An Adoptee's Search for Identity, Family, and Belonging

Join our discussion with an adult adoptee about her search for her birth family and her identity. We will talk with Julie Ryan McGue, a domestic adoptee and an identical twin. She is the author of Twice a Daughter, which explores her coming to terms with her adoption and her search for her birth parents, and Twice the Family, which explores more of her relationship with her adoptive family.

In this episode, we cover:

• Tell us your adoption story.
• What role did adoption play, if any, in your childhood?
• Feelings of needing to be perfect.
• Fantasizing about birth family. 
• When did you begin to search for your birth parents? 
• Was searching for your birth family something you knew you would do from a young age?
• After considerable effort, you located your birth mother. At first, she said she did not want contact. How did that leave you feeling? 
• After you had phone calls and met, you didn’t want to tell her much about your adoptive parents. 
• How did your mom (your adoptive mom) react to your search and when you found your birth mother? 
• How do you wish she had reacted?
• What happened with your search for your birth father?
• Did you feel the same sense of shame, embarrassment, and rejection? 
• Your birth mom’s reticence to help you find your birth father and your continued search caused a rift in your relationship. How is the relationship now?
• The tension between the birth parents’ right to privacy vs. the adoptee’s right to know. 
• Your experience with online adoptee forums. 
• The primal wound.
• Importance of adoptee support groups.

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.
Dawn Davenport  0:00  
Welcome everyone to creating a family. Talk about foster, adoptive and kinship care. I'm Dawn Davenport. I am the host of this show, as well as the director of the nonprofit creating a family.org. Today's show is an interview with an adoptee author, and we're going to be talking about her search for identity, family and belonging. We'll be talking with Julie Ryan McGee. She is an American writer and a domestic adoptee and an identical twin. She is the author of three books, including twice a daughter, which explores her coming to terms with her adoption and her search for her birth parents, and twice the family, which explores more of her relationship with her adoptive family. She also has a bi weekly blog and a monthly column, which you can find at her website. Julie mcgu, author.com there, she explores what it means to find out who you are, where you belong, making sense of it all. Well, Julie, welcome to Creating a family. I enjoyed twice a daughter and twice the family quite a bit. I'm looking forward to talking with you. Why don't we start by tell us your adoption story. How old were you when you were adopted and you and your sister were adopted together? Were you the first children of the family? Are your parents? New parents? Et cetera, et cetera. So just kind of fill us in on your your story.

Speaker 1  1:21  
Well, like so many parents, infertility was the issue that my parents faced for many, many years. They were in their mid 20s, back in the 1950s which is late, considering most people had already started their family. So their infertility issues led to adoption. My twin sister and I were adopted together. We are so grateful that we were placed together. That was a policy that Catholic Charities was very firm about, also grateful that our parents were willing to take on two babies all at once. We were three weeks old, so really tiny. We seemed always to have known that we were adopted. I really don't recall exactly, but I think I was about four years old, and I do talk about that in twice the family that that conversation that surrounded finding out that we came from another mommy's tummy, which is often how adult parents describe it to their child. Yeah.

Dawn Davenport  2:26  
What role did adoption play, if any, in your childhood? And I think here's a time where I would like for you to read from twice the family book on page 31 starting with it didn't seem to matter to my parents.

Speaker 1  2:42  
It didn't seem to matter to my parents, whether we were adopted or their biological children. Their shared goal was to build a large Catholic family. They professed to love us all equally. But for me, it wasn't so simple. I would spend a lifetime wondering about what happened to my family of origin and why closed adoption took me away from them, I would also harbor and interfere that if I wasn't good enough, if I didn't obey every rule and fulfill every expectation, then my adoptive parents might consider Giving me away like my first family had done?

Dawn Davenport  3:22  
Yeah, I want to explore that, that fear a bit. So I want to read from page 69 in twice the family book. And the reason I'm doing it is because I want to jump around and cut in and out, and I be hard to ask you to do it, even though the audience would probably prefer to hear the author read it in her own voice. You say because the facts of my adoption were a mystery, I viewed it as a secret, a stigma in my mind. If I was good enough, if I was perfect, maybe other people wouldn't judge me for being adopted. Maybe I wouldn't judge myself either. I wanted to explore some with you, because this is something we we hear commonly from adult adoptees, and that is the need to be perfect. Can you talk some about that and how that played out in your life and perhaps in your sister's life?

Speaker 1  4:14  
You know, I think it's, as I talk about in the book, an unrecognized fear, even though my adoptive parents profess that they loved us and they cared about us and we were exactly what they wanted, there still is in the back of your mind this, well, something was wrong with me that I was placed for adoption, and I think that that fear of being given away again causes us to try to be everything that we think our adoptive parents want us to be. Certainly, first born children face that same thing. There's this a lot of pressure on first borns to be perfect. And certainly the younger kids are like, Oh, I can't compete with that. They're just too good. So. That was always going on in the back of our minds. And I think, I think my sister was the same way. There was a lot of things by being a twin, there was a lot of things we didn't verbalize with one another. We just sort of would look at each other, give each other a look, and say, okay, yeah, we'll do this. Let's go with this. Mom wants us to clean the basement, we'll just do it together. And I think that camaraderie that the two of us shared was a big part in that being perfect was we could be perfect together, and it felt right, yeah,

Dawn Davenport  5:31  
but, but it's a burden for a child to feel like all parents want their kids to behave and do well or whatever, but, but we don't want our children to feel like that. There is an expectation that if they weren't to do this, that their relationship with us is not secure, correct? Yeah, and that is something that I think it's adoptive parents we have to be aware of, even if our kids are not talking, because I'm assuming you never brought this up with your parents and you didn't

Speaker 1  5:58  
know No. And I think if there was some kind of permission given, and I guess that I would speak to the adoptive parents here that are listening is give your child permission to fail and say it's okay and maybe recognize what they haven't said. I feel this pressure to be perfect, because I don't want to be I don't want to leave this family. I love this family, and so I think that permission given would be so helpful,

Dawn Davenport  6:25  
yeah, and actually to speak it, not just think it as a parent, oh, I don't want them, but to actually let them know, did you and your sister think much growing up about your birth family?

Speaker 1  6:38  
We did, and I would say in a casual way, when we were younger, certainly we would talk about it in our bedroom. We developed a little fantasy about our birth parents. We decided that they were this cute little High School couple. She was probably the head cheerleader and the head football player, and for some reason, just making up that story in our head made us feel better about the situation that they were they were young, and they needed to go to college, and they wanted to go to college, and we sort of said, well, we get it. We get it much later. Though, in my first book, twice a daughter, I find out that that is not anywhere close to the reality we're going

Dawn Davenport  7:24  
to come to, that we're going to come to that yeah, in just a minute, because things work like, yeah, we're going to get into your search. I think that again, I think it is very common, from what we hear from adult adoptees, to fantasize about your biological family, parents, brothers, sisters, all of it. It is, I think, very common to fantasize. And I think it's adoptive parents. We need to recognize that, that it's normal, it's natural, and part of the fantasy involves pitting your perfect, imaginary birth parents against your very real, not so perfect adoptive parents, and I'm going to read a bit from page 50 and twice the family. And again, I'm reading it because I'm jumping around some you said I developed an inner voice, which I would later call my wronged adoptee voice. At first, the voice only whispered in my head when I matured and developed a rich fantasy life about my first family, the voice spoke louder, saying things like your other mommy, your real mom wouldn't do something like this. As I came to pay more attention to it, the voice became indignant, protective, claiming that someday your real mommy will come back for you, and when that day comes, things will be so much better, perfect, even I think that's common, don't you? From your talking with adult adoptees, yes,

Speaker 1  8:41  
yeah, in conversation a lot with adult adoptees, and I think that's one of the things that's important about writing about it and talking about it, is to put these fears and fantasies that we had growing up, out in out, into the air and just recognize the fact that, yes, we all did that, and that was probably really, really normal.

Dawn Davenport  9:06  
Let me take a moment to remind you that we have a Facebook support group for foster, adoptive and kinship families. It is a group that is inclusive of adoptive people birth families as well as parents through foster care, adoption or kinship care, please join us. It's a great group. It's where I hang out online, almost exclusively where I hang out online, and you can find it at facebook.com/groups/creating, a family. And now back to the show. When did you begin to think about searching for your birth parents?

Speaker 1  9:47  
A couple of times. I knew from my parents that it was a closed adoption. They didn't have any information, and they readily said that we don't have any information about your background. And as a child, I. You know, I was in a secure situation. I thought, oh, okay, I can't know, and there's some accepting of that situation. When I was 30 years old and pregnant with my first daughter, my husband said, you know, why don't you contact Catholic Charities and see what they can provide? And it was still in that era in Illinois, the laws changed a lot sooner than some states, but it was still in that era where nothing could be shared. And that essentially was the letter that I got back from Catholic Charities. And then 25 years passed, and I had a breast biopsy, and my husband said, you know, you got to try again. We really should have some medical history, and the stars were aligned. The state of Illinois had changed their adoption statutes, and I could access my original birth record, which opened up a whole new can of worms and was very educational, because the original birth record had my birth mom's name on it, but it was an alias, which was perfectly legal back in the 1950s and 60s, and my birth father's name was legally admitted. So we didn't know that until we started digging into it, and we had some big pills to climb and trying to access information, right?

Dawn Davenport  11:18  
And that's what a lot of twice the daughter is about, and you spent considerable money and a lot of time on searching for just basic information. At first, all you were seeking was medical information,

Speaker 1  11:34  
right? And I didn't have that. I contacted Catholic Charities again, and they gave me a three page type letter with all the non identifying information that was in their file, that was all that they could legally give me until my birth mother was contacted and she gave permission for more information to be released, and that's a whole nother process, and

Dawn Davenport  11:59  
when she was first contacted after this is again, after considerable effort and time, you finally were able, really, by hiring a private investigator to locate your birth mother. At first, she said that she didn't want contact. How did that leave you feeling? Oh

Speaker 1  12:17  
my gosh. Well, the stars were all coming together. It was my daughter's oldest daughter's birthday. My birthday was coming up. A friend was in the hospital, and I was just devastated. I couldn't imagine how my mom didn't want to know my sister and I, you know, I think that's another fantasy that adoptees have, is that our other parents, our first family, is waiting for us, that they don't know how to find us and we don't know how to find them. And I really thought that she would welcome us with open arms. One of the reasons I felt that was that I knew from the intermediary that she'd never had other children, so I couldn't imagine why she didn't want the only two daughters she ever gave birth to to come back into her life. And I didn't know that kind of rejection before, and I needed to get help to deal with it.

Dawn Davenport  13:15  
It was primal. You used two words that I thought were so powerful when you described your feelings, you said you were embarrassed and ashamed. I identified with that. As soon as you I read that, I thought, I think that's exactly how I would feel. I'm not adopted, so I haven't had that experience, but I got that. I thought, yeah, it's not only a rejection again, but now, you know, it's almost like I am defective, if, if somebody Yeah,

Speaker 1  13:42  
I'm not good enough. That back to that whole thing, I'm not good enough,

Dawn Davenport  13:46  
right? It comes right back to that, doesn't it? Yeah, those were powerful emotions to identify. Because I think we all would identify with the idea of, I feel rejected, I feel hurt, I feel angry, or whatever, but the embarrassment and ashamed, which is, of course, as the logic part of us would say, has nothing. You should not feel that way. But that's not how feelings work. And even though you were fully an adult living your life, had your own family, you we can still feel that way, and that's so important for adoptive parents to realize. So after a while, she changed her mind. So you had phone calls and you met. I thought what was interesting is that you didn't share much about your adoptive family with her. I thought that was interesting. Maybe towards after your relationship developed, who might have but at the beginning, you talked about the need to keep your world separate. Let's talk some about that. You know,

Speaker 1  14:47  
it was an interesting time. It was like I didn't want my birth mom to know that much about my parents. It was like I was trying to keep those two worlds separate. As my adoptive family and my growing up years seemed like a precious thing that I wasn't ready to share with her about. And my sister felt the same way. She said, You know, we could share some information, like the number of siblings we grew up with and where we grew up, but we don't need to talk about what kind of parents they were, other than that, they were loving. We also didn't want to make her feel guilty, and there certainly was that we talked about that in length with her several times she did feel guilty, not because we wanted to put that on her. She felt guilty about having made that decision. I know it was a really tough decision for her to make, but she explained. She said, You know, I was a single woman. That was a time in this country's history. Single women can't raise a child by themselves. She knew she wouldn't have the support of her family. And also, if you were pregnant at that time, you left your job and you stayed home to take care of the baby. So she she really explained how cornered she had felt, and I have deep compassion for her situation and what she had to deal with as a result. Right? Absolutely,

Dawn Davenport  16:19  
a quick interruption here. Have you ever wondered what you could do to help creating a family if you have, and I hope you have, one of the best things you can do is follow or subscribe to this podcast, and then please, please give us a rating and a review. Whatever the app you're using will have if you click on the podcast, you ought to be able to rate it. So please give us a rating. If you are feeling really generous, give us a written review. I would really appreciate that, and tell a friend that matters. So please tell friends that this podcast exists. We would really appreciate it. Now, how did your mom, your adoptive mom, react to, first your idea of searching, and then I want to separate that from how she reacted after you found your birth mom.

Speaker 1  17:09  
Yes, you know, this was the conversation that we always had every once in a while, birthdays or whatever. If you ever decide to search for your birth relatives, we'll support you. And I suppose, as time went on, she thought, this is the thing that's not going to happen. And then all of a sudden, out of the blue, I'm close to 50 years old, it happens, and she didn't want it. She didn't want her family jeopardized. She was not supportive at all, but my dad was, and I think that he softened her. He certainly expressed an interest. But because she was very unhappy with me about doing this, we had a little rift happen between us. I stopped calling her as much. Stopped having those little conversations like, oh, you know, Danny did this cute little thing today, I didn't share with her, and a rift really deepened, and then it even further widened when I actually made contact with my birth mom, and we got to know each other, and I shared that.

Dawn Davenport  18:18  
And did you share with your mom that you had were in relationship, because it's one thing to say, I'm searching. I just want my, just want my medical history. That's kind of a safe entry. And I think a lot of adoptees use and then they probably believe, when they're reaching out to search, that, you know, I've got a family. I don't need another one. Just need my, my medical records. But then it develops very often into something more. So, you know, that's different. So did you share with her? Well, you're

Speaker 1  18:46  
so bright about that feeling. And that same thing happened to me. I sort of put it out there. Yeah. All I need is my medical history and genealogy. And then when it became a reality, I was like, No, I really want to get to know her. I really need to know all of what she's about and what all this meant to her. So it was a very real need. My dad, at the time, was in and out of the hospital when we actually met her in person, and there was terrible timing with sharing the fact that we were going to go visit her. She lived in a different state, all the things that came out of it, and then it got to the point where I said to my sister, we got to do this. Then too much time has passed, and our birthdays were coming up, and that was going to be a whole nother situation. So I went and talked to my parents, as I had done before, and basically I revealed all of what had transpired, and it was too much, I think, for my mom, to grasp. But yes, she changed her mind. Yes, you met her, and now you're in relationship with her. And she reacted very negatively. Basically, she said, I don't want that woman in my life. An emphasis on that which I angered me and upset me. I didn't like my birth mom being referred to as that woman, as if it was a dirty word, and I didn't like the fact that she was walking back on a promise she had made on her whole life. So the chasm between us just widened, and like many mother daughter relationships, this is probably one of the toughest things we went through. But one of the points of writing the book was to reveal how it changed once again, how it came back to love and acceptance and forgiveness and the mother daughter relationship feels.

Dawn Davenport  20:47  
How do you wish in your fantasy world? How would you have liked your mom to have reacted to your need to search and then to your finding your birth mom?

