EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Have you ever stopped to think about yourself and your story? If someone were to write your memoir what would it say? We all seek some level of authenticity but have trouble removing the labels and finding our whole story. Welcome to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. In this program we’ll explore diverse stories on identity to help determine what is truly yours. Now here is your host Diane Dewey.

What’s the story behind the story? We’ll find out on Dropping In. Our guests are today’s original thinkers. Conversations that spark new ways of seeing what’s going on. We bring it all to the table. Diverse perspectives, controversy, loving and singular voices. Magically stories reveal the common threads that link us. Experience the joys, the fist pumps, the detours and the hard-won truths of those who blaze the trail so that we might do the same and now here’s your host Diane Dewey.

 

Diane: Welcome to Dropping In everyone. We’ve just celebrated father’s day and before that mother’s day which can be fraught holidays for us adopted folks especially when we don’t know our birth mother and birth father when there is phantoms in our imagination. There’s always a sense of being unmoored and without complete information. How does the sense of belonging develop? What is family? Where is home? Here to talk about it are two authors who are adopted Jacob Taylor-Mosquera, author of I Met Myself in October a memoir of belonging and Julie Ryan McGue author of Twice a Daughter: A Search for Identity, Family, and Belonging. Welcome Jacob and Julie. Great to have you with us.

 

Julie: Great to be here.

 

Jacob: Hi. Nice to be here.

 

Diane: Jacob, you’re calling from Colombia. Is that correct?

 

Jacob: That is correct. I’m here in the city of Cali, where I was born and I just arrived about two days ago. I’ll be here for a month.

 

Diane: Oh lovely. That’s great. This is your native country so you’re back on home turf as it were.

 

Jacob: Yes home turf. I like that. Yes, I’ll be here visiting biological family members and friends and former co-workers and former students. I’m really excited to be here even though it’s Covid and we’re still doing all the protocols for keeping everyone healthy but thrilled to be back here.

 

Diane: Good. Well it’s great to have you with us. Julie Ryan McGue, I think you’re up in Michigan. Is that true?

 

Julie: Diane, I’m in the Chicago area and like our friend Jacob I’m getting ready to board a flight for a family wedding in Hilton Head so I’m sitting in a car and it’s raining like craziness here in Chicago.

 

Diane: A-ha. I think we could even hear it. This is great for you to make these herculean efforts to be with us on Dropping In. This is the beauty of technology. I want to dive right in first and foremost is Julie Ryan McGue, you are the pioneer and initiator and the person who reached out to me to engage us as a panel. I just want to thank you and also applaud you for creating communities around adoption.

 

Julie: Well thanks Diane. I first became aware of Jacob’s book about a year ago when it first came out and I was immediately intrigued by his story because of the international aspect and also because he had so many issues in dealing with his ethnicity and embracing that which is something that I’m also trying to do with my Native American heritage that I discovered in the course of my search.

 

Diane: Yes, that was a surprise. The one thing and yours truly I was adopted from an orphanage in Germany so while I don’t have ostensible racial issues I have the cultural blending but I couldn’t help but notice in reading both of your books which were great. I have to say I toured through both of them and were page turners. I noticed that both Jacob and Julie you had the word belonging in your subtitles. Let’s go straight to this notion of belonging. We can telescope out and say belonging to a culture, a nation, a tribe. We can also look at belonging as a personal sense of feeling good in one’s skin or even in one’s family. I’d just like to throw it out to you both how do you look at belonging? How would you describe it?

 

Julie: Well I can go first. I think one of the issues that I read in Jacob’s book that also I mirror is this conundrum of trying to belong to two families knowing that you belong to the adoptive family in which you grew up and feeling deep connection to those folks but then also delving into this other family that you know historically you belong to but you haven’t developed deep relationships with. It’s like a balance beam trying to figure out can you do both and welcoming both sides of that family into who you think you are and reconciling it. I think that is the deepest issue that adoptees face is do I belong to both? Do I want to choose sides? What does the family want of me? Do they want me just as much as I want to get to know them?

 

Diane: Jacob, your thoughts?

