Jennifer is a reunited adoptee from Pittsburgh. She’s a petite, white blonde of European descent whose adoptive parents are a Spanish man and a Mexican woman. Through her search, she found both of her natural parents are deceased, and she had half brothers on both sides, both named Tom. Unbeknownst to Jen, her maternal half-brother attended the same high school she did and bullied her! On her maternal side, she experienced secondary rejection which will never be resolved because her grandmother developed dementia and passed away.

The post 046 – I Am Adopted, It Is Who I Am appeared first on Who Am I...Really? Podcast.

Jennifer (00:04):

She literally told me, she goes, you know, you focus too much on being adopted and you ask too many questions and I'm like, but I get them adopted. It is who I am. I had no information about myself for 30 years. And you think I'm not going to ask questions.

Damon (00:25):

Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? 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 Jennifer. She called me from Wellsburg West Virginia, where she's a caregiver for the elderly. Jennifer is transracially adopted, but I have to admit not in the way I usually think of that kind of adoption. She stood out in her family and her family stood out in their community. Jen shared that she was completely close to looking for her birth relatives until she got some stark examples of the importance of knowing your family's medical history. When she found her birth family, one of her gut feelings about her birth mother during her search was confirmed, but she also learned a crazy cruel irony about her high school past. In the end, Jen experienced a secondary rejection from her birth family. After she made a mistake at a huge family function. As you listen, decide for yourself, what you think the factors were in that rejection was that misstep as major as her family made it seem or where the history of guilt about hiding the truth or even the early onset of mental illness also factors. This is Jen's journey.

Damon (01:52):

Jennifer's adopted father's relatives are from Spain and he grew up in Pittsburgh. He got a PhD in chemistry, then took a job with a pharmaceutical company working for a while in Mexico city. Her adopted mom was her father's secretary there. They fell in love and her mother got pregnant immediately giving birth to Jen's older sister. Then her father took a job back in Pittsburgh. So he moved his young family back to Pennsylvania. Jennifer's mother wanted a big family, but after several miscarriages and her husband's health problems, they were starting to settle into the notion that it would just be the three of them,

Jennifer (02:29):

Our neighbor, who was a nurse. She, I don't know the connection here, exact details. And she has since passed away. So I can't ask her, but she somehow knew the doctor who delivered me, who was my birth mother's doctor. He worked at Allegheny general hospital in Pittsburgh, and his name was dr. Bell. And he was known for, and I'll say in the air quotes, helping girls in trouble. So she had mentioned this, my parents, you know, that there's these babies up for adoption eventually. And would you be interested in my parents thought about it.

Damon (03:04):

Jennifer's parents didn't hear anything back for a while. Then they received a phone call. They were informed that there were a couple of different babies available for adoption and her parents should go have a look. Jennifer told me the viewing of babies, like their puppies has always been a sore spot with her. When her parents arrived, the recently born babies had families already. So they went home.

Jennifer (03:27):

I only know this story because I heard my mom tell it so often. My mom says her and my dad were in the dining room painting. She was up on a ladder and the phone rings and she heard my dad, all of a sudden, he goes, well, you better tell her my mom and our neighbor, who was the nurse, said there was a baby girl born this morning and she's yours if you want her. And my mom said immediately, yes. And her hands were shaking. And they went and dropped everything and went to the hospital and she was able to hold me that first day.

Damon (04:00):

Her mom dressed her at the hospital that very first day, but Jennifer had to stay in the hospital for a week among other issues. Her mother tried to hide her pregnancy, but her methods caused problems for Jennifer's development in her womb

Jennifer (04:15):

because she, she worked hurdle while she was pregnant. My right foot was bent in such a way that my shoulders were touching my shin. So they had to do X rays and put a cast on my foot, that kind of stuff to correct it. So, yeah, my parents brought me home a week later and my sister, their biological daughter is nine years older than me. And you know, so it was like all of a sudden they had to prepare for a baby. As far as I know, everybody in the neighborhood knew I was adopted and I am of European descent. I am born, as pale as you get. Obviously I'm not Latino. He was Spanish. And he had black hair and dark skin and Brown eyes. And my mom had Brown hair and Brown eyes.

Damon (05:02):

Jen says that there was such an age gap with her and her sister that there was no sibling rivalry. They just weren't the same age to be in contention with one another. When Jen was starting school, her mother pulled her aside to have a conversation about adoption.

Jennifer (05:17):

So when I started kindergarten, um, I think my mom was worried that I didn't know I was adopted, even though it was never a secret. So she kind of, um, like had to, I guess in her way, she was like, reminding me, you know, I have a very vivid memory of this. I was about six years old, five or six. She was like, well, honey, you know that, you know, you're adopted. And then I must have asked her, what does that mean? And she said, well, I'm not your real mom. You know, your mom couldn't keep you. And the only information we had all my life was that they were teenagers from the North Hills of Pittsburgh. That's, that's all we knew. I had a tantrum like, and I wasn't one of those kids that would do that, but I can remember kicking and screaming and saying, where's my mom. Why didn't she want me? I want my real mom and all this. And I can't even imagine how painful that must have been for my adoptive mom, you know, to see me going through that. But I did. And it was hard. It was a really emotional time.

