Have You Seen Her?

Casey’s biological mother doesn’t want to be found. But still, Casey seeks to find her. Needs to. And when she does, a deluge of truth pours forth. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
I'm Danny Shapiro and this is family Secrets, the secrets
that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others,
and the secrets we keep from ourselves. My guest today
is Brooklyn based writer Casey Kahn. Casey's is a story

(00:32):
about love, identity, and belonging. It's also about the questions
that live inside of us until, in the fullness of time,
we're finally ready to ask them.

Speaker 3 (00:44):
I grew up in a suburb of New York City
on Long Island. It was really idyllic in a lot
of ways. It was really close to the beach, which
is something I bribed on. I loved being a camp
counselor and spending time there with my friends. And I
grew up in only in a very close knit Jewish family.
My maternal grandparents lived just down the street from me,

(01:06):
and I admittedly was kind of their golden child, if
you will. My father was a psychologist and my mother
was stay at home mom, and I always knew I
was adopted. I have really early memories of being four
years old and just kind of envisioning my parents picking

(01:30):
me out of a nursery of children in a basina,
even though that was not the case. They really positioned
it in a way. However they did it. I don't
remember the details of their telling me. They did it
in a way that always made me feel really special,
like adored and chosen, and we were all really close.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
Do you write that people would often comment that you
resembled your mom, or that you and your mom resembled
each other.

Speaker 3 (01:55):
Yes, it's funny because, like in all technical terms, we
really do not. I came from these gorgeous, athletic, very tall,
very tan people, and I am very fair, very freckly,
a ruddy blonde naturally, and my natural talents are more artistic.
I was always riding, always drawing, whereas they were like

(02:18):
tennis players and runners naturally. But there's something about me
and my mom. We just have a similar vibe. I mean,
I mean that really calls into question nature versus nurture,
And you know it, did we just rub off on
each other?

Speaker 4 (02:30):
Was it meant to be?

Speaker 3 (02:32):
We would go shopping together and end up dressing alike.
We would share each other's clothes, and we were very
and are very very close. And I do think that
there's a good chance that on a subconscious level. I
don't think it was conscious, especially in adolescents, that my
being adopted made us even closer, because I felt so
appreciated and chosen, and I knew my mother really needed

(02:56):
me and I needed her. My mother was a very
funny woman. A lot of women in my mother's family
they have like a very mischievous sense of humor, and
I kind of fit right.

Speaker 4 (03:06):
In with that.

Speaker 3 (03:07):
Growing up, I was always a class clown, so that
you know, even though that also could have come from
me inherently, like, it just kind of felt very organic
and natural from a personality standpoint. I never felt like
the odd one out, and I know that's not the
case with all adoptees. My dad, my mom, and my
extended family and I all really messed well together.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
It's so interesting too, because when you say that you
don't have any memory of actually being sat down and
told that you were adopted, that really became the prevailing wisdom.
And your father was a psychologist, Like once people really
started thinking about the best way to go about sharing
news about either adoption or donor conception with children, it

(03:49):
was always it's just part of the airy breath it's
part of the fabric of everything. It's not there's no
traumatic moment of sitting down and we have something to
tell you. It's just simply this is. This is our
world that we're in together, and that's what you're describing,
which is such a beautiful thing and such a lucky thing. Gelling,
whether in a biological family or in an adoptive family,

(04:10):
is to some degree a matter of good fortune.

Speaker 3 (04:16):
Yeah, in terms of gelling, being a member of someone's
biological family does not mean you're going to get along
right like, it's just luck.

Speaker 4 (04:22):
Whether it's adoptive, whether it's biological.

Speaker 3 (04:24):
You know, there's not always going to be a beautiful
synergy of personalities necessarily.

Speaker 4 (04:29):
So yes, I always felt very lucky in that sense.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
So was in this you know, really lovely loving childhood.
Where did being adopted sit for you? At a certain
point you say you felt of another time and place,
And I think that that is a very common feeling

(04:56):
among adoptees and or don't conceived people. Where there's a
sense of the term in literature, in an adoptive literature
I remember is genealogical bewilderment, which is a phrase I
love so much. It's like, you know that you're not
genetically related to your parents who you adore, so you

(05:19):
don't know where that other time or place is what
that is. I mean, did that live inside of you
when you were a kid and when you were growing
up and when you were a college student? Like, where
did that reside in you?

Speaker 3 (05:34):
Definitely in my teenage years, my preteen years, it became
really pronounced. I was also always a very dreaming and
creative child. So there are a lot of things that
intersect here and you never really know what comes from
what is that just a personality trait or is that
a product of you know, having a biological disconnect right

(05:54):
or you know, being abandoned at birth. But suffice it
to say, I would say in high school, you know,
post puberty, I really had the ability to daydream in
a way that I now realized could have been dissociative.
There were a lot of things that started happening where
I felt different than my peers. So it was It's

(06:15):
interesting because the feelings were more pronounced in my overall
community and with my peers than it was necessarily even
in my own family. I gravitated very much to my parents' music,
with memorizing lyrics from the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies,
and then I became obsessed with British pop culture of
that era, and then all New England and English literature.

(06:39):
They all kind of coincided in like this little world
I created. It was a permanent sense of wistfulness that
you know, everything was fine by all accounts in my life.

Speaker 4 (06:50):
I did pretty well in school.

Speaker 3 (06:52):
I had friends, but a lot of people did after
school activities, for instance, and I would just prefer, if possible,
to go home and like do my homework, then like daydream,
listen to music, maybe light a candle, like play crossbe
sales now, to do some research, read a book. I
was way more interested in this dream world I created
than really engaging.

Speaker 2 (07:13):
What did you attribute that wistfulness, that permanent state of wistfulness,
and you know, you're describing a kind of being out
of step with the you know, the peers around you.
Did you consciously attribute that in any way to being
adopted or did you just think to yourself, I'm different
from them. I don't know why.

Speaker 4 (07:34):
It's a good question. When you're a teenager.

Speaker 3 (07:36):
No one wants to think like I have a hurdle
or you know, I have a psychological thing that happened
to me, So I don't think I would even allow
myself to consider that. I was also quite extroverted, so
I was very comfortable on stage, so I would write.
By the end of my high school career, my friends
and I would write comedy and perform it. And I
think that was a really good outlet for me.

Speaker 4 (07:56):
But in terms of.

Speaker 3 (07:57):
The separateness of the world in which I lived and
the one I wanted to live in, everyone kind of
knew like Casey wishes she were a hippie, Casey's kind
of quirky, and I think we all collectively just attributed
to those are my interests, and I was of another
time and place. When I was a teenager, I did
realize it was interesting. Being adopted was kind of like

(08:18):
a cool It was almost like a fun fact. And
I remember like talking ill of my birth mother, who
I knew nothing about, didn't know a name, but if
it came up, I'd be like, yeah, that.

Speaker 4 (08:28):
You know that bitch.

Speaker 3 (08:29):
I've always coped with humor, you know, So I do
remember using that as a defense mechanism to my friends,
and in my mind going back and forth between vilifying
that person and wondering, you know, is she okay? And
feeling frankly guilty, wondering if there was someone out there
crying over my absence every day.

Speaker 4 (08:49):
So it was kind of, uh, you know, when I
allowed myself.

Speaker 3 (08:52):
To consider these things as a teenager, I did think
about it. I would think, oh, you know, I feel
so bad here I am with these wonderful parents, and
is there someone else out there mourning me? And then
you know, sometimes in a social context, I would kind
of indulge in that teenage rebellion behavior against the person
who gave birth to me, but a stranger.

Speaker 2 (09:11):
And during that period of time, did you ever talk
to your parents about this or was that a little
bit of you know, just something that you've thought about
on your own. My parents were always very forthcoming. They
would say, you know, there's anything you ever want to
know about your biological family, We're happy to tell you

(09:31):
whatever we can. And it's almost like I didn't believe them,
or I wasn't ready, so we never really talked about it. No,
it felt like a line I did not want to cross.
I did not want to upset them, even though they
didn't make it that way. They did everything correct, you know,
they normalized it. I was loved, I was embraced unconditionally.

(09:52):
I was like welcome to be whoever I was, even
with any differences from them. But I think I knew
if I prodded, it would break their heart. And at
the time it just wasn't worth it to me to
broach those subjects. We'll be back in a moment with
more family secrets.

Speaker 3 (10:27):
When I was in high school, my grandpa was like
my favorite person in the world. And he picked me
up from school one day and he said, you know, Casey, bubbolo,
we're going to run errands. And we went to the
bank and we went into a room a bunch of
safe deposit boxes, and I remember there was like a
long metal table and I kind of stood there tapping

(10:47):
my fingers while he threw lots of envelopes from the
deposit box on the long metal table, and I saw,
just as the envelopes kind of scattered, I picked up
this envelope that Saidc's acceptance into Judaism January nineteen eighty seven,
which was like a few months after I was born
in late eighty six.

Speaker 4 (11:07):
So I got bright red.

Speaker 3 (11:08):
It was you know, I kind of knew, and I
did have some Irish friends and Italian friends who would
like guess my genetic makeup, but I never knew in
a concrete way. And so I looked at it, and
my grandpa saw me look at it and put the
envelopes away, and I never spoke about it with anyone
again until I was an adult and my grandpa died,

(11:28):
and my mom we were talking about that story, and
she said, at the time, he thought I saw like
my birth mom's name and a lot more information than
I actually did see, which was just that I was
converted to Judaism at birth. It's so interesting that that
would have become a kind of its own kind of secret, right,

(11:49):
so it was never spoken of again. And you know,
these kinds of silences within families, you know, endlessly interesting
to me because it's the whole question of why, you know,
why was that something that then couldn't be spoken of,
especially given that it sounds like there was a lot

(12:10):
of openness in your immediate family and with your grandparents
about you know, the facts of your adoption, but just
the feeling of like, well, we're not going to go there,
We're not going to talk about that. Yeah, I could
have been inquisitive about it, but I wasn't. You know,
I could have gone to my mother, but I didn't.
But I do think so much of this is generational. Now,

(12:30):
so many people have adopted children or have downor conceived children,
and I feel like.

Speaker 4 (12:35):
They're in modern generations.

Speaker 3 (12:37):
These conversations are so much more open and welcome and
addressed upfront, and I really admire everyone. Frankly, I just
don't think there was a road map. In nineteen eighty six,
when you were born, there was some understanding about, you know,
the psychology of adoption, adopted parents, and adoptees. Anyone who

(13:01):
would have kept that a secret at that point would
have known that they were an outlier. But a couple
of decades earlier that wasn't the case. And then a
couple of decades since then, it's become, you know, just
a very very different landscape. But I think it's always
important for people to remember how much when all of
this happened in time impacts the story itself. Oh yes,

(13:23):
And you know, it's so interesting because I have the ability,
as I would say, to block start in difficult feelings.
That is a trauma response. I have, as many people do,
like to repress certain feelings. So when I was growing up,
I literally couldn't envision not adopting. And I remember in passing,

(13:44):
when I was like thirteen, my mother mentioned a girl
she knew was having trouble conceiving a baby, and they
were talking, and I said, what's the big deal? Why
wouldn't she adopt a child? Like That's the degree to
which I clearly had a very adolescent understanding of what
it meant to want to have your own baby, and

(14:04):
so frankly on the other side of it, to carry
a baby and give it up when you're developing mentally,
you can't even really get your head around it.

Speaker 2 (14:13):
And it's also adaptive and self protective. Yes, of course,
when it's time for college, Casey goes away, but not
too too far. Her parents have a rule that she
can't go west of the Mississippi. They literally draw a line,
and Casey's fine with this. She adores her parents. She

(14:36):
goes to the University of Michigan, where she thrives both
academically and socially. It's here, too, that she starts fielding
comments about the way she looks the fact of her
being an adoptee and being blonde, which some people interpret
as not looking Jewish, prompt an unsettling comment. Casey hadn't

(14:57):
realized that when she was adopted there was a chance
she was purchased. A friend said that because she was
blonde and white, she must have been expensive. The comment,
the very idea makes her physically sick. She was eighteen
when this was said to her, and she's never forgotten it.
After college, Casey moves to New York City. She wants

(15:20):
to be a writer, but there's no roadmap for that,
so she gets a job in public relations. She's well
suited to PR and meets her future husband, then a
lifestyle journalist, through work. They marry and Casey has her
first child, a son, at the age of twenty nine.
Having a baby, becoming a mom changes everything for Casey

(15:41):
in all the ways new parenthood does, but there's something more.
When she comes to note the magnitude of carrying a baby,
of giving birth, of breastfeeding, and caring for a newborn,
something happens to her. She begins to ask herself questions,
how and why at her birth mother given her away?

Speaker 3 (16:02):
When I first had experienced all of that, you know,
it was just looking me in my face. Always thought
I did always think not. I think I always thought
I can't remember being given away, So what does it matter,
you know, like it's like a look, there's a problem.

Speaker 4 (16:18):
Here's a solution. It all worked out.

Speaker 3 (16:20):
And I think the thought of my son being taken
away from me, the thought of that baby being without me,
and what that does, you know, physiologically, And my mom
would still not like to hear that, you know, I
think she she swooped in and they got me right away,
and you know, I think in my case, I ended
up really lucky because they adopted me at two days old.
But it is undeniable that there's a two day window

(16:42):
in my life where I was not with a mother.
And having my first child really started my curiosity.

Speaker 4 (16:50):
And initially, you know.

Speaker 3 (16:52):
I was just focused on having a baby working. I've
always been a very anxious person, but you know it
was not managed when I had my son. Yeah, I
was quite happy, but I was wired. So I had,
you know, all the paranoid thoughts about my son that
anyone would have.

Speaker 4 (17:09):
But it kind of.

Speaker 3 (17:10):
Prompted me to go into deep research about every child
that was ever afflicted in the world. So as the
years went on, you know, I think that I convinced
myself that it was okay to leave my son to
the degree to which I had to. I was traveling
a lot at that time, and I think everyone mother

(17:31):
is differently, and I was listening to two colleagues who
had had children and worked a lot, and they convinced
me that it's okay. It's better to give your kid
do a professional and I didn't really feel that way
at all. And I think the disconnect of essentially leaving
my child was eating me alive. And when my son
was about two years old, my husband was away on

(17:53):
a work trip, so my son and I went out
to dinner with my parents and I was telling them
how anxious I am, and that I'm just having a
lot of trouble navigating working this much and being a
mom to a young child. And I don't know what's right,
and I don't know what's wrong, and you know, none
of this is out of the ordinary, but I think
there was something else in the background with me.

Speaker 4 (18:12):
I had just entered therapy, So I went to therapy.

Speaker 3 (18:16):
When my son was a year and eight months, maybe
late twenty seventeen, and the first thing, like when I
told my psychologist, I said I'm adopted and he was like, oh,
you know. To him, it was like, okay, let's establish
this right, Like that is a hurdle. You have an
added hurdle that non adoptees don't have. And I never

(18:36):
thought of that prior to that. I never thought of
it in those terms. So having someone with a PhD
tell me that, Okay, you know there is something that
causes you this anxiety for starters, you know, and then
we'll get into the rest of it, but you know,
whether there's chemistry going on, that was like almost a
sigh of relief.

Speaker 2 (18:56):
It felt really empowering. So You're mom asks you at
that point do you want to know more about your
birth mother?

Speaker 4 (19:06):
Exactly?

Speaker 3 (19:07):
So we were at dinner when my husband's away and
in therapy, I'm sharing what my therapist has told me.
At the time, it was clear I had something he
wanted me on medication. I didn't want it yet, and
my mom said, have you been wondering more about your
birth mother? I said, well, you know, what do you know? Like?
How old was she was my first question actually, and

(19:27):
she said thirty nine?

Speaker 4 (19:29):
And I said, what do you mean she was thirty nine.

Speaker 3 (19:32):
I'm thirty nine, right, Now, Never in a million years
would I accidentally have a baby, you know, and again
like life circumstances, right, But I always, my entire life,
envisioned a teenager, maybe in a conflict family, you know,
they were not allowed to have a baby out of wedlock,
a religious family. Like, never did I think it was
going to be a thirty nine year old woman. And
I said, what was her name? And they told me

(19:54):
her name, and it's a very glamorous name from the forties.

Speaker 4 (19:58):
So that took me by surprise as well. And I said,
was anyone an artist.

