079 – There Are Wins And Losses

Who Am I Really?

Paul grew up in a family where he didn’t look like his parents, his father was Mexican and his mother was Japanese. In his childhood, his mother turned incredibly harsh and abusive, especially toward his sister. Searching for his birth mother, Paul made a misstep when he didn’t follow the advice of his search angel, and it cost him a valued relationship. Luckily he was able to connect with his half-siblings on both sides, but one relationship ended abruptly when a spouse fired his gun at Paul! All told, Paul found links to his personal history, and that’s given him the identity he was seeking.

Read Full TranscriptPaul: 00:02 But the one thing that would happen, my aunt told me and one of my older cousins had told me, when I was little, the only person that could get me to stop crying was my dad’s sister. As soon as I was in her arms I would shut up. I would stop and the reason, and here’s, here’s the reason why, this is why I’ve always known that voice. My, my birth mom’s voice is exactly identical to, at least to my ears, as my dad’s sister.

Voices: 00:35 Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

Damon: 00:47 This is Who Am I Really? A podcast about adoptees that have located and connected with their biological family members. I’m Damon Davis and on today’s show is Paul. He called me from Tucson, Arizona. Paul grew up in a family where he didn’t look like his parents and eventually his mother turned incredibly harsh and abusive. Searching for his birth mother, he made a misstep when he didn’t follow the advice of his search angel and it cost him a valued relationship. Luckily, he was able to connect with his half siblings on both sides. But one relationship ended abruptly when a spouse fired his gun at Paul. All told Paul found links to his personal history and that’s given him the identity he was seeking. This is Paul’s journey. Paul figures, he was with Catholic social services for about three to four months before he was adopted. His father was Mexican and his mother was Japanese. He met her in Japan during the Korean War and they got married in the United States.

Paul: 01:50 So right there, when I was old enough to look in the mirror and everything, I was like, well, you know, one of these things is not like the other. I don’t Look anything like either person and I, you know, I was little so I didn’t know

Damon: 02:04 but either. The two of them don’t look alike. So how do you not look alike?

Paul: 02:11 Well you know, my mom was, you know, she’s Japanese and she was small and she really had extreme Japanese features. So I’m like, I’d look in the mirror and I’m like, well, I don’t have those features. And then, um, my dad, I, you know, I like can’t say I really didn’t, you know, I really couldn’t make the total comparison, but I’m like, something’s not right here. And then as I got older, not much older, but the differences kept getting more pronounced. And I remember one of my earliest memory, Geez, I probably was four, maybe five, I was out in the backyard crying I wanted to go home. And you know, um, my dad comes home from work and sees me out in the backyard and asking me, asked me what’s going on, I’m in the backyard bawling my eyes that I want to go home. And then that’s when I got, this is your home. You know, I was like, no, this can’t be my home. I don’t look like you.

Damon: 03:08 Paul told me that he had recently read the book, The Primal Wound, where he learned that his experience as a child of wanting to go home is not uncommon for adoptees. He had one sibling, a younger sister who was adopted about a year and a half after himself. He said the older he got, the more he picked up on his differences with his parents. He noticed something about his adopted mother. She was always overly excitable about everything. He was young, so he didn’t recognize what was going on, but things were changing.

Paul: 03:40 Somewhere around when I was nine or 10, something clicked in her or something and she just became the most abusive, horrible person you could ever want to meet and more so toward my sister then to me, and then as I get older and learn about Japanese culture, they, they favor the son and so that’s why I kind of figured that a lot of her stuff wasn’t, I avoided a lot of it, but the thing is I had to sit there and witness what was going on with my sister and the thing was with my mom, this is what made the whole younger years really difficult, is the abuse she had rake on her, but also with me, it started to become a point where I was, I could never do anything good enough. And then she always had a focal point of another family that was like best friends with my dad.

Paul: 04:31 And actually the couple were my godparents when I got adopted. They had a son, a natural born son, but my mom all of a sudden started making this kid their son, like the example point. So why can’t I do what he does? Why can’t I do what he does? So as time goes on and she just gets worse and worse, that just happened more and more. And then the other thing that was really weird and then as I got older, I found out, cause I was too young to remember it. Supposedly I was a very sickly, sickly, sickly child practically on my deathbed but the problem was is I never felt sick, never thought I was sick. Um, apparently she was doing the Munchausen’s by proxy thing with other folks so she could garner attention or more attention.

Damon: 05:19 How do you mean? Explain that?

Paul: 05:22 what I’m saying is, she wouldn’t purposely get us sick or anything, but she would say that we were sick or come up with whatever maladies and then she would get garner extra attention from the folks at church thing, you know, how’s your child? Stuff like that. But then she would tell us that we were sick. I actually grew up believing I had all these maladies, which I did not have because I was perfectly healthy, to me anyway, I was a perfectly healthy kid that wanted to do everything perfectly healthy kids wanted to do. I wanted to play baseball. She told me, you’re too sick for that. I have this, that and other problems. And that actually went on so far as when I got to junior high, I wanted to play football and my mom would actually show me, we’d go shopping or something like that, and she, she would point out kids in the wheelchairs and she would tell me, I’m of the age where there was still a lot of kids running around who suffered from polio and they were just there in you know, in like leg braces or whatever.

Paul: 06:15 So, she would point out this kid, this kid played football, that’s why he’s like that. And then it’s just high weirdness came from her all the time.

Damon: 06:27 Paul said his mother actually had plans for him to become a high achieving musician, but he had no interest in the violin. He was always a big tall kid and he was into tackle football, but he had to sneak and play with his friends behind the school because if his mother saw the game, she would come out of the house into the school yard to put an end to it. If the family was out somewhere together and the kids got out of sight in a store, he said his mother was start screaming and wailing for them, causing everyone in the store to stop what they were doing, to see what the commotion was about. When I asked Paul about his mother’s abuse toward his sister, he said that it was a combination of mental and physical abuse.

Paul: 07:08 She would just tell her the most horrible things about not being good enough or she would just, if she didn’t do the slightest chore, absolutely Picture Perfect, she would get, she would get the beat down. And um, yeah, it was crazy. Or, the other one that I remember a lot is like at bathtime we’d take a bath, take a shower, well shampoos leave a smell on your hair. Right? There is just no way you can avoid it. My sister would come out and I wouldn’t get it, but my sister would get the sniff check and if she could still smell shampoo in her hair, she’d go off on her. And it finally got to the point where I, I think I was probably 11 and I was big enough by 11. I was actually way taller than my mom and I was, I probably had almost an inch on my dad.

Paul: 07:59 They were short in stature. That’s the other thing that was really weird. I’m like 6’2. I’m not super tall, but I’m taller than big and by 11 I almost had an inch on my dad. And um, one day I was at the house and this is going on in the back of the house, I just went over there and I jumped on her and got her off my sister and I just said, you know, you touch us like that one more time and I’ll kill you in your sleep. Yeah. It’s just, that, that’s, that’s how crazy it got. So then she would just pick and choose her times, like if I was at school, I wasn’t in the house that craziness would go on with my sister. She, it got to the point where she would time her rotten activities and the thing has, you know, back then we didn’t know what to do.

Damon: 08:41 Yeah.

Paul: 08:41 There wasn’t a lot of info. There wasn’t any support. You didn’t know what to do. You almost thought this was normal activity or normal behavior, especially if you grew up with it from the get go, thing is she never dared told my dad, but my dad had to know about all this and that’s the other thing. It got to the point where I was like asking myself, why doesn’t he just get rid of her? And what I had started noticing, he started getting involved with a lot of after work activities. He was almost never home from the time he went to work, he would come home, change clothes and then leave again. So he was like, just, how should I say, just removing himself from the whole situation. Because even when he was home, my mom would go off on him for hours and hours on end too.

Damon: 09:20 Yeah. That’s uh, he was, it was avoidance. He’s like, I don’t need this crap. Yeah,

Paul: 09:25 exactly. It was avoidance. And the thing is, what also tripped me out about it is my mom and my dad were devout Catholics. They were just heavily involved with the church and that was another thing that always just tripped me out. We go to church and then I just one time and I just remember completely, I think this again and we were probably about eight or nine. We’re in church and my mom’s being all pious and we get in the car and I think my sister and I were sitting in the pew next to some other friends from school and I think my sister giggled for something that her friend had said and my mom heard the giggle. So we were in the car. We wouldn’t think anything of it. But we were in the car and soon as we get in the car and the parking lot kind of clears out a little bit my mom starts wailing on my sister in the back seat for the giggle. So I’m like how can you be so pious and all the premises and the teachings are true, when I’m watching you go from that to this, like