She Placed Two Sons for Adoption. Then Spent a Lifetime Helping Families Heal.

What does adoption feel like for the person who never had a choice?

In this episode of Family Twist, Corey and Kendall talk with Leslie Pate Mackinnon, LCSW, a birth mother, therapist, and one of the most respected voices in the adoption and donor conception space.

As a teenager, Leslie placed her two firstborn sons for adoption during a time when young women were often given little say in the outcome. That experience didn’t fade with time. It shaped the course of her life and her work.

For more than four decades, Leslie has maintained a private psychotherapy practice, helping adoptees, birth parents, and families navigate the lifelong emotional impact of adoption, identity, and family secrets. She presents nationally and internationally on issues affecting families formed through adoption and third-party reproduction.

Leslie has been featured on Good Morning America with Robin Roberts, appeared on CNN discussing the impact of the internet on adoption, and was part of Dan Rather’s investigative report Adoption or Abduction. She also appeared on The Katie Couric Show alongside her oldest son, Pete. Her story is included in the book The Girls Who Went Away and the documentary A Girl Like Her.

This conversation goes where many don’t.

Leslie shares what it was like to lose her children without having a real choice, how that experience stayed with her, and what she’s learned after spending decades sitting with others navigating similar truths. She also talks about what therapists still misunderstand about adoption, and why education in this space matters more than ever.

This is a conversation about adoption stories, family secrets, and the emotional reality behind DNA discovery and identity.

If you’ve ever been part of an adoption story, an NPE discovery, or a donor-conceived family, this episode will hit close to home.

Listen now to hear Leslie’s story, and the truth she’s spent a lifetime helping others understand.

Transcript

Kendall 0:02

Hey everybody, it's Kendall. Before we get into this conversation, I want to say something about Leslie. Corey had already heard her story before the Untangling Our Roots conference. He knew the beats, he knew the moments, he knew what was coming. And still, when she stood up and delivered that keynote, it hit him in a way he didn't expect. It wasn't just the story, it was the truth in it, the weight of it, the way she carries it and hands it to a room full of people who suddenly feel a little less alone. And that's really who Leslie is. She didn't just show up to untangling our roots in the biggest way. She helped spark it. She helped create the kind of space where people can finally say the quiet parts out loud. And now she's inspiring a whole new generation across these communities. Adoptees and PEs, donor-conceived people, people trying to make sense of where they come from. And there's also something Corey and I both love about her that you'll hear in this episode. She's a jazz person. And I felt that immediately. Leslie talks about listening to Miles Davis while her son was still in utero, just lying there letting that music wash over both of them. And I don't know, something about that just broke me up a little bit. Because it reminded me that connection doesn't always start where we think it does. Sometimes it's there before we ever even understand it. So this episode, it's about truth. It's about what happens when someone decides they're finally going to tell it all. Here's Corey with Leslie.

Corey 1:49

Leslie, thank you for joining us on the Family Twist Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

I wanted to do this with you since I met you a couple of years ago at UTOR. So I'm glad we finally got it together.

Corey 2:00

And we're excited to have you. Yes, it was such an amazing event. I thought we could start if we could rewind a little bit, and you could tell us where you were in your life when you had to relinquish.

SPEAKER_00 2:15

I can do that. That's the good starting place, because that's how come I'm here in this position now. I got pregnant, Corey, when I was 17 years old, just as I was graduating high school, and was gonna get married. I c I will take a big swallow and tell you that wasn't top on my hip parade. I was about to leave for college, but my boyfriend said, no, no, I'm a stand-up guy, we'll get married, and you can come go to college with me. So that was the plan. And till his parents got involved in things and didn't want me to ruin their son's life. And how did I know it was his baby? He'd been my only boyfriend for a couple of years, you know. So they swift him back to college, and there I sat and my parents and I looked at each other, and they came up with the next plan, which was the plan of the day. Being a good Catholic girl, they went to the family priest, and I was sent to a home for unwed mothers about a hundred miles from where we lived. Oh my story was that I went to France to live with my relatives and learn French. And I want you to know that my mother packed me off to the homewed unwed mother's home with a whole set of like eight records so that I could learn French while I was gone. And not one soul came up to me and said, say something in French. So that that's what happened, and I really had no idea how it was gonna hit me, Corey. I just was this little pregnant girl. I felt like I was in a a dorm with all these other college girls. The only thing was we all had big tummies, and then every so often somebody left in tears, and we never see him again. And once I gave birth and I saw my son, then it all imploded on me. It was a concept until then. It wasn't a reality. And I got very, very depressed.

Corey 4:14

Did you get to hold him?

SPEAKER_00 4:16

I did get to hold him. I did get to baptize him, named him, and yes, I had about four days with him where they'd let me feed him daily, and that was wonderful.

Corey 4:29

But also how hard. I mean because you're you're bonded at that point. Yeah. There's a bond before he's born, but you're really bonded.

SPEAKER_00 4:39

And Corey, I looked at him and it was like looking at the birth father and myself staring back at me. I followed the rules because I was trying to be a good girl, and I had already messed up pretty bad here, so they said, Don't ever speak of this again, don't talk about it. You will go on to have other children, and this'll just be a faint memory. And in fact, when I went for my six-week checkup after the pregnancy, which is all women do that, and the doctor said to me now, Don't you ever tell the man you marry about this? Men don't want damaged goods. Got that well, that imprinted right in there, damaged goods, keep your mouth shut. So I did, and exactly nine months later, my first high school boyfriend from long ago came to visit me at the Catholic girls' school my mother sent me to. Because my mother thought, send her to a Catholic girls' school. That can't happen again. For Christ. They did have males in that state and in that county, and then this old boyfriend came to visit. And honestly, I tell people this, we drank a pint of Rebel Yel, and I remember nothing. Rebel Yel is boobing in the South, for those of you who do not know. And the next morning I thought, oh, we didn't, did we? Because I never had with him. And I thought, well no, maybe, maybe we didn't, maybe we didn't. He was on his way to Vietnam. He went ahead and left. And six weeks later, I was barfing in the toilet, and I said, Oh. That spelled S-H-I-T. I just tried to try to make it soft. But anyway, I I couldn't tell anybody, Corey. And that spring my mother came and picked me up at school and I lied and told her I didn't like it there. I didn't want to go back. Because I knew I was pregnant, but I didn't know what I was going to do. And I had all kinds of thoughts of running away. It ended up that I just kind of got frozen, went to college in my hometown that year. I kept gaining weight and kind of hunching over and hoping nobody would ask me any questions. And about three days before I delivered my son, my stepdad came in the room and said, you know, we don't know quite how to say this, and nobody wants to hurt your feelings, but you look just like you did when you were pregnant with Joseph a few couple of years ago. And I remember thinking, put that in the form of a question, because by this time I literally was almost mute. And he didn't, and I cried and he left the room. And three days later, I was at work not feeling well, and I came home and I delivered my son myself alone in the bathroom with my grandmother downstairs, screaming at the TV. She was watching football. She came up once and said, Are you okay? And I said, Mm-hmm. And she left. And then that night my mother got home from work and knocked on the door and said, Are you okay in there? And I said, Not really. I have a baby here with me. To which she told me a decade later, she thought I had kidnapped someone's child. Oh my goodness. Denial is a big thing, Corey. The story is wild. You don't want to see what you don't want to see. You just don't see it. And she noticed that every time I saw a baby, I would cry. And she thought I finally lost it and went and stole someone's child until she opened the door, and then she could see from the aftermath of birth that nope, he had born been born right there. And nobody ever asked me a question. A day later, a friend of my mother's came and picked him up and took him to an adoption agency. No questions asked. And uh I saw him once, my second son, when I signed the paperwork, which was about two months later, because I was really out of it. But I have to tell you, while I was out of it, that is the one semester in college I made the dean's list.

Corey 8:53

I just want to share this with you. So go. Kendall and I purposely don't go into the these interviews knowing too much. And I think it serves us well because the audience doesn't know much either. But I gotta tell you, I mean, my head is like swimming.

SPEAKER_00 9:07

The biggest question I always get, so I'll say it in case anybody's wondering, is they said, How come your parents didn't notice, you know, what was going on with them? And I said, Believe you me, they asked themselves that for the next 20 years. How did we miss that? And as I said, big dresses, I gained 75 pounds. The dresses were called moo moos and they were just flowing. And I hunched over and I just didn't say anything. And they were as horrified as I was. Well, what do you think I was studying in college? Was psychology and human behavior. And sometimes, like I said, if you don't want to know something or you're just like overwhelmed, you can block a lot of stuff out. Look what I did for years, Corey. I was so upset at what I could have done to him because he got no prenatal care. I couldn't tell anybody, and I felt so bad about my condition landing on him and him having to suffer all that. That was the hardest part for me of coming out of the fog. The hardest and the best was learning what my sons had been through in their lives, because I was told they were going to live happily ever after with these great parents. And they both actually did get good parents. I'm so glad for that. But one set of them got divorced, and the others were much older, and they were good people. There's no perfect parents. There's no perfect scenario, and that's what I had been banking on all those years, and I had no idea that adoption was gonna cause the wounds in them that I'd been carrying. I knew what I'd been through, but I figured they didn't, so they were gonna be just fine. Duh. Then I studied what mother and child separation does to human beings. It was heartbreaking. That was the hardest part for me. But I wouldn't trade what I've learned from adoptees for anything, because that's the passion behind my work. I never want anybody to have to go through what you, I, Kendall, have been through, and most of it's about the secrecy and shame, and I just hate that. So now I tell it all.

Corey 11:32

Do you think therapy was gonna be your path had you not gotten pregnant?

SPEAKER_00 11:36

I think oh if I hadn't gotten pregnant, boy, that's a good question. I did have a leaning. I did really like psychology, but I will say I had a little nun when I was in the maternity home. She was all of 25 years old, and she came and visited me, I think it was every other week or something, and she was a social worker nun, and I thought, no, I could do this. And the more I went and the more I got into psychology, I also came from a very chaotic growing up. My family life was check, check, you could check all the dysfunctions there were, and we had a little bit of everything. And so I kind of leaned towards it, it's true, by the way, everybody laughs about therapists or pretty screwed-up people who just went to school to find out what happened in their family. That's a true fact. We don't like to tell you that, but that is exactly how most therapists get there, not all. And uh But I remember seeing this nun and thinking, well, if she can do this and she doesn't have any experience with this at all, because she's a nun, I think I could be really impactful sitting with people in their pain. Because I've had a lot of it. And I'm here and I'm a survivor. And even at that young age, I knew I'm gonna survive this and I'm gonna go on and do something with my life. So I know that it impacted my decision, but I kind of was on that scent anyway of psychology, just because of the former things that had happened in my family.

Corey 13:10

So hey, quick pause. If you haven't read Surrender, a memoir of Nature, Nurture, and Love by Mary Lee MacDonald, it's definitely worth your time. We had Mary Lee on for episodes 181 and 182, and her story goes to a place a lot of these conversations don't. What it actually took to search for family before DNA, before the internet, when it was microfilm phone calls, and a lot of guts. Unlike what you're hearing today, it's not clean or simple. There's connection, there's distance, and a lot of truth sitting right in the middle of it. If Leslie's story is resonating with you, Mary Lee's will too. All right, back to Leslie. At what point did you think about using uh you know this passion for psychology for helping people? Because, you know, when you were studying and this wasn't something that this wasn't a conversation that was happening. Like there were still not enough therapists for adoptees or people with you know DNA surprises. So when what was that aha moment?

SPEAKER_00 14:17

Actually, I became a therapist, but I was trained in psychoanalytic therapy, which was Sigmund Freud, and one of them is that therapists should be a blank slake, and you never reveal anything about yourself. Well, that fit for me because I knew that if I revealed anything about myself, my clients would run out the door, was my fear. My friends run out the door. So I hid behind that shield and I had a generic kind of practice. I saw lots of teens, I love teenagers, and so forth. And then as I got into adoption land and I began to learn everything I learned, I said, oh my God, there are no therapists here. What is going on? And this is this is big tea trauma. This ain't little tea trauma. This is a big deal. And I knew none of my psychological peers had a clue what I was talking about when I was first learning all this. They were like, well, adoption's really wonderful. And I said, it has some good parts, but it got some really so when I first did get into a lot of organizations, of adoption organizations, and I started telling my story in smaller ways, and then I'd get asked to come speak, and then they'd want me to speak in front of a big group, and they want me to always tell that part of my story about, you know, having one baby and then delivering my second baby. I thought I was the only woman in the world who could have ever done this twice. Well, when I went to search, the nun, that's the first thing the nun told me is, oh, sweetie, this happened to so many girls and they were pregnant again immediately. You guys were trying to fill the hole that was in you. And I said, God dang, I wish somebody had told me that earlier. So you believe you me, I did tell a lot of young pregnant women, you know, you're going on birth control once we get through this, because we just didn't have enough choices. We didn't have enough options, if you will, about how to take care of ourselves. I do recall that when I was being asked to stand up and speak in front of large groups, I'd think, oh, I can't believe it. And still to this day, when I get to the part of having had two children, I can feel it flushing in the back of my neck sometimes. But it's true that the truth does set you free because the more times I said it, people would come up and say, same thing happened to my sister, or oh, I'm so glad you shared that with us. That just really got my attention. I had no idea that the mother suffered as much as they did. And so I just began to know that I was doing the right thing. And that if it was a little hard, too bad, so sad. I needed to keep doing it. And I did feel freedom from doing it too. Don't get me wrong. I did get the relief and had other therapists who said to me, You're so much more authentic.

Corey 17:17

Before we get into the search for your sons, what did your mother think about you getting into this line of work and helping other adoptees?

SPEAKER_00 17:24

That's interesting. She did tell me when I became a clinical social worker, she said, You're doing what I always would have done with my life had I gone to college. And I was surprised because she'd never let me know that. So I think in some ways she was silently maybe nudging me a little bit. Now, when we told her I was gonna be working in adoption, she almost fell on her face because, and I'm gonna talk about that some when we talk about my search and my reunion, because it was like, oh, but you're not gonna find them, are you? And I said, eventually, yeah, mom, I'm gonna do that. When I finally said to her, guess what? I'm gonna search, she was like, Is it gonna be in the front page of the paper in her little town in Florida? I said, What? I live 600 miles away. No, I don't think it'll be newsworthy. And she said, Well, when that happens here, they put those stories in the paper. And I said, Don't worry about it. But I will say, till the day my mother died, she had met both of my sons. She had relationships with them, she thought they were fabulous, and she kept their pictures in the upstairs hallway because she was afraid that somebody would walk in the door and say, Who's that? And she'd have to tell.

Corey 18:41

Would you or were you able to have conversations with her about like what you were feeling, what you were experiencing through through both of those, or was that just no, unfortunately.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

And my story got written up in the girls who went away. And that was kind of a big deal when that got published. I about lost it again because I was picturing my high school classmates reading the story and going, could that be less? But anyway, I said something about, well, you know, my story's been put in a book, and she said, Oh, I don't even want to hear about it. I don't want to hear about it. And, you know, just think of all the things I've learned, and it's made me tougher and more resilient. That truth is there, but it took me a much longer time to be able to be more open about the damage that the trauma did for me.

Corey 19:30

How much do you think with your mother? How much of it was guilt and how much of it was shame?

SPEAKER_00 19:36

My mother abandoned me when I was a child, and I didn't see her for seven years, and she had lots of shame about that. That became a uh argumentative point between my parents, and so she had lots of shame and and lots of guilt. And so I think she felt terribly, and I think that just closed us off from ever having really honest conversations, which I hated because as I said, the more honest I've been, the more authentic I've become, and I would have liked to have had that experience with her too. But she wasn't ready to meet me, so I didn't get to have it.

Corey 20:20

What year roundabout was it when you decided that you wanted to start searching for your sons?

SPEAKER_00 20:24

It was about the mid-90s.

unknown 20:27

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 20:27

And how that happened was one of the effects of my trauma. Was I didn't marry until I was 41. And I I dated the sleaziest fellas you could imagine, all the bartenders, all the not gonna be a good husband material. And I don't mean that against anybody who's a bartender. I was a bartender. But I just mean I was not shopping for a mate ever. And until I started getting to my late 30s, because I very much wanted to fulfill the story I was told that you'll go on and have other children and it'll be wonderful. And I wanted a family so badly. But anyway, I did get married at 41. My husband was 40. We had twins when I was 43, and we had leftover embryos. And I will tell you, it was these two things watching the twins go through their developmental stages. I began to see everything I missed. And I had put it all up on a shelf, just like I didn't, I didn't tried not to think about it. I did think about it, but I kept it way back there. But it all started tumbling out as I was watching my twins grow. And it was like, oh God, I missed this and I missed that. And then they were about 18 months old, and the fertility clinic called me and said, Hey, you've got these four leftover embryos. Here, would you like to donate them to a childless couple? I said, wait a minute, I think I've been at this crossroads before. And the answer is no. Really loud no. But again, I'm still the good Catholic girl. What was I gonna do? Thaw them out and let them die? In all so that everybody knows, because people do ask me that, that is eventually what I did. I donated them to medical science and they thought them out and looked at them under a micro microscope as they faded away. Because no, they were not gonna be raised by anybody else. I wasn't gonna do it to them, and I wasn't gonna do it to me. But that's what got my my roll, my wheels turning about beginning to search. And so, like I said, the kids were about two, and I looked at my husband and I said, you know, I'm gonna have to find my sons. I've just got to know that they're okay. And he said, Oh, okay, great. We just got married, we had twins, they're two. So we we can't even think. He said, Could you wait till they get to kindergarten? I said, sure. No problem. Which was the best thing that ever happened to me, Corey, because I had three and three to four years where I read everything there was. I started going to conferences, I got involved in organizations, and I began to learn everything. And that's what gave me the good reunions that I had. One of them is closed, and I'll talk about that. But that's why I had good reunions was I was able to prepare. And that's the thing I try to tell so many people is they get the information maybe from a DNA angel and they want to search and they're ready to roll. But I don't worry when it's a DNA angel because they'll help them tell them how to do it. But it's like you really have to have this well thought out. You've got to be thinking about the other party. And when you leap real fast, sometimes that'll blow the whole reunion. I was lucky that I had lots of time and I learned lots from everybody in the community, as well as reading everything I could get my hands on about it. So that was a gift. So I started to search itself when they went to school.

Corey 24:18

It was really just a couple of days after connecting with his half-brother on his father's side, right, that his brother was able to to my talking to Kendall's father, figure out and get enough clues to find out who his birth mother was. And Kendall dropped that bomb as fast as no, I think you waited about an hour. I said, Well, let's talk about this a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 24:40

But you're so excited. Yes. Yeah. There is nothing I talk about, those early stages of when we find our people, and then we're even gonna meet them and we start talking to them. That was surreal. And I'm sure Kendall will tell you the same thing. It was surreal. It was like I was in another world, another stratosphere. But yeah, it was incredible. So it the normal thing, the normal reaction is to rush and try to meet these people right away. But if you can slow yourself down, if you can take a little time, that's what I teach people now, is you you up your chances of having a reunion that will last a long time. Yeah. And that's what we're all going for. You you don't want it to break again if you can help it, because that just reopens the wound of the first break you had.

Corey 25:38

So what what clues did you have to go on when you did start searching?

SPEAKER_00 25:42

I had very little. I went to the two agencies where I had relinquished them. The funny part of this story is the organization I got very involved with was Cub, which is concerned United Birth Parents. That's where I fit. I remember when I called them and I said, they said, Oh, we have an annual retreat, you should come. And I said, Yeah, but you don't understand. I gave up two children. And she said, Two children, three children. We have moms here that we have workshops on that. And I was like, So I had found my people and I had gone to, I think it was my second cub retreat, and they said to me, there was used to be this way that they that people found each other called ISSR International Sound X Reunion Registry, and people could register on it if they wanted to find the other person. And so I'm at my second cub retreat, and somebody said, Did you ever fill out that form for ISSR? And I said, Yes. And they said, You mailed it? And I said, No, it's over there in my briefcase. You're going to the post office now, Leslie. To the post office. I had a phone call before I got back from the cub retreat. There'd been a match. My younger son had signed up when he was 18. His mother really pushed him because she knew it would help him. And so I had my first match, and that was 1998. I was in reunion with my first son. Yeah.

Corey 27:12

Wow. Yeah. What was that first phone call and that first in-person meeting?

