Have you ever stood at the crossroads of identity, where the past and present collide in a mosaic of loss and discovery? Monica Hall's life is a living embodiment of such a crossroads, as she gracefully carries the dual mantle of being both an adoptee and a birth parent. In this episode, Monica recounts her story of growing up in a Catholic family in Alaska, the heart-wrenching decisions she faced as a teenager, and the complex journey of self-discovery that followed. Join us to unravel the intricate layers of Monica's identity as she opens up about her upcoming memoir and the challenges that led her to write it.
Her narrative doesn't shy away from the painful realities of her past, including the immense pressure of a young girl navigating an unplanned pregnancy within the confines of her religious upbringing. Listen closely as Monica reflects on her determination to hold her baby despite overwhelming opposition, and witness the transformation that unfolds from her darkest moments to a life-affirming reunion with her daughter after 18 years of separation.
Website: monicahall.com
IG: https://www.instagram.com/monicahallauthor/
FB: https://www.facebook.com/Monica.hall27
Find your people, cherish your people and love your people.
#adoptee #adoptees #adopteevoices #adopteestories #adopteestrong #adoptionreality #adopteejourney #adoption #wanderingtreeadoptee
Have you ever stood at the crossroads of identity, where the past and present collide in a mosaic of loss and discovery? Monica Hall's life is a living embodiment of such a crossroads, as she gracefully carries the dual mantle of being both an adoptee and a birth parent. In this episode, Monica recounts her story of growing up in a Catholic family in Alaska, the heart-wrenching decisions she faced as a teenager, and the complex journey of self-discovery that followed. Join us to unravel the intricate layers of Monica's identity as she opens up about her upcoming memoir and the challenges that led her to write it.
Her narrative doesn't shy away from the painful realities of her past, including the immense pressure of a young girl navigating an unplanned pregnancy within the confines of her religious upbringing. Listen closely as Monica reflects on her determination to hold her baby despite overwhelming opposition, and witness the transformation that unfolds from her darkest moments to a life-affirming reunion with her daughter after 18 years of separation.
Website: monicahall.com
IG: https://www.instagram.com/monicahallauthor/
FB: https://www.facebook.com/Monica.hall27
Find your people, cherish your people and love your people.
#adoptee #adoptees #adopteevoices #adopteestories #adopteestrong #adoptionreality #adopteejourney #adoption #wanderingtreeadoptee
Lisa and I were so thankful in that my siblings were telling stories about my dad, stories that I was missing, and it was just such a double-edged sword. I got to hear these wonderful stories, but I was absent from them.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Wandering Tree Podcast. I am your host, lisa Ann. We are an experienced-based show focused on sharing the journey of adoption, identity, life search and reunion. Let's begin today's conversation with our guest of honor, monica Hall. Monica comes to us from the great state of California today. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Lisa Ann.
Speaker 2:Well, we're excited to have you on board today, and I was wondering if you could kick us off with a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 1:Well, I am an adoptee first and then I'm a birth parent. So a dual threat or a very confused human identity issues and grief and joy and just a whole mix of everything. Yes, I am.
Speaker 2:That's a lot to put into a sentence and I appreciate that you've kicked us off with.
Speaker 2:I am an adoptee and a birth parent and we know that combination is not new for people in our community.
Speaker 2:It just may not be as frequently spoken about, and so thank you for coming on our show and taking the time to talk about you and who you are. When we first connected, simon Ben of Thriving Adoptee Podcast suggested we should connect up, but don't know if he actually understood that we would spend hours talking to each other, including just our preparatory call where we were conversing on our first meeting for three hours, and then today, in preparation for this session, and we've already been chatting it up for almost an hour. I just now looked and I'm like, oh wow, that was an hour. It's been an hour, so an hour. So I'm looking forward to this conversation on behalf of the listeners as well and, if you wouldn't mind, kind of dive into a little bit about what you have been doing in your life and what is an upcoming item and we'll touch on it at the end too. But you have an event coming up in March which is also key to this story and who you are.
Speaker 1:I certainly do. So I believe this airs March 20th, so tomorrow my memoir will be hitting, it will be launching, and I began working on it over the eight years in March. So I don't think I ever in a million years thought I'd write a memoir, especially when I was young. I could barely pay attention in class. I was a horrible student. I never showed up, I cut, I cheated, I was just, I was a mess and I could have paid attention. I had a real low self-worth and self-esteem and I think probably I had some ADD, maybe definitely some learning disabilities, and I was just terrified of being a disappointment. So I think my frontal lobe would shut down when I try something because I was so afraid that I would be be disappointed. My disappoint my parents was basically what it was when I was little.
Speaker 1:So I my daughter asked me to write a memoir about eight years ago and I had been carrying around boxes of appointment books and calendars for you know, journals. My mother had even given me her journals for years you know 40, over 40 years and when she asked me, I mean there was something deep inside me that thought, yeah, that's what I need to do and you know it was perfect timing my kids were out of the house, I had more time and there wasn't a lot. I didn't, you know, didn't have a business to run at the time. I've employed that wasn't, like you know. I had some time to deal with it and I had no idea where it was going to take me. I had no idea the whole I would go down. I had no. I almost stopped so many times writing and generally people don't write. It looks like that's something that happened. That was something that needed to be dealt with.
Speaker 1:You know we don't necessarily write about good news often. You know, usually some some pain behind it and most of the reason I wanted to write wasn't because I had such an interesting adoption story, although that's what my daughter wanted. I wanted to write the figure stuff out, like I. I had been in reunion many years, both sides, but I had so many questions, I had so many.
Speaker 1:You know it was complex relationship with my adoptive mom, my mom I call her mom, definitely complex relationship with my family, my adoptive family, and confusion and I, you know I how I dealt with things is I always just pushed them down. I pushed them down, I didn't look at them, I didn't analyze them, I didn't try to figure out why something felt a certain way. I just moved on Like just let's just go and. And so there was so much to online, because I never felt I would just push it down and cover it up with something, a new event or a new thing. And so I went down the rabbit hole for, especially the first couple of years, really, really dark. But I'm out of the rabbit hole and now I get to talk about it and regurgitate it on my capacity in book clubs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so here, so here you go again and you get to relive it and talk about it, but maybe from a more center, grounded, healthier position, having, you know, taken the time to write it all out for yourself. It's interesting. When we were talking in previous conversation, one of the things that we both landed on is how much we have in common and we didn't even know each other, and that has a theme many times over with guests and others in the adoptee community, and I've always find it very grounding to have those types of connections and to be able to have this level of comfort in the conversation and we had that going on. If you wouldn't mind for the listeners, can you talk a little bit about being an adoptee and how you handled that throughout? You know your maturation of a human.
Speaker 1:I was adopted in 1957. Okay, so that was a long time ago. I was four months old and I grew up in Anchorage, alaska, with what I thought were wonderful parents, but I did not have anything to compare it to. So I love my mom so much, but there I never felt like I was enough with my mother and I never analyzed that it could be because I was adopted. I mean, that never entered my mind, other than that it was a problem.
Speaker 1:Because I was told that I was special, that I was, that I was a gift, that I was a gift from God, that they had prayed for a little girl and God had given them a little girl, and that my other mother loved me so much that she wanted me to have a mommy and a daddy and that she was selfless. So I had this narrative in my head of being special. I did not feel special and never, ever felt it, ever felt it. I felt so less that. But I didn't know that. You know, I didn't know that, where that came from. I just felt always just not enough, and I always wanted to be like the other kids or always wanted to be somebody other than who I was, and I didn't know who I was. I think that was the issue. There was zero identity. I was struggling to find an identity and I didn't know these things.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I was a happy adoptee as far as I knew. But yeah, I mean, I've always been an outgoing happy. I was a happy baby, they said, when I they brought me home. I was always trying to feel enough. But I've also just had this outgoing personality and fun loving. I've never been a depressed person. I've certainly been depressed by writing my manuscript. There is a dark place as because some, some bad stuff happened in my background that I had to, you know, dig it. But I've always been. That's just the way I'm wired. You know, I'm not super sensitive. Like like many, I felt I felt. If I felt bad, I didn't identify it, but I always felt bad. Now I can see that. You know, I was just. I was just always trying to feel enough and I never felt enough.
Speaker 2:I always find that extremely striking when I hear that. It does not matter how many times I hear it either. I didn't really understand during that time period of my life, but now, through reflection, I can connect those dots and depending on how old you are when you make that discovery, it can be as earth shattering as the simplest little thing in your life prior and I always, I'm always, struck by it. I really am.
Speaker 1:You know the adoption narrative that we grew up with. I think it was brainwashing. It was really. It was brainwashing, it's absolutely brainwashing and I mean, what were they to say and what were they to do? How? I mean, what was the? What were they to do? You know, back then, you know you were given a baby and it was like you birthed them yourself. You know this was supposed to be your child and you know my, my brother, who we got three years after I was adopted. He bonded with my mom and.
Speaker 1:I thought I did too, but he really didn't be sensitive like her. He was needy, she was. She was super codependent because of the way she grew up and so it was just. It worked for them. I was always independent, you know, I was outgoing, I could make friends, I could talk to anybody. You know those those things. I always wanted to be on the move and my brother was completely opposite. It was a lot like my mom.
Speaker 1:First time that I really noticed I felt inadequate is first grade. I could not do my numbers. I couldn't. I had a problem transitioning from like 10 to 11 and 20 to 21, and you know those things. And I don't think it wasn't because I wasn't smart, it was because I was so afraid that I wasn't going to get. And when I get afraid, my frontal lobe completely shuts down and I cannot do it. It's a problem with the frontal lobe. It just goes blank out of terror.
