The Reunion No One Prepared Her For

Finding your birth family is often portrayed as the ending of the story. For many adoptees, it's actually the beginning.

In this episode, Patricia Knight Meyer returns to talk about reunion with both of her birth parents, the remarkable relationship she built with her birth father, and the emotional challenges that no one prepared her to face.

Together, we discuss:

• Why reunion with each birth parent took a very different path
• The grief experienced by birth fathers and why it deserves more attention
• Genetic mirroring and finally seeing yourself in someone else
• Why Patricia believes adoptees and birth families need better preparation before reunion
• The inspiration behind her memoir, Wonderland: Memoir of a Black Market Adoption
• The music that became the soundtrack to her journey

And then, right near the end of the conversation, something completely unexpected happens. Corey and Patricia realize they've shared a powerful moment before, they just didn't know it until now.

The e-book edition of Wonderland is available for preorder now. The print edition and audiobook arrive this November, and Patricia will return to Family Twist for a special bonus episode after publication to share readers' reactions and what's happened since the book's release.

Transcript

Kendall 0:00

Hey everybody, I'm Kendall, and welcome back to Family Twist. If you listen to part one, you'll know that Patricia Knightmeyer's story is unlike any other we featured before. Today we pick up with reunion. We talk about meeting both of her birth parents, the unexpected challenges that followed, the remarkable bond she built with her birth father, and why she's so passionate about helping adoptees and birth families better prepare for what comes after finding each other. We'll also talk about her upcoming memoir, Wonderland, a black market baby's rise from adoption's rabbit hole. The e-book is available for pre-order now, and we'll welcome Patricia back this November for a bonus episode when the print edition is released. Oh, and stick around until the very end. Corey has a realization that catches both him and Patricia completely off guard. Neither of them saw it coming, and honestly, I don't think you will either. Let's jump back into our conversation.

