Episode 401 Podcast > Full Transcript
Lori Holden, Intro:
I owe a great deal to today's guest, Rebecca Ricardo. Earlier in my parenting journey, when my children were about eight and ten, I attended a conference in Richmond, Virginia, organized by Rebecca and her team called the Open Adoption Symposium. Not only did I get to learn from experts who delivered the keynotes in the workshops, but I also got to meet several of my online friends who were also trying to make sense of that still new thing; Open adoption. So, today I'm paying the favor forward. Now you get to hear from Rebecca Ricardo. Damon Davis of the Who Am I Really? podcast calls Rebecca, The Adoption Constellation in One Woman. Shout out to Damon of episode 303 here.
Here's more about Rebecca. Rebecca Ricardo joined her family through adoption. This means she's an adoptee. She is also a birth mother of a son she placed for adoption when she was a teenager. Rebecca is a licensed clinical social worker serving as Executive Director for a licensed agency in Richmond, Virginia. C2Adopt.
Rebecca has varying levels of connection to her birth and adoptive family members. She searched and found all birth family members starting in 1993. She was found by her son's family when he was 20 years old. Rebecca's professional life has been working in the field of adoption since 1991, as a social worker, therapist, advocate, searcher, supervisor, and administrator. There are probably very few people who have the multi perspectives and lived experience in adoption that Rebecca has. You are going to get so many of what I call sage snacks in this episode. Amazing bite-sized morsels of wisdom. So, help me welcome the wonderful Rebecca Ricardo.
Lori:
Rebecca, it's so great to talk with you. I just feel so honored because you were early on my journey and helping me form my own opinions and framework for open adoption. So, I'm really excited to be able to share that now.
So, let's start with your entry stories. You've got three entries into adoption. Start with the one of being adopted.
Rebecca:
Sure. So, I joined my family as a baby, not a newborn, but, you know, in the sixties, which is when my family was adopting, babies, typically went into foster care first. So, I was a fairly normal adoptee of the sixties, where I entered foster care from the hospital for about three months and then was placed with my family. I am the youngest of four children, all adopted by my parents. None of us biologically related or connected to each other. And again, the sixties were the height of the Baby Scoop era, so it was fairly easy for my family to adopt that many babies.
Lori:
Let's just, briefly, tell what the Baby Scoop area is. What is that shorthand for?
Rebecca:
So, that is a phrase that refers to a period of time where the adoption of infants in particular was promoted, advocated for, exploited, et cetera. And I'm not going to get the exact date, right, apologies to Suzanne {indistinct 3:57}, who is one of the people who has written the most about that; done extensive research. But it's roughly late 1940s, early 1950s through the mid-seventies, where essentially, we were exploiting women significantly in the United States for the purposes of finding babies for families who wanted them. And a lot of it was pre Roe v. Wade, pre birth control access, pre acceptance of single motherhood, pre a lot of resources being available to women to parent on their own. And so, a lot of women were simply taken advantage of. So, that's where the reference comes from.
Lori:
Perfect. And we'll put some of those resources in the show notes. So, thank you for going over that. Now, back to your story.
Rebecca:
So, anyways, I was the fourth child placed with my family and they ended up stopping there, for a number of different reasons. I think they actually were offered a fifth child, but my father was out to sea with the Navy and could not be back in time for that placement. So, grew up in an adoptive family that was, I will say, open to the extent that we all knew we were adopted, right from the beginning. I'm one of those adoptees who says, I always knew, I don't remember being told. But also, being the youngest of four, I always suspect my older siblings probably said something about it first. I don't know. But it seemed fairly open.
In hindsight, though, and knowing more about adoptive families, what wasn't really open was any of sort of the hard parts of adoption. That was never discussed. We never had like emotional conversations about loss and grief and separation and attachment or anything like that. It was all, again, perspective. And this is how wonderful this is that our family came together this way, and how unique and interesting and et cetera, et cetera.
So, we had that, which I think is fairly typical for my parents’ era of adoption. They weren't really trained well. And when I started doing this work as a professional and would talk with my mom about all that we do with our parents today, she was stunned and openly said, “We probably would have never made it through a home study if we had had to do what you guys are all do now,” and would tell me about her experiences. And she recalls that the sum total of training she got as an adoptive parent is she asked one of the social workers that they worked with, “Should I tell my kids that they're adopted?” And the worker actually said to her, “Yes, tell them once. And if they never ask you about it again, you've done your job right.” Which was a huge burden on her of, “Oh my gosh. So, I tell them. But if they do ask again, it means I didn't do it right.” Like it was god awful advice, obviously. But that's literally all she was ever told about how to handle adoption. And fortunately, she and my father were just smarter than that and chose not to just say it once and openly shared what they could.
But the 1960s, rarely like little information. I have like a little paragraph about each of my birth parents, that wasn't even accurate, by the way. I'll come to find out later. And so, they shared what they knew, but they didn't know very much, and they certainly didn't know how to then tease out that information into anything that like answered real questions for us or anything like that.
Lori:
I think we tend to think of the Baby Scoop era as being really hard on women who place, on birth mothers, because it was about recruiting more expectant mothers. But I think it was also hard, as you're showing, on adoptive parents; we were not getting guidance. And that made it really hard on adoptees as well. So, it was this whole idea that “A baby is a blank slate” and “Raise them as your own and you never have to think about this again,” goes counter to how humans actually are.
Rebecca:
Right. And there was a huge amount of greater disservice. I mean, absolutely, we did a huge disservice to pregnant women, but our adopting parents, none of their infertility issues were tended to, nobody talked to them about how they dealt with that, manage that, how they were feeling about that, how that might influence their parenting and their relationships and no information to help support them around their infertility struggles. And back then, a lot of times you had to prove your infertility; like you weren't allowed to adopt if you could have children. And so, my parents have a doctor say that they truly were infertile.
