Zygote Baby

in me. This is Jane Mints. Jane is an interventionist, which means that she flies all over the world trying to intervene when someone an alcoholic, an addict needs a serious amount of help. When you want to bring the big guns in the person who can handle all of it, the blood, the gore, the vomit, the denial, the life and death stakes of the addict at the end of the line, that's Jane. Because Jane's been there herself, right

in the center of that shame, that addiction. It doesn't own me anymore, but it is something that I battle every single day and I just and I think that, um, I feel better when I'm able to help somebody that is really sort of unconsciously deciding if they want to live or die. And there is that moment when I'm able to connect to somebody for the moment they choose to live, and that's the opening. So that's the power

of what wounded people can do together. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is Family Secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. This is a story about adoption, addiction, recovery, identity, nature, nurture, and well just a little organized crime, but we'll get to that. And like a soft thrumming heartbeat beneath all

of it, shame. I've been thinking a lot about shame during this first season of Family Secrets, because so many of these stories either originate in shame, or cause shame, or both. In Jane's case, her story begins with being adopted. She's the eldest of three adopted children, brought into a wonderful, loving, privileged family. So everything's good, just as it ought to be. I grew up and Shaker Heights, Ohio. My father was a surgeon, my mother stay at home mother. I had

to adopted siblings and we lad really an idyllic life. Um, the rhythm of life was terrific. I had all the opportunity that was afforded me in terms of excellent education, great camps, very feminist you know, grow girl environment, private schools and that kind of thing, lots of travel. My family was incredibly social. We had lots of extended family and friends, and I was really supported and cherished and

celebrated as a kid. But I was very lucky because my life could have been the polar opposite, and I knew that my whole life. So when you say your life could have been the polar opposite, it's because you had the knowledge that you were adopted, and so the sense of luck of the draw or like being adopted into one particular family that was loving and privileged as opposed to another. Correct it absolutely. And I didn't at that time know anything about my birth history, but I

knew I was lucky. And I had a relationship with my father, who's passed on about five years now. Um, that was extraordinary. Jane's dad was a huge personality. She describes him as the mayor of everything. He was Cleveland's favorite eye doctor, and Jane would tag along on his medical calls to the hospital, into the emergency room, even the operating room. He brought home cow eyes, I'm sorry, but you you and taught her how to operate on

them in the family's basement. Jane's mom was also a lovely human being, though Jane felt less connected to her. She was a beautiful entertainer, a great cook, a classic nineteen sixties stay at home mom. My mother today is eighty six years old and reads three newspapers a day and is glued to CNN and ms NBC and the two. The thing that we have most in common today as politics,

which is great. But we're very, very different people. And while I love and appreciate my mother, I never developed, you know, that rapport that I had with my dad. It was just a very different relationship. And still, you know, deeply loving and and all that good stuff. But we're just cut from completely different class. So, in terms of being adopted, were you told that you were adopted at a particular age or was it part of the fabric of growing up for you always? How did your parents

handle it? I think from the time I could comprehend, my mom and dad would read me a little book called The Chosen One, and that was the message from the time I was a small child, is that I was chosen and you know, very special because of that, and so they normed out adoption. The mistake of norming it out was the misunderstanding that children are blank slates. So it was kind of an interesting dynamic where I always felt very you know, loving and accepted and come

from this amazingly cool family. It wasn't until much later in my life that I sort of stood in my own truth and said I deserve to know. I really deserve it. The book Chain Remembers is actually titled The Chosen Baby. Published in the cover features a whimsical drawing of a little boy climbing out of his crib, and the book is described as a universally popular children's story about adoption. The opening goes like this. The first baby was a little boy with blue eyes and curly blonde hair.

He laughed and played with a rattle. The man and his wife watched the baby. Then they shook their heads and said, this is a beautiful child, but we know it is not our baby. And they were taken to see the next and they're asleep. In the crib lay a lovely, rosy, fat baby boy. He opened his big brown eyes and smiled. The wife picked him up and sat him on her lap. The baby gurgled, and the man and his wife said, this is our chosen baby.

We won't have to look any further. We will have everything ready for him by tomorrow and would like to take him home. Then. I am sure the book was well intentioned and its author well meaning, and the parents who read it to their children were ahead of their time, those who were trying to tell the truth to their kids about their adoption. And yet, in Jane's words, the whole idea was to norm it out, to instill strongly the sense that being chosen was all that mattered. My

adoption was a private adoption. And what what I think did go wrong over time is that while it appeared to be transparent, you know, in terms of me knowing I was adopted, my parents claimed they knew nothing about my adopted family, which is not true. So it took me getting my grandmother really drunk and imploring her to show me my original birth certificate, which had been altered. My grandmother, my mother's mother, was just this little pocket person, but she was all ry. I mean, she was no

joke at all. And um, I think that when I was born, my parents gave my grandfather and my grandmother my original birth certificate, and somehow I had gotten wind of that at around seven years old. So I went over to my grandmother's house and she used to smoke Lucky Strikes cigarettes and drink scotch. So we started drinking scotch and smoking Lucky Strikes cigarettes together, and I just

said to her, I have to know. And her whole thing was, well, if your mother ever found out, I would never be able to recover from that because they were very, very bonded and had, you know, beautiful relationship. But she sort of at that moment, there was this crack and I was able to slip through and she gave me my birth certificate, which then gave me the actual doctor and the town that I was born. After she finally finds her birth certificate. Jane hires a private detective.

Jane is twenty six years old. She's in retail computer sales. Her career is on hire. She's a hard partying up and comer. Within three days, she was able to find everything out that I needed to know. And she called me and she said, UM, you better sit down, and I, boy, did I sit down, and she told me I found her This is where she is um. She would like to talk to you. She wanted me to tell you. You know, she's been waiting for you your whole life.

And I said, okay, have her call. And of course, at that time, I was drinking like a fish, and I grabbed a Scotch bottle and I sat on the edge of my bed and the phone rang, and she said exactly those things to me. She said, I've been waiting for you all my life. And and then we agreed to meet. We're going to pause for a moment before we get to the moment when Jane first eats her birth mother. I want to know more about the whole inside Jane, inside so many of us whose origins

have been kept from us. After all, she's had it pretty good. What sends her to the private detective and ultimately to her biological mother? I mean, what is that confusion? What is that sense of emptiness all about? Well, it's interesting when you live in such a beautiful bubble and you have nothing but really good things happening to you all the time. And I was successful, I was had

great friends, I had great family. My whole life, I felt like there was a black hole in my soul that was so deep and wide, and I felt like I didn't deserve to feel that way, and that I felt really ashamed of having these feelings and not being able to really identify what that was about. And you know, I think shame is is what I learned to feel about myself my whole life, even though there was no

evidence that I should be ashamed. But I felt ashamed for wanting to know more about myself and sort of being acculturated. I can't really describe it, but you never you always feel on the outside of life, always, and then there's no evidence for why you should feel that way, so that there's an incongruence. Yeah, I can't tell you how much I relate to that, Okay, Yeah, I know that the feeling of I don't have a right to

this pain. I mean, you know, look at me, look where I live, Look look at this privilege, and you know this environment in which really nothing has gone wrong, that's right, But the feeling of something being terribly wrong, right, and that being an extremely confusing thing for a kid. It it really is. And you know, you and I were talking a little bit earlier that adoptive kids have a very high rate of addiction. And process addictions, which

means being addicted to anything other than a substance. And my family were big cocktailers, and I can remember it nine years old, clearing the cocktail glasses and then taking my first drink, and that feeling of being different or separate or not a part of went away. So it's a classic when substance meets solution. And that was the story of my life. So rather than try to seek an inward journey, until I learned to do that, everything

was external. Everything was an external fix. And that's even more disregulating because there's no you know, you're it's not an authentic journey at that point, right, And ye know what's going through my head is what possible tools? Would you have had to know that an inward journey was

possible exactly? And it wasn't until I landed in treatment that that I started to connect with Native American spirituality and ritual and all this kind of stuff and really realized that there was a huge spiritual part of myself that I never knew existed. I didn't know existed for anybody else. Would you have though, like in middle school in high school, would you have been able to identify this. If somebody had asked you, are you good with what

you know about yourself? Or is that does it feel like there's something more that that you're seeking that would you have been able to articulate that I would have. I would have, but I was never asked, and I didn't look to somebody to, you know, ask me that. Well, that goes back to the narrative of I was chosen.

I've been so blessed, right, I'm so lucky. Yeah, I should just shut up and shut up and enjoy it, right, But you can't if something is so it's it's cellular, and it's also I'm a big YOUNGI in so the collective unconscious is you know, is always so intriguing to me, and there's there's a real disconnect and when you're in

disharmony with the universe, you know, starting with yourself. Everything we talked about running around your back hand, that's what happens, is that you just end up course correcting all the time. When Jane talks about running around her backhand, this is a phrase that originates in her youth as a tournament tennis player, and one I love so much I'm gonna

start using it myself. I was also a tournament tennis player, though probably not as good as Jane, and I remember that coaches love to say this, don't run around your back hand, meaning don't compensate or overcompensate, don't be afraid of your weaknesses, running around whatever your truth is, whatever you know deep down is the right thing to do. So you're only playing with half your game because you're

so worried about failing or missing your shot. Or in Jane's case, if she was enough of a winner, is she nailed every shot, she would continue to be the lucky chosen baby. In my own mind, now that I can construct some of the stuff it was, they can't possibly give me back if I'm this good. So now Jane is twenty six years old, and she's sitting on the edge of her bed with her bottle of scotch and hearing the sound of her birth mother's voice for the first time in her life. When I heard her voice,

it's like my my cell started knitting back together. It was terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. So I decided, you know, on that phone call with my birth mom her name is Linda, to meet her and I flew to Dallas the next week and I was my uniform at the time probably still is today, was you know, cowboy boots, jeans and a white shirt. And I walked off the plane and at that time, people could meet you at the gate, remember that like back in the

Stone ages. Uh. And there was my mother in a white shirt, jeans and cowboy boots and we're doppelgangers, were dead lookalikes. When you see somebody that you're a dead ringer for. I mean my mannerism, the cadence of my voice, the way I wore my hair, my blue eyes, my whole It was the most soul shattering moment, and I think sometimes you have to fall apart to put yourself back together. And that was that brought the house down for me. And then I started to learn to live.

And it was because I felt finally that that I did belong somewhere. Jane's mother, Linda, Her life is complex. Jane describes her as an extraordinary, very wounded person with a loose grip on reality. Linda also has another child, one she has raised, Jane's half brother, who has mixed feelings about the discovery that he has a sibling. He had never known about On her end, she had kept me a secret from my half brother and the family,

so she had to come clean. So we went over and we met my my half brother, who was not really buying into this whole thing. He'd been the golden child and his family, but they had lived a very challenging life, I mean, just needless to say. And so I met him, I met his two little kids and his wife at the time, and the three of us just decided to go out and do some skeet shooting and that was really great. Um. And that's the other thing is, from the time I was a small child,

I could ride and shoot like nobody's beeswax. Skeet shooting as a bonding activity doesn't seem to quite go together with Jane's Shaker Heights, progressive Jewish upbringing. Yes, a liberal Jewish progressive Democrat, you know. I mean we we didn't shoot guns, we didn't do all that kind of stuff. But I went to these this fabulous summer camp where we did all that, and that was just such a part of my d n A because that's my whole family.

We're all you know, outdoorsy outlaws, addicts, you know, really colorful group of people. So we just blew stuff up and it was sort of this cathartic cool bonding. D N a d oxy ribonucleic acid. There's a mouthful for you. Here's a definition the fundamental and distinctive characteristics or qualities of someone or something, especially when regarded as unchangeable. What is it to recognize the characteristics or qualities of yourself in someone else for the very first time. I remember

when I first laid eyes on my biological father. The first time I saw him was on a YouTube video. He was giving a lecture, and what I felt watching him was a shocking sense of familiarity. His gestures, his facial expressions, his very nature was like an overlay of my own. The one thing about my mother, uh Linda, was that she was dynamic. I mean, there was just

something She would just weave a spell around you. Her charisma was extraordinary, and as she started to tell me a little bit about her life, she started to answer a lot of questions about how I operated. Because I'm sort of an outlaw at heart, but I've been refined and I've been educated, and I have a very distinct

moral compass and sort of code of conduct. But my mother, who polished herself, up ended up leaving home at fifteen or sixteen years old, found her way into the St. Louis Mob and became a very high ranking U copo. Just hold on a second here. In all the fantasies that adopted children have about who their birth mother might be, you know, famous actress, foreign royalty, I wonder if high ranking capo in the St. Louis Mob has ever made

the list. Jane's mother with a mobster. She drove getaway cars, She used her beauty to lure men into rooms where bad, bad things happened. She fell in love with Kurt Flood, a Hall of Fame baseball player, and even tried to run away with him. Jane describes Linda as a black widow type, dark and dangerous in a glamorous package. So many of the stories that she told me about that part of her life, which were really the glory days of her life, started to help me make sense of

the mobster and me. And it was just an unbelievable like, oh my god, now I get it, I get why I think this way, I get so. It was just a kind of a a chicken and egg thing. You know, when you can't figure out why you're you operate this like as a little Jewish girl from Shaker Heights. There would be no reason for me to be as street

smart as I am. There would be no reason for me to be able to read a room as quickly as I can, um no frame of reference for any of this stuff, and very different than my other siblings and even my parents. The nature is so strong, you know. The nurture is important, but what I learned was over my lifetime was to appreciate so much the cellular knowledge that is transferred from one generation to another, which it could be argued, is why it's so important, why the

child is not a blank slate. Oh my gosh, it's so true. And without somebody being able to claim their history and to understand their history, most people feel fraudulent and out of congruence. It's a terrible way to live. And that school of thinking. School of thought has destroyed so many people. And today, you know, after my own journey of my own addiction, my job every single day is to be rigorously honest with myself and other people.

And telling the truth is a hard thing to do, and reconciling the truth is a hard thing to do. So Jane meets her birth mom and the rest of her birth family and learns so much about herself that black hole, that yawning empty space inside her is all filled up. She no longer feels the need to drink.

Cue the violence. In the Hollywood version of Jane's life, that's what would happen right the moment she meets her mother, her biological mother, she would have everything she needs, her questions all would be answered, and her addiction, well, that would just go away. But life is not a Hollywood movie. Jane is in her mid twenties when she meets Linda, and it takes her until the age of forty to

get sober. Because I was carrying a secret, and that destroyed me, ultimately destroyed me, and I ended up working my whole life around protecting that secret of having met her, establishing a relationship with her, you know, being forced to live a double life because I was immediately welcomed in to my birth family, all the while remaining staunchly a

part of my adoptive family. And I should have felt like I was complete, but I felt like I had betrayed that I was, had been treacherous and deceitful, that if my family ever really found out that I had done this, that I would be disowned, that the relationships would be forever fractured. And that's actually pretty much what happened. I had to end up telling my father, my beloved father,

because my brother was coming to town. My half brother was coming to town to visit me, and I just it's such a close knit community that we look so much alike my birth mother and looks at that. I knew that the minute he came to town, it was the cat was out of the bag. So I ended up telling my dad about this. Course he was shattered, and he went and told my mother about this, and I don't know that she's ever recovered. And that was the last anybody ever spoke of it. So that's another wound, right.

But it strikes me that you didn't have to have your half brother come to town, so you must have on some level needed to bring this to a boil, no question about it. And you know, some of that's really a blur, and I think instinct kicks in. I wanted my children to meet him, um, I wanted my then husband to meet him, and I needed some support. I needed people to share this burden with me, which it's a weird word to use, but that's what it was. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be back

in a moment. This idea of being burdened feels like an important one. Whenever a family secrets, who carries that burden? And why does the burden shift from one family member to another? Does the burden exist if the secret manages to stay secret? What are all the implications of the hidden,

the unseat, the unknown. Can you talk more about shame, because it seems to me there are a few through lines both in my story and all the stories with the people that I've been in conversations with for this podcast, and one of those through lines is shame. Another is a close cousin to shame, which is this feeling of not deserving. And so it seems to me that when someone has been raised in the atmosphere of the unseid in some way, even if you know child, a child

doesn't know necessarily what the what that thing is. It's just this feeling of not having all the information and somehow not having a right to it, or not having a right to one's own reality, right oh you, just like I feel like i'm you know, a little unglued because you've just hit me so hard with you know, those are the through lines of my life, are feeling worthy. And my sense of worth was in my accomplishments, and people in my life were very happy to wear my

accomplishments on their sleeve. So then I was validated socially and all for all of that. But that was such an external thing. And then shame is another thing that I still, you know, at fifty eight years old, battle every day of my life. And I really do look in the mirror and say, what do you have to be ashamed of? Like You're a cool person, You've raised great kids, you have great business, you help people, you

do it. But deep in my soul, I have never been able to heal that, you know, even with as much work as I've done, you know, in my own growth and my own sort of therapeutic growth, I can't get it right. It's like such a broken piece of me and I just don't quite know how to do it, but I keep trying. Jane has some years of heading down a parallel track to Linda's. Linda is a pill addict.

Jane is an active alcoholic. This is something they have in common, something also likely rooted in their shared biology. But in Jane finally gets sober and Linda, Linda does not. I just had a sort of a flash of insight here. But I lived just culturally differently. But I lived the same story as my mother of feeling on the outside, you know, finding ways to belong um, dealing with the trauma of trying to fit in and figure out where

you exist. And ultimatelyly my mother destroyed herself. I didn't, and I was able to catch myself before I died prematurely. But that same desire to want to destroy one's self I share with my mother. Now I was clean and sober, and she was starting to fall further further into depression, um compensatory behaviors. She was a terrible cigare at smoker, and um she was an alcoholic, but she was prescription painkiller queen. And I just saw mental illness started roll

over her and there was no stopping it. And then, you know, as somebody new in recovery, you want to share that and you want to talk about it. Well, that's the last thing that somebody wants to talk about when they're in active addiction. Linda dies in two thousand seven, destitute and alone in government housing in rural Missouri near the Ozark Mountains, in a tiny house filled with the

stench of cigarettes, every surface covered with tar. Jane had already completed her graduate degree and by that time was well on her way to doing her work as an interventionist. Ultimately, she ended up perishing, and the the talk about the shame of not being able to save her, you know, and then really watch her die and then discover her in the condition, her living condition, which I knew nothing about, thank god, because I would have bankrupted myself to provide

some kind of lifestyle for her. I mean, what a mess. But um, what it did for me is it woke me up. And I'm a light keeper today. And unless you've lived in the dark, you don't know what light is. You think you do, but you don't, you know. Fifteen years down the road now, Um, I feel like I've lived several lifetimes in this lifetime. But this is where I belong because for some reason I have that ability to reach in up to the dark and pull people out,

or be a part of pulling people out. I don't want to you know, sound like a grandized but it's kind of an amazing thing. Well, you aren't afraid of it, no, and you are able to recognize it. And I'm strong, you know, I've survived. Yeah, it's so interesting, isn't it? The way that it can all coexist? And it's still so confusing. While I have lots of pieces and parts,

it's not completely integrated. And I think that that's my sole journey this time around, is to you know, continue to seek the truth and to be of service to others. And that's part of my healing and my journey and my self actualization. But it's all very confusing. Jane uses a lot of imagery in her conversation, and this makes sense to me. Images are often easier to hold onto

the language than words. She described herself earlier as a huge young Gian Carl Jung, the psychoanalytic poet of the unconscious. When Jane studied for her master's degree, she was drawn to the work of Clarissa Pincola s d. Is one

of the great Indian analysts of our time. She's told the story of the Zygote Baby and effectively, Um, and I'll probably butcher this, but you'll get it is that the stork is flying across the sky with a big basket on its back, and all these little babies are in the basket, ready to be delivered to their intended families.

But there are always these the little ones that like over percolate, and they're so excited that they end up falling out of the basket into the wrong family, and they spend their whole lives trying to reconcile their difference. They're they're sort of intuitive, knowing difference from where they landed to who they are as human beings. That's the story of my life. And while I don't feel that my family was wrong, I felt that I did unnaturally land in my family. I am that zygote baby, and

I think that many adoptive kids feel that way. But we end up actually being the most dynamic, resilient, powerful people because of everything that we've had to endure to get to our truth. I'd like to thank my guest Jane Mints, for sharing her family secret. You can find out more about Jane and her work at Jane mints dot com. Family Secrets is an I Heart Media production. Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer. Andrew Howard and Tristan McNeil are the audio engineers, and Julie Douglas is the

executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, you can get in touch with us at listener mail at Family Secrets Podcast dot com, and you can also find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder, and Facebook at Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at Fami Secrets Pod. That's Fami Secrets. For more about my book, Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com