Welcome to the Open Adoption Project. This is episode 115. We're the Nelsons. I'm Shaun. And I'm Lanette. And today we are really excited to have another installment in our National Adoption Month series where we are doing book clubs. So every week we are talking about a different adoption related book with an adoptee hosting our discussion. Yeah, in today's episode we have an interview with Sharolyn Swenson. And Sharolyn is an adoptee, a friend, a neighbor of ours.
And I think Lanette may even say this in the beginning of their conversation, but Sharolyn was the first adoptee that we interviewed on the podcast several years ago. And her episode is fantastic. If you have not listened to it, check it out. It's great. Yeah, there's good twists and turns in her story. And yeah, she's vulnerable in the experience she shares. Yep, we love her. And we're really excited to talk to her about the book Orphan Train written by Christina Baker Klein.
And so we're just going to jump into that and hear what she has to say about that book. So we are here on the podcast with Sharolyn Swenson. We're going to talk about the book Orphan Train by Christina Baker Klein. We're really excited to have you back on the show, Sharolyn. Thank you for being here. Thank you for inviting me. So Sharolyn, I'm pretty sure you were the first adoptee we ever interviewed for the podcast. And you have one of our most listened to episodes as well. Wow, I guess.
If you look at our history. It's probably because I tell everybody to listen to it. I'm glad you do. It's a great episode. I love your episode. So we're definitely referring anyone who hasn't heard your story back to that episode. But for now, can you tell us a bit about your adoption story, a bit about you? So I was adopted in New York City. And I was six weeks old when I was adopted. My birth mother was 17 when she had me. And she was a student at NYU.
My adopted mother was pregnant and didn't tell the adoption agency. So six months later, I had sisters, twin sisters. So my brother was older. And then my younger twin sisters. Fast forward, I was about 32. And my parents had always had a file about my adoption because my parents believed that I should know where I came from. And on one of the pieces of paper they saved was my birth name that the lawyers had accidentally sent them.
And so I had a friend who was helping her husband find his birth mother. And she was having a hard time because it was a very common name. So I told her my birth name. And it's an extremely rare name. And that's the way I found my birth mother, who told me that somebody was my birth father, which it turned out five years later, I found out after DNA that my birth father was not my birth father. And I had another birth father. So that's a brief story. And yeah, check out the full one.
But yes, it's a good synopsis. All right, and then you grew up in a home where you had parents who wanted you to know all of your information about your heritage. And so did your family talk about adoption openly as well? Yes. They always would say, oh, we chose you. And they would talk about how hard it must have been for my mother, but she was so young, to give me up. And yeah, we talked about it whenever I had a question.
And because my sisters were only six months younger than me, it also was never a mystery to anyone. So my parents never tried to hide it. We never tried to hide it. It was just normal. And it wasn't some big secret like a lot of people my age. I'm 57. So people born in the late 60s, it was a secret, and no one wanted to talk about it. Yeah, I love that your parents broke that norm. It feels like that went better for you than maybe for others who didn't have that openness. It definitely did.
Yeah, good. You went. All right, so we are going to talk today about the book Orphan Train. So would you mind sharing maybe what you think a good summary of the book would be? Like, just brief, nothing crazy. So we have two stories going on. One is about a girl whose name changes several times. She's an Irish. She eventually becomes an orphan and is part of the orphan train. And then we have somebody in present day named Molly who is a foster child and is being raised in the foster system.
And so eventually, the Irish girl whose name eventually becomes Vivian meets up with this girl because the girl is helping her. And the book goes through both of their stories, mainly about me, Dorothy, Vivian, which are her names. But we learned a little bit about what orphan trains were like and what happened to people on the orphan trains. Yeah, and the orphan train era is really interesting to me because I feel like it was paved with these great intentions.
But in practice, it didn't always go so well. So even though this book is fiction, I feel like it's a really interesting portrayal of this time in history that I didn't know about until just a couple of years ago. I'm so surprised to learn about it. Yeah. I heard a little bit about it. And it was interesting because last night, I was telling my husband just a little bit about it. And he was horrified. It feels like people being auctioned and then being used as slaves or glorified servants.
There were a lot of issues. And it started out as something that was meant to help the children. But I think a lot of times, it didn't. Yeah, which is heartbreaking. So how do you think your perspective as an adoptee impacted the way that you experienced this book? I think there were a few things. I think the name changes bothered me. Everybody just thinking, well, now I have this girl. And so I can change your name to what I wanted to be. Erase her history. Yes, erase her history of the past.
