Understanding Adoption: Voices From All Sides

Join us to discuss how adoption looks and feels from all sides of the adoption triad. Our guests will be the authors Sara Easterly, Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, and Lori Holden of their book, Adoption Unfiltered.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Adoptee Perspective:
  • 23 adoptees contributed to this section of the book. 
  • What are some of the issues adoptees may face?
  • Compliance and people-pleasing
  • Fantasy Attachments
  • Shame
  • Interracial Adoptees
  • The Danger in the Rescue Narrative
  • Role of religionin adoption for adoptees, birth mothers/expectant mothers, and adoptive parents
• Birth Mother:
  • Before birth mothers get the chance to ask for help, they ask for mercy.
  • Advertisements and search algorithms when searching for adoption information
  • Lack of neutral support
  • Lack of post-placement support—lingering trauma and grief—It’s a different type of grief and trauma.
• Adoptive Parent:
  • Insecurity—who’s the real parent
• Adoption Unfiltered Online

Transcript

Please pardon any errors, this is an automated transcript.

Welcome everyone to Creating a Family, talk about foster, adoptive and kinship care.
I'm Dawn Davenport and I am the director of Creating a Family, the organization, as
well as the host of this show. As you've probably heard, I will not be the
executive director for much longer, nor the host of this show for much longer. Tracy
Whitney, who has been with us for nine years, is going to be taking over the
hosting of this show, and we have not yet announced who the new executive director
will be, but stay tuned because we'll be announcing that soon. Today we're going to
be talking about understanding adoption, voices from all sides. As long -term listeners
know, that has been an important part of what creating a family has done. That is
bringing in voices from all sides. So I think that is better for our children, it's
better for the institution of Adoption as well. Today we're going to be talking with
Sarah Easterly, Kelsey Vandervilt -Ranard, and Lori Holden. They represent all three of
the sides of the adoption triad, an adoptee, a birth parent, and an adoptive parent.
And they're the authors of a book called Adoption Unfiltered. This is a re -error of
a show that we did last year, I think it was. I loved it then. I love their
voices and I love their perspective. I hope you enjoy it again as much as I have.
- Welcome, Sarah, Kelsey, and Laurie. I love the book, guys. I could only imagine
how much work went into it. And I think having three authors probably doesn't
lighten the load a whole lot. I suspect it's equally as hard and maybe harder
because you're trying to coordinate different voices. So anyway, great job. I think
it is a huge addition to the adoption field in general. So way to go.
The way the book is organized is it's organized in three separate sections, adoptee
voices, birth mother voices, and then adoptive parent voices. And that's how we are
going to organize this show. You're going to notice that we will likely spend more
time on the adoptee voice, because let's face it, we're supposed to be making all
decisions for the best interest of the person we are serving, and ultimately the
person we are serving is the adopted person. And so as a result, listening to
adoptees is, if we want to help the current generation of adoptees, we must listen
to those who have walked this path before us. And the book also devotes more time
to the adoptee perspective. I'm using that as justification for a not even division
of this podcast. All right. So, Sarah, we're going to start with you. You include
the voices of 23 adoptees in the book. And I love the how you do that and encode
it from a lot of them. But I think it would help if you tell the audience your
adoption story. We know that you're an adoptee, but tell us a bit about your
adoption before we get into the details. - Great. So I was adopted at the tail end
of the baby scoop era. It was a closed private gray market adoption and growing up,
you know, it was in the closed era. And so talking about adoption was not something
that our family did pretty much at all. And when it did come up, it was very
awkward for all of us. When I was about nine, a vivid memory of Having been
recently told I was adopted, but I also in hindsight question that a little bit,
because I'm not sure if that's when it just really sunk in and the meaning sunk in
and I understood it. Have you asked your parents had they told you before or they
didn't remember? My mom says she talked about it a lot, but I think it may have
been a case. I think I did this a little bit when I was a parent and my kids
were younger. I'm going to use a, I hope it's not offensive metaphor, but Santa
Claus. I had told my kids the truth about Santa, but then it didn't sink in until
later. So I think, you know, I don't know. It's one of those things that my mom
and I just, she's no longer with us. And we had a, we just had a different way
of seeing it. So in her perspective, she had told me, and there were things like
birds in the bees talks. Like when my kids were younger, I had done, you know, new
parent wanting to teach the kids. And then, you know, a couple years later, I'm
like, wait, what? Like, you're asking what? Like, okay, I thought we checked that
off. So it may have been something like that where my mom might have checked the
box and thought I'm doing right. But she was raising me in a time when there
wasn't much information about how to raise an adopted child. And the information that
they had, my parents did their very best, but the information was not very sound.
So, for instance, when I was nine and it really sunk in, I had a situation where
I was cleaning up my room and I had a broken Mickey Mouse watch and I couldn't
figure out, I was really upset. I was supposed to be cleaning out my room and I'm
still to this day very sentimental. I keep a lot of mementos and that was one that
I had kept and I went charging into my mom's bedroom crying and she was, you know,
"What's going on, Sarah? "What's happening?" And I was sobbing and I said, "If I
can't even throw away this broken Mickey Mouse watch, how could my birth mother
throw me away?" That was the first and possibly one of the handful of times we
really talked openly about adoption. My mom held me and she gave the kind of
parenting talks at the time that she was coached to do of saying you were chosen
and most parents don't get to choose their child. I got to choose you, you're
special. And some of these things that I think at the time seemed like a great
message to tell adopted children, but it never felt right. It felt like propaganda.
It felt forced and deep inside I truly did feel broken and flawed like the watch.
There was a reason that watch really was the tool for me towards my grief. And so
that was probably one of the days I was most honest. And then after that, I kept
my adoption and my feelings about it pretty secret and held them pretty tight for a
lot of reasons. I didn't have the consciousness at the time, but the answers and
the way that I was being, you know, the script, something didn't sit right with me
on one level. And then on the other level, I felt a need to protect my parents.
And I was loyal. And, You know, some of that was self -interest because I felt in
my experience, mothers go away, and I needed to keep my next mother close. And so
I would do what I felt she needed me to do in order to keep that close
connection. We had a great relationship, but it also kept me a little bit at an
arm's length with my mother growing up because she wasn't accepting the full me,
I was hiding the full me. And so How do you find emotional rest in a relationship
where you can't be your full, authentic self and express all the parts of you?
Yeah. I want to quote from the book on page 33. You say, "It may not always be
easy to listen to adoptees. When adoptees are speaking, adoptee to adoptee in a safe
space, they speak the truth." Then a little further down the page, "Critical thinking
about adoption does not mean that these adoptees had awful adoptions or terrible
parents. Some adoptions were gross failures and have resulted in necessary boundaries
or estrangements. That can happen in any family, with or without adoption. But many
of the adoptees interviewed benefited from loving relationship with their parents,
birth parents, and /or adoptive parents. I think that's important because I think that
it's often easy for adoptive parents to say, "Well, that adoptee is saying that,"
but they had a bad experience. And I think it's important to acknowledge that you
can still have mixed feelings and complicated issues resulting from adoption and have
been very loved, have felt very loved by your adoptive parents. I think that is
important. Now I want to talk about some of the issues that Both your interviews
with the other adoptees that you included, but also what research has shown Trauma
is certainly one of them But I'm not going to spend as much time talking about
trauma not because it's not important because obviously it is very important but
because we talk about it so much that I think we have lots and lots of Podcasts
and resources on creating a family dot or that address adoptee trauma.
So there's some other issues that adoptees face that I think our audience may not
have heard about. Two of them are compliance and people pleasing. And I want to
quote from Chalice, which is one of the adoptees who you interviewed. And this is
on page 44 of the book. And she says, "I don't have any memories of anyone in my
immediate or extended family ever challenging whether or not I was part of the
family. I don't have any memories of my siblings ever saying, "You're adopted," or
"You're not my sister," or "We're not actually related." And yet, internally, I was
always needing to create more security, doing more, being good more,
so that no one could challenge it, even though no one ever had. But I feel like
there was always this anxiety in me that it could somehow happen. Boy that was
powerful. I thought when I heard that it's such a well She's very articulate.
She does it very well. So let's talk some Sarah about Compliance and I'm the book
actually separates compliance and people pleasing I'm putting them together for the
sake of time because they're similar. I think from your research. I Assume that that
is a common theme that you hear from adopted people. - It is, and I just wanted to
say, back to what you were saying earlier, how adoptees speak truth when they're
talking together. I just, really, I got goosebumps hearing you read Chalice's words,
and that's how I feel too. And I feel that way for every single one of the 23
people I interviewed, that they trusted me this much to take what we were saying in
our sacred one -to -one conversation and allowing me to translate that to the page
and make sense of it and synthesize the broader story. Chalice is incredibly
articulate and I don't know that all adoptees know that about themselves,
that we can do that. I didn't know that about myself. Chalice is very self -attuned,
but one of the things in the book that I really wanted to do is help explain us
to ourselves too. And so I love that quote.
that can be really challenging for us as adoptees, because it's very vulnerable to
show your full self. You could get rejected. And to us, rejection is another death.
Sure. You did some of that with your mom, because you weren't bringing up some of
your questions and your insecurity. And it's a way of being compliant and people
pleasing, because you weren't sure you didn't want to lose her. You didn't want You
put distance and yet inadvertently you were creating distance, but in a way that was
a type of people pleasing. Absolutely. Absolutely. Another thing you talked about was
fantasy attachments. I have seen that as well. So let's talk some about what do you
mean by fantasy attachments as an issue that many adoptees have experienced?
Yeah. This one we do talk about a lot in our circles when we're just together.
Fantasy attachments, if you're in a closed adoption, a fantasy attachment can be just
a lot of energy and time spent wondering who your parents might be.
It's pretty common. I think a lot of us, and it's actually kind of a fun game to
do with adoptees, but who was your fantasy mother? So mine was Madonna, was one of
them. Chose Will. Lots of us fantasize about descending from royalty, you know,
there's a lot of a lot of that. I used to think that, you know, my name, Sarah
means princess. So I kind of went down that rabbit hole at one point. And even in
open adoptions, fantasy attachments can come up when you're fantasizing who someone is
who you're not living with and kind of making up stories in your head or making up
your origin stories of how you came to be. It's something that I really appreciate
as a parent my kids are biological to me but my children have delighted from
probably age three and up of just hearing their origin story and how important that
is for children to grow up knowing how they came to be in the world and we don't
get that on the same level we get the story of how our adopted parents are telling
how we came to their family but we don't get that birthing and and what was the
pregnancy like, and just all those stories as much when we're adopted. So we create
stories because those are, I think, an existential human need to know these things
as we're figuring out who we are in the world and how were we placed here? How
did we arrive here? How did we get here? So the fantasy attachments can just be a
way of figuring that out and trying to make sense of our place in the world. Yeah.
That makes sense, absolutely.
Did you know that most people find out about podcasts through their friends? Word of
mouth truly is how people learn about podcasts. And if you want to help support
creating a family, one of the best things you can do is let your friends know
about this creating a family .org podcast. They can subscribe on whatever app that
they listen to a podcast on, and it helps us with our mission of providing support
and education to foster adopted and kinship families, and also if they're families
who are tangentially related because they have a grandchild, say, who is a foster
child or an adopted child. So let your friends know, please.
Another issue that many adoptees face, and one that was particularly hard as an
adoptive parent to hear about is shame. And I will read a quote from page 59.
"Most of us intuitively know that children are prone to blame themselves for adult
problems such as divorce." As previously mentioned, many young adoptees decided early
on that there was something inherently wrong with them that explains why they weren't
"wanted." We must have not been "good enough" to have been kept, we reason. From
then on, we might live a highly alarmed light trying to be good going forward.
While this might seem like a wonderful trait to our parents and teachers making us
easier to raise, it comes at a high price given the extreme levels of alarm and
adrenaline constantly flooding our systems. Talk to me some about that. That is, a
parent is so hard, you know? That's not what we want for any of our children to
feel. So talk to me some about that from your experience talking with other
adoptees. Yes, I would be happy to. And I guess a part of me wants to first speak
to the fact that you and your listeners, and I'm looking at the room at,
we're on Zoom right now, and I'm looking at Lori and Kelsey. And this is what's
kind of hard about taking the filters down is I'm very much aware of who's in the
room right now and feeling like, oh, gosh, you know, I know that's hard for all
parties in this room. When those filters come down and we say things like that,
because it is hard. It is really hard. And I think it's a very common experience,
very common, for adoptees to not feel good enough. And it's just one of those
things that I think we all need to have our separate heartache over it, because
grieving is and acknowledging it is the best way forward. It's unavoidable. I think
it's at play a lot of the time. And of course, no adoptee can speak for all
adoptees. So I want to just stay clear of that. But I think from what I have
seen, it's pretty core for a high majority of adoptees. And whether we're aware of
it or not, there's a drive to have to prove ourselves. And it's stemming from this
deep well of pain and shame. Yeah, I can absolutely see that.
In that section, I love this quote so much that I'm going to include it.
It's in this same section, but it is not directly tied in, but it is such a
powerful quote. For interracial adoptees, they do not have control over their adoption
stories because standing next to our adoptive families says it all. Oh,
that's great. It's true. And I speak as a transracial adoptive mom. It's,
it's very true that just their presence tells their story or part of it.
It actually doesn't tell their story, but it makes people think they know the story,
which is probably worse in many ways. Yeah, and I will say speak to that Don.
I think most adoptees Really have a desperate desire to try to fit in sure and so
those two things are at odds right off the bat I think most people want to fit in
for adoptees. We have to fit in it's a matter of survival Sure, you know, we get
moved from one family to another and you got to fit in And so of course I'm not
saying that there can't be a sense of belonging in an adoptive family. But I think
that is just a dynamic that is, you know, an undercurrent in those situations in an
interracial adoption. We talk all the time about adoptees owning their own story. And
yet, in interracial adoption, just their physical presence sends a message,
you know, which from a parent standpoint, we don't want, you know, but just the
inherent act of standing next to us. Anyway, there is, I will say, a great section
also on classism and racism and adoption, but we're not going to spend a whole lot
of time on that today. But you should buy the book and read that section because
it's excellent. I wanted to talk about the danger and the rescue narrative because I
think that's an important one. First of all, it seems self -explanatory, but go ahead
and tell us what the rescue narrative is. And then why is that a bad thing?
- Well, the rescue narrative is something we tend to hear a lot. It may not be
said directly to us, but sometimes it is. But we often overhear people saying things
to our parents. Oh, you're such an amazing person. You're such great parents. You're
so good for saving a child and kind of elevating the status of parents for rescuing
a child. And often time, I think parents believe they've definitely rescued a child.
And in some cases, there probably is some of that. There's certainly cases where
that is true. The danger with that is that we hear judgment that we needed rescuing
from our history, our roots. So there's a judgment that's unspoken,
sometimes in those statements, but that's being placed upon our first families, our
first parents. And it can affect our sense of identity. Our first parents are a
part of us. We share thousands of genes, and we have a connection emotionally to
our first parents, even if we're not ready to admit that or not. But there is a
connection that happens just from the way attachment works and the way that in utero
bonding takes place. And there is energy there. There's a lot of energy and
wondering. And so that definitely places judgment and makes it really complicated
because it feels like the part of us is bad. And again, when we already have a
lot of shame as a baseline, then it adds something else to feel ashamed about. It
also implies a degree of gratefulness that is owed.
If you fall in a hole and somebody puts their hand down and pulls you out, you
say, "Thank you." you are expected to be grateful and Gratefulness is not I mean
it's great when your kids are thankful. That's fine and you expect it when I'm kind
of hoping 25 26. That's what I'm going for you I'm saying that I expected to see
some gratefulness actually I have seen gratefulness for my older kids and that's
that's good, but no child Especially no young child. It should be feeling grateful.
They should be, yes, they should be taking for granted the fact that they are
worthy of love and that we're lucky to have them. You know, that is the place that
children should have. And then as they age through birth or through adoption or
whatever else, it's great if they can say, gosh, I'm glad that you did this or,
you know, whatever, that's fine. But we don't want our children to carry the burden
of having to be grateful to us. And rescue implies that it feels to me.
Yes, absolutely everything you just said. I wanted to snap and clap and all the
things. Thank you. Creating a family has a curriculum that I am so proud of for
small group interactive trainings or for support groups. It is turnkey, meaning it's
super easy to use. There are 25 curriculum, each on a different topic. It can be
used online or in person. You can find out more information at parentsupportgroups
.org. All right, now I want to bring the rest of you guys in. Each of the sections
of the book has, which I thought was interesting and I hadn't thought about this,
which is the role of religion, the role of religion plays for adoptees, the role
that religion plays for birth moms and the role that religion plays with adoptive
parents. And I thought that was a really interesting section, but I'm bringing you
all together so that we can hear other voices. So let's start with you, Kelsey.