But the other disservice was the amount of matching they used to do, back in the sixties, to try to make sure that the kids looked like they could have been born to you. And so, it fed this idea that you could get away with not telling people that your children came to your family through adoption. You could just act as if they were born to you, if we matched correctly. And my story of adoption actually includes almost a mismatch because of that. They had adopted three children, all blond hair, blue-eyed kids who matched my father, who was blond haired, blue-eyed man. And my mother had dark brown hair, hazel eyes, and kept thinking, “You're not really matching to me. Like these kids look like me, but okay.” And so, they showed up to pick me up, because, again, nobody knew babies ahead of time. They just said they'd call you and say, “We've got a child. Come get them.”
My parents show up in the waiting room with their three little blond haired, blue-eyed children and not looking the way the agency expected them to look. They had just looked at their home study assessment, saw the last name, Ricardo, made an assumption of Hispanic, match to me because my birth mother is Mexican. And so, when my family walked in the door, not looking like they thought, they said, “Oh, we've made a mistake. You're not going to want this baby. We're so sorry,” and try to talk my parents out of seeing me. And my mom and dad were just like, “We did not bring our entire family down here to not come home with a child. Like, we expected to have placement today. We're going to see this child.” And the story they always told me growing up is my father took one look at me and said, “Oh, she will be the beauty of the family.” And then my mother would tease me and saying, “I took one look at you and thought, ‘Oh my God, why does she have so much hair all over her head?’” Because apparently, I had hair all down to my forehead and she didn't think I was going to be the beauty of the family, but my dad was like, “No, she's going to be the beauty of the family.”
But I actually didn't know that other story of their trying to talk them out. I heard the story about the first time they saw me, all my childhood. My mom didn't share the other story until I was an adult and I was talking to her about the definition back then. I was right out of graduate school, 35 years ago, about special needs adoption. And once upon a time in Virginia, the sole definition included just any minority child. And my mom said, “Oh, well, you were special needs.” And I was like, “What are you talking about? I was not a special needs child. And she's like, “Yeah, because you were considered a minority child.” And I'm like, “What are you saying?” And she told me the rest of the story that she had never shared with me before. To which I said, “Why did you never tell me that?” And she said, “Well, I didn't think that would be interesting to you.” And I was like, “It is the most interesting part of that story. The fact that they tried to talk you out of accepting me into the family, and yet you went ahead and said, ‘No, of course we'll take this baby’ is hugely important.”
As well as I feel like I missed through my childhood, having that strong connection to Mexican, because I wasn't raised understanding that my biological mother was fully 100% Mexican. I was sort of raised to think that she was kind of a Mexican-Italian mix, but you sort of had the thought that, “Well, that was like way back in her ancestry”, right? No, she is like first generation in this country from Mexico; Mexican, and didn't know that again until I searched and found her.
But anyways, so that, again, disservice, disservice, disservice to everyone in adoption back then by that idea that we needed to make families look as if children were born to them and inform them in that way that implied it was okay to keep this secret, implied that it was okay to not be honest and open and transparent about how families came together. It harmed everyone. It harmed children, it harmed adoptive parents, and it harmed placing parents for sure.
Lori:
And the underlying message is that if the things we don't talk about are the things that we shouldn't talk about because there's something wrong with it, and so adopted-ness this can become one of those things and race can become one of those things. And when a child starts to think that there's something fundamentally wrong with them because it can't be talked about, that's so difficult. That just makes attachment and trust so difficult.
Rebecca:
And that is the message of things we don't talk about, then that's something that's bad. It's something that's wrong. And when it impacts you so directly, you can't help but say, “Well, then there's something wrong with me.” Like it becomes personal. I don't care how much people say, “Well, it's not personal. Well, it is not.” It feels personal. And we can't avoid that. Like, we just can't avoid that. And that is one of the primary conundrums adoptive parents have facing them, is how do I help my child see themselves other than something's wrong with me that I was not kept by my biological family, and lift up that self-esteem so that that's only a piece of your story. It isn't the totality of your story.
Lori:
All right. So, you are born and three months later-ish, you are adopted by your family. You've got siblings and you've got parents who are really wanting to do well, but they've got some guidance from, and they want to do what they've been told to do, too. So, fast forward a few years into your teen years and pick it up there.
Rebecca:
Sure. So, a couple of pivotal things happened in my teen years. One is we lost my father to a sudden heart attack when I was probably 12 going on 13. So, all of us were in our teenage years. My sister was 18 at the time, I think 17, 18 years old and my brothers are in between. So, we were all teenagers. And I would say, classically adopted teenagers. We were all struggling sort of. It was the eighties or about to be the eighties, 79, and we were all feeling ourselves for sure.
So, loss of my father. A year later, I found myself pregnant. Ironically, in the midst of my first sex education class, as I'm listening to them educate us about sex and what happens and how babies are made, et cetera, et cetera, I'm thinking, “Huh, I'm pretty sure I'm pregnant.” So, sex education a little too late for the early eighties. Honestly, by the time that I finally told someone who could be helpful to me and then finally got encouraged to tell my mother, which of course is terrifying for any teenager. We did explore other options, whether I could terminate the pregnancy or not, and I was just too far along in my pregnancy for that to be an option.
I turned 15, midway through my pregnancy, so I was very young. Because adoption was a known part of our family, my mother and I pretty quickly sort of put that on the table of, “Well, you know, adoption is a choice because certainly, our family was formed that way.” And because at that time, my thinking about adoption was, “Well, sure, our family is okay. That seems like a good idea.” I hadn't critically thought about my family yet as a teenager. I certainly wasn't attaching any of my struggles in my adolescent years as having anything to do with adoption at that moment. But I was clearly thinking the family feels fairly chaotic right now. We just had lost our dad. What would become my mom's partner was just sort of just coming into our family. There's just a lot happening and everything felt hard and difficult and not a great place to try as a teenager to raise a baby. So, I went the route of adoption.
