Welcome to the Open Adoption Project. This is episode 109. We're the Nelson's. I'm Lanette.
And I'm Shaun. And in today's episode, we have a conversation between Alisha Gallagher, our Director
of Communications, and Steven Roley. We're going to go ahead and just jump straight to that conversation
and Alisha will introduce Steven and of course, Lanette and I will share a few thoughts at the
end of the episode. We're also going to have a little bonus content at the conclusion of our
episode, which invites birth mothers to participate in a research study. Yeah, we are really thankful
for Dr. Rowley for sharing these thoughts. This is a really enjoyable episode. We really enjoyed
listening to this and we're so grateful for him and for Alisha. Okay, welcome everybody. We have
Steven Roley here on the podcast with us. Steven Roley is a psychotherapist practicing in Washington
States. He also worked as an elementary school teacher, principal and college professor. He holds
a master's in psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute and a PhD in administration and policy
analysis from Stanford University. He's also an adoptee and an adoptive father. His new book is
The Lost Coin, a memoir of adoption and destiny. Steven, welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, just from that intro, you've done a lot of different things in your career
and I'm curious why write about this topic and why now? It seems like there would be some
sort of urgency behind the moment of writing it at this moment.
Yeah, I'll back up here at the time in this. I'll put it that way. So why the topic? Well,
as you know from the book, I knew from my early stage I was a dot at it. It wasn't until I was
in 13 that I after kind of a rift with my mother that I became ever more determined to find out
my identity, my birth mother, the circumstances of my adoption which were shielded legally through
sealed records. And to this day, I don't know exactly what more my parents knew or didn't
know about my background. I don't think it was probably less than I think. But I spent up until
age 40. In fact, I was living in Redwood City at the time. When I finally after a long detective
story about how I found who she was, where she was living, and then flew back to these
codes to actually meet her. So that was such a seminal moment in my life and for hers as well.
I mean, it's emotionally just too big to really even describe. I've tried to describe it. I think
I do a good job at that. But still, that something that impact that all that it meant to both her
and me. And so yeah, so several years later, my wife and I adopted a four year old. And that was a
monumental discovery and falling in love at a time with our son to be the time we had absolutely no
reason whatsoever. We were vowed where my wife was a teacher. I was a principal at the time
for a Central Office administrator. We didn't want kids in life with kids all day. So we want to have
our adult time later. Right. That all that all changed with one kid and it would still be true
after him. But we this one we had to have. So that's this whole story how how adoption came into my
life. And then I would say, although I wrote about it and certainly considered I really didn't have
the drive to find my birth father, partly because my efforts were thwarted by the fact that the
records I had it was spelled as name. So it wasn't until much later. So then come to just a little
over two years ago, I got a 23 and me notification from a first cousin, which was unusual. I've been
I've been I've been 23, we almost from its beginning. So I'm really used to getting these
notifications for second, third cousins, which I realized, forget it. I mean, it just it adds up to
nothing. But this one was a first cousin. And this person lived in the Midwest and cut cut,
make the story short. Within within minutes, we discovered, and he suggested he got his mother
in touch with me. And his other aunt, who was a genealogist, got in touch with me when I realized
in a flash, after I gave him some information about what I did know about my birth father,
which was not the right information. It was like incidents like suddenly, I knew his name, he was
he had died in the ladies. And it was name I now knew I had four half sisters who live in the Midwest.
Most of them in the Midwest, and we're all relatively close in age. So we exchanged pictures and stories
and all that stuff. So but I'd say from the moment that I heard that I hadn't really found him, but
he came my way. It was as though the light went on. It's like, okay, now it's time to write. So I've been
involved in writing, we could deal with my life. And but this one, I just boy, it just spilled. And so
I wrote within a day or two, I wrote five or six hours a day, five or six days a week until Labor
Day. So I had first draft done in five months, which then is a whole other story, which you get
to draft and all the other things that happen in terms of getting it right. But that was that
discovery really marked the kind of the that was the bookend for the other the missing third. I mean,
I found her. Now I found him. Although I never had the drive, but nevertheless, was in or out of
was interesting, particularly when I saw the pictures of both of them. My birth mother, I had her
picture for a long time. And she was a charming and beautiful young woman. I likened her to a kind
of a young Jean Turing movie star from the 40s. Okay. And when I saw my father's picture, same age
at age 19, my age, I was not looking at me, it looked like, of course, I'm romanticizing now,
but it looked so much like you're the younger and ascending way who I just happened to still like.
So but it just sort of everything clicked because I'm like, God, I have these two really good looking
pairs on the other hand, or by then I already knew that that he had wanted to know nothing to do
with me or my life then. And certainly, whereas she I think had a deep yearning to reconnect with me,
just didn't have the means to do so. She after I, she gave me a production. She was married soon
after another man. And largely did not have a very happy life at all. Like by drug addiction,
drug addiction, alcoholism. And when I caught up with her when I was about 40 back east,
she had recently been released from a halfway house. So the place where we met was in state
sponsored housing, I kind of a dingy tenement. And at first she was quite hostile. I mean, she
when my half sister who brought brought me there, who I'd only known for a few hours,
knocked in the door and she opened the crack, open the door crack, looked at me and said,
who the hell gave you the right to look me up? I didn't ask you to come. I was like,
time to breathe. Yeah. So that probably wasn't what you were expecting or were you expecting that?
Were you anticipating some? Well, I don't know what I was expecting. God knows where everybody
was nervous, but I wasn't expecting that. I mean, she knew I was coming. But after a little back
and forth, I brought her some flowers, which she said she'd never on that or ever given her flowers
before, which was just like, Oh my God. But then was well to the book, I won't go into detail now,
but it was we're in the kitchen, we've been the guy began to realize just how bright she was.
And I also realized then and later how much she had sacrificed. I got I got the break. I got to
live in a great house, supportive parents, affluent by Midwestern standards at that time,
supportive of education, supportive of me. I had a privilege from the beginning.
Had I stayed with her, I want to actually go into that a little bit. There was a part where
I believe it was your sister who had written you a letter. And she said, I hope you know now that
you were spared. You were the lucky one. And to read like what, how did you read that? I mean,
because there's so many adoption stories where you imagine that maybe you didn't end up as lucky as
the as the biological family, maybe you were placed with option and then they went off and made this
other life and and you missed out. But here you have a family member saying, No, you were the lucky
one. How did that hit you? I think at the time, and certainly since then, it seemed like such a
conundrum because on one hand you're left with as I talk about the inner life, the indelible
impertipious separation of mother and child, the primal wound stays with you creates a sense of
yearning, one to connect, wanted to find who it is, wanted to reestablish it. At the same time,
realizing, well, if that hadn't happened, I would if I would have been with her either as a boy
with a single mother or maybe with a man she didn't want to be with. I realized just how
bad that would have been. So it's like, God, yeah, I escaped. So I want to connect and I'm
glad I escaped. That's a kind of push and pull. And I think the, I think the both are true.
Yeah, I did adopties live with that from my conversations with so many that you,
you want to connect, but you have all these questions about this at the same time or you,
you're happy about reunifying but also sad for what you lost or it's just so many opposites
that live at the same time in perfect unity. Right. We Jungian psychotherapists call that the
Jung's idea of the tension of the opposites and to hold two ideas, whether this is a good example,
hold both to be true. And in terms of therapy or even just the academic reading of Jung and so
forth, the importance is to be patient with those opposites, not try to resolve, to choose a story.