Speaker 3 (20:02):
Because my natural aptitude is to draw, and they said, yes,
we think the grandmother was. So basically, my mother reveals
that my entire life, she'd been googling my birth mother's name,
you know, my entire like as long as Google has existed,
you know, and that nothing has ever come up until
a year prior to this conversation. In twenty seventeen, my

(20:23):
biological grandmother died and the obituary was chalk full of information.
So I'm at the table, like my head is spinning.
I start googling. I was confused, I said, Mommy, they
seem like really well to do. Why did they give up?
You know, they have a house on the cape and
everyone you know, went to Dartmouth. It just didn't it

(20:43):
sounded like a very New England, well to do family.
So this was confusing because I was like, if they
had the financial means to support the life of a child,
why would they abandon me? And my mom said, well,
you know, all I know is that you're a birth mother,
had a husband or a boyfriend, and they were no
longer in the picture.

Speaker 4 (21:04):
They were in California.

Speaker 3 (21:06):
So I just started thinking, okay, like maybe she got
broken up with and she was older and couldn't do it.
And in the immediate aftermath of learning that information, my
husband and I got to digging into archival information, and
so my husband immediately like springs into action and starts
pulling up all these entertaining stories about my biological grandmother.

(21:26):
They had a house on the Cape, and after living
in New York City, they moved to Rochester for my
biological grandpa's job, and so there were all these articles
about her in Rochester, and the quotes in the stories
sounded like things I would say, her natural skills all
the things described in the obituary sounded like you would
be describing me.

Speaker 2 (21:47):
What did that feel like if you can like sort
of teleport yourself back to that moment where your you know,
this information is kind of tumbling at you.

Speaker 3 (21:57):
It was wild and exciting, but it was still at
a safe distance, like there was no context. So it
was like it was really validating, first of all, kind
of understanding where my biological family was from and kind
of the cultural landscape.

Speaker 4 (22:12):
That surrounded them.

Speaker 3 (22:13):
It was somehow things were resonant with me, like movies, literature, music,
So it did make sense and it was very validating,
but it did bring up more questions.

Speaker 2 (22:23):
I'm struck to by this image of the way in
which in your growing up, on the one hand, it
wasn't like you had burning curiosity, but you had you
had some, and this feeling of the state of wistfulness
and yet feeling like, well, you know, you don't want
to hurt your parents by asking them anything about it.
And then on the other side of that split screen,

(22:45):
there is your mom continuing to google and you know,
try to learn as much as she can about this
Earth mother so that she can have that information for you.
If you ever should want it, and also probably because
of her own curiosity and a love for you of
you know, where did you biologically come from?

Speaker 4 (23:04):
But that all happening.

Speaker 2 (23:06):
Under this roof.

Speaker 4 (23:08):
It's moving to me that.

Speaker 2 (23:09):
People in their quiet ways of loving each other and
protecting each other and at the same time holding these
secrets or holding this sense of you know what the
story might be.

Speaker 3 (23:20):
Yeah, And what's so funny about that is she kind
of was like, what took you so long? I suppose
I was thirty one or two at the time, so again,
what took me so long? But donor conceived children, right, adoptees.
I think the reality is is that there's multiple dimensions
that exist.

Speaker 4 (23:37):
Within these communities.

Speaker 3 (23:38):
Of course, yeah, I have two family trees or four
family trees if you're looking at four parents. Not everyone
can say I have more than two parents. So I
think I always knew there was this untapped dimension inside
of me, and it's like breaking the fourth wall, you know,
and her kind of giving me permission to do that

(23:58):
was really a beautiful thing.

Speaker 2 (24:02):
In February twenty twenty, Casey's anxiety spikes drastically again. It's
the very beginning of the COVID pandemic. People are starting
to die, and her dad is in the hospital, a
particularly scary place at this time, for surgery. When she
visits him, she tells both her parents about the severe
uptick in her anxiety. She's been doing everything in her

(24:25):
power to fix herself calm the storm. She tells them
she thinks it might be time for her to go
on medication for her anxiety. Her mom's reply to this
is an interesting one. Have you been wondering even more
about your biological family? Because I see that your biological
uncle's widow is on Facebook. Why don't you message her?

Speaker 4 (24:48):
She said?

Speaker 3 (24:49):
You know, I just know that she would have more
information for you. This is like the only person I
can find, and she's right there, she's on Facebook. So
I message this woman. Hi, James Casey Kahn was adopted
at two days old. This is my biological mother's name.
I believe you might have some information, you know. Thank
you so much for any info you can provide. And
I gave her my email address. I don't think I

(25:12):
expected anything. I didn't expect an immediate response. I know,
not everyone's sitting there like reading their Facebook or I
think I willed myself into forgetting it, because if I
sat around waiting, I would have driven myself insane. I
just had to lower my expectations to like nothing. A
month later, the pandemic shut everything down. This really triggered

(25:32):
me in a way that I did not expect anticipate
ever in my life. I really was not mentally well.
I think I had my first major depression when the
city shut down. I was just despondent. I was really
worried about my son. I was really worried about this
production company my husband and I were trying to get

(25:53):
off the ground. I was worried about any number of things.
Not to mention, we're in Brooklyn and there's constant sirens,
and that first week, my toddler son and I both
got very thick. In retrospect, it was probably COVID, but
I think that just added to the depression. So I
called my therapist, who referred me to his psychopharmacologist colleague,

(26:15):
who diagnosed me with generalized anxiety disorder and put me
on Symbalta. So immediately, you know, I was coming up
with solutions. And then I spoke with my parents in
the suburbs, and we decided that once my son and
I felt better that we would move out to their
home in the suburbs or the duration of the pandemic,

(26:35):
because fools shut down. There was no work. It was
you know, it was everything was closed. So once my
son and I made a recovery, we moved out to
their house in the suburbs, my childhood home. So then
my anxiety medication was starting to work. I had a
real anxiety Swiss. It was like sleeping through my parents' house.

