This week we present two stories from two women who struggled to adopt.
Part 1: Inspired by her work as a parental behavior researcher, Bianca Jones Marlin and her husband decide to become foster parents.
Dr. Bianca Jones Marlin is a neuroscientist and postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Dr. Richard Axel, where she investigates transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, or how traumatic experiences in parents affect the brain structure of their offspring. She holds a PhD in neuroscience from New York University, and dual bachelor degrees from St. John’s University, in biology and adolescent education. As a graduate student, her research focused on the vital bond between parent and child, and studied the use of neurochemicals, such as the “love drug” oxytocin, as a treatment to strengthen fragile and broken parent-child relationships. Dr. Marlin’s research has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Scientific American, and Discover Magazine’s “100 Top Stories of 2015.” Dr. Marlin aims to utilize neurobiology and the science of learning to better inform both the scientific and educational community on how positive experiences dictate brain health, academic performance, and social well being.
Part 2: Raised by white adoptive parents, Kim Evey seeks out motherhood as a way to connect with her Asian identity.
Kim Evey is a Los Angeles-based actress and stand up comedian who has been writing and performing comedy for over three decades. She began her comedy career in Seattle as a founding member of the critically acclaimed long-form improv group Kings' Elephant Theater and as a guest cast member on the Emmy-winning sketch comedy show "Almost Live."
In LA, Kim has studied at The Groundlings and Improv Olympic and taught sketch comedy writing at ACME Comedy Theater. She has appeared in numerous commercials and TV shows, written for children's animation, created and starred in the Sony produced web series "Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show" and produced the trailblazing series "The Guild," a web show so successful that it was actually put on display in The Smithsonian American History Museum. She currently performs stand up at venues all over Los Angeles and her online clips have garnered over seven million views.
Episode Transcript
Part 1: Bianca Jones Marlin
Thank you. I get a lot of text from my husband. He's a psychiatrist and he works at a public hospital in the city. One of my favorite ones was, “Today, a patient told me he's an avocado.”
But one of the ones that really stuck with me was, “Today, I changed the trajectory of a child's life forever.” And when I got home he told me the full story of this patient.
He had a patient who was a young woman and her partner came in and she was around eight months pregnant. She was so chock-full of drugs that she couldn't have coherent conversation with my husband. They had to induce the labor. And as a psychiatrist on-call that night, he had to be the one to make the decision of whether or not that child could stay with her mother. They decided to take that child away and put her in foster care.
As he told me this, we sat on the couch at home, me fighting back tears as I stroked my sleeping two‑year‑old on my lap and I thought back to when I gave birth to her. And I thought back as to the minute I met her, I didn't let her go. I held her to my chest. I kissed her on the cheek. I sang into her ear. And I thought about that little girl and I thought that there was no one singing to her. There was no one touching her. She wasn't wrapped. She wasn't rocked. She didn't have someone for five days straight, not one, anyone else hold her.
And she was going to go into what they called the system and become what they call a ward of the state. I jokingly said like, “Ha-ha, wouldn't it be cool if we could take her? Can we take her, though? Can we take her? Can we take her?”
Bianca Jones Marlin shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Caveat in New York City in May 2019. Photo by Zhen Qin.
Of course like, no, that's not the way it works. But that conversation opened up a serious conversation between my husband and I and it was surrounding this one patient that we decided to sign up to be foster parents. This doesn't come as a new idea. I think overall in our life, my husband's a psychiatrist and he studies how traumatic experience can induce certain pathologies in the brain like schizophrenia. And something traumatic could be having parents that really aren't supportive for you. Not supportive as in like, oh, you should one kid. Like supportive as in like they can't take care of you.
And I, my studies really dive into parental behavior. I pretty much have dedicated my whole adult life studying parental behavior. My PhD was looking at how bad moms can be better with the love drug oxytocin, so I stopped mice from eating their young. All of a sudden, they started taking care of it, so I think I pretty much solved bad parenting.
And my postdoctoral research now is looking at how your grandparents mess you up. It's called transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, and like the trauma that your grandparents have mess you up. So yeah, that's a whole different, whole different conversation.
But I'm really , really invested in not having parents mess you up, but I should say this is not coming from some broken part of my heart where like my parents are all jacked up. My parents are two amazing people and I admire them so much because I think they really inspire this thought of me to make better parents. And that comes from the fact that my parents, my biological parents were foster parents. So I had the blessed opportunity of growing up with many different brothers and sisters coming from many different experiences and living in one household.
