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 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.

Father:
And 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 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.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
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 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. After releasing the previous two episodes of the Birth Mother Matters In Adoption podcast, we’ve received many thanks for sharing this with the audience.

Ron Reigns:
We’ve also gotten a lot of requests to hear the interview Kelly did with these two brave and candid birth parents to present it in its entirety. Obviously, that would be longer than our normal episodes, but Kelly and I both thought it was a really good idea, so here is the full interview.

Father:
All these children that are just innocent. They had nothing to do with anything, and all I seen was money. I didn’t care about nothing and nobody until that moment of me realizing that it was me, that I was the problem with the neighborhood, and that I was the problem with everybody’s families and why all these kids were getting neglected, and why the women are pregnant, and the babies, they’re pretty much high.

Father:
And I was a source of it, and I just couldn’t do it no more. I knew that if I didn’t break the cycle somewhere along the line that I would be the source of making society so much worse. And it’s like, who am I to make the choices about everybody’s life? I’m nobody. And in my mind, it’s just wrong in so many ways.

Father:
Before, I didn’t care. It didn’t mean nothing to me. If this girl was high, getting high, while she was pregnant, doing heroin or smoking meth, I didn’t care as long as I got money. It meant nothing to me.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
And you made a lot of money?

Father:
Oh yeah.

Mother:
And he used to make it a lot of money.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
So what’s a lot of money? If you had to say-

Father:
$200,000 in a week.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Come again?

Mother:
$200,000 in a week.

Father:
They even did a newspaper article on my brother. This is the one who everything fell on was my older brother. They took everything from us. They took everything, and everything went off on him, and the newspaper article was about how we made $200,000 in a week. And all they did was just sit there and collect and do whatever I told them to.

Father:
You’d never really see their faces ever in the neighborhood. I was the one putting out there doing all the work. I was the one putting everybody on the neighborhood. It was all me. They knew it. A lot of people don’t know it, but it was all me. And it’s like, if it wasn’t for me, they would’ve still been nobody. They would’ve just had all this (beep) that they could do nothing with.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
You can’t just stop or turn that off. How did you do it? Did you go to rehab?

Father:
I just stopped and turned it off all on my own.

Mother:
It was pretty much-

Father:
… I didn’t go nowhere.

Mother:
It was pretty much my daughter being taken and stuff that-

Father:
I didn’t go anywhere.

Mother:
… that changed a lot of his outlook on a lot of things, because for months, he tried to get me to go to UMOMs and everything like that, and I was just stuck in the streets pretty much. And even though I was taking care of my daughter, and she had everything she needed … she had all her clothes; she had food every night, everything like that; she had a place to sleep … I was just consumed with the streets too at the same time.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
In what way?

Father:
In every way. Literally, if she seen somebody that was selling drugs, and if she felt like that was the person that shined the most in the neighborhood, that’s who she liked to attract to. Even though she’s not realizing 95% of everybody that’s in the neighborhood that are doing good, they come to me, and they’re like, “Hey, I need your help.”

Father:
And it’d be me the ones that put these people on. And it’d be me the one that make them shine, and don’t nobody ever see it because that’s what I do. That’s what I do best. I get these little rundown drug dealers that nobody respects in the neighborhood. Nobody ever really messes with them too much. And I’ll go and I’ll take them under my wing. I’ll give them a bunch of dope, and nobody sees what I give them.

Father:
They know what I do for them, and they love me to death for it, but it’s like, I already did what I did, and I can’t take it back. They’re already who they are, but I used to literally take these guys and get them, mold them into what I want them to be, give them a bunch of drugs and send them off to the world.

Mother:
And he was just always off dealing with other girls and stuff like that that would-

Father:
I used to be a pimp.

Mother:
… that would go out and ho for him and stuff like that. And so I was pretty much running around the streets by myself. Even though we were together, I was running around the streets by myself and stuff like that, and so I’d stay from house to house, whether it was dope house or not, just trying to basically stay safe with my daughter, trying to keep her with a roof over her head so she wasn’t out in the cold, wasn’t out in the rain and stuff like that, even though it was a bad environment for her and stuff like that. And I know that, but it was just like, at the time, that’s all I had.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
And so you were still kind of interested in him, and you were a pimp at the time? See, the reason I’m asking you guys these questions is because I’m on the other side, so I’ve got to learn because I’m trying to help other people. And so if you don’t teach me, you’re not going to learn this in a book.

Father:
No, you can’t. It’s an impossibility.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
I know.

Father:
I call it the art of manipulation through heroin, especially when girls are on heroin. And people think that these girls are hoeing for me, but really, they’re not. What I’m doing is I’m literally fronting them drugs here because I know they need it, and I’ll give them heroin upfront.

Father:
And I’ll just keep giving it to them and keep giving it to them. And when they run up a bill, I make them go get it by any means necessary. That means if they got to go and post an ad on the internet and have to sell the crack of their (beep) for this, that’s what they got to go do, and they go get my money from me, not because I’m really pimping them. It’s because they owe me money, and I’m a drug dealer, and they want more drugs from me-

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
So they’ll go do anything-

Father:
… so they’ll go do anything, whatever’s necessary, to give me my money.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
So what would be the consequences? What if they said “I don’t have it”?

Father:
Then I would just cut them off, and they’d be sick, and nobody in the neighborhood would mess with them, and they’d always be sick.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Nobody would mess with them, meaning …

Mother:
Nobody would give them dope because he was the one supplying them, so if they didn’t want to pay him-

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
So you really did hold all the strings.

Father:
Yeah. So, it went like this: If she doesn’t give me my money, and she goes to try to mess with the next dealer, I’ll just say, “Hey man, look, check it out. She owes me money. Don’t give her nothing, and if you give her something, then I’m not going to give you nothing.” So, they look at it like this.

Father:
They would rather not give this girl nothing at all than not be able to get anything from me, because then if they’re not getting anything from me, then they’re not making any money, because I was a bully. I’d come with my AK, and I’d sit down inside their dope house and sell dope, sell dope to them, and then sell all my dope out of their house and let them see that there’s nothing they could do about it. It’s either they work for me, or they work for nobody, or they just don’t work at all.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
And you held this power because of the gun?

Father:
No. Well, yeah, because of that and because of the drugs and because of the people that were so infatuated with who I made myself that they backed me. So it’s like, either you’re going to do it anyway, or you’re going to have all these young guerillas that don’t want nothing but to earn stripes. They want to earn stripes. They want to earn clout.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
A reputation in the neighborhood.

Father:
They want to earn the position and reputation and everything in between. And these little youngsters know that if they do what I want them too, they’re going to live a good life. They’re going to have their own hoes.

Father:
They’re going to have their own dope house. They’re going to have their own gun, and they’re going to have money. They’re going to have a car. They’re going to have everything that goes with the life if they do what I ask them to, so it’s like-

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
What’s the average age?

Father:
Nothing under 18. I don’t play that (beep). These other guys that run around, and they bully these little young … I don’t do that (beep). I don’t give a damn-

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
….kids.

Father:
… and a lot of times, even when they’re 18, I’ll get them, and I’ll give them an option. I ask them a question: Is this really what you want to be doing with your life? If they tell me no, I just give them some money, enough to where they’ll be okay, and send them on their way.

Father:
“Here, go do something different with your life, because this isn’t where you want to be at.” I mean, even though I am who I am and I’ve done a lot of things, I still had some type of conscience about the things that I was doing. And when they’re young … 18, 19, 20 … you could easily mold them into what you want them to be in every type of way, shape, form, and fashion. It’s almost like brainwashing an individual, and when they’re young like that, if they’re already too far gone, I’ll get them, and then yeah, wasn’t no problem. But if they’re not, then I try to send them on the right path.

Mother:
Like with me. When I was 15, and we first met each other over at his mom’s house and stuff like that, he asked me, he was like … because I used to sell crack when I was 15. I started selling crack when I was 14 before he got out of prison, and that was just basically to survive, to get food for me and my mom.

Mother:
My mom worked at Taco Bell and everything like that, but by the time she paid rent and everything like that, we didn’t have much. So, without her knowing, I would just go, and I started selling crack. And I was selling crack for a couple years, and then we met each other, and he was like, “Well, how do you feel about selling dope?”

Mother:
And at first, I told him, I was like, “I don’t mess with that,” because just everybody I knew lives were messed up from it. So he left it at that. A couple months later, I call him, and I asked him for some dope, for some G. And he was like, “You’re messing with that?”

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Okay, back up. What is G?

Mother:
Meth.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
I don’t mean to be-

Father:
Crystal meth.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Okay, sorry.

Mother:
Yeah. And he was like, “You’re messing with that stuff now?” And my first reaction was, “No, I’m not. No, no.” I wasn’t going to tell him, “Yeah, I’m doing dope now.” And he’s like, “Yeah, I’ll be there in a minute.” Never showed up, and then next time I seen him, we were hanging out at his mom’s house.

Mother:
And I had a pipe and some dope in a bag and stuff. And I loaded a bowl, and I hit it, and I was like, “Want to smoke with me?” And he’s like, “Yeah, let me see that.” And he grabbed it, and he looked at, and he was like, “This ain’t how you load a bowl. Let me see your sack,” so I handed him the sack.

Mother:
He turned around and walked out the door with it, and I’m sitting here like, “Did he just rob me?” That’s how I felt at the time. “Did he just rob me?” And me at that time, I didn’t realize it, but now I realize it: He was just trying to get me to not smoke because when I first met him, what I told him was that I didn’t mess with that.

Father:
I was only out for seven months at the time. I got out middle of 2012, and then I got arrested in the beginning of 2013, so I wasn’t out that long when I first met her. When I got out, she was grown. With the second go around, when I got that second time, they tried to R.I.C.O. Act me in the end.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
What does that mean?

Father:
They tried to give me natural life for criminal mob boss syndicate, for money laundering, for drug trafficking, for guns. So one of my brothers, he had 42 counts of misconduct involving weapons, four sales charges to an ATF agent, a bunch of drug charges. They tried to hit us with a bunch of money laundering charges-

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
How did you only get four years?

Father:
Because we had the same prosecutor, and she was a new prosecutor, so when she went to file, she misfiled. She didn’t know what she was doing. She tried to hit the R.I.C.O. Act on us and didn’t know how to file it properly, and because she misfiled her R.I.C.O. Act, we walked.

Mother:
The first time I ever got arrested, I was with his brother that got charged with 42-gun charges. They raided the house that we were staying at, and I just so happened to be over there picking up my stuff. And I walked up, and I told him, I was like, “You’re about to get raided.” And he’s like, “No, I’m not. No, I’m not,” so he goes and gets in the shower.

Mother:
And I’m still up there, because there were a couple of people in the house. And I was just watching his back, basically, making sure they didn’t do anything. And one of the people, about a year prior to that, I told him, I was like, “This girl’s going to set you up. She’s going to set you up. I’m telling you right now, just the questions she was asking me, she’s not in it for you.”

Mother:
And sure enough, we got raided. The police knocked on the door. She got up and answered it and just opened the door for them, and then next thing I know, there’s 30 officers swarming the apartment. He’s on house arrest at the time with an ankle monitor for gun charges, and there’s three guns laying out. Two of them weren’t actual guns.

Mother:
One was just a Green Gas Uzi. The other one was a 45-pellet gun, but they were the ones that look real, so in any case, if they look real enough that you can commit a crime like robbing somebody, you get charged with real possession of weapons.

Father:
Well, what they are is they’re less lethal firearms. They’re actual, real guns that were converted into air-soft pistols is what a lot of people fail to realize. They just changed the top slide out to where the bullets can’t pop out of them, and if you were to take them apart, the bottom part slide and the trigger part, the actual firing pin mechanism that’s there, is flipped around the other way. So, all it does is just pop the BB out. You see what I’m saying? But-

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
So why use those?

Father:
They take old firearms that are probably-

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Recycle them.

Father:
Yeah, and recycle them and turn them into air-soft pistols.

Mother:
And then you can easily make them back to a regular gun with no problem. Just takes a little bit of elbow grease, and it’s back into a regular pistol.

Father:
It takes a top slide, a recoil spring, and a firing pin, and that’s it, and you can convert it right back into a firearm like nothing.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
And then-

Father:
Oh, and the barrel. You got to change the barrel out.

Mother:
And so when they came in, they arrested him automatically. They pulled him out of the shower, put some shorts on him and put him in cuffs and put him in the car and took him to jail. And I’m the only one left.

