podcasts

Please tell us a little about yourself — what was your life like before you DNA surprise? I grew up a military brat, mostly in Arizona. I lived in Tucson with my husband and two children and still do. I love the desert. Before my DNA surprise I would say I was part of a close-knit family—my parents live a few minutes away and my sisters are here too. My dad is Mexican and my mom is of European descent, so I grew up ambiguously biracial. My days were filled as a working mom, wife, friend, sister, and daughter. Can you summarize as much of your personal story of how your DNA surprise came about? I bought an AncestryDNA test in June 2021 as part of a Prime Day deal. I had zero suspicions about my dad—I was always told my parents were married after I was born. I look like my sisters. About a month later I got my results. I was first struck by my ethnicity breakdown—I was not Mexican at all, but African American. There was zero latinx in my results. Then I clicked on my matches and to my utter shock/horror I matched with a man I’d never seen before, my biological father. When you tested, you had a parent child match. What was that experience like and what resulted? It was really confusing because my bio dad didn’t have his name in his account – it was a username, so I had no idea who he really was (not that I knew him, anyway). I was way too afraid to contact him, so I called my mom and asked if she knew. She didn’t based on the username. I spent the next few days putting all of my internet sleuthing skills to work until I was able to identify him. I found him on Facebook and lurked everything I could find. I found an old podcast he appeared on just to listen to his voice. It was all very surreal. A few days into my journey my newfound sister contacted me and that really got the ball rolling in terms of building a relationship with my family. You said at one point your mother apologized. That’s often not the case. How did this affect your relationship? My situation, like so many of ours, is very nuanced. Both of my parents knew the truth about my paternity—or so they thought. They believed they were protecting me from someone, but that person is not my biological father. So, while I disagree with their choice to keep a secret from me, I do understand the initial decision. That empathy made it easier for my mother to apologize and for me to be open to receiving it. I do appreciate the apology but I am still processing everything. It’s not an overnight process but I hope our relationship can normalize. You said growing up you didn’t relate to your Mexican heritage. Were you raised in that culture and still didn’t feel connected to it? Yes and no. My parents didn’t deeply immerse me in Mexican culture, but I live in the southwest so it’s everywhere. Whenever we visited family in Texas I saw much of that Mexican side as well. I went to schools in predominantly Mexican areas, at times. I just never felt a real connection despite how hard I tried. I always felt like an imposter but I attributed it to being mixed race. You talk about discovering you were Black. You said in the episode about your own story “It was like I knew but I didn’t know.” Can you talk about that and what you meant?  I’ve always loved, respected, and admired black culture. From music to television to movies to fashion, what’s not to love? As an adult, I became deeply invested in anti racism. So much of who I am aligns with being black, but it never occurred to me that I was. So it’s like I always knew on some level, while never considering that it might actually be true.

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.

