EPISODE 016 | Wendy Jackman: Adoption, Art, and the Fight to Be Seen

In this conversation, Wendy Jackman joins Lee to explore what it means to stay visible in a culture that often demands silence and invisibility—especially for women. Wendy shares her journey through adoption, navigating a narcissistic parent, and learning to recognize the patterns of dissociation that shaped her life. Together, they unpack the generational myths of independence, the economic forces that make people disappear, and the importance of art, writing, and storytelling in reclaiming presence and truth.

Key Topics Covered

• Adoption, gratitude myths, and generational silence
• Parenting shifts: from “don’t cuddle” to interconnectedness
• Economic precarity and invisibility in society
• Dissociation as survival and the struggle to return to presence
• Creativity as healing and resistance
• The impact of streaming on artists and cultural value
• Family truths, loss, and reclaiming connection through story

Wendy offers a powerful reminder that owning our stories is how we resist invisibility. What stories from your own life have you been holding in silence? What might happen if you gave them a voice? Share your reflections with me on Instagram @crone.rising.official.

Crone Rising is for every woman who’s done being quiet and done being small. We’re not here to fade. We’re here to rise — unapologetic, unmuted, and unmissable.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Thank you for joining me on Crown Rising. And you're very welcome. How do you maintain your relevance in a world that wants you to be invisible?

SPEAKER_01 0:24

When you sent the question, I found it so fascinating. Um, it very much meshes with a lot of the work that I've been doing, which has been around um my adoption and trying like finally getting to this place uh in my life where I've stopped, I've stopped uh accepting the be silent, accept however you're treated, and just you know, do whatever you're told. I'm there's nobody left to do that for.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

And be and be grateful.

SPEAKER_01 1:03

Oh, the grateful thing is is astonishing. Yeah, like the fact that you know you you have all these people who are like, we're we're going to treat you badly, and then we'd like you to say nice things about us and uh and thank us. It's crazy.

SPEAKER_00 1:26

Well, as a non-adopted person, I can say I got plenty of that too. Absolutely. I think it might be the generation that raised us.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

I think for sure it is. It's funny, I was uh reading yesterday about someone who was writing about rearing children uh in the 50s, and this whole concept that, you know, don't cuddle your children, don't kiss them, don't hug them, don't uh whatever you do physically around, you know, giving them comfort or giving them love or picking up a crying baby, all of that will be very bad for your baby. And the fact that we now know that's the exact opposite of what babies need is quite telling, I think.

SPEAKER_00 2:14

That way of thinking about things is so anti like feminine.

SPEAKER_01 2:21

Well, and I think it it speaks directly against what all of our instincts as mothers, you know, you have a baby and you there it's not a question. You don't you don't when you hear your baby cry, you don't think, gosh, I wonder what I should do now. Well, your instinct is to go pick up the baby and care for it. And crying is baby language, and we understand it as moms. We're like, I know what that means. That means you need a thing. I might not know what the thing is, but if I go to you and pick you up, I'll pretty soon figure out, you know, which of the few things it is. There's not a long list. There's there's so much energy around. Um, I think certainly in our generation growing up, this whole, you know, be independent from the moment you exit the womb. I think we're finally coming around again to an understanding of the interconnectedness that we require to thrive.

SPEAKER_00 3:24

I just want to go places and see things that I haven't seen before. It doesn't have to be in a hotel room that I'm never gonna set foot in except to sleep and pay through the nose for it.

SPEAKER_01 3:36

Yeah, it's interesting. Um I am not in that place through circumstances. And um even then, just this concept that um like I think that I've been able to shift my expectations toward gratitude and to be able to say, you know, I live in this giant house. I can I can make art, I can do writing, which is what I've wanted to do, you know, through my whole teaching career. I was like, I just want to retire and write. Um, and being able to do that, whether or not it means like right at the moment, I'm like, listen, I have a roof over my house or roof over my head, like a place to be. And um, and that provides me with uh a degree of stability, even if the rest of the finances are a mess, I know that you know, I have this place that is a chunk of investment money that hopefully will look after me. But even if it doesn't, it's um I just I just look at how many people now are in these places where their finances are falling apart in like tsunamis of things that people have not uh looked ahead at and been able to foresee and suddenly are going, you know, people are the these people that have worked their whole lives and are now homeless, it's it boggles my mind. I have such privilege, and there are so many people that don't, and it's yeah, it's very eye-opening, and it's scary when I look at you know what what is their life going to look like. You know, it's not like I even have the means to be able to help at this stage, which makes it worse. Um and it and it's very interesting. I think it ties into this idea of invisibility because when we are all forced to work more and to, you know, if we previously had money and now we don't have any income that we can share with these people in our world who are struggling, it makes more people invisible. You know, like people like me who used to, you know, give money to this charity and that charity, and now I'm like, I'm not even sure if I can pay my bills. I'm looking at, you know, how do we cut things down? How do we make sure that all this stuff happens?

SPEAKER_00 6:32

So the economics are making everybody disappear.

SPEAKER_01 6:36

And and purposefully the when I when I look around and I see things like um in Toronto spending millions of dollars to remove encampments, like the the whole economy of scale has just become bizarre. We're gonna spend millions of dollars to remove these people so we can't see them anymore. Because when we see them, we feel bad, and instead of actually solving the problem with that giant amount of money that you just threw at them for no reason, and the problem is still there and it's going to recur, and now there are more. Part of my writing has been about discovering my own sense of dissociation and discovering just how much dissociation I have done in my life. So I started, um I struggled a lot with uh dealing with being the only person left in my family to deal with my narcissistic mother. And having uh to go through things with her, through health things, and trying to get her that she has dementia, and trying to get her to move. What I found was that I was getting triggered by all these things as soon as I was in her company. And one of the things that I didn't, you know, I would come home and then try to like reset myself and put the pieces back together, and several months later would sort of emerge into the world again, uh, feeling maybe a little less sane than I did before. And I don't think I really understood to what degree both I and we as a society um have learned how to dissociate from all of these uncomfortable things that, you know, uh, I don't think I understood how much reading and and watching I did to dissociate, to feel safe, to be in a place that didn't exist in the real world, so that the real world could just spin itself over here and I could feel grounded. And coming to terms with that and sort of looking at my own life and going, oh my goodness, that's what that is. The thing where I don't want to clean my house is dissociation, the thing where I feel like if I have to figure out what I'm gonna make for dinner, I'm gonna lose my shit, is dissociation. Like I've I'm not present in my life. And that to me has been an incredible awakening, um, an understanding that through my children saying, You're doing this thing again, mom, you're talking about grandma all the time, and I need you to stop. Um, and having, you know, my kids have some good mental health boundaries has pushed me again to do more work and said, Oh, that's a bad pattern. And in the same way that, you know, we dissociate from the things that we see around us that hurt us and that make our souls cringe. I think that we do it to such a huge degree. Our society has been set up to allow us, you know, it says, gosh, you've had a hard day. Watch this thing, and you will be lost in it, and you won't think about yourself.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

Yeah, we have a lot of escape routes. Boy, do we ever.

SPEAKER_01 10:45

One of the things that's been interesting about creating um art and writing, as I'm sure you know, is that we have this society that is entirely dependent upon those things. Creation, music, uh you know, theater, art, television, podcasts, all of these incredible creative outlets for people. And yet society continually wants to like pull the mat out from underneath these things. It says, you know, well, we're not going to fund that. We're going to, you know, ignore the fact that like when we hit COVID and suddenly people spent all day using music to keep themselves from going insane. And yet people didn't understand the impact that COVID was having on all of these artists. And and the machine that switched everything from our previous ingestion of those things. You know, we would buy an album, we would buy, you know, the work of a particular artist, and you would go to see their concert and whatever you would do. I don't think people even still really understand what streaming did to artists and how many people got hurt by that whole takeover thing. Right? And this concept that we can we can own our own behavior, we can own our own things, and if we do that, if we can integrate those damaged parts of ourselves into our adult, we can say that thing happened. Yeah. And it felt it was really hard. It hurt me a lot, and I felt really ashamed about it. Um, and this uh this is what I'm relating to with you talking about like letting those stories out into the world. And this for me is an experience that I did not understand how much of a um, I don't even know how to phrase it, but like this tone of silence that existed in my family because of this toxic way of relating to one another, and nobody was allowed. Like, my brother and I didn't talk. Everything was triangulated through my mother. She controlled all the information. So my dad died, and then shortly after that, my brother got a brain tumor, and then he died of his brain tumor. And after he died, we my sister-in-law had a ceremony um to spread his ashes at their cottage, and we were all there, and my mother left early, and we stood on the dock and for the very first time in our lives told truths that we had never shared. And this concept that we've all been holding on to these, you know, horrible pains and not understanding that in our effort to try to let our inner critics, you know, drive the bus and not shame this person in our life who really kind of deserved the shame, um, we we had become very, very dysfunctional. And that by owning the stories and by sharing the stories, that community, that connection could come back. I think that's what you know, you're talking about this. We've uh we've definitely reached the I don't have any fucks left to give stage, right? Whatever, like all the hurt, there are other things that could happen in my life that could hurt me, but when I look back at what I've made it through, I'm like, whatever, man, we're good.