625: Melissa Guida-Richards: What White Parents Should Know About Transracial Adoption

Shameless Leadership

Sara Dean

Education, Management, How To, Business, Self-improvement

4.7 • 800 Ratings

🗓️ 16 February 2022

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melissa Guida-Richards is a Shameless Mom to two little boys and the author of WHAT WHITE PARENTS SHOULD KNOW ABOUT TRANSRACIAL ADOPTION. Melissa uses her gift of writing to help other adoptees and adoptive families. Her work has been featured in The Independent, Zora, Insider, HuffPo, Level at Medium, Electric Literature, Hello Giggles. And she had a viral Huffpost Article, My Adoptive Parents Hid My Racial Identity For 19 Years. She is also a contributing writer for The Everymom. I am in a Facebook group for writers and when Melissa shared a bit of her story in that group, I immediately reached out to ask her if she’d be willing to join me here on the podcast. I’m so grateful that she said yes. Listen in to hear Melissa share: Her adoption story of being adopted from an orphanage in Colombia, being raised in New York, and not being told she was adopted until age 19 The process of discovering she was Latina, not Portuguese Italian, as her family had led her to believe The process of having her article, My Adoptive Parents Hid My Racial Identity For 19 Years, go viral The evolution of her relationship with her parents in the years after discovering she was adopted What inspired her to write her first book, What White Parents Should Know About Transracial Adoption Important notes for white adoptive parents or prospective white adoptive parents Her experience of finding her biological sisters and mom How having her own children created an entire process of grieving around her adoption How she’s connected to her Colombian culture as an adult and as a mom raising Colombian sons Links mentioned: Join me in Jen Lumanlan’s 10-week Taming Your Triggers workshop: shamelessmom.com/taming Connect with Melissa: AdopteeThoughts.com Melissa’s Book, What White Parents Should Know About Transracial Adoption Melissa on IG Please find our sponsor information here: shamelessmom.com/sponsor/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the Shameless Mom Academy episode 625 with Melissa Guido Richards.
0:06.1	Show notes for this episode, including any links mentioned in the episode, can be found by going to
0:10.0	shamelessmom.com and clicking on episode 625.
0:18.1	Welcome to the Shameless Mom Academy. I'm your host, Sarah Dean. I'm here to give you and other
0:23.7	passionate, driven, unapologetic moms, tools, resources, and a little bit of humor to help you lead
0:29.8	more positive, powerful, and purposeful lives every damn day. One of the best things about the
0:35.2	Shameless Mom Academy is our community. So be sure to join us in our
0:38.4	free private Facebook group to connect with other shameless moms just like you. You can find us over
0:43.8	at shamelessom.com forward slash Facebook. All right. Let's dive into today's episode.
0:58.3	Melissa Guida Richards is a shameless mom to two little boys and the author of What White Parents Should Know About Transracial Adoption.
1:01.9	Melissa uses her gift of writing to help other adoptees and adoptive families.
1:06.2	Her work has been featured in the Independent Zora Insider, Huffpo, Level at Medium, Electric Literature,
1:13.0	and Hello Giggles. And she had a viral article on HuffPost. My adoptive parents hid my racial
1:18.5	identity for 19 years. We dig into that in this conversation. And she's also a contributing
1:24.0	writer for The Every Mom. So I'm in a Facebook group for writers and Melissa
1:29.1	shared a bit of her story in that group a while ago and I immediately, as only I can do,
1:33.1	reached out and started stalking her and asked her if she would join me here on the podcast
1:36.8	because I think this is a really important topic and it's not, it's the one I'm increasingly
1:42.0	seen spoken about, but I think it's often not spoken about and I think it's not, it's one I'm increasingly seen spoken about, but I think it's often not spoken
1:47.0	about. And I think it's something that deserves more bandwidth, deserves more space and should
1:51.7	be brought into the forefront. And I'm so grateful for Melissa Guida Richards for being open to
1:56.8	talking about this publicly and sharing her own experience. So she said yes to this conversation
	...

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