Wandering Tree ®, LLC Podcast
Wandering Tree ®, LLC Podcast is the ultimate audio companion for curious and adventurous minds, offering a journey through thought-provoking discussions and unique perspectives on life, culture, and the journey of an adoptee. This show has been established with the simple goal of reaching other adoptees who may benefit from just hearing other adoptees share on the lived experience. Host, Adoptee Lisa Ann, will share the tangled roots of the life long journey as an adoptee, the search for biological connections, the good and bad of reunions and how saying "I am adopted" has connected to so many others. The candid discussions between Adoptee Lisa Ann and her guests will tackle the term "adoption" and how it is covers so many aspects of our society.
Wandering Tree ®, LLC Podcast
S4:E3 A Journey to Wholeness for A Baby Scoop Era Adoptee with Mary Ellen Gambutti
Have you ever felt like a piece of your identity was missing? Mary Ellen Gambuti joins us to weave the heartfelt narrative of her life as an adoptee from the baby scoop era, a time when societal pressures and moral expectations often forced the hand of birth parents. Her candid recollection begins with the harrowing tale of her abandonment at birth, her experience in a foundling home, and the eventual adoption by a military family—an upbringing that carved a unique background against the backdrop of growing up in the vibrant tapestry of multiple states and countries.
As if life's puzzle wasn't complex enough, imagine grappling with the "primal wound"—the deep-seated trauma faced by adoptees from early separation. Mary Ellen bravely shares her internal struggle, reflecting on how this early rift sowed seeds of identity challenges and loss that lingered into her adult life. Adding another layer, we discuss the hero narrative of military families and how that shaped her emotions and understanding of gratitude, obligation, and belonging. Her insights serve as a beacon for the adoption community, illuminating the crucial need for specialized therapy and support systems.
Our conversation underscores the universal right for adoptees to access their adoption records—a vital piece in the puzzle of self-understanding. Her story, chronicled in "I Must Have Wandered: An Adopted Air Force Daughter Recalls," provides an intimate look into an adoptee's search for connection and the profound layers that shape a life story.
Connect with Mary Ellen here: https://linktr.ee/SCMel
Check out her book: https://a.co/d/0htiDkP
Find your people, cherish your people and love your people.
#adoptee #adoptees #adopteevoices #adopteestories #adopteestrong #adoptionreality #adopteejourney #adoption #wanderingtreeadoptee
Or you don't really see yourself as fitting in and I feel like I might have had an extra barrier to fitting in because of having been away.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Wandering Tree Podcast. I am your host, Lisa Ann. We are an experienced based show focused on sharing the journey of adoption, life identity search and reunion. Let's begin today's conversation with our guest of honor, Mary Ellen Gambuti. Welcome to the show, Mary Ellen. It's good to have you here today.
Speaker 1:It's great to be with you. Thank you so much for having me, Lisa.
Speaker 2:Ann. Well, let's go ahead and kick off today's discussion with a little bit about who you are, and then we'll transition into your adoption story for our audience.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm very glad to be here to tell you my story. It's a generational story. I'm an adoptee. I was born in 1951 and that would have been sort of a few three years into the baby scoop era for those of you in the audience. No, that is a time when there were many unplanned births and being post-war, because in my situation, my mother and father were about a casual relationship, so this was very true. In South Carolina, where there are many, there had been many airbases, so that was how I came to be.
Speaker 1:I was relinquished at birth, but not officially. I guess you would say that I was actually more abandoned. I was born in a hospital, but my mother just walked out and they had to actually track her down. The hospital was a Catholic hospital that was somewhat affiliated with Catholic Charities, so they had this baby but they didn't know what they could do. Rather than send her to be awarded the state, they did manage to track her down and she signed the papers.
Speaker 1:It's actually a couple months later, about two months, I was sent to St Philip Hospital, which was an infant home in Rockhill, the other side of the state. I was born in Greenville, south Carolina, so I was put into a like, a like a foundling home associated with the hospital run by the same nuns that actually took care of me in the hospital where I was awarded for a while, and five months in they did find a match for me, and my mother and father that adopted me were military which was very, very common, as I said in those days and they took me home and for a period of about a year until the adoption was completed, they we continued to live in South Carolina and then basically my store takes off from there because my parents were New Yorkers and so then my, my dependent life basically took off from there.
