Monica Hall, adoptee, birth mother and author of Practically Still a Virgin: Breaking Glass Castles and my way to personal growth.
I was the guest on the podcast, Voice of Adoptees. This episode contains sensitive content and may trigger some listeners.
Below is part of the transcript from this podcast episode:
Monica Hall: I live in Sacramento. I was adopted out of Canada from a foster home with about 10 other babies. I was raised in Anchorage, Alaska, because that's where my parents had been living. That's where a lot of the trauma happened and caused me to write a memoir. We moved to California when I was 16. I'm still in California. It’s been a long journey being an adoptee and relinquishing a child for adoption.
The thing that adoptees most often ask me is, “Being an adoptee, how could you give up your own baby?”
David Schunk: Big question, yeah.
Monica Hall: I get that. I grew up in a super religious Catholic home. My first name is Mary. I'm named after the Virgin Mary and a nun. We went to Mass every Sunday and Holy Day. We had nuns and priests visit. We’d take them shopping, and they'd sometimes stay the night.
My mom was 32. My dad was 42 when they adopted me. They had grown up in the Depression. I think they did the best they could, which wasn't great, but you know, we worked with what we’ve got, right?
David Schunk: Right, yeah, you have to.
Monica Hall: Going through the memoir that just published, some parts were very grueling for me. Maybe it’s part of my personality, but I push down the bad things or just roll over them like a steamroller and keep going. I’m not the sensitive type. I was in denial for self-preservation.
David Schunk: Yeah.
Monica Hall: Thank goodness, or I probably wouldn't be here today. When they brought me to Anchorage, Alaska was still a territory. My parents were from California. They went up to Alaska in 1947. Some people went North to escape, hide, or to make something new.
There was not a lot of law up there. It was the Wild West. I think those early Alaskans were similar to the people who came over on the Mayflower, “We don't like the rules in Europe. We want to make our own rules.”
My dad was in real estate. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. Her folks had been horrible alcoholics. She and her brother hid the knives when her parents fought. She had no supervision. Parents sometimes do the opposite of how they were raised. She was a worrier and overprotective, but I'm a free spirit and that didn't work for me.
When I was three, we went back to Canada and adopted my brother, who was high-need, screamed all the time, and was really thin. He needed my mom, and she needed someone to take care of like she had her drunken parents. I didn't appear to need her because I was the strong little tomboy. At three years old, I didn't want to wear dresses; I just wanted to be in the dirt, tackling the boys at the park and things like that. But I needed her. I really needed her. So, when my brother came along, I was jealous of him. There are pictures of me with my fist over his little head when he's barely walking.
My father adored me, but not in a healthy way, so there was so much that I had to unwind while writing my memoir.
About eight years ago, my daughter, who's now 39, said, “Mom, I think you should write a memoir. You've got such an interesting story. People would be fascinated by how you were adopted and then you gave up a baby for adoption, found your family, and found Mary.”
But to me, it wasn't fascinating because it was my lived life and normal to me.
It was the other stuff that I wanted to figure out, like flashbacks, missing memories. I also had weird feelings about things that never sat right with me. Because my survival strategy was to brush by it and move on.
One of the things that I discovered is that I forever made excuses for my loved ones. While I was in the last few years of writing, a couple of years after my mother passed, my girlfriend in Alaska and I spoke often. She knew me during those times and said more than once, “Monica, you’ve always made excuses for your mom!” That was the hardest thing to see because I love these people. I loved my mom. So, the last eight years of writing have been really hard. Sometimes I’d have to take a break for a few months and then go back to it. I needed distance to see clearly.