Mother:
That’s how I knew the girl set us up is because they didn’t ask her no questions, not name, not, nothing. They just were like, “Okay, you’re free to go.” And so, I was the last one left in the apartment. They took him to jail.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Why not you?

Mother:
Well, they hadn’t taken me to jail yet. I was only 18. I had just turned 18, had no charges, never been arrested, in juvie, or anything like that. And they’re all like, “What are you doing here?” They’re looking at me like, “You don’t even belong in this scene,” basically, because I had never been in trouble. And I asked them for the wallet, which was his wallet. I claimed his wallet so that I could put his money on his books.

Mother:
And the girl that set us up had taken the wallet and his sack of dope and put it in a little bag together, so when they found the wallet, they found a quarter ounce of dope. And they were like, “Well, look it here. Whose is this?” And I looked at them. I said, “To be honest with you, I’m going to tell you right now, it’s not mine, but I don’t know whose it is.”

Mother:
And so they took me to jail and charged me with a quarter ounce of dope, possession of dangerous drugs. That was the first charge I ever caught, and that was in 2014. Up until 2017, in the middle of 2017, I was dealing with that charge.

Father:
Yeah. So, around the time when I came to the realization that I was messing up the neighborhood, she was pregnant. She had already given up 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.

Father:
And she was scared, but my baby’s mother was like, “Hey, it doesn’t matter if she’s doing drugs. They’ll protect her,” so we ended up meeting a lawyer, and then she gives the baby up for adoption-

Mother:
That was…

Father:
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 still was messing with the adoption agency and stuff like that. And then a little bit later on, she gets pregnant, and our lives were just flipped upside down, going crazy and doing all kinds of wild stuff.

Father:
And I felt like giving the child up for adoption is probably 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. Obviously, you can look at me and see that I’m not all there and that I used to be a gangbanger.

Father:
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 the streets and doing wrong, I had my hands in it. Literally any and everything, I had my hands in it, and I would go all the way from-

Mother:
And his tattoos on him that say … Read right here. No, on the …

Father:
Oh yeah.

Mother:
From selling drugs.

Father:
But-

Mother:
He used to stand there like that all the time.

Father:
Yeah, because I don’t play that. It’s like you could have-

Mother:
Cash only.

Father:
You could have somebody that was 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.

Father:
And now somebody that once used to be a good friend of yours is now your enemy because you done messed him up, or you sent 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 gave credit to anybody to alleviate all the extra stuff that can come along with it. You know?

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Yeah.

Mother:
So 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.

Father:
I thought about being a youth counselor and getting these young kids that are in the neighborhood that think that they know what they’re doing, that 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 old that everybody else sees, 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. The one that I’ve been working on is this young kid.

Father:
He’s only 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 you try to get high in the room with me, I’m going to beat you up. You’re going to have some respect for me.

Father:
If you feel like you want to smoke in a room where I’m at, just say, “Hey, check it out, OG. 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.

Mother:
At first, he didn’t.

Father:
He would go smoke in the bathroom.

Mother:
At first, he would look at him like … 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.

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 some of my-

Mother:
He wants to go back to school.

Father:
… my little homeboys and stuff like that, I make them threaten him like, “Hey, he has a curfew now. He’s not allowed to 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 he don’t, he’s going to get beat up, and he’s afraid of it.

Father:
And he goes and does what he’s supposed to. Eight o’clock, he’s inside, because he’s not allowed to be outside past there. He was just a kid. He had no business being out here, and he’ll stay in until the sun comes up, and that’s when he can go out.

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

Father:
I probably wouldn’t be this way, but I was raised different. My dad was a gangbanger. He’s from Southside 35th. I didn’t meet him until I was 10 years old because he tried to kill somebody.

Mother:
Over a poncho.

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

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, took the poncho, and walked off.

Father:
See, what other people don’t know about me though is I’m a product of rape. My mother and my father split ways after this and then went a long 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, stabs her in the back. She gots a cut on her back 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?

Father:
Because he was so hurt on the fact that she had left him. My dad’s 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’s true blue mean?

Father:
It’s as real as it gets.

Mother:
Somebody that likes blood.

Father:
No, he’s a murderer, stone-cold murderer. Don’t get no worse than that.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Is he in prison now?

Father:
I don’t know. No, no. 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 Sandman, and my mother would trade me for drugs-

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
I’m familiar with that, actually.

Father:
I used to live in the Sandman 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 were the worst times in my life. Yeah.

Mother:
We’ll be sitting there playing around, and I’ll try to tickle him, and he just-

Father:
I don’t like being tickled. I don’t like-

Mother:
… automatically-

Father:
… being pulled down.

Mother:
… “Don’t.”

Father:
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. I’ve never been able to be affectionate towards another individual.

Father:
Public display of affection, I can’t do it now because of it. I can’t be affectionate towards another person in so many ways. It takes a really long time for me to even be affectionate towards anybody-

Mother:
For a long time-

Father:
I just really started being affectionate towards her just recently-

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

Father:
… and I’ve been with her for three years. And she doesn’t understand it. It’s like, I lived a hard life.

Mother:
Sometimes he’ll just sit there, and he’ll be like this when I give him a hug, and I’m just like …

Father:
And then-

Mother:
But I don’t-

Father:
… when I got older-

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

Father:
When I got older, and my mother seen 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 I was only 16, 17, 18, 19. She’d take me on these things.

Father:
She called them amazing adventures of a superhoe, 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 into 24th Street and Van Buren, every single last alley.

Mother:
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.

Father:
I was 19.

Mother:
Oh, you were 19 at the time?

Father:
I was 19 years old. It was around the time when Mark Goodell was running around. And my mom was one of the very few people to ever escape him. He ripped a big patch of my mom’s hair out. She was missing a big patch of hair from him ripping her hair off of her head, but my mother escaped him.

Father:
He beat her up real bad, but 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 makes me go get her dope. And as I’m walking, there was this one girl.

Father:
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 hoeing, 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.

Father:
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 couldn’t see nothing and I couldn’t barely stand, he hits me, punches me in the face, and I still get back up. He just turned around and walked away.

Father:
But I had a hole. I had three hoodies and a beanie on. It was the wintertime. He knocked all three of my hoodies off, knocked my beanie off, knocked this big piece 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, blew this all back like this. And I had just pulled 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?

Father:
I took the bus to the hospital by myself because nobody wanted to go with me. They had knew 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:
And what is that?

Father:
It’s 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.”

Father:
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 are 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 when the doctor tells me that I had been shot, that’s when it registered.

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 maybe 12 hours, and then they discharged me. I lived a really, really rough life, and the last thing I ever want for any of my kids is to live the life that I lived.

Father:
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 can 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.

Father:
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.

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.

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.

Father:
That’s a beautiful thing to me. I respect you guys in so many ways.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Thank you.

Father:
Thank you.

Mother:
Yeah, I was telling him when we got-

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

Mother:
Yeah, when I first called.

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

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.

Mother:
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-

Father:
They was charging us $185 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:
Because he’s non-profit.

Father:
Yeah.

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

Father:
They didn’t do none of that. They wouldn’t even help me none, and it’s like, I have a-

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:


Father:
… lot of kids, and I kept telling the man, it’s like, “You think that men don’t get postpartum? Well, we do.”

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Yes, they do.

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

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Yes, they do.

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

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Oh no. We’ll pay for counseling. We’ll pay for anything.

Mother:
And see, that’s the thing is I was sitting there, and I’m unpacking everything and just looking him. 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.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Right.

Mother:
I was like, “This is just crazy- “

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
You have to do this for the right reasons.

Mother:
Yeah, you guys treated us so well. You guys gave us food so that we weren’t sitting there hungry, gave us dishes and everything like that.

Mother:
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 are people. You’re not just-

Mother:
… just to eat.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
… somebody to put in a hotel. Yeah, I get it.

Mother:
I’m sitting there looking at it. So far, I really like 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.

Father:
One of my uncles was adopted from when he was a baby. He was a preemie though, and my aunt 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.

Father:
And then 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 him down the toilet.

Kelly Rourke-Scarry:
Adoption is a beautiful thing.

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.

Ron Reigns:
You can check out our blogs on our website at azpregnancyhelp.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. If you enjoy this podcast, rate and review us wherever you listen to podcasts.

Ron Reigns:
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.