058 – I Feel Like I’ve Found My Tribe

Nicole was adopted into a military family, the structure of which ran against her freewheeling nature. She’s an interracial woman with interracial adopted parents, so they looked like a natural family. In reunion, Nicole is facing secondary rejection from her birth mother, but her maternal grandparents and uncle have accepted her with open arms. She’s learned that her birth father wanted to keep her, and her paternal family feels so natural, Nicole feels like she’s found her tribe.

Read Full TranscriptNicole: 00:05 I feel like I’ve found my tribe. These are, these are the people that like I fit. I feel like I’ve found peace within myself because it’s not who am I really? It’s it’s I am me and I’m who I’m always supposed to have been. It was just put in a different family.

Voices: 00:30 Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

Damon: 00:42 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 Nicole. She called me from the terrible rush hour traffic in downtown Atlanta, Georgia. She was raised in the south, but her mixed racial heritage partially originates from Germany by way of the Commonwealth of Virginia, a state we’re in adoptees. Legal rights to obtain their original birth information are extremely prohibitive in reunion. She’s exercising patience with her birth mother as she waits to be revealed to her maternal siblings, but she’s also surrounded by love and acceptance by other family members on both sides. This is Nicole’s journey.

Damon: 01:30 Nicole was born in Virginia, adopted after three months in foster care. She is a woman of mixed race and she was adopted into a mixed race family. Her mother is white from Germany, her father is African American from Boston, and she grew up in a military family.

Nicole: 01:46 You know, growing up it was, it was pretty normal. Adoption was like, you know, I was a typical day, you know, in the fog adoptee. That makes me special. And it was one of those things where, I mean, it was it really necessary to talk about, you know, it was, I’m adopted and that’s what it is. And you know, here’s our family.

Damon: 02:09 Did you have siblings?

Nicole: 02:10 No, I’m an only child. So my parents actually adopted me when they were both in their late thirties. Um, they just could not, could not have children. My mom had a lot of miscarriages and stillbirths. Um, so they went the adoption route and you know, growing up in a mixed race family it, it just seemed normal. I fit.

Damon: 02:34 Her father had been in the military for more than 20 years by the time they adopted Nicole. So they put down roots in Atlanta, ending the usual repetitive relocations that military families often endure. They wanted to give Nicole a place to feel grounded. They lived off base, but they were still surrounded by military families, which meant a wide array of family mixtures. Many of them with German spouses. Nicole’s parents sent her to the German School of Atlanta on Saturdays because her adopted grandmother really wanted to be able to speak with her granddaughter in her native language. Sometimes adopt these don’t necessarily identify with the culture they’re introduced to when they’re adopted. So I asked Nicole how she identified with Germany.

Nicole: 03:19 Oh, I am. I’m very proud German. It was never a thing. I mean obviously it was odd, you know, going to Germany and being the only brown skinned kid running around with all of the cousins. Very concentrated white area in the small villages. But other than that it was normal. I felt like I fit.

Damon: 03:48 Did you go to Germany often?

Nicole: 03:53 Every Summer my mother and I would go.

Damon: 03:54 What was it like for you there? Tell me more about being this brown child running around as the only person of color, Probably, in the in the area.

Nicole: