Flourish: A New Series of Classes for Adopted People with Pam Cordano and Anne Heffron

I’ve been adopted for a long time, and now I’ve been in this world of COVID and general mayhem for what feels like a long time.

It’s time for a shift. For some new energy.

The other day I drove into Berkeley, home of Pam Cordano’s and my first adoptee retreat a few years ago, and the yearning hit me, hard. It’s time. I wanted to do that thing I do with Pam and other adoptees: create community, bridges, new ways of thinking and being.

Pam came to Spirit Hill Farm for an afternoon, and we made a plan. I love working with her. We get incredibly focused and creative when we are together. We go deep and then we come back to the surface, amazed, both energized and worn out.

Our relationship is based on many things including mutual regard and admiration. It’s also based on our desire to learn new things, to challenge old beliefs and ways of being, and to became as authentically ourselves as possible in the effort of being able to fully show up and make some sort of positive difference in the world.

I tell people that when I met Pam it was like I was a tennis player who had finally met someone who played the same way I did: hard, really hard, seriously whacking the ball for all it’s worth, only, unlike the totally serious players, I also needed breaks for nervous system issues (unexplained tears or diarrhea or the sudden desire to be alone for two days—all of those are my things—I’ll let Pam speak for herself when she’s speaking which, here, she is not).

Tennis, life, is so much more fun when you have a partner who gets you.

I don’t know if our friendship would be quite so deep if we weren’t both adopted. There’s so much that is mutually funny or sad or bizarre to us that we don’t even have to talk about. A baby crying in the aisle at the grocery store? Pam just has to look at me and I wince. Ouch. That crying baby hurts. Someone says to us they would never adopt because they want children of their own. At this point, we just try not to laugh: You’ve got to be kidding me.

One thing I love about Pam is her determination to make the most out of her life. She makes the extra effort again and again and again. One time we were sitting in Whole Foods, brainstorming about an upcoming retreat, and she got up and ran from the table. “Don’t watch me,” she said. A few minutes later she was back. She put a yellow envelope on the table in front of me. It had my name on it.

“Open it, Silly!” she said.

I opened the card. I have to tell you I forgot what the picture was. What I remember is that she had decided to make a moment out of the moment. She had decided, sitting there at Whole Foods, that she wanted to give me a card telling me she was glad we were friends.

One time, for my daughter’s birthday, Pam gave Keats a little box of glitter. My daughter opened the box and laughed. Of course. Glitter.

So much in the adoption world is about pain and strife and sorrow and depression and suicide. You know, the underbelly of living in a body that registered life events as trauma that often, for the most part, went unaddressed for years, decades, in some cases, lifetimes.

One night early on in our friendship when we’d both newly discovered memes, we stayed up very late sending each other the worst, ugliest, meanest, truest memes we could think of having to do with being a person who’d been given up by one mother and adopted by a set of strangers: the new mom and dad. Pam made one of a baby pushing a vacuum cleaner saying something like, “Never mind. I’ve got it.” To the “normal” person, this probably would not be as deeply radical and funny, but to a person who believed she needed to take care of her mother (generally it seems to be the mother) in order to be taken cared of in return, this one made us laugh loudly and long.

Never mind. I’ve got it.

I’m fine.

Pam is generous. She learns something from a book or a podcast or in a class or from her therapist and she often immediately calls me to share. I feel like my learning curve on how to best handle the side-effects of relinquishment and adoption is so much steeper than it would be if I were trying to figure these things out on my own.

This is one reason why I think it’s so important for adopted people to spend time in groups. If they gather with the intention to connect and grow, the group energy can accelerate the process for everyone. I have been in rooms with adoptees where the intention is to “vent” and “dump”. That quickly leaves me needing a shower. Yes, we need to share our stories and our shames and fears, but we also, I believe, suffer less and grow more when we do this with some mindfulness. I have been treated like a vase into which someone is basically throwing up their entire life story without asking me if I want to hear it. I hate this experience. It leaves me sad and lonely and feeling used. I am not without compassion, and I do understand that some people are in too much pain to even be able to think of another person, but at this time in my life I still have to be careful. I’m not a puke vase. I have value. I am rewiring my brain, learning to emphasize value over worthlessness when it comes to how I think of myself.

Pam and I are going to start leading two-hour classes for adopted people Wednesdays from 4-6 PST. We are calling the class Flourish: Adopted People Kicking the Hell out of Their Lives. Emerging from the False Self and Negotiating Life on New Terms. The first class is going to be Addiction Part 1: Peeling Back the First Layer of Your “False Safe Space”.

We will talk and share ideas to help you feel real, connected, alive, valid, valuable, strong, and on purpose. Sometimes we will do writing exercises, so have paper and pen.

People have told us that our adoptee retreats saved their lives. Since we can’t have live retreats right now we wanted to offer on-line classes because something magical happens when you put adopted people together and work to see what can happen next with love and support and safe space. 

We are charging $20 a class to attend, and every week will require a new sign-up on your part to access the Zoom event. To reserve your spot for September 16th’s class (4-6 PST), send Pam $20 by Venmo to @Pamela-Cordano and your email address so we can send you the Zoom link. If you don’t have access to Venmo, you send $22 via Paypal to me at anneheffron@gmail.com (the $2 covers the Paypal charge).

Our goal is not small. We want to change the adoptee community. We want to make it healthier, more connected, more self-confident, more authentic. More fun.

I can’t wait to begin.

(Update: we are holding the classes now both on Wednesdays from 4-6 PST, and we are repeating the class Sunday mornings from 6:30-8:30 PST.)