Creating a Family: Talk about Adoption & Foster Care
Are you thinking about adopting or fostering a child? Confused about all the options and wondering where to begin? Or are you an adoptive or foster parent or kinship caregiver trying to be the best parent possible to this precious child? This is the podcast for you! Every week, we interview leading experts for an hour, discussing the topics you care about in deciding whether to adopt/foster or how to be a better parent. This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are the national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them. Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content: weekly podcasts, weekly articles, and resource pages on all aspects of family building at our website, CreatingAFamily.org. We also have an active presence on many social media platforms. Please like or follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter).
Creating a Family: Talk about Adoption & Foster Care
An Adoptee's Journey
Click here to send us a topic idea or question for Weekend Wisdom.
Join us to talk with Cam Lee Small about his new book, The Adoptee's Journey: From Loss and Trauma to Healing and Empowerment.
In this episode, we talk about:
- You wrote this book for Christian adoptees. Why that specific audience?
- Adoptees have been objectified, scrutinized, and infantized. Can you give examples of where you see this?
- The narrative surrounding adoption, especially international adoption: you were saved, you are better off, God called us, etc.
- Loss and grief that is inherent in adoption. Ambiguous loss and disenfranchised grief.
- Is trauma a part of all adoptions?
- What are the stages of recovery from trauma and how can adoptive, foster, and kinship parents help with this recovery?
- “The cost of gratitude-driven silence is high.”
- I am adopting (kin) a two-year-old girl and planning to keep her basic birth story as part of open conversation. She has details in her story that may be difficult to hear and I would like to keep those from her until she is much much older. Do you agree or disagree with this idea and why? How old were you when you learned your full adoption story?
- Your parents gave you full access to your records, which you could look at with them or alone. Was this helpful, and do you recommend this approach?
- 3-5-7 model for preparing children for permanency
- The reunion experience. Dr. Susan Branco’s seven themes of emotions that participant report from their reunion experience.
Please leave us a rating or review. This podcast is produced by www.CreatingaFamily.org. We are a national non-profit with the mission to strengthen and inspire adoptive, foster & kinship parents and the professionals who support them.
Creating a Family brings you the following trauma-informed, expert-based content:
- Weekly podcasts
- Weekly articles/blog posts
- Resource pages on all aspects of family building
Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.
Hey everyone, this is Creating a Family. Talk about foster, adoptive, and kinship care. Welcome back to our regular listeners and welcome to our new listeners. I'm Dawn Davenport.
I am the host of this show as well as the director of the nonprofit CreatingaFamily .org. Today we're going to be talking with Cam Lee Small about his new book,
The Adoptee's Journey. Cam is a licensed clinical counselor, a transracial adoptee, and a mental health advocate based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was born in Korea and relinquished into foster care at age three.
He was adopted to a family in the U .S. in 1984. His private practice, Therapy Redeemed, specializes in the mental health needs of adoptees and their families.
Welcome, CAM, to creating a family. Thank you so much for having me here, Don. You wrote this book, The Adopted Journey, for Christian adoptees. Why that specific audience?
It is certainly part of the love letter to adoptive communities overall. Some adoptees in the church,
in the local church context, have not always been given access to language and research and testimonies to help them navigate some of the experiences that are almost too deep for words.
So my hope was to contribute to resources and tools that are out there to help them at different points on their journey, whether that's identity development, birth search,
reunion, and other layers of mental health needs so that we can really bring the conversation into the light, normalize it, and give hope to people that are going through it.
The language is positioned to invite Christian adoptees, and it's open for anyone from really any background to sit at the table and we can talk together. I thought as well when I was reading the adoptee's journey,
that although it was written for Christian adoptees, I see it as being a valuable resource, regardless of your faith background or any background. You say in the book,
adoptees have been objectified, scrutinized, and fantasized. Can you give us some examples of where you've seen this? We think about these terms, and for listeners or anyone engaging the book,
I'm thinking of the child or teen I'm just trying to make sense of what's going on in life. I mean, as you mentioned in the intro, I was growing up in Wisconsin and I didn't really have mentors or adopted role models to just take me under the wing and say,
"Hey, what's up, Cam? How are you doing?" With this whole being Korean in the middle of Wisconsin kind of thing. I was just feeling isolated. And when I put some of these pieces in the book like objectified,
scrutinized, infantilized. What I'm really trying to speak to is that adoptee who feels as if the experiences that they're going through are too much for my parents to handle or they make me feel like I'm wrong or make me feel guilty for having different questions or even curiosities.
And we're really trying to point to some of the cultural narratives around adoption to help that adoptee know you're not alone. That there's a reason why when maybe you ask about your birth family,
you get shut down right away or you're strongly discouraged from going down that road because she gave you up. You would have been XYZ.
The circumstances surrounding your relinquishment are clear -cut, black and white. No nuances involved. And we want to say, well,
is there more to this story? So an example of someone being objectified is we're thinking, and again, I want to say that I'm not trying to point fingers here. I'm putting an idea out there to say,
hey, look, here's some background. Maybe the idea that we're rescuing a child to fulfill a humanitarian sort of mission to say, hey, look, I'm so faithful,
or this is the means through which we want to prove that our faith is right, or that our way is the only way. Look, we adopted this child over here. Without asking the child about how they're going through it,
without giving them any space to kind of dialogue with us about that, there's an objectification kind of layer that we're just seeking to unpack together. As a mental health provider,
I'm working with adult adoptees on a daily basis, who are starting to think through these pieces, and their adoptive families are very resistant to giving them information about their history,
to having discussions about the ways that we were raised, some of the events that happened, prove it to us, it's just in your head, suck it up kind of thing. And that's a lonely place to be.
So the idea that the adoptee is this perpetual child, that adults, we know the best for you, And this was the only way to do it.
There are no other avenues or, you know, layers of the situation to consider. That's it, that you're rescued. That's where we're starting to break into that conversation with the entry points,
being the idea of objectification, scrutinization, where are you from? Where are you really from? Do you ever want to find your real family? Why do they give you up? Tell me your story right here, right now at the gas station, the cashier is asking us about it.
Come on, honey, or my mom or someone's dad, they just start sharing the story right there at Chocco, JCPenney's, Walmart, wherever. The child is right there, eight years old, right?
How do we see it from a different angle? And then how do we hear from the adoptees? How does that make you feel when you're being talked about like that in front of others without your consent?
What's that like? Let me pause this discussion with CAM right now to remind you that we have 12 free courses on our website thanks to the support of the Jockey Being Family Foundation.
Through their support we are now able to offer these courses for free. You can find out more information at bit .ly /JVFsupport. That's B -I -T dot L -Y slash J -B -F support.
You talk about the narrative surrounding adoption. It's especially international adoption, but I think it could also apply to other types of adoption. And the narrative that you speak of is,
you were saved, or you were better off, or God called us to do this. How are those narratives destructive for adoptees? When I think about the narrative arc or a storyline,
we're asking who is a static character? Who is the hero? What are the characteristics of the different folks involved in this particular framing of something? Who gets to have strengths and skills and potentials to grow?
Who is functional to move the plot forward? So the narratives that adoptees right now, or adoptee advocates right now, are asking us to reconsider are the ones that keep the child or the archetype of the adoptee in this sort of one -dimensional,
non -agentic, they don't have a choice sort of recipient of charity without their own perceptions or interpretations or lived experiences or even any empowerment in terms of making changes immediately in their own families or perhaps even when we're talking about policies or the way that agencies operate mental health services to include adoptee sensitive information,
trauma integration, disenfranchised grief. That's where some of those narratives can really shape us in ways that prohibit or inhibit or to a healing process.
Mm -hmm. And one of the problems, too, is you were saved, or God called us as implicit in that, especially that you are saved, is that you should be grateful. You owe us, we are the source of all the good that has happened,
that type of thing. Yes, and saved from who or what. I wanna think about my family in Korea or Korean culture or Asian culture,
and for quite a portion of my life. I had this vision in my mind that over there in Asia or Korea is a really bad, dirty,
poor place. And here I am in America, where I have all of these opportunities and these benefits to my life that I've been saved into.
That was really difficult to navigate as I was becoming an adolescent and young adult trying to reckon with the truth about my connection to Korea and the family that I have that are still alive there.
And I talk about that more in the book, but yeah, that process is something that we're allowed to ask for help around. In the adoptees journey, you also talk about that loss and grief is inherent in adoption.
