Latest / Giving Pain Purpose with Lyndsay Soprano / The Black-Market Baby on the Curb Part 1 with Patricia Knight Meyer
Transcript
- Lyndsay Soprano (00:00) Hey guys and dolls. Before we jump into this episode, a note about our content today. This is created for adult audiences only. We advise listener discretion. So if you need a breather, take a break and come back later. This is Giving Pain Purpose, where we talk about the game of living in and with chronic pain and trauma. I'm your host, Lindsay Soprano. On this show, I sit with the warriors, loved ones, doctors, holistic practitioners, and those who've walked through hell and want their voices heard. You don't have to heal quietly and you don't have to fight alone. welcome to Giving Pain Purpose. I am so happy you guys are here today. I have got just the most amazing guest for you today. And this is actually part one of a part two. And it's the first time I've done it on this show. And so I'm a little nervous with excitement, but I am just so happy to have my guest here today. But before we get started on this thing, to protect the privacy of some of the people that we're gonna be speaking about on this episode and in the next episode. We have changed some of their names just from a privacy perspective. So just so you guys know that. So to everyone who is searching for themselves, their identity, their souls, and have been falling down the Wonderland hole, this episode is for you. So I have had two soulmates in my life. One was an incredible guy named Jim who broke my heart into a trillion pieces. And I unfortunately broke his right back in the same number of pieces. And the other is my sweetie and husband Bill. But for the purpose of this episode, I dove back into the belly and soul of my relationship with Jim and reflected on what went wrong at the heart of it all. He had struggled with massive abandonment issues. I struggled with daddy issues and massive safety issues. And all I wanted was my birth father to love me, to feel safe in my skin. And to make Jim also feel safe in our love and embrace the potential of creating a family together. I would have done anything on this planet to have married him and had babies with him. I mean, like anything. We were completely obsessed with each other. I just didn't know that because he and his older sister were trafficked and bought as newborn babies, adopted on the black market, that he truly suffered silently with what family could actually be for him. Even though my family considered him part of our own and embraced him with everything that we had. As I read one of the most beautifully written books that my guest today wrote about black market adoption, I went on a roller coaster of emotions that brought up the sadness of that time of my life, the heartbreak, the loss. But her words and story also gave me clarity that I wish I had so many years ago. And for that alone, I am grateful that I had the opportunity to have this conversation today. I'm already crying, guys. As she states in her book, my abandonment trauma equates rejection as the natural consequence of love. As for many adoptees, I know, love meant at the very least, loss, and at the very worst, total cataclysmic abandonment. Literally cue the tissues as I'm tearing up. Everybody knows it listens to the show. I cry on my show. I didn't expect it quite so soon. So without further ado with a tearful introduction, I would like to introduce you to my absolutely incredible and fiery guest, Patricia Knightmeyer. Hello, my love. Patricia Knight Meyer (03:43) Hello Lyndsay and I'm so sorry you're crying. Lyndsay Soprano (03:47) It's good. It's good stuff. It's good stuff. This is why we do this thing, right. Patricia Knight Meyer (03:51) Thank you so much for having me on the show and w a what a lovely introduction as well. Thank you so Lyndsay Soprano (03:56) Thank you. So Patricia's story began in nineteen seventy when she was trafficked as a newborn along a Texas hospital curb through a black market adoption. She spent decades searching for the truth about where she came from, who was involved, and what had been taken from her before she ever had a voice. That search became Wonderland, memoir of a black market adoption, and it is simply beautiful to read. Coming out in November this year from unsolicited press. Today, Patricia is an adoption reform advocate. A book publicist and digital marketer and a board member of the National Association of Adoptees and Parents. She is also the founder of myadoptedlife.com, serving a community of more than 30,000 adoptees and advocates, working to bring truth, connection, and long overdue conversations about the 30 billion with a bee adoption and child welfare industry into the light. I'd like to just hop right in here, babe, and start at the beginning where you are picked up in a van. along a hospital curve in Texas. And then our conversation will just unfold about your lifelong effort to construct an identity from all of these fragments. Patricia Knight Meyer (05:02) Okay. Well, this story was told to me like a fairy tale. on my mother's lap. Oftentimes when we were sitting under the reading tree in our front yard, I would ask her to tell me the story about how I came into their home. And she always said that it began with them pulling up along a Texas hospital curb in front of a hospital in Houston, Texas, and that the attorney that they had used to find them a woman who had a baby that she couldn't keep. He was there with his secretary, and the secretary carried me out and placed me into this van. And from there they drove away with me. And they didn't realize that day, though, that that attorney was going to eventually extort them out of tens of thousands of dollars with the threat of taking the baby back. And he was able to do that because they had been paying him money that they believed was going to my birth mother for her living expenses, for her medical bills and things like that. But ultimately he kept coming back and saying, well, you're not going to get the paperwork until you pay these other bills or these other expenses. Or a year and a half in, they were like, we can't pay you any more money and we still don't have paperwork. And they knew then they either had to go to the police or they had to just keep their mouths shut and and walk away with me and and raise a paperless baby. Because if they went to the police, I was surely going to be removed from their home until they sorted out You know, why in the world they weren't getting any paperwork? Lyndsay Soprano (06:32) Yeah, I mean, it it's unbelievable, like growing up without institutional recognition of your existence, you know, no records, no medical history, no full truth of where you come from. Giving a little bit of education about what black market adoption is and the desperation of couples that we have and what it looked like in America during this period, because your story happened during what is now referred to as the baby scoop era. Which was between the years, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think it was nineteen forty-five and nineteen seventy-three. And when I was reading your book, which I as I've mentioned to you already at Infinim and multiple people as well, this book just absolutely broke me into a million pieces. I was yelling, I was screaming, I was crying, I was like, I was just like a full roller coaster. But I'd like to give us a little bit of an education about the black market system that we have here at that point in time. Patricia Knight Meyer (07:25) Yeah. Well, you're right. The dates were nineteen forty-five to nineteen seventy-three. And it was during this time that about four million children were placed for adoption. In nineteen seventy, the year that I was acquired, a hundred and seventy-five thousand infants were placed for adoption. And about eleven thousand of those were actually sold on the black market. And I was I was one of them. And so they called us black market babies. And what that really meant was that a baby was placed Or sold, money exchanged hands, an attorney or a doctor usually brokers it, and no judge or agency is ever involved. There's also something called the gray market, which is sort of its legal cousin, also done through a private attorney with no oversight, but it turns to the black market when money really becomes the motive there, right? Now, if all that money that my parents had been paying had actually made it to the birth mother. And the attorney was just taking his standard legal fees and paperwork and such were all delivered, then that would have been a gray market or what they call a private adoption. But the baby scoop era w is sort of emerged after World War Two because at the time, being an unwed mother was a scandal that you you just couldn't survive back in the day. If you were pregnant and single, you couldn't even have a job. And if if someone found out you were, you were gonna get fired. in addition to that, professionals, doctors, and and mental health professionals were were framing unmarried pregnancy as a mental health issue requiring treatment through relinquishment. And that was the actual language that they used. At the same time, adoption was booming, and every single couple wanted a healthy white infant. And the agency wait list became very, very long. And so you had one group of women. In a desperate situation with no power, and then another group of couples with money and very little patience. And that is the gap where these brokers set up shop. And so, you know, scarcity plus money creates a market, and a market creates a broker. And when these people are able to sit in the middle in these transactions with no oversight or no federal oversight or accountability, and with records that are eventually going to be sealed, if there are records, they're going to be sealed away. That sort of secrecy breeds in it's like a petri dish for corruption. Lyndsay Soprano (09:49) Yeah. Well absolutely. I mean, babies essentially are commodities. I mean, it's just it's like unbelievable profiteering off of the life. And I can't imagine what it would have been like to even now for crying out loud. Like, I mean, abortion was illegal then. Right now in the United States of America, we are having a very difficult conversation around that. And I know we will probably end up touching a little bit on that at some point throughout this conversation in part one and part two. But The the fear that can be placed into a young woman's life at whatever age she got pregnant, however she ended up getting pregnant, because a lot of these birth mothers weren't just going out sluting around or what have you, right? And I can say that because I did it. Sometimes they happen f under horrible circumstances and they're, you know, shamed and shunned and it I feel like we're even still kind of doing that, and that makes me sad, for lack of a better term. Patricia Knight Meyer (10:50) we we are, I mean, I my opinion is we absolut we absolutely are still shaming mothers. We're still telling young mothers that they are unworthy to mother a child if they are not married and if they don't have college degree. And you know, right now there's there's a r a huge rise in maternity homes. These are homes that young women are sent to to live in while they wait to relinquish their children. And the There's a the Jerry Falwell Ministry has a certain set of maternity homes where if you enter them, you're guaranteed a full ride to the university. and if you attend live in that home for five, six months, seven months, change your mind. Not only do you not get to go to university, but any clo any period of time that you've attended there, well, now you're on the hook for that. so that's you know, that's coercion. these girls are there's a Fantastic podcast called Liberty Lost. it was up in it was it's done by TJ Raphael and she went in and did an investigation with the mothers that actually stayed in these maternity homes. And that's where I I'm getting this this information around this story. But it's definitely happening. And you know, right now there there's still about ninety thousand adoptions that happen in the US every year, and a quarter of them are still going through private attorneys behind closed doors. the the federal government still does not have any federal oversight over adoptions. And and and there's roughly thirty-six families in line for every baby that's relinquished. So when you you create that kind of demand with people in the middle who and in a closed record system for the most part, only seventeen states allow opa adoptees to have open access to their records when they become adults. it's it's like I said, it just creates all kinds of opportunities for bribery and coercion and blackmail to even exist today. Lyndsay Soprano (12:44) Yeah, I mean I feel like we're we haven't made much change. And how are we not progressing as a society? Patricia Knight Meyer (12:53) Well, and you know, I do say that I think we're headed for a baby scoop two point in the book because of the fact that now we have tens of thousands of women forced into giving birth to children that that they were not planning for. And the the options are very limited. raise this baby or or or put it up for adoption are the two choices. And that alone creates many more desperate mothers in in desperate situations. Lyndsay Soprano (13:23) Yeah. And then we've got this whole push about the fact that people like myself who ended up not A being able to have children, then deciding that it was the best decision that my ex-husband and I ended up not having children. So thank God for unanswered prayers under that particular circumstance. But now they're talking about like women, you you just have to start popping out babies and infertility rates are like dropping. And when you're a teenager, you're like, why are you even talking to teenagers about having babies right now in this country? Like it's just It's the the dialogue and the narrative around children being born in the United States specifically is just it's it's it's horrifying for lack of a better word. And because we hear these beautiful adoption stories, which completely exist, right? Yes. Yeah. And I mean, I've got a girlfriend of mine who adopted a baby from Kenya and it was just like this most amazing experience for her and all the I mean, we've everybody's got a everybody has a narrative about something about their life and their birth, but It's not just all these beautiful flowers and daisies when people are getting adopted. And you guys are gonna hear a lot more about that w with Patricia's story, that's for sure. Patricia Knight Meyer (14:29) You know, and adoption is not cheap. And so there's Lyndsay Soprano (14:32) No, it is. Patricia Knight Meyer (14:33) so many people who desperately want to have the opportunity to be a mother, or a father, and they can't they can't afford to pay what the average adoption costs these days, anywhere from fifty to a hundred thousand dollars. And so when you've got people who really want a baby and don't qualify to go through the proper channels, and then you have a ton of women out there with babies who are just scared to death and some have waited till the very last minute to make a decision. That's where you get a private attorney in the middle to arrange a private adoption and things can go haywire because there's no there's no transparency across the board unless people know to ask for it. Lyndsay Soprano (15:14) Right. Well, thank you for all of that because that was an incredible education. I'd learned more than I did before. And I thought I had researched a lot of your books. So I'm just like, I I am constantly just like amazed at how much I learn when I do this show. I swear to God. I'd like to move into transition if we could, into as you call that mommy and daddy, if you could, who were your adoptive parents, because they're two people who raised you. and you had two very different relationships with both of them. There were some times where I just absolutely wanted to scream at your mom. And then the next minute I was like, I just want to go party with her. and your dad I fell in love with like with all my heart as well. So can you talk to me a little or talk to us a little bit about kind of the roller coaster of the dysfunction that was in your upbringing with with your parents? I mean, kind of go through that. Patricia Knight Meyer (16:05) Yes, for sure. So my father was Hispanic, my mother was white. When they first adopted me, they a lot like a lot of people in the sixties, everybody had, you know, the people were drinking at their desks at work back then. Right. Someone who throws a b a couple of drinks back a day wasn't necessarily considered an alcoholic at the time. But my father when he adopted me was a close to about 300 pounds. And I don't know if it was raising a child that no court had called their own and and looking over their shoulders and worried that at any moment someone could come back for me, that this whole deal could, you know, fall apart. I I think that some of that may have exacerbated the proclivities to addiction. My mother had a lot of generational trauma herself, and that could have played into her alcohol alcoholism. I also believe that she was bipolar, maybe even borderline, due to abuse that she suffered at the hands of her father. and she also lost a sister at 18. And so she had a lot of grief and a lot of trauma that she was self-medicating with alcohol, not to mention just the whole not being able to conceive and never having even probably mourned that that issue in her life. So there was a lot going on with her in that regard. she was a delightful woman on her great days. You know, it was she was fantastic. You were right, fantastic to party with, wonderful, fun to run around. With I like to say that she was Lucille Ball on her best days and Joan Crawford on her worst. Lyndsay Soprano (17:35) my goodness. Like Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I think is what you mentioned. Yeah. Patricia Knight Meyer (17:40) Because I would call sometimes I would call her mommy dearest, but it was always in jest and and she typically laughed about it. My father, on the other hand, he was just this most amazing gentle giant. he he reminded me of a of a big Buddha. he had a he had a beautiful laugh and just was the kind of guy who's friends with everyone. And so he was my very safe space. He was my buoy against my mother's turbulent turbulent tide. And He did much of the cooking in the house. Like I said, he was a meat inspector. He also ran a catering business. But he also was just, I guess he was just smack dab, you know, blindsidedly in love with my mother because he worshipped the ground she walked on and he would do anything to make her happy. And I think that that had to do with the way that they attained a baby. I think it had to do with how like she She had an entire room full of clothes she bought at Sachs and Neiman Marcus on credit on a meet inspector's salary. Lyndsay Soprano (18:39) Right, right. Patricia Knight Meyer (18:40) You know, I had to go to private school because they didn't have the records to get me in public school. So luckily, you know, I did get a a good education. However, they really struggled financially. And my father just about broke his back running some side business, you know, he sold used cars from the side of our house. He really worked himself to the bone trying to provide. And it was hard for me to sit back as a child and watch this very codependent, very dysfunctional dance between the two of them. I I write that my mother drank and my father ate. And I I spent my life trying to save my saviors. I I counted her drinks and I counted his calories. And you know, that made me the dysfunctional daughter you know, of two of two addicted people. But all in all, I think it comes through people have told me that have read the book that it comes through that there was a lot of love between us, even though there was just, you know, a crazy level of dysfunction in the household. Lyndsay Soprano (19:37) Yeah, you had said my mother's mood cycled more than the washing machine. She might never have left the bed if not for the promise of happy hour. The more he ate, the more she drank, the more she drank, the more he ate. I experienced each drink poured and each pound gained as a kind of abandonment. In abandoning themselves, they abandoned me. And that that part of it, I was right. My my birth father was an an alcoholic, and so was my stepmother. And so I can completely identify with the dysfunction that comes with that. And my ex-husband was also a raging alcoholic. And so I'm glad that I am I'm parted ways from all three of those people. But all of that really struck many, many chords with me in reading through that because we the alcoholism is so prevalent in so many households throughout the United States and throughout the globe, obviously. But I just feel like here in the States, we're just we just we're overachievers in this department. my goodness gracious. And I mean, part of that, I mean, it felt like in in in reading that and the throughout the book and your relationship with your mom and your dad, how you became very good at kind of managing both of them. Like you said, like managing their pain and their emotions. And you're the kid and you're like almost felt like you are sometimes more of the adult in the household than perhaps your mom or your dad. But again, I I I fell in love with your dad too. So yeah. Patricia Knight Meyer (21:03) Yeah. I I definit I mean, I definitely was on many levels in that, you know, even my mother was not one to she would drive somewhere, but it was only where she wanted to go. She wasn't gonna drive to the grocery store or go pay the bills or go to the bank. All of that was stuff my dad did. And y because he, you know, he started at three hundred when I was born, but by the time I was seven or eight years old, he was closer to four hundred and four hundred and fifty two pounds somewhere in there. And he had fallen at work, in a s on a slaughterhouse floor and then ended up having to use a cane and he had a lot of damage to the cartilage in his knees and hips. And so he really couldn't walk very far at all. And so I ended up, you know, running in to go to, you know, if if the bank if the drive through the bank was closed, I was sent in. I I he would send me into the grocery store with grocery lists to to do grocery shopping for the entire household when I was nine, ten years old, you know, that sitting out in the car waiting for me to get done grocery shopping. Mom's at home playing Scrabble or, you know, watching MASH. Like it didn't make a lot of sense. But that, you know, that's that's just the way it was. And so I did do a lot of the the adult sort of sort of things that no child should have to to worry about. Lyndsay Soprano (22:20) Yeah. And then I mean, and through that, I mean, that's traumatic in and of itself. I mean, adoption trauma is a a hundred percent part of your entire story, obviously. But it also ended up kind of well, not kind of, you've had health issues that have come from all of this. I mean, what do we have? We have fibromyalgia and autoimmune stuff. You've got anxiety and depression, ADHD and other challenges. When did you first start noticing? physical like health challenges and make a connection that it might have something to do with your adoption story and the fact that you didn't really know the truth of who you were and make that connection. Yeah. Patricia Knight Meyer (23:04) You know, that's such a big question around Lyndsay Soprano (23:06) Yeah that Patricia Knight Meyer (23:07) now, it's fine. I mean, it's it's interesting because I had a I had so many so much I had horrible stomachs stomach aches as a little girl. Like and they were always emotional. And then as a teenager and into my twenties, I would wind up with more than just stomach aches, but like explosive, horrible times in the bathroom where I I would sit on the toilet for hours and with in excruciating pain and horrible gastric reflux and these were always associated with very difficult emotional times in my life. I was under a lot of stress and my my my gastric everything in my gastric system has something to do with extreme stress. I have pictures of when my first got brought home from my adoptive parents from the hospital. They're feeding me baby food at like one month old. And you know, I'm like, who Lyndsay Soprano (23:58) Eating spinach. Patricia Knight Meyer (23:59) And so then I started wondering well like, well what if I was older? But the baby's in the picture still looks like it's one or two months old. And I literally had some doctors when I when I got all of this diagnosed tell me that feeding a baby that early can actually cause all of these these stomach problems. And so that's sort of what I believed for a long time until I started in learning about adoption trauma. And also just in general learning about trauma in general through through Gabor Matei writes a lot about the the body and trauma. Russell Vanderkirk Studies, you know, it says, you know, your body keeps the score. yeah. And Bessel Vonderkirk. And then also I learned about ACE scores, adverse childhood experience scores. And, you know, for listeners who might not know, there's 10 questions about your childhood. They all relate to abuse, neglect, household dysfunction. and the higher your score, the higher is your chance for different chronic diseases. And my score was an eight. They say that a score of six or more takes about twenty years off of your life expectancy. Lyndsay Soprano (25:06) I've said that I'm probably not gonna make it to sixty five. Yeah. Because my ace score is very high as well. Patricia Knight Meyer (25:12) Interestingly, the ACE scores does not include maternal abandonment as one of their aces. So I'd like to add a temp level to that. A temp, right. wrong to that score because I definitely believe that that should be part of part of their equation. And then, you know, there's also a lot of connections to just a adoption trauma as a whole, separation from your mother, adoptees are four times more likely to attempt suicide. and we're twice as likely to develop a substance abuse problem. And we show up 14 times more than the expected rate in addiction treatment programs. So these are huge, huge predictors or proof to me that that adoption is trauma. Lyndsay Soprano (26:00) Well, when it comes to you know, trauma and when you're when you're talking about adoption and how like I'm I'm s sitting here thinking about Jim, right, who I mentioned in the beginning and about the proclivities that he had and the dangerous behavior that he had and that I would share with him. I'll never forget. we had actually broken up. And when I actually moved across the country, I married somebody that I met like 17 seconds later when I said I broke his heart right back. I certainly did. when that whole stupid shit show was behind me, I came back and actually ended up kind of we like off and on just like kept hanging out with each other and sleeping with each other and we couldn't get we couldn't get over each other to a certain extent. I don't even know if I fully am still over him. I live like 10 minutes from him, which is really weird. And so I'm always thinking about him. I'm always wondering what he's up to. and but I remember one night and one of these particular evenings when I got together with him, we he had just bought a motorcycle and it was like pitch black at night. And he put me on the back of this thing, and we were going like a billion miles per hour. And I we the behaviors that we did were so out of control and so dangerous. And a lot of the experiences that we had together were like that. And I was, but I always just like trusted him because I just loved him so much. And I was like, well, if I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die with you. So let's just go for it. You know, it's just like that kind of a thing. And I have gone through throughout my whole life, I've gone through a horrific amount of terrible sexual experiences. I know that you have ex have gone through the same. And so not only did you go through your adoption trauma, but you also went through these. Horrific sexual experiences throughout your life, starting at such a very young age. And how can that not complicate your body and your nervous system and the relationship that you have with yourself, the safety that you have within yourself, that you trusting yourself and your identity? Because I know for me that it felt like everything was just taken away from me. I didn't have a choice in the matter. And then when it came to the point where I had choices, it didn't matter anymore because everything had been taken away from me. So who gave a shit anymore, right? And so I know that those traumas have a hundred percent to do with my health issues that I have, without a shadow of a doubt. There's no doubt that what I have, which is a very rare pain disease, I believe wholeheartedly stems from those specifically those sexual experiences that happened to me as a kid. Patricia Knight Meyer (28:33) Yeah, I definitely believe that any sort of trauma like that can show up in your body immediately or decades later. Absolutely. And, you know, it's hard sometimes to peel back what is adoption trauma and what is just the trauma of being raised in a dysfunctional home with addicted people. I know that adoptees, or at least for me, we're we'll do anything to be included, to feel like we belong, to feel needed, to feel wanted. And I think that a lot of, you know, a lot of the situations, the the sexual assault situations that I got myself involved with, I blamed myself for it because I felt like I had I I had said in my book, I say something like loose weed or or broken wildflower, I was, you know, I was to blame. I had planted myself in that dirt. And, you know, later on I would find a therapist who would say, You were a child, you know, those things happened to you. Right. but when they did happen, I blamed myself because I thought I knew what I was doing was risky. I knew that I was bending the rules and and pushing boundaries. But I just felt like I think I had numbed myself out so much on so many levels that any sort of risque, risky behavior, it just felt like I could feel alive for a minute. And then when those things went sideways, well, then it was, you know, like you know, a horribly traumatic event that just only made me feel smaller and and less worthwhile than I did to begin with. and it also impacted trust, right? Not only trust in other people, but trust in myself. Lyndsay Soprano (30:13) That's right. Patricia Knight Meyer (30:14) Jeez, I make bad decisions. I can't even trust myself. Lyndsay Soprano (30:17) Right. Yeah. What am I doing with my nobody trusts me? I have no idea what's going on. Like I I completely identify with that. You said something in here. Too many n in your book, too many nights spent on the beach with the wrong kind of boys doing the wrong kind of things, numbed the sadness with a different kind of pain. I welcomed it and threw my arms around it. The pain of wanting to be wanted, pain any cost to belong, to be held, to be seen, to escape reality, if only for a