Voices of Adoption

Today In the Den, we’re talking about family—how it’s formed, how it’s nurtured, and how love can expand beyond the narrow definitions our culture sometimes tries to impose. For so many queer people and their loved ones, building a family can come with extra layers of hope, complexity, vulnerability, and resilience. Queer families have always existed. They have always found ways to create home, to build community, and to raise children surrounded by love—even when systems or institutions made that harder than it should have been. For many parents listening—whether you’re LGBTQ+, parenting LGBTQ+ kids, or simply trying to raise compassionate humans—today’s conversation invites us into a deeper understanding of what ethical, inclusive family-building can look like.

Special Guest: Donna Pope

Donna Pope is the host of the podcast Voices of Adoption. Donna brings years of experience and heartfelt storytelling to conversations about adoption, identity, ethics, and belonging. Donna shares a commitment to adoption practices that center compassion, agency, and honesty for everyone involved—adoptive families, birth parents, and adoptees alike.

Links from the Show:

• Voices of Adoption on Youtube
• Voices of Adoption podcast
• Voices of Adoption on IG
• Voices of Adoption on FB
• Join Mama Dragons today

Transcript

SARA: Hi everyone, welcome to In the Den with Mama Dragons, a podcast and community to support, educate, and empower parents on the journey of raising, happy and healthy LGBTQ+ humans. I'm your host, Sara LaWall. I'm a Mama Dragon myself and an advocate for a queer community and I'm so glad to be part of this wild and wonderful parenting journey with all of you. Thanks for joining us. We're so glad you're here. 

Hello, Mama Dragons. Today we're talking about how families are formed, how they’re nurtured and how love can expand beyond the narrow definitions our culture sometimes tries to impose on our families. And for many queer folks in their loved ones, building a family can come with extra layers of complexity and vulnerability and hope. And adoption is one of those beautiful and deeply emotional paths towards building a family. Our guest today is Donna Pope, host of the podcast Voices of Adoption. Donna brings years of experience and heartfelt storytelling to conversations about adoption, identity, belonging. She shares a commitment to adoption practices that center compassion, agency, and honesty for all involved: adoptive families, birth parents, and adoptees alike. Donna has seen firsthand how inclusive, ethical adoption practices can uplift diverse families and empower birth mothers while also being mindful of each person's agency and identity. And that feels really aligned with what we try to cultivate here at Mama Dragons in our community, parenting rooted in love, in truth telling, and in deep care for human dignity. Donna, welcome to In the Den. It's so good to have you with us.

DONNA: Well, thank you. I appreciate you having me. 

SARA: So I am really curious to start just a little bit with your story. And you've been doing this a very long time. So how did you first come into the world of adoption and then storytelling and advocacy? 

DONNA: No, that's a really good question. So I started in adoption, I didn't get trained in adoption. I actually was trained in education and in medicine. And when I was working at a hospital and was a respiratory therapist and doing some medical research, my sister was wanting to adopt. And she had adopted three times. But she asked for my help adopting a fourth time because she needed to go to another agency. So I got involved in a number of local agencies and then started getting some opinions about how adoption should be done. I was a little naive in what I thought should be done, but I still felt like we could do this better. But more importantly, I also had a condo that another agency contacted me and asked if I would house birth mothers in this condo. And so I did. So the women when they were considering placing the child for adoption and they were pregnant but they needed a place to stay for various reasons because they were homeless or they just needed to get out of the situation they were in, they would come and stay in my condo. And I got to know these women really well. And I found that I developed strong opinions on how they should be treated and how sometimes they weren't being treated with the respect that I thought they should have. So we started an agency with the idea of being very transparent to adoptive families about situations that they were in and being very respectful and caring to the women that were placing their children for adoption. And so that's how we got started and have been doing it for about 30 years now.

SARA: What do you think some of the biggest misconceptions are that people have about adoption? 