Shout out to the agency. It's the Barker Adoption Foundation, which used to be known as just the Barker Foundation back in the day. They still exist, still up in the D.C., Maryland area. That's who we used to make this plan. So, in 1980, I gave birth to my son in December, and he's getting ready to have a birthday soon. Spent about five days in the hospital with him. Thanks to my mother, who fought some nurses to make that happen, because I definitely was the victim of some judgy nurses who initially said things like, “Oh, what a beautiful baby. How could anyone give him away?” to a 15-year old. And then when I said, “Well, am I going to get to see him,” I had nurses say, “Well, no, because you're placing him for adoption. Why would you want to see your baby?” And to which my mother launched into mama bear mode and said, “Absolutely not. If my daughter says she wants to see her baby, she will see her baby.” And so, did spend five days in the hospital, seeing him regularly while I was in the hospital. Took a lot of pictures, had a lot of Polaroids, because that was how we took pictures back then that we, my whole family, sort of hung on to and I hung on to, to look at what was a very beautiful baby. He was gorgeous. But he went very briefly to a foster home for about three weeks and then to his adoptive family.
And in 1980, I didn't know anything about open adoption. I don't know that it was even an option on the East Coast. I think maybe this West Coast was starting to head in that direction. But nobody mentioned to me anything about doing adoption any differently than my adoption had been done, which is I would not know the adoptive family. I think I was asked some questions about type of family I might want him to be placed with and whether anything that I didn't want, but I didn't know anything. I think I knew some basics about the family they chose, maybe profession, et cetera, but I didn't really know much. I think that I knew that he was being placed in a family with an older sister who I assumed had also been adopted, which was not true. I didn't know that till much, much later.
So, did not have any expectation of openness at all. But being just who I was, I chose to stay in touch with the agency and the social worker at that agency, which is probably a nice segue to the next question you're going to ask me, which is how did I become an adoption professional?
Lori:
Take it away.
Rebecca:
It was that social worker. The social worker that worked with me as a teenager was the first time that I sort of looked at someone and said, “Oh, that's a job.” I didn't really know social work was a job, even though, ironically, my mother had been a social worker briefly before she started having kids. But I didn't really know about that and I didn't really know about it as a profession. But I remember looking at what she was doing with me and thinking, “Well, I could do that. I think I could do that. And I think now that I've had this experience, like I might actually have a little extra to add to doing this kind of work.” And so, it was literally that social worker that caused me to shift everything that I was doing in high school to suddenly go, “Maybe I should go to college. And if I go to college, I should get a degree in social work, and then maybe someone would let me work in adoption.” And I wasn't really sure people would thinking, “Oh, I'm an adoptee now. I'm also a birth mother. Maybe I'll be like banned from the profession.” But I thought, “If someday I can work in it, I feel like I can help sort of wayward teenagers who are struggling, have that adoption personal experience.” Had no idea how I was really going to use it, but just kind of thought I could do that.
And so, I became a social worker because of her. And I did choose to stay in contact with her by sort of sending letters to her. When I graduated from high school, I had some medical issues with my eyes as a young teenager that I felt like she needed to pass on to his family. Because, again, I was an adoptee. I knew nothing about my medical history to share with them. So, it was literally, as I was learning aging, sharing it back with the agency.
And then by surprise, when my son was about, I think he was about nine years old; nine or ten years old, I suddenly got a letter from my social worker that had a letter from his mom. And because she had been forwarding all my information to them, taking out my name I'm sure, his mom chose to write back to me and ask the worker to send it to me. And so, because I'd stayed in touch, she knew how to find me. She knew I'd graduated from college, she knew I'd graduated from graduate school, et cetera. And so, I got a letter from her, which was wonderful. I mean, it was a surprise. It was shocking. She didn't call me ahead of time and say, “Heads up, letters coming.”
And so, his mom and I, through the agency, ended up exchanging a few letters over the rest of his childhood. And when he turned 18, she sent me photographs of him, sort of one for every year, essentially. So, it was the first time I got to see what he looked like growing up and finally shared his first name with me. I still didn't know last names, but I’d learned his name {indistinct 21:36}.
Lori:
I'm seeing this progression from the sixties to the eighties, and then you get into the profession in the late nineties. No, early nineties.
Rebecca:
Early nineties, Yeah.
Lori:
So, sixties, eighties, nineties. And I'm seeing this progression from this place of disconnection, like absolute disconnection, and then gradually that (very gradually) this is starting to change from absolute disconnection And then your son's mom actually wants connection. What was her impetus for wanting to reach out to you?
Rebecca:
You know, I don't know that it's a good question to have asked that way. I don't know that I'd ever ask that way. I think that, one is, she's just a really good person. And I think she felt, you know, here this woman who she only sort of knew about as a teenager, because, again, you get this slice of information in one point in time. But she had the benefit of, “Well, I keep hearing more about her,” which I wasn't expecting, probably didn't expect. And I think she was starting to see me as a sort of more evolved adult and not just a 15-year old teenager who had a baby. And I think because I took the time to share information, she wanted to take the time to share information.
And I think she also was just really proud of Craig and felt like he was a really cool kid and wanted to share that with me. And so, that's my best guess, based on having met her and talked to her and known her and his father as well.
Lori:
She sounds wired for connection, like she can see the inherent value of maintaining her son's connections.
Rebecca:
I think so. I think, probably, and I won't speak for her on this matter, but I suspect that – So, his older sister was born to them, which again, I made an assumption she had been adopted. It was totally my assumption. I don't think I was misled. I don't think anyone clarified that their daughter, who was five years old when my son was placed with them, had been theirs by birth.
She then found herself surprisingly pregnant very soon after my son was placed with them and they did have another. So, my son is sandwiched between two of their biological children. And I do think that maybe that just caused her to sort of go, “This is a different experience for my middle son, and I need to figure out some way to honor that different experience and sharing information back with the other mother that was a part of his life.” And I think she just honored mothers in general.