moment. Patricia Knight Meyer (30:47) You're gonna make me cry, Lindsay. Because no one has ever read my work back to me before and Lyndsay Soprano (30:52) This is what I do here at Giving Pain Purpose. Patricia Knight Meyer (30:54) That's that's that's really a remarkable experience on my end to hear those words come up come out. Yeah, it was in writing it, I think that I healed from it a bit. I do know that I learned something about the there was another show called The Adult Chair. And I learned about parts work and dealing with taking, you know, understanding when you're acting from your child self and how to start loving and caring and showing up as the adult in the room for that wounded child. And I think that for many years, I would just suppress that little child. Shut up, stay in the corner, don't come out, don't bother me. And then other once in a while, I'd step back and she would just run loose. And I I don't mean little like when I was twelve, thirteen. I mean even in my thirties, some n you never knew my ex husband call well, yeah. Sorry, my ex husband, my daughter's my my my baby daddy. Lyndsay Soprano (31:51) My baby daddy! Patricia Knight Meyer (31:52) He would say, she, you know, she twisted off again, right? But that that child version would come out and just I would I would act I would go I went nuts. And I had I had my daughter and I was doing things that I shouldn't be doing. And again, then I would I would behave that way, I'd have a bad night, I'd party, and then I'd think to myself, I'd feel so much worse about myself down the road. But then at some point I learned that really all I needed to do was show up for that child self and be the mother that she never had and give her love and and let her know I had her back and that she's safe and that nothing like that's ever gonna happen to her again. And I did this in an in an EMDR session that in it my my mother is having one of her mean mo mean mommy moments. Mean she's standing in the kitchen and she has a knife in her hand. And I remember being afraid That she was gonna stab me with the knife, even though she'd never done anything like that ever. I was just terrified. And then she saw the terror on my face and she said, What? Do you think I would stab you? I mean, that alone saying that to a child was crazy. Yeah. And I remembered looking at her and going, And and in that scene, when I was reliving that moment through AMDR, I put myself in front of that little me. And I s and I visually reworked that whole scene in that kitchen and said, You are safe. And we're we're not giving this woman any power of over us anymore. And I will always take care of you. And as I began to do more of those exercises, I began to realize that. In all of those little moments that I let that little child be unattended, that I was abandoning myself and I was abandoning her. And so this fear of, you know, facing that pain and feeling that pain that that she held inside her only created my the adult me even more pain down the road. If that makes any sense. Lyndsay Soprano (34:02) No, it comes it totally makes sense. Absolutely. Because I mean, we're I I feel like from well, not I feel, I I know that from starting this show and being able to to literally cause like you say in your book, you talk about secrets, right? How you kept secrets. I myself did the exact same thing because I was raised in a Christian home. So there's always a shame component to anything and everything. you're you're shamed on what you dress, what you look like, what you say. I'm still shamed to this moment in my life by my mother. and she doesn't know that she's doing it or maybe she does. I don't know. Narcissism is tricky. Narcissism is tricky. and but the the secrets that we keep and how we store them in our body without us even knowing that that it's gonna cause damage down the road. But having this place that I've created here and giving pain purpose and having conversations like this, I never thought that I would ever open my mouth about the things that happened to me, ever, ever, until all of a sudden I'm asking Patricia to do the same. I gotta do the same back because that just feels a little unbalanced and a little unfair. And so through I also write, and so through writing myself and also doing what we're doing today, there's a part of me that feels like some kind of relief, some kind is kind of therapeutic to have these kinds of conversations because it makes you not feel alone. It makes you not feel so ashamed of the things that you've done, things that happened to you that you had absolutely no control over, and things that you did have complete control over and you still chose poorly. Like we were just talking about, you know, and and we have this opportunity to heal because healing is not linear, it's all over the fucking place, you know. And you you read that in every line of your book, how you were trying to heal without knowing that you were trying to heal. You were trying to heal the people around you without knowing that you were doing all of these things. And it's it's admirable to see where you've come and what you're doing with your life now, which we're gonna get into in part two, about how your your advocacy has come from all of this. But I I wanna get to really quickly. When did you within this with at this point in your life, when did you start realizing that you needed to find your biological family and that that might actually finally bring some answers for you about anything and everything that you were doubting? When did that happen? Like when there was there was there a specific decision that was made? Was there like a moment or was it a progressive thing for you? Patricia Knight Meyer (36:51) Well, I think that becoming a mother is what planted the seed of I I'm gonna have to sort this out. Yeah. I just began to realize and not only becoming a mother, I was also a a single teenage mother, unmarried, standing in my birth mother's shoes at eighteen years old. So I was able I think I did that in a in a possibly an attempt to rewrite history to show that she could have kept the child and it would have been okay because I I did that and then I made sure I went to college. So I was really on a mission to prove like, I didn't have to be given away. Look at me. I can do this. Lyndsay Soprano (37:28) Me. Patricia Knight Meyer (37:29) but at the same time I mean, that's just my theory that that's what happened. But I could have just randomly gotten pregnant. And but anyway. but then it'd be Lyndsay Soprano (37:38) That's gonna be the same. Patricia Knight Meyer (37:39) true. So then I get my daughter, I I've got my daughter at home with me. And then I start looking at her birth certificate. And then I pull mine out and it says delayed across the top, which my Parents, my father didn't end up getting from me until I was twelve years old. And it was he ha he just did this like weird sworn testimony that he he brought insurance papers and had something notarized and Yeah, yeah. Basically said, She's been with us her whole life. And and they just wrote whatever day that he told them down as my birthday and gave me this paperwork. So that's when I started questioning like Well, why it said like supporting documents on it and there was no adoption record as an ex supporting document. There there was no nothing, no mention of that. And you would think that's what you would use as a supporting document would be to prove that you need a birth certificate, would be the adoption papers. So that got me looking for an adoption record. And then that's when I found that there was no adoption record and that I had been, you know, never been legally adopted. And so then that on top of the whole thing with the attorney, not providing the papers got me really worried that maybe I'd been a stolen baby. You'd you'd have heard about people just walking out of hospitals with babies or taking babies, you know, out from from daycare centers and all this. Lyndsay Soprano (38:53) People being crazy. Patricia Knight Meyer (38:54) So I had it in the back of my mind, like I really need to figure this out. And then especially when I realized that the state did not have a a a birth certificate on file for me, I knew that if I lost this one delayed certificate of birth paper that they also couldn't find a copy of, I didn't know what I would do to prove that I was born in in the United States. at the time I didn't have a passport yet or anything. Yeah. So so that was also a reason to start looking. Lyndsay Soprano (39:22) And that is where we are going to stop, my dear. 100%, because we are going to get into part two here. so this has been incredible so far for part one of your story. the next part of your story is where I really want to get into the search for how that happened, how you actually did find your birth mom, what that reunion was like, because I know it was that shit crazy. how you came out of the adoption fog and how you got into advocacy and acceptance and ultimately giving your pain purpose. So we are going to say adieu for right now, my friends, but in the meantime, our the episode for part two is gonna be coming out next week. So make sure that you share this one with everybody that you know so that they can listen to part two as well. If you want more information about her and her memoir, which you absolutely 125% have to read, we are only giving you just the high level in part one and two of her story because it's an absolutely beautifully written, remarkable book, as I mentioned in the beginning, and I will continue to do so. It is called Wonderland. So if you go to wonderlandthememoir.com, you can read more about it. You can also go to myadoptedlife.com and she's got all kinds of information about what's coming up. She's doing all kinds of fun stuff to promote the book too in Austin, Texas. And I'm actually gonna fly out and join her, which is pretty awesome. I d I know. I just can't even believe I'm doing it. And I don't care if I'm gonna be in my wheelchair or not, I will be there. So, all right, you guys, you are exclusively invited to share this unbelievable wonderland of a story, VIP pain journey together. Let's get to the heart of how to heal with you by my side. Please follow Giving Pain Purpose wherever you digest your podcast content. We will be there. Visit us at giving painpurpose.com and follow us on all the socials. Thanks for listening, my little VIPs. Catch you on the other side.