And as you mentioned just a minute ago, the interesting part about this loss and grief and the words the mental health professions choose to use with it is ambiguous loss and disenfranchised grief.
How is that loss and grief different from the loss and grief others might feel in a more typical situation? We're talking about death and ambiguous loss is a way to represent the idea that my mom in Korea,
well, I don't know if she's dead or alive actually. And yet she's psychologically present. I miss her. I wonder about her. I have questions about her. I have daily and seasonal moments and personal milestones where I wonder what would it be like for her to be here or even to know about this.
There's an ambiguity. I think the term from Pauline Boss's work, that someone significant can be physically absent, yet psychologically present.
So for adoptees, we imagine our first families being psychologically present as we wonder, who are they? Where are they now? What were they like? Am I like them?
Am I different? Do they think of me? Do they think of me? Yes. All of those things without the verification process without being able to see for ourselves and meet with them in person,
physically absent. And there are a lot of situations represented in why they would be physically absent. Absolutely, we recognize that. But that's the ambiguous nature of some of that loss.
And the grieving process isn't always accessible or normalized for us because you've been adopted. Look at everything that you've gained, buddy. Just be thankful for what you do have. It goes back to the,
"You should be grateful." Do you think that trauma is a part of all adoptions, regardless of the type of adoption? I like to think about that question I posed in the book.
I think it's chapter four on trauma. What is trauma? We want to get some operational definitions going on here, but without going into tell of the cycle babble, what we're asking is what is the impact of a child being separated from their caregiver at any age from birth to five and beyond?
What is the impact of that? What is the impact of early adversity on a child's emotion regulation system, their nervous system, their psychosocial physiological development?
How do we track that? What's the data say? And then how do we treat that? And when I use the word treat, I'm not saying like, Oh, you're just broken damaged goods forever,
and we got to fix you. We're saying how do we intervene or walk alongside someone and help them just navigate through some of these complexities in a way that results in them being able to still live a meaningful,
satisfying life, to have relational intimacies and connections and have capacities to learn well, work well, cope with stressors of life, contribute to the community. That's what we're going after here.
And as a mental health professional, I think we get really stuck on, well, is there loss in adoption or not? Is there trauma in this big word, trauma? Yes, there's a place for that discussion,
but I think if we linger too long about these definitions of you have to meet the DSM SM5 criteria, the way that they say it, and if you don't, there's no treatment option for you. There's no funding for you.
There's no cultural understanding for you. We have to enter in through a new angle. I think we have to say, well, let's ask the adoptee that we're serving right now. What does it mean for you, given your context and 1000 variables in there,
the age of relinquishment, the context around that, the birth family members, where are they now? Is there incarceration, substance use involved, is there coercion? Was there deception involved in the relinquishment in the first place?
For me, when I traveled back to Korea and heard more of my mother's story about her life pre relinquishment, it gave me some more context and even some new revelation about what relinquishment means,
what needs to happen or not happen in order for a woman to be led to that point. And then we're talking about, does a mother want to place her child? What is that?
There's some complexities in there. Who could have helped? Who chose not to? Who knew about me? Who was walking with my mom and she struggled, wow, should I really place his song for international adoption?
What are the benefits and all of these pieces? So, yes, there is a value and asking, "What does trauma mean to us in this situation, and how does it have an impact on the quality of life of each individual that's navigating that,
and how do we walk alongside as allies?" Did you know that hopscotch adoptions have been a long term, and I do mean a long term supporter,
of creating a family and our mission, and this podcast. Hopscotch Adoptions is a Hague accredited international adoption agency placing children from Armenia, Bulgaria,
Croatia, Georgia, Ghana, Guyana, Morocco, Pakistan, Serbia, and Ukraine. They specialize in the placement of children with Down syndrome and other special needs.
They also do a lot of kinship adoptions. They place kids throughout the U .S. and offer home study services and post -adoption services to residents of North Carolina and New York.
So along the lines of how do we walk alongside as allies, I hope that adoptive parents are considered part of the allies. We should be. We should be the biggest allies.
So what are the stages of recovery from trauma and how can adoptive foster and kinship parents help with this recovery? How can we be the ally? There are a handful of adoptee -led resources that speak to this.
I like to ask this question of when it feels as if your trauma or symptoms related to trauma are becoming managed or when you feel as if there's some subjective experience of healing,
how would we know? What would you see in your life or what would you see less of in your life that would indicate that you're on this quote unquote pathway to trauma recovery?
Now, that's subjective to each person. Dr. Judith Herman's work in trauma and recovery, her book there and the research talks about these layers of healing or stages of healing,
we could say, three of them, the first one being safety, establishing safety, number two, remembrance and mourning, and then number three, reconnection with or connection with the community. And that third one is where we get that idea of a survivor's mission that I may have been through an atrocity and one of the ways that gives me meaning and it allows me to move forward is to transcend the atrocity and turn it into
a beacon of goodness or light or healing for the public good. Not that I have to go through trauma in order to be worthy or valuable in the world,
but her idea is when we can find meaning and when we can mobilize our lived experiences in service of something greater than ourselves, there can be a healing aspect of that.
So for allies to acknowledge, number one, that adoption is irreversibly linked to loss and some kind of psychologically overwhelming experiences or early adversity,
family separation, trauma. When allies can acknowledge that, well, then they can start asking some of these questions about what are some of the pain points that an adoptee might be navigating that aren't generally acknowledged by society or that I might have or they might not want to be telling us about that we can listen in on,
what are some of those pain points? And then what can I do as a listener or as someone who lives in proximity to or adjacent to an adoptee, what can I do to help them in their life immediately,
practically? And then, zooming out 30 ,000 feet, what are some of these macro scale, wider picture realities that I can also be aware of and maybe advocate for or alongside them,
like the Adopt These Citizenship Act, for example. There's this sort of loophole where somehow children were allowed to be relinquished internationally and then placed into the U .S. without ensuring that the paperwork finalized their citizenship.
And now there are these cases of adoptees being deported back to the countries of origin where they don't have the language. We advocate for this one all the time, and the frustrating thing is that it was really just an arbitrary date to cut off,
because now when children are adopted internationally, they automatically get citizenship. Nobody's got to file anything, and they arbitrarily cut that date off, and there's no reason for it.
Anyway, yeah. Amen. I won't get on that soapbox, but still it is, it's infuriating, but it's been reintroduced this year. year. We got really close last year, so feeling optimistic.
And to have a witness, like what happened between you and my eye just now, I mean, that is allyship. To have someone say, like, "I can see how that could be a frustrating thing. I could see how that's important.
How affirming and life -giving that can be, even just to hear it from, like, your own adoptive parents." Who you should be hearing it from. Amen. Yes. Yeah. We got a question from our audience when they heard that you were going to be on the show.
So I want to give you a chance to answer this. It's not as directly connected to the book, the adoptee's journey, but I think you can probably tie it in. She says, I'm adopting Ken,
a two year old girl, and planning to keep her basic birth story as part of open conversation. She has details in her story that may be difficult to hear. and I would like to keep those from her until she is much,
much older. Do you agree or disagree with this idea and why? How old were you when you learned your full adoption story? It's so great that people are asking these questions and that there's a willingness and a desire to provide truth and information to the children who are being placed.
I was three and a half when I moved to Wisconsin. And ever since I can remember, my parents gave me access to a photo album of pictures that they took on the day that I arrived at Chicago O 'Hare Airport.
I was able to kind of look through the intake documents from Eastern child welfare and different pamphlets and paperwork. And that was just always something that I had access to. The concept of my full adoption story is multi -layered.
And what I mean by that is there are interpersonal pieces to that of what was the story between my mom and my dad in Korea? How did they get together?
Why was I relinquished? Were the other family members involved? What was the community like in Busan back then in the 80s, what was Korea like, what was going on in the world.
Now that macro level, I really didn't have an interest in that until I started looking further into my adoption story in my mid to late 20s. And up until that point,
there weren't people in my life trying to say, hey, man, here's some information about all of that when you're ready, go ahead and you can review it. It really wasn't on the front burner of our minds in our conversations in our family or my friend group.
The reasons why I was relinquished, that's all in my paperwork. And as I mentioned, I remember just kind of reading through that. My father had died in an accident and my mother was part of this family system,
but circumstances didn't allow her to continue rearing me. I remember seeing that. So, when we are asking about what parts of a story or an origin story do we share with like a two -year -old or an adoptee,
I like to think about that idea of age -appropriate truth. What is age -appropriate truth and how can we say true things and how can we say I don't know when that's truly the case?
Because part of the skill set that we're trying to pass down and impart and teach the current generation of adoptees is number one, consciousness raising, number two, sitting in ambiguity,
sitting in both and sitting when there's this discomfort of I don't know all the answers of my story. This is frustrating. This is lonely. It's painful. And I'm still living my life.
And I still experience amazing friendships and family connections. And I have different opportunities and fun things that I'm doing in my life sitting in that both and now the age appropriate truth part is let's say that there was a non consensual process through which a woman becomes pregnant and gives birth.
How do you explain that to a two year old. And when I'm working with families, we kind of look back at the family of origin and say, how did you all talk about some of these socially sensitive taboo kinds of topics,
even just something about religion, physical intimacy, finances. In some families, there's an unspoken rule that we don't talk about that. In other families, it's pretty open,
and then everything in between and beyond. So for you, if it's the case where it's like, I have a personal discomfort talking about some things,
well, that's an area for you as a caregiver, where part of your job as an adoptive caregiver is to process that on your own time when you can, so that you can provide this true,
honest, factual information to your child. That's part of your work as a caregiver that you can do independently and get support for that formally and informally. Now the child, I think part of our fear could be,
they can't handle the truth. If they were to hear how they were really conceived or born or why they were relinquished, it would suffocate them.
It would destroy them. They would be overcome with anger, fear, sadness, bitterness, resentment, frustration, confusion, all of these things and our trains of thought take us all the way down the road.
Essentially, it's just gonna be really bad for them and they won't have a good life ever, okay? When what we're finding out as we're hearing adult adoptee testimonies right now, and as we've been hearing them from them for the past few decades,
is information empowers adoptees. We've got gaps in the holes in our origin stories and the loss of continuity is one of the eight layers of loss that we have to navigate.
Loss of continuity, meaning it's like walking into a movie, you miss the first 15 minutes of it, that's really important to know about to set up the rest of the movie, okay? Now, I don't want to discount or dismiss the importance of an adoptee's life by likening it to a movie or dramatization,
but some of these layers of just being alive that we take for granted, like, oh, knowing what I looked like when I was born, having baby pictures, knowing who my parents were, their names, dates, the hospital,
all that that we take for granted can be incredibly meaningful. But to our listeners question here, which I'm very thankful for, you're presenting an idea where, well, the information that's great if it was sunshine and rainbows and a walk in the park information,
you know, great, we'd be happy to do that. But the information that you're alluding to is that there are some difficult /hard or dark or maybe some events or behaviors and choices that would not asked the birth family in a positive light,
or maybe it would bring out more questions than answers. I still hold by the idea that if you have a chance to look this model up, it's called the 357 model by Darla Henry,
who is a licensed clinical social worker, 357 model for preparing children for permanency. And in that research, it really helps us understand that children need to know what happened. doesn't matter how hard or out of this world that seems,
children need this basic experience of knowing what happened to me earlier on in my life, okay? Knowing what happened, knowing who's with me, who can I turn to for support right now?
How will I know that I belong and what does the future look like for me? Those are some of the layers. And we're acknowledging that pain can be part of that process. And in that process, there's a sense of co -regulation that can happen between the caregiver and their child that in the context of this safe,
warm, wise, loving relationship that I have with my grown -up here, I can practice sitting with material and thoughts and information that doesn't have a one -size -fits -all answer,
that can bring up feelings of discomfort, that almost forced me to learn how to sit with conflicting feelings and emotions. The piece about that that benefits us is that when I as an adolescent or young adult leave your home and start engaging in other relationships and other life experiences,
I've already got a trail of practice. I've got a track record of I got a category in my mind and body to where I've sat with the tough information about my life.
And yet I have felt safe. I have felt heard and included. I've participated in the meaning making of my own life. I've practiced going through different choices and options and making decisions and seeing the outcomes.
That's a skill set that I'm launching out with. Okay, so the consciousness part is the gradual revelation of adopt the awareness that option is not win,
win, win for everyone involved, that it's happily ever after, that it ultimately saves lives absolutely. The consciousness of that, that's a process and that's what we're scaffolding for Adopt -A -Youth.
And then number two, the skill set of sitting with the range of feelings, okay? It's like on a scale of one to 10, children are born with the ability to feel all the feelings in the world and we've got no skill to deal with those feelings.
Okay, this is a beautiful illustration from Dr. Becky Kennedy. And sometimes parents or society wants to just, let's dial those feelings back down to a three so that we can ourselves as caregivers handle them or deal with them,
'cause we don't know how. And then maybe you learn a couple of coping skills. But for adoptee consciousness, what our job is to say as an adopting? Yes, you are appropriately responding to non normal situations on a scale of one to 10,
you've got a 10 on the feelings radar for the way you hear your adoption story, the way that you feel your feelings in the community to which you were placed. Let's increase your skill set to a 10 as well to match that skill set,
meaning your coping strategies, your community, your ability to think critically about things, your willingness and desire to explore different options for coping, how to express emotions and deal with those and negotiate that.
It's like basketball practice or learning an instrument or memorizing scripture, just these skill sets that we expect children to do in other areas of the life. Well, my goodness, they have the capacity for that.
Let's pull some of those into adopt the awareness and consciousness too. So I admire the way that your heart is set to care for your to say like, I want to protect them from this information.
My invitation is to say, how do we protect them from when they do, if they do hear it, or when it later on in life? And it's like, suddenly I'm 16 years old. I haven't practiced thinking about this at all.
And now you're giving me this manila folder of the truth about my life. That's like skiing down a black diamond, and you don't even know how to go down the bunny hill yet. - Yeah, and can you imagine a worse age and a bit 16 to have this dropped on you when you're trying to figure out so many other things.
And to the listener who sent that question, like, thank you so much. I mean, I have love for all the folks that are really trying to serve the adopted community in this way. Yes, it's a multifaceted question. So yeah,
certainly work with folks you trust in the community. Listen to other adopted testimonies. Work with counselors and helpers that you feel you can invite them into your life.
And just the fact that you're acknowledging I need help and wisdom from outside of myself, that kind of humility is like gold. We need that. The scary one is the doctor parent that says,
I don't need any help. I can do this all by myself. No wisdom required. That's when we've got some more work to do. Amen. Don't forget that we're looking for your questions so that we can answer them on our weekend wisdom.
We won't use your name unless you want to stick. We'll usually answer them in about five to 10 minutes. So it's a quick snack of education and support. Send your questions to info @creatingafamily .org.
The last thing I want to touch on is the reunion experience. Yours was a mixed bag. I think it would be fair to say you were able to find through some very good detective work,
your birth mom as well as your birth aunt and uncle. But after the initial contact, you did not have any more contact. So a mixed bag. You talk about Dr. Susan Bronco's seven themes of emotions that adoptees can often experience with reunion.
What are they and how did that fit into your story? In the book, my hope is that as you read through, you're catching the pieces from chapter one,
two, and three. And actually, all throughout the chapters, I have these portions called Dear Hissong. So these are letters to a younger me. Hisong is your, where's your birth name?
Yes. Yes. Yeah. Thanks for the clarification, Don. So I was born as Yi Hisong. So Hisong Li. And writing to him to really give us a chance to see it from the child's angle.
And as I mentioned in the book, like part of those vignettes are from stories that I heard from my birth mom and my aunt and uncle, like during our reunion about what really happened back then.
And as I'm narrating that, the hope is just to kind of develop a sense of like who this person is that's searching and why they're searching and what a search even is for me. And then when we finally get to the search,
I think in chapter eight or nine or something like that, it's the idea that search and reunion, depending on just the context of your life, the age you were when you were adopted, orphanage,
parents living or not. It is a case by case. It's a very individual, intimate experience that is not cookie cutter. It can't be, you hear a cam story and apply this to everyone else's.
Really inviting every adoptee to acknowledge that your reunion and your concept of search is yours. It doesn't have to be mine. It doesn't have to be adoptee as a monolith.
So it's Certainly Taylor made and Taylor fit to each person involved. So my experience with those seven layers, it flows from my experience of those layers at the beginning of my life,
loss, rejection, grief, fear, isolation, conflicted feelings. If you imagine a child and like I said, for me, I was three years old. So I mean,
my son right now is three years old, and I can just imagine him waking up tomorrow in another country with people that don't look like him, right? So for me, waking up in Wisconsin,
who are these people? What's going on? Feeling a sense of loss, abandonment. What happened to foster mom? I was living with her for six months, eating and playing with her kids,
all that stuff. What is this? And does this food you put in front of me? What are you saying? I don't understand what you're saying. I'm trying to speak. So it's the notion of how did I acknowledge that experience as a toddler and then learn how to ignore them,
put them aside and say, in order to survive in this new land, we need a new game plan. We can't acknowledge this stuff. In fact, don't even admit that that you're Asian,
try to introduce yourself as white, which is sometimes what I did. So now finally getting to the reunion experience, I said something like being on that airplane,
the airplane from Chicago to Seoul on my first reunion trip back, it's like rewinding an old VHS tape back to three -year -old He song. Because I had to put him on pause,
or there was a part of those yearnings and longings inside of me that were halted in that moment, questions, what's going on. And now it's like I'm hitting the play button.
Now that's all sort of dramatic imagery that I've sort of come to realize in this particular season that helped me kind of just put some flesh and bones on what And sort of like resuming this part of my life that had to stop 30 years ago.
And so I say it felt like blood returning to its body, water, 30 layers of grief returning to the shore. And it just erupted. I couldn't stop crying, right? And in the taxi cab there,
just convulsing and breathing and just no clue what was happening. And I didn't have words for it. And then my mom cancels the meeting, but then it's back on again,
being there at the adoption agency in the office, trying to hold all of that. And then reading through my folder, this stack of paperwork essays and intake information,
some old photos. And then also sitting there with my mom right in front of me, asking me questions in Korean and me not understanding her, having my friend interpret for us and eating together and I said that it's like chapter one and chapter eight of a book kind of closing,
pressing up against each other where it was like a surreal experience where maybe part of her remembered what it felt like to be physically in a room with me, but I'm not him anymore,
but I am at the same time. It's this sort of conglomeration of contradictions and paradoxes and resolutions and additional grieving and I liken it to the final meal that I had was with my aunt and uncle and my mom and my friend who was interpreting for us.
It feels like we're having a meal at our own funeral and resurrection at the same time. It's really hard to describe for me and those two words came up for me as I think about that.
Meaning that after all of these years, my mom wraps up a piece of lettuce with bulgogi and rice and puts it in my mouth. I'm like, yo, I'm a grownup. Why are you doing this?
But for her, it's like she's doing that in tears. Why? Because probably the last time she did that, I was three years old and she was getting ready for this very ambiguous journey.
Here we are 30 years later. And then saying goodbye to them, leaving Korea with almost more grief than I had when I entered it, carrying some of my mom's grief even,
knowing that she was still in process of telling people in her life about me, who's holding this with her adoption is still a stigma in the context through which I was relinquished,
still stigmatized for her, and that she lost her partner, my dad. So she's grieving that. And then once I'm hearing more about her actual like personal story too,
just having it in my heart to see it from my birth mom's point of view, in addition to my point of view as an adoptee, I left Korea with more grief than I had when I entered it.
So I experienced a range of feelings and I certainly share a little bit more about the Marvel factor in the book, but yeah, certainly ups and downs, but I didn't let the struggle destroy me.
Part of my work as a clinician is that I believe there's hope in the business of hope, saying that yes, there are some tragic, just unspeakable things that are inherent to an adoptee's journey,
and it doesn't need to keep us buried in the ground. Mm -hmm. Beautifully said. Maybe my family or pieces of my life story were buried through relinquishment and adoption,
but my life became a resurrection. I'm trying to bring these realities out into the light so that they can breathe. I don't need to be ashamed of it. And maybe you could help someone else say, "Wow,
me too. I've had some of those questions as well. I'm so glad I'm not alone." The book is The Adoptee's Journey from Loss and Trauma to Healing and Empowerment.
Thank you so much, Cam, Lee Small for being with us today to talk about the book. I truly appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me, Don. Before you go, I just want to put in a plug for a training that creating a family has created.
It's an interactive training, or it can be used as a support group curriculum for foster, adoptive, and kinship parents. Each of the curriculum, there's 25 of them cover a different topic. Each curriculum comes with a video,
a facilitator guide, a handout, and an additional resource guide. You can get more information at parentsupportgroups .org. That's parentsupportgroups .org.