 

Jacob: I would agree with that. Also just to echo Julie, thank you so much for connecting all of us. It’s always fantastic to connect with other adoptees. Again just a big, big, big sincere gracias to both of you for this. Julie mentioned a really perfect word that I think is super appropriate for this. She said reconcile. I’m going to celebrate that as well as offer navigate when we talk about belonging. I think I agree with everything that Julie just mentioned but the navigation piece also is a big one for me. Like navigating these two families or in some cases more right and trying to really look at who holds the keys to belonging in a family in this case, who gives permission to and who do I feel like I can go to give me the keys to step into that space of authentic and sustainable belonging.

 

Those are the questions that I think have been turning around a lot since the book and looking at how is it my cousin here in Cali or is it my biological is it my adoptive mother and back in Seattle. Who holds the keys to those belongings? Always like kind of just trying to understand who and why and when the permission is given to belong. That’s what I’ve been thinking about a lot.

 

Diane: I wonder myself whether or not the word non-binary is applicable in the sense that the either or becomes very onerous to try to balance an either or equation versus a very fluid equation where it’s almost kaleidoscopic. There are different needs that arise for biological, different callings for adoptive and biological. I also wondered the word that Julie used I also think is operative is expectations because we’re also navigating very, very pronounced expectations from both of those families which let’s face it not all kids really have to do. We are very much adulting at a time when we’re experiencing being a child all over again and finding biological family but at the same time assuaging expectations and feelings of proprietorship from both of these families.

 

I wondered there was one account that I read once that basically said I felt like a tourist. I was a very accommodating tourist. I wanted to like my surroundings and the people who brought me in but I always felt like a tourist. I mean to me that’s a little stark but I do think that as much as each of us have loved deeply our adoptive families not just from a gratitude standpoint, not just from being thankful but just deeply loving in an authentic way who they are as people. I wondered then when we’re talking about belonging do you think that belonging is related to having information, to having complete…

 

Julie: It’s a really interesting question Diane and I think where I’m at middle age I believe that that is true. The folks that are lucky to be part of an open adoption where there is an exchange of information early on or at least access to information I think that they probably have a different sense of belonging. The fact that Jacob’s background was cut off from him for so many years and myself as well there’s this left feeling of wonderment and what if. I think those hold you back from belonging. I think that I would have been more deeply involved emotionally with my adoptive family. If I could have said this is my family, this is where I want to be. I want I know that I’m in the right place but because I had no answers about where I came from I think I was a hold out. I think I held back and I regret that that was the case because now that I have the answers that I thought I am completely involved in all of my family.

 

Diane: It’s a release. How about you Jacob? Can you speak to that point? I think you really elucidated that point in your book that belonging and information are essential. They’re components that are interactive.

 

Jacob: I think had it not been for the information I still would I think be no, I don’t think I know. I would still be searching vigorously for that sense of belonging. The information has been able to kind I think release is the perfect word there. Release, a sense of just tranquility and without that information I think it would still be running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to figure out where exactly I was able to getting back to that permission like who gives me permission to belong here in Colombia or in Seattle or both or neither. The information I think is absolutely fundamental, totally fundamental.

 

Diane: I think so too and I loved the word that Julie used in her book going through hoops to get information that everybody else just has about our birth, our origins, our place of origin. I really then connected to belonging to the human race. I had a sense of suddenly I belonged to the human race. I had an equivalency with other people for whom it’s normal to know where they came from. There was like a dropping into to humanity almost that at least I felt and I think that you both reflected it in your more than wonderful books.

 

I wonder if it’s a good idea to give listeners just a brief synopsis. Julie, you’ve been with us uh on Twice a Daughter and that is just a fascinating compelling story. Why don’t you Jacob just give us a thumbnail so people understand that dichotomy Seattle and Cali? Let’s get a little backfill for your story and where you are now in the process.

 

Jacob: Backstory would be I was born here in Cali, Colombia 1984 and I was adopted by a Caucasian family in Washington State. Not Seattle proper but about an hour and a half drive southwest of Seattle. Since then I’ve been back here. This is my eighth trip down here. I’ve reclaimed the language. I’m actually a Spanish teacher in Seattle now. We can get into how language ties into this too later on. I was able to go on a live television show here in Colombia in 2004. That was a suggestion from a taxi driver. Then that same night that I went on the television interview is when a woman called saying that she was my auntie. She turned out to be who she said she was. All because of the taxi ride and a random television interview led me to my biological family whom I’m really close to now and actually more close with my extended family here in Colombia than with my extended family back in Washington State. I feel comfortable here. I feel happy here. I feel productive here and I definitely feel like I have a sense of belonging here and in some cases more here than in Seattle so that’s a brief, brief little synopsis there for you.

 

Diane: The story is fascinating and I love the kismet of going on live television and locating your auntie but I really think it speaks to something larger which is the sense of belonging that we get from our culture, from our ethnicity and that it can transcend familial belonging. Like you just want to put up a sign that says it’s nothing personal but I belong here. I feel comfortable in my heritage. The psychologist William Glasser spoke to the basic human needs. They are freedom, fun which includes learning, power, love and belonging. This is just as strong a need as any. From an ethnic and cultural perspective we feel the blood of our ancestors moving through us. I strongly believe that. Rilke says, “They who passed away long ago still exist in us as predisposition, as a burden on our fate, as murmuring blood and a gesture that rises up from the depths of time.”

 

I think there’s a way in which we have we have a cellular identity. I wondered for example Julie, now that you know that you are not as Irish as you thought you were. You celebrated that identity before, that you have also French and indigenous population. Have you felt identification with those cultures more as a result of knowing that it was pronounced in the background?

 

Julie: I’ll just share a quick story from my upbringing. I had no idea obviously that I was a product of a Native American as well as a family that was French and German. They were farmers. When I was a child I kept wanting to be outside and garden. In fact one house that we lived in my mom let me carve up a patch in the backyard, in the back 30 if you will. I planted corn and I planted vegetables and all sorts of things. She kept wondering at me like why do you want to do this so badly. I said I don’t know. There’s something about being in the dirt, about seeing something grow and I just feel this need to be outside.

 

Obviously now I know my heritage is one of farmers and of indigenous people that loved to be outside. I found out that my birth father was a big hunter and a fisherman. He taught my brother that I met recently all of those skills. It is exactly what you say Diane that’s baked into your DNA. For adoptees we wonder sometimes where are these characteristics coming from. We used to joke about it calling it the mystery gene. I’m grateful that I know where it comes from now.

 

Diane: Always and Julie so eloquently put we have to cut for a commercial right now but we’re going to come back with Jacob and Julie on this panel of belonging, identity and transracial adoption. Don’t go away we’ll be right back on Dropping In.

 

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You are listening to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. We’d love to hear from you if you have a question or comment about the show. Send us an email to ddewey@trunordmedia.com. That’s the letter ddewey@trunordmedia.com. Now back to Dropping In.

 

Diane: Welcome back everyone. We’re here with Jacob Taylor-Mosquera and Julie Ryan McGue. We’re talking about adoption, trans-racial adoption, identity and a sense of belonging and how these fit together with information. I think that this panel is such a well-qualified one to address the idea that many people just don’t really realize the day-to-day implications of being adopted growing up, how you feel as a kid with a different color skin than your parents, how you feel as an adopted kid in an extended family that’s rife full of biological children. Let’s speak to that. I think Jacob it’s probably your turn. Why don’t you go ahead and give us some of your sense of what it was like.

 

Jacob: I think one of the one of the things that jumps to mind right away is the scene from the book in which I’m in middle school and I’m in a family, one of my grandparents’ wedding anniversary. We’re in this fancy Italian restaurant and everyone in the room except for me is white. I at the time had this pretty, pretty massive afro. Not the best look for me but anyway I walked over to get some punch for my table which included my mom and my grandparents. The people who were being celebrated. I wanted to get some punch for everyone at the table so I got a tray of punch. I was walking back and some older man snapped his fingers at me. Young man when you’re finished with that table you can bring some to ours as well. I looked and I thought well okay, I think maybe he’s in a wheelchair or maybe he has crutches. Maybe I shouldn’t be too quick to react but there were no crutches and no wheelchair.

 

He just expected because as I noticed later the waiting staff there were two black young men on the waiting staff, the catering staff I mean. He confused me with them even though they had their work uniforms on and I was dressed way differently than them and neither of them had an afro. It was just an interesting piece to say wow well, ah. Why is that and then I couldn’t go back and to my table with my family and complain or talk about it or vent because they wouldn’t be able to understand. That was just one example of growing up where I felt like I wanted to speak up but then I couldn’t because no one in my family, the people I was sitting down to dinner with every night, the people I said I loved and do love dearly but they could not relate and they never could. That felt isolating. It felt infuriating. It felt hopeless in many occasions.