First of all, tell us just briefly your story, because this is the first time we're
bringing you into the conversation. We're going to talk to you about the birth mom's
section in a minute, but tell us briefly your story and then talk to us about the
role that you have seen religion play in the birth parent experience.
Sure. So I graduated college with my undergrad degree in 2015.
I moved back home with my parents for the summer and long story short, by the end
of the summer, I found out I was pregnant unexpectedly and without a stable
relationship and I was terrified. I didn't really have options counseling. I sort of
flew through all my options on my own without guidance and just landed on adoption.
I really think out of fear for what my parents were going to say. I grew up in a
pretty conservative Christian household that getting pregnant before marriage was like
this terrible thing and so I knew that this was serious.
I knew that they were going to be upset with me. I had packed a bag anticipating
being kicked out of my house, planned to go to my best friend's house in case it
happened. That didn't happen but it really spoke to the fear that had consumed me
in the weeks leading up to telling my parents that I was pregnant. That fear caused
me to say, "Okay, if you're going to tell them you're pregnant, you have to come
to them with a solution." That was my proposed solution. I told them very early on
in my pregnancy, nobody talked me out of it in all that time.
That was the and it was set in stone, it felt like. And so I matched very early
in pregnancy with a family. I had time to get to know them, but I didn't feel
like I had time to get to know myself in this new part of my life. And so I
very heavily dissociated from the pregnancy, felt very numb to it.
I was very sick. It was a hard, hard journey. And then I gave birth in May of
2016 and I placed my child from the hospital and I had an open adoption and I
still have an open adoption. It's been seven and a half years and I'm still very
fresh in this. But I started working in adoption about a year after.
So way too soon, I started working at an agency in Indianapolis and that job and
that whole experience, it honestly changed my life and my whole perspective on what
this is, what this whole field is, what are the problems and the pain points and
what are the things that everybody else in this constellation experience. I didn't
have post placement support at all. And then I got a job at an agency that I
didn't place through. And it was immediately from zero to 100 having no support to
working with therapists every single day who genuinely cared about my well -being and
genuinely wanted me to give them commentary and help them change to bring them into
a new era of adoption and seeing it in a more clinical viewpoint and a more
support viewpoint. And so that really altered everything for me.
And when we talk about the birth parent section, I want to talk to you about a
lot of those issues. And you alluded to the fact, religion had a huge impact on
you because you felt you had sinned or something and that you were going to be
kicked out of the in -group, you know, the family group. Are there other ways that
religion impacts the experience from a birth parents perspective? Yeah,
I think that I don't consider myself religious and I definitely in my early 20s
teetered on it, but I think that the mental framework that I was raised in with
religion, played a huge part in how I viewed my circumstance and my decisions and
everything. I think even if I didn't say out loud to myself, "Oh, I've sinned," or,
"You know what I mean? You felt the shame of that because your whole life, you'd
been raised to believe that," and so it's hard to not look at yourself that way
and feel the shame, even the shame that's coming from your own judgment of yourself.
- Sure. - You know, so while my parents had grace for me and I lived with them for
the remainder of my pregnancy and my mom made sure I was physically healthy and
took care of me and held my hair when I threw up and stuff like that, you know?
And I didn't go to church with my parents. They didn't ask me to come to church
with them there once I was showing. You know, there were little things like that. I
think for birth parents in general, I see a lot of that same sentiment of the
shame is very prevalent for them. And also the way we talk about adoption,
I think we have these remnants of like early 2000s narratives of adoption that still
linger, you know, just like if every believer adopted and things like adoption is
the gospel and adoption and I think sometimes those narratives want birth parents to
either be dead. So these children are orphans or they need the birth parents to be
the bad guy that these children need to be rescued from. The rescue narrative.
Yes. And so I'm not dead And I'm not a bad person. And so sometimes people don't
know what to do with that information and really when I was writing this section
this entire section about the birth parent experience no matter if Someone had been
affected by the religious narrative or not I wanted them to be understood as a
whole human being on their own accord and someone that doesn't have to fit into a
narrative like that. And to see also the connection that when we tried to craft
these narratives, we put people in a box and ultimately hurts the adoptee because we
are the origin. Yeah. Laurie, how does religion play into the adoptive parent
perspective? Kelsey just mentioned one, the orphan care movement. I liked how she
said that to fit that movement, you've got to be dead or bad, which you're right.
