Lori: As the catalyst for the original book, it is fitting to share your update first. What has happened in the year since Adoption Songs was released?

Cherin: What has not happened since we last discussed all of this? It's definitely a shorter question. The book launch that you invited me to was May 5, 2024, and then right after school ended in June (Cherin is an award winning educator),a month after the book launch, is when everything shifted for me. I had shared with you as part of the as part of the book writing process, my journey on the Ancestry.com and 23 and Me sites, I had to see if my people had participated in these.  Right after school ended last June, so now a year ago, I got a phone call on my way home from the grocery store from my husband Jason, saying, “Are you sitting down? You need to check your 23 and Me account.” And I said, “Well, I just got out of the Wegmans sitting in the parking lot.” Jason said,  “Before you drive away, you will want to check it out.” My heart was pounding of course, and I looked and the results revealed I have a match for a half-sister. I had been matched before with a first cousin who didn't respond to my outreach through the site portal. Up until then, the first cousin was closest I had ever gotten, and if anyone else has taken these DNA tests, you can get inundated with second/third cousin matches.  On this particular day, it was more than a match. It was a message! I looked through the message and responded right away. Long story short, we exchanged phone numbers, spoke on the phone that night and discovered she lives in Westminster, so only 40 minutes from Damascus! It was as incredible!

My half-sister had completed the test because she had ordered, she had a requested a court ordered maternity/paternity test after finding out some information about her mother, that necessitated this, and she wasn't sure that it would be honored, so she had done the 23 and Me test on her own. She had already gotten her results from the court ordered test, and so she had not opened her 23and Me account. You hear this all the time, that people do not check these accounts like they did when the technology was first available. The same with me with Jason helping me, her husband was monitoring it, and called her and said, “You need to check this out!” And she said, “I don't need to check it, because I already got what I needed from the court.” Her husband said, “No, you need to check it out...”

So not only did I find her, but it flipped my whole story upside down. The genetic statistics I had received before had highly favored that the Iranian side of my DNA was maternal, based on all of the characteristics. And the white-anglo side of my DNA was paternal, and it's the opposite. Everything that we had theorized based on articles, DNA statistics, was not at all what I had embraced.

Lori: Your identity is obliterated once again.

Cherin: Exactly. So it was just a lot to sort you like the story that you have in your head. You know you have to reconcile that it's not the story anymore, right? Ann*(changing names for anonymity) is my sister's name. We share a mother. We are maternal half-sisters. I ended up getting together with her and her husband, Jason, and me. The next day, we had dinner and talked for hours.

She was very, very respectful and just in awe, as was I. She was more than willing  to tell me absolutely everything I wanted to know, and completely respected anything that I wasn’t ready for. She said, “You tell me when that's too much information or not enough.” It was surreal in that like most newborn adoptees with absolutely no information about our heritage, had made up a story about who my mother was, and why she felt her only answer was to give birth to me in some random place, wrap me up and put me on a doorstep. I braced myself for a new narrative.

My biological mother has four children. I am the eldest. I was born in February of 1980.

She was sixteen when she got pregnant, and just turned 17 in January 16, and was in this tumultuous on again/off again relationship with my biological father. He was three years older than her. The truth is always in the middle of everybody's version of a story, right? That's the case at all times. They have different versions of events. He says he didn't the outcome, but that he was told that she lost the baby. She said, “No, he knew, and he made me give the baby away.” Whatever the middle ground is doesn't really matter. The end result is the same I was, which we already knew I left on the doorstep. But what we didn't know at the time is that the doorstep was one floor above my biological father's apartment. Then the question becomes was it supposed to be somebody totally random, or was it supposed I being left for him? Did she give the baby to the birth father?

There seems to be no way to know right now and the rest of the events transpired accordingly. She never told anybody. I became brand new information to the entire family.

I was born in February of ‘80, and given away in February of ‘80. She got back together with my biological father, and was with him, and then conceived another baby. At the time I heard the story, I thought a full sister was born in February of 82 exactly two years after I was born. They kept her Nan* is her name (changed). They kept Nan*, my mother and father separated, and got back together again. They were just this off, again, on again situation. My birth mother conceived a third time and this time it was a boy —a full brother, Bill* —was born a year and a half later. In late ‘83 then they separated for good, and my mother remarried a couple of times, and in ‘87 had one more child, my sister, Ann*, who was the one that I found on 23 and Me. Everyone lived in the same area. I grew up right around everybody, so much so that Nan* and my biological father still live in Bowie, which is where I grew up. Nan* and Bill*, my siblings went to the same high school at the same time as me. They're in my yearbook, just didn't know who they were at the time. And Ann* grew up with her father. She lived with her father more than our mother in Anne Arundel County.

I graduated with but so I graduated high school first, Nan*, my oldest sister, dropped out and was back after a couple of years being there. My birth mother has never really gotten life together. She's participated in a lot of like petty crime, fraud and multiple husbands and that kind of thing so unstable for the kids.  Ann* lived with her father, and Nan* dropped out and was with our mother. And then my brother Bill*, lived with our father for most of his life.

It's uncanny that we went to the same schools, and lived in the same area, running in the same circles and never knew anything about one another. So, that was that's super weird.

Another discovery came when we compared our genetic testing that Nan’s* father (whom we thought we shared) in fact was not her biological father. She thought all these years she knew who her father is, and as it turns our, that is not the case. She asked our birth mother about it but she says there were a lot of people back then, so she really doesn’t know. 

I am sure that was difficult news. (The term for discovering that the father you thought was yours, is not is called a Non-paternal Event- NPE. This is a huge phenomenon with the advent of DNA testing, and also assisted fertility where the parents shoes to keep that a secret.) I have not developed a relationship with her. I have talked to her a few times. We've never met in person. She has texted me off and on again. She seems to be doing okay, but it's definitely more unstable, like you know, our mother, because she's always been sort of living that life. Bill* has sort of estranged himself from the whole family. Is just didn't basically what I avoided was, you know, not the most positive upbringing, right? So, for whatever, you know, intervention happened there, a cosmic intervention happened there. That's, that's the, that's the situation that that they grew up in.

Ann*, is estranged from our mother because of some criminal activity that she's been involved. She is the one who broke the cycle of not getting pregnant as a teenager, finishing college, getting married, having kids. She's the only one that I have spent the past year building a relationship with, and it's been very positive. We have gotten we got together several times between finding each other in June and the winter holidays, and then spent that time just sort of feeling things out, getting to know each other, and then introduced our families and our kids over the winter holidays, over winter break, which was a lot of fun. I'm very protective of my kids, and I didn't want to introduce them to anything that wasn't going to be good for them, which is why Ann* is the only person that I have spoken to or reached out to. About month ago, my biological father reached out via the messenger on the on the DNA site, “Just wanting to say hi, it seems like you have a nice family. I'm happy for you.” It was it was a nice message, but I don't know. I cut right to the chase. I wrote back, “Thanks, did you have you always known about me? I just need to know the answer to that question, before I continue any conversation.” And understandably, his response was, “There's a lot of sort of complexity there, and I would be happy to answer all of those questions. I just am not sure that this electronic platform is like the right place for that complex conversation. If you ever want to get together, you know, I'm happy to do so and have that conversation.”  I'm thinking about it, but very intentionally not rushing that decision. There's no need in my mind. I'm comfortable with who I grew up to be and who I am as a parent, and so when I'm comfortable, I will, but I don't feel I need that for validation. I'm going to wait until I feel like that's the right move and sort of honor that.

This year has been huge because when you find out all this information it impacts how you view adoption, right? And I don't think that my view on it is different fundamentally at all, and the gratitude that I have is still the same. But I think what I had to reconcile, and I'm still working on, quite honestly, I think we're all always a work in progress, is this sort of rainbow, warm, fuzzy story that I told myself about just somebody not being prepared to raise a baby and wanting to do the right thing and wanting to just, you know, love somebody something so much that you wanted to sort of rip out your own heart and give this person, you know, a better life.

The same way I felt when my kids were born, now my heart is on the outside of my body. Now, I all of a sudden have this flood of feelings that you've never felt before. But to put myself in my birthmother’s mindset… there is no one can to tell the truth to, and I didn't tell anyone, and I am involved in all of this crime and have not been able to be honest with anyone about anything, and have caused everyone heartache and harm. No one can agree who decided to get rid of the baby. Rainbow’s and sunshine image that you that you tell yourself, your adoptive parents of course tell you haw special you are and loved, and while that’s true, there is so much more going on inside of me that I cannot explain. I think my experience in life and my career especially have taught me that no matter what everybody brings to the table, the best that they can might be harmful to other people, but it could still be the best that they can in the moment. I'm choosing to believe that was the best she could do, even if it wasn't the right decision, which it was.  But it’s also how you come to terms with that. As I reflect,  I don't need parents. But it’s important knowing genetic answers, and filling in the blanks that most adoptees have.

Building a relationship with Ann* has been just icing on the cake that's superfluous, and I find myself really enjoying the nurturing older sibling part of that, because I am seven years older, but she's like me, very mature and very old for her age, because she also sort of raised herself, and so I think we have that in common, but, it's been a year!

It’s a lot to think about, but also it makes you grateful for my own I think parenting journey, I think we're all very hard on ourselves, especially mothers. We're always questioning, are we making the right decision? And we all just make the best decisions we can with the information that we have the moment that we have it right? I think it's made me a little bit kinder to myself as a parent, too. We all mess up, I'm not messing this up as much as I could be.

There were no baby safe haven laws in 1980. I can’t imagine what went on for my birth mother. She gave birth outside of a hospital. Left me on a doorstep. That's trauma, so whatever narrative she told herself for the past 45 years is some sort of protective bubble from that trauma.

As adoptees, we don’t know much, if anything about our background. I can ask things like, “Who did I get this condition from?” Like terrible biomechanical foot issues from it turns out it's my birth mother, right?  I just had my fourth foot surgery in April, so things like that. You know, I can get the answers to but I am going to have to make peace with, sometimes there is no answer, there's no story, there's no truth in the middle that changes the outcome of anything I kind of like for her, that whatever it is that she's done has protected her from this trauma, because if she's not ready to deal with it, then why? Who am I to burst that bubble? The fact that I exist at all has completely thrown a monkey wrench in this family, and I don't blame myself for that. I exist, and I'm proud of that, and it's okay, but my goals have always been to know more about myself, not to upset anyone else's life and, you know, put anyone in trauma therapy. That's not what I'm here for, although there's a lot to be said about trauma therapy, for sure, it's, it's probably something that needs to happen.

Lori: I know that you reached out to me, you know, a few months ago that you were, you know, using, I didn't get into all that detail of everything that was happening for you, but you definitely were sharing that some things have been stirred up in you in the last year. As you you know a little bit what I had learned from the Primal Wound around pre-verbal trauma and that separation from that warm, comfy body, even if it wasn't all that, perhaps the birth mother may not have been happy while you were in gestation, having to endure her own judgements and environment, you were safe, right? We experienced that as newborns, immediately relinquished, and we are an immediate fight or flight, a stress response from our first breath. That has been a huge aha, because I never could name it, but I felt it, and I it's all made sense to me. I want to just throw it back at you, if you're embodying that and understanding that now in a different way.

Cherin: Yes, I mean, I think I've always known what that feeling was. I just didn't or I think I've always known what that feeling feels like, but didn't know what to attach to that feeling. I think there are some attachment things that you work through as an adult, it shifts the way you view safety in relationships. I think having the boys shifted that tremendously, because that was really like Ethan is my first biological connection period. And he is very much a velcro child. Always has been, right now. We are very close. And so I do sometimes think about that. He has me to provide for his needs. If I wasn't giving that to them, would they start to feel unsafe, challenges in forming connections and in relationships?  I think it's when all those neural pathways are formed, right? I think it's very understated to say that just because we don't have all the conscious memories of those moments, the way we do things that happened yesterday doesn't mean that the brain and the body doesn't remember every single moment of that early trauma.

Lori: Many prefer the rainbows and sunshine narrative of adoption and my friends say I had wonderful parents who loved me. Which is true. Not every adoptee experiences this, by the way. I was lucky. You were lucky. And it does not erase that we were taken away and we had no choice. We had no say. We don't know our backgrounds, secrets. You had no birth certificate. I can't access it till I'm 100 years old in the state of Utah. It makes a ton of sense learning so much about how unfair it is to adoptees to be adopted because nobody ever asks us what it’s like? I had a lovely life and all of that, but like you just said, you've always had that feeling you just didn't know what it was, and that's not a good way to live. And we're lucky that we're still here to talk about it, because a lot of people don't make it (suicide rates are significantly higher than the national average for adoptees.)

Cherin: I think that's the biggest thing about the adoptee community that we’re talking about it, that you're working, developing and trying to connect with more people through this work. Because how do you describe it fully to someone who doesn't experience it, how do you describe something that happened at birth when none of us really have conscious memories of that? You have to describe it, and you have to talk to someone who sort of gets it for a minute, not that other people don't, but it's not the same. I think that's what makes the community really important, and I think it needs to shift the way we look at the support that we provide to expectant mothers, that we provide better maternal care, and see if there are ways to keep families together.

And make sure we are preparing adoptive families with the reality during the adoption. I think it has always bothered me that there's a whole crowd in society of people who say that there should be this attitude of gratitude when it comes to adoption. Nobody wants to be saved, nobody wants to be pitied. That's not that should never be the way that babies are adopted. Selfishly, you should adopt a baby because you want a baby, and you are able to fully care for the needs of this relinquished child. Not because you want to save that particular baby, or fulfill some yearning to be a parent that is another trauma that does not get discussed. How many adoptive parents adopt to mask their own fertility issues, which is also trauma. If the number one motivation is, ‘I'm going to adopt this child and I'm going to fix this child’ that is wrong. This child's not broken, society is broken, and babies who were conceived and born as a mutual decision that that's not everybody's situation, but in that situation, right? That is the type of selfishness that. Creates this love bond, right? I wanted you. I waited for you. I want to love you. I made you. We know that this could be very difficult for you and commit to make sure your trauma is acknowledged and treated. It’s a challenging path, and one that's not everybody's path, but why shouldn't adoption mirror that desire? I wanted you, I've waited for you, I prayed for you. I want to love on you, not I felt bad for you, so I gave you this life so in turn there is an unsaid expectation from society that adoptees should have an attitude of gratitude about it. Because I'm very grateful to my parents, not that we don't appreciate our families. It's not that, it's just that at the very heart of it is nobody asked to be born. No one asked to be relinquished. I don't owe my biological parents anything for having brought me into the world. That's not that we don't come into the world in debt for having been created. That's so why would adoption be different?

Lori: Yes, and the piece of where there's trauma on the part of the adopted parents, often especially moms who are unable to conceive that are not dealt with. And unfortunately, I've just learned so many stories and where birth or adoptive mothers and the adoptees just have these disconnects because that trauma was never dealt with, and that trauma ended up being taken out on the adoptee. And I didn't really have that, but I can kind of see that, because my mother had fertility issues as well, and so did I, right? I always have to check my thought processes given I'm also an adoptive parent. I’m reflecting did I do that to Kate?

Learning what I have has certainly allowed us to have that conversation in her young adulthood, so that she can be paying attention to some of her anxieties, and I got her counseling right away, as soon as I heard about all these things. And it's huge, really, so important, really made a difference. I think that's where I'm hoping to help others. And, you know, adoption is not going to go away.  I think there needs to be the proper resources for it. What really struck me when you think about the feelings of that primal trauma. When you are adopted, you've just endured the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to you physically, that separation at birth. The adoption event itself is the most celebrated thing that happens to the parents, to be right to the couple, chosen by the birth mom, or the agency, or whoever is the “broker” of this infant, or foster care situation.

Cherin: As an adoptee you learn very quickly that the way that you feel about it is not to be discussed because it's their greatest joy. You become a people pleaser at birth, because you're thinking this not something that you should disrupt, right? We are this happy family now. And that's not to say that that's not true, but multiple things, as I tell my boys all the time, the most important thing you can learn in life is that there's no such thing as a one like one feeling. There's it's always messy multiple feelings. It's not just that they can exist at the same time. It's that they always exist at the same time. We always have complex feelings about things. To some degree, just the level of complexity changes. But you learn very quickly to suppress that, because you're supposed to believe everything is fine,

Lori: No one asks you, how's it like when you are struggling to fit in? It's more like, you're so lucky to have the best parents in the world!

Cherin: Yeah, and that's the hard thing, you're absolutely right. I never talked about it. You just don’t for fear of some conflict or hurting our adoptive parents.

Lori: I had no idea that most of us don't say anything or talk about it. Exactly what you said, verbatim. I have heard hundreds of times from adoptees,  and what that ends up doing, though, is we make up the empty pieces of our story, so we fit in. While we don't know it consciously, we got abandoned. We were relinquished, so we better be nice, or else we're going to get relinquished again. I expect to be abandoned. I mean, and I'm writing this in my little section, you know, being single and on the dating apps, I expect to get dumped. I expect it to not work out.  Attachment style is powerful to understand.  At this point, I was married for 24 years, so I never even gave it a thought. I didn't know I had anxious attachment. I had no idea until I went out in the world, and I often felt my nervous system kick into fight or flight- mostly flight! I was doing this research at the time all this was manifesting, at least I can fairly quickly recognize it and go get some help, instead of just wondering why I feel this way. It's no wonder that the suicide rate is skewed. One source is saying 36 times the national average for adoptees. That's a very sobering statistic, and that's what needs to change. And I think that's what I have to figure out. To what degree do I want to be part of making things better?

I think sometimes it's that it's taboo for the reasons that we already discussed. And sometimes I think it doesn't occur to anybody to talk about it, always been shrouded in secrecy, especially in my generation, because you couldn't talk about. I mean, my God, she couldn't tell anyone she was pregnant, didn't tell a soul, so she lived in secrecy as a normal construct of how she manages through meaning in life.

Cherin, that's a lot how it's been a year. What's going on in your heart?

Cherin: It depends. It's been up and down. I put a lot of therapeutic work into this before, also, which, started to come unraveled a little bit, but the foundation was still there. It wasn't like I was in a place of simply ignore, let's not talk about, it’s a part of who I am, reconciling that. In order to enter the realm of DNA sites, I had to make that a conscious decision, because you go into that knowing you could find out information and are you ready for that? And everything that comes my way is another piece of the puzzle that I won't unlearn. You have to put the therapeutic work in before you start looking. And I think that's huge. I think that sometimes that's a misstep too.

Lori: What have you discussed with your adoptive parents?

Cherin: It took me a long time to talk myself into telling them, I'll be very truthful about that. I was very nervous about that and very hesitant. They are my parents, and they are focused on my mom's medical issues. They are supportive, no pushback, It’s not something that they ask about since that initial conversation. It took me a couple of months, maybe a little more than that, after the summer ended, to bring that up. And I really mostly brought it up because as we got closer to me telling the kids, because I didn't want the boys to, you know, be on the phone and say, like, “Oh, hey, by the way, grandma, we had dinner with mom's sister, you know,” and my mom be like, “What the hell are you talking about?”  So just to prevent that awkwardness, I talked myself into it.

I remember when I found my half sister, and I was like, “Oh, do I tell my dad?” He was already declining with dementia, but then there the thought I should tell him.

Lori:  What about your Adoption Song (Jason Mraz I Won’t Give Up)?  Does it still resonate?

Cherin: I think so, and I think that's intentional. It’s a huge part of my journey and the self work. It's slow, it's messy. Some days it's better. Other days, it just depends. Is it?

Lori: Maybe it's side B, the instrumental version.

Cherin: Yes, there's some acapella days.