Speaker 1:
Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born by Jamie Lee Curtis and illustrated by Laura Cornell. Tell me again about the night I was born. Tell me how you and daddy were curled up like spoons and daddy was snoring. Tell me again how the phone rang in the middle of the night and they told you I was born. Tell me how you screamed. Tell me again how you called granny and grandpa right away, but they didn’t hear the phone because they sleep like logs. Tell me again how you got on an airplane with my baby bag and flew to get me and how there was no movie.

Speaker 2:
What?

Speaker 1:
Only peanuts.

Speaker 2:
Okay, I like peanuts.

Speaker 1:
Tell me again how you couldn’t grow a baby in your tummy, so another woman who was too young to take care of me was growing me and she would be my birth mother and you would adopt me and be my parents. Tell me again how you held hands all the way to the hospital and when you got there, you both got very quiet.

Speaker 2:
Shh.

Speaker 1:
And felt very small. Tell me again about the first time you saw me through the nursery window and how you couldn’t believe something so small could make you smile so big. Tell me again how tiny and perfect I was. Tell me again about the first time you held me in your arms, and you called me your baby sweet. Tell me again how you cried happy tears. Tell me again how you carried me like a China doll all the way home and how you glared at anyone who sneezed.

Speaker 1:
Tell me again about my first bottle and how I liked it so much. Tell me again about my first diaper change and how I didn’t like it at all. Tell me again about the first night you were my daddy and you told me about baseball being the perfect game like your daddy told you. Tell me again about the first night you were my mommy and you sang the lullaby your mommy sang to you. Tell me again about our first night as a family. Mommy, Daddy, tell me again about the night I was born.

Ron Reigns:
Welcome and thank you for joining us on Birth Mother Matters in Adoption with Kelly Rourke-Scarry and me Ron Reigns, where we delve into the issues of adoption from every angle of the adoption triad.

Speaker 4:
Do what’s best for your kid, and for yourself because if you can’t take care of yourself, you’re definitely not going to be able to take care of that kid and that’s not fair.

Speaker 5:
And I know that my daughter will be well taken care of with them.

Speaker 6:
Don’t have an abortion. Give this child a chance.

Speaker 7:
All I could think about was needing to save my son.

Kelly Rourke:
My name is Kelly Rourke-Scarry. I’m the Executive Director, President and co-founder of Building Arizona Families Adoption Agency, the Donna K. Evans Foundation and creator of the You Before Me campaign. I have a bachelor’s degree in family studies and human development and a master’s degree in education with an emphasis in school counseling. I was adopted at the age of three days, born to a teen birth mother, raised in a closed adoption and reunited with my birth mother in 2007. I have worked in the adoption field for over 15 years.

Ron Reigns:
I’m Ron Reigns. I’ve worked in radio since 1999. I was the co-host of two successful morning shows in Prescott, Arizona. Now I work for my wife, who’s an adoption attorney, and I’m able to combine these two great passions and share them on this podcast.

Kelly Rourke:
All right, so let’s talk about growing up as an adopted child. This is something I have a lot of experience with.

Ron Reigns:
One would think yes, definitely.

Kelly Rourke:
Yes. There are definitely highs and lows. In talking about this, there are a lot of aspects in growing up as an adopted child that are very personal. I want to share this with our listeners, because I believe that it will help us elevate the understanding of adoption as a whole. The adopted child is one angle of the triad. There has been a lot of research done on adopted children. There have been a lot of books, a lot of studies, a lot of interviews, and frankly a lot of interest. Where I think that it’s important to continue all of this research and interest in adopted children is going back to when you know better, you do better.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
And when society changes, the impact in the change of society will affect an adopted child.

Ron Reigns:
Okay.

Kelly Rourke:
An example would be Ancestry.com, 23andMe, and then there’s a few other of those tests. And I, myself, as an adult have taken both of them.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
Now, there is not an age limit. So if there is an adopted child, and the adoptive parents allow the child to take this test, and they learn about it, it really can influence some of their thoughts and feelings and emotions as an adopted child. So that’s one way that as society is evolving and changing, and technology is getting stronger, there’s Facebook, there’s social media. And so when we’re doing studies, and we’re doing interviews, and we’re researching the impact of adoption on children and how they’re going to respond, I believe that it’s very important that we continue down this road.

Ron Reigns:
Okay. Yeah. And I think there’s benefits to the 23andMe and Ancestry.com. But there’s also drawbacks, I would think, especially for a child, because aren’t they very emotional just by being a child, and then it just brings more anxiety or am I wrong?

Kelly Rourke:
I think it would depend on the maturity of the child. I think it would depend on the actual age. I think it would depend on the intent. So if the intent was to find out what nationality, ethnicity you officially are, and the percentages, I don’t see how that would be detrimental.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
If it was to look at who you’re related to, that could be a compromising position, depending on the maturity level and the age. I would say that’s a real possibility that would be damaging in some senses or could be, have the potential. I think the other part that might be kind of fun is in the 23andMe, there’s a lot of I don’t know what they call them.

Ron Reigns:
Where it tells you, for instance, oh, you’re more prone to like sweet foods and salty.

Kelly Rourke:
Absolutely, correct.

Ron Reigns:
Things like that. Yeah, I’ve heard the commercials.

Kelly Rourke:
When I did it and I got it back, it was really interesting. I would say it was pretty accurate. I don’t think it was 100% on, but they say it’s not. I mean, it’s a percentage of so many people, and I still get emails. Even though I did it almost about a year and a half ago, I get emails from them stating that they have come up with a new study and I fall into this category and it’s funny.

Ron Reigns:
Interesting, so it continues to expand.

Kelly Rourke:
Right.

Ron Reigns:
That’s cool.

Kelly Rourke:
And some of the categories that they have are so funny. One of them that made me laugh is, is your second toe longer than your big toe?

Ron Reigns:
Okay.

Kelly Rourke:
That was accurate.

Ron Reigns:
It was.

Kelly Rourke:
So I thought that was funny. Those kind of things, yeah, do you prefer salty over sweet?

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
Are you more prone to drink more caffeine than the average person? Those kind of things are really funny to me.

Ron Reigns:
And fascinating.

Kelly Rourke:
Right.

Ron Reigns:
Because you’re learning about yourself, and it would be the same for an adopted child too.

Kelly Rourke:
Sure. So in those aspects, I think it would be very kind of fun. It would give the ability for them to at least understand what nationality they are.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
And that can be important if they don’t know what it is. But again, I think it’s definitely something that a parent would have to look at their child and see if it was beneficial, see how it would impact them, what the ramifications were, and make those decisions. I don’t think for a young child, it would be beneficial. Definitely an older child closer to the age of 18, maybe. But again, only with the parental consent and if it was appropriate.

Ron Reigns:
Right, the parental support too. If they’re supportive emotionally as parents anyway, then it’s harder to envision seeing problems from something like this.

Kelly Rourke:
Correct. Another aspect to consider would be, if this is something you’re going to do, what are you going to do with the information? Anytime you’re going to introduce your child to something new, I think it’s always good to weigh the pros and cons, and think about how this could negatively or positively impact the child. What outweighs what, and then make a decision.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
And that would be a good example. One thing that I know that I did as a child is, I would think about my birth mother. And as a child, you fantasize, you have these dreams of grandeur. You have these …

Ron Reigns:
She’s a movie star, or things-

Kelly Rourke:
No, I thought she was royalty.

Ron Reigns:
Obviously.

Kelly Rourke:
I thought for sure I had to have been a princess in some long line of kings and queens.

Ron Reigns:
Right. You watched too much King Ralph as a kid and so you thought, oh, this is obvious. I’m a princess.

Kelly Rourke:
I must have, because I was convinced. Right. I was convinced that I was placed for adoption because the lineage, it would have been an issue and they wanted to make sure that it didn’t dethrone anybody. I carried this for a very long time.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
I really believed that I was of the elite. And obviously that was wishful thinking.

Ron Reigns:
Right. Now, when you found out and granted you were how old when …

Kelly Rourke:
34.

Ron Reigns:
34 when you found out. Was there a little piece of you inside that was kind of disappointed. Did you always hold out that hope?

Kelly Rourke:
That is a really good question. In some aspects, I wouldn’t be honest if I said no.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
I remember thinking when I found out I’m not royalty. Okay.

Ron Reigns:
I guess I can deal with this.

Kelly Rourke:
Yes, I can process that. And it was almost like a blindside in a way, because I had from the time I was 12 to the time I was 18, I lived in a suburb of La Jolla, California, and grew up in a-

Ron Reigns:
Lucky.

Kelly Rourke:
Upper middle class family.

Ron Reigns:
Okay.

Kelly Rourke:
And that was what I knew, that was my world. When I met my birth mother, she was living in Grove City, Ohio. She had moved there after she had lived in West Virginia. She had lived in West Virginia pretty much her whole life, except for when she was pregnant with me, they lived in Ohio and then they went back to West Virginia. She went back to West Virginia after she had me and my brothers were born there and raised there. When I first talked to her on the phone, I remember thinking, wow, I can barely understand her because her accent was so strong.

Ron Reigns:
Why don’t I talk like her?

Kelly Rourke:
And so I started to think, is this right? I got really confused really quickly because I thought wow, I kept asking her to say it again. And I’m sorry I don’t … What? What? That was our first conversation, and I wish to God I’d recorded it because probably now it would be very funny to listen to. I think she would agree. I think she would absolutely agree because not only did she have a very, very West Virginia Southern accent, but there is almost a different language. She would use words like Davenport instead of a sofa.

Ron Reigns:
Wow.

Kelly Rourke:
It was something that it took me … I used to almost think wow, okay, I’m going to learn a language, and you do and it didn’t take a long time. I caught on really quick because we spent hours and hours on the phone. But going from thinking, okay, well maybe when we meet, we can go on a Disney Cruise and start there.

Ron Reigns:
Okay.

Kelly Rourke:
And when we first talked on the phone, it was on a Friday, and I flew out the following Wednesday with one of my best friends, leaving the husband and kids at home. And we got there and I wasn’t royalty, and it wasn’t a disappointment. It wasn’t what I was expecting. I think I was so much in shock of not knowing what to expect. I bonded immediately with my brothers, and I bonded with my mother. I loved learning about them.

Ron Reigns:
Right and learning “their language”.

Kelly Rourke:
Absolutely. I remember saying to her on the phone, I really want to see a picture of you. And so she emailed me a picture and when I saw the picture, it was of her in an above ground pool.

Ron Reigns:
Okay.

Kelly Rourke:
It was undeniable, you could definitely see the resemblance.

Ron Reigns:
Wow.

Kelly Rourke:
It was absolutely life changing. I think it was one of those moments when you have a baby biologically, and the baby’s born, and the doctor pulls the baby out and puts the baby on your chest. With all four of my biological children, every single time I thought, “Wow, it’s a baby.”

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
You know it’s a baby, you know the baby’s going to come out. And I know I’ve said this in podcasts before, but there’s still that moment of this is a baby.

Ron Reigns:
How did this happen? Right, yeah, yeah.

Kelly Rourke:
So it was very much a similar mindset when I spoke with her the first time, and I started learning all about her. When my friend, Kim and I flew out, and we met her for the first time, Kim said to me something that I’ll never forget. She said, “What are you looking to find?”

Ron Reigns:
Good question.

Kelly Rourke:
Yeah. I remember pausing for a moment, and I said, “I’m hoping to find myself.” And I think that is what every adopted child in the back of their mind, at the front of their mind, at some point during their childhood or adulthood, is wanting to know, understand and actualize. I wasn’t prepared at 18 or 21 or 25 at that point to go into finding my birth mother.

Kelly Rourke:
People often will ask me, “Well, if you were so curious and you wanted to know her and what happened, what surrounded your adoption situation, why did you wait so long?” And that was one of the questions that she asked me first is why I waited so long.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
I grew up as a very stable adopted child. I wasn’t looking for a second mom, I wasn’t looking for a replacement mom.

Ron Reigns:
Right. You had a stable home that you were a part of.

Kelly Rourke:
I had a stable home, correct. When I made the decision to locate my birth mother, and hopefully have a relationship with her, which I was able to, it was twofold. I wanted to learn more about myself. And at that time in my life, I very much wanted to have a relationship. Because I felt in learning about her, I would learn more about me. And I wanted to show her how much I appreciated what she had done, and what a good choice she had made.

Ron Reigns:
Because you had, like you said, a stable, wonderful life.

Kelly Rourke:
And I wanted to share with her that I had begun an adoption agency, and I had really wanted her to be proud of that, because out of her decision was the result of so many lives being changed.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
In going back to growing up as an adopted child, the questions that adopted children have, and I’m speaking from a personal and a professional stance when I’m describing these questions, not every child is going to have these questions. Not every child is going to have the same line of thinking. It will depend on the age they were when they were adopted. It will depend on if they were a newborn adoption or they were adopted older in life.

Kelly Rourke:
But the questions that run through I would say they are typical questions, common questions, would be why did you place me for adoption? Was something wrong with me? Did you love me? And that’s a big one. Because birth mothers place out of love.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
And I think that that’s something that adopted children really need to understand. This was done in love.

Ron Reigns:
Right. It wasn’t, I need to get rid of this. This was a burden.

Kelly Rourke:
Right, this was a mistake. I need to fix my mistake. That’s not what this is. This is out of love. Another question was, do I have siblings? I learned that I had two brothers, which was really neat. The other thing that I had always wanted to know was who knows about me? And this is really interesting, because not many family members, as I’ve shared before, knew that my mother-

Ron Reigns:
You even existed.

Kelly Rourke:
Had had a third child.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
I was the first, but there was three children, not just two. And so when I came out of the woodwork, and I flew out to-

Ron Reigns:
Quite a shock for a lot of people.

Kelly Rourke:
It really was.

Ron Reigns:
Yeah.

Kelly Rourke:
It really was. It was a shock. My mother had to answer a lot of questions, and-

Ron Reigns:
You think that was pretty hard on her? Or do you think she felt it was kind of a blessing to finally unburden herself?

Kelly Rourke:
I think she almost found it cathartic, because she had held this for so long and had shared it with so few people, that it went to a point that when she would go to the doctor, she would show the doctor pictures of me. She would tell the doctor all about her adoption story.

Ron Reigns:
Wow.

Kelly Rourke:
She wasn’t able to do that for so many years, and this gave her the freedom to tell her story. There was a funny situation that I still kind of giggle about when I think about it. There was a night that during that first visit where she decided to have like a family get together at her house, and believe it or not, I am a little bit of an introvert, like I really …

Ron Reigns:
What?

Kelly Rourke:
Yeah.

Ron Reigns:
No, I don’t see it.

Kelly Rourke:
I was there. My friend Kim obviously was there as well. My brothers were there. My mother’s husband was there. And then a lot of her siblings came over and we have lots of pictures of it. I remember looking at everybody and being fascinated. But at the same time, I also remember slipping out the door and going into the garage and talking with her husband and my brothers who were hanging out in the garage smoking.

Kelly Rourke:
It was almost overwhelming even for me. Especially because one of my cousins had said, and he was joking, I think. I’m sure he was joking. He said, “Would you stand on the coffee table and turn around so we can just all look at you?” And that was when I ducked out the back door.

Ron Reigns:
Wow, look at the time.

Kelly Rourke:
And I know that it was … They were all trying to put the pieces together and figure out …

Ron Reigns:
Yeah, this situation, what’s going on.

Kelly Rourke:
Yeah. The situation and the relation and who I looked like, and it was really neat to see everybody, but again, in some aspects, it was a little overwhelming for me. It was a little much.