Speaker 1  20:59  
Well, I was in an adoption support group at this time with Catholic Charities, and often there were adoptive parents that came with their adopted child to show support, and I would have liked my mom to have shown that same support, to have felt the pain and uncertainty and the rejections that I felt and she didn't. She made it all about her. She made it all about her family, the way she wanted it to be, without any regard to my health or any regard to the identity issues, perhaps that I was feeling. So I wish that she could have gotten to that point at that time. She does eventually. It takes her a while. I think what needed to happen was for my sister and I to prove to her, you know, we're welcoming in another person in our life. We have room for them and to love them, and your role is not jeopardized. That did happen, and it's interesting to me now my mom is 92 my birth mom is also 92 there's a lot of parallels with them. Oh my goodness, yeah, Catholic Charities back then, in those days, really did work hard at matching birth children into adoptive families, both physiologically, but also in other ways, like both of my fathers had reddish hair and glasses, which is a whole nother conversation, but they did do a good job about that, yeah, quite

Dawn Davenport  22:30  
different from the way things are done now. But right, yeah. Could you read from page 191 of twice a daughter? I thought you said that. Well, it's at the very end,

Speaker 1  22:44  
my head and my hands, I remind myself I did not choose to be adopted, and my heart is big enough to love two mothers and two sets of parents, If only my mother wouldn't make me feel so bad about it.

Dawn Davenport  22:58  
Yeah, and your mom reacted verbally, saying, I don't want to know anything about it. I don't want but I think a lot of parents send a subtle message. They don't say that as blatantly as your mom, but they send a subtle message, an unspoken message of discomfort. I am uncomfortable about this conversation, so it leaves the adoptee feeling this is not something that I can bring up, I can tell that it's not. It's one of the reasons we recommend that adoptive parents start reading about adoption and about birth families to their kids when they are an infant. And the reason is you get more comfortable. You get more comfortable using the words, even you get more comfortable with the idea that there is another mom, another dad, that exists for this child. Because you want to send the message to your kid that this is a topic that I can handle. I am not scared by it. And sometimes it just takes practice, you know, to do that

Speaker 1  23:57  
exactly. And I think the message, the uncertain message that my mom sent was to me that the kid that was trying to be perfect her whole life is, oh, I just did something wrong. So then you go back to that whole shame and I'm not good enough thing. And certainly as an adult, I was able to recognize, well, I have to do this for me and setting boundaries around that is a really difficult thing for an adoptee to try and figure out, Where is my loyalty? Is it about loyalty, or is it about protecting my health, but that also of my children? There's a whole lot of conversation about it, which is what's so important about support groups for everybody in the triad? Yes,

Dawn Davenport  24:44  
amen, I couldn't agree with you more as as organizations who run support groups, I would let me pause here to thank the jockey being Family Foundation for their support of this podcast and and their support of create. A family completely and in general. One of the things that chalky supports is providing you free courses at our website. They focus on parenting, so they can be used by foster parents if you need continuing education, but they can also be used by adoptive and kinship parents just to improve your parenting. The subject matters we cover are important and they are useful, and you can find it at Bitly, slash, JBf. Support, that's B, i, t, dot, l, y, slash, j, b, f. Support, thank you. All right, so now we've talked about your birth mom. You also wanted information about your birth father. It is very common for adoptees to find and search for their mother first. I think it's not universal, but it's extremely common. But after you find your birth mom, you wanted to know about your birth father, your birth mom was not forthcoming, and, in fact, was misleading, but not misleading enough, apparently. So just talk some about your search for your birth

Speaker 1  26:05  
father. Yeah. I mean, finding him was always a big question mark, whether we would be able to do it or not, because we had to find her first to even get a name, and whether she was going to, you know, supply the name was also a big question. We spent a year and a half with our confidential intermediary trying to find the man that she the name that she had given. And my case was dismissed that and I was, I guess, resigned, is the word that you know, I'm going to have half of my family history, and that's going to have to be enough. And then one day, I just thought, you know what, I'm going to try a genealogist. Why not? And as luck would have it, in the National Registry of genealogists, there was only one in the area where my birth parents had met. It also turns out that that genealogist was an adopted person also, and this is what she did. So she knew all the people in all the records departments, and she literally camped out and came back to me and said, I don't think you've got the right guy. I think this is the right guy, and you need to contact him and asked him for information. So we did do that, and we didn't tell our birth mom we were doing it, because at that time, the reunion was still blissful. We were in that honeymoon. I didn't want to jeopardize it. I didn't want to accuse her of being a liar. And then my heart was one. I was wondering, is she a liar? You know, there was all of that a doubt.

