Reflections and Regrets with Amy Seek

Welcome to the Open Adoption Project. This is episode 108. We're the Nelson's. I'm Shaun. And I'm Lanette. And today we are really grateful for the opportunity to share a first mom's perspective and experience with open adoption. We're going to hear

from Amy Seek. So Shaun has a conversation with Amy where they talk about her experiences as a mother with placing and relinquishment with grappling with what adoption has meant for her in her life and how it's impacted her, how it's impacted her son, and with the perspective that she placed 24 years ago and so she's had an extensive amount of time to really mull

over how this has impacted her, what it's looked like. And it's a really challenging and vulnerable conversation and we're really grateful for her sharing with us. Yeah so we'll jump to the recording of my conversation with Amy and then share some of our thoughts and takeaways afterward. Well we are now on the podcast with Amy Seek. Amy thank you so much for being with us. Thanks very much for having me. Great well share with us a little bit

about yourself. How about let's get to know you. So I'm Amy Seek. I live in New York City. Professionally I'm a landscape architect. I work on urban parks and public realm design. I work on climate adaptive infrastructure. We're raising shorelines all over to prepare for sea level rise. My passion is beauty. I care about beauty above all things. But open adoption has been a part of my life

for 24 years. It's something I think about a lot. Within the world of adoption I serve on the board of concerned United Birth Parents and I facilitate a first families support group for the National Association of Adoptees and Parents. I wrote a book about birth mother experience in open adoption. It's called

God in Jetfire and that was published when my son was 15 in 2015. And I have written a whole lot of essays on fertility adoption and motherhood and I've also led lots of writing workshops for birth parents with the aim of getting our work published. So I know there's like the writing for healing contingent. I'm very much about writing for publication so that our experiences can be more broadly understood. And I'm working with my friend Rebecca Israel on

her film hashtag adoption which is going to be out before the end of this year. So I have a successful open adoption in that it remains open for 24 years. But time has taught me a lot about adoption which we'll talk about. And I really think you can't draw any kind of conclusions about it until you see a little bit about how it unfolds. And I mean things are continuing to change all the time even 24 years later. But knowing how my son feels about his adoption has really

solidified some of my feelings. And so I care very deeply about helping birth mothers look at their options and work to preserve their family intact and to relinquish a child only in the most extreme and insurmountable circumstances and when they do to know their rights and have the support that they need. So that is my intro. Awesome. Thank you so much. We're again we're really excited to hear from you about your personal story and also some of the great work that you've been doing.

And the community listening to this podcast ranges from adoptees to birth parents to hopeful adoptive parents and family families and friends of all of those. Right. So across across the spectrum of the adoption constellation. And as we come together and have a space where we can share and learn together we're all uplifted and we we gain another little piece to the puzzle for our personal interpretation of how open adoption works in our own families and

how we can support and help others. So we're really again excited to to connect with you and have you with us. If you wouldn't mind could you share a little bit of your personal experience and then we'll jump into some follow up questions. And I just want to say I appreciate what you just said and that this podcast is I can see the evolution even of you guys through this podcast and how much you appreciate the level of curiosity and really asking difficult questions.

And so I really appreciate I really appreciate that. Thank you. So my story is I gave up my son when I was 23 I was in college and I was not ready to marry my boyfriend at the time. And when I was introduced to the concepts of open adoption it sounded like a great experience that would mitigate the pain of being separated from my son. I did not know that anything about infant adoption or sorry infant trauma. I thought that I was the one who was going to experience the real blow of the

separation. And so my curiosity when I was in counseling was really like am I going to be able to survive this. I knew my son was going to be able to survive it. And I believe that the key was finding the couple that we could trust. If we found the couple we could trust we could work through all the inevitable complexities that would be part of this relationship. And so my boyfriend and I searched extensively. We were we searched far beyond our own agency. It was the beginning of the Internet.

And so we kind of learned the Internet through this process. We reviewed hundreds of profiles. We met several families. We were talking to tens of people on the phone and we had a list of one hundred and eleven questions that we sent to the couples that were in the running. And we were basically looking for any reason that we shouldn't trust them. And a lot of people kind of bowed out. They didn't they were not for this. You know a lot of them have probably been through a lot already.

But I had to do what I had to do to make sure I was doing the best for my child. And so when we found his adoptive parents we did have a sense of trust. We knew that they were committed to openness because they talked about it and because they already had an adopted child with an open adoption. And it has played out out well. I feel like that sense of trust was like a good instinct about them.

