we do not talk. I was tired of being invisible.

My own children have also been victims of the lies. They were already in school by the time I found out. Their identities changed as well, along with their ability to trust other people. They endured the years of watching their mom falling apart and trying to put herself together again. They suffered loss also, and it is hard to forgive my mom for that.

The lies robbed me of family—adoptive and my own. Robbed me through the process of making intimacy impossible with the people I grew up with and whose name I legally carry. Robbed me of the opportunity to reach out and connect with my first families because so much time had gone by before I was able to find them. Robbed my children and grandchildren of opportunity. Time that none of us can recover.

All they had to do was tell me the truth. Grant me my power, my autonomy, my ability to know and be myself. If they had done that, been honest, then they could have been themselves as well. We could have established relationships based on choice and openness and understanding. But that didn’t happen. It is too late for the majority of the relationships. Thankfully it is not too late for me and for my kids and for my grandkids to learn how to be in authentic relationship with ourselves and with others. I am not sure I will ever be able to fully trust anyone, but I hope to learn to trust myself. I want to know what it is to say I love you and know that I truly grasp what that means. I want to hear someone else say I love you to me and know that it is said by someone who knows me.

You taught me to hide

So I stayed hidden

You concealed me from myself

Called me a

Dreamer, a

Fabulist

I lived in paper towers

A broken

Rapunzel

You fed me on

Fairy tales

You created a

Fiction

Pressed hard

With your pencil

Wrote over the lines

You erased

With your lies

But,

Everything comes out

When the paper

Is held up

To the lightAnde Stanley—an international, stranger, closed adoption adoptee—discovered her adoptee status by accident when she was in her early thirties. A writer from an early age, in recent years she is learning to use her voice to speak out about the trauma caused by denying adoptees their identities and autonomy. She spends her days painting, writing, and harassing her husband of more than 30 years. Visit her blog The Adoption Files. Find her on Twitter @AndeStanley1.BEFORE YOU GO…

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By Lorah GeraldMy hand strokes the smooth white fur of the rug I am lying on. I move my hand slowly along it. It’s soft and soothing. I rub my face into the fur. My fingers dig into it and pull it close. It calms me and triggers Oxytocin—a hormone associated with pleasurable feelings—to be released by the pituitary gland. My breathing becomes slow and regular. The pain I’m feeling slowly subsides. I start regulating the mental turmoil in my mind. I draw on a memory of when I was happy. The sensation of the fur on my skin reminds me of the love I felt for my dog Brizzie. She was my everything. I spent as much time as I could with her, and I’d miss her when I was working or on vacation. I loved that dog with all of my heart. When she passed, my world crumbled.

I bought this rug to remember how I felt when I’d stroke her fur. She was unconditional love. I could feel it when I looked into her blue eyes. She’d look up at me, the world would fall away, and it would be just us. Our walks together were my happy place. Our connection was pure and uncomplicated. I felt she understood me; she could sense my pain and would come to my side. The love she gave flowed from her heart without pause. When she passed, I could still feel her beside me. Blump, blump, blump she would run up the stairs. I can still hear it. Her movement, her fur, her breath were all still alive in my thoughts but I could no longer reach out to touch her. I wanted to feel her again. I felt like a part of me died when she did.

As an adoptee, I’ve always felt closer to animals than humans. My childhood home was a farmhouse that was more than 100 hundred years old. My backyard had a barbed wire fence separating us from the farm behind it. The cows, horses, and ponies would lean their heads over the fence to eat grass out of the yard. Sometimes I’d gather vegetable scraps or handfuls of grass and hold out my hand to feed them. Their noses moved back and forth in my hand as they chewed the treat I held. They felt soft, like a rabbit’s ear. For a special treat, I asked my adoptive parents to buy sugar cubes for me to give to the horses. I’d slowly walk over to them and touch them, my hand softly stroking their hair. I looked into their gaze. Once I felt trust between us, I’d go to their side of the fence and play in their field. After years, I felt like we were friends. One day, I was told not to go into their field anymore. I understand then that the adults wanted to keep me safe, but it was devastating. I felt as if my friends had been taken away. I agreed to the rules but went into the field anyway when no one was looking. I’d already been taken away from my family, and I wasn’t going to let anyone take away my friends.

Being adopted, it was easier for me to have animals as friends. I loved the feeling of their fur, and I understand now that I was self-regulating my emotions when I petted them. I felt they loved me without complications. They helped heal my hidden pain. I loved all the animals and wanted to take care of them. Growing up, my menagerie consisted of cats, dogs, parakeets, fish, and turtles. My adoptive parents allowed one of my cats to have kittens so I could watch how birth happens. I thought it was gross but I loved those three kittens so much. One was white with a couple of gray spots. The others were tabby cats, one grey and one orange-striped. I was sad that we had to find them homes when they were old enough to be given away. It confused me. I knew my adoptive parents didn’t wait that long to get me. Was I given away too soon? I didn’t want to give them away. I felt heartbroken. It made me think about how I was given away. I knew my adoptive parents never talked to my birth mother. I wanted to know where the kittens were going. Why did my birth mother not ask who was taking me? I cared what was going to happen to my kittens. Why didn’t my birth mother care what happened to me?

Now I sit with my white fur rug, petting it and soothing myself. I remind myself that I am loved and I am worthy. The pain of being given away doesn’t go away. We learn to adapt to it.Lorah Gerald—adoptee, writer, intuitive, Kundalini yoga Instructor, reiki master and ordained minister—writes memoir, inspirational, educational, and opinion pieces and blogs on her website, LorahGerald.com, and as @theadoptedchameleon on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. She hopes to help others, adopted or not, heal their trauma by sharing her lived experiences as an adoptee, educating about breath work and energy healing, and using her natural intuitive abilities.

BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles and essays about NPEs, adoptees, and genetic genealogy.

• Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
• Let us know what you want to see in Severance. Send a message to bkjax@icloud.com.
• Tell us your stories. See guidelines. 
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• Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @Severancemag.

By Bianca ButlerAs a young child, I didn’t know that my mother and her twin sister (now deceased) had been adopted in 1960. I found out in 2000, when, after nearly 40 years of silence, their biological mother wrote to the twins asking to reunite.

That year, when I was 12, we all met my biological grandmother for the first time at dinner in Old Town Sacramento—me, my mother, my aunt, my younger sister, and my adoptive grandmother. By meeting her biological mother, my mother learned her biological father’s identity and that she and her twin are of mixed-race ancestry: African American and white. Their biological mother had been a young African American college student at the University of California, Berkeley when she relinquished her twin daughters for adoption. They were born in a time in the United States when interracial unions were not only taboo but also illegal (Loving V Virginia) and when young unwed women were shamed and stigmatized—a time known as the Baby Scoop Era, from 1945 to 1973, before Roe V Wade in 1973.

My biological grandmother is a trailblazer. She was a college student and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority member at UC Berkeley from 1958 to 1962. She was the daughter of an educated Army chaplain, and her family deeply valued education. When she arrived at UC Berkeley in 1958 from Riverside, California, she was one of roughly 100 African American students on the campus. Berkeley, which she describes as having been bohemian at that time, was a different world to her than Riverside. There, she enjoyed ethnic foods along Telegraph Avenue and the poetry of the Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

On campus in her freshman year, my grandmother met an artist from the Midwest who found her attractive and wanted her to sit for a painting. (She still has this painting today). They had a casual friendship, a brief affair, and an unplanned pregnancy. A few months after giving birth, she decided it would be best to relinquish her newborn girls for adoption due to social pressures and lack of support. She went on to graduate from Berkeley in 1962, earning a bachelor of arts in political science. The twins were adopted together in a closed adoption by a loving and devoted African American family in the Bay Area.

In my late teens and college years, I became deeply curious about the origin story of my mother’s biological parents. Getting to know my grandmother, I was proud to discover we are at least three generations of college graduates. She, my mother, my younger sister, and I all have college degrees. My grandmother and my younger sister even have their master’s degrees. I’m extremely proud of that legacy. It’s one I want to pass on to the next generation.

Although I first learned about the identity of my mom’s biological father in 2000, I didn’t become interested in learning about him until I was in college and exploring my family history. To my surprise, I discovered that he’s an internationally known artist who lives near Central Park in Manhattan. He has a resume full of accolades and accomplishments in the art world spanning several decades.

I first tried to contact him in 2007, when I was in college. I wrote to him at the Manhattan studio address on his website, and when I received no response, I moved on. In 2018, I noticed he used an Instagram account to promote discounted custom portrait paintings of people and pets. I wanted him to do a painting of my mom, and I thought this would be a clever way to reach him. I sent a message on Instagram saying I was interested in a custom painting and asked how I could send him a photo. I was surprised that he responded quickly, and, as he instructed, I sent him two photos by email. But when it came time to make the $500.00 payment to him, I was hesitant to move forward, and he was upset because he’d already started the two portraits.

I finally gave in and sent him a sincere and heartfelt message revealing my identity as his biological granddaughter and the truth of why I had contacted him, and I included my phone number.  Within a couple hours, he called me back. He immediately said he’d received my first communication—the letter I sent him in 2007, when I was in college. The crazy thing is, he told me, he received an email message a week earlier from my mom with her photo and a short letter saying she wanted to meet him. I had no idea my mom had been trying to contact him too.

In our phone conversation, he said he remembered very clearly having had an affair with my grandmother during the Berkeley years but denied that he was the father of the twins. We spoke for about 30 minutes and later communicated briefly through email, during which I asked jokingly if he grew up eating lefse (a popular Norwegian flatbread) and if he liked the music of ABBA. He said lefse was a special holiday treat in his family, and he never heard of ABBA. Even though the contact was brief, it felt good to finally hear his voice and to be acknowledged. The contact ended and he sent me a letter for my mother, his artist biography, one of his essays, a photo from his 20s, and the two portraits he painted of my mom—free of charge. I decided it was finally time to do an Ancestry DNA test to help me get more facts about my racial identity and heritage. The Ancestry DNA test confirmed that I’m 31% Norwegian and, through the DNA matches, that I’m related to his cousins. I sent him the DNA results, but he’s still in denial and, sadly, not open to a relationship.

Finding biological family and taking a DNA test can bring great joy and excitement, but it can also bring rejection and disappointment. With millions of people taking DNA tests such as those offered by 23andMe and Ancestry to reveal their heritage and find long lost relatives, it can be important for people testing to consider having a support system or a therapist to help cope with the possible emotional fallout. It can be very emotional opening up old generational wounds that still haven’t been healed. It’s important to prioritize your mental health and self-care in this process. I found talking with a therapist and supportive friends as well as writing to be helpful. Also, some people don’t want to be found, especially when race and adoption are factors, and I’ve had to accept that reality. I would love to have a relationship with my grandfather and learn about his life and his lifelong passion for art. I’d love to visit art galleries and travel to NYC, but that may never happen. It may be wishful thinking.

On a positive note, through Ancestry DNA I was amazed to connect with a cousin on my mom’s paternal side who is close to my age and open to connecting. She moved to Sacramento from Minnesota last year for graduate school, and we plan to meet. From her own ancestry research, she was able to give me more information about our shared heritage and ancestral homeland in Fresvik, Norway, which, in addition to Oslo, I hope to visit.

Even though my mom doesn’t talk about her childhood or her feelings about being adopted, I know it must have affected her. It’s been a long journey, but it’s given me deeper understanding, pride, and appreciation of who I am and my unique family history. I don’t know what the future holds or whether I will ever meet my biological grandfather, but I appreciate the contact I did have with him and his custom paintings of my mom, and I remain optimistic.Bianca Butler is a SF Bay Area native raised in the suburbs of Sacramento, California. She’s a graduate of Mills College, an alumna of VONA, and a family historian. She enjoys non-fiction writing, digital storytelling, and public speaking. She plans to continue writing family stories about the legacy and lifelong impact of adoption. Butler dreams of doing ancestral homeland trips to West Africa and Norway and documenting the experience through writing and film. She lives in Sacramento, CA. Contact her at biancasoleil7@gmail.com.Severance is not monetized—no subscriptions, no ads, no donations—therefore, all content is generously shared by the writers. If you have the resources and would like to help support the work, you can tip the writer.

On Venmo, @iambiancasoleil

By Sara EasterlyAdoptees are used to others telling our adoption stories—to us and for us. This makes sense to some degree, considering many of our adoptions took place at a preverbal time in our lives. And it takes time, developmentally, to grasp the concept of adoption—let alone make sense of relinquishment’s effects on us.

But at a certain point in our growth process, it becomes essential that we, as adoptees, take the lead with our stories. We’re the survivors of relinquishment. We know adoption from the inside. We alone have experienced the complicated mix of emotions swirling inside—many of which we’ve hidden or pressed down upon out of overwhelm, denial, peacekeeping, shame, fear, or because we prioritize our feelings last. Our voices matter—for our emotional health and for that of the adoption narrative.

Sometimes we don’t fully understand our emotions, or their depth, until we put pen to paper and our unconscious feels free to flow. But organizing our thoughts into story form—through journaling, memoir, essay, fiction, or poetry—can help us make sense of the past with an eye toward future growth.

What’s more, others in the adoption constellation need our perspectives. Fellow adoptees need to know they’re not alone. Each time we write and share our stories, we’re helping normalize dynamics that others may be struggling with in isolation. Historically, adoptive parents’ voices have taken center stage. But without adoptee voices, adoption-related literature falls flat (and very often gets it wrong). Our words can and do make a difference.

Supporting Adoptee Voices

It’s for these reasons that Adoptee Voices came to be—offering writing groups for adult adoptees and creating another space for publishing adoptee essays, poetry, and articles. Through the groups, Adoptee Voices offers:

• Dedicated writing time
• Adoption-specific writing prompts
• Writing accountability
• Community with other adoptee writers
• Publishing and writing advice

With Fall on the horizon, Adoptee Voices is preparing to launch its next writing groups for adoptees:

Craft & Publication-Oriented Writing Group: Eight Wednesdays Starting September 8th

This writing group meets and writes together online, with a focus on the craft of storytelling, writing with publication in mind, and marketing to agents, publishers, and readers. Adoptees can write from weekly prompts or bring their current works-in-progress. After writing together in community, we break into small groups for sharing our writing and giving/receiving feedback. Led by Sara Easterly (Searching for Mom), Ridghaus (Six Word Adoption Memoirs), and Alice Stephens (Famous Adopted People).

Writing as an Emotional Playground: Eight Mondays Starting September 13th

Meeting and writing together online, this group is focused on writing as an emotional playground. Adoptees can write from adoption-specific prompts designed to help explore the unconscious and play with emotions through words. Small groups help to create a supportive environment and build community. Led by Sara Easterly (Searching for Mom), Jennifer Dyan Ghoston (The Truth So Far and Once Upon a Time…in Adopteeland), and Kate Murphy, LCSW (The Couchblog).

For a taste of the writing that other adoptee-writers have shared from the writing groups, visit adoptee-voices.com/e-zine.

Registration for both Fall groups is currently open, but spaces are limited. Adult adoptees can find information and register by visiting adoptee-voices.com.Sara Easterly is an adoptee and award-winning author of books and essays. Her memoir, Searching for Mom, won a Gold Medal in the Illumination Book Awards, among many other honors. Her essays and articles have been published by Psychology Today, Dear Adoption, Red Letter Christians, Feminine Collective, Her View From Home, Godspace, and others. Find her online at saraeasterly.com, on Facebook, on Instagram @saraeasterlyauthor, and on Twitter @saraeasterly.

Read her essay on Severance here.BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles and essays about NPEs, adoptees, and genetic genealogy.

• Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
• Let us know what you want to see in Severance. Send a message to bkjax@icloud.com.
• Tell us your stories. See guidelines. 
• If you’re an NPE, adoptee, or donor conceived person; a sibling of someone in one of these groups; or a helping professional (for example, a therapist or genetic genealogist) you’re welcome to join our private Facebook group.
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If you’re willing, could you summarize your own adoption experience?

I was adopted as an infant in a closed domestic adoption. I searched in my early twenties for my first mother and had a brief reunion before she chose secondary rejection. I reunited with my biological father when I was 27, and we are in a decade-long reunion, including my three siblings who are now young adults.

On your website you describe yourself as an introvert, which probably would come as a surprise to anyone listening to you for the first time. You seem remarkably at ease conversing with everyone and did from the start. Is that a great challenge for you or does it come as easily as it appears to?

I have always loved having deep, in-depth conversations about meaningful topics with one person at a time. If you put me with a group, even with ten of my closest and dearest people, I will be awkward, uncomfortable, and questioning my life’s choices. One-on-one feels natural, and being in the role of interviewer gives a permission that I would love to have in everyday life: ask any questions that pop into my head, even if they’re invasive.

I find you describing yourself as an introvert also surprising because you stood on a stage and did stand-up comedy. That’s not something many introverts can do. Tell us about stand-up comedy—what was your experience and what has it done for you? How if at all does it relate to the experience of adoption?

My brief foray into stand-up comedy came from a desire to add to my interviewing toolkit (and reduce my public speaking nerves). The Adoptees On podcast covers challenging topics, often with a heaviness that can feel unbearable. I need to occasionally add levity into our conversations. I took a stand-up class with maybe a half a dozen others for six weeks. I loved my teacher. He asked us to lead with our story and personal experiences vs. “telling jokes,” which was much more in line with what I wanted to do. The class finished with a public performance of our comedy sets. It was fully one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever done. Generously, the audience did indeed laugh at my set. I’ll always be proudest of my first joke, “The best part about being adopted is never having to think about your parents having sex.” For the adopted people that listen to my podcast, finding good things to think about our adoption experience can sometimes be hard to come by.

I would say relating to the experience of adoption, for many of us, the loss of connection to our biological mothers was the worst thing that ever happened to us in our lives. The relinquishment trauma is real. To do a terrifying thing by choice felt incredibly stupid and like the worst thing in the moment, but afterwards the euphoria carried me for several days.

Did you anticipate Adoptees On becoming quite the phenomenon it’s become and that so many people would be listening?

I never expected Adoptees On to become what it has. My show gets between 20,000 and 25,000 downloads a month and has had 650,000+ downloads all time. Podcasts are a very slow build unless you have some sort of celebrity name associated with them or already have a massive following. There’s this draw to podcasting because it seems easy to do, and people wrongly think that with podcasting comes instant fame. It’s safe to say that Adoptees On is in the top 15% of all podcasts.

You’ve created an extraordinary space for adoptee voices. Why did you start Adoptees On? What purpose did you hope it would fulfill?

I started the podcast because I felt alone. I struggled and lost my first reunion with my biological mother to secondary rejection. I struggled in my second reunion with my biological father and was convinced I was the broken common denominator. I was able to find adoptee blogs to help me feel connected and was building friendships with several other adult adoptees on Twitter. They were the only ones that “got it,” and I had the deep desire to be able to hear all of their experiences so I wouldn’t feel so alone. I have loved podcasts for years. To give the hipster answer, I loved podcasts before they were cool. I listened to podcasts walking to and from university all the way back when I had to download them on iTunes on my desktop computer and transfer them over to my Sony mp3 player and then later my video iPod in 2005. In 2015, I happened to be listening to two different indie podcasts that both had episodes about “how to” podcast. They weren’t shows about that. They both independently had gotten a lot of questions from listeners and shared what they were doing. I had that lightbulb moment—I could do that! Lonely adopted me had found the secret way in. Podcasting meant I could interview adoptees to feel connection. It seems selfish as I look back on that motivation, but I’m thankful it hasn’t stayed that way. It has instead become a way to build connection for many adult adopted people that feel/felt like I did.

Can you tell readers who may not be aware of it about your other podcast?

I do indeed have a second podcast. It’s behind a paywall so a lot of people don’t know about it. I wanted to have something to give as a thank you when listeners signed up to support Adoptees On monthly on Patreon. It’s called Adoptees Off Script, and my main co-host is Carrie Cahill Mulligan (she was my first guest on the main feed, and one of my first adoptee Twitter friends!). We chat about adoptee/adoption news articles, upcoming events of note, personal things that I never talk about on the main show (like what I’m talking about in therapy), and we also have this amazing book club where we read adoptee-authored books once a month. It’s a whole other wealth of resources, but more fun with a mix of serious and silly. I try hard to leave it almost all unedited, so you hear my mistakes and all. It’s one of my favorite things I do. It’s also one of those things where I’m sure I put my foot in my mouth at least a few times a month. It feels safe to talk with Carrie and so I probably dish a little more than I should. We wrap every Adoptees Off Script episode with things we’re loving right now, none of which can be adoption-related. Think book recommendations, movies, podcasts, recipes, products, and one of my latest loves was this gigantic disco ball I bought used from FB marketplace. It’s a rich tapestry.

How important is it for adoptees to feel heard and be seen?

I don’t know if there is anything more important. Having validation of our experiences has been the number one healing tool for many of us.

I believe that storytelling is healing and gives people agency—that it’s healing for the teller and the listener. Can you talk about why you think it’s important—the role you think storytelling plays in healing or in coping? What do you believe both the storyteller and the listener get out of the conversations you have?

I remember once talking with an adopted person in their fifties and they were sobbing as they finished telling me some of their story, “No one has ever heard this before.” Imagine going five decades and hiding the most intrinsic part of your story from both yourself and everyone around you.

Sharing our story is undeniably scary, especially when expressing any amount of discontent or pain with the thing that all of society has always told you is the best thing that could have happened to you. It’s a huge risk sharing a story that includes a narrative that’s contrary to the dominant one—the risk being that of denial or rejection by the listener.

My intent is that when a guest is sharing their story with me, I give them my full attention. Questions come up organically that I’m curious about or that the future listeners will be wondering, and as we dive deeper I almost always empathize and identify with many of the things they reveal. I know my listeners empathize and feel seen even while listening because there is almost always a part of the guest’s story that is relatable. My highest hope is that listeners know they aren’t alone.

Adopted people, former foster youth, foundlings, late discovery adoptees (LDAs), not parent expected (NPEs), stepparent adoptees, donor-conceived people, so many of the communities you serve, BK, can identify with my guests’ stories. The pain in being disconnected from some part of your genetic heritage is real and manifests in many relatable ways.

You’ve talked to a number of guests about how creative pursuits bring healing. Can you comment about some of the ways people have explored or helped cope with their feelings through creative means?

I’ve talked with musicians, actors, painters, jewelry makers, writers (memoir, fiction, poetry), playwrights, costumers, photographers, graphic designers, singers and songwriters, both fine artists and hobbyists, filmmakers, chefs, fiber and textile artists… and I’m sure I’ve missed some. When I say there’s something for everyone to express themselves creatively, that’s no exaggeration. My creative hobby that helps me practice mindfulness is probably a little tacky, but I’m obsessed with 5D diamond painting (think paint-by-number with tiny glittery beads). It’s extraordinarily satisfying.

Have you found that many of your guests find the experiencing of doing the podcast something of an unburdening—that the sharing of their experience with you relieves them in some way just through the conversation?

That is definitely one of the surprises for me of doing this show. I’ve had many guests tell me that their interview was a powerful step in their journey and felt healing to them. To be clear, I’m not a therapist by any stretch of the imagination, but that’s the power of adopted people being heard by another adoptee: fully feeling seen and having their pain acknowledged.

You once wrote in a newsletter that it’s necessary for adoptees to be writing the books, becoming social workers, organizing events, etc. Do you see that happening at the level it needs to happen? If not, what is standing in the way?

I still believe that it’s necessary and want to support as much as possible adopted people leading the way in these areas. I am one 100% biased toward the adoptee voice and family preservation and I have no qualms about saying that. And no, I don’t see it happening at the level it needs to happen. It’s still woefully lacking.

We’ve seen the success of authors telling our stories without truly knowing what it’s like to be adopted. In the “#ownvoices movement” there’s a drive to ensure those who have lived it get the opportunities and I hope that will extend to adopted people getting the bestsellers instead of just our allies. We’ve wrestled with this conversation a bit on the Adoptees Off Script podcast and in my private Facebook group, and some of the thoughtful responses mostly boil down to the fact that adoption and relinquishment trauma is still not accepted or believed by the general public, and often when it’s adoptee voices sharing their truth they are seen as playing the victim.

What prompted me to write that newsletter, if it’s the one I’m thinking of, was sitting at a table of self-identified allies of adopted people who were mocking a painful situation for a pair of adoptees. They recounted a story that took place in my province years ago: a couple fell in love and got married and once the adoption records opened they discovered they were full siblings and had to separate and come to terms with a difficult circumstance. I never want to call someone an ally that would openly mock the adoptees they say they’re serving.

I’ve watched several adoption-related organizations dissolve (or implode) over the past few years, and one thing I’ve noted as an outside observer, is the commonality of what is merely lip service to centering adoptees. I asked an organizer at one conference who had requested me to come and speak, “how many of your other speakers are adopted people” and the response of incredulity on her face was my answer. The thought literally hadn’t even occurred to them that ensuring adequate adoptee representation should be at the forefront at an adoption conference. Some of it is a desire to cater to everyone and so we become an afterthought. I also see the adoptee-led organizations that are thriving, and applaud the challenging work they’re obviously putting in to secure safety and full representation.

In what other ways can adoptees ensure their voices are heard?

I’m prefacing this with a reminder that I recommend doing all advocacy work out of a place of wholeness (serving with the scars vs. an open wound to borrow a common expression). As unfair as it is to have this responsibility, I believe it is our job to tell the whole truth about adoption. If the only people willing to share are the adoptive parents and the folks who only share the brief glimpses of happiness (the reunion porn, as some of us call it), these false societal narratives are going to continue to be dominant.

To ensure being heard? What doesn’t work is the rage-y call-out culture. That gets people blocked and silenced. Instead I think it’s the quiet one-on-one moments when we share candidly with safe friends and family how adoption has truly impacted us. When we’re not under pressure of the quick come-back on a Facebook post; when we’re sharing a full, nuanced picture of our experiences; when we can back up what we’re saying with facts and articles, these are ways we’ll be taken seriously and be heard.

How often do your guests make you cry?

It used to be every single episode, now it’s probably half of the time.

Is there an emotional cost, or burden, of receiving all the stories you hear? How do you carry that and what sort of self-care do you do in response?

First, I want to acknowledge there is a huge cost to my guests sharing their stories. Risk of backlash from their friends and loved ones. Potentially painful recounting of past inner work. Their emotional labor is real.

For me personally, I get wiped out after recording. I often nap afterwards. Sadly I’ve gotten somewhat numb to the hard things people share with me. I have to compartmentalize because otherwise the things I hear haunt me. I have an excellent psychologist who helps me process when things get too challenging. I’ve been known to take a bath in the middle of the day to try and wash away the feelings.

I believe you’ve said that the podcast has literally been lifesaving for some people. Can you explain?

*TW – Suicide

I have had multiple adopted people write to me and share they were experiencing suicidal ideation, a couple of whom had already made suicide plans. Each one found the podcast and for the first time in their lives felt seen and heard by hearing other adoptees share. All of them chose to stay in this world and got supports in place that were adoptee-specific. What a miracle that hearing another adoptee’s story could be lifesaving. Talk about validation being important!

The other surprising note I’ve gotten a few times is that the show has saved a couple of marriages. All of these messages expressed a similar circumstance: relationship problems stemming from search/reunion where the partner didn’t get it. The adopted person shared some episodes from the relationship series with their partners (including an episode my husband did with me) and it led to each of the couples going to therapy with adoption- competent therapists to repair their connections.

Adoptee voices are so important and yet often I get the impression that those voices are in an echo chamber—that adoptees are largely speaking to an audience of adoptees. Do you agree, and if so, doesn’t this limit the ability to truly spread awareness? What do you think needs to happen to make change in this regard?

It takes incredibly strong people with a support system in place to safely challenge the narrative publicly. A lot of us are still working on figuring out our identity, confidence building, and truly learning to love ourselves. Talking with other adopted people and sharing our work with them may feel like a safe first step.

I understand not wanting to put yourself out there—even talking to other members of the adoption constellation isn’t innocuous. Some listeners may remember the disgusting personal attack Caitríona Palmer and I experienced at an adoption conference by a biological mother in 2019. We were presenting a session on our mutual experience of secondary rejection from our mothers. We were describing our personal stories, what we did, what we regretted and wished we had done differently. Truly it was a recounting of our personal stories and memories, when a fellow presenter, who was also a biological mother, ran up to the mic that was for Q&A at the end of the session and yelled at us. Her primary message was that everything we had done as adoptees was wrong and “of course” our mothers left us because of our actions. It was one of the most egregious outbursts I have ever seen in a professional setting and one of the most painful experiences of my life. Both abusive to us as presenters and for the adopted people in the session to witness. I’ve never named her publicly, but I’ve seen her booked at other events and it’s always a shock to see her name on the agenda. Sharing adoptee thoughts and experiences is not always welcome.

When I see adopted people building their muscles in adoptee-land, I hope they will grow into service and sharing in the greater community when they’re ready. I sort of answered part of this earlier, that talking one-on-one to our safe friends and family about what we’ve experienced is the way I believe will spread awareness and change the narrative.

What aspects of the adoptee experience do you feel remain least understood and most require awareness?

Because of the depth of loss, identity confusion, and the loyalty trauma response, many adopted people may not have been able to tell you adoption was a problem until later in life. I have friends that deeply regret their complicity in being the “poster child for adoption” in their teens and early adulthood. Promoting adoption can sometimes be the only way to push down the cognitive dissonance some of us experience.

If you could say any one thing to someone who is not adopted about adoptees what  would it be?

The privilege of the kept is the innate knowledge of identity. They have a naïveté of the importance of access to original birth certificates, medical information, and a full racial, cultural, and genealogical history. When you have always known who you are and where you came from, it’s not obvious that everyone needs and deserves access to that same information. It’s almost impossible to understand what the lack of that knowledge does to us because you can’t remove your intrinsic knowledge of identity to put yourself in our shoes.

What are your plans for Adoptees On going forward?

You’ll see more interviews with academics, more therapists, and more deep dives into topics that I find fascinating. I hope to add some new voices to the community and have been slowly working away at that behind-the-scenes.

What might readers be surprised to know about you?

One of my gifts of reunion is being diagnosed with celiac disease. My biological father passed that down to me, and now that I’ve been tested and am completely gluten-free I feel a million times better. I’ve mastered GF cooking, but GF baking feels impossible to adapt to. The perfect GF cookie remains elusive.

You’ve talked to virtually everyone in the adoptee world. Is there anyone you haven’t talked to that you’re dying to have as a guest?

I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface! I’ve only publicly interviewed 100+ people in the adoptee world. My hopefully-one-day list is extremely long and the limitation is the capacity for the number of episodes I produce each year. I have a lot of people request celebrities like Sarah McLachlan or Keegan-Michael Key. Maybe one day! Truthfully some of my favorite interviews are with adopted people who aren’t necessarily well-known. I love being able to share someone’s story who might not otherwise be heard. If you twisted my arm to name names, my current top two are Jeanette Winterson and A.M. Homes. We’ve been reading some of their work in our Adoptees Off Script book club and I want to be friends with them and thank them for their bravery in telling adoptee stories in mainstream publishing.

What haven’t I asked you that you wish I had?

Absolutely nothing! Thank you for the honor to share with your readers. I appreciate your service to the genetically severed community. What a brilliant magazine name, Severance. Perfection.

What do you do when you’re not researching guests and recording your podcast?

I enjoy interior design and I’m desperately trying to love gardening (mostly failing). I’m always in search of my next favorite podcast. When I read for pleasure, they’re mostly psychological thrillers and I cross my fingers the plot twist isn’t adoptee or adoption- related. I’m being a mama to my two little boys (7 and 9) and I’ve been married for 16 years to my amazing husband who was my first long-suffering listener to me constantly talking about adoption.Haley Radke is the creator and host of the Adoptees On podcast. She’s an adult adoptee advocate, co-facilitator of the Edmonton Adoptees Connect group, and has a BA in psychology. Radke is passionate about elevating adoptee voices to help challenge and change the traditional adoption narrative. Find her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles and essays about NPEs, adoptees, and genetic genealogy.

• Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
• Let us know what you want to see in Severance. Send a message to bkjax@icloud.com.
• Tell us your stories. See guidelines. 
• If you’re an NPE, adoptee, or donor conceived person; a sibling of someone in one of these groups; or a helping professional (for example, a therapist or genetic genealogist) you’re welcome to join our private Facebook group.
• Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @Severancemag.