Shownotes:
Thank you for joining us back here for our series on adoption, Where Grief and Gratitude Co-exist. This series of interviews has been created to share the many faces of adoption to bring not only awareness, but I'm hoping some sense of community and support for those of you who are chosen as an adoptee, for those of you who have opened your hearts to love a child who needed a home, and for those of you who are interested in getting more involved by supporting those who have the lived experience that my guests have lived. I hope you enjoy the episode, and if you do, please hit the like and subscribe button so you can help us continue to do what we have been doing over here in the Healing Family Grief community.
Healing Family Grief. As a reminder, we will be holding a live panel discussion event on Sunday, November fifth at eight o'clock, US Eastern time, where you could join us to ask questions, hear more from our panel, and also learn how you can get support if you are struggling with grief due to adoption, or if you would like to learn how to become a coach to support those struggling with adoption grief. I'll have the link in the show notes. In our final recorded interview, we are talking with Leah Sheveland. Leah's story is pretty extraordinary given the circumstances of her birth.
And the fact that she was abandoned as a little tiny 1.2-pound infant in a Dropbox in Calcutta, India. Lea's story is different than the others in this series because she truly has no way of finding out about her biological family. We discussed how not having that ability probably shaped how she has never had that extraordinary, deep yearning to learn where she came from or the culture of her birth country.
Doing this interview actually spurned a new desire within her. Now she's been talking to me about We should create a coaching program through our Healing Family Grief platform that is a tailored for adoption. So give it a listen. I hope you enjoy the show. And if you're interested in getting onto our panel discussion, please check the notes below and there will be a link to sign up. Talk to you soon.
Hello, everybody. I am so excited because I have someone special. This is the last of our series of four interviews that I'm doing regarding Adoption, Where Grief and Gratitude Co-Exist. Today, I am interviewing my bonus daughter. I have lots of bonus daughters. Leah is one that I spend a lot of time with, live with her and the kids. My son is gone a lot, so I spend a lot of time actually in their home, in the mother-in-law suite and hanging out. Leah has a great story of adoption, different than everybody else that we've talked about. But again, my family is just immersed in adoption with lots of different stories. And so Leah is going to share a little bit about her story, and I'm just going to ask her some questions along. Hi, Leah.
Hey. Good to see you again, and welcome to everybody.
Yeah. So if you would, could you just gives us, as much as you feel comfortable, a little bit about your adoption story?
Sure. We're going to date ourselves here. I am 41 years old. So my story is 40 years old, but it actually started in the late '70s. My mother was engaged to somebody from Europe, and they had planned on starting a family living in the US. He was here going to school and they worked together. Then all of a sudden, his only sibling committed suicide and he decided he needed to go back to Germany to be with his parents. She was at the time already 30 and found herself single and decided there wasn't going to be a lot of time to find somebody else and start a family, and a family was something she really wanted. She explored lots of different options, and at the time, single women, and especially that had crossed the line to their 30s were not really what the US considered adoption worthy parents. They really wanted moms and dads. They really wanted younger folks, just things that she didn't qualify for. So she had had some friends who were in a similar boat and decided that they would look at international adoption. She started some of the research to find an agency and all those things through Children's Home, which still today exists in the US for replacing American children.
But they had some connections with some international adoption agencies, one of them being International Mission of Hope, who was founded in Vietnam in the 1970s and expanded to India in, I think, '77 is what I heard, but started by an American who she was to a doctor. She was very well to do here in this country. They decided to move their family over to Vietnam to start this because there was a lot of Vietnamese children in the '70s that were looking for homes and then expanded to India. Right around the time, Mother Teresa started her adoption agency, any others out of there because again, there was so many children waiting and orphaned. She started the process of putting in a referral doing just like you do in the US. You have to get a physical, you have to submit your financial records, all these things to show that you could really feasibly take a child. If those of you that are old enough might remember this, those of you that aren't, there was a baby selling scandal that came up against Indian adoption in the late '70s, which shut adoption down for a couple of years.
There was a lot of controversy around was there baby selling, were people making money and profit off poor people's misfortune, things like that. She thought, Well, I don't know if this is the thing, but there's not really anything else. We'll just wait it out. By the time that was over, she was 35 years old, 1981. It started up again and there was adoptions both from Korea and India through IMH. She would put her name back on the list. How this list worked was basically the next baby that came in, if it was your number, it was yours. It was a referral system. You put your name on the list. Think of it like taking a ticket from a driver's license counter. When your number is called, you come up and that's your kid. You don't get to choose, you don't get to put in special requests for children as they come and as the next person is waiting. She went back on the list. In 1982, she got a call that I was born and that I was hers. She was thrilled, absolutely thrilled. She had finally gotten her family on board. My grandma was one of those that maybe didn't like a lot of change in her life, had this idea of what her family was going to look like, found herself as an older mother.
She had my aunt at 40, so she was used to being older, but still thought it would look something like a picture perfect life. At the same time that I was born, my aunt married a man from Turkey who had dreadlocks and dark skin and all this. Between the two, my grandma was like, What in the world is going on with this family? But it all worked out wonderfully, and she got my name. All two moved here from Turkey in '82 as well, so we joke that we both came at the same time, but he aged much worse than me. That said, it was beginning of a different look in our family. They are all blonde hair, blue eyes, Scandinavian and German background. All of a sudden, all two and I come and we change what the look of this family and then from there on, grandkids and everything would look like. That was it's an exciting thing. But back to my story in India, and especially in the '80s again, there was a caste system, and it was very much considered if you did something that you shouldn't have, you got kicked out of your caste, which would change your economic future, your social future, all those things.
At the time, many women who found themselves pregnant out of wedlock would either seek abortions or put their babies up for adoption. Calcutta is still today one of the poorest cities in the world, but again, at that time was extremely poor, dirty, people were dying in streets. I have heard stories that are just disgusting. In fact, all those stories have made me never want to go back to visit. But that said, they had these things called adoption drop boxes, and think of it like a library card or book return where you just open the door, conveyor belt comes, you put your book on and it goes back into the library. This was you put your baby on it and it goes into this home that was started by this Cherie who started International Mission of Hope. It was a hospital. They called it a nursing home, but a hospital that took in orphan to children or abandoned children were cared for by US doctors. There were also some Europeans there, I think. Then when they were strong enough, they were sent home via Northwest Airlines at the time to their family. I was born, they think, actually probably a late-stage abortion gone wrong because I was born very early, so I weighed a little over a pound.
Probably would not have made it if my mom had not accepted that referral, but anyway, was dropped. We guess, I don't think you'd live that much longer, so probably the birthday is right, but we guess at a time or anything else because my birth certificate does say abandoned child. The way adoptions work, unfortunately, until it's a legal adoption in the US, your health insurance does not cover said to be child. My mom had to pay out of pocket for all of the care that I was going to need to be able to get strong enough, which by their standards was six pounds to be able to take the flight from India to the US. Most babies did that within a couple of weeks and came home around a month. I was much closer to the five-month mark, but she didn't even think twice. It was like, Absolutely, that's my kid, I'll pay for it. It was wonderful that she did that. Then three years later, she repeated the process and I got a sister, not biological, but from the same orphanage, and her family was then made of the two of us. She never did marry.
She dated much later in life, but never did marry. That was her family. Because her marriage fell through and then because she decided to really look at how she could grow her family outside the typical means that we ended up a family. It's a very great story. She always used to say, You may not have grown under my heart, but you grew in my heart. Because she would get updates every day above one day, my heart stopped. So she got an update. Do you still want to resuscitate and do this and that and whatever? I got pneumonia. Do you still want to treat that? It's very expensive. It requires one-on-one care. She was getting updates regularly. There was times where she could have thrown the towel and then said, I'll take the next available, but she did not. It was a whole different a lot of people pray to get pregnant or have kids. She prayed that this would and it would work and it would be a healthy child, and then same with my sister, three years later.
It's funny. Leah and I met after her mom had passed when she started going out with my son. And when I heard her story, I said, Oh, my gosh. I just know that Mother Teresa held you somewhere she got to that orphanage and she held you because you should not have made it to where you are and be the brightest and such an accomplished woman and health-wise and darn decent health. And you said that your mother used to say the same thing.
