Shownotes
Patrice, from Northern Virginia, said that in her house adoption was never discussed when she was a kid. So her curiosity led to a secret search as an adult. While her birth mother had no plans to meet Patrice, in reunion, her birth father told everyone about his long lost daughter.
Unfortunately, the loneliness of the COVID 19 lockdown drove a wedge between Patrice and her birth father.
This is Patrice's journey.
Who Am I Really?
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Transcripts
244 - Love is Meant to Multiply
Cold Cut
[:[00:00:14] Patrice: So, cause it's scary but just to be 17 and be sent there alone and basically have nobody that really cares about you. You're just very much alone.
Show open
[:[00:01:12] Damon (2): Unfortunately, the loneliness of the COVID 19 lockdown drove a wedge between Patrice and her birth father. This is Patrice's journey.
Opening
[:[00:01:37] Damon (2): It felt like the topic of adoption was taboo in their house. since they didn't talk about it at all, Patrice didn't truly understand the concept of how their family was formed. her family lived out in the country and she was the only girl in her area, so she tried to hang out with her older brother and his friends a lot as a kid.
[:[00:02:07] Damon (2): Becoming the first chair player in the state at the high school level. I asked about life in her home with her adoptive parents. How they were alike and how they were different. Patrice
[:[00:02:36] Patrice: And then a lot of that was also in my adoptive background. So that was the similar part. Now the different part was that my parents were both very tall and so is my brother. But I'm this short little five foot two thing.
[:[00:02:53] Patrice: I guess it's, it stuck out a little bit because of the size difference.
[:[00:03:06] Patrice: I my brother and I both had light blonde hair. My parents had kind of dark hair, but It wasn't so noticeable in that regard. I don't think our features looked much alike.
[:[00:03:25] Damon (2): Yeah, how about your personality traits? as a musician, that's a unique thing in a family But were your other family members musicians as well?
[:[00:03:38] Patrice: Well, my dad actually was a professional musician. He had his own bands and they would travel all over the East coast and play for different parties and dance type events. And I guess I always thought, wow, that's a cool thing.
[:[00:04:24] Damon (2): Yeah, and you should. You should. Nerds make the world go round. Everybody has a contribution,
[:[00:04:30] Damon (2): Patrice has said that adoption wasn't discussed in her home. When she was older, getting married and starting a family were impactful her ongoing curiosity about her adoption. She didn't have bad feelings about being adopted. she was just curious about her roots. Patrice had a file of her adoption records from some half hearted attempts to search over the years.
[:[00:05:21] Damon (2): They suggested she get an attorney, and they offered a name of a guy Whom Patrice ultimately hired for her case. I asked Patrice how she was feeling about hiring a stranger to help her search.
[:
[00:05:34] Patrice: After talking to this gentleman, I felt like, wow, this guy really knows something. And I felt confident that something was going to come of it finally, because I'd been getting so many closed doors before that, but I really felt confident. So this would have been about January of 2014.
[:[00:06:20] Patrice: So that was an interesting twist.
[:[00:06:25] Patrice: Okay, so I've always been a little bit of a detective online so I found this guy, I guess you would call him a search angel. I mean, totally weird because, you're not supposed to meet a person online and tell them all your details, but here I was doing that.
[:[00:07:11] Patrice: So then he looked to see which ones had the same last name. Like. Or at least had a mother and a father listed, which mine didn't have a father list and it just had my birth mother. So he knew that was my case. So then he was able to pull it up and he told me what her name was.
[:[00:07:36] Patrice: So I knew all that before anything came forth with the attorney.
[:[00:07:55] Patrice: Right. I was just a little bit of a detective and I also had a good [00:08:00] friend that was even more of a detective than me. So she was helping me a lot.
[:[:
[00:08:28] Patrice: so I'm looking at these pictures thinking, okay, which one of them looks like me. Oh, maybe it's this one or my friend said, Oh, no, I think it's that one. And we're like, Oh, I don't know. So it's got to be one of these two women in these pictures.
[:[00:08:55] Damon (2): Really? Wow. So you're sitting there [00:09:00] looking at these two women who are prospective candidates to be your birth mother.
[:[00:09:12] Patrice: It was confusing, but it was also very affirming that I was like, wow, I mean, how Of all the millions of billions of people in the world, I've narrowed it down to two and this is like, you know You almost felt like you almost won the lottery like almost won the lottery.
[:[00:09:49] Damon (2): Simultaneously, Patrice had placed her name In a West Virginia adoption reunion registry. Great. Along the way, Patrice realized that the most acceptable thing to [00:10:00] say about why she wanted to search, both to keep the peace with her adoptive parents, and to appease the courts about her search, was to say that she was interested in genetic health information.
[:[00:10:14] Damon (2): Patrice admitted that she did have some health issues at that time and she had gotten her doctor to draft a note legitimizing her health claims, but her real desires for search and reunion came from within. Patrice's hired attorney worked with a social worker in the state capital of Charleston, West Virginia, to reach out to her birth parents.
[:[00:10:47] Patrice: I had all of that. And that was very helpful, but my birth mother didn't want any contact, but I knew what her name was at that point, even though I wasn't really supposed to know what her name was.
[:[00:11:02] Damon (2): How did you do that?
[:[00:11:15] Patrice: felt more comfortable telling me some things about her.
[:[00:11:36] Damon (2): How did it go?
[:[00:12:02] Patrice: So I think. She had a lot more at stake to have this long lost daughter showing up. So I could understand why she didn't want to make contact. But my birth father, he was all gung ho. He was ready to meet me. But you know, again, he didn't have anything to reveal or to lose.
[:[00:12:26] Damon (2): Fascinating. So then what did you do? How did you make contact?
[:[00:12:51] Damon (2): Wow.
[:[00:12:55] Patrice: Was just writing down everything I could write. Because I just had [00:13:00] this feeling like this might be the only time I get to talk to him and I want to write down and know as much as I can.
[:[00:13:07] Patrice: A little bit into the conversation, which was six hours. He said, well, no, this isn't the only time we're going to talk, you don't have to feel stressed about writing things down.
[:[00:13:27] Damon (2): feverishly, right? Yeah. Wow. What was that like when you're sitting there you're talking to this guy, you've never met him before you're having extended conversation and you're thinking it's going to be the last time you might ever talk to him.
[:[00:13:48] Patrice: I guess I was a little nervous because here you are meeting this strange man and you don't want to feel like you're revealing or connecting too much because this person is a stranger.[00:14:00]
[:[00:14:18] Patrice: I wanted to make sure that, okay, this person is safe and is not going to be trying to do any harm to me or my family. But we ended up meeting in person about a month later.
[:[00:15:04] Patrice: And I knew it was him and he had this. big bunch of flowers in his hands.
[:[00:15:30] Patrice: And nobody was honking their horns at us, but we just had this big hug right there in the middle of the street.
[:[00:15:49] Patrice: it was, it really was. I mean, we were both in tears and Yeah, so he got in my car, we went over to Springfield Mall and had dinner. At a [00:16:00] nice restaurant over there and as we went into the restaurant he was telling everybody he's like this proud dad all of a sudden and he's like this is my baby girl and this is the first time we've met and I don't even have to put her in a high chair to have dinner with her because she's not a baby but this is still our first meeting.
[:[00:16:40] Damon (2): How was that for you to be looking at him, but he can't really discern your visual likeness to himself. How was that for you?
[:[00:17:01] Patrice: I eventually brought him a box full of pictures of me. From young childhood all the way up to, getting married and all that. I had pictures of my whole life and he could see those a little bit and he was just like, wow. But he was not like totally blind, but like mostly blind, I guess
[:[00:17:51] Patrice: On his eyes. And I think that maybe there was some botched surgery that led to his blindness. But he actually went [00:18:00] to NIH and had a full workup related to his blindness. I think it was like two days worth of testing that he had. And when he was there this was after we had connected.
