Latest / The Resilience Project / Damon Davis on 279 Adoptee Interviews, Two New Books, and Being "a Branch on Someone Else's Family Tree"

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Damon Davis on 279 Adoptee Interviews, Two New Books, and Being "a Branch on Someone Else's Family Tree" · The Resilience Project

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Hi y'all, I'm Julie.
0:02
SPEAKER_00: I'm a trauma-informed adoptee coach and somatic healing guide.
0:06
SPEAKER_00: After overcoming deep abandonment wounds, I now help adult adoptees move from feeling lost and disconnected to experiencing profound self-belonging.
0:19
SPEAKER_00: I know what it is like to carry the weight of abandonment, to feel stuck in patterns of longing, adapting, and searching for belonging.
0:30
SPEAKER_00: To have tried every healing modality available and come up empty.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: My own healing has taught me this.
0:38
SPEAKER_00: The answers aren't out there.
0:40
SPEAKER_00: They're buried within me.
0:42
SPEAKER_00: And I'm here to guide you home to yourself.
0:45
SPEAKER_00: The Resilience Project Podcast brings voice, visibility, and validation to the parts of adoption society rarely names, but all of us feel.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: Through an trauma-informed somatic lens, I explore the lived experiences of the entire adoption constellation with a tender emphasis on the adoptee experience.
1:11
SPEAKER_00: This podcast goes beyond storytelling into soul telling.
1:15
SPEAKER_00: It offers embodied insight, compassionate education, and a path towards awareness, hope, and strength.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: Each episode invites listeners to understand adoption more deeply, not just with the mind, but with the nervous system and to reconnect with the truth, identity, and belonging that were always yours to come home to.
1:40
SPEAKER_00: Welcome.
1:46
SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to the podcast, everybody.
1:48
SPEAKER_00: As you know, this is my favorite thing to do the entire week is to spend time with my guests or to spend time with you.
1:55
SPEAKER_00: I have crossed paths with today's guest three times now.
1:59
SPEAKER_00: First at the Adoption Making of Me event in Atascadero, then in Austin, and most recently in Minneapolis.
2:07
SPEAKER_00: He's usually the one holding the mic, not answering it.
2:11
SPEAKER_00: This is Damon Davis.
2:13
SPEAKER_00: He emcees those events.
2:14
SPEAKER_00: And if you've been to one, you know exactly the presence that I'm talking about.
2:19
SPEAKER_00: Damon is the creator and host of Who Am I Really?
2:23
SPEAKER_00: Now, this is a podcast that he created, but also he's written a memoir of the same title and spent years doing what I am trying to do here, which is basically sitting across from adopted people and letting their stories be told in full without shrinking them into something tidy.
2:39
SPEAKER_00: He's also the author, like I said, of Who Am I Really, which walks through his own reunion with his birth mother and later the discovery of a biological father who didn't even know he existed, which I completely relate to, Damon.
2:51
SPEAKER_00: That is my story too.
2:53
SPEAKER_00: Here's what makes Damon a little different from a lot of guests I bring on.
2:58
SPEAKER_00: He is a same-race domestic adoptee.
3:01
SPEAKER_00: He's also a father through kinship adoption of two children, plus a biological son of his own.
3:08
SPEAKER_00: He has lived on both sides of placement, the one who has placed and the one who opened his home to kids who needed exactly that.
3:16
SPEAKER_00: That's a vantage point I don't get to sit with very often.
3:20
SPEAKER_00: And I wasn't going to pass it up.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: So his story has been told plenty of other places, and we're not going to spend our time retracing it today.
3:27
SPEAKER_00: What I want to spend time on is what happens after hundreds of interviews with adopted people.
3:34
SPEAKER_00: What he started to see that he didn't see at first, and the two new books, two y'all, that he's writing right now and trying to hold all of it at once.
3:44
SPEAKER_00: So because that's the work I care most about here, illuminating the impacts of adoption that stay unseen, not just for the adoptee, but for everyone the story touches.
3:55
SPEAKER_00: So let's get into it, Damon.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: It is so good to have you here.
3:58
SPEAKER_01: It's so good to be here with you, Julie.
4:00
SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for making space and time.
4:02
SPEAKER_01: This is really dope.
4:03
SPEAKER_00: I would have to say the same thing to you.
4:05
SPEAKER_00: I'm so honored to have you here.
4:07
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
4:08
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
4:08
SPEAKER_00: We have spent some time in some interesting spaces, haven't we?
4:12
SPEAKER_00: The Making of Me event and being able to watch the impact that it has.
4:17
SPEAKER_00: And I think for anyone meeting you here for the first time, which I think that's going to be quite rare for a population because you have a podcast that's been out there for a really long time.
4:27
SPEAKER_00: So I know people know who you are.
4:29
SPEAKER_00: But how would you describe who you are?
4:31
SPEAKER_00: And what is who am I really?
4:34
SPEAKER_01: Fantastic opener.
4:36
SPEAKER_01: I am father, loving husband, entrepreneur, and adoptee advocate.
4:44
SPEAKER_01: Right?
4:44
SPEAKER_01: I spend my time.
4:47
SPEAKER_01: One of my great passions, not unlike yourself, is spending my time talking with other adopted people.
4:53
SPEAKER_01: And at my core, one of the things that really drives me is learning other people's stories in general.
5:00
SPEAKER_01: It's not just adoptees.
5:01
SPEAKER_01: I'm the type of person I much prefer a house party to a club because I can have a conversation at a house party and I can get to know the person I'm standing next to.
5:10
SPEAKER_01: And my favorite thing is understanding how our two very divergent paths bring us together in this moment where we're standing in the same place.
5:20
SPEAKER_01: And so that natural curiosity about how the humans sort of move about the earth is part of what makes me so super curious about the adoptee experience.
5:32
SPEAKER_01: In terms of my adoption specifically, I am, as you've said, I was adopted into a homogenous family.
5:40
SPEAKER_01: Both my parents were black, as am I.
5:42
SPEAKER_01: My interesting, my mom was lighter skinned in color than I am, and my father was darker skinned in color than I am.
5:48
SPEAKER_01: So I being in the middle of the two of them, we looked like we could be family, which is an interesting dynamic because even in a same ethnicity adoption situation, you can still stand out.
6:04
SPEAKER_01: Let's just say I was of darker skin and they were both of lighter skin, or vice versa, you would potentially look at our family almost the same as if I was an Asian child in a white family, a black child in a white family, a Latino or other.
6:21
SPEAKER_01: You mix the races and ethnicities, and you start to recognize very easily in public that someone is adopted.
6:28
SPEAKER_01: I never had that issue.
6:30
SPEAKER_01: So I grew up very comfortable in my adoption, and my parents were always supportive of discussing adoption.
6:37
SPEAKER_01: It didn't come up much, but they invited the conversation in case I needed to chat about it.
6:43
SPEAKER_01: It was never an instance of, hey, let's let's sit down and talk about your adoption.
6:48
SPEAKER_01: At a time when I was sitting down ready to talk about soccer, we're on completely different discussion paths.
6:54
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait.
6:56
SPEAKER_01: I didn't want to talk about that.
6:56
SPEAKER_01: I'm over here being a kid and you're on some adult stuff.
6:58
SPEAKER_01: That's not my interest right now.
7:01
SPEAKER_01: So I was very comfortable with my adoption.
7:04
SPEAKER_01: And my very first guest, Andre, who's like my brother from another and a fellow adoptee, obviously.
7:11
SPEAKER_01: Andre was episode zero one, and he told me, I didn't start talking about adoption until I heard you start talking about adoption.
7:20
SPEAKER_01: And the reason that was true for him was because he had been on the playground much earlier in his life and heard another child admit to their own adoption and watched that child basically be bullied.
7:34
SPEAKER_01: And he was like, No way, uh, you're not gonna get me caught in that trap.
7:38
SPEAKER_01: If that's what you're doing to him, my mouth is closed.
7:41
SPEAKER_01: And a lot of people have that or a similar experience of adoption, is that there's some reason why they don't want to talk about it.
7:51
SPEAKER_01: And therefore, it is in some places a taboo topic.
7:56
SPEAKER_01: In other places, it's just a I don't feel like you need to know that much about me.
8:01
SPEAKER_01: That's that's an another layer deeper that you haven't achieved yet.
8:04
SPEAKER_01: And what that does, unfortunately, is it leaves people open to the narratives that are created for adoptees because adoption can be so under the radar.
8:17
SPEAKER_01: And so the Who Am I Really podcast is a place for adopted people to come on, much like we're doing right here.
8:25
SPEAKER_03: Right.
8:25
SPEAKER_01: And I always tell people this is just a conversation, conversation between two adopted people.
8:31
SPEAKER_01: I want to hear what it was like growing up in adoption.
8:34
SPEAKER_01: Who were your allies and who were your foes?
8:38
SPEAKER_01: What made you decide to search for your biological family?
8:41
SPEAKER_01: Where were you in your life?
8:43
SPEAKER_01: Was this a I was a young kid and I always wanted to search from the time that I was I found out I was adopted to I was a teenager and as a woman, I realized I could have a child, but I'm someone else's child.
8:57
SPEAKER_01: For me as a male, the birth of my son was the catalyst for my search.
9:03
SPEAKER_01: And so all that to say, I interview people about their journey through adoption, their attempt to find their biological family members, all for the purposes of helping to expose the real narratives of adoption, not just the Disney version, as I like to call it.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: Totally.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: And I think it's interesting because a lot of times in those interviews, what I've listened to sometimes it uncovers things they didn't even realize existed.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: As they begin to process with you, they recognize, oh my gosh, this is bigger than I actually thought.
9:38
SPEAKER_00: And makes me think of even the Making of Me event.
9:41
SPEAKER_00: When they started their podcast, they had no idea what it was going to turn into, and they literally came into consciousness on it.
9:47
SPEAKER_00: So it's just fascinating as we all move through these things.
9:52
SPEAKER_00: One of the things you said that stood out to me was the bullying uh in elementary school for Andre, I think.
9:59
SPEAKER_00: It happened to me in middle school.
10:00
SPEAKER_00: I forgot all about this until you just brought it up.
10:04
SPEAKER_00: There was a girl that was a good friend of mine that was at my house and we were playing on this swing that we had outside.
10:10
SPEAKER_00: And somehow it came up that I was adopted and she was like, Oh, I can't be your friend, and she left.
10:16
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, What the heck?
10:18
SPEAKER_00: What is that?
10:20
SPEAKER_00: And so that was my first is something wrong with me?
10:23
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was so wild.
10:24
SPEAKER_00: And then she started telling everybody at school.
10:27
SPEAKER_00: And so everybody started saying things to me that we all hear, well, well, your mom didn't want you, all those things.
10:33
SPEAKER_00: And you have no idea how much it impacts you until something like that, an event like that, can break it wide open for you.
10:42
SPEAKER_00: And I remember after that, walking into my hallway where my mom had all of the pictures and looking at a picture of our family.
10:48
SPEAKER_00: And I too am a same-race adopted person.
10:50
SPEAKER_00: So when you look at people would say I look like my mom all the time, right?
10:54
SPEAKER_00: And I I definitely don't when you now see who my birth mother is.
10:57
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, same.
10:58
SPEAKER_00: And I would stare at that picture, I I feel like for hours trying to make myself look like these people.
11:07
SPEAKER_00: And it's just interesting how this stuff begins to be uncovered.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: And what I love about what we have been able to experience at these making of me live events, in-person events are really something.
11:20
SPEAKER_00: And I think you've MC'd all five, or have you?
11:24
SPEAKER_00: All five.
11:24
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
11:25
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
11:25
SPEAKER_00: That's what I thought.
11:26
SPEAKER_00: I've only been able to be at three.
11:27
SPEAKER_01: So it's been fantastic.
11:29
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
11:29
SPEAKER_01: And shout out to Sarah Reinhardt and Louise Brown.
11:33
SPEAKER_01: They have done some amazing work to create community.
11:35
SPEAKER_01: And I was so grateful to them when they reached out to ask if I would MC.
11:40
SPEAKER_01: It was totally unexpected.
11:41
SPEAKER_01: It's not like we were brainstorming this thing together and they said, why don't you MC it?
11:46
SPEAKER_01: They literally created the thing and said, we need an MC.
11:50
SPEAKER_01: And they reached out to me, and I was just so humbled and honored to do it.
11:54
SPEAKER_01: And it has become one of my great joys.
11:56
SPEAKER_01: I look forward to doing it.
11:57
SPEAKER_01: We do it about twice a year.
11:59
SPEAKER_01: For anybody listening, we're going to be in Los Angeles next.
12:01
SPEAKER_01: We're still working out the details, but get yourself ready for the spring.
12:06
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and and I'll say a couple quick things.
12:09
SPEAKER_01: One, it's one thing to sit and talk with an adopted person face to face as we are now, personally, one-on-one.
12:17
SPEAKER_01: It's different to be in community with a whole bunch of people live.
12:21
SPEAKER_01: And that part is, I find, incredibly valuable and extremely healing because, as you know from having multiple discussions like this, there are so many different perspectives that come from the adoptee experience that being with people who have had a different experience than your own is incredibly eye-opening.
12:46
SPEAKER_01: You can listen to it on a podcast, and then you get out of the car or you stop doing laundry and you go about your life, and you might mull it over a bit, but not really think too heavily about it.
12:57
SPEAKER_01: It's very different when you've sat next to someone and you've heard a story on stage and you turn to someone else and say, That happened to me too.
13:05
SPEAKER_01: Right.
13:05
SPEAKER_01: And now you're out at lunch or out at out for drinks and and you're having a conversation about the poignant moments that that resonated for you or eye-opening things that were shocking or surprising.
13:18
SPEAKER_01: It's very different to be in community.
13:21
SPEAKER_01: And also because adoption can be a lonely place.
13:24
SPEAKER_01: Many times, you may remember when we were in Milwaukee, I said, show of hands, how many people were here or here for the first time in a in a community of live event?
13:33
SPEAKER_01: It was like 50% of the room had never been to one of these before.
13:39
SPEAKER_01: And what that can mean for many of them is that they've not really spoken about their adoption very much.
13:46
SPEAKER_01: And many of them will tell you if you ask them, I didn't really know anybody who was adopted.
13:50
SPEAKER_01: I'm sure I passed them on the street and in my friend group, there was probably one or two that I didn't know about, but it just we didn't talk about it.
13:58
SPEAKER_01: And so to close, I I tell everybody, everywhere I go, a piece of my adoption story just to throw it out there to see what their reaction is.
14:09
SPEAKER_01: If they go, oh my gosh, when I tell them my reunion story, that's amazing, great.
14:13
SPEAKER_01: If they say, Oh, you're adopted, so is my brother.
14:16
SPEAKER_01: I'm adopted, my dad is adopted, whatever their thing is, but I throw it out there everywhere I go.
14:22
SPEAKER_01: I squeeze it into every conversation somehow, just because I know it is not a common thread and that I want to offer, offer people an opportunity to engage with an adoption discussion.
14:36
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, to feel seen when they've never probably even realized they need it in so many ways.
14:43
SPEAKER_00: I I know for me, the only adopted people I knew growing up was my brother.
14:48
SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, but I've right.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: I've had many interactions.
14:51
SPEAKER_00: Even my my guest last week, she was raised in the 80s.
14:56
SPEAKER_00: She was adopted through Catholic charities, and they had support groups.
15:01
SPEAKER_00: So she was raised with this massive group of adopted people.
15:04
SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, huh, that would have been amazing back in the 70s when I was adopted.
15:09
SPEAKER_00: But we didn't know about any of that.
15:11
SPEAKER_01: But also think about your childhood experience where you told a best friend that you were adopted and she said, I can't be friends with you.
15:18
SPEAKER_01: She then went and told everybody else you're adopted.
15:21
SPEAKER_01: If one other adopted person in that group of people she told heard her say that and heard the stigma and bias in her voice about it, she you would never know that that child was adopted because the same thing she, that person is in the position Andre was in, and you were the kid being bullied.
15:40
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
15:40
SPEAKER_00: Hence the reason this is so unbelievably important, what we do, truly, because of how society talks about it and there the stigma is still there, and that's what we're trying to dispel.
15:52
SPEAKER_00: So your same race, domestic adoptee situation here, okay?
15:58
SPEAKER_00: You called it homogenous.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: This means obviously that it doesn't show, like you described.
16:05
SPEAKER_00: Nobody can really tell.
16:06
SPEAKER_00: So, what assumptions have you noticed that people make about that?
16:11
SPEAKER_00: And what do those assumptions actually hide?
16:15
SPEAKER_01: That's a good question.
16:16
SPEAKER_01: I think assumptions that are made fall under, basically, to put it loosely, well, you were probably fine.
16:24
SPEAKER_03: Right.
16:25
SPEAKER_03: Right.
16:26
SPEAKER_01: You know, you didn't have the lack of mirroring, so to speak, that say, an international adopted person might have coming to the United States.
16:37
SPEAKER_01: And even if that person is of similar skin color to their parents, you still might not share facial features, right?
16:47
SPEAKER_01: There, you can think of cultures around the world that you can look at a person and say, they look like they're from the blah, blah, blah region.
16:55
SPEAKER_01: You can tell that they are of African, South American, some form of European, Asian descent, what have you.
17:01
SPEAKER_01: Uh, I did not have that.
17:03
SPEAKER_01: But that doesn't mean that when I looked at my parents, I saw myself.
17:09
SPEAKER_01: When I look at my son Seth, if he's standing next to me, he looks just like me.
17:14
SPEAKER_01: If he's standing next to his mother, he looks exactly like his mother.
17:18
SPEAKER_01: And when he's standing between us, you're like, that's their son for sure.
17:22
SPEAKER_01: If you had a scrutinizing eye and you looked at myself and my adoptive mom and dad, you would say, yeah, I can see some resemblance in there, but you wouldn't necessarily be able to pinpoint the real mirroring.
17:36
SPEAKER_01: And so that mirroring is still lacking.
17:39
SPEAKER_01: And were we from different ethnicities, there would be further lack of mirroring, right?
17:44
SPEAKER_01: You can imagine that, and I'm I'm not, I don't have this experience, but I've spoken to enough adoptees to know that for an Asian child who comes to the United States and is, say, adopted into a white family, they very rarely get a whole lot of Asian experiences that aren't truly cultivated for them as the adopted person.
18:07
SPEAKER_01: And so when they get into more native Asian experiences, I will call them.
18:13
SPEAKER_01: So let's just say they're at an event at an Asian family's home and everybody there is Asian, that adopted person doesn't necessarily feel quote unquote that Asian because they have been living in a white lifestyle.
18:28
SPEAKER_01: You know what I'm saying?
18:29
SPEAKER_01: They are they're white adjacent and don't have a lot of the cultural norms represented in their experience.
18:35
SPEAKER_01: And I don't want to speak for anybody, but I've just I've heard enough stories to know that that's mostly true.
18:41
SPEAKER_01: So all that to say, just because you're in a homogeneous adopted family doesn't mean that mirroring doesn't affect you, right?
18:52
SPEAKER_01: I could have been black and they're black, and I'm super tall and they're hella short.
18:57
SPEAKER_01: I still wouldn't be mirrored, right?
18:59
SPEAKER_01: People would say, where did you get that height from?
19:02
SPEAKER_01: Or if I was heavier and they were rail thin, it would be obvious.
19:06
SPEAKER_01: And so that that's part of what's missing in there is the assumption that just because a child is placed in a home that has some level of outwardly facing mirroring doesn't mean that they see themselves in the family.
19:23
SPEAKER_01: And I've I've spoken a lot about visual, but personality can be true too.
19:27
SPEAKER_01: And I'll I'll close here.
19:30
SPEAKER_01: One of the things that's very different is how people think and act, right?
19:34
SPEAKER_01: If I'm very mathematically inclined and my adoptive parents are theater majors, you can imagine we're on very different planes, right?
19:43
SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
19:44
SPEAKER_01: If I'm extremely athletic, you throw a ball and I'm never gonna drop it.
19:49
SPEAKER_01: And those people, you throw them a book and they're never gonna drop it, right?
19:53
SPEAKER_01: And we're just very different in that way.
19:56
SPEAKER_01: You those are ways that that people also don't see mirroring.
20:00
SPEAKER_01: So it's not just about outward appearances, it's also misalignment of tastes and proclivities.
20:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
20:11
SPEAKER_00: I remember when I first saw my biological sister, I literally felt like she has my face.
20:19
SPEAKER_00: And I had never the only time I'd ever felt that was with my child, like you, when I birthed my first child, and it scared me.
20:27
SPEAKER_00: And so much so that I, oh yeah, because I was like, I don't know.
20:30
SPEAKER_03: What does that mean?
20:32
SPEAKER_00: Well, it just means I don't know how to parent this.
20:34
SPEAKER_00: I don't know how to nurture a person that is connected to me like this because I've never experienced it myself.
20:40
SPEAKER_00: And there was this fear that I lived in for the first week after he was born, which is very different from a lot of adopted people that I hear.
20:47
SPEAKER_00: They wanted to keep them close, right?
20:50
SPEAKER_00: I was so afraid that I would harm him.
20:52
SPEAKER_00: I don't even know where that came from, but it was deep within me that if I love him the way that I feel inclined to love him as my child, this is gonna sound crazy, Damon.
21:04
SPEAKER_00: He's gonna leave me too.
21:06
SPEAKER_00: That's what was deep inside of me.
21:08
SPEAKER_00: I was so very afraid of being left.
21:11
SPEAKER_00: And obviously, he's 26 now, he's amazing, love the kid.
21:15
SPEAKER_00: He literally has my face.
21:16
SPEAKER_00: But the first time I'd ever seen another human person having my face, that mirroring feeling, I don't know if you felt it, but I think I've heard you say this.
21:25
SPEAKER_00: It literally felt like somebody electrocuted me.
21:28
SPEAKER_00: It was this feeling of whoa, that exists.
21:32
SPEAKER_00: And I'm even getting the chills now talking about it.
21:34
SPEAKER_00: It was really amazing.
21:36
SPEAKER_00: And so people can use that assumption that you just talked about as a way to silence us without them even realizing it.
21:44
SPEAKER_00: It's not the intentional, I think.
21:46
SPEAKER_00: It's just how society sees it.
21:48
SPEAKER_00: And I don't know how many times I heard, but you were raised by a great family.
21:51
SPEAKER_00: All of those things, right?
21:54
SPEAKER_00: Until we know which a lot of it is kept um muted within us.
21:59
SPEAKER_00: Is that the Right word, hidden until something brings us into consciousness, right?
22:05
SPEAKER_00: Or as they say, out of the fog.
22:07
SPEAKER_00: And so I think for me, it's really allowing ourselves to feel the experience of what it's like to look like someone.
22:17
SPEAKER_00: Allow ourselves to do that because we it's so new.
22:21
SPEAKER_00: And so that's why Seth chalked you out of your own little stupor.
22:25
SPEAKER_00: It's because it's just that it's so impactful.
22:28
SPEAKER_00: It's hard to even put words to.
22:30
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
22:30
SPEAKER_01: And I'm going to say two things.
22:32
SPEAKER_01: One, I as you said out of the fog, I realize there's a lot of people that don't necessarily like that term.
22:39
SPEAKER_01: And I was trying to think what would another term be?
22:42
SPEAKER_01: And what came to mind for me was pierce the veil.
22:47
SPEAKER_01: Because in reality, adoption is oftentimes portrayed as a veil of who this child is.
22:57
SPEAKER_01: Their original birth certificate is on the other side of the veil.
23:01
SPEAKER_01: The people that they look and act like are on the other side of the veil.
23:06
SPEAKER_01: So just it I wanted to just take a quick tangent to say that as we search for the correct language around adoption and the experiences therein, that piercing the veil, coming out of the fog, these can all be terms related to this process of truly understanding what adoption is.
23:27
SPEAKER_01: I want to say another thing, which is as much as Seth looking like me was impactful, as an infant, it wasn't looked like a little bulk like a bundle of baby parts.
23:39
SPEAKER_01: He kind of looked like me, but it looked like every other baby.
23:42
SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
23:44
SPEAKER_01: But what was the most impactful thing for me with Seth was that as I hovered over him one day, he's laying on the ottoman in front of me.
23:53
SPEAKER_01: I'm in a you know, big chair in the living room.
23:56
SPEAKER_01: And he's just laying there looking up at me, kicking his feet and waving his hands around.
24:00
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, this little dude, who is this guy gonna be?
24:02
SPEAKER_01: This is crazy.
24:04
SPEAKER_01: And I'm projecting out 18 years into this guy's life.
24:07
SPEAKER_01: What's he gonna be when he grows up?
24:09
SPEAKER_01: But the the thing that was most impactful to me in those moments was realizing the impact of having created a branch on our family tree.
24:24
SPEAKER_01: And just quick sidebar, we had done IVF for quite a while before that.
24:29
SPEAKER_01: And he was conceived naturally.
24:31
SPEAKER_01: So that made him extra special to us.
24:34
SPEAKER_01: But the fact that I had created a branch on my family tree, I had never known another biological relative before.
24:42
SPEAKER_01: But then I realized I'm a branch on somebody's family tree.
24:46
SPEAKER_01: I could have been laying on the but on the ottoman, kicking them, screaming, and looking up at somebody, and I have no idea who those people are.
24:53
SPEAKER_01: My family tree is out there, and I have no idea where the roots of that family tree are planted on this earth.
25:02
SPEAKER_01: And it was that was the actual click for me was the image of a family tree, a branch or leaves on that family tree, and not knowing where my branch, as Damon Davis, formerly Michael Sullivan, actually are attached to some trunk somewhere.
25:19
SPEAKER_01: It was just, it was a really I tend to think a lot in imagery like that.
25:23
SPEAKER_01: And that was really that was impactful for me.
25:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's surreal.
25:27
SPEAKER_00: I remember I still don't have my my OBC, my original birth certificate, because I was adopted in California.
25:33
SPEAKER_00: But what I do know is that I was named Diane Bradbury, which is just odd.
25:38
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, weird, right?
25:39
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
25:39
SPEAKER_00: Right.
25:40
SPEAKER_00: So that's good to meet you, Diane.
25:42
SPEAKER_00: Right exactly.
25:43
SPEAKER_00: And honestly, I've done some work with her, whoever you may be.
25:46
SPEAKER_00: I've done some work with that little version of me, and I named her Diane because I was just like, that's who she was.
25:51
SPEAKER_00: She in those first seven weeks, that's who she was.
25:54
SPEAKER_00: So that's me.
25:55
SPEAKER_00: It's just I mean, surreal.
25:57
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's the whole oddity of adoption.
26:00
SPEAKER_00: So anyway, thank you for sharing that.
26:03
SPEAKER_00: And I know I want to touch on this, share whatever you feel comfortable to share, but you became a father, not just through the biological connection with Seth, but through kinship adoption.
26:15
SPEAKER_00: And I'm curious if you are willing to share what led you there and what did it ask of you?
26:21
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, great question.
26:24
SPEAKER_01: I'm open to the whole thing.
26:26
SPEAKER_01: And elements of this are not my story to tell, but the short version is in my in-law family, on my wife's side of the family, unfortunately, my kids lost both of their parents.
26:40
SPEAKER_01: Their mother left their life.
26:42
SPEAKER_01: They they so my wife is of Caribbean descent, and she was born in the Caribbean, moved to Canada, ended up in the United States with her mom, and from LA, where she was, moved to DC.
26:53
SPEAKER_01: So these her paternal side of her family lived in the Caribbean.
26:59
SPEAKER_01: These children are from that paternal side.
27:02
SPEAKER_01: And their mother left them in the Caribbean.
27:06
SPEAKER_01: And unfortunately, my brother-in-law took his own life.
27:11
SPEAKER_01: And so these children are now raised, they were automatically kinship adopted, right?
27:18
unknown: Yeah.
27:19
SPEAKER_01: They were in the family, and they were raised by dedicated aunts and their grandfather, et cetera.
27:28
SPEAKER_01: And they the reason that they ended up coming into our home was because my daughter was reaching an age where the Caribbean is a very male-dominated society.
27:40
SPEAKER_01: And without really true dedicated parentage, guidance, protection, for lack of better words, you could lose a girl down there, right?
27:52
SPEAKER_01: To all kinds of different nefarious influences.
27:56
SPEAKER_01: So we brought my daughter here to try to give her a different life that would hopefully put her on a more positive trajectory.
28:06
SPEAKER_01: And I I do believe that that likely did happen in our home.
28:11
SPEAKER_01: So our home was formed through adoption first.
28:15
SPEAKER_01: My natural-born son came third.
28:18
SPEAKER_01: So two years after we adopted my daughter, we agreed that it would be best to keep siblings together.
28:27
SPEAKER_01: And so my daughter was eleven and her brother was nine, the age that my daughter had come to our house.
28:34
SPEAKER_01: And so we brought her brother to live with us as well.
28:38
SPEAKER_01: Because at the end of the day, they've only got each other.
28:42
SPEAKER_01: Right?
28:44
SPEAKER_01: And far be it for us to have the means to keep them together and not do so.
28:51
SPEAKER_01: And so, and especially as an adopted person, I told my wife, I was like, you know, I get this, right?
28:57
SPEAKER_01: I know how important it is to keep family together.
29:03
SPEAKER_01: And she didn't think that I just wanted to say out loud, I'm good.
29:08
SPEAKER_01: We should adopt both of them.
29:11
SPEAKER_01: Uh, there's no reason to separate them.
29:14
SPEAKER_01: And so we did so.
29:15
SPEAKER_01: What did it ask of us?
29:17
SPEAKER_01: Quite literally everything.
29:19
SPEAKER_01: Right?
29:19
SPEAKER_01: We were young.
29:20
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I would be lying if I said it wasn't.
29:23
SPEAKER_01: It is no small feat to take a child who is nine years old into your home and then two years older, have an 11-year-old and a nine-year-old within just a few years of your own marriage, right?
29:37
SPEAKER_01: I've often joked.
29:38
SPEAKER_01: My wife and I didn't have the chance to travel the world or walk around the house naked.
29:42
SPEAKER_01: We were just, we were married in May, and my daughter was in the house by December.
29:46
SPEAKER_01: You know what I'm saying?
29:47
SPEAKER_01: And so we there's a movie, I think it was Instant Family or something like that.
29:53
SPEAKER_01: It's not the same thing, but the title brings it home.
29:56
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
29:58
SPEAKER_01: And when you think about the fact that an 11-year-old child has had quite a few experiences in their life already before they come to your home, they've got a certain way that they expect to do things and expect not to have to do things.
30:17
SPEAKER_03: Right.
30:18
SPEAKER_01: And bringing a child into your home requires some boundaries and rule setting.
30:25
SPEAKER_01: And that makes it sound like you've got the structure figured out when they arrive, and you don't, right?