 

The day to day was that, feeling very much a part of a family, a loving, caring environment in the home but once I stepped outside it was very different. They still acted of course like we were a family and I was their son and everything in public not a problem but they didn’t notice all the stares in the restaurants. They didn’t notice everything that I had to notice. I think that speaks to the day-to-day. It was just very isolating and trying to juggle that isolation with still feeling very supported and cared for as their son. It’s just very, very complicated experience growing up for sure.

 

Diane: It’s complicated and it’s confusing emotionally. You also didn’t see a lot of examples like yours outside of your home. You were also a community of mainly white people. I also wanted to differentiate, I mean now okay this was horrible. You received ethnic slurs, racial slurs and this sense though that you’re also not actually black. I mean you’re a Colombian. There was a lot for you to parse then. How did that pan out? When did you start I mean what frame of reference did you have to even refer to, to go to? How did you make that out or did you feel rather lost?

 

Jacob: First I get to say that I definitely have been comfortable in claiming my blackness now. We know that just being here in Colombia and around the world the African diaspora is vast. We had millions of African slaves, well enslaved Africans brought here to Colombia. I claim my blackness and I’m proud of it. I’m happy to declare that today and tomorrow and forever. The understanding though from my parents was that you’re right they didn’t understand how I could be black because they didn’t have the information that I have now. This was pre-internet. This is pre-blogs. This is pre Wi-Fi and all these and the cell phones and all this. They didn’t have really the resources to unpack Colombian history.

 

For them I was “just Colombian” but that was missing a big part of it because the world didn’t see me as “just Colombian”. The world saw me as a black young man. All right. I really felt like I needed to claim that and so my reference points first was Ken Griffey Jr. He’s a hall of famer baseball player for the Seattle Mariners. That was my only reference though. I didn’t have anyone in my family or neighborhood or sports teams to say oh look there’s someone who looks like me. Let’s go talk to them and understand what it means to be black in a white society. There was nothing so I had to build that and seek that out myself with my trips abroad.

 

Diane: It’s almost like your identity is a construct. It’s something that you have constructed. I think you have to go and find the pieces of yourself. I think also what I meant to say actually was that you would be presumed to be African-American. Of course you are black but just the sense that the cultural heritage is that much more erased because of an assumption that you’re African-American during that time. Then in the home no matter how well-intentioned that there was a color blindness. There was not an attunement to what you might be going through in your experience.

 

Julie, you told me and that is extraordinary amount of dissonance to Jacob to be coping with as a kid and adolescent. Julie, you told me a story that I found riveting about just the differential between being adopted and versus biological in your family. One Christmas would you reveal that?

 

Julie: I’d be happy to. It’s actually a scene that I’m writing about it what I hope to be a second memoir about what it was like to grow up adopted and also a twin. I did not remember this memory that I’m about to share but it is something that I’ve talked about with my adoptive mom many times. Obviously it hurt her deeply and one of the things that I do love about her is her ability to champion the underdog and certainly to be very protective like a mama bear about her babies.

 

My aunt was hosting us for a Christmas gathering at her home, one of my father’s sisters. There was probably about six to eight cousins at that point. There certainly were are a lot more now. We were sitting around the Christmas tree passing out the gifts that were under the tree and my sister and I were the only ones to not receive something from the aunt that was hosting us. My mom was very wise about it she quickly picked up on the fact that we had been neglected. We were very quick to leave the party and we found out subsequently that my aunt had deliberately not presented us with a gift like the other children.

 

We often talk about that. What was the construct there? Was she trying to say to my mother I don’t recognize these daughters of yours as part of the family? Was it something else that had stuck in her craw and obviously it was deliberate. We still puzzle this. It definitely was something that was harmful in our family. We were always on the lookout for that to happen again with this particular family.

 

Diane: It’s just painful to hear about it, to visualize it being the only two. The innocence of you’re adopted. You’ve done nothing to incur this wrath, this dissociation from a sense of belonging.

 

Julie: Why hurt a child? Why do that to a child who is very innocent and oblivious but to Jacob’s point with his story. There are the people out there that are oblivious as to the harm that they make by a harmless comment which what they deem is a harmless comment.

 

Diane: I want to go to the idea of coping mechanisms and how when I know that you weren’t aware of that Julie when it occurred but there were times for both of you when you had revelatory information where your mother first contacted you or through your aunt you Jacob could get in touch with your mother, your biological mother. There were these revolutionary moments. I had the sense that time slowed down that there was almost a sense of like an out of body experience until you could process what was happening in that moment. I think Julie you’ve had those as well with phone calls. Jacob, do you want to kind of address kind of this inner working of how it works when you finally get the thing you’re looking for and how you process it.

 

Jacob: I think for me the moment and that I really yearn for throughout my youth and throughout adolescence throughout everything was stepping through a door and meeting biological family members for the first time. That initial hug which becomes of course so much more than just a hug. For me it was that moment. It was in 2004. It was here in Cali after talking to my aunt on the phone. Her demanding, not asking, demanding that I come to her place that same night. I wanted to wait until the weekend to kind of just process things and she was really adamant that no, we have a cake. We have a bottle of rum. You need to come and meet your family now. Okay yes, let’s do it.

 

That for me was, that moment I think when you talk about out-of-body experience Diane, that’s the one that I felt that in that moment. It was almost like I was a fly or a bird on the on the wall across the street watching myself go in to that door, seeing not necessarily. I wasn’t looking for people who looked like me. I think that a lot of adoptees chase that but I wasn’t focused on that. I was focused on being in a room with people who I knew had my blood. That for me was, I had never felt so elated, so happy, so pure in my life. Just to sit there. Then I was shocked because I couldn’t, my language was still developing and these other things but it was that moment was golden and then how to process that was I stopped other obligations that I had in the city.

 

I was volunteering at the orphanage that I’m from and I had to stop that and just to be in their presence every day and every night for the next three or four months was the goal. It was just to be there and soak it up. That was it and then after that finding fellow adoptees, not only Colombian adoptees but domestic adoptees, Korean adoptees, everything just to find community for opportunities like the one we’re doing right now which has been my way of processing. It’s bouncing ideas off of and experiences off with other adoptees has been fundamental for me.

 

Diane: Well there’s a couple layers there at least. One is the layer of connectedness, the plasma connectedness that you feel when you’re meeting biological family. I think that then there’s another, a shared experience connectedness. Both are extremely profound so that when you’re working with other adoptees or like when you went back to the orphanage Jacob. Julie, you also are part of a support group for adoptees through your work since Twice a Daughter was published, in your outreach, in your community building you’ve actually located half a dozen other pairs of twins that were adopted through catholic charities. Can you describe some of the connectedness that you feel effortlessly with these groups that you work with?

 

Julie: Well there’s two points to your question. The first part is the fact that I’m an identical twin. One of the blessings of catholic charities as an adoption agency was they had a policy of keeping twins together. I had the fortunate childhood of being raised with my twin. We shared so many experiences and adventures. I do attribute my relationship to her in how I was able to deal with the many ups and downs of our adoption search but that being said as a result of promoting my book I’ve had probably five sets of twins that were adopted through catholic charities reach out to me.

 

I always wonder how many us could there be. There’s five that I know of right now and we’re trying to stay connected. I’m sure there’s more. I’m curious if any of the listeners will make contact as a result of this conversation. That’s the second piece of being connected. Then the adoption support group also through catholic charities that I’m a part of. We have been virtual in our meetings but religious in getting together every two or three months. It’s been impactful. I would give a plug for the virtual communication just because so many folks are dispersed across the country and now they’re still able to connect through one place which was the foundation of where we began. That was Saint Vincent’s orphanage in Chicago.

 

I do want to mention Jacob that there’s a beautiful scene in your book about going back to your orphanage and your feeling of it in the beginning. I had that same experience with my sister. We went back to Saint Vincent’s in Chicago. We did it together and two in one of the adoptees that I’m in contact with talk about how important it was to go back and to see the place where they lived for the beginning of their life that really there was no history of. It predated their relationship with their family and certainly no family of origin was there with us. I think that little snapshot of time that we are able to imagine when we go back to our orphanage is also very impactful for the adoptee.

