035 – Interview w/ A Search Angel – For Every Answer You Get, There Are More Questions

November is National Adoption Awareness Month, so I’m bringing you a different perspective from the adoption community. On prior episodes you’ve heard adoptees talk about the amazing work that they’re search angels have done with them. Today I’m introducing you to one of those search Angels. You’ve already heard about her work in my interview with Stephanie (in episode 29) where she lauded the work of her amazing spouse AND Search Angel, Diana. Diana has always been into family history and exploring genealogy, so when Stephanie’s search for her birth relatives began Diana was all in. Diana shares the processes she goes through to assist adoptees in their searches, some lessons she’s learned over years of searching, and why her volunteer work to help others is meaningful to her.

The post 035 – Interview w/ A Search Angel – For Every Answer You Get, There Are More Questions appeared first on Who Am I...Really? Podcast.

Diana (00:00):

There's a transformation that happens with people and my experience with adoptees is people start out saying, I just want to know a name and I like to say for every answer you get, you end up with five more questions because then it's not just a name. Then you want to know what they look like. Then you want to know something about them. Then you know, then you want to know, did they wonder about me?

Voices (00:38):

Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

Damon (00:49):

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 it's November, which is National Adoption Awareness month. So on today's show, I'm bringing you another different perspective from across the adoption community. Here on Who Am I Really, I focus on people's adoption journeys and their attempts at reunification with their biological family members. On prior episodes, you've heard adoptees talk about the amazing work that their search angels have done with them. Today, I'm introducing you to one of those search angels. You've already heard about her work. in my interview with Stephanie in episode 29 where she talked about her amazing spouse and search angel Diana.

Stephanie (01:34):

Diana is now a California search angel. This became one of those things that you know I felt so strongly about as did she, that she got involved in the search angel community.

Damon (01:45):

She found a calling and you were her first client.

Stephanie (01:48):

Well, that's kind of the way it is.

Damon (01:50):

Diana says she's always been into family history and exploring genealogy, so when Stephanie's search for her birth relatives began, she was all in. Diana shares the processes she goes through to assist adoptees in their searches, some lessons she learned over the years of searching and why her volunteer work to help others is meaningful to her. Here's the story of Diana's work as a search angel. I started by asking Diana what her own connection to adoption had been. She says in her younger days, she didn't really think about adoption even though there were one or two adoptees around her that she was aware of. Everything changed when she met Stephanie. Diana was very close to her own mother, but when she witnessed Stephanie's interaction with her mother, they had one of the oddest interactions she had ever seen between mother and daughter.

Diana (02:43):

There was just something about it, the body language, the way her mother spoke to her. I remember when her mother left the room, I asked her, I said, Stephanie, what's your relationship with your mother like? And she looked at me and she goes, I hope you won't think that I'm strange when I say this, but I find my relationship with my mother to be very unnatural.

Damon (03:12):

Hmm. So you picked up on it though right away?

Diana (03:15):

Yeah. There was something very odd. There was some huge disconnect to me that was so obvious between her and her mother. And then she went on to say, I've always had this feeling that I was adopted.

Damon (03:31):

When they confirmed Stephanie was adopted, Diana started doing research on the subject of adoption. It was eye opening for Diana who didn't have a personal experience with adoption before.

Diana (03:42):

There's a transformation that happens with people. And my experience with adoptees is people start out saying, I just want to know a name. And I like to say for every answer you get, you end up with five more questions because then it's not just a name. Then you want to know what they look like. Then you want to know something about them, then you know, then you want to know, did they wonder about me? So when we confirmed that Stephanie was adopted, we had all these questions and we weren't even, you know, you don't even know what to ask.

Damon (04:20):

Yeah, that's right. Like you said, you don't know what you don't know.

Stephanie (04:23):

Right. And, you know, um, I started doing research on adoption, you know, and I was amazed at all of the things out there on the internet about adoption, the politics involved in it, the, um, the attacks on adoptees who search, you know, they, they talk about an adoption tree at the birth, parents, the adoptive parents and the adoptee. Well, I think families get affected by everything. So I think there's an expansion of that because even though I'm not adopted, uh, I have no idea what it feels like to be adopted. I know what it's like to live with somebody and to watch their transformation of finding peace.

Damon (05:11):

And you assisted with that peace. I heard when Stephanie told her story, I was amazed at how she continued to go back to you with your excellent sleuthing and dedication to helping her find answers, you know, more answers to every question, uh, that she had. I was just astonished. And how fortunate to have that there right in your house. You know, so many people I hear stories of, you know, engaging with search angels online and from a distance and I get the impression that the, the relationship can be, it gets very personal because you're talking about a person's past in a very intimate way and details that they didn't know before. Um, but she has that interaction right there in her home with you. Right. That must've been really fascinating. Diana said she's done genealogy for years. She loved hearing the family stories of immigration. And her own roots back to the birth of this nation. Stephanie had never been into genealogy, but Diana pounced on ancestry.com when it launched. Diana talks about her own work on genealogy first from the perspective of Stephanie's case.

Diana (06:21):

But when we found out Stephanie was adopted and I thought, okay, so we have to figure out where your mother is. And then I wanted to understand, you know, my first inclination is, well, surely she would want to know that you're okay. I've never had kids, but I was thinking, surely this woman would want to know that you were okay. And I went out on the internet and I started doing research and I found, again, lots of politics. You know, the difference between the terminology, birth mother and first mother, um, things that I just had never considered.

Damon (06:58):

What other kinds of things arose for you that you were just like, Whoa, I had no idea that was a thing.

Diana (07:05):

Oh gosh, I learned so much. You know, my, my nice little compartment of somebody who had a kid and couldn't care for it and somebody couldn't have one and could like blew up.

Damon (07:15):

Oh yeah.

Diana (07:16):

I mean I had no idea. And then I would find sites where, um, and I'm gonna use the term birth mothers in our discussion only for descriptive of the difference between, and I will also use the term adoptive. Not everybody was given the choice, which was kind of shocking to me. And I read blogs and stories about women who said they were drugged and they don't even aren't sure what day they gave birth. And I found articles in old newspapers about sealed records. And uh, there was one from, I think California records weren't sealed until some prominent family who had adopted, um, was going to be extorted for money, pay us or we're going to tell your child they're not really yours, you know? Um, and then I thought, well, I guess there's a wide variety of opinions, like with most things in life

Damon (08:15):

Mhmm and scenarios for conception, adoption plans and actual adoptions.

Diana (08:23):

And the secrets, the secrets that are associated with it. Because for me, when I, when it all boils down, that's for me, I can't speak for others. There's nothing wrong with adoption. There's something wrong with the secrets associated with it. How do you mean? Well, they're like legal lies there. You know, I remember when we got Stephanie's original birth certificate, we put it next to her amend one. And she looked at me and said, the funniest thing, but it's so true. She said, look, I'm a car. I got retitled! She says, if you think about what happens when you retitle a car, she goes, that's exactly what this looks like. And I looked at her and I said, how can this be legal? This is like some bizarre form of identity theft.

Damon (09:16):

Yeah. There's a lot of adoptees out there that feel very strongly that their identity has been stolen by virtue of their transplantation into another family, away from their culture and so many other factors. And uh, you know, and in many ways that is true. Um, there are many of the adoptees that are