Latest / The Resilience Project / Black-Market Baby: Patricia Knight Meyer on Wonderland, a Made-Up Birthday, and Learning Love Doesn’t Have to Mean Loss

Transcript

Black-Market Baby: Patricia Knight Meyer on Wonderland, a Made-Up Birthday, and Learning Love Doesn’t Have to Mean Loss · 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.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Her name is Patricia Knight Meyer, and her story starts on a curb.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: In 1970, outside a hospital in Houston, a couple pulled up and drove away with a newborn baby.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: No agency, no judge, no paperwork, no questions asked.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: The baby was Patricia.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: She was a black market baby of the baby scoop era.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: She grew up with a made-up birthday, which I still, y'all, I cannot believe that one.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: A name that didn't exist on any legal document, and a question that followed her everywhere.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Was I stolen?
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: She wouldn't hold a true and accurate birth certificate until she was 47 years old.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't even know if that's totally true.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna talk more about that.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Patricia has written all of it down in her memoir Wonderland, Memoir of a Black Market Adoption.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: It comes out November 3rd, and she's been everywhere lately, including Fox Five, just last week.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: She gave me a signed copy in Austin, and I listened to most of it driving to and from our retreat in May in Moscow, Idaho.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you what I told her.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: It is hands down my favorite Adopte memoir I have ever read.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: Not because it's tidy, because it isn't.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: Patricia doesn't hand you a rescue story.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: She hands you the truth that being placed in a better home, I'm air quoting that, saved her in one way and wounded her deeply in another.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: And both can be true and are true.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Her story has been told in a lot of places.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Today I want to go underneath it, into the body, into what it costs to grow up not knowing, and into what it looks like to finally write yourself home.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: So let's get into it.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: It is so good to be with you, Patricia.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: For anyone meeting you for the first time, who are you, even though I just talked about you, and what is Wonderland?
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Julie, it's great to be here with you too today.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I do remember squealing when we saw each other.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know how to say what else to say after such a lovely introduction.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you've already pretty much explained that I was a baby scoop era black market adoptee.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: I grew up believing I was adopted and then learned later in life that I had actually never legally been adopted.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: That set me on a journey toward finding my biological family.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that ultimately led to my blog, and then years later to this book that's coming out today.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's so, so, so exciting.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I can tell you right now, you guys, it's a beautiful, it's a beautiful tome, if you will.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm showing it on screen if you're not not watching.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: It has a it's like a Bible.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, y'all, this is her life and it's beautiful.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: I have loved it.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: She signed a beautiful inscription on it, and we have become fast friends.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm just grateful to be with you today and talking more about this.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: So when we met in Austin, I I seriously feel like we practically tackled each other.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: What has it been like for you to finally be in rooms full of adopted people after so many years of finding each other online first?
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that that was really an insanely validating experience to me because throughout my whole life, especially high school and my early career and jobs that I would take part of, I would go to technology conferences as a young professional.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it always felt like everybody knew each other and everybody belonged together and everybody was on the same page.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I never ever felt like I fit in.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't feel like I fit in in high school.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't feel like I fit in in the workplace or in in jobs.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: And it wasn't until I walked into my first Untangling Our Roots conference, and I think it was in Louisville, Kentucky, that I was this is what it feels like to fully belong.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I immediately felt understood.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I didn't have to explain my story, you know, yeah.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: People understood it right away.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know, though there was just a cor a camaraderie like I'd never felt before.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I shouldn't say that exactly.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: I had been to the Adoption Knowledge Affiliates conference in 2010, 2011, 12, somewhere in there.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: After I reunited with my birth father, he and I went and we were guests at a conference there.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: It was a smaller conference, and it was many, many years before I think the internet had taken hold of the adoption community and brought so many people from different corners of the world together in the same room.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: And also also different aspects of we have the late discovery adoptees and we have uh NPEs and all of the donor conceived.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_01: And so when I was in a room with with these people who were a decade later who were so evolved and the understanding of uh what it of adoption trauma had been so evolved in a decade, uh I was really blown away.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then I was, how have I missed out on this?
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: Because everybody got online in 2020, and I didn't really find you guys until 2023, and that's thanks to Greg Gentry, my co-host at the Happy Hour, because he read something.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: I started blogging when I met my birth mother, and then he read an article that I wrote about adoption and divorce, and he reached out to me and then we started talking and he was like, Hey, you gonna you should come to this conference?
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, I don't know, I don't know anybody, and he's like, Oh, well, you'll know me.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: So, so I came.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: So now, if just everybody would just bring one person they know that's never been to every time there's a conference, we could just grow flow this thing out of the water.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's amazing.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: I love Greg.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: He was one of my first entry points too.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: In a lot of ways, I was listening to the Making of Me podcast and I heard his episode and posted about it because the he said this phrase that really stood out to me.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: He said, I don't want to be an inconvenience.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it landed in my soul because for years I had felt that way.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just an inconvenience.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so it was these words that I hadn't heard put together that I felt really connected to.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: And he was from San Diego, which is my home state, which I thought was really interesting.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: So I've loved connecting with him as well.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's been, I actually help in fireside adoptees and he helps in there too.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: So it's really, really fun.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so moving on to really the meat and potatoes of what I really want to talk about.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's Wonderland.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: I want to know why you came up with that title, and I also want to know why Alice and why the rabbit hole, which all of that is gonna have a little bit more clarification a little later because we're gonna talk about it, but I'd like to know your perspective of obviously where that came from.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well, for a long time I was thinking about calling the book Black Market Baby.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: There's actually already a book out there called Black Market Baby, and for a little while I let that stop me.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: There's also another book out there called Wonderland, and I didn't let that stop me, but eventually the name came to me, and yet I remembered when it came to me, I was, that's it, because I have been living in a land of wonder my whole life.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: But also the metaphors in Alice and Wonderland and the symbolism of Alice falling down a rabbit hole and losing all sense of herself and having her identity shaken and meeting so many strange people who seemed to want to be helping her, but didn't really, and were giving her the run around.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: That all felt very familiar to my story.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: There's a quote called in the famous quote of the book is Who in the World Am I?
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's the great puzzle.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that got me started thinking, well, I had been quoting that quote for many, many years.
• 10:00
  SPEAKER_01: And then that's when I really connected that to the story.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, okay, this is this is definitely a quote that I want to put in the book.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: And then as I began to write chapters, I started thinking, I wonder if there's another quote that would align with this.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then I found I saw a little glass box.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: I opened it, and that reminded me of Pandora's box.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: And there was another one about there were all these doors around, but they were all locked.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so then I got to the point where I got this, I can't remember the name of it, but it was this full online text of the original Alice in Wonderland from Lewis Carroll.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I would search the tech, the full-on text on this page for keywords and themes that related to my different chapters.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: And as I went through them, I began to find these phrases that oddly perfectly captured whatever I happen to be talking about.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think it's odd at all, my friend.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: I think the synchronicities in your book are clear.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Every single chapter, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: I want you to finish, but every single chapter, everybody, she has a quote from something having to do with some work of Lewis Carroll.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: And it is so applicable to what she's trying to tell you.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's beautifully done.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: So just needed to say that.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Julie.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you just have a very early version or but at some point I was at thought different, and there was a lot of opinion about this, by the way.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: When you're writing a book, you ask people in the community, have been very helpful.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_01: This this book could not have come together without all the people in our adoption community.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: But some people were like, I love the quotes, and other people, these quotes are very distracting.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't even read them.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so I learned early on in my journey as a writer that there's a point where you just have to trust your gut on things.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then sometimes you have to just split the difference.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: So what I ended up doing was because one of the commentary was sometimes these take you out of the story.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes I'm so flowing in the story, I don't want to stop and have my mind go anywhere else, but on to the next chap with the into the story, continue into the story.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I ended up taking out about half of those quotes.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so now not every chapter starts with one, but uh but a good one.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you're right, you're right, actually.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm looking and they didn't all but let me tell you something about that.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: Two things.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: Dr.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: Liz Debeta is one of the people that reviewed your book, and she and I are very, very good friends and do a retreat together, which I love.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: It was really cool.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love her too.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: So it was really cool to see that she was one of the people that had read it.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: The second thing is for me, it helped me normalize ground.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even because some of the stuff that you share is very intense, very deep, very personal, and honestly, extremely inspirational that you would allow yourself to be seen in this way.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's one of the things I said to you when we before we got on camera.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I just need you to know that for me, those quotes helped diffuse it, helped me to come down a little, helped me to ground myself before I dove into a whole other helpful for me.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm glad you left them in there.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: So glad.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm so glad you're gonna help.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thank you.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: I really appreciate that.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's great feedback.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you're very welcome.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: And in the author's note that you wrote, you said, and I quote, part of being relinquished is coming to terms with the fact that you may never know your full story.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: How did you come to terms with that?
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: Have you?
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: And are you still coming to terms with it?
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think a big part of writing the story was coming to terms with the parts that I don't know.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's still very hard.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's just, it's, it's a lifelong wound.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: The first mothers that we talk to, they say even after they've found if they're so lucky to find their family members, they still have this wound that they carry, as do adoptees, even if you are lucky enough to be reunited.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: It just, it's still a wound.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: Writing the story helps me come to terms with the fact that there's still things I don't know.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: But to this day, if I'm having to say what my birthday is, to check my bank account or order a prescription or be in the doctor's office, as you know, the fact that I truly do not know my birthday, every time those words that my that date that I use comes out of my mouth, I my mind goes back to the fact that this is a lie and I may or it could be true, who knows, but I don't know.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: It just it's a daily reminder that I don't know my truth and it will stick with me for the rest of my life.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: And if I ever I won't have a tombstone because I want to be cremated.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I honestly think that's part of it.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: I wouldn't want a date on my tombstone that I'd put a I'd put a question mark after it if I if I did have one.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: Honestly, yeah.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: I would.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, of course you would, because uh and honestly, this is the crazy thing.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: Not many, well, that's not true.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of adopted people are unsure of their birth dates for sure.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, especially international.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: Correct.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: But you are a very interesting situation where your birth mother couldn't even fully tell you when it was.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: She thought it was a certain day, but then you were adopted three days after you were born, uh, if I remember right, wasn't it three days?
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's you're you're confusing three days with three weeks.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: Excuse me.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I knew there was a three in there somewhere.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's interesting because she thought it was December 22nd, right?
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then and you thought it was January 5th.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I did, I thought it was January 5th up until I was 12 years old when my adoptive parents told me that they never received my birth certificate and didn't know my actual birthday.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't even volunteer that part of the information.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: I just put it together.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: I was, oh, wait a minute.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: If you've never seen my birth certificate, how do you know my birthday?
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: And then my mother was, well, we really don't know.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: We just guessed because the lawyer's secretary called on the sixth and said your baby was born last night, and I forgot to ask which day.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then I was, it didn't actually, I'm just now in this very moment.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's funny because you could write a book and you still new things come to you.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: Why didn't I ask my mother?
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: Why didn't you just call the secretary back and get some clarification on that?
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: Who wouldn't pick up the phone and be like, hey, did you mean the fifth or the sixth?
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe they thought that when they finally got the paperwork, they would know.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so it wasn't a pressing question because they they thought they would get the papers and then they never did.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: But at some point you think they would have picked up the phone and called.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_01: But I never had the I never let those kinds of I never thought to go that deep with it.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, as a Dominese, I think we tiptoe around those conversations and at some point we just keep it very high level, you know?
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I also think this is my guess, you find out at 12 years old when you're preparing to be, and I don't want to give things away from the book, but you were gonna be in a show and they needed information for this thing, and you didn't you're like, I need my social security card.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: And they were like, Don't have that.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's wait a minute.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_00: So you grew up celebrating a birthday that was basically made up, and but not and they did the best they could, let's just say we we know this, but at the same time, it was made up.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: You were haunted by nightmares, you talk about the dark man in your book.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: So, what was it like as a little girl to not be able to trust the most basic facts of your own beginning?