Speaker 1:And I remember my parents. We get so frustrated with me, you know, throw down their hands on the table and push their chair back. How are you helper, you know? And I just felt like I was. You know, I was such a disappointment. And I have this. You know I've got a lot of pride. This is the way I was.
Speaker 1:I came here. I'm a Leo, six times a Leo, so I guess I've got a lot of pride, and all I wanted is you to be proud of me. I wanted you to pat me on the head and say Good, mary, monica, you did such a great job. You know, monica, you did this, monica, you did today. I don't need that anymore. I'm older, you know, and I'm past all that. But gosh, for years I just wanted to be enough and I didn't feel and never did. And so in in, that was when I really felt inadequate and then it. I think that the final, the final blow. But I got to be in like second grade. I think it was when we started really reading. We had those SRA reading cards. I don't know if you, adam, but I did.
Speaker 2:I love those things. I was thinking about them the other day, Remember when you would pick one out, you'd read it. You take the little test, you go put it back and you go get the next one because it was progressive reading. Loved them.
Speaker 1:So clever and I went up like three reading levels, like all. I just progressed so quickly and I felt good about myself, you know, and I remember the teacher. I remember I see him seeing a sign outside and asked my mom what it said and she said because it was P I Z Z A, and she said that's pizza. And so in class, you know, the teacher thought she was going to trick everybody and I said it's pizza. And I can still remember the very few times I got accolades there were very few, right, that was a. That was a huge accolade for me, I think it's but but we had I I'm assuming it was a census of sorts and so everybody, you know, got out the number two pencils and had to fill in the dots.
Speaker 1:And there was a question that I could not answer. It did not have an applicable answer that fit me, and that was don't remember the details of it, but are you living with your real parents, kind of question. Well, I was living with my real parents, but they're not my real parents, because I knew I had other parents out there, but I had to. They are my real parents. And I went home confused, I didn't finish the test, I felt inadequate in class. All the other kids could do it, I couldn't. And when I went home and told my mom, my father, when I mean he got really angry and he didn't I mean I took a you know, children are self centered were supposed to be second grade, but I took it that there was something wrong with me, that the problem wasn't with the school and the privacy issues and it was with me, and they made a huge deal about it. Went to school, you know, embarrassed me, you know.
Speaker 1:I felt like I was the error of my being and that and the reading and all the stuff stopped. I didn't progress. It would just stand me right there. I was excited, and so I think you know there's a number of things that happened and you know there's certainly a very abusive, dysfunctional, very sick people that I was adopted by and even now I feel this like a mean disloyal. You know I just go guilt for saying that. You know, because I love them. They were my parents. You know, all I ever wanted was to for them to love me, you know. So I didn't know any of those things when I was a kid. You don't know why you feel certain ways. I didn't know that there was an identity issue. My brother and I thought we were. You know on the outside that it was cool we were adopted, because it was like a parlor trick, we were adopted. Oh well, I wish I was adopted, you know, and. But in reality it caused so much confusion for me, so much confusion, and I didn't know until I started writing my memoir.
Speaker 2:What a time for all of that to come together to later in life, I think is so tricky, no different than you just now describing childhood and now really coming to terms with it in a later adulthood. I'm there with you and I'm many times flabbergasted at what I learned about myself or how I feel about some aspect of the topic. Well, let's move it forward a little bit, because we introduced you not only as an adoptee but as a birth parent, and I think we should at least forewarn the listeners a little bit that the next part of your story is definitely not rose filled.
Speaker 2:And yeah, major trigger warning for those that have sensitivities for some of the things that happen in the world, and to women and the consequences of those actions. So why don't we go ahead and talk a little bit about you as a birth parent? Let's start with you talking about pregnancy and what that, what you know, your age, what that was entailing for you and the struggles of being pregnant with a lot of very circumstantial conditions.
Speaker 1:Well, this was 1973. So things were different and this was in Alaska. I, my parents, were very Catholic. We went to every holy day. We had nuns and priests at our house on the regular. Father girl, my brother's bed you know how you hold up a bed with the wooden slats, you know the mattress. The middle of the night it fell. The father girl fell on the floor. The whole house, should you know. We had nuns at our house. They were at dinner, we were, we went to, we went to mass and and it was every confession, all of that. So there was also this, this purity in our home, this, this, you know, catholic. I was married. I was named Mary Monica after the Virgin Mary. My mother was a virgin when she was married. My father used to tell my brother and that I that that she was a saint, because he couldn't get her in the house until they were married, when we were children you know when she wasn't around.
Speaker 1:There's just some really weird things. So when I got pregnant, my mother never had a baby. I didn't, you know, I had nobody to ask. You know why am I having late grants? I had my fingers swell. What did it feel like? You know how was it painful. You know all those things that I didn't have anybody to talk to about. And being pregnant Back then they hid you away, there wasn't, it wasn't even go to school.
Speaker 1:Now, a few years later, it changed. But it wasn't that way, you know, and my friends knew I was pregnant, but because we were Catholic, I think partly. I'm sure it was out of shame that they wanted me to. Nobody would find out, but I think it was also. They were thought they were protecting me and my parents were older. So when my, when I, was adopted, my father was 42 and my mother was 32. And that was older back then. So they had older ideas as well, and and so, being isolated in all during the last, the winter is pretty lonely and my friends didn't come over.
Speaker 1:I wasn't able to do the things that I used to do, and one of my survival strategies was to be a juvenile delinquent. And my parents my mother, was very. She bought most, almost all my stories. You know I was a really good liar, very narcissistic, a little criminal, and I don't. When I'm thinking about why I did those things now I can see that I just wanted someone to look up to me. Now I couldn't get that at school because I didn't do well, my academics weren't weren't good, the kids that were coming from the lower 48, because now this is a boom town, so we had had oil discovered, and so when I'm in junior high in 1970 and 71. And I didn't get tripled, that you know like we had double shifts. And now there's, you know, bank kids that you know came from the lower 48, then nice homes and nice clothes, and you know I came from a middle class home but we we weren't cool.
Speaker 1:My parents were never cool, they were old fashioned, right. My mom was overprotective and so I didn't fit in in school and I figured there was an event that happened with my father, a very traumatic event, I think. That's where I just clicked when I was 13 and just became as bad as I could be and and started breaking into houses and vandalizing and fighting. You know, taking LSD and breaking out my window and you know, getting into places I should never have been. You know there was some horrific things that I saw.
Speaker 1:At night and in the wintertime it's dark, in the summertime it's light the hardest days. Five hours in the sun never sets, really in the summer it's just. You have this twilight and it was my guiding light when I stuck out my window to feel I wanted to feel I wanted to be a part of it and I never felt that at home I was never a part of it. My mom, nobody wanted to come hang out at my house because it was not a cool place. So being pregnant and isolated was a God said in a sense, because it stopped that activity. I don't know what my life would have been like had that have not my juvenile delinquent behavior. It's just like now I'm in the house with my very Catholic mother crocheting and saying the rosary, so my baby will get good parents going to see a nun every week. You know, it's like a whole different paradigm shift.
Speaker 2:And what I would like us to do is put a little bit around that and acknowledge the circumstances in which you just described the environment, the culture it did shape, how you were going to go through that experience, and so we're going to spend a lot of time, the rest of our discussion, talking about you as a birth parent. Walk us through that decision process and how you started coping with that, and things you told yourself during that journey.
Speaker 1:There was never a discussion about what was going to happen to the baby. It was never, will. You know, rovers is way to went through and it was already available to people in Alaska when I got pregnant, but it wasn't actually Malore 48. But it would have never been an option for our Catholic family, I mean, it was not even not even for me or for my parents. So that never came up in discussion and neither did being a, you know, putting the baby up for an option, which is what we called it back then. It was just assumed. It was no conversation, it's just you're going to go see a nun, I found. You know you have a choice. You can either go to Fairbanks I found a school, pregnant mother, pregnant girls, and there's one in Seattle or you can stay here. They have, you know, classes for girls at the advent, the admin building here, and so you can go with other pregnant girls.
Speaker 1:And I was 15. So I was, I was, I had no job, I had, I was just, I was very mature, just a little, just a little girl. You know, really I was, and so I mean I just went along with the program and the whole time, especially when I started, you know, when the my baby started growing and I could feel her moving and, oh my gosh, I, I, they took me to see sister Mary Claire, every week or every other week depending, and every time that I went to the OBGYN appointment I would either have a conversation with sister Claire or go see her, because she wanted to be apprised of how her apprised goose was cooking, you know. And so I, I again, wanted someone to care about me, and I love sister Claire.
Speaker 1:She was so, so darling oh, you're just a darling and she had a New York accent and she was an older lady and she had a big navy blue, you know, with a, with a veil, with white around her face, and she was just so kind and so sweet and we just hit it off right away. And but the back of my mind, I always knew that her job was to make friends with the birth mother and take her baby, give them to somebody better to raise. That's always what I knew in the back of my mind. Yet I wanted to love her at the same time, you know. So I mean, you think about it with what a mind fuck sorry, but it just is.
Speaker 1:You know, and I'm looking forward to seeing her because I have nowhere to, you know, nothing, nobody's coming over, and I go see her and I know in the back of my mind that that's what's going to happen. And I do know I did. There is absolutely no freaking way. And I mean I, I was completely under my parents thumb except for one thing, and that was I wanted to see my baby. That was the only human that was my relative in the world that I knew. Of my only blood relative I had nobody, my whole family. I even wrote in my journal because my mom bought us a journal. She knew I needed a journal to go through this and I said my mom and my brother and I aren't related because we're both adopted and my parents aren't related to each other and they're not related to us either. We're just all strangers, you know we just. I just felt like a stranger in that house, and so to have somebody that looked like me, that was a part of me, was like that's all I cared about and that's all I did. That's all I hung on to is being able to see her.
Speaker 1:Now, you didn't get to see your baby at the Catholic hospital you couldn't. At the other hospital that wasn't Catholic, but not at the Catholic hospital they didn't let you see your babies. But I groomed Sister Claire from the beginning to let me see my baby and I knew at the very last minute, if they wouldn't let me see her, I would. I would. I'd just hold her around some. Sorry, you don't get my baby, I'm not signing these papers unless I get to see her and hold her. And anyway I didn't have to go that far. That was the you know cause I never defied my parents back then. You just, I mean I would sneak around and I would lie and I would. You know all those things. But you know, if you look at your parents and even when they're talking to you, if you look away or look down or roll your eyes, never did anything like that. I mean slap across the face.
Speaker 1:My mother was a rager, you know she's terrified me and my father. I was never afraid of my dad until he beat me with a wire hanger, the most excruciating thing I've ever felt. I mean I've had 11 pound babies, a baby, you know, natural childbirth, and it had that didn't hold the candle to a wire hanger beating. I'm telling you I don't, I didn't. After the beating I never really I knew it wouldn't happen again. I guess I don't know how I knew it, but nobody ever said they were sorry or anything.
Speaker 1:It was just pushed out of the rug and I hit it from, you know, the authorities, because I love my parents and I didn't want to be taken out of the home and my mother had grew me from young that she was terrified of losing me because I was an adoptee. You know, she's terrified of the mom coming back and taking me and I, my brother and I heard this all the time and so even when things got really really, really bad at home before I got pregnant and I wanted to run away more than anything in the whole world, I would never have done it because it would have hurt my mom, because I loved her so much. You know, here I am going to the nun and I did. She said I'll send a note to the hospital and see if they'll agree to let me see your baby. And so one day I'd go in and we hadn't, you know, talked about the parents or anything and she hadn't found any parents. But closer to the end she had found parents and she, you know, said I found the perfect couple to adopt your baby. They're so wonderful, I mean, they were presented with such enthusiasm that I mean I felt like I was going to throw up and pass out. I mean, I got clammy in my mouth full with saliva, you know, and at the whole time I acted happy. Oh, good good. You know, I'm always wanting to be approved on. You know, f, and I felt like I was just in the end of a dark tunnel. You know, there's a caveat that we didn't talk about, and that is that I had stuck out my bedroom window a lot and I had this virgin mentality because it went hammered home in my home and I knew that I'd make them proud subconsciously if I were a virgin. I don't think it was ever a conversation that I had with my parents, other than my father's very inappropriate raging at me at one point, which is in my book, and it was probably one of the most horrific things I've been through, abuse-wise. Thank God I did some EMDR in 2020,.
Speaker 1:You know, I had 11 big tea traumas. 11 big tea traumas Like not little tea traumas 10 millions living in a house that you were constantly being gaslit, but these were 11 big tea traumas and my therapist, you know, was just like wow, I've never seen so many. And you know, I know that I came to this life, this monarchy, you know, ended up on planet Earth, being able to handle it. You know, I'm strong. I have an ability to repress, push things down, block things out, disassociate. My brain protected me from so much and I've had to unwind that, most of it, in writing this memoir and you get to unwind it with me. You get to, you know, discover the things that I discover as I'm discovering it. I mean, it's like because that's what I needed to do and there's so much that still my brain is protecting me from and I'm grateful for that.
Speaker 1:So I stuck up my bedroom window and got raped at 15 by a 19 year old heroin addict and I had known him and I blamed myself. I blamed myself and I know that at the time I didn't know anything about. You know, back then rape was when you were attacked in a dark alley. You know you had bruises, you screamed, you know, you didn't know you're a seller and you know that whole thing. And this was not the case. I knew him. I didn't want to be intimate with him. He was older, he was scary, I didn't, you know.
Speaker 1:And so the way I wired it in my brain, I felt guilty and I kept it a secret. So when my parents were yelling at me who was it what you know? Broken hearted that their daughter is a slut, you know which is what my mind told me? I was the first time I ever defied them. I didn't answer. I just I couldn't, because if I did, they would have made a huge deal out of it, like they did with the census, and humiliated me and I would have been. I mean, it was just. It was so tragic, you know, and I did not clear that until I was 60, writing my memoir. It took me almost two years of writing over and over again and going over it with my friends and my mother and until I could see it from an adult perspective because my brain had been, I was still seeing so much with a child's stuff mind, and there's so many other things that I did as well. So the that was, you know, something I never told anybody until I had to meet my daughter.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's take a moment for the listeners. It's a lot to process to hear someone talk about the pressures of living in a strict religious home, to know what it's like to be 15. I know we feel old, but it's not like it was so distant. I can't remember to be violated and to not feel capable of speaking of that. That's a very heavy thing to hear and it's a very heavy thing to process and so to write about it, to share about it today, it's gotta be a little bit draining.