SPEAKER_00 27:19

First phone call was amazing. Because I said to him, Well, the fellow that connected me to, you said you're in some kind of in the arts. And he said, Arts? No, I'm into music. And I went, Music? What kind? And he said, Oh, nobody my age likes it. Jazz. And I said, My dad's a dad's musician. He was really good at it too. And so, and I said, My whole family is full of music. Music, music, music everywhere. And he was just blown away. So we talked on the phone. We emailed back and forth. And it took him about two or three months before he was ready to meet. That was fine. We met. And it was just, we just had so much in common. And anyway, it was a great meeting. And we spent the first couple of years going to Sonny Rollins and Stan Getz and all these concerts that nobody else could care less about. They were the lesser known to eat. We were, we're really into jazz. And we'd be going to concerts and just having so much fun. But I will tell you that in the midst of all this excitement and overwhelm, I had this thought, I went, oh my God, I'm looking for both of them. I had, you know, little tendrils out places, and I said, Dear God, do not give me one year. Give me one year. I can't do this. I'm like up in the clouds somewhere. One year. And one day later, after I prayed, I came home from vacation and I had met with the birth father of my first son and said, I'm going to go home and I have some real good connections now and I'm going to find him. And he said, Okay, go for it. And the phone rang on a Monday morning, and she said, This is so-and-so from Catholic Social Services. Are you sitting down? And I said, I can be. Sat right down and she said, You have that your son is sitting here across the desk from me and he wants to know you. And I said, Well, you've got the letters right in front of you. I've been writing every time I moved, every time anything happened. So you knew how to find me. So he and my son is like Kendall. He was like, What are you doing? Can I come this weekend? Sure. And I said, Well, I'm not going to be here this weekend, but I'll be there the next weekend. So I met him the next weekend. And we were off to the races and just in heaven. And by this time, Corey, now my kids are in the third grade. And I said, He'd love it. And he did. He went to show and tell and sat in the front of the room. This is who we found this year. And the kids were all just lapping it up. Everybody, the school, everybody was so warm and so kind, Corey. And the way they supported us and loved us and saw what was happening for us, they got it. They get it on the reunion end. They just don't get it on the adoption end.

Corey 30:27

Right. Yeah. You know? Exactly. What was the reaction of your sons when you told them that they had not only, you know, younger siblings, but but but a half-brother, you know, which that was all that was only a few years.

SPEAKER_00 30:41

They were little kids to them. What's really warmed my heart is that all four of them have made relationships. And when the son that I raised lived in Germany a couple of years ago, the son that I relinquished went over and hung out, they did stuff together. And so that is what warms my heart. They will have these relationships long after I'm gone. And a connection to each other. Because one of them has had a lot of kids in his adoptive family, so he's still got some family strength. But the other one was the youngest of all, and he's lost most of his adoptive relations. So I'm glad that they have somebody and that they really like him.

Corey 31:27

Now you alluded to that the reunions did not last forever.

SPEAKER_00 31:31

No, no. I celebrated 25 years last year. We're 26 years now into reunion with my oldest son. And my youngest son, our reunion lasted 19 years. And given who he was and what he'd been through on my behalf in utero, it was not pretty. I was denying everything, and he was soaking all of that up. And so he struggled a little more with adoption from my viewpoint. He doesn't agree with that. He thinks that adoption didn't impact him. But at 19 years, I I did something that really upset him, and he had every right to be really upset. I used his name and he really asked to be left out of all the adoption kinds of stuff. And I wasn't thinking. He's still in relation with my children. And I do my very best to just kind of stay out of that because I don't want to make them feeling guilty or like I'm looking to them for the answers or how is he or whatever. I try to leave that be. I will say, because this was a big surprise for me, Corey. I did a a presentation at a Cub retreat in the fall, and it was on reunion. And so I was going over some of these facts about my own reunions, and I realized, ah, he shut that down at 19 years, but that was 10 years ago. And it blew me away that I had not had contact for 10 years. It was like, here we go. This is me. This is what trauma does. I literally put him back up on the shelf. I did what I tell everybody to do. He heard from me every Christmas, every birthday. I never heard anything back and I never expected to, but I would send him something. And in between those times, he was up back on the shelf. And he's come tumbling out again since I did this presentation because it was like, Leslie, you're doing what you did for the first 30 years. You were in isolation. You're just like putting it up on the shelf. So we can go back to those same coping mechanisms and not even know we're doing it. I was stunned, like I said, to find out it'd been 10 years. To me, it felt like two years.

Corey 34:13

I get the sense that you are open to reunion again.