Dawn Davenport  27:42  
Was she just mistaken, or was she lying? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1  27:45  
Was her memory failing her? Is that why she misspelled the last name? Anyway, I gave her the benefit of the doubt and contacted my birth father. He also did not want to meet us, but he did give us our medical history. And an interesting thing happened, which really pulled the story all together from so many angles. He told his my half brother and half sister, his two children, that, you know, I was out there and this was going on, and my brother picked up the phone. He was the one that I actually spoke to and without giving away all of the the goodies at the end of twice the daughter, we realized we had an amazing connection, a historical

Dawn Davenport  28:30  
connection, where you have your paths across many times, as well as an emotional connection, both Correct,

Speaker 1  28:35  
correct and while I hadn't actually met him, much of my family had and fact, my adoptive parents already knew him and his wife, which was a healing thing. With my mom, she figured out, oh my gosh, I already know these people. It's okay, and that's often her stance. So yeah, my brother, my half brother and half sister are very involved in my life now. It's a real blessing to have other siblings, and they're just tickled that they've got these two older sisters that are twins. So

Dawn Davenport  29:08  
did you feel the same sense of shame, embarrassment, rejection, when your birth father said no, and he continued to say no. He never reached he never allowed there to be contact.

Speaker 1  29:20  
No, you know, and it's interesting that you would ask that, and my response would be absolutely no. My brother shared with me a lot of things about our birth father, and basically he said, you know, he's not worth you troubling yourself over and that was enough for me. I would have liked to eyeball him Dawn and see what he looked like, like been in the same space. I was not crushed to not have a relationship with him. I had a really special bond with my adopted dad, and my sister did too. And you know, I'm a parent. I have four children. And six grandchildren, and you like to say you don't have any favorites, and on any given day, one of them is a favorite. I can tell

Dawn Davenport  30:07  
you. I can tell you who my least favorite is. Yes, today,

Speaker 1  30:11  
yeah, today. But I always felt that my sister and I were really special to my dad, and I had that same love for him. So meeting my birth father was more of a curiosity. There was no way that he was going to ever compete with my dad.

Dawn Davenport  30:28  
Well and I, as I was reading the book, I thought this story for him is quite different, as it often is, than the story for your birth mom. He walked away. He did the the wrong thing. He did not step up to support her in her pregnancy, help her make these decisions. And there has to be some embarrassment, because he dropped a very significant ball of being a decent human being. And I would guess that whereas, as you say, she was truly between a rock and a hard place, yes?

Speaker 1  31:04  
And let's, let's just be clear too, that that was what a lot of guys did back then. In the 60s, 70s and 80s, they had gotten a girl in trouble, yeah, and it now became her problem, right? And that is exactly what happened between my birth mom and birth father, right? Whereas I think nowadays, there's a lot more support by that birth father for the birth mother, whether they stayed together or not, open adoption has made a lot of things a little bit easier. On some levels,

Dawn Davenport  31:36  
the expectation is certainly that that they would now, as you alluded to before, your birth mom's reticent in helping you find your birth father and your continued search caused a riff in the relationship. I mean, she wanted privacy, and you were reaching out to neighbors to ask, Was she pregnant? Neighbors from her I forgot about that, yeah. Which when I read that, I went, Oh, dear. She is her birth mom is trying to keep this private, this part of her life private, and that's anything but private. And you alluded to the fact that you were in a honeymoon phase. So what happened when your birth mom realized that you were not playing by her rules? Well,

Speaker 1  32:19  
she has a good, strong temper, and she let me have it. I also let her have it that she knew that I was having all these health issues, that were big ones, and that my breast cancer ran in my birth father's family in a significant way, and that by lying to me, she had been an impediment. But I want to, I want to make a point on the other side of this, not to defend my birth mom, but to make a point what was happening in adoption, in the closed adoption era, my birth mom was told that by using the alias and entering into the arrangement that she had with Catholic charities that she would never be found, right? That's a good point. And so to her point, the tables have been turned on me, and all of this is going against what I've always believed, what

Dawn Davenport  33:16  
I was promised, not just that, but what what I was promised when I did this. Yes,

Speaker 1  33:23  
right? So while I was the face of the person she was angry at, she also was angry at the system for turning the tables on her and disrupting her life. So I appreciate that, that that viewpoint of hers, and I wasn't trying to disrupt her life, but I had a very real need for information.

Dawn Davenport  33:44  
Well, throughout twice a daughter, you talk about the tension between the birth parents right to privacy versus the adoptees right to know. Let's talk some about that, because there is, as you just said, there is, from your birth mother standpoint, and and others as well. There's this promise that was made on the other hand. Now you aren't a child, you are an adult, your own needs. So let's talk some about the that tension between those two.

Speaker 1  34:15  
Yeah, I think you know, when a child is an innocent little bundle in your arms. Everybody is trying to do the best that they can for that child, but they're not thinking of that child at 50 years old, what their wants and needs are going to be as they're starting their own family. And I think that ignorance, or I don't know, fairy tale, idea of the adopted child being this blank slate that they can be molded by their adoptive parents and by society.

Dawn Davenport  34:48  
It's all nurture, not nature, right? Exactly.

Speaker 1  34:50  
It's all nurture, and it clashes in a big way with my generation, the boomers that and there were so many of us being. Adopted in that era, that I think, while well meaning, the adoption statute served the adoptive parents and the birth parents and not the adopted child. And you know, that's what we're seeing now with all of these, these successful searches, with DNA and genealogy helping our

Dawn Davenport  35:20  
body recognized that there was going to be a, you know, spit in a cup over the counter genetic test, and that the idea of a closed adoption is false. I mean, there's which brings me a good to a whole other issue of donor conception. You know, donor conception is still very often done anonymously. It's a joke, because it's not just that the donor or the birth parent would go through the genetic testing, but anybody in their line could go through it. And so it's it simply doesn't exist, but it certainly existed, and it's important, and I'm glad you raised it. It's important for, I think, all of us, to realize that there, there is a tension there, and from the adoptees right standpoint, they have the right to know. But that's a that can fly in the face, although very often it doesn't, because birth parents, when they are approached later, are receptive to being contacted, are receptive to sharing information. So there's, in some ways the tension, I think, is the adoption statutes and the legislators to say we cannot provide information original birth certificates, because we that would be violating a promise we made, yes, except for very often, it would be that the the person you made the promise to would be open to it now,

Speaker 1  36:42  
exactly. That's a very good point. Yeah,

Dawn Davenport  36:45  
I wanted to talk briefly at the very beginning, because I've heard this from other adoptees, certainly not all. There's a whole world of online adoption forum for adopted people, and they serve a huge need of being surrounded by others who were adopted, and being able to, you know, disregard the fantasy that our society puts with adoption being the happy ending for all around and that all adoptees should be grateful, and that the unicorn and hearts and stars and flowers version of adoption, which has got to be annoying, to put it mildly, so they serve a huge safe space for adopted people to gather. And yet you said something, what was your experience being on adoption forums?

Speaker 1  37:33  
Well, I was starting out about 15 years ago, so there's been tremendous growth in what's available to adoptees that are trying to get information. Nothing happened. No contact was made between my birth family, any relatives. I don't think beyond my birth mom, there was anyone that really knew. So I did not have a good experience with the forums and the match sites, even the DNA match sites I was matching up with third, fourth, fifth cousins, and I didn't really even have the right that wasn't helpful. It wasn't helpful at all.

Dawn Davenport  38:06  
I was also referring to your right. There are definitely search forums now, which are absolutely and for any adoptees listening to that, please know that there are many forums out there that exist, Facebook and others, for those who are searching, and they're very helpful, because they give you a realistic idea to be help prepare yourself. But you had said something that I wrote down that tell me if I understood this correctly, I believe it was in twice a daughter. You said that the adoptee forums that were just adoptees getting on to speak, felt it was more venting. You felt that you had been wronged by the adoption statute, but many on the forums felt that they were victims of adoption, and you saw that as a distinction, and did not find the space to be as helpful for you. Now you may have that may be different. Now, how you feel? No, no,

Speaker 1  38:57  
I I don't consider myself an angry adoptee, and I think the victim mindset of some adoptees is harsh. It's not open to conversation about, you know, what might have happened, the circumstances, and understanding historically, what has happened with adoption. And I don't find that a positive space for me. I am a very positive person. I see the glass half full, and I really one of the reasons I dove into adoption support group was I needed to understand not only why my adoptive mom was being very difficult, I needed some tools to help me deal with that, and also what my birth mom might have been going through to reject my sister and I right away in those angry adoptee forms, I wasn't being given the tools to deal with my personal situation, so I stopped going to them and participating. I do notice now, though, which I really appreciate, is there are so many sites on social media, Facebook, Instagram, for all ages of adoptees, birth parents and adoptive parents to join together in conversation. I didn't have any of that growing up, besides my twin sister and my brother, two years younger, who was also adopted, those were the only adoptees I knew I didn't have a social worker at school to go talk to about. I'm feeling this identity issue, and I don't know how to deal with it. I'm very grateful that all of these sites are there and that people have a place to go, especially during COVID, I think those sites really flourished because that has a tendency to flare up identity and belonging issues anyway. So I think we're in a good place as far as getting help if we want it, finding support if we need it, and also being able to have a very constructive conversation about, what does adoption mean to me? What does search and reunion mean to me? Here's some pitfalls, here's some tips. We're in a much better place to support one another.

Dawn Davenport  41:14  
I would agree. I would say that I reject the term angry adoptee, because I think that it you could be angry at the system. You could be angry at how you were raised. You could be angry It's okay. I mean, the adopted person didn't have a choice in any of this. I think it's wonderful that there's a place to venture anger, but there's also, as you point out now, there are places where it's good to have a place to venture anger and not be told that you are, quote, an angry adoptee, which it would just tick the ever loving off of me if somebody said that to me. So, so there needs to be a place where you can say, I can't believe somebody just said that to me, but you're right there I and I say this to adoptees who might be listening, as well as to adoptive parents. There are also groups, and creating a family has one, and ours is a group that is open to adoptive, foster and kinship parents, but also adopted people and also birth parents. And the idea is to have a place where we can share that part. You may need more than one group. You may need the group, or you can go and venture fact that this that things aren't great. The things are. There are things that are about adoption, that you wish didn't exist, and maybe you wish that it had never happened and it shouldn't have happened. All of that is okay, and there are places for that, but there are also places online that you can go and have conversations of a different level, especially within the triad. Along those lines, let me ask there is the term the primal wound. It was a book by and I'm Nancy Venere, and I'm just saying her name wrong. I realize that, but I recommend the book. It's on our website. You can find it under our suggested book page. But I wanted to ask you about that. I often will ask adoptees about that, the primal wound. I think you probably know about what it means, but others might not. It's the idea, and this will be a gross paraphrase of what is included in an entire book, is that adoptive people have a whole that was created through the act of being severed from their biological parents. They talk more about it with mother at that time, but and that that whole exists and always exists. What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 1  43:28  
Oh, I definitely feel that that was a wound. I mean, it's really, it's really a trauma, when you think about it on a physical level, that a child is born and then immediately whisked away from that nurturing bond that had developed for nine months. I think I feel lucky on a lot of levels. I have my twin sister that I was with before I was born, and she's still, you know, my major support system. So I carry that with me, but I understand that it was a loss and and I think the information that's did not follow us through life was also a wound too, yeah, and I think that goes back to our conversation about the birth father. Why was I not so interested so much about finding him as finding her? It just goes back again to that primal wound, the the severing and lack of relationship, which is natural and was not was not there.

Dawn Davenport  44:31  
Well. Julie Ryan McGee, I enjoyed both twice a daughter and twice the family. Thank you so much for being with us today to talk about both books and your attorney.

Unknown Speaker  44:40  
Thank you. I enjoyed the conversation. You.