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's weird because I don't know, uh, when you say little girl, I think little.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: And up until 12, I did I did trust the facts.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: I wondered why I had these dreams about this man, uh, this dark man that was always outside our house peering in.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: But I know as a child, I didn't connect that to my adoption.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: I just knew that there was this recurring nightmare I had over and over again.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then I think around 12 or 13, I did connect connect it to my adoption because it was after my adoptive father uh obtained something called the delayed certificate of birth, not amended.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: That's when that dream stopped.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: And it not only just stopped, I actually, and I didn't put this in the book, and I you're pulling all kinds of things I've never told anybody on a podcast before.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: I had a dream where, and these were the kind of things that actually were in the book, but then you have to take them out because you can't give all the details to everything, or your book will be 800 pages.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: But I had a dream after after I he brought the delayed certificate home, and I believed that that was a true legal document that was that everything was fixed.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: I dreamed this dark man showed up on the doorstep, and I went and grabbed my dad's pistol, and I opened the door and I shot him, and then he disappeared into a mist, and then I never had that dream again.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that the dark man did represent some sort of deep-seated fear of being taken away, and that that paperwork, when I got that delayed certificate of birth and I saw my parents' names on it, um, that gave me the security that I felt like I really needed.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: But at the same time, in the period of time between when they came back with that delayed certificate of birth, and I had learned that they never received my paperwork, I did still worry that maybe I had been a stolen child.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I continued to worry about that because I realized as I got older that it wasn't when you go to apply for a delayed, it means that it's basically saying no one ever filed for a birth certificate for this birth.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: But I realized later that the documents that were used to obtain that, you would think if you adopted a child, the the records you would bring would be the birth, the would be the adoption records, right?
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: Here, look, I adopted her, see?
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: But that those records weren't presented as proof.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: It was just a signed affidavit.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's when I realized, okay, so there's no adoption records.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: And then later the state validated that I had never legally been adopted.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: I found that out when I was 18.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that's when I started thinking, well, maybe I was truly a stolen child, because you heard stories about people walking out of the hospital with people with babies.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_01: And who who goes around handing over babies without any paperwork?
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's just I didn't believe that was a very common thing.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: As I got to know more adoptees and I entered into the adoption community, I learned that that's more common than people think.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why I was so excited to be able to go on uh Fox 5 DC for 20 minutes and tell the world, I wish I had been able to tell them that 11,000 black market babies were were born and trafficked the year of 1970 that I was out of 175,000 normal adoptions.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's a big deal.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's not a small number.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's not it's not just a blip on the radar screen, right?
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's more common than people think.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: And there's there's a lot of adoptees out there still dealing with the consequences of right.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I think even when you were talking about, I don't know why I didn't ask my mom, why didn't you call back?
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: You have written about this as well in the author's note, and I want to talk about this because I think that was trauma.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think it was it was a tricky thing, as you call it.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: You said, and I quote, trauma is a tricky thing.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_00: It either blocks out a memory or retains extreme details of events as if they are still happening in one's consciousness.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: Which has it, yeah.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: So which has it been for you?
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: As you have written this memoir, how did you notice was it tricky for you to pull these memories out and put them onto the page?
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm curious about that because I wonder if there was a bit of fragmentation because of all the stuff that you experienced.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: Does that make sense?
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: I said.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: A lot about EMDR and uh the eye movement.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: The sensitization reprocessing.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I had received some EMDR work, but before I went down that journey, I was been working with a therapist and she's she was Catricia.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure that traditional therapy is helping you.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think that a lot of this is living in your nervous system.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I would highly recommend you do this EMDR stuff.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then I get with the EMDR lady and she said, Well, before you do any of this, if you're writing a book, you might want to make sure that you write the parts you want to write.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: Because once we've done this work, you're not going to be able to be in those moments the way you are these days.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: Because I have, I think that they say when you're it's PTSD, right?
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: When you're having PTSD.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: It is, yes.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: It is.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: You're right.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: I could remember these moments that that I describe in the book, the very, very key moments in such detail.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: And people are questioning, how could you as a child remember these things?
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's because it's PTSD.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: I would have these flashbacks.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: I could feel like I was just re-standing there in the kitchen.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: I could tell you all the things that were happening.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: I could tell you the sounds in the room, almost the time on the clock.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: I could just put myself back in any moment just like that and be there.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: But it's weird because I'd be there in this disassociated way.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: I could kind of rem I can remember it in great detail, but I wasn't feeling it because I was protecting myself from feeling the terror or the difficulty of the moment.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so I spent a lot of time making sure that all the stories that I wanted to get out were out before I actually did do EMDR work on some things.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: Now there was a scene that now I can't even remember if I put it in the book or not.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: There was a scene in the kitchen with my mother where she was holding a knife and I jumped and she said, Do you really think I could stab you with this?
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: And later, when I went into EMDR therapy around that, my therapist had me stand in front of little Patricia and block her and tell my mother, We are no longer afraid of you because I'm here to protect her.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: And once I did that, I couldn't go back into that moment with the same sort of it, it just became more of a memory memory for me than a it just happened yesterday kind of a lived traumatic experience.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's exactly what EMDR does.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: It reprocesses, it helps you to be able to actually see the traumatic events as something that don't have to actually impact your present.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I I love how you describe that.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember some scenes in the kitchen, but I'm not sure if I remember that one.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: So that's interesting.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for sharing that.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think that I left that.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: That was another one of those things.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: You go through, I've been through years and so 20 drafts probably.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: And many, many at some point you can only take one or two of the once you've done a story that shows that your I I teach this in memoir writing classes.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: Once you've established a story that shows that your mother had these terrifying fits, you don't have to show 20 of them or even three of them.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_01: You don't even have to show two of them sometimes.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: So some of them had to come out, right?