SPEAKER_00 34:16

Oh, I would be so open. I, in fact, for Christmas, because this is something I had wanted to do for a long time, my Christmas was my deadline. I sent him another letter of apology. I had sent him one at the time it happened. I had said it verbally, and I said, now that I've had 10 years, I truly understand why you shut it down. I got it. I'm sorry I'm so slow, but I got it. And I, with everything I learned when I went to become a therapist, I cannot believe what I put you through. And I am so sorry, but I can't change it. And I know sometimes my work drives you crazy, but it's the only way I can change it for the next generation. And I've got to be sure that nobody else ends up in this pain.

Corey 35:06

Well, you just led us into a great segue because I wonder what attending a conference like Untangling Our Roots would be like for your son. Lordy.

SPEAKER_00 35:17

I think he'd fly out of the room. I don't I think it would be overwhelming and he would wonder what's wrong with all those people. I just took my older son to that cub retreat I mentioned in October. He had presented with me years ago, and he he loved it. He my older son is all about it, and he's the youngest of six children, five of whom were adopted. And he said, it was like the UN. We had this person and these two came from Germany and this from here. And it did normalize his experience. Have so many adoptees living in the house with him. And they were all very different. And he eats it up. He loves to go to things like that. My older son. He's the one that I always say, if he ever opened a door, Corey, and there was like a room full of shit, he'd say, There must be a pony here somewhere. We're going to make it okay. No matter what we find. We're going to work on it till we get it where it's workable, manageable, and we're going to do our best to improve it for the future.

Corey 36:25

It's still in the works, but can you kind of tease what your keynote's going to be about?

SPEAKER_00 36:29

Well, I'm going to talk about a couple of things, but probably the biggest thing I'm going to talk about is secrecy and shame, which has just covered up this realm of humanity. And that goes from adoption to donor conception to NPEs who discover, you know, late in life that, oh, the biological father I thought was my dad isn't my dad. And then they meet this wall of resistance. Oh, you're crazy. Oh, the test was wrong. Oh, this, that, and the other. People's shame is so high around sex and money, always has been. And that's what these two systems operate on. Sex and money or the lack of sex. And we'll put you together in the petri dish. One way or the other, we're going to make more humans for you. And it's shameful if you can't procreate. And it's shameful if you procreate at the wrong time when you're not ready. And it's, you know, it's it's shameful if you have donated your parts. Somebody's going to be critical of that. So it's all this shame that we've allowed for so many years. And I think that we're finally coming out of as a, you know, a mankind is coming a little closer to saying, hey, this may not be pretty, this may not be lovely, but this is what we're all dealing with in this messy life. When I say that about adoption, at least, and donor conception, all that money, then we have great entities that are fighting us for wanting to be more open and transparent and out there and letting people know what our true experiences are like. They're like, oh no, you don't. You know, this is just a wonderful way to conceive a family. It is a way to conceive a family, and good things can certainly happen from it, but it also leaves a lot of trauma and hurt and pain in its wake. If we deal with it, it might not be so bad as it is. I know it wouldn't be as bad as it is if we're holding it in and trying to fix it on the inside without talking to anybody about it. I'm gonna talk mostly about the secrecy, the shame, how that keeps the shutters over us, and how we're breaking free and we're on social media. And listen to me, my mother is rolling over in her grave right at this very moment that I'm telling all. But somebody's gotta do it, and somebody's gotta start saying, guess what? This happens in nice families, in, you know, all kinds of places. And that's the shame that the parents in the NPEs have dealt with. You know, they just didn't want to acknowledge it and thought they might get out of this world without anybody ever having to know. And oops, DNA was discovered, which is another thing I will really talk about. That's that changed our whole ballgame. Once the DNA testing came out, it changed the name of the game completely. And you can't get that genie back in the bottle, thank heavens. No. No. The groups, the conferences are going to get bigger and bigger, and that's fine by me. I want people to know. I want them to have a place to talk. Finding adoption land is really where I found my first family who supported me, loved me, stood by me. I'm slowing it down a little, Corey, and it's time for me to step back and hand off the baton to other people, and that's what I want to do, but I just want to be sure that we keep on talking about it. We keep on getting it out there. We're we can't, and I don't think we're going backwards. I think we're going forwards. That's that's the way, and people are just getting more open about it. And yes, I agree. Yeah.

Corey 40:39

Well, I'm glad that you brought up jazz and music. Kendall's a big jazz fan also. Because the final question that we ask every guest on the show is that when you're going through the fog, the feels, maybe even when this was go when you were going through the uncertainty of being pregnant, was there a song or an artist or a genre of music that helped you?

SPEAKER_00 41:07

Well, all music helps me. And so I certainly stayed immersed in music throughout my life. I think the story about music I want to tell you is the one that my son shared with me. And he was my first reunion, and we were busy talking about both having this big interest in jazz. And I said, like, who do you really like? And he said, Oh God, Miles Davis is my man. And I said, Oh, yes. And he said, I remember where I was in the student center at college when I walked in and I heard kinda blue on the on the speakers, and he said, I stopped. I'd never heard anything like that in my life. And I said, Oh yes, you had. I laid on the sofa listening to kinda blue, because I was, with tears rolling down my cheeks. But at least I was being quiet and we laid there together and we listened to lots of jazz, honey. You'd been listening to it since, you know, you first came on the scene. Wow. And that just blew me out of the water. If you think those things aren't real, they are so real. And having that bond with him, even though I'm not connected to him literally now, I still have that bond inside. And I'm hoping he has it. And that feels good to me because music is music. Well, people ask me, you know, what do you do when you're feeling low? And I said, God, I put on Teddy swims and I dance around the house. That's what I do to feel better. You know, I used to take pills, but nah, not anymore. I've always put music and I use it anymore now.

Corey 42:51

Music is such a lifeblood. Yeah, we've got music, and and here's what we Kendall and I do now. Uh we love vinyl and stuff too, but we'll of course listen to streaming, but we take terms. Like, you got a song in mind? Sometimes we'll just put it into the the the you know Alexa and let it you know come up with see what comes up next. And if we like it, we'll keep we'll keep playing it, or if we don't, then it's the next person's turn. So yeah, music is and I'm sure we'll do that tonight when he gets home from work.

SPEAKER_00 43:18

My last parent died two years ago. And so I got all the jazz collection. And mind you, and it's all vinyl. And we already had our rock and roll. Now we got all the jazz collection. And and we I listen to music all the time. And I've said many times don't ever put me in a world without music. I don't want to live. I want to live where there's music. That's how important it is to me. It's it's my life. Wonderful.

Corey 43:48

Well, thank you so much for being so open to sharing your story. Thank you, you know, for helping the communities. And oh, I just can't wait to give you a big old hug.

SPEAKER_00 43:58

I can't wait either. And yeah, that's where. I am now. My goal now is I'm downloading to the younger ones. I've been teaching adoption competency to therapists for years, but I'm ready to g hand over what I've got. And some of it is so dated, you won't want it. They won't want it. One of my last things that I did, and I feel very happy about is for Cub, we made an online support group network. And we now offer support groups to all people in the constellation and to just birth parents. And we do it online because one of the things I found was people couldn't get to face-to-face support groups. And those were the things that were so healing. But now with the onset of, you know, everything online, we developed an online program and we reached people in other countries that come to our support groups. The thing that hurt our community the most is we were all so isolated. And because of the secrecy and we didn't want to embarrass anybody, we didn't talk about it. And it's the talking that heals us. We can't change what happened. But we don't have to sit there in silence anymore, and we can support one another through the rough spots, and that's that's what makes all the difference in the world for everybody with anything they're dealing with.

Kendall 45:17

Thank you for saying that. Thanks for being here with us. I keep coming back to that image, Leslie on the couch, listening to Miles Davis, not knowing what the future holds, but still sharing something real and beautiful with her son in that moment that stayed with me. Because so much of what we talk about on this show is loss, missed time, missed connections, things we can't get back. But this episode is also a reminder that not everything is lost. Some things carry through. Music, feeling, the way we show up in the world, the way we fight to tell the truth, even when it's difficult. Leslie has spent her life turning something painful into something meaningful, not just for herself, but for so many other people. And like I said at the beginning, she helped light the match for Untangling Our Roots, and now that fire is spreading in the best way possible. We're really grateful for her, and honestly, I'm grateful for this community because none of us are doing this alone anymore. If this episode hits something and you just sit with it for a minute, maybe put on some jazz, maybe give yourself a little space to feel whatever's coming up. We'll be back with you next week. And remember, family secrets are the ultimate plot twist.