S3E9: Damon Davis - Who Am I Really? - An Adoption Journey

Damon Davis is the host of the "Who Am I Really?" podcast (www.whoamireallypodcast.com) where adopted people share their stories of adoption and their attempt to find their birth families. He has interviewed nearly 200 adoptees from an array of life experiences from awful adoptions and amazing reunions to inspiring adoptions and unfortunate reunions.

In his autobiography "Who Am I Really? - An Adoptee Memoir" Damon shares his journey to becoming an adoptive parent and his emotions over the birth of his son, Seth. He opens up about the heartbreak of grappling with his adoptive mother's mental illness while balancing the joy of locating his birth mother working nearby. His journey took a twist when he located his biological father via DNA testing.

Social media and contact information:

IG: @damonldavis, @WAIReally

FB: https://facebook.com/waireally

Podcast Transcript

[00:00:00] Damaged Parents: Welcome back to Relatively Damaged by Damaged Parents. Today we have Damon Davis with us. He is the host of, Who Am I Really? Podcast where adopted people share their stories of adoption. And their attempt to find their birth families. He's interviewed nearly 200 adoptees from an array of life experiences, from awful adoptions and amazing reunions to inspiring adoptions and unfortunate reunions. In his autobiography.

[00:00:27] Who Am I, Really An Adopted Memoir? Damon shares his journey to becoming an adoptive parent and his emotions over the birth of his son Seth. He opens up about the heartbreak of grappling with his adopted mother's mental illness, while balancing the joy of locating his birth mother working nearby.

[00:00:45] His journey took a twist when he located his biological father via D N A testing. You can find Damon by checking out his book, Who Am I Really? An adoptee memoir. And you can check out the podcast. Who Am I? Really? And you can find him on Instagram at @waireally, , is his tag.

[00:01:06] welcome to the show, Damon.

[00:01:08] Damon Davis: Thank you so much, Angela. It's really good to be here with you. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

[00:01:13] Damaged Parents: Yeah, you're welcome. In so many ways mm-hmm. , because I have not yet talked to someone, from this perspective, and I'm, I'm intrigued even just reading your bio. Yeah. You know, that it sounds like it was a great joy to connect with birth mother and maybe not so much with birth father and in my mind as not.

[00:01:36] Like my dad left when I was young, so I think I can kind of understand some of that. but n I wasn't adopted and so I think I always had this belief that all the connections when you made them would be fantastical and loving and beautiful, and it's not true.

[00:01:55] Damon Davis: Yeah. I'm really glad you started off there with the

[00:01:58] fallacy of what the lay public believes adoption is and what reunion is. I think there's been a Hollywood-ification of what adoption and reunion really are, and it's just not true. It's, there's real life feelings and emotions and you know, there's. A lot that goes into a reunion. There's the emotional rollercoaster of the adopted person who may be on a week's journey or a decades long journey or a lifetime journey to find someone.

[00:02:35] They may go on that journey and discover someone immediately or take forever and then be accepted or rejected. So some birth parents will say, oh my gosh, I'm so glad you finally found. I wanted to reach out to you, but I didn't want to disturb your life. Others will say things like, I can't believe you're coming at me right now.

[00:02:59] I dealt with this, you know, quote unquote situation 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. I have a life, I have a family. I, I don't want to know you. Right? And there's things in between. It's not even. For lack of better words, black and white, is that there are folks that will say things like, oh my gosh, I'm so glad you found me.

[00:03:20] We should get together. Mm-hmm , but let's do it next week. Or Let's do it next month. I haven't told my kids about you yet. Maybe I'll do that next week or next year. And then it's 10 years later and the person is like, I've been in reunion with my biological father for, you know, blah, blah, blah years. And he's always said that he would tell his family about me and it's never happened.

[00:03:42] Right. So there's, I, I raised some of just these examples to illustrate that there is a great variety in how adoption reunion can go.

[00:03:55] Damaged Parents: Yeah.

[00:03:55] Damon Davis: There's also a lot of variety in how an adoption itself can go, and I'm gonna just focus on that for a quick minute.