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, of course they did.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_00: So in the brown babies chapter, which is such an interesting title, you wrote, Babies shouldn't have to die to make me special.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: Chased by the ghosts of those lost embryos, I became the compliant daughter.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: And later in The Dark Man, if it weren't for those dead babies, I'd belong to my parents.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: Take us into that if you can.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: What did you do as a child to believe that your belonging depended on someone else's loss?
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: It definitely made me feel like I had to make up for that maternal loss, that I had to be as good as, that I was in competition with these babies that would have I understood mirroring as very, very little, and not just in my own way.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_01: I I understood that I could not look like or be the child that my adoptive mother had carried.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I somehow deep down inside knew that she would have loved them differently than she loved me.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_01: Or I imagined that.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: I can't speak for her.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe she could have loved me the same amount that she would have loved her own natural child.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: I have an analogy about this because I have my own children, I have my own daughter and my own grandsons that I'm biologically connected to.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: And then I have my daughter's best friend that I helped raise since she was seven, and who also ha gave me three boys that I also consider to be my grandsons.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm sorry to these children, I hope they don't and Nahal is her name.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: But the way I describe the difference is if they were each standing on a railroad track and a train was headed for them, I would not think if it was my daughter or my two biological grandchildren, there wouldn't be a second of thought.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: I would just act and I would push them off the track.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: I would still act and push off all the other Mahal and her three children off the track.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: But I would think about it for a second first.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that to me indicates something going on with biology.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe not everybody will feel that way.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe that's just how I am.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm I don't mind being honest about it because I think there's some things that we all want to say, oh, we just love you so equally.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I d I don't know that that's at least for me, when I think about the difference of how my my adoptive mother would have loved me versus her own biological children, I think it has a little bit of something like that tucked inside it.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that we pick up on that as adoptees, and we know that there's that granularity of difference.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: But when it comes to looking like the person, thinking like the person, knowing that you came out of that person's body and that you grew in their belly or did not, right?
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: There is something there that creates a disconnect if if you didn't have it.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I think this makes me think of a quote that you had of being entangled with a desperate sense of gratitude for being saved from a motherless place while still feeling as misplaced as any item in the lost and found box at the library.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: How did gratitude and misplacement live together in you?
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: And when did you first notice that they were both there?
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: I don't remember not I don't remember a time that I didn't feel like they were there, really.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: The gratitude for sure.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: I remember my gr up at the house up high at my grandmother's place, there were a lot of really poor children.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: We there were people on her street that didn't just just were just dirt poor.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I grew up playing with these children.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember going in their homes and thinking, wow, maybe this is what my life would have been like if I hadn't been adopted.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I had meant I had that message of you should be, you're so lucky, you're so special, you were chosen, and Lord knows what your life would have been like.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: I often really believe because of Annie, the play Annie and Oliver Twist and all of that, that I I really believe that there was an orphanage that I was supposed to have been in if I had not been adopted.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: Orphanages didn't, I mean, maybe they did exist in the early 70s, but in my mind, there were these 1930s, 1920s orphanages where I was going to be eating gruel out of a bowl if I hadn't been adopted.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: And that was my belief system as a kid.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so I really did.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: On the one hand, I felt so thankful that that wasn't my fate.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: But then on the other hand, I also knew some adopted children through school, and they had a much healthier home, a much nicer home.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I could a clean home, swimming pools and maids and game rooms attached to their garages.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember thinking, well, I didn't I get an adoptive family like that.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: So there was this sense of, I'm so thankful it could have been worse, but also this other feeling of, but if I was, if they chose this family for me, why was I chosen with a family where my mother's an alcoholic, my dad is severely obese, and we have the lights are getting cut off, and we've got fleas and roaches, and we mail the the grass in the dry in the yard was mailbox high, and it was very, very embarrassing.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I didn't have friends come over because I didn't want anybody to know how I lived.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_01: And it's interesting though, because in the early days when I was adopted, the house was beautiful, the house sparkled, and something happened where everything just suddenly devolved.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I I don't know if it was my my father's obesity got worse or my mother's drinking got worse, or both just eventually there was a tipping point and it all got worse for both of them.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_01: But there was a time when all of our family members used to come over and gather our house, and then somewhere between like five and eight, it became a place where nobody came.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: And and I don't know what happened.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: I still don't know what happened in my family to make all that go so bad.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_01: But uh but I began to worry that if anybody found out that I could get taken away.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: I began to worry that if if teachers or doctors or anybody came over and and saw how we were living and that I was being verbally abused, that that things would not be okay.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I even remember it was the weirdest thing.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: I like I fell out of a bunk bed at a camp when I was eight years old, and I I fell so hard onto a cement floor from the top bunk that my whole one side of my face was black and blue.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I came home and my mother took me to this pharmacy, and the pharmacist pulled me aside away from my mother and said, Is there anything you need to tell me you can?
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: Is your mom good to you?
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: Is she nice to you?
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: Did she hurt you?
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember thinking, Well, I know she didn't do this to me.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: I fell out of a bunk bed.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not lying about that.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: But I often wonder if he sensed that I was still holding something back.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_01: Because I remember thinking, oh, I probably shouldn't tell him that that she yells and screams and cusses and breaks things and scares me.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: Because that's a secret I know I'm supposed to keep.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's not something I'm supposed to talk about, right?
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, and I was fearful, I was really fearful that if anybody found out about that, that I I could get taken away.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: And where to?
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe an orphanage.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you don't know, right?
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_00: You don't know.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you for answering that question.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: You've talked about your parents.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: I want to talk a little bit about them.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_00: You have shared that you had a Hispanic father, a white mother, likely wouldn't have fit an agency's picture for an adoptive family back then.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: So, how does knowing that shape the way you understand what they did?
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think in the 1960s standards, especially in Texas, they would have been considered a mixed-race couple.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: My father was mother was a Hernandez, and his father was part German and part Spaniard.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, oftentimes my adopted father got mistaken for being African American.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: He looked like a light-skinned black man.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, he was also already well over 300 pounds when they were adopting.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I think obesity is more common today than it was back then.