 

Diane: We’re connected by a sense of survivorship for one thing and also a spirit, a spirit of look at the resilience that we’ve manifested. Look at our ability to create and to compile an identity for ourselves, to belong in many worlds in several families and also to get a kind of a spiritual, it is a spiritual connection without any stratification. When you went back to the orphanage Jacob, I loved that scene as well. It was a real touchstone for me. There was no stratification. There was no gentrification, no educational background, no socioeconomical, no racial, no nothing. It’s the bond of the experience. It’s intensely profound.

 

Julie, you’re right about the internet and connecting us through this broadcast. We’re speaking to people worldwide. We have many listeners in China and in the former Soviet Union. It’ll be very interesting to see what happens from this outreach. We’ve got a pause for a commercial break now. We’ll be back with Jacob and Julie for more on Dropping In.

 

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You are listening to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. We’d love to hear from you if you have a question or comment about the show. Send us an email to ddewey@trunordmedia.com. That’s the letter ddewey@trunordmedia.com. Now back to Dropping In.

 

Diane: Welcome back everyone. We’re here with Jacob Taylor-Mosquera and Julie Ryan-McGue. Jacob is the author of I Met Myself in October a memoir of belonging and Julie Ryan McGue wrote Twice a Daughter: A Search for Identity, Family, and Belonging and is at work on a next book of coming of age stories about her twin and surviving and thriving in their family. I want to talk to the point about revealing cultures. Ostensibly the thing that we have as a panel in common is adoption but it’s a real eye-opener to read each other’s stories. I enjoy it so much and feel so grateful to have read these books.

 

I want to talk to you Jacob about one of the things that you dismantled for me which is the stereotypes around Colombia even as a place. That it’s rife with drug lords, that there’s all kinds of violence, that you have no hope of a peaceful existence when in fact you brought us the hood, the neighborhoods, the community, the people, the warmth, the experience of communally having food, no differentiation between who was what to whom, a kind of a one big family feeling. How did you feel about opening up the world of Colombia to others and what’s been the feedback since you wrote this book?

 

Jacob: Great, great question again Diane. I think I love how you put that opening up Colombia. It’s been fascinating to see over the last, especially the last seven eight years how many tourists I see down here during my trips now especially here in in the city of Cali. It’s a city of roughly just about three million people. Just that alone is a big thing for a lot of my friends in Europe and the States they didn’t really realize. The media I think has been a little bit cruel to Colombia and Colombians. I’ve been stopped at the Canadian border a couple times and detained in Miami because I was bringing back coffee but I was coming from Colombia.  The perception was there was something more than coffee in my coffee bags.

 

I think it’s been really fascinating and thrilling honestly for me to be a little kind of mini ambassador of Colombian culture and Colombian people in Seattle. Seattle’s not exactly, it’s not like New York or Miami where we have tons of Colombian restaurants and cafes and adoptees and immigrants. Colombians are still there’s a significant amount now in Seattle but still a knowledge about the country is still really limited. With my Spanish classes, with my history classes I’ve been able to kind of open people’s eyes a little bit to the reality of the country rather than just what people have seen in Narcos and other places. All right. There’s so much more to the country like you mentioned the people I think especially here in Cali are some of the warmest people and most welcoming people that I’ve ever met and I’ve been fortunate enough to be in quite a few different places for varying amounts of time.

 

Then I think the second part of your question was which part again was it the, I forget which part was the second part there Diane.

 

Diane: You were finding home and I wondered I think you’ve basically addressed it in terms of what we will want to hear what the feedback has been but I also want to  address something that it seems to allude to which is impostor syndrome. You no longer have to pass for something else. Julie, you’ve also talked about this. I think Jacob you’re opening up of this world to us is a huge gift. Julie, you also experienced imposter syndrome in a slightly different nuanced way. Let’s just talk about that for a minute. How did you feel in terms of I’m not the real child, all the things, the aspects of imposter syndrome and having to pass?