You know, like, you know, oh, by all means, I always wanted to get back together. Well, yeah,
but there was the other side that you were in it. So, but I think by holding those for as long as I
did it and still today, it's created a, like a dialectic, it created a new fusion, a new sort
of resolution. And so that later in the book, it took me to a very different place with some of the
ritual things I experienced when I could change my perspective out of me being the child and my
mother being the adult. Not my birth mother, my real mom. And because I'd never talked to her
about it after we had our big riff, I never talked to her. I swore I never would. But I had a revelation
actually was on her 100th birthday when I saw my relationship with my mom and what I was doing all
of my life and what she was doing, completely different. So I was the teacher and she was a
student and then everything changed. So by hanging out with that, those opposites, it didn't seem like
it involved my, my mom, who I grew up with my, my mom is my mom was my mom. Something else emerged
out of that that was unexpected and brought enormous resolution. And my mom died a year after
on her 100th birthday. By the time she left all of my little petty jealousies and chip on the
shoulder with her and maybe hers with me just vanished. And it was such a sweet ending because
when going to her funeral and all that kind of thing, I just felt such enormous gratitude and
connection with her and such a deeper affinity and love for her that I hadn't experienced before. So
I can't prove that that happened because of holding out of this office, at least
rationally, the part of my own training is that you have to relate intuitively as you do, I think,
in terms of where you find your meaning where not every adoptee wants to find their parent,
nor should everybody. It should because sometimes there's people you don't want to be reunited with.
Sometimes certain information from you legally or otherwise is blocked from you.
It's a hard, it's a hard pill to swallow. I've met plenty of people. That's been the circumstance.
Many people actually who are from where I was born, the Willows Maternity Sanitary in Kansas City.
I did a last February on my 75th birthday, I did a reading there with a friend who was a historian
of the Willows. Kansas City at that time was the hub of adoption in the United States for probably
four decades, a big center and they have maybe 10 or 12 different homes for Enwood mothers.
The Willows was sort of the, it was called the Ritz. They advertised back in New York newspapers
and magazines. A lot of people came from the East Coast to bring their pregnant daughters.
But there, we did a speech on the second day, we did a speech at the Kansas City Library and
most everybody who came to the speech, pretty good size group were connected to the Willows.
Either they were born there or they had a friend or relative who was there. So those are the
moments where you start to hear the stories. You start to hear the theme of this sort of like
either the joy or the frustration of linking up. One way or the other, that damic underneath the
surface of it, this kind of like yearning for reconnection. Now that's not always true. I
would never claim that's true for all people, but for some people it's sometimes just repressed.
We may be true, but it's in the unconscious. How do we know it's in the unconscious?
So, but a lot of, most many adoptees trying to find their records, trying to find the
dissident relative or trying to find where they're, where that person might be buried is a,
is a powerful driving force that I dare say you have to be in those shoes to understand it.
Because it doesn't logically, you can't make a case for it, but intuitively and emotionally, absolutely.
Yeah. Yep. So back to your experience being kind of unique. Did you feel like your desire to explore
your adoption story was discouraged growing up? And that's why you decided I'm not talking about it.
Discouraged? Yeah, two levels. One was discouraged, of course, by my mom who when I said I would
like to know more and she said, you know, kind of in so many words, how dare you don't you think we
love you enough? And I was so embarrassed. I was so humiliated and so angered by that. I ran to my
room, went to my room, slammed the door and swore I'd never bring this up again. I didn't want to
experience that kind of amelioration. So I just simply went on my way and at that age when I was 13,
I knew I'd have to wait to get to college before I had my own mailing address. I couldn't be mailing,
there were no cell phones or, you know, no Google, no anything. Now, the second layer to that was
that and this is often the case, the people with my adoption agency in a tunnel Iowa were
paternalistic would be a apply way to put it. I sent numerous letters, I kept copies of my
correspondence and theirs. And, you know, they tried to be this kind of like, oh, you know,
sorry, can't help you, you know, go have a good future. We can't help you. And always like, well,
the law says we can't give you anything. So in time, by the time I got into my early 30s,
there was a new director there and who had a totally different disposition. I had helped him
write a letter to the Iowa State Senate when they're trying to get some of the rules changed,
so we're already friendly. And I wrote again, again, say what's changed, what can I have.
And he kind of said on one hand, the letter said, well, these records are sealed. And then
inside there's a little piece of paper, he says, here's something that's not sealed, maybe this
will help. Well, it had everything I wanted to know. My birth mother's name, her hometown,
the name of my birth father, where he went to college, where they both worked. I was like,
I saw that, I was like, jackpot. It was like, I knew then, I was then the hunt was on.
Yeah. That's so interesting that you, there's some people who get a little bit of information
at a time over a long period of time. But it sounds like so much information that you got was all
at once. We were just turning on the lights. Well, I got dribs and drabs, but nothing that really
like stitched it. And this one did stitch it. Now that said, of course, then there's other,
you know, the other thing, okay, well, now we know her name. I know where she lived. I talked
in the book about going to her hometown in Iowa, showing up at the first, the high school, which
like an idiot, I was closed in the summer. I should know as an educator. And so I went to the public
library and asked for a yearbook. Those here, I'm in my, this is the 80s, right? I'm in my, you know,
look like Tom Selleck, yeah, bushy. And in the Midwest, no less. I got my flip flops,
his drip, it's super hot. I come into them and ask the person, the woman at the desk,
if she had a whatever year, it was 1942 yearbook. And she looked at me like,
what do you want with that? And it turned out because the paper, so she's, I don't know what
really happened. There was paper sort of, so they didn't even have covers for things. Let me see
what I can, well, she did. And then after I did enough searching, I finally found the picture
with her name. And when I saw that picture, I think she was probably 15 or 16th of the time,
which would have been roughly my sophomore junior year. I was looking at me. I was looking,
if I'd have been a girl, that's what I would have looked like. Now from that, again, difficulties,
okay, now I know that she is who she is. But where does she live? So at that point, I had stole a
telephone book brought back to the Bay Area and wrote everybody in the county with the same last
name. And explaining that it was for a purpose of a reunion, I didn't say who I was. By then,
I was a doctor. And she had been a nurse. So I let it to think that, well, doctor nurse reunion,
maybe it's a hospital thing. I heard nothing for a long time from anybody. I must have sent out
20 of us. One day, yeah, a small car, don't get envelope came in, single piece of paper, really
small at her name, including her new her married name. And I think it had her address, I think,
yeah, I think an address and town where she was from, that's all I didn't say anything else.
That's all I needed. So as you see from the book, I sat down, wrote her a letter,
which I'm glad I kept a copy of that. And then that letter was intercepted. So there's
these obstacles all along the way. No one said, oh, the doors are open. Here we go. It's like,
well, then I had to, you know, well, we don't know if we could see her. The psychiatrist
in things, psychiatrist, well, now I find out she's been a halfway house. And
at some point after exchange of letters and phone calls, I realized just how bad off she had been.
And my position with my new half sisters was, I'm coming. I'm coming. No, I will not,
I will comply with not meeting her if that's what it comes to. But I will see her. If I have to
stand across the street, I'm going to see her. So by the time all that happened, finally,
the way was clear. And I got to meet her in person. As I say, at the beginning, that was really tough.
After that, the door is open to our souls. I understood everything I needed to know about
her and her with me. I was a reunion. I realized then I realized how much she and her other three
kids from another marriage had been waiting for me to show up. One sister said, Oh, we always had,
we always had a, there was always another chair at the table. We always thought it'd be yours.
So they knew about you? Oh, yeah. When are you going to show up? So,
but like I say, the two, the one, the one son I've never met, he lives in the Midwest, the other
two, once deceased and one is still living back in the back in the East Coast. And we've had scattered
correspondence since then. But, but I, you know, when you're the one who's the adoptee,
making yourself known to a family, who's a family member has been responsible for your bird.
It's not, the dynamic is not the same. I'm like, here I am. It's like, you know, and they're kind
of like, you know, well, in the case of my birth fathers, family, they certainly were polite and
they answered most questions I had. But it's like, well, you're just reminding us that, and it's turned
out, I think two of them were already born by the time I was conceived. See what I mean? Difficult.
I mean, even though their mother is no longer alive, but I don't think they want to ask,
I got the feeling, don't ask them more questions about her or what we knew about our dad too
painful. And I kept to respect that. So, but that's okay. I did what I wanted to do. And I knew where
my limits were. I mean, one day, I think one of them maybe can be out in the summer, but I'd be happy
to be. I've seen their family pictures. I kind of look at, you know, all four of the girls,
all got married, all had children, a huge family. And I look at, if you take the,
the actual, the blood lineage and look at the faces, kind of go, yeah, I see myself in every one of them.
I mean, now they're by Midwestern standards, very traditional conservative, kind of Republican types.
And I always kind of raised that way, but I'm, I'm a West Coast, as you are living in a blue state.
So we're not, we're not living in it. And she told that one of them said, she says,
it's a good thing you weren't around when my dad was still alive. I said, you'd have never gone
along. You know, you never know, athletically would have been very similar. But our, you know,
that just shows you how life takes you in a different direction. So yeah, it really does.
So our, did your birth mom and your mom ever meet or was your mom alive when you had this
reunification experience with your birth mom? Yeah, my mom was alive. And I eventually found
out that she found out about my reunion. She never brought it up. And I didn't tell her, okay, okay.
So you can't tell her how that you made that you didn't want to.
Well, I call it more like a grudge. And of course, it's embarrassing to say now, but
but like I say, at the end of her life, we had a, without words, a major reconciliation that made
my perspective of what her world was like adopting me. So I was six months old. She didn't think she
was ever going to have kids. Actually, the adoption agent actually picked me to be with them.
They didn't come to pick me. They said, we have the boy that's going to be right for you in terms of
development and early IQ testing. My dad's a surgeon. She's a nurse. So that part really
worked out well. So, but I know that she, I think she had to have been enormously nervous about
adopting me and unsure about her own capacity. You know, you get a six month old, big strapping
boy. It's like, here, here you go. Check him out. It's like, you know, so now I do know that they
had, their close friends in town were aware of me being adopted, but my dad was well known in town.
I don't think many people knew or cared that I was adopted. So it was never, to my knowledge,
most people never knew all the way through high school that was adopted. I didn't go advertising
it either. So people wish happens with my son. But they did talk to you about it. You knew from
the time you were young that you were adopted. It was until. And many people would say, oh, you know,
you look so much like your dad. And people say that about my son. They go, oh, you look so much
like your dad. So, well, you have brown eyes. So you have brown eyes. Yeah, people like to look
for the similarities. Yeah. But, but, you know, there was a, for me, my temperament being with
the parents who has raised with us. I was just born to be independent. I was, I was, I was exposed
to things that I talked about in the book at an early age that were different than most of my
classmates growing up. In fact, I'm going back to the death of one of my classmates. Two of them
have died in the last couple of weeks. I'm going back and I want to, but I, but I, my grandparents
had a big hand in raising me as I talk in the book in the beginning, be exposed to race and
racism at an early age, being exposed to the fact that even then I may not have the words for it,
but we lived in a nice big house across the street from the Gulf and country club. I didn't,
I didn't think of us being rich because I don't think we were rich, but, but I realized that
most of the other people I went to school with were, were few others like me and others who
were middle class and below that. And so I realized, you know, like, I'm not, I'm, we were
definitely schooled not to, you know, like keep yourself humble, you know, don't, don't brag
about what your blessings you do have. So that was a good way, good lesson. Still, I was aware
that I had opportunities. In fact, one of the people who died just three days ago, who was a
childhood friend from fourth grade, and we play sports all together all the way through high school.
I realized even then that I knew I was going to college. There was never a question.
And my friend had certainly had the smarts for it and eventually did, but it was really clear that
the emphasis in his family kind of working class, though you got to work, you got to pay your way,
work menial jobs, go to the least expensive place you can eventually go to after community college.
So the bar was set in my mind, this is a judgment I realized, set low for him and other classmates
just kind of like, Hey, in our hometown of the 60s, you can make a decent living with it working
in a factory, you can have a small house and raise a family, of course, that's impossible today.
But that's a kind of like, well, what a what a what a gift to have this my grandmother, I think,
will that for both my mom, for my dad or and his sister, my aunt, to not grow up to be farmers.
One became a teacher, one became a doctor. So that was sort of the I was, I was raised in that
environment where I was never lectured whatsoever about you got to go to college is like, well,
you're going to say, yeah, you're going to the given, just that's something else. There's something
when you look back, write a memoir like this, and even today, even with clients and so forth,
that you realize the hand of fate, how do things turn out the way they do luck and bad luck put
together. Somehow it's not just decisions by me or somebody else or choices we make. And that's
that kind of where the title of the book comes in this sort of ineffable quality of mystery, at
least where I ended up and how I assess the archival that we're talking about as being guided by
forces that I can't account for. Yeah, right. Right. Yeah. Well, I'm it's fortunate you've had
that experience to be able to reflect and write about it and the forgiveness almost has happened
for your mom and for your birth mom to just understand why they felt the way they did,
why they made the decisions they did. And even in the letter that you wrote to your birth mom,
the themes that you write are similar to what I've heard from other adoptees that I don't have any,
I hope no ill will toward you. I just want to meet you. I just want to see you. But the story
and the narrative that some of the birth moms are telling themselves is I couldn't possibly try to
look for him. He probably he might hate me. He might resent me for making the decision I did,
but I haven't heard that from any adoptees all all they want. And what you express wanting is I
just want to meet you. I mean, as a writer, of course, I'm trying to create some drama and
pay those. If you don't mind if I just read one short paragraph. Sure. This is after I've been
to her place. I come back the second day. I meet her roommate who's schizophrenic, who she introduces
to me as her son, which took my breath away. She does that later. She was even when I asked her,
do you remember my birthday? She said, Of course I do. You're my son. You have a mom and a dad,
but I'm still your mother. And I don't forget that. So this is when I'm leaving. Again, this is a
dingy tenement back in the east coast. It's cold. It's I think it was December.
Later that evening, we hugged as I stood to leave, but I can't remember how much after that.
I do recall we held each other closely for a long time.
We both knew that we might not see each other again. Before I opened the door, I brushed a few
strands of her wig back and gently caressed and kissed her forehead with total loving deliberation.
Then I was gone out the door. I kept my head down as I walked into the freezing evening air
in a neighborhood I knew I would never visit again. So that's I kind of like.
Yeah. Now, did I actually think that at that moment? It was seemed utterly obvious because
I was going back to West Coast. I had a job. She was not under good health. We didn't, you know,
I knew I'd still be in touch with it. She wrote a letter to it was never just wasn't the same,
but it didn't matter. I don't think for a second, I doubt that her, her, the connection and depth
with which I connected with her was exactly was reciprocal with her. You can't top that. I mean,
that was that was the what we want to accomplish. I thoroughly believe we're both kind of coming from
such a different place in time. And yet, as I say in the book, he said the last time we held
each other like that, I was 10 days old. So, okay, admittedly, nostalgic. Okay. Yes, definitely.
The same reason going back, same reason going back to Kansas City on my birthday and 75th
birthday. Nostalgia, for sure. Yeah. Yet, I think for the audience of the, there were 30,000 of us
born at the Willows. That's a lot of kids in for several decades and many of whom were there and
they all got it. Yep. How nice to be surrounded with people who get it because there's so much
explanation that is sometimes required if someone doesn't get it. Like, why are you searching? Why
do you have these questions? Why do you why don't you and just easier to be with people who have
witnessed it or have experienced it firsthand reading that I appreciate that. So we have,
I just have one more question for you before we wrap up. You are a psychotherapist. Do you work with
adoptees? That's a really good question. No, not particularly. No. Okay. Despite all the notoriety
and publicity and so forth, I haven't had a lot of people come to me. Now, I'm trying to remember
I have an intake. I have a lot of people who are first session, have some intake and finish.
I can't sound stupid to say it this way. I don't think I have a question of whether they were
adopted, but usually as you get to know the client pretty well. Yeah. But no, I'm not, I'm not shopping
myself as some sort of adoption therapist. What I am, what I do in terms of my handle, my,
my special is about a trauma. So what I've labeled as the separation of mother and child as a form
of developmental trauma, it disrupts the normal development. Let's say it's fatal, but it does
affect you at least that imprint. Now you can take other kinds of trauma, sexual trauma, you know,
violence, abandonment, abuse, physical. So those are kind of running in parallel. So trauma, the
response to trauma or the telltale inference of trauma and the ways in which people in one or two
ways, particularly respond over time to that, not always in a healthy way. That's what I understand.
That's what I think it's my, so I see through that lens, not everybody, but I, but I have a
sniffer for that. And what with our son as I talk about the book, he was four years old, his
birth mother was, it just been killed in an accident. His birth father was living halfway
around the world and wasn't coming back. I understood something in him. I knew something
in him from the moment I saw him. And I liken it to seeing the sense of a minor trapped in a mind
deep down. And I think my wife and I both in so many words, we wouldn't have said it this way,
but I think I'm on a fourth level. It's our job to rescue him. I mean, bring that little one back
out. And I think for those facing the possibility of foster care and so forth, it's an appreciation
for what you don't know. But you can't know. You can have a pretty darn good guess. Maybe we can
talk about the offline sometime, but anyway, but that, that I think begins to inform how the premise
of the one of the themes, if you will, of the book is that on this on the workaday level, the
stories of our lives that we went to school with, and who graced you and who you fell in love with
and who you divorced from and what job you have all that external life, all really important
to navigate all that. But the depth psychological perspective dealing with the unconscious brings
in the fact there's an inner life. And to and we as adoption community, my argument is that many of
us not all that many of us have are much more similar because we've been affected by that
initial primal wound of separation. Some people don't care, don't know, don't believe it. I'm
others dial right into that. And it's just that kind of, I said, if we were our adoption community
had a theme song, it'd be Dylan's like a rolling stone. How does it feel to be on your own a
complete unknown, no direction home like a rolling stone, that yearning of that song when I revisit
that many times. And I read that to that group in Kansas City, like, you can hear that you can hear
that the whole audience just gas like, Yeah, yeah, that's it. Yeah, like a rolling stone. Now, so we
have as I said, the book kind of a, this is a psychological, psychological construct, we have
these inner archetypes. So for us, I argue, at least among those that we have shares that orphan
archetype, that that our orphan energy. Now the inner the life's can be different. What do you
think of as an orphan? What I think about is irrelevant to that, to that energetic presence
that makes us a never in my mind, always in some, you know, a perpetual state of low grade yearning,
even when we find our birth parents, I still have. Now, I think long reconcile that like, like,
is oh, that's a big fat bummer, why can't why, why can't I keep feeling that way?
Realizing that this energy, this sort of quest to know more, this curiosity that it creates,
has been, what's made me, and does and does today, I'm doing a course right now on my teaching
about some of these subjects, I've got another book in mind. You know, in later life, getting the,
getting the creative itch, it's got to get scratched. I mean, I, that's that kind of curiosity,
like it got, you got a good taste of what it's like to be really creative to write a book. Well,
now it's, I'm on a roll without that, that, that orphan art that I bang around and they're
saying, I want to find out more that I dare say they might not. Who knows? Well, that makes
sense then why you'd want to write it now, because you got the two pieces of your story that you
didn't know anything about from your birth bomb and your birth father. And then, and you could
write the story, you could, you could look back at the information perspective you have, but
you're right that the searching and the yearning is, becomes a part of an adoptee's identity. And
then once that search is complete, then it's, I wonder if there's a new sense of grief that comes
into play, because then you know more. And so all the possibilities of how your life might have been
different, it all goes a million different ways. You're grappling emotions and experiences.
I will say, as a, maybe a piece of advice to people who adopt children, when those kids are
younger, or grow up to be old enough to have some understanding without the details. The parents
usually have a position of kind of providing the story. Here's how we came to get you,
or here's what we know about you. But as they get older, and I'd say by the time they get
to round up what I was curious, by the time you get to mid teen level, then there's this kind of
subtle but important transition. And through the encouragement we hope of the parent, is that
mom and dad have a story for you. It's, we think it's a true story. It's not untrue. But now the
kid's got to be able to kid their own story together, their version of it. It may not be what mom and
dad say, their version. And I dare say, as you will, as an adopted, a parent of an adopted child,
and as children get raised in this way, your story will change too. One of the years from now,
your story you have today will be really different. There's will be quite different. But it's that
ownership. That's, I think we talked about having your own voice, having your own personal authority.
Owning your story, as I've done kind of in space with writing a natural memoir, is
it's everything. I mean, that's, that's your, that's you. And it does change over time,
even if it's contradictory sometimes, or even then you filled in the blanks with stuff you don't
even know about, whatever. But so important for kids to have that sense of validation.
Yes. That says you have, we trust you to find your own for.
How empowering that is for a child to hear. That's perfect. Well, let's end there. Thank you so much,
Stephen, for your time. Again, Stephen Rowley on the podcast with us, his memoir is The Lost Coin,
a memoir of adoption and destiny. There's so much more that we couldn't cover in our time together.
So if anyone's listening and is interested in more about his story, then they can go and find his
book. Thanks again, Stephen. Thank you. Well, we want to give a huge thanks to both Alisha and
Dr. Rowley. We love interviewing and talking with adoptees. And of course, with every adoptee
interview that we do, I learned something new. And particularly this, this conversation just
highlighted to me how much adoption has actually changed for maybe the better or how we maybe made
some improvements. Like more ethical, yeah. Yeah. I mean, having been born in a birthing center or a
place where unwed mothers were kind of shipped off to in Kansas City, I was really unaware of this
aspect. And I think you mentioned 30,000 people over many years. I feel like I read something
about that. I hope Kansas was like the center of where women were sent, young unwed mothers
percent to these babies. So I think one thing for me was just culturally and maybe systemically
adoption, I think he's made some steps in the right direction. And grateful that he was willing
to share his story with us and his reunification and connection, which was hard and hard to listen
to, but so grateful for his perspective. Absolutely. I really appreciated hearing his thoughts as an
adoptee as well as an adoptive dad and hearing how he strikes that balance of acknowledging trauma
and working through trauma and ensuring that like we're not hiding from these hard parts of adoption,
but then also really showing that love, tenfold and making those connections. I just
really appreciated hearing his perspectives and thoughts. So big thanks again to Dr. Roli and
thank you so much for listening to this episode. So before we wrap up, we do have a little bit more
to share. We have a research opportunity for any first parents or birth parents who are interested.
The first families project is a research project that's being conducted by Dr. Paulina
Inara Rodis as well as Dr. Ashley Larson-Gibby, who is actually my advisor at BYU. So they are
wonderful. They're trying to give voice to these experiences that birth moms have. And so if you
or someone you know would be interested in participating in their research, please look them up.
You can find them on Instagram at First Families Project. So we're going to go ahead and listen to
a little more about that research and then we'll be back in a couple of weeks with a new episode.
Hi everyone, my name is Paulina Inara Rodis and I'm an assistant professor at Colorado College.
Part of the work I do is thinking about how identities and relationships influence the choices
we make. I'm here speaking to you today because I just started a new project called the First
Families Project with an amazing friend and colleague, Ashley Larson-Gibby at BYU.
We've noticed in literature that there's not a lot that focuses on the specific stories and
experiences of birth parents and we'd like to change that. So we're hoping to find and interview
women who place a child for adoption in the US. Participants who take part in the study will
receive a $50 gift card. So if you're interested, please reach out to us. Our email is FirstFamiliesProject
at gmail.com. We really would like to speak to you and hear more about your stories and make sure
that everyone hears more from birth parents and families and extended families. While we're studying
birth mothers now, we also hope to speak to other members of extended birth and first families
eventually. So if you're interested in what we're doing or want to take part, please reach out to us.
Thank you.