[00:04:00] Damaged Parents: Yeah.

[00:04:01] Damon Davis: Some of the things that happen are, let's center ourselves on what adoption actually is, cuz this is something that I think a lot of people don't focus their minds on and adoption.

[00:04:12] Is a child who has been removed from their family of origin and placed in another family. And if you think about that for a minute, what we like to think about as our family is like a family tree and we're all connected by the roots, the trunk, the branches, and we are the leaves and branches that extend out,

[00:04:33] Damaged Parents: right?

[00:04:33] Damon Davis: What you've done is you've clipped off one of the leaves and you've attached it to another tree and that doesn't really work, does it? Mm-hmm. . So sometimes we are, I'm, I feel very well adjusted in my adoption. My parents loved me endlessly. I looked like my parents. So I didn't have to live my adoption experience publicly, which I'll get into later.

[00:04:54] You know, I was fine. I had two great parents. I didn't need to find , two other parents. I was good to go. Other people don't have the same experience Sometimes what happens? A person is taken from their first family, placed in their second family, and that second family has its own set of issues as to why they were adopting in the first place.

[00:05:17] They may have had a series of miscarriages and were determined not to be able to have a child. They may have never been able to get pregnant, and it was determined that they are not able to get pregnant. So adoption is the way to create a family. Some families have lost a child and are grieving and have love to give, and they put it into adopting another child.

[00:05:42] I say all that to say the adoptive parents also have some issues and challenges and things that they need to work through before adopting a child, because what we sometimes do is place our expectations on a child you. And we do that. I have a biological son and I have two bi adopted children, and I only differentiate them.

[00:06:03] They're all my children, but I differentiate them for purposes of this discussion.

[00:06:06] Damaged Parents: Mm-hmm.

[00:06:07] Damon Davis: and I've put expectations on all of them, right? I expected that I was going to influence them with hip hop, soccer and lacrosse, the things that I grew up with, and they just don't care. They're not interested in the same stuff that I am.

[00:06:22] One of them, you know, likes to draw and, be a gamer and the other one is super artistic and she sows and she is a photographer. Like we put expectations on our kids, no matter what and then you add in a layer of adoption and sort of expectation, and it can really lead to some challenging relationships where adopted people feel like they were brought in to heal a wound, fill a gap.

[00:06:51] they had false expectations that were placed on them about who they were going to be when inherently they are part of another family. I tried to go through just some of these examples and I could go on and on and on. I could literally talk for the whole hour about this stuff because, uh, I bring these things up because I want to make sure people think very clearly about what adoption is.

[00:07:12] I'm gonna say one more thing before I let you come back. I want you to focus on the fact that every adopted person I've ever spoken to has told me that their adoption started from some challenging or otherwise negative place. Adoption never starts from, we had two lovely parents and their life was awesome, and they just decided to give a child up for adoption.

[00:07:38] It doesn't happen that way. Adoption or rarely comes from, what's that

[00:07:42] ex,

[00:07:42] Damaged Parents: I would say I would think extremely rarely after.

[00:07:45] Damon Davis: I've never spoken to a single person who has said, I met my biological mom, and she said things were awesome. I just decided to put you up. Right. They, yeah. No,

[00:07:53] Damaged Parents: I'm only speaking. They place a child.

[00:07:55] right? Mm-hmm. , I'm just speaking from the book, uh, far from a Tree by Andrew Solomon. Mm-hmm. , where him and his husband had a friend and that I, I believe everyone was, was, uh, in the g LGBTQ community and mm-hmm. , then she agreed to carry, you know, to give them a child that she would carry for them. Yes. Um, which is, which can also I think maybe be traumatic to the child, um, of.

[00:08:23] I just wanted to, that's not even I, in my mind, I scenario though. Oh yeah, exactly.

[00:08:27] Right, right.

[00:08:28] Damon Davis: So that's a different scenario. What I'm talking about with adoption is, I would say 99 point, a high numbers, percent of the time is there's an ave or there's a pregnancy and an adverse circumstance that puts the child in a place where they are available to be placed for adoption.