Speaker 2:I want to touch on something I've just picked up in your introduction of yourself that I have not heard very often from other adoptees that I have interviewed, and that is this nugget where you were birthed and more or less abandoned, and I I just don't really like that word, but it's the one that's coming to my mind. Yeah, I've not heard anyone prior to you today who's expressed I couldn't even be put into the system utilizing kind of that broad brush word until they tracked her down.
Speaker 2:I know yeah, I mean, that's not common, and so that's intriguing. That's another layer of a very complex story that we're going to hear a little bits about today. So, eventually, though, you did get into a structure or an infrastructure of care that allowed for you to be get your bare your bare basics is what I what I say in the context of someone was feeding you and changing you and bathing you and taking care of you, and there was a time period for that yes.
Speaker 2:Now I think it's an interesting how how much the military may or may not be playing into your story as we go forward. But before we get there and before we dive into the heart of you know where you grew up in terms of geography Do you mind sharing a little bit with us? Like what was the age when you really understood or learned that you were adopted? Like how did, how did the knowledge come to you that you were an adoptee?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I heard the word, you know, as I, as I was, in my early childhood, because when I was brought to New York the July that that they took me home to South Carolina, there was a lot of talk about, you know, this new adopted, this new family member who was an adoptee. So I had heard that word from a very early age. You know, I I didn't really understand, didn't have the the ability to understand what it meant. I just knew that it was somehow made me different, but I didn't understand whether they loved me, which they, everybody, you know, seemed to have, you know, love me all the extended family. But I didn't understand whether it was because I was different or whether it was because or they loved me even though I was a different. I was always analyzing, from a very early age, and I think that that was a protective thing Based on I think you know, if I can say it in trauma, because when you're taken away from your mother so early like that and I'm one who believes that it is a very severe severance, when you have been inside that person for nine months and familiar with her voice and her emotions and all of that, you're at a loss. You are at a loss.
Speaker 1:I knew that I was different. I kind of liked that I was different, but I didn't really hear the story until I was six, and then my father and mother told it to me as a bedtime story. This is when we were living in Texas. What I found is that it made me really question you know what happened to the others? Who do I really look like that sort of thing. And for a six-year-old, you know you're glad, you're happy that you were or belong to somebody and that you were somehow rescued from this terrible accident that they created a fable about. But it did make me very anxious and this was a characteristic of me that I have had to deal with all my life is this anxiety and this sense of loss. But it did improve because I did search eventually and so there was a happy outcome. I would have to say. The ruminating and the questioning and all of that is something that became very infirmly ingrained in my personality.
Speaker 2:Well, I wanna touch on a couple of things that started through our conversation and bring it back a little bit. Your timeline of birth and maturing is a person in society has a different generational impact, even than mine or some of our audience members. I think that's key. And why I believe it's key is we're talking about things that have no boundary relative to a generation, and so, as you're talking about some of your prenatal experiences, we know that those types of information or the impact of what that is didn't come through in our society until much later, after you were reared as a child to adulthood. Good point. In addition to that, the connection to what we reference in the adoptee community as the primal wound and the trauma associated with that. It's just really in the last couple of decades coming to the surface and its impacts, and so you're one of the people that had such a different experience because there wasn't this overarching other discussion that we're having now. You were literally in a different base.
Speaker 1:Error.
Speaker 2:But the impacts were.
Speaker 2:yeah, but the impacts were the same right what we didn't touch on and I wanna make sure we don't overlook this. While in the introduction you mentioned military and adopted by military, that in itself had some impact into you as how you were internalizing identity and I say that in the context of Air Force and moving around a significant amount of time and so to hear about your adoption as a bedtime story at six, it takes me back to hearing about my adoption as a five year old going into kindergarten and I don't think there's any good time.
Speaker 2:But, man, we can affirm, maybe it's not when you're five and six.
Speaker 1:I agree. I think so too, because you're just out and out of a time period when everything is magical, right, I mean when you're two and three and four and five years old. You live in a make believe, a magical world. So for my parents my father, by the way, had been, just, had been gone for a year. He had we moved to Texas and he basically left for Japan for almost a year, as. So not only I was not really that familiar with him, since with military separation he had been away quite frequently, but certainly at age five he was away for a year when we lived in New Jersey.
Speaker 1:But in any case, coming out of that magical time period, when you're being told that you have nobody, that we loved you, we wanted a child and loved you and basically took you home, and if we hadn't I mean this was the way I read it anyway if we hadn't, you would have had nobody, there would not have been anyone for you and that was supposed to be this hero save your mentality. And for my father, that was deeply important to him to be able to have rescued me. And but I could not, I couldn't understand that All I knew was, hmm, people that were mine are basically dead to me. There was an accident and I survived and I survived, and because I survived I have these people that were willing to basically take me out of the street, what I like about where you're going with this and I just want to tag in a little bit.
Speaker 2:We talk about the narrative of chosen and gratitude and lucky. As the daughter of someone in the military who already is exhibiting a hero mentality, I have a military connection that does happen. And then to do this, you're just consistently elevating the societal norms of that time period, of what made a good human, a good man, you know, dedicated to his country, dedicated to his family and willing to take in, take in. And I can see where there's a, you know, a friction point in that narrative for the person such as you living in the experience, yeah, thanks, that's helpful and so astute of you.
Speaker 1:My father was, you know, a. He was not physically a very strong presence, but he exhibited his strength by, you know, his devotion to my mother and his intent need to protect me, you know, and that protection of protection actually ended up having a fairly negative effect on me. He didn't understand who I was. How could he? He had no information other than that my mother was, from their point of view, a wayward woman and left me, and that was it. So he couldn't know who I was, but he tried to make me who he wanted me to be, and I think this is something that will resonate with you know, your audience, because they're Many of us have said that as adoptees, we were molded, or attempted to be molded, into what their ideal child would have been, because they did lose a child in some sense, and that's why they got us out of loss Out of loss.
Speaker 1:So they had dealt with that loss right.
Speaker 2:That loss had not been addressed Well in your story. What we haven't touched on is that you are an author, and I want us to kind of start bringing in a little bit of how you have been working through these thoughts and this conversation, your lived experience of adoption. I just want to say that you published a book August 8th of 2022 and the title of that is I Must have Wandered and Adopted Air Force Daughter Recalls. It's a good book. I read it. I stayed up last night to finish the last of it so that we were prepared for today, and there's a theme in there that we haven't touched on yet. We've talked quite a bit about your father, but we haven't touched on the relationship you had with your mother, and so I think that that's interesting. I always look for how can I connect to my guest, and we have some theme and shared theme about the approach of mothering, and so do you mind sharing with the audience your mother and how she mothered you in this life journey?
Speaker 1:Sure. Well, she was an Air Force wife and as such she was post-World War II Air Force wife. So she was out of the depression, out of that whole era of hardship and not being able to have her own child, and she was a nurse as well. She was a registered nurse and a visiting nurse as well. So she had a lot of caring instinct about her. But primarily what molded her was duty To the country To be a good spouse to her officer husband and then, of course, to be a mother of a child she did not.
Speaker 1:Birth was, I think, extremely hard for her. When I think about it now, as a child, as an infant, with my father often away, she was under a great deal of stress and I think she wasn't really equipped to handle that, even though she was a nurse. I think she was capable, but she psychologically, emotionally, I don't think that she was capable of handling it. A child that she did not have, and I think that was a conflict that we were in pretty much her entire life. I mean, she died a few years ago. She was already in her mid-90s, but we still struggled.
Speaker 1:I struggled, I think, for acceptance to her, which is a very odd kind of thing to think of it, because I think she always maintained like some kind of a distance between us. That was probably even further complicated by the fact that I did a search, but that's a slightly different angle. When I was an infant, she had that emotional problem right. She was afraid that I was going to get taken away from her, that she couldn't really do it. She was tortured really. But I think that she confessed that when I was quite young I think I was probably only around five or six or and then going forward she would say that I thought you were going to get taken away from me, which is something to hear when your child that well, why? That might have even been prior to my having the lecture, the lecture on my adoption.
Speaker 2:The poor thing, you know. Yeah, I think of that, mary Ellen, in the context of what a burden to put on her human psyche and your human psyche. Absolutely, I have shared this and so I don't want to go too deep because I feel sometimes it's I'm a broken record and I don't want to be the broken record, but I have learned only in the past couple of years to have more empathy for my mother, who raised me and understanding the complexity of what she was going through as a woman that could not bear children and then having a child that she needed to nurture, and there were, you know, common themes around the ability for the child to actually attach to that female and to feel like that's the mother, and what that played on on her for years and years and years. And how, then, that impacted my perception of our relationship and what I was looking for from her, and I'm open about this, I really just wanted her to like yeah, I just wanted her to love me, and I don't know if she was ever capable of doing so.
Speaker 2:And I say it in that way, not in a, not as if I'm demeaning her. I mean it as if I don't know if she could wholeheartedly love me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, basically you're giving her some slack. Yeah, you are, because and it's the same thing with me and I really didn't come into a full understanding of that relationship. And until she was in her very old old age, and that was when she was going into some dementia and she would say things that were just horrific. I mean, she would say things like you're not really mine and well, that was, that was the worst of it right there, that's pretty damn.
Speaker 2:Let's be honest about it that that's hard to come back.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And then the nurses would say, because we were, she was in assisted living, she doesn't mean it. She doesn't mean it, she's. You know she's she's having some dementia and this and that, but I know she meant it. I know that she was basically telling it like it is. But in any case, you know she's to be forgiven and we had some friendship.
Speaker 1:You know, it's not that we did not have a kinship, but her closeness was really to her own mother and that's the strange part of it, because her, her mother, was so close to her that that I think it, even though I absolutely adored my grandmother, she was so close to her. I think it was out of her, of a fear. I don't know, I don't want to try to psychoanalyze her, but it seems like her fear to bond with me came out of a fear of losing her mother or not having the you know, the faithfulness, and that's just couldn't have been further from the truth. My, my grandmother, was just such an open and wonderful person and poor mom, you know she needed her, especially as an Air Force wife who never really emotionally sort of grew away from from her mother. So it was complex.
Speaker 2:Well, I picked up on that. I did pick up on the closeness of the relationship between your grandmother and your mother, but I also picked up on the closeness of the relationship between yourself and your grandmother and it was so heartwarming to read those portions of your book in the context of. I could relate with almost everything you said around. I would do this. It was almost like you were your grandmother's shadow and she was, you know, really embracing you and loving on you and I I got to. Oh, I wonder if that's common for grandmothers of adoptees, because they see that other disconnect and they're compensating in some ways. Totally my theory not based in science. No, no studies to back that up.
Speaker 1:But but my my yeah, well, I think there's something to that, because my, my grandmother was, I'm sure she was quietly astute, you know she observed, but we didn't live with her all the time. But there the household was set up for us as a as a quote unquote permanent home. So my father called it in New Jersey, so that when we were away and we were often away that my grandparents would still have a home that we could come back to. So it's not that we were there all the time. I'm sure that when we were there, the way she mothered me was was a little bit, perhaps a little bit or or different.
Speaker 1:Had I been a natural child but again, I could be reading into it as well. But, yes, I mean, I adored her. She was the, the person who had the tolerance that that my mother did not have. My mother was not a tolerant person and was sometimes could, could actually be very cruel and emotionally and sometimes physically too. But both of my parents were, could be emotionally and physically abusive, but my grandmother, of course, was not. She was a sanctuary. You know, she was somebody and and I always, and I think of her every day.
Speaker 2:That's interesting. We have that in common as well. I absolutely adored my grandmother on my adoptee maternal side. I speak of her often. I reference her as my hero. If I could be half the woman she was, I'm going to be, you know, really, really happy with the life that I leave on the earth. She was. She was a phenomenal person Doesn't mean she wasn't imperfect as well. I love the imperfect of her as much as I love the perfect of her.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I understand.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I do. I think about my grandmother every, every day, every day of my life. I get it. I 100% get it yeah. It's so unique because it's a different aspect to how we feel about our attachment to the adoptee family in the context of kind of that, that chasm of I'm not really belonging, but we both share this. Like there's this one person that is my, you know, my basic idol. It's just very interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree, there's so many good things and in what you say, I just tackle a little bit about your identity and how you felt about yourself. This is really about you and we talked a little bit about those early years. But things started shifting for you as you were going through all of the normal developmental milestones of life and you give us a little bit of insight into, you know, the complexity of being that military child lack of connection with your, your father mostly absent, true lack of emotional connection with your mother and then how you were navigating some of those tougher years.
Speaker 1:Not well, I have to say. I think when we, when we returned from three years in in Japan, we returned to the, to the home where my grandparents lived in New Jersey, and we stayed there through my, you know, AJ teen, I left then. That was a very, very difficult time for me because not only as a military quote, unquote brat. You're in a different sort of culture, still not the same as growing up in your own hometown with, with all of your familiar friends and and places. So I would try to try to assimilate.
Speaker 1:I think I was definitely in a culture shock and when I come, when I think about having been a, an adopted, you know, 12 year old and also a military child who is completely unfamiliar with the town I had left behind, or not completely familiar, that's probably a bit much. I mean, I did know kids from previous years. I had gone to the same school in kindergarten, fourth and eighth, so I knew some kids. But it was very, very difficult to make my way. I was extremely shy, self-conscious, or you don't really see yourself as fitting in, and I feel like I might have had an extra barrier to fitting in because of having been away, being a military child. I just couldn't find myself, and during high school it really was terrible. This is also the Vietnam War era. I graduated from high school in 1969. Any of your audience that can understand what the cultural implications of that were, you'll find that you were faced with all kinds of different choices. I didn't always make the right choices.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it was definitely a larger national, shifting culture time period. I don't know if all of us can relate to that. I think that it depends on a lot of things. When we look at history, we can see all of the different eras not just generation but truly eras and having to navigate some of those to be associated with an era of wartime where we weren't really all connected to what we were doing, and there was Exactly, yeah, it wasn't like there was this unification around what was going on at that particular time period, exactly yeah.
Speaker 1:It was much, yeah much, much different than the post-World War II era, where the depression and the unification Roosevelt era and all of that. And then, with that era, the Vietnam era, which my father was actually involved in the Southeast Asia conflict before we left for Japan because, as you know, that was brewing, but it was more a question of war and peace than, of course, the women's movement was budding, and so, yeah, it was a pretty chaotic mess to begin with, and people that I knew in high school were being shipped off. I had a number of guys that ended up in Vietnam. Unfortunately, a couple of them didn't even return and they were so young, so it was a very, very hard time. My father was away in Thailand during my junior year. He was away the entire time. He was head of operations in Northern Thailand for people who were soldiers, who were flying out, and he came back quite troubled about the entire thing. And, of course, he came back to a daughter who was pretty much of a mess, but I was still living home.
Speaker 2:Right, you were pushing against the norms with your peers.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:So I kind of equate that I don't mean it to sound flip infant, just to lighten this up a little bit. That era was a hot Southern mess. Oh it was, wasn't it? Yeah, I mean, that's just, I just yeah. So we were talking. I'm like, you know, there's a really good reference to Southern pride here for some of our listeners.
Speaker 2:It really was, and people were, you know, going through things, and then you add in all the layers that you were going through. It's quite intriguing. Let's talk a little bit and do a little shift here. I understand all of those major complexities and I applaud you for getting to where you are in life, having the courage to write a lot of this in your book. I want us to just pivot, though, and talk about your biological search, what finally spurred you to do that, and about how oldish were you. If you're willing to share, no problem.
Speaker 1:It was 30 years ago that I actually embarked on it In my second marriage and we needed to get a passport. This is exactly what triggered it. We needed to get a passport. I found that I could not use the documentation that I had used as a dependent as an Air Force dependent I had to. All I had was a certificate of baptism and birth and that was no longer considered a valid form of ID. So I used, I tried to get my passport. That way didn't work. And then I realized, you know, in my conversation with the state of South Carolina, I realized that there was actually something else and that was an amended birth certificate. Well, that was really a shocker. I had no idea that that was something like that existed. And when I looked into it with my conversation, just before the internet as well, with all my phone calls, so I got one I got my amended birth certificate and seeing that document tells me that I was actually born in Greenville, south Carolina, which my other document says that I was born in Rock Hill, which is where the infant home was. So my parents had told me all my life that I was born in Rock Hill. There was no mention of the town of Greenville and that really got me thinking.
Speaker 1:And now, at the same time this was happening, my husband came in contact with Joe Saul, the counselor. He was doing a lot of activism in Adopt-E-Rites in the state of New Jersey. My husband was an employee at the state of New Jersey. He picked up one of Joe's pamphlets because they were having a march. They were doing, like I said, quite a lot of activism then for Adopt-E-Rites. He brought it home to me and I ended up finding out about Adoption Forum, a Philadelphia-based Adopt-E advocacy group. So we went to a couple of meetings down there. They connected me with search people in South Carolina. Well, that really just launched it. Once I had that information, I just knew I had to keep going.
Speaker 1:When I was a teenager, I thought quite a lot about who do I look like. I dreamt that I would see my biological siblings. Now I had no idea that I actually had biological siblings, but now I'm thinking about these quote-unquote siblings. So you know, I was really fired up when this happened and I just spent a good year and a half tracking down any kind of kin that I might have in South Carolina and I was successful. You know, in a nutshell, ended up meeting my biological mother a year before she passed away, which was again. It was just a I guess they call it perpinkoody, the sense that there are people that you are kin with and then you meet these people. It was really quite extraordinary. Overall, it was quite positive to. I met a sister who was close in age, and then cousins and you know. I mean it was really quite rich experience, but it really was life-changing.
Speaker 2:Let me ask you a couple of questions, as we're kind of digesting all of that information Absolutely when I hear you talk about that time period, mary Ellen, there's two defining moments. One is I just needed my passport. It was the catalyst to getting information. The other one is, while I'm here, I might as well go all the way for it, because I've had other experiences that indicate I probably should go and look for these people. What is really interesting, and understated many times from my perspective only that the efforts that adoptees in certain generations have had to go through to get some of even the basics that we're able to get today because of technology, because of DNA testing. The groundswell we're feeling now has a very solid, firm foundation of people who have already gone through many of those hurdles. We're still jumping over hurdles, there's no doubt about that, but there's still a lot of value in the work that was done before technology and the pervasiveness of it.
Speaker 1:Right? Well, I certainly can't take any credit for it. The people who people like the adoption forum and people who you know Alma and others those are the people that deserve all the credit for all the hard hard work they have done and still continue to do as far as adoptee rights are concerned. But yes, I totally agree, this was a hard fought battle. My state has only just released the ability to get our birth certificates, so I finally have mine after all these years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and we've touched on this a little bit already, but the generational spread and the different areas really isn't a boundary and it doesn't change a lot of this conversation. You know, I think about your reunion with your birth mother and you mentioned it was a year before she passed. We have that in common, we actually have that in common too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but, and we have some siblings in common. What I think, though I don't want to gloss over, is there was a lot of positivity for you as as a human, meeting, finding and meeting and forging relationships on your maternal side, and I don't want us to overlook that, because, if I remember correctly, when we were talking previously, you referenced it as coming into your wholeness. This search and those reunions and that relationship building activity has helped you become the whole you that you are, is is. Did I hit that right?
Speaker 1:Oh, I think so. Yes, I think none of this is a good good analogy, but it's like peeling back the the layers of of who you are for, good and bad. My birth mother was definitely fraught, you know, with with issues, but it didn't matter because she was mine and I and I had her. You know, there was no, there was no sense that that I would blame her, because I could really understand how that could have come about and I know a little more now that I have my my records. Meeting her, it was all, it was all good. You know, it was all right. Yeah, it's, it's been extraordinary, it really has I. I wouldn't change how it happened. I wouldn't change it for the world. Anything happened was all to the good. The search is concerned.
Speaker 2:I was very, very fortunate, but yeah, Well, I'm glad that it's turned out that way for you. And now I want us to move to another portion of what we want to talk about today, and that is the takeaways from our conversation. I think there are three of them that are really starting to bubble up, and one is along the lines of it doesn't matter your age, your generation, your era, there's always time to figure stuff out Don't be consumed. I think one of the things you and I agreed to earlier was let's not put a boundary on ourself around a time period. I'm too old, I'm too young, I'm I don't have, you know, all of the resources. It can be daunting and tiring. Go ahead and lay your sword down for a little bit if you need to, but there's no boundary, and you're a representation of of that statement.
Speaker 1:Oh, thank you. I mean I I can honestly say I don't feel like kept me young. I think it was very, it was very grueling, but you know what? The whole life? Life hasn't been that simple or easy, but I think finding your identity is it's number one. You know, if you, if you're fortunate enough to have knowing, knowing, knowing who your mirrors are, knowing who all you know your biological family is, you know, that's all good, but I think adoptees have the an inherent right, you know, to our identity and to our heritage, and this is something that I say many times in in my book that we need to make sure that these laws get changed, not only for domestic adoptees but for for international adoptees. The way has to be paved for everybody to be able to have access.
Speaker 2:I think that that's such an important portion of the conversation, mary Ellen, and it ties into adoptee communities and connection, and one of the things I know you would like to put on the table is the conversation for the generations behind you, and not only them, the adoptees, not only the biological parents, but also the adoptee parents, the adoptive parents. And so what is your message to that group of our long story and our long trials and tribulations?
Speaker 1:You know, I think, in terms of fellow adoptees, we we do have, we do have to acknowledge that all of our stories are different, but we're all tied in in terms of, you know, the genetic identity and and the loss of heritage. So we do have, we can't, we have to acknowledge that we have the right to to these records. So that's one thing. As far as adoptive, adoptive parents are concerned, I would have to say you know, be aware that that you're that you've got, you're taking on quite a complex individual by adoption. You know that that child deserves all the empathy and understanding and honesty and transparency that they can get. And you know if, if there's suffering, if there's any type of behavioral issue, they're entitled to adoption therapy. You know people that are qualified to take care of adoption issues. Just get help if you need it, because we all know that there is. Now we know that there is such a thing as adoption trauma, and take care of yourselves and get the help you need.
Speaker 2:What I would say in support of your comments are part of my mission to say go find the tool that works for you. Lots of adoptee, competent therapist and then we have to acknowledge that we don't all have all of those things all the time at our fingertips. So find the one that allows you in that moment to address that thing, and then go find the one that helps you move to the next iteration of your journey.
Speaker 1:I think you're right and I just want to say that my opinion of don't rely on each other, only just open yourself up to different ways and think critically about what your approach is going to be, but get the help of qualified professional if you need it.
Speaker 2:And if you can not, all of us can. I know that's just such a hard. It's so hard for us to wrap our head around that because we want it so badly, but lots of tools lots of tools While we're coming to the end of our conversation today. It's been fantastic. I don't want us to overlook, though, that you do have a book, and so go ahead and tell us the name of your book, where we can find you, and yeah, let's go there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so glad to be here. My book is, I must have wondered, an adopted Air Force Daughter recalls, and it's a memoir about. I really think of it as a hybrid memoir. It's a collage of letters and prose, poetry and articles and photos, so it's a. It's pretty all encompassing, so it's available anywhere. Books are sold, so have a newsletter. If you're interested, you can go into sub stack and find me there. The call is roots and branches and I would welcome you to come and join and follow me there. My writing I really haven't been that much on Facebook, but I am also on Facebook and Instagram.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, that's great. I just want to close with thank you for joining us today. I do know that it is hard for adoptees at times to tell their story, and we end up reliving some of those experiences as we're telling them. So it is an honor it is a true honor for me to be able to be in this space and to share it with you. You are always welcome here at Wandering Tree podcast and I just want to wish you the best. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening to today's episode of Wandering Tree podcast. Please rate and be sure to sign up so we can experience the lived adoptee journey together. Want to be a guest on our show? Check us out at WanderingTreeAdoptedcom.