DONNA: Well, we could start with the birth moms because that's kind of where a lot of my heart is, is with these women. There's a lot of misconceptions. And I think some of them are being corrected, but that these women don't know what they're doing or that they're not clear on their choice or that they don't love their child or they’re losers in some way or various other things. And I would correct that misconception by saying a couple of things. One is they do know what they're doing. And they're well thought through decision makers. They love their children deeply but the average age of birth moms is about 28 years old. So they're grown women. They are capable of making decisions. I often will say we actually work with more women that are over the age of 40 than we work with women under the age of 18. So they're women that have been around. Eighty percent of the women we work with already have other children. And so they understand the challenges to come with it. They love their children. But for whatever reason, their circumstances are such that at this point they don't feel like they can raise another child. And they think it would be in the child's best interest to be placed with a family. However, they desperately want to have a part in how that happens because they love these children. So they want to have a say in the family that the child goes to. They want to have a relationship with that family. They want an ongoing awareness of how their children are doing. And so that's really important. I mean, if you think about it, you think about this woman and she makes the decision not to have an abortion. She makes the decision that she's going to give life to this child. So she carries this child for nine months and going into tenth month. And then eventually she goes through the whole pregnancy, she goes through the delivery, and sometimes that can be traumatic, sometimes it can be easy, sometimes it can be a C section. And for most families, for most mothers, they will go through all of that, and then at the end of the time, now they have this cute little baby that they can hold and they feel the joy of having this child. Well, these women go through all that. And they have this cute little baby. And then they place this baby with somebody else. And so now they experience this additional loss of this child. So how do you help women go through this process? And do they, are they aware of what they're doing? Yes, they're very aware. Are they tricked into it? No, they're not being tricked into it. But there is a lot of compassion and a lot of kindness that needs to go into helping do what they feel that they need to do. And a key part of the whole thing, them having a good relationship with that adoptive family because in the process of going through the loss of the experience, they can also kind of feel some of the joy, the excitement and happiness that the adoptive family is feeling. If you’ve got a good connection with them there, then that joy kind of rubs off on them a bit. But they can co-mingle the joy in the sadness. And good adoptive families will feel some of the sadness as well as the excitement and joy they have. And so it's all about the relationship that they can develop with that family. And as an agency, our job, really, is to support that relationship and help them move through it and it be a good experience for both parties.

SARA: You talk a lot in your work about ethical adoption practices. 

DONNA: For sure. 

SARA: And I'm curious what does that mean? What does that look like? 

DONNA: Yeah, that's a really good question. And sometimes I’ll hear people go, “It needs to be ethical.” And I’ll think, “What do you mean by that? Just what does that word even mean to you?” And I have some strong opinions about it as you can imagine. And I think ethical adoption comes down to really one term: self-determination, meaning that the birth mother and the adoptive parents are given the ability to determine themselves what they want. Now, how do you help people make a good determination themselves about what they want? Well, there's several steps. One is they need to know their options. They need to know, okay, I'm faced with this pregnancy or I'm faced with this inability to have children. Okay, what are my options? If she's a birth mom, her options are she can have an abortion and sometimes that right is not there as much, or she can parent this child, or she can do an adoption. So, she needs to understand her options. But then she needs to be able to understand the consequences. What will happen if I choose this option? What can I expect might happen from it? Now, we can't ever predict everything. But we, over time, we can kind of see some of the patterns: if you choose going this direction, this might be some of the things you'll experience. And so then we kind of help her walk through what are some of the options and what are the consequences of those options. And then the next step is to give her support in whatever choice she makes. Okay. Now we of course are an adoption agency. So we're best designed to support an adoption if that's what she wants. If she wants to choose an abortion, then there's other people that can help her with that. If she wants to parent, then there are sources and resources to help with that. And one of our jobs is to provide her with some of those resources if that's what she's trying to do. But if she wants to do an adoption, then our job is to help her see, “Well, this is the pattern. This is the path that will follow if you choose to do an adoption.” And what do we need to do to make it so that it turns out to be a good adoption? Now, when I say a good adoption, what I mean is that it's good for all parties. It's not that the adoptive family gets the baby and they win and the birth of mother loses. It's not that. It's somehow the needs and the desires of all parties get met to the degree that they can be met. And the key as I've already mentioned comes in the relationship between them. And if you develop a good relationship and they feel like that can be an ongoing thing, then that can lead to a relationship with their children. Now not everyone wants that. But there are the options. And so being able to know those options and the consequences that will follow and then supporting them.

