What it's like to find your birth parent | Am I Normal? with Mona Chalabi

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 25 December 2023

⏱️ 21 minutes

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Summary

In Britain, one-fourth of people who were adopted make contact with their birth parents before they turn 18. In this episode of Am I Normal? with Mona Chalabi, another podcast from the TED Audio Collective, guest host Saleem Reshamwala meets Amanda, a Dominican woman who was adopted by a white couple in Connecticut. Amanda always knew she was adopted, and was curious about her birth parents. After a few years of dead ends, she finally finds her biological mother ... in the last place she expected. You can listen to more Am I Normal? with Mona Chalabi wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Ted Audio Collective.
0:02.0	Audio Collective.
0:04.0	Hey Ted Talks daily listeners,
0:11.0	Elise Hugh here.
0:12.0	Thank you so much for listening to our show
0:13.4	over the course of this year. Today we're doing something a little
0:16.7	different or sharing one of our favorite episodes of the year from Am I Normal,
0:21.6	another podcast in the TED Audio Collective.
0:24.4	We hope you enjoy it, and if you like what you hear,
0:26.5	you can listen to more Am I Normal,
0:28.6	wherever you get your podcasts. So Salin, this might sound kind of random, but I have been thinking about adoption ever since I found out that about 2% of all people under the age of 18 in the US have been adopted.
0:50.0	That is one out of every 50 kids.
0:52.8	Huh, that's a larger number than I would have guessed.
0:56.0	Yeah, one of the reasons why that might be a higher number than a lot of people would expect
1:01.2	is because many people don't necessarily have the identity of being an
1:05.1	adult tea, right? They might just feel like my parents are the people that raise me. Why do I need to go around explaining
1:10.8	biology to a bunch of strangers. So maybe we as a society continually
1:16.0	underestimate that figure. It feels like even in that category there's got to be so many
1:22.0	different subcategories with their own stories too.
1:25.6	Yeah, roughly 1.8 million stories and that's if you just count the children right
1:31.2	It's worth telling these stories for no other reason
1:34.1	and the fact that this is a really common experience.
	...

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