A Class on Value and Money for Adoptees with Joyce Maguire Pavao and Me

After a lifetime of avoiding difficult conversations, I have found my deepest joys in walking straight through doorways that look as if they are on fire. It all started when I walked through the Adoption doorway and wrote You Don’t Look Adopted. Then, for years, I walked through the My Voice Doesn’t Matter and Who Am I to Have Opinions doorways and blogged like a whirling dervish until I finally proved to myself the universe would not strike me down for intentionally, loudly, and truthfully existing.

Now I walk my dog more than I blog because I’ve settled down inside. I feel heard and seen. Now I feel my job is to help other people walk through their own flaming doorways because although ultimately, like being born, you have to go through the passageway alone, it’s so much better when someone’s there to celebrate you when you emerge. I love collaborating with people in this process, because, as art is putting two unlike things together, collaboration is its own kind of art when there are two (or more!) people with the same goal.

I’ve been doing six-month long adoptee groups with Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao for a while now. The most recent one on boundaries ends in two weeks, and as much as I rejoice in the beginnings, I have mixed feelings about the endings. I feel pride and wonder for these people who had committed to meeting every Sunday (the people on the West Coast show up at 6:30 AM their time—and on Daylight Savings they were there even though, technically, it was 5:30!!) and then did it. To be a part of people connecting and bonding is a wonderous thing. My favorite thing about being adopted is the community of adopted people I now have. It’s like when you’re a kid and you discover a frisbee. It’s so much more fun when you have someone to throw it to and who will throw it back to you! Adoptees get each other in powerful and life-changing ways. We need that kind of mirroring just as we need food and water.

I have heard time and time again that an adopted person can’t do a group I’m leading because they are cash poor. I try to make my events affordable, but I have also learned if I give them away, the event itself has less value to the participant than if they had to come up with their own resources to pay for it. When you were both relinquished and then purchased as a baby or as a child, your sense of personal value can go haywire. Joyce knows adopted people, and she has been a therapist for a long time. She is a treasure, and so I thought, who better to have an extended conversation about personal equity with than Dr. Joyce Maguire Pavao?

My goal is to be part of something that helps adopted people feel empowered, confident, and excited to be alive. I think this year will be amazing, and I would like to invite you to join us. We’ll meet via Zoom starting May 7 and go from 9:30 – 11 AM ET. It costs $200 a month. I look forward to walking through fires with you.