Damon (06:27):

Bet. I mean, it's, uh, it's great that she told you it's in, you did grow up with the knowledge, but you know, that's a volatile time there where a child is starting school. They're already sort of going to be in a place of comparing themselves to other children. And then they get this huge piece of news dropped on them. Jen's mom was afraid. One of the children in her school was going to spring. The news that she was adopted on her, Jen says her neighborhood was an upper class white collar enclave. So their family was the minority because there were nearly no families of color. And her adoption was well known. She talked about her relationship with her adopted parents.

Jennifer (07:08):

My dad, he had a lot of issues. Are you aware of that? The elephant man, you've heard that story.

Damon (07:13):

Yeah.

Jennifer (07:14):

My dad had two of the three elements that he had. One is called acromegaly, which means enlarged extremities and then fibrous dysplasia, which he would get like fibers growths of calcium in different parts of his body. So he was disfigured. He had a very large head, large hands or feet, and he had to go multiple through multiple surgeries. When I was a little kid and stuff like my dad was my hero. He was like, go to, I never really had the bond with my mom most. I mean, my mom and I were like oil and water. My dad and I would have these, fantastic conversations. And you know, he was just, he was my rock

Damon (08:08):

when Jen was 14, her sister who was 23, got married and moved away. That left Jen and her parents at home together. She said that as an adoptee in adolescents, she leaned toward being the people, pleasing child, not really acting out,

Jennifer (08:24):

but I had this angry anger in me that I didn't understand. And I was really, really, really angry at my birth mother when I was a kid. I mean really angry. I like from that tantrum that I had, I held onto that all through my adolescents.

Damon (08:42):

Yeah. I was going to ask if it had subsided

Jennifer (08:46):

as I grew up and I learned about her, I was very angry. And then because of my family being so different from me, I always felt the need to explain it. So like something would come up about Mexicans. Oh yeah. My mom's Mexican immediately. People look at you, like you've got an eye in the middle of your forehead, like, huh, how'd that happen? And so I had this descent mechanism and I would immediately say, because I got tired of the questions people would ask, I would just fire every, it was rapid fire, like my defense mechanism. And I would say, yeah, my parents, my mom's Mexican, my dad's Spanish. No I'm adopted. No, I don't know where my mother is. No, I don't want to know where she is. I don't care. She didn't want me to, why should I care about her? And I, that was like blame and blame. And that way it would be the end of it. People wouldn't ask any more questions about my adoption and that was it. And that was how I dealt with it for a really long time.

Damon (09:46):

So I asked Jennifer what the turning point was for her to change her mind about searching for her biological family. She said, things changed in 1990 when her father passed away, she, her mother and grandmother took care of him for nine months until he lost his battle with cancer immediately after his mother developed leukemia and moved in with Jennifer and her mother until she passed. So Jen's sister, their biological child had a solid knowledge of her cancer risks, but Jen knew nothing about her medical predispositions. She took me back to her childhood where she explained that her growth was stunted with no family medical history. She had to go see specialists about her development

Jennifer (10:29):

because my group was done. I had to go to this growth hormone specialist every six months and get x-rays and have blood drawn. And then they look to see if you've got breast buds forming or, you know, look in your underwear to see if she's got anything else like puberty wise. And they've checked you all over. And it's very violating to tell you the truth. When you're a little kid, I hated it. I hated it. And I was going to start with when we're in treatment and in the summer between fifth and sixth grade, there was like this. If she doesn't grow, you know, an inch and a half over the summer, then we're going to start her on treatment. And I sprung up to it's just that medical background thing really, you know, got me started on the path to even being open because I had been so closed off to it

Damon (11:21):

in 1994, her sister and fiance were back in town. Jen was at their place watching the Maury Povich show on television. You may remember that talk show did a lot of reunions of family members, but Jen had never seen one of those episodes before, as she watched Maury Povich told the backstory of his guest, then he said,

Jennifer (11:42):

well, we have someone here for you, uh, to meet you. And they brought out her natural mother and I'm sitting watching this with tears just streaming down my face, hugging each other. Sorry, I get tripped up about this, watching them hug each other. And I'm sitting there and I'm watching these two women sitting beside each other and I am just analysing everything and they've got these similar features in the way they move is similar. I was just like really moved by it. And then the birth mother says to her daughter. She says, I never stopped thinking about you. And that's why I was like, wow. Maybe my mother's thinking about me too.

Damon (12:42):

At the end of the show, they listed all my reunion registries for people to enter their personal information. Jen jumped on her sister's computer and stayed there for hours.

Jennifer (12:52):

I was so fascinated by how many people were out there looking.

Damon (12:58):

She kept going back to her sister's place, staying for hours at a time, hunting online for different reunion, registries entering her own information in each one and searching for info that other people had entered that could have matched with her. In 1999. After five years of searching, Jen had a bad feeling about her search.

Jennifer (13:18):

I don't know if it was gut feeling or what, but I started saying, if she's not out there looking for me, she must be dead. And that was just the feeling I had.

Damon (13:28):

So Jen has shared how she had a tantrum as a child when she learned she was adopted and that she had deep seated anger. As a teenager, she shares a little bit about how her adopted mom felt about her search.

Jennifer (13:40):

My adoptive mom was not crazy about me searching at the beginning. I had asked her to get my adoption records a few times and she was real hesitant