A better life

This Is Uncomfortable

Marketplace

News, Business

4.8 • 3.5K Ratings

🗓️ 13 July 2023

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Susan was a teenager, she set out to find answers about her birth parents. As an adoptee, she longed to know where she came from. When she eventually reunited with her birth parents as a teenager, she thought she’d finally feel at peace. She couldn’t have known that many years later, she’d find herself in a very similar position, only this time longing for her own child. We follow Susan’s deeply personal story, taking a look at the interplay of money and adoption, and how history can have a way of repeating itself.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Susan was just 17. She was standing in front of a closed door and on the other side of it was her birth mom.
0:10.0	This would be Susan's first time meeting her. She took a deep breath and opened the door.
0:17.0	I remember her standing up right away and just rushing over to me and giving me a huge hug.
0:25.0	And she was crying and like touching my hair and touching my face.
0:32.0	They were in a bland conference room at an adoption agency. The same agency that had facilitated Susan's adoption so many years ago.
0:40.0	They embraced each other. Her birth mom kept saying Susan's name over and over again.
0:46.0	It was like, you know, this has been 17 years in the making.
0:50.0	I felt her love for me and I felt her grief right away.
0:55.0	They shared the same curly hair, same eyebrows. Susan was in a kind of dreamlike state.
1:02.0	I remember her smell. I remember being like, oh, that's what she smells like. And like really liking her perfume.
1:09.0	It was a lot to take in but it was like, oh thank god this is finally happening.
1:15.0	I'm not going to have to live with these questions. I'm going to know who I am, where I come from.
1:23.0	And there won't be someone out there missing.
1:30.0	That longing all the years spent wondering. It was difficult.
1:35.0	For a while, those feelings left her body in mind. But what Teenage Susan didn't know at the time is that many years later, she'd be missing someone else.
1:44.0	She'd have more unanswered questions. And she'd find herself in a very similar reunion.
1:51.0	Only this time, Susan would be reuniting with her child.
2:01.0	I'm Rimeche and welcome to This Is Uncomfortable, a show from Marketplace about life and how money complicates it.
2:08.0	And today we're taking a look at the ways money can complicate adoption. There's such a huge range of adoption stories out there.
2:15.0	It'd be impossible to cover every perspective. So we're not going to try to do that with this episode.
2:20.0	Instead, we're focusing on Susan's story. We're only using her first name because we're telling her story just from her perspective.
2:27.0	It's pretty remarkable and hearing it made me think more deeply about adoption.
	...

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