Speaker 1:Yeah, see, that's what I was saying. I get to regurgitate it in podcasts and book clubs. It does not go away. But you know, this is the thing, and I'm just really quick. I wanna say this you know I wrote this. I realized I was writing it because my daughter wanted me to and then I realized there was more that I needed to heal, that I didn't even realize I needed to and then I could have stopped at any time.
Speaker 1:I'm doing this because, gosh, so many people have related to just the essays I write on my website. I mean I feel like I'm not alone. I mean not everybody's been great, thank God, but we've all had struggles and humiliations and difficulties, you know, and when I hear somebody else's, and especially told with such honesty, that I mean I feel like I can speak up to, like my secrets aren't so bad. You know what I mean, and so you know the book's not depressing. By the way, it's got some definite, you know, difficult subject matter, but it's written like a novel and it's entertaining and you know healing and parts of it are funny and some of it's very sad, but, man, I survive, I survive, I'm a survivor. You know what I mean. I thrive today, you know, and this did not take me down being an adoptee, being raped, being abused, being a birth mother, having to lose my child to adoption, all the other shit that's happened in the whole of the years that I've been on the planet and there's been a lot of other stuff, right, none of it took me down. Yeah, it was hard and yeah I mean, but I believe anybody can if they want to heal. It is not unique to just a few. You know it is available and there's so much out there to help us today If there wasn't back in the day, you know.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Nobody talked about it. You know, it was all hush hush. Thank goodness for podcasts.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what I've also heard in this conversation is how you have set aside any shame that you may have had or felt during that time period and, as an adult, and because of all the things that you have done to work on you and heal you and share out you and survive, the shame component of it is not coming through and I think that's a really good thing to celebrate. So congratulations it's I know it's a very difficult thing to let go. Well, I want us to stick a little bit to you. Ultimately did relinquish your daughter. It was a girl. You referenced her as a her a few times now in our conversation and you, from that point until when, always knew you were going to do what.
Speaker 1:So the whole time I was pregnant, the only thing I hung on to was 18 years. That was it 18 years. I counted the years Every birthday. Every birthday I'd sit and I'd think about her, knowing that that she would be thinking about me too. And on my birthday, like my 16th birthday, I just relinquished my daughter. It was probably one of the most depressing days of my life. It was dark and gray, july 27th in Alaska. Alaska summers could be miserable and nobody wanted to come over, nobody wanted to hang out with me, and it was just morose and depressing. That was. My baby was just not even a month old and I thought, and I wrote in my journal my other mother is thinking about me, must be thinking about me. I think about my baby all the time. It's so weird thinking that somebody's thinking about you that you don't even know, like my mom thinking about me and my birthday.
Speaker 1:That's kind of how I got through those 18 years, other than lots of drugs and alcohol, because I spiraled out of control. We moved about nine months later to the lower 48 in California where I live now Sacramento area and not long after that my father passed, a couple of years later and I had a very sick, complex relationship with my father. He was abusive and favored me. It's just gross. And so when he died, I went. I just started drinking and going up to the bar every night and sleeping with any guy that would take me home, looking for a daddy, looking for someone to replace the only person that really gave me attention my mom didn't drop me when we got my brother and I was such a mess. And then I found Black Label, which is Johnny Walker Black on the rocks and that's what I drank.
Speaker 1:And it was, oh my gosh, it took care of all of it. I could have a drink and it would all melt away All the pain I felt. Enough for the first time. It worked until it stopped working At the end. I mean, I was drugs, cocaine, so I could drink more. But I just hung on to the idea that in 18 years I can find her and I would look for her.
Speaker 2:Well, you did, you did look and you did find her, and so fast forward us to kind of where you are today in the context of that relationship.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, she looks just like me. We FaceTime. She's been going through some school stuff. She was changing careers in the last two years so we don't we weren't talking as often, but she lives in Grand Rapids, michigan, and she turned 50 in June and I went back for my granddaughter's graduation party. She's going to Michigan State and she had a big party and my daughter didn't want to celebrate her birthday. She doesn't like birthdays. Interesting, right she was. She was used to sit by the window waiting for me to come for her cry and when she was eight I had given the sister to give to the parents of Virgin Mary Statue and she had taken it to school as a show and tell the talk. Whatever her birth mother had given it to her. It was packed in a bag and it fell out and got a little dent in the virgin's head.
Speaker 1:You know, it was just troubling. You know to her her prized possession, but it sits next to her bed still today, always has. I was really surprised to see it there and she's always been there. Can we were reunited when she turned 18? And that was incredible. But now we have the same clothes on our closet, we have.
Speaker 1:We talk alike, we walk alike. We are both like bulls in a china shop. We are both bright, but not educated per se. Smart, she's real smart, and I always thought I was stupid. I'm not. I'm pretty smart too, you know, just a different kind of smart, not the book smart, Although I wrote a damn book, I mean, you know, and I've had a lot of success in my life. So, yeah, I've got some smarts, but, and so is she. And but again, you know, she had a really good family. She got a really good family, oh my gosh. So I mean, everything's not perfect, you know, never is. But man, she, she's a wonderful parents. I was envious of her parents. I wish I had parents like that, you know, although I would never want to not have my parents, you know, because they're my parents. It's like you wipe them away. They're my parents even though they were.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's just one of the more unique things about adoption and being adopted is that, despite or in spite, you decide which of those two words you want to use, and their definition of who you ended up with as parents. Those are your parents and we. We can't do anything differently about that. It's just the fact and yeah, it's. It's not our would-a, should-a, could-a, it just is. And it is very hard sometimes to to come to terms with that. I don't, I don't really care who you are, it's just sometimes hard. It is.
Speaker 1:I don't know, it's very hard to unwind. You know, I've heard adoptees being really angry and, you know, wish they'd never been adopted.
Speaker 2:We have a tendency not every adoptee, but many and those that I talk to we have attachment issues, banding mint issues, and we have trust issues, and so you put those all in one little human ball of fire. So you're going to get what you get and you know that's just where we're, you know that's just where it is and it doesn't. It's another one of those things we can't apologize for. There's nothing to apologize for.
Speaker 1:And you know, I don't, I don't anymore, I don't know that I ever really did apologize for that, but I definitely.
Speaker 1:I've definitely everybody's wired a little differently when it comes to your parents. You know, and you know I. Just I don't, and you know I. This is the other thing. It's just I've done a lot of work on myself. I got sober 40 years ago. On tomorrow, when this airs, it'll be the 21st tomorrow and I will have 40 years of continuous sobriety, clean drugs at alcohol and and that's when my, my healing journey really began I'd already found my biological family. I found them in 1980. And that that was, that was huge. And then in 91, I was reading on my daughter and that that did some healing. And by the time I was reading on my daughter, I was sober. I was sober up seven years, I think. Incidentally, she ended up getting sober.
Speaker 1:She's just like me, just like me, and she's going to be sober up April, 30 years. So you know, the apple doesn't fall, fall far from the tree. We're so much alike and at the same time we're so much alike that we annoy each other Because those character defects we both have the same ones, and I see them in her and she sees them in me. It's a mirror. Things that irritate me about myself I see in her. So you know, we have had our complexities for sure in our relationship. But man, she'll call me, and it's generally on a Sunday, and she'll call me and it looks like she just wants me to pull her out of a hole, like I don't know what's wrong. I'm just so sad. I don't know what's wrong and it's Sunday, it's the day I related to this, the day I gave birth, and she wants, she goes, and I remember one her, her daughter, comes over, my granddaughter mommy what's wrong?
Speaker 1:Why are you crying? She goes. I just miss grandma. So she doesn't identify. She's not really out of the fog per se. She does, she goes. I don't want to do that. I don't want to go to fog. I don't want to listen to all my may already angry enough, but you know.
Speaker 1:So she's not there, but she, you know, she has identified it. You know I miss grandma, you know, and I miss all the stuff, all the things that I can't be a part of and I can't be either. It's or my birth, my birth family adopted out of Canada and I go back and forth. The Canada, my family's all like I'm indigenous, I'm a third creed in the end, and I didn't. I mean I always had a, you know, always felt like I wanted to be, Didn't know I was until I found my family. But they have family reunions, we put our handprints on TPs, we have dried meat, we do all the things you know, and both sides of my family and and I miss it all.
Speaker 2:It's very hard to to wrap our brains around that. Prior to us hitting the record button today, we were talking about a couple of different things and at you talking about your heritage and your large family going and traveling to see each other. We had just talked about something very similar I shared with you. I hold the Bible of my adopted maternal grandmother and in her era, that's where all of the family information is stored, and we were I don't even know why we got here Listeners. I don't know how Monica and I got here. In all honesty, we'll just kind of laugh a little bit because we don't know how we got here, but we were kind of talking about end of life. For some reason I brought it up and in the context of this Bible and I shared with you.
Speaker 2:I've been thinking about this Bible today specifically and I need to make some decisions about it, because it's not my current immediate family, it's not their heritage, it's my adopted family's heritage and it means something to me, which is why I have it.
Speaker 2:But when I pass and someone has to clean my stuff out, unless I'm explicit about that thing, I'm afraid someone's going to throw it in the trash, and it is. It is a family heirloom and so I need to make sure my nephew gets it or my niece, who are actually part of the bloodline, the official bloodline. And even though we shared that back and forth and you and I were talking just about the things we've missed as adoptees with our biological family, at the same time I look over at my maternal biological family I've shared. It's a very large family and they're very close and I love watching them and how they are tight to each other and how they'll pull apart, because that's what families do and they come back together and they're tight and I kind of missed that and I miss, I miss it, I missed it and it's a whole and it's really unfortunate. It was stolen. Well, definitely not, not honored, definitely not honored for sure. And yeah, it's complex. It's complex. There's no doubt about that.
Speaker 1:I feel like I got ripped off. You know, I mean I've accepted it and I mean I've lived with it for very long time. I've been in reunion with my biological family like I don't know 43, 44 years, my daughter, you know what 50 years and what 32 years actually, and 33 weeks, my goodness, and. But I don't think I'll ever truly get over the grief of what I lost and I don't, and it's okay, you know, I've accepted that this, this is my destiny and these are the things that I get to heal. It's made me a better person, it's made me kinder, it's made me more compassionate and, ultimately, I think that's that's the healing component that I needed and what happened in their lives that made them do the things that they did. Hurt people, hurt people right.
Speaker 1:And and when I can step away from that and look at them from a different lens into their life. I've heard a lot of adoptees. They're angry at their birth parents for relinquishing them, and particularly their birth, birth months. And I never have been ever angry. I never got to meet her. She died when I was seven was a whole that I never got. I never had to ask her why or what the background was. I mean I only could listen to stories from other people about her.
Speaker 1:I never, ever doubted that she loved doesn't mean that I didn't have that primal wound in that whole, but in my mind and in my heart I never felt that she didn't love me or want me and I think that might be because I really pushed and I loved my baby with my entire heart, my whole being. I love that. The birth mothers so much pain and so much guilt and so much shame right, and I had a lot of that as well. But even passion for the adoptees, it just want to know things. You know it's our birthright to know where we came from and what the hell happened and why you didn't keep me.
Speaker 2:When we were speaking earlier, we talked about what makes your story and the fact that you've decided to put a pen to paper and what makes you a great advocate in the community is that connection between understanding what it's like to be an adoptee and being comfortable in your adoptee skin, but also having that experience of birth parent under very ugly conditions and needing to relinquish, and living through that side, which might have balanced for you from the time you gave birth until she was 18, your mindset of knowing. Okay, I get this whole adopted parent, birth parent, adoptee thing a little differently. I'm living a different side of that. It's powerful. I have mentioned this many times.
Speaker 2:I will plug this book just as much as I'll plug your book, which is Candace Cahill's book, Thank you. She speaks very openly about her experience as a birth parent and relinquishing. I loved it from the concept of. I needed to read that. I needed to hear that side of the story because I wasn't going to hear it from my birth mother. It really humbled me and I think your story is another iteration of that type of conversation that we need to hear. So I appreciate that you've come on the show today to share that with the listeners. Yeah, Candice's book.
Speaker 1:Goodbye Again. Excellent, she did a really good job and man kindred spirit there. You know my book the name of it is Practically Still A Virgin.
Speaker 2:I'm looking forward to the opportunity tomorrow to order my own official copy and go from there, as we're working to close out today, and there is so much more we could talk about, and so you know how I feel you are always welcome here, but if there is a piece of this journey that you would like to make sure we touch on before we say adios for today, what would that be? I?
Speaker 1:didn't talk about a lot of the stuff that happened, especially the reunion with my family, and I did get to my father and I was there in his deathbed in 2018. You know, it was the same hospital where I was relinquished and I mean, I was there for four days in this hospital. It was health care. It's not like hospice, where you actually have, you know, you're in the hospital and you have a room where you could all hang out with family. It's like completely different, lisa, and it was so painful in that my siblings were telling stories about my dad, stories that I was missing from, and it was just such a double-edged sword. I got to hear these wonderful stories but I was absent from them. I didn't get that kind of a dad. I got the kind of dad that's abusive and, oh man, I mean that was such a gift. At the same time, it was so painful. This one day, I mean one afternoon, I just needed to get out of there and walk and I knew that I was relinquished.
Speaker 1:I was born at that hospital and I thought there's no way it would still be there. Well, the ward where it was dark, the doors were all closed. You could see the sign that said nursery number, whatever on it on the door. I went through those halls and I saw those windows and I saw those rooms and it was a full circle because I was relinquished at the hospital but then I got to be there with my father at the end of this life. It was like a full circle. So this is so much, so much that I am grateful for, and even the bad stuff, because I have this absolutely open heart today because it got broken open. So the book actually is on pre-order today. You can pre-order it. So anybody who's listening just go to Amazon or review by books in a scope.
Speaker 2:Play by this book. Well, thank you. Thank you again for being on the show and opening up more of your heart to our listeners and sharing out some of those extremely painful pieces. We do appreciate it and you're welcome here anytime, so thank you again.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, Lysanne. It's always 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? Check us out at wanderingtreeadopteecom. Come share. No need for a book.