111 – This Is What I Hoped You’d Be Like

Who Am I Really?

English - March 07, 2020 11:00 - 51 minutes - 70.5 MB - ★★★★★ - 211 ratings
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Previous Episode: 110 – We’ve Wanted This Our Whole Lives

Next Episode: 112 – My Whole Life Is a Success

Ginger who lives in Los Angeles, began her reunion journey as a teenager who found her birth mother, saw her picture, emailed her, but never made the leap to meeting the woman. In adulthood Ginger had given birth to twins who emotionally impacted her and reminded her of the story of her own birth shared by her birth mother via email many years before, so she resurrected their relationship. This episode is unique because we captured Ginger’s story in the lead up to her cross country reunion, then we followed up shortly after to see how things were in the aftermath of hours spent face to face with her birth mother. This is Ginger’s journey.

Ginger (00:05):

And I sent it to her and she wrote back and said, you have no idea what you have done for me. You have just uncapped 34 years of guilt and shame and made me feel so much better. And she asked me, would you be willing to, to meet and I said, Oh yeah, I definitely would.

Damon (00:31):

Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? This is who am I really a podcast about adoptees that have located and connected with their biological family members. I'm Damon Davis and on today's show is Ginger who lives in Los Angeles. Her reunion started as a teenager who found her birth mother emailed her, but never made the leap to meeting the woman in adulthood. Ginger had given birth to twins who emotionally impacted her and reminded her of the story of her own birth shared by her birth mother many years before. So she resurrected their relationship. This episode is unique because we captured Ginger's story in the lead up to her cross country reunion. Then after to see how things were in the aftermath of an hour, spent face to face with her birth mother. This is Ginger's journey.

Damon (01:37):

Back in the summer of 2019, I was sitting on a plane ready for takeoff. When I checked email one last time before setting my phone on airplane mode, I found an email from Ginger who said she was meeting her birth mother in a few days. And she knew there was only going to be one chance to capture herself in the version of who she was before reunion. So she hoped we could record before and after interviews. I immediately recognized that she was absolutely right. We are different people before reunion, then we are after. So I emailed her back to say, yes, she admitted she had been listening to who am I really a lot in the days leading up to her reunion,

Ginger (02:21):

I was listening to it thinking, Oh my gosh, all these things are going through my mind about like, what's about to happen. And this is like an interesting spot to be in like that I'm in right now. And I won't have this spot anymore after this weekend. It's like, my life is going to be like before and after this weekend, it's going to be like, I'm a, I'm going to be a different person with different views. So I'm like, I shouldn't, I don't know. I just want to record and like tell the story like, as it happens so that, uh, the emotions are raw.

Damon (

Ginger (00:05):

Damon (00:31):

Damon (01:37):

Ginger (02:21):

Damon (02:55):

Since I was traveling, I didn't have my normal recording setup. So I spoke to Ginger

Damon (03:00):

Through my laptop with ear buds and their terrible microphone while sitting in the lobby of a library in Sacramento, California. So I hope you'll forgive me for the sound quality of part one of this episode, as we traded in for the experience of hearing Ginger's story, as she packed her bags for her reunion day. So what you're about to hear is Ginger's perspective before reunion in August of 2019, then her recount in September, 2019 of her reunion, two weeks before our call Ginger celebrated her 35th birthday. She said she felt like she was living in an alternate universe, given the surreality of what was about to happen in her life. Ginger admitted that her main thought was concerned that she would fly to Kentucky. Then her birth mother would back out of their meeting. So this was an interesting interview because we could only record the first half without any knowledge of how things would turn out. So like I always do. I asked Ginger to describe her life in her home and in her community as an adoptee, Ginger grew up in a small coal mining town called Harlan, Kentucky way down in the Southeast corner, near Virginia and the Northern border of Tennessee. She said, it's a place that's unlike the rest of America. Ginger's parents were trying to have children for 10 years before the call came for her parents to pick her up.