In that there's never been a time that we were there was even the slightest threat of not being able to see him if we wanted to. And throughout his childhood I visited about every three months or so. We didn't live close together ever. So in the early days I would go for a weekend and stay with them because the travel took so long and you did that you know stay the weekend to make it worth it.

But eventually I started coming only for day trips as he got older and that was largely because I just couldn't handle the intensity of being there for very long. So I would make a long travel stay for a short time and make a long travel back. When he turned 16 he started visiting me in New York City and that started a whole new era of our relationship. And around that time we started talking about adoption. It was never a secret, but he never seemed very interested in talking about it.

And I still try it all through his childhood. I would try because I knew I was the adult and I should be the one initiating conversations that might be tricky. But he just wasn't he didn't show any that got no traction. So it was only when he was about 16 that I began to hear what adoption had meant for him and that was that was a real shift. And now he's about to turn 24. He's developing his own voice around his experience.

And it's been really revelatory to me to learn what was going on inside him under my nose despite all my prior experiences. He just didn't have words for it. And so I'm 47 now. I'm married. I don't have other children. I've tried. I've had multiple miscarriages and failed pregnancies. That is that's one of the impacts of adoption in my life. And I mean, there's tons of tons of very good things. I'm definitely presenting myself as a woman. I'm a woman of my own.

I'm definitely presenting a very sad and difficult story. There's tons of happy things in my life. But my life has really been shaped by adoption loss. And there's just no escaping it. There's not a thing in my life. I can't point to the way that adoption had a role there. And so I think that's the short version of the story. Wow. Thank you for being so open and sharing. And you're right. Every experience is different.

And there are really difficult aspects of stories and there are happy aspects of life. And it's hard to paint the whole experience that you have had and that you're having in a short interview. But we appreciate it. We appreciate your vulnerability and sharing some of the maybe harder or challenging feelings that happen. Well, we have a lot of questions for you. And we would love to hear a little bit.

So speaking about openness and your experience there, what would you share with an expectant mother who's considering an open adoption? I have so much to say about this. The first thing is to really understand what's meant by the word open. It sounded to me like it was standing in for words like truth and transparency, like reciprocity and like symmetry. And it can feel really blissful before the birth. It can feel exactly like that.

Like you have a true partner in life with this adoptive couple. But the reality of the power dynamic is a reality. It is a fact. The law favors adoptive parents. And future contact is not legally enforceable. So once you surrender your rights, of course, I know that your listeners know this. The adoptive parents can close the adoption.

Most of the birth mothers that I know, and I'm friends with a very large community of birth mothers, don't have a level of openness that they understood they were agreeing to. And many of them don't get to see their children at all. And so that's like the most basic thing to be very aware of for someone considering open adoption. But because my adoption remained open, I don't want to risk being some kind of like story of victory, and if you can stay open, then everything is great.

The main thing that I'm here for is to say that openness is not a remedy for the pains of adoption on any side. And there's a few ways that I can talk about that. One of the things is I never felt really free to share my real experience. So ahead of the birth, I'm telling her how scary this is to be considering this decision. I'm telling the adoptive family, they're almost my primary support because they're the only ones as invested in it as I am.

But that when the birth happens and they take the child, I knew that my grief and all the processing I was doing were things that would threaten the adoptive family. And if they weren't comfortable, if they didn't like spending time with me because I was so sad and only talked about sad things, they had the freedom to shut me out. And I was counseled that I had a role to play in their entitlement.

Basically entitlement is their sense that they have the right to love that child, that that child is really theirs. And I didn't want to give my child to someone and then them not love him. And so I was told, you let them name them, you have a relinquishment ceremony. And implicitly, I understood I don't show my grief. And that is really paralyzing for the relationship. It means it's not transparent. It's not true.

I also thought, although there's only so much you can imagine, you can't imagine having a baby in the first place, but imagining this crazy structure of open adoption is doubly unimaginable. I thought visiting would be something like resuming my motherhood. That's kind of what I thought it was all about. And after he was born, there was nothing as satisfying as breastfeeding him. I kept him for a couple of weeks. But the visits were not easy and they were not like a return to motherhood.

What is broken in letting the child go was broken for me. And coming together was not like building on a bond. It was like this perpetual return to an injury that couldn't be fixed. And to have been breastfeeding a month ago and then to be pretending to be a casual acquaintance introduced this cognitive dissonance in my life that was really paralyzing. My instincts shut down and I didn't want to cling to him too much because I didn't want them.

I didn't want to threaten them with how much I wanted him. I dissociated and I was a zombie. I feel like I was a zombie for about 10 years. And you wouldn't have thought it because I got two master's degrees. I got jobs in San Francisco and New York and I was traveling. I did tons of traveling overseas. I'm a very high functioning zombie. But some people don't get out of bed and some people maniacally chase accomplishments. And I just was that side of it.

There's something about all the adults thinking this is okay. What you're going through, like adoption is good. This is okay. This is normal and natural. That was so confusing to my head because it felt so not okay. And every single time I left his home, I did not want to be alive. And that includes two weeks ago when I left his home. I cannot tell you how difficult it is to sit with that dissonance.

And so I really part of what I would like to communicate to any family having an open adoption that's like the mom is not visiting. It's hard to visit. It's hard to return to that power structure where you're not good enough. And the proof of it is they have your child and it's right in front of you. So yeah, give grace to the mothers who are having a hard time visiting. And the biggest thing though is that it doesn't mitigate the trauma to the child. The maternal separation still happens.

And my son is awesome and brilliant. And he does have his own story that I don't want to say too much, but it's important because of what it means for me. I was waiting this whole time because I was like, okay, I can be collateral damage if this worked well for him. And he struggles to know where he belongs. He describes it as having two centers of gravity that leave him lost in space. He understands the story perfectly. He's been told it his whole life.

He loves everybody, respects everybody, but adoption goes against the most basic thing in nature, the bond of a mother with her child. And that is going to have consequences. And I wouldn't have done this if I had known that. I think that things that expectant mothers should consider is that they aren't going to return to the person that they were with this addition of a child they get to visit.

It is an identity changing thing to have a child and certainly an identity changing thing to lose a child. And so your plans are already moot. All those plans for what you were going to do in college and all that, they're already moot because you're a mother. And so it's time for a complete recalibration.

And so I guess I'll say one more thing, which is that not being able to be physical with my son in the way that I would have been as a mother is one of my biggest losses because I'm with my family. I'm super cuddly. I'm super kissy and huggy. And I loved sleeping with him. I would wake up before he was hungry. I sensed when he was getting ready to be hungry. And it was just the most satisfying thing to be so in sync. And so just to be so cuddly.

And it's stifling that instinct really broke something in me, detached me from my natural instincts. I had to spend my whole life just kind of like holding myself still not, you know, I can't go to him. He doesn't know me anymore. I can't go to him and just grab him and smush him. I would like give him a nice polite hug in front of his family. And you know, I didn't want to express too much.

But that exercising, that physical restraint also broke something that has had an impact on my entire life. We were recently climbing a tower in Italy. We met in Italy. And we climbed this tower. I have a super fear of heights. And my fear of heights was greater than my reserve around my son, my physical reserve. And I was grabbing him and holding on to him as we were climbing these stairs. And that was like the best thing since like cuddling him when we were born.

And so there's just like, there's this thing that we're both constantly trying to restore. We're trying to get it back. And it can be kind of painful. It's like, why did we lose that thing in the first place? Yeah. Yeah, that natural bond. And we've seen that so clearly with our kids. Last week, we were visiting our daughter's birth mom. And we see her parents regularly, but she moved out of state a couple of years ago. And so they Marco Polo and they FaceTime and all of those things.

But this was the first time they'd been together physically and probably a year and a half, which is a long time in our adoption experience. And we met at an amusement park and our daughter from like 100 yards away saw her and just ran and they just embraced and they just stayed in this hug where her birth mom was holding her off the ground for like three or four minutes.

And just to witness that, I feel like there was this, and I can't put words to either of their experience, but just this deep connection that probably does foster some level of healing for both of them. That was just really sweet. So I love the way that you articulated that really clearly and painted that picture for those of us who obviously haven't had that side of the experience. It's really important for us to know. So thank you so much. That's hard, hard to share and hard to comprehend.

So thank you so much. How do you feel like your feelings and you've already shared a little bit, but how do you feel like your feelings have changed over time? Well, so there have been two big shifts, I think, in my experience. One was after I wrote my book and I began speaking about my experience. So when I wrote my book, I was just trying to document a very particular kind of grief that I thought most of the world doesn't know about.

I had deliberately not exposed myself to the adoption world because I sense there's probably like a lot of politics around it. And I just wanted to test my own experience as a completely isolated case. But of course, I start the book tour and it was adoption communities that were inviting me to speak in large part. And so that was when I met people who helped me understand my experience in a cultural context that it really, my experience is part of a history of adoption.

And it's part of a history of other people deciding who gets to be mothers. I understood I was introduced at one talk as a victim of a coerced and unnecessary adoption. And I was very surprised by that language because I was doing open adoption. I was like, I chose. And it has taken some time for me to understand the cultural context and the ways that coercion has taken a different form to end for me to understand I could have done this.

I wasn't in the situation that I describe of it being just insurmountable circumstances. I just bought into a cultural narrative that you're going to make this couple really happy. You're going to get to have your degrees and your career and the child's a blank slate. So of course, he's going to be fine. So that was one thing was being sat down. I said, do you know Ricky Salinger, the historian, like wake up little Susie. She sat me down and was just like, don't you get it?

You are not just like one person who had this experience. You are like, there's a line of women. Women have been treated in this way. People women have been capitalized upon in our society for generations and generations. And so you're just like the latest version. And that was kind of, it took me a while to really process that. And I now do understand. And now I'm very active and I want people to understand that. You've got to see the structures that are at play in this decision.

So that was one major shift in opening my eyes to the industry of adoption. And then another thing was my son beginning to speak about it. And to know, I don't know exactly how to talk about what he, about his experience, but it's just that I understand he's not a blank slate and this is not what he would have chosen. And he's spending a lot of his time. He was saying the other night that bifurcating a family doesn't simply double the love. You don't bifurcate a family to double the love.

Because you're always hearing like you have more people to love you. It's just like, I want fewer people. I want just like the people I'm supposed to be with. So I just wouldn't have, a kid is going to have struggles. A young adult is going to have struggles. I just wouldn't have given this one. I would have given him. So I also would say that another thing about open adoption, one of the hesitations around open adoption is it could be confusing for the child.

And I was always looking for that confusion and never finding it and thinking if he knows I'm his birth mother and he's told the story that it would be, that would make everything okay. And it would, like for him, it was normal to be adopted when he was growing up. But the confusion is at a really deeper level. And that I just couldn't have seen before. He told me recently that if I had raised him, he would know how to dance. And I was like, no, you wouldn't.

I do not, I'm not like some kind of, I don't dance. And he said, but that's why, because he would have grown up knowing who he is, like with just an inherent sense of who he is, such that he would have pushed hard against me and rebelled and tested the waters outside of our family. But he's ended up spending so much of his time just trying to understand who he is instead of doing like what all the other kids are doing.

Like, you know, so having such a deep anchor in their family that they can go off and they know what it means to rebel. And I guess another thing that just naturally happens, you get older and then you are going back, you know, I was about 10 years apart from the adoptive family. And as you get older, that difference becomes smaller and smaller. And it became very strange to, for them to still have my son. It's like, I have a job. I'm trying to have kids. I have financial security. I'm married.

Why is this still the structure where this is a structure that is predicated on I'm not, I don't have what it takes, but now I do have what it takes. And I still want him. And so that, you know, the distance that I talked about that, it got bigger and bigger and bigger. And I delayed parts of my own development. I didn't get married until I was 41. And I know that part of it was, I was supposed to do something that made it all make sense to have given him up.

And I still haven't found that thing yet. And also I wanted, since this whole structure was contingent on me not being mature enough or whatever, I stayed a little bit unstable so that it would make sense to me. And finally, I just couldn't do it anymore. I had to, you know, I had to grow up. And it's very strange to still be in this particular power structure. Yeah. I love the way that you phrased a lot of this.

And I think, again, you've shared this in a way that helps me understand that, well, there's two major thoughts in my mind. One is that you feel like in order for this to truly be the case for adoption to be the right situation, that I can't be the ideal parent, right? So I might be sabotaging some of my own progress and growth, maybe even subconsciously, because for this to all make sense, I can't progress. I can't be the person.

If I had been this person, then I would have felt more, I don't know, justified or adequately prepared to be a parent. And so I'm stopping myself from getting there. I don't know if I've ever thought of it in that light. And I think that you shared that helps me see that. I can't remember what the other one was now. Maybe you'll remember it. It'll probably come back later, but that's okay.

So thinking about back when you were expecting and support systems that were there, particularly before you placed in the hospital early on, what do you wish that people that might be in that situation soon or right now would know? What do you wish you would have known? Yeah. Well, I said before, I didn't think I initially experienced coercion, but the industry has gotten really smart. It has spent millions of marketing dollars to assist in that effort.

And so the pressures that it puts on women are invisible and take the form of support. And they use the well-meaningness of the adoptive families to their advantage. They're creating a cultural narrative around adoption that conceals the industry that's behind it. And so I would love for people to know a few of the ways that coercion happens that I didn't see, but that I experienced.

One of them is positive adoption language, the idea that placing a child for adoption, making an adoption plan, things that sanitize what is still systematic family separation. It makes it sound like the adults of the world have created something ethical and good, that they've finally perfected this new thing, but it sugar coats the realities that if we saw them for what they are, we might deal with them differently. The agency was my main source of counseling.