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: That would have been considered to be really abnormally large.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know that they could have passed a home visit.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: He was a meat inspector.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't make a ton of money.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: He did have a lot of side businesses.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that after they spent some time on an on several agency wait lists, they just felt like, well, we have to do a private adoption.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_01: And it meant like we just talked about.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: There were many private adoptions at the time.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think that they understood that they were in the middle of a black market adoption until the paperwork didn't come, or maybe they had some sense of it even before I was handed over.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because I remember my mother did tell me that the attorney was telling us that your birth mother won't leave the hospital.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so, yes, the baby was born on the 5th or 6th, but you can't get her till the 11th because you can't come to the hospital until your birth mother has left.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so maybe, maybe even my own mother and father thought, well, it's awful weird that we're supposed to like can't go in the hospital and that we have to meet along this curb.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: But by that point, I think they were so desperate that they were just, we're just gonna do whatever we possibly can to have a baby.
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think they ever thought that the papers weren't gonna come.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_01: And then I can't imagine the the terror that they would have felt.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: Do we go to the police?
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_01: Because they at that point the attorney was threatening to take me away from them if they didn't continue to pay for all these random bills.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_01: They had paid more than twice of what they had agreed on, and ultimately they decided to just walk away.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: And if they hadn't walked away, they were running the risk that I was gonna wind back up in this same dirty attorney's hands.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_01: So, and no, and very strong risk that I certainly wasn't gonna wind up with them.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I can't, I don't blame them for viewing them as being victims of the the secrecy and coercion and lack of oversight and regulation that was happening then and is still happening today.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely agree for sure.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I want to take a breath right here and tell you listeners and viewers about something.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: I know, as you've heard Patricia talk about, that a lot of the people that listen and watch have done a lot of things.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_00: They've read a lot of books, maybe they're in free groups online, or they still feel, even with all of that, that they're healing alone.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why I created The Refuge, a monthly community for adult adoptees, where you don't have to explain yourself to be understood.
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: We have a monthly gathering call together, a seat in revolution, one of my coaching programs where you get to listen to a teaching each month, and a thread for every episode of this podcast actually gets dropped a couple of days ahead of time.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: One member's words that I'd love to share with you is there's no need to perform here.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: For the first time, I can be still.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's$47 a month, and you can come exactly as you are, and you can find the link in the show notes.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get back to the episode.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: So on that curb, you wrote that encoded among your first somatic memories is your separation from your mother.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: And that for you, abandonment trauma equates rejection as the natural consequence of love.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: That love meant at the very least, loss.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_00: Where do you feel that in your body then and now?
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: And can you tell?
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: I feel it in my I need more of, I need more of your exercises and classes.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: I've been thinking about going to the retreats that you do with Liz, right?
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: Because I still struggle to connect with how my trauma lives in my body.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: I do know that it lives in the anxiety that comes out of in my body.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: Constantly I'm dealing with anxiety.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'm dealing with aching muscles.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's turned into fibral myalgia for me.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's turned into Hashimoto's thyroiditis.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: It has at some points in my life, it was depression.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: So, and as a little girl, it was tons of stomach aches.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then in relationships, when it comes to love equals cataclysmic abandonment, it's this self-fulfilling prophecy that whoever I love isn't going to stay.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think I honestly pick people that I expect will leave so that my expectations will be met.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: I'm still single.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: And at this point, I'm like, I don't even feel I think I'm in a very happy point in my life now where I'm like, I don't I can't imagine wanting or needing, I don't have certainly on a book lunch, I don't have time to have a relationship.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: But if uh but if I meet, if if I do wind up with Mr.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_01: Wright, he's gonna be an amazing person because it's gonna take an awful, amazing person to get me to like stop everything I'm doing and let somebody in because I've just learned for so long to just be okay doing my own thing.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that that mindset can can be healthy, but can also be just another defense mechanism to blocking the flow and try and being vulnerable to love in your life.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's so, so hard to be vulnerable.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: But and I know we'll probably get to more to conversations about my birth father, but that was one of the gifts of finding him and having a really healthy reunion with a birth parent, is that I was a hundred percent open and vulnerable to him.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_01: And he took that with so much responsibility and care and handled it so gently.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I think he healed a lot of those, those wounds that I had about love and trust because he he truly got it and he he truly helped me heal those those core wounds a great deal.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I love that story, and we will talk about that a little bit more.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_00: I get the not being connected to your body and still feeling difficulty being able to.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's very common.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of the things that I see with most of the clients that I help.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's this head knowledge is so prevalent and full, and there's so much stuff there that when I ask them, how do you notice that in your body, they just look at me like I have two horns growing out of my head.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how to identify it, but you did a good job describing that you had inflammation throughout your body, that you noticed that it was in your belly, which I don't know if you know that that's very typical of adopted people.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: They have a lot of stomach issues, and that has to do with that part of our body, has to do with our identity.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_00: It has to do with where our worth lives, it has to do with that.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: So it makes sense that that would be stirred up and then it ends up going, yes, going sorry.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: I just remembered something that I think is so important.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_01: I had talk about body stuff.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_01: I had this horrible year of constantly feeling like I needed to pee.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I know it's horrible.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: It ended up being my pelvic floor was in lockdown.
• 40:52
  SPEAKER_01: All of the muscles in my pelvic floor were clenched super tight.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_01: And this was a stress response that I eventually learned after going through all this pelvic floor therapy.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_01: But one of the very interesting things is I had a C-section.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I would go to this pelvic floor therapist, and every time she would massage, she somehow said that part of this release was needing to massage my C-section scar, which was horizontal right above her pubic scale.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_01: I have it too.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I, every time she would touch it and start massaging it, I would start sobbing, sobbing on her table.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: And then she would tell me, you need to go home and do the same thing.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, I can't, I can't, I can't do that.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: I can't touch that part of me.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: I cannot massage that.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_01: And she's and lucky for me, she was also, I don't know, some people call it woo-woo, but she understood the mind, body, spirit connection.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_01: And she was like, This has a lot, this has something else to do.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: This is a psychic energy in your body connected to you the birth of your daughter or birth in general.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: And and then I still do the massaging because she talked about how important it was and that it would help.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_01: And when you constantly feel like you have to pee 24-7 no matter how much you go, you're willing to do anything.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: But I cried every time that I suddenly realized for some reason I had this difficulty with massaging.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_01: There was this was the core a place of a core source of my wound.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: I I still don't 100% understand it, but I'm fascinated by it.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then the other thing I wanted to talk about, both in relation to your program that you were just talking about and to the work that you do with Liz, is a year ago, this weekend, or a year ago or so, I went to the the cub retreat.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: I'd been to many concerned United Birthparents retreats.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_01: Same thing I'd been to other conferences, right?
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: But at that Cub retreat, I spent some time with some first mothers that one night.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I didn't have, we sort of haven't gotten into it, but I had a difficult reunion with my birth mother.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I thought I'd written a book, right?
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_01: I must have processed all this.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_01: Surely I processed it.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_01: I cried a lot while I was writing different chapters.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: Surely this is processed.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: I went back to my room after having this really beautiful, supportive conversation with birth mothers, and I sobbed.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_01: I cried in a way that I don't know.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_01: I might have only cried once or twice in my life.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_01: This sorrow of this loss of connection with my birth mother was profound.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I was so shocked.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_01: I was, I had no idea that I still have this much grief swirling around in me, needing to come out.
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_01: Now I do, right?
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not so naive to think that I got it all that off that night.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_01: I still tear up right now thinking about it.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I encourage people who think just because I've read the books, just because I've done a few classes, just because I do yoga, that doesn't mean anything.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's it you could still give yourself the grace of knowing that there still is and maybe will always be.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Grief that that has to be honored and let out and released, and otherwise it will continue to give you problems, physical, health, mental, whatever, throughout your life.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that even relates to this next question because you write that being relinquished to a quote unquote better home saved you in a certain way, but it also wounded you deeply, which we talked about in the intro.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then simply you said adoption is not a promise of a better situation.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_00: We hold all of it in our body, and we're going to talk about that even more.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_00: But what do you want people to understand about that?
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_00: Especially people who still believe the better life story, quote on.
• 44:39
  unknown: Yeah.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think a big part of the work that we're doing, and that we all want people to understand is that adoption isn't does not is not a win-win situation for everybody.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: But also, more importantly, it should not be the first option.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_01: It should be the last option.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_01: And that it's not a binary choice.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: And that there's so many other options and avenues that we're applying a a permanent solution to a temporary situation.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_01: And that if we took some of the money that we're giving adoptive parents in tax credits to the first mothers in these difficult positions just for the first six months of their motherhood, we could be enabling so many mothers and children to stay together and preventing vast numbers of people in our society.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_01: They're going to walk through the world to have what are the statistics?
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_01: Again, twice as likely to have an addiction problem, four or five times more likely to commit suicide.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_01: We're not solving a problem.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_01: We're just moving it down the line and creating a different situation for society to deal with down the road.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_01: And most people never put those two things together.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, because it's it's not talked about as much as it should be.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_00: And but I think let me just say this.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_00: I've been corrected when I've said this before.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's died by suicide now.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_00: We don't say commit because we or attempted suicide because commit sounds like they committed a crime.
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_00: When really, no, we know that's not what happened.
• 46:08
  SPEAKER_00: What they've done is they've got to be a good idea.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for educating me about that.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_00: You're welcome.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_00: I was educated because in one of my first episodes, I said that and I had somebody call me out on it.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_00: A couple of people actually.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so I made a correction the next episode because I was, I'm going to be careful with my language.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_00: I know what that means.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: So now it is now it is died by suicide.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: Died by suicide, but that's not that stat.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_00: That stat is that we know is for sure because they're still actually reviewing and redoing the Ollie Foundation one that said we were 35 times more likely to attempt, attempt suicide.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_00: That's yeah.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_00: So I you're welcome.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_00: I just wanted to make sure that we all were on the same page now.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_00: You know what?
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_01: We're all that's what we're here.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_01: We're educating each other, right?
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's what we try to do.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's a beautiful thing.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_00: So you talked about the attorney.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_00: You eventually did track him down, and he was the one who brokered your placement, and you learned, and you've talked about this already, that he extorted your parents and probably threatened them that he would take you back.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_00: So from that, in that search, it led you to a biological cousin whose placement was handled by that same attorney.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_00: What was it like to find out that someone shared not just your blood, but your same origin story?
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 47:23
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it was very validating to learn that that her story.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: I felt very sorry that she went through that experience as well.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: But I also had never a hundred percent believed the story because my parents didn't pay all their bills, and I wasn't sure if they were just coming up with some other reason why they never got my paperwork that tried to make them sound like they had been the victims.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_01: But then when I learned about this happening to her, then I knew that it it was true and that he had been, and we were probably not the only ones.
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_01: I I do want to clarify with you though that uh you say I tracked him down.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_01: I sort of did, in the sense that yeah, I found his sex secretary, yeah, and I had the opportunity to meet him after he was semi-retired.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I basically chickened out.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_01: I was so overwhelmed, scared, frustrated, just got out of college, had a new job, no money.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I it had a baby, I think, didn't you?
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_01: A five-year-old, yeah.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, five-year-old at this time.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I just and my mother was living in my dorm room with me and it and two dogs that we weren't supposed to have in there.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_01: I was a hot mess at the time.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_01: It was candy.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_01: I felt I felt like there's no way I can like open this can of worms right now.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a shame because I think about what if I had done that and I had found my biological father sooner.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: But I do believe everything works out the way it is supposed to, I suppose.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't think I was psychologically ready for that.