 

Julie: One of the things about being adopted from the late 1950s and 60s is in that era of adoption history the agencies were trying to match babies in looks and background to their adoptive families. While I had the same coloring and physical characteristics as my adoptive family quite often people would say oh you look just like your mother. Inwardly I’d say well of course I don’t but if people see that then that’s fine. I was very polite about it. I came to find out once I met my birth mother that indeed she does look in a lot of ways like my adoptive mom. Definitely I could have passed for my adoptive mom’s biological daughter but it imposed on me this feeling of I am not living the life that I was born into. Therefore the existence that I’m going about from day to day is a bit of a lie.

 

We talked earlier about me not being as Irish as I thought I was. My family was a big Irish catholic family and we celebrated everything to do about Irish culture. We’ve been to Ireland many times. I married a man with an Irish last name. Inwardly when I was embarked on my adoption search I worried. What am I going to find out? Am I going to find out I’m not Irish and how am I going to deal with that with my identity. I did find out that there is Scott Irish. That’s a smaller percentage certainly than I was making myself out to be but that whole reality was definitely part of feeling an imposter.

 

Diane: Yes and I think you took this identity. You carried it with you. I am Irish and people I think don’t realize the implications of that. You may have made life choices based on your concept of yourself, your self-concept as being Irish. I married an Irish man. Maybe that was a felt connection. Obviously that’s also love but the sense that we’re acting on false information. I think the other thing that you allude to about you hear comments all the time you look like your dad. I actually thought the same thing about the achievement but and I was the only one in my family. I shared with my father brown eyes. There’s that politeness. You have to be polite and say oh thank you very much meanwhile you’re instantly transported back in your mind to I’m not related to these people. I actually have no biological connection to these people. I mean there’s a reverberation that occurs. I think a relinquishment of that politeness is one of the big reliefs of learning identity.

 

I wanted to also address something that both of you experienced and I did too which is the fantasy that your biological and adoptive families are going to magically collapse into one another and love one another and embrace one another as you do. How has that been Jacob for you busting that myth?

 

Jacob: The big one. My fantasy was definitely more related to my biological mother and my relationship with her which I mean listeners will find in the book not the case. This time that I’m here for example I’m not going to see her. I have no plans of seeing her. You can look more into the book for reasons as to why that is. I think what’s been really great about my adoptive mom especially is she came down to surprise me and met several members of my biological family here. I was able to be the interpreter there between English and Spanish. It was a dream come true. I think my fantasy was fulfilled in that regard.

 

Since then however it’s been I think I really have now let go of that that notion that I can bring the two together and have it this be some kind of harmonious eternal relationship. I think they both are just in their own little worlds with me now as part of them both but I had to lower my expectations there significantly. They still ask about each other and we’ll share some pictures on WhatsApp and some videos here and there but I think right now I’m content with just knowing that I have two and they have knowledge of each other. They can ask me about each other whenever they want. We’ve worked out I think a pretty positive relationship, just a triangle there of support and love which has been great.

 

Diane: It’s a reconciliation of the two families. As we said in the beginning I really had great admiration for your mother to come down, to come to Colombia.  I thought it was very unifying and healing. We have just a few minutes well, actually we have less than that. We have astoundingly little time left. Julie, you did experience what you call a level of tolerance for your adoptive parents’ reaction. If it hadn’t been for that plot twist that we can’t reveal at the end of your book they may never have accepted but you did have finally that experience of acceptance. How was that for you and just briefly?

 

Julie: It was like some of the points in Jacob’s book. It’s like the plot twisted dramatically towards the end of my search. My mother who was very reluctant to have me going down this path even at middle age turned on a dime from being a welcome supporter of most my family. My relationship with both of my birth parents’ families is similar to Jacob’s. They continue to ask about one another and I share information.

 

Diane: Julie, I’m sorry. We have to finish. We’re closing now. I’m sorry to interrupt you. The truth is necessary to cultivate our sense of individualism and belonging. From Jacob I think we can all agree this has been so valuable. Thank you both Jacob and Julie for being here. Thank you to our engineers Matt Weidner and Aaron Keller, to our producer Robert Giolino and to most of all, to you our listeners. Remember to stay safe and it’s the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Till next week you can find Jacob Taylor-Mosquera on social media and Julie Ryan McGue as well. Thank you both. Until next week thank you for dropping in.

 

Thank you so much for dropping in. Please join Diane Dewey again next Friday at 8 AM Pacific Time and 11 AM Eastern Time on the Voice America Variety Channel. We’ll see you then.