I didn't have money for real therapy and their counseling was of course biased. I was told that eventually the pain would subside. That is not true. I can tell you from so many birth mothers I know in their seventies, the pain does not subside. The pain changes form. You learn to function around it. It does not, you do not forget. I was not informed of the impacts to my son. I said that before. And the workbook I used asked me all kinds of questions about money, whether I had enough of it.

And of course I didn't. And it implicitly created this sense of inadequacy and that money was the real test of whether you should be a parent. And it was masquerading as like we're helping you make a plan. So we need to know you have enough money. So I just remember I couldn't even fill out the sheet. I was just like, no, no, no. I'm going to do adoption. I'm not going to even fill out the budget sheet because I can't do that. So they helped me create an adoption plan. The agency did.

And the idea was if I have a plan, then if I experience any doubts, I'll be able to look to my plan for guidance. They're like, what that does is it keeps you from making other plans. I didn't look for support because I was making a plan for adoption. Whenever I talked to anybody about my pregnancy, I would say, but I have an adoption plan. And I would teach them this new thing they hadn't known about.

And what that did was, so I had some professors who were actually planning to offer me a place to live in their home because they thought I probably wasn't going to be able to do it. And they were planning on offering this to me, but they didn't want to disrupt my plans. So they weren't going to offer it to me unless I didn't, unless the adoption fell through. They told me that after I had given them up, and I was just like, if I had known that, that would have changed everything.

So creating the plan really silenced all the support that could have come out of the woodwork for me. And the second thing is, at the time of the birth, when I fully changed my mind, though I couldn't admit it to myself, but it was perfectly clear what I should do, that I needed to be with my son, the plan severs the mother from her feelings. And feelings can be really instructive. My feelings told me don't let the child go, and that was right.

But my plan was supposed to be wiser than my instincts. And like, whoever thinks that a mother's instincts are not right for her child. So I would say the plan is totally tentative. It's like one way I would make another plan for parenting. I mean, they tried to get me to do that, but like I said, it was so effective. The way that they convinced me I didn't have enough money to even think about it. The other thing is pre-birth matching.

I used to be a total salesman for pre-birth matching because I did such a good job of it. I did an A plus job of pre-birth matching. But it exposes birth mothers to a more privileged family, to the earnest and worthy desires of that family. And it undermines what she has to give to the child and her own worthiness to be with that child. And it makes her feel indebted and obligated to the family. And that happens even in my, like I wasn't being funded. Sometimes there's money happening.

That wasn't happening for me, but I still felt very obligated to them because of their expectations. And they tell you about birth mothers who disappoint the family and you just want to be like one of those birth mothers who's strong enough not to disappoint them. And so it's a really effective form of coercion where it's using everybody's good intentions to make this adoption happen against what might be best.

And I used to think that finding this family was like one of my biggest accomplishments. And I now consider it my biggest regret because I would not have done adoption if I had not found them. There was nobody else in second place. And another thing is the agency gives you a false sense of security. So I had the idea that the sooner my son could go to his family, the better he would adjust. That's the blank slate idea of what an infant is. It's not true. We know that it's not true with puppies.

We know that newborns need time with their mother. And when my son was born, I couldn't sign the papers. I couldn't when I planned to, which was 72 hours after. I kept him for two weeks. I breastfed. I got him through the colostrum. I thought if I can give him the immune support, at least that will be some kind of foundation. But a reality is that a newborn gets the highest price for an agency. And the idea that they create is false, that a newborn is going to adjust better.

The sooner he goes to the new family, that's not true. What's true is that time with a mother is an anchor in the world. And it is a critically important time. And if you want that time, you have all the time in the world. You can wait a year. And you'll still find an adoptive family if you really need to go that route. But I was like, I got to do it. I got to do it. I got to make a decision. I'm like, what am I doing to this child to not make a decision?

I was informed of my revocation period, but I was not empowered around it. It was kind of presented to me as a formality. And by that time, I cared too much about the family's feelings to go back on my decision anyway. I think that women need to know their revocation period, and they need to know it's theirs to use. It is like one of the very few powers that we have. And it's there to be used. I don't have my paperwork. A lot of women don't get their paperwork.

In any other legal transaction, you get your paperwork. So in general, we don't have legal support, and we're not informed of our rights. And that's another form of coercion. I know women who signed away their rights to a revocation period not knowing that that's what they were doing. And of course, there's a lot more blatant forms of coercion in practice today. Another thing, it's not quite coercive, but it's untransparent.