[00:08:48] It. Abuse in the home. It is societal pressure to not be a single unwed mother. It is parental pressure. Don't you bring that child into my house that you had with that boy that I told you not to be with. It is, you know, a one night stand that turns into an oops. I got pregnant. There are all of where.

[00:09:13] It wasn't necessarily, there's some influence, there's coercion to put babies up for adoption because there's a marketplace for it, et cetera.

[00:09:20] Damaged Parents: Mm-hmm.

[00:09:20] Damon Davis: I say all that to say that we need to just keep our minds focused on the fact that adoption starts from a challenging place. Many times it is filled with love when a child is placed in another family, but sometimes it's not, and we have to be cognizant of the fact that there are some awesome parents and some awful parents out there.

[00:09:43] and that's on the adoptive and reunion side of things.

[00:09:48] Damaged Parents: Yeah. And I see your point. I was just thinking is, is uh, and thank you for letting me challenge, challenge you on that point because I do see that and as I thought more about it, I was realizing that yeah, most women don't go out to get pregnant to, so that they can give a child up for adoption.

[00:10:06] There's no. Market for that. I guess, I don't know if that market is the right word,

[00:10:13] Damon Davis: yeah.

[00:10:13] Damaged Parents: But , so I could see your point in that a woman gets pregnant, there's already a struggle. And I'm thinking probably on some level that child, that baby. It gets passed down epigenetically as well.

[00:10:30] Damon Davis: Yeah. There's, you know, there's a, a saying in the adoptee community that adoption is trauma. You know, so for myself, I was an infant when I was born and placed for adoption, and I was born via cesarean section, so I was taken from my mom's body and she had already made an adoption plan for me and the people in the room where I was born.

[00:10:54] And she knew that if we bonded, like she would not be able to go through with it. So I was taken from my mom, who I had been inside for nine months, heard her heartbeat, heard her voice, you know, felt her rhythms, shared , her nutrients, everything, and never saw her again for 36 years. That's incredible that in and of itself

[00:11:20] is a trauma. And while I was only in a d in foster care for three to six months, I think maybe three, and I was taken to a loving home. I was taken to a home as an infant with parents whose voices I'd never heard before. You know, an environment that I had never been in, even though I'm inside the womb, it's a unfamiliar place with unfamiliar.

[00:11:44] You know, sensory inputs and, um, , it's challenging. I was, I'm lucky they loved me dearly. I was the focus of everything that they had to give. I was the only child. And like I said, we kind of, we kind of looked alike. You know, my mom's light, my dad's dark, and I'm in the middle. we've shared, you know, similar birthdays.

[00:12:05] My birthday is October 14th. My mom's is the eighth, my dad's was the 17th. And uh, and so we just kind of felt like family and it was amazing. We had similar personality traits. We had the same classic challenges that every family has of getting along, like raising a teenager is not easy. And I was, you know, I wasn't any different than anybody else on the planet, but, um, I got, I was lucky and I've spoken to many adoptees who weren't as lucky in their adoption.

[00:12:33] and, uh, they've, they've said, you know, I felt like a second class citizen. My parents didn't seem like they should have been parents in the first place. Um, they were too focused on each other. They were focused on alcohol. They were focused on hanging out. It felt like they adopted at that time because societal pressure said you had to have, you know, 2.1 kids and a dog and a picket fence.

[00:12:56] And so they went out and created the family that was pressured upon them. So adoption has a lot of challenges.

[00:13:03] Damaged Parents: Ouch. I never thought of that that way. Um, I just wanna go back to how you were talking about the trauma from birth. And I, I don't know that it's ever been put to me. I don't think I've ever even thought of it.

[00:13:17] You know, taking from a mom not knowing voices, I mean, those are some really important things in an infant's life because it's how they learn to view the world and connect and, you know, feel comforted. You love, yeah, comfort, love, all. That's great. Those things. And I'm just wondering like how. It sounds like you ended up in a loving home, which actually may have helped heal you, but how does anyone heal from that trauma?

[00:13:47] Damon Davis: Yeah, I was very fortunate, as I've alluded to already, and I think people heal from the trauma in different ways. We all deal with different situations in our own way. And some people struggle mightily with realizing what adoption means. What, so in the adoptee community, we call this realization that I was a child that was from this family and now I'm over in this family.

[00:14:15] Like the actual recognition that you're having right now, it, they call it coming out of the fog, right? That the fog of adoption is everything is rosy. The classic sort of Hollywood scenario that we think of in adoption where there's a reality to it and people come out of the fog and they cope in different ways.

[00:14:37] Some people are super solid in themselves and they're like, I know who I am and I'm gonna go find whoever it is that I need to find. others are like, I can't believe this happened to me. This, why would my mom do this? No wonder my parents were so awful or I'm thankful that my parents were so awesome and I'm really glad that they're supportive of my desire to search.

[00:15:03] so people cope with it in different ways, and some of that is from

[00:15:07] the input that they get from their adoptive family. So sometimes people sort of feel like they wanna search and they'll share it with their adoptive family, and they're, and the adoptive family can sometimes be like, well, weren't, weren't we enough for you?

[00:15:24] Damaged Parents: Oh, like they're being betrayed now because

[00:15:26] Damon Davis: you're, yeah, you're betrayed. Like, you know, we, we brought you into this home. We loved you so much. We tried so hard, you know, to make things happy. and the message is lost on the adoptive family in that instance because what the adopted person is saying is, I need to go find this for me.

[00:15:46] I'm not saying you weren't enough. I'm saying I have unanswered questions about myself and we've all been on a personal journey of discovery, whatever that may be. It may be what you, what inspired you to start this podcast, Angela? Right, right, right. Some personal journey that you've been through sent you on a voyage and that brought you here.

[00:16:09] To this moment where you're now interviewing other people about their life experiences. We all go through a life journey. And for an adopted person, it's a really special journey because it's a discovery of the fact that quite literally, you could have been a different person in your life trajectory. If you had stayed with your biological parents, you would've grown up.

[00:16:33] In a different community, in a different culture, in a different socioeconomic status. You might have been, uh, I'm a, a black adoptee that grew up in a fairly predominantly white community in Columbia, Maryland. If I had grown up with my mom, I might have been raised in a predominantly black community for all I know.

[00:16:53] You know what I mean? So that would've led to a whole different set of experiences exploring what you feel inside about your loss of identity is important and it's lost on people, that that's something that you can't really fight you. You almost feel driven to try to find answers just because, I mean, just think about it, Angela, if I said to you, listen, Angela, I gotta tell you something, you, your mom is not actually your mom.

[00:17:25] You were born from another woman. You would automatically think oh my gosh, there's another woman out there who is this person, right? Yeah. It's an automatic un, like you can't fight it kind of thought process to go through and it's an important journey for people to be able to go on. But sometimes the adoptive family is supportive and sometimes they're not.

[00:17:47] Uh, because as I said before, they feel betrayed. So to go back to your original question, like people cope in different ways. They go to facebook groups where other adoptees are talking and they learn about what the lingo is and what other people are feeling, and they identify with other people's stories in order to not feel alone.

[00:18:06] They listen to podcasts like, Who Am I Really? Once Upon a Time in Adoptee Land, Living in Adoption Land, uh, adoptees on all of those podcasts and more are out there sharing adoptees stories and journey. From across the adoption spectrum, and it's important for us to be able to find those resources and start to learn.

[00:18:28] What did that other adoptee do? How did they cope with the abuse, the feeling of betrayal? The, I searched for a biological relative and I found a gravestone. I searched for a biological relative and they said, listen, I don't want to know you. Right. How do people cope with those things? The resources are out there.

[00:18:49] Social media groups and on podcasts and things like this that help people through that stuff,

[00:18:55] Damaged Parents: gosh, that just is, is so hard. , the only way I could even relate is not, my dad left at eight and then I think I met him at 26 ish. Mm. Um, And I was really grateful for what he said. And I always share this story so that maybe other people can borrow it from me in that, you know, he, when I, when I met him, he apologized and said, I'm really sorry I couldn't be the father you needed me to be.

[00:19:25] Damon Davis: Wow.

[00:19:25] Damaged Parents: And I think that that was healing. So while it's not even close to not knowing who this person was, you know, there was that huge loss for that period of time.

[00:19:37] Damon Davis: Yeah.

[00:19:37] Damaged Parents: And that huge injury. and

[00:19:41] Damon Davis: yeah, it's relatable for sure.

[00:19:42] Damaged Parents: I'm really surprised at how much I relate to the pain and suffering in the story of, of what happens in an adoption because I'm also, uh, you know, how could, how could an adoptee not want to look?

[00:19:57] Um, mm-hmm. , there was an, like you were saying, so many months in a womb and a heartbeat and a con, like a very physiological connection to another human being that then was totally cut off. And I almost wanna call it like a spiritual, it could be a spiritual wounding.

[00:20:15] Damon Davis: Yeah. it can be a wounding in so many ways, you know, spiritually, emotionally, physically.

[00:20:24] I mean, you could go on and on and on, but let me be clear, there will always be a need for adoption. There are so many circumstances where there's a challenging environment for a child that we need to help them get out of so that they have their best opportunity for a thriving life. There will always be that need and there are parents who die. Unfortunately, there are abusive situations that happen. There are, you could name several different reasons why a child might need to be removed from a home and placed in a different place. I think one of our, one of the things we need to work harder on as a society is trying to help elements of the family themselves to take that child on in a kinship adoption

[00:21:19] versus continuing the marketplace of paying for the process of adopting a child into a completely different family. And I'm careful about how I say those words because there is a marketplace for adoption. There are people who want to adopt family. If I want to adopt children, and I, I respect them for that.

[00:21:42] I've done it. So I'm not dis people for that desire. What I am saying is the first line of choice in a child's future should be, can we support the extended family in helping that child to stay with the family? Because the first step shouldn't just be, alright, let's take this child from over here and place it way over here in this other family.

[00:22:10] can we move the child just down the tree a little bit to an aunt or an uncle, a grandmother or someone, you know, instead of providing, like paying exorbitant amounts of money to place the child somewhere else, can we get a little bit of assistance to let that person move into a slightly bigger home where they'll have a bedroom for this child and they can support the child, and the child stays in the family, right?

[00:22:34] Or even then support.

[00:22:36] Damaged Parents: How can we as a society support that? Yeah. Right? Yeah. Because I don't think it's very well supported, at least not where I live. Yeah. Um, there's not the tools or the counseling and the additional things that might be needed when, one person in a family becomes pregnant or maybe there's a drug problem or whatever Right.

[00:22:56] To shift it over to another family mm-hmm. and to keep them there. There's, there's that injury too. So everybody's already injured. You know Right. How, how do we, how do we support healthy and safe and love?

[00:23:09] Damon Davis: Right. I'm glad you raised that point cuz it's a really good one. I've spoken from the perspective of trauma to the child.

[00:23:17] Right. The removal of the child from their original family in place with another family which can work out great and which can work out terribly depends. I haven't talked at all about the TRA trauma for the family. Right, the original family for the woman who gets pregnant and she shares her pregnancy with her sister, her mother, her grandmother, whomever, her, you know, whoever in the family, fathers, brothers, whatever.

[00:23:43] And then that child is placed for adoption. That whole family lives with that history that that child is out there somewhere and they have no idea where that child is. Right? Yeah. And that is a secret that can eat away at you. It is a trauma that the family lived through. There's a, there's a, I'm not sure if you've heard this scenario of something called the Girls Who Went Away.

[00:24:09] There's a book by Anne Fessler named the Girls Who Went Away, and in that book it talks about this, what they call Baby Scoop era of adoption where. There was just so much. You can't be a single mom. You can't do this alone. The parents that we've arranged for you are gonna be better than you could ever be as a parent and there was this societal pressure to remove children.

