March 14, 2019 • 34 mins
Jane Mintz's parents were forthright about her being adopted, but not about her birth mother's identity. As an adult, Jane found her biological mother and discovered many more secrets, the cost of keeping them, and why we all deserve to know where we come from.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Shame
is so powerful that the minute it has a little
bit of the creep factor, like you give it a
little bit of room to breathe, it's it rolls over
you again. And it's so funny because I live my
life today not being ashamed of my conduct, not being
(00:20):
ashamed of how I navigate this world. Yet it lives
in me. This is Jane Mints. Jane is an interventionist,
which means that she flies all over the world trying
to intervene when someone an alcoholic, an addict needs a
serious amount of help. When you want to bring the
(00:40):
big guns in the person who can handle all of it,
the blood, the gore, the vomit, the denial, the life
and death stakes of the addict at the end of
the line, that's Jane. Because Jane's been there herself, right
in the center of that shame, that addiction. It doesn't
own me anymore, but it is something that I battle
(01:01):
every single day and I just and I think that, um,
I feel better when I'm able to help somebody that
is really sort of unconsciously deciding if they want to
live or die. And there is that moment when I'm
able to connect to somebody for the moment they choose
(01:23):
to live, and that's the opening. So that's the power
of what wounded people can do together. I'm Danny Shapiro,
and this is Family Secrets, the secrets that are kept
(01:45):
from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
secrets we keep from ourselves. This is a story about adoption, addiction, recovery, identity, nature, nurture,
and well just a little organized crime, but we'll get
to that. And like a soft thrumming heartbeat beneath all
(02:06):
of it, shame. I've been thinking a lot about shame
during this first season of Family Secrets, because so many
of these stories either originate in shame, or cause shame,
or both. In Jane's case, her story begins with being adopted.
She's the eldest of three adopted children, brought into a wonderful, loving,
(02:28):
privileged family. So everything's good, just as it ought to be.
I grew up and Shaker Heights, Ohio. My father was
a surgeon, my mother stay at home mother. I had
to adopted siblings and we lad really an idyllic life. Um,
the rhythm of life was terrific. I had all the
(02:52):
opportunity that was afforded me in terms of excellent education,
great camps, very feminist you know, grow girl environment, private
schools and that kind of thing, lots of travel. My
family was incredibly social. We had lots of extended family
and friends, and I was really supported and cherished and
(03:15):
celebrated as a kid. But I was very lucky because
my life could have been the polar opposite, and I
knew that my whole life. So when you say your
life could have been the polar opposite, it's because you
had the knowledge that you were adopted, and so the
sense of luck of the draw or like being adopted
(03:35):
into one particular family that was loving and privileged as
opposed to another. Correct it absolutely. And I didn't at
that time know anything about my birth history, but I
knew I was lucky. And I had a relationship with
my father, who's passed on about five years now. Um,
that was extraordinary. Jane's dad was a huge personality. She
(03:57):
describes him as the mayor of everything. He was Cleveland's
favorite eye doctor, and Jane would tag along on his
medical calls to the hospital, into the emergency room, even
the operating room. He brought home cow eyes, I'm sorry,
but you you and taught her how to operate on
them in the family's basement. Jane's mom was also a
(04:20):
lovely human being, though Jane felt less connected to her.
She was a beautiful entertainer, a great cook, a classic
nineteen sixties stay at home mom. My mother today is
eighty six years old and reads three newspapers a day
and is glued to CNN and ms NBC and the two.
The thing that we have most in common today as politics,
which is great. But we're very, very different people. And
(04:43):
while I love and appreciate my mother, I never developed,
you know, that rapport that I had with my dad.
It was just a very different relationship. And still, you know,
deeply loving and and all that good stuff. But we're
just cut from completely different class. So, in terms of
being adopted, were you told that you were adopted at
(05:03):
a particular age or was it part of the fabric
of growing up for you always? How did your parents
handle it? I think from the time I could comprehend,
my mom and dad would read me a little book
called The Chosen One, and that was the message from
the time I was a small child, is that I
was chosen and you know, very special because of that,
(05:25):
and so they normed out adoption. The mistake of norming
it out was the misunderstanding that children are blank slates.
So it was kind of an interesting dynamic where I
always felt very you know, loving and accepted and come
from this amazingly cool family. It wasn't until much later
(05:48):
in my life that I sort of stood in my
own truth and said I deserve to know. I really
deserve it. The book Chain Remembers is actually titled The
Chosen Baby. Published in the cover features a whimsical drawing
of a little boy climbing out of his crib, and
(06:08):
the book is described as a universally popular children's story
about adoption. The opening goes like this. The first baby
was a little boy with blue eyes and curly blonde hair.
He laughed and played with a rattle. The man and
his wife watched the baby. Then they shook their heads
(06:28):
and said, this is a beautiful child, but we know
it is not our baby. And they were taken to
see the next and they're asleep. In the crib lay
a lovely, rosy, fat baby boy. He opened his big
brown eyes and smiled. The wife picked him up and
sat him on her lap. The baby gurgled, and the
(06:49):
man and his wife said, this is our chosen baby.
We won't have to look any further. We will have
everything ready for him by tomorrow and would like to
take him home. Then. I am sure the book was
well intentioned and its author well meaning, and the parents
who read it to their children were ahead of their time,
those who were trying to tell the truth to their
(07:10):
kids about their adoption. And yet, in Jane's words, the
whole idea was to norm it out, to instill strongly
the sense that being chosen was all that mattered. My
adoption was a private adoption. And what what I think
did go wrong over time is that while it appeared
(07:31):
to be transparent, you know, in terms of me knowing
I was adopted, my parents claimed they knew nothing about
my adopted family, which is not true. So it took
me getting my grandmother really drunk and imploring her to
show me my original birth certificate, which had been altered.