SARA: So in the adoption circumstances where – it sounds like what you're describing is what many of us understand to be an open adoption where the birth parent knows who and maybe even chooses or is matched with an adoptive family and there's some agreement about a relationship after the birth of the child – how do you coach adoptive families in approaching that kind of open relationship with a birth parent? 

DONNA: Yeah, no, for sure because there are some that are afraid of that. First of all, we recognize that the families feel uncomfortable sharing their phone, their email, their address, things like that. Now maybe in time they might, but initially they don't know this other person very well. So the birth mom may want more than the adoptive family does. Now what we've experienced over time is that usually in the beginning of an adoption the birth mom will have a high level of interest in maintaining the relationship. The adoptive family sometimes not so much. They're experiencing what I often call the grab-and-run syndrome where they just want to take the baby in a run away. And we get it. We get it. That's the old mama-bear feeling of “I want to establish my little home and my nest.” And so their desire for it may change. But as time goes on, the birth mother goes on with her life and maybe her interest is more sporadic. And she just wants to check in and see how the baby's doing. And then the adoptive parents’ interest might raise because the child may be asking questions. And the child may have interest in “What is my biological parent like?” And so, then, if they have that relationship, then they can get some of the answers and support them. Then maybe after 15, 16, 18 years, then the child may have an interest in it. So knowing that that dynamic is fluid and it changes over time, we needed to have a way of them being able to come together in a place where there's some privacy and yet there's freedom to be able to talk. And so we created an online program called Hearts Connect that we're soon going to adapt into a larger program that's called Adoptions.com and where they can come and they've had this moderated safe place where they can maintain a certain degree of privacy, but they can post pictures, videos, and messages. Chat back and forth as much as they want. And if there is a need, there will be a counselor that will be assigned to step in and help with the conversation when the case arises. If there's no need for it, then they just have their conversations. But that that remains and it stays there for years. And that's kind of the key is that it maintains over years. And not just for a year, not just for a few months, but because as the interest of the birth mother goes down and maybe the interest of the adoptive family goes up, maybe it goes down but then here comes the child. And now the child's interest comes up. And so having this ongoing safe place where they can come get information, they don't have to write letters, they don't have to wait for the thing, they don't have to call anybody, they just go on. And one of the nice things about that is because some birth mothers really don't have an interest in it. Maybe for a few years, maybe for 10 years. And then maybe they'll go on. So one of the things that we expect from our adoptive families is that they maintain a regular posting. Initially quite often, but then at least a couple of times a year, just so that when and if she comes on – or even if the birth father comes on – there can be kind of a history of how the child's doing. 

SARA: That's really great. That feels like something I haven't heard of before. And it's interesting because it seems so simple. 

DONNA: It seems so simple, so obvious. 

SARA: Yeah, right, some ongoing support in your adoptive process for all the parties involved. 

DONNA: Right. Yep. 

SARA: How did you talk to families about their communication with their adopted children, and when to tell them or how to tell them and have an openness versus not? 

DONNA: Yeah, well, who knows? And I don't mean that flippantly because every child is so different. I have three adopted children and they could not be more different. And if I gave you one pat answer, it wouldn’t work for all three of them. And so I say, “Who knows?” But there are some guidelines. And here's the guidelines: Never, ever lie. Just don't lie. Tell the truth, so always tell the truth. But you don't have to tell all the truth, all at once. So you tell the truth at the level and the speed at which the child has interest. And then you don't force anything more on them than what they want or they're interested in but you kind of follow their lead. And so I flippantly say, “Well, who knows?” because you don't know what they're going to want. You don't know what their need is. I have three boys and they're all so different in how they feel about their relationship with their biological parents. One has an open relationship. He's gone and spent Christmas with her and her other son. And, you know, they chit chat back and forth often. And he came to me the other day and he said, “Mom, can we help Monica?” And I said, “Okay, well, what is it that you think she needs?” And so he told me. So he has this concern about his biological mom that he came and he hoped that I could help fulfill. And we of course will do what we can do. And then I have another son that when his birth father reached out to him, he wanted nothing to do with him. And so do I ever think there should ever be a time when you don't answer honestly what it is that they want to know. And that's why the interest level for adoptive families will sometimes rise because the questions that their children might ask. You may need that relationship with the biological parents to be able to answer it. 

SARA: Oh, yeah, I see. That's very interesting. For many LGBTQ folks, adoption is a really significant way that folks choose to create their own families very intentionally. 

DONNA: For sure. 

SARA: Do you work with queer parents differently than you might with heterosexual parents? 

DONNA: No. 

SARA: Are there some, what are some of the barriers then or biases that queer prospective parents still encounter in our culture and in the adoptive process? 

DONNA: Well, we let the biological parents make the decision as to who they want to be matched with. That's part of the self-determination. And so one of the first things we always ask them is, “What do you want in an adoptive family?” And then we just listen. Now sometimes they don't have a clue what they want. Sometimes the most common answer is they'll say, “Well we just want someone that will love the child.” Okay, well let's make sure we do that. But then we'll start to go through, do you want a single parent? Do you want a heterosexual couple? Do you want a bisexual couple? Do you want a queer couple? We usually don’t go through all that. We'll just give them the choices. And then they tell us. They tell us what they want. And we'll ask, “Do you want them to have other children? Do you care where they live? Do you care what their religious affiliations are? And so that determination is on them. Now, do they always know what they want? No. And so part of counseling is to walk them through the options that they have. And so that's step one, finding out what it is that they want. Then step two is then we go through our families and we look for couples that might match what it is that the birth parents want, the birth parents want. And then we contact those couples and we say, “Here's the situation. Are you interested in being shown?” And if they say, “Yeah. Show me.” Then we show their profile. And then the birth parents will look through their profiles, usually a number of profiles and then say “I'd like to talk with these people.” And then, if they have a good conversation, then they'll usually want to meet and then we match them. So do queer couples have a harder time in the hospital? Yeah, sometimes, sometimes. And I don't know if it's that they're really having a harder time or they feel less comfortable. Sometimes that's the case. But most of the time it just goes great. It just goes fine.

SARA: What are some particular strengths that queer families bring into the adoptive parenting world?

DONNA: It's hard for me to say that any different than any other families because every family brings strength and every family doesn't. I think one of the challenges is that a lot of times they've already struggled with maybe the feeling of being different. They've already struggled with that. And a lot of times adoptive families, that's one of the struggles they have to do is that, especially if they're going to adopt transracially or they're going to adopt a child that might have some mental or physical or drug-related handicaps, they're entering into a world in which they feel like they're not the norm. And so sometimes grappling with the fact that “My life is different than my neighbors’. My life is a little different than other people.” Sometimes they will have already grappled with some of those issues and have resolved them because every adoptive couple has to do that. They have to struggle with the feeling of, “This is not how I anticipated I would have children. This is not how I anticipated I would raise my family. And so can I see the benefits of it? Can I see the value to it?” I had one man ask me, he said – we presented him with a situation that was going to be challenging. That’s all there was to it. It was going to be challenging. There were some racial issues related to it. There were some drug issues related. And he looked turned to me and he said, “Do you think I should do this?” And I said, “I don't know. But let me ask you this question. Are you happy with the way your life is right now? Do you want your life to stay the way it is right now? If the answer to that is yes, then probably you shouldn't do this because your life will not be the same once you do this. Your life will be vastly different. Your heart will be opened in a way that you haven't yet anticipated. You will feel things that you didn't know you could feel. You will have different relationships with different people. You will see the world differently than you currently see it right now if you do this. So if you don't want that to happen, then don't do this. But if you're open for that and if you're ready to go into an adventure where the person you love most in the world doesn't look like you, doesn't act like you, doesn't feel like you do, and yet you love them with all your heart, what that will do is now it will kind of spread. And now you'll love other people that maybe don't act like you do, that don't feel like you do. Your heart will be different because now you have chosen to love someone different than you, which opens you up to love other people different than you.”

SARA: That's beautiful. What a beautiful framework to consider for adoption and for adopting children with different needs and with different backgrounds. That’s really lovely. In your podcast, Voices of Adoption – which we'll post a link to that in our show notes for our community to explore – you've covered some really interesting topics. And I kind of just want to touch on a few of those. One of the things that you've shared in that podcast is a conversation around adoptive parents avoiding centering themselves as the heroes of the story. And I can imagine that it's pretty easy to do that, you know, to imagine they've come and rescued this child and are giving it a different, better life. How do you talk about that with parents?

DONNA: Well, you can never tell people, “Be different than you are!” You just can't tell people, “Be different!” 

SARA: Our community knows that very well. 

DONNA: You just don’t. Instead, you kind of go back to the whole idea of self-determination. If people are going to try to go down a path and they're making the choice to go down the path, you can try to, sometimes I think of it as my story is that if someone is in a canoe and they’re coming down the river and you’re standing by the side of the river and you’re hollering out, “There’s some rocks in front of you? Go to the side. Go miss the rocks.” Or, “There’s a waterfall coming up, you better pull over.” And you might have a perspective that they may not have. And you can share with them your perspective. And, if they’re interested in listening – some people, they’re not interested, they just go down over the falls and they don’t want to hear it. They don’t have to hear your perspective – And sometimes your perspective may not be accurate. But you can share with them. And the whole idea of being the hero to your story, all I can say is, “Well, give yourself five years because pretty soon you’ve got to get over being the hero of the story because you no longer matter. It’s the child that matters.” And every parent knows that. Every parent understands that. If you try to maintain, “I’m the hero of my story and I’m the boss here in this house,” pretty soon, you recognize that parenting is much more of a servant position. It’s much more of a, let me help take care of you, position. And the hero kind of dies out of you a little bit. So it would be nicer for it to happen sooner rather than later or else you begin to resent your children. 

SARA: It’s good advice for all parents, really. It’s a way of putting yourself in the back seat and really focusing and listening to, not just what does your child need, but who are they? Who are they telling you they are?

DONNA: For sure.

SARA: What have adoptees taught you that you wish more people, and particularly adoptive families, understood?

DONNA: You know, I think they’ve taught me in a similar way to what children teach you. Not that they’re children, but the idea of letting them be who they are and quit trying to make them be something you think they should be. I struggled with that a little bit this weekend. I’ve got a woman who, she’s a drug addict. She’s been on fentanyl for a long time. And she’s trying to get methadone so that she’s not on fentanyl. And she’s going to have a baby within a month or two. And she’s struggling as hard as she can to not do drugs while she’s doing this. Now everybody around her would go, “She should just not be doing…” And there’s lots of judgments and there’s lots of feelings about that. And I just want to say, “Stop. Stop. You’re asking someone who is an addict to not act like an addict.” I have a brother who struggles with impulse control and he struggles with anger and he struggles with a lot of things that people would go, “He should get over that. He should just get over that.” And he’s even in a treatment facility, and they call and say, “He should not do that.” Okay, so what you’re saying is “The person exhibiting the symptoms of the very thing you’re treating them for, he should not do that.” And sometimes I find that we tend to judge people for being what we expect them to be rather than accepting them for what they are. Now, can people change? Of course they can change. But I don’t know how much. And I don’t know to what degree. And it’s not my place to do that, to make them be that. And I think that’s what I’ve learned from birth parents is – honestly, and I’m kind of embarrassed even to say this – but I used to think that I could change them. I used to think that with good counseling, with a loving environment, with care, that I could help them have an experience and now they would be different. Who in the hell do I think I am? Yes, you certainly should give people a loving environment. You certainly should give people good experiences. You certainly should give them good counseling. And then you should give them ongoing support. But more importantly, accept them for who they are. And accept them. And then, as they progress through life, if they’re going to change, if experiences of their lives will help them go and nudge them in a different direction. And if part of what my experience has been with them has nudged them in a more positive direction, yay, yay, yay. Wonderful. But that’s up to them.

SARA: That’s very powerful. And another real lesson in parenting too, in that we can give all of the love, and care, and attention, and support to our children, and they are still going to be who they are. And it might not look like we imagined. 

DONNA: It may not. There is one thing that I think is important, though, and that’s for us to maintain what we feel is our values. Sometimes it's a temptation that if people are kind of acting in a certain way that we go over and act like that with them. That's not what matters. That's not our values. In trying to maintain the relationship, there's sometimes that temptation to, “Okay, I'm going to maintain the relationship, so I'm going to be with them and I'm going to act like them, and I'm going to do that because I want to maintain the relationship.” If that's not fitting with your values, then don't do that. Don't do that. Instead, just maintain your value. And it's challenging to choose to be who you choose to be, while letting them choose to be who they choose to be. And that's a challenging thing to do. 

SARA: It sounds to me like you’re talking a little bit about the clarity of our own boundaries. 

DONNA: Yeah.

SARA: You know, as humans, as parents, and when we're in relationship, particularly with people who are struggling with and addiction and mental health, and untreated addiction and untreated mental health, it can be difficult to try to figure out how can I stay in relationship with them and also hold my own boundaries. 

DONNA: For sure. And I'm going to ask you, how do you recommend people do that? 

SARA: Oh, I think it's really hard. I think people need support. I think there's a difference between loving someone for who they are and seeing the essence of their true selves and not enabling harmful behavior. And I think that line is fuzzy. I don't think there is a bright line. I think that is the big struggle for parents to live in that world, particularly of addiction and untreated mental health, is that it isn't clear. 

DONNA: It isn’t clear.

SARA: And you don't know until you're in the thick of it, what that boundary is for you, or what it might be for your child or your relatives. So I don't have great advice about that. I've watched people struggle mightily, and it's really complicated. 

DONNA: Yeah. And staying solid yourself does mean that you have to surround yourself with other people with at least the values you have. And you stay with them. And that gives you the strength, and then that allows you to be able to reach out and be kind and non-judgmental to other people without feeling like you're going to lose yourself. 

SARA: Yeah, well, similar to what you described with the website portal and conversation, and in our community, we're all learning that finding a community of support is really helpful and really important, of people who have some shared experience in your world, some people that you can ask questions of “What was this like for you?” I'm sure for adoptive parents for adoptees, there's a lot of those support spaces that are really, really helpful to talk with people who've been down that road. 

DONNA: Absolutely

SARA: And have a sense of what that's like. You know, your story about this birth mom that's addicted to fentanyl made me think about when an adoptee, when a child’s full identity and story has some very difficult and painful parts, how can families create space for that, to honor the difficult pieces and maybe the more painful pieces of a child’s story? 

DONNA: Yeah, it's a really good question. There's a guy named Simon and I talked with him. He actually gave me some good insight into this because sometimes people will talk about the trauma of adoption. And sometimes there's a lot of anger towards adoption because we may not be recognizing there’s trauma in it. And so he kind of, he said that sometimes we may be trauma blind, meaning we were blind to the trauma. And then we may become trauma aware. We are aware that there's trauma there. Okay, so we made some progress there. But then he goes on to say, we become trauma – and he's actually got a middle step in there – but that we can move towards becoming trauma-free. So, he will sometimes refer to it in this way: that if you're in this storm and you just feel like the storm is just enveloping you, this trauma, this feeling of, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, there is a storm, And for what we can see, yeah, it's dark. It's rainy. It's lightning. But that doesn't change that there's a sky out there. It doesn't change that clouds can part. The storm can abate. And there is a clear sky out there. Sometimes we forget, in the middle of it, that there is something more that we just can't see or feel right now. Now, how do we get there? Well, I am a strong advocate for counseling. I am a strong advocate for EMDR, for working with a good therapist and maintaining an exceptional relationship where you can talk through the trauma, talk through the feelings that you're having, and have that person help guide you to a different way. Absolutely, get good, effective therapy with somebody. But you're not going to do that if you have no belief or no hope that there is a clear sky, that you can move through the trauma. You're also not going to do it if you don't think you're in any trauma at all. And so you're blind to the trauma. Every adoption, every adoptive family, every adoptee, every birth parent goes through trauma. And you go, “Well, Donna, that's kind of a blunt over statement.” No, no, it's not. Now, to the degree though, that it is, well, that kind of depends. But these issues, the why I couldn't have children biologically for an adoptive family, taking on a child that's different than mine, struggling through the problems of this child, there's trauma there. A birth mother, I've already described how absolutely there's trauma there. She's made a choice and it's her choice and she wants this and she's happy about it but that doesn't mean that there wasn't loss and that there wasn't hurt there. And she's got to kind of work through that and some of those are, some of the working through it, can be intellectual, some of it can be somatic – meaning your body actually feels it – and you have to kind of work through it with techniques like the EMDR that help you move through the physical aspects of it. And then the emotional, all of those things require someone to attend to those issues and help move them through. 

SARA: That's great. That's a really interesting and helpful framework for trauma in general regardless of where it is. I’m going to sit with that for a little bit. In your podcast, you've done so many episodes. What has been some of the most interesting or helpful information you've discovered and learned from having done this podcast and done this work? 

DONNA: You know, honestly, I was surprised. I thought I knew a lot because I've been doing it for a lot of years. But to me, it's a privilege. It sincerely is a privilege. I'll be sitting here talking with someone like this. And I'll be hearing their story. And their story is so unique. And yet it's so kind of like other people's stories. So certain patterns start to evolve after you hear these different stories. And there's differences to them all, but there's patterns that kind of emerge. And I've talked with lots of the adoptees, adult adoptees, and you start to see a pattern of – and then I think this becomes so important for adoptive families to recognize – but you begin to see a pattern of them feeling this loyalty to their adoptive family and not wanting to displease mom and dad, who their mom and dad is. And so maybe they won't talk to them about it. And so time will go on and they'll find themselves angry. They'll find themselves -- and they don't even know why. And they don't even know they're angry, because they don't know how other people feel – but they don't really address it until maybe they get into their 20s and a little bit later. And then they have this hunger, this feeling of desire to know more about themselves. And they start to look for it. And so as I've listened to these stories, I've asked the question, “Did you talk with your parents about this?” “No, I didn't want to upset them.” So I tell this story and I'll tell it again. When my oldest son was probably about eight or nine, he was really struggling. And so we went to a counselor. And the counselor, after we talked for a few minutes, the counselor invited me to step out of the room and wait in the hall or the corridor. And so I did. It wasn't 30 seconds. I don't think I'd even sat down that she called me back in and said, “Donna, he has something to ask you.” I thought what in the world would he have said to her in that short period of time? And why couldn't he have said it to me?” And so I came back in and she said, “He would like to know why his biological mother placed him for adoption and didn't place his older brother.” Super good question. 

SARA: Yeah.

DONNA: It never occurred to me that it was even in his mind. And so I answered it. I mean, I think he was satisfied with the answer, but I told him what the answer was. The answer was that she had actually had her older son with a sister because she was going through a really tough time and she couldn't even raise him and couldn't raise my son. And so she placed him for adoption. Then she got her life back together, went back to school, cleaned up her act, was able to get her other son from her sister. Excellent question. And then of course the follow-up questions would be, “Can I get to know them?” And the answer is, “Yeah, let's do that.” So being aware of the questions that are not being asked for adoptive parents and making sure that the door is open without forcing – I mean, later on I asked him, “Do you want to meet your biological father?” And then I showed him the picture. I said, “You can if you want to.” “Okay.” And later, years later, I asked him again, “Do you wish you would? Do you want?” “No.” So being aware and making sure that the doors are open for these questions to be asked without being pushy, is one of the things that I've learned as an adoptive parent from hearing the stories of adoptees.

