Secret Son
The (adoptee) podcast about searching, identity and secrecy
Secret Son
Alicia is a Punk Rocker
Hey y'all - between us, some days I just wanna be sedated.
This is not one of those days.
In episode 6 of Secret Son, I head to the Deep South, set on the porch for a spell and have a leisurely tête-à-tête with Alicia Bratton.
And, honey, let me tell you, we cover some stuff – progressive Alabama politics (no joke), bayou existentialism and the freedom that fifty brings.
And, it goes without saying - secrets!
Hey, ho, let’s go!
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Alicia Bratton is a 1972 Baby Scoop Era adoptee in a closed adoption. Reunited with/re-abandoned by her mother and in reunion with her father. She went to college in Alabama on a performing arts scholarship for Trombone Performance and Vocal Performance, yet became a nurse (her mother of origin is also a nurse).
Classically trained in piano and voice, she lives in rural Alabama and, in her words, "I'm just trying to find my voice in the adoptee world." She's been a registered nurse since 1995, working primarily in labor/delivery and psychiatric nursing.
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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
Hey everybody, welcome to secret sun. I'm Mike Trupiano. This is the podcast about searching identity and secrecy. I'm 23 years old. I'm in the French Quarter in New Orleans. I'm a stage manager at the Little Theater, la petite theater. I'm not sure how to say it in French, and the play is Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie. I've never seen it before. I just took this job. I was fairly new to town. I needed some money. Never stage managed before. Pays very little, but I had this vague idea of pursuing some sort of life in theater, and this is what presented itself to me. Why was I in New Orleans? Some writers I really liked said when they moved there, it blew their mind and changed their entire perspective. So I thought, okay, that's what I could use. So I drove down from Missouri to New Orleans. Took a couple days. Great. I'm ready to have my mind blown. Weirdly, this play I'm working on is about St Louis, and it's about a guy trying to get out of his hometown, and he has an overbearing mother, and he has a kind of put upon younger sister. So for about 45 nights, I'm sort of watching my life story night after night presenting itself, and then at the end of the play, the guy leaves town. He's had enough. I was 23 years old, such a formative time in my life. I had been thinking about leaving town for a long time. Why I went to college? I have no idea. It just seemed like the thing to do, and it wanted to put off dealing with the so called real world for a while. So I went to college, unsatisfying. Dreamed of New Orleans. Finally, I ended up there. I'm watching Glass Menagerie, and I'm thinking, this is exactly where I'm supposed to be. This is my memory of New Orleans. Very powerful. My guest today also has a New Orleans connection. Very interesting story. I love her attitude. I love her accent. Here's Alicia. Where are you right now? I
Unknown:am in Alabama, near the Tennessee border, where Tennessee meets Mississippi. I'm up in that corner. We are in the foothills of the Appalachian chain.
Mike:So how'd you end up there? I guess you were born in Alabama, Mobile,
Unknown:Alabama in 1972 Alabama is backward in a lot of ways, but astoundingly, not in the realm of adoptee rights. Back in 2000 our records were unsealed. I got my original birth certificate in 2000 I had done some work with some advocacy to try to get our records open. Our legislators were open to that, and we have open access at age 19 to our original birth certificate and any other things that are in our adoption vows. My birth mother has a unique name and or had a unique maiden name, so she was very easy to track down. My birth father has probably the most common Well, it is the most common surname. It's Smith. So he had a very common name. He was a little more difficult. I found both in the same year in
Mike:2000 How does classic rock play into your story?
