The Cousin Who Was Actually My Mother: Kinship Adoption with D.A. (PART 1)
Cate & Ty Break It Down
PodcastOne
4.5 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 8 July 2026
⏱️ 58 minutes
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Summary
In this deeply personal episode of Break It Down, guest D.A. (@difficult.adoptee) joins the show to deconstruct her experience growing up within a kinship adoption. She shares her journey of discovering at age seven that the woman she thought was her cousin was actually her biological mother. She discusses navigating preverbal trauma, surviving a toxic and narcissistic home environment, and the challenges of advocating for her own mental health as a teenager in a system that often preferred silence over real healing.
This is PART 1 of a two-part discussion!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Okay, well, guys, welcome back to another episode of Kate Ty Break It Down. |
| 0:11.8 | Today I am by myself, but I have a lovely guest. |
| 0:15.5 | Honestly, it is one of the first adoptees that I ever came across online. |
| 0:21.3 | And I remember seeing herself at Urson being actually, I was still kind of partially in my fog and kind of being offended. |
| 0:28.5 | And I was like, oh my gosh, like she hates an option. |
| 0:31.2 | And I was in their comedy. |
| 0:32.5 | I'm a birth mom and yada, yada, yada. |
| 0:35.3 | And then the more I got to listen to her story and her opinions and all |
| 0:38.8 | those things. I was like, oh my gosh, a lot of this makes sense. So I want to welcome DA. |
| 0:44.7 | Yeah, well, thank you for having me. I actually do remember when you started coming into my |
| 0:49.7 | lives and everybody was like DMing me and I was like I get it I see it I know but you know what |
| 0:56.5 | I listened because I never I never actually watched the show but I had seen clips and I do |
| 1:02.8 | remember it being very triggering for me because I do think there are like a lot of parallels between |
| 1:06.9 | our stories and for anybody that's like doesn't me, I guess I could start with, like, |
| 1:13.0 | my birth parents were 14 and 16 when I was born, and that is essentially the whole reason |
| 1:18.5 | why I was placed for adoption. And so they only knew each other for a little bit, I think, grew up |
| 1:26.1 | in small town, Texas, you know. And when my birth mom got pregnant with me, she hid it for a little bit, I think grew up in small town, Texas, you know, and when my |
| 1:29.1 | birth mom got pregnant with me, she hid it for a really long time. And I was born two months early. |
| 1:34.2 | So essentially, people knew for like two months. And so everybody was scrambling to come up with a plan. |
| 1:41.4 | Her parents had asked, well, her mom had asked her sister, so my great |
| 1:46.6 | aunt biologically, to adopt me. And she said, yes, they already had two children, a five-year-old |
| 1:52.4 | and a three-year-old at the time. And she had wanted more children, but had chosen to get her |
... |
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