Megan grew up in an affluent suburb of Chicago and was comfortable with her adoption, but curious about her start in life. After pregnancy, “I struggled with mental health problems and became addicted to narcotics and anti-anxiety meds.” When she met her maternal relatives, things went well until her aunt shunned her for her addiction recovery. On her paternal side, that same news, being in recovery, was met with acceptance, because we all have our challenges. More than anything, Megan is thankful to finally have a sister, and it’s someone listeners already know. (http://www.whoamireallypodcast.com/071-i-would-give-anything-to-hear-his-voice/)

Read Full TranscriptMegan:                        00:03               Am I opening up my heart to this woman who is just gonna stomp on it? Do I let myself accept the love that’s coming at me and just take it at face value and so that’s what I decided to do, but I was not going to make, you know, midnight pilgrimage to Chicago to meet them. Because I’ve been hurt. You know what I mean? I’ve been really hurt by my birth mother’s side of the family.

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 Megan. She called me from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Megan grew up in an affluent suburb of Chicago and was comfortable with her adoption but curious about her start in life. When she met her maternal relatives, things went well until her aunt shunned her for her addiction recovery. On her paternal side, that same news was met with acceptance because we all have our challenges, but more than anything, Megan is thankful to finally have a sister and it’s someone listeners already know. This is Megan’s journey

Damon:                       01:34               Megan grew up in Beverly, an affluent neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. She’s the oldest of three children in her family, all adopted, raised strict Irish Catholic. Megan says she was told she was adopted from as far back as she can remember and it was something to be proud of.

Megan:                        01:50               I remember my mom, um, telling stories to my younger brothers and myself about how she had prayed to God and God blessed her with three beautiful children and it sticks in my head. The neighborhood I grew up in, there were a lot of adopted children, so we knew, we knew and initially we knew we were different because it was brought up to us. Oh, they’re not your real parents. And as we kind of figured out the other children who are adopted, we kind of realized we weren’t different we were special, you know, our parents loved us so much that they prayed for us. And, and you know, we were chosen to be in this family.

Damon:                       02:37               Megan was adopted through an adoption agency called The Cradle. So was her middle brother and a lot of the children in her community. Her father was a lawyer, her mother was a stay at home mom and the children didn’t want for anything. But ultimately the longing Megan felt was for her greater understanding of herself. For example, she wanted to know things about herself, like who she got her physical features from,

Megan:                        03:00               those types of questions came up in college. I was an RA in, at college in my first two years of college I went to St Louis University. And that’s a private Jesuit College Catholic. And um, one of the girls on the unit was an RA and she became pregnant. And that kind of brought up a lot of questions because she made her decision, which was her decision. It’s her body, her choice, the whole nine yards. But I started thinking about my birth mother and you know, this was, I was born in 74. So this was, you know, this was right around Roe vs Wade and you know, she could have made a different decision. She didn’t have to put me up for adoption. And so I just started wondering about who this person was and I kind of, I kind of built her up in my head. She was this great, wonderful selfless person who, you know, got pregnant unexpectedly and wanted the best for me and decided to put me up for adoption.

Damon:                       04:07               So in 1994, Megan was watching an episode of the Oprah Winfrey Show where she talked about an adoptee’s legal entitlement to obtain non identifying information. Mentioning that Illinois is one of those states where that’s possible. Megan wrote a letter to The Cradle, identifying herself, her parents, and requesting information on her birth mother. They mailed back a packet of information to her home during the summer of 1994. When Megan got home from work one day her parents were sitting together in the living room awaiting her arrival.

Megan:                        04:37               And my dad said, Megan is there something you want to tell me, something you want to ask me? And I’m like, oh my God, what did I do?

Damon:                       04:44               Her father pulled out the envelope and asked again if there was anything she wanted to ask them. She really felt like she was in deep trouble because she didn’t tell her parents that she was launching a search.

Megan:                        04:55               I didn’t tell them that I was doing this. This was, this was something I did and I didn’t want to hurt them, you know, I didn’t want them to think that I didn’t love them anymore. You know, that I said that because I was searching for this information, that it meant that I loved them any less. Um, and I sat down with my mom and dad and my mom was crying and you know, it was a good conversation and my dad said, what do you want to know? And I just told him, I said, I want to know who she is. I want to know, do I look like her? You know, I just have all these questions. And I rattled off this list of things that I wanted and he said, well, I can help you with one thing. And I said, oh, okay. He says, Do you want to know her name?

Megan:                        05:44               And I was like, it was a private adoption, like my adoption was closed. It says it right in my paperwork. Well, my dad was a lawyer and he happened to know the lawyer who worked at the adoption agency, so he and my mom were there the day that they terminated my biological mother and father’s parental rights, so he heard the name and it was an odd name. It wasn’t, it wasn’t like Smith or Jones. It was a unique name, and so he remembered it all those years. He remembered it, which is ironic now because my father passed away from early onset Alzheimer’s disease.

Damon:                       06:25               Oh, so that information could have left him. Wow.

Megan:                        06:29               Absolutely. Absolutely.

Damon:                       06:31               Megan was 20 at the time of that conversation, she told me she also hadn’t spoken with her siblings, who were adopted, about her desire to search. She didn’t want to spark a bunch of searches and make her parents feel badly. I circled back to something Megan said before that her neighborhood was affluent and there was a large population of adopted children in it. I asked if she thought there was a correlation between that collective affluence and the rate of adoption in those neighboring families and she said, yes. We chatted about how much it can cost to complete an adoption and the business that adoption has turned into in many cases,

Megan:                        07:07               it’s not something that a family that is completely loving and would be tremendous parenst to a child are able to afford. It no matter how you adopt a child, it’s a wonderful experience. But it’s unfortunate that those without the means to afford it financially are unable to do what other people that happen to have $30,000 lying around are able to.

Damon:                       07:39               Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean the idea that a person could have, you know, most love in their heart, the most altruistic vision and no financial means to complete an adoption versus somebody who, as you know, I’ve interviewed on the podcast many times, parents who are not fit to be parents but are in a position of affluence and can afford it end up with more than one child in many cases and sometimes those children are miserable.

Megan:                        08:10               Look at my half sister, Amanda. I mean, look what she went through. My heart breaks for her.

Damon:                       08:16               Did you hear that? Remember that name, Amanda, we’ll come back to her in a few minutes. Let’s go back to the living room where Megan’s parents have confronted her about her envelope. Her mother is crying, but

Megan:                        08:28               they were, they were good tears. She wasn’t, she wasn’t, you know, wasn’t coming from, from a place of sadness was, she was happy for me almost. You know, that, that I was getting to know this piece, this information as, as minimalistic as the page and the information was, I had some information, you know, so we sat down and we read it together.

Damon:                       08:54               Megan learned her mother was four foot six inches tall and had worked odd jobs and the documentation explained the woman’s social and family history. But what shocked Megan the most was.

Megan:                        09:05               it said that I had a half sibling. It didn’t say brother or sister, it’s just that I had a half sibling who was placed production in 1978 and so, you know, instantly in the, in addition to who, who are my biological parents, well, Holy Shit. Now I have, I have a sibling?

Damon:                       09:25               Right? Mind blowing.

Megan:                        09:29               Like, okay. Holy Shit, number one. Number two. Um, why did no one notify my parents that I had a sibling.

Damon: