Secret Son
The (adoptee) podcast about searching, identity and secrecy
Secret Son
Send Me An Angel
Who better to launch with than the woman who helped me track down my father?
Adoptee rights advocate and search angel extraordinaire Annette O' Connell and I talk family searches, secondary rejection and the ecstasy of experiencing genetic mirroring.
Somehow I called her by her maiden name of Daly. Apologies!
Music by the inimitable Cassis Birgit Staudt.
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Annette Daly-O’Connell (she/her) is a domestic adopted person born in NYC during the Baby Scoop Era.
Having been born Pre-Roe; she feels it is vital that the US not go back to a forced birth society.
She has been active in adoptee rights since 2014.
Annette is the spokesperson for the New York Adoptee Rights Coalition and is on the boards of Adoptees United, Inc. and Bastard Nation.
She works part-time for The Adoptive and Foster Family Coalition of New York on the Communications Team and volunteers as a search angel
NYAdopteeRights.org • AdopteesUnited.org • AFFCNY.org • Bastards.org
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This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it, either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical or legal advice.
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To make a one-time donation or become an ongoing patron:
https://www.patreon.com/secret_son
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Podcast: www.secretsonpod.com
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/secret_son
Mike Personal Site: www.miketrupiano.com
Voice: https://soundcloud.com/heartlandrefugee/sets
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Show Link:
https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1659085017
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Produced by: Trout Sound GbR Trupiano & Staudt copyright 2024
All rights reserved
Secret Son Interview with Annette O' Connell
Mike 00:01
This is Secret Son. I'm Mike Trupiano. Why am I doing a podcast? And why am I doing a podcast about this topic - secrecy and adoption? I was an adoptee. I grew up in secrecy. I guess I am still an adoptee. I searched for my family. I found my mother, then I found my father. Kind of. I found my father's side of the family. They were welcoming. How amazing. But there's still some secrecy. I still have to be a secret. There's still people who don't know about me in the family, and they can't know, and it irritates me. I thought - I have to talk to other adoptees about this. How do they deal with the secrecy? Because the secrecy is everywhere in adoption. Before you search, even after you search and find, if you're lucky enough to search and find. My guest today, on my very first episode, is a woman who helped me break that secrecy. Annette Daly will be here. She was there. She did research for me, and she plucked him out of the ether, or, at least, my father's side of the family, and forever, that secrecy was gone. I finally knew his name. I finally knew family history. I found siblings. I couldn't believe it. Never expected it. I couldn't have done it without this woman. So, here's Annette Daly, and she's going to talk about that and her story, her search and her adoptee rights activism and being a search angel. She's forever tied to my search and finding my father. Let's listen. Here's Annette. Hi Annette.
Annette 02:00
Hi Mike, how are you?
Mike 02:01
It's so great to see you.
Annette 02:02
It's great to see you after all of our communications over the years. It's nice to put a face to the name and a voice and a real, live person behind it all.
Mike 02:11
It's amazing. I've known you, in a sense, four and a half years. I've known you virtually.
Annette 02:15
It's crazy that it's been that long. It's crazy that it's been that long.
Mike 02:20
It's super crazy. I was going to look up the date, I think it's April 21 when, which was a Saturday, when you made such a big mark on my life - and I'm getting choked up already -
Annette 02:32
Don't get choked up because then I'll cry.
Mike 02:35
- because you were my search angel.
Annette 02:37
I was happy to be it but I'm still happy to be a search angel.
Mike 02:43
Yeah, you've been there for consultations since we found my father's side of the family. April, I think it was the 21st - I should have confirmed that April, 21 - I was sitting at this desk about two in the afternoon my time. You must have been up early - eight-ish on a Saturday.
Annette 03:01
I'm an insomniac. So, I probably hadn't even gotten to bed yet.
Mike 03:04
I guess maybe we had connected the day before - I don't remember - and maybe we said, 'let's talk Saturday' and I was trying to work and then I guess you messaged me and said, "hey, I'm your search Angel" and I said, "okay," and you asked me a few questions. "Are you on Ancestry?" I think was the first question, and I was but I had stopped looking at it because I think I'd just gotten so frustrated, and just that prior week, I'd said, 'to hell with Ancestry. It's doing nothing for me' and I signed up for 23andMe and then suddenly you came around and you said, Well, give me your password. And I said, Well, I don't know this woman but what do I have to lose? I'll give her my Ancestry password.
Annette 03:46
It wasn't even the password because we don't need passwords for Ancestry. There's a way for you to share your DNA with me. So, it wasn't even the password because I won't help anyone with 23andMe because I won't take anyone's passwords. So, there's a way to share and that's what you did,
Mike 04:06
Right. It's a little bit of a haze. I remember it was about two in the afternoon, and I was doing some kind of work on one monitor but I had Facebook open on the other and that's where we were conversing. You disappeared with whatever connection I gave you on Ancestry. I gave you the permission and you said, "I'll be right back" and you came back a few minutes later. Oh, what did you say? At some point, you said, "I hope you're sitting down" because I think what I had done in the interim while you left, I said, 'well, let me look on Ancestry and see what it is' and then I saw this connection. Cousin dash -,
Annette 04:41
- first cousin. ‘Close relation’ is probably what it said – ‘close relative.’ It doesn't specify.
Mike 04:48
And all I saw was the ‘cousin.’ I was so excited to have a cousin. I said, 'oh, my God, I have a cousin' and then you message a few minutes later, and I said I had logged on, and I see I have a cousin and you said, "well, I hope you're sitting down." I think - oh right, because it was obviously my half-sister's name and you said, "well, I hope you're sitting down. I think that your sister." What?? Something I never expected. Unbelievable. I never expected any siblings, which I may have relayed to you. I'd given up on finding my dad. I'd found my found my mom years before and all I wanted was just his name - basically his name, and some photos and some family history. And then you said, "it's your half sister. I'm going to do a little more research." You left. You found my dad's death certificate. You saw this woman's name on the death certificate.
Annette 05:43
That started it all. And from there, I did some more research and found out where she was located and how many kids she had. And, you know, went into complete search angel mode, as I call it, at that point.
Mike 05:55
Unbelievable. The Day the Earth Stood Still, and my first thought was, 'I'll never have to wake up wondering what my dad's name is again. That was my first thought.
Annette 06:04
And what an amazing - that's such an amazing feeling, right?
Mike 06:07
And not think the whole day, every day, you know, for me, maybe some people don't but for me, every day, every hour, having found my mom, and then not caring about finding my dad, and then after about six months of not caring and then really caring. I mean, I looked a long - kind of a long time for him - I mean, I think decades.
Annette 06:27
Probably. Probably. Sure.
Mike 06:29
So, you are forever associated in my mind -
Annette 06:34
You know, one of the things that's so - all of the different hats that I wear within Adoption Land are extremely humbling but one of the most humbling things is being able to be a part of connecting puzzle pieces for people and of being able to present someone with an entire puzzle - not with a puzzle with pieces still missing, but with, like, almost the final piece of the puzzle, and having lived through it myself, I know what it feels like to be on your end of it, and it's so humbling for me to be a part of it, and I love the fact that you have kept me somewhat updated as to how things go and when you met your sister, you let me know. I love that because we get - we as search angels - get so emotionally involved ourselves, especially when you are an adopted person yourself, and you know what's happening on the other side of the screen of your computer, right? Like I know how you're waiting anxiously. So, I’ve been there. I've lived that. So, it becomes so emotional for us too. There are people who don't follow up with us. I'm always like, 'but wait, I want to know how it went. What did they say? How did it go? What did they look like?' So, thank you for for following up and for filling me in on the end of the story. And again, probably because I am an adopted person, right? It's like we become friends. There's a certain form of therapy involved with it, like peer-led therapy because I get it and I want to be there for people who I help to search. I want to be there to have them ask the questions and to help support them emotionally through it.
Mike 08:21
I have needed that and that's part of the reason I started this podcast is the frustration with my paternal side of the family and the mandated secrecy. First of all, they didn't want me to contact my uncle. I pushed through that, and I said, "well, I'm going to contact him. You can approve or not" and now it's cousins, and, you know, and I think you said something at some point about their mother, you know, and I was always indifferent about their mother - I don't need to contact their mother - but cousins would be good. And every step of the way, I've thought, 'how important is it?' Do I want to risk alienating them because then I lose the siblings and you've always told me, "Well, it's your life. Go for it.