30:31
SPEAKER_01: The same way you didn't know how you were going to parent your son who is of your body and looks just like you.
30:39
SPEAKER_01: These are two children that are not of my body, and I've never parented before.
30:44
SPEAKER_01: And they're they're 11 and nine years old.
30:47
SPEAKER_01: So there was a lot of counseling and with them as a sort of family unit, them individually, us as a couple, just trying to talk out what the things we were going through were, and to try to empathize with them.
31:06
SPEAKER_01: Empathy is my favorite word, right?
31:08
SPEAKER_01: You put yourself in someone else's shoes and try to understand what they're going through because of their background, history, and perspective, right?
31:15
SPEAKER_01: And that was important for us to do.
31:20
SPEAKER_01: And it it required quite a bit because there were no shortages of challenges from learning disabilities to behavioral issues, many of which were not of their own doing.
31:34
SPEAKER_01: When you bounced around from home to home, my son basically didn't feel like any home was a home for him.
31:40
SPEAKER_01: It was a stopping place.
31:43
SPEAKER_01: And so we had to try our best to reinforce for him that this was home, that we love him, that you're good.
31:52
SPEAKER_01: This is the stable place now.
31:54
SPEAKER_01: Uh, but it was it was still challenging.
31:56
SPEAKER_01: And we definitely, like any parent does, made mistakes.
32:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we all do.
32:01
SPEAKER_00: And I think the beauty is you have a perspective that a lot of adopted people don't, living as an adopted person, as a kinship adoptive parent, and a biological parent.
32:12
SPEAKER_00: That's a lot to have to navigate.
32:15
SPEAKER_00: So I guess my question to do to you is what do you notice that you don't think you would have noticed if you had not had all three of those roles?
32:26
SPEAKER_01: That's a good question because it's the things I notice are innumerable.
32:30
SPEAKER_01: I've had so many experiences now, it's hard to pinpoint what I've learned from where on the podcast.
32:38
SPEAKER_01: You know what I'm saying?
32:39
SPEAKER_01: I've I've hosted the oral histories of adoptees with adoption the making of me five times.
32:46
SPEAKER_01: So I've heard multiple stories there.
32:48
SPEAKER_01: 279 episodes on who am I?
32:51
SPEAKER_03: Right.
32:51
SPEAKER_01: Really, plus I'm adopted.
32:53
SPEAKER_01: My kids are adopted, my son is by a lot.
32:55
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I've got experiences from, and I'm in reunion.
32:59
SPEAKER_01: I've done I've had an incredible reunion with my birth mother, whom I was lucky to find working right around the corner from me.
33:06
SPEAKER_01: And I had a surprise reunion with my birth father through DNA.
33:10
SPEAKER_01: I have so many experiences, it's impossible to parse out where I learned what from.
33:17
SPEAKER_01: But some things that I have absolutely taken away that are core to the adopt the experience are that adoption is a traumatic experience.
33:30
SPEAKER_01: As much as it comes from love, and I I I sometimes chafe a little bit when people say adoption is trauma.
33:40
SPEAKER_01: I understand exactly where we're all coming from, and it's not that I don't agree.
33:45
SPEAKER_01: It's that it feels when it comes from certain people's mouths like they're saying that they're that they're angry at the entirety of the whole thing.
33:58
SPEAKER_01: And for me personally, and this is only my opinion, I am not angry at the whole thing, candidly.
34:08
SPEAKER_01: I respect that an adoption is a traumatic event.
34:14
SPEAKER_01: I get that, but they are not all traumatic in their entirety.
34:20
SPEAKER_01: I had a wonderful upbringing growing up in Columbia, Maryland.
34:23
SPEAKER_01: I wouldn't have the friends nor experiences that I've had up until this point were it not for adoption.
34:29
SPEAKER_03: Correct.
34:30
SPEAKER_01: Am I curious?
34:31
SPEAKER_01: And I'm gonna say this two things can be true at the very same time.
34:36
SPEAKER_01: I've had an amazing life, and I very much wonder what it would have been like to have been raised by my birth mother, whom was a single mother in an unexpected pregnancy with no money, no job.
34:52
SPEAKER_01: She was graduating graduate school, but with a baby on the way, no prospects for what her life would be.
35:00
SPEAKER_01: And I'm sure she would have sacrificed a great deal to make our family work.
35:07
SPEAKER_01: But all that to say, it would have been a very different experience from where I am now.
35:12
SPEAKER_01: And so I recognize that the separation of the two of us, I was an infant adoption.
35:21
SPEAKER_01: I was taken from her body via cesarean section.
35:24
SPEAKER_01: I was never placed on her chest for us to bond for even a second.
35:27
SPEAKER_01: She didn't even know what I looked like.
35:29
SPEAKER_01: I went to the warmer and then straight to adoption.
35:32
SPEAKER_01: For three months, I was with people I have no idea where I was.
35:36
SPEAKER_01: And then I was adopted.
35:38
SPEAKER_01: So that part for me, trauma.
35:42
SPEAKER_01: No doubt.
35:43
SPEAKER_01: I was inside this woman's body for nine months.
35:47
SPEAKER_01: I heard her voice.
35:48
SPEAKER_01: I ate her food, I experienced her environment, all of those things.
35:53
SPEAKER_01: And then all of a sudden it was gone.
35:55
SPEAKER_01: And I went over into adoption and I'm in some foster home with a lady I've never met before or parents I've never met, never experienced.
36:02
SPEAKER_01: I've never, if there was a father in the home, I never heard this dude's voice.
36:06
SPEAKER_01: I didn't hear this other mother's voice.
36:09
SPEAKER_01: And then I went on to yet a third mother, my mom, and another dad, my dad.
36:15
SPEAKER_01: So I get it.
36:17
SPEAKER_01: It is traumatic.
36:20
SPEAKER_01: However, there will always be the other, another lesson that I've learned from all of this is there will always be adoption.
36:27
SPEAKER_01: There are folks who wish they could abolish the entire thing.
36:35
SPEAKER_01: My sense is that what they wish to abolish is the marketplace institution that commoditizes children and is searching and scraping to find them, to shuttle them off to families who very much want to have a baby.
36:53
SPEAKER_01: The marketplace makes it a bad experience for a lot of people because the matchmaking is mismatched for the needs of the child.
37:03
SPEAKER_01: It's highly geared towards the needs of the parents.
37:05
SPEAKER_01: Right.
37:06
SPEAKER_01: Many of the parents whom have not done the work they need to do to get over their own issues.
37:14
SPEAKER_01: And we've all got them, so I'm not blaming them.
37:17
SPEAKER_01: Everybody's got some work to do.
37:18
SPEAKER_03: Right.
37:19
SPEAKER_01: But many adoptive parents have lost a child, have dealt with the challenge of an inability to conceive, or have other issues, even from their own upbringing, right, that they haven't done the work on before bringing a child into their home.
37:35
SPEAKER_01: And then they parent the way they were parented.
37:38
SPEAKER_01: And that's not necessarily the best way to bring up a child.
37:43
SPEAKER_01: So adoptive parents have work to do, and and I really think that adoption needs to keep the adoptive person at the center.
37:53
SPEAKER_01: So I've said a lot there, but I like I said, I can't parse out where I got those lessons from.
37:58
SPEAKER_01: They're they're from all over the place.
38:00
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
38:00
SPEAKER_00: And I love that.
38:01
SPEAKER_00: They they should be.
38:03
SPEAKER_00: That's that's your lived experience.
38:05
SPEAKER_00: I think what's interesting about you talking about the trauma, I really put it into three different camps.
38:10
SPEAKER_00: It's the reason why I believe that adopted people have complex trauma because there's layers of it.
38:16
SPEAKER_00: I feel like there's the primal trauma of what you described of being in the mom's womb, knowing only her tastes, her sounds, her smells.
38:24
SPEAKER_00: And then there's the severance or the relinquishment trauma right after that, where for me it was similar.
38:29
SPEAKER_00: I was taken directly from her, never saw her, put into the nursery or whatever.
38:34
SPEAKER_00: And then there's that when you are adopted piece that feels so that would be considered what I say, the adoption trauma.
38:42
SPEAKER_00: That when you go into this house where you're like, who are you?
38:46
SPEAKER_00: I don't know who where am I?
38:48
SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
38:49
SPEAKER_00: And it's crazy because for me, it was seven weeks, and my birth mom actually attempted to abort me twice between weeks 12 and 16, and that's in my paperwork.
38:58
SPEAKER_00: And so I really believe, yeah, yeah, between weeks 12 and 16, it this isn't something that you would normally hear in the state of California, but because I was getting my master's in counseling, my social worker sent me six pages and told me you need to read this and journal about this because your story's gnarly.
39:15
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, what the heck do you mean?
39:17
SPEAKER_00: And then when I read that, fragmented my brain and I never it took me 10 years to really work through that.
39:23
SPEAKER_03: Wow.
39:24
SPEAKER_00: So all that to say we are so impacted by that environment.
39:28
SPEAKER_00: And and back at the time when we were adopted, I I believe around the same time, yeah, they were literally told that we were blank slates.
39:37
SPEAKER_00: My mom said that's what we were told.
39:40
SPEAKER_00: We didn't know any different.
39:42
SPEAKER_00: And of course, I don't blame them.
39:43
SPEAKER_00: Why would I blame them?
39:45
SPEAKER_00: It's what society did.
39:46
SPEAKER_00: And I as well had a very good adoption.
39:49
SPEAKER_00: So if I tell you, it's so layered.
39:53
SPEAKER_00: But I agree with you.
39:54
SPEAKER_00: I think it's very, very important for us to recognize the layers of the trauma and not just say, because there are some adopted people that don't feel any of this.
40:03
SPEAKER_00: They they truly don't.
40:04
SPEAKER_00: And so we need to honor that lived experience too.
40:08
SPEAKER_00: I think so.
40:10
SPEAKER_01: I agree 100%.
40:11
SPEAKER_01: And I think I've come to realize another lesson that I've learned is that everybody's experience falls onto a spectrum, right?
40:20
SPEAKER_01: If if you know math, you know that everything is a bell curve.
40:24
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
40:24
SPEAKER_01: Right.
40:25
SPEAKER_01: There are people over here on one end that were adopted.
40:31
SPEAKER_01: They never think about it twice.
40:32
SPEAKER_01: They have zero interest in looking for any biological family.
40:35
SPEAKER_01: This is my life.
40:36
SPEAKER_01: This is my home.
40:37
SPEAKER_01: I don't want to know any medical history.
40:39
SPEAKER_01: I'm not interested at all.
40:41
SPEAKER_01: There's a vast majority of people in the middle, I believe, that have some level of curiosity.
40:47
SPEAKER_01: They've looked up at the moon and wondered if their mom is looking up there too, right?
40:51
SPEAKER_01: They've looked around the crowd and they've kind of wondered, I wonder if any of my biological relatives are in this crowd with me.
40:57
SPEAKER_01: And they have had the experiences that you and I have talked about about having children or other major life events, getting married in and of itself, and even contemplating children can be a catalyst.
41:09
SPEAKER_01: Adolescent discussions and other things.
41:11
SPEAKER_01: So there's people I believe in the middle who have some level of consciousness about an adoption experience and are interested in some reunion at on some level.
41:22
SPEAKER_01: They have some kind of curiosity.
41:24
SPEAKER_01: And then there's folks, I believe, on the sort of very extreme end who are like, this is not me.
41:31
SPEAKER_01: I want my original identity.
41:33
SPEAKER_01: I'm going back to where I came from.
41:35
SPEAKER_01: You people are not my real family.
41:38
SPEAKER_01: I'm changing my name, et cetera, et cetera.
41:41
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and and there's every experience in between.
41:45
SPEAKER_01: I've I've often made the analogy to the soundboard in a in a music studio.
41:51
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
41:52
SPEAKER_01: Right?
41:52
SPEAKER_01: There's like 175 different sliders, and you can push one slider and make one noise and pull it back, and you won't get that noise at all.
42:00
SPEAKER_01: And you push this one over here, and the same thing.
42:03
SPEAKER_01: And the reason I like that analogy is because there are so many different pieces to the adopte-e experience that it's like you could label each one of those sliders on the soundboard with transracial adoptee, homogenous adopte-e, adopted into a poor family, adopted into a rich family, domestically adopted, internationally adopted, wonderful relationship with birth adoptive mom, terrible relation, adoptive father with my siblings, desire to search, reunion with birth mother, reunion with birth father, reunion with siblings, how did my family take it when I told them I was searching?
42:37
SPEAKER_01: All of those and many more that I didn't even name are sliders on this adoption storytelling combo.
42:46
SPEAKER_01: And and you slide anyone, and you've got a completely different story for an adopted person.
42:50
SPEAKER_00: It's it is wild.
42:52
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's crucial to understand to increase people's curiosity.
42:57
SPEAKER_00: And no judgment needed anymore.
43:00
SPEAKER_00: We need to move beyond that and start because because judgment is what creates the shame that we experience.
43:06
SPEAKER_00: If we can just be curious about people's lived experience.
43:09
SPEAKER_00: And once my mom was able to do that, my adoptive mom, she has she has flipped her whole.
43:14
SPEAKER_00: I was able to interview on the podcast.
43:16
SPEAKER_00: She was able to say, I get it now.
43:18
SPEAKER_00: Wow.
43:18
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's such a blessing for me.
43:22
SPEAKER_00: And I know not a lot of people have that experience, so I'm grateful I have that recording forever because I think it's really special.
43:30
SPEAKER_01: You and during November Adoption Awareness Month, or whatever we call it these days.
43:37
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
43:37
SPEAKER_01: You know, I will frequently do a male adoptee perspectives panel.
43:44
SPEAKER_01: And birth mothers will do a panel, and various people from across the adoption constellation will do panels and presentations and things.
43:53
SPEAKER_01: But it would be so interesting, and I don't know the correct terms for this, but to have an adoptive parent who Get it perspective panel, right?
44:02
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
44:03
SPEAKER_01: Your mom and several others who will can openly admit I started off over here.
44:08
SPEAKER_01: I was told they were blank slate.
44:11
SPEAKER_01: And now I realize through my experience watching Julie go through her desire to search, her active, her active search, her pursuit of reunion.
44:22
SPEAKER_01: Now I understand both myself and Julie better and the adopt the experience.
44:27
SPEAKER_01: It would be really cool to see somebody put together a again, I don't know what the right there's no term for it as far as I could tell, but adoptive parents who get it.
44:36
SPEAKER_01: Adoptive parent allies, I don't know.
44:38
SPEAKER_01: But that would be really interesting to hear those perspectives.
44:43
SPEAKER_00: I think so too.
44:44
SPEAKER_00: I think what's interesting about what you just said is the light bulb still goes off for her sometimes, specifically when my boys talk about it.
45:01
SPEAKER_00: And when I found out I was, yeah, when I found out I was Italian, I'm 52% Italian.
45:06
SPEAKER_00: I found that out in 2021.
45:08
SPEAKER_00: I remember saying to them, this is huge.
45:11
SPEAKER_00: And when we first visited Italy, my mom was having a hard time understanding why we were emotional.
45:15
SPEAKER_00: She didn't get it.
45:16
SPEAKER_00: And all of us cried when we were there.
45:19
SPEAKER_00: There was this feeling of connection with something we had never understood.
45:23
SPEAKER_00: And all of us, and it was this cool thing to share.
45:27
SPEAKER_00: And what I remember is I think it was this past Christmas, she was remembering a time when she was in Norway, which is her parent.
45:36
SPEAKER_00: That's her culture.
45:37
SPEAKER_00: And when she was standing in the center of her, I think it was her great-grandmother's house, sobbing because of the same thing.
45:45
SPEAKER_00: And she, I get the chills talking about this, but she immediately came downstairs and she goes, Julie, I get it.
45:52
SPEAKER_00: Because I was living in her condo with her at the time for a little bit.
45:55
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, thank God.
45:57
SPEAKER_00: Because it's because she used to always tease me about it.
45:59
SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, you're Italian now.
46:01
SPEAKER_00: And I'd be like, well, I am.
46:02
SPEAKER_00: So let's just allow that too.
46:04
SPEAKER_01: Now, and by the way, always have been, just FYI.
46:08
SPEAKER_01: Good point.
46:09
SPEAKER_01: Just so we know where we are on the calendar, it's kind of started from day one, just so you know.
46:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but it it's just those things connect us in ways that I think she we've become closer because she's been willing.
46:23
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's the thing with adoptive parents.
46:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
46:26
SPEAKER_00: So I'm grateful.
46:27
SPEAKER_01: That's wonderful.
46:28
unknown: Huh.
46:28
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
46:29
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
46:30
SPEAKER_01: I hope somebody heard and will and will say, hey, I think my mom or dad would would go on this thing with you.
46:37
SPEAKER_01: I would love for your comments to get filled up with folks saying, Yeah, yeah, yeah, my mom would do it.
46:41
SPEAKER_01: My dad would do it.
46:41
SPEAKER_01: I think we should do it.
46:42
SPEAKER_01: I think that'd be really amazing.
46:44
SPEAKER_00: I do too.
46:45
SPEAKER_00: Well, maybe this is something you and I need to think about.
46:47
SPEAKER_01: I think that'd be great.
46:48
SPEAKER_01: Let's do it.
46:49
SPEAKER_00: I would love doing that.
46:50
SPEAKER_00: Let's do it.
46:51
SPEAKER_00: My mom would so do it.
46:52
SPEAKER_00: Uh and I know people that would.
46:53
SPEAKER_00: Uh I know of quite a few, actually.
46:56
SPEAKER_00: This would be fun.
46:57
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
46:57
SPEAKER_00: I I don't want to get off on a tangent.
46:59
SPEAKER_00: I want to move forwards what we were going to talk about, but this is awesome.
47:02
SPEAKER_00: So after all of the interviews that you've done, you've talked about them.
47:06
SPEAKER_00: 200 and something.
47:08
SPEAKER_00: I know you already said the number.
47:09
SPEAKER_00: I don't remember it, but 279.
47:12
SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh, it's amazing.
47:13
SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh.
47:14
SPEAKER_00: I love it.
47:15
SPEAKER_01: Cool.
47:16
SPEAKER_00: So there has to have been a through line for you that you didn't expect when you started the podcast.
47:22
SPEAKER_00: I'm curious what that is, if you could identify it.
47:24
SPEAKER_01: You you say it like there's one and one definitive.
47:28
SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
47:29
SPEAKER_01: Here's the big one.
47:30
SPEAKER_01: I mean, they're all adopted?
47:31
SPEAKER_01: Does that count?
47:33
SPEAKER_01: You know, one through line I would have to name is the fact that there comes a time in an adoptee's life where they have an eye-opening moment, this piercing the veil, coming out of the fog, where they say, Oh, I get it.
47:52
SPEAKER_01: And it may be hoisted upon them by someone else.
47:57
SPEAKER_01: It may be accidental, it may be their own discovery or realization.
48:04
SPEAKER_01: But at the end of the day, I do believe that most adopted people do think about their original family, whether they're willing to admit it or not.
48:18
SPEAKER_01: And again, it just it comes from a variety of angles, some of which could be expected, and others are completely unnamed and you couldn't see coming around the corner.
48:31
SPEAKER_01: Other through lines are the importance of being acknowledged.
48:40
SPEAKER_01: Not necessarily reunited, but just when I've reached out to you, birth mother or birth father, could you at least just admit, yeah, that was me back in the day.
48:53
SPEAKER_01: I'm not ready to talk about this now, and I don't know if I'll ever be, but I just want you to know your search is over.
48:59
SPEAKER_01: Right?
49:00
SPEAKER_01: That acknowledgement versus ghosting is incredibly important, right?
49:07
SPEAKER_01: Because I want think about how it would feel if you even just had an acquaintance that you met.
49:16
SPEAKER_01: You met somebody at a conference and they were like, oh, let's exchange numbers.
49:19
SPEAKER_01: We should stay in touch.
49:21
SPEAKER_01: And you shoot them a text and they ghost.
49:25
SPEAKER_01: And you say, Well, I'm probably busy, I'll wait.
49:27
SPEAKER_01: And a couple of months go by and you shoot them a text, nothing.
49:31
SPEAKER_01: And you find them on Facebook and you say, Hey, looks like I found you.
49:35
SPEAKER_01: This is really good to be connected.
49:36
SPEAKER_01: Nothing.
49:37
SPEAKER_01: There's they've completely ghosted you.
49:39
SPEAKER_01: And that's just a friend person you were, an acquaintance and at a conference.
49:42
SPEAKER_01: Now imagine if that was the parent that you came onto this earth because of.
