After the adoptive father she loved so much died, Alison learned her birth father, Tim, was looking for her and she took it as a good sign of things to come. Sadly she found herself disappointed in him, and later in her birth mother, Jean, whom he contacted without telling her. Alison had no idea her birthmother struggled with mental illness, so their contentious relationship was inexplicably challenging. After Alison took legal action to gain access to her adoption records from the agency that refused to turn over her information, she finally laid eyes on the detailed context of her past that meant so much to her, and only her.

Read Full TranscriptAlison:                         00:00:01          I am the one that had no choice in this. Right? You know, like when you realize like, you know, my, my adopted parents had a choice. They choose, they chose to adopt. My birth mother had a choice, even though in some sense she didn’t, but there was still choices made, right? That weren’t my choices. I mean, I’m the only one that, that completely had no choice. So I realized that like, and this in reunion. I can choose who I have relationships with and who I don’t, you know, I, I, you know, so I realized it’s okay. Like I don’t need to make this work with my birth mother.

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

Damon:                       00:00:47          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 Alison. She called me from Massachusetts. After the adoptive father that she loved so much died, Alison learned her birth father was looking for her and she took it as a sign of good things to come. Sadly, she found herself disappointed in him and later in her birth mother whom he had contacted without telling her. However, after Alison took legal action to gain access to her adoption records from the agency who refused to turn over her information, she finally laid eyes on the detailed context of her past that means so much to her and only her. This is Alison’s journey. This is Alison.

Alison:                         00:01:40          I just want to tell you, but I, you know, found your podcast not that long ago.

Damon:                       00:01:45          I always like to hear how the show is impactful for people.

Alison:                         00:01:49          And um, I, I shot you an email after the first one I listened to, you interviewed your friend,

Damon:                       00:01:54          she’s talking about one of my lifelong buddies, Andre, whom I featured way back in my very first episode.

Alison:                         00:02:01          And he, he actually used this person named Sheila Frankl in his search and at some point in my journey she helped me in actually getting my unredacted adoption record.

Damon:                       00:02:13          Are you serious?

Alison:                         00:02:15          No. Small world thing. I was like, oh my gosh. Like his story was so much like mine and then I listen.

Damon:                       00:02:20          That’s so amazing.

Alison:                         00:02:21          Yeah, it was amazing. And then I’ve just been, you know, listening, I’m not done, but it’s impressive how many I’ve listened to. I would just, I’m always plugged in and I just like, just can’t believe you did this. Like it’s so good and there’s so many people like us and we need to hear each other’s stories. So, um, yeah. So I completely appreciate it. It’s really good.

Damon:                       00:02:43          No, man, I really appreciate that. Thank you so much. And to now, here we are. Alison is episode 85 crazy how time flies in this small world of ours. Anyway, Alison’s parents had tried to have children for almost 10 years before they adopted her older brother Bradley in 1961. She was born in 1963, in Boston. Two years later, their mother gave birth to their sister after 15 years of infertility. Alison said she always knew she was adopted and her parents always made it special and tried to normalize it so much so that their sister,

Alison:                         00:03:21          my sister actually had voiced, you know, like when we’re young adults, you know, a little bit of sadness that she wasn’t adopted. My parents made like such a big deal about it that she always felt like, well, who’s gonna make a big deal out of me? You know? Um, so you know, like, you know, funny cause she is important and we all love her and um, but she was just kind of like, you know, I just wish I was also picked out special. Um, which is sort of the vernacular back then, which isn’t used now in adoption. But that’s, you know, kind of how I think, you know, parents were kind of coached to, to share that with their adopted kids.

Damon:                       00:03:54          That’s interesting. You know, I never really thought about that. That, you know, there’s a lot of uh, discussion online and with folks who are, you know, considering adoption or who have adopted and how they should treat their adopted children. And you know, I, I have mixed emotions about sort of having a birthday for the child and a, I hate the word Gotcha Day, but the, the idea of bringing the child home like the day that we became a family, because if you are just trying to be normal, like constantly raising it can actually keep it at the forefront of your mind if you want to just forget and just be yourself. And I hadn’t really considered what it means for a biological child of the parents to have to endure that. That’s really interesting.

Alison:                         00:04:40          Yeah isn’t that Interesting? Yeah, it was, it was really a thing for her. I mean, she wasn’t joking. She, it really, it, it bothered her.

Damon:                       00:04:46          Yeah I could see that. Oh yeah,

Alison:                         00:04:48          yeah, yeah, yeah. Me Too. Um, and you know, and, and, and, you know, on the flip side, I was actually, you know, one of my struggles being adopted was not so much the longing for my birth parents, but I just wish that I had been born to my parents that adopted me. Do you know what I mean? Like, I just wish I was just, their’s.

Damon:                       00:05:09          Why? What did you feel to make you want that?

Alison:                         00:05:10          you know, there’s some othering I think that happens when you’re adopted. So for example, you know, like we were super open about adoption in my family and, um, so if I would share with somebody, you know, like people would always comment, so there’s three of us and people would say, oh my gosh, you guys don’t look alike. So we would, if whoever, whoever, it was in my family would say, oh, that’s because, you know, Alison and Bradley were adopted and Candace wasn’t or whatever. And people would often say like the weirdest stuff. Like, like, oh my Gosh, you know, my brother used to tease me that I was adopted and I was so upset. I was hysterical until my parents told me that I wasn’t like, you know, like it was seen as this like awful thing to be adopted. And now there’s another thing that happened to me is when, so my, my dad, my adopted father, passed away when I was 17 and it was, it was awful. And we were, we were really close. So I, you know, I had this part time job at a department store and I’d gone back to work like a week after he had died, but I was still a mess. And, um, so I had gone like to the break room into the bathroom to kind of collect myself. So I was know in the bathroom, like in a stall, like crying and wipe my eyes. And these two, two coworkers, who were also teenagers walked in and they were talking about me because they didn’t know I was in there. And one of them said, oh my gosh, you know, Alison is still upset about her father. And then the other one said, I don’t know why she’s so upset. He wasn’t even her real father.

Damon:                       00:06:34          Oh my gosh.

Alison:                         00:06:36          Yeah. So things, you know, it’s like little things like that that I just didn’t like, I didn’t like that. It, it didn’t, I didn’t feel different in my family, but I know that other people saw me differently. Um, and I, yeah, I didn’t care for that.

Damon:                       00:06:52          Yeah. Right.

Alison:                         00:06:52          You know, I didn’t like,

Damon:                       00:06:53          yeah, that’s like what I was saying. You just want to feel normal. And if you’re constantly reminded of it, it’s kind of annoying. Right?

Alison:                         00:07:01          You just want to feel normal. Right.

Damon:                       00:07:02          Alison followed up by pointing out that their two youngest children are also adoptees and they love making a big deal out of the day they were adopted too. They were older at the time of their adoptions, so they know when it’s their special day on the calendar and it doesn’t hurt that they receive a present too. She said they talk about the memories of when the children first arrived in their home, just like a natural child likes to hear about their own arrival into their parents’ world. She said she even loved to hear the story of her own arrival into her parents’ home. They went to pick her up, forgot the diaper bag, and of course she pooped everywhere.

Alison: