This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we return to our American stories.

Up next, you're going to hear the story of a woman who took her own traumatic story

and turned it into something truly beautiful for so many. Here's Monica Kelsey, the founder and CEO

of Safe Haven Baby Boxes. I wasn't really told much growing up other than my birth parents were young in love and couldn't care for me, so they placed me for adoption.

And that's what my parents were told when they adopted me to protect me.

And so my whole life growing up, I felt like I had this fairy tale family waiting for me when I turned 18 and my birth records would be opened.

And, you know, they loved

me so much, they placed me for adoption. And I didn't realize that that was going to be the

farthest thing from the truth. I'm going to take you back to August of 1972 when a young 17-year-old

girl was brutally attacked and raped and left along the side of the road,

and she pressed charges against the man who had raped her, and he was arrested and he was

charged. And then when she was finally getting her life back to normal, she finds out she's

pregnant. And she was hidden for the remainder of the pregnancy, and she gave birth in April of

1973 and abandoned her child two

hours after that child was born and and that child was me. I graduated high school. I joined the

United States military. I spent eight years defending my country and then got out of the military,

met the love of my life,

started a family, and then joined the fire service and became a firefighter and a medic.

And having my own kids really kind of opened me up to finding my beginnings, finding out who I was, finding out my story. So I started the long journey of looking for my biological mother,

and I actually found her when I was 37 years old. And that became the best and the worst day of my

life, because that is truly when I learned the circumstances of my birth. Being 17 and pregnant was looked at differently back in

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