Shownotes
Laura became a dear friend when we quickly bonded over being adoptees while working together. Laura had been searching for her family of origin for years, before the age of the internet, and the promise of consumer DNA testing linking long lost relatives. In this episode Laura reveals her childhood challenges to bond with her adopted family who were open about her adopted status in unhealthy ways. Their mental health issues and the emotional childhood that Laura lived, drove her desire to find her family origin, as the wondered about her biological mother every day.
The post 002 Laura R – When the Law is in the Way, Try DNA appeared first on Who Am I...Really? Podcast.
Laura: 00:00 From the beginning of doing that DNA test I specifically have looked at it as whatever comes of this and whether people are welcoming or they, they don't want to know me. I just have to accept it like, and I think as a message to other adoptees on that journey, you really need to get to that place. If you don't get to that place, you're going to be in potentially for a lot of pain.
Voices: 00:26 Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?
Damon: 00:37 Who am I really? Welcome to Who am I really? A show about adoptees who have located and connected with their biological family members. I'm Damon Davis and on today's show we have my former colleague Laura, Laura told me the story of how she had a challenging childhood in adoption. Had a struggle to gain identifiable information from her birth records out of New York state and her ultimate connection to her aunt through DNA testing and a happy family reunion.
Damon: 01:20 So thanks for coming. What, what do you have here?
Laura: 01:23 So that is the information that I received in 1999 it was the combination of a request I'd made to the State, New York State for non-identifying information, which you're allowed to receive without the consent of any party because it's not identifying as no names or addresses or anything attached to it. And I think I made the request like two years before and it came kind of, so it came as a shock when it actually came. I was like, wow, I didn't even remember like making the requests. It been such a long time before and we were living in Pittsburgh and I had just been accepted to law school.
Damon: 02:01 Wow. So this is a generic description of everything about your adoption situation,
Laura: 02:10 Right. It's like a time capsule. It's what was recorded between August 30th, 1968 when I was born and February 20th of 1969
Damon: 02:19 that's amazing. Wow. So let's start back at the beginning. First of all, you and I worked at HHS together.
Laura: 02:27 Yes.
Damon: 02:27 I remember one of the things that was a bond for us was the fact that we identified ourselves as adoptees.
Laura: 02:34 Yeah. And that walk in Providence from a restaurant.
Damon: 02:36 That's right.
Laura: 02:37 And I don't even know how we got onto that subject.
Damon: 02:39 I know. I think I just talk about it so much. Well, it just comes up. So yeah, that was really a revelation.
Laura: 02:47 Yeah. And that was before either of us found anybody.
Damon: 02:50 Yeah, that's right. You're right. I had not, I may have initiated my search, which might've been why it came up, because it wasn't too long after I joined HHS that I decided that I was going to reach out. And that's probably how we got to talking about it. So tell me a little bit about your community, where you grew up, what your family was like, your parents.
Laura: 03:11 So I grew up in a little town called Bavel, which isn't so little anymore, but back in the 70s was a very small town. My parents adopted me in February of 1969. My father was a mail carrier. My mother was a stay at home mom. It was a blue collar oasis and a lot of wealth, but it was like this little blue collar enclave. Both of my parents had mental health issues. My childhood, I would say was not a happy one, but I think they loved me as best they could. And I've come to terms with all of that. I think it adds a really important, I think in, in sort of initiating that search to not, and I think it's interesting that it happened when it did, when I've probably been at the most stable and the most happiest of my life. Right. So open to anything good and bad. I think that was a really important part of it.
Damon: 04:03 So in your childhood, are you saying that part of the trauma of your childhood was there mental illness? Yes. In what ways?
Laura: 04:11 It's very difficult to explain it. Um, people who knew my parents understand it. I'll give you a really good example. I can kind of sum it up. So people will ask me, Oh, did you always know you were adopted? And I answered that question would be yes. I never remember not knowing because my parents made such an issue out of it. So if I did something bad, they would threatened to take me back to Mineola, which is the county seat for Nassau County, which is where the adoption took place. Right. And so they would often do that. My mother would say it all the time. I remember even maybe when I was seven or eight years old, them actually getting me in the car and driving to Mineola from Bavel, which is about a 20 minute drive, at least maybe 30 minutes. Yeah. So it was, it was a lot of chaos and it was not happy.
Laura: 04:57 And so I had a, a very traumatic adolescence probably dealing with a lot. And because I, it was always very front and center that I was adopted. I never really felt part of that family. And because I also knew it from the beginning, I thought about my parents, my biological parents, every day, every day. I mean, and there were times in my life when I very much wanted to find them. There were times that I was worried about finding them and explaining to them what had happened. That really bothered me to be able to say, well, you made this decision didn't work out so well. I mean I do tend to look at the world as all's well that ends well. And so I think in the end there's reasons for everything and why things worked out the way they did. I think I gained a tremendous amount of strength and now knowing who my parents are and where I came from, I think it's better that I was adopted by my parents because I don't know if another child could have dealt with it.
Damon: 06:00 Interesting. So you feel like you are a person of inner strength that ended up being able to handle this situation and perhaps someone who might not have had the same inner fortitude might not have been able to deal as well. Right. That's fascinating. And the challenge of this continual mental warfare against you because of their own inability to sort of manage their own mental health. Do you know what their diagnoses were?
Speaker 1: 06:24 Um, my father I think had depression. Has a really strong history of depression in the family. Basically the end of the day, the diagnosis I've received was schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and OCD. It had basically been untreated her whole life and my father protected her and wouldn't let you know anyone sort of get in the way. So even though social workers would reach out because there were reports of abuse or she would do erotic things in the community, he would constantly protect her. So she just never got help. So once we moved to Pittsburgh, she actually got help and was on medication, which definitely helped. It definitely helped in working with her and, and so that was a productive time, I think. But at that point I was in my thirties and already had children of my own. So I did take care of my parents as, because I'm an only child and I just, I'm very responsible. And knowing now people have come from that is really evident that that's the sort of,
Damon: 07:19