And I think it's contradictory to the idea that's being sold of open adoption is that I have no idea how much money was exchanged for my son. But I know that typically 30 to 50,000, even more. And no services that I received warrant that expense. And if I had known that someone was making $30,000, what I wouldn't have done for $30,000. When I signed the paper, it would have shifted my thinking about this whole transaction.

I knew that there was money somewhere, but money was a very ugly thing to think about when I was pregnant. I think that letting women know the kind of profit they are creating for an agency is critical information for them to have. I think that they should know when that transaction is taking place. I just think if it's not a for profit, if it's not all about the money, then that's why. Yeah. Yeah. And I was also coerced by the lack of other alternatives. I had no family support.

Our social infrastructure is not built for single mothers or lower income mothers. And my family didn't offer support because they were buying into the same thing I was. They thought it would be best for my son. I had my whole life ahead of me. And openness just changed everything, made it all good. And on my deathbed, my father apologized. And the system is creating a situation where a father has to make a deathbed apology.

And that killed me to know how much it hurt him to know that he hadn't been there for me in the way that he would have liked to have been if he had known. And I just want to say even ongoing contact with the adoptive family is coercive because you don't want to disrupt the family or get yourself cut out of the picture by sharing your real experience. And you don't want to undermine your child's whole existence. So you don't, so you have to believe in it.

It has to be good because your life is built on it. Everybody's life is built on it. So I have little by little let his adoptive family know, like, I have thoughts about this thing. You know, it's too late now for the adoption to be closed. So I'm safe now. I'm in the safe territory to actually be able to speak about it. And I don't, my intention is not to hurt them, of course. I'm just saying I have the utmost respect for them.

And I think that we are all sold a very poor system that is not about creating, that is not about giving homes to children. It is about, it is about selling children for the profit of the agency. And it is using all of us against each other. And so I'm, let's build something better. That's what I have to say. I want to say one more thing about support systems. Is that okay? Yeah, totally. I have so much to say. That's okay.

So there had been a single mother who volunteered to be the doula for me. And she told me that if I'm going to lose my son, I should have a fantastic birth experience. And she taught me all about pregnancy. She taught me how to have a natural childbirth. She was in there fighting the doctors from putting any pricks in me. And I got to have a natural childbirth and breastfeed. And it was so amazing. And she also has recently expressed her regret that she thought adoption was the best solution.

But that was a fantastic support. And I do think women should try to have a great birth experience, not shut down your emotions for the birth. And I just have to say that my sister has also been an incredible support for me. Did offer to help me raise him, but I just thought we're both poor. What are we going to do? Raise the child together. Yeah. Wow. Thank you so much. So many great thoughts. And I could get on a lot of soap boxes based on a lot of things that you said.

We really struggle with agencies that profit off of this experience a lot. And we agree with you that there needs to be a different, better system that I think we can all play a part in making. But thank you so much. I think, again, you've articulated that in a really, really profound way for us to think perhaps differently than we have in the past. Thinking about the adoptee or the birth parent who's already received those titles, right? So the adoption already happened.

What support systems or what encouragement or advice do you have for the birth parent or the adoptee for seeking additional help? I think the first thing is that we can listen to them and acknowledge that the trauma of adoption is real. I think that it can be really hard for my son to hear, well, you could have felt that even in plenty of natural families or whatever have that experience. It's just, yes, everybody's life is hard. Everyone has issues.

But if we want to create ethical systems, it's important to acknowledge that adoption is a very particular kind of trauma and not undermine the experience of adoptees. Of course, being in community with people has been really supportive for me. I lead a support group and I see how it is so critical for some people. It's an experience that only others in this world can very quickly understand. But I also think that denial is a really important stage.

For me, I wanted nothing to do with people around adoption for a very long time because they're such sad people. So you go through the stages that you need to go through. Also, I know that a lot of stuff is happening primarily. And so I've gone through an anger period. And it's good to have therapy and get it out because I know that the anger is misdirected. Therapy is good. Therapy is good.

I think the ones that I've heard that are especially good for people with adoption experience where the trauma is so deep, like the EMDR, somatic therapies, IFS, I've done some of those, not all of those, and definitely hypnosis, things that get you very quick to your deep subconscious where you need to be treated. So I wish I had better advice for this. It's pain. And I guess maybe the thing that I would say is we also, on a cultural level, we are victims of this system.

And also, we are not victims. We all have the privilege and strength and resilience to make beautiful lives. That's not to negate the many injustices. But there's also lots of joy. I have a really hard time communicating when I'm talking about adoption that I'm actually really funny and laughy. You have a whole other, these things work in parallel. And sometimes the capacity for grief is equal to the capacity for love. And so I think they're very much kindred.

