Amanda describes her childhood with a father she considered to be a hero and a mother whom she loves despite her physical and mental abuse while showing favoritism toward her sister. She always wanted to search for her birth parents, scouring her house for information about herself when she was a kid. Unable to endure the abuse against herself and her brother Amanda called social services, after which she was disowned. When she finally obtained her adoption records she found one birth parent was deceased, and the other didn’t want contact yet.

Read Full TranscriptAmanda:                      00:02               I want him to contact me when he wants to be a part of my life. We’ll get to know me, but it still hurts because I talked to the brothers all the time and I’m like, why can’t he just pick up the phone and just call me or or even returning email. It would be wonderful to just have something. It’s just like don’t silence it. It is so, so I would just give anything to hear his voice.

Voices:                        00:35               Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I in mind?

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 Amanda. She called me from Mount Horeb, Wisconsin. Amanda is originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and she says, even though she lives in the country, you still can’t get the city out of her. Amanda describes a childhood with her father. She considered to be a hero into mother whom she loves despite her physical and mental abuse, while showing favoritism toward her sister. She always wanted to search for her birth parents, scouring her house for information about herself when she was a kid. When she finally obtained her records, she found one birth parent was deceased and the other not wanting contact yet. This is Amanda’s journey. Amanda was born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the second baby to her 23 year old birth mother, but she was placed in foster care when she was nine months old.

Amanda:                      01:48               My mom actually gave me upon her own volition initially because she thought that I would be better off with someone else because she just was having a tough time with it and actually it was good that she did because apparently when they did the intake or weighed like 12 pounds, so I was severely malnourished. And so then when I went to foster care, of course, you know I bolt right up, ya know, because they were feeding me, but I remember my foster parents. Well, my foster mother, I remember her to be very loving and very attentive even though she had, I don’t even know how many other kids she had in the house, but there were quite a few. But uh, Ken and Jean Newsome were my foster parents.

Damon:                       02:36               That’s interesting that you have memories of them. How long were you with them?

Amanda:                      02:41               Till? I was three and a half.

New Speaker:              02:43               Oh Wow. So some of your formative years were spent with them. Were spent?

Amanda:                      02:48               Yeah.

Damon:                       02:49               Wow.

Amanda:                      02:50               Yeah. But my biological mom was involved. Um, it took that long to terminate her rights. And what makes the most interesting is that my mom’s case for involuntary termination of parental rights was the first in our state that was actually successful in 1978.

Damon:                       03:10               Your mother was the first successful case of the state terminating a parent’s rights.

Damon:                       03:20               Amanda has read her file and learned that her birth mother was offered mental health assistance back in 1978. She was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder,

Amanda:                      03:31               She suffered a very traumatic childhood herself. So when I read all that it kind of just put everything together for me as far as why she was the way she was. Why she did the things that she did. For instance, my case worker, in some of the case notes, I noticed that there was some conversation with my birth mother where she had said she had noticed that I was sucking my thumb and she goes, “well, I thought I cured the child with that”, and a case worker was perplexed and She asked what my mom meant by that, and she goes, well, I tied her hands behind her back. Oh boy. Then she said also that she had shaved my head as an infant thinking my hair grow back faster, so she has some very interesting ideations about how to change things. For instance,

Damon:                       04:21               Amanda believes that with appropriate medications and supports, perhaps she could have done better as a mother, but that’s a hard thing to speculate. She mentioned that her birth mother was involved in her life while she was in foster care. Apparently there was a period when the woman was living in the home with Amanda, but not for very long. Something went awry with the foster mother and not long after that her birth mother’s rights were terminated.

Amanda:                      04:45               I, I believe that she did. She did want me. I just think that she gave up because she felt that she just really wasn’t going to win no matter how hard she tried.

Damon:                       04:56               She says she has memories of what her foster mother looked like and recall spending one of her early birthdays with Jean, but she couldn’t recall what her birth mother looked like at all. Her birth mother’s parental rights were terminated in 1978 and Amanda was adopted about one year later, then moved to Milwaukee. But remember, Amanda was nearly four when she left Osh Kosh with her adopted parents. So she recalls leaving her foster home.

Amanda:                      05:22               And I remember I was sitting in the backseat of the car facing the wrong way, facing back in the back and actually up against the back of the seat looking out the window. And um, and I remember I had big tears rolling down my cheeks and I couldn’t. I couldn’t cry out loud because I didn’t wan them to hear me because…

Damon:                       05:46               You remember that feeling?

Amanda:                      05:46               I do. So I think the fear was that if they heard me or saw was that they might want to get rid of me too. And that’s something that I carried with me my whole life. Yeah, that fear.

Damon:                       06:03               So even as a toddler, and it sounds like about four years old, you had the sense that going with these new parents was not necessarily final that they… If they determined that you were in any way undesirable, they could send you back and you didn’t want that. So you. You held your emotions back.

Amanda:                      06:30               mmmhmmm….That’s something I was trained to do as a kid. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t react to stuff at least down in front of them. My bedroom, while It was a place of punishment most times. It was also a place of solace for me because it was a place where I could express myself without any recourse.

Damon:                       06:49               She says her childhood was hard because there was a lot of competition with her siblings, especially her sister who were adopted after her. Amanda said she was an awful student in school, but she loved to go to school because it was an escape. She connected with the adults at school better than she connected with her own parents, sometimes. Amanda was in special Ed classes because she had what was later determined to be attention deficit disorder. She did well on standardized tests, just not in her studies. So Amanda believes the masking of her emotions and her learned behaviors were part of what morphed into perceived learning disabilities. At home. The kids were involved in a lot of sports, like golf. It was the one space where Amanda could feel good about herself despite her mother’s unkind words.

Amanda:                      07:38               I guess I use golf as kind of a way to show my mom up (laughs) because for whatever reason I have a stronger upper body than she does and um, so by the time I reached a certain age I could really hit the ball, you know, kind of John Daly style. I could just just really know, smack it out of the field and it used to it… I don’t know why it brought me joy that a preterm her, but it was just the one thing that I was good at. She couldn’t, she couldn’t cut me down for, you know what I mean? And so I always, you know, if I hit that ball $250, I was happy. If it went in the woods drilling, that’s funny.

Damon:                       08:20               Well, what I was going to ask was you said you used the words. It was the one thing she couldn’t cut me down for. What does that mean? How would she cut you down?

Amanda:                      08:32               It was awful that way. When I hit puberty, I dealt with my weight. My weight was always a hard thing to deal with after puberty and so she would… She would find a way to use that against me in any way she could like if a friend and I switched clothes She would tell me in front of my friends that I looked fat in those clubs and then she would kind of tell me almost on a daily basis that I was fat and stupid and she would call me other words and those things really resonated with me my entire life. When I found something that I was good at that I knew she couldn’t put me down for. I really, I really just tried to use that so that those things would shine as opposed to the negative, you know, and I was hoping that that would bring her some sort of way to give me a compliment to make me feel good about myself, but she never did. Not until even now, it’s hard to get a good compliment out of her, but she made it really hard, grow up in that house and, and aside from that, you know, like I said, the struggle with the sister, she was...