SPEAKER_02 1:02

I always knew I was adopted. My mother had told me that story since I was a little girl, but I had an inkling that something was I wouldn't even say it was an inkling. I'd say it was more like uh an intuition. Because as a little girl, starting about five or six, I would have these dreams about this dark man. I called him the dark man, and he was a tall, slender man in a black suit with a dark fedora hat and a briefcase and black gloves. And he would show up outside the house looking in the windows, coming for me. And in the dreams, I would be running through the house trying to lock the doors so that he couldn't get to me. And I also remember my mother telling me, and I know a lot of moms tell their children this if anyone ever comes and says that you need to go with them, if they stop you at the park, if they come to the house and say that there's something happened to us, this is our code word. You do not go. And I feel though that there was something about the way she said it that, and she would paint it like they could just pull over and just pull you into the car. And maybe being an adoptee, it just sounded more terrifying for me, but I do think there was something in there deeper because I and I don't know if these warnings she gave me caused me to have these dreams about the dark man, but it was a very real feeling. I and I do wonder if if as a little infant, if I have these memories of seeing this lawyer figure coming and going. But what's really interesting is when my adoptive father actually ended up going to the state of Texas, well, he told me he went to the state of Texas and got what's called a delayed certificate of birth. Now, that's not an amended one. That just means he went and said that I was his child and that they just had gave birth to me in home and we they never filed per birth certificate. So let's just get one made now. And he just gave them my birthday of January 5. But that's a date that they were just told by the attorney and that was never seen on any paperwork by anyone. So it was just a guess. And at 13, I learned that my birthday was also just a guess. But when he brought back this paperwork and I saw their names on this delayed certificate of birth, it looked like a real birth certificate, and it meant I could get a social security card. Something settled in me. I had one last dream about the dark man. And in that dream, he came to the door and I ran and I got my father's pistol because my father ran bars and stuff at night. He always carried a pistol. This is a dream. I didn't do it. Right. But I dreamed that I got my father's pistol and I run to the door and I just shoot the man and he falls backwards and disappears. And I never had the dream ever again after that. So I do think that some in some dark way, I had some feelings that something wasn't quite right. But the thing I think I worried about more was just being taken away again. Like if I got taken away from one family, I could get taken away from this one. I think the stress of raising a child that they didn't have paperwork for and they got that delayed stupid birth, I think that that knowing that really at any moment, somebody could show up at the door and say, hey, this didn't get ever get worked out. My mother, who already liked to drink a lot, became more of an alcoholic year after year. And my father, who was 350 pounds when I was born, eventually ballooned to 650 over my lifetime. And then he died when I was 25. There were a lot of layers of trauma going on, right? He had his own traumas that made him eat and have his problems long before I ever came around. My mother had been severely abused by her alcoholic father who beat her and her mother and sister. And so they had their own traumas. And I think that when I was growing up, and I had this very loving but very apathetic father who basically worshipped the ground my mother walked on and modeled for me that we just have to do everything we possibly can to keep this woman happy. And as an adoptee, of course, I wanted to keep everybody happy. And a mother that I knew was unstable. And in retrospect, I believed she was borderline, personality disorder, and bipolar, and that she was medicating with alcohol. But I knew that if anybody ever came or anybody discovered the abuse that was going on in my home, verbal and a little physical, you know, I'd get slapped or pushed or things like that. Not by my father, just by my mother. She threw a lot of plates, she broke a lot of glasses, she threw things, broke things, but she never physically like hurt me. But I was still exposed to all of this. And so I knew like if anybody ever finds out all this stuff is happening in my house, not to mention that the electricity is getting cut off. And we had a bunch of dogs. Like we had like 10 dogs in our house at one point, and tons of fleas and tons of roaches, that there was neglect and there were levels of weird poverty, except that my mother had a closet in our room that was filled with clothes from Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue on a meet inspector's salary. So it was a weird family. I write about it in the book. It was a very weird thing to grow up in with a lot of mixed messages. Are we poor or are we not poor? Right. And is this a safe home or is it not safe? Because when my mother was having good days, we were taking these day-long bicycle rides and going to beautiful parks and having picnics, and we had this beautiful reading tree where she read to me in the afternoons in the front yard. And she was just a joy to be around on her good days. And I called that happy mommy. And then, like, I would wake up and suddenly mean mommy was there and the world was a scary place. So I very much feared that people were gonna find out and that I was gonna be taken away again, even in the light of all that. I did not want to be taken away again because my God, that's a complete unknown. I have no idea what the next family is going to be like. So I am just gonna keep these secrets, be as good as I can, try to save my saviors. And that's what I did. That's how I became a very codependent person that had a lot of work to do on myself as soon as I started coming out of the fog and realizing that this paperwork problem when I was a kid was actually something way more nefarious. Right. And that my parents were just damaged people who did the best they could. They were complicit in this. And I think that as you go down your journey, this was happening right around the time I found my birth father, birth mother when I was 40. I still hadn't put all these pieces together. I was still trying to just fill this void, right? And then when I met her and she started being very critical of the family that raised me and the life that I had, that didn't go well. I was like, who are you, lady, to be critical of these people that you left me with, right? But I also hadn't found a concern united birth parents. I didn't understand birth mother trauma. I hadn't read the primal wound, I hadn't read the girls that went away. And so our reunion was pretty much doomed from the start because I had all this unresolved trauma and baggage that I wanted her to fix for me. And I had just dropped into her world all of a sudden, she wasn't looking for me. And she had not in any form or fashion even, she had stuffed that thing that had happened to her so far back that she hadn't done any work on that and maybe wasn't even capable of at that point in time. As I came out of this, in retrospect, I began to learn what I should have done before I entered reunion, what I wished I'd known while I was in reunion, how reunion changed me in the process. That's when I realized I wanted to write Wonderland, a memoir of a black market adoption. And I don't even know that I could have written that book, except that one of the good things that came out of finding my birth mother, many good things came from finding her, obviously, but one in particular was that she led me to my birth father. And he didn't have the trauma, he didn't even know I existed. He didn't have the trauma that she had. And so at 70 years old, when I showed up, he was overjoyed, and he was very angry and upset that those years had been stolen because he had a four-year-old son when I was conceived and he was 27, and he said he would have raised me. So I'm a big fan of adoptee rights. But he was able to listen to my life, shine a mirror up for me, be my mirror. He said, I will never call you. I only want you to call me. Every day I want to hear from you, but I will never put an expectation on you. And I respect all your boundaries, and I will never say a bad thing about these people that raised you. Do I wish you'd had a better experience growing up? Yes. But if whatever happened to you has put you as you are in front of me today, and I wouldn't change a thing about that, about who you are today.

