083 – An Unbelievable Emotional Roller Coaster For Me

Before becoming an adoptee advocate Rich was searching for his own identity. As a child, his older adopted sister vengefully told him their mom wasn’t his real mother. It made him wonder who the other woman could be. When he was in college, his adoptive parents gave him an envelope of non-identifying information. Many years later they handed him another document that revealed his birth name. Rich found himself resenting their decision to withhold information from him that he clearly wanted. When he found his maternal aunt they discussed his birth mother enough to realize she wasn’t the only sister in the family to have relinquished a son in Denver.

Read Full TranscriptRich: 00:00 I started reading her the description of the birth father from my non identifying records and she got really quiet and she said, oh, this changes everything she goes, I know who your birth father was and so once we sorted it all out, we were both in bed for two days because she hadn’t known that her younger sister had done this.

Voices: 00:35 Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

Damon: 00:47 This is Who Am I Really? A podcast about adoptees that have located and connected with their biological family members. I’m Damon Davis and on today’s show is Rich. He called me from Denver, Colorado where he works in adoptee advocacy, but before he took on that body of work, Rich was searching for his own identity. When he was in college, his adoptive parents gave him an envelope of non identifying information. Then years later he received another document with his birth name. When he found his maternal aunt, they discussed his birth mother enough to realize she wasn’t the only sister in the family to have relinquished a son in Denver. This is Rich’s journey. Rich has an older sister who was adopted, like himself, and a younger sister who was the biological child of his parents. Like many adoptive parents, they didn’t think they could conceive a child until she was born. They were set with their daughter and son they had adopted and there was no plans for any more children. It’s amazing how often that storyline is repeated in adoption. Interestingly, since adoption was such an open topic in their family, at one point their younger sister had a bit of an identity crisis.

Rich: 02:03 The funny thing, you know, how families show slides and baby pictures and that sort of thing. And um, my younger sister was the only one with the newborn new new newborn photos. And at one point she sort of had an existential crisis thinking that she was adopted too, but they just weren’t telling her.

Damon: 02:23 Oh, interesting.

Rich: 02:25 You’re, you’re the only one with the pictures in which your purple.

Damon: 02:30 Hmm.

Rich: 02:32 They’ve got, they’ve got the evidence.

Damon: 02:34 Yeah. You’re new new newborn in this. Wow. That’s really fascinating. I’ve never heard anyone talk about their sibling who was biological to their parents having this alignment of their identification with you and your sister as adoptees before. That’s fascinating. Yeah. The mind of a child, you know, you want to be like those around you. And if the two out of the three children in your home are adoptees you must figure, oh, I must be adopted too.

Rich: 03:03 Well, and it was, it was a hot topic for a while, uh, because my, uh, older sister one day was angry with me and she presented it to me in a different light when she said, rather than saying you were adopted, a lot of them wanted and chosen and all those things that we hear. She said, mom’s not your real mom. And I was five at the time. It was, it was pretty devastating to me. It shook my world. I said, I just said, what? So she just repeated it. Nope. Mom’s not your real mom and sort of gloried in the triumph of having stunned me. And so of course I went and asked my mom about it and she explained that even though they’d said that we were adopted, that was different than thinking that there was another mom out there somewhere. And I really struggled with that.

Rich: 04:00 I moped around and was depressed and was saying, I wish I knew who my real mom was. And finally at one point she just said, well, I’m your real mom. She was your first mom. Something in my head said, okay, and we, we move forward with that. But it never, I always wanted to know. Uh, the unfortunate thing is, is she told me I would never know. And so that hung with me and there’s a part of me that was very saddened by that and the part of me that filed it away kind of like saying, well, we’ll, we’ll see. You know, we’ll see if I never...