Annette 09:05
It's your story. It's your story. That's the bottom line for me. One of my fellow adoptee rights activist friends, colleagues - one of my closest friends - though, said, years ago, "people are not secrets" and and that, for me, has become the bottom line because if you look up a secret, a secret is a thing, and you're a real live person. You're not a thing. I'm a real live person. I'm not a thing. While someone may have kept knowledge of us or knowledge of our births from friends or family members, we are not secrets because we have birth certificates. There were doctors in the room. There were nurses in the room. A secret is something that nobody else is supposed to know. There's lots of people who know we exist, and, therefore, we are not secrets and there's a lot of power to owning your own truth.
Mike 09:57
I thought, well, I feel better when I'm plugged into this adoptee world and I had thought about starting a podcast about something, and I thought, well, maybe I could talk to adoptees about their lives, but what about and then what's the biggest thing in my life? My obsession was the secrecy, which is so irritating. So, that's the background why I started doing this -
Annette 10:18
I'm glad you did it.
Mike 10:19
- because I thought maybe I can get some clarity, because I'm always back and forth - how important is it to talk to cousins that are on the other side of the world?
Annette 10:29
I always say - there's comfort to be found within our community, right? There's comfort in knowing we're not the only ones. And to a certain degree, misery loves company, right? It's not like we want to drag anyone into our misery, but to be able to commiserate with people, for people to be able to say, yeah, I get it. I've been there. I felt that
Mike 10:47
I'm still a little self-conscious talking about this taboo subject of adoption. Or is that? Is that gone for you? Because I couldn't talk about it growing up,
Annette 10:56
That was gone for me when I got into the adoptee rights activism - when I was lobbying in Albany to get our OBC bill passed in New York, that was gone for me, because the legislators and their staffers would ask me really personal questions that, at first, I wasn't comfortable answering, and then I realized how powerful my truth actually was, and that in order for for my truth to be valid for me, I had to speak it.
Mike 11:29
You're a Baby Scoop person, right? Closed.
Annette 11:33
I am.
Mike 11:34
I was always obsessed about finding when I was young. Was that your experience? And then how did all that progress?
Annette 11:41
I always self-identified as adopted. Even as a young child, I would introduce myself as like, "hi, I'm Annette. I'm adopted." It was just part of who I was. Pre-Roe, Baby Scoop Era, had very little information. The subject was taboo with my mother. My mother would kind of get like Fred Sanford from from Sanford and Son, when he would, like, hold his chest and say, "I'm coming, Weezy, I'm coming" if I would mention adoption or wanting to know why I was given up, my mother would be like, "you're killing me, Annette, you're killing me!" So, I learned very young not to discuss it with her, just to tune it out and not discuss it with her because I didn't want to kill my mother, right? But I was told that when I turned eighteen that my original birth certificate would come in the mail. I always correlate the imagery in my head was that I was like Charlie Brown waiting for his Valentine. I turned eighteen, and for two weeks, I checked the mailbox every single day because my birth certificate was going to come, and our mailman's name was Mike, and Mike would be like, "not today, Annette". "Ok, Mike. Have a good day." So, about two weeks in, I was like, Yeah, this isn't going to happen. This isn't coming for me. And I was eighteen, like, I was just like, whatever. You know, moved on.
Mike 13:01
How old were you when you first started asking? You were like twelve?
Annette 13:05
Oh, no, much younger.
Mike 13:07
Wow.
Annette 13:07
Much younger. When I was in first grade in Catholic school, there was a classmate who had been a foster child who was being adopted. The nun, Sister Anne, made cupcakes to celebrate that this person was being adopted, and I started to cry, and Sister Anne said - Annette, why are you crying? I said - well, I was adopted and nobody ever made me cupcakes. To me, this was very logical. How come she's getting a party? I like cupcakes. I like food. Make some for me, too. So, I always as far back as I can remember.
Mike 13:48
So, they told you at a young age.
Annette 13:50
Yeah, yeah.
Mike 13:51
Your adoptive parents told you at a young age.
Annette 13:54
My mother would say that it was it was actually part of the agreement with the agency was that I had to know I was adopted, but someone told me later on in life that actually a neighborhood child had made a comment to me, and I didn't understand what she was saying, and I went home crying, asking my parents, like this girl says that I'm adopted. What does that even mean? And that at that point, they fessed up to it. But I guess they, they said they were waiting until they thought I was old enough to understand. Who knows? They're not here. I can't ask them.
Mike 14:28
I've heard that so many times. Isn't funny how the neighbor kids know so that means the parents are talking about it for whatever reason.
Annette 14:37
Well, yeah, because like these people, this, this family where the woman was never pregnant, suddenly have a kid. So, the neighbor adults are talking about it, for sure, and kids are intuitive. You know, you listen to conversations among the grown ups and you catch on.
Mike 14:52
That's true. I didn't think about that.
Annette 14:54
Yeah, right. All of a sudden this, you know, thin woman or non-pregnant woman suddenly is holding a bundle of joy. And so - well, where'd you get that from? Sure, wasn't the Five & Dime. Even though they make you feel like it's from the Five & Dime. Like, did my parents were, but we chose you. I'm like, was there a lineup? I remember I used to ask my mother, was it, do you remember the show Magilla Gorilla? I remember asking my mother, like, Was it like Magilla Gorilla? Like, how much is that baby in the window? What do you mean? You chose me? Those things always bothered me, even as a young child,
Mike 15:31
I would hear that. I heard that from a young age. You know, other people had to have their kids, but we chose you.
Annette 15:37
We chose you. Yeah, there was a girl in grammar school who used to make fun of me for being adopted, and I would go home crying, and my mother told me - well, you go and tell her that her mother got stuck with her and we chose you. I was like, you get stuck with a kid and you get to choose kids like for it was very confusing to me, you know, like, but why didn't my mother want to be stuck with me? She could, she doesn't have to be stuck with her. She could trade her in. She could put her up for adoption. That, to me, that would be the perfectly logical thing as a child to say to that, right? Well, oh, instead of saying someone was stuck with their kid, put them up for adoption. It's fine. Trade them in for a newer model.
Mike 16:15
Somehow, all of this is considered less confusing than if we were to know our original names and our original family history. Somehow, all of this is considered -
Annette 16:24
Exactly and I used to ask my parents all the time like, Well, what was my name before you got me? Because they didn't get me until I was five months old. We don't know. We forget. We were never told. What difference does it make? You're Annette daily. What difference does it make? And I was like - well, what did they call me? Hey, you ugly baby, bald baby, fat bit. What did they call me? So, after the waiting for the OBC thing, when I was twenty-three, my mom asked me to go up into her attic to get something down for her. And I went up into the attic, which had the pull down hatch and just the beams. There wasn't flooring, but there was they had a dresser stored in the attic, and I opened up one of the drawers, and there was this manila envelope that said correspondence regarding adoption of Annette Marie Daly, not to be opened by her until her twenty-first birthday. And with a flashlight holding it under my chin, looking at these papers, I'm like, okay, so I'm twenty-three. Yep. Uh huh, that's still so older than twenty-one. What is this? And it's a whole file. I still have it. It lives right here by my desk, actually, and among the papers, it said, 'in regard to the adoption of Kimberly' and I got really confused and I said - Kimberly? Who the hell is Kimberly? And then it just suddenly dawned on me that it was me - that I was Kimberly - and that's a name that I never liked. If someone came up to me and introduced themselves to me as Kim, I automatically just decided I didn't like this person because I never liked the name and I ended up being physically like, vomiting over it, being physically ill over it. And I went downstairs, and what the hell is this? Like holding this manila envelope and shaking it like - what is this? Twenty-one? I'm twenty-three and I asked you all my life what my name was and you told me you didn't know but here it is. Oh, well, we must have just forgotten. It's not important anyway because you're Annette. I was like, it is important because it's who I was born as. It's who I was. That answered the question of - what was my name before this? Maybe if they had said - oh, your name was Kim but we changed it for whatever reason, maybe adoption would have had a different type of meaning to me but then I started kind of psychoanalyzing myself and saying - oh, well, that's why you didn't like the name because your subconscious just put this block around it and said, nope, nope, nope because I must have somehow remembered having been called that for my first five months.
Mike 18:52
Okay, were you with your mom for five months?
Annette 18:56
I was placed in a "temporary home," and my mother signed the papers when I was four or five months but they can't tell me whether it was a foster home, whether it was New York Family or whether I was with her and since I never got a chance to meet her, that's a question that I will never have an answer to.
Mike 19:19
So, from there, you're twenty-three - does the search come about?