(26:57):
But I was in recovery mode. I was meditating. I
was just trying to keep it together, trying to keep calm.
I was drawing, I was painting the time. I was
really into all the spiritual healers. You know, I had
like my army of people I was relying on and
spending money on, you know, terror card readers or witches.
And I was just speaking guidance wherever I could find it.

(27:18):
I read so many books, so much literature about adoptees,
about trauma, and that is when things started to hit me.
I read The Primal Wounds for the first time, I
read the seven Core Issues of Adoption, and you know,
it was just a really profound blur of the time.
I thought everyone must be going through a similar mental break.

(27:39):
I think some people had, you know, productive pandemics, not me.
I did not, And I do know that during that
period a lot of family secrets did emerge. You know,
people have told me that the period of idleness kind
of brought out a lot to the service. So April
twenty fifth, it was a Saturday, I received a response
from my biological uncle's widow. So I guess you could

(28:00):
say she's my biological aunt, you know. She wrote me back, apologized.
You know, it had been two months since I've ridden her.
She revealed, you have an older brother, you have a
middle sibling. She didn't even indicate that it was a
brother at the time, she didn't seem to know.

Speaker 4 (28:16):
They lost track. She didn't indicate if it was a
brother or a sister.

Speaker 3 (28:22):
And she said that the last time I went to
see your birth mother, she shut the door in my face.

Speaker 4 (28:29):
She said, are you available for a call. So I'm
freaking out.

Speaker 3 (28:33):
I'm thinking that the anecdote about my birth mother shutting
the door in her face, I'm sensing a mental health issue.

Speaker 4 (28:38):
I'm worrying that that's what's happening.

Speaker 3 (28:40):
Three children, three adoptions to different families, no trace on
the internet.

Speaker 4 (28:47):
I'm like, crap, this is what it is.

Speaker 3 (28:48):
And I was worried about that, you know, with all
of my anxiety the entire time, I was really worried
that it's a severe mental health issue. So I hop
on the phone with this aunt and she tells me
that my birth mother has paranoid schizophrenia. And as she
put it, she said, she's like one of those homeless
people that yell in the streets. And so I start weeping,

(29:09):
and she said, I'm so sorry. Do you want me
to stop? And I said, no, just you know, tell
me everything. I'm just processing. And she said, my birth
mother was a very dynamic, hilarious. There are some people
in the world, right, you'd say they're steady, they're reliable,
they're organized. Right, those are not descriptions one would use
for me. They would say vibrant or funny, creative, And

(29:33):
those are the all the descriptors one would use for
me she used for my birth mother. And supposedly what
happened it might have begun a little bit when she
was in her college years, but when she was in
her mid twenties, she really started yelling obscenities to strangers.
On the beach on Cape Cod, and so she entered
severe mental illness. And she would go through a couple

(29:57):
months where she would take the medication minister to her
and she would become her old self again.

Speaker 4 (30:02):
But then she would end up back out on the road.

Speaker 3 (30:05):
She drove around the country, meeting different men, sleeping with
different men.

Speaker 4 (30:09):
She lived out of her car.

Speaker 3 (30:11):
She had an on again, off again husband who was
also severely mentally ill. He was six or five, dressed
like a cowboy, and he was a bricklayer. And maybe
he's my biological father, she said, We don't know, but
he had a vasectomy, so probably not. So it was
just like all this information and I was steamrolled. It
was really It wasn't like in that moment the information

(30:35):
that I had two siblings was superseded by all this
other stuff.

Speaker 4 (30:38):
You know what I mean. It was just so much information.

Speaker 2 (30:45):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Casey is back in her childhood bedroom, surrounded by a

(31:06):
flood of new information, names, relatives, fragments of a life
she never knew. For years, she and her husband have
been searching for clues about her biological family. Now her
mom has joined the investigation. Together, they sit at the
computer late into the night, chasing down every detail they

(31:26):
can find. One clue is especially strange. A cousin remembers
that Casey's birth mother once lived in Palm Springs in
the nineteen eighties, staying with relatives, and, according to family lore,
spent a lot of time hanging out with professional golfers.
It sounds almost ridiculous, but Casey and her mother lean
into it, scrolling through image after image of golfers from

(31:50):
the era, studying square jaws and brown hair and crow's feet,
wondering if one of these faces might belong to Casey's
biological father. At the same time, Casey is piecing together
a wider picture of the family she never knew. Through
twenty three and meters, she connects with other cousins who
are stunned to learn about her. They had heard bits

(32:12):
about her birth mother, but never the full truth that
she struggled with schizophrenia, that she had placed three children
for adoption, that entire branches of the family had quietly
lost touch in some ways. Casey realizes that she is
the one revealing the family's secrets back to them. Then

(32:33):
another possibility appears, an aunt tells Casey she has an
older brother, some one who had once gone looking for
answers himself. Casey waits anxiously for the introduction, following every
rule of family protocol, resisting the urge to track him
down herself online for a full week. She wonders if

(32:53):
he even wants to meet her. Finally, the call comes through.
It's a Friday night. Within an hour, Casey's on the
phone with the brother she never knew. She had one
more piece of a life that until recently had been
completely unknown to her.