Ron Reigns:
And it probably was for them as well, but I mean, wow.

Kelly Rourke:
They seemed to be okay.

Ron Reigns:
You were a fish out of water over there.

Kelly Rourke:
I was. I was a fish out of water. Although, I will say I was in some aspects very comfortable. It was almost like I had found my tribe in some ways.

Ron Reigns:
Wow. That’s cool.

Kelly Rourke:
And that was cool. That was very cool. In children, they’re going to want to know, like, who knows about me? That is a really big deal because when you’re older and if you decide to look for your biological family and if you don’t have an open adoption, so you want to look for your biological family, that is something that you will want to know because you don’t know who you’re going to come across.

Ron Reigns:
Right, and what to say.

Kelly Rourke:
Correct, and what to say.

Ron Reigns:
Okay.

Kelly Rourke:
Mother’s Day was always bittersweet for me, with my-

Ron Reigns:
Before or even after as well?

Kelly Rourke:
Before I found her.

Ron Reigns:
Okay, right.

Kelly Rourke:
I always celebrated and will always celebrate my adoptive mother, on Mother’s Day.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
She raised me, she was an amazing mother. But at the same time, I knew that I had another mother out there too.

Ron Reigns:
And you want to celebrate with her.

Kelly Rourke:
I was wishing there was some way yeah, that I could celebrate with her. I made sure from the moment that I met her that I never missed a Mother’s Day and I always send bouquets of flowers and so forth, because I never had that opportunity before.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
And now that I’ve lost her, that’s hard because I’ve gone back to not being able to celebrate with her. So that’s hard. Birthdays were I would say the hardest, my birthday, and I never understood it as a child and even as a young adult, up until probably in the last decade.

Ron Reigns:
Okay.

Kelly Rourke:
When I was younger, I always remember thinking, that’s our day with my birth mother, that’s our day.

Ron Reigns:
Okay.

Kelly Rourke:
The funny thing is when I met my birth mother, my birthday is on the 14th, of the month. And I was born in the middle of the night, close to around midnight, she couldn’t remember which day it was. So here I’m having this moment and she’s not even quite sure which day.

Ron Reigns:
You’re doing this whole Fievel, somewhere and your mom’s going, was it today or yesterday?

Kelly Rourke:
Was it today or tomorrow?

Ron Reigns:
Yeah, exactly. That’s hilarious.

Kelly Rourke:
That was kind of, yeah.

Ron Reigns:
I mean, I know it was right in the …

Kelly Rourke:
Exactly, exactly.

Ron Reigns:
Was it after midnight. Okay, that’s funny.

Kelly Rourke:
She would say, on that day, I would go out and I will look at the stars and I would think about you and I thought, yeah, I didn’t go out and look at the stars and have that Kumbaya moment, but it was something.

Ron Reigns:
The Fievel thing.

Kelly Rourke:
Right. So I didn’t like birthdays.

Ron Reigns:
Really?

Kelly Rourke:
No.

Ron Reigns:
Okay.

Kelly Rourke:
Because it was a reminder of a loss.

Ron Reigns:
Okay.

Kelly Rourke:
Even though I think she made the best, most amazing choice when she chose adoption, it doesn’t negate the fact that it’s still a loss.

Ron Reigns:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Kelly Rourke:
And so as a whole, I don’t like birthdays. I don’t like my children’s birthdays. Because to me, they’re a reminder of they’re a day older and a day closer to when they leave the nest. And so my kids will say, “Oh, it’s your birthday, or my birthday is coming up.” And of course, as a parent, you celebrate their birthday and you do all the things that you should do, but in my heart, I don’t like birthdays.

Ron Reigns:
Interesting.

Kelly Rourke:
It’s not something that I think will probably ever go away because birthdays aren’t associated with positive things in my mind.

Ron Reigns:
Okay.

Kelly Rourke:
Kind of a different take.

Ron Reigns:
It is a very different take.

Kelly Rourke:
And it’s something that our listeners may not realize. Now, that’s not to say that every adopted child is going to feel that way.

Ron Reigns:
Right, or even every person, because I don’t see birthdays as like a bad … Not a bad thing, negative thing, like you do, but I almost see them as a non-thing. Just like, okay, I was born on that day, for instance, or especially for myself. Now, for others, I’m kind of like you. I’m like, oh, that’s a happy day and I’ll celebrate. But when I think of myself, it’s just a day.

Kelly Rourke:
Right, and I can play the game. Don’t get me wrong. We celebrate with the kids that you know we don’t talk. I don’t share this.

Ron Reigns:
You do huge birthday parties. It’s fun and have all the people over.

Kelly Rourke:
I do. I do, probably reverse effect.

Ron Reigns:
Yeah, so you overcompensate. I see.

Kelly Rourke:
Yeah.

Ron Reigns:
I think we’re starting to get to the bottom of you. No, I’m just kidding. Like I’m doing a psychological …

Kelly Rourke:
I’m saying this is becoming a little bit like a therapy session, but that’s okay. That’s okay.

Ron Reigns:
No, it’s fun.

Kelly Rourke:
I think what is very cool, very, very cool is when children that are adopted internationally, especially this, I think, I believe started in China, but I’m not sure so don’t hold me to that. When China adoptions became big, they would celebrate Gotcha Day, in addition to a birthday and I think that is absolutely …

Ron Reigns:
Oh, I see. That’s the day I gotcha.

