Nicole was adopted into a military family, the structure of which ran against her freewheeling nature. She’s an interracial woman with interracial adopted parents, so they looked like a natural family. In reunion, Nicole is facing secondary rejection from her birth mother, but her maternal grandparents and uncle have accepted her with open arms. She’s learned that her birth father wanted to keep her, and her paternal family feels so natural, Nicole feels like she’s found her tribe.
Read Full TranscriptNicole: 00:05 I feel like I’ve found my tribe. These are, these are the people that like I fit. I feel like I’ve found peace within myself because it’s not who am I really? It’s it’s I am me and I’m who I’m always supposed to have been. It was just put in a different family.
Voices: 00:30 Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?
Damon: 00:42 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 Nicole. She called me from the terrible rush hour traffic in downtown Atlanta, Georgia. She was raised in the south, but her mixed racial heritage partially originates from Germany by way of the Commonwealth of Virginia, a state we’re in adoptees. Legal rights to obtain their original birth information are extremely prohibitive in reunion. She’s exercising patience with her birth mother as she waits to be revealed to her maternal siblings, but she’s also surrounded by love and acceptance by other family members on both sides. This is Nicole’s journey.
Damon: 01:30 Nicole was born in Virginia, adopted after three months in foster care. She is a woman of mixed race and she was adopted into a mixed race family. Her mother is white from Germany, her father is African American from Boston, and she grew up in a military family.
Nicole: 01:46 You know, growing up it was, it was pretty normal. Adoption was like, you know, I was a typical day, you know, in the fog adoptee. That makes me special. And it was one of those things where, I mean, it was it really necessary to talk about, you know, it was, I’m adopted and that’s what it is. And you know, here’s our family.
Damon: 02:09 Did you have siblings?
Nicole: 02:10 No, I’m an only child. So my parents actually adopted me when they were both in their late thirties. Um, they just could not, could not have children. My mom had a lot of miscarriages and stillbirths. Um, so they went the adoption route and you know, growing up in a mixed race family it, it just seemed normal. I fit.
Damon: 02:34 Her father had been in the military for more than 20 years by the time they adopted Nicole. So they put down roots in Atlanta, ending the usual repetitive relocations that military families often endure. They wanted to give Nicole a place to feel grounded. They lived off base, but they were still surrounded by military families, which meant a wide array of family mixtures. Many of them with German spouses. Nicole’s parents sent her to the German School of Atlanta on Saturdays because her adopted grandmother really wanted to be able to speak with her granddaughter in her native language. Sometimes adopt these don’t necessarily identify with the culture they’re introduced to when they’re adopted. So I asked Nicole how she identified with Germany.
Nicole: 03:19 Oh, I am. I’m very proud German. It was never a thing. I mean obviously it was odd, you know, going to Germany and being the only brown skinned kid running around with all of the cousins. Very concentrated white area in the small villages. But other than that it was normal. I felt like I fit.
Damon: 03:48 Did you go to Germany often?
Nicole: 03:53 Every Summer my mother and I would go.
Damon: 03:54 What was it like for you there? Tell me more about being this brown child running around as the only person of color, Probably, in the in the area.
Nicole: 04:05 I guess to me, because like I said, for my family made it very normal. Um, I did have a cousin and she was also mixed race military as well, but she grew up in Germany rather than moving to the states. Her mom stayed in Germany, so like I said it, it was just boggling normal. I mean, I guess it was, I noticed that I kind of stuck out of. But it, to me it was like, Oh, you know, I’m the special kid, you know, I’m the one brown kid here, here in Germany. Of course everybody was fascinated with my hair and, and all of that, but it was, it was just very, very normal.
Damon: 04:43 Nicole’s interracial heredity meant she really looked like she could be the product of her adopted parents. They even have little inside jokes and the family about her resemblance to her father’s distant relatives who were also mixed race. Some of them passing for white. A lot of adoptees have that joke or sometimes irritation at the constant reminder that they couldn’t possibly look like their relatives because they were adopted. Of course, their families resemblance made it hard to convince her friends. She was telling the truth when she revealed she was an adoptee
Nicole: 05:14 and my friends, some of them just didn’t believe that I was adopted. You know, there’s no way you’re adopted. You look just like your family. And I’ve looked. My Dad told them that I’m adopted and he goes, oh, maybe she was. Maybe she was on. That was our joke.
Damon: 05:32 It’s funny in they’re ask. So you’ve talked a little bit about your German orientation, but tell me about your father. He’s black from Boston. What did he, what did he introduce for you in terms of culture and how did you deal with sort of racial identity growing up in general?
Nicole: 05:50 I think it was more so. He didn’t really touch on waste to entirely much, but his sister, he funny enough, his sisters also adopted. Their mother was a widow and they were adopted by my grandfather and they actually had the choice to be adopted and some of them decided to be adopted and others did not, but they were big on kind of bringing me into the African American culture. And they were very insistent that when it came time for college that, you know, we have to, you have to tour the black colleges in the area, um, you know, uh, you know, reminding me of how to take care of my hair because my mom tried to, but she wasn’t, she didn’t really know how to take care of my hair other than like let’s slap a relaxer in it and keep it straight so, you know, they, they were a big part of that as well as my grandmother because, you know, we would go to Germany every summer, but we also went up to Virginia and I would stay with her for two or three weeks. Um, so my dad’s mom, my grandmother was very big into kind of reminding me of embedded into the culture and going to the very typical black churches participating in a the choir and all of that. So I got it pretty good on bedside. Yeah, there is a reason I feel like there is a reason I was put into the family that I was in because there’s too many small little coincidences within my biological and adoptive family.
Damon: 07:20 It sounded to me like Nicole was perfectly comfortable right where she was so naturally. I was curious about what made her want to search. She said it’s always been something she wanted to do and her parents were well aware. Her mother used to joke with her and in certain situations that she must be just like her biological mother
Nicole: 07:39 because I was this loud boisterous child of in you know a very buttoned up military family and very strict rules and here’s this artsy kid and where is she getting it from?
Damon: 07:52 when Nicole turned 18, she was moving out of the house, but she also contacted Catholic charities to request the documents necessary to start her search. But listen to how she talks about the experience.
Nicole: 08:06 $500 fine that you have to get the paperwork moving out of the house. $500 is not something easily come by .
Damon: 08:18 It’s funny that you used the word fine also, right? They would call it a fee, but you very much feel like it’s a fine for finding your own identity, Huh?
Nicole: 08:27 Yeah. I mean that’s what it really feels like. And I had my first son when I was 19 years old, so that was the same age that my birth mother was when she had me so and I actually considered an adoption plan for him, but thinking about just to me, the hell that she went through and those feelings. I couldn’t do it because they’re going to make it work, we’re absolutely going to make it work.
Damon:
