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
S5:E1 Jenny Becknell's Story of Resilience and Hope Series 1 of 3: Navigating Teenage Pregnancy and Adoption
What happens when your world is turned upside down at 18? Jenny Becknell knows firsthand the whirlwind of emotions that come with an unexpected pregnancy during college and the life-altering decision of adoption. Join us as Jenny, a birth mother, shares her intimate story, beginning with her shock and initial excitement upon discovering she was pregnant while balancing school and family expectation. She opens up about navigating her complex family dynamics, where her sister's simultaneous pregnancy and an abusive home added immense pressure to her situation.
Jenny’s candid storytelling takes us through the emotional labyrinth of facing familial and societal pressures. Listen as she reads from her journal entries, revealing the profound internal conflict she faced. Was placing her baby for adoption truly in her child's best interest, or was it a desperate attempt to satisfy her parents? Jenny reflects on the cultural and religious influences that shaped her decisions, and how these themes echo in her interactions with the birth father and the broader adoption community.
Throughout the episode, we explore the lasting impact of adoption on Jenny's life, including the ongoing pain and what-ifs that she continues to grapple with. She speaks on the importance of creating safe spaces for birth mothers and adoptees to share their stories and the critical need for empathy and understanding. Despite the heartache, Jenny highlights the fulfilling life she's built with her husband and other children, offering a message of hope and resilience to our listeners. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to understand the deep emotional layers of adoption.
Yes, and even in my little journal that I had left for her, I did talk about him and I talked about his family and what I knew and just telling her, like anything you ever want to know, like I'm going to be here to tell you anything, and even in that I look back at these words and I have to keep remembering I was only 18 when I was writing this.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Wandering Tree Podcast. I am your host, lisa Anne. We are an experience-based show focused on sharing the journey of adoption, identity life search and reunion. Today kickstarts our fifth season, and when starting this adventure, I never dreamed of taking things to this level. The original intention was to create a release valve for myself during the trials and tribulations of biological reunion, share my own experiences and show at least one other adoptee in this great big world that they were not alone To date. Here is what I personally have learned Our numbers are many. We yearn for support and understanding. We desire to better ourselves. We also desire connections For some. We strive to aid others through groups, books, blogs and podcasts. Those moments of reflection provided a perfect segue into our upcoming three-part series Creating Connection, understanding and Empathy Between Birth Mothers and Adoptees, and so I'm extremely honored to have with us today our guest, jenny Becknell. Good afternoon, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Hi, lisa Ann, it's so good to be here and what a great introduction. And really exactly what it is that drew me to you was listening to your podcast and just seeing that you did have all of those components in your story and being the same exact things. That I, as a birth mother, really think is super important is having that connection and understanding and care about just being able to listen to what everybody has to say in their experience. So, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 2:That is a great place for us to start. I mentioned in the introduction that is a great place for us to start. I mentioned in the introduction this is a three-part series, three different stages of this process and your experience Pregnancy period, the post-adoption period and then post what I'm going to call kind of a reunion period the next 18 after and I'm excited about it you and I have spent I don't know if you realize this almost six months preparing for these three episodes. It has been a little bit of an emotional roller coaster for both of us for different reasons, not specifically because of what we're trying to craft here today, but a lot of this stuff can get heavy very quickly and open up old wounds, and I know that that's important for us to acknowledge today as well.
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1:In fact, I was just having a conversation with my husband before we started to talk today and I was trying to explain to him why it was really important for me to have our house just empty, like I just didn't want anyone else to be here, because it is really really hard to go into some of these places and, being the person and having the personality that I do have, I do always kind of worry and wonder what everyone around me is thinking and how they're feeling about what it is that I'm saying, and so sometimes I find myself, even today, being more concerned about what someone else might be feeling about what I'm saying that I am about actually saying what I need to say.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, like it causes me a lot of anxiety if I don't feel like I have the space to just be able to go deep into those places that are really really hard to go to, but I also think that there's a lot of importance in doing that for everybody. So I agree and I appreciate you for, honestly, you've really, really pushed me along and encouraged me to do this and I greatly appreciate that.
Speaker 2:So thank you. Well, again, you are more than welcome, but I feel the true benefit of this conversation and I am honored deeply. Let's go ahead and kind of get there. Many things you said are going to resonate with adoptees, birth parents and adoptee parents. We share a lot of the same concerns and emotions, but we're many times I don't know hesitant to talk about them because we're not sure how they're going to hit. So I would like it if you would start out telling us a bit about you prior to discovering you were pregnant.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I was 18 years old, I was away at school for the first time away at college for the first time and I had gone to school on a soccer scholarship and I had gone to a school 18, I'm sorry an hour and a half away from where I grew up. And I grew up in a family of seven. I was the second oldest of seven children and at the time that I had found out that I was pregnant, my 17-year-old sister, who was a junior in high school, had found out six months prior that she was also pregnant. So I had an older sister that was 20. I was 18. My younger sister was 17. And then another sister that was 15, another sister that was 13. And then my youngest. Two brothers were eight years old and six years old and, honestly, up until really preparing for this, I had not even thought about the ages of my siblings. But knowing that I was going to be coming on here today and talking about pregnancy and the decision and where my life really was at that time, it made me kind of look back at some of those things. And I had started a journal for my daughter when I was pregnant. I realized you know our memories and our brains kind of work and compartmentalize things. But I was also off after 30, almost 32 years, 33 years. I was even off on the time that I got pregnant. So I typed in my daughter's due date the other day and found out that I didn't get pregnant until the end of January. And all this time I'm thinking I had gotten pregnant in December. So it's interesting, but anyway so. But I had started a notebook. So my timing that my brain has been telling me all these years has been off by a couple of months. And so I found out. So back up a little bit, my sister, I told you, was pregnant. She was six months ahead of me. Her daughter was due. She was born at the end of March. My sister's daughter was born at the end of March.
Speaker 1:I got pregnant at the end of January, not really sure exactly what it was that I found out, but I remember I was in my dorm room and I don't know why I decided to take a pregnancy test. I don't remember the reason for it. I don't know what alerted me to am I pregnant? I don't remember any of that. But I remember taking the pregnancy test, that I was alone when I did that and I've said even before like that doesn't sound like me to be alone, but that's what my memory says was that I was alone. I don't know that that's a fact.
Speaker 1:But I do remember seeing the pregnancy test and my initial response was excitement, because I love children. I've always loved children. G grew up with a huge family, so babies were always just super exciting to me. I was always I always babysat, you know, for people's children, as I was growing up and always loved playing with my little brothers and my sisters, and so I just was always just really in love with children. So my initial response was to be excited.
Speaker 1:And then, immediately after remembering and realizing that my 16-year-old sister, who had just turned 17, was pregnant and getting ready to have a baby, and knowing that my parents had been the entire time she was pregnant, telling her you cannot bring this baby home, you cannot have this child break. We're not going to raise this child in our home. You cannot do this. You need to place your child for adoption and we're going to send you to a counselor for adoption. And so a lot of the things that I was new, immediately upon finding out I was pregnant, were already there from my sister, having been through the same thing just a few months earlier.
Speaker 2:You had a good baseline right then of understanding around not only the social expectations of women who are not married and pregnant, but also a good indicator of your family's principles and expectations. That had to have been very hard to rationale between the two things that I've just heard you speak of large, loving family, your family, your immediate family. You had several children and then having a sister in the same position as you going through it and you're kind of. You have a front seat view of what it's going to be like even for you.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, and also another part of the story that I do think is important and part of what was always on my mind was that my dad was a very abusive man. So growing up, my parents obviously were together, but my dad had grown up in foster care back and forth and was adopted, as I think he was 12 or somewhere around that age, by his aunt, so he always knew his mom as well, but we kind of had two grandmothers and two grandfathers. We, growing up, we knew both of them. So I think that was also something in my mind too. I did not there was not really a huge desire of my own even to have my daughter being raised in the home of my parents, because I knew that wasn't a great environment to be living in and so I didn't want her to have that experience like I did either.
Speaker 1:That was definitely something that was on my mind, and I had also graduated from high school with a girl who had a baby and placed her baby for adoption, and it was an open adoption and that was the first I'd really heard of that, and so that was something that I think was kind of in my mind at the time too was like I could do what was best for my child, which is what that's. All I had heard, was this was what was best for my child instead of what was best for me. Like it was very much like you are extremely selfish to put yourself before your child and the best thing to do is to put your child first, and that is to give your child a two parent family that can raise them together in the same home. Loving parents, you know, that have money that can provide experiences and things that you are not able to give to your child. It was just kind of just in my brain, like that's just kind of what I knew, and so I believed at that point I was always kind of the rebel of the family, I guess, so to say so.
Speaker 1:I was always kind of looked at as like the black sheep, the one that's always kind of the rebel of the family, I guess, so to say so. I was always kind of looked at as like the black sheep, the one that's always kind of doing the wrong thing and I think subconsciously, not really realizing it at the time, but I feel like, in a way, growing up and not ever being able to please my parents, that and it seems so messed up now because I'm you know, this is the life of a person right that I'm making a decision for, but at the time you're not thinking about that and I'm just thinking, oh, like this is such a great opportunity to please my parents, like I can, for the first time ever, maybe, do something that they're going to be like wow, she actually does care about others instead of just herself, kind of thing. You know, I think that maybe there was some of that that played a part in it as well. And just I just remember thinking I need to sacrifice my own self to make sure that this child has everything that he or she deserves. And so if I have to go through pain, if I have to go through hurt, if I have to go through agony, if I have to go through whatever it is I have to go through, it will be worth it so long as my child has everything she or he deserves I didn't know if I was having a boy or a girl as long as my child has everything that she or he wants and can you know, that's what really matters, it's not me If she can live a happy life, she can live with people who love and adore her, and it can be an open adoption.
Speaker 1:That's just more people to love her. So how could that be bad? So that's kind of where it came from on in my thought process, I think.
Speaker 2:So in that time period you had a lot of inputs, you had a lot of information at hand, you had some new and emerging topics, open adoption. How were you starting, or what process during your pregnancy Were you starting to kind of get to a decision, and what kind of pressures do you feel you were under, aside from what you already knew?
Speaker 1:I'm just going to be honest and say I don't really know how to answer that question. I can tell you that I kept a journal for my daughter. I had started it in April. She was born in October.
Speaker 1:My daughter, I had started it in April, she was born in October and I have eight or nine journal entries where I wrote to her and I can tell you that I was referring to myself as mom in all of these entries, in the ones that I had left for her in April, that I didn't leave another one for her until July. I'm still referring to her as her mom and her best friend. At the end, End of July it was love you, mom. And then it slowly went actually to the next one, which was in September, when I'm telling her that I had met her adopted parents for the first time. At the end of that letter I referred to myself as your birth mother. When I look at that now like it breaks my heart because I wasn't. I was still her mother and I'm still her mom today and she's almost 32. Yeah, so I, you know, once I met them in person, I had started referring to myself even differently and continued even on as I was reading through this because I continued writing this journal to her even after she was born and I read it today and I think it's probably the first time that I've read it since I wrote it One time back in 2010, I transferred the handwritten notebook into a typed letter but even at that time I was typing words.
Speaker 1:I was not reading, I was not into what I was writing to her. But I read through it today, knowing I was going to be on here, and it's truly heartbreaking to read it and to talk to her and telling her about her family and telling her about who I am and who her birth father is and who all of my brothers and sisters are, and telling her that I lost myself when I made this decision for her and that I don't know that I'll ever find myself again. And anyway, it's just it's. It's very sad to read parts of it. Parts of it it's really shows my immaturity and my age, talking to her even about who I'm dating and you know, just like really silly things, as I as I read through it.
Speaker 2:But yeah, yeah, take a minute. It's okay. It's a lot to digest.
Speaker 1:So yeah, so I think that that was kind of, I guess, the process I was going through. I just remember it was like a repeated it was almost just on repeat Like you need to do what's best for your child. It doesn't, you don't matter, it's about your child, it's about your child, what's best for your child, and that truly, truly is all I wanted was just to do what was best for her. And I wish I would have known about the primal wound. I wish I would have researched more.
Speaker 1:You know, even in my life now, I'm a huge researcher. I want to know about everything before I move forward with anything, and never connected that it came from making this decision and not doing what I should have done to research all of the information, truly believing that I was making the best decision for my child so that she could have the greatest life possible, and then, all of these years later, to realize that that's not what happened is just devastating. It's something you can't. There's nothing that I can do to change it, nothing. Yeah, I don't did that answer your question responses of the situation.
Speaker 2:It is hard to talk about this. It's also hard to listen to it as an adoptee, but there are some really key items that I think are precious and I would like to highlight them. To be a teenager, to have a number of extenuating circumstances during a time period in a major life decision like this, and to have enough wisdom and strength to write things down, is pretty unique, and I think that is a key component to maybe how adoption is today, or could be even enhanced today, because I am a firm believer it's never going away as much as we would maybe want it to. I think that it's going to be something that exists long past my life cycle. So my point of advocacy around that is the more we can share, the more we can educate and the more we can create connection and bond. Yeah, I hope so, jenny.
Speaker 2:Thank you for sharing some of those very intimate moments of decision making and some of the activities that you did during that period of time. I think it's extremely special and very unique to have a journal or even small entries. Know, small entries over a period of time, be it one or 100, is irrelevant. Just to have that is very important many times for adoptees because it creates a little bit of a connection point and helps us gravitate towards our true identity. Us gravitate towards our true identity.
Speaker 2:So, while you were speaking of that experience and sharing some of your journal entries and also criticizing yourself because you were so young and what you were saying, just the fact that you had the patience to do that and the forethought to do that is, in my book, a win. So, kudos, I believe it would be a good place for us as well to transition a little bit and kind of talk about how do you navigate, you know, a pregnancy where you're that young and you're clearly in the time period where we're talking about, people still had expectation of marriage and we weren't as open around just general topics of sexual freedom or orientation, or you don't have to be married in order to do these things. I don't want to go political, liberal, conservative, but just a different aspect of life right More tolerance, more patience, and how does that work in this story?
Speaker 1:I think that for me I know that I grew up Catholic, so I just grew up knowing like that's just kind of how things were. I didn't really even ever challenge that in any way. I just knew that every child deserved to have a mother and a father, and so that was just kind of always there for me. And so even when I shared that with Anna's father, I, you know, I called him right away to let him know when I found out I was pregnant and you know, and he too was happy. And when I told him like he wasn't the guy that says, oh no, like we aren't going to do this, he, you know, had this like plan that you know, he could work during the day and I could go to school at night, or vice versa, like he would talk about these things. And there was just I don't know it's interesting to look at it now and I'm not sure why, but I just always knew it was just like an inner knowing that that was not the way that things were really going to be. That, yeah, it sounded really nice, it sounded really pretty, but I just knew that's not really how it was going to be. And I look back at that now and I think that was really unfair of me. I look back at that now and I think that was really unfair of me.
Speaker 1:I have since her birth. Father is in her life and has been in her life since she was five, kind of moving ahead a little bit there. But I have even recently apologized to him and said I'm really sorry that I did not give us an opportunity. I didn't give us that chance. Give us an opportunity. I didn't give us that chance and he's just he's still to this day just a really great guy and he will not allow me to hold any of these decisions on my own.
Speaker 1:I've I've apologized to him even since then for not giving him the opportunity to parent her, and he said you didn't make that decision on your own, we made it together, which is actually, in my opinion, not true at all, because the entire time I was pregnant with her, I spoke to him twice Once I went back home, which I went back from college at the beginning of, at the end of April, and I only spoke to him a couple of times for the rest of my pregnancy. Anyway, it is interesting, but he's been really great and supportive over the years to me even.
Speaker 2:You know that's very interesting. Let's do a little reflection around that topic. I think that that's something that we gloss over when we're talking about these situations is the importance of the decision with the biological father as well. I'm comfortable in making a statement that says we put so much pressure, 80% of that decision, on the female, and we just overlook that father component, and not in a statement of criticism, right, but you just emulated that through the conversation, through your dialogue that said, you talked to him twice and I wonder if you, in reflection, think that was because of society or because of your upbringing, or it just was the way it was.
Speaker 1:It was because he didn't call me. I mean, I was at home, I was living with my parents and I was kind of the one going through it. I wasn't reaching out to him. I don't think my parents would have really accepted that. That was back when there was long distance call too, by the way, so you couldn't just call somebody and talk to him. So he lived a few hours an hour and 45 minutes for me. So it would have been a long distance phone call that I would have had to have gotten permission for, that would have had to have gotten permission for that, and otherwise I probably would have called him every day.
Speaker 2:I probably would have called him a lot. But it's so interesting around the conversation of making a decision and this is a life-changing decision and the barrier was you weren't married, you guys weren't in this really strong relationship, you were long distance something, and there was a barrier of time and perception of money and therefore it just kind of pushes forward. That same kind of old school narrative of the decision lies solely with the one carrying the baby and, interesting, he didn't call you, you didn't call him. That's how it goes sometimes and we just don't have enough in our emotional intelligence bank sometimes at that age to know that it's that life changing.
Speaker 1:Yes, and even in my little journal that I had left for her, I did talk about him and I talked about his family and what I knew and just telling her, like anything you ever want to know, like I'm going to be here to tell you anything. And even in that I look back at these words and I have to keep remembering like I was only 18 when I was writing this. But even during all of that, I would not say anything negative about him to her at all, even though there were times where I was thinking like I'm so mad at him for not calling me or, you know, I really would love for him to have been there when she was born, and you know just all the little fantasy things in my head, because I really did adore him and cared about him a lot. But I just wanted him to choose me, not just me, because I was having his child, and I thought that was the only way we would really be able to sustain any sort of relationship, really be able to just to sustain like any sort of relationship. And although when I look back at it now, I think that us being together just for her would have been good enough and who knows what could have happened from there. But I didn't even give that opportunity to him, or even think about that, and until years and years later, where I just thought I mean not that I would undo my husband and my children that I've had with him or anything like that, but who knows, like who knows. But even in this journal I say to her I dream all the time about what it would be like for just me, you and your dad, to be together, like what that would be like. So anyway and honestly that you know it's something that still, it's still with me. It has not ever gone away, you know, ever.
Speaker 1:Another thing that I was thinking as you were talking is something else that has come up for me over the years. In reflection back to this time, I think if there was someone going through this decision and looking back, like you can only see what's going on in your life right in front of you, and you can sometimes only focus on today or next week or what might happen then, and it's too hard for us to see what the future is going to look like. And so if I'm able to somehow do that for somebody, I would really just encourage anyone to try as hard as you can to find someone who will support you to raise your child. Keep looking, keep asking, keep searching, look on the internet. Find a birth mother that doesn't ever want someone to have to go through that again and put their child through that. But what I say now is my daughter deserved for me to fight harder for her. She deserved that. I should have done that.
Speaker 1:I am a very strong person. I have a strong personality. I have a strong will and I sometimes get stuck in being so angry at that 18 year old girl for not doing it. Then, like of all the times in my life where I needed to fight hard for the right thing, that's when it was, and she deserved that. She deserved a birth mother that would have fought tooth and nail to do whatever I could to raise her.
Speaker 1:The only thing that I can say is I didn't realize that. I thought I was doing that for her. I thought I was doing what was best for her and it just wasn't. It wasn't what was best for her and it wasn't what was best for me, but I always knew. I always knew it wasn't best for me. There was never a doubt in my mind from the moment of go that it wasn't best for me. I knew that we are really shown to to always sacrifice ourselves for others, and I guess maybe some people do it and some people don't I don't know, but I definitely she deserved for me to have done that and, frankly, I deserved to have done that for myself and I didn't. So I don't know if that makes sense what I'm trying to say, if I'm saying that correctly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it does. I think that, in the context of this conversation, for you in hindsight which is the only place you can be right now you know that you would have liked to have had a different approach to the decision-making process. I believe you and I will agree on this. That perspective, though, is coming from a place of growth and reflection and age, and seeing this from day one of acknowledging you're pregnant to where you are today. Where you are today, it wouldn't have been that way for you on day birth, which we were going to get to here in one of our upcoming segments, but what I'm finding very heartfelt in this conversation is the theme of. It's just not an easy decision and the ramifications are all around difficult, and to have birth mothers willing to talk about that pain and the long-term effects of those decisions is so important to me, because it helps me understand some of where I come from and the effects and the long-term items, and the reflection and working through the pains and the joys as well. None of us can turn back the clock.
Speaker 2:That just isn't going to happen, but at least we can talk about it and give another person an opportunity to think about the experience differently.
Speaker 2:It really is part of changing the narrative around adoption, where the thing people focus on is how wonderful it is You're doing somebody a favor, this is so special, you're so chosen, I mean all those things right. There can be beauty in there, but there's also hardship, and I feel really strongly about that. Well, we're getting close to the end of what we wanted to cover today in this first segment, and it's been hard on you. I can tell our listeners can't see you, but I can see you, and I want to thank you for putting yourself out there and being emotional and vulnerable and truthful and really getting to the core of what we really want to get out to the people around these types of topics and create some bridges between these two dynamics the birth parent and the adoptee. I do want to say, though you made a point in all of this you also have had a life and you have a husband, and you guys have been married 31 years.
Speaker 1:I believe It'll be 29 years this year. Oh, I was so close.
Speaker 2:My daughter's 31. Yeah, and you have other children and you are very proud of who you are and what you've done over the time period. This is a portion of your life, but it's not the sum total of your life. Yes, very true. Well, with that, I want to ask you one more question, and then we'll wrap up for today and we're going to preface for everybody what the next segment will be. As we're closing, what do you want the listeners to consider between now and our next session?
Speaker 1:I think, really just allowing ourselves to hear each other. I think it's just really really important that people be kind to each other, be respectful to each other and keep space for all of us having different experiences, which comes from, whatever our background is, and just trying to like sometimes step outside of what it is that we might be looking at and doing in our lives and realizing that there's another way, and it's not always one or the other like sometimes it's both. And you know, I made a journal entry a month after my daughter was born saying I would do this all over again. That to me is crazy that I ever said that we have to allow ourselves to be wrong sometimes and to have love for that, and not just with ourselves but with each other.
Speaker 1:And I oftentimes will see so much anger and bitterness and mean times. We'll see so much anger and bitterness and mean, nasty, shaming things that people say to each other, from adoptee to adoptive, parent to birth parent, and sometimes I'm just like, wow, have we not all been through enough? Have we not all in every single aspect? We're all doing the best we can today and like we need to look at each other that way and give each other the space to just I don't know like, just like, like, let's be respectful and kind of like we've already all been through enough.
Speaker 1:So people aren't just saying what they're saying for the hell of it. They're saying it because that's where they are at that moment. But if we do not slow ourselves down and open up our own minds to hear and care about other people, we're never going to move forward. We're just going to stay stuck in this back forth stuff. So I think it's just really important to be true, to be honest and to be reflective and understand that someone else's story is not going to be the same as yours, but to know that they were probably doing the best that they could either way. So I think that's the first. That's kind of what came to my mind when you said that.
Speaker 2:Well, I do like the hold space aspect of that. I can't stand in everyone's shoes, I can only stand in my own and I don't know everyone's hurt or heal, and that's the truth and I don't try to. I have enough of my own to deal with. So to try to cast my net further out would really be detrimental to next 18 years. And you were on the cusp of a different style of adopting, which was open adoption. So you have an experience around that that you would like to share out and I think is important, because it can go wonderful, it can go sideways, it could be steady, eddie, and there's always a lot to learn in that. I know.
Speaker 2:From my own perspective, I've often wondered what would have it been like to be part of an open adoption versus a closed adoption. I probably would have had a lot more access to who I am and the pieces of my puzzle that have been missing and are still missing. I do still have life gap. I keep thinking I'm going to go solve for that, and here we are in fifth season and I just can't get motivated enough to go solve for that. Maybe I'm too scared, I don't know. But in open adoption you don't have life gap, and so there's a small benefit maybe to that. And then there's potentially we're going to dive into. Maybe it's not a benefit to know. Maybe when you get too ingrained and too involved it has other unintended consequences. So I'm looking forward to our next discussion for Unlanguishment first, 18 years.
Speaker 2:Thank you, lisa. All right, well, thank you for being with us today, jenny, and again, listeners. We're going to wrap up for today and we'll see you on the other side. Talk to you again soon. Thank you for listening to today's episode of Wandering Tree Podcast. Please rate, review and share this out so we can experience the lived adoptee journey together. Want to be a guest on our show? Check us out at wanderingtreeadopteecom.