Tell us about your own NPE story to the extent you’re comfortable sharing it. Seeing only 1% French was the red flag in my initial 23andMe DNA report. I was raised to believe I was significantly French and Norwegian. A few months later I took the Ancestry DNA test to compare from the same database that my sister had used. Those results produced the most shocking and traumatic day of my adult life. I had a half brother appear on my DNA results, and I didn’t have a brother as far as I knew. A trip over to my mother’s house an hour later produced more confusion, dismissal, and a host of secrets started to come out. Apparently, my mother and BF worked together in the 80s and had a one-night stand. My mother never told him she got pregnant and never saw him again, or at least that’s what I’ve been told. My mother still claims she didn’t know to this day. I think the most painful part of finding this out is how my mother, birth father, and newfound family have treated me in the aftermath. How far into your own journey were you when you started your podcast? Six weeks after I had my DNA shock I published my first trailer for the podcast calling for NPEs to share their story and giving a launch date of July 2019. What compelled you to start the podcast? The only comfort I had in those first few weeks of shock was reading other NPE stories on the forums online. I was nodding along with their written stories and scrolling for hours and hours. I would read aloud parts of other NPE stories to my husband at all hours of the day and night. I wanted to be able to listen to these stories as I walked around the house and did my errands. I knew I couldn’t continue to sit in front of a computer the rest of my life but I wanted to bring the comfort of finding others like me everywhere I went. I searched “NPE” on the podcast platforms and at the time did not find anything like it so decided I would produce my own. I realize now I could have used other terms and certainly found other podcasts with these stories on them, but with my limited knowledge at the time I was unable to find other podcasts. Did you initially find NPEs very willing to speak out, or did you have to coax people to share? I have only ever asked one guest. My first one I had to search for on reddit; I was too afraid to ask anyone on the DNA sites because I didn’t want to break the rules and get kicked off if they considered it “self-promotion.” After that I’ve had a pretty steady stream of people who reach out. I’m booked for 22 weeks out. I can only handle about one guest a week at this time because I do everything myself including scheduling, recording, and editing. I’m only a hobbyist—I’m literally learning everything as I go. I believe stories benefit the teller as well as the audience. From your experience sharing people’s stories, can you talk a little about the ways the stories help the listeners, and the ways telling the stories helps the storytellers? I know every story I record is sacred. Somebody out there is listening and nodding along in relief. A lurker, or perhaps a new NPE bingeing on stories all night long when they can’t sleep from the overwhelming grief they are experiencing. I get emails from listeners saying they have been listening or bingeing all night long to some of these episodes. As for the storytellers, I wish I could explain the relief, giddiness, and joy I hear in their voices after I sign off. Some of what they tell me afterwards is pure gold, but of course off the record after I’ve stopped recording. They all sound like a weight has been lifted off their shoulders; sometimes they’re exhausted and yawning. I leave every recording session feeling filled with empathy and love for my fellow NPEs. Why do you think storytelling and sharing is so important for NPEs? I don’t think most NPEs receive true understanding and empathy from people. We get it. We can empathize with each other’s heartbreak, confusion, anger, and, sometimes, joy. Finding a community has been life-saving for me in this journey. In one episode you mentioned that you sought therapy after your NPE discovery. Can you talk about how you chose a therapist and whether it was difficult to find someone who understood NPE issues?

Tell us little about yourself apart from your adoption journey and your podcast/genetic genealogy work? I am a wife and mother of two. I’m currently on my fifth career. I made my living as an actress/singer for most of my life. That slowed down in my forties, so, needing a creative outlet, I went to beauty school and got a cosmetology license. I’ve always been a genealogy hobbyist, but the advent of direct-to-consumer DNA testing changed my world and heralded a whole new skill set. And the impossible question: Can you summarize your own adoption journey?  Always knew I was adopted and was always implicitly aware of the general mismatch between me and my adoptive family. To be clear, that doesn’t mean I didn’t love and appreciate them. It means I spent my life feeling like I was “other” than those around me, and it was emphasized by the general consensus that I should try harder to blend in and not be my own person. I found my biological mother in my early twenties and it was quite uneventful and stress free. My parents were supportive of this effort and even reached out to my biological mother in solidarity. Years later, after having my own children, I realized I needed to complete my search and began an arduous and often shocking journey into identifying my paternal family. It became an obsession. As has always been my way, if those around me told me that something was impossible, I leaned in to prove otherwise. Being hypervigilant is a common thread among adoptees and it has pretty much dominated my motivations in life. (For the full story, please listen to the first 20 or so episodes of my podcast “CutOff Genes.” Caveat: Genetic genealogy is relatively new and always evolving, and the testing sites update their platforms regularly. That said, some of the earlier episodes may contain content that’s no longer relevant.)

In her new podcast, Everything’s Relative, writer and therapist Eve Sturges talks with individuals whose worlds have been upended by DNA surprises. She sits down, for example, with Joy, who was told at age 10 she was donor conceived and who, growing up, had little if any interest in her birthfather. But when facts later emerged to demonstrate how much like him she was, she became driven to learn everything she could about him—a process she likened to dating—and thus developed a profound relationship with a man she’d never known, the birthfather who died many years earlier. As Sturges observed, Joy didn’t know she was missing pieces until the pieces fell into place. And there’s Mesa, who, before learning that she was an NPE, had had a tumultuous childhood and already was no stranger to trauma. Her discovery triggered a bewildering identity crisis; suddenly she had a Hispanic heritage about which she knew nothing. Learning that she had no connection to the family she’d grown up thinking were “her people” and wanting to connect with her biological family turned her life upside down. In situations such as these, Sturges observed, where NPEs reach out and connect with their biological families, they in some ways also must become disconnected from the family they’ve known.