Unknown:My birth father is a very open guy. When I found him, he gave me my conception story. I don't really even know any other way to say that. When he did that, he burned me a CD. Remember, this was back in 2000 so he burned me a CD of his favorite music, and the song that I was conceived to, which is nights in white satin by the Moody Blues I am the result of a quote, unquote, bad acid trip in New Orleans, like two doors down from the House of the Rising Sun. My birth parents were hippies. They were living in a hippie boarding house. My birth mother was the cook and my birth father was kind of the caretaker, and they lived together until I was conceived, and then it kind of all fell apart. 1972 I was born. Okay, so still hippie time? Yep, still hippie time, the tail end of it, but that's what made me is the hippie time. Now, when I listen to knights and white satin, I have a completely different viewpoint of
Mike:it. When you heard that, that was the song, was it like? That's why I've always loved that song, or the song meant nothing to you before? No, it
Unknown:actually did. I've always liked classic rock music, punk music. And now that I've met my birth father, I know exactly where that came from. I'm pretty sure that in utero I heard some really good bands live. I know that for a
Mike:fact they told you they went to concerts, they did nice they went to concerts
Unknown:and smoked a lot of dope and lived a very, very happy existence. I had no real desire to go to New Orleans. I knew I was born in mobile, so I did have some desire to go to mobile, because I thought that that was probably where my story was centered. So my birth mother still lives in mobile. She didn't leave after I was born, but my birth father did move on back to New Orleans. He has taken me to the house where I was conceived, had my picture taken outside growing up here in the rural area, I thought, I think probably what a lot of adoptees think. They either think that their parents of origin are these wealthy, wonderful people who it's either grandiose or they were just poor people who just couldn't keep me uneducated. I don't think it's usually a very realistic middle of the road idea of where you could come from. They're just normal people. And growing up, the story was, I was born to a couple of teenagers who couldn't keep me but my birth father was 21 and my birth mother was 19. I mean,
Mike:when I was a teenager, I was obsessed. I mean, I guess many, many people think, Well, I must have a different family out there. I knew I did, and I just couldn't stop thinking about them. That lasted until I initially found my mother at age 28 Was it an obsession? Absolutely,
Unknown:I was obsessed in a very private way. I think that's probably what a lot of us are. I didn't have anybody that I could talk to. Nobody was helpful emotionally, because when you're adopted, you're supposed to suck it up. Suck it up. Be great, go into the family, never talk about it. I have a running joke. It's hashtag grateful, hashtag thankful, Hashtag blessed. We've all heard it. We have all heard it numerous times. So I kept it to myself, but in every face that I saw, I thought that could be my parent, that could be my sibling. Is that who it is? It's this constant longing and looking at every face that I saw, and I'm a same race adoptee, so you could have assumed that I was not adopted. You could just look at my family and just assume that on the surface, it may look like that, but we all know that living with other people and living with people that you have no genetic relationship to completely different story. So I was obsessed with finding people who I thought could possibly be my family. You started searching as a teenager. It was pre internet. There was really no way for me to do that as a teenager, I was born at the Florence Crittenden home for unwed mothers. That was one of the quote, unquote, popular unwed mother homes across the United States. If there would have been any way that I could have went and broke in and looked through records at that place, I would have but, you know, pre internet, it was just difficult. I suffered in silence, just like I know every other adoptee from the baby scoop era did.
Mike:How about adoptive siblings? Or were you only
Unknown:trying? I'm an only, and I'm an only for both of my original parents also. So I'm it other
Mike:than my sister, my adoptive sister. I don't think I knew any adoptees
Unknown:one town over there were a set of twins that were adopted. I don't know how I found out that they were adopted. It seems like when you're adopted, especially in a smaller place, you are kind of made an example of during certain things like studying genetics and biology in high school, because everybody knows you're adopted. Literally everybody in this town of 3500 people knew that I was adopted growing up, it's been interesting growing up in a tiny little town, being such a small percentage of the population, and everybody knows it. People who are my parents' age remember the day that they got me and brought me home, and it's hard to hear that over and over and over again by all of these different people. You
Mike:were a little self conscious about your accent, but I love hearing it, and especially with that Ramones t shirt on. Oh yeah, yeah. Also
Unknown:made me an anomaly in this tiny town, there were no punk clubs. It's like cognitive dissonance when you hear my accent, and the assumption is that maybe I listen to country music and that kind of thing. But no, it could not be further from the truth.
Mike:When you finally started searching, was it secretive? Did you go to your caregivers, your adoptive family? No, no, it was completely secretive. There was no talking about the adoption in the family, no we can often tell that it's painful for them. Growing
Unknown:up, I knew that I was adopted because they were infertile. They didn't make that a secret. They even told me that they had plans that when they had their first baby, and it was going to be a boy, and they told me what they were going to name him, it got. Down to those details, and I knew it was this deep Festering Wound that was never healed. Was never going to be able to be healed. I was a band aid, and I knew that, yeah, we know somehow. We know in eight we know I was three months old when they got me. And actually, tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the day that they got me. My mother has varied over the years between calling it gotcha day and my adoptive birthday. Both of those are very not okay with me.
