071 – I Would Give Anything To Hear His Voice

Amanda describes her childhood with a father she considered to be a hero and a mother whom she loves despite her physical and mental abuse while showing favoritism toward her sister. She always wanted to search for her birth parents, scouring her house for information about herself when she was a kid. Unable to endure the abuse against herself and her brother Amanda called social services, after which she was disowned. When she finally obtained her adoption records she found one birth parent was deceased, and the other didn’t want contact yet.

Read Full TranscriptAmanda: 00:02 I want him to contact me when he wants to be a part of my life. We’ll get to know me, but it still hurts because I talked to the brothers all the time and I’m like, why can’t he just pick up the phone and just call me or or even returning email. It would be wonderful to just have something. It’s just like don’t silence it. It is so, so I would just give anything to hear his voice.

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

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 Amanda. She called me from Mount Horeb, Wisconsin. Amanda is originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and she says, even though she lives in the country, you still can’t get the city out of her. Amanda describes a childhood with her father. She considered to be a hero into mother whom she loves despite her physical and mental abuse, while showing favoritism toward her sister. She always wanted to search for her birth parents, scouring her house for information about herself when she was a kid. When she finally obtained her records, she found one birth parent was deceased and the other not wanting contact yet. This is Amanda’s journey. Amanda was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the second baby to her 23 year old birth mother, but she was placed in foster care when she was nine months old.

Amanda: 01:48 My mom actually gave me upon her own volition initially because she thought that I would be better off with someone else because she just was having a tough time with it and actually it was good that she did because apparently when they did the intake or weighed like 12 pounds, so I was severely malnourished. And so then when I went to foster care, of course, you know I bolt right up, ya know, because they were feeding me, but I remember my foster parents. Well, my foster mother, I remember her to be very loving and very attentive even though she had, I don’t even know how many other kids she had in the house, but there were quite a few. But uh, Ken and Jean Newsome were my foster parents.

Damon: 02:36 That’s interesting that you have memories of them. How long were you with them?

Amanda: 02:41 Till? I was three and a half.

New Speaker: 02:43 Oh Wow. So some of your formative years were spent with them. Were spent?

Amanda: 02:48 Yeah.

Damon: 02:49 Wow.

Amanda: 02:50 Yeah. But my biological mom was involved. Um, it took that long to terminate her rights. And what makes the most interesting is that my mom’s case for involuntary termination of parental rights was the first in our state that was actually successful in 1978.

Damon: 03:10 Your mother was the first successful case of the state terminating a parent’s rights.

Damon: 03:20 Amanda has read her file and learned that her birth mother was offered mental health assistance back in 1978. She was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder,

Amanda: 03:31 She suffered a very traumatic childhood herself. So when I read all that it kind of just put everything together for me as far as why she was the way she was. Why she did the things that she did. For instance, my case worker, in some of the case notes, I noticed that there was some conversation with my birth mother where she had said she had noticed that I was sucking my thumb and she goes, “well, I thought I cured the child with that”, and a case worker was perplexed and She asked what my mom meant by that, and she goes, well, I tied her hands behind her back. Oh boy. Then she said also that she had shaved my head as an infant thinking my hair grow back faster, so she has some very interesting ideations about how to change things. For...