[00:24:33] , infants and children from young mothers and place them with adoptive families. And these women would be pregnant and would be sent away from the family to, , a home for unwed mothers and there would be a gang of girls there, all pregnant, all in their different scenarios, different ages and all this stuff, but sent away from their families to be pregnant

[00:24:54] deliver and then return home and hopefully cover over the whole story with a secret. Oh, she had to go away for surgery. She went away to study. She went away to be at her aunt's house for the summer, whatever the thing is.

[00:25:06] Damaged Parents: Yeah. And I just wanna point out something that came up in my mind as you were telling that story, uh, cuz I know we're, running a little short on time, but is the injury to the male because the man is, I, I truly believe if he knows about the pregnancy and then things like that happen is also injured and that a lot of times it's just not even visible to the possibility that because.

[00:25:31] We don't, they don't generally grow a belly, you know, we don't know that there was a pregnancy. They don't get sent away. And that's right. There's this whole glossing over of the pain that a man might experience mm-hmm. from that very same thing, and we just don't

[00:25:46] talk about it.

[00:25:47] Damon Davis: Yeah, you're absolutely right.

[00:25:48] I've read another book, I can't remember what it was, um, American Baby. Gabriel Glasser, American baby. She talks about the story of a young, a young man who was a man who was placed for adoption, uh, grew up and ended up very sick and on dialysis, but very interested in finding his birth parents. And what, Gabrielle learned in investigating his story was that his parents had.

[00:26:14] Married and stayed together. They were very much in love when he was a kid and they, they didn't, um, their parents forced them apart and forced the child into adoption. I think they got, they tried to get married anyway. And, uh, I raised that to say that the father was very interested in being with the mother of his child.

[00:26:32] And so you're right, there are sometimes damages to the father as well. I spoke to a guest on my show who told me that when she found. Um, and when she was in Reunion, she found out that her biological father was completely broken up over the fact that his daughter was being placed into adoption against his will, to the point where, I mean, for all intents and purposes, it ate him alive.

[00:26:57] He cried in his room, he was alone. He blasted the music and he cried on the floor. And it ended up impacting him very deeply mentally in some really challenging ways. So, There's trauma across the board. Um, but I don't, you know, I don't wanna speak completely negatively about adoption because I'm the man I am today because I was placed for adoption.

[00:27:17] You know what I'm saying? Like, yeah. I, I is not lost on me that if I had stayed with my mother, a young woman who, you know, would've had to scrape and struggle to get by in order to give us a decent life, like I probably would have done well with her because I was with her. But there are advantages that I probably received from not having that early struggle, you know, that helped me advance in life.

[00:27:46] But it's a catch 22. Yes. I missed out on 36 years of knowing that woman. I missed out on 36 plus years of knowing my biological father and all of my biological relatives. You know, I've had. Four sets of parent, two sets of parents now four parents, you know, and lots of cousins and, and uncles and stuff like that.

[00:28:05] So there's, you do miss out on a lot.

[00:28:08] Damaged Parents: Yeah, I'm so grateful that we were able to talk about all the different dynamics of being an adoptee. The injuries across the board, and then the possibility of healing and of ending up in a family where that love can really heal. And then you can, for lack of a better metaphor, spread your wings and fly, you know, go find, uh, your other family.

[00:28:29] You guys check out, Who am I Really?

[00:28:32] And you can find Damon on Instagram at @waireally is the tag. Thank you so much for coming on the show. What a beautiful conversation

[00:28:43] today.

[00:28:43] Damon Davis: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, Angela. And thank you for the platform to let people talk a little bit more about their own life experiences. I think the storytelling is really, really important. So good job.

[00:28:53] Damaged Parents: Thank you. Thank you for being a

[00:28:54] part of it.

[00:28:55] Damon Davis: Of course. My pleasure.

[00:28:56] Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Relatively Damaged by Damaged Parents. We really enjoyed talking to Damon about his experience with adoption. We especially liked when he spoke with an abundance of love and compassion for all involved in the adoption process. To unite with other damaged people connect with us on Instagram, look for @damagedparents We'll be here next week still Relatively Damaged see you then