She did a number of things that I think was always an attempt to (I just keep using the same word) honor me when I met her and we were going poring over photographs of his childhood. She made a point of showing me that every birthday, the little stuffed animal I had sent home with him from the hospital, she sort of always made sure it was like picture next to the cake and as a way of just sort of saying, “Hey, your birth mom's part of this to this day.” And that kind of stuff is just special to hear about.
In her first letter to me, I remember getting to the end of it and she thanked me. And I remember being just so blown away by that thankfulness. And it was hard to articulate. My then boyfriend, now husband, at the time was just like, “Why is that surprising that she would thank you?” I said, “It's not that she would thank me. It's that I was surprised by how that felt, was that she saw me as a real person. And that was just very meaningful because I didn't even realize that was something I needed, that that was some that that message was necessary for me to hear from her.” So, I did not expect to cry at that, but okay.
Lori:
I just love it. It sounds like she was in a place to do what I call adoptee math, which is instead of seeing the other mother as subtracting or substituting or dividing the pie of love that the child can have for a mom, she saw it as multiplying and adding to Craig. And the surplus helps you.
Rebecca:
Yeah. And I think she, unwittingly or not, maybe she knew that was the intent. I don't know that she necessarily knew that I needed that message, but I was shocked that I needed that message. I had sort of gotten to that point in my progression as a mother who had placed a child for adoption of saying, “Oh, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. Like, I don't need any validation for this.” I remember telling people who would try to acknowledge me on Mother's Day. I was like, “No, no, no, no, no. I don't need any acknowledgement. I'm not a mother. I'm not really a mother. I'm not parenting a child.” Although my husband will be the first one to tell you that the first year he didn't acknowledge Mother's Day with me, I lost it. And again, surprised by, “Oh, I didn't know it was meaningful until I didn't have it.” And then I was like, “Oh, I do want to be acknowledged as a mother.”
And I think, his mom acknowledging me as a valuable person that she cares about, I didn't realize I needed that message from her until I got it. And that, again, all of these things, this is when I say to moms that I work with now, “I don't even know how to articulate all that you don't know you're going to feel until you feel it. But I can tell you it's there.” It will sneak up on you. It will surprise you. It will bowl you over when you're trying to make this very difficult decision about, “Can I live with this decision of adoption?”
And I think the hardest thing as an adoption professional to navigate is how do you talk honestly with women who are facing this decision about that kind of emotional impact? It's really hard to say to someone, “I'm just here to tell you there's a bunch of walls you're going to smack up against later in life after you make this choice. You still might need to make this choice, but I'm here to tell you, these are the walls that surprised me. There are loads of other women I've talked to that I know have hit these same walls that it's just really hard.” I mean, when you talk about making that shift of using your personal with professional and how it led me to work in the field, that is probably one of my biggest areas of growth and hard work is, how do I do this with other women from an ethical place and an honest place, when I know that these things happen and they come out of the blue and you're not always prepared for them. And I just super, super fortunate and had great support around me every time one of those things happened. And I don't know that all women do.
Lori:
I'm kind of seeing that the way we used to do adoption in the Baby Scoop era was that it was a onetime event; we never have to think about it again. And that also is morphing over these decades to where we're understanding this is not a onetime event for an adoptee. That's a journey. And it's not a onetime event for a parent who places. It's a journey, an emotional journey. And even for adoptive parents, it's not a onetime event. We filled our arms. Now we're done. We never have to look back. It's a journey. We are all processing this big event that happened to us.
So, with your son, you said that his mom reached out to when he was nine and you said that you met him when he was 20. So, what was that like?
Rebecca:
So, again, you can't predict life, right? So, I can't talk about one search story without the other because they all intermingled at the same time. So, I had found my biological mother, I had found my biological father. And right around that same time, my son's father found me and reached out to me. My son was in college and I think his dad sort of was hoping for, oh, another positive adult connection will be helpful to him as he makes this transition into adulthood.
But he initially wanted me to reach out to my son and not tell them who I was, like be, I don't know, bump up against each other online somewhere, which was brand new, and everyone was just starting to be online, connecting with people, which is how he found me, actually. He didn't know me. He didn't know what I was doing for a living at that point. And I was like, “Yeah, no, I'm not doing that. No. That's not how I will approach this. My son needs to want to do this and it needs to be his choice and his decision, which I had always felt very adamant about that, you know, I made my choice when he was born. It needed to be his choice if he wanted to reconnect with me. But I would make it very easy for him to do that. So, I never change my name. I always made sure phone numbers were in my name, not my husband's, so I could be easy to be found.
So, as much as I wanted to know my son, and now I knew his full name, and now I actually knew where he's going to college. And it would have been really easy for me to just go, “Yes, let me go find my son.” I held off and said, “Here's what I need to have happen is you need to share with him that you found me. And you can share all my contact information, but you need to put it in his hands. And then he needs to decide when he wants to do that.”
So, it took him, ironically, not ironically, about nine months to decide to reach out to me. And he finally did on his own and in his own way. And we met by email first and stayed email only for quite a few months, probably a good six or seven months, before we actually met in person. And when he wanted to meet me in person, what he did was he invited me to come see him in a play. He was a theater major in college and he said, “Well, come see this play that I'm going to be in, and then we can meet the next day.”
So, the first time I got to see him, I had permission to stare at him for about 3 hours, which is not something that a lot of placing moms get to do, which is all what we all want to do when we meet our kids is just stare at them, which is creepy and weird, and nobody really wants anyone to do that. But I got to do that, which was fun. And then he actually didn't wait till the next day. He had his girlfriend come find me during intermission and said he wanted to meet me right after the play.
So, that's where we met. We met at the theatre. It's very brief and quick introduction there. And then we got together the next day for lunch and dinner and all of that. And we've been in contact ever since and, I think, have a good relationship. And we've built a good, strong friendship and connection. I think it sometimes feels, perhaps motherly, but most of the time, I think it feels like just a really special friendship more than parent-child. You know, we're not that far apart in age. So, we don't necessarily have the whole generation gap. I'm only 15 years older than him. So, that makes it a little different, too. But it's been great. It's been great having him in my life.
Lori:
And how was the reunion with your birth parents.
Rebecca:
So, different than that. I, of course, searched for my birth mother first because I think that's what most of us is adoptees do. And in a lot of ways that usually, I don't want to say, is the easier person to search for. But in some ways, it is because nothing's easy about searching. Particularly, nothing was easy in the early nineties as we weren't really doing – We were starting to do a lot of stuff online, but we weren't quite there yet.
So, I found my birth mom through a series of sort of coincidences. Again, by working in the field, I was helping someone with their search here in Virginia. She was living in California at the time and she said, “Oh, I wish I could do something to help you.” And I'm like, “Well.” And so, she knew some people who could do some things and be helpful to me. And so, anyways, I found my birth mom and through a third party intermediary, had them reach out to her. And she was not interested in being found and was not interested in connecting with me. Initially wrote a fairly difficult letter, difficult for me to read. I don't know how difficult it was for her to write. If I give her grace, I can say it was difficult for her to write. But it was very difficult for me to read and basically said, “No one knows about you. I don't really want to tell anyone about you. I don't know anything about your birth father. I don't have any information that's useful to share with you.” And sort of, “Please go away.” That's a good summary of it.
And so, I did go away for a little while, but I'm a tenacious person. So, I basically just kept about, I don't know, once a year sending something to her or saying, “I'm still here, I'm still interested. Would still love more information. I feel like you do have valuable information to share with me.” Whatever. I try to be nice about it. I try to be very like little postcards, little card. Just, “I'm still here. Here's how to reach me” and wasn't getting anywhere with that after several years.
And so, the only other person that I thought I knew for sure knew about me was her husband that she was married to at the time that I was born, which is not my biological father. And I knew that. So, I thought, “Well, he had to have known because my mother had always told me they had to delay my adoption to go find him because he was the legal father and needed to also consent to the adoption because, you know, a child born to a marriage is considered to be the product of the marriage.” And so that's why I thought he knew about me.
And so, I went and found him and figured, “Well, he knows. So, I'm not revealing her secret.” Well, he did not know. He had no idea.
Lori:
Oh, my gosh.
Rebecca:
Yeah. So, whoops. I was like, “Oh my God, this is bad.” And they divorced. I think they divorced the same month I was born. Again, didn't know. I knew she was separated from him when I was born, but I didn't know anything about their divorce and apparently it was not a good situation afterwards. But once he found out about me, he thought it was kind of a cool thing. And so, he reached out to his kids, who are my older siblings. So, my mother was parenting three children from her marriage when she had me. So, I am the fourth in her family too. So, he reached out to his kids and said, “Hey, this person’s reached out to me. Do you do anything about that? So, now, of course, they didn't know. And so, now this the secret was out and it was not a good situation. All happening by email. It a lot to smooth this over. And I felt very bad. I had not intended to out her to anyone, and I certainly didn't intend for her children to find out that way. But once it was done, it was done.
So, we navigated that sort of, okay. And my oldest sibling, I think, was far more understanding initially and tried to be a little bit of a peacemaker between us, but really wasn't – he wasn't getting my birth mother to do anything different. Sort of, in some email exchange, my sister and I were having with each other. She happened to mention, “Yeah, Mom and I were talking about your birth father the other night” and I sort of went, “Her letter said she didn't know anything about my birth father. What do you mean you were talking about my birth father and come to find out?” She's like, “No, she absolutely knows who your birth father is.”
And so, after I blew an initial gasket of, “Excuse me. Really not okay for you to know about my birth father, and I don't get to know my birth father,” which, fortunately, she agreed with that. She was like, “Yeah, that doesn't make sense. I shouldn't know this information if you can't know this information.” So, she got her mom to give her permission to tell me.
So, I then started to search for my birth father, which was equally difficult and hard, even though several years had gone by. The internet was a little bit better. Still not great. And he has a fairly common name. I took a stab in the dark with a name and an address, thinking, “Maybe this is him. I don't know.” I sent him a letter and took a really long time to hear back from him because come to find out he was out of the country for several weeks on a fabulous vacation with his wife and came back and found my letter. And I had found the right person. I mean, it was just one of those things you hear these stories all the time about, it makes no sense that I picked this one address of these multiple men with the same very common name and it happened to be the right one.
And he was thrilled to be found. So, I had the polar opposite experience with him. He called me right away. He apologized, “I'm so sorry it took me so long. I just got back into the country. We're catching up on all my mail. My wife sees your letter.” She immediately says, “Oh, my God, you've got to call her.” He had told his wife about me before he married her. He had not told his other kids, but he was fully prepared to do that and very quickly was like, “I'll share this with the rest of my family,” who I think only one brother of his knew about me at the time. Nobody else knew.
But he then shared me with all his family, his kids, people at work. He went to work and told everyone at work, “I have another daughter.” And so, we have had a really wonderful relationship that would be even closer if we lived closer together. But we're on opposite coasts, so it just made it hard to spend a lot of time together. But we have spent some good chunks of time together, and we call each other several times a year and you text and do all that. And he's wonderful and his family has been wonderful to get to know.
Lori:
Do you have three older siblings there, too?
Rebecca:
No, they're younger. They're three younger siblings. So, I was his first. And I would, at that time, have said to you that I was my birth mother's last, but my search story continues with a much later discovery. After all these, figured out who my birth mom is, my birth father, reconnected with my son, to discovering that there was another child born to my birth mom. That again, stumbled upon by – the California birth index used to be searchable and you could search by a woman and it would bring up all the children born to her. And then I saw another child born to her after me, two years later, who was also just named Baby Girl, just like I was; didn't have a name. And I thought, “Oh, wait a minute, is there another one out there who maybe was placed for adoption?” But I didn't know. I didn't I had no idea. But it looked that way. But it took me a very long time to work up the courage and the nerve and the wherewithal to figure out how to find her.