Kelly Rourke:
Yeah.

Ron Reigns:
Got it. Oh, that’s sweet.

Kelly Rourke:
It is. Now, I was gotten, if you will, on the third day, so that would be a lot of celebrating.

Ron Reigns:
Wow, it’s like half a week for you.

Kelly Rourke:
So we didn’t celebrate a Gotcha Day. Yeah, not even half a week. So it wasn’t something that we celebrated. But I think when you have a court finalization, if you have an adopted child that you adopted as a newborn, I think that that is a really neat, a Gotcha Day is a really neat thing.

Ron Reigns:
Right. And it’s something else to remember that very special time. Cool.

Kelly Rourke:
Correct. The other question that adopted children may or may not have is, they wonder if their birth mother regrets her decision for placing for adoption. Now, in my situation, my birth mother did regret her decision.

Ron Reigns:
Did she? Okay.

Kelly Rourke:
So, that was because she was just 15 turning 16, and she had less than three weeks’ notice that she was officially going to have a baby.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
She really didn’t have time to process what was happening. She was in shock. She didn’t understand really what adoption was. I mean, back in the ’70s, that wasn’t something that was an everyday conversation. There weren’t celebrities openly adopting. It wasn’t something that was talked about as it is today, and there was no aftercare whatsoever.

Ron Reigns:
And now, thanks to her, there’s a huge program.

Kelly Rourke:
Right.

Ron Reigns:
That’s kind of neat, the Donna K. Evans Foundation.

Kelly Rourke:
Right. So, where I think it needs to be understood is those birth mothers that have adoption regrets, I feel did not receive the attention care during their pregnancy, the preparation and then the aftercare. They’re the ones that didn’t receive counseling. She received no counseling. She did not and was not allowed to even see me after I was born. She was not allowed to say goodbye. She didn’t have closure. She didn’t have the opportunity to hold me, kiss me, nothing.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
And I’m sure and I’m speaking for her but in her mind, later on, she probably wondered, did that really even happen? Like what occurred? She had the baby. She had a baby; she left the hospital. A couple days later she went to the courtroom. She said her mother waited in the car. She walked up the court stairs and went in front of the judge and said she wanted to do the adoption. And she came back down the stairs and got in the car and went back to school and then dropped out a few days later, a few weeks later I think it was. And so, it wasn’t something that a 16-year-old in 10th grade could comprehend.

Ron Reigns:
Well, even in life in general, I think back of my first marriage and it truly seems like another lifetime. It doesn’t even really feel real. So, especially for something that really extended maybe four weeks of her life and changed that four weeks. I mean, I was married for seven years, and I hardly remember it. You know?

Kelly Rourke:
I do, I understand.

Ron Reigns:
Yeah.

Kelly Rourke:
I think that’s a really good example. So, I think when she went on to have … After she dropped out of school, she went back to West Virginia, because I was born in Columbus, Ohio, so she went back to West Virginia, and she got pregnant pretty quickly, with my younger brother, who she then had on her 18th birthday, literally, they share a birthday.

Ron Reigns:
Oh, that’s kind of sweet.

Kelly Rourke:
And it was her life then moved on. She got married and then had my youngest brother a few years later. I think, in my opinion, adopted children want to know that their biological mother is happy and at peace and has joy in her life, especially when they’re in a happy and healthy and safe and loving home. There is even if it is not something that is an actual effect, there is that reciprocal relationship in their mind.

Kelly Rourke:
Everybody wants the best. They want happiness and joy. And as an adopted child, I did want that. Now, I will tell you where we’re talking about dreams of grandeur, when I was 15, I was absolutely convinced upon my 16th birthday, my birth mother was going to show up out of the blue with a car.

Ron Reigns:
Wow.

Kelly Rourke:
And that did not happen.

Ron Reigns:
Oh, Princess Kelly didn’t get her car or two.

Kelly Rourke:
Or carriage with horses.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
No, didn’t happen.

Ron Reigns:
Oh, well, I’m kind of sorry for you. But you made it out okay.

Kelly Rourke:
I did.

Ron Reigns:
You did all right.

Kelly Rourke:
I made it out just fine.

Ron Reigns:
Good for you.

Kelly Rourke:
I did. Adopted children, like everybody else, want to feel a sense of belonging. They want a connection. We talked about in a previous podcast about how nobody wants to be singled out or feel different. And adoptive families can really instill that sense of belonging, and they can do that through finding connections outside of biological connections with their adopted child. They can share hobbies, they can share preferences, they can share lots of things.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
That are not just we both have blue eyes, or we both have a shorter second toe or we both have blond hair or what have you.

Ron Reigns:
A proclivity to eat chocolate, whatever.

Kelly Rourke:
Absolutely, absolutely.

Ron Reigns:
Yeah. I got you.

Kelly Rourke:
When I am an exceedingly picky eater, I mean, exceedingly picky eater. And my biological brother, that was one thing that both my brothers and I found was really fun is finding our likes and dislikes and what was the same and what was different. They’re both exceedingly picky as well.

Ron Reigns:
Really? Okay.

Kelly Rourke:
And so was my mother, to the point of people tease me and laugh when I go out to eat because I am so picky.

Ron Reigns:
Okay.

Kelly Rourke:
One of my brothers said yeah, I don’t eat anything that ends in -ese. So no Chinese, no Japanese. Now, I do.

Ron Reigns:
Oh, I see. Okay.

Kelly Rourke:
I do. I do like those foods, but I don’t like seafood. I don’t like pork. I don’t like to eat meat off of a bone. I could go on for probably an hour.

Ron Reigns:
Right?

Kelly Rourke:
And they’re the same.

Ron Reigns:
What do you mean they’re the same?

Kelly Rourke:
They won’t eat anything like that either.

Ron Reigns:
The same foods though.

Kelly Rourke:
Correct.

Ron Reigns:
Because I think back with my own family, like my brother, especially when we were growing up, he’s kind of changed since, but he didn’t like eggs. I don’t know anybody who doesn’t like eggs, but that’s fine. That was his thing. I don’t like onions or tomatoes. Another sister, what was it? We all have different ones.

Kelly Rourke:
Oh no, we were all the same.

Ron Reigns:
We were all picky, but it was all different. Maybe we don’t have the same parents. I’m just kidding.

Kelly Rourke:
Yeah. We were all pretty much the same.

Ron Reigns:
Wow, that’s interesting. Except for the -ese thing.

Kelly Rourke:
Right.

Ron Reigns:
That’s the only thing that’s different for you.

Kelly Rourke:
Right. And that made me laugh.

Ron Reigns:
Yeah, that is funny.

Kelly Rourke:
And that may have been lack of exposure to those ethnic foods.

Ron Reigns:
Okay, that makes sense. Because, I mean, you grew up in the San Diego area, so you had a lot more of that.

Kelly Rourke:
Right. So a funny story about him. Sure. When he came out to visit me, I took him to one of those restaurants where it was a Japanese restaurant and they cook at the table.

Ron Reigns:
Oh, yeah, the …

Kelly Rourke:
I want to say Tamagotchi, but that’s a game.

Ron Reigns:
Benihana.

Kelly Rourke:
Like that, but it wasn’t a Benihana, but it was like a Benihana. I thought, “Oh my gosh, this is really nice. You’re going to love this.” I remember him sitting there and looking at the food and really just kind of pushing it around in his plate, and he’s watching-

Ron Reigns:
Trying to be polite, but still not trying to eat it.

Kelly Rourke:
Trying to be polite. And as he’s eating it, he’s kind of making faces, and I thought, “Do you not like this?” And he goes, “It’s very nice.”

Ron Reigns:
Oh.

Kelly Rourke:
Yeah, it was just so funny to me because I thought, “Oh, he’s going to love this like, this is amazing.” Not so much.

Ron Reigns:
Just didn’t dig it. That’s funny.

Kelly Rourke:
No, he didn’t dig it. So those kinds of things were fun. We all like the same TV shows. Our favorite, ironically, was Little House on the Prairie and my brothers, they’re tough guys.

Ron Reigns:
Right, but they would tear up to Laura Ingalls.

Kelly Rourke:
Yes, that was to me just amazing. My youngest brother’s son, his name is Landon and it was …

Ron Reigns:
After Michael Landon, that makes sense. Cool.

Kelly Rourke:
And it was so funny that when my brother came out to visit, the other brother, he said, “You have all of the Little House on the Prairies on DVD.” And I said, “I do.” And he goes, “Oh, let’s watch all of them.”

Ron Reigns:
Wow.

Kelly Rourke:
So we spent probably 24 hours watching and both of us could recite along with each episode because we both-

Ron Reigns:
You’ve seen it that many times.

Kelly Rourke:
A hundred times.

Ron Reigns:
Wow.

Kelly Rourke:
I would call him up on the phone, and he would be watching it on one of the channels.

Ron Reigns:
Okay.

Kelly Rourke:
So that was really interesting to find that the-

Ron Reigns:
All these connections that aren’t just the big toe thing.

Kelly Rourke:
Right.

Ron Reigns:
Okay, I got you.

Kelly Rourke:
That was really neat. So that finding a sense of belonging would be a big thing. And we’ve talked about before when you’re filling out medical history forms. Again, kids don’t want to be singled out. And they don’t want to be different. Nobody does. So when you’re filling out a form, and as an adult, you have to put adopted, unknown for when they say family history, does anyone in your family have a history of heart disease or diabetes or cancer, and you’re writing unknown, unknown, unknown, unless you have an open adoption and you have that information.

Kelly Rourke:
When you are a child, obviously, you’re not filling out those forms. But then when you walk back into the room to meet the doctor, oftentimes the doctor will ask questions to the adoptive mom. And it normally comes out, “Oh, well, they’re adopted. We don’t know that where they’re adopted.” And again, to an adopted child, to me, it was in the sense saying, she’s different.

Ron Reigns:
Right. You don’t belong.

Kelly Rourke:
That was hard.

Ron Reigns:
I’m sure it was very difficult. A lot of that, like you said, has been alleviated by open adoption, semi open adoptions. Because you have more of that connection, a lot of these issues that we’ve talked about today.

Kelly Rourke:
Correct. And that’s so amazing, and that shows us as a society, how far we’ve come.

Ron Reigns:
I think it’s neat.

