How can attending an adoptee summit transform your understanding of identity and connection?

In this episode of Family Twist, we're joined by Monica Hall for an insightful discussion on the Untangling Our Roots Summit. Monica shares her profound experiences at the summit, emphasizing the healing power of connecting with others who have similar adoption-related experiences. The episode explores the emotional journey of adoptees and birth parents, highlighting stories of reunions, the deep sense of loneliness many adoptees face, and the importance of compassion and understanding in these unique relationships.

I Knocked On My Birth Mother's Door

Benefits of Listening:

• Gain insight into the transformative power of adoption summits and how they foster healing and connection.
• Learn about the emotional impact of reunions between adoptees and their birth families, including heartwarming and challenging stories.
• Understand the importance of listening to birth parents' stories to grasp the full scope of the adoption experience.

Tune in to hear Monica's moving stories and discover how shared experiences at adoption summits can lead to profound healing and connection—listen now!

So can we go back to the summit for a minute and talk a little bit about the healing factor of something like this? And I know it's a lot of people. I had 50 conversations that, of course, they're all starting to blend together now because, you know, it's just a short period of time. And I'm sure you had more than that. Talk about the experience of this type of summit where all these people are coming together that have.

they're overlapping experiences. Boy, it is. So I think, you know, we have a lot of things to heal in the, in the constellation. Everybody's touched in some way or another. And the, how we're going to heal that is by connection. And one of the things that they say when you've lost someone you love, like one -on -one therapy, they recommend a group therapy and grief is group therapy. And that's why these podcasts are so amazing. And these.

these type of summits where we're hearing people's stories and we're connecting with these people that have the same lived experience and survived these experiences. And you don't feel alone. You don't feel so alone because I didn't realize it because I'm such an extrovert and I've always been so outgoing and go getter. I didn't realize that growing up, I was lonely. I was lonely. And I think the loneliness stemmed from no identity and no nobody that

was genetically related to me. I felt very alone. And there was a page in my book where I wrote about the time that I got the non -identifying information when I was pregnant at 15. It's like finding my mother was as hard as finding a message in a bottle from her. It was like, especially back then, there was no DNA like we have now, which has been incredible. So I grew up, even though I didn't think so, I was lonely.

You said something too about being at this summit and having these experiences and then not being great in a crowd. And that's one of the reasons you dress up like you do so that it's an attention starter and you don't have to break into a group of people to have a conversation. Interestingly enough, I'm an extrovert, but I'm not a party goer. It's not because I don't drink. It's because I would rather have a one -on -one deep conversation with someone any day.

than light, small talk. It's torture for me, small talk. And so what happened at this conference was that I had some really deep conversations with people. And I was so blessed in that I was on a panel, the panel, we were all birth parents and adoptees. There were three of us, one was a man. And it was really, really incredible. The room was pretty full. And after a guy was all nervous, he was standing out by my table, probably in front of your table, and he was like,

I'm gonna go meet my birth mother, will you come with us? And I didn't know this guy. And I'm like, hell yeah. hell yeah. And I had dinner plans with a bunch of authors, published authors that I hadn't met yet, that I was really looking forward to. And it was like, no, that trumped. And so the people that, there were four of us in the car, he'd never met his birth mother.

She lived in Denver. She was about 80. He'd sent her a couple letters. Neither one of them were replied to, and he was just going to go knock on her door. And he's from out of the country, and he had just come on a whim with these other people that he'd been in Zoom with that were adopted. So I was in the front seat because of my knee. I couldn't sit in back. It was a convertible. And then the woman that was driving, and then there was four of us. And we pulled up to this really nice house. And.

He got out and went up to the door and knocked on the door. And I'm telling you, we were whispering in the car. The doors are closed, the windows are closed, and we're watching him. And I got it on video, I'll probably put it on TikTok. You can't see who he is, but he's standing at the door. You can't tell if anybody's at the door, but you sense that there's a storm door and you don't know he's knocking. And then he's standing there. And I'm, is there somebody at the door? Yes, I think there's somebody. He's talking to somebody.

And then he's dropping papers and he's explaining and pointing back to the thing. And then he opens the door and walks in and we're in the car. He's in, he's in. my God, he's in. It was like the best moment. It was the best moment. Shut the front door, literally. Really. Got the front door. Yeah. And I mean, it was so incredible. So we're in the car going, holy crap, holy crap, holy crap. And he was in there for 15 minutes.

And it just so happened there was a guy that came out, we thought maybe it was his brother, he was carrying a tripod camera and he was the realtor photographer at the ladies moving. And she was only there because the photographer was late. She would not have been home. And so the synchronicity of things, like there's been so much synchronicity and he comes out after 15 minutes and he literally looked like he'd just gotten laid. You know, that glow you have. And I said, it looks like you just got F.

And he goes, I got bad news. And we're like, what? And of course he's glowing. He goes, I'm going to need two hours. And so we took off. It was the day that it was storming and lightning and everything. We went to eat for a couple of hours and came back and he was, he was really elated. He had a two hour conversation with his birth mother. They were so much alike. They both traveled. It was, you know, those moments, those kinds of

things, you cannot replace that kind of an experience and that kind of a connection. I'm connected to all four of those people now forever. That was wonderful. And I also went with another woman to meet her birth mother who didn't know she was coming, who left town because she didn't want to meet her. So we have these two sides of the coin because this is something that I try to say.

So think about this, and you've not had children, you have your fur babies, but when you carry a child in your womb for nine months, and then you birth this child, there is a bond that you cannot escape. It's a mother -child bond. It's not just mental or physical or emotional and spiritual, it's everything. And so when this...

this whole relinquishment thing happens and however you're coerced or because of don't enough money or whatever it is, there's no closure. There's no, it's a disenfranchised grief. It's grief that you can't really talk about. So, or like maybe like abortion or an affair or something like that. These are disenfranchised grief. They're grief. Nobody brought casseroles to my house. There was no funeral. Nobody asked me how I was feeling or how I was doing.

No, I didn't get a funeral or a death certificate. And people assume because you relinquished that you don't care. And so you're expected to move on like it never happened. And this is what happened, especially in the 60s, 50s, 60s and early 70s. You're expected to just move on. And how do you move on? How do you, how does somebody deal with that kind of grief? So when I left the hospital,

I felt like I was going to die. I mean, that grief was so great. I felt like I was not going to live. And I had to come up with a mantra. And I did, as I looked back at the hospital, I just said, I won't think about right now. I just won't think about it right now. I just won't think about it right now. I just won't think about it right now. And I did that so that I could survive. I pushed that down. I never cried. Because I knew if I started, I'd never stop. And I'd die. So here, think about this.

These mothers back in the day, they were sent across the country. Family disowned them or didn't. People, you know, they had to quit school. They had to go on. It was a shameful thing. They're expected to go on with their life. They don't tell their children, their new husband. They don't tell them because it's so shameful. They'll think horrible things about them. And then 40, 50 years later, their children come back who really want the identity. What happened?

Why did you give me up? I just need to look at your eyes. I just need to find out who I really am. And they can't do it because they have suppressed that pain and that grief for a lifetime. And if they let that out of the box, they're going to cease to exist. That's untappable grief. And so these adoptees are devastated by that secondary rejection. And my heart breaks for them, really does.

And it angers me that the birth mothers are so self -centered, but I get it. It's not just self -centeredness, it's self -preservation. Yes. Monica, you've just opened up, I think, a lifeline to Kendall because that's the trauma he's going through after almost seven years of his birth mother not willing to have any kind of connection, even though he's connected to her other children. And it's a

daily trauma that he deals with, but this is going to give him something to think about. Have him reach out to me. Absolutely. Those are the stories that the adoptees need to be hearing. They need to hear the birth mother stories.

I just want to give you a big old hug right now. You're fantastic. And thank you for being so open about your story. It's so important. These communities, as you know, are only growing. They are. You know, the heart is the thing that gets closed up from grief, from pain, and from anger and resentment. And...

You know, that the heart is that is the place that we store all this. And so everything I do, I do to keep my heart open in the compassion rather than the judgment and that those cycling thoughts of, of for me or what they did or didn't do. And, you know, I do a lot of, a lot of coaching with people on

on that and it's really sad because I see them on social media that people that are really angry and I understand anger but at some point we've got to get out of that cycle because A, it hurts us physically. People get sick from that kind of anger and they also attract more.

of that same type of energy. So the more that we can keep our heart open and listen to other stories and be willing. And you know, some people, they're just not there yet. They're in a place where they want to be angry and they want to be that victim mentality. I think that that feels like a safe place or feels like a right place. And they don't know how to get out of that. I've been addicted to my thought. We're all addicted.

thoughts, there's that. But I've certainly been addicted to my cycling thoughts. And I know that that is, I go down the rabbit hole. And so I've really tried to work on that. And what you think about, you bring about, and what you engage in, and who you engage with, the people that you're around is going to influence that. So if you're always on social media following the same kind of

you know, mantra and the same kind of information you're going to keep in that cycle. You know, everybody's got their destiny. Everybody's got their path. And I, you know, I don't know that it's good or bad. It's just is it is what we were dealt. And mine's been rough, but man, I wouldn't change a thing. You know, wow. Yeah, I like me. That's powerful. What you just said.

very powerful.