She did. She always swore that Mother Teresa… And it was interesting because Mother Teresa had her own agency going in Calcutta at the same time, but they would wander, as I hear it, wander the streets looking for babies that didn't get lucky enough to be put on the conveyor belt and maybe they put them on themselves. But they were looking for these abandoned children in the streets of Calcutta to make sure that part of Mother Teresa's whole journey was to save lives and to really help India. And so she would walk the streets and my mom swears that she's the one who found me in some dark alley and put it on the conveyor belt and probably not hers because it was too far away and this small infant was not going to live.
Yeah.
See hers. But she does swear that that's the only reason I was around
And I feel the same way I always have from the moment that I met you. You came into this family then three years later, your sister came into this family, very different. You and your sister are very different people, that type of thing. I had some challenges there in terms of education and being able to, what do I say, learning challenges and that type of thing. You didn't, your sister did. So your mom had to spend a lot of time with your sister from that perspective. And you got very close with your nanny and pops, your grandparents, the one who was like, Oh, my gosh, what's happening to our family? So great to you. What would you say when you look over your life have been the challenges of being adopted and being brought over? Are there any that you say and what might those be?
So it's interesting because I've heard the story again about nanny, we'll lovingly call her nanny. And a quick funny story there is the maternal grandmother in India is called nanny. And my grandma never wanted to be Grandma Johnson because grandma Johnson already existed and was not the nicest woman in the world. So she, being her first grandchild, hoped and prayed that I would not come up with grandma Johnson, and on my own, I came up with nanny. So she was in love right away, but obviously that probably sealed the deal. And if you ask anybody, she used to call it her bookends, but my cousin Anthony, who was the last and I was the first of five of them, were by far her favorites, and she didn't even try to hide it. She would just very openly had favorites. And it's funny because she was so against in the beginning this idea and whatever that I would end up being her favorite. And maybe it's first, maybe it's that we spent a lot of time together. I'm not quite sure. But some people would see that as a challenge. It was never a challenge for me because we bonded as if I was her blood-related grandchild.
But other people were not always so accepting. People with little kids are fairly blunt in what they say because it's black and white. Well, you don't look like so and so. Well, correct, I don't. I do have a picture here. This is my mom. You can see the blonde hair, blue eyes, and then you can see the dark skin that I have. It was very obvious growing up. It wasn't one of those where you look like your family. You could pretend a little bit longer or keep the secret a little bit longer. It was well-known. But would ask and I would just say, Well, that is my mom. Well, that's not your real mom. Well, to me it was. I didn't even really know what that meant, so I would just say, Well, yes, it is. My mom would never discount that I was adopted, but never say there was someone else out there either. We were real family. I had a little bit of that, but I also was lucky enough that everybody that I came in contact with early in life was very accepting. The person who did my daycare one of the days my grandma couldn't have a daughter my age and we're still very good friends today and raising our kids as friends.
My cousins have always been extremely close to me and never saw a difference. Like I said, two of them are half-Turkish, so they look not American either as little kids. There's been people who have asked, but we never lie about the issue. I was adopted. And so it hasn't really faced… It hasn't made any challenges for me that haven't been easy to face. I think that's where the difference between me and my sister is that she was maybe not as strong of a personality, not to be mean, but not as intelligent. So she took some of those comments as personal insults, and at a very young age already started to question, Why do I not look like you? Why do I not fit in? So and so says this. You could see that it really started to eat at her and eventually turned into many teenage problems and eventually running away and drugs and all those kinds of things. But it was because she couldn't really wrap her head around the fact that she was given up for adoption and what happened to my real parents, why she didn't have a dad growing up. That was tougher for her than for me.
I was like, Oh, whatever. Then really just fitting in. I think she always felt like she really didn't fit in. I never felt that because I was so close to my grandma, so close to my mom. I had a close-knit group of friends. High school was easy because I went to a big school where there was a lot of people to meet up with and join sports teams with. I have never pictured myself as different, so that's probably why those challenges were not as huge to me as they are to other people.
And it could go all the way back, like when I interviewed my cousin, Barb, even in the epigenetics or the relinquishment, the abandonment, that type of thing. Her situation could have been so much more different than you, and being how tiny and non-viable you were, but then you were cared for and you were cared deeply for because they had to in order to have you survive, where it could have been a whole different situation for your sister, which we know can impact. And there's a lot of trauma-informed, therapeutic approaches now that I know that they're using for adoptions and that type of thing.
Which I think is wonderful because those didn't exist 20 years ago or 30 years ago when she was that age and probably could have benefited from some of that. My mom did try to find psychologists and things like that, but international adoption really got popular about 10 years after me when we started doing international adoptions with China. And even Russia was a big thing in the '90s, so it really got more popular. But back in the '80s, there just was not a lot of that yet. Especially being in Minnesota, fairly white communities, it was obvious if you didn't look like a lot of the people around you and there just wasn't a lot of, to your point, resources for help. Some people did struggle. I just never really thought of myself as different.
So.
They kid on I'm the blondest Indian when I got my job at 20 years ago now because there were a lot of Indian developers there who were culturally Indian and they ate the food and they spoke the language and they would all go to dinner every day and they would never ask me. I was like, Why? They never asked me. They would ask some of my friends who were not Indian but were friends with them. I finally said, Derek, why do they never ask me to go to dinner? He was like, Well, they're afraid of you because they call you the blonde Indian. They don't know how to accept somebody who looks like you but is not like them. I'm like, Oh, okay.
Interesting. Interesting.
Yeah. I've just always identified, to be honest, as white.
Yeah. It's not a dis on your cultural aspects, but it's just that this is all that you know, is that you grew up in this Scandinavian heritage- Catholic family. -family. I think we can probably surmise from what we just talked about. The gifts are your life. You were loved deeply given all the opportunities that had you not been given that you most likely would not have survived. When you're talking 40 years ago, a 1.2-pound baby in the streets of Calcutta, and yes, they had medical care and that type of thing, but even in Western medicine here, a lot of those children would not survive at that age or have really significant health challenges and all of that where you really don't.
No, it's been amazing. I have friends who have had premature babies in this country and they have problems with their eyes. It's one of the biggest things with the eyes or the lungs. I guess as a younger child, I got pneumonia fairly often, but I think that's pretty much… I don't get all that often anymore. I still don't wear glasses at 41. A lot of the things that they say premies have challenges with have never impacted me. I do credit that to probably the one-on-one care that was given and obviously great good care because it is a third world country today yet. Definitely, 40 years ago was not advanced at all.
I'm thinking about this, and you and I have talked… Leah and I talk a lot. We spend evenings just solving- Wrapping things up. -solving all the world problems and watching Netflix. But defining you as who you are today, what would you say because of your birth story, your adoption story, how has that defined you as a woman, 40-year-old woman today?
The funny part is I actually don't think it defined me. I do not think of it as a defining moment. However you come into this world, hopefully it is to a loving family. Not always, though. You are who you are, I think. Some of that is your personality, God chose to give you. Some of it is nature versus nurture first. Nurture plays into it, but I have never been defined by it. It is a fact, right? I was adopted. I did not look like my family. It really has not defined me. I think the struggle has been not knowing some of the background, so there is no health information. We did not come with health information because obviously you were abandoned, so you didn't have that anyway. Some of the things that if you have historical information you can plan for, you can, from a medical perspective, have tests run or check as potential issues down the road we don't have. I think that's been a little bit more of a challenge just because you don't really know what you might be predisposed to have. You don't know necessarily what to plan for. But I don't think that there have been any huge challenges in my life.
I was able to be educated to your point and find jobs fairly easily. In fact, maybe the color of my skin has helped in some of that. Obviously, it just to me has not been a defining moment. It has been more of a part of my story, and I'm proud of it. I'm proud of the fact that I was adopted. I don't think of my mother as anything less than my mother. I've never thought of her as like adopted mom or a second mom or anything like that. It's the mom that I had. Unfortunately, she didn't live as long as I would have liked, but it was exactly the story that it was meant to be. I did not say that I have a lot of challenges from it or it hasn't defined me in a bad way at all.
What I see just knowing you is probably the biggest thing was when you're going to have your first baby, and it was like, Am I going to be able to connect with this child? Because I've never had that. I don't have that psychological, emotional, maternal. I don't have any of that. And am I going to be able to love this child because I don't have... I had it from my mom and the family, but that was one of your questions. And so tell us what having... You're now going on your third child coming soon, but what has that done for you and changed even in the way that I don't even know if it's a thinking or in your heart. What has changed you?
Absolutely. That's a great question. It is true what Pat was saying. I was always under the assumption that maternal instinct was something that you just were born with, and maybe because I wasn't attached right away to my mother, so the whole idea of breastfeeding and anything like that was not part of my life, maybe I missed that because I didn't even want children. For the longest time, it was not on my radar. A career was on my radar, making money was on my radar. Anything around success was on my radar, but having children was nothing I really ever wanted. I felt like maybe I didn't have that maternal instinct. Maybe it wasn't something that I was called to do really. Even after we got married, I was 36 when we got married, and it wasn't necessarily a thing that I even thought would be possible because of my age. I am much smaller in stature, so I have been told it may have been harder to carry a baby, all these things. I thought, Well, if it happens, great. If not, that is not a big deal to me. I'm not going to cry over not having a child.
Then we did have one miscarriage and thought, Well, it's just not supposed to be. I didn't even try and ended up pregnant with Grace. I will tell you that I didn't think I could ever love something as much as I loved Grace. I mean, that child, and I think partially, and I tried to explain this once to my husband, who can be a little bit less nurturing than I sometimes would like, I said, I think it's partly because it's the only person in the world I am related to that I know. I did the whole ancestry, DNA thing. It came back with no results. I've never been genetically the same or related to anybody. Then here's this baby, and she was perfect. She was the most adorable, still is an adorable child. And it changed me inside. Something that I can't even tell you because I didn't think I wanted children. I didn't think I'd be a grader. I didn't really necessarily want two or three or however many God will let us have. But once I saw Grace, it was like, not only is she related to me, but I made this. This little thing is mine, and it's not just that she had no health problems.
There was nothing. My pregnancy was easy with her. I had a C-section because of my size, but it was very easy and I recovered quickly. She's just been like my little sidekick forever, my little buddy. To this day, I still sleep with her because of that. But she literally is probably the closest thing I have to perfect. She's perfect, and she's just perfect, and she's just to me. There was no way I couldn't love her. All those worries that I had, all those thoughts of, Oh, will I be able to do it? Well, do I have the DNA to be able to do this? Absolutely. It just comes to you. I think most moms will tell you that you don't understand that love until you have your own child. But it is absolutely true that it changes you completely. Then once I had Grace, it was like, Well, if we get pregnant again and I was approaching 40, it'll happen and it'll be great. It was. Laney was equally as wonderful, a little bit more of a complex pregnancy, but just you couldn't have asked for better. Then surprisingly, at 41, here I am pregnant again, and this is the easiest of all of them so far, so I'm sure it's going to be an adorable little boy.
But now I don't worry at all because it's just like you will find a way to do what you do. I think that's a mother. I don't think that has anything to do with how you got your baby because my mom obviously didn't carry but felt the call and was a great mother. Everybody, his kids, like I said, I hear they are changed forever by those children. You see it more in moms than dads because dads don't have that old carrying for nine months and all of that. I think it is really just an instinct that once you see that baby, you're bound to it. But it has been just a miraculous thing for me because of the whole I'm actually related to two people on this earth now, soon to be three. Funny thing there is for a long time, Grace did not like me. She actually looked a lot more like Trevor. She is still very fair-skinned. They all are light brown hair. In fact, it's almost turning golden blonde. People would not necessarily peg me as her mother. Even one time I was picking her up as an infant from daycare, and you fingerprint in so you don't have to stop and talk to anyone.
You get in, you get their car seats. I have the car seat. I go into the infant room to pick her up. All of a sudden, this door is locked and this person staring at me. I'm like, Huh? Pretty soon the director of the facility walks in, goes over to the person, What's wrong? Somebody's trying to steal Grace. She looks, she goes, No, that's Grace's mother. I must not have done pick-up enough times to be on this person's radar. But it offended me. Actually, I have to say it was offensive because I grew up not looking like my mom, and no one ever questioned it. I suppose, partly the times we didn't have locking doors and all that, but no one ever questioned that I was 10 Shades Daugther and my hair was black and everything else. Then here it is my own child, and you're questioning whether I should be walking out the door with her. But it has really just almost brought my family completely other. I wish my family was here. Like I said, my mom's gone, my grandparents are gone. So all of the people that I wish could have met Grace are not here, but I know they're seeing her from above, and they would just be thrilled because it finally brought full circle.
I came into their life for a reason. Grace came into mine, and now it's this perfect circle of love.
Yeah, and that's really what it's all about. It really is about the act of love, the emotion of love, the energy of love. As you said, your mother, absolutely, her heart was blown wide open with you and your sister, and that there was never a question that she was not your mother. I think you really are one of the fortunate ones. I don't know, maybe you're questioning of you did the ancestor DNA, nothing came back. But it's like you're pretty pragmatic about that. Maybe that is because you just know there's no way for me to ever know, so I need to accept the fact that this is my family. This is my family. I can't be searching where a lot of people really are looking to search. They do. A lot of the people that I have interviewed on this discussion have that.
I think the one thing you brought up, and it probably has defined me and maybe not the best day in the world either, but I look at life very black and white. There is not a lot of emotion in anything. I don't get real happy about a lot of things. I don't get real sad about a lot of things. It's just in the middle. There's not a lot of gray. It should either be this way or this way. That goes for how you clean your house versus how you raise your kid. To me, there's just not a lot of gray in anything or emotion in anything. Some people have often said you never seem that thrilled and you never seem that sad, or you don't cry about these events and you don't… I can't explain that to you because I do feel things. It's not that I'm one of those people that has a mental condition where they don't feel things, but it never really goes that deep. It's like, okay, so now you're faced with this. What are you going to do? For me, it's like figure out the best way to move on, what's the most reasonable, pragmatic, logical way to move on, and you don't dwell on things.
Some people would call that callous or emotionally scarred or whatever, but it just was… I think even when my mom died, it was horribly tragic. She was only 60 years old. I was 26. It should never have happened. It was diabetes that went completely wrong. I think over the nine months that she was in the hospital, I definitely had time to process what we knew was coming, unfortunately, and the fact that it was her choice to go on hospice and call it. She was very fine with dying and understood heaven was a real place. It was not scary for her, so it wasn't scary for me. But it really was never one of those things I really didn't cry for her. My grandma and I just became even closer than we already were because she lost a daughter. I lost a mother. We were both buddies. It just was one of those things many people get stuck. Of course, there are times I think there are said moments where you wish she was here the night before our wedding, of course, having these things that you wish she were part of. But then logically, I say she is part of them.
I don't believe they're that far gone. She is seeing it just in a little bit different view. I feel like that emotional part for me has and maybe it does come from adoption. Maybe it's just my personality is cold, but whatever it is, I just don't really feel a lot and-.
Well, knowing you, I would never call you as cold because you do seek out in your very relationship-oriented, and that is really important to you. But you are like, I'm pragmatic. This is just the way it is. Let's not get overly emotional over this. We don't know. It could have come from abandonment. It could have been your survivalist instinct. You could be just a case study for all of that, but you just don't know. But you're one that it's like, this is the way it is. I would say the most emotion that I have ever seen in you is with your children. That is where true joy, it's not contained. It's absolute true joy when you are with your children because that just speaks right to your heart, which is so beautiful. Before we close on this, because you just shared so much, and I think we're going to have this live panel discussion in early November just so that people can ask questions and that type of thing. What I really gained from talking with you is the abandonment is not always there forefront. Everybody has a different experience from interviewing everybody. Everybody has a different experience.
Some are more pragmatic than others. Others are always seeking, which is okay. We're learning how to do things better. There are lots of assistants out there. As your sister-in-law, my daughter-in-law, Kate, works in social services and adopted our little Rosie. We know that there's lots of really cool things out there to help support the family and the adoptive one. But it's not always necessary. You grew up, and even though some may call them challenges, you don't call them challenges. It's just like it is what it is. We're going to move forward in life, and I'm going to live my life in the best way that I know it to be and embrace it because you know that relationships, they can be tentative. I believe you came into your mom's life for that period of time just so that she could have that absolute joy and love of being able to give love and receive it. So if you had one thing that you would like to tell the audience, just a piece of wisdom for those who are adopted or are the adoptive family, what might that one nugget be?
I think that adoption is beautiful. I think it is a calling for the person that's doing the adopting and then the one that got adopted. I don't think anyone should ever feel bad about it. I don't think anyone should ever question if it's for them, if they felt called to do it, they should. But I think for the adoptee to try and not label yourself as different is going to be the biggest thing because you will find that you'll fit in just how you were supposed to. Sometimes people who are biologically related have challenges that make them not fit into certain things or even feel like they're part of their family at times. If you just let it unfold and don't dwell on that, I think life will be not that it won't have challenges, but that it will be just fine because it is, at the end of the day, I believe God writing a story the way he was to be. He puts people, he sends babies down. I believe all of that is planned long before we come here, and we really have no say in any of that. If you would just not worry about what others are going to think or how it's going to impact you and not dwell on that, but look to the future, I think you'll be much better off because the future is whatever you want it to be.
Your story and how you got here is just the beginning, but the old analogy of you write each chapter you do, and it's totally up to you on how you're going to write that chapter.
Wonderful. If you're struggling with writing the chapter, there are people out there that can.
Support you. Again, like you said, lots of help out there. A last funny story, but sometimes the things we don't… At my wedding, there was no parents there, so my uncle, thealtu, who came over from Turkey in 1982 as well, walked me down the aisle. People afterwards who didn't know me real well or weren't from my side of the family said, Oh, he looks a lot like you. You have the same nose. Well, Aaltu and I are not genetically related either, but he was meant to be there because all through life we had darker skin, we do look similar. All the way through marriage, he was the one that we've always been very close and like confidants. If you look for those people, it doesn't necessarily mean you're related to him, but if you look for people who are going to support that journey, you will find them and they will be there to walk with you.
Absolutely. You and I were just talking. I was talking about the breathe coaching model for grief that I train people to be certified grief coaches. But it's like now it's time to take a look at how do we tailor that for adopted families or people who have been adopted who might be struggling and just want to really walk that path to have a happy and fulfilled life? And maybe they're feeling a little stuck because we know that there's lots of tools. And again, there's trauma-informed therapeutic approaches through psychologists that are super important because not everybody was taken right, was brought into a family right at birth. Some kids are going through the foster system and the foster to adopt. And so there's all those transitions and abandonments and all of that type of thing. So there are so many people out there and finding your tribe. Like you said, finding out all two is one of your tribe.
And accepting the things that made you. I mean, one of the things people kid about all the time is my love for bleach and cleaning, but I really think that was something from being born in an institutional facility or basically born. Probably, especially with those small babies that had to be kept clean and bleached and whatever, so that embracing the things that people call quirks, but that really is who you are. That's not anything to be ashamed of. You love the smell of bleach, then use it in your house or whatever the case may be. I really hate the idea of ever going back to India. People find that weird, but I don't associate with India as anything other than if it was the malls or something beautiful and it'd be trying to go to, but otherwise a part of my history. So embrace what you want to embrace, let the other stuff go, and then really accept the rest of it because it is who you are and it's part of your story. Like you said, whether it's fostering, whether it's placement of an international adoption, whatever it is, it's not maybe the ideal or not the thing people think of when they think of family, but it's the way families are created, so embrace it.
I love it. Well, thank you so much, Leah, and for everybody else. Again, with this, we'll have a link to sign up and come and visit us. We're just going to come together as a little family so people can ask questions, feel whatever the case may be, so that we can have a live panel discussion. Because we know that there's lots of beliefs, lots of twists and turns, and lots of ideas on how to really move forward and allowing that grief that a lot of people feel through the adoption process to really coincide with the great gratitude and the gifts that come from it. So thank you. Thank you.
I love what you're doing, and I love that your family is made up of so many amazing stories that come together to be a family now.
Me too. Okay, we'll talk to you later.
Bye-bye. Bye.
Contact us:
Cami Thelander: www.bearfootyogi.com
The Confident Grief Coach School: www.healingfamilygrief.com