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 2:
Do what’s best for your kid and for yourself, because if you didn’t take care of yourself, you’re definitely not going to able to take care of that kid and that’s not fair.

Speaker 3:
I know that my daughter would be well taken care of with them.

Speaker 4:
Don’t have an abortion, give this child a chance.

Speaker 5:
All I could think about was needing to save my son.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
My name is Kelly Rourke-Scarry, I’m the Executive Director, President and Co-founder of Building Arizona Families Adoption Agency, the Donna Kay 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:
And I’m Ron rains. I’ve worked in radio since 1999. I was the cohost 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-Scarry:
Okay, so for those of you that joined us for the last podcast, it was part one of the series of two episodes where I was speaking with a birth family that came into our adoption program. And in listening to them, they were so amazing and so brave and had such candor that I wanted to make sure that they were comfortable, which they said they were, in sharing their story to bring education and awareness to adoption and to the reasons why people choose adoption. I think there’s so much question out there as to how can a birth family do this? Why are they using-

Ron Reigns:
Why would you “give up your baby”?

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Right.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
And what the reason and rationale is behind it. And this birth father and this birth mother were able to take, in my opinion, all these unanswered questions and summarize it into their beautiful story. And in listening to this birth father, because he’s the primary talker in this, the birth mother does talk as well and she did an amazing job, but he talks primarily throughout the podcast. In listening to him, I feel that he will continue to be very relatable to other birth fathers and for other birth parents that are considering adoption. And so as we continue to listen to their story, I just continue to be amazed over and over again.

Ron Reigns:
And I do want to say that if you are listening to this episode, without listening to the first one, I highly recommend you stop it right here, go back and listen to our last podcast so that you get this full interview. It is powerful. And again, it is enlightening.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
It is. So, let’s go.

Birth Father:
Yeah, so around the time when I came to the realization that I was messing up the neighborhood, she was pregnant and she had already given this child up for adoption that she already didn’t want, and I was housing her at the time and I ran into one of my baby’s mothers and that’s when she tells us about the adoption agency because she was still using drugs at the time. And she was scared, but my baby’s mother was like, Hey, it doesn’t matter if she’s doing drugs that protect her. So, we ended up meeting this lawyer who ended up… she gives a baby up for adoption.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
That was-

Birth Father:
It was not the adoption agency, but it was my baby’s mom who was like, Hey, don’t worry about it, because she was doing the same thing and was still getting high and I still was listening to the adoption agency and stuff like that.

Birth Father:
And then a little bit later on, she gets pregnant. And like our lives were just like flipped upside down, going crazy and doing all kinds of wild stuff. And it’s just like I felt like giving a child up for adoption is probably like one of the most beautiful things you could possibly do for yourself, for the child, for the family that can’t have children. And it breaks the cycle of… Obviously you can look at me and see that I’m not all there. And then I used to be a gang banger. If you know me well enough, you’ll know that I used to be a boss drug dealer and everything in between. Anything that was having to do with streets and doing wrong, I had my hands in it. Like literally, any and everything, I had my hands in it and I would go all the way from-

Birth Mother:
On that step too, read right here.

Birth Father:
Oh, yeah.

Birth Mother:
From selling drugs. He used to stand there like that all the time.

Birth Father:
Yeah. Cause I don’t play that it’s like you could-

Birth Mother:
Cash only.

Birth Father:
…have somebody down that was like a real good friend of yours and you give them credit and then they don’t pay you. And now you feel some type of way because he feels like he don’t have to pay you. And now somebody that wants just be a good friend of yours is now your enemy because you done messed him up. Or you send somebody to kick in his door and go get your money from him, and now you guys are beefing over money. So, I just never give credit to anybody. It alleviates all the extra stuff that can come along with it, you know?

Birth Mother:
Yeah, he used to stand there like this, cash only. When people would come to buy drugs from him, he’d just stand there with his arms crossed. Cash only. Right here.

Birth Father:
I thought about being like a youth counselor and like getting these young kids that are in the neighborhood that think that they know what they’re doing, they think they know that they’re grown, and they think that they know what they want to do with their life and I’ll show them something. Let everybody else see it, and then I’ll show them something new, something that they don’t know how to do, and never even been taught how to do, and then show them the direction that they should be going with their life.

Birth Father:
Like the one that I’ve been working on is this young kid, nobody gives a tool. He’s 16 years old. He runs the streets. He gets high. And at first, I wouldn’t let nobody give him drugs around me. He wasn’t allowed to get high around me. I told him if he tried to get high in the room with me, I’m going to beat you up. You’re going to have some respect for me. If you feel like you want to smoke in the room where I’m at, just say, Hey, check it out, Jake. Is it all right if I smoke? And I’ll step out the room, but you’re not going to smoke in the room with me. And he respected that and he did it every time.

Birth Mother:
At first, he didn’t.

Birth Father:
He’d go smoke in the bathroom.

Birth Mother:
At first, he would look at him, and I sat there and I talked a little while. I was like, “Look, it’s just how he is. It’s the same way he was with me. And to be honest with you, when I was your age, I wish I would have listened. I wish I would’ve, but I didn’t. I didn’t have it in my mind that it was bad for me. Not until way later.

Birth Father:
But he’s starting to get it here and there. I’ve been pushing him to go to job Corps every day and pushing him to go to Job Corps every day. And even once in a while-

Birth Mother:
He wants to go back to school.

Birth Father:
… with the home boys and stuff like at, I make them threaten him like, Hey, he has a curfew now. He’s not allowed run around the streets. If any of my homeboys see him out on the streets, they’ll beat him up, because he’s past curfew and make him go register in the school. Because if you don’t, he’s going to get beat up and he’s afraid of it and he goes and does he’s supposed to.

Birth Father:
Eight o’clock he’s inside because he’s not allowed to be outside past there. You’re just a kid, you don’t do it speeding out of here and he’ll stay in until the sun comes up and that’s when you can go out.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
What if somebody had done that with you?

Birth Father:
I probably wouldn’t be this way. I was raised different. My dad was a gang banger. He’s from South side 35th. I didn’t meet him until I was like 10 years old because he tried to kill somebody.

Birth Mother:
Over a poncho.

Birth Father:
Slit this dude’s throat from ear to ear over a poncho.

Birth Mother:
That he gave his mom and she had taken it off at a party and he picked it up and was wearing it, and so he thought that there was something going on between his mom and the dude, and just walked up, pfft, took the poncho and walked off.

Birth Father:
… know is like, I’m a product of rape. My mother and my father split ways after this. And then along the time when he catches her at another party and she’s all drunk and he gets her and he’s having sex with her and rapes her, stabbed her in the back. She’s got a cut on her backpack, probably about a good five inches from him breaking a beer bottle and stabbing it into the back of her and twisting it and then running it up her back.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Why did he do that?

Birth Father:
Because he was so hurt on the fact that she had left him. My Dad’s like 100% true blue. I’m surprised he’s not on a serial killer list because that’s how bad he is.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
What does true blue mean?

Birth Father:
Like it’s as real as it gets.

Birth Mother:
Somebody that likes blood.

Birth Father:
He’s like a murder, like a stone-cold murder. Don’t get no worse than that.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Is he in prison now?

Birth Father:
I don’t know now. And then my mother, she was a prostitute. She was a crack head when I was growing up. I actually lived in this hotel called the Sand Man. And like my mother would trade me for crack.

Birth Mother:
I forgot about that, actually.

Birth Father:
I used to live in the Sand Man motel when I was a kid and my mother would trade me for drugs to tricks and to homosexual men when I was just a kid, five, six, and seven, those are the worst times in my life.

Birth Mother:
We’ll be sitting there playing around, I’ll try to tickle him, and he’s just automatically, like don’t.

Birth Father:
I don’t like being tickled, I don’t like being pulled on, I don’t like none of that or any of that stuff. There’s a lot. I don’t like being hugged because of it. Like I’ve never been able to be all like affectionate towards another individual. I can’t. Like public display of affection, I can’t do it now because of it. I can’t be affectionate towards another person. And in so many ways, it takes a really long time for me to even be affectionate towards anybody.

Birth Mother:
For a long time-

Birth Father:
… first started being affectionate towards her just recently and I’ve known her for three years.

Birth Mother:
And we’ve been together for three years.

Birth Father:
And she doesn’t understand it. It’s like I lived a hard life.

Birth Mother:
Sometimes he’ll just like sit there and he’ll be like this when I give him a hug and I’m just like… but don’t care-

Birth Father:
When I got older-

Birth Mother:
… I’ll still hug him. I’ll still embrace him because I love him.

Speaker 3:
When I got older, my mother seen like the type of person that I was and that I was always going to be what she thought I was always going to be. And she used to take me on these. I was only like 16, 17, 18, 19. She’d take me on these things she called them amazing adventures of a super ho, and I would run the streets while my mom prostituted, and she would make me sell drugs. I’ve been in every alley on Van Buren from the freeway, the I-17 all the way down, up until like 24th street and Van Buren, every single last alley.

Birth Mother:
And when he was 12, he went to go get dope for his mom one day, some crack for his mom and got shot in the head.

Birth Father:
I was 19.

Birth Mother:
Oh, you were 19 at the time?

Birth Father:
I was 19 years old, it was around the time when Mark Goodall was running around, and my mom, one of the very few people that ever escape him, he ripped a big patch of my mom’s hair out. She was like missing a big patch of hair from him ripping her hair off of her head, but my mother escaped him. He beat her up real bad, but she ends up, she fights back, gets him up off of him. It was the same night. And she comes back with the money that he had handed to her, and I go, she’s makes me go get her dope.

Birth Father:
And as I’m walking, there was this one girl, I don’t know why I would do it every time I would see her, I would either give her money or I’d give her dope, try to help her out because she was out there and she set me up. She set me up to get robbed by this guy. This guy jumps out the bushes and he shoots me because I didn’t want to give him what I had. He shot me in the head point blank with a nine-millimeter, dropped me to the ground. But I was so high on sherm at the time, I still got back up, even though I see nothing and I couldn’t barely stand, he hits me. He punches me in the face and I still get back up. He just turned around and walked away.

Birth Father:
I had a hole. Like I had three hoodies and a beanie on, it was the winter time. He’d knocked all three of my hoodies off, knocked my beanie off. Knocked this big piece, like right here, like this back all the way like this. And it came out the bottom part of my neck right here, like this on the bottom part. I do this all back like this. And I just had just like pulled my hoodie, one of my hoodies, and put it right here like this and got my beanie and put it on top of my head and walked home.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
You didn’t go to the hospital?

Birth Father:
I took the bus to the hospital by myself because nobody wanted to go with me. They didn’t know that I was shot in the head like that, and I didn’t realize that I was shot. My uncle kept trying to tell me, but it wasn’t registering in my head because I was high on sherm.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
What is that?

Birth Father:
It’s like PCP. So, because I’m high on PCP, nothing’s registering to me. He keeps telling me that you need to go to the hospital, dude, it looks like you’ve been shot. See, you got two holes, you need to go. And I was like, well, somebody take me up there. Somebody take me up there. And I took the route 24 bus, all the way to McDowell, and got on the McDowell bus and went to the one that’s on 12th street by myself, bleeding. And people were just looking at me because I’m covered in blood. And you could see that I had been shot and everybody’s looking at me like, how are you even still standing? I get to the hospital, and then that’s when the doctor tells me that I had been shot. That’s when it registered.

Birth Father:
And they just stitched me up and sent me on my way. Gave me some Percocets And they gave me a morphine drip for a little while and they gave me three Percocets. I sat in the hospital for like maybe like 12 hours, and then they discharged me. Like I lived a really, really rough life.

Birth Father:
The last thing that I ever want for any of my kids, is to live the life that I live. And I know that I can’t just go and just give my child to anybody and think that they’re going to live a good life. I can go somewhere like this and know for a fact that I could pick a family that’s going to do the right thing. And I know for a fact that my child’s going to live a good life. I know they’re going to be loved. I know they’re going to be cared for. I know they’re going to be clothed. I know they’re going to be housed. I know they’re going to get educated. I know they’re probably going to go to college.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Yeah.

Birth Mother:
My two kids that I gave up for adoption right now, one of them is in pageants and the other one they want to put in pageants. The one I just had, they want to have her put in pageants, too.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
You guys are amazing.

Birth Father:
Thank you. I think you guys are amazing. You sit there and you work your whole life and make sure that these children have somewhere good to go and then make sure that the family that’s putting the child up is taken care of. That’s a beautiful thing to me. I respect you guys in so many ways.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Thank you.

Birth Mother:
I was telling him when we got-

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
I was the one that talked to you on the phone.

Birth Mother:
Yeah. When I first called?

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Birth Mother:
When I first got to the motel and stuff like that, after they did the intake and all that, and they gave us the hotel bag and the food box and stuff like that. I was sitting here looking at him and I was like, “Look at this.” The last adoption agency we went to, we sat in a motel for a week. I was hungry the whole time. They didn’t give me no money, no nothing to get nothing to eat, and I was just sitting there hungry. We ended up going to the-

Birth Father:
They ended up charging us $85 an hour just to order an Uber. He was an adoption lawyer who owned an adoption agency, and he would charge his lawyer fees to order an Uber.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
It was for profit. We’re non-profit.

Birth Father:
Yeah.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
I mean, we do this because we believe in it. I was adopted and my husband, he does the business side of it. And when my mom died three years ago, we started the After Care Foundation, so we help birth parents after you have the baby and everything’s free. So, we help with like job placement, resumes-

Birth Father:
They didn’t do none of that. They wouldn’t even help me now on this site, I have a lot of kids and I kept telling the man, I said, “You think you think that that men don’t get postpartum? Well, we do.”

Birth Mother:
Yes they do.

Birth Father:
And they wouldn’t help me with anything.

Birth Mother:
Yes they do.

Birth Father:
I couldn’t get them to do anything for me.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Now, we’ll pay for counseling. We’ll pay for anything.

Birth Mother:
And see, that’s the thing is like I was sitting there and I’m unpacking everything and just looking and I’m like, I looked over at him and I was like, “Look at this. This is how they’re supposed to do it.” He didn’t do what he was supposed to do. I was like, “This is just crazy.”

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
You have to give people the right examples.

Birth Mother:
Yeah, you guys treated us so well, like you guys gave us food so that we weren’t sitting there hungry. Gave us dishes and everything like that. Like, we didn’t have none of that stuff. When we were sitting at the motel over there, when I was hungry, we literally had to walk next door to the other motel and steal food.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
You’re people, you’re not just somebody to put a hotel.

Birth Mother:
Just to eat.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Yeah, I get it.

Birth Mother:
I’m sitting there looking at it like, so far I really liked the way you guys do things.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
And if there’s ever something you don’t, come talk to me. Because like I said, I’m one of the founders and the director. So, I will fix it. I don’t let anybody disrespect birth parents because like I said, my mom was one and she wasn’t respected.

Birth Father:
One of my uncles was adopted from when he was a baby. He was a preemie though, and he his mom, Angie, was the one who adopted him. But he was so small that you could hold him in the palm of your hand and he wore doll clothes and my aunt nursed him back to health. And he’s living today because of her. If it wasn’t for her, he would be dead, because his mother didn’t care. She was going to flush them down the toilet.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Adoption’s a beautiful thing.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Wow. That was incredible.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
I don’t even have words to say again. I’m speechless.

Ron Reigns:
I don’t either. It was amazing. That was a fantastic interview. And I actually have chills just thinking about it again and it’s amazing. So, thank you so much for sharing that with me and for our listeners as well.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Oh, absolutely. I think that there are certain moments in your professional career and/or lifetime that you hear something and as Oprah used to coin it, the aha moment.

Ron Reigns:
Right.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
And there were so many aha moments throughout this.

Ron Reigns:
And a couple of, oh my God, moments too.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
There were, many. And it was one of those things that as an adoption professional, I want everybody, whether they’re in the adoption community or whether they are the gentleman walking down the street, I want everyone to hear it because my hope is that it will not only increase adoption awareness indication, but it will also increase compassion and unity.

Ron Reigns:
Right. So, you don’t just look at somebody who is giving their child another chance as, Oh, they’re giving up their baby. You think, wait, these are real people with real issues and real lives. And they’re making a brave choice.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Again, I applaud them as I applaud every birth parent who makes the adoption choice. And I think, I coin that other phrase, it takes a village to raise a child. I think it takes the world to come together and really stop with the stereotypes and stop with the preconceived notions and perceptions. And I think we just need to understand that we come from all walks of life. And if we put the judgment down and pick the compassion up, we’re going to get a lot further.

Ron Reigns:
We have a pregnancy crisis hotline available 24/7 by phone or text at (623)695-4112, or you can call our toll-free number 1(800)340-9665. We can make an immediate appointment with you to get you to a safe place, provide food and clothing, and started on creating an Arizona adoption plan or give you more information. You can check out our blogs on our website at AZpregnancyhealth.com. Thank you for joining us on Birth Mother Matters in Adoption, written and produced by Kelly Rourke-Scarry and edited by me, Ron Reigns.

Ron Reigns:
If you enjoy this podcast rate and review us wherever you listen to podcasts and as always thanks to Grapes for letting us use their song, I Don’t know as our theme song. Join us next time for Birth Mother Matters in Adoption for Kelly Rourke-Scarry, I’m Ron Reigns, and we’ll see you then.