Unraveling Me

S1 E50 - Unraveling Corey & Kendall Kendall always knew he was adopted. His parents welcomed his questions, and when his adoptive mother died, his father showed him the name he’d been given at birth. Kendall was ten. He searched through phone books, library records, and adoption registries, and petitioned the court three times for his sealed records. Years of dead ends left him believing he might never find his genetic family.

Then his husband, Corey, gave him an Ancestry DNA test. Kendall’s closest match was a brother who had been searching for him, too. That connection led to six siblings and two very different experiences of reunion: a warm welcome from one side and something much more complicated with the other.

SHOW NOTES

In this conversation, Kara, Corey, and Kendall discuss:

• Growing up with adoptive parents who supported Kendall’s curiosity
• Searching for family before DNA testing made close matches possible
• The phone call that introduced Kendall to his brother Chris
• Finding connection with siblings while respecting the relationships each person is ready to have
• How Corey supported Kendall through the search and reunion
• Why they created Family Twist and the community they found through sharing stories

Kendall and Corey speak candidly about joy, rejection, lost time, and the family they have built together. Their story holds room for all of it. Corey serves on Right to Know’s board. For more from Corey and Kendall, listen to their podcast Family Twist.

Everyone has the right to know the truth about where they come from. Unraveling Me speaks to those people impacted by DNA surprises, NPEs (non-paternal event), adoption, assisted reproduction, and other revelations that their parentage isn't entirely what they thought. Having experienced an NPE herself, Kara (through Right To Know and this podcast) seeks to highlight those moments when we learn the most unsettling of secret—who we really are.

At Right To Know, we encourage engagement to facilitate and create real change. As an organization, we are inclusive. We assist adoptees, the donor-conceived community, people with an NPE, birth parents, gamete providers, new genetic family, recipient parents, raising families, and significant others. In learning and growing from each other, we must put the voices of adoptees, donor conceived, and people with an NPE first.

For more information about Right To Know - or if you have a story you want to tell - please visit us at https://righttoknow.us/.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

S1 E49 - Unraveling Stephanie Stephanie’s story is about what happens when a lifelong search for roots finally begins. It is also a reminder that success does not always mean finding every answer. Sometimes it means discovering where you come from, building relationships along the way, and finding the courage to keep searching. Stephanie was adopted at three years old from a Mother Teresa orphanage in India and raised in a white Catholic family on Long Island. She always knew she was adopted, but for most of her life, she gave little thought to the identity, culture, and history she had lost.

That changed when her husband gave her a DNA test. Stephanie’s limited paperwork said she was born in Patna in northern India, but her DNA matches pointed toward Kerala and the Malayali community in southern India. She also learned that the birthday she had celebrated for nearly 50 years was not her actual birthday. Suddenly, even the most basic facts she thought she knew about herself were uncertain.

SHOW NOTES

In this conversation, Kara and Stephanie talk about:

• Growing up as the only Indian person in nearly every room, including her own home
• Searching for other Indian adoptees and finding community through conferences
• Discovering that her adoption paperwork and DNA tell different stories
• Connecting with genetic relatives without yet knowing how they all fit together
• Returning to the orphanage where she lived and confronting the life she might have had
• The pressure adoptees face to feel grateful
• Why love does not erase an adoptee’s need for identity, history, and genetic connection

Everyone has the right to know the truth about where they come from. Unraveling Me speaks to those people impacted by DNA surprises, NPEs (non-paternal event), adoption, assisted reproduction, and other revelations that their parentage isn't entirely what they thought. Having experienced an NPE herself, Kara (through Right To Know and this podcast) seeks to highlight those moments when we learn the most unsettling of secret—who we really are.

At Right To Know, we encourage engagement to facilitate and create real change. As an organization, we are inclusive. We assist adoptees, the donor-conceived community, people with an NPE, birth parents, gamete providers, new genetic family, recipient parents, raising families, and significant others. In learning and growing from each other, we must put the voices of adoptees, donor conceived, and people with an NPE first.