[:[00:18:34] Patrice: But I got to go to NIH and I had a full day workup to look at everything regarding my eyes. So the good news was that I don't have any of those issues that he has, but. The bad news was I was really hoping that they could do something from evaluating me that would lead them to be able to help him,
[:[00:18:57] Patrice: there wasn't anything.
[:[00:19:17] Damon (2): Interesting. And I love that you said you were hoping to be able to contribute something to his better health, right? You got something by being there. Sure. and being participatory in the entire evaluative process that figured out whether you had a genetic linkage to his blindness, but I like that you were also hoping to contribute something back to basically helping or curing him.
[:[00:19:53] Damon (2): So you're only going to get one side of the story. What was his side of the story for you?
[:[00:20:14] Patrice: It wasn't anything like that. They were in a loving relationship. But she got pregnant. Pregnant and I, he told me that it was like her first time ever having sex, but she got pregnant with me. And then my biological father, his name's Joe. Joe had this cousin who was a OBGYN. And so it was his cousin that actually did the pregnancy test.
[:[00:20:52] Patrice: You're pregnant. So it was kind of interesting that it was Joe's cousin, who was the doctor that, that told him [00:21:00] the news.
[:[00:21:05] Patrice: So, both of my biological parents were being raised by a single parent. And the reason for that is, in my biological mother's case, she died when my birth mother was like 13.
[:[00:21:42] Patrice: So both of the single parents had to work really hard just to be able to support the kids.
[:[00:21:49] Patrice: My birth mother was an only child and she did not get along well with her father. It was just a very tumultuous relationship.
[:[00:22:38] Patrice: So. That was interesting that, he could be married all those years and she would never know and then they never had any children together.
[:[00:23:15] Damon (2): Patrice said it was one of those moments when time just seemed to stand still. But Patrice's social worker had shared that the woman did not want any contact with Patrice.
[:
[00:23:27] Patrice: have the medical information and the social information about her. And so I had that much, which was important, but I felt rejected that she didn't want to have any contact with me, but I understood it because she, he's married and her husband likely doesn't know about me.
[:[00:24:19] Patrice: One other thing related to that is interesting. So when I, the attorney, Was able to get all of his information and then eventually sent send it to me and all of the names and identifying information on the records that the attorney had were supposed to be redacted and It wasn't supposed to have hit my birth mother's name or my birth father's name.
[:[00:24:55] Patrice: don't know if that was an accident or maybe somebody was like, Hey, this girl really needs to know. [00:25:00] I don't know which it was, but that was pretty interesting. But at that point I already knew what her name was, but it was just like, Wow, somebody really goofed here, but it's all good.
[:[00:25:13] Damon (2): You were rejected in making contact with her as an adult. Do you maintain an effort to try to reach out to her? Some people will send the annual Christmas card, just to make sure people know that you're still out there and thinking of them. Like, do you do anything to try to remind her that you're still open to connecting?
[:[00:26:20] Patrice: And just, I told her I, I loved her and I wanted all the best for her. So she at least had that much information. And the social worker told me that after the letter, the brief, very brief letter was read to her, that there was just silence. I could just understand that it really meant something to her.
[:[00:26:43] Damon (2): Yeah, I'm sorry. That's really rough. Because you wouldn't be here without her. And you want to at least get one chance to see her, meet her, connect. And she's just not able to go back to those days.
[:[00:27:08] Patrice: And I do know that when I was, she was basically sent away from her family. To this place in Ohio where I was born, according, that was a common thing back in those days. So here she was 17. She was alone. She was sent away to this unwed mother's home and gave birth there. And, I just remember myself when I was giving birth that it was like, you really want somebody there with you.
[:[00:27:52] Patrice: How alone she was.
[:[00:28:00] Damon (2): A lot of times we're so selfish to just think, why don't you want to know me? And the truth is, we have to remind ourselves of the trauma that our birth parents went through at the time that we were conceived and eventually relinquished. And those aren't memories to return to. So it's nice to hear that you're, Like I said, holding that empathy for her in that situation that she found herself in.
[:[00:28:25] Patrice: one other thing I know about her was she was before she even got pregnant with me. She was on track to finish high school one year early. And so, she graduated from high school. pregnant with me, but I don't think she was showing yet. So in those days, a girl would not have been allowed to continue high school being pregnant.
[:[00:28:51] Damon (2): in how
[:[00:28:54] Damon (2): it your assertion that she may have been pushed out of school if she was [00:29:00] pregnant?
[:[00:29:14] Patrice: So she graduated early and that would have been like, what, May or June of 1970. And then I was born in October of 1970. So I think she graduated. And then sometime in the summer, she was sent away and she gave birth to me in October then began college in January. So really it didn't set her back in terms of her schooling more than just, basically the first semester of college she missed.
[:[00:29:48] Patrice: But not really, because she was able to start college still like a semester. Earlier than what most people her age would have done. So, she had a lot of goals for herself. [00:30:00] Like I could just tell by seeing how her, what her career is. And she also has a medical career too. So that's interesting that we both have that.
[:[00:30:50] Damon (2): Your birth mother and you,
[:[00:30:54] Damon (2): That's really cute. That's really cute. And
[:[00:31:07] Patrice: I had all these pictures. I mean, that, present. For mother's day was the best mother's day present I ever had or ever will have that was just How shocking is that you get pictures of your own mother that you've never seen before you get that on mother's day
[:[00:31:27] Patrice: really cool.
[:[:
[00:31:52] Damon (2): when I asked Patrice about her experience with her adoptive family, she said she didn't tell her parents about the search and she [00:32:00] was hesitant to say anything because the topic was taboo.
[:[00:32:24] Damon (2): Like, on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being ecstatic for the reunion, and 1 being they would never speak to Patrice again. Her aunt signaled that she thought her mom would be distraught over the news, assigning a value of about 3 or 2 to her receptivity. Moving to Patrice's father, her aunt thought he'd be kinda neutral.
[:[00:32:49] Patrice: So that day, I was on the phone with Aunt Mary, and then I talked to each of my parents separately. The first one I talked to was Mom, and she happened to be like [00:33:00] upstairs in the house, and Dad was like downstairs in the house. So that was good that they were both not knowing what this conversation was.
[:[00:33:33] Patrice: That, there's more people for me to love and there's more people to love me. And my family, my kids, and I don't feel like it's going to take away any of the relationship that I have with you or dad. And I think she had to let that sink in for a while and eventually she was okay with it.
[:[00:34:15] Patrice: Dad was just neutral. Didn't have much to say. And that was all right. And then they actually, my parents actually met Joe at my house for my daughter's birthday. This was March of 2015. And. They all sat at my kitchen table and we're talking and everybody was very cordial and and rewind just one little bit here. My mom still says to me we were promised that those records would remain sealed and she felt very violated That I would be able to get this information that she just really didn't like the idea.
[:[00:35:02] Damon (2): This is the challenge we face, right? His promises were made. Times have changed and the babies that were adopted are grown up and they're able to express themselves.
[:[00:35:52] Damon (2): She hadn't planned for any contingency. And I'm, I always like to remind people, like, we're all new to this. I've never [00:36:00] been through adoption reunion before, so I don't know how this is going to go, right? It's not like you do this every day, like, when you change jobs, you're like, well, when I changed my last job, I did this.
[:[00:36:15] Damon (2): That, that's not something she can, have possibly created a contingency for in her mind. However, it is still a valuable exercise for for folks to try to do. And it's unfortunate that she said such hurtful things. But I love what you said, Patrice, this idea that I believe love is meant to multiply.
[:[00:36:54] Damon (2): And these are friends and family members. And that's just, it's wonderful that you said that. So I'm glad that you were able [00:37:00] to reach a point where everybody could sit down at your kitchen table and meet and be cordial. That's really impressive. She came a long way.
[:[00:37:12] Patrice: And everyone's laughing and During some food and having a good time. So, I think a lot of the fears that my mom had were really felt like it comfortable. She was okay. And then I think it was an interesting piece that I met my birth father, but I had met my birth mother, I don't think my mom would have been as receptive because I think she would have felt threatened by or feeling like she was going to be replaced if I had met my birth mother.
[:[00:38:06] Damon (2): I agree. I think there's a lot of challenge in our adoptive parents meeting what I will loosely call their direct competitor, right? It's there. It's not a competition, but that's how it feels potentially to some of our adoptive parents is if I hadn't been on the scene, this is the person who would have done the job that I did, or this is the person who actually brought my child into this world.
[:[00:38:55] Damon (2): Right.
[:[00:39:16] Damon (2): Patrice stopped me because she had something else to say. She shared that she and Joe spoke nearly every day for five years from 2015 to 2020. Unfortunately, in 2020, The world went into a pandemic, and Patrice's work in healthcare completely disrupted her ability to be in touch with Joe daily.
[: [:[00:40:08] Patrice: Cause he's a real jokester kind of person. And then I realized he's not joking. Like he really thinks that I was out there having an affair and he even acted like he. He saw me doing something, and first of all, he's blind, second of all, he doesn't drive, and third of all, there was nothing going on, so I don't know what he thought he saw, but I tried to convince him, like, no, I, I don't do that's just not me, I would never do something like that So spent a long time trying to convince him that wasn't true, but he had it all in his mind that was the reason I wasn't calling him.
[:[00:41:09] Damon (2): Yeah, that is sad. And I wonder if, this is a man who lives alone, lives with blindness. Like he's probably fairly isolated. I don't know anything about his social structure, but here comes this wonderful new relationship with his daughter and I'm sure he developed quite an attachment to you.
[:[00:42:00] Damon (2): If he's basically imagining that you're having an affair, like that's a pretty serious scenario to both come up with and follow through on to the point where he would be openly accusatory towards you and hold to it is a big deal. And I wonder if there may not be some signs of a cognitive impairment that's starting to develop where to release that either.
[:[00:42:25] Patrice: crazy. I actually spoke with his physician to say like what, what was going on and let him know and also interesting was that Joe's brother who lives in Silver Spring, he's a retired clinical psychologist. And so I spoke to him to say, What do you think about this?
[:[00:43:10] Damon (2): I
[:[00:43:13] Damon (2): good. Well, I'm so sorry that happened, Patrice, but thank you so much for being here and sharing your journey, and I hope you're doing okay. This is a lot to go through, and, but, you got some closure, right, and
[:[00:43:32] Patrice: And I thought, I really want to share my story, but with this, the way this ended, I just felt it was so raw that I didn't want to, didn't really know I could talk about it, but now I just felt like I can talk about it now and not feel bad. It was just such a, high emotion with all of this and, high emotion, the way it ended, but, I still attack on him every so often.
[:[00:44:11] Damon (2): Yeah, I hear you. I hear you. All right. Patrice, thank you so much. Take care. Okay.
[:[00:44:27] Patrice: I'm looking forward to reading it
[:[00:44:42] Damon (2): So thank you so much for the support and the compliments appreciate it
[:Closing
[:[00:45:18] Damon (2): Maternal reunion rejection can be a devastating blow, but so can the hurtful words of adoptive parents when their initial reaction to reunion news is to focus on themselves with comments like, I guess we weren't good enough.
[:[00:45:54] Damon (2): That whole situation is avoidable when an adoptive parent shows up thoughtful and supportive of [00:46:00] their child, even if the initial shock of what has been revealed stings at first. I'm Damon Davis, and I hope you've found something in Patrizia's journey that inspired you, validates your feelings about wanting to search, or motivates you to have the strength along your journey to learn, who am I really?
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