49:49
SPEAKER_01: And they won't even say, yes, it's me.
49:53
SPEAKER_01: They just they ignore the certified male.
49:57
SPEAKER_01: They block calls and do all kinds of other things.
50:00
SPEAKER_01: Listen, man, we're all adults.
50:03
SPEAKER_01: This is water under the bridge.
50:06
SPEAKER_01: And it's not my fault that you didn't deal with things that happened in the past.
50:13
SPEAKER_01: I definitely give birth mothers a pass because many were told this event happened, and we are never going to speak about this again.
50:24
SPEAKER_01: And they can't say there's a bias and stigma against these women.
50:29
SPEAKER_01: They were oftentimes coerced, manipulated, drugged at the time of an infant's birth, etc.
50:37
SPEAKER_01: It's a traumatic event for a birth mother.
50:40
SPEAKER_01: However, I do believe that there when you've got someone biologically related to you walking around this earth, it's not fair to not say, Yeah, it's me, but I I I really need you to just kind of leave me alone.
50:56
SPEAKER_01: I think many adoptees would rather have the confirmation that they found the person than to be completely and summarily ignored when they are walking around this earth as a result of having come from these people.
51:10
SPEAKER_01: So my point is one through line is the desire for acknowledgement.
51:16
SPEAKER_01: Reunion would be fantastic, even if only for a moment.
51:20
SPEAKER_01: Some people just like they just literally want to drive by and see a person working in the yard and be like, that wow, that's them.
51:28
SPEAKER_01: Or let's go out and have a beer, and then I don't, we don't even have to be friends.
51:32
SPEAKER_01: I don't need to see you again, but I'll buy you a beer, let's take a picture, and then we're done.
51:37
SPEAKER_01: But other people really do crave a relationship.
51:41
SPEAKER_01: But all that to say, I feel like many adopted people just want acknowledgement.
51:47
SPEAKER_01: And if not, if if acknowledgement isn't enough, can we just meet once?
51:52
SPEAKER_01: I understand if you can't tell everybody in your life, but I'll meet you at a restaurant and let you don't have to tell anybody.
52:01
SPEAKER_01: I think that the that will fill a hole in an adopted person's heart more than a biological parent ever realizes.
52:12
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I absolutely agree.
52:13
SPEAKER_00: And I think what you just described are some of the unseen impacts that we experience, but it's not just us, the birth families experience it.
52:20
SPEAKER_00: I think adoptive families experience unseen impacts, and and those keep showing up.
52:27
SPEAKER_00: And you are an adoptive parent.
52:29
SPEAKER_00: So you I think even when those stories look nothing alike, in all of the interviews that you've done, I'm just curious, is there and this is going to be hard to narrow down, but is there one impact that is unseen that you see showing up across those stories?
52:47
SPEAKER_01: Well, I think the one impact is disconnection.
52:51
SPEAKER_01: At the very least.
52:53
SPEAKER_01: So I I've I've been listening to some of my old episodes recently, and I was listening to a woman named Michelle.
53:00
SPEAKER_01: She has a her episode was called Error 404, Birthday Not Found.
53:05
SPEAKER_01: And this is because she is a woman who was found in China with a note that said this baby was born on such and so date.
53:15
SPEAKER_01: Impossible to know if that's the real date or not.
53:19
SPEAKER_01: And she was adopted into a Japanese family here.
53:23
SPEAKER_01: So she had that sort of quote-unquote Asian mirroring, but Chinese and Japanese people don't look at the channel.
53:30
SPEAKER_01: Not the same.
53:30
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
53:31
SPEAKER_01: And so even in her own family, the same way I was talking about mirroring in a black family, not necessarily taking, she could have had some of the same challenges.
53:40
SPEAKER_01: So all that to say, I've been listening to these shows, and Michelle basically said, I don't really feel a connection to China.
53:50
SPEAKER_01: I if I go back there, who am I looking for?
53:53
SPEAKER_01: And I didn't grow up there.
53:55
SPEAKER_01: And so it's a real sad sensation to know that an individual can feel a complete disconnect from an entire continent of people that they come from.
54:07
SPEAKER_01: And that's just one story, right?
54:10
SPEAKER_01: That I had no idea who my birth mother is, was, but I was curious.
54:15
SPEAKER_01: I got lucky.
54:16
SPEAKER_01: I found my birth mother within just a couple of months.
54:19
SPEAKER_03: Right.
54:19
SPEAKER_01: Many people search for years and they never find anything.
54:24
SPEAKER_01: Mothers get married, they change their name, then she becomes harder to find.
54:27
SPEAKER_01: It just, it's really challenging.
54:29
SPEAKER_01: But at the end of the day, most people I've experienced are looking for some level of connection to no no pun intended or whatever the proper thing is, but who they really are.
54:41
SPEAKER_01: Who am I really?
54:43
SPEAKER_01: And an acknowledgement of that who they really are.
54:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I agree.
54:49
SPEAKER_00: It's interesting when you talked about her and China and Japan, all of that.
54:54
SPEAKER_00: When my boys and I were in Italy, it's funny because the pictures I have, I was in this shirt.
55:00
SPEAKER_00: And so it just reminded me of the funny.
55:04
SPEAKER_00: But we were at the top of the Duomo in Florence.
55:08
SPEAKER_00: Florence.
55:08
SPEAKER_00: All of us.
55:09
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, all of us were crying.
55:11
SPEAKER_00: Because there was j we all felt this overwhelming feeling, almost like roots growing into this the ground.
55:19
SPEAKER_00: I don't know how to we all talked about it.
55:21
SPEAKER_00: It was this beautiful experience, and there was grief involved in that.
55:26
SPEAKER_00: So what you were just describ describing, that unseen impact of not being connected to a culture that you've been your whole life, but you didn't know.
55:34
SPEAKER_01: It's ugh.
55:35
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, your heritage is important.
55:37
SPEAKER_01: And the thing I said this in Milwaukee.
55:39
SPEAKER_01: Ancestry documents.
55:40
SPEAKER_00: Especially Minnesota.
55:42
SPEAKER_00: Minnesota, Damon.
55:43
SPEAKER_00: I said Milwaukee again.
55:45
SPEAKER_03: God.
55:48
SPEAKER_03: Jesus.
55:51
SPEAKER_03: You are crazy.
55:52
SPEAKER_03: Minneapolis.
55:53
SPEAKER_03: Okay.
55:55
SPEAKER_01: In Minneapolis.
55:56
SPEAKER_01: Oh my God.
55:58
SPEAKER_00: It's okay.
55:59
SPEAKER_00: Hey, we all make mistakes.
56:00
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna get to LA and I'm gonna be like, welcome to Los Alamos.
56:09
SPEAKER_00: Should just for fun.
56:11
SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh.
56:11
SPEAKER_01: I can't believe it.
56:12
SPEAKER_01: I said in Minneapolis, one of the things that I said on stage is Ancestry.com has millions and millions and millions and millions of people as clients, and not all of them are adopted.
56:26
SPEAKER_01: And what that tells you is the desire to search for and connect with your heritage is a human experience.
56:34
SPEAKER_01: It's not an adoptee experience.
56:36
SPEAKER_03: Amen.
56:37
SPEAKER_01: Actually, it occurs to me we had a little bit of a discussion in Minneapolis about the advocacy efforts around the nation.
56:48
SPEAKER_01: And I would love to see that point be raised amongst the legislators who are railing against open records.
56:57
SPEAKER_01: Say, by the way, do you have an ancestry account?
57:00
SPEAKER_01: Why?
57:02
SPEAKER_01: Why did it interest you to have an ancestry account?
57:04
SPEAKER_01: Oh, because you wanted to know your family history?
57:08
SPEAKER_01: Imagine now what that feels like for me as someone who didn't grow up in my biological family, who doesn't know the kinds of stories that I'm hunting for, right?
57:19
SPEAKER_01: Right.
57:19
SPEAKER_01: You heard your mom say that you were of Irish descent and that your grandparents came over on such and so boat.
57:26
SPEAKER_01: I've never heard those stories.
57:28
SPEAKER_01: So you can imagine then how impactful it would be for me, who has grown up in a different family, to actually hear the stories of my heritage.
57:39
SPEAKER_01: And if you don't, then I suggest you delete your ancestry account.
57:43
SPEAKER_01: Do you know what I mean?
57:44
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
57:44
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I do.
57:46
SPEAKER_00: I absolutely do.
57:47
SPEAKER_00: And I appreciated it when you shared that on stage.
57:50
SPEAKER_00: I think all of the stories I know from our conversations have have really impacted you.
57:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
57:58
SPEAKER_00: And and because of them, you have actually sort of been on a hiatus from your podcast in order to go back and listen to all of the episodes in order to create a book that was initially what you were going to do.
58:14
SPEAKER_00: Let's just be honest, right?
58:17
SPEAKER_00: And then you realized crap, there's more here.
58:22
SPEAKER_00: And so that's what I want to know about.
58:24
SPEAKER_00: So this listening to all the episodes turned into two books.
58:28
SPEAKER_00: Where did that come from and the why behind it?
58:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
58:32
SPEAKER_01: It's a you've you've raised a really important point there on there's a lot there.
58:37
SPEAKER_01: So again, who am I really?
58:39
SPEAKER_01: Nine years, 279 episodes.
58:42
SPEAKER_01: And in essence, I've joked that I've kind of have a research cohort of the adopt the experience because as the host, I'm not afraid to ask people all kinds of hard and wild questions about their experiences, about their feelings.
58:57
SPEAKER_01: That's my job as the host.
58:59
SPEAKER_01: And it's it's it's one of my great joys because it helps me to bring connection between myself and my guests.
59:05
SPEAKER_01: But again, what I've realized is in doing that work, I have created a research cohort of adopte-e experiences.
59:13
SPEAKER_01: And I decided that I wanted to write a book that was going to cover the adopte-e experience.
59:22
SPEAKER_01: It has morphed into two books because I realized along the way that one, if I wrote it as one big book, it would be a huge, gigantic, massive.
59:36
SPEAKER_03: It'd be a Bible.
59:37
SPEAKER_01: It would, I mean, quite literally, it'd be insanity.
59:41
SPEAKER_01: Uh but the other thing that was really important in my realization was that we're actually talking about two experiences.
59:51
SPEAKER_01: One is the adoptee experience, which will be book one.
59:55
SPEAKER_01: And that's growing up in adoption.
59:58
SPEAKER_01: Everything from an adopted person's transition into the home, from the various ways that that happens, to the various reasons that an adopted family might seek to adopt.
1:00:09
SPEAKER_01: How does that family get along?
1:00:11
SPEAKER_01: Adoptive mother, adoptive father, adoptive siblings, biological siblings to the parents, etc.
1:00:16
SPEAKER_01: All of the questions that I ask in the beginning of a show, what is it like to grow up in adoption?
1:00:22
SPEAKER_01: And then that first book is going to end with the various triggers and catalysts that make a person want to search for their biological family members and the avenues a person might take to do so.
1:00:38
SPEAKER_01: The reason the first book inside the adoptee experience stops there is because many adoptees will tell you I was a different person after reunion or even searching with I totally can say the same for myself.
1:00:55
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
1:00:56
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:00:57
SPEAKER_01: And so the second book is going to be inside the adoptee reunion experience.
1:01:03
SPEAKER_01: So the first one, inside the adoptee experience, inside the adoptee reunion experience.
1:01:09
SPEAKER_01: And I've separated it out because when a person when it clicks, I think I actually need to do that.
1:01:16
SPEAKER_01: I need to search for these people.
1:01:18
SPEAKER_01: Your brain is now on a different set of tracks.
1:01:22
SPEAKER_01: You were, you were on a the first set of tracks before, you've now jumped the tracks, and you're looking for people that you're genetically related to.
1:01:30
SPEAKER_01: And you start to do things that others may not even realize you're focused on.
1:01:37
SPEAKER_01: You may be going to the public library and nobody knows it.
1:01:41
SPEAKER_01: You may be laying in bed at one o'clock in the morning, can't sleep, and you're searching through adoption reunion registries and creating an ancestry account and looking up what does it mean to do DNA and find biological relatives?
1:01:54
SPEAKER_01: All stuff that is clandestine activity that even your spouse or partner won't even know you're doing.
1:02:03
SPEAKER_01: And then you may not tell your adoptive family either.
1:02:08
SPEAKER_01: So you end up going on this sometimes secret journey, unsure.
1:02:12
SPEAKER_01: Am I doing the right thing?
1:02:13
SPEAKER_01: Am I going to open a can of worms?
1:02:15
SPEAKER_01: There's all of that.
1:02:16
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:02:16
SPEAKER_01: And then what do you actually find?
1:02:19
SPEAKER_01: Some people unfortunately find a grave.
1:02:22
SPEAKER_01: They were too late to connect with somebody, or that person passed a long time ago.
1:02:28
SPEAKER_01: They find folks who are completely disinterested in any reunion.
1:02:33
SPEAKER_01: They're like, listen, that was a long time ago.
1:02:35
SPEAKER_01: That was 40 years ago.
1:02:37
SPEAKER_01: I have a whole family.
1:02:39
SPEAKER_01: My wife or husband doesn't know that I have another child out there.
1:02:42
SPEAKER_01: Neither do my kids.
1:02:43
SPEAKER_01: And I'm not about to open this can of worms now.
1:02:46
SPEAKER_01: I'm in the autumn of my life.
1:02:48
SPEAKER_01: I'm, and they might not even say sorry, but I would like to think that their sentiment is, I'm sorry, but I can't do this.
1:02:54
SPEAKER_01: But then there are other people who find an open, willing, biological parent who says, I have basically, what took you so long?
1:03:04
SPEAKER_01: I have been waiting for this for so long.
1:03:06
SPEAKER_01: I've been thinking about you.
1:03:07
SPEAKER_01: We've been looking for you.
1:03:09
SPEAKER_01: I've told everybody that I can think of.
1:03:11
SPEAKER_01: And so the experience of those experiences plus any level of reunion, whether it's we just send letters and I just can't get her to come out of her house and meet me, to we talked on the phone that day and I met her the next day.
1:03:28
SPEAKER_01: And we've had a wonderful relationship since.
1:03:30
SPEAKER_01: Again, these are the sliders on the studio board.
1:03:34
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:03:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:03:34
SPEAKER_01: And so the inside the adoptee experience is going to be that whole piece of what does search look like?
1:03:42
SPEAKER_01: How does one go about it?
1:03:43
SPEAKER_01: How does the reunion introduction happen?
1:03:46
SPEAKER_01: What is reunion like in the beginning?
1:03:49
SPEAKER_01: And how does it evolve over time?
1:03:51
SPEAKER_01: Right.
1:03:51
SPEAKER_01: What happens when the honeymoon period is over?
1:03:54
SPEAKER_01: And we were so excited to find each other, but now we realize how different we are.
1:03:58
SPEAKER_01: Do we still get along?
1:03:59
SPEAKER_01: Or do they separate from you?
1:04:01
SPEAKER_01: Do you pull back from them?
1:04:02
SPEAKER_01: Did they say something to offend you?
1:04:04
SPEAKER_01: Or do you just kind of feel like eh, we're just kind of different people?
1:04:08
SPEAKER_01: So that's why it's two separate books because I want to talk about living in the adopted family first and then separate out what it's like to think about and attempt an adoption reunion.
1:04:25
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, I think that's great.
1:04:26
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you've ever heard of Elizabeth Barber.
1:04:29
SPEAKER_00: She's an adopted person who is actually doing research on reunion as well right now.
1:04:34
SPEAKER_00: Also and is also writing a book.
1:04:36
SPEAKER_00: And then her and Leslie McKinnon were on the podcast not too long ago because they're doing a reunion retreat in November, which I think is so, so great.
1:04:45
SPEAKER_00: That is incredible.
1:04:46
SPEAKER_03: I love yeah.
1:04:47
SPEAKER_00: I love that you're doing that.
1:04:48
SPEAKER_00: And I think it's I just think it's so important.
1:04:51
SPEAKER_00: And is there a goal with this?
1:04:54
SPEAKER_00: Who do you most want the books to reach?
1:04:57
SPEAKER_01: You know, folks ask me stuff like this, and I always say the first customer is me.
1:05:04
SPEAKER_01: I want it to be a book that I'm proud of.
1:05:07
SPEAKER_01: That I've I've actually taken what I've heard, what I've learned, and I have supported the Adoptee community in sharing their stories and having this as a resource where at some point in any one of those books, they can point to a paragraph and go, that is me, even if they were not the guest whom shared their story on the show.
1:05:33
SPEAKER_01: So I want this to be something that I feel really confident and proud about.
1:05:39
SPEAKER_01: And then the second customer is literally everybody else.
1:05:42
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's what I was thinking.
1:05:44
SPEAKER_01: If it if it touches one person, if you pick it up, Julie, and you go, Oh my God, that page 47 where you talked about blah, blah, blah, that absolutely hit me.
1:05:53
SPEAKER_01: Job done.
1:05:54
SPEAKER_01: And everybody else after that is icing on the cake.
1:05:58
SPEAKER_01: I only need to touch one.
1:06:00
SPEAKER_01: Other person besides myself.
1:06:02
SPEAKER_01: I think it will be an amazing resource for adoptive parents, adopted people, birth mothers and birth parents, social workers who are supported.
1:06:13
SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's so many people who can learn from this because as I've said, it feels like research.
1:06:19
SPEAKER_01: And and I've joked before that when I look at the analytics of the of my guests, it's frequently women.
1:06:31
SPEAKER_01: Very few men.
1:06:33
SPEAKER_01: But I also have some first mothers come up to me and say, I've listened to your show.
1:06:38
SPEAKER_01: And I've joked that it feels to me like when you're a parent and you're driving down the road and your kids are in the backseat and they're just talking away like you're not even there.
1:06:50
SPEAKER_01: It's like they're they're in a Waymo and they're the car's just driving itself and they're just saying everything.
1:06:56
SPEAKER_01: But the parents get to listen to what the kids are talking about, what their language is, how they're expressing themselves.
1:07:03
SPEAKER_01: And so I'm hopeful that biological first birth parents will pick it up and realize these are some of the things that the adopted person that I placed, relinquished, was cursed, coerced out of and keeping went through.
1:07:22
SPEAKER_01: And that they'll that folks will pull lessons from from different perspectives too.
1:07:27
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:07:27
SPEAKER_00: Right.
1:07:28
SPEAKER_00: I think that's so huge.
1:07:29
SPEAKER_00: I love that you're doing this.
1:07:30
SPEAKER_00: I know I already said that, but it just makes me so happy it's so needed.
1:07:34
SPEAKER_00: So you're welcome.
1:07:36
SPEAKER_00: Underneath the podcast, the books, the live events.
1:07:39
SPEAKER_00: What are you actually building toward?
1:07:43
SPEAKER_01: Healing and happiness.
1:07:45
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
1:07:46
SPEAKER_00: Totally get that.
1:07:47
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:07:47
SPEAKER_01: That's it.
1:07:48
SPEAKER_01: And it's not even need they don't even need to necessarily be my own.
1:07:52
SPEAKER_01: Right?
1:07:53
SPEAKER_01: That a lot I've had so many people.
1:07:56
SPEAKER_01: There's a lovely woman came up to me at in Minneapolis and said, found your show and it helped me through.
1:08:03
SPEAKER_01: I think her name was Heather.
1:08:05
SPEAKER_01: I found your show and it just helped me through so much, right?
1:08:08
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and I've had that experience with a lot of people.
1:08:13
SPEAKER_01: And that to me is so fulfilling because as I sit here, you and I are talking.
1:08:19
SPEAKER_01: We have no idea when this comes out what person is sitting where listening to this.
1:08:24
SPEAKER_01: But if it's impactful for them, we have done something incredible.
1:08:30
SPEAKER_01: And so I just keep going, hoping that I will find my own happiness in supporting the community and that the community will find healing and hearing from one another.
1:08:42
SPEAKER_01: That's that's really it.
1:08:44
SPEAKER_01: That's what I'm building towards.
1:08:45
SPEAKER_01: There's nothing further.
1:08:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know what?
1:08:48
SPEAKER_00: I I really relate to that.
1:08:49
SPEAKER_00: I was I'm doing a seven-day self-discovery journey, going through my seven phases right now with about five adopted people.
1:08:56
SPEAKER_00: And today we were exploring shame.
1:09:00
SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that came up for me was sometimes you just don't know with all the work that you do, podcasts or coaching others or putting your stuff out on socials, whatever it is.
1:09:11
SPEAKER_00: Am I even having an impact?