I mean, yeah. So how does that impact adoptive parents? Yeah,
by the time you get to my section of the book, which is called Adoptive Parents
Unfiltered, which comes after birth parents unfiltered, which comes after adoptees
unfiltered. We have a theme going on here. We do have a fourth part of the book
that we can mention later, but they've already read Sarah's section about religion.
They've already read Kelsey's section about religion. So there wasn't a whole lot
left for me to cover except to look at it from the adaptive parent lens. And one
of them is the orphan care movement and how so often when what starts out as an
initial desire to really help out babies or children who need help is a lot of
times in other countries who are experiencing some sort of a tragedy somewhere along
the way. And this is all outlined in the book "Child Catchers" by Catherine Joyce,
and industry crops up around this. And sometimes, adaptive parents in their zeal to
do what their spiritual religious leaders are asking them to do, they lose sight of
the line between what is ethical and what is really serving the child and what is
serving other people. And we lose sight of that line. So we tell the story of
somebody who adopted internationally and these pieces later didn't make sense, she was
in a group with other people who had adopted from the same country and they were
starting to wonder had their children actually been trafficked. So that's one of the
effects that religion can have is that unchecked zeal that doesn't have a check on
it. Another way is looking at when we do come to adoption and make that decision
for external reasons to look good in the eyes of other people, then we're gonna
probably continue that into our parenting. And so we want obedient children who make
us look good. And we use tactics that may be authoritarian to make them obedient
and what is really needed. And Sarah does such a great job outlining this in her
section is more connection -based parenting, not separation -based parenting, not fear
-based parenting. We have to relate with our children more from a place of
connection, and that wasn't modeled for all of us. And it's not always modeled in
our religious settings and our spiritual settings. So those are two of the ways that
I tried to cover that in the religion section. Okay, and so coming around to the
adoptee perspective, unfiltered. Sara, how does religion play into the adoption
narrative for an adoptive person. When we were talking about the rescue narrative
earlier, it does go a little bit hand -in -hand. There's a fair bit of when we hear
about premarital sex as a sin, when we know that that's where we came from,
it just pricks that shame core. It makes us feel shameful about our first families
and our origin stories, if that is our story. And in my case, it was my birth
mother and my birth father were not married. So we kind of can put some judgment
on our parents and vilify them with the church to some degree. And then how do you
make sense of that when that's where you come from? So that's a part of it. You
know, we hear a lot, forgive me, because I'm probably going to get a little bit
controversial here, but we'd hear a lot in church settings. And I grew up with this
messaging that adoption is the holy answer to an unplanned pregnancy because abortion
is not okay. There's suffering of the fetus. When you're an adoptee and you live
with suffering your whole life, it's kind of like a raising the hand. Wait a
minute. I have lifelong suffering. We know that adoptees are four times more likely
to attempt suicide. We have lifelong effects of depression, trauma, anxiety,
depression, there's high numbers of addiction, that is all suffering. And so it's
hard to reconcile those things when we are putting all the focus over here on a
fetus and none of the focus goes over here on the suffering adoptees when you're in
church settings for the most part. That's really hard when you're growing up in
congregations. I identify as Christian, I find myself in a lot of Christian spaces.
And I will also say they're very hard to maneuver in even as an adult in my
fifties. I have people coming up to me and saying, oh my gosh, it's so beautiful
that you're adopted. And it's really hard to know what to say. And the cultural
perception and it's very, very strong in the church setting is that adoption is
holy. It's God's work. It's just very complex to untangle all those things when we
have attachments still and we will forever have attachments to our first families.
It's very hard in these current settings to see a lot of Christian influencers using
adoption to build their platforms and it happens a lot and it is really activating
and I I could cry right now thinking about it when I see it I just feel so much
emotion and so much heartache over that this that this is how people are using
their children to show they are this multicultural family and to show that they're
doing the good God's work and doing all of these things. And it's so wrong to use
children that way. And I see it the most in Christian spaces. And then I also see
a lot of parents later, I hear adults my age lamenting about their children and not
finding God. And I want to be like, are you kidding? Of course they're running from
God. Like this, you've wrapped up adoption in God so tightly, like you got to run.