So, again, through my professional connections of going to adoption conferences, learning about searching, I finally found someone to say, “Hey, is there any way for me to do like a reverse search for someone if I only know Baby Girl, date of birth and who her biological mother is? Is there any way to figure out her adoptive name?” And I did find someone who knew how to do that, who knew how to do the reverse search on the birth index and figure all that out.
So, I got her name, had another search friend help me track her down. So, I met another sibling who was also placed for adoption, but much, much later. It was, I think 2010, when she and I finally connected. And she had been interested in searching, but had had no clue on how to go about that. She had been raised to know that her biological mother had four children, but didn't know that another one of those four children had been placed for adoption.
And we reconnected. I connected her to our birth mother's side of the family. Unfortunately, my birth mother did nothing different. She treated her practically the same way, tried to deny that it was true. And so, we went and did a sibling DNA test so she could go back and say, “No, it has to be that you're my biological mother.” And unfortunately, she's continued to not be willing to meet her. But my siblings have met her online; two of them in person, one of them. And so, she does have connections to all of us as siblings. But her birth mom, our birth mom, still no contact with her, unfortunately. So, that's how my search stories go.
Lori:
That's a lot of connections and reconnections.
Rebecca:
{crosstalk 42:05} decades.
Lori:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me ask you to put your professional hat back on. The people who come to your agency, what do you want them to know about the long view of adoption?
Rebecca:
Oh, what do we not want them to know? Oh, we want them to know everything; the good, the bad, and the ugly. You know? I mean, the journey. And I know a lot of people don't like that we use journey, even, because it makes it sound, I think, a little too like it's a fun lark, which isn't really what I think about when I think about a journey. I think journeys have highs and lows, they have difficulties, they have conflict, they have smooth parts of the path and they have bumpy and rocky parts of the path. I mean, to me a journey is all of that, and that is for sure what we're trying to communicate to any of our clients. And I say, any of our clients. So, it's moms who are coming to us pregnant, the dads of those babies those moms are pregnant with, our pre-adoptive families, adult adoptees who come back and make use of our support group or need us for some search and reunion help, and families as they're raising their children is, there are huge pitfalls to adoption that you have to be prepared for and you have to be ready for. And you cannot go into this with that naive, “Well, love will conquer all. And if I just love this kid enough, all will be well,” because we just have way too much proof that that's not enough.
And we shouldn't want that to be enough. I mean, even intact biological families, it isn't just because they love each other that they're successful. A lot more goes into a successful family than just love. It's work. It's hanging in there when it gets hard. It's having disagreement. It's having a, “I don't understand you, but let me try to keep understanding you because I love you and I want to do that.” It's coming back around when we've been angry at each other in figuring out how to get back into connection again. And so, intact biological families have to do that to be successful. So, why wouldn't we expect that in adoptive families.
And we have this extra layer of there was a disconnection originally. Every adoptive family starts from a place of disconnection. The adopted person is disconnected from their birth family, even if it's under the best of circumstances, in the most pleasant way, with the most attention to let's do this gently and with care and with love, it's still a disconnection. The adoptive family is disconnected from the origins of the child coming into the world. They weren't a part of having been pregnant with this child. And of course, the biological family is disconnected from the child they were a part of their origin. And after having that child as a part of their body for 9 to 10 months is then disconnected, even if they still get to have contact through open adoption, even if they get to know how the child is doing, it's still a disconnection and we just need to stop being scared about that. Like that just needs to be okay that that's how adoption starts, so that we manage that disconnection more honestly and truthfully.
But I would say that that's the hardest hurdle to get parents around. Like, they want to come in with the professionals just being reassuring that, “Oh, of course we'll be able to find you a placement.” “Oh, of course this will work out fine.” “Oh, of course, you don't need to worry about that.” “No, you won't need to worry about…” Like that's what they want from us. They want this constant reassurance that this will all be fine. And we're one of those agencies that that is not what they get.
So, that's what I want people to know, that to do this well, you've got to be willing to face the hard stuff up front. And if you can't, then don't do this. I mean, just don't do this. It's not necessary for you to do this and then want to do it badly. But I don't think anyone really wants to do, but I think people get their blinders on about adoption and they want it to be how they want it to be. And they don't like to hear that how they want it to be isn't actually how it is.
Lori:
You're speaking my language, too. I have morphed from open adoption to openness in adoption as where we kind of need to head, which is exactly what you're saying; openness in adoption is dealing with what is and not what we wish it would be. And having the courage to say, “Oh yeah, we're in a hard thing now and we need to figure this out.” And it would be silly to expect that an entire marriage is going to be the honeymoon. I mean, in the journey of a marriage or any long term relationship, there's going to be, like you say, the journey of the ups and downs and the conflict and the love is there and that can help you, but it doesn't do it all by itself.
Rebecca:
Yeah. And I really, I think over time, have gotten more and more comfortable talking the analogy of any intimate relationship has this journey of difficulty and conflict and reconnection and coming back, because you want it and you want to be in it.
The slight difference (It's a big difference) that happens in adoption though, is that in all our other relationships that we can do that analogy, the power dynamic is to adults choosing it. And in adoption, the child didn't choose it. They didn't ask for this. And just because you think it's better for the child, and again, I say the “You” as the placing mother and father or the adopting mother or father, just because those adults think, “Well, it was better” doesn't mean the child's going to.
The fact that people don't want to hear that from adoptees is probably the place where I spend more of my time now because I feel far more confident really speaking to that of, “You have got to listen to us when we say, I don't care that you had more money than my birth mother. It still would have been meaningful me to be stayed in that family. I don't care that you looked more stable. I would have gladly taken instability and less stuff (because how about I wouldn't have known the difference) but I wouldn't have had this.” And this is hard. This idea that the person who gave birth to me made a choice to not keep me is just simply hard.