For more information about Right To Know - or if you have a story you want to tell - please visit us at https://righttoknow.us/.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

S1 E48 Unraveling Tom J Tom Junod has spent much of his career investigating other people’s lives. His profile of Fred Rogers inspired the film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, and his essay The Falling Man became one of the most recognized pieces of writing about 9/11. But in his memoir, In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man, Tom turns that investigative lens on his own family.

Tom grew up loving and fearing his father, Big Lou: a charismatic, stylish, larger-than-life man who treated masculinity as something to be performed. From a young age, Tom sensed that things in his family were not quite what they seemed. When he finally began investigating his father’s past, one revelation led to another: hidden relationships, misattributed parentage, unknown relatives, and a family history that looked nothing like the one he had inherited.

SHOW NOTES

In this conversation, Kara and Tom discuss:

• Loving and fearing a larger-than-life father—and struggling with whether to become like him or reject his example
• How Big Lou’s ideas about sex, appearance, and masculinity shaped Tom’s childhood
• Finding a path toward his own identity through writing
• Watching the family history he had always accepted as fact unravel one discovery at a time
• What DNA revealed about misattributed parentage across multiple generations
• His father’s refusal to acknowledge an unknown sister—and Tom’s determination to find his own
• Recognizing something familiar in his half-sister Lizzie before DNA confirmed the connection 
• Navigating gatekeeping, uncertainty, and the decision to make contact
• Why a difficult truth can sometimes bring relief
• Bringing Big Lou’s descendants together at a family reunion
• How uncovering the truth can become an act of assembly rather than destruction

Tom’s story is about fathers and sons, inherited definitions of manhood, and the secrets that shape families long after the people who created them are gone. It is also about what can happen when someone refuses to leave the truth buried—and discovers that unraveling an old family story can create space to build something more honest, connected, and whole.

Everyone has the right to know the truth about where they come from. Unraveling Me speaks to those people impacted by DNA surprises, NPEs (non-paternal event), adoption, assisted reproduction, and other revelations that their parentage isn't entirely what they thought. Having experienced an NPE herself, Kara (through Right To Know and this podcast) seeks to highlight those moments when we learn the most unsettling of secret—who we really are.

At Right To Know, we encourage engagement to facilitate and create real change. As an organization, we are inclusive. We assist adoptees, the donor-conceived community, people with an NPE, birth parents, gamete providers, new genetic family, recipient parents, raising families, and significant others. In learning and growing from each other, we must put the voices of adoptees, donor conceived, and people with an NPE first.

For more information about Right To Know - or if you have a story you want to tell - please visit us at https://righttoknow.us/.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

S1E47 Unraveling MP MP grew up feeling like the odd person out. He looked different from his brothers, struggled to connect with the man he believed was his father, and was repeatedly reminded that his interests, personality, and appearance did not fit the rest of his family. At 13, he unexpectedly learned that his parents had married after he was born. That first crack in the family story left him wondering what else he had not been told.

MP did an ancestry test to explore the Pennsylvania German ancestry he had grown up hearing about and matched with a man he’d never heard of as his father. When he brought the truth to his maternal family, he was met with denial, dismissal, and demands that he remain silent to protect his mother. Refusing to carry someone else’s secret cost him nearly every remaining family relationship. But it also allowed him to stop questioning himself, set boundaries, and begin building a life and identity of his own choosing.

SHOW NOTES

In this conversation, Kara and MP talk about:

• Growing up without genetic mirroring and being treated as the family oddball
• Turning to religion in search of identity, family, and belonging
• Receiving an unexpected father match and hearing his own voice reflected for the first time
• Revisiting childhood memories after realizing how much of the family story was untrue
• Being pressured to keep the discovery secret to protect his mother
• Losing family relationships after choosing truth and setting boundaries
• Attempting to build a relationship with his genetic father
• Learning to trust his instincts and take his physical and mental health seriously
• Changing his last name and creating a family crest of his own
• Finding belonging through chosen family, creativity, and the interests he once felt pressured to hide

MP’s story is about what becomes possible when you finally release the shame that never belonged to you. By choosing his own name, creating his own symbols of family, and imagining a different future, MP shows that belonging does not always come from the people who raised us or the people whose DNA we share. Sometimes, we have to build it for ourselves.

Everyone has the right to know the truth about where they come from. Unraveling Me speaks to those people impacted by DNA surprises, NPEs (non-paternal event), adoption, assisted reproduction, and other revelations that their parentage isn't entirely what they thought. Having experienced an NPE herself, Kara (through Right To Know and this podcast) seeks to highlight those moments when we learn the most unsettling of secret—who we really are.

At Right To Know, we encourage engagement to facilitate and create real change. As an organization, we are inclusive. We assist adoptees, the donor-conceived community, people with an NPE, birth parents, gamete providers, new genetic family, recipient parents, raising families, and significant others. In learning and growing from each other, we must put the voices of adoptees, donor conceived, and people with an NPE first.

For more information about Right To Know - or if you have a story you want to tell - please visit us at https://righttoknow.us/.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

S1 E46 – Unraveling Sheridan By 40, Sheridan believed she had already done the difficult work of understanding her childhood. The man named as her father on her birth certificate died by suicide when she was six, leaving her to grow up beneath the weight of grief, religious shame, unanswered questions, and the childhood belief that perhaps she had not been enough to make him stay.

In her late 30s, Sheridan began confronting how that loss had shaped her. She recognized the connection between fatherlessness, fear of abandonment, and an identity built around being helpful, funny, charming, and indispensable. With the support of her husband, she worked through much of that grief and entered her 40th year feeling grounded.

Then she took a DNA test.

It was supposed to confirm her Dutch ancestry before a family trip to the Netherlands. Instead, Sheridan matched directly with a man identified as her father—a man who was very much alive.

Content note: This episode includes a discussion of suicide.

SHOW NOTES

In this conversation, Kara and Sheridan discuss:

• Growing up after a father’s death by suicide and carrying the religious stigma surrounding it
• The fears children internalize when they believe they might have prevented a parent from leaving
• Worrying that mental illness or suicide might be part of your own genetic inheritance
• How loss and instability contributed to people-pleasing, overfunctioning, and the need to be indispensable
• The lasting impact of fatherlessness and the harm hidden inside jokes about “daddy issues”
• Loving and appreciating her mother while still making room for grief, anger, and unanswered questions
• Sheridan’s “psychology of and”—the ability to hold seemingly conflicting truths at the same time
• The surreal moment she realized the father she believed was dead was not her genetic father
• Trying to process an impossible result while her mother insisted the test must be wrong

Sheridan brings both lived experience and the insight of a therapist to a conversation about grief, worthiness, abandonment, and the stories children create to explain what adults will not tell them. Her story shows that healing is not erased when new information arrives, but it may need to expand to hold a truth we never imagined.

Everyone has the right to know the truth about where they come from. Unraveling Me speaks to those people impacted by DNA surprises, NPEs (non-paternal event), adoption, assisted reproduction, and other revelations that their parentage isn't entirely what they thought. Having experienced an NPE herself, Kara (through Right To Know and this podcast) seeks to highlight those moments when we learn the most unsettling of secret—who we really are.

At Right To Know, we encourage engagement to facilitate and create real change. As an organization, we are inclusive. We assist adoptees, the donor-conceived community, people with an NPE, birth parents, gamete providers, new genetic family, recipient parents, raising families, and significant others. In learning and growing from each other, we must put the voices of adoptees, donor conceived, and people with an NPE first.

For more information about Right To Know - or if you have a story you want to tell - please visit us at https://righttoknow.us/.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

S1 E45 - Unraveling Mathew Mathew grew up without a consistent father in his life. In 2013, he took a DNA test simply hoping to learn more about his ancestry. Eight years later, a Facebook message asking whether he was related to someone led him back to those results. His mother refused to tell him the truth. As Mathew built relationships with his new paternal family, his mother and much of his maternal family resisted or minimized his discovery. The resulting estrangement contributed to a severe mental health crisis. Mathew speaks candidly about suicidality, how his wife helped save his life, and how the NPE community helped him begin to heal.

Content note: This episode includes a candid discussion of suicidal thoughts. Please listen with care.

SHOW NOTES

In this deeply honest conversation, Kara and Mathew discuss:

• Growing up without a father figure
• Returning to DNA results years later
• A mother’s denial despite clear evidence
• Finding a genetic father who already knew about him
• Genetic mirroring and a lifelong love of trucks
• Maintaining his relationship with the father he had always known
• Maternal family estrangement and invalidation
• The impact of his discovery on his wife and children
• Suicidality, support, and finding help

This is a powerful conversation about fathers, truth, belonging, and the importance of finding people who understand. Mathew’s willingness to speak openly—especially about men’s mental health—reminds us that no one should have to navigate a DNA surprise alone.

If you or someone you know needs immediate emotional support, call or text 988. Right to Know also maintains a non crisis hotline 323-825-5673.

Everyone has the right to know the truth about where they come from. Unraveling Me speaks to those people impacted by DNA surprises, NPEs (non-paternal event), adoption, assisted reproduction, and other revelations that their parentage isn't entirely what they thought. Having experienced an NPE herself, Kara (through Right To Know and this podcast) seeks to highlight those moments when we learn the most unsettling of secret—who we really are.

At Right To Know, we encourage engagement to facilitate and create real change. As an organization, we are inclusive. We assist adoptees, the donor-conceived community, people with an NPE, birth parents, gamete providers, new genetic family, recipient parents, raising families, and significant others. In learning and growing from each other, we must put the voices of adoptees, donor conceived, and people with an NPE first.

For more information about Right To Know - or if you have a story you want to tell - please visit us at https://righttoknow.us/.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

S1 E44 – Unraveling Susan & Marci This episode is about living between worlds and eventually discovering that identity does not have to fit neatly into a single category. We can be fully connected to more than one culture, build families through both genetics and choice, and create a sense of home around the people who truly see us. Susan and Marci both grew up in white adoptive families, visibly different from the people raising them and separated from cultures they were somehow expected to understand. Susan, an American Indian transracial adoptee, was removed from her family at 18 months. Marci was born in South Korea and adopted into a deeply religious family in Upstate New York. Both learned early that even when their families did not acknowledge race, the outside world did. They were left to navigate racism, cultural disconnection, and the pressure to be grateful while searching for a place where they could feel fully at home.

SHOW NOTES

In this deeply thoughtful conversation, Kara, Susan, and Marci discuss:

• Saviorism and the expectations placed on adopted children
• Why “not seeing color” leaves transracial adoptees unprepared and unprotected
• Experiencing racism that their raising parents could not, or would not, recognize
• Cultural memory, code-switching, and knowing the rules of one world while looking like you belong to another
• Traveling to Korea and returning to the reservation in search of connection
• Feeling like an imposter within your own racial or cultural community
• Susan’s unexpected path to finding the siblings who had been searching for her
• Marci’s acceptance that she may never find her Korean family
• The history and systemic forces behind Korean intercountry adoption and American Indian child removal
• The lifelong need for genetic, ancestral, and medical information
• Letting go of expectations and defining family, identity, and belonging for yourself

Susan and Marci speak candidly about what transracial adoption can sever—not only family relationships, but language, culture, social memory, and the instinctive ways people learn how to move through the world. They also challenge the idea that adoptees must prove they are “authentic” enough to belong anywhere.

Susan is the author of Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption. Susan, Marci, and Kara are also contributors to Relative Strangers, an anthology edited by B.K. Jackson.

Everyone has the right to know the truth about where they come from. Unraveling Me speaks to those people impacted by DNA surprises, NPEs (non-paternal event), adoption, assisted reproduction, and other revelations that their parentage isn't entirely what they thought. Having experienced an NPE herself, Kara (through Right To Know and this podcast) seeks to highlight those moments when we learn the most unsettling of secret—who we really are.

At Right To Know, we encourage engagement to facilitate and create real change. As an organization, we are inclusive. We assist adoptees, the donor-conceived community, people with an NPE, birth parents, gamete providers, new genetic family, recipient parents, raising families, and significant others. In learning and growing from each other, we must put the voices of adoptees, donor conceived, and people with an NPE first.

For more information about Right To Know - or if you have a story you want to tell - please visit us at https://righttoknow.us/.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

S1 E 43 – Unraveling Ashley  Ashley grew up in what she describes as a hurricane—an unpredictable childhood shaped by physical and emotional abuse, fear, and the constant need to stay small and safe. As an adult, therapy helped her recognize just how unhealthy the family system had been, and she eventually made the difficult decision to cut contact and build a life that felt completely different from the one she had known. Years later, while struggling with infertility, friends pointed out something Ashley had long noticed but never seriously questioned: she did not look like her family. 

Show Notes

Kara and Ashley touch on:

• Growing up in an abusive and volatile home and learning to hide her needs
• Therapy, boundaries, and deciding to cut contact with her family 
• Infertility, pregnancy loss, and becoming a mother 
• Learning that many knew the truth except for her
• Moving slowly through reunion and allowing a new relationship to develop 
• Becoming a mother and seeing her own childhood through a different lens
• What it feels like when someone simply keeps showing up 

Ashley’s story holds two very different kinds of family disruption: the family she had to step away from in order to protect herself, and the family connection she never knew was possible. 

Her experience is a reminder that discovering the truth does not always make life easier—but sometimes, amid the grief and disorientation, it can also bring something unexpectedly good. 

(Content warning: This episode contains discussion of childhood physical and emotional abuse, suicide, and pregnancy loss.)

Everyone has the right to know the truth about where they come from. Unraveling Me speaks to those people impacted by DNA surprises, NPEs (non-paternal event), adoption, assisted reproduction, and other revelations that their parentage isn't entirely what they thought. Having experienced an NPE herself, Kara (through Right To Know and this podcast) seeks to highlight those moments when we learn the most unsettling of secret—who we really are.

At Right To Know, we encourage engagement to facilitate and create real change. As an organization, we are inclusive. We assist adoptees, the donor-conceived community, people with an NPE, birth parents, gamete providers, new genetic family, recipient parents, raising families, and significant others. In learning and growing from each other, we must put the voices of adoptees, donor conceived, and people with an NPE first.

For more information about Right To Know - or if you have a story you want to tell - please visit us at https://righttoknow.us/.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

S1 E 42 – Unraveling Mary - Mary always knew she was adopted. She grew up with loving parents, an adopted brother, and a younger sister, and while she was curious about where she came from, searching for her genetic family was something she could put off—until a comment from her young daughter made her see that the unanswered questions did not belong to her alone. That moment eventually set Mary on a decades-long search through closed adoption records, Catholic Charities, confidential intermediaries, courthouse files, libraries, old newspaper clippings, and more than a little detective work. Then she took an AncestryDNA test.

SHOW NOTES

Kara and Mary talk about:

• Growing up knowing she was adopted and the questions she learned not to ask
• The conversation with her daughter that changed how she thought about searching
• Navigating closed adoption records and confidential intermediaries
• Discovering a brother who had also been relinquished
• Seeing a photograph of her genetic mother for the first time
• Unexpected DNA matches that make you reconsider what you believed for decades
• Making room for the different people who have filled the role of father 
• Why knowing the truth about our origins matters, even when that truth changes everything

Mary’s story is a reminder that finding family does not always mean reaching the end of the search. Sometimes, the answers we find become part of the mystery themselves.

Everyone has the right to know the truth about where they come from. Unraveling Me speaks to those people impacted by DNA surprises, NPEs (non-paternal event), adoption, assisted reproduction, and other revelations that their parentage isn't entirely what they thought. Having experienced an NPE herself, Kara (through Right To Know and this podcast) seeks to highlight those moments when we learn the most unsettling of secret—who we really are.

At Right To Know, we encourage engagement to facilitate and create real change. As an organization, we are inclusive. We assist adoptees, the donor-conceived community, people with an NPE, birth parents, gamete providers, new genetic family, recipient parents, raising families, and significant others. In learning and growing from each other, we must put the voices of adoptees, donor conceived, and people with an NPE first.

For more information about Right To Know - or if you have a story you want to tell - please visit us at https://righttoknow.us/.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

S1 E41– Unraveling Ona, Nina, Christine, and Sarah This episode is a powerful reminder that family truth rarely lands evenly. One sibling may feel immediate joy while another needs distance. A parent may have been loving and present for one child while remaining absent, or causing profound harm, in another child’s life. A discovery can validate feelings carried since childhood while also creating entirely new questions and grief. In today’s episode, Kara sits down with Nina, Christine, Ona, and Sarah. Each came to her discovery through a very different door, but their stories share one central theme: unexpectedly finding a sibling later in life.

Their stories appear in Relative Strangers, an anthology edited by BK Jackson. Together, they reveal that discovering a sibling is rarely only about adding someone new to the family. It can expose long-held secrets, reshape how we understand our parents, and awaken grief for the years, memories, and relationships that can never be recovered.

(Content warning: This episode contains discussion of sexual assault and childhood abuse.)

SHOW NOTES

In this thoughtful and deeply layered conversation, Kara, Nina, Christine, Ona, and Sarah discuss:

• Four very different paths to discovering previously unknown siblings
• The disbelief, relief, recognition, validation, and joy that can accompany discovery
• Grieving lost time, missed childhoods, and siblings who died before they could meet
• Genetic mirroring, shared traits, physical resemblance, and unexpected sibling synchronicities
• Why family members can respond very differently to the same new sibling
• Adjusting to the language of an expanded family—from “my father” to “our father”
• Cross-siblings and the relationships that form between people connected through a shared sibling
• How one discovery can raise new questions about what else a family may have concealed
• Deciding what to tell a sibling about a shared parent who was loving, harmful, absent, or complicated
• Loving a parent while also confronting the harm caused by their choices

Nina, Christine, Ona, and Sarah do not offer a simple reunion narrative. They offer something more honest: a conversation about secrecy, truth, lost time, belonging, and the complicated work of building a relationship with a new sibling.

Relative Strangers, edited by BK Jackson, is a collection of 28 personal essays exploring the shock, longing, grief, and transformation that can come with discovering previously unknown close relatives.

Everyone has the right to know the truth about where they come from. Unraveling Me speaks to those people impacted by DNA surprises, NPEs (non-paternal event), adoption, assisted reproduction, and other revelations that their parentage isn't entirely what they thought. Having experienced an NPE herself, Kara (through Right To Know and this podcast) seeks to highlight those moments when we learn the most unsettling of secret—who we really are.

At Right To Know, we encourage engagement to facilitate and create real change. As an organization, we are inclusive. We assist adoptees, the donor-conceived community, people with an NPE, birth parents, gamete providers, new genetic family, recipient parents, raising families, and significant others. In learning and growing from each other, we must put the voices of adoptees, donor conceived, and people with an NPE first.

For more information about Right To Know - or if you have a story you want to tell - please visit us at https://righttoknow.us/.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.