Annette 19:24
I realized that I could write to the agency to ask for non-identifying information and I sent the paperwork off. Nine months, twelve months later, I got a response saying that my records had all been destroyed in a fire. And again, I'm twenty-three - I don't have access - there's no Internet. I just take what they tell me and say - oh, well, you know, figures. This is my shit luck, right? Mine are the ones that are destroyed in a fire. Whatever. But let me backtrack for a second. I did decide to try again. I was diagnosed with a degenerative corneal disease when I was about thirty-six and told that I needed to go on a donor list and have a corneal transplant. And, at that point, I tried the agency again because my doctors were pretty appalled that I didn't have any medical information. So, initially they told me that there was a fire in the 80s and then, this time, they told me that my records were destroyed in a fire in the 90s and at that point, I realized - oh, okay - y'all are lying and I actually had someone that I knew who was an attorney who told me that we were going to file with the court to have my records opened and I said - listen, I'm having this surgery. My insurance isn't paying for everything. I'm in no financial position to pay you to do this and he said - no, no, no - I'm doing it pro bono. So, I filled out all of these papers to file action with the court to have them open my files. The judge pulled my attorney aside one day and said, Listen, save your clients money and he said she's not paying me. I'm doing a pro bono and he said - then save your time because it ain't going to happen. He said - we've only ever once unsealed records and that was for a Native American who needed to know what tribe he was from. And my attorney said - Annette, I'll push forward with this if you want. I said - listen, the odds are stacked against me at this point. I've been told about two fires. The birth certificate didn't come when I was eighteen. Maybe I'm just not meant to know this information. And then fast forward a decade longer and that's when I found out that my birth name was actually listed in the New York Public Library sixty miles from where I always lived and I never had that information and I only found that out because I'd been on Facebook for a few years and I just said - oh, let me look for adoption groups I finally decided one night and I found all of these groups with people telling their stories and, as I was reading their stories, I just had tears pouring down my face going - it wasn't only me. Other people felt this way too. Holy crap.
Mike 22:18
When did you plug in to the adoptee world? I connected with you in spring of 2018.
Annette 22:24
It was only 2014 that I got into Adoption Land, as I call it, because it is its own universe. So, my husband and my son and I went down to the city two weekends in a row looking for my birth name and the New York City Birth Index is four columns - teeny, tiny. You have to correlate your birth date with the county you were born and then your birth certificate number because our amended birth certificate number is the same as our original one. The second weekend - we were going to be going for a third weekend - the second weekend, I found it and literally screamed out loud in this room like - holy God! Thank you, Jesus! I got it! I got it! Five minutes before the library was shutting down. Took some pictures of it with my phone, which you weren't supposed to do. I had to sneak into a dark corner to do it and by the time I got from Manhattan to Paramus, New Jersey, which is only about a twenty to twenty-five minute ride, I - through Google - had found a picture of who I believed my birth mother to be and the only way I could describe that is that my soul knew this was the person and everything kind of took on a life of its own after that and at that point is when I realized - like, I started going back to the eighteen year old waiting for the birth certificate and I thought - no, this needs to change. I need to get involved in figuring out how to make this change where someone really could get their birth certificate at eighteen in New York and that's when I got into the adoptee rights aspect of it all.
Mike 24:04
You never met your mom. I'm sorry to hear that.
Annette 24:07
I did not. I reached out to her. I had discovered that - so, I found my name in April; found her picture, obviously, did some research into her. She had a son who she raised. Wasn't sure whether I would want to contact her because I knew that she was dying and I knew that I didn't want to contact him because I knew she was dying and because if he didn't know about me, I didn't want him to be angry at his dying mother. If he did know about me, I didn't want him to feel like I was suddenly looking to interject myself into the story. So, I did send her a message on Facebook and said - I'm adopted. This is my birthday and I think that you're my mother and I sent pictures of myself and my son because I thought maybe she would want to see her grandson and at first she didn't respond and I wasn't willing to accept no response. So, I sent a follow-up message and, to that one, she basically responded and told me to go to hell and told me exactly how to get there and denied being my mother and said that we bear no facial resemblance. In the meantime, my face is her face. Like I stole her face. She ended up dying. Three months later, I did what I could, right? I reached out to her and I reconcile it with myself, saying - at least she went to my grave - to my grave, God forbid - to her grave knowing that I was okay, knowing that I had been looking for her, having seen photos of me, having seen photos of her grandson but she also went to her grave denying being my mother.
Mike 25:48
You know.
Annette 25:51
Uh, huh. Well, eventually DNA. Eventually, I had another family member do DNA and that absolutely confirmed it. As far as we know, she took the secret with her but there were family members who came out and said - well, you know, she did go away for a couple of months - and, you know, so it was that kind of like - oh, she's gone for a few months and then she's back and she looks a little different than when she left. So, there was the rumor mill and there was speculation whether anyone for sure knew. I don't know.
Mike 26:27
Yeah, she went to a weight loss clinic. She lost that 84 pounds.
Annette 26:33
Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So funny.
[01:26:38]
What a weird time, this Baby Scoop Era - people disappearing.
Annette 26:41
And we're heading back down that road again now with the reversal of Roe and forced birth coming back. We're on a very dangerous precipice right now with all of that.
Mike 26:56
Controlling women is an ongoing feature of Western Civilization, it seems, and women's fertility.
Annette 27:03
It absolutely is. The subjugation of women is - most governments are founded on misogyny to begin with - and misogyny is is deep in there. So, like, eugenics and misogyny and all of these things just keep showing up. No matter how much we try to fight it, it keeps coming around. You know, make no mistake, any kind of forced birth - and adoption itself - adoption itself is so rooted in eugenics to begin with.
Mike 27:32
I think it's only in the last couple of years that I put things into a larger context. My adoptive family was rough, particularly my adopted mother. I don't know if she particularly wanted kids but the pressure back then - maybe you were seen as mentally ill if you didn't want kids. So, it's made me think of things in this larger feminist, women's rights context.
Annette 27:54
I mean, that's it. That was a woman's job. A woman's job was to get married and, you know, have kids and populate the earth.
Mike 28:00
Oh, I'm so sorry, but you didn't like the name Kim.
Annette 28:03
I've since embraced it. It kind of pieced it together for me why I didn't like it. Yeah, you didn't like it. Your subconscious remembered being called Kim. Now I've embraced it. Look, when I came onto zoom, that Kim was what my name was showing on Zoom. I have a Kim Saxen Facebook page. I don't utilize it all that much anymore but that was my searching page. That's what I used when I had a search poster going around the Internet. That was my means of contact. That was the page that I used to contact my mother. I knew that was my birth name. So, let it sink in that, yeah, this is right. This is me.
Mike 28:44
I really wanted to know my dad's last name, and when I finally found it out, I just sat in this chair just staring out the window for, I think, the rest of the day, I just felt all these disparate jigsaw puzzle pieces coming together.
Annette 29:01
That's what it is. We look at anybody in the world and we see a whole person. Even if they have physical, physical scars, if they have, you know, are missing limbs, we still see a whole person. What we don't see are the pieces of the person that are pieced together. I used to tell people like, you know, you see this, right? You see a whole person, but you don't realize that, like, there's pieces that are squeezed in when you're doing a jigsaw puzzle and the piece doesn't quite fit but you jam it in anyway to give the appearance of whole. That's how I always feel - I created myself. I wanted to present as a pretty well put-together human while, in the meantime, in the inside, I was dying. Once I saw my mother's face, just on the trip home from the library, I finally felt comfortable in my own skin because there was somebody else in the world that I looked like I. I always thought all my other friends were pretty or thin or more this, more that. Finally, I had someone that I looked like and I just felt more comfortable in my own skin. So, I get the pieces coming together thing because they really do but you'll realize there's still more pieces and you're gonna realize - oh yeah, that piece was missing for a while, huh? Now it's there. It's an ongoing experience with some of the highest highs. It's like a craziest roller coaster with some of the highest highs and the lowest lows.
Mike 30:36
My half brother has eyes like mine. I've always been very self-conscious because my eyes are kind of at half-mast but then, since I met him, he has the same thing. And so now I'm totally fine with it. I'm very relaxed with it.
Annette 30:50
That's it. You just become more comfortable in your own skin. There's a lot to be said for genetic mirroring. That's where humans get their self-confidence from and we start to develop it as infants, looking at a face and seeing familiarity. The truth is powerful. Own your truth because your truth is your eyes; your truth is your height; your truth is - you know, there's so many layers to the truth. The secrecy thing is so damaging. It's so damaging to so many people.