SARA: As I'm listening to you, I'm struck by how much of a parallel there is for parents who have queer kids in that moment of coming out. And many parents like yourself who feel like for some it was more complicated information to receive and understand and for some, like yourself, really, “Why didn't you tell me sooner?” and just having that awareness that it's just complicated for a kid. And sometimes they might need time or the help of a counselor to be able to talk to even a supportive parent or even a parent who does this work. And I just really appreciate you sharing that. It's just a good reminder for us parents to hear that sometimes they just need the help of someone else to figure out how to talk to you about the hard thing.

DONNA: Absolutely, I totally agree. And as parents, because you go back to your statement of being the hero in your story, because we want to be the hero in our story, because we want to feel like this child – “I’m a successful parent because this child has turned out the way that I think this child should turn out.” And when this child isn't turning out the way that we think this child should turn out, there's a lot of emotions. There's a lot of trauma for us as parents. And I think for me, getting counseling as a parent, and years of counseling, and it really came down to one thing. “Donna. Let it go! Let this desire you have to make your children into what you want them to be, let it go.” And that's a really hard thing to do, because it's a reflection on us, who are supposed to be the parents and train them and teach them and have them turn out the way we think they should turn out.

SARA: Yeah. What gives you hope right now, when you look at the future of adoption?

DONNA: The idea of letting people be who they want to be, but at the same time there are principles that I think need to be followed. We have certain principles and our guiding principles. We don’t have very many rules, but we have certain guiding principles. And one of them is that we do what we say we're going to do. Meaning, me as a person, I will do what I say I'm going to do. You can count on that. I will be stable there. Now does that mean that I expect you to always do what you say you will do? Well, it'd be nice, but I can't determine that. I can only determine what I will do. But you can depend on me to do what I will do. In adoption, you don't realize how important that particular, one little principle is. Because adoptive families, they're so unsure and they're so trying to figure this out and they're so not wanting to be taken advantage of, and not wanting people to trick them or charge them more money than they said they were going to charge them. They feel like they have so little control of their life that they need someone that will do what they say they're going to do. And so then they can count on it. Birth parents, they live a life of chaos and they need someone who will do what they say they're going to do and they can count on it and move forward. Adoptees, very same thing. But usually by this time they've got adoptive parents that will be doing what they say. And so if people will be solid in themselves and move forward so that other people can depend on them, so that they can count on them, that gives them hope. What also gives me hope in adoption—and here's my little plug for what we're building—we learned from the idea of Hearts Connect that people wanted these places where they could go and share information that, when needed, could be supported by a counselor, that someone could step in and say, “This conversation is kind of going off the rails. If you keep saying things like that, pretty soon this other person is not going to want to talk to you anymore and you will ruin the relationship. So let's try talking differently. Let's try rewording how you're going to say this.” So having someone that supports that interaction seems to be an important thing. And so we're expanding it. And what we’re doing is we're creating a platform. And this platform will be such that adoptive families can come in, birth parents can come in, adoptees can come in, and people that represent waiting children can come in And that businesses, counselors, agencies, facilitators, medical providers, anybody who provides adoption services can come in. And the platform will allow them to connect together, both connect with each other to match adoptive families and birth parents, and adoptive families and adoptees, adoptees with their biological parents, and all of them having the support of adoption professionals. That gives me hope for adoption because we’ll create this platform where people can connect, have community, and find others that they need to find support from.

SARA: That's amazing. That is a beautiful project. Thank you so much for this conversation and for your time today. This has been really, really interesting and really enlightening. And I appreciate all that you have shared with us today.

DONNA: You bet. Thank you for having me.

SARA: Thanks so much for joining us here In the Den. We want to tell you about free, public QPR classes. QPR is Question, Persuade, Refer and it is a powerful suicide prevention training designed to equip you with the skills and confidence to recognize warning signs and respond when someone you love may be in crisis. The training is online, secure, and just two hours long. It’s a small time commitment that can make a life-saving difference. You can register for this training on our website at mamadragons.org. 

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