Ginger (04:30):

She said she ran right out to Belks. That was her store that she liked to go to. And she bought the prettiest little baby clothes and bottles and all this stuff. And she drove, um, the requisite hours to come and pick me up. And she said, she, she went into the hospital, she and dad, and they looked into this window with little bassinets of all kinds of little babies. And she said, she looked at me and she didn't know which was her baby, but she said, Glen, I hope it's that one. And she said, I was the prettiest little baby in the bassinet room. So she, she, um, said that they took her into a little room, um, and said, get ready for your baby. And they brought the baby in and it was indeed me. And so with that story, um, she tells it with such love and she, she just, uh, has always made me feel like adoption was a really special thing rather than like a thing that I should be self conscious about or anything.

Damon (05:37):

So since Ginger felt special, she flaunted her adoption for how special she was to have been chosen. But every once in a while, as she expressed her pride for being adopted, the person she was telling would respond apologetically as if she had admitted something with pride that she should have been ashamed of. It hadn't occurred to her that there might be a sad story to be told about being adopted. Still her mom and dad were wonderful parents as is often the case after a child is adopted Ginger's birth parents had a biological child three and a half years after her adoption. So they lived a bit of a nature versus nurture experiment. Seeing how her sister developed in contrast with her own development being raised by the same parents. I asked Ginger what she noticed in their family.

Ginger (06:28):

According to my own case study, I would have to say that nature and nurture are both very viable factors in how we turn out, like what our morals and our, our goals and, and our like, values are. Um, but like certainly nature is a huge, huge part of it. You, you can not deny it.

Damon (06:56):

Ginger says her family are very quiet people, not big talkers, very kind and loving. They're dark haired, not super tall, not particularly adventurous. And generally by the book kinds of people.

Ginger (07:10):

And I, on the other hand am like the Flamingo, uh, just crazy tall, um, blonde, blue eyed, uh, loud artistic person who, um, uh, I, I was, uh, I was just the multicolored sheep of my family, I guess you could say. And luckily my mom and dad, they, they nurtured this side of me. My mom put me in like every, she put me in piano lessons and all the different sports and all the different, um, singing, acting, all that stuff. And it was cool because though my sister and I are worlds apart when it comes to personality, we we're still just best friends to this day because we, we just get each other. And I wonder sometimes like if we were, uh, a lot closer in personality, if we would be as, as close, because we, we never like experienced competing or anything at all, my mom was so attentive to like, well, if I give one child something, I have to do the same for the other. She, she was almost to a fault just obsessed with making everything even so that I wouldn't ever feel like I wasn't a part of the family.

Damon (08:37):

To me, Ginger sounded like she was pretty well content in her family. She told me she never gave search and reunion a second thought growing up. But when she was 18, the curiosities popped into her mind. She spoke with her mother about her inner thoughts. So her mom handed over a folder of Ginger's non identifying information, her birth mother's last name was identifiable in the file. So using her dial up internet, she got online and searched for babies born on her birthday to any woman with her birth mother's last name. She found a match and wrote down the woman's very unique first name expecting that after nearly 20 years, the woman would probably be buried. Ginger searched for the unique first name as a married woman in Kentucky, lo and behold,

Ginger (09:29):

There was a name that matched that, but that was the principal of a high school. And so I clicked on this and there was a picture of her on the website of the high school. And as soon as I saw that picture, I just knew that that was her because she, she just looked like me and I had never experienced that before.

Damon (09:52):

She could see that the expression on the woman's face, her eyes, the texture of her birth mother's hair looked just like herself.

Ginger (10:01):

The top half of her face, and her hair looked so much like me and I just, I just knew it was her. And, and when my mom came in to, I showed her and I remember, I don't know if my mom would even really like, admit to this or remember this, but I saw like a little bit of fear in my mom's eyes because she, my mom was like, Oh, she's so pretty. And I think mom sort of worried like, Oh, you're like, you're going to leave me for, for your birth mother, because she's so pretty and so successful and this kind of thing. And, um, I didn't even think to myself, like when I, when I saw her face, I wasn't like, she was pretty, um, I was just like, Oh, she looks like me a lot, but her, her jealousy for a second, there was just natural. And, and she never, like, she never has, uh, displayed jealous tendencies at all. She, she has like, talked about concerns, little here and there just, she, she tells me about her feelings like, but she, she really, my mom is really excited for me to meet my birth mother, but she thinks that'll be really grounding for me. And she, uh, she's curious herself too.

Damon (11:18):

Ginger said that in her late teens, not super emotionally intelligent, she didn't realize the gravity of the picture. She had just discovered online. She just thought it was kinda cool. Foremost for her was knowing the story of why she was placed for adoption and how the whole thing went down there online was her birth mother's email address. So Ginger nervously drafted an email.

Ginger (11:43):

I don't know why I was just, I didn't know what her life was like, and I really didn't want her to, I didn't want to infringe on her in any way. Um, but I did want to know what the story was. So I, I emailed her and the last like lines of the email I remember was like, well, it would just be so easy to click send. And so I did, I just click, click send. And two days later I got a reply from her. And that was when I was 19. And remember I'm 35 and I still haven't met her.

Damon (12:17):

Her birth mother wrote back a very detailed email answering the question of Ginger's backstory. The woman's story picked up from the time when she was 19 years old, about to start college,

Ginger (12:30):

Her brother, she had two brothers and one of them had recently died in a motorcycle accident. And she was in a deep depression and she was still like plugging away at college, just like trying to be the best she could be. But as you can imagine, her parents were not there for her in this time of loss, really, because they had had, they had suffered the worst loss you can suffer. And so her parents and her other brother were not really emotionally there for her at that time. And she didn't really have anybody like who could, she could like lean on. Um, the only person she really had was this on again, off again, boyfriend that she had had for a couple of years. Um, that's what she told me that he was, he was this on again, off again, boyfriend. And, um, she said that she ended up getting pregnant that first year of college. So she actually didn't start to show until like, until about five months along. And so she just went about her business. Then she went to another city for one semester and had me, and then she went back to college. Like nothing had happened, just continued with her college, sucked it up and got her degree and went on to become a principal of high school.

Damon (13:51):

Ginger's birth mother leaned on her boyfriend for emotional support. Then Ginger was conceived. She said that even in the woman's writing, she could see pieces of herself the same turns of phrase and self expression. As if the email had almost been written in her own voice. I realized her birth mother had emailed the story of her own pregnancy at 19, very close to the same age. Ginger was when she was drafting her inquisitive email to her birth mother.

Ginger (14:23):

And that's the thing that I look back and think, Oh my Lord, I was so blind. Um, as a 19 year old to like, I was in my own world there, I was in college too. I was like about to go study abroad for like the second time. And I was just a little punk rocker. Like bebopping around doing my own thing. I had my own little jerk of a boyfriend. And, um, it was like, it was like, I, all I wanted in that time was like the answers. And when I got them, it was like, Oh, this is so cool. She seems so cool. I thought I wasn't like going there emotionally. I wasn't like really like thinking about her and like what she had gone through in that time

Damon (15:11):

They wrote back and forth, conveying shallow pieces of themselves. Mostly Ginger talking narcissistically about herself, a self centered teenager. At one point Ginger's birth mother didn't reply to an email and things died off Ginger's curiosity had been satisfied and having a picture of her birth mother online was a place where she could go back to see the woman she came from. But her initial curiosities were satisfied from time to time. Ginger Googled her birth mother and could see she was very involved as a pillar of the community. Ginger said she probably pushed down some self-inflicted shame about possibly tarnishing, the woman's reputation in the community that she held. So dear

Ginger (15:55):

And I sorta thought me like making further moves to like, get to know her at this time. It just might be something she's not ready for because she, she's kind of a big deal in this small town. She's like, she's like, well known and well loved in that town. And it might be a big scandal to say like, Oh, she has a daughter that she had when she was 18. And

Damon (