And I did for many years. I had to, in my memoir, I tell the story of my
spiritual journey and how that is all tied up with adoption. But I was running for
really good reason. It's too tangled up and it does a lot of emotional harm and
there is a reason that I just find such a disconnect in those spaces with people
and I want to say, oh my gosh, like you're not paying attention because there's a
lot of hurt being done and wielded onto adoptees that I think a lot of people in
those spaces just don't even see. I think you're right about the not saying part.
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That's bit .ly /jbfsupport. All right.
It was an interesting approach to address it from all three of your perspectives. So
I'm glad we were able to talk about it. Kelsey, now I want to come back and talk
to you about the birth mother experience. You have already shared kind of what your
story was. I wanted to read, actually, two quotes from page 106. I didn't realize
both of them were there. I wanted to start with this quote. One was, you said,
"Before both mothers get a chance to ask for help, they ask for mercy." I thought
that was beautifully written and really summed up the experience from,
And let me stop by saying there are many different adoption experiences. There are
birth moms who have struggled with substance abuse disorder and had their child
remove their birth mothers who are not able to care for their child, unfortunately,
sometimes due to simply poverty. And so there are different scenarios. But the
scenario you're describing, well, actually, the other scenarios I just mentioned, the
need to ask for mercy first before you asked for help. That's powerful. Did you
feel that? I assume you did? Yeah, I think that just as you said, everybody has a
different story and that could mean something different for everyone. But oftentimes
it's just that you're looking at that positive pregnancy test and it is just one
more thing that you cannot process and handle at this time. And sometimes it takes
expectant parents months and months to even make that call call for help. And so
they're spending a lot of time asking for mercy or being numb to the circumstance
and in disbelief of the circumstance. Yeah. And you alluded to this, that a lot of
times we're going to talk actually about the need for counseling,
neutral counseling. And this is also from page 106. From the moment Someone searches
for adoption information. The advertisements and search algorithms guide her like an
unseen current, and it's guiding you towards making the decision to place your child,
I think is what you were implying. And they went on to say that. So who counsels
pregnant women when they're trying to figure out, "What do I want?" I have an
unplanned pregnancy, and sometimes they're planned, it turns out that you're just not
able. But let's say it's an unplanned pregnancy. Where does that woman go or mom
go? A safe place to figure out what her options are. And let's say also,
sometimes it's a couple that are trying to figure this out. So she'll be inclusive
of both. Well, they go to Google right now. That's what happens right now. Everybody
goes to Google, whether you're looking for a restaurant for dinner, or you're looking
to find help about adoption, something very serious, you're going to Google and
Google is a total mind field. It's something I've spent past three years of my
career researching and harping on in adoption policy about the circumstances of the
advertising and the lack of support and help that's out there. Where I would like
them to go is different. I wish that they could get neutral counseling on their
options from some kind of like a liaison that has no financial stake in in her
choice. I wish that would happen in healthcare to ensure that she's also getting
prenatal care. That's what I wish most. Yeah. And then let's talk about post
placement support. You had none. No. And is it because the agency,
I assume you, did you work through an agency? An attorney. An attorney. Well, and
that's one of the things we tell people when they're choosing an attorney, it's like
a la carte. There are some agencies that do provide counseling, not all but some,
but very few attorneys do. And so adoptive parents have to be the ones who are
insisting on it and paying for it. Then in itself can be a challenge. I will say
that I think it's important to get that support because the grief and the trauma
that you're experiencing is a different type of grief and trauma. There's a lot of
different types, but this one is a hard, it's, it's more complex. It's a different
type. I mean, disenfranchised grief is the name, but yeah. So where can people at
this point, birth moms or birth dads, where can they find support? I think in the
past, you know, seven and a half years since placement for me, I'm happy to say
that there's much more accessibility to support than there was when I first placed,
but there's so much more work to be done. There are adoption competent or adoption
fluent therapists out there. A lot of that doesn't include birth family competent.
No, a lot of it does not. Yeah. So that's still something that really needs to be
refined. But there are support groups. I always do caution people about the online
like Facebook groups that are supposed to be support groups because those often can
be such contentious spaces and not healing at all and not really truly moderated by
someone that should be moderating just intense spaces like that. People are dealing
with a lot of trauma and you can only get so much through a screen and a
keyboard. But there are places like on your feet foundation, lifetime healing
foundation, they do an online support group that meets on zoom once a month, also
empower Alliance out here in California and in the Bay Area, they do that as well,
as well as some in -person support groups, Lifetime Healing Foundation does in -person
groups, and there's also retreats. And I think the time that I finally met a birth
mom, I've known birth moms my whole life, my adoption has been a huge part of our
life in my family. My dad was adopted and in reunion pretty much since I was born.
But meeting a birth mom over being a birth mom together for the first time was
hugely impactful for me. And so that community...
that fits them and understands adoption and the complexities that accompany it.
Well said. Thank you. Well, Lori, we did not leave a lot of time for you, but I
will say that creating a family podcast as well as creating a family spends a lot
of time talking with and to adoptive parents. However, I do want to, there's so
many things I'd like to ask you about, let's talk about insecurity as one of the
things that adoptive parents feel. I think it's hard to admit that, that we feel
insecure, but I think a lot of adoptive parents do. So what do adoptive parents
feel insecure about? Yeah and you're so right about that, Don. That and the external
reasons for adopting that I mentioned, those are all really usually below the surface
of consciousness. We're not always aware of them, they come out in ways that don't
serve us and our parenting with our children sometimes. If you come to adoption
through infertility, one of the big insecurity things is for some reason, you were
destined not to have a biological child. So that's something to come to terms with.
Your body failed. Your body failed. And depending on how you view femininity, you
are less feminine. Yeah. And masculine for the men as well. Very good point. Thank
you. And then you go through a home study process, and even if you've never had
any parenting experience before other than being parented, you have to prove to
somebody that you would be a good parent and that you got this, that you can
handle anything, even though you have no idea what that means on the ground. Then
that kind of leads to the fragility because when things do get challenging, you've
built up this perception of yourself that may feel a little bit shaky, because in a
way we're faking it. We're hoping to make it, but things happen and it gets hard
and we don't. Sometimes it's also hard to ask for help because we've made such a
big deal about being spectacular human beings who should be parents. The insecurity,
the way it manifests sometimes, is that we can have a really hard time acknowledging
the fact that there are other real parents out there. So we may not be able to
enter into conversations with our child when it's time to do that about birth
parents, about their origin story, whether birth parents are around or not. We might
have a little bit of jealousy going on that we didn't get birth to them and
somebody else did. And we might talk in a dismissive or equalizing way in our minds
to make us bigger and them smaller. So there's a lot of ways that that insecurity
can come out. But what I do know is that when people get that, that is motivating
them from under the surface. They all want to do better. They all want to address
that. They all want to neutralize that. They all want to be more actually secure
for their child. We do better when we know better to paraphrase Maya Angelou.
Yeah, absolutely. The fourth section of the book, which I'm giving this as a teaser,
you're going to have to buy the book to read. It is all about hope and healing.
So I'm your appetizer. So now you're going to have to get the meal by buying the
book. We think that this kind of community that you've built at creating a family
is so important. Yours is a cross community. And we think reading this book should
be read in community and can be read in community. So we are including a book club
discussion guide on our website. So we just want to invite people who want to read
this in community to use that guide. There's some special goodies from Sarah and
Kelsey and me in there. So it just makes sure readers know about that. Great idea
because I agree with you about reading in community. I didn't read it in community,
but I might join the book club because I think Sarah said it, one of the realities
of being unfiltered is you know that you could be hurting people. That's no reason
not to do it because if we don't speak of these things, it's an illusion of
closeness. It's an illusion of understanding. So all the more reason. So great job.
I would hope yes. Is there a website specifically for the book? It's
adoptionunfiltered .com and on there is a book section, a podcast section,
an event section, and the book club guide that people can use for their own book
club, whether it's for all adoptive parents or just for adoptees or just for birth
parents or across a group. If they want to be a mixed group, yes, excellent. So
adoptionunfiltered .com. I thank you so much, Sarah Easterly,
Kelsey Van Der Vleet, Van Yard, and Laurie Golden for being with us today to talk
about listening to adoptees the voices from all sides. I appreciate it. Thank you
Children's House International for your support of this show as well as the nonprofit
creating a family. Children's House International is a Hague accredited international
adoption agency currently placing children from 14 countries. They place with families
throughout the U .S. Children's House also provides home study services and consulting
services for international surrogacy.