Understanding Adoption: Voices From All Sides

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 both the host of this show, as well as the director of the nonprofit creating a family.org. Today we're going to be listening to the voices of adoption from all sides. We will be talking with the authors of a wonderful new book, adoption unfiltered. The authors are Sara Easterly, Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, and Lori Holden. Sara is an adoptee Kelsey is a birth parent. And Lori is an adoptive parent. They live work advocate and lead in the adoption space in all sorts of different ways. And they are the co authors of the book, adoption unfiltered, they also host a podcast of the same name. Welcome, Sarah, Kelsey. And Lori. I love the book guys, I can 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're 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. They're ultimately the person we are serving as 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 adoptive perspective. I'm using that as justification for a not even division for 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 did that encoder from a lot of them. But I think it would help if you tell the audience, your adoption story. How do we know that you're an adoptee. But tell us a bit about your adoption before we get into the details?

Speaker 1  2:21  
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 clothes 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.

Dawn Davenport  2:58  
Have you asked your parents had they told you before? Are they didn't remember, my mom

Speaker 1  3:04  
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 we just had a different way of seeing it. So in her perspective, she had told me, and there were things like birds and 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 what 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 at 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 a Mentos 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 sir, what was 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 helped 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 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 and 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, mother's 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, right?

Dawn Davenport  6:13  
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, adopted 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 estrangement as 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 podcast and resources on creating a family.org that address adoptee trauma. 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 Felice 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 and me that it could somehow happen. Pour that was powerful. I thought when I heard that. It's such a 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 adoptive people.

Speaker 1  9:04  
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 shoelaces 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. Sure. Lisa 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. She Elise 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 in particular, because even when she said it, I remember being like oh Yeah, me too, you know, hashtag me too. Yeah, that is not something we generally talked about widely in our spaces. And I wish we had more of those conversations about authenticity and the incredible vulnerability involved in that 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.

Dawn Davenport  10:26  
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 to put distance and yet, inadvertently, you were creating distance, but in a way that was a type of people pleasing. Absolutely.

Unknown Speaker  10:49  
Absolutely.

Dawn Davenport  10:50  
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,

Speaker 1  11:04  
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 I, we 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? Well, lots of us fantasize about descending from royalty. You know, there's a lot of that. I used to think that you know my name, Sara means princess. So I kind of went down that rabbit hole at one point. And even an 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 really 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 adoptive parents are telling how we came to their family. But we don't get that birthing and that 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 are 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

Dawn Davenport  12:45  
the world? Yeah, that makes sense. Absolutely. Did you know that most people find out about podcast 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 podcast on. And it helps us with our mission of providing support and education to foster adoptive and kinship families. And also if their families who are tangentially related because they have a grandchild say who is a foster child or the 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 his 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, quote wanted. We must have not been quote 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 apparent is so hard. So 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.

Speaker 1  14:33  
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. Sure. And feeling like oh gosh, you know, I know that's hard for all parties in this room. You 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've seen, it's pretty core for 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. Hmm. Yeah,

Dawn Davenport  15:47  
I can absolutely see that. In that section. I love this quote, so much that I'm going to include it. It's in the 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.

Speaker 1  16:31  
And I will say speak to that done. 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 or 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

Dawn Davenport  17:06  
talk all the time about adoptees owning their own story. And yet, interracial adoption, just their physical presence, sends a message, which from a parent's 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 adaption. 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?

Speaker 1  17:52  
Well, the rescue narrative is something we tend to hear a lot, it may not be sent directly to us, but sometimes it is. But we often overhear people saying things to her parents, oh, you're just such an amazing person. You're such great parents, you're so you're so good for saving a child and kind of elevating the status of parents for rescuing a child. And oftentimes, I think parents believe they've definitely rescued a child. And in some cases, there probably is some of that, you know, there are 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 or first parents. And it can affect our sense of identity. Our first parents are a part of us, we share 1000s 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's 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 wandering. And so that definitely places judgment and makes it really complicated because it feels like a part of us is is bad. And again, when we already have a lot of shame as a baseline, then it adds something else to feel ashamed about.

Dawn Davenport  19:16  
It also implies the 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 2526 That's what I'm going for you I'm saying that I expect to see some gratefulness actually I have some gratefulness for my older kids. And that's, that's good. But no child, especially no young child 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 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,

Speaker 1  20:22  
absolutely everything you just said, I wanted to snap and clap and all the things, thank you.

Dawn Davenport  20:28  
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 parent support groups.org. All right. And 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 gonna talk to you about the birth mom 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.

Speaker 2  21:43  
So I graduated college with an 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, plans to go to my best friend's house in case that 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, Kay, if you're going to tell them you're pregnant, you have to come to them with a solution. And that was my proposed solution. I told him very early on in my pregnancy, nobody talked me out of it in all that time. And so that was the plan. 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 and 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 play 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.

Dawn Davenport  25:01  
And when we talk about that in the birth parent section, I want to talk to you about a lot of those issues. And you alluded to the fact religion headache, 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. Yeah. Are there other ways that religion impacts the experience from a birth parents perspective? Yeah, I

Speaker 2  25:27  
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 I've, 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 judgement of yourself? Sure, you know, so yeah, well, 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 me 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,

Dawn Davenport  28:01  
how does religion play into the adoptive parent perspective? Kelsey just mentioned one, the orphan care movement. I like to actually say 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?

