A Tapestry of Belonging in the Complex World of Adoption with Adoptee Julie McGue
When the quest for identity entwines with the intricacies of adoption, it's a journey worth sharing. This is precisely what Julie McGue, the award-winning author of "Twice a Daughter: A Search for Identity, Family and Belonging," offers as she unfolds her narrative of self-discovery as an adoptee on our latest Wandering Tree Podcast episode. Her story, marked by the complexities of closed adoptions and a lack of medical history, reveals the nuanced challenges adoptees face in understanding where they come from and the evolving legal landscape of adoptee rights.
The conversation takes an emotional turn as we delve into the silent struggles of birth mothers and the identity crises plaguing both them and the adoptees they've parted with. Julie sheds light on the weight of initial rejections, the secrecy shrouding their decisions, and the misleading information that adoptees often grapple with. It's a raw look at the powerful need for compassion in navigating these relationships and the unanticipated discoveries that DNA analysis can unveil, reshaping one's sense of self and ethnicity.
Lastly, we tackle the delicate matters of loyalty, authenticity, and the language we use to speak about adoption. Julie passionately makes the case for terms that honor all members of the adoption triad, dismantling misconceptions and highlighting the importance of positive language. We wrap up our profound discussion with a nod of gratitude to Julie for her openness and extend an invitation to our listeners: If Julie's candidness resonates with you, your voice and story are welcome here, adding to the diverse experiences that make the Wandering Tree Podcast a beacon for those seeking connection and understanding in the world of adoption.
Find your people, cherish your people and love your people.
#adoptee #adoptees #adopteevoices #adopteestories #adopteestrong #adoptionreality #adopteejourney #adoption #wanderingtreeadoptee
A Tapestry of Belonging in the Complex World of Adoption with Adoptee Julie McGue
When the quest for identity entwines with the intricacies of adoption, it's a journey worth sharing. This is precisely what Julie McGue, the award-winning author of "Twice a Daughter: A Search for Identity, Family and Belonging," offers as she unfolds her narrative of self-discovery as an adoptee on our latest Wandering Tree Podcast episode. Her story, marked by the complexities of closed adoptions and a lack of medical history, reveals the nuanced challenges adoptees face in understanding where they come from and the evolving legal landscape of adoptee rights.
The conversation takes an emotional turn as we delve into the silent struggles of birth mothers and the identity crises plaguing both them and the adoptees they've parted with. Julie sheds light on the weight of initial rejections, the secrecy shrouding their decisions, and the misleading information that adoptees often grapple with. It's a raw look at the powerful need for compassion in navigating these relationships and the unanticipated discoveries that DNA analysis can unveil, reshaping one's sense of self and ethnicity.
Lastly, we tackle the delicate matters of loyalty, authenticity, and the language we use to speak about adoption. Julie passionately makes the case for terms that honor all members of the adoption triad, dismantling misconceptions and highlighting the importance of positive language. We wrap up our profound discussion with a nod of gratitude to Julie for her openness and extend an invitation to our listeners: If Julie's candidness resonates with you, your voice and story are welcome here, adding to the diverse experiences that make the Wandering Tree Podcast a beacon for those seeking connection and understanding in the world of adoption.
Find your people, cherish your people and love your people.
#adoptee #adoptees #adopteevoices #adopteestories #adopteestrong #adoptionreality #adopteejourney #adoption #wanderingtreeadoptee
I'm still struggling with thinking of myself as being Native American. Not because I have any kind of prejudice, just it's not something I grow up thinking about myself. Nobody gave me a clue that that was something in my background. I was told I was Irish and German, which I am.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Wandering Tree Podcast. I am your host, lisa Ann. We are an experienced-based podcast focused on sharing the journey of adoption, identity, life search and reunion. With me today is Julie McGew. She is the award-winning author of Twice a Daughter a Search for Identity, family and Belonging. She has recently launched a new book titled Belonging Matters Conversations on Adoption, family and Kinship. Welcome, julie to the show. How are you today? Thanks, lisa. Thanks for having me Absolutely Well. We're looking forward to this conversation and I was hoping you could kick us off with a little bit more about you, julie, and also a bit about your adoption story Wonderful.