Mike:That's tomorrow. The records were opened, and then you you had your mom's name. I did okay,
Unknown:and I called her. Her last name was very unique, and in the state of Alabama, there were four people listed with that last name. I cold called, and I was just like, I'm looking for so and so. And the second one that I called was her dad. So the
Mike:call is like, I'm looking for this woman who had a kid on I'm looking for
Unknown:Karen. She lived in mobile in 1972 and I'm not sure if she's still there, but I'm looking for her. And he said, and I quote, I know who this is. She's finally got her life together. Please leave her alone. Oh
Mike:my god, yep, wow, that's what he said. And
Unknown:I'm the only grandchild that this man ever had. This is her dad.
Mike:Maybe her life was falling apart because you weren't around. I could
Unknown:not leave it at that. I told and I told him, I said, I cannot leave this
Mike:at that. So you seen your mom had no siblings. She had one
Unknown:sibling who never married. She's in a long standing same sex relationship, and she never attempted to have children. I'm the only grandchild, but please, please leave her alone. Yeah, which you didn't. I did. Probably, no, I didn't. I'm a pretty good amateur Sleuth. I think that is also a common theme with a dog face. We are very good sleuths. So I did find her phone number. The first time that I talked to her, she told me that she had no idea who I was or what I was talking about, that I had the wrong person. And I said, Well, here's my phone number and here's my name. If you can think of anything different, just let me know your memory gets job. Yeah, and it did. So she did call me and we had a discussion, a long discussion, she didn't at first want to give me my dad's name. She finally did, but she had no information on what happened to him after that time, and like I said, he had a very common name, so once again, I had where he had grown up and his name. So I started cold calling these people in the town where he grew up. Because where else are you going to go with that so and this is in another strange little town, Pascagoula, Mississippi. I'm sure you've heard
Mike:that name before. Yeah, go there for the music festival. But there happened
Unknown:to be five of him in the town, five names like his in the town. First one I called was not the right one, but he had empathy for me. The first phone call I've made where this man has empathy for me. Don't know him. I'll never meet him. I told him what what I was doing, and I told him the name that I had, and he said, I'm really sorry that I can't help you. I'm not him. I wish there was some way that I could help you, because I know that for you to be doing this, you really are desperate for this information. And I said, the only way that you can help me is if you can tell me where I can find this man. And he said, Well, what year did he graduate? He wanted some basic information. He called me back, believe it or not, this man, he owns a car dealership, took the time out of his day to call me back, and he said, I think this might be the person. And here are his parents name. Wow. Yeah, it's weird. Man, it is a trip. If I can say anything, I can say it has been a trip. I called his parents phone number, and that was actually him. That was actually his parents. His mother was the only person who had known that I had been born. And she said, I tried to get them to let me raise you so that we would not lose you, but your mother just could not do that. She said she you had to go. You had to go. It was heartbreaking at the thought that I could have grown up with family, with genetic relatives, not genetic strangers. You can understand how that would feel. Yeah.
Mike:Okay, so that was your mom, your dad's mother. So she knew,
Unknown:but her husband did not. Her husband did not know. So she's keeping this secret.
Mike:I guess you were 34 something like that at that time, and then she had to talk with him. Oh, I've been keeping this secret all these years,
Unknown:yes. And then my birth father has three siblings, they didn't know either. So I was just the big secret. I was the big. Big secret on both sides of the family, big secret because my birth mother's husband did not know she had actually raised his son from toddlerhood up through adulthood, and then my birth father's wife did not know, and they had no children.
Mike:I guess you're talking on the phone with your paternal grandmother Grandmother, and then she says, Here's my son's phone number, yes. So I call again.
Unknown:I'm not afraid, apparently, to call people. It's a thing. And so I call. He knows the day that I was born. He knows all of this information. You call his cell phone, and he picks up. I call his house phone, we verify some information, verify my birth mother's name, my date of birth, that kind of thing. He said that he had always hoped to find me that he had registered on back when searches were just starting. A lot of the registries where you could match up your information with other people's information to try to find your parents. He had registered on numerous registry site hoping that I would happen up on him. We verify all of that. I say, Are you sure? Because I don't know what their lifestyle was like, you know I'm like, Are you sure that you are my birth father? And he said, there's no doubt. You know, we live together at the same house. We worked together in this group. We were together all the time. I have no doubt, because I'm always suspicious and doubtful that I'm finding the right people. So I just, I just want some details and to be assured that I'm not going to go down yet another road that's going to end in more disappointment. So I found both of my birth parents in 2000
Mike:Yeah, one time I emailed 10 siblings because I thought they were my half siblings, and it turns out they were not siblings. Who's the wrong potential birth father?
Unknown:Yeah, I was concerned about that, but all of the information seemed pretty legitimate, and we haven't done any DNA testing or anything like that. When we look at each other, it's quite obvious that I am his offspring.
Mike:Super so you've met with both of them, your mom, your dad. I mean, yes, grandparents, when I met my
Unknown:birth mother first, since 2000 I've only met her twice, this is going to be also about secondary and tertiary. Rejection
Mike:is the secret over now. So everyone knows. Everyone
Unknown:knows everyone on my birth mother's side that was not a welcoming situation, but on my birth father's side, they welcomed me loudly and with open arms. My birth mother's dad, who I had talked to on on the phone, he passed away, and I did not get to meet him, which I don't think he probably wanted to meet me anyway. So no, I did not meet him. I have went and visited the place where he's buried. I have a lot of empathy for people who I call it, soaked in trauma. She was literally soaked in trauma. Her mother passed away when she was two weeks old. She had an aneurysm and she died. So she was raised by a single father, that grandfather that I had talked to on the phone, and he was an alcoholic, and her life was filled with trauma, even before I came along. So that whole family dynamic was just trauma. So they did not greet me with open arms or anything like that. It was not a rosy reunion that is portrayed in the movies and on TV. That is not what that was. It's quite the opposite. It's hard to take a grown person. When these people last saw me, I was an infant. Now I'm a fully grown adult with my own history. A lot of my history can be tied back to the trauma of adoption, and they don't want to see it, and they don't want to hear it, and they don't want to know about it, and they don't want you to bring it up, and they don't want to have any part to do with that part of me. But if they don't have any, don't want any part of me that involves that, then they don't want any part of me at all, because that's who I am. Unfortunately, that's what I am.
Mike:When you say they You mean, you mean everybody, dad's side, mom's side, they want
Unknown:the rosy picture. That's not what it is. Everything's not okay. It's never been okay. But they want me to say, oh, everything's okay. Even in my adoptive family, they've always just wanted me to say, Oh yeah, everything's okay, but that's not reality.
Mike:Well, even in Reunion, of course, growing up, there's the pressure to do that. But even in Reunion, it's like, well, everything's all right, right? And also, well, you had a good adoptive family, right? And it's like, I have to play this game, or otherwise, I'm going to get rejection from the newly discovered Earth family.
Unknown:And I did. I got one side rejection and one side, yeah, we understand that, but just don't talk about it as much. But we're not going to. Reject you, but just don't talk about it as much. Whereas my birth mother was like, we had an on again, off again relationship until the elections of 2016 and then it was like, I have no idea what I said or did, but I did something and I said something wrong, and I will never be able to figure out what I did wrong yet again, and she told me she was cutting off contact, blocking me on all social media, because you are bad for my mental health. And she left it at that. And I've never heard from her again. I think
Mike:it's always cumulative. We try to figure out the reason, you know, is it this event? Is it this event? But it's just finally, they can't take any and she couldn't. I feel like it's always our side that's doing the therapy it
Unknown:is. And I think I might have recommended that maybe she might need some therapy, number one, to deal with keeping a secret for over 30 years, and you're the only one who knows this big secret. How awful would that be to have to live with that? I can't imagine that therapy has been a godsend for me. Think everybody needs therapy, especially adoptees and parents of origin. We just need
Mike:it. Your mom did not remarry, and no no other she did remarry. She
Unknown:gave birth to no other children, but she did raise her husband's child, and she
Mike:was not married. No, they were living they were not married, living together. What name did you follow?
Unknown:Not named. She told me that she had no intention of naming me because she knew that she was not going to keep me. So on my birth certificate, it is only baby girl. Oddly enough, the birth certificate says that I was born at 7am and weighed seven pounds, zero ounce. You know, I think they kind of just put what they wanted to down. I was a labor and delivery nurse for years, so I know that the odds are not with that, but I was just baby girl, no name. How
Mike:is it to find out the last name? Like for me, I felt like, Oh, my God. Finally, some reality. I
Unknown:have very much connected with those names. Names are so important to me. I've done the ancestry and 23andme and I have traced my birth families back, and I relish in finding each new name. The histories of them are so unique. My name has never fit me. The name that I was given is not me, the surname that I grew up with that is not me, that is not my people, that is not my history. It was surreal and something that I just wish I had known growing up. I wish I had had the authenticity growing up. I think this is common with adoptees too. I have always melded into whichever group I was with at the time, and I have become whoever I've been with, just to try to fit in and to avoid getting that rejection again. If I'm so much like them, they're not going to reject me. I'm finding my place.
Mike:I just found my dad's name. I was almost 51 I've just been lamenting, Oh, I'm so behind. And you know, but then I talk to you, and it's like 2122 years, and you're still, I guess, process. I
Unknown:will be processing this for the rest of my life. I'm in an online support forum for adoptees one of my I look at him as my mentor, because he's very profound in his thought process. But he is 83 and he is still processing. He processes every day, and he helps other people process it. And He came to the conclusion that this will be with him, and this will be part of his daily thoughts, what he's working through every day until he's no longer in this life,
Mike:the older I get, and I guess especially since having found my paternal side of the family through DNA, this idea of just the new birth certificate, the original identity, erase your why is it?
Unknown:It's crazy. I can't figure
Mike:it out. You know, would it? I mean, would it have been they always say, well, it would it be too confusing for the kids? It really would that have been more confusing than this waking up every day, what it is, yeah, I think this is the justification. It's to
Unknown:make the adoptive parents and society more comfortable with an unnatural, uncomfortable situation. It's not about the adoptee, that's for sure. I have found that none of this is about the adoptee. It's about making the adoptive parents and society more comfortable with what's going on. We're just steeped in secrecy and lies and this unnatural relationship that we're supposed to be in some days, I just want to forget that I'm adopted. But how do you do that? How do you do that? I pull out that amended birth certificate, like when I have to renew any of my information passport, anything, and I look at it, it's a ridiculous, meaningless piece of paper.
Mike:Were you ready? Were you so ready to take your husband's name like, Thank God I can finally get rid of this
Unknown:name. The funny thing about that, this also ties into adoption and identity. I guess this is my third marriage. Gosh, I could do a whole podcast on why, and a lot. And a lot of it goes right back to the inability to I can't maintain relationships, if you want to know the truth about it. This is my third marriage. Names mean literally nothing to me, because they've always been somebody else's name, and never my actual name. The only names that have ever meant anything to me are the ones that I found when I searched I've been adopted, I've been married three times. These names mean literally nothing to me. It's not my true identity. We're
Mike:just born knowing how arbitrary these things are. It's like, Yeah, this is not who I am. It's like something that normal people have to study Zen for 20 years to understand. It's like, really, well, yeah, this is I call myself
Unknown:a casual nihilist, because my saying is, nothing matters. It's all gonna end. So nothing really matters anyway. That's my catchphrase, and I'm just your casual, everyday knowledge. Because to me, that's what being raised with no history and no identity. That's what it is. To me, nothing really matters. We don't have control over any of this. People are going to do with us what they want to and force us into these other roles. We don't have a say, and everything's going to end, and you don't have any control over it. My husband does call it happy thoughts with Alicia. He says, Oh, I see we're at happy thoughts with Alicia again today. But of course, he's not adopted. He can't understand, no,
Mike:my wife does not understand my obsession with horror movies and true crime. Oh, I do
Unknown:love true crime. I love any kind of mystery true crime.
Mike:I love things with obsessed detectives, because that was really me waking up every day on the search
Unknown:every day starting I guess I don't know. I can remember looking at strangers faces when I was maybe six or seven years old, like what you said, waking up every day in search mode, no matter what. And still, I hold out hope that I might have, and this is pretty ridiculous, but I hold out hope that I might have that half sibling that my father doesn't know about out there somewhere, and I'm going to have this person show up sometime, and I'm going to have this close relationship with them. It's like a just this longing that never goes away. Every time I get a new alert that I have a new person matched on Ancestry or 23andme the thought goes through my mind, this may be a sibling that nobody knows about. Yeah, this may be. It's still that searching for something two
Mike:people living in a commune in New Orleans in 72 there might be, who knows, siblings out there,
Unknown:and there could be and who knows what other big secret these two people could have. You know, who knows if I was kept a secret for that long, there's a possibility there are more secret. Adoption has made me very untrusting, and the repeated abandonment, because this is my third, and I'm pretty sure final time being abandoned by my mother that will make you lose trust in people. My birth father has not abandoned me. It's just that whole relationship. It's just It's just weird. He has these expectations that I am something different, I think, than what I am. I think that is on both sides with the adoptee and the original parent. I think the original parent if they've known about us, which some don't, but if they have known about us, they have these ideas of maybe the way that we grew up and what we turned out to be like, to some degree, not as much as the adoptee has about the parent, but I think these parents that do know about us have in their own mind what we should be like, but they've missed out on us growing up steeped in trauma. So it turns out that they may not like what they find either. It turns
Mike:out living in secrecy is not that healthy for anyone.