And we need more of placing parents and adopting parents to just sit with that and go, “Okay, you're right. I get it.” If we could get more people to just do that, I think adoptees could get a little bit farther, a little bit faster in our own healing. Because what, unfortunately, we get so consistently from all of our parents, as well as the general public, our friends, our neighbors, is “Why aren't you just happy with what you have? Why can't you be grateful? Well, it's a good thing that happened to you. Look where you would have been.” I mean, it's just constant messages of how we feel about our experience is not correct to everyone else.
Some of my birth siblings who were raised by my biological mothers have said comments, not trying to be hurtful, but have said, “Oh, you were better off because you got lots of advantages to do things that we didn't get.” What? It just is diminishing. Let us just feel like this is just not always great for us. And can we just let that be okay?
Lori:
So, I'm hearing you say that to be validated as an adoptee is one of the hugest things to for an adoptive parent to be able to give the space for the adoptee to feel their actual feelings, not the expected feelings, and to be able to hold that. To be able to not be triggered by that, not react to it, not even assume that it's about us, the adoptive parent. But to provide that space for an adoptee is such a gift.
Rebecca:
Absolutely. And to be okay with your child being in a different place than you are, that your gained perspective is valid too. But that is your perspective. That is how you came into this. You came into this as a full adult, making choices and making decisions and gaining what you wanted out of this, what you wanted to grow your family. And you did. But that it also needs to be okay that that doesn't feel like a total gain for us all the time. It doesn't mean that it doesn't ever feel like a gain for us. I mean, that's the other thing is I feel very connected to my adoptive family in all the ways that you would want me to feel connected to them. And I would have liked to have felt connected to my biological family, too. And there is disconnection to both as much as there is connection to both. And that is the space we live in as adoptees that's super challenging.
And when you're someone like me who has an added layer of being one of those other sides of adoption, it's incredibly difficult to navigate all that and yet so important to do it. Like, I could not do this work if I had not done an immense amount of work on me. And it's not like I did that work first and then came into the field. Unfortunately, I was literally doing the work as I was coming into the field. I definitely have some cringe client experiences that I look back on and go, “Oh, I did not handle that well.”
But I also took advantage in the opportunities to grow and heal and use my resources and take advantage of therapy and do all the things we tell our adoptive families to reach out for help, listen to the experts, go listen to alternate stories, be open to hearing even what makes you uncomfortable. I had to do all that; to listen to a lot of stuff that made me uncomfortable. I had to listen to the, you know, I can sit with adult adoptees and hear them talk very badly about birth parents, and I'm a birth mother. And I can sit with birth mothers and hear them talk about the pain of making decisions and how agencies treated them and I'm an agency worker. And, you know, like I can, ooh, but I can do it. And so, that's how I know it can be done.
So, I say that to a lot of adoptive families that I work with because they tend to be the ones most resistant, quite honestly, of saying, “I know it can be done, that you can sit in these uncomfortable places and grow and learn and come out in a different place because I had to do it too.” So, I give that a lot back to my clients of saying, “Yes, I know it's hard. Yes, I know I'm challenging to you to look at things from a perspective you don't really want to, you don't really like, doesn't feel good and yet I know how valuable it can be to come out on the other side of that. And you'll be a better parent and you will likely have a better connection, which is ultimately what all parents want, if you do the work.”
And I say that to placing parents too, if you want to have a connection someday, back with your child who will grow up and hopefully want to reconnect with you, you got to do the work. You got to be willing to sit with that child who may say, “Screw you. I don't like the decision you made. Your reasons for it aren't valid to me,” and you're going to have to be able to sit with that and hear that and own that and figure that out, too.
Again, journey, journey, journey. I mean, everyone's got to keep doing the work in order for us to, at all parts of an adoptees lifetime, be there for them in a really meaningful way and help them. Because even though I'm 57 years old, I still need help sorting this all out. I may not really be able to get it from my parents directly right now, but I still need help and support and assistance and I'm constantly reaching out for it, even at 57.
Lori:
I don't think a single episode of this podcast has gone by without the message, “You've got to do your own work, people,” and you've just brought that home so beautifully. So, let's get to our last question, and this is the question that all Season 4 guests are going to get. So, thank you for kicking off season four, Rebecca. How do you think we can best support adoptees in building healthy identities and connections from the start? I think this whole interview has been about that, but maybe just give us the down and dirty on this.
Rebecca:
Sure. Well, you know, our best support to adoptees is transparency, openness, providing access to information, allowing us to choose how to make use of that information and not having that dictated by other people.
Lori:
When you say us, you mean adoptee; an adult adoptee?
Rebecca:
Yes. We need to be the owners of our information and the decision makers on how to make use of that information. And so, we still need to dismantle systemic issues that are keeping documents and information protected from us, of having all this gatekeeping around what we're allowed to know about us.
Lori:
You're talking about original birth certificates and adoption records.
Rebecca:
Original birth certificates and adoption records. I mean, I think that information is about us. Yes, it's about other people, but other people who already made a choice about what to do legally. I can get on a soapbox about original birth certificates and the issues that people keep raising about birth mother privacy. It's like but you're talking about privacy around someone who legally terminated their rights to this child. And yet you still want to imply that they have rights to privacy, but they knowingly, supposedly (and I know there are a lot of women who didn't quite knowingly make this choice) but on paper, the legality of making the choice to terminate your rights means you have terminated your rights. And yet we want to not only give them rights to privacy, but more rights than any other parent has over a document. No one else controls their child's birth certificate other than the adopted persons whose birth certificate we seemingly want to let other people control. Your kids turn adulthood, they can go get their birth certificate. Well, you're not your kids, but if you gave birth to kids, they would be able to go access their birth certificate. They would never have to ask you a question about it, but not adoptees. So, anyways, that and adoption records. I think we have the right to all of our information.
So, that is how we support adult adoptees. We support adult adoptees by also fixing some of the systemic issues inherent in adoption; the ethical problems, the transfer of money. We know so much more about the damaging impact of adoption and how we do it is part of the damaging impact. It's not necessarily the adoption itself; it's the process we put people through that does a lot of the damage. And we could fix that. We could do this differently. Those are all ways in which we could be supporting adoptees better, as well as just listening to their stories and not listening to them with a, “Yeah, but I know someone who doesn't feel like that.” So, it doesn't mean my experience isn't valid. So, listen to what I have to say. And then when you start to, I think you don't have to listen to very many of Damon Davis’, “Who am I really?” podcast to go, “Hey, there's some themes here, people.” Like, we do all have radically different stories, but if you weren't picking up some themes, and I think his is a nice cross section because of how randomly people come across wanting to be on his podcast. So, it's not like he's getting some super-secret subset of adoptees who are all in collusion to say, “Let's all tell our stories the same way.”
And even the adoptees that I know everyone wants to say, “Yeah, but I know an adoptee who says they aren't struggling with any of this, that they don't have any of these questions, that this isn't hard for them.” You know, my response to that is, “Awesome for them. And they're not dead yet. So, there's still time for this to get hard, for this to get confusing, for this to get difficult, and for them to have some epiphanies that they didn't have before because it all happens for all of us at different times.”
I happen to get really into wanting to understand my adoption experience in my early twenties. Some people don't get into that until their sixties, seventies. They live their whole life with, I'm sure you've heard the term, fog, of just those blinders on of, “No, it was great. It was great. It was great. It's great.” It's a survival coping skill, right? For a long time, we need to believe it's all okay, because the other side of that is terrifying. So, it's a survival mechanism.
The other thing I always say to people who want to tell me that is they might not want to tell you. You might think you're a safe person for them to tell that to, but I'm here to tell you, as an adopted person and as a birth mother, we pick and choose who we're going to be open with. And it is a lot for us to really lay ourselves open bare, with our emotions around this. And so, we're not going to do that with just anyone.
And so, for a lot of us, including me, even to this day, there are certain situations where people will say, “Oh, well, how was that for you?” And I'll be like, “It's fine,” because I'm not going to get into it with you right now. So, you walk away from that interaction saying, “Well, I know an adoptee who said it was fine.” And maybe it was fine in that moment, but you're not going to hear my whole story.
Lori:
So, let me see if I can summarize a few things for people who are raising and adoptee to adulthood. Things we can do along the way is I hear you saying transparency; just tell the truth. Deliver the truth. I hear you saying validation. Validate the child by validating their birth parents and their birth family and their experiences. Give them the space to be sad. Give them the space to experience that grief and loss. Give them the space to be maybe even angry, envious, whatever it is. So, validation, transparency. You've mentioned before, honoring. You felt honored when your son's mom reached out to you. She honored you. So, these are some ways to help with that integration.
We talk so much on this podcast about the both-and. And I originally started using it as both adoptive family and birth family. But I've come to see that also as the both end of these emotions. So, this journey of the highs and the lows, the joy and the loss. And so, becoming, as adoptive parents, expansive enough to be able to hold the both end of those, so that whatever our child is feeling, we can hold it. And that's how we feel safe to them. That's our best shot at feeling safe. Of course, we can just do our own work and clear away our own stuff is what we can do to feel safe. Does that about wrap it up?
Rebecca:
No, that's great. And I'm so glad you used the word, integration, because I think a lot of why I want people to be doing this throughout their child's childhood is so that we as adoptees do have that chance at integration. So, it's not hitting us all in adulthood, which is a much harder time to go back and integrate. It's much easier to integrate hard stuff as a little at a time as we're growing, developmentally, within the safety of our family, when our family is supposed to feel safest to us, not when we've launched from our family and are now sort of out there on our own. And I think that's my generation of adoptees, that's what's been hardest for us, is we were doing most of this work as adults separated already from our adoptive family. So, we were flailing around literally on our own, trying to integrate. And integrate, looking back on a childhood going, “What? Wait a minute, now my childhood doesn't make sense.” So, integration for sure.
And the other thing is, I want all parents to know this. Our job as parents is to raise our children to leave us and be out in the world successfully. Why wouldn't you want to teach how to manage hard stuff? There's nothing about the rest of their lives separated from us that's going to be easy. It wasn't for any of us. Why would we think it would be for our kids? So, they need the skills to manage the tough stuff. So, why wouldn't we want? We shouldn't want adoption to just be rainbows and unicorns and all good all the time because when are we teaching about the hard stuff?
This is a great opportunity to make sure you're imbuing in your child what they need to just cope with the world, let alone cope with adoption. But the world has hard things and we need skills. We need skills on how to manage that. And our job as parents is to model it, to teach it, to recognize that our kid may need to use a different strategy than works for us. So, we need to be open to teaching other strategies, “This doesn't work for me, but maybe it'll work for you.” And giving you a chance to practice and figure out what does help them manage anger and sadness and loss and separation and frustration and confusion. And the list goes on and on. Right? That's our job as parents.
Lori:
Even the emotions need to be integrated into a whole. Yeah.
Rebecca:
I mean, we can't know what happy feels like if we don't know what's sad feels like. And is always a more effective way to look at this than either-or, because it all is there and we want to experience it all. And in adoption, just if we accept it, it forces all of that to the surface. Because if you're really tending to the adoption issues well, you're grappling with all of this, a little at a time, over your child's childhood, and into adulthood. And the journey continues literally until you're dead.
Lori:
Yep. Yep. Thank you so much for being with us today, Rebecca, and sharing all of your perspectives and your wisdom, your hard earned wisdom.
Rebecca:
It is hard earned and still earning it.
Lori:
Thank you so much for coming, because we're not dead yet, right? We're still on the journey.
Rebecca:
That’s right. We're not dead yet. Everything is still possible journey, as long as you're still here.