Speaker 3  28:20  
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 unsheltered, 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 section about religion, they've already read Kelsey section about religion. So there wasn't a whole lot left for me to cover except to look at it from the adoptive 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, 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 Katherine Joyce, and industries crops up around this. And sometimes adoptive 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 adopt internationally. And this 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, have 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 going to 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 of outlining this and 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 that ways that I tried to cover that in the religion section. Okay,

Dawn Davenport  30:33  
and so, coming around to the GOP D perspective, unfiltered Sarah, how does religion play into the adoption narrative for an adoptive person?

Speaker 1  30:47  
When we were talking about the rescue narrative earlier, it does go a little bit hand in hand, there's a fair bit of you know, when we hear about premarital sex is a sin when we know that that's where we came from. It just picks 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, we're not married. So we 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 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 separation, 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. And even as an adult, in my 50s, 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 the this is 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, you know, adults my age, lamenting about their children and not finding God and they want to be like, Are you are you kidding? Of course they're running from God like this. You've wrapped up adoption and God to sewed so tightly like, you gotta run and I did for many years, I had to I 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's 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.

Dawn Davenport  34:17  
I think you're right about that not saying part. If you haven't heard of it before, you should hear of it now. And that is creating a family has 12 free courses that are available to you to use as either your continuing education primarily if you're a foster parent, or just to become a better parent, if you are parenting, or if you're waiting to learn more and deepen your knowledge of what it means to parent through foster care through adoption or through kinship care. These courses are brought to you by The jockey Bing Family Foundation, and you can find them at Bitly slash J B F support that's bi T dot L y slash JBf support. All right, it was an interesting approach to address it from all three of her 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 birth, mothers get a chance to ask for help. They asked for mercy. I thought that was beautifully written, and really summed up the experience from and let me start by saying, There are many different adoption experiences. There are birth moms who have struggled with substance abuse disorder and had their child removed their birth mothers who are not able to care for their childhood, unfortunately, sometimes due to just 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 ask for help. That's powerful. Did you feel that? I assume you did. Yeah.

Speaker 2  36:10  
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 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.

Dawn Davenport  36:41  
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. Yes. And they went on to say that. So who counsels pregnant women when they're trying to figure out? What do I want to have an unplanned pregnancy? And sometimes their plan, but it turns out that you're just not able, but let's say it's an unplanned pregnancy? Or does it 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 be inclusive of both. Well,

Speaker 2  37:37  
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 minefield, it's something I've spent the past three years of my career, researching and harping on and 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 health care, to ensure that she's also getting prenatal care. That's what I wish most. Yeah.

Dawn Davenport  38:30  
And then let's talk about post placement support. You had not? No and is it because the agency, I assume you did you work through an agency, an attorney and attorney? Well, and that's one of the things we tell people when they're choosing an attorney. It's like ala 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 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 your experience 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 of disenfranchised grief is the name but yeah, so where can people at this point birth moms or dads, where can they find support?

Speaker 2  39:26  
I think in the past, you know, seven and a half year since placement for me, I am happy to say that there's much more accessibility to support than there was when I first place 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.

Dawn Davenport  39:50  
No, a lot of it does not. Yeah, so

Speaker 2  39:53  
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, I've adoption has been a huge part of our life in my family. My dad was adopted in 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 aspect is one part of that post placement support. I do think that one on one support with a licensed therapist also can be useful. And I don't think that therapy is for everyone. But I think ideally, what I would like to see is variety and choice for women to be able to have therapy with someone that fits them, and understands adoption and the complexities that accompany it.

Dawn Davenport  41:38  
Well said, Thank you. Well, Laurie, we did not leave a lot of time for you. But I will say that creating a family podcast as well as creating families spends a lot of time talking with and to adoptive parents, however, I do want to, oh, 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?

Speaker 3  42:11  
Yeah, and you're so right about that done 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 in 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

Dawn Davenport  42:37  
body failed, your body fails. And depending on how you view femininity, you are less feminine, yeah, and masculine for the men as well. Very good point, thank

Speaker 3  42:46  
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 shady, because in a way, We're faking it, we're hope we're going 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 give 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.

Dawn Davenport  44:21  
We do better when we know better to paraphrase my Angela. 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

Speaker 3  44:45  
think that this kind of community that you've built it creating a family is so important, yours is across community and we think reading this book should be reading community and can be reading 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 and community to use that guide. There's some special goodies from Sarah and calcium V in there. So I just want to make sure readers know about that.

Dawn Davenport  45:09  
Great idea because I agree with you about reading and community. I didn't read it in community, but I might join the book club. Because I think Sarah said, one of the realities of being unfiltered is you know, that you could be hurting people. There'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?

Speaker 3  45:37  
It's adoption unfiltered.com. And on there is a book section, a podcast section, and Events 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 fans or across a group

Dawn Davenport  45:52  
if they want to be a mixed group. Yes. Excellent. So adoption unfiltered.com I thank you so much. Sarah easterly, Kelsey van durably, Banyard, and Laurie Holden for being with us today to talk about listening to adoptees 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 placed with families throughout the US children's house also provides home study services, and consulting services for international surrogacy

Transcribed by https://otter.ai