(07:52):
My grandmother, my mother's mother, was just this little pocket person,
but she was all ry. I mean, she was no
joke at all. And um, I think that when I
was born, my parents gave my grandfather and my grandmother
my original birth certificate, and somehow I had gotten wind
of that at around seven years old. So I went
(08:13):
over to my grandmother's house and she used to smoke
Lucky Strikes cigarettes and drink scotch. So we started drinking
scotch and smoking Lucky Strikes cigarettes together, and I just
said to her, I have to know. And her whole
thing was, well, if your mother ever found out, I
would never be able to recover from that because they
were very, very bonded and had, you know, beautiful relationship.
(08:35):
But she sort of at that moment, there was this
crack and I was able to slip through and she
gave me my birth certificate, which then gave me the
actual doctor and the town that I was born. After
she finally finds her birth certificate. Jane hires a private detective.
Jane is twenty six years old. She's in retail computer sales.
(08:59):
Her career is on hire. She's a hard partying up
and comer. Within three days, she was able to find
everything out that I needed to know. And she called
me and she said, UM, you better sit down, and I, boy,
did I sit down, and she told me I found
(09:19):
her This is where she is um. She would like
to talk to you. She wanted me to tell you.
You know, she's been waiting for you your whole life.
And I said, okay, have her call. And of course,
at that time, I was drinking like a fish, and
I grabbed a Scotch bottle and I sat on the
edge of my bed and the phone rang, and she
said exactly those things to me. She said, I've been
(09:42):
waiting for you all my life. And and then we
agreed to meet. We're going to pause for a moment
before we get to the moment when Jane first eats
her birth mother. I want to know more about the
(10:02):
whole inside Jane, inside so many of us whose origins
have been kept from us. After all, she's had it
pretty good. What sends her to the private detective and
ultimately to her biological mother? I mean, what is that confusion?
What is that sense of emptiness all about? Well, it's
interesting when you live in such a beautiful bubble and
(10:26):
you have nothing but really good things happening to you
all the time. And I was successful, I was had
great friends, I had great family. My whole life, I
felt like there was a black hole in my soul
that was so deep and wide, and I felt like
I didn't deserve to feel that way, and that I
felt really ashamed of having these feelings and not being
(10:48):
able to really identify what that was about. And you know,
I think shame is is what I learned to feel
about myself my whole life, even though there was no
evidence that I should be ashamed. But I felt ashamed
for wanting to know more about myself and sort of
being acculturated. I can't really describe it, but you never
(11:12):
you always feel on the outside of life, always, and
then there's no evidence for why you should feel that way,
so that there's an incongruence. Yeah, I can't tell you
how much I relate to that, Okay, Yeah, I know
that the feeling of I don't have a right to
this pain. I mean, you know, look at me, look
(11:35):
where I live, Look look at this privilege, and you
know this environment in which really nothing has gone wrong,
that's right, But the feeling of something being terribly wrong, right,
and that being an extremely confusing thing for a kid.
It it really is. And you know, you and I
were talking a little bit earlier that adoptive kids have
a very high rate of addiction. And process addictions, which
(11:58):
means being addicted to anything other than a substance. And
my family were big cocktailers, and I can remember it
nine years old, clearing the cocktail glasses and then taking
my first drink, and that feeling of being different or
separate or not a part of went away. So it's
(12:21):
a classic when substance meets solution. And that was the
story of my life. So rather than try to seek
an inward journey, until I learned to do that, everything
was external. Everything was an external fix. And that's even
more disregulating because there's no you know, you're it's not
an authentic journey at that point, right, And ye know
(12:42):
what's going through my head is what possible tools? Would
you have had to know that an inward journey was
possible exactly? And it wasn't until I landed in treatment
that that I started to connect with Native American spirituality
and ritual and all this kind of stuff and really
realized that there was a huge spiritual part of myself
that I never knew existed. I didn't know existed for
(13:05):
anybody else. Would you have though, like in middle school
in high school, would you have been able to identify this.
If somebody had asked you, are you good with what
you know about yourself? Or is that does it feel
like there's something more that that you're seeking that would
you have been able to articulate that I would have.
I would have, but I was never asked, and I
(13:28):
didn't look to somebody to, you know, ask me that. Well,
that goes back to the narrative of I was chosen.
I've been so blessed, right, I'm so lucky. Yeah, I
should just shut up and shut up and enjoy it, right,
But you can't if something is so it's it's cellular,
and it's also I'm a big YOUNGI in so the
(13:52):
collective unconscious is you know, is always so intriguing to me,
and there's there's a real disconnect and when you're in
disharmony with the universe, you know, starting with yourself. Everything
we talked about running around your back hand, that's what happens,
is that you just end up course correcting all the time.
(14:14):
When Jane talks about running around her backhand, this is
a phrase that originates in her youth as a tournament
tennis player, and one I love so much I'm gonna
start using it myself. I was also a tournament tennis player,
though probably not as good as Jane, and I remember
that coaches love to say this, don't run around your
back hand, meaning don't compensate or overcompensate, don't be afraid
(14:36):
of your weaknesses, running around whatever your truth is, whatever
you know deep down is the right thing to do.
So you're only playing with half your game because you're
so worried about failing or missing your shot. Or in
Jane's case, if she was enough of a winner, is
she nailed every shot, she would continue to be the
lucky chosen baby. In my own mind, now that I
(14:59):
can construct some of the stuff it was, they can't
possibly give me back if I'm this good. So now
Jane is twenty six years old, and she's sitting on
the edge of her bed with her bottle of scotch
and hearing the sound of her birth mother's voice for
the first time in her life. When I heard her voice,
(15:22):
it's like my my cell started knitting back together. It
was terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. So I decided,
you know, on that phone call with my birth mom
her name is Linda, to meet her and I flew
to Dallas the next week and I was my uniform
(15:44):
at the time probably still is today, was you know,
cowboy boots, jeans and a white shirt. And I walked
off the plane and at that time, people could meet
you at the gate, remember that like back in the
Stone ages. Uh. And there was my mother in a
white shirt, jeans and cowboy boots and we're doppelgangers, were
dead lookalikes. When you see somebody that you're a dead
(16:09):
ringer for. I mean my mannerism, the cadence of my voice,
the way I wore my hair, my blue eyes, my
whole It was the most soul shattering moment, and I
think sometimes you have to fall apart to put yourself
back together. And that was that brought the house down
for me. And then I started to learn to live.
(16:33):
And it was because I felt finally that that I
did belong somewhere. Jane's mother, Linda, Her life is complex.
Jane describes her as an extraordinary, very wounded person with
a loose grip on reality. Linda also has another child,
(16:53):
one she has raised, Jane's half brother, who has mixed
feelings about the discovery that he has a sibling. He
had never known about On her end, she had kept
me a secret from my half brother and the family,
so she had to come clean. So we went over
and we met my my half brother, who was not
(17:15):
really buying into this whole thing. He'd been the golden
child and his family, but they had lived a very
challenging life, I mean, just needless to say. And so
I met him, I met his two little kids and
his wife at the time, and the three of us
just decided to go out and do some skeet shooting
and that was really great. Um. And that's the other
(17:36):
thing is, from the time I was a small child,
I could ride and shoot like nobody's beeswax. Skeet shooting
as a bonding activity doesn't seem to quite go together
with Jane's Shaker Heights, progressive Jewish upbringing. Yes, a liberal
Jewish progressive Democrat, you know. I mean we we didn't
shoot guns, we didn't do all that kind of stuff.
(17:57):
But I went to these this fabulous summer camp where
we did all that, and that was just such a
part of my d n A because that's my whole family.
We're all you know, outdoorsy outlaws, addicts, you know, really
colorful group of people. So we just blew stuff up
and it was sort of this cathartic cool bonding. D
(18:20):
N a d oxy ribonucleic acid. There's a mouthful for you.
Here's a definition the fundamental and distinctive characteristics or qualities
of someone or something, especially when regarded as unchangeable. What
is it to recognize the characteristics or qualities of yourself
(18:42):
in someone else for the very first time. I remember
when I first laid eyes on my biological father. The
first time I saw him was on a YouTube video.
He was giving a lecture, and what I felt watching
him was a shocking sense of familiarity. His gestures, his
facial expressions, his very nature was like an overlay of
(19:05):
my own. The one thing about my mother, uh Linda,
was that she was dynamic. I mean, there was just
something She would just weave a spell around you. Her
charisma was extraordinary, and as she started to tell me
a little bit about her life, she started to answer
a lot of questions about how I operated. Because I'm
(19:26):
sort of an outlaw at heart, but I've been refined
and I've been educated, and I have a very distinct
moral compass and sort of code of conduct. But my mother,
who polished herself, up ended up leaving home at fifteen
or sixteen years old, found her way into the St.
(19:47):
Louis Mob and became a very high ranking U copo.
Just hold on a second here. In all the fantasies
that adopted children have about who their birth mother might be,
you know, famous actress, foreign royalty, I wonder if high
ranking capo in the St. Louis Mob has ever made
(20:07):
the list. Jane's mother with a mobster. She drove getaway cars,
She used her beauty to lure men into rooms where bad,
bad things happened. She fell in love with Kurt Flood,
a Hall of Fame baseball player, and even tried to
run away with him. Jane describes Linda as a black
(20:28):
widow type, dark and dangerous in a glamorous package. So
many of the stories that she told me about that
part of her life, which were really the glory days
of her life, started to help me make sense of
the mobster and me. And it was just an unbelievable like,
oh my god, now I get it, I get why
(20:51):
I think this way, I get so. It was just
a kind of a a chicken and egg thing. You know,
when you can't figure out why you're you operate this
like as a little Jewish girl from Shaker Heights. There
would be no reason for me to be as street
smart as I am. There would be no reason for
me to be able to read a room as quickly
(21:11):
as I can, um no frame of reference for any
of this stuff, and very different than my other siblings
and even my parents. The nature is so strong, you know.
The nurture is important, but what I learned was over
my lifetime was to appreciate so much the cellular knowledge
(21:32):
that is transferred from one generation to another, which it
could be argued, is why it's so important, why the
child is not a blank slate. Oh my gosh, it's
so true. And without somebody being able to claim their
history and to understand their history, most people feel fraudulent
(21:58):
and out of congruence. It's a terrible way to live.
And that school of thinking. School of thought has destroyed
so many people. And today, you know, after my own
journey of my own addiction, my job every single day
(22:19):
is to be rigorously honest with myself and other people.
And telling the truth is a hard thing to do,
and reconciling the truth is a hard thing to do.
So Jane meets her birth mom and the rest of
her birth family and learns so much about herself that
black hole, that yawning empty space inside her is all
(22:42):
filled up. She no longer feels the need to drink.
Cue the violence. In the Hollywood version of Jane's life,
that's what would happen right the moment she meets her mother,
her biological mother, she would have everything she needs, her
questions all would be answered, and her addiction, well, that
(23:03):
would just go away. But life is not a Hollywood movie.
Jane is in her mid twenties when she meets Linda,
and it takes her until the age of forty to
get sober. Because I was carrying a secret, and that
destroyed me, ultimately destroyed me, and I ended up working
my whole life around protecting that secret of having met her,
(23:27):
establishing a relationship with her, you know, being forced to
live a double life because I was immediately welcomed in
to my birth family, all the while remaining staunchly a
part of my adoptive family. And I should have felt
like I was complete, but I felt like I had
(23:48):
betrayed that I was, had been treacherous and deceitful, that
if my family ever really found out that I had
done this, that I would be disowned, that the relationships
would be forever fractured. And that's actually pretty much what happened.
I had to end up telling my father, my beloved father,
(24:10):
because my brother was coming to town. My half brother
was coming to town to visit me, and I just
it's such a close knit community that we look so
much alike my birth mother and looks at that. I
knew that the minute he came to town, it was
the cat was out of the bag. So I ended
up telling my dad about this. Course he was shattered,
and he went and told my mother about this, and
(24:31):
I don't know that she's ever recovered. And that was
the last anybody ever spoke of it. So that's another wound, right.
But it strikes me that you didn't have to have
your half brother come to town, so you must have
on some level needed to bring this to a boil,
no question about it. And you know, some of that's
really a blur, and I think instinct kicks in. I
(24:53):
wanted my children to meet him, um, I wanted my
then husband to meet him, and I needed some support.
I needed people to share this burden with me, which
it's a weird word to use, but that's what it was.
We're going to take a quick break. We'll be back
in a moment. This idea of being burdened feels like
(25:25):
an important one. Whenever a family secrets, who carries that burden?
And why does the burden shift from one family member
to another? Does the burden exist if the secret manages
to stay secret? What are all the implications of the hidden,
the unseat, the unknown. Can you talk more about shame,
(25:46):
because it seems to me there are a few through
lines both in my story and all the stories with
the people that I've been in conversations with for this podcast,
and one of those through lines is shame. Another is
a close cousin to shame, which is this feeling of
not deserving. And so it seems to me that when
(26:10):
someone has been raised in the atmosphere of the unseid
in some way, even if you know child, a child
doesn't know necessarily what the what that thing is. It's
just this feeling of not having all the information and
somehow not having a right to it, or not having
(26:31):
a right to one's own reality, right oh you, just
like I feel like i'm you know, a little unglued
because you've just hit me so hard with you know,
those are the through lines of my life, are feeling worthy.
And my sense of worth was in my accomplishments, and
(26:53):
people in my life were very happy to wear my
accomplishments on their sleeve. So then I was validated socially
and all for all of that. But that was such
an external thing. And then shame is another thing that
I still, you know, at fifty eight years old, battle
every day of my life. And I really do look
(27:14):
in the mirror and say, what do you have to
be ashamed of? Like You're a cool person, You've raised
great kids, you have great business, you help people, you
do it. But deep in my soul, I have never
been able to heal that, you know, even with as
much work as I've done, you know, in my own
growth and my own sort of therapeutic growth, I can't
(27:38):
get it right. It's like such a broken piece of
me and I just don't quite know how to do it,
but I keep trying. Jane has some years of heading
down a parallel track to Linda's. Linda is a pill addict.
Jane is an active alcoholic. This is something they have
in common, something also likely rooted in their shared biology.
(27:59):
But in Jane finally gets sober and Linda, Linda does not.
I just had a sort of a flash of insight here.
But I lived just culturally differently. But I lived the
same story as my mother of feeling on the outside,
you know, finding ways to belong um, dealing with the
(28:24):
trauma of trying to fit in and figure out where
you exist. And ultimatelyly my mother destroyed herself. I didn't,
and I was able to catch myself before I died prematurely.
But that same desire to want to destroy one's self
(28:46):
I share with my mother. Now I was clean and sober,
and she was starting to fall further further into depression,
um compensatory behaviors. She was a terrible cigare at smoker,
and um she was an alcoholic, but she was prescription
painkiller queen. And I just saw mental illness started roll
(29:10):
over her and there was no stopping it. And then,
you know, as somebody new in recovery, you want to
share that and you want to talk about it. Well,
that's the last thing that somebody wants to talk about
when they're in active addiction. Linda dies in two thousand seven,
destitute and alone in government housing in rural Missouri near
(29:32):
the Ozark Mountains, in a tiny house filled with the
stench of cigarettes, every surface covered with tar. Jane had
already completed her graduate degree and by that time was
well on her way to doing her work as an interventionist. Ultimately,
she ended up perishing, and the the talk about the
(29:54):
shame of not being able to save her, you know,
and then really watch her die and then discover her
in the condition, her living condition, which I knew nothing about,
thank god, because I would have bankrupted myself to provide
(30:14):
some kind of lifestyle for her. I mean, what a mess.
But um, what it did for me is it woke
me up. And I'm a light keeper today. And unless
you've lived in the dark, you don't know what light is.
You think you do, but you don't, you know. Fifteen
years down the road now, Um, I feel like I've
(30:36):
lived several lifetimes in this lifetime. But this is where
I belong because for some reason I have that ability
to reach in up to the dark and pull people out,
or be a part of pulling people out. I don't
want to you know, sound like a grandized but it's
kind of an amazing thing. Well, you aren't afraid of it, no,
(31:00):
and you are able to recognize it. And I'm strong,
you know, I've survived. Yeah, it's so interesting, isn't it?
The way that it can all coexist? And it's still
so confusing. While I have lots of pieces and parts,
it's not completely integrated. And I think that that's my
sole journey this time around, is to you know, continue
(31:24):
to seek the truth and to be of service to others.
And that's part of my healing and my journey and
my self actualization. But it's all very confusing. Jane uses
a lot of imagery in her conversation, and this makes
sense to me. Images are often easier to hold onto
the language than words. She described herself earlier as a
(31:48):
huge young Gian Carl Jung, the psychoanalytic poet of the unconscious.
When Jane studied for her master's degree, she was drawn
to the work of Clarissa Pincola s d. Is one
of the great Indian analysts of our time. She's told
the story of the Zygote Baby and effectively, Um, and
(32:10):
I'll probably butcher this, but you'll get it is that
the stork is flying across the sky with a big
basket on its back, and all these little babies are
in the basket, ready to be delivered to their intended families.
But there are always these the little ones that like
over percolate, and they're so excited that they end up
falling out of the basket into the wrong family, and
(32:33):
they spend their whole lives trying to reconcile their difference.
They're they're sort of intuitive, knowing difference from where they
landed to who they are as human beings. That's the
story of my life. And while I don't feel that
my family was wrong, I felt that I did unnaturally
(32:54):
land in my family. I am that zygote baby, and
I think that many adoptive kids feel that way. But
we end up actually being the most dynamic, resilient, powerful
people because of everything that we've had to endure to
get to our truth. I'd like to thank my guest
(33:22):
Jane Mints, for sharing her family secret. You can find
out more about Jane and her work at Jane mints
dot com. Family Secrets is an I Heart Media production.
Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer. Andrew Howard and Tristan
McNeil are the audio engineers, and Julie Douglas is the
executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like
(33:44):
to share, you can get in touch with us at
listener mail at Family Secrets Podcast dot com, and you
can also find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder, and
Facebook at Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at Fami Secrets Pod.
That's Fami Secrets. For more about my book, Inheritance, visit
Danny Shapiro dot com
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. Shame
is so powerful that the minute it has a little
bit of the creep factor, like you give it a
little bit of room to breathe, it's it rolls over
you again. And it's so funny because I live my
life today not being ashamed of my conduct, not being
(00:20):
ashamed of how I navigate this world. Yet it lives
in me. This is Jane Mints. Jane is an interventionist,
which means that she flies all over the world trying
to intervene when someone an alcoholic, an addict needs a
serious amount of help. When you want to bring the
(00:40):
big guns in the person who can handle all of it,
the blood, the gore, the vomit, the denial, the life
and death stakes of the addict at the end of
the line, that's Jane. Because Jane's been there herself, right
in the center of that shame, that addiction. It doesn't
own me anymore, but it is something that I battle
(01:01):
every single day and I just and I think that, um,
I feel better when I'm able to help somebody that
is really sort of unconsciously deciding if they want to
live or die. And there is that moment when I'm
able to connect to somebody for the moment they choose
(01:23):
to live, and that's the opening. So that's the power
of what wounded people can do together. I'm Danny Shapiro,
and this is Family Secrets, the secrets that are kept
(01:45):
from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
secrets we keep from ourselves. This is a story about adoption, addiction, recovery, identity, nature, nurture,
and well just a little organized crime, but we'll get
to that. And like a soft thrumming heartbeat beneath all
(02:06):
of it, shame. I've been thinking a lot about shame
during this first season of Family Secrets, because so many
of these stories either originate in shame, or cause shame,
or both. In Jane's case, her story begins with being adopted.
She's the eldest of three adopted children, brought into a wonderful, loving,
(02:28):
privileged family. So everything's good, just as it ought to be.
I grew up and Shaker Heights, Ohio. My father was
a surgeon, my mother stay at home mother. I had
to adopted siblings and we lad really an idyllic life. Um,
the rhythm of life was terrific. I had all the
(02:52):
opportunity that was afforded me in terms of excellent education,
great camps, very feminist you know, grow girl environment, private
schools and that kind of thing, lots of travel. My
family was incredibly social. We had lots of extended family
and friends, and I was really supported and cherished and
(03:15):
celebrated as a kid. But I was very lucky because
my life could have been the polar opposite, and I
knew that my whole life. So when you say your
life could have been the polar opposite, it's because you
had the knowledge that you were adopted, and so the
sense of luck of the draw or like being adopted
(03:35):
into one particular family that was loving and privileged as
opposed to another. Correct it absolutely. And I didn't at
that time know anything about my birth history, but I
knew I was lucky. And I had a relationship with
my father, who's passed on about five years now. Um,
that was extraordinary. Jane's dad was a huge personality. She
(03:57):
describes him as the mayor of everything. He was Cleveland's
favorite eye doctor, and Jane would tag along on his
medical calls to the hospital, into the emergency room, even
the operating room. He brought home cow eyes, I'm sorry,
but you you and taught her how to operate on
them in the family's basement. Jane's mom was also a
(04:20):
lovely human being, though Jane felt less connected to her.
She was a beautiful entertainer, a great cook, a classic
nineteen sixties stay at home mom. My mother today is
eighty six years old and reads three newspapers a day
and is glued to CNN and ms NBC and the two.
The thing that we have most in common today as politics,
which is great. But we're very, very different people. And
(04:43):
while I love and appreciate my mother, I never developed,
you know, that rapport that I had with my dad.
It was just a very different relationship. And still, you know,
deeply loving and and all that good stuff. But we're
just cut from completely different class. So, in terms of
being adopted, were you told that you were adopted at
(05:03):
a particular age or was it part of the fabric
of growing up for you always? How did your parents
handle it? I think from the time I could comprehend,
my mom and dad would read me a little book
called The Chosen One, and that was the message from
the time I was a small child, is that I
was chosen and you know, very special because of that,
(05:25):
and so they normed out adoption. The mistake of norming
it out was the misunderstanding that children are blank slates.
So it was kind of an interesting dynamic where I
always felt very you know, loving and accepted and come
from this amazingly cool family. It wasn't until much later
(05:48):
in my life that I sort of stood in my
own truth and said I deserve to know. I really
deserve it. The book Chain Remembers is actually titled The
Chosen Baby. Published in the cover features a whimsical drawing
of a little boy climbing out of his crib, and
(06:08):
the book is described as a universally popular children's story
about adoption. The opening goes like this. The first baby
was a little boy with blue eyes and curly blonde hair.
He laughed and played with a rattle. The man and
his wife watched the baby. Then they shook their heads
(06:28):
and said, this is a beautiful child, but we know
it is not our baby. And they were taken to
see the next and they're asleep. In the crib lay
a lovely, rosy, fat baby boy. He opened his big
brown eyes and smiled. The wife picked him up and
sat him on her lap. The baby gurgled, and the
(06:49):
man and his wife said, this is our chosen baby.
We won't have to look any further. We will have
everything ready for him by tomorrow and would like to
take him home. Then. I am sure the book was
well intentioned and its author well meaning, and the parents
who read it to their children were ahead of their time,
those who were trying to tell the truth to their
(07:10):
kids about their adoption. And yet, in Jane's words, the
whole idea was to norm it out, to instill strongly
the sense that being chosen was all that mattered. My
adoption was a private adoption. And what what I think
did go wrong over time is that while it appeared
(07:31):
to be transparent, you know, in terms of me knowing
I was adopted, my parents claimed they knew nothing about
my adopted family, which is not true. So it took
me getting my grandmother really drunk and imploring her to
show me my original birth certificate, which had been altered.
(07:52):
My grandmother, my mother's mother, was just this little pocket person,
but she was all ry. I mean, she was no
joke at all. And um, I think that when I
was born, my parents gave my grandfather and my grandmother
my original birth certificate, and somehow I had gotten wind
of that at around seven years old. So I went
(08:13):
over to my grandmother's house and she used to smoke
Lucky Strikes cigarettes and drink scotch. So we started drinking
scotch and smoking Lucky Strikes cigarettes together, and I just
said to her, I have to know. And her whole
thing was, well, if your mother ever found out, I
would never be able to recover from that because they
were very, very bonded and had, you know, beautiful relationship.
(08:35):
But she sort of at that moment, there was this
crack and I was able to slip through and she
gave me my birth certificate, which then gave me the
actual doctor and the town that I was born. After
she finally finds her birth certificate. Jane hires a private detective.
Jane is twenty six years old. She's in retail computer sales.
(08:59):
Her career is on hire. She's a hard partying up
and comer. Within three days, she was able to find
everything out that I needed to know. And she called
me and she said, UM, you better sit down, and I, boy,
did I sit down, and she told me I found
(09:19):
her This is where she is um. She would like
to talk to you. She wanted me to tell you.
You know, she's been waiting for you your whole life.
And I said, okay, have her call. And of course,
at that time, I was drinking like a fish, and
I grabbed a Scotch bottle and I sat on the
edge of my bed and the phone rang, and she
said exactly those things to me. She said, I've been
(09:42):
waiting for you all my life. And and then we
agreed to meet. We're going to pause for a moment
before we get to the moment when Jane first eats
her birth mother. I want to know more about the
(10:02):
whole inside Jane, inside so many of us whose origins
have been kept from us. After all, she's had it
pretty good. What sends her to the private detective and
ultimately to her biological mother? I mean, what is that confusion?
What is that sense of emptiness all about? Well, it's
interesting when you live in such a beautiful bubble and
(10:26):
you have nothing but really good things happening to you
all the time. And I was successful, I was had
great friends, I had great family. My whole life, I
felt like there was a black hole in my soul
that was so deep and wide, and I felt like
I didn't deserve to feel that way, and that I
felt really ashamed of having these feelings and not being
(10:48):
able to really identify what that was about. And you know,
I think shame is is what I learned to feel
about myself my whole life, even though there was no
evidence that I should be ashamed. But I felt ashamed
for wanting to know more about myself and sort of
being acculturated. I can't really describe it, but you never
(11:12):
you always feel on the outside of life, always, and
then there's no evidence for why you should feel that way,
so that there's an incongruence. Yeah, I can't tell you
how much I relate to that, Okay, Yeah, I know
that the feeling of I don't have a right to
this pain. I mean, you know, look at me, look
(11:35):
where I live, Look look at this privilege, and you
know this environment in which really nothing has gone wrong,
that's right, But the feeling of something being terribly wrong, right,
and that being an extremely confusing thing for a kid.
It it really is. And you know, you and I
were talking a little bit earlier that adoptive kids have
a very high rate of addiction. And process addictions, which
(11:58):
means being addicted to anything other than a substance. And
my family were big cocktailers, and I can remember it
nine years old, clearing the cocktail glasses and then taking
my first drink, and that feeling of being different or
separate or not a part of went away. So it's
(12:21):
a classic when substance meets solution. And that was the
story of my life. So rather than try to seek
an inward journey, until I learned to do that, everything
was external. Everything was an external fix. And that's even
more disregulating because there's no you know, you're it's not
an authentic journey at that point, right, And ye know
(12:42):
what's going through my head is what possible tools? Would
you have had to know that an inward journey was
possible exactly? And it wasn't until I landed in treatment
that that I started to connect with Native American spirituality
and ritual and all this kind of stuff and really
realized that there was a huge spiritual part of myself
that I never knew existed. I didn't know existed for
(13:05):
anybody else. Would you have though, like in middle school
in high school, would you have been able to identify this.
If somebody had asked you, are you good with what
you know about yourself? Or is that does it feel
like there's something more that that you're seeking that would
you have been able to articulate that I would have.
I would have, but I was never asked, and I
(13:28):
didn't look to somebody to, you know, ask me that. Well,
that goes back to the narrative of I was chosen.
I've been so blessed, right, I'm so lucky. Yeah, I
should just shut up and shut up and enjoy it, right,
But you can't if something is so it's it's cellular,
and it's also I'm a big YOUNGI in so the
(13:52):
collective unconscious is you know, is always so intriguing to me,
and there's there's a real disconnect and when you're in
disharmony with the universe, you know, starting with yourself. Everything
we talked about running around your back hand, that's what happens,
is that you just end up course correcting all the time.
(14:14):
When Jane talks about running around her backhand, this is
a phrase that originates in her youth as a tournament
tennis player, and one I love so much I'm gonna
start using it myself. I was also a tournament tennis player,
though probably not as good as Jane, and I remember
that coaches love to say this, don't run around your
back hand, meaning don't compensate or overcompensate, don't be afraid
(14:36):
of your weaknesses, running around whatever your truth is, whatever
you know deep down is the right thing to do.
So you're only playing with half your game because you're
so worried about failing or missing your shot. Or in
Jane's case, if she was enough of a winner, is
she nailed every shot, she would continue to be the
lucky chosen baby. In my own mind, now that I
(14:59):
can construct some of the stuff it was, they can't
possibly give me back if I'm this good. So now
Jane is twenty six years old, and she's sitting on
the edge of her bed with her bottle of scotch
and hearing the sound of her birth mother's voice for
the first time in her life. When I heard her voice,
(15:22):
it's like my my cell started knitting back together. It
was terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. So I decided,
you know, on that phone call with my birth mom
her name is Linda, to meet her and I flew
to Dallas the next week and I was my uniform
(15:44):
at the time probably still is today, was you know,
cowboy boots, jeans and a white shirt. And I walked
off the plane and at that time, people could meet
you at the gate, remember that like back in the
Stone ages. Uh. And there was my mother in a
white shirt, jeans and cowboy boots and we're doppelgangers, were
dead lookalikes. When you see somebody that you're a dead
(16:09):
ringer for. I mean my mannerism, the cadence of my voice,
the way I wore my hair, my blue eyes, my
whole It was the most soul shattering moment, and I
think sometimes you have to fall apart to put yourself
back together. And that was that brought the house down
for me. And then I started to learn to live.
(16:33):
And it was because I felt finally that that I
did belong somewhere. Jane's mother, Linda, Her life is complex.
Jane describes her as an extraordinary, very wounded person with
a loose grip on reality. Linda also has another child,
(16:53):
one she has raised, Jane's half brother, who has mixed
feelings about the discovery that he has a sibling. He
had never known about On her end, she had kept
me a secret from my half brother and the family,
so she had to come clean. So we went over
and we met my my half brother, who was not
(17:15):
really buying into this whole thing. He'd been the golden
child and his family, but they had lived a very
challenging life, I mean, just needless to say. And so
I met him, I met his two little kids and
his wife at the time, and the three of us
just decided to go out and do some skeet shooting
and that was really great. Um. And that's the other
(17:36):
thing is, from the time I was a small child,
I could ride and shoot like nobody's beeswax. Skeet shooting
as a bonding activity doesn't seem to quite go together
with Jane's Shaker Heights, progressive Jewish upbringing. Yes, a liberal
Jewish progressive Democrat, you know. I mean we we didn't
shoot guns, we didn't do all that kind of stuff.
(17:57):
But I went to these this fabulous summer camp where
we did all that, and that was just such a
part of my d n A because that's my whole family.
We're all you know, outdoorsy outlaws, addicts, you know, really
colorful group of people. So we just blew stuff up
and it was sort of this cathartic cool bonding. D
(18:20):
N a d oxy ribonucleic acid. There's a mouthful for you.
Here's a definition the fundamental and distinctive characteristics or qualities
of someone or something, especially when regarded as unchangeable. What
is it to recognize the characteristics or qualities of yourself
(18:42):
in someone else for the very first time. I remember
when I first laid eyes on my biological father. The
first time I saw him was on a YouTube video.
He was giving a lecture, and what I felt watching
him was a shocking sense of familiarity. His gestures, his
facial expressions, his very nature was like an overlay of
(19:05):
my own. The one thing about my mother, uh Linda,
was that she was dynamic. I mean, there was just
something She would just weave a spell around you. Her
charisma was extraordinary, and as she started to tell me
a little bit about her life, she started to answer
a lot of questions about how I operated. Because I'm
(19:26):
sort of an outlaw at heart, but I've been refined
and I've been educated, and I have a very distinct
moral compass and sort of code of conduct. But my mother,
who polished herself, up ended up leaving home at fifteen
or sixteen years old, found her way into the St.
(19:47):
Louis Mob and became a very high ranking U copo.
Just hold on a second here. In all the fantasies
that adopted children have about who their birth mother might be,
you know, famous actress, foreign royalty, I wonder if high
ranking capo in the St. Louis Mob has ever made
(20:07):
the list. Jane's mother with a mobster. She drove getaway cars,
She used her beauty to lure men into rooms where bad,
bad things happened. She fell in love with Kurt Flood,
a Hall of Fame baseball player, and even tried to
run away with him. Jane describes Linda as a black
(20:28):
widow type, dark and dangerous in a glamorous package. So
many of the stories that she told me about that
part of her life, which were really the glory days
of her life, started to help me make sense of
the mobster and me. And it was just an unbelievable like,
oh my god, now I get it, I get why
(20:51):
I think this way, I get so. It was just
a kind of a a chicken and egg thing. You know,
when you can't figure out why you're you operate this
like as a little Jewish girl from Shaker Heights. There
would be no reason for me to be as street
smart as I am. There would be no reason for
me to be able to read a room as quickly
(21:11):
as I can, um no frame of reference for any
of this stuff, and very different than my other siblings
and even my parents. The nature is so strong, you know.
The nurture is important, but what I learned was over
my lifetime was to appreciate so much the cellular knowledge
(21:32):
that is transferred from one generation to another, which it
could be argued, is why it's so important, why the
child is not a blank slate. Oh my gosh, it's
so true. And without somebody being able to claim their
history and to understand their history, most people feel fraudulent
(21:58):
and out of congruence. It's a terrible way to live.
And that school of thinking. School of thought has destroyed
so many people. And today, you know, after my own
journey of my own addiction, my job every single day
(22:19):
is to be rigorously honest with myself and other people.
And telling the truth is a hard thing to do,
and reconciling the truth is a hard thing to do.
So Jane meets her birth mom and the rest of
her birth family and learns so much about herself that
black hole, that yawning empty space inside her is all
(22:42):
filled up. She no longer feels the need to drink.
Cue the violence. In the Hollywood version of Jane's life,
that's what would happen right the moment she meets her mother,
her biological mother, she would have everything she needs, her
questions all would be answered, and her addiction, well, that
(23:03):
would just go away. But life is not a Hollywood movie.
Jane is in her mid twenties when she meets Linda,
and it takes her until the age of forty to
get sober. Because I was carrying a secret, and that
destroyed me, ultimately destroyed me, and I ended up working
my whole life around protecting that secret of having met her,
(23:27):
establishing a relationship with her, you know, being forced to
live a double life because I was immediately welcomed in
to my birth family, all the while remaining staunchly a
part of my adoptive family. And I should have felt
like I was complete, but I felt like I had
(23:48):
betrayed that I was, had been treacherous and deceitful, that
if my family ever really found out that I had
done this, that I would be disowned, that the relationships
would be forever fractured. And that's actually pretty much what happened.
I had to end up telling my father, my beloved father,
(24:10):
because my brother was coming to town. My half brother
was coming to town to visit me, and I just
it's such a close knit community that we look so
much alike my birth mother and looks at that. I
knew that the minute he came to town, it was
the cat was out of the bag. So I ended
up telling my dad about this. Course he was shattered,
and he went and told my mother about this, and
(24:31):
I don't know that she's ever recovered. And that was
the last anybody ever spoke of it. So that's another wound, right.
But it strikes me that you didn't have to have
your half brother come to town, so you must have
on some level needed to bring this to a boil,
no question about it. And you know, some of that's
really a blur, and I think instinct kicks in. I
(24:53):
wanted my children to meet him, um, I wanted my
then husband to meet him, and I needed some support.
I needed people to share this burden with me, which
it's a weird word to use, but that's what it was.
We're going to take a quick break. We'll be back
in a moment. This idea of being burdened feels like
(25:25):
an important one. Whenever a family secrets, who carries that burden?
And why does the burden shift from one family member
to another? Does the burden exist if the secret manages
to stay secret? What are all the implications of the hidden,
the unseat, the unknown. Can you talk more about shame,
(25:46):
because it seems to me there are a few through
lines both in my story and all the stories with
the people that I've been in conversations with for this podcast,
and one of those through lines is shame. Another is
a close cousin to shame, which is this feeling of
not deserving. And so it seems to me that when
(26:10):
someone has been raised in the atmosphere of the unseid
in some way, even if you know child, a child
doesn't know necessarily what the what that thing is. It's
just this feeling of not having all the information and
somehow not having a right to it, or not having
(26:31):
a right to one's own reality, right oh you, just
like I feel like i'm you know, a little unglued
because you've just hit me so hard with you know,
those are the through lines of my life, are feeling worthy.
And my sense of worth was in my accomplishments, and
(26:53):
people in my life were very happy to wear my
accomplishments on their sleeve. So then I was validated socially
and all for all of that. But that was such
an external thing. And then shame is another thing that
I still, you know, at fifty eight years old, battle
every day of my life. And I really do look
(27:14):
in the mirror and say, what do you have to
be ashamed of? Like You're a cool person, You've raised
great kids, you have great business, you help people, you
do it. But deep in my soul, I have never
been able to heal that, you know, even with as
much work as I've done, you know, in my own
growth and my own sort of therapeutic growth, I can't
(27:38):
get it right. It's like such a broken piece of
me and I just don't quite know how to do it,
but I keep trying. Jane has some years of heading
down a parallel track to Linda's. Linda is a pill addict.
Jane is an active alcoholic. This is something they have
in common, something also likely rooted in their shared biology.
(27:59):
But in Jane finally gets sober and Linda, Linda does not.
I just had a sort of a flash of insight here.
But I lived just culturally differently. But I lived the
same story as my mother of feeling on the outside,
you know, finding ways to belong um, dealing with the
(28:24):
trauma of trying to fit in and figure out where
you exist. And ultimatelyly my mother destroyed herself. I didn't,
and I was able to catch myself before I died prematurely.
But that same desire to want to destroy one's self
(28:46):
I share with my mother. Now I was clean and sober,
and she was starting to fall further further into depression,
um compensatory behaviors. She was a terrible cigare at smoker,
and um she was an alcoholic, but she was prescription
painkiller queen. And I just saw mental illness started roll
(29:10):
over her and there was no stopping it. And then,
you know, as somebody new in recovery, you want to
share that and you want to talk about it. Well,
that's the last thing that somebody wants to talk about
when they're in active addiction. Linda dies in two thousand seven,
destitute and alone in government housing in rural Missouri near
(29:32):
the Ozark Mountains, in a tiny house filled with the
stench of cigarettes, every surface covered with tar. Jane had
already completed her graduate degree and by that time was
well on her way to doing her work as an interventionist. Ultimately,
she ended up perishing, and the the talk about the
(29:54):
shame of not being able to save her, you know,
and then really watch her die and then discover her
in the condition, her living condition, which I knew nothing about,
thank god, because I would have bankrupted myself to provide
(30:14):
some kind of lifestyle for her. I mean, what a mess.
But um, what it did for me is it woke
me up. And I'm a light keeper today. And unless
you've lived in the dark, you don't know what light is.
You think you do, but you don't, you know. Fifteen
years down the road now, Um, I feel like I've
(30:36):
lived several lifetimes in this lifetime. But this is where
I belong because for some reason I have that ability
to reach in up to the dark and pull people out,
or be a part of pulling people out. I don't
want to you know, sound like a grandized but it's
kind of an amazing thing. Well, you aren't afraid of it, no,
(31:00):
and you are able to recognize it. And I'm strong,
you know, I've survived. Yeah, it's so interesting, isn't it?
The way that it can all coexist? And it's still
so confusing. While I have lots of pieces and parts,
it's not completely integrated. And I think that that's my
sole journey this time around, is to you know, continue
(31:24):
to seek the truth and to be of service to others.
And that's part of my healing and my journey and
my self actualization. But it's all very confusing. Jane uses
a lot of imagery in her conversation, and this makes
sense to me. Images are often easier to hold onto
the language than words. She described herself earlier as a
(31:48):
huge young Gian Carl Jung, the psychoanalytic poet of the unconscious.
When Jane studied for her master's degree, she was drawn
to the work of Clarissa Pincola s d. Is one
of the great Indian analysts of our time. She's told
the story of the Zygote Baby and effectively, Um, and
(32:10):
I'll probably butcher this, but you'll get it is that
the stork is flying across the sky with a big
basket on its back, and all these little babies are
in the basket, ready to be delivered to their intended families.
But there are always these the little ones that like
over percolate, and they're so excited that they end up
falling out of the basket into the wrong family, and
(32:33):
they spend their whole lives trying to reconcile their difference.
They're they're sort of intuitive, knowing difference from where they
landed to who they are as human beings. That's the
story of my life. And while I don't feel that
my family was wrong, I felt that I did unnaturally
(32:54):
land in my family. I am that zygote baby, and
I think that many adoptive kids feel that way. But
we end up actually being the most dynamic, resilient, powerful
people because of everything that we've had to endure to
get to our truth. I'd like to thank my guest
(33:22):
Jane Mints, for sharing her family secret. You can find
out more about Jane and her work at Jane mints
dot com. Family Secrets is an I Heart Media production.
Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer. Andrew Howard and Tristan
McNeil are the audio engineers, and Julie Douglas is the
executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like
(33:44):
to share, you can get in touch with us at
listener mail at Family Secrets Podcast dot com, and you
can also find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder, and
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