Yeah. Wow. You've shared a lot of thoughts about some of the challenges in adoption in the community. What are some of your thoughts on actions that, as a community, we can take to improve? There's one thing, if you are thinking about adoption, if you're thinking about open adoption, don't promise something that you're not going to deliver. Absolutely. That is one of the most important things. And don't let a mother, there are ways that you mislead a mother.

I've just heard so many stories from birth mothers of what they thought. And what, and you know, that the adoptive family communicated something in such layered language that actually they were staying true to their word, but they had made it a very, not very much of a promise, but the mother understood, the mother trusted them and understood like she's going to have this much contact. So one of the best things right now immediately is don't go about this.

If you can't actually commit, wait for a birth mother, you can commit to, or wait for a mother you can commit to. We always say under promise and over deliver. And don't ever say, as badly as somebody might want a child, don't ever say anything that you can't be okay with in the future. Because I think that really, it is clearly coercive language.

Like you were talking about that if we're saying anything untrue or something that we're not comfortable with, just so that someone makes a decision to place with us, that's absolutely unethical. Yeah. And I think we can also get more creative. I think we can think about adopting mothers and children. I think we can just think about way more radical forms of fixing the social ills that is part of the infrastructure of our world.

And that is like, so I have secondary infertility, I had miscarriages and I don't get to have a child. And there's no option for me. Because I will not take a child from someone else and try to convince myself that it is mine. I would like to support, I mean, my passion happens to be single older women who are aging alone, which is like many of these birth mothers are. But just find vulnerable people to take care of and really take care of them.

Removing, separating a mother from her child is taking care of nobody. And so just get creative. So I think some of the biggest challenges we face is our absolute determination to see adoption as like necessary and natural and inevitable. And like, well, you can't, you aren't saying get rid of adoption completely, right? There has to be adoption. No, there doesn't. There doesn't have to be adoption.

And we need to look at this thing hard and look at our own desire and understand that our own desire as intense as it may be. And I used to wake up gasping like my story cannot be that I gave up my only child. I have to have a child. Like I know I need the healing of a baby, of someone I get to raise. And my dad said also on his deathbed, I want you to have a child that you get to raise. And I was like, please don't say that. And I don't get to have it. And that's okay.

And just like I can adjust and have happiness, even though I gave up my child, I can also adjust and have happiness even though I don't get to have a child, even though that feels like it would be the perfect ending to this story. I get to love other people in the world. And so that's the kind of, that's what we need to be doing for each other.

I also want to say something that may not be directly related to this question, but you've had some discussions in various different podcasts about boundaries and healthy boundaries and stuff. And I just want to say that I think that a lot of times boundaries are an excuse for not wanting to have a difficult conversation. And they're used, it's sort of like, once you say, no, I have a boundary, like I need to create this boundary for my, you know, then it's like an untouchable.

And let's also do harder work in relationships and not use, not let boundary setting be our first recourse when something gets hard, because it's going to get hard. Yeah, it's going to be challenging. The episode that we did, I think it actually was released today. She her name is Kyra. She's also a birth mother and one of the things she talked about was how boundaries are these things that don't are never solidified and solid.

And if we feel like that that's the case, then we need to change it, right? That should be an ever evolving conversation that we should, we should create space where we can have difficult conversations. We have to have crucial conversations with people. And sometimes we're going to say things or hear things that might harm our ego or might be hard for us to hear, but we need to hear them.

And I think for everyone in the adopted adoption constellation, especially the adoptive parents need to be okay with hearing things that are going to challenge who they are and their beliefs and how they feel about things. And that just needs to happen. Totally on board that we have to make sure that we are as transparent as we can be with feelings and don't hold boundaries over people or create disconnection because you're unhappy with how someone feels. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that.

You actually we connected months ago after we had released an episode on kind of some third party reproductive doing embryo adoption specifically. I know that you have some interest and knowledge there and we would love for you to share some of your thoughts. And as this is something newer to the adoption community, we'd love to learn anything that you could share there.

Well I had initially reached out to you because I heard that episode on embryo donation and this is something that the adoption world and the third party reproduction world are coming together, which I have lots of links I can give you for this. But basically it's this next frontier of family building and there are now enough adults who are donor conceived that we're learning that they experience many of the same things as adoptees.

The genetic discontinuity is still problematic and it is absolutely vital that we educate ourselves about the impacts of our decisions on the future humans that we are creating. They have feelings about it and those feelings matter. And I have people in my life who are going about, they are in the baby mania, they are going to do whatever they have to do to get a baby because they cannot stop and think and you know time is ticking.

But people want to know their genetic history and it's not just about medical information, this is about identity. And so some things to know are you've got to tell them right away that they are donor conceived. It is not something to tell them when they're three or five or 12, it is something to tell them when they're zero if you do go about that way.

But I just I reached out to you because I think as you're exploring the complexity, as you're getting deeper and deeper into the complexities of open adoption, people might be running to embryo donation or third party reproduction as the simpler route. And yes, you create a stronger boundary from the birth family but that birth family still exists and is still going to have impacts.

And so I think I'm totally not an expert and I told you this before, I'm totally not an expert on this but I have some resources that I can point to and I just really want to encourage everyone. We've got to listen to the people that we're creating, adoptees and donor conceived people and hear what they have to teach us about the ethicalness or not of our practices. Yeah. So if you are conceived an embryo adoption, reach out to us, we want to hear your voice.

And if you know somebody, reach out to us. We are all about amplifying the adoptee's voice because I mean, it really it's all about them and they were the only ones that really didn't have any decision at all in this experience that is now their life. And we want to do everything that we can to make sure that it's the best experience. We can create the best experience and understand from adoptees as much as we can. So I love that.

I love that advice and we would love to share some of those resources in the show notes here. Thank you so much. Is there anything else that you'd like to share as we wrap up? There's like there's too much. I know. No, there's nothing. There's I think that I think I think I covered a lot. We honestly I've really loved this conversation. And like I mentioned in the very beginning, it's really important for us to understand this experience from so many different perspectives.

And I love the light that you've shed on the birth mother experience. And it helps us all think really deeply about why we're doing what we're doing and how we're doing what we're doing. Thank you. Sincerely, thank you for being with us. I enjoyed it. Thank you very much for having me. Listening to this episode with Amy, it was really impactful and meaningful for me. I'm so grateful for her for taking the time to share with us. And I'm so grateful that she reached out to us.

She Yeah, she reached out after we had that episode on embryo adoption and shared some resources. We're going to have more resources from her that she's pointed us toward in the show notes as well as information for her memoir that she wrote called God and Jetfire Confessions of a Birth Mother and some other sources and resources she shared. But so thankful for Amy for the hard conversations that she was willing to have and for the thought provoking dialogue that it created. Yeah, for sure.

I think that I mean, I walk away from this conversation. We recorded this quite a while ago, but I walk away from hearing this again. This conversation again with this deep desire to make sure that we're amplifying amplifying different voices in the adoption constellations so that as a community, we're well educated. We know what's what individuals feel, what they potentially can experience, both the heartache and the joys that come.

And this definitely deepens my compassion and empathy toward birth mothers and expect to expect them others that are considering adoption for their child. So I feel just this extra amount of love toward that that group of people who are going through and have made and gone through these really challenging experiences. For me, as I listened to this, I kept thinking about all of these. I mean, there's many issues that we don't even understand our issues, right?

And I appreciated that in the conversation she talked about coming to understand things more completely over time. But we know that there is so much coercion and there's unethical practices and adoption agencies. We've talked about the limited experiences we've had where we've seen adoption agencies practicing really, really poorly. Right. And where it's not about what's best for this child, what's best for this mother, how can we do things ethically. Right.

And so my big takeaway is how can we bring about the changes that need to happen in the adoption community? Right. And Amy's right. Like in the perfect world, we would not have adoption. And until we get to that perfect world, what can we do better? Yeah. And I mean, there are so many situations and intricacies in every different situation that is for me personally, it's hard to say that we can be at that point right now, obviously. But how can we, how can we approve what we have right now?

How can we come to something even better than we have right now? I think there's some of the questions that we as a community need to ask ourselves. Yeah, absolutely. And I really appreciate the thoughtful way that she brought that into my mind. Yeah. Yeah. This was a really heavy but helpful episode for me and I expect it is for you guys too. So thanks for listening. Thanks for being here.

And also just a huge thanks again to Amy for reaching out to us, for having this conversation, for sharing her thoughts and experience. We really value you and are so grateful that we got to meet with you. And if you would like to talk with us and share your experiences as an adoptee, as a first parent, please feel free to reach out to us at openadoptionproject.gmail.com. Also we have a research opportunity that we'll be sharing about soon for first parents.

And we have another episode coming up in a couple of weeks that is an interview with an adoptee named Steven Rowley. And he is an author and a psychologist. And we're really grateful for the opportunity to share some of his experiences and thoughts as well. We'll be back in a couple of weeks and until then, thank you so much for listening.