Unknown:No, it is not. What a shock, what a shock. I will say that growing up here in the south, and as I'm talking to you, I live on 120 acres out in the middle of nothing, growing up here, I knew that I was very different, and it made me so much more open to accepting everybody, because no matter who I looked at and who I saw, who I passed on the street, they could be related to Me. So it really helped me be a lot less. It just helped me be a lot more open to everyone. I'm not going to make any judgments, because that could be my actual family. I think
Mike:when you see how arbitrary everything is, if I had been adopted to somebody in Brooklyn, Jacob Bernstein. Or something, I'd have a whole different exact set of values and like. So why am I clinging to this? And you see how so called normal people just they cling to these values. They're raised in as if they're them, and there's only one way of living. And as adoptees, it's like, well, there's this whole you can mix and match. I
Unknown:could be any, I could be anything. I could be anybody. I could have went any, anybody could have came and picked me up that day, when I was three months old. They were the next in line to be called to come pick me up. I could have went anywhere. It just so happened that I came to a rural area on a farm, but I could have went anywhere. I could have been named anything. So why would a name matter to me? You know, insert name here. It was happenstance, and people say it was because I was raised in a very, very conservative religious home and church. And obviously that was not me. That was not where my internal compass was pointed, but I had to play the part and participate and all of this stuff. And a lot of times I've wondered, why me? Why did I get picked to come here and then people say it was God's will? I don't buy into that. If, if people do, then you know, I'm supportive of that, because that's your own idea. I've come now to saying to people, even in this rural religiosity centered area, this was not God's will. If there is a God, and that throws them off. First, if there is a God, then this trauma that was inflicted on me and every other person who was relinquished and abandoned, then I don't want any part of his will. I don't want to participate in that. And what you're saying is not helpful. You were talking about identity, and it's not just the name. This had to become my identity as well. Growing up this rural, religious centered life, it had to become my identity, because I didn't want to be abandoned again, you know, so I played my part well. I took this name that they gave me, and I wrote my own script as the days were being lived. I did it to the best of my ability, because I didn't want to be abandoned again, but now that I'm 50, I don't care anymore. You know, there's some freedom in that. It's not that I don't work through it still every day, but there is some freedom now in saying, if you don't have this experience of being adopted, and if you don't have this experience of like not having a name when you're born and having to live with people who you're not related to, then you have no right or ability to speak on what is and what is not in my realm, and I'm really glad at least that time and age is bringing me to that point.
Mike:Alicia, it's your first time talking about this publicly. No,
Unknown:yes. How is it for me, it's still like a taboo, like I'm gonna get in trouble. I will always feel like the bad baby who's going to get in trouble. I will always feel I'm saying the quiet things out loud that nobody wants to hear. I hope to become more vocal. And when you asked if I would like to do this, my inside voice said, you don't have anything to say. And then my big girl inside voice said, what you have to say is just as valid as what anybody else has to say and your experiences are just as valid as what anybody else has experienced living in the rural south, it's not as common for people to go against the narrative where it was, you know, God's will and that kind of thing. And I think somebody somewhere, hearing my voice coming from Alabama might make them feel less alone. If you can do it there, you can do it anywhere, baby.
Mike:Thank you. Alicia, holding down the fort for us adoptees on her 120 acre farm in Alabama, a voice for southern adoptees. I love her accent. I'm all in favor of regional accents. This no accent world we're heading toward. I'm 100% against it there. I've said it. Please subscribe. Please tell a friend if you like the show. If you don't like the show, maybe your friend. Would like it. Tell them anyway. Of course, there's Patreon, no stress, but just tell a friend about the show. That would be great. The downloads are amazing. It's very enjoyable to watch them. And you guys have given me great feedback, and I appreciate it. Feel free to email me. Tell me what you like, what you don't like. See you next week. You.