So given the opportunity to do what my parents had done and to aid in pretty much trying to buffer what a parent who can't take care of their child can do, we decided to take this dive.
And the dive is a pretty deep dive. I was like, okay, so we're going to sign up to be foster parents and like sign our names. We both have like doctorates and like, oh, yes let's pick this family because they have a doctor and a kid. They already have toys. BAM, that's it. Like next week I have a kid. We're walking down the park. I’m looking at my foster child. I know, right? Not the case.
So we go online and we sign up when we find an agency and they're like, “So now we're going to start on a journey of 60 hours of class.”
I don't think I spent 60 hours of class in college and I have a PhD. 60 hours? Six-zero. So we dedicated Saturday after Saturday going to these classes. And my husband would come off of a 24‑hour shift and at 9:00 a.m. be sitting in the class. And we would take our daughter and drive her an hour-and-a-half out to Long Island to my parents’ house to have someone watch her so we can figure out how to be a better parent and watch another child.
So we were really dedicated. But I think one of the parts that stands out to me in the class was they asked us to close our eyes. They asked us to imagine ourselves as we were. So I'm an adult. I have a husband and I have a child. And they said imagine at night you're laying in bed and someone knocks on your door, and it's the people-taker.
They come in and they say, “Okay, now, it's time for you to go. You have 30 minutes. Pack yourself up in a plastic bag. We have to go take you to your new family.”
And I don't know why. I don't know where they're taking me. I don't know this new family, but I'm forced to pack up. I have 30 minutes to say bye to my life, and I'm taken away by this person and put into another home.
And when I get to the other home, the husband's like, “Hi, we've been waiting for you.”
I don't know these people. I have another daughter and I'm forced to call this daughter my daughter and this family my family. And at night I'm laying down on a pillow that's not my pillow but I'm supposed to feel comfortable and feel okay, because when it comes down to it, if anything was taken away from my life, my family would be the one thing I would fight for the most. My job can go. My fancy pants can go. But my family is what I would fight for.
Bianca Jones Marlin shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Caveat in New York City in May 2019. Photo by Zhen Qin.
Foster kids that's the first thing they lose is their family. And I think that mental activity really put the hours into perspective of the Saturday classes, spending time away from my family, my daughter, doing the drives. Because we were going to be given an opportunity to help buffer that traumatic experience. And if by God I spent 10 years of my life studying it, I could spend 60 hours putting the money where my mouth was.
So we finally finished the 60 hours of class. We had a home visit, which they come in and they check every nook and cranny of your home, and I thought, look, I study how to make best parents best parents. My house is baby proof.
They came in they're like, “Nope, nope, nope. Death. Nope.”
So they go into every nook and cranny of your personal life. They call your friends. They call your family. They ask about your background. They ask how you are as a person. They really dig in because they want to make sure you're someone who is capable of taking care of a child.
And somehow, after all those hours and after actually nailing my IKEA furniture to the wall, we passed that test. We were giving the clear.
Last Tuesday I was sitting in a café and I got the call. I looked at the phone and I was like, “Oh, my gosh. It's either they found some other like rat bait hidden behind my toilet or something and I can't be a parent or this is happening.”
And I pick up the phone and they say, “Hi, we have a placement.” It's a young lady around the same age as my daughter. She has bruises that can't be explained by her parents and she's looking for immediate placement.
My heart was so big and overwhelmed with joy at the prospect of finally being able to do what I've worked so hard to do and I thought so long about doing. And as I thought about that joy, I thought about the immediate seven days following that conversation. Ironically, I was heading out to go to a job interview in which I would tell a room of esteemed scientists how much I care about parental behavior because I've dedicated my life to it and they should hire me because I'm so good at it. And this caused a little bit of dilemma in my mind because I knew I was going on that trip and applying for jobs, still a postdoc with a two-year-old and a husband who works nights and still trying to iron out my life.
So I’m given that opportunity and balancing it out with my life. I had to make the decision to say no. That was one of the hardest things I had to do in this journey thus far because I felt like I had failed that little girl.
But wisdom has a way of showing itself ironically, because what we also learn in the class was that it's not about us. It's about the kids. And I knew by me saying no, I was saying yes to that child having a family that she deserved.
