The Waging Peace Podcast

Redefining Adoption: By Listening to Adoptees with Guest Angela Tucker

• Diana Oestreich • Season 1 • Episode 5

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Have you listened to an adult adoptee's perspective on foster care and adoption?

I'm an adoptive mom and I learned from Angela Tucker, a Black woman adopted out of foster care by white parents , what I most wished I had learned through the adoption process.


  • Learn the one phrase Angela says an adopted person in your community needs to hear from you!
  • Listen to the story of an 85 year old birth father who is looking for his 55 year old daughter in Angela’s documentary film.
  • Learn how her parents taught her to humanize her birth mother.
  • Adoption is often a permanent solution to a temporary problem.


Watch Angela's story advocating for adoptee's rights in her  2013 documentary Closure, which recounts the search for her birth parents and is streaming on Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Amazon Prime.


Read her book "You Should be Grateful" anywhere books are sold.  "You Should Be Grateful" challenges the fairy-tale narrative of adoption, giving way to a fuller story that includes the impacts of racism, classism, family, love, and belonging.

Follow her on Instagram @angieadoptee


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Speaker 1:

All right. Thank you for joining us on the Waging Peace podcast, Angela. We are thrilled to talk to you. Oh man. Well, just be real with you. I have a second set of notes that I printed and these are the old ones. You know, when you look down and you're like, I changed that, but we can do this. So thanks for letting me use my old set of notes, but I'm really excited to introduce you all to my guest. Angela Tucker is a black woman adopted from foster care to white parents. Her debut book you Should Be Grateful Stories of Race Identity and Transracial Adoption, has received wide acclaim. Angela is the founder and executive director of the Adopti Mentoring Society and is a subject of closure, a documentary that chronicles her search for her biological parents. So we're going to dive right in to how you are telling your story of justice and joy through your everyday life and work. These are the stories of Waging Peace that we all need to hear more of, and I'm so pumped to have you here with us today, Angela, so welcome.

Speaker 2:

Thank you. I am delighted to be invited. Thank you.

Speaker 1:

And where are you at? Right now I live in Seattle, Washington. Okay, I always like to know people's like actual location because I think it's culture. We all are living a little bit of culture every single state. So I'm in the Midwest, so if you hear me talk about hot dish, that's just a little culture coming out for you.

Speaker 2:

Hot dish Okay, great, and if I look sweaty it's because all of my windows are closed. We have smoke coming in from all angles Canada and Eastern Washington so it is not great air quality, man. Yeah, it's so. It's such a bummer for so many.

Speaker 1:

Right, because I think summer is such a thing, and then to have to close your windows and kind of stay inside. So as a way to just honor you and the identities that you hold into and make space for that, I always like to ask people what can you tell us? The faith story you were given as a child, and if it's not a faith story, what was kind of the world view that you were handed to to kind of like see the world through or make sense of it when you were a child?

Speaker 2:

My parents were hippies in the 60s 70s and that really kind of framed my upbringing Because I, as everybody knows, I'm adopted. My parents adopted all of their kids except for one, biologically, and I have seven siblings, so they adopted a ton of us. And this has to do with my worldview, because they believed that we were kind of that, we were, we were procreating at a rate that's going to outpace the resources in our world, and so their belief that shaped their desire to adopt from foster care. So growing up then I really got pretty involved in justice ministries like feeding the homeless and other ways that weren't really seen as giving back but it was just seen as interacting with humanity and it was also a tool that my parents used to humanize our birth parents. So if there were one, one or two small things we knew about our birth parents, then we would get closer to that source.

Speaker 2:

So for me I knew that my birth mother struggled with homelessness. She lived across the country in Tennessee where I was born, but we were often going to the church to feed the homeless, so that my parents wanted to teach me that my birth mother is a human. It was pretty cool because at an early age. Then I didn't pathologize people who were, you know, begging on the side of the streets and if I hadn't had that experience I probably would. I'd probably think like, oh, all homeless people are incapable of keeping their kids and therefore they don't love them and my birth mother must not love me. But instead, doing these sorts of engagements and opportunities, I at a young age, would talk to people at the homeless feeds who would be like you know, I don't want peas, or I only want cookies, and it helped me be like they're humans. They have preferences. Maybe my birth mother has a sweet tooth and maybe she hates vegetables or you know that kind of thing, which is actually incredibly helpful. So that's just kind of a glimpse into the worldview for me.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for sharing that. I think that's really beautiful and kind of surprising too, because, as you know, the Christian faith has been such a force for adoption, so I think it's easy to not realize that many people in the adoption world there's just such a diversity in that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean my parents don't fit into the Christian evangelical folks who adopt as a form of like saviorism or who kind of newborns predominantly or internationally. You know, I know there's a great book called the Childcatchers by Catherine Joyce which is a really hard read, but it's about evangelical Christians adopting children from international adoptions and how the need to evangelize often overshadowed the child and their biological family. So for me, not having that my parents are Catholic and I grew up going to Catholic Mass but not having it be embedded into the savior narrative was actually really surprised to me when I started learning people's assumptions about my adoption, especially those who were Christian.

Speaker 1:

I just love hearing that because it sounds like your family just planted something really beautiful in you, not only for your story but for, like our village, as human beings. So, man, I just want to cheer. A beautiful thing to hear about. So you've probably heard the quote from Cornell West. Dr Cornell West, justice is what love looks like in public. So private love is great, but love in public is contagious. So what do you hope will become contagious in public right now? Either in the world or in the adoption world?

Speaker 2:

I have to focus on my lane, which is the adoption world, and the contagion that I hope for is extending humanity to people's birth parents. Right now, birth parents are very practically invisible. When people think about adoption, they do not think about birth parents, and when they do, it's typically negative. They did this bad thing, therefore. They couldn't keep their kids, and that's what kind of defines them. Forever more.

Speaker 2:

I would love for folks to recognize that birth parents love their kids, and surely many aren't capable of raising them. That doesn't mean they don't need a place in their kids lives altogether. If I could add one more piece, it would be in the foster care world, and that is remembering that people in foster care, youth in foster care, are in your neighborhood. They aren't like way over there in some distant city. They are right next door to you and I find that to be. I find that that would be a really helpful reframe for folks to perhaps feel more responsibility to care for those kids who are currently words of the state. I think it's funny sometimes when I tell folks that I was in foster care. They just do a double take Like wait what you? No way, as though they are just expecting not someone who loves fashion and wears hot pink lipstick, but like a destitute child without socks, on the side of the road.

Speaker 1:

You know, and that is not us Right and just thank you for sharing that, because I think there are in my personal family. There are more birth mothers than adopted children. We have both, but the birth mothers like I didn't even know about until probably after I mean later adultish, so like their names were not spoken, and so I think that thing where birth mothers are, even in families, like not talked about, and that bias and that part I feel like is such as a woman, that's wrong and to, as a village, how to erase that someone is a mother, someone like that is one of the, whatever your experience with that is. That is a life changer and to not honor that and that especially it was a hard road.

Speaker 2:

I think like in this. Yes, I mean it has led to generations of women be feeling like they are walking shame, shame and stain on our society. Another piece is the birth fathers and I had the great privilege of doing a short documentary about this black man who was 85 years old, still searching for his 55 year old biological daughter. He had been searching for 54 years and he found her and we documented that. It was profound to hear this black man talk about how if he had raised her which he'd wanted to, so bad he said she would have gone to this elementary school and had this teacher. I would have put her in this program and he had it all. He was parenting her, basically, even though she wasn't in his life.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and the humanity of that. Like I have two teenage sons and I'm not, I'm raising them to be good humans who know the power of caring for our community and each other. So I don't ever want them to be dismissed because they're a male, so they can't be as important in in a child's life or not care as much as so. And then the second thing that you said to about foster care I think is so important.

Speaker 1:

I'm part of a community that advocates and just offers hospitality for families who are also unsheltered. And so you think people like, oh, you know homeless people, you know they're somewhere else. And I'm like no, we're in the neighborhood, we're just, it's this house and multiple families get to stay there as they work things out. And I'm like every single mom and mom I've met there Same things. Any mom friend I have happened to them experience the same stuff. They just had three things happen at the same time, you know. And so their kids are getting picked up by the bus, going to school, with everybody's kids. And I think people don't realize, like these kids they're here and they're our, they're in our community. So I think. And then the foster care like there's always been this, like I don't know. I've just heard this bias where there's this narrative that foster kids, they're the reason that they're in foster care.

Speaker 1:

Oh, yes, and I'm like they're just their kids and maybe their adults are just working through some stuff right now or their adults are having some problems. Like there is a bias that foster kids are like bad kids.

Speaker 2:

They are there at no fault of their own and then also not blaming their biological parents, who are often there because of generational trauma and the way that our society exists around capitalism and poverty and how we interlace those things. That also, you know, lest we think that that couldn't be us, that is a problem. We are all. Just, you know, a couple happenings away from that being our reality and I think our refusal as a society to truly believe that and to think that we are above that is part of the problem.

Speaker 1:

Right and it's not serving anybody. I feel like it is taking away this social fabric, that I think back in the day if we had more kinfolk families, you know, if somebody's having a surgery, then the kids might just go next door to auntie's house.

Speaker 2:

Yes, we actually did this, and black folks are famous for this. I mean, that is partly how we survived and thrived after being enslaved, was? This is why when you hear black families say like, oh, that's my cousin, that's my brother, that's my sister, and it's not, we're not talking biologically, because we are so used to the collectivist family rearing Grandma takes care of so and so, and that is that sustains us. There can never be too many people in a kid's lives to love them.

Speaker 1:

Right and I think it just builds in that collective mercy and grace and like vibrancy that says you know what, even if one of your parents might not be doing so hot, you are still have all of these other people to lean on, so there's not so much blame on that one parent who is hurting.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, which also gives that parent space to then get through whatever they're going through quicker, because they can rely on someone else to love their kid.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I mean family's tricky. So you know, like adoption has its own magnificent thing to it of tricky.

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker 1:

It's hard, but so does normal family, like just the regular. I didn't choose my parents, parents didn't choose kids, but when I was, I was speaking down in it was in the South and it was a event for women, rural culture bearers, which is a phenomenal way to honor that women are the culture bearers in our communities. They're really the ones who are caring for and continuing the, you know, bringing community together.

Speaker 1:

And I think that's out of 10. It's cause they're raising kids. So we went around the room and people were talking you know, there's like a get to know, you question, and anyways, so many people. Women in the room kept saying like this one thing is important to them was something that their grandmother gave them.

Speaker 2:

Yes.

Speaker 1:

Because I was like like I kind of know my grandparents, but they were not, you know, they just weren't significant people in my life, but so many, I would say almost half their greatest memory was with their grandmother, or their grandmother raised them. Wow, yes, which gave me a lot of hope that, like we still can have people who can raise us or care for us without there being some devastating thing, just because you know, like a daughter wasn't able to do that at that time.

Speaker 2:

You know, I don't know.

Speaker 1:

It opened my eyes a lot to great grandmothers and even if you don't have a great relationship with your mother, then maybe your grandmother can be that for you.

Speaker 2:

I love hearing that Absolutely. I mean we overlook a lot of the people really close to us who could provide that. I think that's magnificent.

Speaker 1:

And it kind of takes the pressure off knowing that your mom can do for your kids what you might not have it in you to do for them. So you are a film producer, an author and a cultural commentator. More than that. I see you challenging and crafting a truthful narrative that centers adoptees refusing to accept a fairytale of gratitude. Instead, it requires pain to be honored and griefs to be faced. So what's the story that you most want folks to hear in that?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, I think it's. This is really tricky for people to understand, but for me, I am grateful for my adoptive parents. I think they're wonderful, I'm close to them, have a great relationship and with my siblings, and I am not grateful to have been adopted. But differentiation can be tricky and that is where that line comes in the title of my book. You should just be grateful is that?

Speaker 2:

The assumption that I owe everything to my adoptive parents is really short-sighted. I really actually wish that society would care for my biological family in a way that I couldn't. I didn't need to be adopted and that they could keep me, that I could stay in my culture, which is in the deep South, even though I was adopted into a positive place, a healthy environment. It doesn't replace the loss, and so that's. The hope is that people can understand that adoption really is an industry just like any other. It operates on supply and demand.

Speaker 2:

Being adopted is trauma at its root, even if it's needed, and that when folks hear the words adoptive parents, that we shouldn't automatically think of them as the most noble, saintly people in the world. Those things really serve to hurt us adoptees because it puts us in a really tricky bind and I do believe that's why so many adoptees struggle with mental health issues is because of that inability to articulate our truth without having people come back at us with saying things like well, if they didn't adopt you, who knows where you'd be, maybe you'd be dead. All of these sorts of comebacks kind of are like a muzzle and I hope that can change. I'm working on changing that.

Speaker 1:

Me too and thank you for doing that work. I truly think it is life saving for adoptees, but it's also humanity giving for people to lay down those comebacks and to actually be willing to be a human in that story. That says there is loss here. And as a society I think we can create places where families can stay together, have a couple hard years, have whatever, but we're not going to let families not be together. Right, yeah, that's the ultimate good, because that's what every single person would wish that no mother would ever, no parent would ever not be able to raise their kids and no kid won't be able to grow up with their parents. So kind of piggybacking off of that. I love how you said it. It said something around kind of the way I might not say it right, but that it's hard to talk about adoption for fear of hurting someone or it being misconstrued.

Speaker 2:

Yes, I wrote that in my book. Yeah, it feels inevitable that sharing for an adoptee, sharing our truth someone will get hurt. There are just so many emotions tied to us. For adoptive parents, it could be the greatest day in their life. They are so excited to get us to adopt us. For birth parents, that same day can be the most traumatic day of their lives that they are just heartbroken to lose us. And for us adoptees in the middle trying to describe what it's like for us to be transplanted into a new place, that can feel really scary unless we know we have the unconditional love from all the people who are involved, and many adoptees don't have that. I'm grateful that I do.

Speaker 2:

I'm able to ask my parents really hard questions like why couldn't any black families have adopted me? That's a true question that I have, A fantasy that I had that I could have been raised by at least black folks. My parents would answer that question. They didn't feel like it was a knock against their parenting or that I was being disrespectful towards what they had done. It was a reasonable question and so, having that freedom, I learned as I started my career that that is unusual, that a lot of adoptive parents would start crying or just reprimand the child for asking such a question. That feels really not loving.

Speaker 1:

Right and then unfair, because something that I've heard, as there's been processing going on, is from an adoptee's perspective. People made a lot of choices about their life and they didn't get to, so their birth mother made a choice, and then their adopted parents made a choice, and then the adoptees in the middle being like hold up. Everybody made these choices, but what about me?

Speaker 2:

Right, and if we don't address that or allow adoptees space to process it, then for so many adoptees it turns into controlling behavior or the opposite, people pleasing behavior. I'll just do what anyone asks anytime. I'll just be grateful for anything, and that is a really scary place to be too. So yeah, absolutely agree.

Speaker 1:

So what do you think is the most powerful phrase or thing that an adoptee's community can tell them or affirm for them? What would be the most powerful thing someone could offer an adoptee if they were part of their community?

Speaker 2:

Just believing them being what they say, allowing an adoptee to say I don't think I'm getting all my needs met specifically a transracial adoptee, if their parents are white and they're black or brown. If a adoptee says I really need to be around black folks or it's really hard to live in this community because I'm the only black person in the room, that it's taken as truth rather than oh, but you get access to this and that and this and that and you have these good friends, like that might be true, but the root of what they're saying is not that. So it's like listening to what they're actually saying can be really tricky for people, because there's just that knee-jerk response that people have to try to protect the adoptive parents at all costs, to try to protect them, to say they did the best they could, they're doing everything they can for you, instead of doing that. To just say I hear you. That does sound hard. That would feel incredible.

Speaker 1:

That's awesome and I'm going to put that in the show notes for everybody. We will have that exact phrase. Put it in your pocket, you know, because I think it matters that validation and this could be a dumb question, but this is another one that I've kind of heard in my house is I don't want to be around black folks because I'm uncomfortable.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, I mean definitely specifically in transracial adoption, when adoptees are are so assimilated into whiteness that it can then be really uncomfortable and many black folks feel a sense of imposter syndrome or feel very disconnected to their genetics, which I do believe it is still the parents' responsibility to reconnect that. That's a lot of work, but it is the the. To continue the deracination of blackness would look like allowing a child to say you know, I don't want to be near my people because it's uncomfortable. That is only going to further our history, which is that black families have a really hard time staying together because of things like you know, our laws and Um redlining and all these different ways. So I abs.

Speaker 2:

When I work with transracial families, I'm often talking about white families moving to more diverse areas, racially diverse, so that the white couple is perhaps in that space of feeling uncomfortable because they're the adults and they can handle it. Or outsourcing some of the needs, outsourcing the conversations about the n word. It is much more productive for a black kid to have that conversation with a black adult. It's tempting to just take the easy route and allow for the status quo to continue, which means assimilation to whiteness, but then what happens is an adoptee turns 18, 19, 20, they go to college, they leave the home and there is a huge sense of loss of who am I, how did I get here? And I love mentoring kids in that age range, the young adults, but I really feel like if only when they were in the comfort of their home, the safety with their parents, could they have explored these issues. Then they could handle some of the other big work that happens for all folks once they leave their parents homes.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's so. That's a good, that's a good word to remind folks. You know, the work is the work and and giving kids the best, the best shot they have is doing it younger than being like well, you're, you're out of sight, out of mind, and you know that's because you're.

Speaker 1:

And you say a second thing too, that there is a lot of work that happens in that 18 to 22, that I don't necessarily think that society gives much cred to. There's a little bit of that like oh, they're in college, it's so easier, they're all just like party and it's like developmentally and soul wise and characterise Like. Those are like whiplash years. You know like they're powerful, they're crazy, they're chaotic, but it's like foundational work.

Speaker 2:

Yeah yeah, individuating from your family is such a huge part of of our health, but it can't be done without a solid foundation and I think for so many adoptees they just don't feel like we have that base foundations of some people liking it to, feeling like they're trying to build their sense of self on on sand instead of like deep roots and I. That is a double whammy of tough work.

Speaker 1:

Right, but I think that's such a good kind of signpost to just remind people like those are really like powerful years and kids need. And I'll say kids because I'm like, oh my gosh, I was 23 and I thought like I was totally an adult and knew everything and I'm like I was a baby. I was just like handed things and I was just regurgitating things that I had been handed but I had not experienced, had first person experience with many of those things I had not even given myself permission to like. Maybe not you know, maybe question that, yeah, you know, and those years are for that.

Speaker 1:

So you're creating belonging and a bridge for people from what they don't know to a new way of seeing adoption and adoptees. That really forces majority culture folks to wade into polarizing realities of white supremacy, of who's benefiting from white supremacy, systematic racism and inequality, and so, as I see, you kind of building that bridge and also like forcing majority culture people to like work into these realities. I really think that that is what is activating justice and that is instigating joy, because we can't get there until someone can pull people into that.

Speaker 2:

And so I see you doing that here.

Speaker 1:

And I just want to ask you, like, what is the biggest thing in those places that you think people are just missing, like you can say it, but in I guess people are missing about adoption, the world of adoption or how it works, or their place in it.

Speaker 2:

That's okay. That helps me think about answering your question. It's really common for adoptive parents to try to take themselves out of the major system that is adoption, so it's really easy for Well, I often hear adoptive parents say we really wish that our kid could have stayed with their biological family, but they just couldn't have. They had to come to our family. I hear this from like every adoptive family that I talk to, so in my brain, how are we ever going to reach family preservation if everyone thinks they're an exception to the rule, which is the case? Every adoptive parent, some adoptive parents, even Once they've adopted a child that they longed for and wanted, then they go work on family preservation efforts on others', behalf, but they would still say my kid needed to be adopted by us.

Speaker 2:

What I'm coming up against is something that's really difficult to dismantle. Honestly, it's a white entitlement. Like I deserve this and I've wanted this for so long. I get it, which, when people operate from that, it's really hard to think logically or push back against a system that's already moving.

Speaker 2:

So they might now do things that I recommend, which is make sure you ask the social worker, like have they checked out all potential not just biological kin of this kid, but also fictive kin, and fictive kin is coaches, teachers, people who are already in the kid's lives. Has the social worker looked and seen if there's anyone in that sphere that could adopt this child first? That question is really hard to ask. If parents already feel a sense of entitlement like this is my child. But once they get that child and they adopt them, they're very likely to become an activist for that next person that they don't know to say, oh wait, make sure there's nobody closer to the child that can adopt them. That seems to be like a very that's a really hard thing for me to continuously watch and one that I want to try to dismantle, but I it's really hard to educate when emotions are so high.

Speaker 1:

That has to be really hard because you do it's just like they can see it, if they can see it in the next person. So is it just that protective denial, Like they can't accept that there is this grief and they got something and it cost their child something. You know what I mean. Like people just denial it so they don't really have to feel those emotions and realities of choices.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, I had a great conversation with a beautiful soul, amanda Carpenter, who is a white woman who was fostering a black kid who then became available to be adopted while she was fostering him. And the agency said, okay, let's move forward to adoption. They've been fostering him for a year and a half and they loved him and he was doing great there. And they said, no, they said we love him so much, but we are going, we are willing to continue fostering him until you find a black family for him. And the agency was like what They'd never had anyone do, that pushback and they found a black family. They did the work, but they wouldn't have done it if this family hadn't pushed back. And the beauty is that Amanda is still in this boy's life. I am so thrilled.

Speaker 1:

That's a beautiful story and just to piggyback off that, I have a friend and I was telling her how excited I was to interview you and she was telling me that in because I asked her. I said, you know, in like a lot of Christian spaces, adoption is like a call. You know they really have this like it is a call. You know it's part of their faith. And I said, do you have that in Islam? And she said this really interesting thing I want to ask you about she said that they don't. She said that they are asked to foster any child that needs it, but not to adopt, because originally there was like wars and many orphans and she said that if families adopted these kids then their wealth wouldn't stay with a child, it would be the adopted family. So it was one to like maintain, you know, like wealth for the child and secondly, it was so that they would always preserve their identity of who they were from, that they would never have their name changed.

Speaker 1:

They would never be. They would always be from who they were from, or that they were living or dead.

Speaker 2:

Oh, it makes I have all the feels I'm so jealous. America is unique in that we do believe in the blank slate theory. We do believe we do have these caste systems that we don't like to admit and capitalism. This all plays in in the sense that there is this idea that if we adopt a child from one family to another and just erase the previous family which we make a lot of excuses to say the first family was bad, poor, wouldn't be able to provide all that stuff If we just put them in another environment, then they will succeed and be happy.

Speaker 2:

We we don't have a strong sense of, certainly, collectivism, but also we really prize nuclear family arrangements and individualism in a way that many other cultures don't, and so I just love that. I wish that could be the case for us. But at this point adoption really isn't synonymous with loss, like how your friend would automatically understand it's. Adoption is synonymous with permanency, and that is seen as something that would trump losing your original family culture. Like, at least you have a home, shelter, food, love all around you, so it doesn't matter if you lose your family name and they never get to know you. But wow, that is beautiful.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So I guess I would want to know from your perspective, would moving to a place of saying, yes, there are kids who need some stability and they need a home right now, but would you advocate to say just foster, like that these kids may be in a home for as long as they need to be, but only foster like? Don't adopt them, like? Do you feel like that would be?

Speaker 2:

something you would. No, that's definitely not the answer, because adoption, especially for older kids who can consent to being adopted, I think that is a good route. You know kids who are maybe 13 and up and can consent, especially if they're being adopted by kin or fictive kin. We don't want kids to be in long-term foster care, but I do think that we could talk about guardianship or other arrangements where we aren't severing a birth parent's rights forever. Oftentimes we're adopting kids for, you know, we're doing the permanent adoption for a temporary problem. It's kind of tricky for us adoptees to make sense of that when we get older and our birth parents are stable and doing well.

Speaker 1:

And maybe have another family. Yeah, you know, be like, well, this doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, my birth mother now has three kids that she's raising and do. Yeah, but I'm over here. That's because we do this permanent thing called adoption when in reality, perhaps it's a lack of resources for a birth parent that, if we provided, they could be on their feet in a couple years. So guardianship is what I'm curious about in lieu of adoption, but adoption also is an okay solution. I'm not an abolitionist, but I don't believe that we need to be adopting kids across state lines, across countries. I think kids can stay closer to their roots and still have a healthy upbringing. I mean, this is where it comes back to local communities, neighbors. There are people who can provide different levels of support so that a child doesn't have to be the one to move all over the place.

Speaker 1:

That makes a ton of sense and I hope like that is one of my hopes that we will start to be communities that see each other interconnected and that all of our kids are just as important as the ones who live in our houses.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, such a big deal too I think I talk about this in my book but just how hard it is for us to extend empathy, compassion and true understanding for a child that we don't feel like we own. So if it's our child, then we want everything for them, we want the best for them, but if it's a kid down the street, then it somehow is decreased by a huge amount really quickly. Right, that is an astonishing level of denial, and I think our brain has gotten rewired in a sense and that scares me. I think that also plays into that. Adopting a kid without asking all the questions first. It's part of that where it's this willful denial in order to get what we want instead of thinking about the big picture.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, there's some big value put on responsibility. If you're being responsible for a kid, then you can. Since you're being responsible for them, then you can make all the decisions. And it's divorced from a collectiveness that our kids are threads of our community, which means the community needs our kids and our community is here for our kids Like we can't be separated from that.

Speaker 2:

I wish I could remember this great proverb. That is an African proverb, but I don't remember the. I can't cite the source, but it's something like in a community, instead of asking how are you doing, people ask how are the kids? That's like the first question. It's as common as it is in our culture to say how are you. It's to say how are the children? And people can answer the question. They know how all the children are and that's the measure of health.

Speaker 1:

I love that. That's what I think we're working for as peacemakers, and I'm like man justice is love in public. But I also don't think that some kids, you know, whenever someone has that new baby or whoever's child and they look at him like you don't just think like, oh, I hope you just survive. It's like no, like I hope you have joy, I hope you get to experience things, and I think, until we start to look at joy as a birthright, that does every kid, some kids shouldn't just have to squeak by because that's just what they were born into or that's all there is, I'm like every kid deserves to have joy.

Speaker 1:

I can't have joy if my neighbor's kid doesn't have joy.

Speaker 2:

I love that. I think that's a beautiful way to like. If we could create a metric to measure that, then I would love to see the index around the whole globe of which cultures are thriving Like. That would be fascinating. I think. Another idea, though, is it is also going back to the birth parents. It's really unfathomable for me to think about how easy it is for us to see someone who's come on hard knocks an adult holding a baby, and for our reaction to be I need to get that baby instead of let me support that person. And I know this is what has happened when I worked at an adoption agency and we would go into homeless encampments and take the babies and the kids and put them in foster care and do nothing with the adults, and that made zero sense to me, right.

Speaker 1:

Because, like human dignity and knowing that your neighbor might be in that camp right now, but they're still always your neighbor, and then divorcing a child from the dignity of the person who's raising them, it doesn't make any sense. It makes so much more sense to be like, hey, we are going to figure out how this whole family can stay together, because that is what is dignified for the parents and the kid deserves their parents and their parents actually deserve to get treated like they matter.

Speaker 2:

Humans, yes, yes. We have an extra room in our house. We're not just going to foster, to parent that child, but you're both welcome in.

Speaker 1:

Right, that makes so much sense. So before we wrap up, I'd love to ask you, or see if you're game for some rapid fire questions.

Speaker 2:

Let's do it.

Speaker 1:

So these are just like from the hip, you don't have to overthink it. Okay, whatever you want to say, just like, let it roll. Okay, all right. So the first one is what is your purpose?

Speaker 2:

Don't overthink it, Angela. It's really to expand the meaning of family.

Speaker 1:

Love that Number two. How do you play?

Speaker 2:

Oh, fashion shopping, makeup, Awesome yeah.

Speaker 1:

My closet. Yes, and the last rapid fire is what is your superpower?

Speaker 2:

You know, I think being hard of hearing has really played into this, but I love, I think I'm fairly good at reading people's faces and for the first five years of my life, because of drugs in utero in my system, I couldn't hear. My parents didn't know that I wasn't hearing until I was five and I got some hearing aids and so for those first five years of my life I got by by reading people's faces and ultimately reading their lips, and I think that has served me really well even now, in terms of that empathy that we were talking about earlier. It's an interesting world when it's totally quiet, you know, when I don't have my hearing aids in, and knowing how to still navigate people, and I think it comes down to really making eye contact, looking people in the face, and that's something not a lot of people do. So it might be a superpower, or it might just be that I am less reliant on computers and like my phone, because in order to interact I have to look and see your face.

Speaker 1:

I think that's a superpower and, like you know, in like the Marvel Universe, I've boys, so we're all about like the superheroes.

Speaker 1:

That is a serious superpower to be able to like read lips or just know what somebody is like about. That is a serious superpower. So, angela, thank you so much for just sharing yourself with us and sharing where you're seeing justice and the joy that you envision that communities will really be embracing families and family preservation, and that's what the next generation is going to experience more of if we step up and do the work.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, thank you for this conversation. Yes, I loved it.

Speaker 1:

Thank you so much for sharing with us. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Diana K Oestreich

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