1:09:13
SPEAKER_00: And as an entrepreneur, I think it can be so challenging to really believe that it's making any difference.
1:09:19
SPEAKER_00: It's just hard.
1:09:19
SPEAKER_00: You just don't know.
1:09:21
SPEAKER_00: And one Heather was one of the people that came up to me and said, Thank you so much for your podcast.
1:09:26
SPEAKER_00: It's helped me so much.
1:09:27
SPEAKER_00: And of course, I was like, I didn't even know you listened.
1:09:31
SPEAKER_00: It's just, it's so encouraging to hear those things and know that you're really having an impact.
1:09:37
SPEAKER_00: And when I think about what you just said, the question that I would love to ask you as we begin to close is, is there anything that you feel like you're still wrestling with as you write these?
1:09:50
SPEAKER_01: Making sure in the writing, making sure that I represent as many experiences as humanly possible without drowning people in the writing.
1:10:04
SPEAKER_01: Because with 279 different people, there are various combinations of experiences.
1:10:09
SPEAKER_01: And I'm making these statistics up, so don't hold me to it.
1:10:13
SPEAKER_01: But if 65% of the people have reunited with their birth mother, I can't put all of them into the reunion with birth mother chapter, right?
1:10:21
SPEAKER_01: You get bored reading it.
1:10:23
SPEAKER_01: So you have to start to parse out well, if this person found their birth mother, did they also find their birth father or not?
1:10:30
SPEAKER_01: And how did that go?
1:10:32
SPEAKER_01: And so part of the reason the project is taking me so long to do is, well, one, there's real life out here happening that I got to do other things like be a husband and a father.
1:10:44
SPEAKER_01: But um there is this challenge.
1:10:47
SPEAKER_01: Uh, it's not a linear project.
1:10:49
SPEAKER_01: I can't just sit down and write chapter one, chapter two, chapter three.
1:10:52
SPEAKER_01: When I listen to somebody like Michelle's story, I'm gonna hear her ethnicity piece and I have to make notes on that.
1:11:00
SPEAKER_01: And I hear her her desire to connect with community, but not wanting to go back to China.
1:11:06
SPEAKER_01: There's gonna be these different elements from everybody's story, and I have to put them in their respective places and then weave it together in that particular chapter.
1:11:16
SPEAKER_01: So Michelle may have a piece in book one and a piece in book two, which is the I don't want to reunite, that also has to be represented.
1:11:25
SPEAKER_01: So that's one of my big challenges right now is just sitting there working it out to get through every single one of these stories and just be the best steward of the stories that have been trusted to me.
1:11:41
SPEAKER_00: Oh and you're doing you're doing a great job.
1:11:43
SPEAKER_00: And I know it matters to you.
1:11:45
SPEAKER_00: And the reason I know it matters to you, Damon, is because one of the things that I think was really impactful for me in Minneapolis was Where?
1:11:53
SPEAKER_03: Where were we?
1:11:54
SPEAKER_00: Never heard of it was when right after the documentaries were shown and you got up on stage and were emotional, like tears were coming down your face.
1:12:08
SPEAKER_00: I think all of us felt that way at the end of that documentary when we were seeing the Korean babies be and honestly, I could not compute what was happening initially.
1:12:16
SPEAKER_00: I I felt almost blindsided by what I was seeing.
1:12:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
1:12:21
SPEAKER_01: And so for anybody who doesn't know what we're talking about, we should probably do it some justice.
1:12:26
SPEAKER_01: So we watched a documentary uh from a Korean-born adoptee.
1:12:31
SPEAKER_01: Forgive me, the name escapes me.
1:12:33
SPEAKER_01: We could probably put it in the show notes, but Yeah, I can find it.
1:12:35
SPEAKER_01: The documentary ends with an old-style camcorder sh focused down a at the door of a plane jetway, and nothing happens for several minutes, and then all of a sudden, people start coming off, and it's the pilot and one guy with a baby in his arms.
1:12:52
SPEAKER_01: There's this long extended pause, and nothing happens.
1:12:57
SPEAKER_00: Nothing.
1:12:58
SPEAKER_01: And then one mother, two mothers, three mothers, all white women carrying Korean babies, and it was this stark image of the adoption marketplace walking off of the plane from Korea.
1:13:15
SPEAKER_01: And it was so emotional to watch these children be separated from their homes and culture and brought to the United States.
1:13:23
SPEAKER_01: And I get it.
1:13:24
SPEAKER_01: It's possible that those children might not have had a good life where they were.
1:13:27
SPEAKER_01: I make no judgment about that.
1:13:29
SPEAKER_01: I'm simply saying that the visual of seeing children be almost like production line, just one after the other, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, coming off the plane was incredibly moving because those infants had no choice in the matter.
1:13:53
SPEAKER_01: They're just in a new land with a new family, and that's just it.
1:13:56
SPEAKER_01: So that's what we're talking about is how incredibly emotional it was to see that scene unfold at the end of the documentary.
1:14:03
SPEAKER_01: And yes, I was incredibly emotional.
1:14:05
SPEAKER_01: I I stood in front of the room and I cried in front of everybody.
1:14:09
SPEAKER_01: I'm an emotional guy.
1:14:10
SPEAKER_01: I cry on the podcast.
1:14:11
SPEAKER_01: Um, but and I think that that's an important thing for the emotions of the adoptee community is to let it go, man.
1:14:17
SPEAKER_01: Don't hold it back.
1:14:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:14:18
SPEAKER_01: Get your emotions out of your body, get your writing, your songs, your poems, whatever your self-expression is out of your body.
1:14:25
SPEAKER_01: Because if you're holding it in, it's gonna, it's gonna jam you up and you're gonna, it's it's just not healthy.
1:14:30
SPEAKER_00: No, it's not.
1:14:31
SPEAKER_00: And if you were watching on on screen, I don't know if you noticed, my whole body got chills and then I shook because I just felt it in my body.
1:14:40
SPEAKER_00: And it's one of the things that I do, that's my job, is to help people somatically move the emotion out of their body.
1:14:46
SPEAKER_00: And so I appreciated so much how you personified and embodied that on stage.
1:14:51
SPEAKER_00: I think it's important and it's clear how much this matters to you and what a passion it is for you.
1:14:57
SPEAKER_00: So I appreciate that so much.
1:15:00
SPEAKER_00: And the last question I want to ask really is where can people find you now?
1:15:04
SPEAKER_00: Because you have put it on a bit of a hiatus, and I know you can still listen to whom I really.
1:15:10
SPEAKER_00: It's not like that's not available, it's available.
1:15:12
SPEAKER_01: It's there.
1:15:12
SPEAKER_00: You have yeah, you have your memoir, and there's got to be updates on the two new books.
1:15:16
SPEAKER_00: Where is the best place for people to find you?
1:15:19
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, great question.
1:15:21
SPEAKER_01: Uh, you can find the podcast everywhere you get podcasts, whether it's Apple or Spotify, what have you.
1:15:28
SPEAKER_01: It's Who Am I Really?
1:15:30
SPEAKER_01: The memoir is by the same name.
1:15:32
SPEAKER_01: And if you go to who am I really podcast.com, I believe at the top you may see books or resources or something like that.
1:15:38
SPEAKER_01: Forgive me.
1:15:39
SPEAKER_01: Just to redid the website.
1:15:41
SPEAKER_01: But look through the website, you will see a place where uh inside the adopt the experience is represented, and you can sign up to uh get updates about the book and coming out when it is forthcoming.
1:15:53
SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
1:15:53
SPEAKER_00: I'm so glad.
1:15:54
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for that.
1:15:55
SPEAKER_00: Obviously, I will put all that in the show notes.
1:15:57
SPEAKER_00: And so I would love for you to come back at some point and talk to us about what these two books really taught you after you are finished doing this because I think it would be really, really cool.
1:16:08
SPEAKER_00: So as we close today, just remember Damon has spent years doing exactly what I am trying to do here, making room for the parts of adoption that don't fit in this single tidy story.
1:16:23
SPEAKER_00: And what struck me most is that he's not doing that from one seat.
1:16:28
SPEAKER_00: He's doing that from multiple.
1:16:29
SPEAKER_00: He's an adoptive father, he's also an adoptee, he's one who has sat across from hundreds of people and heard what doesn't get said out loud very often.
1:16:40
SPEAKER_00: And that's sacred, honestly.
1:16:42
SPEAKER_00: So that's the whole reason I keep bringing people like Damon onto the podcast, not to retell a story you can already find because his is out there and it's worth reading and listening to, but to get underneath it, to ask what he's learned that he couldn't have known from the start.
1:16:58
SPEAKER_00: And two new books deep into that work, I don't think he's finished learning it.
1:17:04
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that is the truth.
1:17:06
SPEAKER_01: Too much to learn.
1:17:08
SPEAKER_00: Too much.
1:17:09
SPEAKER_00: And I just am so glad that you're here.
1:17:11
SPEAKER_00: And I'm so glad that everybody listening and watching is here as well.
1:17:15
SPEAKER_00: And if this one landed for you, just sit with it for a minute before you move on to whatever is next in your day.
1:17:21
SPEAKER_00: Give it the moment that it deserves.
1:17:23
SPEAKER_00: And Damon, again, like I said, once those books are out in the world, there is a seat back here for you, and we'd love to have you back.
1:17:30
SPEAKER_00: And if anything in this conversation triggered something for you, I want to invite you to do one of two things.
1:17:36
SPEAKER_00: Sit with it, like I said, for a bit.
1:17:37
SPEAKER_00: Or schedule a call with me.
1:17:39
SPEAKER_00: Happy to talk to you about what you have heard and learned.
1:17:41
SPEAKER_00: You don't have to carry whatever just surfaced by yourself because you aren't alone.
1:17:46
SPEAKER_00: As you can see, there's us out there who are willing to have the conversations.
1:17:50
SPEAKER_00: And if this podcast meant something to you, please leave a five-star review or even just a few written words.
1:17:55
SPEAKER_00: It genuinely helps more adoptees and the people who love them find their way to hearing this.
1:18:00
SPEAKER_00: And remember, belonging is never something you were supposed to go out and find in someone else's approval, someone else's family, or someone else's definition of you.
1:18:08
SPEAKER_00: Stop outsourcing belonging and insource it.
1:18:11
SPEAKER_00: And I'll see you guys next week.
1:18:12
SPEAKER_00: Have a happy Thursday.
1:18:14
SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
1:18:14
SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Damon.