Corey 10:45

That's incredible.

SPEAKER_02 10:46

He got it. And I gave him a book. This is the only book on birth fathers out there. It's called like My Birth Father's Shadow. It's a very old book. It also talked about genetic sexual attraction. And he read that book. He started a channel on Facebook for birth fathers to support them. He went to the Adoption Knowledge Affiliates Conference. We spoke together on this two years into our reunion when I ended up divorced because I had immersed from this chrysalis, a completely different human being, and I didn't work in the relationship that I was in anymore. That led to my husband having a divorce. And I will admit, I was like a crazy woman and happy reading with my birth father, and all I did was obsess with my birth father, and I probably pushed my husband away. But during that time, when I started getting back out on the dating scene, my birth father got incredibly overprotective and incredibly jealous. And the newness was wearing off, and I felt safe and happy and supported. And so I was going to go out and be and do Patricia. But my birth father's like, hey, what about those 40 years we're supposed to make up for over here? And he started feeling really jealous and very angry. And so he went through his own grieving and he had to acknowledge that he was having what felt uncomfortable to him as like romantic feelings, not in the sense that he wanted to have sex with me or anything, but that he wanted closeness. He wanted intimacy. He felt jealous. He's like, I felt like a jealous high school boyfriend. It's like I'd sit by the phone and wait for it to call and I'd get angry and you were 10 minutes late. And so he went to his wife and he had these conversations with her. And then he he went to his son, who this brother that I discovered through him and had shared all this information. And then he found this therapist in San Antonio who specialized in genetic sexual attraction, Patricia Dorner. She's retired now. And he drove himself two hours round trip to therapy twice a week for like four or five months to work on himself. And I hear a lot about birth father reunions where the father's all in and then suddenly he just pulls away and disappears. And a lot of that has to do with these very natural feelings that men have. She wants dad to tell her she's beautiful and fawn over her because that is her way of coming into the world and feeling safe with the men that she does wind up with. And when you get into a reunion with a birth father, all of that is happening and it's a very compressed time period. And it's very confusing because now you've got this 40-year-old woman sitting in a bar or a cafe or a restaurant with this 70-year-old man and they're holding hands, eye gazing across the table, smiling. And everybody in the restaurant thinks that you two are an item until it bothered my birth father so much that anywhere we went, he'd have to stop and announce to everybody in the room, this is my birthdaughter. Because he didn't want people to think that he was, you know, a creepy old man. So part of the advocacy work that I want to do is to get more information out there to people who enter reunions with birth fathers. And this happens on the birth mother side as well, to help them understand that these feelings are normal and they're natural, and you have to work through them, and there's a lot of shame associated with it. You've got to get past that. That's that's the book I'm gonna write when I'm done with this one.

Kendall 15:12

Well, and this may be an aspect that you're thinking of too. Your biological dad's thinking about all that time he missed there when you were becoming a woman. He wasn't, you know what I mean? Like it it must be the most strange dynamic for a parent to go through. You know, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:31

There was just a lot of grief, a lot of grief. But he meant he was there for the birth of his two great-grandsons, and we had pictures of him holding them, right? But he also missed the birth of his granddaughter, right? But there were so many, so many levels of things that that he missed. I would tell him about the grandparents, the, you know, my maternal grandparents and how my grandmother gardened. And it was weird because when I found him, he lived on a ranch and he had like this A-frame type house on this property. And he was a contractor. He had like vegetable gardens and very, you know, work with your hands kind of guy. And I would tell them about the fact that like my adoptive grandfather built me my first BB gun and taught me how to shoot it and planted strawberry patches with me, and how I would tend the garden with them and can things. And these were all the exact, they were so similar. My birth father and his wife and the way that they lived, they were so similar to my grandparents, just in the way they lived and just in personality. And it was very hard for him to realize like somebody else taught her how to fish, somebody else taught her how to shoot a gun, all of these things. But we did do that stuff together with my grandson. And when I met him, we ended up having 10 years in reunion together. And within like the first few, within five years, my daughter got pregnant. And so he had five years with his oldest grandson. And he was there when my grandson caught his first fish and was there for target practice. And he was there when I killed my first rabbit and then cried.

unknown 17:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:07

Because I didn't really think I was gonna hit it. And then he told me that we had to clean it. So I was like, because I was always looking for things that I had no one had taught me how to do so he could teach me how to do them.

Corey 17:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:17

And so I'm like, okay, teach me how to clean this rabbit is the last thing I wanted to do, but he really wanted to teach it to me. So we did. And then when it's over, I'm like, well, can we at least cook it? Oh, we can't eat this rabbit because it's April and it probably has a disease. And I'm like, why'd you let me make me crane it? So you would learn.

Kendall 17:35

It's wonderful that you had those moments with him, though, you know.

SPEAKER_02 17:39

Letting him feel like he was able to leap his mark and shape me. He and I are so much alike. My daughter says that my mannerisms are like him, I speak like him, I think like him, I tinker with things like him. We could, we really truly could finish each other's sentences. We even like the same ice cream. We are so much like very anxious people. When I found my birth mother, I didn't find a lot of similarities, some physical similarities, but any similarities that I found, they were like the things I didn't like about myself, but that I knew to be true about myself. But finding him, it really helped me understand what parts are nature and what parts are nurture. And that was fascinating. Genetics are fascinating.

Corey 18:25

I completely agree. Patricia, I think you're really gifted at, and this is important to us because we don't like to know too much going in. So we we purposely didn't read the book ahead of time. And we want our listeners to be intrigued and want to know more. And you're very gifted at giving us just enough about the different stories about about all four of your parents that people I think are going to be very intrigued. I also want to be respectful of our time and give you an opportunity to answer what is our traditional final question, which is when you are writing the book, is there a particular musical artist or song or genre that you leaned on to help you get through the process? It's a weird question.

Kendall 19:10

It's just because we're such big music lovers, and we can point to musical influence in so many parts of our lives.

Corey 19:19

We've helped each other bond by meeting the parents that are gone already through the music that we, you know, have together constantly.

SPEAKER_02 19:28

Well, that's an interesting question. There are a lot of musical nods in the story. My adopted father played the piano by ear and grew up running around the French Quarter with Fats Domino, was good friends with him. And so I was raised on all of Fats Domino's music. One of my chapters is called Blue Monday, which is a nod to one of Fats Domino's songs. And then there's another chapter called The Batman, which is also a Fats Domino song. But ultimately, one of the key songs was Fire and Rain by James Taylor. I've seen fire and I've seen rain. I've seen sunny days. I could not find, you know, find a friend. And I always thought I'd see you again. That song was playing the day I drove down the road to meet my birth father, down his driveway, his very long driveway, and drove down there to meet him. And when I got there, I found out that one of the homes on the property had burned down. About two years later, when I got divorced, and then shortly after I got my divorce, well, that triggered major abandonment issues. Then I lost my job because it wasn't functioning in my job. So then my birth father said, Well, I have this little cabin out here on my property. Why don't you move in it and finish writing this book that you've started? Because I'd already started writing this book at the time. And I said, Okay. So I packed everything I had, moved into this little cabin, put the majority of everything I had there and in the garage. And then there was a leather little storage unit off to the side that I put the rest of the stuff in. And within three months, everything I owned burnt to ashes on my birth father's property. I had let a friend come to stay with me. She put her car in my garage because it was a new used car and it was convertible. She didn't want it to get dirty. I moved my car out, put her car in. It caught itself on fire, and the whole house and everything I had burnt to ashes on my birth father's property. All my family memory videos, all my pictures, all my journals. The book was in the cloud, thankfully. But that really tore me apart. And so then that song, I've seen fire, and the very next day, it rained like crazy after the fire. And I'm like, why couldn't it have been raining if it's yesterday? You know? So that idea of I've seen fire and I've seen rain, I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end. So that has been my birth father's and mine song. So that is also a big part of this book. I named the book Wonderland primarily because we grew up wondering about our origins. And when we go into reunions. It is like sliding down a rabbit hole. And the big question in my li my life has always been, who in the world am I? That's the great puzzle. And Alice does lose all sense of herself and has to figure out how to get herself out of that rabbit hole and come back to a sense of normalcy. So that's the reason I named the book that. And so when I market it, oftentimes I put this Taylor Swift Wonderland song with it because it talks a lot about in her lyrics, we found Wonderland and we got lost in it. Things had never been worse, but never been better. The lyrics really spoke to me on that. And then it also talks about her feeling this sense of needing to sleep with one eye open at night.

Corey 22:48

Oh my gosh. Patricia, I've got to share this because I know I've told this story on the podcast about being at that first summit and on technically our roots. I met more than a hundred people or had conversations with more than a hundred people that weekend. But I remember specifically Saturday, it was a was a draining day, and I'm like, I gotta go. I I just gotta go back to my room. It was like eight o'clock. I went trying to go to bed on my mind is just racing. I'm like, why don't we go and go to the gym and roll the treadmill for like 45 minutes, wear myself out, and hopefully I can go to sleep. So I just went back downstairs in a black t-shirt and black shorts, went to the gym, did just that. But I had to walk through the lobby of the hotel to get go back to the elevators. And I got stopped by Brian Stanton and several other people, and all of a sudden I'm engulfed in conversations, and it's two o'clock in the morning, and I'm holding this woman's hand, and we both have a glass of wine in our hands, and and she's telling me the story about how she burned her birth father's cabin down, and we're both crying. And that was you.

SPEAKER_02 23:48

I remember that. And I appreciate you taking that time with me too.

Corey 23:53

And when I say it's a life-changing weekend, life-changing experience, I I mean that to my core.

SPEAKER_02 23:59

It really is.

Corey 23:59

And that's one of those moments.

SPEAKER_02 24:01

And the beauty of it is it's our reunion still lasted, and he hadn't even upgraded his insurance since he renovated the cabin, unfortunately. But our reunion survived that as well.

Corey 24:12

I think there's no handbook for this. But all of these books that are coming up are almost like a chapter of a handbook to kind of help people. Because everybody's stories are different, but they've all got some similarities there too. And people can have touchstones to to walk away from them. So um thank you for being willing to put your story out there.

SPEAKER_02 24:33

I put it up on Gally, which is a way book reviewers and librarians and people can find it. And one of the most rewarding things so far that I feedback that I've gotten is from people who said they didn't know they're not adopted, they didn't know anything about adoption, but that this book has really made them rethink what their views are, their assumptions about adoption and that it's stuck with them in thinking about how complex these things really are and how it affects people's lives in so many different ways. So that means a lot to me because I think as a community, the thing we really need to focus on is how to get outside of our circles and into the general population. That's so important, right? One in five people know someone who's adopted. This is not a little niche community. A lot of people think it is. They don't have any idea. So I appreciate that you guys are creating a platform to where we can get those stories further out there. I definitely want to mention that it's out on November the third. It's currently on pre-sale for the ebook version. I narrated my own audiobook also.

Kendall 25:38

That is fantastic.

SPEAKER_02 25:39

That'll come out on November the 3rd also. It was so nice to meet you, Kendall. Thank you, you too.

Kendall 25:44

Patricia, thank you so much for trusting us with your story. One of the things I appreciated most about this conversation is that you didn't try to make reunion look easy. You talked about the joy, the grief, the awkward moments, the healing, and the work that comes after finding the truth. I think that's something a lot of our listeners are going to recognize. If you'd like to follow Patricia's journey, be sure to pre-order the ebook of Wonderland, a black market baby's drives from adoptions rabbit hole. The print edition and audiobook arrive this November, and when they do, we'll welcome Patricia back for a special bonus episode to hear how the book is being received and continue this conversation. As always, thank you for listening, for sharing these episodes, and for helping us build a community where every story matters. We'll see you next time on Family Twist. And remember, family secrets are the ultimate plot twist.