Mike 31:23
To finally see my dad and, apparently, I'm like a twin to him. I look exactly like him apparently.
Annette 31:31
From the pictures that I saw, I was like - yeah, uh huh. This is right. Uh huh.
Mike 31:38
My half-sister did tell me, you know, if you had not been a twin of dad, I don't think I would have believed you.
Annette 31:46
As a search angel, we always advise people - unless you have DNA confirmation, because then it's entirely different but if you just - like, in my case, where I just thought that this woman was my mother - proceed carefully. Don't bring up adoption because they think that we're like money hungry. We're out to for someone to save us. We're looking to get into the wills or that's what people always, always think but they love the reunion porn videos, right? The hugging and the kissing and the crying in airports. People love to see that.
Mike 32:19
I have tried to not think about adoption. I've tried to live a normal life. This thing set the course of our life.
Annette 32:27
It defines us.
Mike [01:32:31]
You have to grapple with it.
Annette [01:32:34]
We should all be members of SAG. We should all be members of the Screen Actors Guild. No matter what age you were when you were adopted, right? You're put into this new role, right? You're put into this new role. You're put into this new family. Even people who are adopted through foster care, you're still leaving a life that you once knew and being forced to acclimate. We're the best actors in the world as far as I'm concerned. We should have our own Emmys or something. Let's do that. Let's make that happen. Let's make the Emmys for bastards or something. I don't know.
Mike [01:33:16]
The Bastos.
Annette [01:33:16]
There you go. No, that's a good one. I like that.
Mike 33:19
I don't know if you know this film Zodiac where these detectives are just obsessed with finding the Zodiac Killer and I love that film and then I realized, oh, that - because that's how I lived. I lived being obsessed about finding someone. So, I relate to this obsession. That was a weird sort of disappointment when, as soon as I found my dad that day with you, I felt like - oh, the search is over. Like, that's who I am. I'm the searching guy. If I'm not the searching guy, I don't know who I am.
Annette 33:52
But the search wasn't over, though, right? You found his name but you still had to learn about him. You still had to learn about him. And, for me, I'm totally still learning. My birth mother died in 2014 and I'm still learning new things about her.
Mike 34:10
How are you doing that? Through cousins or -
Annette 34:11
Through my brother with whom I have a relationship. I've made contact with friends of hers, or who knew her within their profession; through DNA because I also recently discovered that I actually have a full sister out there as well who was also placed for adoption. You think it's over and then something else happens or transpires. I've had matches in my DNA who were also adopted, you know, and helped them piece together their sides of their stories, too. It just doesn't end.
Mike 34:53
Yeah, sometimes my half-sister drops these nuggets on me of - did I ever tell you that dad, when he wore sandals, always wore socks? I do the same thing. I don't like wearing sandals. I always wear socks with sandals. Things like that.
Annette 35:16
Things like that, yeah.
Mike [01:35:13]
Oh, I didn't even know I needed to know that but now I feel like that's really important to know.
Annette [01:35:17]
That's it. These little - what your sister considers to be this little minutia, right? This little just detail about dad takes your breath away because you never knew that you needed to know that piece of information about your father because now maybe it makes sense for you. Those types of things - I always say - I listen with bated breath and wait for the little details to come out just in passing. Like - one Christmas, mom - blah, blah, blah, blah and I'm like - file that away. Mom one Christmas did this.
Mike 35:49
Yeah, we have to figure all this out kind of retroactively. Didn't do it in the moment. We have friends who have a daughter who sings. Just the casual way people talk about things of like - oh, yeah, she's just like her grandma who sang all the time. The non-adopted people just kind of listening but me I"m I'm thinking - oh, yeah, I got none of that. I'm figuring all this out now.
Annette 36:11
Figuring it out now and figuring it out without having the benefit of having your father, in this case, around to give you the stories.
Mike 36:22
We will defeat the secrecy.
Annette 36:25
Burn it down. That's what I keep saying. We're gonna burn it down.
Mike 36:32
That was Annette Daly. She's amazing. I'm so glad she was here for episode one. When I thought of doing episode one, I thought that's who I want. Please do the podcast thing. If you like that, please comment, rate, subscribe. If you really like it and you want to support the show, click on the Patreon link. I'd appreciate it. See you next time. And remember, keep breaking those secrets.