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so when I meet adoptees, I I have some very clothes, some people in my life who are adoptees who have no interest in looking.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I I try not to ever pressure anyone because we all do that on our own time.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_01: And there's nothing worse than than adoptee entering a reunion that they are are not ready, don't want, or unprepared for, or not interested in.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a shame.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that's the scary thing on both sides, right?
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_01: We never know whenever we're entering and when we're reaching out to somebody about a reunion, we don't know if it's a good time in their life or where they are, what they're going through, if they're emotionally ready for it or not.
• 49:28
  unknown: Yeah.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_00: So very true.
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's a bit of a luck with the draw.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_00: It is a bit of a luck with the draw, and it's interesting because my next question was going to be about this.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: You have actually been in reunion with both of your birth parents since 2010, and you've said you wanted the book to help adoptees who walk into reunions they're unprepared to have.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_00: And you just were talking about that.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_00: What do you wish someone had told you before yours?
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, uh, well, that's your your reunion may open up more questions than than answer questions for you.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_01: You may come away with more questions than you had from the from the get-go.
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_01: I wish that they had told me that I really needed to think about what I wanted out of reunion and to do the emotional work, find a I don't even know if adoption trauma-informed therapists existed back then, but to try to find one, or at least do the work in therapy.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_01: I wish I had read several of the books.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_01: I wish I had read The Primal Wound before I entered reunion.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_01: I wish I had read The Girls Who Went Away before I entered reunion.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_01: And now I would certainly tell people get connected with all these communities.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_01: Attend some some online Zoom meetings, uh, understand these different perspectives that that can come.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's so unpredictable.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_01: No two adoption reunion adoptions or adoption reunion stories are alike.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_01: So it's very hard to give people advice because there's there's so many different players and it's never the same.
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_01: You don't know what you're gonna walk into.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_01: You don't know if those two people stay together, and now that you have you're gonna meet full-on biological siblings, you don't know if you're gonna expose that there was a an affair in the family.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so until you have educated yourself enough about all the potential, the m well, just at least the most likely potential scenarios that you could walk into.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody's gonna go walking through the forest completely unprepared with no flashlight and bear spray or whatever.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_01: You arm up when you go on a grand adventure.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I would just say you have to think about it that way.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_01: You have to mentally think of how do I how do I protect myself?
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_01: What am I gonna put in my in my adventuring bag before I hit the road?
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_01: Because it is a b it can be very it's guaranteed to be incredibly difficult.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so learn reading about the mistakes other people have made and and understanding the rules of going slow and understanding that it takes two people to have a reunion and that everybody is gonna have some different expectations and that the person with the least expectations is the person that's going to go that you have to follow.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's like when you're they say when you jog with people or you run with people, you always have to set the pace at the slowest runner or the slowest runner on the hike.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's the same thing in reunion, but yeah.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love that.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I just want to touch on this before we move into a couple of closing questions.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_00: You had a beautiful reunion relationship with your birth father until he passed.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_00: And what did that relationship give you in the time you did have?
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_01: It truly gave me that genetic mirroring that I needed so much.
• 52:33
  SPEAKER_01: That was that was a huge part of it.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_01: And he and I were so much alike, not just not just visually.
• 52:39
  SPEAKER_01: Like people say genetic mirroring, I think people immediately think, well, I they just look like you.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_01: But we had the same mannerisms, we had the same expressions.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_01: We we dissected questions and and we problem solved in the exact same way.
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_01: And we could almost it really felt like we could just read each other's minds, we could look across the room and know exactly what the other person was thinking.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_01: And to have that kind of connection with another human being when you've been starved of it for so long was incredibly healing.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll tell you, losing it.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_01: Again, losing it a second time is really hard.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm so glad I had it.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_01: I'm so glad I had it with him.
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I'm really scared of that because my birth mom situation wasn't great, and my birth father's situation has been amazing.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_00: So just considering that makes me emotional too, and I'm so sorry.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's really hard when it's really hard when you lose it again.
• 53:38
  SPEAKER_01: But we did have 10 years together, and he thought we were only gonna have five.
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so And I I released the book on the anniversary of his death.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I remember to make a happy day out of a very sad one.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_01: Of course.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_01: But but he did, he gave me so much.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so I want to note that a lot of people have said, Well, I found my birth mother it went horribly wrong.
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_01: Why in the world would I want to go in again with a with a and I I would have been one of those people, but Yeah, I was one of those people, so she yeah, and she she she pushed me.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_01: I I didn't really want it, and then she went off and I wanted his information, but I wanted to decide what I wanted to do with it.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_01: But my birth mother didn't give me that ability to make that choice.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_01: She reached out and told him about me, and that's what pushed me into that reunion.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_01: But I'm so glad it happened.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so I tell a lot of people at first when just when you're born naturally to a parent, sometimes you just take after one parent more than the other.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I really think that I just took a lot more after my birth father, and that's why we had the amazing connection that we did.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, just just because the first one doesn't go well, that that could actually indicate that the other one might have some more likelihood to be a good one.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the final quotes that I want to bring up that you have in your book is the tie that does bind adoptees, adoptive parents, and birth parents is loss.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_00: We have all lost something.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_00: And those losses are traumatic.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_00: We were just talking about one and require healing.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_00: And you've been very clear that you see the conditions that created the baby scoop era showing up again today.
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_00: What do you most want people across the whole constellation to take from Wonderland right now?
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there's across the constellation, I think that there's a little bit for everybody, both for first mothers and adoptees.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: I want them to understand how complicated reunion is.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I am not proud of how I behaved with my birth mother.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_01: I I definitely take ownership of the part of the problems that she and I had.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_01: I have so much empathy for first mothers, and many of them were instrumental in bringing this book into the world.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I hate that I'm not gonna give away the how the book ends necessarily, but I I wanted to be as honest about how difficult reunion can be as possible and how sometimes irrational people's feelings are while they are trying to deal with with the reunion, how trauma can come back and hamper our reunions, and that it's not our job to fix each other.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's just our job to fix ourselves.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so I don't want the book to scare anybody away from reunion in the constellations.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_01: But I definitely wanted it to be sort of like a hand a handbook on here's what not to do.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_01: But for the larger community, for the world out there, I wanted Wonderland to make people think differently about adoption and start poking holes in this idea that it's a win-win for everybody.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_01: And the reviews that I have gotten back from early NetGalley reviewers, and these are people who the majority of them have no connection to adoption.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I'm really relieved because people have been saying, I never really ever even thought about adoption.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_01: I knew it existed out there, but I never thought about what it was like to be adopted or what it was like to really push a child.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_01: And now you've made me really think about I know people adopted in my life, and I've I never really thought about how that impacted them.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's making me want to go have conversations with them and ask them questions, making me want to learn more about it.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_01: And the best critique, one of the things that people have said that they wished they'd had more of in the story is more information about adoption and and black market, the history of the black market.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm glad.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, go, let's go research some more.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_01: I actually added it to a page on my website.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to learn more about this, here you go.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, if I'd put more of that in there, people would have said, Well, I want more of your story, right?
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_01: And this is so you can't make everybody happy, but I'd much rather have people say if they're they felt like anything was lacking, it was the fact that they wanted to learn more about the history of black market adoption or the history of private adoptions in general.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and that's something that I really hope that the book will motivate the average person who reads it to start reconsidering how we approach adoption in general as the first option, it should really be, like I said, the very least.
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_01: And then people act like they don't even know what the first if well, if not that, then what?
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_01: Use your common sense, people.
• 58:23
  SPEAKER_01: How about family?
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_01: How about kinship?
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_01: How about guardianship, temporary guardianship for family members?
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 58:29
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a whole other conversation to be honest with let's make sure birth fathers get to let's legislate to make sure they have a right to know their child exists before before the baby's place for adoption.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 58:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_00: So lastly, I want you to tell us about the book launch.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's coming out November 3rd.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh down the rabbit hole is happening in Austin on November 6th.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_00: There's going to be a panel and a live performance of a chapter from the book.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_00: And with all of that, where can people find you right now and learn about all of this information?
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, my blog at myadoptedlife.com is all the information is there.
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to go straight to just the information about the book and the event, you can go to wonderlandthememoir.com.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_01: The there is a link to sign up for free tickets to live stream the event.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_01: Even if you don't think you can watch the live stream, which is going to be happening at 6 30 central time on the night of November the 6th.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_01: If you do register for the live stream, a recorded link will be sent to you afterwards so you can watch it later on NAPS YouTube channel.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_01: But uh it's any net proceeds from the event go to the National Association of Adoptees and Parents, Saving Our Sisters and Adoption Knowledge affiliates.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_01: So there's opportunities to donate to the event as well.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's important for people to know the event is free.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_01: So it is, it's completely it's completely free.
• 59:59
  SPEAKER_01: And we just I just got some really awesome news about it just day before yesterday.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_01: Sarah Reinhart of the Making of Me podcast is going to be our MC for the evening.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's so exciting.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_01: She just moved there.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_01: She literally just moved there.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_01: And that was that was part of it.
• 1:00:13
  SPEAKER_01: She she reached out to me and said, Hey, I'm I got tickets to your event.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm looking forward to coming.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_01: And then I was like, Great, wonderful.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, also, how now that you're here, would you be interested in being an MC?
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_01: I really need one.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_01: And she was like, uh, she would be so honored.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, I would be this amazing.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, so I'm so amazing.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thanks for sharing that.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_00: And as we close today, there is a line in Wonderland I underlined twice.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_00: Patricia writes for that her, as for so many adoptees, love meant loss.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_00: At the very least, loss, and at the very worst, this is what she mentioned earlier, total cataclysmic abandonment.
• 1:00:56
  SPEAKER_00: That wasn't a belief she chose.
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_00: It was encoded in her body before she had a single word for it.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_00: On a curb, in a handoff, in a story nobody wrote down.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_00: And here's what moves me about Patricia.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_00: She didn't wait for the system to give her the truth she went looking.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_00: For the attorney, even though she didn't actually meet him, for the parents, for a cousin who shared her beginning, for a piece of paper that finally said who she was.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_00: But the piece of paper was never the whole answer.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_00: It never is.
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_00: The real work was in her learning slowly that love doesn't have to end in leaving, that she doesn't have to be compliant to be kept and that her story belongs to her.
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_00: That's what belonging is, not something a family, a system, or a document hands you.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_00: Something that you build from the inside.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_00: It is something that can stir a lot in you, so don't rush past it.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_00: And if it feels supportive, put a hand where you feel it, whether it's your stomach, your heart, and breathe there for a moment.
• 1:01:57
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're ready to do some of this work, Trisha talked about it.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_00: If you're ready to do it in person with other adopted people, Dr.
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_00: Liz Debeta and I are hosting on Mother to Revolution and Adopty Healing December 4th through 6th in Highland, Michigan.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_00: Just 14 adopted people.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_00: Her film on Mother will be shown.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_00: There will be writing, thematic work, and one-on-one sessions for everyone.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_00: There's also a massage therapist coming.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be amazing.
• 1:02:20
  SPEAKER_00: All meals are included.
• 1:02:21
  SPEAKER_00: There are 10 spots left, and the link is in the show notes.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_00: Wonderland comes out November 3rd, and if you're anywhere near Austin on November 6th, yep, she's showing it in the image there too.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're anywhere near Austin on November 6th, go down the rabbit hole with her or register online to watch.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_00: Patricia, thank you so much for trusting me with this conversation, and thank you for writing the book so many of us needed.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, thank you.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Julie, and thank you for all of the wonderful quotes from the book and research that you did pulling that together.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_01: That was fantastic.
• 1:02:54
  SPEAKER_01: One of the best interviews I've done.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you so much.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that I say at the end of every episode is stop outsourcing belonging and insource it.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I will see you next Thursday.
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_00: Have a great week.