We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sarah Reinhardt & Louise Browne a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Sarah Reinhardt &, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you tell us the backstory behind how you came up with the idea?

We had owned an ice cream truck together (The S’Cream Truck) and during the pandemic we started talking a lot on the phone, since it was hard to get together in person. It had been a few years since we sold the truck and we were both wanting to find something to do together. We started talking about doing a podcast – something we could do remotely. And it dawned on us that we should do something we both know intimately – adoption. We were both adopted and it had always been what had drawn us to each other initially. When adoptees meet, we recognize each other. It’s a universal thing with adopted people.

We started off without knowing a lot about it -but that’s how we’d been with the truck – we winged it until we made it. And it worked this time, too. At first, we started off interviewing anyone who had anything to do with adoption – oh, your brother was adopted? Come on the show! But then we realized that we had something deeper and it needed to be geared toward adoptees. Adopted people are the voices we want to amplify, whose stories we want to have told, and whose voices need to be heard.

We had no idea how it would go or if we’d find an audience, but it worked. At first, we reached out to anyone we knew who’d been adopted or was in the adoption triad, but then people started reaching out to us. We built a website, and people found us on all the podcast platforms and social media, and then we became one of the top podcasts for adoptees. It’s been incredibly rewarding, knowing that we are reaching people and helping people. We get messages daily thanking us for what we’re doing. We had no idea it would be like this.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

We are both adopted, and as mentioned earlier, decided to turn our experiences into a podcast. In each episode, we recap a chapter from a book centered on adoption and then interview a fellow adoptee. These are intimate and deep conversations that delve into what it’s like to be adopted.

Adoption: The Making of Me uncovers adult adoptee themes, including what people grapple with as they grow up, and the common (often untrue) story that many were told – their mother loved them so much that she gave them away.

We seek to amplify adoptee voices and to help change the mainstream narrative around adopted people being “lucky” or that they were “better off.”

Adoptees are the only people on the planet expected to be grateful and their trauma often goes unacknowledged for many years.

We are proud of so many moments. We are most proud of becoming a place for adoptees to feel heard and to tell their stories in their own words. Adoptees are often the most overlooked members of the triad (the triad in adoption means the adopting parent(s), the birth mother & birth father (also very overlooked), and adoptees themselves). Society often hears the “Hollywood” moments and endings in the adoption narrative, but really doesn’t focus on how adoptees feel and what they struggle with. Examples of those struggles are that adoptees are four times more likely to contemplate suicide, suffer from depression, have addictions, be incarcerated, and struggle with low self-esteem and identity issues.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

We met through our sons when they were in elementary school, and then we discovered that we were both adopted and that was an immediate bond. Since adoptees make up less than 3% of the population, it’s kind of a silent recognition – you know things about each other without having to speak the words.

And then of course we became good friends and business partners.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

We pivoted towards the end of our first season (we’re now in season 5). Oddly enough, neither of us had ever read a book about the adoptee experience. We both had just accepted what we were told – “you were so wanted, you’re chosen, you’re lucky” – whatever the myriad of messages told to adoptees, we bought in.

But both of us knew we had *stuff*, and had even talked about it. “Oh, I have abandonment issues because I’m adopted”, or, “It’s hard to get close to someone…. because I’m adopted!” But there was also kind of a disconnect to that. And both of us had been to the therapy over the years, but not one therapist ever connected the dots back to the trauma of relinquishment.

So when we started the podcast, backing in as we do, and read our first ever book about adoptee trauma, The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier, it was profound and we started – this is a common adoptee term – “coming out of the fog.” That means, that you wake up and kind of go, “What the heck? This is weird. Taking a baby from its mother and sticking it in a family of genetic strangers.”

As our season wore on, we started to realize that we needed to focus on adoptee voices; those were the voice that we wanted to give space for.

So since season two, we’ve been exclusively a podcast by and for fellow adoptees.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.adoptionthemakingofme.com
• Instagram: @themakingofmepodcast
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/themakingofmepodcast/
• Twitter: @makingofmepdcst
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcLPEzBpQdjq0c6Ne86Nh4Q

Image Credits
The photo of Sarah and Louise on the bench was taken by Jeff Forney.