Submit Podcast or Channel

The Dark Side of Adoption: Inside America's Black-Market Baby Trade with Patricia Knight Meyer

October 27, 20260 comments♥ 0
00:00 This week I talk with Patricia Knightmeyer about her book, Wonderland Memoir of a Black Market adoption. Here's a really short synopsis. Illegally adopted as a baby in 1970, Patricia Knightmire grows up in a troubled household, unaware that her parents paid $30,000 in blackmail to keep her, and that her entire identity rests on falsified documents. As she embarks on a decades-long search for the truth about her origins, she uncovers devastating family secrets, and the exploitation at the heart of America's black market adoption industry.
00:32 I can't imagine having to basically become the detective of your own life in adulthood and then finding out all of these things. But that is what she did. And she documents so many different parts of the process in this book. It's very emotional. It's harrowing. It's empowering. It's all those messy things that life is.
00:53 And naturally, she is now a really big proponent of ethical. adoption and also maintaining awareness, there are consequences in every adoption. I'd love to hear me to hear from her about all these different subjects. So that being said, let's hear from Patricia. The first thing I tend to ask people is what drew them to writing. But I think it's a little bit, it's just a little bit different in this case where when I started your memoir, the thing that like immediately stood out to me is like you were kind of having to ask. like a detective about your own life. Like you were the detective, but it was also your life that you were kind of trying to unravel.
01:35 So what was that experience like? And when did you kind of decide, like, I'm going to write this and put it out as a memoir? Well, I decided that I would write the book right as I was in reunion with my birth father. Because we had lost 40 years together. you know, the subtitle is memoir of a black market adoption. So I didn't have a legal adoption. And on top of that, he had never been told that I even existed. So he was very surprised when he found me.
02:10 And in trying to make up for that time together, because lucky for us, we had a very good reunion. I was looking for a way to be close to him. And when I found him, he lived about three hours away from me. And I had learned through people advising you about how to go about reunion, you know, you don't like move in with each other or, you know, even though you really want to see each other all the time, you can't have to go slow. Well, we really didn't go slow. But, but what we did do was I rented a cabin.
02:39 Well, I didn't rent one. I was given a cabin by one of his friends to write the book, to spend some time getting to know him. And by that time, I had decided I wanted to write the book. And what inspired that was simply the fact that I had had a blog my adopted life. I'd been blogging for about two years after I'd met my birth mother. I had always been a writer, even as a little girl I was writing. I had journal entries.
03:04 I had poem that I'd written for my birth mother. So I had a lot of material. But I knew I needed a place to get away. So this writing cabin seemed perfect for me to start working on it and also to start getting to know him. and then like this magic happened because he he would come over at night and I would share the pages with him that I'd written that day and then he would read them and then that would spur more questions that he had about my life which would lead to more memories or me realizing oh well I need to put this in what I've just written as well because you know when you're writing your own story
03:43 it's hard to remember that you know all these things but nobody else does and so So he was a wonderful, it was a wonderful symbiotic birth of this book because he would come back with those questions. Well, what does this mean? Like, well, how did that happen? Why was that going on? And we became a team in that regard in developing the first draft of this book. And so in many ways, you know, he pretty much helped me write it.
04:16 That's so cool. Like I'm glad that is kind of where you ended up with it because there is one of my questions is you have a lot of moments in this book where like maybe something very happy is happening or like very positive. And also at the same time, there's something like negative or scary or or difficult. And so there seems to be like kind of like a lot in conversation about like things can be multiple things at once. Like they can be difficult. they can be happy they can be great memories they can be memories that look different when you look back on them um so i'm glad you guys to have that experience with him because there were a lot of experiences that were very difficult for you as well um let me let me interrupt you real fast on that i will
05:04 yeah i learned that two things this is something that i really learned through writing the book two things and sometimes three or four things can be true at once yeah and that was one of the difficult things to try to frame. I loved my adoptive parents and they were flawed people. I meeting my birth mother was one of the best days of my life and it was one of the hardest. And so when you learn that you don't have to see things in black and white, it's very liberating. Writing it properly is a real challenge. I bet. Yeah. Yeah, because it's like you go, this story spans decades of your life. So we go all the way back to the beginning and like your early memories with your adoptive parents. And you're having to write about yourself at a time
06:01 where you didn't have all the knowledge that you have now. So what was it like writing those early years? And kind of like you said, like when you're trying to like represent it as truthfully as possible, those years have to be a little bit harder to decide on. you know, oddly, the early years felt like the easiest thing to write for me. Oh, wow. I think it was because trauma, when it's not fully resolved, you know, if you studied PTSD or anything like that, it lives in this part of your brain that still thinks it's happening. It does, your brain doesn't understand timelines, right?
06:40 And so before I, while I was writing a lot of this, I had not done EMDR3. therapy, which allows you to not sort of have these memories that are so crystal clear that you can be thrown back into them at any moment and suddenly feel like under attack again or panicky. And so I had a lot of that from my childhood. And I think going back as an adult and putting myself there, I could really, I mean, I deeply, deeply remembered these scenes when my mother was losing her shit on me. excuse my friend um i deeply remembered the scenes the tender moments with my grandmother um and so those
07:22 and some of that stuff i was writing in my 20s like there's content in this book that i wrote for my like my first college creative college campus um you know assignments for creative writing in like english 101 so i was writing about these moments in my life of course i wasn't doing a very good job writing it, but the material was there. So it wasn't like I was 50 years old trying to go back to a memory that, you know, happened when I was four or five, 100%. I had things that I had written in my 20s and my teens about this that I could also pull from. And that was the beauty of having all those journals. Then people will learn in the book that ultimately all of my early writings, all of my notes and everything burned down in a house fire. And I lost all my pictures.
08:17 And that was probably the lowest, you know, I've ever been in my life was losing all of those, those memories. But luckily, I had pretty much gotten through the book and didn't need those, those anymore, you know, but I used them a lot in pulling those childhood stories together. But also they were very present in my memory. Mary Carr, the famous Mary Carr who wrote The Liars Club and Lit and Cherry and a number of others, she also wrote The Art of Memoir. And she seems to, she believes that you sort of need about five years at least to let, whatever's happened, sort of marinate in your memory and can, you know, distill itself down. into what matters most, right?
09:13 Yeah. And some of the stuff that I was writing around my birth mother, um, and, you know, because my birth father appears in the book, but it's really not till late in the end. But a lot of that birth mother stuff,
09:27 I was still so very close to it. I still had a lot of mixed feelings about it. I still had it carried a lot of guilt about my role and guilt about what I was writing. Uh, and so that really got in the way of, some things for a while. I probably had more drafts and more rewrites regarding that. Yeah. And I found that, you know, sometimes the things you can't write about or you're struggling to write about, it's because you need to do the emotional work around that. So I
10:00 studied a lot about narcissism and borderline personality disorder and the trauma, a birth mother's trauma. The Girls Who Went Away is a fantastic book to help me gain empathy for my birth mother. She did a lot of nasty things, but I also really wanted the reader to understand that she was traumatized and that when you relinquish a child, even if you're not, you know, whether you're forced to or you chose to do it yourself, it is a wound that you carry and it impacts you throughout your life. And it wounded her and it wounded me and the black market. aspect of it, wounded, you know, victimized my parents. They were, they were extorted by the attorney that they hired to adopt me. So I, I, I threw that writing process, I began to really
10:49 see, and I wanted my reader to see that this had happened to me, but it had also happened to them. And they were all victims of what I believe to be a broken, antiquated adoption system. basically has no, especially then, no oversight, no guardrails. You know, it was the wild west of adoption during the baby scuba era and still in many ways this. So it was hard to write because you wanted to show flawed people, but I also loved these people and I wanted people to have a little, give all of my parents a little grace and that they handled things. in my lifetime. Yeah. Because that's what I do. I mean, like, probably why, why I'm not crazy. Right. You do. I mean, everything you just talked about there, the book really also explores like what it can mean to give someone grace. And but also like, uh, like there is a difference
11:57 between like forgiveness. There's difference between understanding someone and there's a difference between like knowing that they're they're causing harm or like the empathy making you kind of like look past behaviors that are harming you and i think that's like one of the it's so hard pulling all of that apart um especially when you grew up in a tumultuous situation in general those are kind of hard to to figure out so what what was it like writing about all of those different aspects Well, it's very important that you can feel all you want for whatever person's been through in their lifetime. And you can understand, like you said, why they do the things they do. But you also still have to hold them accountable, right?
12:44 I was an infant, a minor, a child. There were things that happened that should not have happened. And so I'm okay with, you know, putting it out there and saying they failed. even though they were doing their best, their best was not good enough, and they failed in all these different ways, right? An adoptee is not expected to grow up in a home with fleas and roaches and the lights getting turned off and a mother that's verbally abusive. Like, this is not in anybody's adoption plan, right? No. They were able, I was put in that home. My adoptive parents went around the system, Maybe I guess that because they were a mixed race couple, by the 1960s standards, my mother was white, my father was Hispanic.
13:38 He was also beginning, the very beginnings of extreme obesity. He was around, back then, somebody who was 300 pounds was considered really big. And, you know, at his heaviest, he grew to 650 pounds. And my mother became an alcoholic. Now, I don't know if those, the stress of raising a baby that they had been, that they never got adoption papers for exacerbated their, you know, addictions or, you know, maybe it was underline. But ultimately, the system allowed me to be placed with people who were ultimately not equipped to raise a child.
14:20 And so the system needs to be held accountable for that. I know that they didn't intend for all those things in our life to happen the way they did, but it still happened. And so, you know, I have cousins that are very upset that I'm writing about these dirty secrets and, you know, painting my parents in this bad light. Right. I've not read the book. And I'm like, if you read the book, you will understand that I give them so much grace.
14:47 Yes. And it's funny because I've also had some early readers, not about. but enough to make me go, ooh, that's interesting. They've come back and said, well, I don't understand why, like, your adoptive mother was so cruel and abusive, and you basically let her off the hook. But when it came time to, you know, meet your birth, when it came time with your birth mother, you basically kicked her to the curb with, like, very little, you know, compassion for that. And my, my comment is, if I had given my birth mother the same grace I gave my adoptive mother,
15:26 I would still be the very codependent child with no boundaries that I was at the beginning of the book and throughout the middle of the book. My character grew, I learned. I found myself. I found my own voice. I found my true identity. And it was truly, I was able to create boundaries. and grow in my self-esteem, that happened because I found, I went on my, on a search for who I was,
15:56 I solved my mystery, and I finally felt like I knew who I was and where I belonged in the world. When you don't have that sense of self, you go through the world as a chameleon. You shape-shift, you want to fit in, you're scared to death of rejection, right? I was terrified of losing the birth mother that I had searched my whole life to find once I found her. But I also knew that a relationship built on an inauthentic foundation was no real relationship at all. And for me to be truly authentic, I had to decide I'm not willing to take verbal abuse. I'm not willing to engage or tolerate racist types of comments in my presence. There's things I cannot tolerate.
16:46 And that just shows growth. Yes. Yes. Anyway, I kind of got off on a tangent there. No, no, I get that because it's like, I think, whatever, to these readers who feel that way. Like in some ways, too, we also spend more time with your adoptive mother. So it's like, there's also less time even just from that perspective. You know what I mean?
17:08 Like it's like you technically had like, you had the childhood with her. So there was also more going on. And when you were a child, you couldn't go no contact when you're eight years old. Like there's no option for that. So I understand why it makes people uncomfortable. But there has to be room for exactly what you said. Like if you grow up in an environment that causes you to be codependent and causes you to feel like you have to regulate the whole mood of the house to like try to find some peace. then maybe later on you handle it differently when you're kind of confronted with the same thing.
17:47 Like it makes sense to me at least. I mean, I'm really glad though, and I'll give this advice to anybody who's working on a book. And I'm so glad I did not have that I didn't get this feedback until after the book was out into the world. Because I would have been such a, I'm such a people pleaser to this day. Like I would be second guessing myself on everything, you know. And it's, although there's. getting feedback from early readers is now it's like, okay, I'll put that in my pocket and think about that for the next book. Yeah. And a lot of the, some of the stories that I took out. I mean, I wrote 120,000 words and boiled it down to 90.
18:31 And so I have a good chunk that I know that I'm going to use in the next book. And the next book is going to be about how I applied the the hard won lessons about reunion to my reunion with my birth father. So the next book will be about my reunion with my birth father and a lot that was involved there. That included a divorce that was triggered because of how I behaved in reunion. My husband felt very abandoned and decided to have an affair. And then that triggered my own abandonment issues. And then that's when the house burned down. So there's a ton to write about. And then, next book and her mother is going to be in it as well. So there will be more revealed about her in the next one. And since I knew I was going to write another one, and I'm not writing it like a
19:24 part two because I've learned that you never know who's going to pick up which book first. So you have to write your book like anyone could find the first one and be like, oh, I want to read about this other one then, you know, then learn about the other one later. Yeah. But she'll definitely be in that one and people will learn more about her and understand more about the circumstances of how everything went down. The other interesting thing that some reviewers noted was that they wanted to learn more about how everything impacted my daughter in my life. Right? Because she was left at home with my mother, who I took in, who was an alcoholic as an adult. I was a single mom and I relied on my mother.
20:07 I put my daughter in the same path of the storm that I was put in and also looked the other way like my father had modeled for me. That also I will explore in the next book. But they did want to know. We wanted more information about how all this impacted your daughter. And there was a part of me. It was like, well, you know, I'd have to write a much longer book if I'm going to do all of that. But also as a child and as my daughter. daughter, a lot of that is her story to tell. And I don't, I, and she was a minor when all of the
20:45 stuff was happening. And so I just felt like maybe she and I will write a book or maybe in my next book, I'll actually let her write some chapters. Yeah. That her voice will be stronger. But ultimately, you know, I teach memoir writing classes. And the way that I tell people to do, do it is, you know, hang all the, determine your key turning point moments. Like, what are the top 10 or 20 things that have to be in the book? And then what are the substories that support those things that are going to prove the points you're trying to make around those things? And you'll eventually see that there's all these other things that would be really nice to have. Yeah. But they're not half to halves. And so you have to call them out. And it's very, very hard process.
21:35 But ultimately the litmus test for each one is does it move the story forward? Mm-hmm. Can the story be told without this? Mm-hmm. That's a really important one. Yeah. You know, and so a lot of the things I wanted to include, I just simply couldn't, which I guess is why I want to write another book. Yeah.
21:58 Yeah. Well, I think it's powerful what you're talking about. your dedication is to your daughter as well. And you kind of mention, like, becoming a mom made you want to understand how to kind of keep improving as a mom. It was, I should have, I didn't, that one note I didn't copy over. But I think that's powerful that you're, like, aware of the fact that, like, she might want to tell her version of the story versus not just being told something, especially from like the experiences that you had as well um and so i think some of what you're talking about you kind of mentioned it too where like you ended up uh getting divorced as well um and how
22:45 some of it was similar to your childhood and so repetition compulsion is like when you're in therapy it's a big thing that talks about like these the unfinished business the wounds that you haven't healed from your childhood you're going to keep playing them out until you confront them so what was it like writing about even like the stuff like that because like it's very uncomfortable sometimes i have my moments too where you're going through life and you're like oh i know where this is coming from and you have to be nice to yourself too so that you don't beat yourself up so what is it like sifting through all of that you mean sort of looking at different scenes and understanding why i was behaving the way i was yeah yeah i mean ultimately it's very
23:30 if you can have those moments. Yeah. And, you know, it's weird because I just had one of those moments in regard to one of the passages in this book. I was just ran. I was going to do a reading, an online reading. And I had picked this particular chapter out and I was preparing to read it. And as I was reading it, I note that I say, I don't know why I never told my father how my
23:57 mother behaved when he was out of the house. and I don't answer that question in the book. I just pose it. And I think I posed it because at the time, I didn't have the answer to it. But as I read that line, this light bulb went off in my brain, and then I started bawling.
24:19 I realized in an instant, it was because I knew, in my mind, I wanted to imagine that if I told him he would stop it and he would do something about it. But I think in my core, I was fearful that if I asked him and told him about it and then he didn't do anything about it, he and I wouldn't be on the same team anymore. Yeah.
24:42 So I liked to imagine that he was my hero because if I ever came to him about it and told him about it and he didn't do anything about it, then I would have felt even more alone, right? And I do know that, I mean, there were, and I had signs, it had signals and signs about that because I would, you know, I, whenever she was cussing and yelling in front of us, you know, around or to him, I'd be like, you know, why does she have to be like that? And he would just say, well, that's your mother, you know, just let her be, it will pass. You know, this too shall pass. But, but when I would go, so that's one example of how I just, I was like, man, I wish I could go back and put that in the book. right? Right. But there were times when I was writing that I, I did learn a lot about my behaviors, like especially like when I had such a difficult reunion in the first few minutes of meeting my birth mother and all of those feelings that were going through me. It was trying to figure out, give myself some grace because it was very shamed of how very quickly I had these, these feelings of, you know, not, not, no connection, nothing, right, you know.
25:58 And I didn't really understand it. So I spent a lot of time digging through that, trying to figure out why do, why did I really feel that way? Why? Yeah. And you look for, when you write stories like this, it makes you find some of the, it really makes you dig deep to find some of those answers. And then the answer is, if you just don't know, the most important thing I think is to put on the page, I really don't know why I behave that way. I'm still trying to understand why I behave that way. Because if you say that, then the reader won't think that you're trying to hide something from them, right? You really know why you felt that way, but you're not, you're not going to say it, you know? Right. Yeah, those are two big moments. So we had, my mom
26:42 went on very, like, outward rampages or like very external ones that were like very, very obvious to see and then we would all typically like go to our bedrooms to get away from her and then it was the same thing my dad would come up to our rooms and be like you know your mom is just like this and i need you to go down there and apologize to her so that like things could be normal again and it's one it's one of those memories where you look back on it as an adult and you're like but but you were the adult and like why were you making excuses for her and like why didn't you want to do anything to like help us out like we didn't even know what we did wrong which i'm was your experience as well sometimes you're like am i going to apologize and the lesson he was teaching you was people can
27:29 treat you badly and you're supposed to let it happen and maybe even apologize for it yes and and my dad's a pastor so there was very much the the evangelical Christianity of it all the devil made her do it yes yeah and like reinforces it like you are a better person you go apologize it'll be okay and it's just like you're like but i'm a kid and i'm scared and no one seems to care so i feel you on that one um the so the other kind of interesting i i don't want to say interesting in like uh oh it's entertaining what you went through but another interesting thing is like you have a very unique um perspective to think about nature versus nurture or genetics versus environment because there was like the the turmoil that you between your adopted parents and
28:25 you and then there's also you have a very like you have a different experience with your birth mom and your birth dad even though you're genetically related to both of them um so what what what has like kind of changed for you over time as you've learned more about that and like what what is it like having the perspective of both of those things yeah i think before i actually experienced reunion i would have said that nature versus nurture was probably a 50-50 thing i would have said well you know it's it's a good bit of both right yeah um and in some regard i i probably still i mean i do believe that both things are involved but i probably say it's more 75 percent nature and 25 percent nurture. Mainly because I still was just so even despite what I went through in my raising home,
29:23 I was just still so different from them. But what I did realize is I gave my, in retrospect, when I met my maternal grandmother and found out that she was an English teacher and that she journaled every day, when I met my birth mother and realized that she's very, very self, sort of like a very self-involves sort of has a lot of anxiety and things like that I I could see myself in her I could see the things that I didn't like very impetuous also like I could see things I didn't like about myself in her and I mean it wasn't her fault I didn't just happen to inherit we were alike in these like weird ways that weren't necessarily we're showing themselves in the best light yeah when I met my birth father there were similar things
30:15 like there were great things like I looked a lot more like him but I also thought a lot more like he did I'm like a tinker I'm very analytical thinker I'm a I want to I want to sort of argue the case is my nature of way of going but also he had extreme anxiety he's very much a control freak and most adoptees are you know a little bit of control freaks because so much much of life was out of our control. Yeah. But he was too. And then we just had these weird, like we both loved pistachio almond ice cream and
30:55 had just so many odd things in common. But yet I can see when I look back at my, on my adoptive family that my mother who was like really, she could do math in her head. She was an excellent scrabble player. She knew that she very early on recognized that I'm a different kid. Like I was, I would, I could not, I didn't have a lot of interest in. I was absolutely horrible in math. Yeah.
31:28 But I would take, as a little, little kid, I would take radios apart. I wanted to see how things worked inside. I would stand in front of the mirror and ask my mother, how does it work? Can you tell me, how does it work? How does it work? And she said that she called one of her friends and said, what do you tell your children when they ask you things like, how does the mirror work?
31:51 The lady said, my children don't ask me those kinds of questions. But my birth father would have been one to ask those sorts of questions, right? So I did learn, and that's just part of genetic mirroring that adoptees miss out on when we haven't found our family. But lucky for me, my adoptive mother, that there were things that I was interested in that she wasn't, that she really nurtured, like theater and, you know, drawing. I was very right brain kid. And so she, she did the crazy, I mean, there's stories in the book that I didn't put. One of my favorite ones is in many ways,
32:30 even though when she was on her, she was manic. So when she was having a bad day, it was bad. And when it was a good day, it was like living with Mary Poppins. Like I remember there was a day in January where I said I really wanted to be in, take a swim in a swimming pool. And she pulled a blow up swimming pool into our living room, got the water hose from the front yard, filled it halfway up with water, boiled a big pot of hot water on the stove, and put the swimming pool with water in it in the middle of our living room
33:00 with a bunch of towels around it. I'm like, who does that? Yeah. You know? Yeah. But she would also do things like we had a farm. that would deliver, you know, back in the day, you could, well, now we have pharmacies that deliver now, but there was a period of my life where that didn't happen, right?
33:19 Yes. You could call the pharmacy and she would let me order, you know, crayons and arts and in construction paper and glue and glitter and I'd have an, you know, afternoon of art making anytime I wanted to do something like that. She was, you know, she was on it. And so, like I said, on her good day, she was great. Yeah. And she did nurture the talents that I think I was born with.
33:47 Yeah. Which unfortunately, a lot of adoptees don't, they're raising parents don't know to do that. Right. And they try to push them in, like, if they're not, you know, a sporty kind of person, if they don't, they're not outdoorsy or, you know, aren't into tennis or track or whatever, they're making those kids do that. anyway to fit in with the rest of the family and and that's unfortunate when that happened yeah well that kind of leads to another one of my questions pretty well is that so you have you have your adopted parents and then you have your experience where you realize you don't like have an actual legitimate earth certificate um and so then that kind of sets off like how am i like how am i going to
34:36 get a social security number, like all of those different things. But finding community with other people who had been adopted is what kind of helped you fill in some like knowledge gaps or even some of what you're saying there were like not all parents knew to encourage like different interests. But your mom kind of just found that. But it had to be so relieving to find people in adulthood who understood and it's probably kind of a whole other version of found family which is interesting for the circumstances yeah yeah so can you talk about that and kind of like your passion now to talk about the ethics of adoption oh oh sure that's i could talk all day long about all that yeah um i first found the adoption community when i right after i'd found my birth mother
35:31 and we were struggling. And someone at work who was an adoptee said, oh, you know, you should check out this adoption knowledge affiliates that was at the time meeting in person in Austin. This would have been like 2010. So I went there and, yeah, it was a little terrifying. It was sort of like showing up to an alcoholic, it's anonymous, you know, like, what am I going to find, you know, what's going to happen here?
35:59 you know, like I'm supposed to be okay. Like, what are these people going to tell me about myself? But it was not. I found that it wasn't like that at all. And there were first mothers. Some people call them birth mothers. I like to call them first mothers. There were first mothers there who understood reunion and was trying to help me
36:22 understand my birth mother's perspective and telling me all the things that I've been doing wrong. You know, like sending her emails full of people. pictures of like every single special moment in my life that she'd missed out on, right? Okay. I wanted her to get to know me and all she could see was a life that she missed out on. And so there was also adoptees there. And then there were adoptees there who were searching and unfortunately had doors slammed in their faces. So then I began to realize that I was very fortunate.
36:54 And then I started feeling guilty because I was struggling with my birth mother when so many people, you know, wanted to find their birth mothers. But anyway, adoption knowledge affiliates really helped me at the time. And they told me about the books I needed to be reading to help with my reunion experience and to also help with my primal wound, which I didn't know I had. So it was a real, what we call coming out of the fog moment. Yeah. And then I brought my birth father. And he attended some meetings once I found him. And then he and I did some, we were panelists on a panel, and we shared our adoption reunion experience at this one conference.
37:37 And it was wonderful. And I really wish we had continued that. I think that he was experiencing some health issues. Or it might have also just been that we were so happily in reunion that we were sort of like, we don't need this community anymore, which was so dumb and naive. because I then sort of like fell out of the community until 2023. And my birth father passed away in 2021. And that left me feeling incredibly alone.
38:10 He had become my best friend, most trusted confidant. I lost him for a second time. She's so hard to talk about. I'm sorry. It's okay. Take your time. It's a good thing. It's really a wonderful thing to,
38:23 to grieve, right? Yeah. But somehow it was like after COVID, I don't, oh, I still had my blog, but I hadn't blogged on it in a very long time. And I think that I had returned to my blog. And by now we had that the adoption community had really blossomed during COVID on the internet. Like everybody started, there were online Zoom support groups that,
38:53 had not happened before because of COVID. And that's when a lot of adoptees started writing their books during COVID. And it was, I had started writing my, I'd been focusing on my book during COVID as well. I had gone to a writing retreat for my 50th birthday in 2020 and come back and suddenly it was COVID. But while I was there, I'd met my developmental editor. And so I was very focused on this book. And Pop was still alive at that point. So he was really did see me get to like get serious and he saw like you know well developed a well developed version of this book yeah but um but ultimately once he passed away i think that between me continuing to work on the book and me looking for some sort of emotional support system
39:41 i ended up going to my first adoption conference in 2023 and when i walked in it was called untangling our roots and when i walked into it i was just like wow I felt so at home. I felt so understood. There were also people there who had learned late in life, you know, that they were adopted or people who had taken DNA tests and found out dad wasn't dad, non, non parental events. They call them NPEs. And then there were donor conceived people. And then I started realizing how much we all, how much overlap there is when it comes to identity and secrecy.
40:22 and surprises that we all share. And no two adoption stories are alike. And it's interesting because by that time I was 50 years old, and it's very hard to make new friends when you work from home, period. And it's even harder, the older you get, because everybody's already got a big chunk of friend. You know, they've already got only so many. I think I read a study once it said,
40:46 you can only maintain eight to 10 serious relationships in your life. Right. at some point other people just have to drop off. Right. So I really needed some good friends in my life. I was feeling pretty lonely. And I had good friends, but they lived in other states far away and all this. Well, today, now it's what, what are we?
41:09 Three years, it seems like so much of a longer period of time. But yeah, three years later, almost four years later, I have so many people. people who I consider to be now dear lifelong friends. I mean, the first person I pick up on the, pick up the phone with when I, you know, I'm having an adoptee moment, right? Or celebrating something. And so many people have helped me launch this book. I had first mothers edit read and beta read the book. I had adoptees beta read the book. I had therapists that are in that community who we were sometimes adopted summer at birth mothers and adoptees all in one. You know, they read and some of them are adoptive parents also.
41:56 And so they all read it. They all gave feedback and they've all been very supportive and they all did it for free. And so when I am done with this, my hope is to help other people coming up with their stories behind me, you know, to be that same paying it forward, being that launching pad, being that here to listen. into but the friends the friends that I have found and now every time a conference comes around you know I feel like the same excitement you had when you were a kid and you were headed to camp I'm like I'm going to camp I'm going to be with my people I'm going to have fun that's what book events have become for me as well exactly I'm like oh I get to go be with these people that I know like yeah love things in the same way that I do and like I feel safe with them like all of it it's such a
42:48 thing to find your people. Yeah, like I have one person that I found recently who had a, and I keep finding them. That's the interesting thing is like new people show up too. And this, this one woman, she lost her, she had like a 10 year reunion relationship with her birth mother. And they were like I was with my pop, just two peas in a pod. Yeah. And we've spent more time online talking to each other. And I told her, I was like, you know, we are in a very, very small club of people who not only found their birth parents. Then we had a beautiful reunion with our birth parents. And now we understand what it is to lose them all over again. So we are, you know, I can truly feel there's not many people on the planet who will understand how I feel
43:39 in that regard or how she feels because our paths have been so aligned. And that's the beauty of this community. You're likely going to find somebody who whose story aligns well enough with yours that you will find this purse, this support system, you know, that that you so very much need. Yeah. Yeah. I know there's lots of conversations around memoirs and you may have even touched on a little bit about like you are sharing like the stories of other people in your life as well and some people are like oh you're just writing this for revenge and I so like I always felt like there was something off growing up I knew I was really excited to get out of the house but I didn't know why and it was reading other people's it was actually a subreddit which not all of reddit is hateful
44:33 just so everyone knows um there was a subreddit called raised by narcissists that all of a sudden I was like oh like oh there's a name for this oh other people have experienced this And especially amidst narcissistic abuse, there's typically a lot of gaslighting. And so one of the hardest things to get to is to, like, believe your version of the events and to believe what was happening was actually bad. But it's other people's stories from me that helped me feel confident in myself, in my stories, and like what I could do. And it was so interesting because I listened to your audiobook this week, just as
45:13 I had finished in the shadow of eight by Colin Goslin. And it's not about adoption, but it is about growing up with a mom who's obsessed with appearances and is very abusive toward him. And he talks about that at the end of it, too, where he was like, I need to, I want to tell this story because I want other people to like hear it and maybe believe themselves. So I think that's like the other thing that's so powerful about memoirs like this is like you telling your story is going to help other people understand their story. as well. Yeah, that's, that's right. And that's a big part of why I wrote it. I wanted people who were going through reunion to see the mistakes I made to understand that it's complex. Yeah. People who are raised by alcoholics or people with generational trauma. That I'll say that there's hope. Like, yeah, I don't really know. I don't take credit for the fact
46:08 that I consider myself to be a pretty, like, well, you know, well-rounded, not, cruel, kind, loving person. Like, they, my adoptive parents gave me some of that. My biology gave me some of that. Reunion has certainly made me feel better in my body, better in this world. But I think that there's sometimes adversity, the way that you react to it is just like, well, I know how I'm not going to grow up to be. Like that was my, like, I took all the bad things that I saw going on and being like note to self. I will never do that to my daughter. Note to self. I will never do that to my husband. Note to self. And I think that's sort of if you can, if you can go at it when things like that are happening to you. But also now, you know, there's so many resources. There's
47:03 there's online support groups. There's Zoom meetings. In my age, there was a library. Like, that was it. You know, you couldn't find help the way you can. can find health these days. So I also really want to hope that people in the book, that read the book, will look at the back of the book or go to my website and realize that there's all kinds of organizations out there to help anyone who's on any kind of similar journey of healing from whatever kind of trauma they experienced. Yeah. And I'll put that link in the show notes for anyone who's wondering about it. Then kind of like a two-part question about like adoption in general. So you learn that you were a part of a black market adoption. You also start to learn
47:51 about like maternal infant separation. And so even just like in a non-black market adoption, there's still trauma that happens. So can you kind of talk about, both of those things and then even what you're saying, there's still some black market adoptions going on as well. I mean, you have to assume that there are in an industry that's a multi-billion dollar industry, where the average adoption costs anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000. And there's a, obviously, 90% of the time adoptive parents are put under a very, very, you know, very large microscope to make sure that they don't have any kind of, you know, records or, you know, sexual abuse in their history or whatever.
48:45 Right. You've, but yet the statistics say that on average, there's about 35, 36 waiting families for every baby that is relinquished. There's not this like huge, you know, plethora of infants that need homes anymore. And so that all makes it very, very competitive. And yet you've got unlicensed. You don't have to have a license. You need to be an attorney, but you don't have to have a license to conduct an adoption.
49:20 There is no federal oversight. Closed records mean that the paper trail gets locked away and no one can follow up. And so I'm imagining that there are probably parents out there with lots of money, but that don't qualify or don't want to wait in line for years who will go around the system and what we call private adoptions that are also called gray market adoptions. The reason they're called gray is because how quickly they can slide into the black market when you, when money becomes the profit motive or when, you know, it doesn't make any sense that that there's one attorney representing both parties, right?
50:00 There's one right in the middle. There's all this secrecy in private. privacy. The birth mother's not supposed to know who the adoptive parents are. The adoptive parents don't want to know who the birth mother is, may or may not. But, well, if the right hand doesn't know what the left hand's doing and the guy in the middle is telling them two different stories, crazy things can happen. And so I don't know, I don't have proof that it's still happening today. I suspect that it very well could be. But when it comes to what separation in general does to a child, there's a lot of children that, for whatever reasons, wind up in foster
50:42 care and don't get adopted for the first few months of their life. There's also a lot of children that are adopted out of foster care at, you know, one, two, three, four, any, you know, in any age. But initially in that early infancy period where you can't give an infant word, you can't explain to the infants what's happening to them. All they know is that the only mother they know is gone missing. And studies show that only days old infants can pick out their own birth mother's breast milk and their own mother's voice. And they've been listening to it in utero for all these months, right? Right. And her smell. And so an infant is going to know if they are with that. that mother or not and that causes trauma in addition to that while a birth mother is pregnant
51:41 the stress of knowing you're going to be relinquishing your child it raises cortisol levels in her system so the baby's brain is being bathed in cortisol a friend of mine in the community called it pickled pickled in cortisol but what that really means is is that the part of your brain that is used to cortisol being a stress hormone that raises your, you know, your heartbeat, your heart rate and your anxiety, that that's a constant for them. And so their brain hardwires and adapts to having that level of hypervigilance and that level of anxiety. So you are born. These infants are born hyper-anxious individuals. And then the one mother they have is taken away from them. And then can you imagine what that does to the child's psyche?
52:32 And, you know, it was just just this very morning. I had experienced something that made me cry and that I wish I had put in the book. And it's a perfect example of this. I was getting ready for this big book launch event that I have coming up in, in Austin, which I'd love to tell you about. Yeah. And I was wanting to put out some memorabilia from the book. So I was going through some old boxes, stuff that I packed up and hadn't really looked at
52:57 since the fire and a lot of it was fire damaged. But I found this one magazine that I had been in that hat box that I started talking about in chapter one. And it was this baby magazine. And I never, I looked at it a thousand times, but I never flipped through it. And today I started flipping through it. And as I flipped through it, two newspaper clippings fell out of it from 19 January. It was a Monday of something in 1970. I don't know what month. Wow. But these newspaper, these newspaper clippings literally said, let me see if I can find them because I took a picture.
53:39 Yeah. The top of one said, infant needs loving substitute when his mother goes away. And it was an article that my adoptive mother had clipped out talking about infant depression. and how it can suddenly come taking away the mother and not providing a suitable substitute. This situation emphasizes once again the importance of a tender loving care for the very young infant. So my mother was studying this very thing we're talking about. And then in this other article clipping with it was infants signal by crying. So she was, I obviously had been crying a lot and she was trying to understand what to do with her crying baby.
54:32 And is powerful. It was. I mean, I got chill bumps and then I thought, oh, man, if I'd found this, I certainly would have put it in the book. Yeah. Yeah. It'll be in the next one maybe. Yeah. But it was interesting that they were calling this a syndrome.
54:48 And then it said later that it was first noticed in babies that were sent away. separated from their mothers during world during like during war yeah and that they were like but don't worry they get better after three months that's that's what the article and i'm like yay for doctors in 1970 i guess uh it is it's so fascinating the more we learn about like even in utero like you're picking up on your mom's uh like her version of homeiosasis like you were talking about with the cortisol i remember learning that and being like, oh, well, that doesn't vote too well for me in that case. I mean, you don't have to be adopted to inherit your mother's cortisol levels. Right, right.
55:34 Yeah. And what's interesting is my mom was adopted. And she adamantly, I haven't spoken with her over a decade. But as long as I knew her, she's like, I have no interest in knowing anything about it. These are my parents. I don't even have other parents out there. So it's like she's someone I also will. will be tempted to be like, oh, well, things were hard for her too. But it also got to a point where
55:59 like it's not going to be healthy for me to be in relationship with you. I will tell you that from the few things that you've shared in this call, it's likely true that a lot of what your mother is struggling with is very much tied to her fear of abandonment and lack of a strong sense of self and feeling like things are out of her control and the healing comes from understanding why. Yeah. And that adoption is the reason. It really is.
56:32 And there's a lot of, there's a whole group of adoptees in my community and first mothers whose goal is to educate psychologists and therapists that you need to ask your patients right off the bat. Are you adopted? Because I spent 10 years in therapy trying to solve all these relationships. relationship issues that I had with myself and with other people. Right. And never mentioned I was adopted.
56:55 It wasn't until I found my birth mother and walked into therapy. And I'm like, well, I found my birth mother. And he's like, wait, what? What? Yeah. Yeah. And so why they don't think to ask that right off the bad is so important because there's a whole different way you're going to treat and someone if you know that, right?
57:14 Yeah. So there are organizations within our community whose goal is to educate physicians. and therapists about adoption trauma. Yes. Yeah, there's, and like you were saying, also outside of adoption, like those, even like, I think there's more science, either studying or publishing about how those first two years, it's so easy to think that since we don't have tons of concrete memories from that
57:39 time, that it's like, why would it matter? Like, I didn't even know what was happening, but your, like, lizard brain or, like, the part that's attuned to things that aren't just words, it was picking up on stuff that whole time. So I'm glad there are more people studying that. Vessel Vanderkirk says the body, he wrote the book, The Body Keeps the Score. Yes. And as does Gabor Matte writes a lot about this because he was one of those infants that got taken from his mother during the war. Oh, yeah. He writes a lot about that. Yeah. I ended up reading both of those when I first started therapy. Well, the body keeps the score. I do have to quickly
58:19 shout out what my bones know by Stephanie Fu. Incredible. Very, very similar, like, talking about C.P.T.S.D. Which we don't have tons of awareness around quite yet. It's complex PTSD, if anyone was asking, it's like, if you experience one event where, like, you're robbed or something, you're going to have PTSD from that one event, and you can maybe work through it. And then complex PTSD is an.
58:49 unending series of events kept happening to you further making your body think like we're never safe and we need to be like hypervigilant all the time exactly so those are good too um i could probably talk to you forever but tell me you know so much i'm so impressed with how much you know about all this stuff oh well yeah it's you know those of us have been through it like the educating yourself on it helps so much yeah um tell me about your your book event that you have come up though your your launch event yeah i don't know when this podcast is going to come out so i guess um it can come out before your pub date if that helps that would be awesome if it would yeah then i can come out on tuesday the book releases on november the third um which is not not for not for
59:38 elect not because of the election but because it's the anniversary of my birth father's passing yeah but then three days later on the on november the sixth i am having a big book launch event called Down the Rabbit Hole. It's at the Texas State History Museum, the Bullock. And a chapter of the book will come to life on stage, and then it will be followed by a panel discussion on adult adoptees rights to our original birth records. And it is a non-profit event. It's going to be live-streamed for anyone, anywhere to watch. All you have to do is sign up and ask for a ticket to the live stream and the link will get emailed to you that morning. And it's to raise awareness about Texas Adopty Rights,
01:00:23 but it's also to any net proceeds from the event will go to support the adoption knowledge affiliates, which I mentioned earlier, an organization called Saving Our Sisters, which helps first mothers and helps them find ways to not relinquish their children. And the National Association of Adopties and Parents, which I'm a board member of, those three organizations will,
01:00:49 are the benefactors of any net proceeds from the event. So we really hope people will turn up online and watch. If they're in Austin, they're welcome to join us in person. There will be a reception and book signing afterwards. Yeah. Perfect. I'll make sure I get that link in there as well. And then, yeah, this can come out so people have some time to sign up as well
01:01:10 and come out a little bit earlier. Thank you. I do love to ask at the end, if there are, any books you love or books you always recommend. It can be related to this. It can be fiction. If you read fiction, like you can talk about whatever books you want to.
01:01:27 Oh, well, I mean, I already mentioned the art of memoir by Mary Carr. If you're a writer, then I highly recommend that book. One that I just, it's difficult because I really,
01:01:40 really love The Liars Club because Mary's book and her childhood takes place similar to my own, like really like my grandparents place wasn't that far from where she grew up. So we sort of grew up in the same Texas town, you know, time. But I think my absolute favorite book is called Wave Walker. Oh, okay. It's by a woman named Suzanne Hayward. Okay. And it's basically the story of how she grew up on this
01:02:10 large, large sailboat with her parents who decided to circumnaut circumnavigate the globe when she was seven years old. Whoa. She thinks it's going to be a one year, two year trip. It ends up being her entire life. Oh my gosh. And her parents are not very invested at all in her education. So she ends up figuring out a way how to teach herself everything.
01:02:35 Wow. Through mail order, you know, mail order school correspondence. And she goes on to attend. one of i i can't remember which one it was but a major university in in england can't remember which one it was um but and obviously write an amazing book about it i'm an amazing book about it and looks like oxford university that's right yeah the name it escaped me but yes it's okay and i mean her life talk about giving you hope and and going through it and her her parents weren't violent people, but they definitely were very narcissistic and self-centered. It comes across, and I think that
01:03:20 they stopped talking to her after she wrote the book. Wow. Yeah, but God, it's a great book. It sounds a little bit like educated. It's a lot like educated. Okay. Yeah. It's like educated on the water. Oh, yeah, totally, totally. They should those two, those two authors should get together and have a book, you know, have a book. Truly, we need to get them out to see. I need to get them both on the You could call it the surf and turf books. Yes. Oh my gosh. I love that.
01:03:51 Okay, I'm going to go write them now and tell them I want to arrange their surf and turf night. Yes, please do it. Well, I'm adding this to my list. That sounds fascinating. And she narrates the book herself, which is part of why I chose to narrate my book myself because it's like I couldn't imagine it in anybody else's voice other than hers. Yes. And even though I've listened to the book a thousand times, sometimes I just still listen to it to go to sleep at night because it's such a soothing voice. It's just a beautiful voice. That's amazing. I couldn't, like my brain didn't go toward audiobooks when it was fiction for the longest time. And like two, almost two years ago, that changed for me. But my friend was like you should try memoirs first because like often, not always, the author will read it. It's a little bit more.
01:04:43 more like someone telling you their story. And shortly after that, I listened to Viola Davis's. And I was like, oh, yeah, she was right. Like, it's so powerful when the person narrates it. So I loved that you narrated it as well. And before we go, I have to ask you a question. Yeah. Did you listen to the audio book? Did you find the Easter egg in the back? Oh, I don't think so. Oh, you might want to go back and look again. Because you did send me a link. I'll tell you. I'll tell you what it is. I'll tell you what it is. And I'll also tell you where you can find it in a different place. It is an audio of me when
01:05:13 I was three years old talking with my parents. Oh, okay. And singing and singing with my grandmother, Minnie. It's only about two minutes long. It's not very long. That's my Easter egg. It's in the back of the, it's in the acknowledgement section of the audio book.
01:05:28 Okay. And it's not really an Easter egg if I tell you where to find it and all that, but so, oh well. And there's a book, there's a link that goes with the audio book called Wonderland, the memoir slash Discover. Okay.
01:05:40 And that has a ton of family photos. It has the four word written by David Bowle. It has the reunion video with my birth father. And it has the Easter egg audio. Wow. Oh, and it also has a playlist of every song that I mentioned in the book. Oh, yeah, you do. Yeah, you do mention them.
01:06:00 Yeah. That is such fun extra content for people to know about. Yeah, I want people to know about it. It didn't, it's, you know, it's hard to let people know about it in the audio book. As I didn't put it at the front. but I do mention it at the very end like if you want to learn more but I don't explain everything that's there so yeah okay I started going back and forth between the text and the audio so I need to go I need to go find this at the end of the audio for sure that's so special I love that and you can find
01:06:30 it on that discover page too okay the audio is there too so cool go dig back into the audio book if you don't want to but thank you so much this has been such a great conversation is thank you where can people, where's the best place for people to follow and stay up to date with all of this? So folks who are interested in my adoption advocacy can go to my adopted life.com. And of course, all my social media handles are there as well on my website. Specifically interested in the book can go to wonderland the memoir.com. If you want all the extra juicy details of the audiobook, Wonderland, the memoir slash discover. slash discover and that's it yeah yeah that's where to find me and then of course all my handles are on my
01:07:18 on my website page so yeah yeah awesome well those will be in the show notes for everyone so um go find those and then thank you for writing this story and thank you for talking with me about it thank you so much for having me on and for reading and listening to the story as well i really appreciate it always a great conversation when a host does that.