Speaker 1:So an interesting tidbit that makes me a little different than most adoptees is I'm an identical twin, and my twin sister and I were adopted together, which was the policy of Catholic Charities back in the day to keep multiple birth siblings together. At 48, I had a breast biopsy, and that incident sent me on this path to find out what my medical history family background, were all about. I'm from a closed adoption, which means I didn't have any information about my birth parents who they were, what their story was, why we were placed for adoption and no family medical history or background. The closed adoption was an interesting thing to tackle. Fortunately for me, back in 2011, the state laws changed in Illinois, which is where I was adopted, and we gained access to our original birth record. So that, unfortunately, wasn't as helpful as I would have liked.
Speaker 1:The original birth record. Back in those days, birth moms often used an alias, which was perfectly legal, and the birth moms didn't have to put the birth father's name on the birth certificate, so parental rights were not anything that birth fathers had to sign off on, and so the story of twice a daughter was finding our family medical history, a process that took, oh well, over five years. We started off with our adoption agency, a confidential intermediary, I used a private investigator at one point and the confidential intermediary and I and a genealogist really broke the story about who my birth father was and how to find him. So that's the story in a nutshell.
Speaker 2:Well, it's fascinating and I want to maybe take you a little bit as a pioneer to the adoption community in terms of your story and your timing. I know that some of those items that you just talked about were different than some of the search that we are capable of enacting today based off of DNA. Thank you for kind of paving some roads for us. It's meant to me a term of endearment to you, not anything more. I think it also allows for us to talk a little bit about the concept. I've heard you say right to know versus right to privacy, and so give a spin on that from your perspective. What does it mean and how do you kind of rationale that out in your mind?
Speaker 1:It really goes back down to the nutshell that anybody who is not adopted has all their information from their family accessible somehow through family history, shared journals, even the family Bible Doptees. We don't have any information about ourselves, and I really believe that we have a right to know the basic facts about ourselves and that there should not be gatekeepers that prevent us from having access to that. Now, on the flip side of that, birth parents and adoptive parents too they're both in the same camp, believe that they have the right to their own privacy, that they should be able to withhold information that protects their identity, their secrets. Shame is a big part of this in respect to birth parents. They often are led to adoption because of an unplanned pregnancy or circumstances in their environment or financial situation. The reason why I lump adoptive parents in there too, is adoptive parents don't want to really co-parent with a birth parent, and so that arm's length distance that they put between themselves and the birth parent is their right to privacy, their right to manage their family the way they want to. And so you've got this battle of wills between the adoptee, who's wanting more access to information, more access to all of their relatives, and then you've got the battle with the birth parents and the adoptive parents. So this is the stage that's being set in the United States right now for adoptee rights.
Speaker 1:Illinois was one of the first states to allow access to original birth records. There are, at this count, about 15 to 16 states that have changed their adoption statutes, and that's not very many when you think about it. So if you're adopted in New York, for example, you have access to your original birth record. That just happened about a year and a half ago. There are other states where you know it's just dumb luck, you cannot have access.
Speaker 1:So fortunately, dna analysis or genetic genealogy has come so much farther than it was, as you pointed out earlier. In my case I was matching with third, fourth, fifth cousin, and I did without any accurate names. I didn't even know which side of the family I lined up on. So those databases are only as good as the subscribers, who they sign up, who signs up to participate, and I'm just now, okay, so almost 14 years into reunion with my birth family matching with first cousins. There was a reluctancy, I guess, that people sharing their DNA, and so my right to know was limited by not only the adoption statutes in Illinois, but also by genetic genealogy and where it was in the growth pattern.
Speaker 2:I still, to this day, find that just crazy, for as far as we've come as a society and an organization of people, it just never fails to boggle my mind that we are still in that mentality of division associated with a human's right to know and someone else's right to privacy, but, more importantly, those that have made decisions on behalf of an infant, I don't know if I would say with lack of regard, but maybe lack of long term understanding.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, and I think therein lies the conversation with adoptees like me writing our stories. There's numerous new books out about adoptees and anybody in the adoption constellation sharing their stories and their struggles to make connection and share information, and that conversation is so important because that's what's going to facilitate change across the country and when it comes to adoptees rights.
Speaker 2:Well, you spoke about your first book, twice a Daughter A Search for Identity, family and Belonging, and in the introduction we mentioned you've recently launched another book Belonging Matters Conversations on Adoption, family and Kinship. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to read. I've also listened to it. So for our audience, Julie provides not only an electronic version through all your outlets but also an audio version, and I enjoyed both of those. I want to have us go to your book, your most recent one that launched, and talk about the style. I loved it. It was unique. If you would not mind giving us context about you as an author, why you decided to become an author and then the style of this book.
Speaker 1:When I was telling friends and family about this crazy adoption search that I undertook the rejection of my birth mom, her changing her mind, needing a judge to get involved to access medical history, the twists and turns of finding birth relatives and then discovering a brother and a sister I didn't know I had, and a very strange but heartwarming synchronicity with my half-brother. I was telling that story to people, and they were you've got to write this down, and I thought you know what I'm about to be an empty nuster. I could write this story, so I started taking memoir writing classes with several different colleges and universities and started writing the story about the same time that the story was unfolding. Then I embarked on hiring an editor and got the story to the point where it was ready to be released. What happened afterwards, though, is what led to this new book Belonging Matters. I started blogging regularly, publishing essays and periodicals, and all of those topics were related to identity and belonging and family, because my family was changing. At the time, I had these new birth relatives that I was incorporating. My brother had a relationship with the family that I grew up with, so that brought in the idea of what I thought my family was all about my brother's mother, who I'm not related to, calls my sister and I her stepdaughters, and so the lines were blurring about family and kinship and I thought, you know my readers really need an update. Twice, a daughter came out in 2021.
Speaker 1:So the essays in this new book are about things that happened that didn't go in the book, or things that happened after the book went to the publisher, and stories about my own family. I share a lot about my husband and my kids, the funny things that they do. Each of these pieces is meant to be a standalone piece. So, while there's some overlap sometimes in things that are mentioned, they're meant to be standalone pieces but not a continuous story. So I delve into topics, the difficult conversations that I've had with my birth mom, with my adoptive mom. There's an essay about not meeting my birth father, and there's also an essay about what gift my birth father did give me, which is something we can talk about later if you'd like. But one of my favorite essays that you and I have touched on is this essay called Birth Mothers Should Come With Warning Labels.
Speaker 1:I did not have a good understanding of the journey that a birth mother goes through. If you will. The social worker coached me when I was making contact with her. She said you got to be patient with her. She's you are entering her life midstream. She doesn't know you're coming and she's going to be operating out of fear and shock. It's like walking into a movie when it's half over. You know there's a lot you have to learn. That was a warning label.
Speaker 1:While I did hear what the social worker was telling me, it also was difficult to assimilate that rejection that I got first off. She was operating out of fear and shame. She had not told the husband that she had been married to for over 30 years that she had two daughters and placed them both for adoption. So she had a lot of ground to make up. I wish I would have understood that better.
Speaker 1:I did get a lot of insight from. Catholic Charities has a post adoption department in Chicago and they have a regular support group that has adoptive parents, birth parents and adoptees included, going to those sessions and hearing birth mothers share their story on why they had to place their child for adoption and the loss that they felt about it, the shame surrounding that act and also the heartache on trying to make connection with their lost daughter or son. That allowed me to get a better understanding of my birth mother's reactions. She's a tough cookie she still struggles with because they're there. I'm claiming loudly that she was a birth mother and had an unwed pregnancy is not something that she's gonna easily do and I am aware of that, but it's still hurtful because I want her to welcome me with open arms and she has a lot of obstacles to doing that. So that was the meat of the topic. Birth mothers should come with warning labels.
Speaker 2:I liked that particular essay for all of those reasons and then some One of the things from my own journey that I struggled with that will tap into. Another portion of the topic I know we wanna talk about is my identity. You learn things that may set you on a different path of who you are and that is hard to prepare for. I'm not really convinced yet that any book or any support group or any podcast is truly going to give you every tool you need to manage through that. There are fantastic tools, but just that portion of the conversation, julie, where we're trying to find who we are, a little bit more of our background. But also I did not take into account what I might learn could impact who I believe myself to be. Yeah, yeah, so key, so key.
Speaker 2:Well, I hear the compassion in your voice for birth mothers. We do share that. I gained an immense amount of compassion when I met Candace Cahill and read her book as well, and so if you have not had a chance to read that one, it is so good. It reminds me a lot of also how you're approaching things. Hers is called Goodbye. Again, it was probably the book I've said this before it was the book I needed to read to gain my compassion that I hear in your voice and I see in your book that we're talking about today in that particular essay, and so you know, just kudos to our ability to also grow ourselves and our community to have a little bit of compassion. Now, that doesn't take away from man it really stinks to be rejected Right.
Speaker 2:You're just wounded already and then you're wounded again, and I think that is. It's hard to grapple with that, no matter who you are, no matter how you prepare.
Speaker 1:Or how old you are, and I think that that's part of this conversation is. I was a middle-aged woman going through this search. I had a strong family values background in the family. I grew up in a wonderful marriage for strong kids, where there wasn't anything catastrophic going on in my life when I started on this path and I think those that support and stability was a key part of helping me go through this path of rejection, secondary rejection and then over again when I tried to find my birth father.
Speaker 1:So going back to what you were talking about, the identity, finding things out about yourself that I'm still grappling with. So my birth father, I found out, was one quarter Chippewa Indian and this astounded me. I'm still struggling with thinking of myself as being Native American, not because I have any kind of prejudice, just it's not something I grow up thinking about myself. Nobody gave me a clue that that was something in my background. I was told I was Irish and German, which I am, but I think they told everybody back then because kids that had that family background were easier to place. There wasn't anything objectionable in their background but the Native American piece. And going back to the original birth record, because my birth father's name is not on my original birth record. I cannot claim any connection to the Chippewa Indian organization. I'm not considered part of the tribe and I can't, unless the laws change and DNA analysis allows us to, to claim what is our rightful heritage. So that piece of knowledge was another slam. I thought this is just something. It just keeps on going. I have the piece of paper that says I belong, but I don't belong because there's something missing and I think all adoptees that are on this path they discover things like that every day. Piece of information that prevents them from really belonging.
Speaker 1:One other thing that happened that I talk about quite a bit is I was told my sister and I were told that we were fraternal twins. So I don't know where the misinformation happened, if somebody at the hospital on the day we were born checked the wrong box, somebody not care or where the misinformation happened. But when DNA analysis was strong enough, we did testing and we're identical twins. Now you look at the cover of my book and there'd be no doubt in your mind that my sister and I are identical, but the facts were that my folks had been told that we were fraternal. It's not that big of a deal. I mean, I'm a twin, I have my sister in my life, but for an adoptee it's just one more little detail that somebody got wrong and it just feels like such a travesty that for 50 years I was latching onto something that was incorrect information.
Speaker 2:Well, it's very key to not only belonging but identity, and I have spent an entire calendar year now truly in deep study on identity. I had my own kind of moment and it was earth shattering for me and how I saw myself and my worth, and it pulled me from the top of a mountain and I call it the abyss. I mean I went really deep.
Speaker 2:I spent probably a good two years just trying to figure out who I am in the context of identity, and so I also resonated with the essay. I Feel Like a Fake where you touch up on imposter syndrome and so. I know when we were talking previously, we both landed on a term that I loved coming from you whole identity. Would you mind giving me a little bit of context around that? The essay started for me.
Speaker 1:When I was a teenager, my family was very Irish. They were deeply involved in the Irish community and traditions in Chicago. We attended festivals. The St Patrick's Day Parade in downtown Chicago is a big deal. It's like New York. They dye the river green and there's a lot of hoopla around that. My folks entered my sister and I in the St Patrick's Day Queen contest and I was fortunate to be on the court and ride in the parade atop a convertible.
Speaker 1:While that was so fun, as a teenage girl I was so thrilled to have that opportunity inside I thought to myself I wonder if I even deserve to be here. What if I'm not Irish at all? I've taken a spot away from a little ass that deserved to be here. And that doubt about my ethnicity really percolated for a long time and you can imagine when I did do DNA analysis and found I was like half Scotch and Irish, I was absolutely relieved who I thought I belonged to and where I, where I landed, turned out to be true and it was a relief. But that feeling, a feeling of fake, is troubling and I think it eats at you. It eats at your confidence, it eats at your belonging. I was only half in. You know if I really Irish am I am I not, I was only half in, and now I think that I really can champion the fact that I am Irish and that is my traditions and my ethnicity, and my kids have latched on to that too.
Speaker 2:I like that for myself. I talk about the triangle a little bit differently and it is around the concept of your identity and your self-worth. So there is, you know, a really difficult component of the conversation that says I'm relinquished, I'm chosen, and your self-worth? Which tags to your identity? Self-worth for me and identity are so intertwined. I talk about it in the context of pre-search and reunion, because search has a large component of that.
Speaker 2:I was truly a person that I feel in hindsight was on top of the mountain. I see it differently now, of course, but, you know, very successful by my definition, both personally and professionally. I loved my life in the context of what I was living, and I never doubted who I was as that person. And I met my birth mother and I learned something and it set the course for, wow, I must have been an absolute imposter and didn't even know it, and what I thought about post. One of our conversations, julie, was the topic you talked about, where we're assimilating into our families and part of our identity is that we are not just this adoptee, but we are part of this family and your belonging. That is an identity. We're part of the people that created us and that is part of our identity, and then we are the people that we've become through life experience. I don't think that they're mutually exclusive, even though we may struggle with that in some some capacity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that you are right on with that. It's interesting to me to be able to join my brother and sister, my half-brother and sister, and fold them into the family in which I was raised and we have this commonality, which has a lot to do with my sister law. But the ability to do that was not something I ever thought was going to happen. My adoptive mom although my parents were always professing to be supportive of a search someday the fact that it didn't happen until I was 50. I think my parents had basically said we're all good, you know, the kids are happy with who they are and they don't need to delve into this. But then I had this breast biopsy and got pushed into the search, and that brought out an interesting situation with my adoptive mom. She was not in support of that search. Our relationship struggled. It never struggled before that. It struggled because I didn't have the support I thought I needed and I was looking at her through a different lens. She I had a sibling that passed away suddenly when I was a teenager and while the intellectual side of my brain was saying, well, she's afraid she's going to lose me too. I intellectualized that, but my feelings were still hurt that she was not supporting me, and something that I needed to do for health reasons, but also for my kids. They needed to know what they were dealing with longer term, and that relationship with her went through a big change. There was a rift. I was not sharing anything with her. A good piece of my identity and belonging kind of went right out the window. Here's this family that I really identified with and they weren't supporting me. So it wasn't just finding out I'm Native American, it was finding out things about my own parents. My father always supported the search and I think he was a good barometer as to helping my mom with her doubts.
Speaker 1:You know, identity and belonging are always changing. They are like the key factors in our lives. It starts with that lunch table. You know that you don't fit in as a middle schooler or a high schooler. It starts there when do I belong? Throw an adoptee in the middle of that we're already struggling with where do we fit in? And our family? Where do we fit in with society? I never liked the conversation when people would find out I was adopted. They were too curious and they would ask questions that I didn't welcome.
Speaker 1:So now it's an interesting thing, I lost my husband about a year and a half ago and fortunately I was in a good place with my adoption search and reunion and he really was the instigator. And I'm finding that, you know, I'm going through this whole belonging piece and identity again. It just doesn't stop. I'm not a wife anymore, but I'm still a mother, I'm a grandmother and now I'm an author and I think we're doing this constantly through our existence. We're figuring out who we are and it's changing always. We're figuring out where we belong.
Speaker 1:You know, now I belong to some of my in-laws' families. I just wrote a blog piece about this being the the odd guest at Thanksgiving. All my other kids were with their in-laws and significant others and I found myself in New Jersey with my daughter's family and my son-in-laws, parents and aunts and uncles, and because my daughter was on call she's an OB she wasn't even there at Thanksgiving. But I felt like I belonged to those people and so belonging is not just who you are biologically related to. It's related to who you feel comfortable with, where you feel comfortable, and I think that's just always changing and I think, rather than be angry you know, I'm not angry about my adoption anymore.
Speaker 1:There's an acceptance about my situation. Stuff happens to us that we have no control over, and if we can learn to accept it and maybe forgive the bad actors, the bad players, we have a better chance of being a self-content person. I am not an angry adoptee and I feel bad for the adoptees that are, because it doesn't allow them to move on and lead a productive life. Identity and belonging are a conversation that we're always going to have. I look at my own mom, who's 91 and she's a widow and she's in a senior community and she's still making friends and she's still figuring out. You know where she belongs, and life is always changing and we have to change with it.
Speaker 2:Well, two things First of all, our condolences for your loss and second, what a powerful example of lived experience on this journey. I do appreciate the perspective that says before we get and I'm going to paraphrase before we get too hung up on who we are and all of the implications of adoption, let us also sit in a space where we remember what it's like to be a teenager and then newly married and, in your instance, a widow, grown children. I love your forward thinking mentality of embracing evolution of ourselves as part of this. That allows us to acknowledge and find places to heal. I think you just gave our listeners a great perspective on an approach to just kind of moving forward. If you sit in that and think about it for a couple minutes, what a great gift, thank you Well.
Speaker 1:I hope that you know, by talking about adoption and where it fits into who we are, as well as all the other conversations that adoptees and birth parents are having, that those people that are outside of our little world, are touched by adoption world, have a greater understanding of the things that we have to grapple with. We're grappling with life as they know it. Certainly other people have these same struggles of being a widow or a troubled teen or an older person in a senior community, but we have that added factor in there of trying to find out who we are and where we came from. Oh my goodness, and assimilating that.
Speaker 1:I had a conversation right after I was working on Twice the Daughter, with a friend person that I respected at the time, and the intimation from her in the conversation was that I was being a disloyal adoptee. By researching my family history, I was being disloyal to my adoptive parents. That there should have been, as she said, aren't you grateful for the life you had and this is a constant theme that I love to talk about, because it's something we need to dispel in the community that we are not being disloyal to our parents that raised us by this search for self. If we don't go down that path and it's a path that we want to be on we're being disloyal to ourselves. So I'm not saying everybody needs to search for their family history.
Speaker 1:Certainly that's not a choice that's right for everybody. But those of us that do go down that path, we're choosing to do that for a good reason, and the outsiders looking in that aren't touched by adoption should really be sitting back and listening and taking note and saying, hmm, what do I not know about this situation? Am I willing to listen to this perspective and consider it, instead of imposing my own judgment into this situation, because that was a hurtful conversation to me? I do feel loyal to my adoptive parents. I still take care of them. They're in my life, I have not disregarded them, and so the intimation that I was being disloyal really angered me. And anyone that's listening to your show that's in the triangle gets what I'm saying. But those outside of it, they need to operate with caution, maybe with their own set of care instructions.
Speaker 2:I'm almost speechless.
Speaker 2:I don't know if I've been that way many times on the show, but I am definitely almost speechless as you were talking. One of the things that kept running through my mind was having the space to understand. We are not working towards disloyalty or out of malice, but we are also working towards authenticating ourselves and there is just no easy way to consistently share that for someone who is not in this particular seat in this community To truly, I think, get it. I believe surface level there's a lot of compassion, but I don't know if we are ever going to get, on the whole, a true like I get you. I think we'll hear more I hear you's than I get you's, if that makes any sense to you.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I think a good part of this work of I get you. We need to be grateful for the next generation and I think that the conversation that we're having today falls into that is that society is getting better. There is not this shame around an unwed pregnancy. Certainly, a lot of gay couples have adopted children. That's not a stigma to parenting and single women are parents. So I think we're making progress, but it takes time and it takes a lot of people raising their voices and being the loudest person in the room to get people to consider. There's a different way of looking at a topic. Adoption is always going to be relevant when you think about it. There's six to eight million adoptees in this country. You multiply that by their two such a parents and siblings and friends, and it's a topic everybody is aware of. It's universal, so it's not going to go away, and our understanding of it and the language we use around it the positive adoption language is always changing too, and I hope that we continue to work towards more understanding around the issues.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I want to clarify. I don't believe that you're indicating positive adoption language under the context of everything's fantastic, wonderful. We reference it sometimes as unicorns and rainbows. That is not at all, julie, I know what you meant. Do you mind taking just a couple of minutes to clarify that for our listeners?
Speaker 1:Absolutely so. In my era, 1959, when I was adopted and I still slip this out in public, which you're not supposed to say is I was given up for adoption, so that's my language around my adoption. When open adoption became in the forefront in 1982 on, the language changed. The proper terminology today is placed for adoption. It sanitizes, in my mind, the situation yes, you're placed for adoption, but most adoptees something got given up in the process of being adopted. I still think I was given up. I gave up an identity. I gave up this belonging to my birth mother, all of that so positive.
Speaker 1:Adoption language is a term in the adoption community that has placed kinder words around certain labels like birth mother. First, mother is a label that's kind of gaining recognition and it's maybe the right way to talk about it. The one that really gets me going is real mother. I can remember conversations as a kid when somebody would say well, do you know anything about your real mother? Oh, wow, I mean that stung like a slap on the face. I think both of them are real. Honestly, my adoptive parents were the parents in the trenches giving me a life, teaching me values, what was right and wrong. They're very real to me and my birth mom. She's still very real to me too, because she's in my life. Which one is the real set of parents? Why are we forced to make that label and have it stick? So there are other examples. Natural mother is another label associated with your birth parents. Slash first parents.
Speaker 2:As you were talking, julie, things that were running through my mind along this topic, maybe some grace on what words we use and why there is a connection to our age, our era and the circumstances. Just like you, I really don't believe I was placed for adoption, I was relinquished. I feel more comfortable using the term relinquished and I do believe that my identity is connected to that event and it wasn't a one and done, and so therefore, if I want to use relinquished because it works for me, I want the grace to be able to do so. Therefore, in the dialogue that you just kind of explained, positive narrative to us, the concept of a real parent or a first parent or a birth parent, I think there's room for all of that language to exist and to honor where each adoptee sits. Try not to get too hung up on it. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:Yes, I do. Yeah, I mean it's hard, for me at least, to call my brother a half-brother and a half-sister. To me they are a brother and a sister and for a long time I was calling him my new brother and he took objection to that. He goes I was always your brother, we just have a new relationship. So I mean, he felt it too on his end and so I stopped calling him my new brother. He is just my brother and so I think, like you said, the labels are always changing based on how we feel about our situation.
Speaker 2:I 100% agree. As we're getting ready to close out for today, I want to ask is there something in particular that we haven't covered yet, that you would like to leave with our listeners?
Speaker 1:Oh, you know, I think what I want to say is that just never give up. There were points in my search where I, you know, I didn't know I was going to be able to move forward and there was always a workaround. It took a while sometimes to find that workaround and while it took longer than I thought and longer than I wanted, I didn't give up. And I would tell the listeners it may look like you're not going to have a relationship with a birth relative or a parent. Don't give up on that. Keep fighting along in each little step. We'll get you right to where you need to be.
Speaker 1:I have a wonderful counselor in my life that I love this saying and I want to pass it on to the listeners. She says that which is right is unfolding, and why I love that saying is because we have to give ourselves time. We have to give our lives time to unfold. I like it because it doesn't say things are predestined or things happen for a reason. I hate that, a whole idea. But this unfolding of life and that which is right for us is unfolding is such a powerful message that I want to leave with the listeners.
Speaker 2:A great place to leave us. I want to thank you for that and that is so encouraging. Thank you so much for spending time with us today. It has been a joy to have you on the show and please know it is always my honor to bring people to the show that want to tell their story and their lived experience. I do not take that lightly, so thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Thank you for your hard work in putting this together. It's a pleasure.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening to today's episode of Wandering Tree Podcast. Please rate, review and share this out so we can experience the lived adoptee journey together. Want to be a guest on our show?
Speaker 1:Check us out at wanderingtreeadopteecom you, you, you, you, you Music.