And that was bothersome to me. I think with Molly's story, it was particularly bothersome to me because it was all about money. But that also applied to some of Vivian's situations. And it just made me think of people that I've met whose adoption stories didn't have to do with someone wanting a child and to be a parent. It was more about them being a savior. And you see that all the time where people say, oh, I'm going to have a couple of children and then adopt a few.
And it's always because they're going to save someone instead of offering some, I don't know. Yeah, there's a huge problem in the adoption community with adoptive parents or prospective adoptive parents not understanding the problems with that saviorism kind of role in adoption. And how it's really not healthy for a child to be adopted with those reasons. I'm always surprised when people say that their parents said, you should thank me.
And I have the opposite experience that my parents were always thanking me and thanking my birth mother. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good thing to bring up, though. It's, I think, becoming less common, I hope. But I hope that people are recognizing that that's not a healthy thing to put on any child. Yeah. I also think in this book, you see the different situations that adopted children can go into.
And for me, it's always a struggle when I hear people talk about their situations to kind of figure out how much of it is normal that we just grow up and we all have lives that have crazy things that happen to us. We have trauma. And how much of it is based on the fact that we're adopted. Trying to figure that out is always interesting reading. Yeah. So interesting. Probably impossible to completely know, but really an interesting thing to bring up.
I have heard a lot of people talking recently about how in adoption, it's a different life, right? You're not getting a better life necessarily, but it's a different life. And just recognizing that we really can't ever know. Yeah, I think even at my age sometimes, when I'm going to sleep or whatever, I just think, oh, I wonder what it would have been like if I would have been with this other family, because I know my birth parents. How would that have been different from the life I had?
And neither of them seemed like they were terrible. They just were different. I think that's how things often are. It's just so gray that it's hard to have a definitive black and white where it's like, oh, yeah, this is definitely better. It's just so hard to know. Right. Yeah. All right, so the minister in New York City who started the orphan train movement, his name was Charles Lauren Brace.
He was quoted as saying, when a child of the streets stands before you, you cannot, in rags with a tears in face, you cannot easily forget him. And yet you are perplexed what to do. The human soul is difficult to interfere with. You hesitate how far you should go. So based on what you know about orphan trains, how do you feel? Do you feel like it went too far, this movement trying to help these kids who were without homes? What could have been done better?
I think one of the differences from what we have today is that homes are studied. And it's not just drop a child off and see, oh, who shows up, and we don't know what their intentions are. Because throughout this book, you see how there are different parents that have different intentions for the children and different home wives. And I think that's a little bit different today.
But I also think it was probably horrible to be on the streets in New York City, homeless, without food and someone to care for them, or to be in an orphanage where you didn't have that one-on-one contact with a parent. You had no bonds, really. So I don't know what the answer was. And I hope that in today's world, we have better answers than they did then. Yeah, I mean, it's a small thing. But I think home studies are a huge improvement now.
When I hear people complain about the process, I'm like, but aren't you so glad that this is in place, that we're hopefully being more careful about who is bringing these kids home? So why do you think Vivian waited to share her secret? I'm trying to not spoil things too much. Of course, people know that there might be spoilers in this episode. There will be. But why do you think she waited to share her big secret until when she did? It was a really long time.
And how can the adoption community maybe combat some of the shame and stigma that might get in the way of sharing secrets like that? I think you just answered the question, which is there was a lot of shame and a lot of stigma. And I think it took a while for her to trust Molly to share what had happened in her life. And as they unpack or organize the boxes, this story unfolds.
And just a lot of shame, because I myself remember when I was a teenager thinking, oh, if I ever got pregnant, I don't think I could give a baby up for adoption, because I don't want to have this cycle that, oh, we have children and give them away all the time. And so I think having had her life and then knowing that she had to trust the child to somebody else had to be pretty hard.
Yeah. Well, I feel like sharing it with Molly, it makes sense, because they both shared experiences as adoptees or children who were in these challenging situations. But also, I imagine it was harder to share that with maybe that fear of shame and stigma. And so I loved Molly's response. I thought that it was really compassionate. Yeah, so were you surprised by Molly's reaction to that? I think so.
I mean, I think that you would think that coming from someone who had been going from home to home, she would think more on the lines of the person, of the child than of the mother. But she did seem to show compassion for the mom. Yeah, I was surprised. It was very mature, seemingly to me. Yeah. And then were you surprised by Vivian's decision to relinquish that child? I was very surprised by that decision. I don't think in the same situation I probably would have.