Speaker 3 (33:10):
There's mutual enthusiasm often because we're coming from the same
starting point. And I do think that when adoptees meet
for the first time. I've spoken to other people who
have found hidden siblings, but they were a result of
an affair or something, and it was like not a
comfortable situation, whereas this was very easy mutual curiosity about

(33:33):
one another. Now, we grew up very differently, like couldn't
be more different.

Speaker 4 (33:38):
He was the youngest in the family, the only one.

Speaker 3 (33:41):
Adopted as a baby, had multiple adopted siblings in his family.
But there was common ground, like he's like a boisterous guy,
super smart. There was definitely a shared the wistfulness I
talked about and certain things of feeling out of place.
We talked for hours and it was really just an instant,

(34:02):
like beautiful thing.

Speaker 4 (34:05):
It was then a whirlwind from there. We talked constantly.

Speaker 3 (34:09):
I would go on walks, tell him about every single
facet of my life, everything he missed, every awkward experience,
every like rejection, every almost like every pimple I had.
Like it was really a desperate attempt to bring him
up to speed and vice versa.

Speaker 4 (34:23):
It was really sad.

Speaker 3 (34:24):
When I look back on it, it was the embodiment
of happy sad, you know. It was so much grief
and so much joy at the same time.

Speaker 2 (34:31):
Yeah, because you didn't grow up together and you were
never going to be able to redo that, and at
the same time creating a sibling relationship which both of
you yearned for.

Speaker 3 (34:43):
Yes, and I think the other things that were going
on at the same time, as I was absolutely obsessed
with learning about my birth mother, I couldn't get enough.
So when this new brother had gone looking, he got
to meet my biological grandmother before she died. They had
a very lengthy conversation that she let my brother record.

Speaker 4 (35:03):
So I listened to that recording.

Speaker 3 (35:04):
We call it the podcast because it's three hours about
my family, and it was very entertaining and very devastating.
So I was like grasping to information from there, kind
of trying to guess who my birth father.

Speaker 4 (35:16):
So there was just a lot of obsessing.

Speaker 3 (35:18):
He also get photos of her where it was clear
io I look a lot like her, my birth mother.

Speaker 4 (35:24):
It was all consuming.

Speaker 3 (35:26):
On the recording that my biological grandma, who mind you,
was probably ninety five at the time. She was telling
the whole story of my birth mother and the ways
in which she had each child and gave up each child,
and she said the middle one was born on the
cape in Hyannis, and she said that girl.

Speaker 4 (35:45):
So I latched onto that. I latched onto it being
a sister.

Speaker 3 (35:49):
And at the time, my brother's wife, my sister in law,
we did a zoom together before we ended up meeting
in person, and she said, I thought it was a brother.
You know, She's like I thought they said it was
a brother, and me and my brother were like, no, No.

Speaker 4 (36:04):
On the recording they said it's a sister. So for
over a.

Speaker 3 (36:07):
Year I thought I had a sister that was missing.
So I gave her a name. I called her Lily.
I like wrote in my journal about wanting a sister
her like, I was obsessed with thinking about this missing sister.
And I'm so grateful to my husband for supporting me
during it and giving me space and like giving me love,
because it's really must be frustrating, because I was consumed

(36:30):
with this other world. You know, obviously I never stopped
being a mother, and I love him so much, my son,
I never stopped loving him in a way. I think
part of my obsession with finding answers about myself was
to be a better mother.

Speaker 4 (36:44):
Like I thought, if I.

Speaker 3 (36:45):
Could stitch together the story of myself, I could be
a better mother to my children. I was pregnant, I
knew I was having a girl, and I was like,
I've really got to get it together and find out
everything I can to be the best mother to my son.

Speaker 4 (37:00):
But to a girl.

Speaker 3 (37:02):
What happened was we were trying to give this imaginary
sister space, right, it seemed unlikely that a girl who
was older than me wouldn't have gone looking like so
I worried.

Speaker 4 (37:11):
I'm like, is she dead? You know? Is she also?

Speaker 3 (37:15):
Does she have paranoid schizophrenia as well. I was really
worried about her. And finally my mom said, it's always
my mom.

Speaker 4 (37:23):
You know, I had my daughter.

Speaker 3 (37:26):
She was six months old, so it was probably a
year and a half since I found my older brother.
My mom said, cut the crap already, you know, like
you could be proactive. And she had already been looking
in all these adoption forums Cape cod Girl nineteen eighty
four or five.

Speaker 4 (37:43):
We didn't have a date at the time, and she
got nothing.

Speaker 3 (37:47):
And then finally I just googled Massachusetts private investigator and
I got on the phone with a private investigator, and
that began the journey of my finding my brother, which
kind of unfolded very quickly the brother I thought was
a sister.

Speaker 2 (38:04):
Not long after, Casey connects with her newly discovered middle brother.
The three siblings begin imagining something they can't quite explain.
They know their birth mother lives in the Finger Lakes.
They don't have a plan, no script, no guarantees they'll
even speak to her, but they feel compelled to just go,
if only to see the woman whose absence has shaped

(38:27):
all of their lives. They first meet together on Zoom
in August of twenty twenty one, Casey and her middle
brother are nearly the same age and immediately notice their resemblance.
They also discover they grew up not far apart. Soon
all three meet in person, bringing spouses and families together,

(38:48):
trying to make sense of this sudden expansion of their world.
There's confusion and grief and all sorts of reckoning, of course,
but there's also joy. Eight months later, the law lost
siblings make the trip. Casey finds a modest airbnb near
where their birth mother lives. They arrive, drop their bags,

(39:09):
have some drinks, and sit together in the electric reality
of it. All three siblings who were strangers months earlier,
now preparing to face the person who connects them, the
person who surrendered them.

Speaker 3 (39:24):
And then the next day, we drive to the parking
lot of the apartment complex where we lived, and the
minute we got there, we're like, this is the dumbest,
Like what.

Speaker 4 (39:32):
Are we even doing?

Speaker 3 (39:33):
You know, like we don't she's not going to look
like her photos from the nineteen seventies, you know, she's
not going to look like we don't even know who
she is, and we're not, what are we gonna do?
My oldest brother spots a guy across the parking lot.
He haus like long hair streaked with dye, giant aviators,
a goat see, and a military jacket. And he was like,

(39:56):
I'm going to go talk to that guy. And he
did and he went over and they were talking for
like ten minutes, and me and my brother Evan were like,
what on earth are they talking about? And he comes back.
He's like, yep, they're friends. He was like he knows
everything about her. And we said, you know, was he
asking why you were asking questions? And he was like nope,
he's like not all with it either, but you know,

(40:17):
he just gave me all this information about her routine.
And so he said, her routine is like she goes
to Wegmans, she goes to the lake to flirt with people,
she goes to McDonald's, and she's all on foot. She
walks and walks and walks, and she's very thin. We
just started driving around the neighborhood. We went to the

(40:39):
places that this man told us she goes to, hoping
to run into her. And what we were told by everyone,
what my oldest brother was told by our biological grandmother,
what even this man said, what the aunt told all
of us was that she talks to strangers and just
talks and talks and talks. Is probably what empowered us
to go in the first place where it's stranger, we

(41:00):
want to talk to her. We just want to be
in her path and hear her voice. You know, never
in a million years was I going to say I'm
your baby. You know, that was never the intention, by
any stretch of the imagination. We heard that she loves yapping,
we were like, we want to yap with her. We
want to bump into her McDonald's and have a chit
chat and just see what she looks like, hear her voice.

(41:21):
So we were driving around and then we drove back
to the apartment complex. We see this man again. We said,
have you seen her? And he said, oh, it's almost time.

Speaker 4 (41:30):
She's going to be coming back.

Speaker 3 (41:31):
He said just stay put stay right here, and we
stood there and then she came in and I was
able to see her from the side, and she was
so petite like in a way I didn't expect because
I'm five six. I was told she's five seven, five eight,
And you know in the picture she wasn't like a
tiny little bird like thing, you know, but she was

(41:54):
very very tiny looking, and she was wearing like a
ski cap that concealed.

Speaker 4 (41:58):
Her hair, so I couldn't see her hair.

Speaker 3 (42:01):
We noticed that she was walking with tiny little steps,
and she actively avoided us, so I was silent.

Speaker 4 (42:07):
I was terrified.

Speaker 3 (42:09):
And the man tried calling her over and she didn't
say anything. And then my oldest brother said hey, and
you know, kind of called out. He didn't say her name,
and he said, do you know of a place to
eat around here? And she spoke and she sounded exactly
like me, but in a Transatlantic accent. And then she
kind of turned toward my middle brother and he said

(42:31):
to me, oh my god, Casey, she looks just like you.
But at that point in time, I hadn't really seen
her face as much as they had.

Speaker 4 (42:38):
So the following day, you know, we were more equipped.

Speaker 3 (42:42):
And mind you, you know, after we had that brief
exchange with her, we were thrilled. We're like, okay, we
could go home, like let's just enjoy the rest of
our weekend. Like we saw her, that's it, Like we
don't need to do this again. But something changed where
we're like, no, like maybe we can chat with her
again now. Granted we I realized how selfish this is,
you know, like she has a severe mental illness. But

(43:07):
I did speak with my psychologist who said, behaving like
the furniture instead of saying, oh, I'm your child is
the way to do it. You could just try to
blend in with the furniture, and it's kind of the
correct strategy. Like she might talk to us, you know, however,
like she's a smart cookie, my our birth mother, Like
we know she's intelligent, and she would catch on, but

(43:28):
you know, we weren't. It was like logic went out
the window. We were just on adrenaline. So the next
day we went to Wegmans. We went to McDonald's. No
one's seen her because people kind of know her around
the town from what I understand, And we were driving
back and we saw her walking and we started videoing her,
which she couldn't see, to be fair, but we wanted

(43:49):
to get a look at her and so as able
to like get photos of her just that we could
keep forever.

Speaker 4 (43:56):
So then we started getting a little reckless.

Speaker 3 (43:58):
We would just like put ourselves in her path, right,
And this man said, she likes this beer from the
region called Jenny. It's like a you know, Genesee beer.
It's just like a cheap beer. So we bought it,
and like a bunch of idiots, we kind of like
put ourselves in our path and with like start drinking
beer and be.

Speaker 4 (44:14):
Like, hey, would you like a beer?

Speaker 3 (44:15):
Like as like fading her, which is so embarrassing, but
we were desperate, you know, and she would just politely
say hello to us and kind of walk by. Probably
two interactions, and there was one moment where she looked
at me and I got a real front on view
of her face and the sun just happened to be

(44:35):
hitting it, and her eyes were so vibrant, and I
could really see the definition of her mouth and her teeth,
and I was like, holy shit, it just again it's
like seeing yourself in the face of another.

Speaker 2 (44:49):
Person, which she probably saw as well.

Speaker 4 (44:52):
Yes, I think the image of me was her former self.
So what how?

Speaker 3 (45:00):
And was we rushed back to the parking lot and
we ran into the same friend the man.

Speaker 4 (45:05):
We told him who we were. We said, where her children?

Speaker 3 (45:08):
And he said, oh, that's right, he said, she once
mentioned she had a son, but then she dropped it.

Speaker 4 (45:13):
So you know, she denies we exist. She never aborted us.

Speaker 3 (45:17):
Because she would be nine months pregnant, and she would say,
I'm not pregnant. And then when she would with my
middle brother, he was in labor. She's like, I'm not
in labor. She's like, it's a very this isn't happening.
And then she discharged herself from the hospital and left
him there and she kind of went back and forth.

Speaker 4 (45:37):
He's beautiful. I wish I could keep him. And then
she left.

Speaker 3 (45:39):
So she is very much in denial about us. But
she'll have glimmers supposedly where she remembers that she had
children that she gave away. So we started talking to
this man and he said, she'll be coming back. He said,
just stand with me. Let's crack open the beer again.
So this is like eleven in the morning. I don't
drink beer at eleven in the morning. And he said,
she will never not stop and talk to me. Let's

(46:00):
just talk. So once again, she comes back in and
he says, you know, hey, ya, you know, and he
says her name, and she ignored him. She said hi,
but kind of kept walking and he said, I have
some friends here I want you to meet, and she
said no, thanks, and then she started making her way
up the steps and she was entering her security code
into her keypad, and he said, come on, like, just

(46:23):
come say hi, and the three of us kids are
like silent at that point. We were so nervous, and
she went out of a buddy like, so cheeky and
salty and just reminded us of us, you know, and
probably the way like she did not at any point
come off like as someone suffering dramatically from a mentally

(46:43):
ill person. I did not see any behavior that my
aunt had said. You know, she's like a homeless person.
You know, she was not behaving in that way. And
I do know that you know, schizophrenias, you know, the
symptoms of it kind of wane as one ages. So
this man starts telling us all about her, all about
like her sexual proclivities, and he's like, she's probably spying

(47:05):
on us right now. And he kind of pointed up
to her window and he said she leaves her door unlocked.
He said, she lets people come in and use the bathroom.
People are always passing through. Why don't you just go
knock on our door? And I'm like, absolutely not, that's crazy.
My brothers are like, okay, but you know, we don't
have to say who we are. We could just say like, hey,

(47:26):
I'm like, I don't know, this sounds crazy, and the
man said, no, she always has people passing through just
say you're my friends. So we went up and we
tried to knock on her door, and there was no plan.
I thought, you know, I would say hello, and just
I really just wanted to talk to her. You know,
everyone had said she'll talk to you, she doesn't care,

(47:46):
she doesn't ask who you are. She'll talk to strangers.
But she had already given us so many signals that
she did whoever we were, she didn't want anything to
do with. So we knocked on our door and she
said go away. And I think one of my brothers
started to say something, and she went, you should never
knock on a stranger's store. And she was reprimanding us

(48:07):
like she would her own children. It was very clear
to me in that moment that on some levels she
knew who we were. And I was so upset because
I was thinking, we're not strangers. I don't want her
to think that I'm poorly raised. We're not strangers. So
I said, is your name? And I said her name?
And then she said no, go away, And so we

(48:29):
ran and that was it. I felt a real sense
of finality. I felt really relieved. I don't need anything
from her. I think my brothers feel different. I think
the feelings come at different times. But after the fact,
the man, the friend, contacts us regularly and he told
us she was mad at him. She said, you were

(48:52):
friends with that prostitute and her two pimps that were
following me around. And he said, no, those are your children,
and she said, oh right, and she knew, like she
didn't deny it. She said, oh, that's right. And then
the next week he said the same thing. She said,
what was that prostitute? He said, you mean the one

(49:13):
that looks exactly like you, that's your daughter. And she
was like, oh right, that's my daughter, Like she knew.
Would I do that again? No, But it was in
the moment, and I can't really describe the adrenaline and
the feeling of trying to see this person and knowing
it might be your last chance. It was dangerous and
it was selfish in a lot of ways, but there
were signals being given to us that she's open to

(49:36):
interacting with strangers and they come to her door. It
wasn't our best judgment call, but I think it really
gave a sense of closure for us.

Speaker 2 (49:46):
Everything about this story is to me about longing and
about a profound need and desire for answers. Really to
go back to the beginning of our conversation, the genealogical
bewilderment to no longer be bewildered. Yes, and so you know,

(50:07):
the three of you on It's caper to just you know,
to see her, hear her voice. It was a hedge
against bewilderment, the bewilderment that each of you had carried
with you throughout your lives up until that point. Do
you feel that that sense of bewilderment and that sense
of that permanent state of wistfulness has now been sort

(50:31):
of fully put to bed for you?

Speaker 4 (50:33):
Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (50:34):
It took a few more years after that, but now
you know, the reality is is it's all died down
and we've established equilibrium.

Speaker 4 (50:43):
I'm not talking to my brothers every two seconds.

Speaker 3 (50:46):
I just feel like I live life in the present
and I have a really clear understanding of who I
am with all its complexities, and I really feel all
I care about right now is my children and my
husband and the people inside of my little home and
my parents. Frankly, I have a new appreciation and a
new closeness to them. I think four years since that

(51:07):
meeting with the birth mother in this year, twenty twenty six,
it is a completely different scenario.

Speaker 4 (51:13):
I feel calmer and calmer by the month.

Speaker 3 (51:16):
Even I don't ever want to go through anything like
that again, but I'm so grateful I went through it.

Speaker 2 (51:21):
All. Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acre
is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.

(51:44):
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
find me on Instagram at Danny writer. And if you'd
like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
check out my memoir Inheritance.

Speaker 1 (52:22):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.