Before becoming an adoptee advocate Rich was searching for his own identity. As a child, his older adopted sister vengefully told him their mom wasn’t his real mother. It made him wonder who the other woman could be. When he was in college, his adoptive parents gave him an envelope of non-identifying information. Many years later they handed him another document that revealed his birth name. Rich found himself resenting their decision to withhold information from him that he clearly wanted. When he found his maternal aunt they discussed his birth mother enough to realize she wasn’t the only sister in the family to have relinquished a son in Denver.

Read Full TranscriptRich:                            00:00               I started reading her the description of the birth father from my non identifying records and she got really quiet and she said, oh, this changes everything she goes, I know who your birth father was and so once we sorted it all out, we were both in bed for two days because she hadn’t known that her younger sister had done this.

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 Rich. He called me from Denver, Colorado where he works in adoptee advocacy, but before he took on that body of work, Rich was searching for his own identity. When he was in college, his adoptive parents gave him an envelope of non identifying information. Then years later he received another document with his birth name. When he found his maternal aunt, they discussed his birth mother enough to realize she wasn’t the only sister in the family to have relinquished a son in Denver. This is Rich’s journey. Rich has an older sister who was adopted, like himself, and a younger sister who was the biological child of his parents. Like many adoptive parents, they didn’t think they could conceive a child until she was born. They were set with their daughter and son they had adopted and there was no plans for any more children. It’s amazing how often that storyline is repeated in adoption. Interestingly, since adoption was such an open topic in their family, at one point their younger sister had a bit of an identity crisis.

Rich:                            02:03               The funny thing, you know, how families show slides and baby pictures and that sort of thing. And um, my younger sister was the only one with the newborn new new newborn photos. And at one point she sort of had an existential crisis thinking that she was adopted too, but they just weren’t telling her.

Damon:                       02:23               Oh, interesting.

Rich:                            02:25               You’re, you’re the only one with the pictures in which your purple.

Damon:                       02:30               Hmm.

Rich:                            02:32               They’ve got, they’ve got the evidence.

Damon:                       02:34               Yeah. You’re new new newborn in this. Wow. That’s really fascinating. I’ve never heard anyone talk about their sibling who was biological to their parents having this alignment of their identification with you and your sister as adoptees before. That’s fascinating. Yeah. The mind of a child, you know, you want to be like those around you. And if the two out of the three children in your home are adoptees you must figure, oh, I must be adopted too.

Rich:                            03:03               Well, and it was, it was a hot topic for a while, uh, because my, uh, older sister one day was angry with me and she presented it to me in a different light when she said, rather than saying you were adopted, a lot of them wanted and chosen and all those things that we hear. She said, mom’s not your real mom. And I was five at the time. It was, it was pretty devastating to me. It shook my world. I said, I just said, what? So she just repeated it. Nope. Mom’s not your real mom and sort of gloried in the triumph of having stunned me. And so of course I went and asked my mom about it and she explained that even though they’d said that we were adopted, that was different than thinking that there was another mom out there somewhere. And I really struggled with that.

Rich:                            04:00               I moped around and was depressed and was saying, I wish I knew who my real mom was. And finally at one point she just said, well, I’m your real mom. She was your first mom. Something in my head said, okay, and we, we move forward with that. But it never, I always wanted to know. Uh, the unfortunate thing is, is she told me I would never know. And so that hung with me and there’s a part of me that was very saddened by that and the part of me that filed it away kind of like saying, well, we’ll, we’ll see. You know, we’ll see if I never know.

Damon:                       04:39               Rich said, other than that they had the quintessential suburban family. They went to church every Sunday, went on family vacations to see relatives and visit various states across the country. I asked Rich about the relative homogeneity of his family. I’m often curious about the visual clues a person might have that they are somehow different from their family members.

Rich:                            05:00               And it was kinda funny because one day someone commented, that, my dad and I looked alike and we just sort of looked at each other and said, well, that’s funny. We both have blue eyes and we both have big ears, but that’s about as far as it went.

Damon:                       05:16               It’s pretty funny. I remember I used to do that too. You know, people would say that to my dad. Oh my gosh, he looks just like you. And immediately we would look at each other like, really do I? It’s funny, I used to say, I said, you know, my father passed away. I said in his, the sort of eulogy speech that I gave that I think that people saw more of the spirit that you picked up from the person in the fact that you’re there together interacting. Then they did actually, you know, a physical resemblance in my opinion.

Rich:                            05:47               Right? I think so that you, you imitate mannerisms and gestures and even facial expressions. It’s the whole nature and nurture piece of the conversation.

Damon:                       05:58               I asked Rich to describe his personality traits as compared with those of his other family members. He said his parents were the post World War II generation, People who had a job to do and did it. They kept their commitments and they really applied themselves to their lives. He said their differences weren’t as apparent until he was old enough to be more contemplative about it all.

Rich:                            06:19               Their biological heritage was mainly English and German, which, you know, if you want to stereotype cultures, tend to be a little more still like a little less communicative. And my biological heritage is Irish and Swedish and Scottish and a little bit of northern European mud. And so in that sense, I think I was wired pretty differently from what they were. And it wasn’t, it wasn’t clear at first, but I think that as I grew up and started to think more critically about our interaction and what was happening and um, some of the dynamics, I think that we really, I don’t know if we were oil and water, it’s not like, we had fights all the time or that kind of thing. It was just my internal expectation of how the world interacted was very different than theirs and at times it left me feeling, Eh, what’s the best word? Somewhere somewhere between not normal and crazy for thinking and communicating and wanting to interact the way that I wanted to and getting the message that this didn’t make sense.

Damon:                       07:44               Interesting. Around what age do you recall feeling that way and can you give me even the highest level example of something that exemplifies that feeling?

Rich:                            07:54               Probably I would say initially maybe about age seven which interestingly enough is the age at which many adoptees and children in general start to develop the capacity to grieve, in second grade, I would have these crying jags at school and I didn’t know why. The teacher would say, what’s wrong? What’s happening? What? Did someone hit you? Did someone do something to you? And I couldn’t explain it and I said, I don’t know. I just can’t stop crying. I didn’t learn about that until years later. At Adoptees in Search here in Colorado when Ron Nydam, who is a therapist and an author mentioned that, where you just casually mentioned in passing in one of the talks he gave that eight, seven, or eight is when children develop a capacity to grieve. And that light went off right away. And so in in the midst of those feelings with my folks, I can remember feeling things. One night I walked into the living room and sort of stood at the edge. I think my mom was reading a book and my dad was reading a newspaper or something like that. And uh, my mom looked up and inside I had all these, moist emotions roiling around as she looked up and in a very pleasant tone and just said, how can I help you as if she was sort of, you know, the family waitress, but completely or seemingly unaware that anything wrong was going, was happening inside me. She was asking like, would you like a glass of milk? And so that’s probably my earliest memory of that.

Damon:                       09:43               And what, what happened when you, but you were, you were boiling inside, like the emotions were just raw. It sounds like,

Rich:                            09:50               right? It was. It was. I didn’t, I didn’t have words for what was going on, but probably probably at the time just would have helped a lot to have been hugged or held. We weren’t a particularly affectionate family, especially after a certain age. When we were little, you know, we were read to and sat on our mom’s lap, just that unite and that sort of thing. So as I said, I think pretty typical the generation, and it’s interesting because I’ve talked to people who are not adopted, men who were not adopted in particular, uh, about the dynamics in their family and how it impacted them. And it leads to an interesting conversation about what is related to adoption, what’s related to being raised by postwar parents. Many men were raised a certain way or emotionally traumatized by war and just not able to be as engaged emotionally or affectionate with their children. And it wasn’t expected. You know, there were, there were a much more defined family roles.

Damon:                       10:57               So...