But I think that's kind of what we learn with adoption, is we can't be too judgmental of the decisions. But I thought it was interesting that she didn't think she had the capability to love someone, because she hadn't had a lot of love in her life. Yeah. Yeah. That was heartbreaking. Well, and it made me wonder how often these things are cyclical. You talked about where we didn't feel love, and then maybe don't feel like we can give love, and it becomes a cycle of challenging situations.
I don't know. I think sometimes people don't have that mirror in their lives where somebody's mirrored how to handle situations and how to bond with people. Yeah. Well, that broke my heart, that entire section. So I already mentioned this a little bit, but Molly supported Vivian's reunion. And she also wasn't really interested already in having her own reunion. So do you have any thoughts on maybe how readiness for reunion or timing for knowing when it's right, how adoptees can figure that out?
I think if you're not involved in an open adoption when you've known from the beginning, it's really a mystery about why your parents gave you up. And adoptive parents try to tell you a story, but they don't really know the answer. And they don't know how the birth parents handled it later in life as they had to deal with the separation. So I feel like when we're searching for birth parents, you need to be old enough to be able to handle it, because some people do get rejection.
And rejection is really hard, especially if you think that you're searching for the one person who's going to be that person who loves you in your life. Yeah, and help you feel whole. Yeah, help make you feel whole. And so I think going into it knowing, realizing that there can be good and there can be bad reunions. And I had good, then bad, then good. I've had mixed, because it's like any other relationship. You just get to know people. And sometimes it works out.
But I've heard some heart-wrenching stories of people that it didn't. And if you don't have that maturity and you're not ready for that outcome, that could be disappointing. I also understand, though, at least having medical histories and things like that are important, too. Yeah. It's such a challenging thing to navigate. And I agree, I think, that it was really mature that Molly recognized. Maybe she wasn't quite ready for that. And we don't know. Maybe down the road she will be.
So I would love to talk more about communication and adoptive families and how that can impact and adopt these experience. Just speaking from your own experience and then looking at these experiences in this book and seeing how communication or lack of communication might play out in different adoptive families. So in my family, being adopted was not a secret. And we talked about it. And I was in a family where it was OK to ask questions and to be encouraged to show your feelings.
So for the most part, I mean, my parents weren't perfect. But they did love me, which I think is a really important part of communication and people. And not going with fear, because I remember I had one friend who didn't find out she was adopted until she was like, she graduated about 18, 19 years old. And she really had such a hard time dealing with it. Because I feel like when you keep things a secret, you're saying there's something wrong with it.
And I think that can be anything in the family. When you hide things from each other, then you're saying there's something really wrong instead of saying whatever it is, this happened, and this is how I dealt with it. Or this is how this person's dealing with it. And just that recognition that no one's perfect, but how are we going to get through this? But I think fear is a big reason why people don't communicate very well. I think that's so insightful.
And I feel like today with adoption, it seems like we're doing better. We're not maybe as fearful of talking about adoption. But in other areas, I think it's still a struggle. With embryo adoption, we've been talking on the podcast about how a lot of people who are conceived using assisted reproductive technology don't find out until they're 16, 17, 18, right? It's like history just repeating itself a little bit differently. I see that on a lot of sites that have to do with DNA.
That all of a sudden they're like, this doesn't make any sense. Why doesn't it make sense? But on the communication, I just have this other thought too, is that we need to be careful in how we communicate it, even to our friends and to other people. Because we do need to deal with all of our feelings. But if there's a lot of negative feelings and you're sharing it, I think that's also hard on the child.
So I think finding the right people to communicate with and being, I don't know, recognizing the child's feelings. Yeah. Yeah, I love that. And letting the child guide those discussions. Yeah, I love that. So what did you most relate to in this book? What themes were most resonating with you? I think probably it was the, for me, I found out later in life that I was Jewish, and I'm also half Croatian, or quarter Croatian and quarter English.
And I know, basically, in American society, you know a lot about English culture, and I've lived there. But I feel like this disconnect, like I don't know what it means to be Jewish or to have these certain holidays, or to even like the whole Jewish experience. Whereas I think that's what happened, like when both of these, Molly and Vivian, are adopted, it's their whole entire heritage is cut off from them.
And so Molly doesn't understand, remember enough about being Native American and all of the culture that goes with it. She talks a little bit about it. And Vivian, her whole Irish culture is sort of erased from her. People didn't want her to be Irish anymore. Now you're with me, and you're going to be what I want you to be. And so I think that kind of resonates with me, I think that feeling that we have of where did we come from and what does it mean.
So that's probably what resonated the most with me. Yeah. Well, and no matter how much you communicated with your adoptive family about adoption, they couldn't help you find those answers until you found your birth family. And so that's a really important aspect, I think, to talk about. How do we help adoptives feel that connection to their culture and heritage? And I think it's even more profound when it's interracial adoption and things, which wasn't the case for me. But it is.
It's like you almost feel like you don't belong anywhere because you're not really part of this culture or you're not part of that one because you're straddled the two. Yeah, that's so hard. Yeah. Mm. Yeah, thank you for sharing that. All right, so overall, would you recommend this book? Do you feel like it's worth reading? I think it's a good book to read. It's an interesting story. But I think it's one of those things where somebody threw everything in the kitchen sink in there.
This is all the different possibilities of things that could happen in one person's story. So you just have to recognize, OK, this is a little bit unrealistic that they would be put in all these different situations at the same time. But it is a good introduction to this is what orphan trains are. This is what it was like.
And I think she really did tie into that cultural disconnect that people have and a little bit into how adoption can be fraught with people with maybe good intentions, and she showed people with bad intentions and how things can go awry and the ways they can be OK. Absolutely.
Well, and looking at so many of those different parents and homes that she lived in, there were a lot of parents who maybe did have good intentions but weren't focused on her and her needs, but maybe thinking more about their own needs. I'm thinking the couple who wanted to call her after their deceased daughter. It's like they named, yeah. A loving family. They loved her, but they wanted to replace someone. So it was just kind of a little bit. She was never going to replace their daughter.
No. Of course not. Trying to make her into their daughters and pretend like the daughter didn't exist in a way, that she was the daughter. Yeah. That was strange to me. It just doesn't seem child-centric at all. But it is not. It was strange, and yet it was interesting because that was the best experience that she had. There was kind of an irony there that here these people were so good to her, treated her like a daughter, but it was their daughter, their deceased daughter. Weird conditions.
Yeah. So that was kind of, I think, the one thing was that neither of them ever really found a home, which was kind of sad. Yeah. Because I even feel like Vivian went through so much that even when she got married again, I didn't sound like she really found a place to go home. Yeah. Well, and she still didn't feel like she could be completely vulnerable and share all these different parts of herself and her experiences. Yeah. Yeah, really interesting.
So the author, I believe, wrote this book after finding out that her husband's grandfather was one of the children who rode the orphan train. I thought that was an interesting connection to this. And I'm pretty sure she drew heavily upon this book by Andrea Warren called Orphan Train Writer, and it focuses on a boy named Lee Nailing and his experience riding the orphan train. And you can see that if you read that book, that she probably drew a little heavily from these experiences.
Yeah. Right, because she didn't experience it. So that's the only thing. I think that's pretty much true of historical fiction. You've just got to remember it's fiction. Yes. It's not the truth. If you really want to know what happened, you can get a little closer to by reading a nonfiction book. Yes. But yeah, I felt like that was a pretty good stepping stone to learn a little bit about it. And then if you want to learn more. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely, I agree.
All right, so do you have any big takeaways for the adoption community based on this book? I think it's what we talked about, which is be cognizant of where people come from, communicate, try to just make it a joyful occasion and not something to hide or be secretive about. I love that. That's great. All right, well, thank you so much for being here today and for sharing with us. Thank you.
Well, we just want to give a huge thanks to Sherlyn again for being with us and sharing her experience related to the orphan train. Yes, I really enjoyed our conversation and really appreciate her teaching and helping us learn as we try to become better and more informed about adoption. So thank you so much for being with us for this episode. Just a couple of quick announcements.
If you are an adoptee or a birth parent and you'd like to share some of your experiences and your thoughts with us on the podcast, we would love to hear from you. You can reach out to us at open adoption project at gmail.com or on Instagram, we're at open adoption project. And again, we love hearing from adoptees and birth parents. If you want to share your story, we want to share it. Thank you.
And to hopeful adoptive parents or recent adoptive parents, just a quick announcement that Lynette's guide that she wrote for adoptive parents and openness has been expanded. And we've added five new chapters, about 50 new pages of content that is kind of a summation of what we've learned as adoptive parents, interviewing many, many adoptees and birth parents, and also considering literature and data that has been shared about adoption. So it's a great resource.
It's available also on our website at openadoptionproject.org. And it's very reasonably priced. All the proceeds from the guide go back into the podcast so we can keep producing. Yep, it just supports us sharing adoptee and birth parent experiences, which is really our whole goal here. So thank you so much for being here with us, for helping us as we continue listening and learning. And we'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.