I Was Told My Birth Parents Died. That Wasn’t True.

What happens when the story you were told about your adoption turns out to be a lie, and you find out at the moment you need support the most?

In part one of this two-part episode, we talk with Marylee MacDonald, an adoptee who always knew she was adopted and believed she had a tragic but simple origin story. She was told her birth parents had been killed in a car accident. The door was closed. The past was settled.

Until it wasn’t.

At 15, when Marylee became pregnant, her adoptive mother revealed the truth. Marylee’s birth mother was alive. And she had been a teenage girl, just like Marylee.

This episode explores what it means to grow up being told you were “chosen,” while also learning that what can be chosen can also be unchosen. Marylee reflects on the pressure to perform, the subtle reminders that she was different, and the deep ache of growing up without mirrors. No one looked like her. No one sounded like her. No one shared her temperament, her intellect, or her fire.

Part one focuses on Marylee’s early life, her adoption, the lie she was told about her origins, and the experience of being sent to a home for unwed mothers with little explanation and no real choice. It is a story shaped by secrecy, shame, and survival in an era of closed adoptions and hidden pregnancies.

Part two will follow Marylee into the search for her birth family, the reunions that followed, and the son she was forced to surrender.

What We Talk About in Part One

• Knowing you were adopted, but not knowing the truth
• Being told you were “chosen” and the pressure that creates
• Subtle comments that signal you do not fully belong
• The absence of mirrors for adoptees
• Discovering the truth during a teenage pregnancy
• Being sent to a home for unwed mothers without explanation or consent
• How secrecy and shame shaped adoption in the 1950s and 60s
• The emotional cost of learning the truth too late

About Our Guest

Marylee MacDonald is an adoptee and author whose work explores adoption, identity, secrecy, motherhood, and reunion. Her writing reflects both the emotional cost of closed-era adoption and the long process of building real family connection after decades of separation.

Website 

Book: Surrender: A Memoir of Nature, Nurture, and Love 

Content Note: This episode includes discussion of teenage pregnancy, adoption secrecy, family rejection, and emotional distress. Please listen with care.

In part two, Marylee shares how she searched for her birth family long before DNA testing. Through microfilm, legal notices, and carefully scripted phone calls, she recounts the moment she heard a familiar voice on the other end of the line. She also shares how she reunited with the son she was forced to surrender, and what it means to build real family history after years of silence.

Connect with Family Twist

If this episode resonates with you, share it with someone who understands how family secrets shape identity. If you have a story of adoption, late discovery, or a family truth that surfaced years later, we would love to hear from you.

Family secrets are the ultimate plot twist.

Transcript

Adoption secrets and the story you’re told as a child

Corey 0:02

Welcome to Family Twist. Today's episode is one Canal and I have been reflecting on because it pulls together so many of the things that we talk about on here, but it does it in a way that feels almost cinematic. Adoption, secrets, shame, identity. And the way family history doesn't always show up as one clean story, but as fragments. A story you're told as a kid that sounds neat enough to accept until one day it isn't. Our guest is Mary Lee MacDonald. She's the author of a memoir that tells her adoption and reunion story in full, including the search, the fallout, and what it actually looks like to build relationships with found families over time. We'll link to Mary Lee's books in the show notes. Mary Lee is known to his adopted for as long as she can remember, like Kendall. She was given an origin story that sounded tragic but tidy. A car accident, a closed case, a version of the truth that felt complete enough to not question. And then, when Mary Lee was 15 and a half, she became pregnant. And in the middle of that crisis, her adoptive mother told her something that rearranged everything. Her birth mother hadn't died. She was alive. And she'd have been a teenage girl, just like Mary Lee. From there, Mary Lee walks us through what it felt like to grow up being told you were chosen, while also learning how fragile that idea can feel. The pressure to behave, to perform, to be grateful, to not screw up. The way adoption can still be loving and still quietly conditional at the same time. You'll also hear Mary Lee talk about something many adoptees recognize instantly, even if they've never had words for it. The lack of mirrors, not seeing yourself and anyone, not hearing your voice echoed back, not knowing where your temperament, your creativity, your stubbornness, your fire actually came from. Part one is the early chapters. The adoption, the lie, the pregnancy, the home for unwed mothers, and the moment Mary Lee realizes the story she was told is not the whole story. And in part two, we follow her into the search, the reunion. And what comes after the reunion when DNA gives you connection, but you still have to build shared history from scratch. Here's part one of our conversation with Mary Lee McDonald. Well, Mary Lee, welcome to the Family Twist Podcast.

Marylee 2:11

Thanks. It's great to be here.

Corey 2:13

Well, we're excited to have you and thank you for reaching out to us because part of our mission is sharing stories about adoption, adoptees, and every story is different, but then we find every story's got some similarities as well. So can we start off talking just a little bit about your adoption?

Adoptee hypervigilance, feeling different, and the absence of mirrors

Teen pregnancy at 15, home for unwed mothers, truth revealed

Marylee 2:30

Yeah, sure. Like Kendall, I knew from the get-go from as as freely as I could crawl under the bed and find the desk funnies. I think I knew I was adopted. It was always part of what he was almost out of my identity and made me feel special. I think there must have been a coaching system instigated by social workers and adoption workers that said, in order to prevent the child from being traumatized, you must tell them that you chose them rather than a regular parent who didn't get to choose their child. You just had to whoever they might have had. Well, that of course is a total myth because what can be chosen can also be unchosen. You know, on the surface, I bought that as a child. Oh, I was chosen, and it certainly was made to feel very special, given every kind of lesson here was dance and art, tap dancing, performance. You didn't even have it. My parents were not wealthy, but we made sure that I did childhood things that would be enriching for me. And at the same time, there were little comments made by my father in particular that suggested there was something not quite right. For instance, the comment I remember, and you know, as an adopted person, you're very hyper-attuned to what your parents were saying. Perhaps all children are. But anyway, he he made a joke one time about my dark hair and grain that, oh, she was supposed to be Irish, but there must have been some Spanish sailors that jumped off the shit when the Armada tried to invade England. And that's why she's so dark-haired and brown-eyed. Well, the dreams off that there are dark-haired Irish people. The black Irish, so-called. And yet for him, he was expecting somebody one and like his version of Irish. So those comics just stuck with me. You don't ever get in a car with a stranger. And I had the feeling of, well, who would come, you know, try, try to take me off the sidewalk. I was extremely cloistered as a child, not a lot, but with other kids. I don't know what that was about. Maybe there were kidnappies, and there was the Lindbergh 80-year-oldly work. Just little droplets of things that I couldn't quite make sense of. And when I was 15 minutes, I became pregnant with my high school boyfriend. And that is what I learned that my mother, your father had not showed them a pharax. As I had been told and believed all my life. Oh, your mother, no, she wanted to raise you, but she was still in a car after. And your father too was very tragic. Totally in Malwarty. It turns out that when my mother asked me if I could be grunting, and I responded yes, she said, You're just like your mother. Just like my mother? But you don't know anything about my mother. My mother was was dead in a car crash. No, she wasn't. She was a 16-year-old girl just like you. That was almost wonderful to fucking pop. Yeah. But I was like someone. Because I think growing up as I looked at one of it, yeah, the thing I missed was having a mirror. There was no one around who looked like me, who had my personality. I had no other siblings, and my parents were very old, like yours. So they were as old as most people's grandparents. And had gotten me because Namakranu the adoption was the food. Showed him some society should get a serarius system. So it was a not private adoption, it was through a social working agent. And anyway, the contrast between people I grew up with and the family I eventually found was just completely stunning. And it took me a long time to figure out how to find them. But because I had dog, and I didn't know anybody who didn't bother seeing a pregnant woman. My mother didn't have friends who were pregnant. She obviously 42 when she adopted me. Was not unique. So I had zero practical knowledge. I never babysit. Babysat I did it with the neighborhood with the remote children. I basically knew the the sixth grade version of how babies are for. In those days it was a black and white movie, but all the girls were ticking it in one room, the boys were kicking it to the other room.

Corey 8:02

I just had a flashback, I think it was probably fifth or sixth grade, but the boys movie was hosted by Jimmy Cricket.

Kendall 8:09

Oh really? Wow. That seems very odd.

Adoption stigma, inheritance, and who really belongs in a family

Corey 8:15

It is it is odd. In fact, I'm gonna have to Google and find out what that was all about because it I it even seemed odd at the time. So, Mary Lee, just to get a little bit more perspective about your adoptive parents, did they advise you how you should tell people you were adopted, or how did they introduce you and let people know that you were adopted?

Marylee 8:36

I think it was generally pretty well known if I was adopted. They would say this is Mary Lee, our daughter. They wouldn't say this is our adopted daughter, although in inheritance, when one of Uncle left me some money in his will, he referred to me as his adopted niece. So therefore he left the majority of his money to charity. And I think that was just a hedge to say, I don't really owe her anything. She's got family, she comes to quite a greater share of the inheritance. You can say no because she's just adopted. I mean, the issue of adoption often comes up when you're giving out the family jewelry. It's an adopted child and others that are not adopted or standing at a grave. Wow, that's the tiny the the family blood wife seems to really bubble up. Those who are not are separated at that time into one camp or the other.

Corey 9:45

So going back to what your adopted mother said, you're just like your mother, obviously that's the the nature part of things, not the nurture part. And while you might have had those thoughts that, oh, okay, maybe I am like somebody out there, at what point did you realize that you had been lied to your pretty much your whole life?

Marylee 10:05

I realized then right then and right then. Okay. Absolutely.

Corey 10:08

And how did that impact you immediately?

Marylee 10:11

I think when really began wounding my mother, or Telling Ian that way, for at the moment of my greatest vulnerability, she failed to model unconditional my adoptive mother. And is that not what any mother is supposed to do? Love a child unconditional. There had always been a condition condition was that you will be a star CD. You'll reflect well with you'll make us proud of you because I waited a long time trying to get you, and therefore I want some pity back.

Kendall 11:05

There were moments when I felt that way about my adoptive father, not my mother so much, but my adoptive father. And maybe it had nothing to do, maybe he would have been that way with a biological child. I don't know, but the the pressure to be the best was very, very present, you know, and it was positive most of the time. But boy, don't bring home a B when you're used to making straight A's because you know my mother had died by the time that ever happened. And my dad, that's when he was not tolerating, you know, a B level work, you know, wasn't gonna happen.

Nature vs nurture, temperament, creativity, and genetic truth

Marylee 11:51

Yeah. In my case, my mom was a school teacher, and so academic success was super important to her. And she worked with slow learners. Well she basically had the hide books from me because she was worried that I was gonna be hoarded school. I wasn't hoarded school, but when I met my biological gambling, of course, it made sense that I would be the academically. I mean my mom was really smart, she didn't go to knowledge because she got pregnant at a young age and it refused to serve her a new CLA where she comes to the and she got married two years later. She was a great writer, I'm a liar. Beautiful, beautiful letter writer. My three sisters are all quite kappas. Yeah, so there's some don't ask me to do math, but on the verbal side, we can get our background to draw.

Corey 12:58

So now before we go down the path of finding your birth family, and before we go down the path of your pregnancy, can you tell us just a little bit about the circumstances of which how you're the pregnancy with of your mother and what happened once it was discovered she was pregnant?

Marylee 13:13

Yeah, my mother was my same age, actually, in 15 and a hat. I have a picture of her pregnant holding a cat and I'm the lump under the cat. She was living in Southern California in Culver City, and she would go down to a beach, go to the beach every weekend with friends, take the streetcar down there, and she met a guy, he was 19, and he was not in the army, so probably while guys were still serving overseas. I was born in 45, just at the tail end of the war. My father was she told my sisters that Progneti became a result of date, right? But I don't know that it was because he he gave her a necklace that she'd kept all her life and gave to me. And I think that the man who was the father of all my siblings my forced at once. I think that was a story she may made uh to tell the family because I think she was just a you know away nine years with on a heart to try. But I think it was more consensual because because she actually had the necklace and a couple of other things that she kept front end. And when I talked to him, she said, oh yes, I remember her very well. We were very much in love. But of my siblings on on that side, one of my sisters on that part of the family said, Well, there were probably hundreds of you out there, because he was a serial monogans, married four times, but he know had multiple ways. And on that side of the family, my his his brother, my half-brother, died in his unquietme after having stalked him, killed his wife in blood daylight. Oh my. So the thing was blaming him and wife that part of the family is all in construction and illegal activities. Like letting the air out of tires and a parking lot and in Robbie's and letting and what so when I put all those pieces together, it's the pieces of the hustle, and that feels right too. There's a certain aspect of impulsivity that it is uh that I own up to. I can be pretty impulsive. I have a very bad temper. You would never guess it, because I'm not a new bad view right now. I worked construction for about 30 years. I was a contractor, which is unusual for a woman to do that. But I felt that I had innate ability, and I've had started building things when I was a kid. Building the forts. I had the straight fort in my backyard. It was still on a great harbor. There was some ability that was coming through that geometric tree as well.

Corey 16:46

Yeah, more of the nature coming through.

Marylee 16:48

Yes, more nature coming through.

Alcoholism, fear, and control inside an adoptive family

Corey 16:50

So it sounds like the revelation that you were pregnant instantly changed the relationship with your adoptive mother. What about your adoptive father?

Marylee 16:59

My adoptive father was actually used in karma visitors up the thing as karma worry. Well, when I found out about my bird father, he gave me his kind of a scallywag, I guess you would say. My adoptive father was very much that way too. He was an alcoholic. And he drove around with car chains under his front seat. So in case he had some moment of road rage, he could jump out and he could grab things and swing them like a gladiator at the offending driver. He also had a hammer under his fret seat. Violet, my mother got a divorce when I was 13. So he was not around, I never saw him. He died on Speed Row in Los Angeles.

Corey 17:50

Wow. So he didn't even know that you were pregnant.

Marylee 17:53

No, he didn't, and my mom was afraid because she was afraid he would try to get custody of it. So that's but her solution to that was to take Moganda Phoenix to a friend Led Brothers, where I could hide Alice. And she was very protective. I didn't realize until I looked at the lever notes how completely terrified she was that he would kind of insert himself back into her my leg. I think she was the pride that I would be molested. She was afraid that I was airing to the edge where he would do something to me. But what he did to me was give me idiom rope burrings, yeah, punch me in the stomach, ones like that to toughen me up. From the time I was 13 on, he was not in our in our life. You choose flats and got a court order.

Corey 18:52

She didn't really give you any kind of choice in the matter. Like you were going to the house of unwed mothers, you're gonna have this baby, the baby's gonna be adopted.

Searching without DNA tests, loyalty, grief, and delayed reunion

Marylee 18:59

She didn't give me any choice, but she also didn't talk to me about it. It was the only discussion about it. And in the home, I wasn't talking to her. When we looked down in Phoenix through two and a half months, yeah, I probably said five words to her. Can you take me to the library? I hate stamps. I was just totally numb. Is the best way to describe it. Numb with confusion. With missing my boyfriend, with uncertainty about what this meant. I was uh and a student and ended up graduating from Stanford with an honors from honors. Yeah, that has two he plucked out of my academic track in the middle at the end of my sophomore year of high school. And that just Found that the first semester, my junior year of high school friend with mothers was just totally disoriented. With an air was very nice. Nobody ever talked to you about what I was going to do. Surrender not surrendered like that. Uh yeah. There were threats of paternity suit. My uncle was recknaming my boyfriend without the paternity suit. Because I was underage. And his goal was to go to West Point, which he eventually did. And then black with her f with a kiblash on his academic hat or less a condition.

Corey 20:48

So, you know, this is the very early 60s, so clearly no way to do a DNA test or anything like that. At what point did you start thinking about, well now at least I know that my parents were killed in a car crash. How do I find them?

Part two preview, adoptee search, reunion, and finding mirrors

Marylee 21:02

Yeah. Well, when I went in the home for unlored mothers, I was just thinking about surviving. I didn't search for my for my mom until after my adoptive mother died. And I think that's fairly common because of the feeling of disloyalty. I had a swan feeling that I had ruined my mother's life a day. And yeah, I had ruined her life, and then she actually physically fell apart. She developed a condition called fluidruvia, which is a jerking of half of her body. And so she had to take a six-luck leaf from work. And that calmed down while we were in Phoenix. She was a little bit overlapped. But I think between the whole Ruha cause and my father. And then followed by my pregnancy. And also the death of her mother, which had occurred between the time my father left and I got pregnant. Her mother, who lived with us, my my very, very amazing and stalwart grandmother, passed away quite suddenly. And it was at actually at Posmola that uh I came back from the hospital one night after having stayed in San Francisco with my mom, grandmother who was covering from surgery. My mom said, Well, why don't you go, Mom? You know, you've been up all night. So I said, Okay, but how? She said, Well, you could take her bus. Do you know anybody who's kicked you up at the bus station? He said, Yeah, I just left his thigh at youth club. And he could probably pick you up. And actually, that was how I got up with my husband. But he did pick me up at the bus station and you know the rest, five children later.

Corey 23:17

Wow. That was part one of our conversation with Mary Lee MacDonald. And if you want to spend more time with her story beyond what we can fit into a podcast episode, Mary Lee has written a memoir about her adoption and found family journey, and we'll include all that information in the show notes. I'm gonna pause on something she said that I think a lot of our listeners will feel in their bones. The idea of being told you were chosen, and how quickly that can turn into pressure. To earn your place, to be perfect, to be careful, to not disappoint. Mary Lee's story is also a reminder that adoption secrets aren't just paperwork or backstory. They shape childhood, they shape trust, they shape how safe you feel inside your own family. And when the truth finally shows up, it rarely arrives gently. In part one, we were still in the early layers: the adoption, the clues that don't quite line up, the lie about her birth mother, the pregnancy of 15, and the feeling of being carried through a life-changing experience without anyone really stopping to ask what she wanted or needed. Part two is where the search begins. And it's not a modern click-a-button searching, it's old school. Microfilm. Legal notices buried in the property section of the newspaper. Phone calls where you have no idea who will answer, or how they'll respond, or whether the line will go dead. And when she does find them, you hear something so many adoptees describe. That moment where the world tilts back into place. The voice, the resemblance, the mirror. Part 2 goes live next week, and I don't think you want to miss it. If you want to support the show, the best thing you can do is share this episode with someone who understands that family secrets aren't just gossip. Their legacy, their identity, they're real. Thanks for listening. And remember, Family Secrets are the ultimate plot twist. The Family Twist podcast is presented by Sab Watfair Marketing Communications and produced by Hav the Cowite the Cabbage LLC.