I went back that evening and I chatted with my husband about it. He reminded me about that mental experiment, about leaving your house, about leaving your home, about leaving your family and entering a new home and it's how awkward it is to have a family saying, “I've been waiting for you.” But how heartbreaking would it be to have that little girl come to an empty home.
I think wisdom finds herself in that place in between no and not yet. It's not that I can't be a foster parent, and it's not that I'm a horrible foster parent. I'm just not there yet. And that's okay because that space in between no and not yet, that's where I find wisdom and I know that's where I'll find her. Thank you.
Part 2: Kim Evey
I've always wanted to have a baby but maybe not for the best reason. Most women want to become mothers because they love children. Not me.
Now, don't get me wrong. I like kids. They're fine. But for me, having a baby was a lot more about nature and a lot less about nurture. Because, see, I'm adopted and everyone else in my family, they're white. So, for me, when I had a baby, it would be the first time that I would see my DNA in another human being. It would be like my own little science experiment.
I was really excited to see the outcome. Would they have any of my personality traits? Any of my mannerisms? But, most importantly, would they look like me?
In the Olan Mills’ family portrait of the Eveys, circa 1978, you see my paternal grandmother, her three sons, their wives and their children, of which I am one, and you instantly see one of these things is not like the other.
I was born in Seoul, South Korea. I was adopted when I was 17 months old and I instantly bonded with my family, my parents - I'm an only child, and my extended family. But their love couldn't make me look like them or anyone else in the upper middle-class white neighborhoods that I grew up in or anyone else in society in the 1970s, basically.
I could count on one hand the number of Asian people that I knew of at the time in television and film, and only one of those people was a woman, Connie Chung. She was a reporter and later a news anchor and so people were constantly asking me, “Are you going to be a reporter when you grow up?”
Kim Evey shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Lyric Hyperion in Los Angeles in May 2019. Photo by Mari Provencher.
Everyone else, they were men and, for the most part, the characters that they portrayed spoke with Asian accents. So I knew that's how people saw me. I remember being really engrossed in a book one time at the airport and slowly becoming aware of someone going, “Hello, hello. I guess she doesn't speak English.”
Suddenly I was like, “Oh, gosh, she's talking about me.” And I went, “Oh, no, no. I do. I speak English.” And I held up the book that I was reading which clearly had the title Are you there God? It's Me, Margaret in English on the cover.
I had a woman once say to me, “Oh, you're oriental. We have one of your rugs.” Exactly.
Guys, I gotta tell you, that was in 2000, I think, someone said that to me.
And when I was a kid, other kids would always make fun of me for being Japanese or Chinese. I'm Korean. And I've had my fair share of people tell me to go back to where I came from, kids and adults.
So I always looked forward to having a baby, to having my own miniature version of myself because this mini-me would share not only my blood but also my Asian features.
Well, unfortunately, I'm a late bloomer so by the time I met the love of my life I was in my 30s. By the time we got married, I was in my mid-30s. And by the time we started trying to have a baby, I was almost 40. By the way, my husband is white. Surprise!
So we tried ourselves, unsuccessfully for a year, and then we decided to enlist the help of a fertility specialist. So now my science experiment was going to get the help of science.
After a year with a fertility specialist, science, my savior, had failed. We had four procedures and none of them worked. We had no baby and now we're running out of money, so I had to look at some cold hard facts. I had never been pregnant in my life so I did not know if it was even possible for me to get pregnant. And at this point, even if I did get pregnant, there's really a higher likelihood that I could have a miscarriage because of my age.
I knew after what I'd gone through emotionally in the past year with those four procedures that the idea of having, conceiving a child and then losing it, I just knew that I wasn't going to be able to handle that. So it was just becoming really apparent that with the money we had left, if we really wanted to make sure that we had a baby when all was said and done, the smarter thing to do was going to be to adopt.
So I had to make a decision. Did I want to become a mother no matter what or did I just want a mini‑me? Well, I dug really deep and I realized… that I just wanted a mini-me. I did. I was not proud of this fact. In fact, I was actually really ashamed of it. I wanted to be a good person. I wanted to be that altruistic woman who just had this wellspring of love to give to any child in need, but that was not where I was at. I had this childhood dream, although at this point it was starting to feel like it was just a childish crazy idea, because saying it out loud now it seemed crazy.
“Kim, why do you want to have a baby? Because you love children?”
“No, I just want to see what one looks like.”
That was not something that I felt like I could say out loud to anyone because what kind of a shallow, horrible human being was I? Instead, what I did was I said, “No, you know what? We are going to adopt. We're going to do that.”
I sort of half-heartedly looked into it and then time passed and eventually my story morphed into, “Well, we're looking into other options.” And then it became, “Eh, we tried. Didn't work out.” That was my party line for about three years whenever the idea of kids came up.
Then one day I was at a party and somebody asked if I wanted to have kids. Instead of, “Eh, we tried it. It didn't work out,” for some reason I said something like, “No, I'm good.” And I realized in that moment - I was shocked - that I was not good. I realized that those words were a lie and that I wanted a baby.
Now, you have to bear in mind I had just quit a job six months prior, so part of me was worried that I was just trying to fill a void, like a naïve teenager even though I was in my mid-40s. But I think the bigger part of me knew that I had needed this break to get some clarity. And what I figured out was that when I made the decision not to keep trying to have my own child, I was grieving. And I didn't realize that. So every decision after that was informed by this grief. And so, I made the mistake of thinking that this grief was me and that it was a character defect that I had. That I was missing some component of motherhood that all women were supposed to have. But I wasn't. I was just really sad.
So now that some time had passed and I was able to just relax and know what I wanted, I did have that wellspring of love and it had filled up and I was ready to become a mother, and not the mother of a mini-me but just a mother.
Kim Evey shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Lyric Hyperion in Los Angeles in May 2019. Photo by Mari Provencher.
So I went home and I told my unsuspecting husband how I changed my mind in the last two hours since he had seen me. That was a fun conversation. But we ended up finding an adoption agency that specializes in open adoption - that's when you stay in touch. As the adoptive family, you stay in touch with the birth mother if everybody wants to do that. And that was important to me because I don't have any idea who my birth parents are.
And then the adoption agency actually put to rest any final hopes that I might have had about a mini‑me because they told me: you know what? It's really, really uncommon for Asian babies to get adopted out because just culturally, Asian people tend to—the family unit comes in and they help to raise a baby if a baby is born out of wedlock. So I was like okay, that's great. Doesn't matter.
We started working on something called the Dear Birth Mother Letter, which probably in olden times was just a lovely missive that was actually a letter telling the birth mother what your intentions were. These days, it is a four-page color brochure with pictures and text. It's you presenting yourself and your life to the birth mother.
They told us at the orientation that the birth mothers get a lot of these, so it's really important for you to make yourself stand out somehow. So I was just hoping beyond hope that maybe the fact that I was adopted would help us stand out somehow.
Well, that is actually what happened. So our Dear Birth Mother Letter arrived in a box to a woman's house, a potential birth mother's house, with literally hundreds of other letters. She was so overwhelmed by this that she let her mother sort out the initial pile of letters.
I will tell you right now that our birth mother was also adopted - from Russia. So when her mother, I'll call our birth mother T, when T's mother first sorted through this and she saw our brochure and she saw pictures of me with my parents, she thought, “Well, T's going to identify with this.” Because even though T was from a Russian orphanage, she's actually 100% Asian. Her mom who was sorting through those brochures is white, just like my parents. And to make things even better, the birth father was also white, just like my husband.
So we met our son 40 minutes after he was born. He's now three years old. His name is Charlie. And if you saw him with us, you would never in a million years guess that he was not our biological child. Strangely, I got my mini-me after all.
Now, would I have loved my son any less if he was not the same race as me? Of course not. I look at him and I see nature and nurture working in him in the same mysterious and exquisite way that it works in all of us. And I see my husband in his outgoing personality. I see me in his compassionate nature. I see both of us in his sense of humor, (although that could just be because my husband and I both have the maturity level of three-year-olds).
And I look at his beautiful little face and I can clearly see the physical features of each of his birth parents working in harmony to create this wonderful little guy. But when we go out together in public, strangers are always saying things like, “Oh, I can't tell who he looks more like, mom or dad.”
And when they tell me how cute he is, I always say, “Thank you. He's adopted.” Because, for me, adoption used to be a story about being different. And now, for me, it's a story about being the same. The same as my son, the same as his birth mother. And we are all connected through nature and nurture. And this is a story that I just want to share with as many people as possible, so thank you.