Kelly Rourke:
I do too. We talked about genetics and nationality. And one way to do that is if you don’t have an open adoption is the 23andMe. And maybe, at some point when your child is nearing adulthood, maybe that’s something if you choose to that you could look into because that would be a way to find out what nationality.

Ron Reigns:
Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Kelly Rourke:
Another thing growing up as an adopted child, you’re really looking for a connection. You really want a biological connection. It is not uncommon for adopted children to want to have a biological child. I remember talking about it when I was a teenager. Now, I was not a teenage mom. But I remember thinking that I will then have a biological connection.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
When you don’t have a biological connection with an adoptive family, if there’s not a half sibling or a sibling where your adoptive family was able to adopt another child from your birth mother, there is a longing for one. There’s really no way to remedy that. But I think it’s something to acknowledge, and it’s not something to not talk about.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
You do want to look like somebody in your adoptive family. But that’s twofold as we’ve talked about, because when somebody comes up and says, “Wow, it’s hard to believe you’re adopted. You look just like your adoptive mom.” As a child, I remember thinking, I don’t know what to do with that.

Ron Reigns:
Yeah.

Kelly Rourke:
And even as an adult, I don’t know what to do with that. Okay. I don’t know what the response is supposed to be. Thank you?

Ron Reigns:
Thank you, right.

Kelly Rourke:
I mean, it’s not …

Ron Reigns:
Cool. Yeah. I wouldn’t know how to respond to that.

Kelly Rourke:
Another thing that you may not think about when you’re not adopted is what am I going to look like when I’m older?

Ron Reigns:
You don’t have that, especially with the closed adoption like you had. You don’t have a picture of somebody who you’re supposed to look like when you get older. I mean, me and my brother look like my dad.

Kelly Rourke:
Yeah. What was really neat, in a weird way, is when my mother was in a coma, and I was in the hospital and I was sitting with her and the nurses would come in and out of the room. And they kept asking me her age because she really does look … She looked a lot younger than she was.

Ron Reigns:
Okay.

Kelly Rourke:
When they’re pointing this out, I remember looking at her face, and thinking, wow, they’re right. I’m looking for wrinkles, and I’m really not seeing any.

Ron Reigns:
Wow.

Kelly Rourke:
And then I’m looking at the roots of her hair and confession, I do get gray hairs. So she has roots because she was dyeing her hair. She had no gray hair.

Ron Reigns:
Really?

Kelly Rourke:
None. So now I’m like kind of picking through her hair trying to find one because now I’m thinking …

Ron Reigns:
How come I have? What’s going on here?

Kelly Rourke:
What happened?

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
We’re 16 years apart.

Ron Reigns:
Skipped a generation.

Kelly Rourke:
We’re 16 years apart here, like what …

Ron Reigns:
That’s hilarious.

Kelly Rourke:
It really kind of is, yeah. I thought, okay, that’s not fair. So then my birth mother and I did have a talk. She listened very nicely because she was in the coma. And I just talked, and I asked her-

Ron Reigns:
She didn’t interrupt like I do all the time. Got it.

Kelly Rourke:
No, she didn’t interrupt. She didn’t disagree. That wasn’t fair. She had no gray hair. She had none, and it wasn’t like she had just dyed it, like I said, her roots had grown out. So when I was combing her hair, I’m trying just to pacify myself and find some.

Ron Reigns:
Yeah, please.

Kelly Rourke:
There wasn’t any. There wasn’t any.

Ron Reigns:
Perhaps your dad, your biological father.

Kelly Rourke:
Perhaps, because it wasn’t from her, because she does not have any. Adopted children, as we’ve spoken before, family trees are confusing. When people talk about exploring their ancestry that is very twofold, because you have grown up as an adult looking back as an adopted child with a family that you very much identify with. That is your mom and dad. When you are adopted, you love them. That is your mother and father.

Ron Reigns:
They raised you.

Kelly Rourke:
Correct. Biologically, it’s different. And when you’re doing a family tree, it’s very confusing. Do you do two? If you don’t do two, which one do you do? And even as an adult, I struggle with that. I struggle with well, I have two sets of families. Do I draw two trees and then put a connection between them?

Ron Reigns:
Because you’re now the connection, the connecting link.

Kelly Rourke:
I think that it would behoove some ancestry data person to really take this into consideration and develop something.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
Because it would alleviate a lot of that, what do I do?

Ron Reigns:
Uncertainty.

Kelly Rourke:
Family reunions, when you’re a child, and it’s not discussed are just fine. When you go to a family reunion and the adoption is talked about, it’s one more she’s different. She’s not an outcast, but she’s not really part of-

Ron Reigns:
Us.

Kelly Rourke:
Right. And an adopted child very much wants to be the us, very much. Adoptive mom and dads very much want their adopted child to be part of the us. Sometimes family members don’t use the right terms, the right lingo. And when you do adopt, educating those around you is really important, so that the child, the adopted child, and the adoptive parents can be the us, because that’s where they want to be.

Ron Reigns:
Right. I’m trying to put this in my head because I obviously didn’t grow up adopted. But I try and picture myself at a family reunion where, like you said, the adoptive parents are your parents, they chose you. But then say the cousins and the uncles and aunts, they didn’t really choose you, and you’re technically not part of their tree.

Kelly Rourke:
Biological tree.

Ron Reigns:
Biologically, and so I imagine that would feel awkward and uneasy especially to a child.

Kelly Rourke:
It’s a little confusing.

Ron Reigns:
So okay, interesting. These are things I never really thought about or put in my head.

Kelly Rourke:
Yeah.

Ron Reigns:
I appreciate you sharing.

Kelly Rourke:
That’s probably because these are things that people don’t talk about.

Ron Reigns:
And they should, especially when there is an adoption, and that way the rest of the family knows.

Kelly Rourke:
And when there’s a closed adoption, yes.

Ron Reigns:
Okay, this is what you should think about that.

Kelly Rourke:
Correct.

Ron Reigns:
This person does belong, they are our tribe.

Kelly Rourke:
Yeah.

Ron Reigns:
Okay.

Kelly Rourke:
When you are adopted as an adopted child, one of the biggest fears, and I will say that this is a common fear for adopted children is abandonment. Because they already feel in some sense, even though the biological mother lovingly placed in for adoption, without having the knowledge and the ability to understand really what that means and what that process looks like, there is some sense of fear of abandonment.

Kelly Rourke:
Is somebody going to leave again? Is somebody going to really still want me? Did I do something wrong? Are you always going to be there? What’s going to happen after I turn 18? Are you still there? And so, when you have an adopted child, the best thing in my opinion is constant reassurance. I’m going to be there for the rest of my life. And that is what they want to hear. You may think when you’re talking to your adopted child, you’re saying it too much, but you’re not. You’re not.

Ron Reigns:
You can never say it to an adopted child or just a child, yeah, you always need the reassurance.

Kelly Rourke:
I’m always going to be there. I’m always going to love you.

Ron Reigns:
Like you do with your kids.

Kelly Rourke:
Absolutely. You’re going to make mistakes, and I’m going to be there to help you get back up. And that is something that is so important, and I’ve been asked professionally, will my child maybe have a harder time taking them to kindergarten or preschool or dropping them off at college? And the answer is yes. In a lot of situations, yes. That’s not to say for sure it’s going to be every child, but it is a sense of separation, and that is hard on an adopted child.

Kelly Rourke:
When you are told about your birth family, as an adopted child, I know that I personally, as I’ve said before, soaked everything in, the three things that I know, I soaked everything in. And that was just unreal. Now, my adoptive mother shared something with me that I didn’t know, until I started looking for my birth mother. I was adopted through an attorney. It wasn’t through an agency at that time, it was through an attorney. She had been sending him pictures of me every Christmas.

Ron Reigns:
Really?

Kelly Rourke:
And I never knew that. And when she disclosed this to me, she gave me his name, and he was still alive, and I reached out to him. And ironically, he had business in Phoenix, about a week to two weeks later.

Ron Reigns:
Really?

Kelly Rourke:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), and he flew out and asked to meet me. And so of course, I jumped at the opportunity and met him, and he shared with me what he remembered. Back then, they didn’t keep files like they keep now. But it was the first opportunity I had had because I hadn’t found her yet to learn more.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
I remember thinking, I’m not going to forget ever a word that you have said. And of course, he wanted to focus on what an amazing childhood I had and everything else. And I did. And I wanted to know everything that he … I wanted to know everything.

Ron Reigns:
Yeah, give me details.

Kelly Rourke:
Right. And so that was very, very interesting. And actually, it was a situation where he actually wasn’t even an adoption attorney. He was, I guess, colleagues in some aspect with the family doctor that my mother had gone to when she found out she was pregnant, and had contacted this attorney to do the adoption, kind of neat.

Ron Reigns:
That’s very neat.

Kelly Rourke:
Yeah. In all aspects, I believe adopted children can thrive in adoptive homes, they can be loved and feel secure and feel safe. And yet they’re still going to have those thoughts and feelings about adoption. Not every child and not every thought and feeling we described. But those are common thoughts and feelings.

Ron Reigns:
And not everybody is severe as others. It’s always to degrees.

Kelly Rourke:
It will depend on the situation.

Ron Reigns:
Yeah.

Kelly Rourke:
And those things don’t negate what an amazing job the adoptive family is doing. That’s just part of adoption. I would really like to stress to adoptive families just because your child has questions, or they have fears or they have concerns, that doesn’t mean you’re not doing amazing.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke:
Again, it’s just part of adoption.

Ron Reigns:
If you’re a birth mother, adoptive family member, or adopted child or just a listener to the podcast and you’re facing depression, grief or anxiety, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available 24 hours a day at 1-800-273-8255, that’s 1-800-273-TALK.

Ron Reigns:
Thank you for joining us on Birth Mother Matters in Adoption, written and produced by Kelly Rourke-Scarry and edited by me, Ron Reigns. We also want to thank Building Arizona Families, the Donna K. Evans Foundation, and the You Before Me campaign. A special thanks goes out to Grapes for letting us use their song I Dunno as our theme song.

Ron Reigns:
You can check out our blogs on our website at azpregnancyhelp.com, and you can call us 24 hours a day with questions or comments about the podcast or adoption in general at 623-695-4112. That’s 623-695-4112. Next time on Birth Mother Matters in Adoption, we’ll be discussing adoption disruption and what happens to a birth mother when she chooses not to place her baby for adoption. For Kelly Rourke-Scarry, I’m Ron Reigns. We’ll see you then.